The Last Princess (25 page)

Beatrice did not protest as her mother seized control. After the unwonted breakdown of the summer, it must have seemed that, at last, things were returning to normal, the Queen planning and making decisions, Beatrice agreeing and falling into line. For eight months Beatrice's happiness had hung in the balance. The Queen's bossiness was a small price to pay for the realization of that joy. T o Lady Waterpark, who m she had known now for twenty years, Beatrice wrote on 6 January,

If good wishes could make me happy, I am sure I ought to be so, but I think I have every reason to look with confidence to the future. It is a great comfort to me that Mama is now thoroughly reconciled to the thought of my marrying, and that my future husband has already endeared himself to Her. Please God this event may brighten her life, and our one wish both of us is to devote our lives to her.
²⁶

The Queen had been correct in her assessment of Beatrice's ‘amiable’ nature, formed long ago; even the sufferings of the summer had not lessened her loving loyalty. Only now the princess had a soulmate to support her in her lonely task. After years of treading water, watching with kindness as life unfolded around her but never quite happened to her personally, she could
‘look with confidence to the future', secure in the love of her mother and the man who would shortly become her husband. Liko had twined himself about the Queen's heart – as Beatrice's sister-in-law Marie, Duchess of Edinburgh, commented sourly, the Queen ‘found in him true perfection’.
²⁷
All that remained to trouble her complacent equilibrium were her fears for the wedding night itself.

SIXTEEN

‘The fatal day approaches’

At seventy-seven Alfred, Lord Tennyson felt that he was fading fast. ‘I think that, blind as I am, growing blinder, I am best away from the wedding,’ he wrote to the Queen, declining her invitation to Beatrice's marriage, which had been fixed for 23 July.
¹
He did, however, address a special celebratory poem to Beatrice. Later that year it was included in
Tiresias, and Other Poems
alongside ‘To the Duke of Argyll’ and an epitaph on General Gordon, the last an undertaking after the Queen's own heart. In advance of the general release, Tennyson printed privately one hundred copies of ‘To HRH Princess Beatrice’ and dispatched them to Osborne.

The Queen approved Tennyson's offering, with its tactful and ingenious reconciling of the claims of daughterly and wifely love. Beatrice herself was less enamoured, despite the Queen's claims in her letter of thanks to Tennyson written on 12 July: ‘How can I sufficiently thank you for those exquisite touching, beautiful lines which I read to my beloved Child, who was equally delighted with them and with the beautiful thoughts they contain.’
²
Two lines in particular distressed Beatrice:

The Mother weeps

At that white funeral of the single life,

Her maiden daughter's marriage.

Whether it was the accuracy of Tennyson's insight, his distasteful reference to sex (however politely oblique), the use of the word ‘funeral’ in connection with her marriage when so much of her life had already been overshadowed by death and its obsequies, or the permanent reminder in verse of something upon which she
preferred not to dwell – the summer-long struggle with her mother, with all its attendant tears and sadness – Beatrice did not explain. But the lines rang truer than the vapid platitudes typical of such commemorative works, and the princess balked at so public a statement of her recent private dispute with the Queen.

For the Queen, happy as she was with her laureate's poem, the business of commemoration did not end with poetry. She commissioned commemorative medals in bronze and silver from Allan Wyon of Regent Street. Wyon not only designed but made the medals, which showed overlapping profile busts of Beatrice and Liko on one side, on the reverse their two coats of arms, hers encircled by oak leaves, his by laurel leaves, surmounted by coronets. As had been the case with all eight of Beatrice's siblings, the Queen also required a painting of the ceremony. Two years previously she had commissioned from a military painter, Richard Caton Woodville, a view of a battle in which her favourite son Arthur served. That painting having given satisfaction, twenty-nine-year-old Caton Woodville was now the surprising choice to paint Beatrice's wedding. Henry Ponsonby wrote to him on the Queen's behalf on 19 June: ‘Although I have only seen War pictures by you, do you ever paint peace pictures? Such as an interior of a church and marriage ceremony.’
³
The artist accepted the round-about invitation. To help him in his task, on the day of the wedding itself all the royal guests were photographed after the service. The result is a shockingly bad painting that contains many recognizable likenesses. It must have been a source of some relief to the artistically gifted Beatrice that the picture was not destined for a wedding present. Even the Queen, a questionable judge of paintings, was not pleased, and felt herself justified in her decision to pay Caton Woodville only half the sum she had given for Linton's picture of Leopold's wedding three years earlier.

Whatever its shortcomings artistically, the picture at least furnished the Queen with happy recollections. Not only was the form of Beatrice's wedding day entirely of her devising, but all involved – from the Osborne servants, in their new blue livery
ordered specially for the day, to the bride and bridegroom themselves – acquitted themselves exactly as the Queen required, enabling Henry Ponsonby to write afterwards to the Lord Chamberlain, ‘The Queen commands me to ask you to convey Her Majesty's thanks to all in your Department who did their duty to the Queen's entire satisfaction.’
⁴

The Queen had left little to Beatrice. The day before the wedding Beatrice, with Liko, who had arrived on the island with his family two days earlier, accompanied her on her final tour of inspection of preparations at St Mildred's. By then the temporary covered passage that led from the lychgate to the church's principal entrance, the south porch, was in place. It provided a covered corridor for the wedding procession in the event of a change in the weather and, flanked by three tiers of benches, additional seating for guests who could not be accommodated inside the church. Open at the sides, it was shady without being dark, and its rafters were garlanded with flowers and evergreens. Inside the church itself columns and arches were similarly decorated. The vicar, Canon Prothero, had finalized arrangements for decorations with the Royal Household at the end of June, writing to gentleman usher Sir Spencer Ponsonby Fane,

