The Last Princess (44 page)

Beatrice had embarked on her second and last work of translation, half a century after the publication of
The Adventures of Count Georg Albert of Erbach.
This time the material was a diary, that of Queen Victoria's maternal grandmother, Augusta, Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. It covered the period from 1806 to 1821, including the marriage of the Duchess's daughter Victoire to Edward, Duke of Kent, Queen Victoria's father. There was a further topicality, in addition to the family connection, which Beatrice explained in her proposed introduction to the translation: ‘The curious similarity between the days of the Napoleonic wars and our own times has led me to think that this Diary might appeal to some readers, interested in that period.’
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It was a thought shared by her eventual publisher, and one on which he pinned many of his hopes for the book's sales: ‘The references to Napoleon and his marshals and to matters of
general European importance are very interesting indeed. It is curious how if Hitler and Nazis be substituted for Napoleon and France, extremely suitable and apt many of the criticisms are to the present day.’
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Beatrice's choice of publisher fell on John Murray. The company had published her previous translation and more recently, in September 1938, John Murray himself had sent Beatrice a present of its edition of the letters of the Prince Consort, edited by Dr Kurt Jagow. Beatrice did not approach Murray, however, until the work was complete, indicating that to a large extent the translation had been undertaken not in order to write a book, but for her own enjoyment, interest and occupation. Bessie Bulteel's letter to Louise on 3 October 1939 suggests there was little else to do at Ravenswood: ‘We are leading a very quiet life here, and have seen nobody, so there is nothing to tell you.’
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What's more, despite their recent exchange of letters, when the time came, the letter of approach was written not by Beatrice but by Minnie Cochrane -on 28 October 1940. ‘Princess Beatrice has asked me to write and say that as you once very kindly published a book for Her Royal Highness, The Princess wonders if you would do so again. Her Royal Highness has translated from German the diary of the… maternal grandmother of the late Queen Victoria. The original is in the archives of Windsor Castle. The King has given his permission for it to be published.’
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By this time Beatrice had left Ravenswood. The house had offered limited respite from the winter cold, January 1940 bringing deep snow and hard frosts, both of which prevented Beatrice from getting outside and served to exacerbate her ongoing struggle with bronchial asthma. Added to this, despite its remoteness, Ravenswood was in a defence area: extensive troop movements threatened the prevailing tranquillity. On one occasion in July 1940 the troops in question were Canadian. Beatrice invited them into the garden, where she joined them in her wheelchair, a gesture that marked her clearly as her mother's daughter.

We have masses of troops all round us, and I saw some Canadians a few days ago, who were resting near the gate. I had them told
to come into the grounds and go round the garden. After they had been given a little refreshment, I went out in my chair to speak to them, which seemed to please them very much, and one asked leave to photograph me. They were very fine looking young men, in the Artillery, and showed me their guns, with great pride.
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Beatrice was much struck by the coincidence of the soldiers being Canadian. She had recently settled to move from Ravenswood to nearby Brantridge Park near Balcombe. The house belonged to her niece, Leopold's daughter Alice, and Alice's husband Alge, Earl of Athlone, Queen Mary's brother. Before the outbreak of war Lord Athlone had been appointed Governor-General of Canada. During their absence on the other side of the Atlantic, the Athlones had decided to let Brantridge Park. The house offered an ideal solution for Beatrice. Princess Louise had died at Kensington Palace in December 1939 and Ena was spending the duration of the war in neutral Switzerland: there were no longer any ties for Beatrice in London. Brantridge, a handsome, mid-eighteenth-century house in an extensive park, was both larger and quieter than Ravenswood. Despite its proximity to the latter, it stood outside the defence area; its size allowed Beatrice to have living with her, in addition to her attendants, her remaining son Drino and his wife Irene. On 28 July 1940 she wrote to Lord Mottistone of her plans: ‘I am going to move in the middle of next month to Brantridge Park, which Alge and Alice are letting, so as to be able to have my son and daughter-in-law living with me, and am thankful not to have to face another winter here all alone and so isolated.’
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Within weeks of settling in to what would be her final home, Beatrice completed her translation of her great-grandmother's diary. On 1 November Minnie Cochrane wrote from Brantridge to John Murray, who had agreed in principle to accept the work for publication but asked that he be allowed to see it to estimate the likely costs involved. ‘Her Royal Highness wishes me to say she always meant to send you the typed translation, and will do so directly she gets it back. At present the King is reading it, and
it then goes to Queen Mary—but as soon as the Princess has it back, it will go to you.’
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It ‘went’ on 26 November, Beatrice taking the opportunity to write to Murray herself for the first time. ‘I am at last sending you my typewritten manuscript which I received from Queen Mary this morning, who seems most interested and impressed with it, thinking it would be sure to be appreciated (by the public) and all the more so being a private Diary… I should like the book to be published very simply and inexpensively, and shall naturally await your verdict with anxiety!”
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Happily, Beatrice's anxiety was without foundation. John Murray delivered his verdict on 6 December:

I have been reading the Diary with much pleasure and interest and should like if I may to congratulate Your Royal Highness on the very skilful way in which the work is done so as to avoid an impression of being a translation at all… The Diary well deserves publication and it will be a pleasure and honour to me to bring it out. I shall be willing to bear all the cost of production and publication and pay Your Royal Highness a royalty of twelve-and-a-half per cent on all copies sold after the first 500 and fifteen per cent if or when 1,500 copies have been sold… The book, including a moderate amount of advertisement, will cost over £200.
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Beatrice accepted Murray's terms by return of post.

