On a February morning in 1960, in a bungalow at the edge of the jungle in North Borneo, a servant 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.
She had been the richest heiress in England, married to a cousin of the king, and the great love of her later years had been a man whose country her own had spent three hundred years ruling. Three days later, whatever those letters held went down with her into the sea. When Sir Ernest Cassel died in the autumn of 1921, he left the greater part of one of the largest fortunes in Britain to his shy, restless nineteen-year-old granddaughter, Edwina Ashley. Cassel had been born in Cologne, the son of a modest Jewish banker, and had arrived in England as a teenager with little more than a bag of clothes and a violin.
Within a single working lifetime he made himself indispensable to the richest men in Europe, and then to the most important of all: Edward VII, first while Edward was Prince of Wales, and then when he was king. Wherever the king went, Cassel’s money followed, into railways in Egypt and America, into mines and steelworks and armaments, into the tangled debts of princes and governments. By the time he died he was spoken of in the same breath as the Rothschilds. What he left to Edwina was extraordinary even by that standard.
She received a life interest in a trust fund valued at around £7,300,000, a sum that in today’s money would run close to £400 million, with a further £1,600,000 settled directly for her benefit. With the money came the houses: Brook House, her grandfather’s vast mansion overlooking Hyde Park, and through her father, Broadlands, the graceful house in Hampshire the Ashley family had held for generations. A skilled working man of that year might hope to earn under £200 across a whole year of labor. Edwina’s trust threw off more than that in interest before she had finished breakfast.
Her childhood had been a strange compound of splendor and neglect. Her mother died when Edwina was nine, and her father remarried a woman Edwina remained distant from. The one steady warmth in her early life came from the old financier himself, who doted on the clever, difficult child and made her, in the end, the heir to his empire of money. She grew up rich beyond ordinary counting and lonely beyond ordinary telling.
One friend put it more plainly than any biographer has managed since: for Edwina, there was always something missing. In July 1922, some eight thousand people pressed around St. Margaret’s 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: 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.
In Edwina Ashley he had found the one thing his lineage could not supply. She in turn had found a man whose name opened the last few doors even her fortune could not. Queen Mary was there, and the aged Queen Alexandra, and the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII, stood beside the groom as best man. The marriage of new money to old blood was staged as public spectacle, and the whole of fashionable London turned out to watch the two currencies fuse.
Their honeymoon lasted the better part of six months. They toured Europe, crossed the Atlantic, were received at the White House by President Warren Harding, and went on to Hollywood, where Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks entertained them and Charlie Chaplin made a short comic film with the young couple purely for their own amusement. For a brief and dazzling season they were among the most photographed people in the world. Beneath the surface, though, the arithmetic of the marriage was already strange.
It was largely Edwina’s fortune that paid for the yachts and the villas and the fleet of motorcars, while it was Mountbatten’s blood that gave her rank and access to the palace. Each had brought to the altar precisely the thing the other lacked. Within a decade, the passion had drained out of the marriage. Mountbatten was often at sea for months on end, married as much to the Navy and to his own soaring ambition as to his wife.
Edwina began to take lovers, and she did not take them quietly: the American sportsman Laddie Sanford, the newspaper executive Mike Wardell, the soldier Bunny Phillips, and others whose names have only half survived. After a painful stretch in the early 1930s, when a divorce case involving another couple dragged Edwina’s name into open court, the two of them arrived at a settled understanding. According to his biographer, they agreed between themselves to have an open marriage, with Edwina loyally supporting her husband’s career while both sought their pleasures elsewhere. Mountbatten himself carried on a long attachment to a French woman, Yola Letellier.
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. ”
In the summer of 1932, a Sunday newspaper printed a story that sent the king of England into something close to panic. It named no one, but the whole of fashionable London supplied the same name: Edwina Mountbatten. The man the rumor attached to her was the American singer and actor Paul Robeson, then one of the most famous performers alive.
It was an almost certainly false pairing. Robeson’s wife answered the gossip by pointing out that the lady was just about the one person in England the Robesons did not know. It made no difference. In the England of 1932, the suggestion that a great lady had taken a black lover touched all of the era’s deepest anxieties at once: race, empire, the purity of the very bloodlines supposed to justify aristocratic rule.
That the woman accused was married into the royal family made it a matter of the crown’s standing. King George V ordered the Mountbattens home and ordered them to sue. The case came before the Lord Chief Justice himself. Edwina’s counsel, Norman Birkett, called it the most monstrous and atrocious lie he had ever heard in his life.
Both Mountbattens swore on oath that there was not a word of truth in any of it. The newspaper collapsed completely, produced a groveling apology, and withdrew every syllable. Edwina won her full costs and, in a calculated aristocratic gesture, declined any damages at all. That evening the Mountbattens celebrated, and the next day they lunched at Buckingham Palace.
The victory had a hollow center: the rumor had pointed at the wrong man, but the deeper suggestion, that Edwina Mountbatten was a woman of enormous appetite who did precisely as she pleased, was not a lie at all. There had been a man, and his name was Leslie Hutchinson, called Hutch: a cabaret pianist and singer from the West Indies, in the 1920s and 1930s one of the most sought-after entertainers in the country. Among the many women said to have lost their heads over him, the persistent and well-sourced whisper has always placed Edwina Mountbatten near the front. None of this was ever established in court.
But it has lasted the better part of a century because the people who moved in that world believed it and repeated it. She was said to have showered him with gifts: a jeweled gold cigarette case, a gold ring with her own coat of arms engraved inside, a watch of gold and diamonds. And there was a harder truth folded inside: Hutch paid a price for the world’s fascination that Edwina never had to pay. He remained a black man in a white society that applauded him from the far side of the footlights and then quietly shut doors in his face.
