The Last Princess (16 page)

The week before Christmas 1876, the court was at Windsor. The Queen and Beatrice walked to the Prince Consort's Mausoleum to pray before the annual departure for Osborne. Beatrice had been spending her days restoring order to certain of the Queen's papers. In her Journal, the Queen recorded:

Walked with Beatrice down to the Mausoleum and back. She has been very busy these last days sorting old music of mine, amongst which treasures have been found. After my dreadful misfortune in ‘61, everything was left untouched, and I could not bear to look at what my darling one and I used to play together. Only within the last five or six years have I looked at my music again, and only quite lately re-opened my duet books and others. The past has seemed to rush in upon me in a strange and marvellous manner.
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This trivial-seeming occupation, imposed upon a quiet, musical nineteen-year-old whose life held few distractions, is significant: just as when the Queen dictated her Journal to Beatrice in the terrible summer of 1871, her entrusting her daughter with the music she had once enjoyed with the Prince Consort represents a step taken towards complete confidence between the two women, confidence the Queen would share with no other child. The rediscovery of former pleasures also afforded the Queen further indulgence of memories of a happy but departed past, another instance of the overshadowing by bygones of Beatrice's cloistered existence.

What began with duet books culminated in the Queen's Journal. After the Queen's death, Beatrice devoted more than
thirty years to ‘editing’ her mother's diaries, omitting passages she considered unsuitable for the eyes of any third person, rewriting entries, copying her revised version into a series of blue notebooks and destroying the originals. It was a task towards which the whole of her adult life had tended. Her training began with writing the Queen's Journal when illness incapacitated its author, and organizing long-neglected music scores the Queen had laid aside, abandoned and forgotten. Such tasks bound mother and daughter ever more closely together, their relationship in both cases an outlet for emotions denied any more ‘normal’ channel, the Queen through her early widowhood, Beatrice because the Queen refused her friends or companions of her own age. By the second half of the 1870s, with Beatrice no longer a child except in a specifically emotional and by extension sexual sense in her mother's estimation, the Queen and her daughter looked on the world with one mind. Beatrice's apprenticeship had been exacting and ruthless: undertakings such as organizing the Queen's old music may have been presented as a diversion -may even have been a diversion – but for Beatrice there was nothing voluntary in the occupation. She had learnt already that her mother's wishes were also the request of a sovereign to a subject: the work Beatrice carried out for her mother had an aspect of sacred duty that permitted neither shirking nor flippancy. It was this seriousness of purpose that Beatrice would later apply to editing the Queen's Journal. By then she had long ceased to question the Queen's dictates.

No wonder the Queen could describe Beatrice as ‘the flower of the flock’, the only one of her children who had ‘never given [her] one moment's cause of displeasure’.
²
During her marriage the Queen had struggled to submerge her sense of self in the Prince Consort, making his thoughts her thoughts, his way of encountering the world her way; so, after the Prince's death, she strove to subjugate Beatrice. She was not motivated by malice or even conscious selfishness, but by her terror of being finally alone – her husband, her mother, her first mentor Leopold of the Belgians and her childhood confidante Baroness Lehzen were all dead by 1870, while four of her nine children were married, with
others certain to follow. Beatrice had not even been the Queen's first choice for the position of constant companion and emotional crutch: she had been too young at the time of the Prince Consort's death and the Queen had convinced herself that, as she would shortly follow her husband to the grave, only a child already adult in 1861 could help her. The Queen had tried to fashion from each of her daughters her ideal helper and had demanded from her sons unremitting indulgence of her sadness. In each case she had failed. Only with Beatrice did her tenacity reap dividends. ‘Thank God she is not touchy and offended like several of her brothers and sisters are,’ she wrote in October 1873.
³
Repeatedly the demanding Queen would thank the Almighty for this child whose tractable nature was little short of a divine gift. In the summer of 1876 Lady Waterpark accompanied the Queen and Beatrice ‘to a school feast at Whippingham. Her Majesty stayed some time and both she and Princess Beatrice seemed much amused.'
⁴
There is a clear inference that Lady Waterpark did not appreciate, or was not privy to, the amusement of her royal employers. The communion of mother and daughter was so close as to exclude outsiders. Even within the Royal Family Beatrice and her mother came to be viewed – as the Queen herself had once described them—as inseparables. Alone of the Queen's children, Beatrice had not signed the Crown Princess's inflammatory letter in the summer of 1871. Henceforth her siblings would view her as effectively of one substance with their mother. ‘This letter is only for you and Beatrice! Please don't have it copied,’ Alice wrote to her mother shortly before the former's death.
⁵
Her relationship with Beatrice was the most enduring pleasure of the Queen's widowhood and, until her mother's death, provided Beatrice's
raison d'etre.
What would happen to the princess next her mother does not appear to have considered. Only two people had previously enjoyed such intimacy with the Queen: the Prince Consort and John Brown.

