The Last Princess (15 page)

Other onlookers than the Queen considered Beatrice's confirmation proof not of her age but her innocence. Such purity of mind and body did her appearance and behaviour suggest to her French governess Mademoiselle Norele that she was reminded of a lily – as any nineteenth-century Catholic Frenchwoman must have been aware, a symbol of the Virgin Mary. Mademoiselle Norele gave vent to her feelings in poetry, composing sentimental verses, which the Queen forwarded to Sir Theodore Martin with the comment,

She did look so like a lily, so very young, so gentle and good. The Queen can only pray that this flower of the flock, which she really is (for the Queen may truly say she has never given the Queen one moment's displeasure) may never leave her, but be the prop, comfort and companion of her widowed mother to her old age. She is the Queen's Benjamin.
¹³

Two years later Beatrice was the unwitting cause of the dismissal from Balmoral of a cousin of John Brown's, piper Willie Leys. Drunkenness was the nominal cause of Leys's dismissal; his offence in fact was to have frightened Beatrice, wh o came across him in this condition. It says much for the success of the Queen's policy of overprotecting her daughter that nineteen-year-old Beatrice's response to a drunken Highlander encountered in a castle corridor should be such as to merit his sacking despite his close kinship with the Queen's favourite servant. Perhaps the roses Beatrice wears in her hair in Graves's portrait were not, after all, an unintentional coquetry, but on the contrary a symbolic reference to her unspoiled virgin purity, a royal rosebud not yet ready to bloom.
Though she herself may not have recognized it until later, a single seed of romance had already been sown by the time of Beatrice's ‘lily'-like appearance at her confirmation.

The Second Empire of Napoleon III and his Empress Eugenie collapsed on 5 September 1870. Eugenie and her son Louis Napoleon, the Prince Imperial, fled to England, where, on 20 March 1871, they were joined by the defeated Emperor. The British Royal Family was quick to sympathize with the imperial exiles: the Prince of Wales offered Chiswick House as a London residence (an offer which, for political reasons, he was forced to rescind), and the Queen lavished on the Emperor and Empress many ‘delicate attentions’.
¹⁴
The imperial family settled at Camden Place, near Chislehurst in Kent. When, in February 1872, they made plans to watch, from the Army and Navy Club, the Royal Family's procession to St Paul's for the service of thanksgiving for the Prince of Wales's recovery, an invitation to Buckingham Palace was quickly issued; and the exiled sovereigns watched the procession set off from the vantage point of the main palace balcony on which, afterwards, the Queen would receive the acclamation of the cheering crowds.

Queen and Empress were near contemporaries, but Eugenie did not give birth to her only child until the relatively late age of thirty, with the result that the Prince Imperial was only a year older than Beatrice. Once Queen Victoria had found him ‘short and stumpy’
¹⁵
– ‘The boy is a very nice child but excessively short—shorter than Beatrice who is a year younger than him’
¹⁶
– but with the Prince and his parents now near neighbours, and the Prince's attainment of manhood cloaked in a mantle of romantic tragedy, that opinion began to change. In October 1871 the Prince entered the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich as a gentleman cadet. The following year he was invited to a military review at Bushey Park, also attended by the Queen. At the Queen's invitation he spoke to her while she remained in her carriage, he on horseback alongside. When he had finished speaking to the Queen, he rode round to the other side of the carriage to speak to Beatrice, as always since Louise's marriage her mother's companion. Quickly the society journal
The World
seized upon the meeting as proof of an imminent engagement. On 20 May 1874 a Royal Artillery review was held on Woolwich Common, attended by the Prince in the entourage of the guest of honour, Tsar Alexander II. The Prince Imperial was all but mobbed by the crowd, who broke through the police cordon to shake hands with the man they believed destined to be the Queen's last son-in-law. Rumours of his imminent marriage to the Queen's youngest daughter would continue until his untimely death five years later.

