The Last Princess (34 page)

Whether Beatrice or Louise felt the greater remorse for the line each had taken, they quickly reached an understanding, and amicable relations – eased by their shared sorrow – were restored. It was Louise rather than the Queen who travelled first to Cimiez to be with Beatrice, and Louise who suggested she design a bronze reredos for Liko's memorial chapel at St Mildred's. The finished reredos depicts the Crucifixion with Christ supported by the Angel of the Resurrection, a composition Louise correctly surmised would comfort Beatrice in her grief. It complements the bronze screen which sculptor Alfred Gilbert designed for the chapel, and it is appropriate that work on the chapel was undertaken by artists who were both known to the Prince: Liko and Gilbert had become friends in 1892, when the latter was working at Windsor on a memorial to the Queen's grandson Albert Victor.

‘All seems so different from the last waiting,’ Lady Lytton confided to her diary on 11 February 1896, ‘on account of the very great sorrow and the death of that good looking charming Prince Henry of Battenberg at the war.’
⁸
Months later, Marie
Mallet, promoted to extra woman of the bedchamber, echoed the strain: ‘How all the brightness is gone, I quite fear
for ever.’
⁹

Liko's death changed the atmosphere of life at court. With him died the theatricals that had done so much to cheer the sombreness of the previous decade. The series of operatic performances staged annually at Windsor for the Queen's birthday was suspended, too, and would not be resumed until 1898. Princess Mary of Teck, now married to Beatrice's nephew George of Wales, wrote to her brother Adolphus on 28 January 1896, ‘Isn't it sad about poor Liko? Poor Aunt Beatrice it is awful for her, her whole life ruined, one's heart bleeds for her in her fearful sorrow – what will the Queen and she do now, those two women quite alone, it is too sad and depressing to think of.’
¹⁰

The problem was not Beatrice, who made a very deliberate decision that her grief, unlike that of her mother thirty-five years earlier, must not overwhelm those around her, but the Queen, to whom Liko's death and the loss of a handsome supportive male presence dealt a body blow. The Queen found herself mired in sorrow. ‘My poor old birthday again came round, and it seems sadder each year… fresh sorrow and trials still come upon me,’ she wrote on her seventy-eighth birthday, in 1897, burdened by what had become a significant weight of sorrowful anniversaries.
¹¹
Beatrice struggled to spare her mother further unhappiness. She confided her own sadness not to the Queen but to her sisters the Empress Frederick and Helena–the latter had supported her through a short preliminary service held on board HMS
Blenheim
in advance of the funeral proper – and her sisterin-law the Duchess of Albany, who had been widowed even younger than Beatrice. She drew comfort, too, from conversations with Marie Mallet (Beatrice would ask to stand as sponsor to Marie's second son Henry in 1898), and her own lady-in-waiting Minnie Cochrane, whom Lady Lytton described as devoted to her. She wrote regularly to Bishop Taylor Smith in Sierra Leone and enjoyed the sympathetic prelate's occasional visits to Windsor. It was to Taylor Smith that Beatrice commended the Duchess of Albany: ‘We are very intimate together and she has been so loving and full of sympathy with me in my sorrow… I
am sure you would like my sister-in-law, she is such a good excellent woman.”
¹²
Added to this, Leopold and Helen's children, Alice and Charles of Albany, were close in age to Beatrice's children and provided for the latter company of the sort Beatrice herself had been denied in the years following her own father's death. Drino's relationship with Charles mirrored that of the two boys’ mothers. ‘He and Charles are quite inseparable and delighted to be together again,’ Beatrice wrote to Drino's headmaster on Boxing Day 1899. ‘Drino is nearly as tall as his cousin so one would never think there was more than two years between them.’
¹³

The wider problem at court was not that Beatrice could not be roused from her mourning, but that to varying degrees both mother and daughter had lost the reason for looking forward. Their inability to anticipate pleasure in the present created an atmosphere of lassitude and stagnation that inevitably failed to rouse them and became self-perpetuating, adding to the sense of ennui that had for long lain at the centre of court life.

