The Last Princess (26 page)

Only the Queen's invincible determination made a royal wedding on the Isle of Wight possible. From every practical viewpoint the scheme was unfeasible. There was not enough room in St Mildred's even for the reduced number of guests entailed by a non-state occasion. The Queen filled Osborne with her guests, then took over nearby Norris Castle and East Cowes Castle. Still there was not enough room. She dispatched guests to Osborne Cottage, Kent House and Park Villa. Two of the royal yachts, the
Victoria and Albert
and the
Osborne,
became floating hotels. Still some guests remained in London until the morning of the wedding. The choir of St George's Chapel Windsor and the organist Mr Parratt were imported for the occasion, though they received shoddy treatment for their pains, the Master of the Household asserting in advance, ‘We cannot provide in any way for the choristers coming from London. They should make their own arrangements for refreshments. I suppose at East Cowes.’
¹²
Adding a note of confusion, the Queen – despite her earlier letter to the Crown Princess detailing the absence of trains – refused to commit herself to any definite dress code, and it was left to the Mistress of the Robes, the Duchess of Buccleuch, to provide a resolution: ‘Ladies staying in the Isle of Wight to wear long dresses with demi-toilette bodies, cut down on the back and with sleeves to the elbow. Jewels to be worn on the
dress and in the hair as for full dress evening party. Only those ladies who travel down to Osborne for the day are to wear bonnets and smart morning dresses.’
¹³
Helpfully, the Duchess made available her own dress at her dressmakers in New Bond Street, so that those who remained uncertain could see exactly what was expected.

Few of these ramifications affected Beatrice. She was accustomed to the tortuous workings of her mother's household, and the Queen's need to involve herself and make decisions at every level. Her thoughts were fixed firmly on her wedding day and what lay beyond. As she wrote to Leopold's widow, the Duchess of Albany, on the first day of her honeymoon, ‘What rest and peace I feel now that all is accomplished, my heart has so long desired.’
¹⁴

Liko arrived on 20 July with his parents, his brothers Franz Josef ('Franzjos') and Sandro, Prince of Bulgaria (the latter accompanied by his Bulgarian secretary Toptschilecheff), the Grand Duke of Hesse and his children, and the Hesse suite. At a private investiture service attended by Beatrice and Arthur, the Queen awarded Liko the Order of the Garter (she had made a similar award to all her sons-in-law except the commoner Lord Lome), and conferred upon him the style ‘Royal Highness’ (as a morganatic prince he had previously been ‘Serene Highness’). Liko's change in status had been an issue since the Queen announced Beatrice's engagement, the Prussians vociferously determined not to recognize or honour any escalation. So acrimonious did the debate become that the Queen had asked the Grand Duke of Hesse to try to defuse the situation, in particular by pacifying her troublesome grandson William of Prussia. The Grand Duke did not succeed, but the Queen was undeterred. In Britain, at any rate, Liko would be raised to the same level as Beatrice, even if this gave the penny press one more reason to carp. ‘It is not vouchsafed to all of us to be demorganaticated, bridegrooms, Royal Highnesses, and Knights of the Garter in the twinkling of an eye,’
Vanity Fair
commented after the wedding.
¹⁵

The wedding day itself was a perfect English summer's day, sea and cloudless sky cerulean blue. Across the island the weather
provided a boon to local children. In Newport three thousand Sunday-school children marched to the home of Alderman Me w for a picnic followed by games and races; similar children's parties were held in honour of the day at Ryde and Binstead. Even the Queen resisted the temptation to lament the heat. Despite the houseful of guests, she and Beatrice breakfasted alone, outside under the trees. During the course of the morning Arthur and his wife came out to see them and, later, Liko too. The Queen gave Beatrice a special, additional wedding present, a halfhoop ruby ring that her uncle Augustus, Duke of Sussex, her father's favourite brother, had given her on her wedding day. It was the lesser of two tokens of singular esteem the Queen bestowed on her daughter that day. Th e other was among her most treasured possessions. It was her own wedding veil of Honiton lace, which she had additionally worn at the christening of all of her children but which no other daughter had been permitted to wear. It was a particular favouritism that signalled more eloquently than any words the Queen's drawing a line under the unhappiness of the summer and her acceptance of Beatrice's marriage. Beatrice wore it suspended from a tiara of large diamond stars.

