On a February morning in 1960, in a bungalow on the far edge of a vanishing empire, the Countess Mountbatten was found dead in her bed. Scattered across the covers lay a pile of letters from the prime minister of India. For thirty years, this woman had been among the most talked-about wives in England, mistress of a fortune worth close to four hundred million pounds in today’s money, married to a cousin of the king. Half of fashionable London had passed through her rooms.
Yet the letters beside her bed belonged to none of the lovers the gossip columns had spent decades counting. They had come from the one man she was never permitted to keep, whose name no British paper had ever been allowed to set beside hers. Edwina Cynthia Annette Ashley was born in London in November 1901 into a world where two great powers of the age met inside a single child. On her father’s side stood the old aristocracy of England, descendants of the reforming Earls of Shaftesbury, masters of Broadlands in Hampshire.
On her mother’s side stood the newest money in Europe, the Cassel millions made in international high finance. Her mother died in 1911, worn out and only thirty-one years old, leaving nine-year-old Edwina to a cold stepmother and the vast silences of very large rooms. The one person who saw her whole was her grandfather, Sir Ernest Cassel. Cassel had come to England from Cologne as a young man with almost nothing, climbed from a junior clerk’s desk to become the private banker and confidant of King Edward VII, and made himself one of the richest men in Britain.
He was a Jewish outsider in a society that never quite let him forget it, and he answered the coldness of that society by making himself so useful that it found it could not do without him. From him, Edwina absorbed two lessons that would run through her whole life: that money in sufficient quantity buys a person past almost every barrier the world can raise, and that having everything is no guarantee against being profoundly alone. When Cassel died in September 1921, the restless teenager became overnight one of the wealthiest unmarried women in the country. Under his will, she received a life interest in a trust fund worth roughly seven million pounds, a sum approaching four hundred million in today’s money, plus a further one and a half million settled for her benefit alone.
She was left Brook House on Park Lane and stood in time to inherit Broadlands. At nineteen, Edwina Ashley answered to no living soul for a single penny. Money removed every obstacle that gives an ordinary life its shape. Every reason to wait, to save, to plan, to want a thing she could not simply reach out and take.
She had time and beauty and an income larger than that of most government ministers, and a hollow at the center of herself that none of it touched. On a July morning in 1922, eight thousand people pressed against the barriers outside St. Margaret’s Westminster to watch a sailor with no money marry the richest girl in England. The groom was Lord Louis Mountbatten, known to everyone as Dickie, tall, handsome, ferociously ambitious, a great-grandson of Queen Victoria and cousin to the crowned heads of half of Europe.
The Prince of Wales stood as best man. Queen Mary and Queen Alexandra attended. The papers called it simply the wedding of the year. Those who watched with cool eyes understood the bargain inside the romance.
She was buying blood, rank, and a place at the center of the royal circle. He was marrying security, style, and the means to live as grandly as his ambitions demanded. At the beginning, there was also something that looked a great deal like love. The honeymoon announced to the world exactly what kind of couple they intended to be.
They went to America for six months, were received by President Warren Harding, and were taken up by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin, who wrote and shot a short comic film with them purely for fun. There were two daughters, Patricia in 1924 and Pamela in 1929. Dickie went back to his ships and his courses and his relentless program of self-improvement, forever away at Malta or on maneuvers. Edwina played the young society wife.
But the machinery of the marriage was already visible to anyone who cared to look. He had married a fortune and the entry it brought into the innermost royal circle. She had married rank and a great name. Each had received exactly what the bargain promised.
Neither had received the thing a marriage is supposed to be for. Through the 1930s, the couple enjoyed a combined income before tax of about one hundred thirteen thousand pounds a year, nearly sixty thousand after tax, at a time when a member of parliament was paid four hundred pounds and a housemaid might earn thirty. Edwina had no occupation the world would recognize. She could not stand for parliament, could not go into business, could not do very much of anything at all except be Lady Louis Mountbatten, hostess and ornament, and she was far too intelligent not to feel the insult buried in the role.
She read voraciously, traveled compulsively, often alone, to the far corners of the earth. She drove fast cars fast, danced until dawn, and moved through the whole glittering carnival like a woman searching a crowded house for a door that was not there. She was, in the phrase that follows her through every account of her life, always missing something. By her late twenties, she had begun looking for it in other men’s beds.
She did not take lovers because she was wicked, nor because she was a helpless victim of a cold husband. She took them because she was a woman of enormous appetite and no permitted outlet, and because the one thing all her money could not buy her was a reason to be faithful. The affairs made her feel wanted urgently, specifically, for herself, by men who could not simply have her for the asking. She was magnetic in a way the photographs only hint at, a quick, dangerous, restless vitality that pulled people towards her.
