The Last Princess (42 page)

Beatrice received morsels of consolation from the many letters written to her in the weeks after Maurice's death. Her replies reiterate the same story, a sentiment shared by those bereft in war since time immemorial: she struggles to assuage her grief with the knowledge that her son died valiantly in a noble cause. To Lady Elphinstone Beatrice wrote on 13 November,

Sympathy such as yours is very helpful in this awful trial, and to know how much my darling Boy was appreciated. It is one of those losses one can never get over, and it is so terribly hard to sit quietly and resignedly realizing that one's dear child, who was like a ray of sunshine in the house, will never be amongst us again in this world. In the midst of all I have much to be thankful for, in that he died a noble soldier's death and without, as I am assured, suffering, and I have two dear sons still spared to me, when so many poor mothers have lost their one and only one.
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To Lord Knutsford, at whose invitation she had visited war wounded in the London Hospital, Beatrice wrote, ‘Nothing could touch and help me more to bear this great trial, than to know that others feel for me. To lose a beloved promising young son is a terrible trial, but I can look back with pride on him, and on his work nobly fulfilled, and life willingly given for his King and Country.’
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‘My aunt’, wrote Marie Louise forty years later, ‘was wonderfully brave when the terrible news came that Maurice… had died of wounds. Her courage never failed, and she looked on herself as one of the thousands of mothers who had given their sons for the safety of England.’
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Despite her sadness Beatrice went through the motions of royal life, duty before inclination, others before self. On 18
November she telegraphed her condolences to Lord Cadogan—‘I feel so deeply for you in the loss of your dear son’
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– a simple, even commonplace message, its poignancy derived from the shared experience of sender and recipient. She also steeled herself to reject Lord Kitchener's exceptional offer to have Maurice's body brought back to England for burial at home. Instead the Prince was buried with his comrades in the town cemetery at Ypres. Although Beatrice did not doubt that she had made the right, indeed the only possible, decision, it was not one she found easy and it affected significantly her sorrow at her son's loss. To exacerbate her disquiet, Ypres would shortly be subjected to extensive shelling. Colonel Seely wrote to reassure her. ‘I can assure you [you] have greatly… relieved my mind,’ she replied, ‘for I was indeed anxious lest all the shell fire there has been might have disturbed and damaged my dear son's last resting place. I am most thankful to hear from you that this is not the case nor likely to happen in the future, for this apprehension was such an aggravation to my distress.’
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It was not, however, an easy Christmas. Beatrice wrote to Sir Frederick Milner in the New Year, ‘All these festive days have been peculiarly trying… one cannot help one's thoughts going back to that lonely little soldier's grave in a foreign country, and to that bright young life, cut off so early.’
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On 28 September 1920 the Ypres League was founded. It provided an association for those who had survived the battlefields around the Belgian town, and a focus for remembrance of the 250,000 men, Maurice of Battenberg among them, who had not survived. Its patron-in-chief was George V, its patrons the Prince of Wales and Beatrice. In her capacity as patron of the Ypres League she would lay a wreath at the Remembrance Day celebrations long into the thirties, though by then she walked with difficulty and the effort cost her sorely.

To commemorate Maurice more visibly Beatrice commissioned from Philip de Laszlo a posthumous portrait undertaken from photographs in 1916. Although de Laszlo disliked working in this way, he made an exception in Beatrice's case. Six years earlier she had supplied him with a letter of introduction to the
Queen Mother of Spain, which resulted in a number of lucrative and highly publicized commissions from the Spanish Royal Family, including a portrait of Ena. Beatrice herself had also sat for de Laszlo and, in June 1913, allowed her portrait to hang among an exhibition of his work held at Agnew's.
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In St Mildred's, Whippingham, she hung a painting by Lavery,
The Supreme Sacrifice,
in Maurice's memory, and for the Church of St Nicholas-in-Castro she commissioned an altar painting to mark his death. The church stood within the precincts of Carisbrooke Castle. In 1897 its chancel had been restored in Liko's memory. During her summers on the Isle of Wight, Beatrice attended Sunday evensong there and would later be accused of treating the church as a royal peculiar.