The book was published on 12 June 1941. Over the course of the intervening seven months, publisher and author – referred to by John Murray privately as ‘the Royal translator’
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– enjoyed a regular, polite correspondence concerning such matters as the index, illustrations for the book, and its title, Murray making the suggestion that was ultimately accepted of
In Napoleonic Days.
Together they devised the unavoidably cumbersome subtitle: ‘Extracts from the private diary of Augusta, Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, Queen Victoria's maternal grandmother, 1806 to 1821’. Due to the cleanness of the manuscript, Murra y decided to save time and expense ‘by having only one stage of proof’,
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and Beatrice – as she had in 1890 over the publication
of
The Adventures of Count Georg Albert of Erbach—
deferred to her publisher's knowledge and experience: ‘If you should wish to make any further small alterations,’ she wrote to him on 15 December, ‘please do so without referring back to me.’ Beatrice chose ‘a dull green binding’
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and, ever modest, found herself ‘agreeably surprised at how pleasantly it reads’ after receiving through the post the first proof.
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Although publication was slowed down by the Ministry of Aircraft Production, which briefly took over the printing works – with the result that ‘all work was thrown into confusion with consequent weeks of delay’, as Murray explained to Beatrice – and despite John Murray's publicity material advertising the book's price as eighteen shillings rather than the correct 7s. 6d, 230 advance copies had been sold to booksellers by the eve of sale. ‘It has been a great pleasure to me to be associated with Your Royal Highness over the publication of this book and I do indeed hope that the results will be really satisfactory to reward the care and thought which you have given to the work,’ Murray wrote to Beatrice on that occasion, adding that at least a thousand copies needed to be sold in order to cover expenses.

Both John Murray and Beatrice herself placed their trust in the magnetism of the royal name. Murray printed 1514 copies and offered seventy-seven to members of the press.
In Napoleonic Days
was favourably reviewed in the
Spectator, The Times,
the
Daily Telegraph
and the
Times Literary Supplement.
By August almost a thousand copies had been sold, that figure rising to 1300 by early October. At regular intervals Norah Thomas wrote on Beatrice's behalf enquiring after the progress of sales and offering, at one point, Beatrice to autograph copies in order to speed up the process (an offer Murray refused as unnecessary, though he did ask Beatrice to sign his own copy). On 10 February 1943 John Murray wrote to Beatrice announcing the sale of the last eighteen copies of the edition.

As had her work on her mother's Journal,
In Napoleonic Days
provided Beatrice not only with employment but with a continuing interest, as she followed the progress of its production
and eventual sale. Not for a moment now did the pain in her knee leave her, her fingers and her limbs ached with constant rheumatic pains and no glasses properly corrected her worsening sight. Unable to walk, continually troubled by her breathing, her life had become that of an invalid. When first she moved to Brantridge Park there had been visits to and from her brother Arthur, the last survivor of her eight siblings. But Arthur died in January 1942. More than a century after the birth of the Queen and Prince Consort's eldest daughter, Beatrice found herself indisputably the last princess. Her parents, her siblings, her husband, two of her children and six of the ten nieces who had been her bridesmaids were all dead. Tired and suffering, she remained, the last gently flickering candle of Britain's dazzling Victorian age. ‘She struggled so hard to “carry on” in spite of all her sufferings with supreme courage but it was very painful for those who loved her,’ Irene Carisbrooke wrote after her death.
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To the small group living together at Brantridge Park, it was obvious that it was only a question of time and that, when it came, the end would be a blessing.

But for Beatrice herself there was no question of giving up. Both the Isle of Wight and the progress of the war continued to absorb her attention. One of her last letters to Lord Mottistone, a friend for fifty years, written on 11 November 1943, reveals the scope of her interests:

I think your suggestion of submitting the name of General AspinallOglander as a Deputy Lieutenant [of the Isle of Wight] a most excellent one, for he certainly has rendered great services… How thankful one is for all the splendid war news, but I fear the end of this ghastly war is not yet in sight and that there are still very serious hard times to face… I am keeping fairly well but continue to be much troubled with my bronchial asthma, which is so fatiguing. But this time of year is very bad for that sort of thing.
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That bronchial asthma troubled Beatrice throughout the winter of 1943-4. Though the following summer witnessed a temporary lessening of pain, the autumn saw the return of her old sparring partner with renewed vigour. By October she was seriously ill
and, on 25 October, summoned by telegram, Ena left Geneva to return for the last time to her mother's side. She travelled by converted bomber sent by the British government, but still arrived only just in time. At ten past five on the morning of 26 October, in a house deep in the English countryside belonging to a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, the last princess died peacefully in her sleep. Close beside her, adding colour and flesh to the ghosts of the past that had cloaked her through most of her eighty-seven years, were her son and daughter and her only daughter-in-law. Beyond the rolling fields and the steel-grey sea that wrapped the shores of her mother's kingdom, world war would continue for a further eight months. Among its casualties was a pretty, insignificant little town near Frankfurt, seat of a grand duchy and a dynasty that, except as a memory, had disappeared. That town was Darmstadt. Four months after Beatrice's death, flattened by bombs, it too disappeared. On 26 February 1945 Queen Mary wrote to her brother in Canada, ‘Poor Darmstadt has ceased to exist, everything gone. This was done by Americans, rather sad.’
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It was the town where Beatrice had fallen in love, the agent of her liberation, the X factor that gave to the last princess a love and life of her own.

NOTES

CHAPTER ONE: ‘It is a fine child’

1
Longford, Elizabeth,
Victoria Rl
(Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1964), p. 261.

2
Hibbert, Christopher,
George III: A Personal History
(Viking, London, 1998).

3
Weintraub, Stanley,
Victoria: Biography of a Queen
(Unwin, London, 1987), p. 225.

4
Hibbert, Christopher,
Queen Victoria: A Personal History
(HarperCollins, London, 2000), p. 219.