The Last Princess (37 page)

I have had some frightful domestic upheavals lately, which have greatly worried me, and I have to part with the governess… There has been a great want of straightness, which has destroyed all my confidence, and I found that my children's love and trust in me, were being steadily undermined. This has been a very painful revelation to me, and I felt for their good a change must be made.
¹⁴

Beatrice did not state – may not have arrived at – the conclusion that the children's governess could not have swayed their affections so completely had they seen more of their mother. Juggling the demands of her growing family and the mother for whom she filled the roles of daughter, mother, confidante, secretary and nurse, Beatrice, as always, gave precedence to the claims of the failing Queen.

In June 1900 Beatrice sailed to the Isles of Scilly, a voyage full of evocations of Liko, who had undertaken the same trip on board the
Sheila
a decade earlier. In December she visited her eldest sister the Empress Frederick in Germany. The Empress was dying of cancer. Mercifully she would outlive her mother, though only by seven months. Beatrice wrote the Queen's letters to the Empress and read to her mother the latter's replies, which, like the Queen's, were dictated to her youngest daughter, in the Empress's case Margaret, or ‘Mossy', of Prussia. Even Beatrice's ‘holidays’ from the Queen were bound up with the business of
dying. Her visit to Friedrichshof in December was of short duration, intended to reassure Beatrice of her sister's condition without alarming the Queen. The only assurance Beatrice drew was of the inevitability of her sister's imminent demise. Wracked with pain, the Empress scarcely clung on to life. She successfully dispatched Christmas presents to Osborne, not telling her mother her true condition. Beatrice in turn reported to her sister her determined hopes for the Queen's recovery. ‘I do think she is a little better and able to take more nourishment,’ she wrote on Boxing Day 1900.
¹⁵
Ten days later the Queen herself reiterated the hope, writing to the Empress that she hoped soon to improve.
¹⁶
She hoped in vain. The Queen died at 6.30 in the evening of 22 January 1901. Earlier Leopold had played his violin to soothe his grandmother's last hours, Maurice had cried so loudly that he had to be removed from the room, and Beatrice's nephew William of Prussia, Emperor since Fritz's death in 1888, dandled the twelve-year-old Ena on his knee. Beatrice sat at her mother's bedside alongside Helena and Louise, her three daughters repeating for the Queen the names of her children and grandchildren who were present.

‘She was our Mother,’ wrote romantic novelist Marie Corelli after news of the death was made known, a characteristic statement of sentimentality and exaggeration. Even Mary Ponsonby, who prided herself on her unrosy attitude to the Royal Family, spoke of the ‘grief which is one of the greatest sorrows of my life'.
¹⁷
For Beatrice, neither verdict was an exaggeration. To Dr Story, principal of the University of Glasgow, she wrote on 15 March from her temporary retreat at the Empress Eugenie's villa at Cap Martin in the South of France, ‘It is indeed a calamity that has fallen on the whole Empire, and to us her Children, you may imagine what the grief is. I, who had hardly ever been separated from my dear Mother, can hardly realize what life will be like without her, who was the centre of everything.’
¹⁸
Struggling with her overwhelming sense of loss, she fell back on the distant niceties of royal politesse, replying to Lady Elphinstone's letter of condolence, ‘It is indeed a terrible blow that has fallen upon us all, and it is very soothing in our great grief, to feel that
it is shared by others.’
¹⁹
To Marie Mallet – courtier, friend, near-contemporary and occasional lady-in-waiting to Beatrice – the princess expressed herself more openly. Three months after the Queen's death, her sorrow had not begun to abate: ‘This first sad return of my birthday without my beloved mother! No one knows what the daily missing of that tender care and love is to me, coming as it does on top of that other overwhelming loss, so that my heart is indeed left utterly desolate. If it were not for the dear children, for whom I have alone to live now, I do not know how I should have the courage of struggling on.’
²⁰

Once before, writing to Bishop Taylor Smith after Liko's death, Beatrice had vowed to submerge her grief in trying ‘to be bright and cheerful for the dear children's sake'.
²¹
In that instance, she mostly succeeded in shielding Drino, Ena, Leopold and Maurice from the full torrent of her suffering. But she did so not through the company of her children but by submergence in her mother's needs and the consolations of religion. Now there was no longer a Queen to come between Beatrice and her children, a void that for Beatrice could never be filled.

