The Last Princess (12 page)

Public sympathy with Queen Victoria's mourning was of finite elasticity. By the end of the 1860s that elasticity had reached breaking point; it took the near death of the heir to the throne from typhoid fever in December 1871 to rally once again public sympathy behind the Queen, who appeared to have forgotten or to judge of no consequence the visible duties of monarchy. Before that turning point was reached, Bertie, along with several of his siblings and the Queen's ministers, had tried to point his mother towards a proper understanding of what was expected of her: ‘If you sometimes came to London from Windsor, and then drove for an hour in the Park… the people would be overjoyed… The more
People
see
the Sovereign
the better it is for the People and the Country.’
¹⁶
As so often, the Prince's suggestion fell on
deaf ears. The Queen did, however, undertake a brief sojourn in London in March 1869. Her purpose was not the good opinion of either the Prince of Wales or her disaffected people, but to visit the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park. Afterwards she drove through the park in a carriage with Beatrice and a lady-in-waiting. Beatrice, at nearly twelve, did not question the purpose of her mother's outing and was in no position – herself still a child – to formulate judgements on her mother's conduct of her royal role. She was accustomed to maudlin excursions. She understood her mother's predilections and the hegemony the Prince Consort's shade continued to exercise over his family. She had received anyway a sweetener the previous morning in the form of a trip with her mother to the Zoological Gardens.

A fondness for animals was among the shared tastes of mother and daughter. For the Queen, animals, notably Dash, the King Charles spaniel who brightened her teenage years, and the Duchess of Kent's parakeet and tame canary, had supplied the want of companionship that was such a feature of her solitary childhood. Four decades later, when the Queen refused to resolve the conflict of public and private duty, not acknowledging that any conflict existed, animals were the subjects whose affection never wavered, the children whose allegiance did not falter. For the Queen, Dash was only the beginning of a lifelong passion for dogs that she indulged in numbers of collies (associated in her mind with Scotland), dachshunds (invariably given German names, such as Dackel and Waldman) and, at the end of her life, Pomeranians. The Queen discovered animal painter Charles Burton Barber in the 1870s and commissioned from him a series of canine portraits to record these many friends, including a picture of herself and Beatrice with three collies and a dachshund on the slopes at Windsor. A pleasantly second-rate practitioner, Burton Barber enjoyed royal patronage until his death in 1894: in 1877 he painted Beatrice's collie Watts; the following decade he painted Spot for her; and in 1891 he painted her favourite collie, Oswald. The Prince Consort kept a finch in his dressing room; Beatrice grew up to love caged birds, a taste she in turn would pass on to her own children, whom the
Daily Mail
later
reported travelling between the Queen's homes with their bird-cages in tow.

Animals returned affection unquestioningly; their wordlessness made them ideal companions for the adventurous role play of a lonely daydreamer. Beatrice kept cats as well as dogs and suffered the misfortune of having one of her cats shot by a keeper in Windsor Park. This could not have happened to a cat belonging to her mother, the Queen wrote comfortably to the Crown Princess: the Queen's cats wore collars with her royal monogram, ‘and that preserves them’.
¹⁷
History does not relate what happened to the birthday tortoise for which Beatrice had thanked her brother Arthur in 1863; hopefully its heavy shell offered protection from the zeal of the Queen's keepers.

Animals provided Beatrice with an outlet for her abundant energy as a growing child. Only gradually did she adapt herself fully to the somnambulant pace of her mother's widowhood. In 1869, while Louise sketched with the Queen on the banks of Loch Ard in view of Ben Lomond, ‘Beatrice [ran] about merrily with Jane Churchill’.
¹⁸
She needed exercise and activity, and this animals, particularly horses, supplied. Tommy, the solid Shetland pony of Beatrice's earliest rides, was quickly outgrown. He remained at Windsor and was later given to Beatrice's niece Victoria of Hesse, who renamed him Dread after the character in Harriet Beecher Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Tommy was succeeded by Beatrice, named after her owner, the correspondence of name of rider and mount no doubt simplifying the life of the royal grooms. Riding played the largest part in Beatrice's life at Balmoral, where the Royal Family spent as much time as possible outside, the Queen determinedly fostering the illusion that she was not a working monarch but a laird's widow deeply attached to the country and the people surrounding her house. Sometimes Beatrice rode while the Queen travelled by carriage; on other occasions, as before the Prince Consort's death, the Queen accompanied Beatrice on horseback. Often they took with them a dog, which added to the bustle and enjoyment of the excursion. At Balmoral the collie could be sure of encountering others of the same breed at the cottages the Queen and Beatrice visited
with blankets and baskets of food, or to witness a christening or the laying out of a dead baby.

In his sitting room at Osborne, Leopold hung portraits of a dachshund and a Dandie Dinmont. Both were painted by Land-seer, who in 1867 also contributed a pen-and-ink sketch of a dog at rest to the Prince's autograph book. In Beatrice's sitting room hung an earlier painting by Thomas Woodward of a chestnut charger bearing the Queen's side saddle. Animals were integral to the life of the Royal Family; they surrounded them in art as well as in the flesh. In the case of the Queen's youngest, lonely children, their role is obvious.

EIGHT

‘Youngest daughters have a duty
to widowed mothers’

Beatrice was nineteen when the Queen wrote, with complacent affection, ‘She well deserves being loved, for a dearer, sweeter, more amiable and unselfish child I have never found, and she is the comfort and blessing of my declining years.’
¹

The Queen had never disguised her adoration of her youngest daughter. At fifty-seven she had been, in her own words, ‘a woman, no longer young’ for five years, and was happy to lean on this prettiest of props. She was, one observer noted, ‘very large, ruddy and fat’,
²
with a hearty appetite and robust constitution, but fretted continually about her health. Beatrice was taller than her mother, at this stage still slender, with a fine complexion and rich red-gold hair that tumbled over her shoulders. Estrangement from the company of her contemporaries had not lessened her natural girlish instincts: she enjoyed pretty clothes and lace, which she later collected. Over time she had grown up pliant and gentle, no longer the harum-scarum tomboy of her childhood: pliancy, gentleness and an overriding equability made her the Queen's ideal companion, and would earn her much praise in her mother's correspondence.