Nevertheless, Beatrice worked hard to rebuild her life. ‘Between times when the tears do not flow, she is cheerful and her old self,’ the Empress Frederick wrote in the immediate aftermath of Liko's death.
¹⁴
Over time the tears ended and, to outsiders, Beatrice quickly appeared fully herself again. This semblance of normality involved a concerted effort of self-control. In the summer of 1898 she took her daughter Ena, then aged eleven, to Germany. Mother and daughter visited a number of scenes of the past, notably Heiligenberg. ‘It made me very sad for the first time to revisit my dear Husband's old home, for the first time without him,’ Beatrice wrote to Bishop Taylor Smith. ‘Each place is so bound up with memories of the happy past and oh! how I longed that the present might only be a dream. I have taken up my life again with all its work and interests, but there are moments where the sense of all that I have lost comes over me with overwhelming force, and I have a hard struggle.’
¹⁵

The Queen had agreed to Beatrice's departure alone to the South of France in February 1896. Recognizing belatedly that
marriage and subsequent widowhood marked Beatrice's maturity and ought to confer some degree of independence, the Queen also began, at around the same time, to consider plans for providing her with at least one separate home of her own. The Queen's choice fell on Kensington Palace, where she herself had been born and lived as a child and where, since 1875, Louise and Lord Lome had enjoyed the use of an extremely large apartment, which would remain their principal home throughout their marriage. In March 1897 the Office of Works drew up plans for an apartment for Beatrice overlapping partly with the space once occupied by the Queen and her mother within the old state apartments. The parlous physical condition of that area of the palace and the expense involved in restoring it made the plans impractical, and Beatrice would have to wait until after the Queen's death for her permanent London base in the old palace. The Queen in the meantime did not regard either Beatrice's period of mourning alone in the South of France or her fruitless plans for a new home at Kensington Palace as preliminaries to any full-time separation from the daughter who had never left her. With the mourning obsequies over, Beatrice returned to her post at the Queen's side.

It was, of course, the only life she knew. Even marriage had scarcely altered its course. Aside from having no home of her own, Beatrice was unaccustomed to occupying her days with her children and neither her marriage nor Liko's death had diminished the belief, instilled in her from childhood, that her first duty was to her sovereign-mother. This sense of purpose helped fill the emptiness of her early widowhood. It was a role she resumed not simply through duty but prompted by compassion. The Queen, who had for so long considered herself an old woman, was now increasingly prey to the depredations of time. ‘My great lameness, etc, makes me feel how age is creeping on. Seventy-eight is a good age but I pray yet to be spared a little longer for the sake of my country, and dear ones,’ she wrote on her birthday.
¹⁶
Her mobility was severely impaired and her sight failing rapidly. Beatrice had become an enthusiastic amateur photographer. In 1897 s n e exhibited photographs – alongside pictures taken by
the Princess of Wales, Princesses Louise and Victoria of Wales and the Duchess of York – at the New Gallery on Bond Street. The Queen installed a darkroom for her at Osborne. To Victoria of Battenberg the Queen wrote in 1898, ‘Dear Auntie Beatrice… photographs a great deal and most successfully.”
¹⁷
The truth was that the Queen's sight was no longer up to any reliable assessment of the success or otherwise of Beatrice's photographic efforts. As early as 1892 she had written to Dr Reid, ‘My eyes are troublesome. I can get none of the spectacles to suit; they are wrongly focused, and at night reading is very trying and difficult, though I still at times find dark print not too unreadable.’
¹⁸
By mid-1895 Reid could tell his former colleague Sir William Jenner, ‘The Queen's defective eyesight is now a serious hindrance to her writing letters.’
¹⁹
The following year she was diagnosed with nuclear cataracts in both eyes.

The implications for Beatrice were considerable. Despite the difficulties, the Queen had no intention of retiring from the business of government or that of managing her considerable and far-flung family. Each commitment involved extensive correspondence. Both the Queen's official and private correspondence fell increasingly within Beatrice's remit. Though Beatrice shared the task intermittently with her sister Helena and, more regularly, with Harriet Phipps, the Queen's personal as opposed to private secretary, and the cycle of women in attendance on the Queen, Beatrice was the fixed point at the centre of the circle. ‘I am rather helpless about important things without Beatrice or Lenchen, Harriet Phipps also being away,’ the Queen wrote to the Empress Frederick in May 1899.
²⁰
Sir Henry Ponsonby had died in 1895. He was succeeded as private secretary by his son Frederick (‘Fritz’) and Arthur Bigge, whose relations with Louise-real or imaginary – had so alarmed Beatrice. To Beatrice, Fritz Ponsonby and Arthur Bigge fell the task of appraising the four bags of mail ‘as big as large armchairs’ that arrived daily for the Queen.
²¹
The task was twofold: in the first instance, the Queen had to be apprised of the contents of the day's letters; in the second, Beatrice and Harriet Phipps took dictation of the Queen's replies – to ministers and grandchildren alike. Beatrice read to
the Queen from the newspapers and also the precis of official documents made daily from the contents of the Queen's red boxes by Ponsonby and Bigge.

