On the morning of August 27, 1979, a bomb hidden by the Provisional IRA tore apart a small cabin cruiser off the coast of County Sligo, Ireland. The explosion killed Lord Louis Mountbatten, aged 79, his 14-year-old grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, and 15-year-old Paul Maxwell, a local boy helping with the boat. The Dowager Lady Brabourne, Nicholas’s other grandmother, died of her wounds the following day. The same day, 18 British soldiers were killed in a separate ambush at Warrenpoint.
Mountbatten was the great-uncle of Prince Charles and the uncle of Prince Philip. He had been the architect of the royal marriage between Philip and the future Queen Elizabeth II, and he had shaped the life and romantic choices of Charles. His death removed the one figure whose guidance the prince had relied on above all others, and it set in motion a chain of events that led to the most public marital catastrophe in the modern history of the monarchy. The story of that catastrophe is inseparable from Broadlands, the grand Hampshire estate where Mountbatten lived.
The house, built in the Palladian style beside the River Test, was saved from the collapse that destroyed thousands of English country houses in the 20th century. It survived because of the fortune brought into the family by Mountbatten’s wife, Edwina, the granddaughter of the financier Sir Ernest Cassel, who inherited more than two million pounds in 1921. Their marriage, which began in 1922, was an open arrangement, and Broadlands became a place where privacy could be bought and secrets could be kept. Louis Mountbatten used Broadlands as an instrument of dynastic ambition.
In 1947, he arranged the marriage between his nephew, Prince Philip, and Princess Elizabeth. The newlyweds spent the first nights of their marriage at Broadlands. That marriage lasted 73 years. Mountbatten then took on the role of mentor to Prince Charles, who called him “the grandfather he never had.
” In 1974, Mountbatten wrote Charles a letter advising him to sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as possible before marrying a suitable, attractive, sweet-charactered girl. He also allowed Charles to use Broadlands as a private place to conduct a relationship with Camilla Shand, whom the prince had met in the early 1970s. But Mountbatten hoped Charles would eventually marry his own granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull. That plan never came off, and in 1973 Camilla married cavalry officer Andrew Parker Bowles.
After Mountbatten’s murder, Charles, grieving and without his mentor, followed the prescription the old man had left behind. Within 18 months of the funeral, he was engaged to Lady Diana Spencer. She was young, beautiful, and considered a suitable bride. They married on July 29, 1981, in a ceremony watched by hundreds of millions of people.
The newlyweds then went to Broadlands for the first days of their honeymoon, in deliberate imitation of the 1947 marriage that had succeeded. But the blessing that had worked for Elizabeth and Philip failed completely. Diana later said there were three people in her marriage, meaning herself, Charles, and the woman he had never stopped loving. The marriage ended in formal separation in 1992 and divorce in 1996.
Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997, pursued by the press that had followed her since her honeymoon. The house survived all of it. The Cassel money that Edwina brought through the door insulated Broadlands from the taxes and falling rents that destroyed its neighbors. The house passed to Mountbatten’s elder daughter, Patricia, who had lost her son to the bomb at Mullaghmore and who kept the estate whole.
The house remains a private family home, with a limited number of rooms opened to visitors each August. Louis Mountbatten believed a dynasty could be engineered with money, cleverness, and the right rooms. Every marriage he arranged on purpose came apart, while the attachment he tolerated as a passing indulgence, the relationship between Charles and Camilla, proved to be the one that lasted. Charles married Camilla in 2005.
The house that sheltered the beginning of that attachment stood serene through every ending, a perfect picture of permanence that could never make a marriage hold.