In February 1960, a servant in a bungalow at the edge of the jungle in North Borneo found the Countess Mountbatten of Burma dead in her bed. She had died in her sleep at fifty-eight, thousands of miles from the marble palaces she had been born to inherit. Scattered across the covers, where they had slipped from her hands during the night, lay a pile of letters. Every one of them had been written by the prime minister of India.
Three days later, her body was committed to the sea. Edwina Cynthia Annette Ashley had been born in 1901 into a strange compound of splendor and neglect. Her mother died when she was nine, her father remarried coldly, and the one steady warmth in her early life came from her grandfather, Sir Ernest Cassell. The German-born financier had arrived in England as a teenager with little more than a bag of clothes and a violin, and within a single working lifetime had made himself indispensable to the richest men in Europe, becoming the private financier and shooting companion of King Edward VII.
When he died in 1921, he left the greater part of one of the largest fortunes in Britain to his shy, restless nineteen-year-old granddaughter. She inherited a life interest in a trust fund valued at around £7. 3 million, a sum approaching £400 million in today’s money, along with Brook House, the vast mansion overlooking Hyde Park, and the expectation of Broadlands in Hampshire. It was an almost obscene inheritance to hand to a girl who had not yet found one solid reason to get out of bed in the morning.
A skilled working man of that year might earn under £200 for a full year of labor. Edwina’s trust threw off more than that in interest before she had finished breakfast. Those who knew her described the same quality again and again: she was quick, impatient, physically fearless, incapable of sitting still, hungry for a life larger than the one that had been arranged for her. As one friend put it plainly, for Edwina there was always something missing.
In July 1922, some eight thousand people pressed around St. Margaret’s Church in Westminster to watch the richest heiress in England marry a comparatively poor young cousin of the king. The bridegroom was Lord Louis Mountbatten, known to everyone who loved him as Dickie. He was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, a serving officer in the Royal Navy, with charm, royal blood, boundless ambition, and almost no money of his own.
Queen Mary was present, and the aged Queen Alexandra, and the Prince of Wales himself stood beside the groom as best man. It was the marriage of new money to old blood, staged as public spectacle. The honeymoon lasted the better part of six months. They were received at the White House by President Warren Harding, entertained by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in Hollywood, and Charlie Chaplin made a short comic film with the young couple purely for their amusement.
For a few bright years they seemed to be exactly what the photographs promised. But beneath the surface, the arithmetic of the marriage was already strange. It was largely Edwina’s fortune that paid for the yachts and villas and fleet of motorcars, while it was Mountbatten’s blood that gave her rank and access to the palace. Each had brought precisely the thing the other lacked, and both of them knew it exactly.
By the 1930s, the passion had drained out of the marriage, and in its place the Mountbattens built something colder, stranger, and far more modern. They made, in effect, a private treaty. They agreed to stop pretending. Edwina began to take lovers, and she did not take them quietly.
Her name was linked with a long procession of men: an American sportsman, a newspaper executive, a soldier who became a near-permanent presence at her side. Mountbatten himself carried on a long attachment to a French woman. He summed up the arrangement in later years with a sailor’s bluntness: “Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds. ”
The affairs were never the disease.
They were only the symptom of the same fevered search for a missing thing that had driven her around the world and back. In the summer of 1932, a Sunday newspaper printed a story that sent the king of England into something close to panic. The paper spoke of a scandal involving a woman of great wealth and the very highest connections whose association with a “colored man” had become so open that the two of them were the talk of the West End. It printed no name, but the whole of fashionable London supplied the same name in the same breath: Edwina Mountbatten.
The man the rumor attached to her was the American singer and actor Paul Robeson, an almost certainly false pairing. King George V ordered the Mountbattens home and ordered them to sue. In July 1932, the case came before the Lord Chief Justice. Edwina’s counsel called the article “the most monstrous and most atrocious lie” he had ever heard.
Both Mountbattens swore on oath that there was not a word of truth in it. The newspaper collapsed, produced a groveling apology, and withdrew every syllable. Edwina won her full costs and declined to take any damages. The next day they were summoned to lunch at Buckingham Palace.
