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 58 years old, thousands of miles from the marble palaces she had been born to inherit. Scattered across the covers, where they had slipped from her hands in the night, lay a pile of letters. Every one of them had been written by the prime minister of India.
She was one of the richest heiresses in England, married to a cousin of the king, and the great love of her later years was a man whose country her own had spent 300 years ruling. Whatever those letters truly held, she carried it with her three days later 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 a shy, restless girl of 19. Her name was Edwina Cynthia Annette Ashley, and in a single stroke of a solicitor's pen, she became one of the wealthiest unmarried women in the world.
The money had been made by a remarkable man. Ernest Cassel had been born in Cologne, Germany, the son of a modest Jewish banker, and had arrived in England as a teenager with, by the legend that grew around him, 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 man of all. He became the private financier and shooting companion of Edward VII, first while Edward was Prince of Wales, and then when he was king.
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 the money of today would run close to £400 million. A further amount, something near £1,600,000, was settled directly for her benefit. With the money came the houses. She inherited Brook House, her grandfather's vast mansion overlooking Hyde Park, and through her father, she stood to inherit Broadlands, the graceful house in Hampshire that the Ashley family had held for generations.
She had been handed at 19 almost everything a human being can be handed. A skilled working man of that year might hope to earn something under £200 across the whole of a year of labor. Edwina's trust threw off more than that in interest before she had finished her breakfast.
She was 19 years old. She had already buried her mother and now her grandfather. What she had not been handed was a reason for any of it.
Edwina's childhood had been a strange compound of splendor and neglect. Her mother, Maud, Ernest Cassel's only surviving child, died when Edwina was 9 years old, and the loss cut something loose in the girl that was never afterwards quite fastened. Her father, Wilfrid Ashley, a Conservative member of Parliament, married again, and Edwina's relations with her stepmother were distant and often frozen.
The one steady warmth in her early life came from the old financier himself. Her grandfather doted on the clever, difficult child, drew her into his enormous, silent houses, and made her, in the end, the heir to his empire of money rather than any son or nephew of his own blood.
So she grew up rich beyond ordinary counting and lonely beyond ordinary telling. A girl who could have anything she pointed at and who wanted always something just past the edge of the room. Those who knew her later described the same quality again and again in almost the same words. She was quick, impatient, physically fearless, incapable of sitting still, hungry for a life larger than the one that had been arranged for her. One friend put it more plainly than any biographer has managed since. For Edwina, the friend said, there was always something missing.
In July of 1922, some 8,000 people pressed around a church in Westminster to watch the richest heiress in England marry a comparatively poor young cousin of the king. The newspapers called it the wedding of the year, and for once the newspapers were not exaggerating.
The bridegroom was Lord Louis Mountbatten, known to everyone who loved him as Dickie. He was a great grandson of Queen Victoria, a nephew by marriage of the murdered Tsar of Russia, and a serving officer in the Royal Navy with a jawline that photographed like a recruiting poster. He had 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 that even her fortune could not.
They had met at a ball in London, circled one another through a season of parties, and become engaged while Mountbatten was away touring India as part of the household of the Prince of Wales. She had in effect followed the empire out to its jewel to secure him. It was a fitting beginning for a marriage that would end a quarter of a century later in the very same country.
The ceremony at St. Margaret's Westminster was less a wedding than a state occasion. Queen Mary was there, and the aged Queen Alexandra, widow of the very King Cassel had served, and the Prince of Wales himself, the future King Edward VIII, stood beside the groom as best man. The crowds outside were so dense that mounted police were needed to open a path to the doors.
Then the golden couple went out to look at the world, and the world came out to look at them. Their honeymoon lasted the better part of 6 months. They toured Europe, then crossed the Atlantic and moved across the United States as though they were royalty in exile. They were received at the White House by President Warren Harding. They went on to Hollywood, still raw and new and half invented, and were taken up by its first great stars. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, the reigning king and queen of the young film industry, entertained them. Charlie Chaplin, at the very height of his fame, made a short comic film with the young couple purely for their own amusement.