Ponsonby, for one, considered her ill-suited to the task, writing to his mother,

The most absurd mistakes occur… Imagine Princess Beatrice trying to explain our policy in the East. Biggs
[sic]
or I may write out long precis, but they are often not read to Her Majesty as Princess Beatrice is in a hurry to develop a photograph or wants to paint a flower for a bazaar… When her sole means of reading dispatches, precis, debates, etc, lies in Princess Beatrice, it is simply hopeless.
²²

Ponsonby's harsh assessment is that of a man struggling to carry out a job that, by virtue of the Queen's diminishing faculties, had become, in the sense that his father had understood it twenty years earlier, largely unmanageable. His frustration vented itself on Beatrice, the guardian of the gate, whose unrestricted access to the Queen and unwavering enjoyment of her fullest confidence had inspired similar responses in others. Beatrice was not stupid -her letters and two works of translation are proof of her intelligence. But hers was the mind of a dedicated amateur clerical worker rather than the naturally gifted, and she shared the political naivety of most of her siblings. The Queen relished the skirmishes of domestic policy, in which she saw no contradiction in upholding the pre-eminence of the Crown and defending the rights of the working man; and the broader picture of foreign policy, regarding herself as the embodiment and champion of British prestige across the globe. Beatrice felt no such personal interest and her attention was frequently absorbed by smaller, more immediate concerns. She was attentive and diligent up to a point, but her political acumen was limited. The Queen discouraged all her children from involving themselves in politics and guarded closely her unique access and prerogatives. Beatrice in turn did not press the Queen against the latter's will, which remained formidable, and so the royal aspect of the business of
government proceeded with a growing lack of fluency through the final years of the Queen's life.

Marie Mallet suggested that the private secretaries’ objections arose in part from the Princess's sex.

‘Biggie’ was rather cross with me yesterday because the Queen had made me read some War Office box to her and he thinks it absurd that military messages should go through the Ladies! But that is the natural result of having a sovereign of eighty!… I am sure the tendency now will be for me and my colleagues to do more and more, and in the state of the Queen's sight and considering her age it is quite inevitable.
²³

Beatrice was foremost among those ‘ladies’ and more than a match for Ponsonby and Bigge. Despite her diffidence and shyness, she was not lacking in confidence and, when pressed, determination. ‘She was very business-like and capable: she was extremely kind to me, but I had a feeling that I should not like to oppose her wishes,’ wrote an artist who encountered Beatrice in 1900.
²⁴
Though Bertie chafed at the confidential papers the Queen showed Beatrice and his own exclusion from the political aspects of monarchy, and Louise spoke ‘with a sense of the ludicrous’ about both Beatrice and Helena – ‘and poor Mam a so deluded by Beatrice, my dear, and by Helena’
²⁵
– the Queen herself was quite happy with the unstinting assistance given to her by her widowed youngest daughter. In his autobiography
Recollections of Three Reigns,
published posthumously (and also after Beatrice's death), Fritz Ponsonby drew a veil over his frustrations at the Queen's working practice, simply writing of the period 1897 to 1899, ‘Although I had for over two years been Assistant Private Secretary, I had never done the work of Private Secretary, nor had I ever seen the Queen about business. Occasionally after dinner she would talk to me about letters that had interested her, but all the work was done by boxes.’
²⁶
Wisely Ponsonby – the consummate courtier – forbore to share with the Queen his reservations about Beatrice, or indeed any of the Queen's ladies. H e recognized the unassailability of Beatrice's position, the Queen's favourite of her children, privy now to every aspect of her public and private life. It was a position Beatrice shared with none of her siblings, nor any of the Queen's servants or government ministers. But for Beatrice, in her role as spectator and trusted confidante close to the centre of power, a role she had never invited and did not crave, time was running out.