Beatrice would soon have reason to feel relief that she had taken pains to commemorate both Maurice and Liko in so concrete a form. In the summer of 1917 George V asked those of his relations with German titles to relinquish them and, where necessary, assume ‘translated’ English versions of their names. The request was in effect a command, as Louis of Battenberg wrote to his daughter Louise on 6 June: ‘It has been suggested that we should turn our name into English, viz: Battenhill or Mountbatten. We incline to the latter as a better sound… of course we are at his mercy. We are only allowed to use our German title as the Sovereign has always recognized it, but he can refuse this recognition any moment.’
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At a stroke the name Battenberg disappeared in Britain. Beatrice reverted to her pre-marital style of HRH The Princess Beatrice, dropping the additional ‘Princess Henry of Battenberg'. On 11 September Leopold became by royal warrant Lord Leopold Mountbatten and, on 7 November, Drino was created by letters patent Marquess of Carisbrooke, Earl of Berkhamsted and Viscount Launceston. Responses to this process of forcible ‘adjustment’ were mixed. Victoria of Battenberg, Alice's daughter Victoria of Hesse, now Marchioness of Milford Haven, wrote to her lady-in-waiting that she regretted her relocation to the peerage: ‘I am unduly influenced by the recollection of brewers, lawyers, bankers Peers';
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while Drino, whose hauteur and self-importance made him a figure of
fun for many in his family, was predictably resentful of the demotion. ‘I shriek with laughter when I think of Drino,’ wrote his cousin Louise of Battenberg on 13 June.
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The following month, deprived of his princely rank, Drino married Lady Irene Denison, daughter of the second Earl of Londesborough, at the Chapel Royal, St James's. In due course, on 13 January 1920, their marriage would provide Beatrice with her only British grandchild, Lady Iris Mountbatten – added to a daughter-in-law, whose relations with Beatrice were considerably easier than those Beatrice enjoyed with the increasingly disaffected Alfonso of Spain. Iris's childish antics offered Beatrice an antidote to the sadness of the decade that lay ahead. Like her own mother, she embraced her status as grandmother. ‘I spent a very peaceful, quiet Christmas,’ she wrote on 29 December 1926, ‘and had the pleasure of seeing my dear little granddaughter's joy over her tree and toys.’
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It was for Beatrice a timely reminder. So much had happened that was far from joyful.

TWENTY-SEVEN

‘The older one gets the more one
lives in the past’

It was so much easier to look not forwards but back. In her Christmas card to Louisa Antrim, in December 1943, Beatrice wrote, ‘The older one gets the more one lives in the past.’
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In truth she had done so for decades. Portraits, photographs, letters, journals, and memories happy and sad continually drew her back. ‘To me alas! the war is always a very present memory and anything connected with it is of supreme interest,’ she wrote from Carisbrooke Castle in September 1924.
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Maurice had been dead for almost a decade. Two years earlier, suddenly and unexpectedly, while Beatrice was on holiday in Sicily, Leopold, too, had died.

Leopold did not die as a result of the war. His haemophilia restricted his ‘active’ service to an aide-de-camp's role and, at the cessation of hostilities, he returned to London to live with Beatrice at Kensington Palace. Though the timing of his death shocked Beatrice, the fact of its happening did not. Leopold's health had always been precarious, and there had been a number of scares in the past. In December 1909 he was reported to be seriously ill in a nursing home in Manchester Square in London. Ena made a special journey from Spain to visit him. The
Tatler,
clearly anticipating the worst, printed a full-page photograph of all four of Beatrice's children taken the previous year at Osborne Cottage, with the caption: ‘A reminiscence of a visit under happier circumstances'; ominously the photograph was surrounded by a broken black border.
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Leopold rallied on that occasion – only to die alone on Sunday morning, 23 April 1922. The previous day he had undergone an emergency operation at Kensington Palace. His apparently normal recovery was followed swiftly by an
unexpected relapse. Too late Beatrice cut short her holiday.

