The Last Princess (30 page)

Even more time-consuming were the theatricals – mostly short comic plays – in which Beatrice but not Liko took part. In spite of her shyness, Beatrice had an enthusiastic long-term interest in play-acting, Lady Waterpark noting as long ago as 22 January 1877, ‘Princess Beatrice went with Miss Cadogan and Mile Norele to the rehearsals of some Theatricals at Lady Biddulph's.’
¹¹
A question mark, however, hovers over her acting ability. While Beatrice was the more diligent in learning her lines, Louise was the more dramatically gifted of the sisters: ‘Princess Louise wh o could act but couldn't learn her part was Miss Hardcastle; Princess Beatrice wh o couldn't act but could learn her part was Constantina Neville,’ wrote Arthur Ponsonby of a production of Goldsmith's
She Stoops to Conquer
in 1893.
¹²
The twin disabilities of the sisters made them a less-than-ideal combination. Arthur's brother Frederick Ponsonby, about to join the Queen's staff as assistant private secretary, was also among the cast of the same production. He tended to greater leniency towards his royal co-players:

Both Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice were quite good in their parts, but very sketchy with the words. I therefore learnt their parts as well as my own, so that I could either say their words or prompt them. Everyone else did the same, but there was one small bit when they were both on together and of course they stuck, each one thinking it was the other's fault. After an awkward pause the servants gave a round of applause, which I thought was a very intelligent way of helping them, but although the prompter was able to start them again, they could not get going and the stage carpenter solved the problem by letting the curtain down.
¹³

Nevertheless, the Queen insisted that her daughters take the principal roles in any entertainment as the only solution befitting
their rank. She also interfered with scripts to present her daughters to best advantage.
Used Up
was staged at Balmoral in October 1889. Beatrice was cast as Mrs Ironbrace, who only appears in the first act. George Rowell, in
Queen Victoria Goes to the Theatre,
claims that the Queen requested the script be rewritten to correct the oversight, leading Arthur Bigge to suggest a programme note: ‘The return and reconciliation of Mrs Ironbrace is by command!’ On occasion, the Queen's interference went too far and Beatrice grew irritated by her tendency to offer suggestions during performances. ‘I will be good, I will be good!’ the Queen replied to one stern reprimand from her daughter.
¹⁴

In the Queen's Golden Jubilee year, 1887, a painter the Queen had once employed as a copyist embarked on an imaginary group portrait of the Queen, Helena and Beatrice. Alexander Melville was commissioned by an officer connected with the British campaign in Egypt in 1882 to paint the Queen and two of her daughters knitting the quilts that they presented to the Royal Victoria Hospital at Netley for soldiers wounded at Tel-el-Kebir. None of the royal subjects gave Melville a sitting. The large, gloomy picture of the three women knitting striped blankets is one of many bad portraits of Victoria and her family. Despite its stiffness, however, it suggests something of the easy domesticity of the Queen and her two most biddable daughters. Knitting was a favourite after-dinner occupation of the Queen and her ladies, the Queen even occasionally conducting for herself with a knitting needle at drawing-room concerts. The picture, though stagey and unconvincing, has a cosy, comfortable aspect; a fictitious scene, it is nevertheless rooted in fact.

After Beatrice's marriage, evenings of knitting more often gave way to theatricals and
tableaux vivants,
performances of operas, operettas and plays by touring companies the Queen commanded to court, adding to the life of the Queen's Household an element of worldly sophistication and amusement that had been lacking in the recent past. It was a sign of the new happiness Beatrice and Liko's marriage had brought to her life that the Queen countenanced and even embraced such changes. Undoubtedly they added to the enjoyment of life in the Queen's houses. But,
happening as they did twice or three times a year, they were not enough to relieve the tedium that settled over the court as advancing age curtailed the Queen's activities and further slowed the ritualized routine of her days. ‘The life here is utterly dull,’ Marie Mallet wrote from Balmoral in June 1890. ‘We see nothing of the Queen except at dinner on alternate nights, we have no duties to perform to occupy our minds and the weather is horribly cold and wet. At the same time it is impossible to settle to anything on account of interruptions. We just exist from meal to meal and do our best to kill time.’
¹⁵

