The Last Princess (24 page)

The Queen's only faith had been in the memory of Beatrice's lifetime of unflagging attentiveness and Henry's handsome face. To her eldest daughter she wrote that she considered Henry ‘the handsomest of the three handsome brothers’ (there were in fact four brothers).
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The Queen had never been immune to masculine good looks. Henry was born in Milan, on 5 October 1858; as an adult his appearance whispered of that southern infancy, with his dark hair and bright, dark eyes. His Italian nurse called him ‘Enrico’, corrupted by the infant tongues of his brothers into ‘Liko’ (pronounced ‘Leeko’). The moniker, with its tang of
exoticism, endured lifelong and was the name by which both Beatrice and the Queen knew him. Happily, in aspiration Liko was anything but exotic. Despite his military training and the stories of his father's martial prowess that had delighted him as a boy, in 1884 he was prepared, after a struggle, to forswear such occupation in return for Beatrice's love. He renounced his commission as a first lieutenant in the Prussian Garde du Corps. With such fidelity did he accept the Queen's circumscription of his married life, that at the time of his death the
Illustrated London News
was able to claim, ‘Prince Henry of Battenberg has been to the Queen, we believe, what any of her younger sons, remaining unmarried and staying with her, might possibly have been.’
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Far from losing Beatrice, the Queen would find that (after a fashion) she had replaced Leopold.

Lady Waterpark was not in waiting at the time of Beatrice's engagement but returned to Osborne at the end of January 1885. She recorded in her diary, ‘I have omitted to say that since my last waiting, the marriage [engagement] of Princess Beatrice to Prince Henry of Battenberg had been announced. The Queen seemed very happy about it.’
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With the decision made, the Queen did her best to put a brave face on things. Mostly she succeeded. Contemplation of the wedding night, and a fear that the marriage might yet unsettle her routine in the long term (despite her best efforts to prevent it from being a marriage in anything but name) continued sporadically to haunt her. Try as she might, she could not completely overcome her initial antipathy, though she struggled to remind herself of the many reasons to be sanguine.

I am surprised at myself [she wrote to the Crown Princess], considering the horror and dislike of the most violent kind I had for the idea of my precious Baby's marrying at all… how I should have been so much reconciled to it now that it is settled. But it is really Liko who has so completely won my heart. He is so modest, so full of consideration for me and so is she, and both are quietly and really sensibly happy.
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The Queen recognized her daughter's imminent change in status by rewarding her with a second lady-in-waiting, Minna
Cochrane, known as ‘Minnie’. Minnie Cochrane was a contemporary of Beatrice's and an Isle of Wight neighbour. Her services supplemented those of Lady Biddulph, wife of Keeper of the Privy Purse Sir Thomas Biddulph and a friend of the princess's from childhood, who had acted as first lady-in-waiting to her for several years. Miss Cochrane was not a stranger either to the Royal Household or to Beatrice personally: with her sister she had spent periods in waiting during the early 1880s and, subsequently, had been received at Osborne on a more social footing, visiting for lunch or to play duets with Beatrice. Her appointment would prove more successful than the Queen's previous attempt to provide her youngest daughter with her own lady attendant, the Hon. Ethel Cadogan, whom Henry Ponsonby had hesitatingly described on her arrival at court in 1876 as ‘gushing but has points’, but who the Queen later unflinchingly dismissed as jealous, sensitive, hot-tempered and unpopular with her colleagues.
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The appointment of Miss Cadogan had been another of those occasions when the Queen's treatment of Beatrice drove a wedge between Beatrice and her siblings. Helena and Louise reacted indignantly to the discovery; after all, they had not had a lady-in-waiting before they were married. With the announcement of Beatrice's engagement, there could be no objections to Miss Cochrane's appointment.