John Brown died of erysipelas in March 1883. To her grandson, the future George V, the Queen wrote, ‘I have lost my
dearest best
friend who no one in
this World
can
ever
replace…
never
forget
your poor sorrowing old Grandmama's best and truest friend.'
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Eighteen-year-old George had not been born at the time of the Prince Consort's death; unlike many of the Queen's family, he at least could not say he had heard it all before. The Queen was ill herself. Having slipped on stairs at Windsor, she was unable to walk; with the shock she found herself unable even to stand, and only managed to attend Brown's funeral leaning heavily on Beatrice's arm. As in 1861 her physical and emotional recovery were slow. At the beginning of June Arthur wrote to Louise, ‘Poor Mama has been terribly upset by Brown's death -and her knee has given her so much trouble, she is still very lame’,
⁷
while almost a year later the Court Circular lugubriously quibbled: ‘Her Majesty is able to take short walks out of doors, but she can stand only for a few minutes.'
⁸
Brown's death was sudden and, to the Queen, unexpected. To his sister-in-law, she wrote that she ‘[knew] not how to bear it, or how to believe it possible.'
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She employed the service of a masseuse, Charlotte Nautet, to assist with her recovery and required the constant presence of her new physician, Dr James Reid. Neither was enough, and the death of ‘The Queen's Highland Servant’ added an extra burden to Beatrice's already full-time duties. As the Queen wrote to Brown's sisters-in-law: ‘You have your husbands – your support – but I have no strong arm to lean on now. Dear Beatrice is my great comfort.'
¹⁰
Now Beatrice's workload was physical as well as clerical and emotional. If she felt the shades of the prison house moving ever closer, Beatrice kept her fears well hidden.

To date no record of Beatrice's relationship with John Brown has surfaced, but she, more than any of the Queen's children, had extensive dealings with the abrasive Scotsman who shared with her the role of Queen's shadow. Beatrice, more than her siblings, understood exactly what John Brown did for their mother. She saw that, though the Queen treated Brown with injudicious favouritism that gave rise to ill feeling among other servants, courtiers and even the Royal Family, she could not survive without the duties he performed for her, menial tasks for the most part that would otherwise have been the business of a
number of different servants – as the Queen herself expressed it, ‘the offices of groom, footman, page and
maid,
I might almost say, as he is so handy about cloaks and shawls.'
¹¹
The stable boy-turned-ghillie had been entrusted by the Prince Consort with the particular charge of overseeing the Queen's comfort and safety. From his summons to Osborne in 1864 until his death nineteen years later his unswerving attentiveness, which contained no trace of the courtier's deference but suggested rather a lover-like tenderness, consistently inspired in the Queen feelings of comfort and safety. For Beatrice, auditor of all the Queen's woes, it must have been a source of some gratitude that at least one important aspect of the Queen's private life was taken care of by someone else. His ‘only object and interest is my service, and God knows how much I want to be taken care of, the Queen had written to the Crown Princess on 5 April 1865.
¹²
At the time, Beatrice was one week short of her eighth birthday, too young to take care of her mother. Nineteen-year-old Helena would shortly leave the Queen to be married; seventeen-year-old Louise was unsympathetic, fifteen-year-old Arthur training to be a soldier, while Leopold at thirteen was a part-time invalid. No child could satisfy the twin requirements of caring for their mother and making her service their only object and interest. Seizing on John Brown as a familiar face endorsed by the Prince Consort, the Queen directed the man to fit the job. As the years passed, Beatrice would see too much of what that job entailed to experience the misplaced jealousy several of her siblings felt towards John Brown.

