The Last Princess (17 page)

If, inadvertently, John Brown's presence lessened the burden of care and comfort imposed upon Beatrice, it is unlikely that she analysed its import until much later, if at all. Brown had been a ghillie at Balmoral before he became the Queen's full-time attendant. At Balmoral his role was less circumscribed than it would afterwards become: when Leopold first visited the castle in the summer of i860, it was John Brown who led him on Topsy the pony, the Queen not then claiming his full attention. John Brown was a part of Beatrice's life almost from her earliest memories. He shared her attendance on the Queen to the extent that only after his death, when imagining became reality, could she conceive of her life with the Queen without him. He rode on the box on the front of the carriage when the Queen took her daily drive with Beatrice and her ladies. He accompanied the Queen on her holidays abroad, though he detested foreigners and was forcibly immune to the variety and blandishments of foreign
landscapes. And at Balmoral, where the Queen and Beatrice spent up to four months a year, he was ubiquitous. He accompanied them, for example, on their visits to cottagers, when the Queen attended a Highland christening or, with her customary mournful tastes, took Beatrice to see the dead body of a ‘poor sweet innocent bairnie, only three years old… I… was glad she should see death for the first time in so touching and pleasing a form”
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– as if the story of her whole life had not been written in the vocabulary of death.

When, in the early 1870s, the Queen resumed the expeditions from Balmoral she had begun with the Prince Consort, John Brown was always of the party. In the evening he waited at table. Invariably the travellers lodged in somewhat cramped conditions, and Brown's room was never far away from either the Queen's or Beatrice's. At Dunrobin in 1872 the Queen recorded, ‘I went to see Beatrice's room, which is close by [mine], down three steps in the same passage. Fraulein Bauer, and Morgan, her dresser, are near her. Brown lives just opposite in the room intended for Albert's valet.'
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Five years later, the Queen and her party put up at the Loch Maree Hotel: ‘Up the short but easy small winding staircase came small, though comfortable, rooms. To the left Beatrice's, and Brown's just opposite to the right.'
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Living so regularly cheek by jowl like this would quickly have exposed any tensions in the relationship between Beatrice and John Brown. Since no source mentions any such unpleasantness, we must assume none existed. Indeed, it would be surprising if two people whose whole lives were devoted to the Queen's comfort had not endeavoured to work together amicably, setting aside personal grievances and antipathies. That it was possible to exist on amicable terms with the vilified Scotsman is suggested by a letter the Queen wrote to her granddaughter Victoria of Hesse, following a visit of Victoria and her sister Ella to Windsor: ‘Brown said on Friday morning that it seemed all wrong without you and as if “a Blight had come over us”.'
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Since he rarely dissembled, Brown evidently liked the Hessian princesses. Victoria and Ella were close to Beatrice in age, and the three girls were friends. It is unlikely that John Brown would have got on with
her nieces if his relationship with Beatrice had not been cordial.

Among the significant alterations we know that Beatrice made to Queen Victoria's Journal after her death is the excision of much material relating to John Brown. This was influenced by a number of factors—Beatrice's knowledge that scandal-mongers considered the Queen and Brown lovers, and her awareness of the deep dislike for Brown felt by several members of her family, in particular Bertie, who was certainly king when Beatrice began working on the Journal. It is also the case that a characteristic of Beatrice's reworking of the Journal is her downgrading of the prominence and significance accorded to servants. The Queen took an active interest in the lives and welfare of her servants; in her Journal as bequeathed by Beatrice all assume the status of background figures. Benita Stoney and Heinrich C. Weltzein, in their compilation of the letters of Frieda Arnold, one of the Queen's German dressers, compare before and after Journal entries for 9 August 1845, t n e former having survived in a copy made in the Queen's lifetime. The former reads, ‘I undressed as quickly as possible and then Singer, Peneyvre, Rebecca and Dehler set off for Woolwich. Skerrett and Margaret return to Osborne.’ (All those named are maids or dressers.) Beatrice's transcription reads: ‘Undressed as quickly as possible, the maids having to leave for Woolwich.'
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In this case, the servants expunged, with the exception of Miss Skerrett, were not known to Beatrice; her deletions do not indicate personal animosity. Nor should her excision of so much material concerning John Brown be interpreted in such a light.

