The Last Princess by Matthew Dennison

Author:Matthew Dennison
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

SEVENTEEN

'There now burnt a bewitching

fiery passion'

For Beatrice marriage changed everything and nothing. A year after her wedding she opened the annual show of the Royal Horticultural Society of Southampton and the Hampshire bee-keepers’ association exhibition. The aldermen and burgesses of the town presented her with a proclamation on vellum. It expressed ‘the profound respect we entertain for your personal character and our admiration of the affectionate manner in which you have comforted and assisted your widowed mother our Gracious Sovereign the Queen'.1 In March of that year Beatrice and Liko, accompanied by Liko's sister Marie, had visited the Empress Eugenie in her house at Farnborough Hill. A member of the Empress's household described to her grandmother her impressions of the royal party: ‘We kissed the Princess Beatrice's hand and curtseyed to the others, who are both very nice. The Countess is very pretty and amiable and merry, and so is Prince Henry… Princess Beatrice is very quiet indeed and seems dull and out of spirits… “suppressed”… from the constant restraint of the Queen's presence she has lost all life and spirits.’2

Married or not, everything came back to the Queen. From long association with the Queen, Beatrice was the best known of the royal daughters, her uncomplaining attendance on her widowed mother a source of admiration for the contemporary public. Closer to home, opinions differed. ‘No man can be always with the Queen,’ Sir Thomas Biddulph had written in the 1870s, his immediate target John Brown, ‘without being very much the worse for it.’3 No woman either, and Beatrice's behaviour was conditioned by long years at the Queen's side, so that those who met her briefly—like ‘Goodie’ of the Empress's household – considered her ‘suppressed', all natural ebullition of spirits dampened by the Queen's insistence on absolute subjection to her shattered, sorrowing, widowed state. Beatrice's was a soft, quiet, deep voice – she sang as a mezzo-soprano; its mellow hush suited the Queen's distaste for loud and jarring noises. Her manner was retiring and unassertive, and she had a habit of not looking her interlocutor in the eye or even appearing to listen to what was said to her. She resisted controversial topics of conversation and referred anything problematic to her mother. Her clothes were discreet, though she had a fondness for elaborate trimmings, particularly lace, and jewels. Towards the Queen her manner was sympathetic if unsentimental; to any third party she could appear offhand, disinterested. She treated the Queen and the Queen's business, however trivial, with a degree of reverence that would increasingly become the dominant note of Victorian court life towards the end of the Queen's reign. Marriage to Liko gave Beatrice's life an additional focus beyond the Queen, but it did not wholly alter her existence. What it brought her was happiness of an active, immediate variety she had never known, save in those first unthinking years before the Prince Consort's death. To her husband, Liko's sister wrote during that spring visit, ‘It is nice to see how radiantly happy Liko and Beatrice are.

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