‘The day splendid,’ wrote Victoria at Osborne House, ‘a very hot sun, but a pleasant air.’1 As usual she breakfasted outside beneath the trees. The sight of the breakfasting queen beneath her ‘large green-lined and green-fringed parasol’, a Scottish piper playing, was eccentrically magnificent.2 She’d eat a boiled egg from a golden cup, and her empire was usually present in human form. ‘Two Indian Khitmagars in scarlet and gold remained motionless behind her chair,’ wrote one witness, while ‘a page and a Scotchman in a kilt waited till she rang.’3
This particular morning Beatrice was also present at the breakfast table with its view of the sea, and the meal was heavy with emotion. As it finished, Victoria handed her daughter a ruby ring of great sentimental value, a wedding present she’d been given forty-five years previously. Victoria ‘could hardly realise the event that was going to take place’.4 But this, at long last, was her youngest child’s own wedding day.
Victoria had long treated Beatrice as a human crutch. As a baby, Beatrice stood out among her stolid, Hanoverian-looking siblings. She’d been a beautiful infant, with blue eyes and a satin skin. ‘Quite the prettiest of us all,’ one of Beatrice’s sisters said, ‘she is like a little fairy.’5 ‘Such a delight to kiss and fondle,’ Victoria wrote upon Beatrice’s first birthday, regaining a bliss in babies she hadn’t experienced since her firstborn. ‘If only,’ Victoria added, Beatrice ‘could remain, just as she is.’6
The empty conventional words – ‘remain, just as she is’ – would have cruel significance as the beautiful baby grew up.
Beatrice was not only pretty but also precocious. Albert called her ‘the most amusing baby we have had’.7 At three, she had golden hair and high spirits, ‘a most amusing little dot, all the more so for being generally a little naughty’.8 She wanted to read a letter written by one of her mother’s ladies-in-waiting. ‘You can’t, it is French – you must learn,’ the lady said. Oh, but Beatrice already had: ‘I can say “bonne jour and wee”.’ When asked why she had not completed a chore, Beatrice always had a ready excuse: ‘I was very busy, too busy blowing soap bubbles.’9
But then this privileged childhood as her parents’ pet came to a sudden end. On the ghastly night of Albert’s death, there are persistent tales that Victoria took the baby Beatrice into her own bed, and wrapped her little body in the nightshirt of the man who had just died. ‘Though this story is most probably apocryphal,’ writes Princess Beatrice’s biographer, Matthew Dennison, it ‘stands as a metaphor’ for Victoria’s treatment of her youngest child and favourite daughter.10 After Albert’s death, Victoria diverted much of her love and her clinginess to Beatrice instead.
In the early years of Victoria’s widowhood, it was Beatrice, still not yet ten, who ‘mothered’ her mother. Beatrice ‘spends an hour with Her’ each morning, we’re told, ‘and is in agonies when She sees Her cry. “Dear Darling” as She calls Her, hugging and kissing her so tenderly.’11 The youngest daughter in any well-off Victorian family understood that she would be expected to remain at home, unmarried, to be her parents’ companion and carer. Beatrice was no exception. At six, she was asked if she would like to be a bridesmaid? ‘Oh, no, I don’t like weddings at all,’ she replied at once, ‘I shall never be married. I shall stay with mother.’12
When Beatrice was old enough to be launched upon the marriage market, Victoria avoided the subject. She forbade her household from even mentioning weddings in conversation if Beatrice was present. Isolated from her contemporaries, the ‘amusing little dot’ began to lose her self-confidence, and grow shy and withdrawn. Henry Ponsonby noticed Beatrice’s ‘want of interest, which I believe comes from fearing to care for anything the Queen hesitates about’. He suspected that her nervous, tongue-tied manner would never change unless ‘a good husband stirs her up’. But that was an unlikely prospect. ‘Poor girl,’ Ponsonby concluded, ‘what chance has she?’ Someone else who sat next to Beatrice at dinner reported that there was hardly any safe topic to talk about. ‘What with subjects tabooed, the subjects she knows nothing about, and the subjects she turns to the Queen upon, there is nothing left but the weather and silence.’13
Beatrice was also losing the blonde beauty of her babyhood. Victoria’s latest doctor, James Reid, naughtily referred to her in private as ‘Betrave’, a pun on the French word for beetroot.14 Matthew Dennison describes Beatrice in her late twenties as a ‘dumpy, despairing figure, too overwhelmed by boredom even to look up’.15 Albert had noted Victoria’s tendency to fret and sweat over small domestic matters. ‘Your fidgety nature,’ he’d complained, ‘makes you insist on entering, with feverish eagerness, into details about orders and wishes which, in the case of a Queen, are commands.’16 The adult Beatrice bore the brunt of this, acting as an unpaid maid whose life was micromanaged by her mother.