I had already settled to dress up the stump of the Pulpit with ivy and ferns, but your idea of the corresponding one the other side is brilliant. Will you give orders for it. If you would order a light iron rail round each stump, the gardeners can make a pyramid of flowers in pots, which would look very well. I only hope they will send me plenty of flowers, and in good time, then we shall do very well.
⁵

In the event, the lectern and the pulpit, decorated as Prothero had suggested by his wife and daughter with lilies, white roses and ferns, were moved in order to widen the aisle, and a false floor laid so that the Queen did not have to negotiate any steps; it was covered with crimson cloth overlaid with Indian and Persian carpets. The effect – in the church the Prince Consort had helped to design – won the Queen's full approval. Unhappily, St Mildred's verdant splendour was short-lived. Within an hour
of the service ending locals in pursuit of souvenirs had stripped the building of every frond and flower, overcoming the attendant police through weight of numbers.

Beatrice spent the run-up to the wedding occupied as usual with the minutiae of the Queen's life, correspondence for the most part. Even on the wedding day itself, the Queen recorded, Beatrice ‘was busy answering telegrams up to the last’.
⁶
She also accompanied her mother on engagements not connected with her wedding, such as the Queen's review of the Camel Corps from the Sudan, held at Osborne and also attended by Beatrice's soonto-be brother- and sister-in-law, Louis and Victoria of Battenberg.

It is unlikely that mother and daughter spent cosy evenings discussing that aspect of Beatrice's marriage that now most concerned the Queen – her conjugal relations with Liko. The Queen remained agonized by the prospect of what Liko had in store for her ‘Baby’. ‘I count the months, weeks and days that she is still my own sweet, unspoilt, innocent lily and child,’ she wrote to the Crown Princess after Beatrice's last unmarried birthday.

That thought – that agonizing thought which I always felt, and which I often wonder any mother can bear of giving up your own child, from whom all has been so carefully kept and guarded – to a stranger to do unto her as he likes is to me the most torturing thought in the world… I can't help saying to you what has cost me always so much, and what in poor, darling, gentle (and not very strong) Beatrice's case almost tortures me!
⁷

Though the Queen had doggedly subjected Beatrice to the mental and emotional harrowing of eight months’ exclusion from her good graces, she felt she hardly dared risk her in bed with the man she loved enough to bring upon herself this aestival wrath. Nor would her stultifying consciousness of Beatrice's long-preserved purity allow her to discuss with her this aspect of a wife's duties, thereby potentially smoothing the path she imagined so liberally sprinkled with tears.

Instead, days before Liko's arrival, an evening at Windsor was spent with Beatrice reading to her mother from the diary of the
recently decapitated General Gordon, ‘which [was] painful and harrowing, as it [showed] how badly he was treated by the Government’.
⁸
The Queen took pleasure in these ‘ordinary’ evenings, with their similarity to so many evenings of the recent past to which she clung so ardently. Until the very last minute she remained, on and off, deeply unhappy about Beatrice's approaching nuptials. ‘I am
very depressed’
she wrote to Victoria of Battenberg on n July. ‘How I dread the week after next and how I wish it was months and years off! The nearer the fatal day approaches the more my invincible dislike to Auntie's marriage
(not
to dear Liko) – increases. Sometimes I feel as if I
never
could take her myself to the Marriage Service – and that I would wish to run away and hide myself!’
⁹

For Beatrice there were no second thoughts. Her trousseau had been ordered from the London fashion house of Redfern, a favourite of her sister-in-law the Princess of Wales. It contained garments of understated luxury, simple in outline (by contemporary standards) but made from sumptuous materials of exquisite quality. Evening gowns, several with trains, were embroidered with different-coloured pearls. From Ireland came quantities of the finest linen.

Beatrice's fittings jostled for time with the reception of deputations from around the country bearing gifts. The boys of Eton College gave her a diamond-and-sapphire locket, ‘the maidens of England’ a Bible; members of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, of which she herself was an honorary member, presented an album of drawings; ‘the tenantry of the Queen's Deeside estates of Balmoral, Abergeldie and Birkhall’ offered a park phaeton and a pair of ponies in anticipation of more rain-drenched Highland drives; while a deputation from Liverpool presented an address and ‘a wedding cake upon a silver plateau, ornamented with silver figures of English and German soldiers and a seaman, the whole resting upon four Liver birds’.
¹⁰
Nearer to home, on the Isle of Wight, the inhabitants of West Cowes gave the princess a large mirror in a silver frame. Mr Thomas, schoolmaster of Whippingham School, presented an opal-glass candelabrum with twelve flower glasses on behalf of the
parishioners of Whippingham and children of the school. The last would be among those who stood in fields along the carriage route from Osborne to the church, cheering the last princess, whom they knew so much better than the siblings who had gone before her. All the deputations had to be welcomed and thanked; there were letters of thanks to be written to donors at home and abroad, family, friends and public bodies. The Queen's Household combined to offer a single present; courtiers close to Beatrice also gave more personal presents, such as the black-and-gold Japanese folding screen Lady Waterpark sent to Windsor in June. ‘It will be most useful, reminding me of our long and pleasant intercourse, which luckily is not to be broken off by my marriage,’ Beatrice wrote by way of thanks.’
¹¹
All the presents were displayed at Osborne in time for the wedding.