The Last Princess (27 page)

At Osborne, as the sun sank, fireworks erupted from the yachts in the bay. The terrace and the lawns were strung with lights; reflections of multicoloured garden lights danced in the fountain. The bands played as dinner was served in the two large tents. Among the guests was the Queen's cousin, George, Duke
of Cambridge. In his diary he noted, ‘The Queen was again present and seemed wonderfully cheerful and well.’
²⁵

Beatrice's honeymoon lasted from Thursday evening until Tuesday lunchtime. It included two visits from the Queen – on Sunday and again on Tuesday. At five days’ duration, the separation, despite interruptions, was longer than the two-day break at Windsor granted to the Princess Royal when, in 1858, she had married the Crown Prince of Prussia, or the three-day honeymoon of Alice and Louis of Hesse, spent three miles outside Ryde in a house the Queen and Prince Consort had thought of buying before they found Osborne. O n that occasion the Queen visited for tea on the second day.

Beatrice was grateful for the chance to spend time alone with Liko, but satisfied that they return to her mother when the five days expired. In response to a letter from Leopold's widow she wrote of her happiness, proud at last to be able to address her sister-in-law on terms of equality:

Liko's kindness, thoughtfulness and tenderness are intensely precious to me, and I feel so safe and content in his dear hands; God grant that I may make him as happy as he deserves, and that we may be spared to each other… We sit out nearly all day and it does me so much good, and this place is looking quite lovely. I am thankful to say we remain till Tuesday, and we are quite content with that.
²⁶

It was an acknowledgement that five days was not long to spend alone before returning to live with one's mother. But Beatrice was essentially a pragmatist. There had been too many times when she had doubted that this moment would arrive at all to tilt at windmills now. She would happily have married Liko with no honeymoon. Hers was neither a complaining nor a fanciful nature. She did not interpret as ominous the accident that befell their carriage on the approach to Quarr Abbey, one of the leading horses falling and taking with it its partner. The coachman detached the front two horses from the reins and the carriage continued drawn by a single pair.

SEVENTEEN

'There now burnt a bewitching
fiery passion'

For Beatrice marriage changed everything and nothing. A year after her wedding she opened the annual show of the Royal Horticultural Society of Southampton and the Hampshire bee-keepers’ association exhibition. The aldermen and burgesses of the town presented her with a proclamation on vellum. It expressed ‘the profound respect we entertain for your personal character and our admiration of the affectionate manner in which you have comforted and assisted your widowed mother our Gracious Sovereign the Queen'.
¹
In March of that year Beatrice and Liko, accompanied by Liko's sister Marie, had visited the Empress Eugenie in her house at Farnborough Hill. A member of the Empress's household described to her grandmother her impressions of the royal party: ‘We kissed the Princess Beatrice's hand and curtseyed to the others, who are both very nice. The Countess is very pretty and amiable and merry, and so is Prince Henry… Princess Beatrice is very quiet indeed and seems dull and out of spirits… “suppressed”… from the constant restraint of the Queen's presence she has lost all life and spirits.’
²