For a brief and dazzling season, the two of them were among the most photographed people in the world. It was celebrity of a wholly modern kind, the fame that attaches itself not to what a person has done, but simply to what a person is. And Edwina, who had grown up watched and judged and never quite loved, took to it with an ease that should perhaps have troubled those who knew her best.
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, and each of them knew it exactly. That is a firm enough foundation for an alliance of interests. It is a far shakier one for a lifelong love affair.
Within a few years, Edwina had discovered that the money was not enough. It was not nearly enough. It never would be.
The scale of the Mountbatten life in the 1920s and 30s is difficult to hold steadily in the mind. In London there was Brook House, and there Edwina did what only the very rich even imagine doing. She had a great part of the old mansion pulled down and rebuilt, so that she and Dickie might live in an enormous penthouse stacked at the top of it. A home in the sky of some 30 rooms, with a private lift rising to it, a thing so novel and so lavish that it drew comment across the whole of society.
In the country there was Adsdean, a rambling leased house in Sussex where the couple kept horses and dogs and polo ponies and a small permanent house party of the fashionable and the titled. Behind it all stood Broadlands in Hampshire, the family seat waiting its turn. And around the edges of the year ran the whole gilded circuit of their class. The season in London, the yachts on the Riviera, the shooting in Scotland, the winters chasing the sun.
Through the 1930s, Edwina and her husband enjoyed a combined income before tax of something like £113,000 a year. Even after the taxman had taken his share, they were left with around £60,000 a year to spend as they pleased. Set that beside the world outside their gates. A laborer might keep a wife and children on £2 or £3 a week. A good living-in servant was glad of £50 a year and her board. The Mountbattens spent more on flowers and motorcars and traveling than whole streets earned between them.
They belonged to a set that measured its wealth not by what it owned, but by what it could afford, never once to think about, and it bored her. That is the secret at the center of the young Edwina. The parties, the couture from Paris, the endless migration between London and the Riviera, and the great country houses, the whole shining machine of the smart set left her hollow. She was too clever by half for the life she had been handed, and too rich to be forced into any other.
She traveled compulsively, sometimes vanishing for months on end, to the coast of Africa, to the islands of the South Pacific, to wherever was furthest and strangest and least like a drawing room, as though motion itself might fill the space that stillness always opened.
She was, by the ordinary reckoning, a careless mother, leaving her two daughters largely to nurses and boarding schools while she chased the horizon. Patricia had been born in 1924, Pamela in 1929, and both grew up knowing their mother more as a glamorous, intermittent visitation than as a constant presence. It was the exact pattern of her own childhood handed down intact.
By every measure the world knew how to apply, Edwina Mountbatten had already won the whole game before she was 30. And still she woke again and again in the most beautiful rooms in England with the old familiar ache that no amount of any of it could reach. She had everything and something was always missing.
Within a decade of the wedding of the year, the passion had drained out of the marriage, and in its place, the Mountbattens built something colder, stranger, and far more modern than anything they had promised at the altar. They made, in effect, a private treaty. They agreed to stop pretending.
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. And Edwina was young and beautiful and rich and permanently dangerously bored. The distance did what distance does. She began to take lovers, and she did not take them quietly.
Her name was linked first in the drawing rooms and eventually in the courts with a long procession of men. There was the American sportsman known as Laddie Sanford. There was the newspaper executive Mike Wardell. There was the soldier called Bunny Phillips, who became for years a near permanent presence at her side, and even in the strange manner of that world, something close to a friend of the whole family. And there were others whose names have only half survived, and others still whose names have not survived at all.
Her daughter Pamela decades afterwards told a story that has become famous precisely because it captures the sheer scale of it without a flicker of shame. Returning home one afternoon, Edwina was met by a servant who reported on the state of the house, and the report ran like a roll call of the waiting. One gentleman, he said, was in the drawing room. Another was in the library. A third was in the boudoir. A fourth was in the anteroom, and there was a fifth, the servant added, whom he simply did not know what to do with.