TWENTY-THREE

‘I have my dear Mother's written
instructions’

In the dome of the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore, a trapped sparrow circled, fluttering. Close to the tombs of the Queen and Prince Consort, Marochetti's sepulchral effigies white as death in the pale wintry light, the Royal Family had gathered for a service of remembrance on the first anniversary of the Queen's death. An unnamed princess, distracted by the sparrow, whispered to her neighbour, ‘Do you think that little bird could be Mama's spirit?’ The affecting notion was passed along the row of mourners until it reached Queen Alexandra. ‘No, I do not think it could be Mama's spirit,’ she replied, ‘or it would not have made a mess on Beatrice's bonnet.’
¹
With the benefit of hindsight, the reader may choose to disagree with Alexandra's assessment.

Shadows of the past clung to Beatrice; she would never shake them free. As she had been associated with the Queen in life, so she was in death. On 28 July 1903, she travelled by train to Scarborough to open the new town hall. The seaside town was
en fete,
hung with bunting and flags. Beatrice was escorted from the train into a carriage and presented with a gold key with which to perform the ceremonial opening. Afterwards the company of local dignitaries and their guests moved into the town-hall gardens. Beatrice unveiled a statue. On its tall pedestal it towered above the watching throng; photographs and a commemorative postcard show them craning their necks to see. The statue that dwarfs them is of Queen Victoria.

The association of Beatrice and the Queen obtained not only in the minds of the public but in Beatrice's own mind too. Years passed, and the Queen's legacy faded, changed, diminished. For Beatrice her mother remained vividly part of her life. At London's
Lyric Theatre in 1937 Laurence Housman's
Victoria Regina
told the story of the Queen's life, Pamela Stanley in the principal role. A friend wrote to Beatrice, commending the production and reassuring her about the play's content. Beatrice's reply – written thirty-six years after the Queen's death – reveals the depth of her feeling. ‘I am very thankful to hear from you, that you really considered it such an excellent rendering of both my dear Parents’ personalities… there was nothing in any way objectionable or too contrary to facts. But I am sure you will understand I cannot bring myself to see my dear Mother, whose memory is still so intensely vivid in my mind and heart, personified on the stage, by a stranger, however good.’
²

For Beatrice, in whose affections she was a living presence, no one could represent the Queen. Except Beatrice herself. In 1902 she embarked on the task for which history remembers her. In itself it constitutes a significant act of representation: the editing, and where she deemed it necessary, rewriting of her mother's Journal.

Contrary to popular assumption, Beatrice is not named in Queen Victoria's will as her literary executor.
³
With her brother Arthur and Keeper of the Privy Purse Sir Fleetwood Edwards, she was a co-executor of the will. As she had during her lifetime, so after her death, the Queen placed her trust in her favourite children, regardless of the impropriety of overlooking her heir Bertie, ‘for no child', she had written to Arthur's governor Sir Howard Elphinstone in 1882,’ (excepting her beloved Beatrice) was ever so loved by [the Queen] as that precious Darling son… her darling from his birth!’
⁴
The role of literary executor that was to provide Beatrice with employment and consolation through the next two decades was one the Queen had imposed upon the princess privately, probably without either ever having recourse to so formal-sounding a description of the task. Beatrice claimed she had her mother's ‘written instructions’ to assume the responsibilities synonymous with literary executorship, and since such an injunction on the Queen's part was entirely in keeping with her lifelong confidence in her youngest daughter and Beatrice's
intermittent role as the Queen's amanuensis, writing on occasion both her Journal and her letters, no one doubted the claim. In the light of Beatrice's subsequent actions, it would have been an unlikely claim to have invented. Beatrice's ‘editorship’ extended, as we have seen, to rewriting. As the Queen's favourite child, she had least to fear from the Journal, least reason to covet the task of rewriting in order to improve her own showing in her mother's account. Given her essentially modest nature, it is also improbable that Beatrice would have fought for the job, had the Queen bequeathed it elsewhere, on the grounds that, as the Queen's most intimate confidante, she understood her best.