The wheel had turned full circle. Once, it was rumoured, the Queen had wrapped Beatrice in the Prince Consort's nightshirt, a physical comfort in the painful days of longing that followed the Prince's death. No w she gave to Beatrice her own wedding veil. From the age of four Beatrice had been forced to consider the Queen not simply as her mother but as the happiest of wives dealt the cruellest blow by the one force she could not control, death. No w at last the role of wife passed symbolically from mother to daughter in the handing from one to another of the wedding veil.

The service started at one o'clock. While the Queen rested,

Beatrice began to dress, in dearest Albert's room, in order that I might be near her. I came in, whilst her veil and wreath were being fastened on. It was
my
dear wedding veil… She wore besides, the diamond circlet with diamond stars… Whilst my cap
was being put on, Beatrice came in ready dressed. Her dress was quite simple, in ivory white satin, very long, trimmed with my wedding lace, and some small garlands and sprays of orange blossoms, myrtle and white heather. Her jewels were diamonds.
¹⁶

In addition to the tiara of diamond stars, Beatrice wore a short necklace of large diamonds from which hung a large diamond cross, a necessary massing of bright stones if she were to avoid being eclipsed by her mother, who set off her customary black dress with a diamond necklace and the Koh-i-noor. Beatrice's dress, which the Queen described as ‘quite simple’, strikes the modern viewer as anything but, but beneath the lush garlanding of orange blossom and foliage the dress itself was indeed simple, a tightly laced white bodice above a long, almost straight skirt, over which was draped an overskirt of beautiful lace. On her left shoulder Beatrice wore the Victoria and Albert Order and the Imperial Order of the Crown of India, the second a present from the Queen on New Year's Day 1878 in anticipation of her twenty-first birthday. Her ten bridesmaids, whom Henry Labouchere, the MP who had voted against her annuity, described as showing a ‘decided absence of beauty’,
¹⁷
wore high-necked white dresses with flounced skirts and carried saucer-shaped bouquets of stephanotis. Owing to their large number, the brides-maids travelled separately to St Mildred's. Beatrice travelled alone with the Queen in a closed carriage drawn by four greys, the last of the fourteen carriages that made up the royal procession. As they drew near to the church, their arrival was signalled by the sounding of guns and the noise of cheering from the crowds along the way.

A guard of honour of her sister Princess Louise's Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders awaited Beatrice at St Mildred's; at the entrance to the covered passage Bertie was dressed in the uniform of a field marshal. Together mother, brother and sister entered the packed church. As at any wedding, the congregation included friends and relations, childhood associates and a number of compulsory invitations. All Beatrice's siblings save the Crown Princess and her husband sat in the chancel (the absence of the
German imperial couple meant that Beatrice was married without either of her surviving godparents, just as her confirmation had been distinguished by its lack of godparents). Also in the chancel were Mademoiselle Norele, Beatrice's French governess, and Fraulein Bauer, her German governess who was now reader to the Royal Household. Sir Henry Ponsonby, who had hoped so earnestly that Beatrice be allowed to marry, sat in the Queen's pew, as did Ethel Cadogan, Beatrice's first lady-in-waiting, who would again spend periods in attendance on the princess after her marriage. Close to the altar was Lady Waterpark, and in the Household pew the same Lord De Ros who had shown the eleven-year-old princess the Tower of London. Absent was the Queen's cousin, Princess Mary Adelaide, Duchess of Teck, in mourning for her father-in-law Duke Alexander of Wtirttemberg; she had been the first of the Queen's correspondents for whom Beatrice became a go-between, in 1872, at the outset of Beatrice's long secretaryship. Also absent was Gladstone. Despite public disapprobation of the snub the Queen refused to relent and invite the ‘half crazy and in many ways ridiculous old man’ whose second ministry had recently fallen from power.
¹⁸
The Empress Eugenie declined her invitation, though there had been no breach in friendship between Napoleon Ill's widow and the Queen or her daughter. Eugenie kept to herself her reasons for staying away from the wedding of the girl she may once have intended as her daughter-in-law. Instead, two years later, she became the godmother of Beatrice's only daughter.

