The Last Princess (32 page)

The letter came from the heart, its composition the work of a single sitting. ‘Sir Arthur Bigge told me’, Lord James of Hereford noted in his diary, ‘that the Queen's beautiful letter of thanks… was written by the Queen (notwithstanding her failing sight) by her own hand, without making one correction. She had no assistance in its composition.”
¹
In her own Journal, the Queen wrote simply, ‘Wrote a letter to be published in the papers,
thanking my people for their kind sympathy with Beatrice and me in our great sorrow.’
²
The Queen's doctor reported, ‘H M crying and sobbing much,’ and such were the reports of her devastation on hearing the news that Liko had died, Reid told his mother, that ‘there was a panic in London about the Queen, and one evening they had her “dying” and even “dead”!’
³

For her part, Beatrice responded to Liko's death in a manner that blended elements of predictability and surprise. Predictably she submitted without complaint to the loss of all that had made her life happiest; she had been schooled in submission from earliest infancy. But she resisted the Queen's verdict of Liko's death as a shared tragedy, ‘our great sorrow’. She comforted the Queen as she had always done, then she went away from court for a month to grieve alone, solacing her deep unhappiness that could not give place to the Queen's emotions. ‘I must bear with patience the heavy crop God has seen fit to lay on me,’ Beatrice wrote to the wife of the Prince Consort's biographer Sir Theodore Martin, whom she and Liko had visited on the Queen's visit to North Wales six years earlier.
⁴
It is a statement of resignation, but the image of the crop is a painful one.

John Taylor Smith was three years younger than Beatrice. The Westmorland-born clergyman was a canon-missioner in Sierra Leone when he was asked to join, as chaplain, the expedition to Ashanti on the coast of West Africa, which Liko had also joined. The two men became friends. ‘He gave me a message, in case anything happened, as so many deaths had taken place,’ Taylor Smith told a public meeting in the year of Liko's death. ‘Like a soldier, the Prince said, “I have settled my matters, everything in England, before I came out, but if anything should happen to me … I want you to see the Princess for me and give her the message which I have just told you.”’
⁵
Taylor Smith delivered that undisclosed message to Beatrice in the South of France following Liko's death on 20 January 1896. Like her husband before her, Beatrice became friends with the clergyman, and it was to Taylor Smith rather than the Queen that Beatrice looked for support in her bereavement. ‘In moments of deep depression and loneliness,
how often I think of your words of encouragement,’ she wrote to him.
⁶

On 2 February 189 6 the
Illustrated London News
set forth Liko's reasons for going to war.

It is easy to understand the manly spirit that prompted him, doubtless contrary to the wishes of the two illustrious ladies who wanted his companionship at home, to join this Ashanti Expedition for the chance of proving himself endowed with… qualities of soldiership… He may have been restless of late, as was suspected from his prolonged yacht voyage in the autumn, slightly impatient of the routine of the royal household, and of the lack of important work… For his own sake we could have wished him, long ago, active professional service, like the Duke of Connaught, in the Army, or in the Navy, with the Duke of Edinburgh and his own brother Prince Louis; but then, perhaps, the married life of Princess Beatrice and the household comfort of our Queen would have missed for long intervals the genial presence of him who has cheered their feminine retirement and has aided them in the frequent reception of their relatives and friends. He has not lived in vain or unworthily as a good husband and father, a good adopted son, a prince of the royal home.

Less eloquently, in his poem ‘The Funeral of the Late Prince Henry of Battenberg’, the nineteenth-century's worst poet William McGonagall concluded,

Prince Henry was a good-fearing man –

And to deny it few people can –

And very kind to his children dear,

And for the loss of him they will drop a tear.