Mountbatten was not blameless in any of this, and never pretended that he was. After a painful stretch in the early 1930s, when a divorce case involving another couple dragged Edwina's name into open court as the woman who had come between them, the two of them arrived at a settled understanding. According to his biographer Andrew Lownie, they simply agreed between themselves to have an open marriage in which Edwina would go on loyally supporting her husband's career while both of them sought their pleasures elsewhere and asked no awkward questions of the other.
Mountbatten himself carried on a long attachment to a French woman, Yola Letellier, that ran through the greater part of his life. He summed the whole arrangement up in later years with a sailor's bluntness that has outlived almost everything else he ever said. "Edwina and I," he remarked, "spent all our married lives getting into other people's beds."
It sounds, put like that, almost jaunty. But there was a cost hidden inside the freedom, and Edwina was the one who paid it. An open marriage removed the walls, and the walls, for all their weight, had at least given the restlessness something to push against. Now there was nothing to push against at all. She could have any man she chose, and she chose a great many, and still the ache did not lift for longer than an evening.
The affairs were never the disease. They were only the symptom, the same fevered search for a missing thing that had driven her round 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 a panic. It named no one. It did not have to. Everyone who mattered filled in the blank in the same instant.
The paper was called The People, and the item it ran some seven weeks before the case it would provoke was a small masterpiece of poisonous suggestion. It spoke of a scandal, it said, that had shaken society to its very depths. It described a woman of great wealth and the very highest connections whose association with, in the language of that day, a colored man had become so open that the two of them were the talk of the West End.
It printed no name, and it did not need to print one, because the whole of fashionable London supplied the same name in the same breath. And the name it supplied was Edwina Mountbatten. The man the rumor attached to her was one of the most famous performers alive, the American singer and actor Paul Robeson, whose deep voice and towering presence had made him a sensation on the London stage.
It was an electric pairing and, as it happens, an almost certainly false one. Robeson's wife, Essie, when the gossip reached her, answered it with a dry precision that ought to have ended the whole matter on the spot. It was incredible, she said, that people should be linking her husband's name with that of a famous titled English woman, since that lady was just about the one person in England the Robesons did not know.
It was a perfect reply, and it made no difference at all, because the machinery of scandal once started does not stop for the truth.
In the England of 1932, the suggestion that a great lady had taken a black lover was regarded in the circles that ran the country as a scandal of a wholly different and graver order than a merely white affair would have been. It touched all of the era's deepest and ugliest anxieties at once about race, about empire, about the purity of the very bloodlines that were supposed to justify aristocratic rule in the first place. That the woman accused should be one married into the royal family itself made it not a private embarrassment, but a matter, in the palace's frightened eyes, of the standing of the crown.
When King George V grasped what had been printed, he did not counsel discretion or patience or letting the thing die of its own accord. He ordered the Mountbattens home from abroad, and he ordered them to sue. The honor of the throne, he had decided, was to be defended in the full glare of open court.
So it was that on a July morning in 1932, the case came before the Lord Chief Justice himself, and the court was opened at the unheard-of hour of 9 in the morning, so great was the crush of people fighting to hear it. Edwina's counsel was Norman Birkett, the finest advocate of his generation, and he rose and gave the article exactly the name the palace needed the world to hear. It was, he told the court, not too much to say the most monstrous and most atrocious lie of which he had ever heard in his life.
Both Edwina and her husband went into the witness box and swore on oath that there was not a word of truth in any of it. The newspaper, confronted by two members of the royal circle testifying under oath and left with no evidence worth the name to set against them, collapsed completely. Through its own counsel, it produced a groveling apology and withdrew every syllable.
