An excerpt from The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves
Mountbatten had resurrected his old friendship with the Duke of Windsor. In February he had dined with him in Paris. ‘We seem to have caught the old spirit really even more than in the 1930s,’ he wrote in his diary, returning again the next month. There was a purpose behind this newfound friendship, amidst concerns about the Duke’s health and what would happen to his papers and possessions after his death.
In May 1972 the Duke had died, and Mountbatten was asked to greet the Duchess at the airport when she accompanied the body back to Britain for burial. She was nervous about meeting the Royal Family, especially the Queen Mother, but the visit passed smoothly. Mountbatten noted in his diary after he took her to see her husband lying in state in St George’s Chapel:
At the end she stood again looking at the coffin, and said in the saddest imaginable voice: ‘He was my entire life. I can’t begin to think what I am going to do without him, he gave up so much for me, and now he has gone.’
Broadcasting a tribute, Mountbatten, with customary hyperbole, spoke of how the Duke had not just been his best man, but ‘my best friend all my life’.
Lord Mountbatten and the Duke of Windsor in the early days of their friendship
Mountbatten now turned his attentions to ensuring the Duke’s estate came back to the Royal Family, suggesting to the Duchess that she left everything in her will to the Royal Family, or to a charitable foundation in the Duke’s name, which he and Prince Charles would administer. He was concerned that she had dismissed her English solicitor and that her French lawyer, Maître Suzanne Blum, was exerting her influence. Mountbatten offered to act as an executor of her will and to find another lawyer connected to the Royal Family.
There were claims by Blum that ‘two individuals, authorised either by Lord Mountbatten or “some other person”, acting upon what she alleged to be royal authority, had somehow obtained the keys to the Duke’s boxes and confidential filing cabinet and burgled the contents . . . The contents included the Duke’s private correspondence, the documents of divorce from Win Spencer and Ernest Simpson . . . and a certain amount of the Duchess’s personal correspondence.’
Maître Suzanne Blum
There were also rumours that Mountbatten had arranged for correspondence between the Duke of Windsor and German, Italian and British fascists to be placed in the Royal Archives.
A friend of the Duchess, Linda Mortimer, visiting her shortly afterwards found her ‘very angry. She said she had been thinking of leaving most of her things to Prince Charles, and some younger members of the Royal Family’, but Mountbatten had been ‘picking up boxes and swords and trinkets’, saying, “This belongs to the Royal Collection.”’ Wallis told Mortimer that she had changed her mind and Mortimer tried to persuade her ‘that’s just the way Mountbatten is. He’s never been known for his tact.’
Tactful or not, Mountbatten did save the papers from being sold on the open market or given away and a large amount of material was indeed returned to the Royal Archives in three batches – 15 June 1972, 13 December 1972 and 22 July 1977 – all of it approved by the Duchess and her advisers. Kenneth Rose, close confidant of the Royal Family, noted in his diary: ‘I hear that the Duchess of Windsor has promised to leave Queen Alexandra’s jewels back to the Queen – on condition that the Prince of Wales attends her funeral. Mountbatten arranged the deal.’
Mountbatten enjoyed being the elder statesman of the Royal Family and had no hesitation offering advice to the Queen and to Philip – advice they sometimes took. It was Mountbatten who had suggested Prince Charles attend Trinity College, Cambridge, Dartmouth and then spend some time in the Royal Navy. He was close to the whole family, but had become even closer to Prince Charles in the early seventies, when the Prince of Wales was posted to Portsmouth and would frequently come to stay at Broadlands, where a room was left permanently made up for him.
Broadlands
‘It’s lovely having him here,’ Mountbatten wrote in his diary at the beginning of 1972. ‘We’ve had so many cosy talks. What a really charming young man he is.’ In November, Mountbatten had written to him, ‘I miss you a lot for there is no one whose company I enjoy more, as I expect you realise.’
The relationship was reciprocated. ‘As you know only too well, to me it has become a second home in so many ways,’ wrote Charles after leaving Broadlands for a six-month cruise, ‘and no one could ever have had such a splendid honorary grandpapa in the history of avuncular relationship.’ Mountbatten responded, ‘I’ve been thinking of you – far more than I had ever expected to think of a young man – but then I’ve got to know you so well, I really miss you very much.’
Not close to his parents, ‘in his Uncle Dickie he found someone to whom he could open up, confess his mistakes and misgivings, and turn for advice,’ felt John Barratt. ‘Lord Mountbatten was never short of a few words of advice for anyone, and he particularly enjoyed having the boy who would one day be king turning to him for counsel.’ The royal biographer Sarah Bradford thought Mountbatten ‘uniquely placed to instruct the Prince with authority and intimacy about the governance of Britain and to help him interpret the duties and opportunities which faced him. By the time Charles was twenty-three, Mountbatten had become his closest confidant and the greatest single influence of his life.’