But the victory had a hollow center. The court had cleared her of a lie. It had not, because it could not, cleared her of the truth. The rumor had named the wrong man, but there had been a man.
His name was Leslie Hutchinson, known to everyone who mattered as Hutch. He was a cabaret pianist and singer from the West Indies, one of the most sought-after entertainers in the country, with a voice like warm smoke and a way of holding a room that made duchesses forget themselves and their husbands. The persistent and well-sourced whisper placed Edwina near the front of the many women said to have lost their heads over him. It is the most durable single piece of gossip in her story rather than a proven fact, but it has lasted because the people who actually moved in that world believed it and repeated it.
Whatever the exact truth, the shape of it fits everything else known about her. She was a woman who took what she wanted, who was drawn to talent and danger in the same motion, and who cared very little what the drawing rooms whispered. The taboo that terrified the monarchy seems simply not to have registered with her as a limit at all. When the bombs began to fall on London in 1940, the heiress found the one thing her fortune had never been able to buy her.
She found something that had to be done that no one but she could do, that could not be delegated to a secretary or escaped by taking ship for somewhere warmer. She found a use. She threw herself into the work of the St. John Ambulance Brigade, and she did the work itself with her own hands and back.
By 1942 she had risen to superintendent-in-chief of the entire brigade, a post she would hold for the remaining eighteen years of her life. During the Blitz she went wherever the bombs had been, helping to build the schemes that put first aid posts and rest centers across a burning city. The woman who had once vanished for months to the South Seas because she was bored now worked days that would have failed a cabinet minister. Photographs from these years show a woman who has stopped searching because she has finally found the thing that was missing.
In the last year of the war, Edwina flew into the wreckage of Japan’s collapsing empire to bring the dying home. In the great operation to recover the prisoners of the Far East, something like ninety thousand men were brought out of captivity from around 230 separate camps scattered across a region three thousand miles wide. Edwina herself flew roughly thirty-three thousand miles in the course of it, landing at jungle airstrip after airstrip, walking into camp after camp to see with her own eyes what had been done to the men inside. She walked among men reduced to bone and fever, men who weighed little more than the children they had once been.
She did not flinch from any of it. She came out of the camps a graver woman than she had gone into them, with a kind of moral authority that no amount of birth or money could ever have bought her. In the spring of 1947, the Mountbattens were sent to India to end an empire, and they were given some fifteen months in which to do it. It was one of the largest and most dangerous tasks any two human beings had ever been handed.
The India they flew into was a country holding its breath before a catastrophe. After decades of struggle, British rule was finally ending, and the only questions left were how, and how fast, and at what price paid in blood. The Indian National Congress under Jawaharlal Nehru dreamed of a single united India. The Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah demanded a separate homeland to be called Pakistan.
Between those two visions there seemed no bridge. They took up residence in the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, a palace of around 340 rooms, the most magnificent house the empire had ever raised for itself, occupied at the very last by the couple who had been sent to close the empire down. From the first, Edwina threw herself into India exactly as she had thrown herself into the Blitz and the camps. She toured hospitals and welfare centers, met the Indian leaders and the Indian women and the poor of the teeming cities.
The Indians noticed it and marked her out because of it. And in the middle of those frantic, sleepless months, something wholly unexpected was quietly beginning to happen. Among the Indian leaders who came and went through the halls of the Viceroy’s House was a widower, cultured and lonely and magnetic, who had spent long years in British prisons for the single crime of wanting his own country free. His name was Jawaharlal Nehru.
He was about to become the first prime minister of a free India. The two of them became very quickly inseparable. They toured the relief camps side by side. They talked long into the Indian nights.
A garden party photograph with Nehru seated cross-legged on the ground beside Edwina caught something that the whole of Delhi was already whispering about. The letters, hundreds upon hundreds of them, began to flow and did not stop for the rest of her life. Whether they were lovers in the fullest sense has never been settled and never will be. Edwina’s authorized biographer judged the relationship purer than a physical one could have been.
Her daughter called it plainly platonic, describing the three of them as a happy threesome, a form of love, though not a physical one. Others have leaned the other way. What is not in any doubt, because it survives in his own hand, is the part played by the husband. Far from being the wronged and raging party, Mountbatten blessed the whole thing outright, writing to Edwina that he had always understood the very special relationship between her and Nehru and was able to bear it, by the remarkably lucky fact that God had not chosen to add jealousy to his defects.