Liko spent Christmas 1884 on the Isle of Wight, the guest of his brother Louis and heavily pregnant sister-in-law Victoria at Kent House, on the Osborne estate. On 23 December the Battenberg party was invited to dinner at the big house. In her manner towards her most contentious guest the Queen made clear that, all boxes being ticked to her satisfaction, she was now happy to welcome him into her family. Liko did not need further prompting. As the Queen recorded in her Journal on 29 December,

Received a letter from Liko Battenberg saying that my kind reception of him encouraged him to ask my consent to speaking to Beatrice, for whom, since they met in Darmstadt eight months ago, he had felt the greatest affection! I had known for some time
that she had the same feelings towards him. They seem sincerely attached to each other, of that there can be no doubt. I let Liko know, to come up after tea, and I saw him in dear Albert's room. Then I called the dear child, and gave them my blessing.
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With Albert's shade summoned to the party, and Beatrice once again restored to the status of ‘child’ through her belated compliance, the Queen smiled upon the union she had done her best to resist. To complete her volte-face, she telegraphed her old friend the Empress of Germany and her daughter the Crown Princess to share the good news. Only the latter responded as the Queen had intended.

Even the briefest pause would have allowed the Queen to anticipate the certain negative reaction to the news of the German imperial family. Although the Crown Princess's second son Henry initially wired his congratulations direct to Beatrice and Liko, he later rescinded this good opinion and joined in the family's undeviating condemnation of a marriage between a royal princess and an upstart princeling of morganatic birth. Astonished, the Queen wrote to the Crown Princess (a lone voice in Berlin in rejoicing in the match): ‘I must tell you how very unamiably the Empress and even dear Fritz [the Crown Princess's husband] have written to me. I think really the Empress has no right to write to me in that tone… Dear Fritz speaks of Liko as not being of the blood – a little like about animals.’ So affronted was the Queen that she had copies made of the empress's letter. She enclosed one for the Crown Princess to digest, alongside her ‘rather stern answer’. With an understated anger that would have been clear to her daughter, the Queen explained, ‘I cannot swallow affronts.’
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Unhappily, to add fuel to the fire, the Queen's letter crossed with one from the Crown Princess in which the writer detailed the disapproval of the engagement expressed by her children, Beatrice's nephews and niece by marriage. At this the Queen's fury finally erupted. William of Prussia, the Queen's first grandson, had married, in 1881, Augusta of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenburg, known as ‘Dona’, a portionless princess whose claims to prettiness the Queen had already previously
denied. Now she denounced ‘the extraordinary impertinence… insolence and I must add, great unkindness’ of the Prussian children. But she saved her parting shot for William's wife. ‘As for Dona, a poor, little, insignificant Princess raised entirely by your kindness to the position she is in, I have no words.’
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The Queen's confidence in her decision did not falter in the face of Prussian criticism. She dismissed Berlin's stuffiness, asserting, like King Cophetua, that in England if a king chose to marry a peasant girl, she would be queen as much as any princess:’
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‘If the Queen of England thinks a person good enough for her daughter, what have other people to say?’
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To highlight the contrast with the reaction of her Prussian relatives the Queen reported the kind telegrams she had received from every other sovereign. With partial truthfulness she claimed, ‘The marriage is immensely popular here and the joy unbounded that she, sweet Child, remains with poor, old shattered me!’
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It was true that popular opinion at home approved Beatrice's willingness to remain with her mother after marriage. A sermon preached after Liko's death commended Beatrice as ‘that youngest daughter whose touching wish to remain at her mother's side, even after she became a wife, appealed to the heart of a nation’.
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But the general public rejoiced in Beatrice's marriage only insofar as it promised happiness to the Queen's favourite daughter. Liko's foreignness and his lack of fortune went against him. A splendid position might have carried all before it, but Liko was a prince only in name, without a throne and with no close connection with any of Europe's great ruling dynasties (his brother's position as Prince of Bulgaria was rightly discounted). A ‘German pauper’ was not an asset to Britain's already highly Germanized Royal Family but a potential drain on the national purse. On a wave of happiness, and buoyed by the knowledge that her siblings and the Queen's Household warmly supported her engagement, Beatrice scarcely noticed public carping. Accustomed to seeing events as she wished them to appear, the Queen simply ignored the noises off, although she made plain to Gladstone's government that she had noted those of her ministers who had not written to congratulate her on the news.