The importance and extent of the Queen's papers meant that Beatrice could not carry out her charge in secret. Her siblings -including the new King, whose first action in contravention of the Queen's wishes was his decision to reign not as Albert Edward but as Edward VII – knew about the bequest, as did Beatrice's co-executor Sir Fleetwood Edwards. It is possible, however, that only Beatrice understood the exact nature of the Queen's injunction. Bertie invited Lord Esher to arrange his mother's papers, an invitation that in practice extended beyond the Queen to encompass papers relating to a number of royal forebears, notably George III. Esher,
eminencegrise
of the Edwardian court, became by this and similar invitations, archivist to the King. But in relation to Queen Victoria his responsibility could extend no further than official papers, given Beatrice's role and the fact that at least some of those concerned believed that the Queen had not simply intended Beatrice to exercise control over her private papers, but that the papers should, for her lifetime, fall within Beatrice's ownership. As Cynthia Colville, later a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary, told Sir Sydney Cockerell in July 1945, ‘Queen Victoria… left the diaries and correspondence to Princess Beatrice.’
⁵
Beatrice herself pursued her task without subterfuge, involving Esher – whom the Queen had known and whose daughters Dorothy and Sylvia had shared dancing classes at Windsor with Beatrice's children in the 1890s – from the outset. On 13 December 1905, she wrote to him, ‘I have two more volumes of the Journal to give you, for putting away at Windsor,
and perhaps you could call some day for them’ – an instruction that neatly encompasses the distinction of role between princess and courtier: Beatrice rewrote the Journal and destroyed the original; to Lord Esher, in his capacity as Bertie's informal archivist, she handed the copies that, though still precious, could safely be entrusted to the care of a third party.
⁶

On 18 October 1902 Beatrice wrote to Esher requesting assistance: ‘I feel I ought finally to go through all that remains for as I have my dear Mother's written instructions to be solely responsible for the arranging and retaining of them in the manner she would have wished, I must not leave it to others…’
⁷
That Beatrice did not explain the constituents of ‘them’ or the extent of ‘it', suggests that Esher at least understood the parameters of her authority. Sir Fleetwood Edwards recognized that authority as principally covering the Queen's Journal. He discussed the position with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the same ex-Dean of Windsor Randall Davidson who had assisted Beatrice with the publication of
The Adventures of Count Georg Albrecht of Erbach
a decade earlier. To Arthur Benson, Davidson wrote in February 1904 concerning the Journal, ‘I have seen Sir Fleetwood Edwards. I find that the books in question are to the best of his belief under the unfettered and personal control of the Princess Beatrice and of her alone.’
⁸

Unopposed by the King, Beatrice began her task the year after the Queen's death. Despite her letter to Esher, more than three years passed before she showed him the extent of those papers of her mother's over which she exercised control. It was not until 31 January 1906 that the latter was able to write to his son Maurice, ‘Today Princess Henry [Beatrice] came down to Windsor, and we opened, for the first time, all the boxes of the Queen's private correspondence, which are in the vaults.’
⁹
In the interval Beatrice had made available to Esher papers she considered fell within his jurisdiction as Bertie's archivist. These included items not related to the Queen, for example, a book of letters written by George IV to his ministers in the mid-i820s, which she released in August 1905. She also discussed with Esher her working practice in relation to the Queen's Journal, but did
not, before 1906, feel constrained to permit him access to any of the Journal, and did so then only at Esher's request, the latter at that point editing the first of what would become three published instalments of the Queen's letters.