The Last Princess (41 page)

But Ena and Alfonso knew differently. Alfonsito was haemophiliac. In his deep disappointment, Alfonso denied the strength and frequency of the warnings he had received of such a possible outcome. Later the Spanish would claim he had been deceived
by Ena and her mother, so eager were they for the marriage to take place. Perhaps Alfonso himself came to believe it. From the time of the terrible discovery, except when absolutely necessary, he never spoke to Beatrice again and avoided spending time with her. In July 1908 Drino wrote to his cousin's wife Onor, Grand Duchess of Hesse, about an impending visit of Ena to Beatrice and her sons at Osborne Cottage without Alfonso and without her babies: ‘Ena arrives here on the 15th and Alfonso comes for a week on the 25th to take her home. I think it rather a sore subject that the children can't come as well.’
²¹

For her part, Beatrice remained loyal to her son-in-law. She was holidaying in Vernet in the South of France in March 1913 when an Isle of Wight neighbour, Colonel Seely, then Secretary of State for War, wrote to tell her about his visit to the King and Queen in Madrid. ‘I was sure you would be interested by your interview with the King,’ she replied. ‘[He] certainly is extraordinarily clever and knows so much. He works so hard for his country, and it is wonderful what improvements and impetus he gives to everything.’
²²

Whatever the truth of Beatrice's feelings concerning Alfonso and his changed behaviour towards her following the revelation of Alfonsito's condition, she would soon have weightier matters to concern her. The year after her letter to Colonel Seely war broke out. Although Spain remained neutral, hostilities enforced a separation between Beatrice and Ena – and her brood of Spanish grandchildren had by then grown to six in number.

TWENTY-SIX

‘Days of overwhelming anxiety’

On 22 June 19 n several thousand commemorative medals were distributed to the children of the Isle of Wight in the name of the Royal Governor. Accompanying the medals was a letter from Beatrice explaining their significance: ‘Children, I am today sending to each of you a Medal to commemorate the solemn occasion of the Coronation of my dear Nephew King George V. That the effigy which these medals bear may be a constant reminder to you of your loyalty and devotion to your Sovereign and Country is my fervent hope.’
¹
Nine years earlier, at the time of Bertie's coronation, she had presented similar medals.

Beatrice bore a German title. Her husband, her father and three of her four grandparents were German. She spoke German fluently and, like her mother—but unlike Bertie – took a pro-German view of Continental politics. Both her published works—
The Adventures of Count Georg Albert of Erbach
(1890) and
In Napoleonic Days
(1941) – were translations from the German. In the aftermath of the Queen's death Marie Mallet went so far as to suggest, ‘I am… sure Princess Beatrice would far rather live in Germany, but for the sake of her children that would not be wise.’
²
But she defined herself as fiercely English. In a letter to a friend, written in September 1924, she distanced herself from the land of her fathers: ‘The German frame of mind is a very difficult force to fathom.’
³
When, on 4 August 1914, Britain found itself at war with Germany, Beatrice was not wanting in patriotism.

Like the war itself, her war work operated on a number of fronts. In relation to the Isle of Wight she saw her role as one of
commendation and encouragement. She wrote to Tennyson's son shortly after the outbreak of hostilities, about island volunteers:

It is one of the most critical moments of our Empire's history, when its very existence is at stake. All should gladly prove their love for their country, their homes, and their determination to defend them to the last, as well as to help our friends and allies in their dire hour of need… In these days of overwhelming anxiety, surely none can hear the call to arms in vain, and I feel convinced that the men of the Isle of Wight will not be behindhand in volunteering to take their part in this great struggle.
⁴

Though her letter reveals much of the spirit of the times, it was not mere empty sabre-rattling. Beatrice had three sons: all would serve in France, even the haemophiliac Leopold, whose condition, had he wished it, would have disqualified him from active service. To Colonel Seely, Regimental Commandant of the Isle of Wight Volunteer Regiment, Leopold wrote from barracks in Aldershot on 16 March 1914, ‘I wanted to thank you so very much for your kindness in getting me my regular commission. I am more than grateful, as I have always wanted to be able to soldier seriously and never thought I should be able to do so.’
⁵
In fact Leopold's serious soldiering was of an extremely circumscribed nature: he entered the war as a lieutenant in the King's Royal Rifle Corps, his activities restricted to a staff appointment. Nevertheless he embraced voluntarily a patriotic duty from which he might easily have been excused. His service consolidated that of Drino, in the Grenadier Guards, and Maurice, who in 1910 fulfilled his own childhood promise of following his cousin Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein into the 60th King's Royal Fusiliers. When, early in the war, Beatrice received a letter from a member of the public asking in peremptory tones what part she was playing in the effort to win the war, she replied that she had already lost her husband on active service, and that all three of her sons had left for the front on 12 August.
⁶

The willingness of Drino, Leopold and Maurice to expose themselves to the dangers of the arena of war was not, of course, purely altruistic. For the third generation of Princes of Battenberg
the armed forces provided a career and a purpose. Beatrice's position as the youngest of the nine royal children effectively prevented her sons from inheriting any royal role as we understand it today; Liko's lack of fortune meant that they inherited little else besides. As early as 1901, when Maurice was only ten, Marie Mallet claimed that Beatrice was ‘anxious now about the future of the three boys, who must work their own way; they are handicapped rather than helped by rank’.
⁷
Significantly, all had embarked on military careers before war was declared. After six years in the navy, from 1902 to 1908, Drino joined the army. To Alice's son Ernie, Grand Duke of Hesse, Beatrice wrote on 30 September 1909, ‘Drino is… hard at work now in his military duties. I had a very satisfactory report of him from his Colonel.’
⁸
In the same letter she asked her nephew to entertain Maurice for a Sunday at Darmstadt, as he was shortly ‘going to Germany for a couple of months, to work up his German before going to the Military Academy at Sandhurst’.
⁹