Like the response of the German imperial family, the tepid, even negative national reaction to Beatrice's engagement could have been anticipated by the Queen. At the time of Louise's engagement to Lord lorne in 1870 the Queen had supported Louise against those of her own children, chiefly Bertie and the Crown Princess, who opposed the marriage of a princess to a commoner. Correctly, the Queen had explained the two-fold nature of the popular objection, xenophobia and penny-pinching: ‘Small foreign princes (without any money) are very unpopular here’;
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‘the feeling against foreign marriages has long been very strong here, especially if the Princes are poor.’
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Fifteen years later the Queen had changed her tune. (In her defence, her previous argument had assumed the British princess would live abroad with her foreign prince, thus taking to another country the dowry and annuity provided for her from British taxes.)

Despite mutterings in the popular press, when the question of Beatrice's annuity came to be debated in Parliament in May of the following year, the vote passed with a majority of three hundred and thirty-seven to thirty-eight. The liberal republican Henry Labouchere raised the loudest protest (happily ‘not in violent language’ as the Queen reported afterwards
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); yet even he failed to garner significant support. Explaining his reasons for not seconding Labouchere's opposition to Beatrice's annuity, radical MP John Bright, a potential ally of Labouchere's who had been canvassed by him as such, wrote:

The Princess is now the only unmarried daughter of the Queen, and I cannot believe that any significant number of our people would wish her to be treated in a manner less generous than has been the case with her sisters… I gather from the concluding words of your resolution that your objection to the grant is on the ground of economy, on which you will permit me to say a word. The annual grant of £6,000 is less than one farthing per family among the seven millions of families in the United Kingdom, and therefore cannot be regarded as a burden that can be felt… In years past I have spoken in Parliament against the magnitude of some of the grants to the Royal family, but I could not condemn
this present grant on any grounds. I feel that in the course I am now taking… I am acting in accordance with the general character of my countrymen, with whom whatever has a taint of unkindness and meanness is condemned.
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The Prince of Wales was swift to thank Bright for his words on Beatrice's behalf: ‘Having read your letter… relative to my Sister's Dowry, I cannot resist writing a few lines to express my warmest thanks to you for the kind expressions you made use of … and I know that this will be deeply appreciated by the Queen and every member of my Family.’
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The Queen had not doubted that Parliament would rally to her support, and began making preparations for the wedding as soon as she announced the engagement. At Osborne, on 31 January, she formalized Minnie Cochrane's appointment as Beatrice's second lady-in-waiting; three days later, with the Dean of Windsor but without Beatrice, she went early in the morning to nearby Whippingham Church. This, the Queen had decided in a calculated break with tradition, would be the venue for Beatrice's wedding. Royal princesses did not marry in parish churches, but the Queen, with her horror of public show, was determined that Beatrice's wedding would not be a state occasion.

The use of St Mildred's restricted the number of guests who could be asked and allowed the Queen, as a face-saving exercise, not to invite the German imperial family, whom she knew, even at this stage, would refuse her invitation. She outlined preliminary plans to the Crown Princess: ‘The wedding is to be here at Whippingham church – half state uniforms and evening dresses, but no trains, and Beatrice will have no train or train bearers—but eight of her nieces as at dear Alice's marriage.’
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Later the number of bridesmaids was increased to ten, as the Queen explained to one of her favourite correspondents, the poet laureate Tennyson: ‘my eldest son's three girls, Louise, Victoria and Maud of Wales, dear Alice's two motherless girls, Irene and Alice of Hesse, Princess Christian's two, Victoria and Louise of Holstein, and my son Alfred's three, Marie, Victoria and Alexandra Marie of Edinburgh’.
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In 1866 and 1871 Helena and Louise had been
attended by an octet of daughters of the aristocracy. Such pains had the Queen taken that Beatrice not make friends outside the immediate court circle, that it is unlikely Beatrice could have mustered a similar flotilla of suitable girls of her own age. Instead, her bevy of nieces included – on account of the overlap of generations – a smattering of near contemporaries (Irene of Hesse and the Wales girls), the future Tsarina of Russia and the future queens of Norway and Roumania. At least four took a close interest in the proceedings, the Duchess of Edinburgh writing to the Queen that her three daughters were ‘very flattered and proud’ to be asked to play such an important role in their aunt Beatrice's wedding,
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while from Darmstadt, Irene of Hesse, Liko's cousin, wrote to the Queen shortly after the engagement, ‘[Liko's] letters from England have always been so full of happiness.’
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