The Last Princess (18 page)

After initial irritation, the Queen appears to have renounced her plans with a degree of good grace. She found for her Hesse grandchildren a second English governess, Miss Pryde, to work alongside ‘Madgie’ Jackson: both women were expected to submit detailed reports on their charges to the Queen in England. In addition, the Queen chose Helena, whose daughters were of a similar age to Alice's younger children, as surrogate mother for
the Grand Duke's offspring; Helena would make annual trips to Darmstadt and have the Hesse children to stay with her during holidays. Bertie remained interested in the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill, and was considered by the Archbishop of Canterbury a significant force behind its ultimate success in 1896. The Grand Duke of Hesse sincerely mourned Alice's death and, after a decent interval, embarked on a romantic liaison which, when she learnt of it, his mother-in-law moved swiftly to crush. Having spent April 1879 with the Queen at Baveno on the western shore of Lake Maggiore in northern Italy, Beatrice had resumed unruffled the life she knew so well at her mother's side. Wistfully but cheerfully she wrote to Theodore Martin, who had sent her the fourth volume of his life of the Prince Consort, ‘We have returned here enchanted with our journey, but missing terribly the beautiful scenery we have just left, and I hope this will not be our only visit to Italy.’
¹⁰

In the time the Queen spared her, when the Queen was engaged in political business (with which Leopold not Beatrice at this point helped her) or in driving with any of her ladies-in-waiting, Beatrice was at work on a book. The book was a work of design not composition. It was a birthday book, with one page for every day of the year, a lengthy index for the names of those whose birthdays were entered in the appropriate day, and an illustrated frontispiece to each month. Each of these frontispieces included a poem or poetic extract within an illustrated border. The poets chosen indicate catholic tastes on the part of the ‘author’, from Milton (May), Herbert (February) and Wordsworth (October), to the eighteenth-century populist Mrs Hemans (March), Longfellow, whom the Queen, Leopold and Louise had met in 1868, when Beatrice was still considered too young for such distractions (January), and Beatrice's socialist contemporary William Morris (August). The borders, painted in watercolour, all depict flowers. Like her sisters and the Queen, Beatrice had been instructed in painting by watercolourist William Leighton Leitch; she also took lessons from N. E. Green and would later be taught by Benjamin Ottewell. In the early 1880s she became an honorary member of
the Royal Institute of Painters in Watercolour, with which -emboldened by the success of her birthday book – she exhibited in 1883, 1884 and 1885 (unsurprisingly, given her rank and prestige, Beatrice's paintings were illustrated in the Society's catalogues). Later she would exhibit with the Isle of Wight Fine Art Society, of which she was president. On 9 September 1905 the
Isle of Wight County Press
recorded that Beatrice opened the society's twenty-sixth annual exhibition, at the School of Art, Ryde, and herself exhibited two paintings in oils.

A Birthday Book Designed by HRH the Princess Beatrice
was published in 1881 by Smith, Elder & Co., the house which had earlier so successfully published the Queen's
Leaves From the Journal of Our Life in Highlands
and, more recently, had been responsible for Theodore Martin's life of the Prince Consort, in which the Queen took so close an interest. Like her mother's book, Beatrice's was intended for public sale, and Smith, Elder & Co. rewarded her handsomely for her efforts. Unlike the Queen's compilation of illustrated journal extracts, there was to be no cheap edition of Beatrice's
Birthday Book.
The large volume was lavishly produced: colour lithography was undertaken in Leipzig; several monthly frontispieces were heavily gilded; and the pages were gilt-edged. Smith, Elder & Co. set a price of forty-two shillings a copy, and the princess nominated the Belgrave Hospital for Children as the recipient of all proceeds. She herself received £500 for the copyright on 3 October 1881, one of the largest single payments made by the publishers to any of its authors that year. On 11 March 1882 Beatrice received a second payment of £250. The publishers had initially decided upon two editions of one thousand five hundred copies each, released on 15 November 1881 and 16 February 1882. A further edition of five hundred copies was also printed in the spring of 1882, although Beatrice did not receive additional payment. The investment Smith, Elder
&C
Co. made in its royal author is indicated by the large sum the company spent on advertising the first printing – £163 13s. 1 id in addition to giving forty-three copies to ‘Editors and Friends’. Beatrice herself received fifty copies of the book.

Publisher and princess both had reason to be pleased with
their first joint sortie into print. Despite its high price, the
Birthday Book
sold well, with Smith, Elder & Co. continuing to receive orders for copies as late as 1887. By then Beatrice was married with two small children and a host of new concerns. Her
Birthday Book
remains a work of considerable charm, with a strong period flavour. Brought up without the Prince Consort's deep interest in art, Beatrice nevertheless embraced current developments in art and design – she owned furniture by Collinson & Lock, for example, made in the 1880s from ebonized and gilt mahogany in a safely ‘royal’ diluting of current E. W. Godwin-inspired aesthetic movement ideas. The
Birthday Book's
blend of sentimentality and Gothic aesthetics endeared it to its contemporary public, not least among them the Queen. The Queen was not only proud of her daughter's work, she had a passion for birthdays and anniversaries and also enjoyed collecting auto-graphs. She gave a number of copies of the
Birthday Book
to favoured members of her growing family. Those that survive, annotated and autographed, provide an insight into the dramatis personae of Queen Victoria's later court.