Beatrice's curious childhood had effectively ended three weeks short of her fourteenth birthday. It ended with a marriage, not her own – for that she still had many years to wait – but that of her sister Louise to the Marquess of Lome, heir to the Duke of Argyll, on 21 March 1871. The Queen used the ceremony to indicate that she had taken a further Lilliputian step towards overcoming her misery of 1861: with her coal-black, jet-sparkling dress she wore not only her customary diamonds but rubies, an unprecedented splash of bright colour. Beatrice wore a dress of
rich rose pink that brought out the burnished highlights of her hair. With hindsight it ought not to have been a day of celebration for Beatrice: Louise's marriage and departure from court – though she continued intermittently to assist her mother – left the Queen with one last daughter to take on the role of informal secretary with which she could not dispense and without which the onerous burden of sovereignty became insupportable. That daughter was Beatrice, and in the matter of securing her compliance, the Queen – rubies and epistolary blandishments notwithstanding – was resolved to brook no gainsaying. ‘Youngest daughters’, she wrote to the Crown Princess, ‘have a duty to widowed mothers.’
³
Eight days after Louise's wedding, accompanied by six of her children, the Queen opened the Royal Albert Hall. On this occasion Beatrice wore not pink but a shade the newspapers described as ‘the fashionable green’, a foil for her mother's impenetrable black. It was the nearest thing to independence she would be permitted.

The Queen's anxiety was understandable. Alice, Helena and Louise had each in turn taken on the duties that now fell to Beatrice. Even Louise, the Queen's least sympathetic daughter and initially her least promising helpmeet, long before her departure had become ‘(and who would some years ago have thought it?) a clever, dear girl’,
⁴
whose passing her mother regretted. But each daughter had longed for marriage, and with marriage each had left her mother. Louise, by marrying one of the Queen's subjects, remained in Britain. Helena, too, on account of having married a princeling without a throne, Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, stayed close to her mother's side, her first married home being Frogmore in Windsor Great Park. But Helena and Christian produced four children in five years, and the obligations of their growing family completed Helena's temporary withdrawal from her mother's service. Alice lived in Germany. With the accession of her husband to the Grand Duchy, she would be known as the
Landesmutter
('mother of the country'); she could not, under such circumstances, also take on the role of playing mother to her own mother across the sea. Beatrice was the Queen's last chance, ‘the only one who needs me now’,
⁵
as she
spun it to herself. The reality was quite the opposite, and the Queen formulated her plans without reference to Beatrice herself. Beatrice's role was acquiescence. There must be no thoughts of independence or escape.

That escape meant marriage was a synonym Louise had recognized only too clearly. Marriage was a daughter's passport to an independent establishment. More significantly for the Queen, it represented inevitably divided loyalties and the downgrading of the Queen from her daughter's first priority to her second (after her husband) and, with the arrival of children, third, fourth and so on. In late 1872 Lady Augusta Bruce, now herself married and no longer in attendance at court, visited the Queen at Windsor. She found her ‘in despair over the fact that her daughters were married and filled with their own interests, from which she was excluded. The Queen's one comfort was Princess Beatrice, “and I'll take care that She never marries… She is quite happy at home and contented and sweet tempered… and without jealousy”.’
⁶
In reply Lady Augusta suggested that Beatrice ‘had no one to be jealous of’.
⁷
Whether or not she intended this as a compliment to her erstwhile royal mistress, her statement points to the bleakness of Beatrice's position. Beatrice enjoyed the questionable blessing of her mother's wholehearted preference and this was the single boon of her extraordinary existence. She had seen so little of life. Her perception of her siblings’ marriages had been distorted by the Queen's funereal response to each happy event. Beatrice could not know that life held greater rewards than to serve her mother as handmaiden. The challenge the Queen set herself was to prolong access to this knowledge for as long as possible.

That the Queen should have experienced anxiety about Beatrice's loyalty as early as 1872 amounts to nothing less than paranoia. Beatrice, she knew, was ‘amiable and unselfish’, words that on the Queen's lips denoted total concurrence with her wishes and her assertions, and a willingness on Beatrice's part to put everything relating to the Queen before her own concerns – the very course towards which Beatrice's life had tended since before her fifth birthday. Beatrice harboured no secret desire to
escape her mother. She was still a child, after all. Her mother was all she had. She had no friends outside court and would not have conceived of leaving her mother to live with one of her siblings, even had she enjoyed so intimate a relationship with them, which she did not. Her brother Arthur, she had seen, lived semi-independently of the Queen, in the nominal charge of his tutor, or ‘governor’, Major Elphinstone. But this was not a daughter's role. Daughters behaved as Alice, Helena and Louise had behaved, and remained at home to help their mother for as long as they could. While the Queen connived to find ways of preventing Beatrice from leaving her, Beatrice accepted as inevitable the position she now occupied. It was part of the natural order of her mother's (very unnatural) family. In this sense, the Queen's assessment of her last daughter's character is entirely correct: Beatrice
was
unselfish, because she understood that she was a cipher in an equation in which, except on the Queen's part, there could be no ‘self. She was still too young to think of marriage; she had never experienced or perhaps even conceived of independence; she had no home except with the Queen. Any role the Queen allotted her became simply the modus vivendi of Beatrice's home.