Beatrice was at Carisbrooke Castle in the summer of 1914. She had been expecting a visit from her niece, Helena's daughter Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein but, under pressure from her brother-in-law Louis of Battenberg, altered her plans. She telephoned Marie Louise early on the morning of 4 August, the day war was declared, to announce her immediate return to London. On a bank holiday, with no supplies save a solitary chicken in the larder, Marie Louise found herself not, as she had anticipated, embarking on a pleasant holiday in the Isle of Wight, but entertaining to lunch her mother, her aunt Beatrice and their respective ladies-in-waiting. Drino and Maurice, Beatrice told her, were already under orders. She did not relish the prospect of their departure but told her niece, ‘You must come and stay with me as I cannot face being alone.’
¹⁰

The destination for that ‘stay’ was Kensington Palace, to which Beatrice had moved at speed for the duration of the war. Marie Louise had been divorced by her husband, Aribert of Anhalt. She and Beatrice were both alone and the arrangement suited each equally. Marie Louise moved into Apartment Two, Kensington Palace and remained there for the next three years.

Although aunt and niece pursued separate public lives, Marie Louise's presence helped stave off Beatrice's loneliness during the long period when the war prevented her from visiting Ena in Spain. Marie Louise was an ideal companion. Like Beatrice she had been among the small number of the Queen's intimates at the end of her life, all quiet, devoted acolytes who treated the Queen with reverence and awe. The two princesses shared a similar outlook and similar interests, although not, sadly, music: Marie Louise's piano playing was so bad that to listen to it gave Beatrice hiccups. The war work undertaken by both focused on the wounded, Marie Louise having inherited her mother Helena's interest in nursing, Beatrice being assiduous in her hospital visiting – as she wrote to Sir Frederick Milner at the beginning of 1915, ‘It is intensely interesting is it not, visiting all the poor wounded. They are so brave and uncomplaining, one feels, one cannot do enough for them.’
¹¹

In Hill Street, in Mayfair, Jeanne, Lady Coats, widow of the J. & P. Coats cotton sewing thread magnate, owned a small private hospital. At the outbreak of war, the hospital became the centre of Beatrice's activities and was named, in her honour, the Princess Henry of Battenberg Hospital for Officers. Beatrice took more than a nominal interest in it, and it was due to her enthusiasm that, only weeks into the war, the hospital received a visit from the King and Queen. They talked to patients, admired the operating theatre with its X-ray equipment, met Dr Rice-Oxley and his staff. Their visit was dutifully recorded in the
Illustrated War News
of 23 September, which announced that Beatrice's ‘interest in the hospital is such that she visits it daily’. Closer to home, Louise would go on to convert several rooms in her apartment at Kensington Palace to a temporary hospital.

That interest did not, however, make Beatrice forgetful of the claims made on her by her position as governor of the Isle of Wight. From a distance she continued to involve herself administratively with those aspects of island life that fell within her jurisdiction. On 18 March 1916, she appointed Lieutenant Colonel Augustus Macdonald Moreton Sub-Commandant of the Isle of Wight County Volunteers; on 4 June 1918 she wrote to
her deputy governor General Seely about a recent memorandum issued by the Central Land Association concerning agricultural landowners evolving a scheme to express their gratitude to the men of their estates who had gone to fight. At the same time she continued intermittently to be called upon in her role of executor of the Queen's will. When, in May 1917, publisher John Murray wrote to the King's private secretary Lord Stamfordham requesting permission to pulp ten thousand unsold copies of the Queen's
Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands
(Murray having bought out Smith, Elder
&c
Co.), Stamfordham referred the request to Beatrice. Her unsentimental response – whatever she may privately have felt about the Queen's evidently declining stock among the reading public – allowed Stamfordham to give Murray a prompt reply to his request: ‘I have heard from Princess Henry of Battenberg who entirely appreciates the position with regard to the 10,000 copies… and gives you authority to deal with them as you think best.’
¹²
Like her mother, Beatrice had become an assiduous desk worker. She immersed herself in paperwork, a diligent correspondent; steeped herself in the escapism of her public role. By the time of Murray's letter she had suffered her own war tragedy that put into perspective the degree of her sadness at the destruction of the Queen's book written long ago. Her heart was not in the Queen's beloved Scotland of fifty years earlier, nor in the peaceful fields of the Isle of Wight, but in bloodier, muddier pastures – Flanders fields near Ypres.

Beatrice's youngest and almost certainly favourite son Maurice died on 27 October 1914. He was twenty-three. He died at Zonnebeke near Ypres, leading an attack on the front line, killed instantly by an exploding shell. The news devastated Beatrice. She felt keenly the irony of the death so young of this the liveliest, most handsome and dashing of her sons. Inevitably her thoughts returned to Liko's death. ‘You can imagine,’ she wrote to a friend, ‘how this fresh great sorrow has reopened the old wound. But I try to think of Father and Son reunited, having both left such a bright example behind them.’
¹³
Newspaper reports echoed her comparison of father and son, the
Sketch
reporting on 4
November, ‘Prince Henry of Battenberg, father of the deceased Prince, a Colonel in the British Army, gave his life, as Prince Maurice has done, for England.’
¹⁴
Months later Ena wrote to Queen Mary of Beatrice's continuing sorrow and her pain at their separation: ‘It is very hard to be away from my old home at such a time as this and especially so since Maurice's death, when I know that Mama is so sad and needs me so much. I would give anything to be able to go to her.’
¹⁵