In October 1882 the Queen and Beatrice – the latter now the author of a successful charitable work – were once more at Balmoral. They were joined by members of the Queen's extended family. Photographs record the autumn get-together, the Queen invariably seated centrally, with children and dogs at her feet, adults sitting or standing behind her. One such group shows the Queen, Arthur's wife the Duchess of Connaught holding on her knee their first baby, Margaret of Connaught, three spotted terriers, Ernest of Hesse and Alix of Hesse, the future Tsarina of Russia. To the Queen's left, implausibly kilted, sits Ernest and Alix's father, Alice's widower the Grand Duke Louis IV. Standing behind him, one hand resting on his shoulder, her fond gaze fixed upon him apparently oblivious to the camera, is Princess Beatrice.

TWELVE

‘Dear Beatrice suffered much
from rheumatism’

On n November 1882
The Graphic,
an illustrated weekly paper, published two half-page pictures under the headline ‘The Queen At Balmoral’. One showed the Queen with Beatrice in the castle drawing room, an eye-watering vision of tartan and graceless cabinetry. The other, ‘The Afternoon Drive’, bears the explanation: ‘In the afternoon Her Majesty, in a carriage and pair with outriders, drives with the Princess and ladies-in-waiting to her favourite resorts in the neighbourhood.’ The illustration is remarkable only on account of the fearsomeness of the weather. All four occupants of the open carriage – the Queen, Beatrice and two ladies-in-waiting—hold above their heads large black umbrellas. They appear calm, unruffled, even gracious in the Queen's case as she inclines her head to acknowledge the salute of a passing kilted Scotsman. Against the decorous party horizontal rain lashes with vigour. It is, we suspect, a cheerless autumn outing, horses, carriage, outriders, John Brown on the box, and all four passengers ice-cold and soaked to the skin. It was probably raining when the party set off from the castle: after fourteen years in waiting, Marie Mallet recorded, ‘I can safely say I never remember a warm congenial day in the Highlands during the many months I spent there.’
¹
The bracing air and vigorous Scottish climate were very much to the Queen's liking; her Highland Journals seldom deplore decidedly inclement weather except insofar as it obscures the view. But they did not suit Beatrice. By her early twenties Beatrice had developed rheumatism so acute that she was forced to take the first of a series of Continental spa cures. None yielded any permanent improvement and she would continue to suffer for the rest of her life.

In September 1873 the Royal Family was at Inverlochy Castle. The weather began ghastly, but the Queen was not to be deterred from enjoying herself and seeing as much as possible of the neighbourhood. ‘As the rain did not cease, Beatrice, Jane Churchill and I walked in the grounds to the stables, which we looked at, then out at the lodge and as far as the farm.’ After lunch, ‘the day seemed better, but again and again the sunshine was succeeded by heavy showers; still we determined to go out … We came home at twenty minutes to eight… but the weather has been bad.’
²
It is unlikely that the ‘we’ who ‘determined to go out’ included the then fourteen-year-old Beatrice: the royal plural embraced the inclinations of only one member of the party.

If anyone was to blame for the Queen's foolhardiness in the face of cold, wet discomfort, it was her physician Sir James Clark. Clark had attended the young Princess Victoria when, in 1835, she suffered from typhoid fever at Ramsgate. Having pulled her through that crisis, he found a faithful acolyte in the future monarch. The doctrine of good health to which thereafter the Queen adhered scrupulously was Clark's youthful thesis ‘De Frigoribus Effectis’, in which he established the positive properties of fresh air and cold and the certain pitfalls of overheating. The Queen applied the principle indiscriminately, with all the imperturbable zeal of the convert: when pregnancy rendered one of her daughters-in-law lethargic and lassitudinous, she ordered that the house be kept without heating until the baby's birth.
³
Windows in the Queen's homes were flung wide—to let in wind, as little Beatrice had explained to her German governess—and fires scarcely lit. Lord James of Hereford, a minister in attendance at Balmoral, described the castle as ‘cold as death’.
⁴
Bertie dismissed it as ‘the place of a thousand draughts’, an epithet that might easily have been applied to any of the Queen's homes.
⁵

To her governess, Lady Car, Beatrice wrote from Balmoral on 21 May 1874, ‘I was so sorry leaving [Windsor] thinking it would be so cold, and nothing out, but I am quite agreeably surprised, for it is very unusual to see everything out in May, in Scotland.’
⁶
A hint of dread underlies this letter to one of her few confidantes of the slender seventeen-year-old who would be expected to sit beside the Queen on her rain-lashed carriage drives and, afterwards, to wear the regulation low-cut evening gown in her Arctic dining room – a complaint reiterated by the usually mild-mannered lady-in-waiting Edith, Countess of Lytton, as late as 1897. Henry Ponsonby, the Queen's private secretary, once related a conversation between the Queen and Beatrice: if condemned to the choice, would you select residence at the Equator or the North Pole? Their respective responses did not surprise their audience. Beatrice was decided in favouring the Equator, the Queen equally certain in championing the North Pole. ‘All doctors say that heat is unwholesome but cold wholesome,’ she asserted with questionable veracity.
⁷
So pronounced was the Queen's belief in ‘De Frigoribus Effectis’ that, like many of her contemporaries, she endowed fresh air with moral and philosophical as well as health-giving properties. What she regarded as the reactionary spirit of the Russians arose from the ‘terribly unhealthy atmosphere’ in which they lived on account of sealing shut their windows from September to May.
⁸
Left to her own devices, the Queen chose to holiday in Switzerland, escaping the British heatwave of 1868; Beatrice's holiday destinations after her mother's death included Egypt, Algeria and Sicily.