However, in 1884, a remarkable thing happened. Beatrice, who’d just turned twenty-seven, accompanied her mother to the quiet German town of Darmstadt. They were attending the marriage of one of Victoria’s many nieces to Prince Louis of Battenberg. Also present was the groom’s brother, Prince Henry.
Henry, often known as ‘Liko’, was the third son of Alexander of Battenberg. The Battenberg brothers were dashing young princes-about-Europe, multilingual, and martial in their interests. Their mother was only morganatically married to their father, which meant that Henry wasn’t properly royal. But this did not prevent him and Beatrice from secretly falling in love. During the Darmstadt trip, other wedding guests noted that Victoria ‘alarmed and tyrannized over her family’.17 And when she discovered what had been going on behind her back, she was horrified. ‘The dreadful engagement’, she called it. She felt the fact that her permission hadn’t been asked beforehand amounted to a grave deception.18
What was worse, Prince Henry was an army officer, serving in the royal household of Prussia. In the normal course of things, any wife would go to live with him in the Prussian royal palace of Potsdam.19 Victoria was adamant that there was to be no engagement, not least because Beatrice could never leave her mother.
On 23 July 1885, though, Victoria spent the morning resting in her Osborne bedroom while Beatrice used her dead father’s room nearby to get dressed for her long-awaited wedding. She had to be cruelly corseted to fit into her wasp-waisted white dress, with orange blossom at the bosom and all down its long lace skirt. ‘I came in,’ Victoria recorded in her journal, ‘whilst her veil & wreath were being fastened on. It was my dear wedding veil which I wore at all my Children’s christenings.’20
Beatrice must often have thought that this day would never come. She later told her eldest son that from May to November 1884, after she’d announced her intention to marry, her mother simply refused to speak to her. Any communication took place in the form of notes. Given Beatrice’s previous closeness to her mother, this seven-month estrangement must have been hard to bear.21
Beatrice’s exact statement, that her mother never addressed a word to her, must have been exaggerated by hindsight, for Victoria’s journal does record at least some conversation. On 8 July, for example, Victoria notes that ‘Beatrice came early to my bedroom to wish me goodbye’ before going on a visit.22 And yet, this particular page of the journal only survives at all in Beatrice’s own later transcript. It must have been tempting for Beatrice, as she decided what to copy and what to leave out, to massage the evidence here and elsewhere to minimise the record of her mother’s nastier behaviour. Perhaps she even did it unconsciously.
And it is undeniable that Beatrice’s name, which had previously peppered their pages, practically disappears from the queen’s letters. Exceptions are made only when Victoria writes, for example, ‘of the pain it has caused me that my darling Beatrice should wish … to marry’. ‘What agonies, what despair,’ she wrote, what ‘horror and dislike of the most violent kind’ she felt, ‘for the idea of my precious Baby’s marrying at all’.23
The problem lay not so much with Prince Henry; Victoria had a host of unrelated reasons for wanting her youngest daughter to remain single. As she told one of her sons-in-law, ‘mine is a nature which requires being loved, and I have lost almost all those who loved me most.’24 She felt she was owed company, attendance, attention from her children, and from an unmarried daughter most of all.