Death would provide for her the keynote of the twenties. As the decade began, she continued to work at her mother's Journal. Slowly, certainly, she witnessed the final demise of its lengthy cast list. It had begun during the war, with the death of Louise's husband Lord lorne in 1914. Arthur's wife Louischen died in March 1917, then, in October, Helena's husband Christian. In July 1920 the Empress Eugenie died in Madrid. Louis of Battenberg, restyled after 1917 Marquess of Milford Haven, Beatrice's brother-in-law, died in September 1921; months later followed Leopold's widow Helen. With the death of Helena in May 1923 only three of the Queen's children remained: Beatrice, Arthur and Louise. Marie Erbach also died in 1923, joined in 1924 by Franzjos, the last of the Battenberg brothers. In November 1925 Beatrice's sister-in-law Alexandra died, Beatrice briefly forewarned in a telegram explaining that, though conscious, Alexandra was not expected to survive the night.
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At the same time, Beatrice's own health began its slow descent: the rheumatism that had plagued her for forty years escalated in severity and she suffered increasingly from bronchial complaints. ‘Poor Aunt Beatrice has had a bad time while we have been away,’ the Prince of Wales wrote to his great-aunt Louise in October 1925, thanking her for her present of throat lozenges; letters do not record if Louise sent Beatrice a similar parcel.
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So much of Beatrice's life and work was connected with death. In addition to the Ypres League, she involved herself closely with the League of Remembrance – one of its tasks was providing hospitals with medical supplies in peacetime – writing to Lady Bathurst on 16 May 1920, ‘How too kind of you, besides becoming a Patron of the League of Remembrance, saying you wish to give it a donation of £50. I am indeed grateful to you.’
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The same year, Beatrice saw a picture in the
Illustrated London News
of a shrine in a Russian Orthodox chapel in Peking. Within the shrine were two coffins containing the remains of the Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia (Beatrice's niece and Liko's cousin, formerly Ella of Hesse) and her companion Sister Barbara.
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Beatrice passed on the cutting to her sister-in-law Victoria Milford
Haven, Ella's sister; Louis and Victoria Milford Haven had the coffins removed to the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, and Louis sent Beatrice a detailed description of the service of re-interment.

Bertie's death in 1910 and the accession of George V trans-formed Beatrice from sister of the King to aunt of the King, thereby further downgrading her status within the Royal Family as well as adding to the toll of her sadness. Her relationship with her nephew was, however, cordial and positive. In January 1919 the King created Beatrice a Dame Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire, in recognition of her wartime services as president of the Isle of Wight branch of the British Red Cross. In December 1931, when Beatrice issued an appeal in aid of the Isle of Wight County Hospital, Frederick Ponsonby responded on the King's behalf, enclosing a cheque for £100: ‘While of course it would be impossible for His Majesty to subscribe to all the hospitals in the United Kingdom, the King has decided to make a special exception in this case, in view of the fact that Princess Beatrice is issuing the appeal.’
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Privately, in an off-the-record note, he confided, ‘There was… the sentimental reason of Osborne which made a difference.’
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The King's fondness for his aunt did not prevent him from overruling her objections, in 1928, to Frederick Ponsonby's publication of a selection of letters of the Empress Frederick. John van der Kiste attributes Beatrice's reservations to her unwillingness to bring before the public the controversy surrounding her marriage to the morganatic Liko, in which the Prussian imperial family had entered so forcefully.
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It may be, more simply, that, busy ‘editing’ her mother's Journal, Beatrice's guiding principles in such matters had become blanket concealment and withdrawal from the public arena of anything potentially inflammatory. Ponsonby himself, never Beatrice's greatest admirer, later recorded, ‘Princess Beatrice, who had not read the book but only the extracts in the newspapers, said it was a dreadful book.’
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