As at the death of the Prince Consort, the Queen turned to Tennyson in March 1883. Of John Brown she wrote to the poet, ‘He was part of my life and quite invaluable.’ She added, ‘I have a dear devoted child who has always been a dear unselfish companion to me, but she is young and I can't darken her young life by my trials and sorrows. My other children, though all loving, have all their own interests and homes.'
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For more than twenty years Beatrice's life had been darkened by her mother's trials and sorrows. During that period, she had mutely watched
as all eight of her siblings acquired ‘their own interests and homes’. We do not know if she ever wondered whether her turn would come, if she would be allowed to marry and experience life outside the narrow confines of the Queen's houses.

With John Brown's death her turn was both closer and more remote than either the Queen or Beatrice imagined.

ELEVEN

‘She is my constant companion’

On Beatrice's eighteenth birthday the Queen gave thanks for the special joy her favourite child had brought her.

How many prayers and thanks went up to our Heavenly Father for this darling child, whose birth was such a joy to us, and who is my blessing and comfort, whom God will, I know, keep near me and preserve! I could but feel my heart full in thinking the little Baby my darling one loved so much, to whom he almost gave his last smile, had grown up to girlhood and to be of age, and
he
never have been there to guide and protect her!
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Anointed with the Prince Consort's dying smile, Beatrice had had no choice but to grow up as her mother's particular comfort. Happily, she had developed ‘the sweetest temper imaginable’ and became ‘very useful and handy… She is my constant companion and hope and trust will never leave me while I live. I do not intend she should ever go out as her sisters did (which was a mistake) but let her stay (except of course occasionally going to theatres) as much as she can with me.’
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That year the Queen wrote a memorandum concerning the procedure to be followed in the event of her own serious illness or death. ‘Supposing she was too ill to be herself consulted,’ she wrote in her customary third person, she nominated Beatrice as her lieutenant and alternative sounding box. ‘Princess Beatrice, from living always with the Queen, is the one who is to be applied to for all that is to be done.’
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Clearly, in black and white, the Queen expressed her certainty that Beatrice would never live anywhere but with her.

In her determination not to lose this daughter on whom she leaned so heavily, the Queen summoned to her aid God's will.
Together, the Queen decided, monarch and maker would collude to prevent Beatrice from leaving her mother. The first seeds of potential discord were sown not by Beatrice or by the Queen but by two other of the Queen's children, one living, one dead.

It was not enough that 14 December had carried off the Queen's husband and very nearly, in 1871, her eldest son. In 1878 it wrought again its cruel havoc with devastating effects. Aged thirty-five, Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, died of diphtheria on the seventeenth anniversary of the death of her father. She left behind her, besides her widower Louis, four daughters and a son, aged between six and fifteen.

