BOOKS
A piece of cake
Alastair Forbes
THE MOUNTBATTENS: THE BATTENBERGS AND YOUNG MOUNTBATTEN by Antony Lambton Constable, f12.95, pp.256 One of Tony Lambton's first and quite evidently traumatic memories, so he tells us in this markedly opinionated but never- theless most intriguing book, is of 'sitting, paralysed with shyness and terror', in the company of 'the fat, garrulous old Princess [Beatrice, Queen Victoria's youngest daughter and widow of the onetime "sun- beam" of his mother-in-law's unexciting court, Prince Henry of Battenberg] with her pendulous cheeks, guttural voice and cross expression, the two-eyed torturer' of his 'little old great-aunt', Miss Bessie Bul- teel, who had lost one eye and strained the other to perpetual weepiness at her ill-paid job of reading aloud to a royal employer, elsewhere compared by the author, still nursing his 'shocked feelings' at this single sighting of her, to 'a prize rosetted pig'. So much for the mother of the kindly and agreeable Queen Ena of Spain, the esteemed grandmother of the only Batten- berg male descendant yet to have occupied a throne and in doing so to have proved the best by far of the whole bunch, the shrewd and fearless King luanito', worthy son of Franco's bitter opponent, the Infante Don Juan de Borbon y Battenberg, himself, like Dickie Mountbatten, his father, brother, nephews and great nephews, formerly an officer in Britain's Royal Navy.
That Lambton had formed a strong distaste for the family of the House of Battenberg's unwitting Founding Father in the middle of the last century, Prince Alexander of Hesse, was first made mani- fest in his Elisabeth and Alexander, a bizarre work of fiction lightly sprinkled with faction, of which the least said perhaps the better. Suffice it only to explain that the correspondence between them that ensued from it earned him the enmity, unlikely now to prove any less lasting, of the lady whose place-card at Buckingham Palace, Windsor or Balmoral (at all of which she is a regular and welcome guest) reads, on our indulgent Sovereign's orders, 'Her Royal Highness The Princess Margaret of Hesse and by Rhine' (Dickie's mother, a grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, never rated more than a Her Grand Ducal Highness), as well as of ter champion Princess Tatiana Metter- nich' (elder sister of the adorable `Missie' Vassilchikov of the wartime Berlin Diaries, so enthusiastically reviewed by me in these pages). It is a characteristic Tony Lambton tease for him to express to both these ladies, in his long list of unsolicited ack- nowledgements in which I was interested to come across my own name, his 'grati- tude for stimulating me into relevant inves- tigations into the House of Hesse which I might otherwise have neglected'.
I cannot, however, see how his claims either to scholarship or to good breeding can be usefully advanced by variously calling the childless widow of Wolfsgarten (so highly esteemed in Hesse-Darmstadt, where she has adopted as sons and heirs the orphaned Hesse-Cassel Princes Moritz and Eurico, who lost their admirable royal Italian mother, Mafalda, in a Nazi concen- tration camp when it was ironically bombed by the Allies shortly before war's end, a fact unmentioned by Lambton), `English . . . of lower-middle-class blood . . morganatically married.' He really should know that Princess 'Peg', a most cultivated and enlightened Bundesrepublik Maecenas, has never been any of these things, as her elderly but evergreen royalty-fancying historian-cousin, Sir Steven Runciman, would certainly be the first to agree. Indeed the Scotsman, esti- mating her to be one of Edinburgh's most distinguished exports ever, was recently disappointed to find that the former Miss Margaret Geddes would not agree to be the subject of a profile in its new weekly magazine. She was, after all, a close kinswoman to Elizabeth Garett Anderson as well as the grand-daughter of Edin- burgh's first woman physician.
I don't doubt that she was all for denying Lambton access to the Alexander of Hesse and Hartenau papers, but she was never- theless being strictly truthful in telling me several years ago that these now form part of the Broadlands Archives, even while they are still physically lodged at Darm- stadt. By rights they ought now to be transferred to their ultimate designated destination, the university of South- ampton, and there made available for study, without censorship by the Broad- lands Trustees. On the latter's Board is still, on paper at least, officially to be found serving the non-pareil former pub- lisher and saviour of the London Library, Sir Rupert Hart-Davis, who alas nowadays rarely leaves the Yorkshire dales of his biological forefathers. But he, now tells me that he was only appointed in order to assist in choosing a biographer for Dickie, in the event Philip Ziegler, and having done so has been out of touch save to step in and rescue poor Richard Hough, the very able official biographer of Dickie's parents and excellent editor of Queen Victoria's letters to his mother, from the hands of Lord Bradbourne and his wife the present Countess Mountbatten of Burma, who are the only other trustees. I think the great and good Rupert should now either stand up for freedom of speech and of the written word and get the archives opened up or by resignation remove the last vestige of intellectual respectability that his name still confers on the Bradbourne pair.