Edwina won, and won totally. She was awarded her full costs, and in a fine and calculated aristocratic gesture, declined to take any damages at all, as though money were beneath the whole squalid business, and she needed only to be believed.
That evening, victorious and publicly cleared, the Mountbattens went out to celebrate at the Café de Paris. And the very next day, they were summoned to lunch at Buckingham Palace by the king and queen, whose honor they had just defended in the newspapers.
And yet the victory had a hollow center, and Edwina knew it better than anyone. The case had been won on the wrong man. The rumor had pointed at Paul Robeson, and Paul Robeson she had almost certainly never so much as met. But the deeper suggestion, buried under the lie, that Edwina Mountbatten was a woman of enormous appetite, who did precisely as she pleased, and let the world talk itself hoarse, was not a lie at all.
The rumor had named the wrong man, but there had been a man, and he did not sing in a concert hall. He played in the small hours in the private rooms of the very rich, and his name was Leslie Hutchinson, though everyone who mattered called him Hutch.
Hutchinson was a cabaret pianist and singer from the West Indies by way of the nightclubs of Paris and then of London. In the 1920s and 30s, he was one of the most sought-after entertainers in the country. He had a voice like warm smoke, immaculate evening dress, matinee idol looks, and a way of holding a room that made duchesses forget themselves and their husbands.
He performed for the smartest set in London, at the grandest houses and the most exclusive clubs, and among the many women who are said to have lost their heads over him, the persistent and well-sourced whisper has always placed Edwina Mountbatten near the front. This is not something any court ever established, and it should be spoken of plainly as what it is, the most durable single piece of gossip in the whole of her story rather than a proven fact. But it has lasted the better part of a century, and it has lasted because the people who actually moved in that world believed it and repeated it and were there.
The details that survive are exactly the kind that gossip cherishes and history can never quite pin down. A producer who was present recalled watching Edwina at a great party interrupt Hutch as he sat playing, lean down over him and kiss the back of his neck, and then lead him by the hand through the closed doors of the dining room while the party pretended not to see. She was said to have showered him with gifts of a value that told their own story without a word being spoken. A jeweled gold cigarette case, a gold ring with her own coat of arms engraved on the inside, where none but he would ever find it, a watch of gold and diamonds.
Whatever the exact truth of it, the shape of the affair fits everything else that is known of her beyond dispute. Here was a woman who took what she wanted, who was drawn to talent and to danger in the same motion, and who cared very little what the drawing rooms whispered as she passed.
And there was a further edge to it that the age felt keenly, and that she seems not to have cared about at all. The whole convulsion of the lie case, the panic of a king, had turned on the horror in that society of a titled English woman crossing the color line. If the gossip about Hutch was true, then Edwina had done in private very much the thing the newspaper had accused her of in public, and had done it without a tremor of the fear that had gripped the palace.
And there is a harder truth folded inside that one, which is that Hutch himself paid a price for the world's fascination that Edwina never had to pay. For all his fame, he remained a black man in a white society that would applaud him warmly from the far side of the footlights, and then freeze him out the moment he stepped over an invisible line. Edwina risked her reputation in the affair, and won it back in a single morning in court. Hutch, if the affair was real, risked a great deal more than that, in an age that could destroy a man of his color on nothing more than a rumor.
Through the 1930s, Edwina moved from man to man and from continent to continent with a hunger that never once managed to feed itself. She was, by the ordinary reckoning of her class and her time, having the very time of her life, and she was, by the private testimony of the friends who loved her, among the unhappiest women any of them knew. The affairs, the jewels, the sudden flights to the far ends of the earth. All of it was the same search, wearing different clothes, and the search kept coming home empty.
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 at last a use.
As the war came on, she threw herself into the work of the St John Ambulance Brigade, the great volunteer body that provided first aid and nursing across the country. And she did not do it in the manner of a titled patroness lending her name to a sheet of headed paper. She did the work itself with her own hands and her own back.