Marie Mallet was not alone in her assessment. No boom in amateur theatricals was enough to delude a vigorous, healthy man in the prime of life that his days were profitably occupied, and Liko was forced to look elsewhere for distraction and fulfilment. At the time of Marie Mallet's complaint, he had already temporarily escaped, cruising round the Isles of Scilly in a yacht called
Sheila
given to him by the Queen. Beatrice, of course, remained at home.

NINETEEN

‘A simple life, with no great
incidents’

At forty-eight Adelina Patti retained a youthful figure. The prima donna who, for twenty-five years, had been a favourite at Covent Garden, also retained for the time her extraordinary voice. Her youthfulness surprised Liko, when, on 23 August 1891, he visited Patti at Craig-y-Nos, her castle in South Wales. To mark the occasion, Patti had decided to sing the Garden Scene from
Faust
in the castle's recently completed theatre. ‘For me,’ Liko told a fellow guest, ‘Faust never loses its freshness, besides I have never seen Mme Patti as Gretchen. How wonderful that she should still be able to sing these youthful parts.’
¹
The performance took place after lunch. After tea, held to the accompaniment of an electric organ, the Orchestrion, Liko left. His visit lingered in Patti's memory. ‘Poor Prince Henry,’ she remarked on his death. ‘What a dear, sweet man!
Et comme il etait beau, n'est-ce qu pas?’
²

Like the cruise to the Isles of Scilly the previous summer, Liko's visit was made without Beatrice. Again like last summer, Liko was sailing. He had anchored his yacht at the Mumbles, off the coast of South Wales near Swansea, and was staying close by at Clyne Castle. His ‘bachelor’ trip was a source of considerable pleasure. His sister remembered him as ‘happiest of all, and most unfettered… on board his beloved sailing yacht
Sheila.’
³
Marie Erbach also recorded Liko as undertaking numerous voyages on
Sheila
with Beatrice beside him. But this was not always the case, and at the end of 1889 Liko embarked on a four-month trip without her.

At the time of Beatrice's engagement the Queen had been clear that she could not spare Beatrice and Liko to travel without her.
Over time she relaxed this stricture, but the journeys the couple made without the Queen, mostly to Liko's family in Germany, were of short duration. There could be no question of the Queen sparing Beatrice for as long as four months. She took a dim view of the proposal – ‘Liko is soon leaving us on what/consider a very foolish expedition and I hope wont be very long away and come back safe’
⁴
– but she did not withhold her permission. It was left to Beatrice to cope without Liko as best she could. Marie Mallet described the run-up to Liko's departure:

Prince Henry is off tomorrow on a four-month yachting trip to Corfu and next to Albania where he expects to get plenty of sport, woodcock, wild boar, etc. He is in the highest spirits just like a boy going home for the holidays but poor Princess Beatrice daily appears with red and swollen eyes and we all dread tomorrow, I think she will dissolve when she finally bids him ‘Goodbye’. I am so sorry for her, she will be lonely and her children are not much to her as yet. I am sure she sometimes longs for liberty.
⁵

The Prince departed on 8 November and remained away over Christmas. He had the tact to return on 10 February, the fiftieth anniversary of the Queen's wedding, in celebration of which Beatrice had organized the family present on behalf of her siblings and their spouses: a large prayer book inscribed with a short verse she had requested from Tennyson. With Liko back at court, and the status quo again established to her satisfaction, the Queen forgot her earlier irritation: she was, predictably, taken only with the changes in Liko's appearance caused by his period in the south. ‘Dear Liko returned… looking the picture of health, very brown and with a beard, which makes him look like Ludwig [his eldest brother Louis] and Sandro, but I liked him better without it.’
⁶
Beards and boating were not a new coupling for Liko. O n 7 October 1888 Beatrice's nephew Albert Victor of Wales had written to Louis of Battenberg from Abergeldie on the Balmoral estate, ‘Liko was full of his yachting trip round the west coast when he seems to have had a very good time of it. H e came back looking quite the Ancient Mariner with a scrubby beard which did not suit him a bit. So we made him take it off in a day or
two, and gave him no peace until he had done so.’
⁷
On this second, later occasion neither the Queen's opinion nor the memory of Albert Victor's distaste swayed Liko, and the beard became a fixture.