The line drawn across India in August 1947 set some fifteen million people walking in terror along the roads and left behind it, by the higher estimates, a million or more dead. When British power was formally handed over and the subcontinent split into the two new nations of India and Pakistan, the border cut straight through provinces where Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs had lived side by side for centuries. Trains crossed the new border and arrived at their platforms filled with nothing but corpses. Villages were surrounded and butchered to the last child.
Columns of refugees were fallen upon and slaughtered on the open road. This was the catastrophe into which Edwina threw herself without hesitation. She took charge of the relief effort, organized mass vaccination against the cholera that swept through the packed refugee camps, and fought day after day for clean water, for sanitation, for food and shelter. She went into the refugee camps in person, driving herself so hard that those around her began to fear openly for her health.
Her relief work through the partition was, by any fair reckoning, the finest thing she ever did in her life. When the Mountbattens finally left India in the summer of 1948, Edwina left a piece of herself behind. She left the work that had given her whole life its meaning, and she left Nehru. For the twelve years that still remained to her, she kept the thing between them alive in the only way that remained open: in ink.
The letters crossed the world in both directions month after month and year after year, an unbroken conversation carried on quietly above the heads of two great nations. And when they could contrive to meet, they met, with the strange and generous figure of the husband quietly seeing to it that the two of them should have their time together. From around 1956 Edwina suffered from angina. In 1958 she suffered a small stroke, and later that same year a severe attack of chickenpox caught from a grandchild.
The warnings were plain enough for anyone who cared to read them. She did not care to read them. In November 1959, Nehru came to London and Edwina was there among those who gathered to mark his seventieth birthday. Within a few short months she would be gone.
In February 1960, on an inspection tour for the St. John Ambulance Brigade, Edwina traveled to North Borneo, and there in a bungalow in the town of Jesselton she went to sleep one night and simply did not wake again. She was found the next morning, the twenty-first of February, dead in her bed at fifty-eight, her worn-out heart finally giving way. All around her lay the letters from Nehru.
She had carried them with her to the other side of the earth and had been reading them in the last waking hours of her life. She had asked to be buried at sea, and her wish was carried out to the letter. On the twenty-fifth of February, her body was borne out from Portsmouth aboard the frigate Wakeful, and there in the gray water off the English coast, with the Archbishop of Canterbury speaking the words of committal, she was given to the deep. Then came the most extraordinary gesture of the entire story.
Nehru, on learning that the woman he had loved for so long was to be committed to the sea, ordered a warship of the Indian Navy, the frigate Trishul, to sail to English waters and escort her to her rest. As the Wakeful carried Edwina out and her body slipped beneath the waves, the Indian frigate stood by in the Channel and cast a wreath of marigolds onto the water where she had gone down. A nation that Edwina’s own country had ruled for three long centuries had sent one of its warships halfway around the world to lay flowers upon the sea for an English woman. Even in death, she drew the perfect line beneath her own character.
Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, offered a verdict that was half exasperation and half admiration: “Dear Edwina, she always liked to make a splash. ”
When her affairs were finally settled, her personal estate was valued at something close to £600,000, against which the state levied death duties of more than £330,000. The fortune that had once made a lonely, motherless girl the richest heiress in all of England was cut cleanly and almost exactly in half. The most private part of the long correspondence between Edwina and Nehru was never published.
It passed into private keeping in India, held under lock and key, and there it remains to this day. The central question of her whole life sits exactly where she left it, sealed and silent. She had everything, and something was always missing. That was the sentence that first opened the door on her, and it holds true right down to the end, because the thing that had been missing turned out not to be a lover, or a jewel, or a journey, or a fortune.
It was a purpose large enough to spend herself upon, and she found it only when the whole world she had been born to rule was falling to pieces around her. The freest woman in England had spent thirty restless years learning the single lesson her money could never teach her, and she sealed it away in letters she carried across the world to a jungle bungalow at the edge of everything. Whatever those letters truly held, she took it down with her into the deep.
And the sea, which keeps its secrets far better than any archive ever kept them, has never once given it back.