In November of 1939, she became county president for London. By 1942, she had risen to superintendent-in-chief of the entire brigade, a post she would hold for the remaining 18 years of her life, and into which she poured an energy that left people half her age gasping to keep up.
During the Blitz, she went wherever the bombs had been. She helped to build the very schemes that put first aid posts and rest centers and shelter provision across the shattered boroughs of a burning city, so that when a street came down in the night, there was somewhere for the survivors to be taken and someone trained to meet them. She inspected divisions the length and breadth of Britain, driving herself from town to town through the blackout, learning the names, remembering the details, demanding that the volunteers be properly trained and properly equipped and properly led.
The woman who had once vanished for months to the South Seas because she was bored now worked days that would have felled a cabinet minister. And for the first time in the whole record of her life, the accounts of her stopped speaking of restlessness. They begin instead to speak of purpose.
Edwina's trouble had never been idleness of the common kind, the mere laziness of the spoiled. Her trouble was that she was a person of real ability and real physical courage with absolutely nothing to spend either upon. She was fearless, which in a socialite is only a talent for dangerous holidays, but which in a wartime relief worker walking into a bombed street is very close to heroism. She was clever, impatient, and impossible to satisfy, which in a society hostess is a recipe for private misery, but which, in an administrator racing the clock to save lives, is exactly the temperament the moment demands.
The war did not change Edwina's nature. It simply, at long last, handed her a task large enough and hard enough to be worthy of the person she had always secretly been.
The honors followed, though they were plainly not the point of anything she did. She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1943, and she deflected the distinction at once onto the volunteers themselves, saying that it was a recognition of the wonderful contribution the brigade had made, and particularly of what it had done during the war.
In the last year of the war, Edwina flew into the wreckage of Japan's collapsing empire to bring the dying home. What she saw there finished the making of her.
As the long war against Japan ground toward its end in 1945, the Allies faced a grim and enormous problem right across Southeast Asia. Scattered through the jungles and strung along the railways of the conquered territories were the prisoner of war camps. In them were tens of thousands of men who had spent years in captivity, starved, beaten, and worked down to skeletons, dying now faster than ever. As the Japanese grip crumbled and the guards began to melt away, someone had to find them, reach them, and get them out before they died where they lay in the mud. Edwina, by now a proven administrator with the rank and the iron will to cut clean through military delay, made it her personal work.
In the great operation to recover the prisoners of the Far East, something like 90,000 men were brought out of captivity from around 230 separate camps scattered across a region 3,000 miles wide. Edwina herself flew something in the order of 33,000 miles in the course of it, 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, and to make certain with her own voice that the help she had ordered was actually reaching them.
What she found in those camps marked her for the rest of her days. She had grown up in a world engineered from the ground up to keep suffering safely out of sight. Now she walked among men reduced to bone and fever and a despair beyond speech along railways where prisoners and conscripted local laborers had died in numbers that beggared the imagination. On one notorious stretch of line alone, hacked through the jungle at the cost of a life for every few yards of track, prisoners had died in their hundreds, and the forced laborers of the region in their tens of thousands.
She did not flinch from any of it, and she did not hand it down to a subordinate to spare herself. She went in herself again and again into the stink and the flies and the dying. And she used every last ounce of her rank and her ferocity to make the relief move faster.
Those who traveled with her through those weeks watched something harden and deepen in her at one and the same time. She did not weep, and she did not turn her face away. But she came out of the camps a graver woman than she had gone into them. Someone who had now seen with her own eyes the very bottom of what human beings will do to one another when the restraints are taken off.
On the first day of 1946, she was made a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and a Dame Grand Cross of the Ancient Order of St John. But once again, the decorations were the smallest part of what she had won. Word traveled through the services and through Whitehall and up at last into the palace that Lady Mountbatten was not merely a great lady playing at charity between parties. She was a relief worker of the very first rank. Tireless, fearless, and above all effective.