It was to avoid just such obituaries that at 5 a.m. on 8 December 1895 Liko sailed for Africa's inhospitable Gold Coast. T o his sister Marie, he wrote, ‘You will understand that, as a soldier, I would like to embrace the first opportunity that offers of doing something to serve my adopted country.’
⁷

The Ashanti war, like so much British imperial policy, was
motivated in part by ideals, in part by commerce. Despite an earlier undertaking, the native king, Prempeh, continued to traffic in slaves and indulge in human sacrifice on a regal scale, offering up to the gods an estimated three thousand hapless subjects a year; he also neglected to keep open a two-hundred-mile-long road through densely forested country from the interior to the coast, essential for communications and trade. The British decided to install a resident to oversee belatedly Prempeh's compliance with the earlier treaty and to establish a British protectorate over the region. The ultimatum outlining these proposals having been ignored, Sir Francis Scott, Inspector of the Gold Coast Constabulary, was instructed to lead an expedition against the errant Prempeh. Liko volunteered for the post of Scott's military secretary.

The Queen refused her consent. The following day she discussed with Beatrice her objections, chief among them the dangers of the climate. But Beatrice took her husband's part. She told the Queen that Liko ‘smarted under his enforced inactivity, and this was about the only occasion which presented no difficulties, as he would go as a volunteer without usurping anyone's place’.
⁸
Fifteen years earlier the Prince Imperial had sailed to the Cape, embarked on a similar mission, an undertaking that lived on in Beatrice's memory. O n this second occasion, when she was not, as in 1879, powerless to influence events, she put her husband's wishes before her own sense of dread, assuring the Queen that Liko would soon be home, unscathed by his experiences. Against her better judgement, the Queen relented. ‘Prince Henry is going to Ashantee
[sic],’
Marie Mallet wrote to her husband Bernard.

Poor Princess Beatrice is inconsolable but so patient and unselfish and declares she is glad he should do some real work and that
she
will never stop him in any sort of way. I admire her more than I can say, never should I have the courage to pack you off, my darling, on such an expedition… I have been talking to the poor Princess and comforting her as best I can. Of course he [Liko] is bursting with excitement.
⁹

Tha t excitement – so jarring to Beatrice's feelings–was not seconded by the popular press, which railed at the inconvenience
to the expedition of counting a member of the Royal Family among the party, and ridiculed Liko's heroism. They were quickly disproved in the former contention. Beatrice read the Queen reports that ‘the native Chiefs… were greatly excited and surprised when Sir Francis introduced Liko, “who had married the Queen's daughter”’.
¹⁰
But the offending papers did not moderate their tone. Even after Liko's death, one society weekly, sent to the printer before the news was known, asserted, ‘There is, I am assured, no truth in the report that the Poet Laureate's first “commanded” work will be an ode on Prince Henry of Battenberg's expedition to Africa.”
¹¹

The Queen recorded in her Journal on 6 December 1895,

Took tea with Beatrice and Liko and directly afterwards he came to wish me good-bye, and was much upset, knelt down and kissed my hand and I embraced him. He said he went not out of a sense of adventure but because he felt it was right… I could think of little else but this sad parting. God grant that dear Liko may be brought back safe to us!
¹²

Markedly less maudlin than his mother-in-law, Liko wrote to Beatrice after arriving in Africa, ‘The whole thing is like a dream … I am really happy and pleased to have received permission to see all that is going on.’
¹³
For Beatrice, the dream would rapidly take on the qualities of a nightmare.

By the middle of January, wife and mother-in-law knew that Liko had contracted malaria. T o Bertie the Queen reported that the illness was sufficiently serious to have forced Liko to return to the coast for closer medical attention: ‘It is a terrible disappointment for him, but we heard this morning that the fever is declining, so perhaps he may yet go back. It is a terrible trial for darling Beatrice.’
¹⁴
The Queen described Beatrice, understandably, as existing in a state of ‘such cruel suspense’.
¹⁵

