On a February morning in 1960, in a bungalow on the far edge of a vanishing empire, Edwina Mountbatten was found dead in her bed. Scattered across the covers lay a pile of letters from the prime minister of India. For 30 years, she had been one of the most talked-about women in England—mistress of a fortune worth close to £400 million in today’s money, married to a cousin of the king. 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 her name was never permitted to be linked with in any British newspaper. Edwina Cynthia Annette Ashley was born in London on November 28, 1901, into a collision of two worlds. Her father, Wilfrid Ashley, was a Conservative MP descended from the reforming Earls of Shaftesbury, master of the Hampshire estate Broadlands. Her mother, Maud, was the only surviving child of Sir Ernest Cassel, a German-born Jewish financier who had risen from a clerk’s desk to become the private banker and confidant of King Edward VII.
When Maud died in 1911, worn out at just 31, Edwina was nine years old. Her father remarried a cold stepmother, and the grieving girl was left to governesses and the vast silences of very large rooms. The one person who saw her whole was her grandfather. Cassel installed the teenager almost as mistress of Brook House, his enormous mansion on Park Lane, where she learned what money could command.
A friend would later say of her, in a phrase that follows her through every account of her life, that for Edwina there was always something missing. Cassel died in September 1921. Under his will, Edwina received a life interest in a trust fund valued at roughly £7. 3 million—the equivalent of close to £400 million today—plus a further £1.
6 million settled for her benefit alone. At 19, she answered to no living soul for a single penny. On July 18, 1922, she married Lord Louis Mountbatten, known to everyone as Dickie. He was a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, tall, handsome, and ferociously ambitious, but a junior naval officer with comparatively little money.
The crowds—8,000 strong—gathered outside St. Margaret’s Westminster to watch the wedding of the year, with the Prince of Wales himself serving as best man. The bargain was understood at once: 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. The honeymoon announced what kind of couple they intended to be: six months in America, received by President Warren Harding, entertained by Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and featured in a comic home film with Charlie Chaplin.
The marriage settled into a conventional shape at first. Two daughters were born—Patricia in 1924 and Pamela in 1929. But Dickie’s career consumed him. He kept lists of important people he had met and pursued advancement with single-minded absorption.
Edwina’s fortune paid for the style of life a rising man of his ambitions was expected to keep. Through the 1930s, the couple enjoyed a combined income of about £113,000 a year before tax—against which a housemaid earned perhaps £30 a year and a member of Parliament £400. Edwina spent more on flowers and motorcars in a single season than most of her countrymen would see in a lifetime. The restlessness that had defined her since childhood acquired an unlimited budget and an absent husband.
She read voraciously, traveled compulsively—often alone—and drove fast cars fast. She gathered around her the loudest and most modern society London could produce, moving through the glittering carnival like a woman searching a crowded house for a door that was not there. By her late 20s, she had begun searching for what was missing in other men’s beds. The affairs were made possible by three walls of silence: money, which meant she feared no man’s leaving; libel law, savage and expensive, which made any editor who named her risk ruin; and deference, the unwritten treaty of an establishment that policed its own.
Behind those walls, Edwina moved almost exactly as she pleased. Her friends knew everything; her servants knew more; the ordinary reader of an ordinary paper knew nothing whatever. When a biographer assembled the list 70 years later, it ran to at least 18 names. Among the earliest was Laddie Sanford, a wealthy American polo player.
There was Mike Ward, connected to the Beaverbrook press. There was Bobby Sweeney, the amateur golf champion. There was talk, reliable enough to be set down, that her attachments ran to women as well as men. But two names carried a weight the others did not.
The first was Harold Phillips, known as Bunny, an officer in the Coldstream Guards—by the considered judgment of biographers, the great love of Edwina’s life. When Bunny married another woman, Edwina was, in the plain word the record uses, devastated. The mistress of 18 affairs found herself, for once, on the wrong side of the equation. The second name must be handled with care.
Leslie Hutchinson, known as Hutch, was a cabaret pianist and singer from Grenada, one of the most glamorous performers in Britain. The evidence linking him to Edwina is gossip rather than proof—but it is persistent, well-sourced gossip, wrapped in details that leave a permanent trail: a jeweled gold cigarette case, a gold ring engraved on the inside with her family coat of arms, a gold and diamond watch. None of it was ever proved in any courtroom. The scandal that finally broke into print attached itself to entirely the wrong man.
In May 1932, a Sunday paper called The People printed a coded paragraph about a titled woman whose association with a colored man had become the talk of the West End. No name was printed; none was needed. The rumor mill supplied Paul Robeson, the American singer and actor—a man Edwina had in all probability never so much as met. His wife retorted tartly that Edwina was just about the one person in England they did not know.
King George V took a direct and personal hand. The Mountbattens were abroad, and word went out that they were to come home at once and sue publicly, ferociously, and above all successfully. The case came on in July 1932 before the Lord Chief Justice. Edwina did the thing no woman of her rank was supposed to do: she went into the witness box herself and swore on oath that the story was false from its first word to its last.
The newspaper crumpled completely, withdrew the allegation without reservation, and apologized in the most abject terms the court had heard. Edwina declined to accept any damages at all. That very evening the Mountbattens were seen out celebrating; the following day they lunched at Buckingham Palace with the king and queen. The victory was entirely real—and it was at the very same time a magnificent act of concealment.