By this stage in her life, if Victoria was thwarted in anything, she would say that her health was at risk. Her physical fitness had become something of a smokescreen behind which she would hide. The queen ‘is roaring well and can do everything she likes and nothing she doesn’t’, wrote one perceptive courtier in 1869.25 The same year the historian Thomas Carlyle described her as ‘plump and almost young’, with a waddling walk; she ‘sailed out as if moving on skates, and bending her head towards us with a smile’.26 A less friendly German source from the Darmstadt wedding, though, described her as looking ‘like a cook’ with a ‘bluish-red face’. This gentleman believed the rumours that she was ‘more or less mentally deranged’.27
Yet it was indisputably the case that Victoria’s eyesight had begun to fail. And here the role of Beatrice, the person who read the queen’s correspondence aloud, was vital. Frederick Ponsonby, son of the magnificent Henry, joined his father in the royal household, and described the role of unofficial Private Secretary that Beatrice attempted – but ultimately failed – to fill. ‘The Queen is not even au courant with the ordinary topics of the present day,’ wrote the younger Ponsonby, ‘imagine B[eatrice] trying to explain … our policy in the East.’ He, or Arthur Bigge, would write long reports setting out what they thought the queen needed to know, ‘but they are often not read to HM as B[eatrice] is in a hurry to develop a photograph or wants to paint a flower’. As a result, ‘hideous mistakes’ sometimes occurred. The saddest aspect of the situation, according to young Ponsonby at least, was that it was only Victoria’s eyes that were wearing out. ‘Her memory is still wonderful, her shrewdness, her power of discrimination as strong as ever.’28
Victoria had also grown increasingly squeamish. She’d once been notably at ease with bodies and biology and matters of the flesh. But she’d come to think of her daughter as a pure, perfect, untouched lily. She therefore experienced deep distress when she imagined Beatrice losing her virginity. ‘That thought – that agonizing thought,’ Victoria wrote, that ‘is to me the most torturing thought in the world.’29 The queen would not have been so concerned in her more robust youth. But this was nine babies later, and it also reflects how women were seen more widely in high Victorian culture.
Yet Beatrice, perhaps realising that this was her only chance, persisted in her rebellious insistence that she would marry. By December, her mother’s silent disapproval could not be sustained. Beatrice could marry, Victoria conceded, but there was one condition. Prince Henry would have to give up his army career, and come to live with his mother-in-law. While Victoria would reluctantly allow the marriage, it was ‘quite out of the question’ that Beatrice should ever ‘have left the Queen’.30
It was an unusual stipulation, but Prince Henry agreed. And once Victoria knew that he was ‘willing to come & live in my house’, she could resist no longer. It was at the very end of the year, on 29 December 1884, that she called Beatrice and her betrothed into Albert’s room at Osborne. There, in the presence of her dead husband’s spirit, Victoria gave them her blessing.31
She might have reconciled herself to the thought that she was gaining a son rather than losing a daughter, but even so Victoria dreaded the couple having children. She was relieved to find that the courtship had included ‘no kissing, etc.’, which she believed that ‘Beatrice dislikes’. (One suspects that Beatrice may have failed to express her true opinion on the subject.) ‘The wedding day,’ Victoria groaned, ‘is like a great trial and I hope and pray there may be no results!’32
This royal wedding, indeed any royal wedding, was bound to be good for the monarchy. To a constitutional commentator like Walter Bagehot, who observed the phenomenon at work, a royal family was simply much more palatable ‘to the common mind’ than a republic. ‘One person doing interesting actions,’ he thought, was a hundred times more attractive than scores of elected representatives, all doing the same boring things. He believed that women in particular ‘care fifty times more for a marriage than a ministry’.33 And Beatrice was a quietly popular figure in the press and with the public, who appreciated her selflessness. ‘Many daughters have acted virtuously, but thou excelleth them all,’ ran the inscription on a silver tea and coffee service among her wedding gifts.34
To make it entirely clear that Beatrice would never leave Osborne, she was to be married there, and the first royal wedding to take place in a parish church was planned. It soon became clear that the pressure upon the Isle of Wight’s accommodation would be immense. Some guests were to stay on board the royal yachts. Forty-four witnesses would sign the register, in an order that Victoria had carefully worked out in advance, to avoid any demeaning squabbles about precedence.35