All the Queen's sons enjoyed acrimonious relations with the Queen's ubiquitous Highlander. In her dealings with John Brown, Beatrice had three advantages over her brothers. First, she was a girl, and the Queen's daughters fared better with Brown than her sons, perhaps because the position he appeared to usurp was one that belonged to a man not a woman, and was hence resented to a greater degree by those who considered themselves contenders. Second, she enjoyed the singular esteem and affection of the Queen, who delighted in her; and Brown, for all his faults, was not disinterested when it came to the Queen's happiness and
well-being. Third, Beatrice at this stage in her life was noticeably less ‘royal’ in her actions and self-perception than her elder siblings. She did not, as a knee-jerk reaction, balk at what others considered the inappropriate closeness of the relationship enjoyed by a servant with his sovereign. Even the favourite Arthur was guilty in this respect, and the Queen felt compelled to write to his governor, ‘Reserve is not necessary towards the faithful devoted confidential servants who have known him from childhood… If any of the Queen's sons put on a tone of stiffness in her presence towards her people when she does not do so, it is as if they meant to show their mother and the Queen that they disapproved HER MANNER.'
¹³
This injunction applied ‘especially to my excellent Brown, who
ought
to be treated by
all
of
you,
as he is by others,
differently
to the more ordinary servants’.
¹⁴
Beatrice never expressed disapproval of her mother's manner, and she and John Brown were too much in one another's company – often in circumstances of extreme confinement –
for
her to behave with reserve towards him. Such a course would have been akin to her conceiving a pronounced antipathy for the Queen's favourite lady-in-waiting: an unworkable stance even had it been in Beatrice's nature, which, where her mother was concerned, it was not.

John Brown's usefulness to the Queen was initially of a practical nature: he was ‘a good, handy, thoughtful servant’.
¹⁵
More than this, since he held the Queen in no awe, and had no qualms about addressing her on terms of near equality and sharing with her his forthright opinions, he quickly assumed something of the role the Queen had first devised for her children. He offered her the support that she had seen no daughter but Beatrice could give her; unmarried, his loyalty to her was absolute. ‘There is one person whose sympathy has done me – and does me – more good than almost anyone's,’ the Queen wrote to her eldest daughter in 1866, ‘and that is good, honest Brown… He has, when I have been very sad and lonely – often and often -with his strong, kind, simple words – so true, and so wise and so courageous, done me an immensity of good – and so he would to anyone in sorrow and distress.'
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This sympathy, felt by the
Queen to be of a loving nature, remained a part of the relationship of mistress and servant. With the passage of time and Beatrice's growing maturity, this aspect of the Queen's needs increasingly became Beatrice's province. But it is possible she did not address it as satisfactorily as the less inhibited Scotsman. As a four-year-old, Lady Augusta Bruce had noted, Beatrice had been noticeably distressed by the Queen's grief during those morning visits she paid to her mother in the aftermath of the Prince Consort's death. But one result of growing up alongside her mother's effusions of sentiment was that, except at moments of crisis such as the death of the Prince Imperial, Beatrice learnt to hold her own emotions in check: the Queen's sorrow burned greedily, admitting no parity in the feelings of those close to her. So Beatrice, always supportive of her mother, may have expressed her sympathy in quiet gestures. John Brown, by contrast, where the Queen was concerned wore his heart on his sleeve. As she wrote to his brother Hugh after Brown's death: ‘My beloved John would say: “You haven't a more devoted servant than Brown” – and oh! how I felt that! Afterwards so often I told him no one loved him more than I did or had a better friend than me, and he answered: “Nor you -than me. No one loves you more.”'
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