Married or not, everything came back to the Queen. From long association with the Queen, Beatrice was the best known of the royal daughters, her uncomplaining attendance on her widowed mother a source of admiration for the contemporary public. Closer to home, opinions differed. ‘No man can be always with the Queen,’ Sir Thomas Biddulph had written in the 1870s, his immediate target John Brown, ‘without being very much the worse for it.’
³
No woman either, and Beatrice's behaviour was conditioned by long years at the Queen's side, so that those who met her briefly—like ‘Goodie’ of the Empress's household –
considered her ‘suppressed', all natural ebullition of spirits dampened by the Queen's insistence on absolute subjection to her shattered, sorrowing, widowed state. Beatrice's was a soft, quiet, deep voice – she sang as a mezzo-soprano; its mellow hush suited the Queen's distaste for loud and jarring noises. Her manner was retiring and unassertive, and she had a habit of not looking her interlocutor in the eye or even appearing to listen to what was said to her. She resisted controversial topics of conversation and referred anything problematic to her mother. Her clothes were discreet, though she had a fondness for elaborate trimmings, particularly lace, and jewels. Towards the Queen her manner was sympathetic if unsentimental; to any third party she could appear offhand, disinterested. She treated the Queen and the Queen's business, however trivial, with a degree of reverence that would increasingly become the dominant note of Victorian court life towards the end of the Queen's reign. Marriage to Liko gave Beatrice's life an additional focus beyond the Queen, but it did not wholly alter her existence. What it brought her was happiness of an active, immediate variety she had never known, save in those first unthinking years before the Prince Consort's death. To her husband, Liko's sister wrote during that spring visit, ‘It is nice to see how radiantly happy Liko and Beatrice are.’
⁴

In her mother's eyes, those of the Royal Household and those of the public she encountered through the increased programme of royal engagements she undertook as a married woman, Beatrice remained primarily the Queen's most devoted daughter, her mother's wishes her foremost obligation. In that sense she
was
suppressed: her perception of her duty to the Queen led her to suppress her own desires in favour of her mother's – with the notable exception of the question of marrying Liko. But she was not out of spirits. Marie Erbach was correct in her assessment of Beatrice and Liko's radiant happiness. The challenge for both would be to sustain that happiness in a domestic environment that required not only Beatrice but Liko too to give the Queen's wishes preferment in every sphere. Beatrice's daughter Ena claimed of her mother's relationship with the Queen, ‘She had to be in perpetual attendance on her formidable mother. Her
devotion and submission were complete.’
⁵
There is no question but that Beatrice was also devoted to Liko and that Liko in turn came to share her devotion to the Queen. But it was a tall order for an active twenty-seven-year-old ex-army officer to embrace the unquestioning submission to imperious caprice that in Beatrice's case had become second nature. The royal honeymoon lasted five days. On Wednesday morning, business resumed as usual. On Friday, belatedly, the House of Lords passed the bill of Liko's naturalization, overlooked amid the wedding preparations. Liko now enjoyed formally all the rights and privileges of a natural-born Englishman. He had become, by act of Parliament as well as by marriage, his mother-in-law's subject.

To her granddaughter, Beatrice's niece-cum-sister-in-law Victoria of Battenberg, the Queen wrote from Balmoral in the autumn of 1885, ‘I thought you would like to hear how well all is going on – how nice and sensible dear Liko is, how happy dear Auntie is and they are together – and yet so sensibly, etc so that I feel but little change.’
⁶
In emphasizing stasis over change, the Queen deluded herself. The decade of Beatrice's marriage was the Queen's happiest since the Prince Consort's death. With tact, humour and circumspection, Liko coaxed her in tiny, hesitant steps away from the shadows of the past. Within months of Beatrice and Liko's wedding, Marie Erbach wrote, ‘I am glad that since Liko has been of her household, several of the Queen's lonely habits of life have gradually disappeared under his influence.’
⁷
The Queen danced with Liko, she even sang again apparently unaware that these were symbolic innovations. Christmas 1885 was the most carefree the Queen had spent since i860, when the Prince Consort had swung Beatrice in a napkin and sunlight glittered on the frost outside the windows of Windsor Castle. Like the Prince Consort and John Brown before him, Liko treated the Queen not as a figurehead inspiring awe but as a woman willing to be cajoled, susceptible to a handsome face, respectful of those who were not afraid of her. The Empress Eugenie's ‘Goodie’ told her grandmother, ‘Prince Henry it appears keeps [Princess Beatrice] always on thorns, for he is very out-spoken and not afraid of the Queen as they
all
are and he gives
his opinion whenever he finds an opportunity at the risk of offending Her Majesty.’
⁸
Liko chose his opportunities judiciously: there are few recorded instances of the Queen taking offence.

