Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom

Queen Victoria holding Princess Beatrice in 1862

Princess Beatrice was born on 14 April 1857 at Buckingham Palace, London.[1] She was the fifth daughter and youngest of the nine children of the reigning British monarch, Queen Victoria, and her husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (later the Prince Consort). The birth caused controversy when it was announced that Queen Victoria would seek relief from the pains of delivery through the use of chloroform administered by Dr John Snow. Chloroform was considered dangerous to mother and child and was frowned upon by the Church of England and the medical authorities.[2] Queen Victoria was undeterred and used "that blessed chloroform" for her last pregnancy.[3] A fortnight later, Queen Victoria reported in her journal, "I was amply rewarded and forgot all I had gone through when I heard dearest Albert say 'It's a fine child, and a girl!'"[4] Albert and Queen Victoria chose the names Beatrice Mary Victoria Feodore: Mary after Princess Mary, Duchess of Gloucester, the last surviving child of King George III of the United Kingdom; Victoria after the Queen; and Feodore after Feodora, Princess of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, the Queen's older half-sister. She was baptised in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace on 16 June 1857. Her godparents were the Duchess of Kent (maternal grandmother); the Princess Royal (eldest sister); and the Prince Frederick of Prussia (her future brother-in-law).[5]

The daughters of Queen Victoria mourn the loss of their father. Beatrice is standing in the centre.

From birth, Beatrice became a favoured child.[6] The elder favourite daughter of Prince Albert, the Princess Royal, was about to take up residence in Germany with her new husband, Frederick ("Fritz") of Prussia. At the same time, the newly arrived Beatrice showed promise. Albert wrote to Augusta, Fritz's mother, that "Baby practises her scales like a good prima donna before a performance and has a good voice!"[7] Although Queen Victoria was known to dislike most babies, she liked Beatrice, whom she considered attractive. This provided Beatrice with an advantage over her elder siblings. Queen Victoria once remarked that Beatrice was "a pretty, plump and flourishing child ... with fine large blue eyes, [a] pretty little mouth and very fine skin".[8] Her long, golden hair was the focus of paintings commissioned by Queen Victoria, who enjoyed giving Beatrice her bath, in marked contrast to her bathing preferences for her other children. Beatrice showed intelligence, which further endeared her to the Prince Consort, who was amused by her childhood precociousness.[6]

He wrote to Baron Stockmar that Beatrice was "the most amusing baby we have had." Despite sharing the rigorous education programme designed by Prince Albert and his close adviser, Baron Stockmar, Beatrice had a more relaxed infancy than her siblings because of her relationship with her parents.[9] By four years of age, the youngest, and the acknowledged last royal child, Beatrice was not forced to share her parents' attention the way her siblings had, and her amusing ways provided comfort to her faltering father.

Princess Beatrice in 1868

In March 1861, Queen Victoria's mother Victoria, Duchess of Kent, died at Frogmore. The Queen broke down in grief and guilt over their estrangement at the beginning of her reign.[10] Beatrice tried to console her mother by reminding her that the Duchess of Kent was "in heaven, but Beatrice hopes she will return".[11] This comfort was significant because Queen Victoria had isolated herself from her children except the eldest unmarried daughter, Princess Alice, and Beatrice.[12] Queen Victoria again relied on Beatrice and Alice after the death of Albert, of typhoid fever, on 14 December.[13]

The depth of the Queen's grief over the death of her husband surprised her family, courtiers, politicians and general populace. As when her mother died, she shut herself off from her family—most particularly, the Prince of Wales, (whom she blamed for her husband's death),[14] with the exception of Alice and Beatrice. Queen Victoria often took Beatrice from her cot, hurried to her bed and "lay there sleepless, clasping to her child, wrapped in the nightclothes of a man who would wear them no more."[15] After 1871, when the last of Beatrice's elder sisters married,[16] Queen Victoria came to rely upon her youngest daughter, who had declared from an early age: "I don't like weddings at all. I shall never be married. I shall stay with my mother."[17] As her mother's secretary, she performed duties such as writing on the Queen's behalf and helping with political correspondence.[18] These mundane duties mirrored those that had been performed in succession by her sisters, Alice, Helena and Louise.[19] However, to these the Queen soon added more personal tasks. During a serious illness in 1871, the Queen dictated her journal entries to Beatrice, and in 1876 she allowed Beatrice to sort the music she and the Prince Consort had played, unused since his death fifteen years earlier.[19]