Fortunately for Lambton, the late Count Egon Corti had, back in the Thirties, had ample access to the now hidden papers and had made some very good use of them in books that have provided invaluable source material for the present volume. 'I have sought', wrote Corti, 'to avoid any personal bias in the narrative of events.' Alas, Lambton has not quite so conscien- tiously striven. Nor, from his beautiful Sienese seat, has he been able to keep close enough check on the editing, let alone proof-reading, of his publishers, who already on the blurb falsely pretend that their author is revealing for the first time that Dickie's grandfather tad no right to the title of a Prince of Hesse at all'. Had they bothered to read the text, assuming their understanding of the English lan- guage, they would not have sanctioned such nonsense nor, in further hand-outs to the press, again repeated that Prince Alex- ander of Hesse 'in truth had no right to that title'. Every student of history and, a fortiori, every last and remotest royal kin of the pair, has always known that the Grand Duke of Hesse was not the biologic- al father of his two youngest children, Marie, later Tsarina of Russia, and Alex- ander, later the begetter of the Batten- bergs, having long tolerated his Baden Princess wife's liaison with the handsome Baron de Grancy, the Court Chamberlain of aristo Swiss origins. Tsar Nicholas I, Marie's future father-in-law, informed of it at the time by his friend Count Orloff, with great good sense merely replied, 'Good- ness me, who are you and who am I? Who on earth can ever prove such a thing?' (Of course, nowadays, someone, thanks to genetic fingerprinting, probably could.) As for Elisabeth's fiancé, the future Alexan- der II, when told the same thing by Russia's ambassador at Darmstadt, he settled it once and for all by asking him, 'Is Princess Marie in the Almanach, de Gotha?', and, on hearing the answer, `Yes', exploding, `Alors, de quoi vous melez-vous, imbecile?'
But Lambton is no imbecile and certainly quite worldly enough to know full well that persons who may discover that they have sprung from loins other than their Debrett or Gotha-registered sires are in no way obliged to disclaim their inherited or cour- tesy titles, nor, pace this book, should they ever be classified as illegitimate.
Then again, Lambton's editors have allowed his text to be overlarded with the word morganatic, used it would seem as a pejorative adjective, sometimes quite absurdly as in 'a morganatic postman's daughter'. I siippose a morganatic postman must be the kind who, as in Britain, only delivers Saturday's wedding telemessages on Monday morning. The word on the Continent, where ebenburtigkeit has until lately been such a fetish, merely refers to a title or name given as a wedding present to a spouse of unequal birth, either above or below; for example, say, Snowdon's earl- dom to the young Armstrong-Jones. After all, were it not for Princip's shots at Sarajevo, old Franz Josef would have been succeeded by an Emperor Franz Ferdinand whose morganatic consort would have had to remain Duchess of Hohenstein (their children, incidentally, unlike the Batten- bergs, not at all humiliated by their happily married parents' differing nomenclature). But then their high-well-born mother was not (as Lambton claims Dickie's Hauke grandmother was) dismissed by dear old
Prince Alphy Clary as 'a lower-middle- class German-Dutch-French-Swiss-Hun- garian-Polish-Jewish goulash', nor was she seven months' pregnant and in enforced exile when her marriage certificate was finally delivered to her. Julie Hauke, for some reason rechristened Julia throughout by Lambton (who, unlike Alexander of Hesse, refuses to judge her pretty), was clearly an exceedingly ambitious woman whose .distant coldness and severity as a mother caused her daughter and four sons to remember their tender-hearted and dashing father with much more affection. They relied on their own warm love for each other in a happy childhood in which their confusing holiday intimacy with their imperial Russian cousins (just as Dickie's a generation later) was to cause adult pain and snubbing put-downs.
In his racily readable account of the very different careers of the four 'very good- looking' — to borrow the ever susceptible Queen Victoria's qualification — brothers (to this day immortalised in the four contrasting squares of a Battenberg cake), Lambton is often perceptive about the Insider-Outsider complex that was to cause Dickie's own social insecurity, which made him turn Mountbatten history into a Miinchhausen farrago. No wonder Field Marshal Templer could once expostulate to him, 'Dickie you're so crooked that if you swallowed a nail you'd shit a cork- screw'.
Perhaps the most interesting and worth- while achievement of Lambton's literary exercise is his examination of Dickie's conspiracy to have the British Royal Fami- ly's dynastic name changed to the angli- cised version of the obscure hill picked out to give the pregnant Julie a title and a countenance. Later he settled for the compromise Mountbatten-Windsor. In fact there had never been the slightest need for Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark to acquire any surname at all in 1947, certain- ly not his mother's, which had, until her marriage, been Battenberg not Mountbat- ten. Another Dane, Claus Billow, had at the same time taken his mother's name only because his father was a convicted Nazi collaborationist. Poor Prince Andrew of Greece, always a favourite of King George V, had been nothing of the kind and he had certainly not been responsible for the long years of eccentric religious schizophrenia that had separated his wife from husband and children. Prince Philip did, indeed, favour anglicising one of the paternal names, Oldenburg, to Oldcastle, but, along with innocent old Chuter Ede, the Labour Home Secretary, arranging a British naturalisation of which as a direct descendant of the Electress Sophia of Hanover he anyway had no need, got bullied by Uncle Dickie into the absurdity of becoming for a short time Lt. P. Mountbatten R.N.
The loudest protest at Dickie's plotting was to come from Queen Mary, herself a grand-daughter of another German mor- ganatic marriage but a fierce defender of the 'Old Family' of her jolly fat mama, a direct descendant of George III. Churchill, in Cabinet and Privy Council, backed her up, but Macmillan later incomprehensibly went and ratted on them both.
Lambton's promised second volume, a study both of Dickie's daring and Dickie's deceits, should provide the straight-as-a- die Prince of Wales with yet further useful eye-openers to some of his Honorary Grandfather's tortuous schemings. All the same, I was surprised by Lambton's rare discretion in omitting any reference to Ludwig (as Queen Victoria always referred to Dickie's father) Battenberg's unrivalled collection of bisexual pornography, once the pride and joy of his eldest son, Georgie Milford Haven, whose grandson, present head of the House of Mountbatten, has just married the heiress daughter of a former Billingsgate porter. So, for all Dickie's cheating and fudging, genealogy wins in the end.
'I blame the cave paintings!'
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