The Last Princess (38 page)

Beatrice had decided before she began work not simply to retain the Queen's Journal as it existed, expunging or scoring out whatever she considered potential cause for concern, but to transcribe it in a completely new, handwritten draft, destroying the original as she proceeded, burning it page by page. (This may have been the Queen's own idea, or a plan of operation mother and daughter devised together.) She chose the firm of Parkins & Gotto, the court stationers who supplied her writing paper, to provide her with the large, blue, hardback, ruled notebooks she had decided upon, agreeing with Esher that the volumes -there would ultimately be one hundred and eleven – remain unnumbered until she had finished the task in its entirety. To Esher she wrote on 23 October 1904, ‘Would you kindly order me two more books for copying my Mother's Journal into. I am working regularly at it and am really making some progress. I sent to Parkins 6c Gotto, but they did not seem to understand, so I must beg you to give the order. They should be without the number of any volume for as I agreed with you, those could be added later.’
¹⁰

Beatrice's choice of the word ‘copying’ indicates the light in which she viewed her task. Historians have inevitably emphasized the destructive aspect of Beatrice's work, for which she is regularly vilified, and it is undoubtedly the case that much has been lost as a result of her transcription. In her own mind the undertaking was not one of destruction but preservation – preserving the Journal in a form that would preserve for posterity the Queen's memory as Beatrice considered it ought to survive. In this she acted wholly in accordance with the Queen's intention in allotting this responsibility to her. The Queen did not make such decisions lightly: she understood clearly how Beatrice regarded her, that mixture of love, veneration and deep awe. Her bequest of the role of literary executor to Beatrice signalled a green light to the work of bowdlerization, excision and revision on which Beatrice
expended almost thirty years. Unlike her son Bertie and daughterin-law Alexandra, the Queen did not leave instructions that on her death her papers were to be destroyed wholesale. She was far-sighted enough to appreciate their future historical value but recognized that they contained both incidents and expressions that reflected discredit on either the protagonists, the writer or both. Whether her motive was egotism or a proper awareness of the claims of history, the Queen's decision to sanction the preservation of her papers in revised form is a positive one; Beatrice's place as legitimized bar to any adviser to the Queen's successor who might otherwise have suggested destruction of the papers is to be celebrated. Although George V and Queen Mary would later be among the earliest protesters against Beatrice's work, the King himself had once planned that his journal suffer a more drastic fate. As Lord Esher recorded in his diary in November 1908, ‘The Prince [of Wales, later George V] told me that he kept a journal, and had left instructions that it was to be destroyed at his death. We argued with him, and he fetched a volume, and made me read it. Very simply written, and quite inoffensive, but well worth preserving…’
¹¹

In her conversation with Sydney Cockerell in 1945 Cynthia Colville applauded the solution the Queen had devised half a century earlier. ‘She [Cynthia Colville] said that as Queen Victoria had left the diaries and correspondence to Princess Beatrice, nothing could be done—but that it might be just as well that the old Queen's good qualities would not be further hidden by the publication of her sillinesses…’
¹²
– an assessment that, in different words, probably matched the Queen's own and that of her ‘editor’ daughter. Three months earlier, Sir Sydney had reached his own conclusion that the material Beatrice was likely to have removed would not have interested him personally:

I believe that Queen Victoria's diary… revealed tiffs with Prince Albert, which might or might not prove of some little importance to future historians… But I find gossip about the Royal family for the most part very small beer. They are admirable people. They do their duty as monarchs in a manner that is beyond all
praise. But their private lives, so far as they have any, concern me far less than those of men and women of character that are not under perpetual observation…
¹³

Since the only extensive surviving record of the Queen's Journal before Beatrice's transcription is the series of extracts quoted by Sir Theodore Martin in his official life of the Prince Consort, ending in 1861, it is not possible to make any but a conjectural assessment of the nature and impact of Beatrice's work. Comparisons with the Queen's written output that escaped Beatrice – notably the voluminous correspondence with the Crown Princess – suggest that the loss is as much one of tone as content: the Queen habitually expressed herself with force, vigour and complete confidence in her opinion, however extreme the viewpoint she espoused. Much of this survived Beatrice's edit-orship: were this not the case and the prevailing tone wholly of blandness, it is unlikely that historians would lament her excisions. Equally impossible to assess with certainty is the extent to which Beatrice's ‘arrangement’ and ‘retention’ complies with ‘the manner [the Queen] would have wished'.