The devotion that Beatrice showed to her mother was acknowledged in the Queen's letters and journals, but her constant need for Beatrice grew stronger.[20][21] The Queen suffered another bereavement in 1883, when her highland servant, John Brown, died at Balmoral.[22] Once again, the Queen plunged into public mourning and relied on Beatrice for support. Unlike her siblings, Beatrice had not shown dislike for Brown, and the two had often been seen in each other's company; indeed, they had worked together to carry out the Queen's wishes.[23]

Prince Henry of Battenberg, who was married to Beatrice from 1885 until his death in 1896

After a short honeymoon, Beatrice and her husband fulfilled their promise and returned to the Queen's side. The Queen made it clear that she could not cope on her own and that the couple could not travel without her.[41] Although the Queen relaxed this restriction shortly after the marriage, Beatrice and Henry travelled only to make short visits with his family. Beatrice's love for Henry, like that of the Queen's for the Prince Consort, seemed to increase the longer they were married. When Henry travelled without Beatrice, she appeared happier when he returned.[41]

The addition of Prince Henry to the family gave new reasons for Beatrice and the Queen to look forward, and the court was brighter than it had been since the Prince Consort's death.[42] Even so, Henry, supported by Beatrice, was determined to take part in military campaigns, and this annoyed the Queen, who opposed his participation in life-threatening warfare.[43] Conflicts also arose when Henry attended the Ajaccio carnival and kept "low company",[44] and Beatrice sent a Royal Navy officer to remove him from temptation.[44] On one occasion, Henry slipped away to Corsica with his brother Louis;[35] the Queen sent a warship to bring him back.[35] Henry was feeling oppressed by the Queen's constant need for his and his wife's company.[44]

Despite being married, Beatrice fulfilled her promise to the Queen by continuing as her full-time confidante and secretary. Queen Victoria warmed to Henry, as she often did with other handsome, strong men.[45] However, the Queen criticised Beatrice's conduct during her first pregnancy. When Beatrice stopped coming to the Queen's dinners a week before giving birth, preferring to eat alone in her room, the Queen wrote angrily to her physician, Dr James Reid, that, "I [urged the Princess to continue] coming to dinner, and not simply moping in her own room, which is very bad for her. In my case I regularly came to dinner, except when I was really unwell (even when suffering a great deal) up to the very last day."[46] Beatrice, aided by chloroform, gave birth the following week to her first son, Alexander.[46] Despite suffering a miscarriage in the early months of her marriage,[47] Beatrice gave birth to four children: Alexander, called "Drino", was born in 1886; Ena in 1887; Leopold in 1889 and Maurice in 1891. Following this, she took a polite and encouraging interest in social issues, such as conditions in the coal mines. However, this interest did not extend to changing the conditions of poverty, as it had done with her brother, the Prince of Wales.[42]

Although court entertainments were few after the Prince Consort's death, Beatrice and the Queen enjoyed tableau vivant photography, which was often performed at the royal residences.[42] Henry, increasingly bored by the lack of activity at court, longed for employment, and in response, the Queen made him Governor of the Isle of Wight in 1889.[35] However, he yearned for military adventure and pleaded with his mother-in-law to let him join the Ashanti expedition fighting in the Anglo-Asante war. Despite misgivings, the Queen consented, and Henry and Beatrice parted on 6 December 1895; they would not meet again. Henry contracted malaria and was sent home. On 22 January 1896, Beatrice, who was waiting for her husband at Madeira, received a telegram informing her of Henry's death two days earlier.[43]

Devastated, she left court for a month of mourning before returning to her post at her mother's side.[43] The Queen's journal reports that Queen Victoria "[w]ent over to Beatrice's room and sat a while with her. She is so piteous in her misery."[48] Despite her grief, Beatrice remained her mother's faithful companion,[43] and as Queen Victoria aged, she relied more heavily on Beatrice for dealing with correspondence. However, realising that Beatrice needed a place of her own, she gave her the Kensington Palace apartments once occupied by the Queen and her mother.[49] The Queen appointed Beatrice to the governorship of the Isle of Wight, vacated by Prince Henry's death.[35] In response to Beatrice's interest in photography, the Queen had a darkroom installed at Osborne House.[18] The changes in the family, including Beatrice's preoccupation with her mother, may have affected her children, who rebelled at school. Beatrice wrote that Ena was "troublesome and rebellious", and that Alexander was telling "unwarrantable untruths".[50]

