The Last Princess (39 page)

Beatrice had lost her home at Windsor, her rooms at Buck-ingham Palace and at Balmoral. In August 1901 she was summoned, with Helena and Louise, to meet Bertie at Osborne to discuss with him his plans for the house. Their discussion was conducted in German, to prevent the siblings’ respective attendants overhearing a debate that grew increasingly heated. Beatrice had so much to lose. But Bertie's mind was made up: he would brook no gainsaying. So swiftly did Beatrice lose this home too.

The Queen had left both Beatrice and Louise houses on the Osborne estate, Osborne Cottage to Beatrice and Kent House to Louise. Although Beatrice had used the cottage – a substantial mock-Tudor villa – since the death of its previous full-time resident, Sir Henry Ponsonby, in 1895, and in 1899 had built Albert Cottages close by for the use of her children, connecting the two buildings by a covered passageway, she had not anticipated it becoming her principal home, detached from life at the Big
House. But Bertie had no plans to live in the Big House: on the contrary, he had already decided to present it to the nation. His decision caused Beatrice consternation. The reaction of the youngest sister with whom he felt no intimacy had two effects on the King. In the first instance, Bertie increased the size of Osborne Cottage's garden as a guarantee of Beatrice's privacy once the main house was no longer a royal residence; in the second, he made a last-ditch effort to keep the house within the family at no inconvenience to himself. He offered it to his heir, Beatrice's nephew George. Th e offer was made in December, four months after Bertie's ‘discussion’ with his sisters, with a degree of insistence that James Pope-Hennessy, in his biography of George's wife Queen Mary, claimed distressed the King's son and daughter-in-law, who had no use for Osborne and, like Beatrice, could not have afforded to maintain it. On 12 December Mary wrote to her husband, ‘Just returned from tea with Mother-dear [Queen Alexandra], she spoke to me about Osborne… she says that of course if we cannot take it the old place will have to go to rack and ruin. I told her we were going to talk it over and see what could be done.’
⁴

What could be done, of course, was nothing – the result the King must have anticipated – and Bertie moved quickly to settle Osborne's fate. On 22 February 190 2 Lord Esher wrote to his son,

I had an ‘audience’ of the King yesterday, and settled a lot of small coronation details. Also, a really important thing if he sticks to it, that he will give Osborne to the nation—on the day of his coronation. He wants me to go down there next week and report on the place generally. I shall do this. I shall stay with Princess Henry at her house. Just for one night. He wants me particularly to look at the things which can be brought away. There are
tons
of rubbish! Of course the part of the house in which the Queen died will be kept as a shrine. It is in fact the scheme which I originally proposed to the King.
⁵

In the face of Bertie's determination and Esher's characteristic self-satisfaction with the scheme he claimed as his own, Beatrice
was powerless. She did, however, succeed in influencing Esher's perception of Osborne and its importance, so that the disposal of the house was accomplished not with the gung-ho abandon of a new broom sweeping clean old cobwebs but with an appropriate degree of regret. Esher's follow-up letter to his son, written after he had stayed with Beatrice at Osborne Cottage, shows the extent to which her thoughts about Osborne had shaped his: ‘… I have been all over Osborne, and the property. There is a sadness hovering over the whole place. It is like the grave of somebody's happiness. I suppose it is because one realizes that it was everything to the Queen, and is nothing to those who come after her.’
⁶
But Beatrice's persuasiveness – her unique perception of the extent to which the house
was
everything to the Queen – was not sufficient to make Esher abandon the scheme he had settled on with the King. ‘Still, I don't think it
can
be given up,’ he concluded, ‘and I must tell the King so.’
⁷