It was not in Beatrice's nature to offer recriminations, and her pleasure in Liko's return outweighed her sadness at his having gone. She recognized that the fault lay not with Liko but with the Queen. It was natural that Liko should crave vigorous activity, the masculine camaraderie of his crew members and the sense of freedom and independence sailing gave him. All were absent from his home life, hedged about as it was by the Queen's proscriptions. By having agreed to marry Liko on the Queen's terms Beatrice could not defy her mother and join him for four months away from court. Nor was it in her character to conceive as much. Instead, husband and wife reached an understanding: Liko continued to sail without Beatrice – to the Scillies and the Channel Islands in 1890; off the Welsh coast in 1891, when his handsome appearance so impressed Adelina Patti; in the Mediterranean in 1894, his cruise coinciding with a visit made by Beatrice to Cannes – but never again involving such a lengthy separation. In love with her husband as she was, Beatrice could not help longing for liberty from her mother to travel with him, as Marie Mallet saw. Perhaps she longed for liberty in the fullest sense. She recognized – as she had recognized so long ago – the impossibility of that hope, and resisted the limitations of her own life curtailing Liko's unnecessarily.

As with her response to Beatrice's wish to marry, the Queen's attitude arose partly from thoughtlessness. She adored Liko – months after Beatrice's marriage, Arthur wrote to Louise, ‘The “young couple” are very flourishing and Mama more taken with him than ever’
⁸
– but remained determined not to lose Beatrice, that determination now compounded by her pleasure in Liko's company. She gave him his yacht, although it is doubtful that she anticipated he would make such extensive use of it, and encouraged his sporting life. In Scotland, he shot and stalked – Albert Victor described him as ‘very deadly with the stags’;
⁹
at Osborne he went out with the Isle of Wight Hunt; there was
tennis at Windsor and Balmoral, the new craze for bicycling, and ice-skating in the winter. Increasingly he travelled further afield
for
sport, shooting with friends made at court, including Major General Sir Henry Ewart, one of the Queen's equerries. On 18 November 189 0 the
Bury and Norwich Post
told its readers,

Prince Henry of Battenberg (husband of Princess Beatrice) accompanied by Colonel Clerk, Colonel Carrington, Colonel Vivian and Captain Prettyman arrived at Kentwell Hall, Melford. The party was met by Sir Henry Ewart, on Tuesday they shot through Court Wood and Scotch Yards Wood with lunch at Court Farm, afterwards Mr Byford showed them his stud of Suffolk agricultural horses.

Shooting being an all-male preserve, it was natural that, on these occasions, Beatrice did not accompany her husband.

The sports husband and wife shared included ice-skating, riding and tennis. In February 1895 Liko put out his shoulder so badly skating at Osborne that the attack of muscle pain that followed prevented him from travelling when shortly the Queen left the island for Windsor. Moretta of Prussia, staying with her grandmother the Queen the month after Leopold's birth, records playing tennis with Liko: ‘He got awfully hot – so did I.’
¹⁰
It may have been that Liko was unfit, hence the overheating and the pulled shoulder. But it is more likely that Moretta, only eight years Liko's junior, found herself pitted against a man wh o gave vent to the frustrations of his uneventful daily life in vigorous physical exertion, be it tennis or skating. As E. F. Benson wrote in his biography of the Queen's daughters published during Beatrice's lifetime,