The Last Princess (19 page)

‘La petite Princesse Beatrice… est si jolie,’ Queen Victoria wrote to her favourite portraitist Winterhalter in 1859. The lively sketch she commissioned from the artist – of the two-year-old Beatrice in an Arab headdress, clasping an exotically costumed doll – suggests Winterhalter shared her opinion.

The Queen and Prince Consort photographed in 1857 on the terrace at Osborne with all nine of their children, Beatrice on her mother's knee. The family would exist in this form for all too short a time.

A sculpture of the young Beatrice's hands, by Sir Joseph Edgar Boehm.

This commemorative montage published in 1901 shows Beatrice from childhood to adulthood—starting with Richard Lauchert's portrait of the six-year-old princess, which Queen Victoria thought ‘lovely and so like’.

The five daughters of Victoria and Albert in hieratic pose surrounding the bust of their deceased father. Only Beatrice – ‘a most amusing little dot’ – at this stage resists complete submergence in the atmosphere of gloom.

‘The happy time is when children are six to five and three years old,’ wrote the Queen. In this photograph of the Queen with five-year-old Beatrice the year after the Prince Consort's death, are few intimations of happiness.

During her teenage years, Beatrice's isolation within the Queen's family grew. In 1868—the year of this photograph—she found herself alone in the schoolroom.

Beatrice's eldest brother, Bertie, Prince of Wales, married Princess Alexandra of Denmark on 10 March 1863 at St George's Chapel, Windsor. Throughout the service the Queen's attention fastened on Beatrice: ‘I could not take my eyes off precious little Baby, with her golden hair and large nosegay’

A young woman at last: Beatrice's downcast gaze, her failure to meet the viewer's eye, were by now characteristic of the shy and hesitant princess.

A Birthday Book
by HRH The Princess Beatrice was published in 1881 by Smith, Elder & Co. Beatrice received £750 for her work on the book. Proceeds from the sale went to the Belgrave Hospital for Children.

Beatrice's sufferings from rheumatism began early. Daily, rain-sodden drives with the Queen at Balmoral – as depicted by
The Graphic
on 11 November 1882—cannot have helped.

Queen Victoria was won round not simply to Beatrice marrying but to Henry himself—with his dark good looks ‘the handsomest of the three handsome brothers’, as she described him (in fact he was one of four brothers).