Beatrice entered the world of publishing for the second time in 1890. Her second book differed from the
Birthday Book
of the previous decade.
The Adventures of Count Georg Albert of Erbach: A True Story
was a translation. The original – in German, by Emil Kraus—told the story of an early-seventeenth-century knight of strong religious conviction who underwent a series of adventures, involving considerable personal hardship, in defence of his faith. In her preliminary notice Beatrice offered an explanation of why she had undertaken and sought to publish the translation:

The following translation has been made with the hope that it may prove of some little interest to those amongst our countrymen who have passed any time in the Island of Malta, as well as to those who have followed the history of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. The chief merit of the narrative lies in the fact of its having been compiled from the archives of the family to which it refers. It consequently gives an accurate picture of the times when Malta played an important part in the annals of the Order which laboured so valiantly in the defence of the Christian faith.

The princess did not return to Smith, Elder
&c
Co. but chose for her publisher John Murray, the introduction probably made by the Dean of Windsor, Randall Davidson, who acted as go-between for author and publisher. It was Randall Davidson who submitted Beatrice's manuscript to John Murray on 9 July, and to Randall Davidson that Beatrice addressed her comments on Murray's amendments to the translation. In a statement that illustrates the way in which Beatrice's self-effacement could be mistaken for brusqueness or lack of interest, she wrote to the Dean on 5 August, ‘I hasten to say that I have not the slightest objection to the corrections Mr Murray finds necessary, being made on my manuscript, which is of no value whatever to me.’
⁹

For her pains, John Murray offered Beatrice less lucrative
remuneration than Smith, Elder
&c
Co. had paid in 1881, though the arrangement – that all profits from the work be split two-thirds to the princess, the remainder to John Murray – was still generous within its terms. Murray agreed to print two thousand copies, which were released in two editions of a thousand, in December 1890 and March 1891. Although the second impression failed to sell in its entirety, with seventy-seven copies being pulped, the book made a modest profit, and Beatrice received £124.

As she grew older, ‘churchiness’ would become an increasingly important aspect of Beatrice's character. Count Georg Albert made greater claims on her, however, than his exemplary fidelity to his faith. The princess was doubly related to the Erbach family, through her paternal great-great-grandfather Count Georg Augustus of Erbach-Schonberg, and her sister-in-law Marie of Battenberg, who in the present generation had married Count Gustav of Erbach-Schonberg. Marie doted on her brother Liko and she and Beatrice became firm friends, corresponding regularly in German. Beatrice, like all her siblings, spoke and wrote fluent German. She also shared with her siblings an interest in their labyrinthine family history. In 1887 Helena had edited and translated
Memoirs ofWilhelmine, Margravine ofBayreuth,
while in 1892 the Queen and Crown Princess discussed an idea of the latter's for writing a memoir of the Queen's aunt Elizabeth, Landgravine of Hesse-Homburg, third daughter of George III. The Queen, in that instance, was not encouraging: ‘She was very hasty and
remuante
[restless], very fond of politics,
pas facile a vivre
[not easy to live with] and a great trial to poor Aunt Adelaide [wife of William IV].’
¹⁰

Beatrice's translation can be seen as a barometer of the degree of change and, alternatively, stasis marriage had wrought in her. It includes statements that express not only Count Georg Albert's modus vivendi, but that of the royal author. A knight of St John tells Erbach, ‘No knight can live according to his own liking, and in all things, big or small, the one watchword is
obedience,
nothing but
obedience.’
¹¹
Later, playing chess with the Turkish Princess Selima, Erbach chooses the black counters. ‘Thou
shouldst have left that to me,’ Selima tells him, ‘for sorrow is a woman's lot for her lifetime.’
¹²
As she speaks, ‘a deep melancholy [overspreads] her face'. How often the Queen had uttered similar statements to Beatrice. Now, at the happiest moment of her life, Beatrice could write the words dispassionately.