On 28 February 1874 the Crown Princess wrote to her mother,

Lately I have been thinking a great deal about the keeping of letters, and it is painful to see how the wishes and orders of the dead are set aside… Such and such letters are not to be read, are to be burnt, should be carried out to the letter! But in our position it is over-ruled by the consideration ‘these papers may be very useful, they may contribute remarkable facts and details to history and they had better be saved…’ I want your authorization to burn all I have except dear papa's letters! Every scrap that you have ever written – I have hoarded up, but the idea is dreadful to me that anyone else should read them or meddle with them in the event of my death.
¹⁴

The Queen kept her daughter waiting more than a fortnight for her answer, but her reply shows both wisdom and an absolute conviction that the fate she decreed for her letters would be respected by her successors:

Now about the letters… I am not for burning them except any of a nature which affect any of the family painfully and which were of no real importance, and they should be destroyed at once… Your letters are quite safe and would be returned to you in case of my death… I would however destroy any of a nature to cause mischief… I am much against destroying important letters and I every day see the necessity of reference.
¹⁵

If the Queen intended the same criteria to be applied to her Journal, only passages ‘[affecting] any of the family painfully… of no real importance', that is, concerning domestic rather than political issues, should have been destroyed by Beatrice. But Beatrice was not privy to her mother's correspondence with her eldest sister, even though she would later have access to the Crown Princess's letters; and views expressed in 1874 by Queen Victoria in rude good health, with no thought of death, may have been significantly at variance with those expressed almost thirty years later by the same Queen in her dotage, to a daughter of very different character.

Beatrice treated the Queen's commission with seriousness. ‘Could you call on me at Kensington,’ she wrote to Lord Esher in November 1904. ‘I would give you the key of the box, so that you could get some volumes of the Journals out for me. Having finished the last book I had for writing into, I am anxious to lose no time in looking through some more. It is such a tremendous work, that I do not like to waste any time.’
¹⁶
That she adopted such a line is not surprising. Her whole life had tended towards the promotion of the Queen's well-being. For forty years she had loved and attended to her mother devotedly. Now she devoted herself to fulfilling this last charge. She did so with a sense of application absent from much of her ordinary life—ladies-in-waiting record her beginning paintings then handing them over to be finished, for example – demonstrating what Marie Mallet, one of her chief supporters, characterized as Teutonic rigour: ‘She is very German in the way she concentrates her mind on a given line of thought or action.’
¹⁷
Her one further published work, undertaken once her transcription of the Queen's
Journal was complete, again involved diaries and was again inspired by the Queen: a translation of extracts of the diary of her maternal great-grandmother, Duchess Augusta of SaxeCoburg-Saalfeld, in 1941. But by then Beatrice was an old woman, condemned by ill health to such sedentary occupations as reading and writing. In the short term, despite the responsibilities of the Queen's literary executorship, she was a member of the Royal Family, with her own children all still unmarried and, for the first time in her life, her own home and a life to call her own.

TWENTY-FOUR

‘Osborne… is like the grave of somebody's happiness’

In February 1909 Beatrice travelled from Gibraltar to Tangiers aboard HMS
Antrim,
making use, as was the Royal Family's custom, of a ship of the Royal Navy to transport her. ‘February 18 HRH Princess Henry of Battenberg came aboard and passage to Tangiers and landed until Saturday. Ship left and we carried out Night Firing Practice and then anchored at Gib,’ wrote crew member Owen Budd in his diary. His entry for 20 February recorded, ‘Went to Tangiers to fetch HRH Princess Henry of Battenberg and took her to Algercerias
[sic,
Algeciras in south-west Spain] and then anchored at Gib.’
¹
Two years later, Beatrice returned to North Africa, on this occasion her destination Algiers.