She risked her reputation and won it back in a single morning in court. Hutch, if the affair was real, risked a great deal more than that. 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: a use. She threw herself into the work of the St.
John Ambulance Brigade. In November 1939 she became county president for London; by 1942 she had risen to superintendent-in-chief of the entire brigade. During the Blitz she went wherever the bombs had been, helping to build the schemes that put first aid posts and rest centers across the shattered boroughs of a burning city. She inspected divisions the length and breadth of Britain, driving herself from town to town through the blackout.
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. For the first time, the accounts of her speak not of restlessness but of purpose. The war did not change Edwina’s nature. It finally handed her a task large enough to be worthy of the person she had always secretly been.
In the last year of the war, she flew into the wreckage of Japan’s collapsing empire. In the great operation to recover prisoners of the Far East, something like ninety thousand men were brought out of around two hundred and thirty separate camps across a region three thousand miles wide. Edwina herself flew something in the order of thirty-three thousand miles, landing at airstrip after jungle airstrip, walking into camp after camp to see with her own eyes what had been done to the men inside. On one notorious stretch of railway, prisoners had died in their hundreds and forced laborers in their tens of thousands.
She did not flinch from any of it. She came out of the camps a graver woman, and she earned a reputation that word traveled through the services and up at last into the palace: she was a relief worker of the very first rank. In the spring of 1947, the Mountbattens were sent to India to end an empire, with some fifteen months to do it. The India they flew into was holding its breath before a catastrophe.
The Indian National Congress, with Jawaharlal Nehru at its head, dreamed of a single united India. The Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah demanded a separate homeland called Pakistan. Between those visions there seemed no bridge. Mountbatten took up residence in the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, the grandest expression of British dominion ever raised, with around 340 rooms.
Edwina threw herself into India as she had thrown herself into the Blitz and the camps. She toured hospitals and welfare centers, met Indian leaders and Indian women and the poor of the teeming cities, and asked hard, specific questions and remembered the answers. India held close to 400 million people, and the machinery of British administration that had ruled them was being taken to pieces at speed. Among the Indian leaders who came and went through the halls of the Viceroy’s House was one who was different from all the others: Jawaharlal Nehru, a widower, cultured and lonely, who had spent long years in British prisons for the single crime of wanting his own country free.
He was about to become the first prime minister of a free India. In Edwina he found an equal, a woman as quick as he was and as unimpressed by convention, who had walked through the same kind of human wreckage and had not once looked away. In Nehru, Edwina found the thing she had been searching for since she was a lonely, motherless girl: a man who valued her not for her fortune, nor her rank, nor her fading beauty, but for her mind. “It was a strange relationship,” she wrote, “most of it spiritual.
” The letters, hundreds upon hundreds of them, began to flow and did not stop for the rest of her life. The question that seventy years have not settled is whether they were lovers in the fullest sense. Her daughter Pamela, who was there in the house, called it plainly platonic. Others have leaned the other way.
What is not in any doubt is the part played by the husband. Far from raging, Mountbatten blessed the whole thing. After a health scare of Edwina’s, he wrote to her that he had always understood the very special relationship between Jawaharlal and herself, and that he was able to bear it, “by the remarkably lucky fact that among my many defects God had not chosen to add jealousy. ”
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 two new nations, millions of people found themselves on the wrong side of a line. Trains crossed the new border and arrived filled with nothing but corpses. Whole villages were butchered. Edwina threw herself into the center of it.
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, sanitation, food, and shelter. She went into the camps in person. In a moment when British rule was ending in blood and bitterness, here was the Vicereine herself on her knees in the filth of the camps doing everything within human power to ease the suffering of a people who were no longer even her charge. Her relief work through the Partition is, by any fair reckoning, the finest thing she ever did in her life.
For twelve years after she left India, the two of them kept the thing between them alive in the only way that remained: in ink, month after month, year after year. Nehru carried the weight of governing a subcontinent of hundreds of millions of people, newly free and desperately poor. Edwina was back in England, still superintendent-in-chief of the St. John Ambulance Brigade, still working herself to the bone.
When Nehru came to London, it was Edwina’s own husband who quietly saw to it that the two of them should have their time together. From around 1956 she suffered from angina. In 1958 she had a small stroke, and later that same year a severe attack of chickenpox. The warnings were plain enough for anyone who cared to read them.
Edwina did not care to read them. To stop working now would have been to hand back the one thing that had ever truly filled the empty place inside her. In February 1960, on an inspection tour for the St. John Ambulance Brigade, Edwina Mountbatten traveled to North Borneo.
There in a bungalow in the town of Jesselton, she went to sleep one night and simply did not wake again. She was found dead in her bed on the 21st of February at fifty-eight. All around her, scattered across the bedclothes where they had fallen from her hands, lay a pile of letters. They were from Nehru.
She had carried them with her to the other side of the earth, and she had been reading them in the last waking hours of her life. She had asked to be buried at sea. On the 25th 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 she 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, the very flowers of Indian mourning and Indian honor, onto the water where she had gone down. A nation that Edwina’s own country had ruled for three centuries had sent one of its warships halfway around the world to lay flowers upon the sea for an English woman. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who had known Edwina her whole life, offered a verdict that was half exasperation and half admiration, and entirely true: “Dear Edwina, she always liked to make a splash.
”
When her affairs were finally settled, her personal estate was valued at close to £600,000, against which death duties of more than £330,000 were levied. The fortune was cut almost exactly in half by the country that had spent forty years watching her spend it. The most private part of the long correspondence between Edwina and Jawaharlal Nehru was never published. It passed into private keeping in India, held under lock and key, and there by every account it remains to this day.
And the sea, which keeps its secrets far better than any archive ever kept them, has never once given back the rest.