That suspense would end with a shock. The fever did not decline. Liko's deteriorating condition ruled out a return to fighting, and a decision was made to send him home by battleship. O n 22 January, as she prepared to set off to meet her husband part-way at Madeira, Beatrice received a telegram. It contained
the news of Liko's death and had taken almost two days to reach her. ‘All she said in a trembling voice, apparently quite stunned, was “The life is gone out of me”,’ the Queen confided to her Journal.
¹⁶
First Arthur and his wife Louischen, then the Queen struggled to comfort her. ‘Went over to Beatrice's room and sat a little while with her. She is… so piteous in her misery. What have we not all lost in beloved noble Liko, who has died in the wish to serve his country! He was our help, the bright sunshine of our home. My heart aches for my darling child…”
¹⁷
In her anguish the Queen paid Liko the ultimate compliment: ‘It seems as though the years ‘61 and ‘62 had returned.’
¹⁸

In his will Liko had requested he be buried at Whippingham. With Arthur, on one of the long days between receipt of the news and the arrival of the body, Beatrice returned to the church in which she had been married to choose the spot. To the official of the Lord Chamberlain's office dispatched to Madeira to bring back Liko's remains, she gave a crucifix to be placed in his hand in the coffin, alongside sprigs of ivy, white heather and myrtle from her bouquet and a small photograph of herself attached to the symbolic posy. The partly preserved body arrived at Portsmouth on board HMS
Blenheim
on 4 February. The following day a military funeral was held at St Mildred's, with a second, more public service held simultaneously at Westminster Abbey, for which Beatrice had chosen the hymn ‘Christ will gather in His own'. The day after the funeral Beatrice wrote letters of thanks to those who had sent flowers, her long training as the Queen's secretary lending discipline even to her desperate time. To Edith Lytton she wrote, ‘I desire to express my most grateful thanks for the beautiful flowers which you have so kindly sent for my dear Husband's funeral and for the sympathy for me in my deep sorrow, of which I feel they are the outward sign.’
¹⁹

On 13 February, Beatrice and all four of her children left the Isle of Wight for Cimiez in the South of France. Later she would be joined by her sister Louise and, in March, by the Queen, who wrote to her Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, ‘We are well and the beloved Princess quite admirable in her courage and patient resignation.’
²⁰
The same month, Canon Taylor Smith returned
to England to deliver Liko's last message to Beatrice. The Queen requested he travel to Nice to report to her and her daughter, and there – in recognition of his services to Liko and to Beatrice–she appointed him her Honorary Chaplain. That final message, for which Beatrice had waited two months and which Taylor himself was afterwards at such pains to conceal from any third party, may have been the same message later discovered by Nina Epton and revealed in
Victoria and Her Daughters
as: ‘In case I die, tell the Princess from me that I came here not to win glory, but from a sense of duty.’
²¹
For Beatrice, in her devastation, it must have been cold comfort.

Of greater succour to the thirty-eight-year-old widow were Taylor Smith's own words of consolation, the prayers in which he led Beatrice and the passages of religious writings he copied out for her. ‘I have never half thanked you for all your helpful sympathy,’ she wrote to him in May, after returning to Windsor. ‘In hours of deep depression, when I feel overwhelmed by the sense of my loss and the longing for the dear “vanished hand”, I recall your beautiful words of strength and hope, which indeed have done me good.’
²²
Later she told him, ‘I know I may count on your prayers for me, in the hours where I feel weighed down by the sense of my loss, and when for the present the joy seems to have gone out of my life.’
²³
From the first Beatrice was upheld by her faith, though the battle was not an easy one. ‘It is God's will,’ her sister Helena wrote on 29 January in answer to a letter of condolence sent to the Queen, ‘and it
must
be well, and
that
it is
well
is what my darling Sister feels. She is admirable beyond words. Her wonderful firm faith is sustaining and helping her in this her hour of sorest need. Her patience, gentleness, submission, her courage and unselfishness are beyond all praise. But oh! it rends one's heart to see her.’
²⁴
Though the Queen had invoked the memory of 1861 and its aftermath, nothing in Beatrice's response to her tragedy echoed her mother's derangement of self-pity.