With her customary facility for embracing contradictions, the Queen had insisted that Liko wear the uniform of the Prussian Garde du Corps, though his feelings towards Prussia at this stage can have been mixed at best, and despite the Queen having made it a condition of his marriage that he renounce his military career. The effect of the dazzling white tunic, white breeches and high black boots added a note of Ruritanian whimsy to the service in a small parish church officiated at by four clergymen including the Archbishop of Canterbury, and caused the Princess of Wales to dub Liko ‘Beatrice's Lohengrin’. The Queen, however, was pleased with the charming picture.

A happier-looking couple could seldom be seen kneeling at the altar together. It was very touching. I stood very close to my dear child, who looked very sweet, pure, and calm. Though I stood for the ninth time near a child and for the fifth time near a daughter, at the altar, I think I never felt more deeply than I did on this occasion, though full of confidence. When the blessing had been given, I tenderly embraced my darling ‘Baby’.
¹⁹

The bride, wh o had entered the church to Wagner, left to Mendelssohn's Wedding March – on the arm of her husband, Princess Henry of Battenberg at last. T o the absent Tennyson the Queen wrote, ‘The simple, pretty little village church, all decorated with flowers, the sweet young bride, the handsome young husband, the ten bridesmaids, six of who m quite children with flowing fair hair, the brilliant sunshine and the blue sea all made up pictures not to be forgotten.’
²⁰

The scene at Osborne after the ceremony [reported the
Illustrated London News]
was that of a brilliant garden party, the guests being entertained in the marquees erected out of doors. From the south entrance abutting upon the lawn was a covered way, leading to a great oblong tent, decorated with palms, ferns and flowers sent from the Royal stove-houses and gardens at Windsor. In the centre was a horse-shoe table where eighty guests lunched and dined… On the lawns were two large tents, occupied by the band of the Marines, the other by that of the 93 rd Highlanders. The music tents faced the Queen's pavilion, where fifty of the more select of the wedding party, including the inner circle and the family of the Queen, together with the bride and bridegroom, partook of luncheon.
²¹

Previously the register had been signed not at St Mildred's but at Osborne, the Queen having drawn up in advance an order of precedence expressly for the purpose, to avoid family squabbles over rank. When the lunch was over, as Liko's sister Marie, Countess of Erbach-Schonberg recorded, there ‘followed a march past of all the guests before the Queen and the bridal pair’.
²²
It was five o'clock by the time Beatrice and Liko left – to the strains
of the National Anthem, Beatrice having changed into a costume of ivory crepe de chine trimmed with lace and wearing an ostrich-feather hat, for the six-mile drive to their honeymoon destination. Until that moment the Queen had controlled herself admirably. At the point of departure, her composure faltered. ‘I bore up bravely till the departure and then fairly gave way,’ she confided to her eldest daughter. ‘I remained quietly upstairs and when I heard the cheering and “God Save the Queen” I stopped my ears and cried bitterly.’
²³

The unthinkable had finally happened: Beatrice had escaped from her mother. With all the cruelty of youth she reported to her sister-in-law Helen the Queen's collapse at the critical moment. She felt truly sorry for her, Beatrice admitted, as did Liko. The complicity of husband and wife in that instant, had the Queen known it, would have been the final twist of the dagger in her heart. The irony was that her behaviour of the summer arose in part from the depth of her love for her daughter and her terror at losing that love by sharing her with another. But that terrible summer had served to confirm Beatrice's love for Liko and created between mother and daughter the first tiny fissure. Once, Beatrice had refused to talk to a potential suitor because the Queen had forbidden her. Now she felt sorry for the Queen as she took her seat in the carriage beside her husband.

The couple were destined for Quarr Abbey, the home of Colonel and Lady Adela Cochrane, brother and sister-in-law of Beatrice's new lady-in-waiting. At 5.45 they passed through a triumphal arch at the foot of Wootton Bridge. ‘The outrider appeared in sight, and the united bands struck up “God Save the Queen”. The royal cortege passed slowly through the loyal and enthusiastic throng, the Prince and Princess graciously acknowledging the hearty cheers of welcome.’
²⁴
Under the arch passed husband and wife, en route for their new life.