Preparations began to transform Osborne into a college for Royal Naval cadets, replacing the old Dartmouth-based training ship
Britannia,
and a convalescent home for officers. The central portion of the house was sealed off with iron grilles, with no unauthorized admittance, looked after by a caretaker and the house governor. For the remainder of her life Beatrice retained a protective interest in this preserved core of her parents’ home, replying to a request from Lady Mottistone on 2 July 1936, ‘In answer to your letter, I shall be very pleased to authorize you to request the Governor of Osborne to let you take the Duke and Duchess of Brunswick over the Private Apartments at Osborne during their visit to you at Mottistone, for naturally it must be of great interest to them.’
⁸
In the meantime Bertie cleared the house of many of its contents. He dispatched to Beatrice at Osborne Cottage Barber's portraits of her collie Oswald, and Drino in his cradle watched by the dogs Spot and Basco; a painting by Rudolph Swoboda of baby Ena with one of the Queen's Indian servants; a small portrait by Tuxen of Beatrice and Liko with Drino at the time of the Queen's Golden Jubilee; and Sohn's horrible portrait of Beatrice, the last hardly a welcome gift even to one, like Beatrice, without vanity. Objects and
paintings made their way to Windsor and Buckingham Palace. Other sitters, like Beatrice, found themselves recipients of their own portraits. To Balfour, his Prime Minister, Bertie wrote on the morning of his coronation, ‘The King feels that he is unable to make adequate use of Osborne as a Royal Residence, and accordingly he has determined to offer the property on the Isle of Wight as a gift to the nation.’
⁹
By August 1903 the college was almost finished and ready to accept its first intake of cadets. Beatrice did not linger to witness their arrival. At the beginning of December a member of her staff wrote to a friend, ‘The Princess will be away from the Island about eight months.’
¹⁰
Egypt was calling.

Accompanied by two of her children, Ena and the invalid Leopold, along with the children's cousin and Beatrice's goddaughter, nineteen-year-old Beatrice of Coburg, Beatrice arrived in Cairo for Christmas. The depleted family – Drino and Maurice remained at home, Drino having begun training with the Royal Navy the previous year, Maurice still at school – spent Christmas as guests of the Khedive at the Jhezireh Palace. Warmed by the African sun and released by distance and the strangeness of all around her from the anxieties that had oppressed her since her mother's death, Beatrice rode camels, visited the bazaar, ancient temples and the Sphinx. The Khedive loaned the royal party his yacht, the
Ferouz,
in which they travelled up the Nile, stopping to visit recent excavations. They viewed the digs at the Plain of Thebes and there met Howard Carter, who with Lord Caernarvon would later discover Tutankhamen's tomb. At the beginning of February they travelled into Sudan and to Khartoum, where Beatrice met the Inspector General of the Sudan, the Austrian-born Slatin Pasha, who had dedicated his book
Fire and Sword in the Sudan
to Queen Victoria and visited the Queen at Balmoral. Maurice wrote to his ex-tutor, Mr Theobold, ‘I had a letter from Mama, saying that they had enjoyed themselves very much at Khartoum; they saw Slatin Pasha there.’
¹¹
Ever her mother's daughter, in Khartoum Beatrice visited the site of the death of General Gordon, that hero in whose exploits the Queen had interested herself so
closely and whose journal Beatrice had read to her mother only nights before her wedding; and she laid the foundation stone of the Anglican cathedral, All Saints. The royal party visited Aswan, where Beatrice's brother Arthur had officially opened the famous dam two years earlier. They crossed the desert on camels, pitching camp at an oasis; they visited Wadi Hammamat, famous for its wells and hieroglyphic tablets scored with pharaonic graffiti. Both Beatrice and Ena took photographs by the dozen. It was not a trip Beatrice could have made while the Queen was alive. It was the most adventtirous holiday she would take.

Eight months after her departure, having book-ended her voyage with sojourns in France and Germany, she returned to England, to Osborne Cottage on the Isle of Wight, and her new London home, an apartment at Kensington Palace. This was not the apartment that had first been discussed during the Queen's lifetime and abandoned on the grounds of expense, but a smaller though still substantial apartment close to that of her sister Louise in Clock Court. For the next forty years Apartment Two, Kensington Palace would constitute Beatrice's principal home. But for Osborne Cottage the clock was ticking.