That reputation was about to become the single most important fact of her life. For her husband, Lord Louis Mountbatten, had risen through the war to the very summit of Allied command in Southeast Asia, and a still greater appointment was now being pressed upon him. He was to go to India and bring 300 years of British rule there to an end. And he would not go alone.
In the spring of 1947, the Mountbattens were sent to India to end an empire, and they were given, in effect, some 15 months in which to do it. It was one of the largest and most dangerous tasks any two human beings had ever been handed. And the danger in it was not to them. It was to hundreds of millions of others.
The India the Mountbattens flew into was a country holding its breath before a catastrophe. After decades of struggle, led by figures the whole world now knew, British rule was finally and unmistakably ending, and the only questions left were how and how fast and at what price paid in blood. The great and terrible fear was that the subcontinent would tear itself apart along the line between its Hindu majority and its large Muslim minority.
The Indian National Congress, with Jawaharlal Nehru and the saintly figure of Gandhi at its head, dreamed of a single united India. The Muslim League, under the cold, brilliant lawyer Muhammad Ali Jinnah, demanded a separate homeland for the Muslims of the subcontinent, to be called Pakistan. Between those two visions, there seemed no bridge. And everyone who understood the country feared that the difference would be settled not in any council chamber, but in the streets and the fields with knives and fire.
Into this, London sent Lord Louis Mountbatten as the last viceroy, with plain orders to get Britain out and to do it quickly. And at his side went Edwina, the last vicereine India would ever have.
They took up residence in the very seat of imperial power, the Viceroy's House in New Delhi, a palace so vast that it strains belief even in photographs. Designed by the architect Edwin Lutyens to be the grandest single expression of British dominion anywhere on earth, it contained around 340 rooms and required a small standing army of servants and gardeners to keep it running. It was, in its cold pink stone way, the perfect stage for the end of the story. 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 very first, Edwina threw herself into India exactly as she had thrown herself into the Blitz and the camps, which is to say wholly and with no regard whatever for her own comfort or safety. She toured hospitals and welfare centers. She met the Indian leaders and the Indian women and the poor of the teeming cities. She used her enormous position not to preside from a distance but to work at close range. And the Indians noticed it and marked her out because of it.
Here was no ordinary vicereine, no remote figure in a tiara waiting out the final months of the Raj in air-conditioned rooms. Here was a woman who came into the wards herself, who asked hard and specific questions, and remembered the answers she was given, who plainly and genuinely cared about the country she had been sent to leave.
India in that year held something close to 400 million people, very nearly one in every five human beings then alive on the earth, and the whole machinery of British administration that had ruled them was being taken to pieces at speed. Even as the tension between the communities tightened by the day, every hospital she walked through was short of staff, every welfare scheme short of money, every problem she met multiplied by numbers that dwarfed anything even the war had shown her. She threw herself at all of it regardless, with the same flat refusal to be daunted that had carried her through the camps of the Far East.
Mountbatten, judging that any delay would only mean a greater harvest of killing in the end, took the fateful decision to bring the date for the transfer of power forward. The whole vast machinery of ending an empire and dividing a subcontinent between two new nations had to be driven through in a matter of weeks rather than the years everyone had assumed. Borders that would decide the fate of tens of millions were to be drawn in haste by a man who had barely set foot in the country, working against an impossible deadline with maps and out-of-date census returns.
And in the very middle of these last frantic and sleepless months, amid the maps and the midnight meetings and the mounting sense of dread, something wholly unexpected was quietly beginning to happen to Edwina Mountbatten. 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. A widower, cultured and lonely and magnetic, who had spent long years of his life in British prisons for the single crime of wanting his own country free. He looked at the vicereine, and the vicereine looked back at him, and each of them saw, for the first time in a very long and disappointing while, a person who understood them completely.
His name was Jawaharlal Nehru. He was about to become the first prime minister of a free India, and he was to be the last and by some measures the greatest love of Edwina's life.