After a good deal of confusion caused by Victoria’s customary detailed but unclear directions, it emerged that guests were to wear demi-toilette, which meant jewels and elbow-length sleeves.36 One guest noticeably absent from the list was the Prime Minister, William Gladstone, who was back in office after Disraeli’s death. Victoria had not been able to bring herself to invite the man she called a ‘half-mad firebrand’, even though it would have been politically expedient.37
By late morning, in hot sun, Victoria and Beatrice were finally ready to leave by carriage for the short drive to the church of St Mildred’s in the nearby village of Whippingham. ‘The whole way crowds of people,’ Victoria noted with satisfaction.38 St Mildred’s was a ‘little ivy-clad village church’, and this was supposed to be ‘an ideally perfect village wedding’.39
It was one o’clock, and the bride was late, by the time they arrived. Outside St Mildred’s stood a guard of honour of Highland soldiers and a band of ‘Pipes & drums’. Bertie was waiting at the gate, along with ‘the sweet young Bridesmaids’ wearing white dresses and white carnations.40 Ten in number, they were all Beatrice’s nieces. The radical MP Henry Labouchère thought they possessed a ‘decided absence of beauty’. He also considered that Bertie ‘seemed ill at ease and out of sorts’, while Victoria ‘looked exceedingly cross’.41
Feeling the pressure of the occasion, Beatrice and her mother now moved along a red-carpeted covered way lined with people.42 The church interior was filled with ‘ivy and ferns’ and a ‘pyramid of flowers in pots’.43 The choristers from St George’s Chapel, Windsor, had been brought down for the occasion, but they were feeling miffed because no one had remembered to arrange for them to have any refreshments.44
Waiting patiently at the altar was the stunningly handsome Prince Henry, in his brand-new blue sash of the Order of the Garter. Beneath it, at the queen’s own request, he was wearing his glittering white Prussian military uniform.45 The music was German too. Beatrice’s walk up the aisle, orange blossom in hand, was accompanied by Wagner, ‘beautifully played on the organ by Mr Parratt’.46
Beatrice could only squint at her groom-to-be through the folds of the very same Devon lace veil her mother had worn when she’d married Albert. This was hugely significant. Victoria attached great importance to clothes, and a well-informed source tells us that ‘almost without exception, her wardrobe woman can produce the gown, bonnet, or mantle she wore on any particular occasion.’47 The veil was one of the most precious items in the Albertian reliquary. ‘I look upon it as a holy charm,’ Victoria wrote, ‘as it was under that veil our union was blessed forever.’48 Her loan of it to Beatrice was an important act of blessing.
And the queen seemed to have relented. ‘A happier looking couple could seldom be seen kneeling at the altar together,’ she wrote. ‘Though I stood for the 9th time near a child … at the altar, I think I never felt more deeply than I did on this occasion.’49 Even so, those present noted her impatience with the Archbishop of Canterbury’s lengthy homily: ‘Her Majesty commenced to tap with her foot in a very ominous way.’50 Then the veil was lifted, and with it much of the tension, and Beatrice was married at last.
Matthew Dennison reads the lending of the veil as the closing of a circle, as redemption.51 Yet I see it more as an action of control. Yes, Victoria had allowed Beatrice to marry. But only on her own terms.
Back at Osborne, after the signing of the register, it was time for a sumptuous lunch. The wedding breakfast took place on the lawn in tents filled with ferns and flowers.52 Victoria’s meals were notoriously quick affairs, by now served in a succession of courses rather than from common serving plates: ‘when you finish one dish you get the next, without a pause for breath.’53 A visitor who often dined at Osborne in the 1880s recorded how dinner lasted exactly fifty minutes, ‘too much put on each plate by the servants’ and all the food ‘thoroughly British’.54
This kind of large-scale, outdoor entertaining was something that grew more common as Victoria’s reign progressed. The late-night balls of her youth were giving way to the garden parties that survive as a fixture of national life to this day. When such parties were held at Buckingham Palace, Victoria would be driven slowly round the lawns in her landau before entering a ‘large black tent banked up with flowers; it was wide open – all the front – and her faithful subjects could see her taking tea and having her toast buttered by the Indian servant.’55 There’s even jerky surviving film footage of the elderly Victoria being handed, with great difficulty, out of her vehicle.