At Bushey the Queen had revised her opinion of the Prince's ‘short and stumpy’ appearance, finding his looks instead ‘very nice’. Louis Napoleon, though like his father undeniably short, had inherited much of his mother's legendary beauty, including her downward-slanting eyes, long, straight nose and wide, sensuous mouth. The Cardinal de Bonnechose, a friend of the imperial family, commended his ‘gentle, dreamy face, blue, melancholy eyes, and thoughtful, open brow’.
¹⁷
To this the Prince added his father's dark colouring and considerable charm, and an aura of exoticism derived from his family's circumstances; the inherited bravura of two generations of imperial adventurers; Eugenie's impetuous Latin blood and her connection, albeit small, with the royal house of Stuart; and his overwhelming self-confidence. The Prince was one of only two people Henry Ponsonby encountered who were not afraid of Queen Victoria; the other was John Brown. Later, Ponsonby might have added to his list Beatrice's husband, Henry of Battenberg, whom, save in height, the Prince strongly resembled. Time would reveal other parallels between the two men linked with Beatrice by fact or rumour.

Napoleon Ill's death in January 1873 served further to strengthen the bond between Queen Victoria and the Empress Eugenie. One manifestation of their friendship was the interest the Queen took in the Prince Imperial, who was soon established as a favourite at court. Lady Waterpark was in waiting when, on 9 August 1876, the Prince dined at Osborne: ‘I thought the Prince Imperial very pleasing with remarkably
good manners,’ she wrote in her diary.
¹⁸
We cannot know if Beatrice, too, at this stage found the Prince ‘very pleasing’ since she did not entrust feelings of so private a nature to posterity, but it would be surprising if she had been entirely immune to the Prince's charms. He was the first man of her own age whose presence at court the Queen had encouraged, and unlike her brother Leopold, her only other regular young male companion, the Prince appears to have behaved towards Beatrice with consistent affection and good humour. The Queen had certainly come close to having her head turned by Louis Napoleon's father on her state visit to Paris in 1855; the Prince not only shared his father's charisma, but bore a strong facial resemblance to the handsome, dark-haired foreign prince whom Beatrice would eventually marry for love.

In her biography of the Empress Eugenie, written in 1906 when both the Empress and Beatrice were still alive, Jane T. Stoddart wrote: ‘On the Prince Imperial's tomb lies a wreath of white immortelles given by Queen Victoria, and a bunch of purple heather recently laid there by Princess Beatrice. It had been gathered on the common by the Princess when she was the guest of the Empress Eugenie.’
¹⁹
This action on the part of the widowed, middle-aged Beatrice is not proof positive of a romantic attachment thirty years earlier – as we have seen, she had been brought up from earliest infancy to revere and commemorate the dead, and in later life she had a deep sentimental attachment to those connected with the scenes of her youth – but it is certainly suggestive.

Whatever the nature of Beatrice's and Louis Napoleon's feelings, they were never to be consummated in marriage. In 1879 the Prince Imperial joined British reinforcements sailing for Natal in South Africa to quash a Zulu uprising. His presence in the theatre of war – irksome to the Prime Minister, Disraeli – had been brought about by the combined efforts of the Queen and the Empress. They acted in concord to realise the Prince's strong desire to join the fighting party despite their separate reservations – the Queen acknowledging that the Prince was ‘very venturesome’ – and those of the British government and military
authorities.
²⁰
As events turned out, it was not the Prince's venturesomeness but misfortune and sheer force of numbers on the part of the enemy that brought about his death – on i June, on the banks of the Ityatosi River. In company with a small scouting party the Prince was surprised by Zulus. Quickly his commanding officer Captain Carey mounted his horse and rode off, taking with him as many of the party as were able to follow. But the Prince's horse first reared and plunged then bolted, trampling on his right hand. Though he ran after the animal, holding on to the stirrup, the leather tore and the Prince had no choice but to turn and face the enemy alone. In vain he fired three shots with his left hand. The Zulus closed in on him and killed him with their assegais, seventeen fierce wounds horribly mutilating his body.
²¹
‘He who belongs to a race of soldiers can make himself known to the world only by military exploits,’ Louis Napoleon had written to his childhood friend and fellow cadet at Woolwich, Louis Conneau.
²²
Happily, Beatrice was not privy to the friends’ correspondence. Less than twenty years later the words would have a cruelly prophetic ring.