In the summer of 1903 Beatrice had carried out a programme of improvements to the cottage and its adjoining Albert Cottages. To Mr Theobold she wrote in June, ‘The houses are in a complete state of dismantlement, and there will be many little repairs needed, following on the putting in of the electric light.’
¹²
The work complete, Beatrice continued to spend part of each year on the island, happy in the short term with her new home. On 12 December 1906,
The Bystander
confidently but erroneously reported that she would shortly be bringing out a book on the Isle of Wight, the mantle of association passed firmly from mother to daughter. The following year, her great-nephew Edward of York, the future Edward VIII, arrived at Osborne College as a cadet; he was shortly joined by his younger brother Bertie, later George VI. Both were entertained to Sunday tea by Beatrice at Osborne Cottage. But in 1912 Beatrice sold the cottage. With her mother no longer at the Big House, Osborne was a changed
place, its soul departed. Maintaining a house on the estate that she used only part-time was expensive and inconvenient for Beatrice. As governor of the Isle of Wight, she had a second, official home on the island, a suite of rooms at Carisbrooke Castle. Restoration work at the castle had been under way ever since Liko's death, when a series of rooms had been repaired in his memory. It was to Carisbrooke Castle that Beatrice moved, flying her standard from the flagpole when she was in residence to denote the official nature of her occupancy. Henceforth her connection with the island would be just such an official one and one that she held in her own right. She had taken a step away from her mother's life on the Isle of Wight. It was a partly regretful, partly necessary move.

TWENTY-FIVE

‘Please God the young couple
may be very happy’

On 22 December 1888 Ada Leslie, a member of the nursery staff of the Emperor of Germany, wrote from Osborne to her cousin Pollie, ‘One of my greatest pleasures at Windsor was, and here is, visiting the Nurseries, the little Prince Alexander and the Princess Victoria of Battenberg are the sweetest little things you can imagine. The little Prince is two and the little Princess rather more than a year. If I possibly can I will get you a photograph of them.’
¹
It was an opinion Beatrice had shared wholeheartedly, delighting in her babies. As they put babyhood behind them, however, she made a faltering connection with her children, regarding them with a degree of detachment evident, as we have seen, in her letter to Drino's headmaster in which coolly she analysed the shared failure of self-reliance of Drino, Ena and Leopold; and consistently accorded greater import to the needs of her mother than those of her children. Accompanying Beatrice to Germany the summer after the Queen's death, Marie Mallet was astonished when, rather than alter her plans to look after the haemophiliac Leopold, who had fallen ill, Beatrice left him behind at the hotel and proceeded as planned to the next stage of her journey: ‘The Princess tries to cultivate the maternal instinct – she loses so much. Leopold is an angel child, so sweet and attractive. He pines for someone to cling to – he wants petting and spoiling.’
²
‘Petting and spoiling’ were not in Beatrice's nature: she had been attentive and, as an adult, undemonstratively loving towards her mother, but she had never petted her. Nor would she her own children. She abandoned Leopold to hasten to her sister, the Empress Frederick, then only weeks from death. It was a mission the Queen would have applauded. For Beatrice,
family piety and duty remained a one-way street: the Queen's family came first, her own a belated second.

There were positive implications of this detachment on Beatrice's part. It never occurred to her that her own daughter Ena should forsake marriage and remain at home with her. She eschewed the plan the Queen had devised for her and the fate Beatrice's sister-in-law Alexandra decreed for her middle daughter Victoria, although, like the Queen, Beatrice increasingly undertook engagements with Ena at her side: on 7 October 1905, the
Isle of Wight County Press
recorded, ‘Princess Henry of Batten-berg and her daughter, Princess Ena, presented prizes at the 1st Royal Fusiliers’ annual regimental sports day at Parkhurst Barracks.’ As a child, Beatrice considered Ena a girl of ‘very difficult’ character; as an adult, Ena showed a preternatural reserve in all matters of affection. She offered cold comfort as a long-term companion. What she did possess was good looks entirely in line with contemporary taste that ultimately won her a crown. When it happened, her dazzling marriage would be regarded by some as Beatrice's crowning achievement. By others Beatrice was almost eliminated from the equation. Ena married Alfonso XIII of Spain on 31 May 1906. Two days later, in its special royal wedding number,
The Sphere
told its readers, ‘It is very noticeable that in the lives of both the royal lovers women of strong character have played an important part. To his mother … Alfonso owes much, while his Queen has had the benefit of being brought up under the eye of her grandmother Queen Victoria, and her godmother the Empress Eugenie…’
³
In thrall to her mother, Beatrice had forfeited authority or influence over her pretty daughter.