Princess Beatrice with her mother, Queen Victoria

Beatrice's life was overturned by the death of Queen Victoria on 22 January 1901. She wrote to the Principal of the University of Glasgow in March, "... you may imagine what the grief is. I, who had hardly ever been separated from my dear mother, can hardly realise what life will be like without her, who was the centre of everything."[51] Beatrice's public appearances continued, but her position at court was diminished. She, unlike her sister Louise, was not close to her brother, now Edward VII, and was not included in the King's inner circle. Although their relationship did not break down completely, it was occasionally strained, for example when she accidentally (but noisily) dropped her service book from the royal gallery onto a table of gold plate during his coronation.[52]

After inheriting Osborne, the King had his mother's personal photographs and belongings removed and some of them destroyed, especially material relating to John Brown, whom he detested.[53] Queen Victoria had intended the house to be a private, secluded residence for her descendants, away from the pomp and ceremony of mainland life.[54] However, the new King had no need for the house and consulted his lawyers about disposing of it, transforming the main wing into a convalescent home, opening the state apartments to the public, and constructing a Naval College on the grounds. His plans met with strong disapproval from Beatrice and Louise. Queen Victoria had bequeathed them houses on the estate, and the privacy promised to them by their mother was threatened. When Edward discussed the fate of the house with them, Beatrice argued against allowing the house to leave the family, citing its importance to their parents.[54]

However, the King did not want the house himself, and he offered it to his heir-apparent, Beatrice's nephew George, who declined, objecting to the high cost of maintenance. Edward subsequently extended the grounds of Beatrice's home, Osborne Cottage, to compensate her for the impending loss of her privacy. Shortly afterwards, the King declared to Arthur Balfour, the Prime Minister, that the main house would go to the nation as a gift. An exception was made for the private apartments, which were closed to all but the royal family members, who made it a shrine to their mother's memory.[55]

Princess Beatrice, who was Governor of the Isle of Wight from 1896 until her death in 1944, was also President of the Frank James Memorial Hospital at East Cowes, from 1903 until her death.

Retirement from public life

Beatrice continued to appear in public after her mother's death. The public engagements she carried out were often related to her mother, Queen Victoria, as the public had always associated Beatrice with the deceased monarch.[59]

Prince Maurice of Battenberg. After his death during the First World War, Beatrice began to retire from public life.

The beauty of Beatrice's daughter, Ena, was known throughout Europe, and, despite her low rank, she was a desirable bride.[60] Her chosen suitor was Alfonso XIII of Spain. However, the marriage caused controversy in Britain, since it required Ena to convert to Catholicism.[61] This step was opposed by Beatrice's brother, Edward VII, and Spanish ultra-conservatives were against the King's marriage to a Protestant of low birth, as her father, Prince Henry, was the son of a morganatic marriage. Thus, they considered Ena to be only partly royal and thus unfit to be Queen of Spain.[60] Nonetheless, the couple wed on 31 May 1906. The marriage began inauspiciously when an anarchist attempted to bomb them on their wedding day.[60] Apparently close at first, the couple grew apart. Ena became unpopular in Spain and grew more so when it was discovered that her son, the heir to the throne, suffered from haemophilia. Alfonso held Beatrice responsible [62] for having brought the disease to the Spanish royal house and turned bitterly against Ena.[62]

During her time as Queen of Spain, Ena returned many times to visit her mother in Britain, but always without Alfonso and usually without her children. Meanwhile, Beatrice lived at Osborne Cottage in East Cowes until she sold it in 1913, when Carisbrooke Castle, home of the Governor of the Isle of Wight, became vacant.[63] She moved into the Castle while keeping an apartment at Kensington Palace in London. She had been much involved in collecting material for the Carisbrooke Castle museum, which she opened in 1898.[64]

Portrait by Philip de László, 1912

Her presence at court further decreased as she aged. Devastated by the death of her favourite son, Maurice, during the First World War in 1914, she began to retire from public life.[65] In response to war with Germany, George V changed the name of the royal house from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor and at the same time adopted it as the family surname, to downplay their German origins. Subsequently, Beatrice and her family renounced their German titles; Beatrice stopped using the style Princess Henry of Battenberg, reverting to only using her birth style, HRH The Princess Beatrice. Her sons gave up their style, Prince of Battenberg. Alexander, the eldest, became Sir Alexander Mountbatten and was later given the title Marquess of Carisbrooke in the Peerage of the United Kingdom.[66] Her younger son, Leopold, became Lord Leopold Mountbatten and was given the rank of a younger son of a marquess.[35] He was a haemophiliac, having inherited the "royal disease" from his mother, and died during a knee operation in 1922 one month short of his 33rd birthday.