The Queen's grief was pronounced, and she related its course, as ever, to her Journal. Though she was habitually selfish in her indulgence of sorrow, she took time to mention Beatrice's unhappiness: ‘Dear Beatrice, crying very much, as I did too, gave me the telegram… It was dawning and little sleep did I get… Beatrice is so distressed; everyone quite stunned.’
²³
That these Journal entries survive to indicate Beatrice's affection for the Prince, and were not expunged by Beatrice during her ‘editing’ of her mother's Journal, can have three explanations: the princess's grief was the same as she would have felt for any young man known to her killed in his prime; her affection for the Prince was so pure that its admission to posterity could involve no shame or scandal; she continued to cherish her feelings for the Prince and his memory, and could not bring herself to destroy all evidence of a former happy attachment.

In support of the last explanation is a further entry in the Queen's Journal – for 18 August 1880.

[The Empress] asked me to keep [a] small packet, which I was only to open after her death, and then said, would I like perhaps to open it and “de l'avoir de mon vivant”, which I said I would, and she undid the parcel, and took out a most splendid emerald cross, cut out of one stone, without any joints, and set at the points with fine diamonds, with two magnificent large ones at the top. It had been given her by the King of Spain when she married. When I asked her if she would not still wear it, she answered, “non, non, jamais plus de pareilles choses”, that it was one of the few things she had kept and reserved for the future wife of her dear son. Alas! she gives everything away now.
²⁴

Either the Queen or Princess Beatrice (or both) appears to have overlooked the significance of the Empress's statement that the cross was among the few pieces of jewellery she had kept for her future daughter-in-law. Since the Empress's gift was made four-teen months after her son's death, it is unlikely that the action was wholly unconsidered on her part, arising simply from the excess of her grief. Though it reveals nothing of Beatrice's feelings, it points to a desire on the part of Eugenie – who would remain a lifelong friend of Beatrice's—that her daughter-in-law should have been closely connected to the Queen. The Queen accepted unquestioningly the munificent gift – the cross weighed a staggering forty-five carats – as a tribute paid by one friend to another. She referred to Eugenie as ‘dear sister’ and the women remained such until the Queen's death. In 1883 the Queen commissioned from her newest portraitist, Carl Rudolph Sohn, a portrait of the Empress, which she hung in her sitting room at Osborne. O n her death she bequeathed the picture to Beatrice.

Theo Aronson, in his
Queen Victoria and the Bonapartes,
claimed that on the Empress's death in 192 0 at the age of ninety-four, Beatrice wrote to Eugenie's lady-in-waiting requesting the immediate destruction of a number of her letters to Eugenie. H e also repeats two rumours: the first, unsubstantiated but also repeated by David Duff, that a photograph of the Prince Imperial stood on Beatrice's desk until her death; and the second, that Beatrice had confided to her eldest son, the Marquess of
Carisbrooke, at the end of her life that she had been in love with the Prince Imperial, a rumour denied by Lord Carisbrooke in his lifetime.

Opportunity and good looks do not inevitably lead to love. That Beatrice should have fallen in love with her future husband at twenty-seven is not proof that at seventeen she conceived similar emotions for a man who resembled him physically. But it is hard to see why the Prince Imperial should not have caused some disturbance in the tranquil heart of a lonely, isolated young woman whose mother's machinations had hitherto excluded from her line of vision any other suitable object for her natural outpourings of affection.

TEN

‘A good, handy, thoughtful servant’