Men fell for her hard and fast. She was clever enough to hold them and cool enough to drop them when the charge went out. She was protected by a double wall that guarded women exactly like her: the wall of money on one side, and the wall of a press that dared not print a single word on the other. Libel law was fierce, and the deference of an entire establishment policed its own and protected its own.
Her friends knew everything. Her servants knew more. The whole of fashionable London passed her name from dinner table to dinner table. The ordinary reader of an ordinary paper knew nothing whatever.
When a biographer finally assembled the list of her lovers seventy years later, it ran to at least eighteen names, and the newspapers of her own day had been permitted to print not one of them. Of all the men, one broke her heart. Harold Phillips, known as Bunny, an officer in the Coldstream Guards, was, by the judgment of the biographers who have weighed the surviving evidence, the great love of her life. When Bunny at last married another woman, Edwina was devastated.
The mistress of eighteen affairs, the woman who dropped her lovers the instant the charge went out, found herself on the wrong side of exactly that equation. It is the single detail that rescues her most completely from caricature. The other name belongs to an entirely different order. Leslie Hutchinson, known as Hutch, was a cabaret pianist from the island of Granada, one of the most glamorous performers in Britain.
That a black colonial entertainer and a white countess should be linked together struck at once at the two most sensitive nerves the British establishment possessed: the nerve of class and the nerve of race. In May 1932, a Sunday paper called The People printed a story about a titled woman and a colored man that everyone in London read as a single name. No name was printed. None was needed.
The man the rumor mill supplied was not the pianist most historians now suspect, but the American singer and actor Paul Robeson, a figure famous enough to make the story travel around the world, and a man Edwina had in all probability never so much as met. King George V took a direct and personal hand in the affair. Word went out that the Mountbattens were to come home at once and sue publicly, ferociously, and above all successfully. In July 1932, the case came before the Lord Chief Justice.
Edwina went into the witness box herself, swore on oath that the story was false from its first word to its last, that she had never met the man. The newspaper crumpled completely, withdrew the allegation, apologized in the most abject terms. Edwina won on every point, declined to accept any damages at all. The following day, she lunched at Buckingham Palace with the king and queen.
The verdict was absolute. The specific charge was false. But the general truth the paper had blundered towards, that Edwina Mountbatten was a woman of many lovers living inside a marriage that had long since stopped pretending to be faithful, was accurate to the last detail. The court had been used to defend a false accusation in order to bury a true one.
The war that began in September 1939 changed Edwina Mountbatten more completely than any lover ever had. She threw herself into the St. John Ambulance Brigade with the same energy, the same physical fearlessness, the same lifelong refusal to sit still, pointed at a task large enough to swallow her whole. By 1942, she had risen to superintendent in chief, the most senior woman in the entire organization, a post she held for the remaining eighteen years of her life.
She went down into the underground stations where Londoners huddled from the raids, toured the bombed streets and casualty posts while the fires still burned, drove herself past the edge of exhaustion. The recklessness that had made her a scandal in a nightclub made her in a bombed city simply brave. In the wreckage of the Japanese surrender, she flew thirty-three thousand miles to reach the men everyone else had written off as already dead. Working through the organizations she led, Edwina helped to oversee the recovery of something in the order of ninety thousand prisoners, scattered across roughly two hundred thirty separate camps spread over some three thousand miles of ruined territory.
She went into the camps themselves, walked among the skeletal survivors, inspected the conditions with her own eyes, and where she found neglect, she was merciless with the officials responsible for it. To thousands of prisoners, the very first sign that the outside world had remembered they were alive was the arrival of Lady Louis Mountbatten, notebook in hand, refusing to be hurried and refusing to be lied to. The honors followed, earned in a currency no one has since been able to sneer at: Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1943, Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and Dame Grand Cross of the Order of St. John in 1946, and in 1948, the Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire.
In the spring of 1947, she walked into a palace of 340 rooms to preside over the death of the largest empire the world had ever known. Her husband had been sent to India as its last viceroy, charged with bringing the greatest possession of the empire to independence, fast. Edwina arrived as vicereine, mistress of a court at the exact historical moment the court itself was to be dismantled forever. She took command of the entire humanitarian side of the transfer of power.
Through the spring and summer of 1947, British India was divided along hurried and bitterly contested lines into two new nations. The partition set in motion one of the largest and bloodiest movements of human beings the world had ever seen. The estimates of the dead range from several hundred thousand to more than a million. The displaced ran as high as fifteen million human beings.