Relations between the Queen and Alice had latterly been strained, but the Queen took a close interest in her Hesse grandchildren. After what ‘must have been a dreadful Christmas and what a New Year!’
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, the Queen invited the family to Osborne. They arrived on 21 January. The following day, writing to the Queen's cousin Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck, Beatrice described their first meeting: ‘I cannot tell you how sad the meeting yesterday with Louis and the Children was. For the first time to miss darling Alice, and to see him alone. It all brought our terrible loss so vividly before us.’ Happily, the Grand Duke's grief was all his sister-in-law required it to be: ‘It is such a comfort that he likes to speak of dear Alice and of all she did.’
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When the mournful party departed six weeks later, Beatrice recorded predictably, ‘The parting from dear Louis was very sad … We miss the dear Children so much, the house feels quite empty without them.’
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Even taking account of the circumspection Beatrice would wisely have employed in writing to this most garrulous of the Queen's relations, there is little here in these conventionalized, formal, even distant expressions of regret to suggest that she had conceived for her grieving brother-in-law anything more than the sympathy his circumstances inevitably inspired – as indeed she had not. Nor did anyone else in her family think otherwise. But it occurred to Bertie, whose voice for once found an acquiescent echo in the Queen, that a solution offering comfort and convenience all round (if not a recipe for happiness), was that Louis remarry – directing his choice to his
sister-in-law Beatrice. The couple would live between Darmstadt and the Queen's homes, with the greater part of their time spent with the Queen, who would thereby not only not lose the daughter she had no intention of releasing but be able to oversee the upbringing and education of her four granddaughters and Louis's heir. Victoria and Ella, the eldest of Alice's children, were Beatrice's near contemporaries, whom we know she accounted friends. Among Louis's recommendations was his marked fondness for Balmoral – so rare among the Queen's children and their spouses – on account of its shooting and stalking. Contradictory in this as in so many of her plans, the Queen does not appear to have anticipated difficulties in reconciling her frequently expressed determination to keep Beatrice ‘very quiet and at home’
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with the imposition upon her of stepmotherhood to a family of five and marriage to a man twenty years her senior with whom she had no shared interests. It is unlikely that the Queen solicited Beatrice's feelings in the matter. Nor did she draw pause for thought from her excessively sheltered daughter's singular lack of qualifications for the task she so glibly allotted her. Only one obstacle blocked her path: the law.

That it was illegal for a husband to marry the sister of his deceased wife did not unduly concern either the Queen or the Prince of Wales. Bertie threw himself behind the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill's passage through Parliament, and the Queen kept the matter at the forefront of her conversations with the Prime Minister, Disraeli. On 6 May 1879, having successfully passed through the Commons, the bill reached its second reading in the House of Lords. The Prince was in the house to make a speech in favour of the change to the law; with him he carried a petition signed by 3258 Norfolk farmers praying that the prohibition be ended – an eccentric attempt to strengthen his cause given that the majority of the objections to the bill were raised by Church of England bishops in the Lords who were unlikely to be swayed by this or any other evidence of strong feeling in rural East Anglia. Inevitably, the bill was thrown out. The Queen had applauded its passage through the Commons as ‘such a slap to
the bigots’;
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in the Lords, those ‘bigots’ refused to be slapped into line. The Queen met Disraeli the following lunch time: ‘Talked of the loss of the Bill, permitting the marriage with a sister-in-law, in favour of which Bertie presented a petition, and which we are most anxious should pass. It has passed the Commons but is thrown out in the Lords, the Bishops being so much against it. Lord Beaconsfield [Disraeli] is in favour of it, but the whole Cabinet against it!! Incredible!’
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By the time the bill successfully became law, the Grand Duke of Hesse was dead and Beatrice a widow.

No mention is made of Beatrice in this account by the Queen of her conversation with Disraeli on 7 May 1879, but the bald ellipsis of her ‘which we are most anxious should pass’, with its bland, unspecific, perfunctory tone, has all the hallmarks of a Journal alteration made by Beatrice after the Queen's death. It is possible that Beatrice was not aware of the plans Bertie and the Queen were hatching for her until some time later, perhaps not even until she began her work on the Queen's Journal. The pronounced support of her family for the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill ought to have given her (as the Queen's last unmarried daughter) some indication of the way the wind was blowing. However, if Beatrice was in love with the Prince Imperial, then at this point, the last year of the Prince's life, she may have been too wrapped up in her feelings for him to spare much time for, or even take seriously, so fantastical a scheme as her mother betrothing her to Alice's widower. Whatever the explanation, it would be in keeping with Beatrice's extremely private nature had she erased from the Queen's Journal records of unfulfilled plans for her marriage – distasteful to her, hitherto unknown to her, or otherwise.