Just as he had allowed Philip, before he married, to use Broadlands to meet young women, so Dickie encouraged Charles to discreetly bring girlfriends, such as Georgiana Russell (now Lady Boothby), to the house. One visitor that spring of 1972 was Lady Jane Wellesley, daughter of the Duke of Wellington, who was to be his girlfriend for the next year.
According to the gossip columnist, Nigel Dempster:
Mountbatten set up a slush fund, administered by a British lawyer through a private bank in Nassau in the Bahamas . . . to ensure that potentially troublesome conquests could be swiftly and handsomely paid for their silence. Certainly two, and possibly three, six-figure dollar contracts were signed between December 1974 and July 1979.
Mountbatten’s advice to his great-nephew was clear:
I believe, in a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down, but for a wife he should choose a suitable, attractive and sweet-charactered girl before she met anyone else she might fall for. After all, (your) Mummy never seriously thought of anyone else after the Dartmouth encounter when she was 13! I think it is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage.
Mountbatten was not above pushing his own candidates including, in 1974, his 17-year-old granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull, whom he was told Charles was keen on. He drafted ‘how to woo’ letters to Charles and even went to the lengths of enlisting his favourite goddaughter, the chic Sacha Abercorn, to take Amanda to Paris on a clothes-hunting trip to smarten her up.
Charles and Amanda Knatchbull
Amanda and Charles saw much of each other over the next five years in London, at Broadlands and in the Bahamas. Sibilla O’Donnell hosted them twice at her home in Nassau. ‘I was given strict instructions by Dickie to leave them alone as much as possible which I did, and then they went to Eleuthera . . . Dickie tried very hard to get them together.’
Jonathan Dimbleby revealed in his authorised life of Prince Charles that:
Amanda had grown fond of Prince Charles, warming to his energy and enthusiasm, his sense of the ridiculous, and his kindness. She admired his immense seriousness, his understanding of the natural world, the fact that he had read Small is Beautiful, the seminal work on the environment by Fritz Schumacher, and that he could quote from Laurens van der Post. She was also touched by his love for her family, and especially for her grandfather.
In 1978, when Prince Charles was due to visit India, Mountbatten engineered a visit for himself and tried to include Amanda in the trip – but both her father and Prince Philip objected, worried that Mountbatten’s presence might distract from Charles’ visit and put Amanda unfairly in the media spotlight. In spite of that, Charles did propose to her, but she gently refused. ‘They liked each other, but they couldn’t fall in love,’ according to Sibilla. ‘There was no chemistry. They had known each other too long, since they were children.’
Mountbatten needed to be wanted and loved to feel he could act as an intermediary in other people’s love affairs. Another relation he tried to matchmake for was his nephew Carl Gustaf, King of Sweden, first with Lady Jane Wellesley and then Lady Leonora Grosvenor, and when Prince Michael of Kent confided in him, alone of the Royal Family, that he had fallen in love with a Catholic divorcée, Marie Christine von Reibnitz, it was Mountbatten who encouraged the match and suggested they marry in Vienna.
His desire to involve himself in his family’s life was not always welcome. In December 1977, after handing over responsibility for World Atlantic Colleges to Prince Charles, the latter wrote to him:
I agreed to take over as President from you on the understanding (as I saw it) that you wished to cut down on your commitments, etc. From the way you have been tackling things recently, it looks as though you are still going to do too much as Patron. I hate having to say this, but I believe in being absolutely honest with you, and when I take over as President I may easily want to do things in my own particular way, and in a way which could conflict with your ideas. So please don’t be surprised if, like the other evening at Broadlands, I disagree with your approach or appear to be awkward and argumentative. I am only taking a leaf out of your book after all.
In April 1979, tensions flared up again after Mountbatten criticised Charles for breaking short his holiday with the Brabournes on Eleuthera, which had caused inconvenience for others:
I thought you were beginning on the downward slope which wrecked your Uncle David’s life and led to his disgraceful Abdication and his futile life ever after. Of course you were legally right – the US Coastguards could recall a crew from Easter weekend leave if you really wanted them. An officer was on duty and had no claim for the extra 3 days with his fiancée. But how unkind and thoughtless – so typical of how your Uncle David started. When I pointed this out you flared up – so I knew you had seen the point. I spent the night worrying whether you would continue on your Uncle David’s sad course or take a pull.
Charles was shortly – as he now seriously contemplated marriage – to keenly feel the loss of the wise advice of his honorary grandpapa.
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