12 August 2007

The Last Vice-Reine



Edwina's husband Dickie was a hero of the Empire. He was born three years after his great grandmother Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, the year before her passing, and thus appeared at the zenith of the greatest common aggregation of peoples the world has ever known. He was a catch when he grew to manhood.

The family knew him as Dickie, anyway. He was born as Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Battenburg, and had a few dozen other titles, most of them derived from German royalty. That all had to change during the First War with the Germans. The family named was changed top accommodate public loathing of the Huns. For the rest of his life he would be known as Lord Louis Mountbatten, once a Prince of Hesse, and then the more homey-sounding Marquis of Milford Haven.

In 1922, Dickie was traveling the sub-continent of India with his cousin, Edward, Prince of Wales. That was when Edwina caught sight of him. He cut a fine figure in his Royal Navy uniform, and if a girl could not aspire to be Queen, like the predatory Wallace Simpson, she could at least bag a Serene Highness.

Socialite Edwina Cynthia Annette Ashley was a handsome woman, slim and elegant, with an impeccable pedigree of her own and the purse to match. She had the resources to do exactly what she wanted. With the war just over and the horror passed, she could do exactly what she wanted.

Edwina's maternal grandfather was the immensely wealthy Sir Ernest Cassel, friend and private financier to the future King Edward VII. Being of the nobility is not easy. As a girl, she was estranged from her father over that complex business with his second wife Molly Forbes-Sempill. Edwina was packed off on the boarding school route, where she acted out rebelliously.

Meanwhile, Sir Ernest had lost his beloved wife, and decided to step in to solve his granddaughter's problem. He took Edwina in, and eventually made her the hostess of his stately London residence, Brook House.

When he passed away in 1921, he left Edwina two million pounds, and the properties at Moulton Paddocks and Branksome Dean. Castle Cassiebawn in Ireland came down to her as well, when her father died, since he was of the line of Temples. In short, Edwina had almost everything a girl could want.

Except one thing. The twenty-year-old heiress set her sights on Dickie as the perfect mate.

Dickie was inclined to agree. Heredity and titles aside, he was making a pittance on his Navy salary- barely six hundred pounds a year. At a stroke, a match with Edwina would provide the means for him to follow an honorable military career while living in the style to which a Prince is entitled.

Edwina and Dickie were wed in 1922 at St. Margaret's Church in Westminster. The Royal family was all there, and the future King who would turn in his crown for love was the best man.

The couple had a charmed life. Two daughters were born; Patricia came along two years after the wedding and Pamela was born the year of the Great Stock Market Crash. They were well insulated from the hard times did not affect them, and Dickie was content to follow his studies of the Marconi radio system and become an expert in Fleet signals, assigned to the Mediterranean Squadron in Malta.

He pursued his military career and was a literate man, for a Royal. He took to polo, the sport of kings, and wrote a popular book about it under a pseudonym. He also penned books on naval terminology in two languages.

Edwina had the randy predilection of the noble class, for whom the rules of conduct were for others. Scandal dogged her. Theirs was a marriage of institution, and family alliance. Jealousy was a factor, but the money was on her side of the marriage. Their daughter Pamela later said that her father took the first affair hard, but learned to deal with them. She loved him well enough in her fashion, but he was often gone.

Edwina spent the interwar years doing exactly what she wanted. There is a certain amorality that goes with great wealth and privilege, and Edwina took advantage of it. It is said that she enjoyed the sexual company of intelligent non-British men.

In the mid-1930s, she vanished on an extended sea-cruise, her whereabouts a mystery. Dickie had command at sea when Edwina disappeared, and that might have been why he returned to a staff job in Whitehall in 1936 to keep an eye on the home front.

The outbreak of the Second World War changed everything, of course, as it did for everyone. Dickie deployed immediately and saw heavy action off Norway and in the Med. Edwina was galvanized and threw herself into relief work. It was an epiphany, and for the first time in her life, she devoted her considerable intelligence and energy to the service of others.

After having a ship sunk beneath him near Crete in 1941, Dickie was called back to London to help in high-level war planning. Churchill made him chief of the Combined Operations Centre, the fulcrum of joint planning. One of his projects was a cross-Channel Commando raid on the occupied French port of Dieppe. Code-named Operation JUBILEE, it was an unmitigated disaster. It had been intended to gain intelligence and a wealth of prisoners.

Instead, it resulted in the death or capture of half the 6,000-man landing force. It achieved none of the lofty goals. Most of the casualties were Canadians, and the ones who survived had long memories.

One of Dickie's other memorable efforts was a plan to carve gigantic airfields out of the arctic ice and float them south to the convoy routes across the Atlantic. The floating bases- great flat icebergs- would then be treated with sawdust so that they would not melt. The U-boat threat in the mid-Atlantic, out of range of land-based aviation would thus be neutralized at a stroke. It was madder than some of the schemes of that war, though perhaps not as mad as the harnessing of the atom to make a bomb.

At the Quebec Conference of 1943, Dickie brought two blocks in his briefcase to the Chateau Frontenec. One of plain ice and the other of the treated ice-sawdust mix to demonstrate the unique strength of the hybrid material.