Her purpose on both trips was her health, her continuing battle against rheumatism that made her crave the sun and warm climates. The spas of Continental Europe that, with their ‘healing’ waters and programme of massage, had brought Beatrice such relief in her twenties, failed to effect any discernible improvement two decades later. In 1905 Beatrice opened the Spa Baths at Ripon in North Yorkshire; she did not add the northern watering hole to her annual itinerary. But in the sunshine of North Africa -even briefly sampled – she found relief at last. To an Isle of Wight neighbour, Beatrice's lady-in-waiting Bessie Bulteel wrote on 17 May 1911, ‘The Princess is wonderfully better since being in Algiers and is able to walk quite well now.’
²
The letter offers an insight into the severity of Beatrice's condition; it would continue to cause her suffering for the next thirty years.

Travel satisfied Beatrice's curiosity about exotic, distant coun-tries. Such was her enjoyment of her five-month trip to Egypt
during the winter of 1903-4 that, on her return, she accepted the position of patron of the new Institute of Archaeology at the University of Liverpool. In the immediate aftermath of the Queen's death travel offered an escape from the scenes of the past, with their still painful memories of the Queen and Liko. Describing Beatrice as ‘terribly unhappy’ during an extended visit to Germany in the summer of 1901, Marie Mallet wrote, ‘She never grumbles or repines or regrets the luxurious advantages of the past… she only dreads returning to the familiar haunts where all is now so fearfully changed.’
³
But more than health, diversion or distraction, in the years before the First World War travel provided Beatrice with a refuge – as it has generations of the dispossessed. With the death of the Queen, the princess who had remained constantly at her side lost not only her mother and closest confidante – the emotional centre of her life – but her home – a physical as well as a spiritual dislocation.

Beatrice was unique among her siblings in having no independent home of her own during her mother's lifetime. Newspapers such as
The Graphic
may have suggested at the time of Beatrice's engagement that the newly married couple would live at Frog-more, but the Queen had other ideas. On 1 August 1885 the
Illustrated London News
dispelled any illusions its readers may have harboured: ‘At Windsor Castle a suite of apartments is being prepared for the use of Prince and Princess Henry of Battenberg, when residing at the Palace with the Queen. Apartments will likewise be prepared for the Prince and Princess at Balmoral when the Court is in Scotland.’ As we have seen, plans made in 1897 for an apartment at Kensington Palace, in the short term, came to nothing.

At the Queen's death her homes became Bertie's homes, Beatrice welcome only by invitation. Windsor Castle and Buck-ingham Palace were maintained by the State; Balmoral and Osborne had been the Queen's private property. In addition, Sandringham in Norfolk had been Bertie and Alexandra's home in the country for almost forty years. The Queen had firmly intended that both Balmoral and Osborne henceforth be
considered official residences of the British Crown, and to that end her will bequeathed a share in Osborne – the house most closely associated with the childhood of the nine royal offspring -to each of her surviving children. Perhaps it was this very connection with his childhood—marred, as it would remain in his mind, by a succession of unsympathetic tutors and the troubled nature of his relationship with his parents, who compared him unfavourably with his more precocious elder sister Vicky – that set Bertie on his course of resistance to the Queen's wishes. He neither needed nor wanted Osborne, and determined to rid himself of it. Its associations were negative. He did not feel, as Beatrice did, Osborne's near sanctity: it was not for him, as it was for her, the scene of any great happiness. Beatrice had spent so much of her life at Osborne and on the Isle of Wight. There she had married Liko and there Liko was buried. She was governor of the island, as Liko had been before her. The regiment that bore her name drew its numbers from the island's men and several of her patronages and presidencies were Isle of Wight organizations. She recognized Osborne as the tenth child of her parents’ love and cherished it accordingly.