Daughter of Empire
For Edwina and Ashley and India, with my love
Contents
1
M
y father could trace his roots back to the ninth century. Through forty-one generations, he was able to recount the lives of our ancestors –
royalists, rebels and saints. He never tired of telling me that it was extremely rare for a family to be able to cite two canonised antecedents. ‘The first’, he would say proudly,
‘goes way back to the thirteenth century. St Elizabeth of Hungary was a gracious princess who secretly gave alms to the poor. Her husband didn’t approve of this and one morning, ordered
her to remove the cover of her basket. And . . .’ I loved the ending of this story, ‘. . . her forbidden bread had miraculously turned into roses.’ ‘The other was your Great
Aunt Ella, the Grand Duchess of Russia, who, following her husband’s assassination, became a nun and worked tirelessly among the poor and sick of Moscow. In 1918, when she, the chief nun,
three young princes, a Grand Duke and a lady-in-waiting were thrown down a mineshaft by the Bolsheviks – along with a few hand grenades for good measure – witnesses heard her clear
sweet voice singing “Hail Gentle Light” and other hymns of fortitude to her fellow victims. Before she died, she tore up her nun’s veil to provide bandages for the princes’
wounds.’
Now known as St Elizabeth of Romanova, my great aunt is one of twelve modern saints preserved in sculpture above the West Door of Westminster Abbey. It was hard to keep track of my
father’s long line of relatives, but as he loved lists and charts and stories he was always ready to bring them to life. For many generations his ancestors had been rulers of the Grand Duchy
of Hesse in Germany, a landlocked territory far from the coast. It was his father, Prince Louis Alexander of Battenberg, who changed all that and altered the course of the family’s path. In
1868, at the tender age of fourteen, beset by dreams of a seafaring life, he surprised everyone by announcing that he was leaving home to set sail. In fact he was so determined to become part of
the ‘greatest navy in the world’ that he took British citizenship, eventually rising to the top job of First Sea Lord and Admiral of the Fleet. He didn’t cut off his ties with
Europe completely, though, falling in love with his cousin Princess Victoria of Hesse, a sparky, independent-minded granddaughter of Queen Victoria, who was related to most of the royal courts in
Europe. In those days it wasn’t always an advantage to have family members scattered across Europe, and during the First World War his mother found herself on opposite sides to her brother
and sister. Luckily, my father always said, while patriotism was intense, it never undermined strong family affections.
My grandparents married in 1884 and lived variously in England, Germany and Malta. My father, also Prince Louis of Battenberg but known as ‘Dickie’, was born in 1900, the youngest of
four children. The ageing Queen Victoria held him at his christening and he wriggled so much that he got her full square in the face with a fist and a foot, knocking off her spectacles. He always
told me that at only a few weeks old, he couldn’t possibly have known he was to be ‘seen and not heard’ while in the Queen’s arms.
My father was blessed with enlightened parents. His mother in particular thought that children should not only be seen and very much heard but that they should also be exposed to new ideas and
the classics. She kept meticulous records of the books she read and was always keen to try new experiences. Passionate about cartography, she worked for many years on a detailed geological map of
Malta, participated in archaeological digs and, rather daringly, scooping up my father to provide the required extra weight, flew in a Zeppelin airship and a very early model of a biplane, even
though, as she said, ‘it was not made to carry passengers and we perched securely on a little stool holding on to the flyer’s back’. Coming from a line of progressive thinkers,
she taught my father herself until he was ten years old, gifting him an education that was thorough and polymathic. She taught him to be open minded, methodical and thorough, and above all
encouraged him to enjoy learning, to enquire. Later, when I got to know my grandmother, I could see how entirely free of prejudice she was, how
interested
she was in all that was around her
and just how much of an influence she had had on my father’s refreshing way of viewing the world. She was to be an inspiring force in my life.
A month before his tenth birthday my father was sent to Lockers Park prep school in Hertfordshire, and two years later he entered the Royal Naval College at Osborne. As war became inevitable, at
the beginning of 1914, his Germanborn father was forced to retire from the Admiralty as First Sea Lord because of the anti-German hysteria at large in the country, scurrilous newspaper headlines
whipping people up into a frenzy of hatred. My grandfather resigned, even though the Navy was solidly behind him, and this episode had a profound effect on my father, who vowed to succeed to the
position of his wronged father. Then, during the war, when King George V decreed that the royal family should anglicise their name, choosing Windsor, my grandfather changed his from Battenberg to
Mountbatten. The King created him the Marquess of Milford Haven, having offered him the title of duke, but, practical to the last and looking around him at the grandeur of the English nobility, he
calculated that as his savings had been decimated in the German economic downturn, he simply didn’t have the wealth that would be expected of him with that rank: an English duke had to
maintain a grand style of life. My father also ceased to be the younger Prince Louis of Battenberg and received the courtesy title of Lord Louis Mountbatten.
During the First World War, my father joined Lord Beatty’s flagship HMS
Lion
as a midshipman, and later he was appointed first lieutenant of a small ship, HMS
P31,
and for a
time, aged only eighteen, he found himself in command of a crew of sixty. Through Princess Mary my father contrived that King George V should come on board during the Peace Pageant on the Thames.
He saluted smartly as the monarch came aboard. ‘Hello, Dickie,’ said the King jovially, ‘how’s Chicken Bella?’ The fact that his sovereign remembered the stupid doll
he had had as a two-year-old mortified the nineteen-year-old second-in-command and exposed him to remorseless teasing.
The Admiralty now sent the ‘war babies’ who had been unable to complete their education to Cambridge University, and my father went with both Prince Albert and Prince Henry. They all
led a wildly social life, falling in and out of love between studying. Tall, with the good looks of a Hollywood film star, my father was very much in demand. He was also in demand from the royal
household, accompanying the Prince of Wales – the future King Edward VIII – as his personal aide-de-camp, on tours including Australia and, later, India and Japan.