In front of a panel of distinguished Army and Navy officers, he drew his service revolver and shot at the block of ice, which shattered into a thousand pieces. Then he fired at the treated block to show how it resisted impact. The bullet ricocheted off the block, grazing the trouser leg of Fleet Admiral Ernie King, Commander of the US Fleet, and embedded itself in the wall.

Admiral King was impressed, but the project was overcome by the advent of long-range aviation.

Winston Churchill was one of Dickie's mentors, and in late 1943 he appointed him the overall Commander of the China-Burma-India Theater, consolidating authorities in him that had been divided in various organizations and territories.

One of those was held by the new Viceroy of India, Field Marshall and Viscount Archibal Percieval Wavell.

Wavell was a competent general and administrator, who had done the best with his limited forces in the early days of the Axis expansion. Arriving in Delhi in 1943, he mandate was to maintain the status quo, and prevent the Indians from exploiting the pre-occupation of His Majesty's Government with the Nazis and Japanese to their benefit.

Wavell was an industrious officer, and he prepared for his assignment with due diligence. He is considered to be one of those British officers who actually understood the mood of the Indians, and how to deal with them effectively. He made well-considered recommendations on how to improve a desperate situation on the sub-continent, and was consistently ignored. He might have been one of the best Viceroys to serve, at the end of the imperial day.

He was relieved to see Churchill turned out of office by Clement Attlee in the first post-war elections, but became rapidly disenchanted with the Labour government's ability to make decisions. Perhaps the view from Delhi was not the same as it was in Whitehall, where rationing of petrol and food continued, and life in victory was oddly barren and bleak.

Wavell was against Partition. He felt that it would lead to chaos and bloodshed neither Indians nor British could contain. When it was decided that British policy would be to grant independence to a partitioned India, it was the good soldier who created the Border Commission. He appointed Sir Cyril Radcliffe to its chair, with the charter to survey a border between prospective Muslim and Hindu-majority states.

The Attlee government did not believe that Wavell was the man to execute the policy. They believed that Dickie, Churchillian though he was, harbored Labour sympathies. Based on his experience in the region, they appointed him the last Viceroy of India on 20 February, 1947. His mandate was to create two independent states by 1948.

Winston was quite cross with him about the India business. He had famously declared that he had not be elected Prime Minister to preside upon the dissolution of the British Empire, and there he was, in forced retirement while Dickie was off in Delhi carving up and divesting the crown jewel of the imperial crown.

With all that, though, it is impossible to consider Dickie as anything but a man of his times. I'm quite sure he did not intend for all those people to be killed.

Messy business, that.   

The contrast between post-war London and New Delhi could not have more stark. The splendid new capital that Edwin Lutyens and his friend Herbert Baker had constructed radiated confidence in an imperial future that did not exist.

It is said that when the new Viceregal couple was shown to their quarters, Edwina asked for some food for her little dogs to be brought up. A turbaned servant arrived shortly with two lamb-chops in bowls of silver. Edwina sent the servant away and closed the door to her chambers. Meat still required a ration coupon in London, and would so for years. She ate the chops herself.

Edwina's love affair with Jawaharlal Nehru, the handsome chief of the Congress Party, began shortly thereafter. It was on a trip to a hill station called Mashobra, near the summer capital of the Raj at Shimla. It was one of those cool and magical places to which an Imperial could retreat from the crushing heat of the plains, and it is undeniably romantic to have the Himalayas as the backdrop to passion as large as a nation.

You can make of the affair what you will. There were those who believed the worst of it, which is to say the best; there are others who say it was purely platonic. I know my opinion, but a gentleman should be discrete. Whatever it was in reality rest now in the tomb. In one way or another, it lasted the rest of Edwina's life.   

Dickie had to tolerate it, and all the while he had to build an official relationship with his wife's lover affecting the lives of hundreds of millions of people. All the while, he was conducting sensitive negotiations with the aesthetic Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, and the remote and suspicious Muslim leader Muhammed Ali Jinnah.

Lady Pamela, Edwina's daughter, later said that she thought her mother's love for Nehru created an “extraordinary emotional triangle in the midst of a major political upheaval.”

Even for someone like me, that is an understatement. If you have time, we can chat about how they drew the line for the partition of India tomorrow. The Radcliffe Commision carved families in two, and set the scene for one of the most catastrophic and bloody migrations in history.

But that is enough for today. After their service on the sub-continent was done, Edwina continued to devote her energy to worthy causes, including those of the dispossessed Hindus of Pakistan, and the displaced Muslims of India. The papers said that she had a dalliance with the famous singer and activitst Paul Robeson in New York. She sued successfully for defamation.

While on a trip to Borneo in 1960, Edwina died of unknown causes. Dickie was Chief of Defence Staff at the time, and he was able to accede to her wishes for a burial at sea off Portsmouth.

A Royal Navy frigate was employed to scatter the ashes of the last Vice-Reine. In honor of the solemn occasion, two ships of the Indian Navy stood by in respect. They were dispatched by the Prime Minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru.

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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