Following the war, Beatrice was one of several members of the royal family who became patrons of The Ypres League, a society founded for veterans of the Ypres Salient and bereaved relatives of those killed in fighting in the Salient.[67] She was herself a bereaved mother, as her son, Prince Maurice of Battenberg, had been killed in action during the First Battle of Ypres. Rare public appearances after his death included commemorations, including laying wreaths at the Cenotaph in 1930 and 1935 to mark the 10th and 15th anniversaries of the founding of the League.[68][69]

Last years

Princess Beatrice in later life

Even in her seventies, Beatrice continued to correspond with her friends and relatives and to make rare public appearances, such as when, pushed in a wheelchair, she viewed the wreaths laid after the death of George V in 1936.[70] She published her last work of translation in 1941. Entitled "In Napoleonic Days", it was the personal diary of Queen Victoria's maternal grandmother, Augusta, Duchess of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. She corresponded with the publisher, John Murray, who greatly approved of the work.[71] She made her last home at Brantridge Park in West Sussex, which was owned by Queen Mary's brother, Alexander Cambridge, 1st Earl of Athlone, and his wife, Princess Alice,[72] who was Beatrice's niece; the Athlones were at the time in Canada where the Earl was governor-general. There, Beatrice died in her sleep on 26 October 1944, aged eighty-seven (the day before the 30th anniversary of her son, Prince Maurice's death).[35] After her funeral service in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, her coffin was placed in the royal vault on 3 November. On 28 August 1945, her body was transferred and placed inside a joint tomb, alongside her husband, in St Mildred's Church, Whippingham.[63] Beatrice's final wish, to be buried with her husband on the island most familiar to her, was fulfilled in a private service at Whippingham attended only by her son, the Marquess of Carisbrooke, and his wife.[63]

Beatrice was the shyest of all of Queen Victoria's children. However, because she accompanied Queen Victoria almost wherever she went, she became among the best known.[73] Despite her shyness, she was an able actress and dancer as well as a keen artist and photographer.[74] She was devoted to her children and was concerned when they misbehaved at school. To those who enjoyed her friendship, she was loyal and had a sense of humour,[75] and as a public figure she was driven by a strong sense of duty.[76] She was Patron of the Isle of Wight Branch of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution from 1920 until her death.[77] Music, a passion that was shared by her mother and the Prince Consort, was something in which Beatrice excelled. She played the piano to professional standards and was an occasional composer.[78][79] Like her mother, she was a devout Christian, fascinated by theology until her death.[80] With her calm temperament and personal warmth, the princess won wide approval.[81]

The demands made on Beatrice during her mother's reign were high. Despite suffering from rheumatism, Beatrice was forced to endure her mother's love of cold weather.[82] Beatrice's piano playing suffered as her rheumatism got gradually worse, eliminating an enjoyment in which she excelled; however, this did not change her willingness to cater to her mother's needs.[82] Her effort did not go unnoticed by the British public.

Tomb of Prince Henry of Battenberg and Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom in St Mildred's Church, Whippingham, Isle of Wight

In 1886, when she agreed to open the Show of the Royal Horticultural Society of Southampton, the organisers sent her a proclamation of thanks, expressing their "admiration of the affectionate manner in which you have comforted and assisted your widowed mother our Gracious Sovereign the Queen".[83] As a wedding present, Sir Moses Montefiore, a banker and philanthropist, presented Beatrice and Henry with a silver tea service inscribed: "Many daughters have acted virtuously, but thou excellest them all."[84] The Times newspaper, shortly before Beatrice's marriage, wrote: "The devotion of your Royal Highness to our beloved Sovereign has won our warmest admiration and our deepest gratitude. May those blessings which it has hitherto been your constant aim to confer on others now be returned in full measure to yourself."[85] The sentence was, as far as it dared, criticising the Queen's hold over her daughter.[84]

She died at Brantridge Park, the home of her niece, Princess Alice, and her husband, the Earl of Athlone, at the time serving as Governor General of Canada. Osborne House, her mother's favourite home, is accessible to the public.[86] Her Osborne residences, Osborne and Albert Cottages, remain in private ownership after their sale in 1912.[87]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Princess Beatrice.

Wikiquote has quotations related to Princess Beatrice of the United Kingdom.

• Ceremonial observed at Beatrice's wedding: "No. 25495". The London Gazette. 28 July 1885. p. 25495.
• "Isle of Wight Beacon on Princess Beatrice". Archived from the original on 12 February 2009. Retrieved 14 February 2008.
• Information about Queen Victoria's journals
• Carisbrooke Castle Museum
• Osborne House
• Princess Beatrice letter, MSS SC 1247 at L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University