The specific charge was false; the general truth, that she 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 1939 changed Edwina more permanently than any lover ever had. She threw herself into the St John Ambulance Brigade, rising from county president for London in November 1939 to superintendent-in-chief by 1942—the most senior woman in the organization, a post she held for 18 years.
She built shelter schemes across a capital being pounded from the air. She went down into the Underground stations where Londoners huddled from the raids. In 1943 she was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In 1945 and 1946, in the wreckage of the Japanese surrender, she took on the coordination of the prisoner-of-war rescue across Southeast Asia.
She helped oversee the recovery of roughly 90,000 prisoners scattered across some 230 camps spread over 3,000 miles of ruined territory. To reach them, she personally flew close to 33,000 miles into airstrips hacked out of nothing, walking among the skeletal survivors, inspecting conditions, and forcing officials to move. In 1946 came appointment as a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and as a Dame Grand Cross of the Order of St John; in 1948, the Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire. Her husband had been sent to India as its last viceroy, arriving in Delhi in March 1947 with a mandate to transfer power in a matter of months.
Edwina took residence in Viceroy’s House, the vast 340-room palace designed by Lutyens, knowing she would be the last English woman ever to reign inside its walls. She took charge of the humanitarian side of the transfer of power. Independence came in August 1947, and with it partition. Along the new frontiers, Hindus and Sikhs fled one way and Muslims the other.
Estimates of the dead range from several hundred thousand to over a million; estimates of the displaced run as high as 15 million. Edwina took charge of the United Council for Relief and Welfare, organizing vast refugee camps, driving vaccination campaigns against cholera, and fighting for sanitation, food, and clean water. She worked far past the point of exhaustion, walking through the wards herself, refusing to command from a safe distance. The leaders of the new India, men who had spent their careers fighting the empire she represented, made a single remarkable exception for the Vicereine.
Among those who watched her most closely was the new prime minister. Jawaharlal Nehru was a widower, cultured and idealistic, a man who had spent years in British prisons and who now had to build a nation. The first meeting had come in Singapore in 1946, when Edwina was knocked over in a crowd and Nehru and Mountbatten linked arms to help her up. When the couple arrived in Delhi, the acquaintance deepened fast.
Through the 15 months of the transfer of power and the catastrophe of partition, they were rarely apart. She called it a strange relationship, most of it spiritual. She found in him the one man who respected her mind—and for a woman who had spent a lifetime admired for her money, her beauty, and her daring, almost never for her intelligence, that respect was a kind of oxygen. What actually passed between them is the great withheld secret of her life.
Her authorized biographer, Janet Morgan, judged the relationship purer than a physical one. Her daughter Pamela Hicks, who was there, insisted flatly that it was never physical, calling the three of them a happy threesome. The biographer Andrew Lownie inclined to the view that it was indeed a physical affair, citing a claim that Mountbatten knew perfectly well they were lovers and was, most extraordinarily, proud of it. Edwina’s friend Marie Seton said she really did not know, but that she would think on the whole probably yes.
The most intimate letters remain sealed to this day, held privately away in India. In 1952, after a health scare, Edwina showed Dickie the letters Nehru had written to her. He wrote back that among his many faults, God had not seen fit to add jealousy—and that he had always made their visits to each other easy. He was not merely tolerating the bond; he was actively helping it along.
The correspondence ran on for the rest of her life, hundreds upon hundreds of letters, London to Delhi and back. Her daughter Pamela described the three adults as a happy threesome, held together not by deception but by shared and open understanding. The 1950s used Edwina very hard. Angina came in 1956, a small stroke in 1958, a savage case of chickenpox she would not rest through.
She ignored the distress signals and kept traveling. On February 21, 1960, in Jesselton, a town on the northern coast of Borneo—today’s Kota Kinabalu—she went to bed at the end of a St John inspection tour and simply did not wake up. She was 58. When they found her in the morning, there was the detail that has come to stand for the whole contradiction of her: a scattered pile of Nehru’s letters lying across the bed.
She had asked to be buried at sea. On February 25, from the deck of the frigate Wakeful off Portsmouth, with the Archbishop of Canterbury officiating, her body was committed to the deep. And then the man in Delhi acted. Nehru ordered a warship of the Indian Navy, the frigate Trishul, to sail to Portsmouth and take part in the burial.
As the English frigate committed her body to the water, the Indian frigate stood by, 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 her family treasured ever since: Dear Edwina, she always did like to make a splash. Her personal estate came to a gross figure of some £589,000, of which more than £333,000 went in death duties—well over half of everything she had. The great Cassel fortune, worth close to £400 million in today’s money when it fell to her in 1921, had been reduced by the leveling machinery of the century to a comparatively ordinary inheritance.
What survived her was not the money. Broadlands still stands in its Hampshire parkland. The St John Ambulance Brigade, the relief institutions she built and led, and the memory of the 90,000 prisoners brought home and the refugee camps organized in India’s worst summer—those endured. Nehru died four years after her, in 1964.
The most intimate letters outlasted them both, sealed away in India, unread. Every other secret of her life has been dug up and turned over by biographers. Only this one has held. The freest woman in England spent 30 long years discovering the hardest truth of her life: that a freedom bought with a fortune is not the same thing as a purpose worth the having.
Her real transgression was never a lover in a drawing room. It was a woman who insisted that her mind, her conscience, and her body were her own to give—and who built a marriage strange enough and honest enough to let her keep them.