At Beatrice’s wedding luncheon, the guests feasted to the accompaniment of ten bagpipers from a Highland regiment, who marched round the table ‘playing splendidly’.56 Victoria had a long-standing, highly inconvenient habit of listening to military music while eating. Once, the younger Ponsonby recalled, he had the job of reading some documents aloud to her during a dinner performance of Wagner by the Royal Marines band, bellowing so that she could hear. The other guests found it hilarious when the music came to an unexpected stop, leaving Ponsonby ‘shouting’ into silence.57
After the lunch, and a photograph, the mother-of-the-bride’s mask began to slip. At four, she went upstairs with Beatrice, who was to change into her going-away dress of cream crêpe de Chine. The awful moment of parting was approaching. Prince Henry was also summoned, and now Victoria broke down in tears. She took leave of ‘my darling “Baby” … I felt utterly miserable when they left my room, & had not the heart to go down & see them drive away.’ She would, in fact, see her daughter in just two days’ time, but even this short break seemed unendurable.
After dinner that night, the guests spilled out into the sweet-smelling air of the gardens. The evening sky was bright with fireworks, and the yachts in the bay below ‘were lit up & sent off rockets’.58 The great fountain in the middle of the Osborne lawns was ‘hung with many-coloured lamps’ and while ‘the fireworks gleamed and paled, and died out in the darkness … the sounds of laughter made pleasant echoes in the night’.59
Yet Victoria could not enjoy it. She felt old, and tired, and lonely. She circulated dutifully among the guests on the lawn, ‘& tried to speak to people’. But she was so weary, and ‘so low, that it was an effort, & I escaped quietly to my room. My dear child was never out of my mind.’60 Even on peaceful days it was usually one o’clock in the morning before Victoria nodded off.61 After a trying day like this one, perhaps it was even later before the lady-in-waiting appointed to read the queen to sleep found that her work was done.
After Beatrice had driven triumphantly off with her gorgeous husband, through crowds and past massed bands, her first thought had been of the mother she’d left behind.62 Arriving at nearby Quarr Abbey for the night, Beatrice immediately sat down to write a letter to say that she’d arrived safely.63 She could then with a clear conscience try to enjoy her forty-eight-hour honeymoon.
Beatrice regretted her mother’s histrionics. ‘When I took leave of her,’ she told a friend, Victoria had ‘got very upset, poor thing’. But Beatrice also now experienced, perhaps for the first time, the pleasure of having had her own way. ‘What rest & peace I feel,’ she admitted, ‘now that all is accomplished, my heart has so long desired’.64
Beatrice would in due course give birth to four children, and her husband became a valued member of Victoria’s family circle. With his love of theatricals and singing, Prince Henry’s lively company meant that ‘several of the Queen’s lonely habits of life have gradually disappeared’.65 One of the rare photographs of Victoria smiling was taken at Osborne the year after the wedding, the queen’s podgy face a butter-ball of pleasure. In the picture Beatrice stands behind her, and Victoria has a granddaughter and a great-granddaughter at her side. Four generations, and her own grin, encouraged the queen to pronounce the sitting ‘very successful’.66
But there is a sad coda to Beatrice’s story. Henry eventually got bored with jollying along his mother-in-law on the Isle of Wight, and finally won grudging permission to go to fight in Africa. He was observed to be ‘bursting with excitement’ at the prospect of being a soldier once again.67
His mission was to destroy the Ashanti Kingdom and – purportedly – to end its traditions of slavery and human sacrifice. In reality, the expedition was part of the unseemly ‘Scramble’ for Africa that was taking place between the various European powers, who used gunboats and machine guns against native populations armed with muskets.68
Yet the continent of Africa also had its own natural defences. Henry was travelling through modern-day Ghana when he succumbed to the malaria that attacked no fewer than half of the British forces. He died on board the ship bringing him home, and his corpse was preserved in rum in a makeshift coffin run up out of biscuit tins.69 He was laid to rest in St Mildred’s Church, where he’d been married just ten years before.
Regardless of her initial reluctance to accept Prince Henry into her family, Victoria was inconsolable, mourning him as ‘a bright sunbeam in My Home’.70 And Beatrice, having loved, and lost, had no choice but to return to being her mother’s closest companion and assistant. She devoted her fifty-year widowhood to writing, copying, checking and labouring away as the queen’s most trusted and intimate secretary.
Despite her valiant struggle, Beatrice failed, in the end, to escape.