Directly into the heart of all this, Edwina threw the last full measure of her strength. She took charge of the United Council for Relief and Welfare, organized the vast refugee camps that grew up around the great cities, drove the vaccination campaigns against cholera counted out in hundreds of thousands of doses, fought for the sanitation schemes and the distribution of food and clean water. She walked directly into the camps and the overflowing hospitals, refusing to be spared the sight of the thing she was working herself to death to relieve. The leaders of the new India, men who had spent their careers fighting the empire she represented, came to regard her with a genuine and lasting affection because they had watched her serve their people at the very worst moment in their modern history.
Among those who watched her most closely was the new prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru. A widower, cultured, idealistic, and profoundly lonely at the summit of a vast responsibility. With Nehru, there was no question at all of the quick conquest and quicker discarding that had defined every one of her affairs. Here at last was an equal, and an equal is the one thing that cannot be collected.
He was, in the phrase she used of him, a man who respected her mind. For a woman who had spent a lifetime admired for her money and her beauty and her daring, and almost never for her intelligence, that respect was a kind of oxygen. She called it a strange relationship, most of it spiritual. It was the deepest attachment of a life that had never before let anything reach the bottom of it.
In 1952, after an episode of illness frightened her into a new honesty, Edwina showed Dickie the letters Nehru had written to her. What he wrote back is the single most remarkable document in the entire story. He told her that he knew and had always understood the very special relationship that existed between Jawaharlal and herself. He told her that among his many defects, God had not seen fit to add jealousy.
And he told her that this absence of jealousy was precisely why he had always made their visits to each other easy. Her daughter Pamela described the three of them as a happy threesome. The correspondence between Edwina and Nehru ran on for the whole of the rest of her life, hundreds upon hundreds of letters, London to Delhi and Delhi back to London. The two great purposes she had discovered at the end of the world, the relief work and the love, had become permanently and inextricably tangled together.
Her heart wore out under the punishment she insisted on giving it. The angina came in 1956, a small stroke two years later. She ignored all of it, because the relief work that had become the entire meaning of her life would not wait for her to recover. In February 1960, she traveled to Jesselton in North Borneo, as far from Park Lane as it was possible to travel and still be within the shrinking bounds of the empire, to inspect the local work of the brigade she had led for eighteen years.
She spent her last day at it. She went to bed in the warm dark with the letters of the prime minister of India near at hand, as they always were. In the night, her heart finally stopped. She was fifty-eight years old.
When they found her in the morning, the letters lay scattered across the bed. What followed her death matched the strangeness of the life exactly. Edwina had asked to be buried at sea. On the 25th of February 1960, from the deck of the frigate Wakeful off Portsmouth, with the Archbishop of Canterbury officiating, her body was committed to the sea.
And then the Indian prime minister ordered a warship of the Indian Navy, the frigate Trishul, to sail all the way to Portsmouth and take its part in the burial. As the English frigate committed Edwina’s body to the deep, the Indian frigate stood by on the water beside it, and a wreath of marigolds, the flowers of Indian mourning, was cast upon the waves. The Queen Mother, on hearing of it, produced the line Edwina’s family have treasured ever since: Dear Edwina, she always did like to make a splash. Her personal estate came to a gross figure of some five hundred eighty-nine thousand pounds, and after death duties of more than three hundred thirty-three thousand, well over half of everything she had was gone.
The great Cassel fortune had been reduced by the leveling machinery of the century to a comparatively ordinary inheritance. What survived her was not the money. It was the work of the St. John Ambulance Brigade, the memory of the ninety thousand prisoners brought safely home, and the refugee camps organized in the worst summer India ever knew.
The fullest account of her marriage, written by her biographer Andrew Lownie, put the treaty in a single sentence: they agreed to have an open marriage, and Edwina would continue to support her husband’s professional endeavors. Her real transgression, in the end, was never a lover in a drawing room. It was that she insisted against the whole weight of her class and her century that her mind and her conscience and her body were her own to give, and built a marriage strange enough and honest enough to let her keep them. She had chased sensation for twenty years and found it hollow to the core.
She had been mocked without mercy, and then later decorated with honor. She had stood in a witness box and sworn to her innocence of the single affair she had not had, while every one of the ones she had went quietly unrecorded behind the three great walls that guarded her. And at the very last, on a narrow bed in a bungalow in Borneo, the Countess Mountbatten was found lying dead with the letters of the Prime Minister of India scattered across her bed, the letters of the one man she was never in all her life permitted to keep.
The most intimate of those letters remain sealed to this day, held privately away in India, keeping their secret exactly as faithfully as their owner once kept hers.