Nehru was in 1947 standing on the edge of the greatest achievement of his life and profoundly, achingly alone within it. He had been born to wealth and privilege himself, the son of a grand Indian lawyer, and had been sent to England to be educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, so that he moved through English drawing rooms and English ideas with perfect ease, even as he devoted his life to breaking England's hold on his country. He was cultured, bookish, and steeped in both the poetry of the West and the philosophy of the East. He was also a widower, his wife long since dead, his years scarred by long stretches inside British jails, a man of immense public magnetism and deep private solitude.
In Edwina he found at last an equal, a woman as quick as he was, as tireless, as unimpressed by convention, who had walked through the same kind of human wreckage he had walked through and had not once looked away from it. And in Nehru, Edwina found the thing she had been searching for since she was a lonely, motherless girl in her grandfather's silent houses. She found a man who valued her not for her fortune, nor her rank, nor her fading beauty, but for her mind.
For a woman who had been valued the whole of her life for the wrong things, for her money, her name, her looks, and her scandals, it was a revelation close to a rebirth. Men had wanted her fortune, and men had wanted her body, and a great many of them had wanted only the reflected glamour of being seen at her side. Here at last was a man of the very first rank, who plainly wanted none of those things, who had a whole nation to build, and a place in history already assured to him, and who valued her simply and completely for the quickness of her mind and the largeness of her heart.
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 from those first weeks, with Nehru seated cross-legged on the ground beside Edwina where she sat on a low sofa, caught something that the whole of Delhi was already whispering about behind its hands, an ease between them that had plainly traveled well past mere friendship. And the letters, hundreds upon hundreds of them, began to flow and did not stop for the rest of her life.
Edwina herself described the thing between them in words that have survived. It was a strange relationship, she wrote, most of it spiritual, which existed between the two of them. Nehru brought her, she felt, a great deal more than mere understanding. He brought her the rare and reviving experience of being respected entirely and only for her intelligence.
And here the story arrives at the question that 70 years have not settled, and that this account will not pretend to settle either, because the only honest answer is that no one now living truly knows. Were they lovers in the fullest sense of the word? Or was theirs the rarer and stranger thing, a passion of the mind and the spirit that never once crossed over into the body?
The people who were best placed to know have never agreed among themselves. Edwina's own authorized biographer judged that the relationship was purer than a physical one could have been, and that Nehru respected Mountbatten far too deeply to have betrayed that trust. Her daughter, Lady Pamela, who was actually there in the house, called it plainly platonic and described the three of them, her mother, her father, and Nehru, as a happy threesome, a form of love, she said, though not a physical one. Others have leaned hard the other way. One biographer inclined firmly to think them lovers, in fact, citing an account that Mountbatten himself knew it perfectly well, and was even proud of the fact. A close woman friend of Edwina's, pressed directly on the question, would only say that she really did not know about the physical side of the affair, but that if forced to guess, she would think probably yes.
What is not in any doubt at all, because it survives in his own hand, is the extraordinary part played through all of this by the husband. Far from being the wronged and raging party, Mountbatten blessed the whole thing outright. After a health scare of Edwina's, she showed him the letters from Nehru, and his written reply to her is one of the most remarkable documents of the entire affair. He knew, he told her, and had always understood the very special relationship that existed between Jawaharlal and herself, and he was able to bear it. He wrote, by the remarkably lucky fact that among his many defects God had chosen not to add jealousy. That he told her plainly was the very reason he had always made their visits to each other easy.
Here was a husband setting it down in ink, deliberately clearing the path to his own wife's great love. It is this, far more than the finally unanswerable question of what did or did not happen behind any closed door, that makes the whole story so strange and so deeply human. Three extraordinary people standing together at the exact hinge of history worked out privately among themselves a way to hold a thing that would have shattered lesser people. And they did it not with lies and denial, but with a kind of terrible clear-eyed honesty.
But this private drama was unfolding against a public one of almost unimaginable scale, and the public one was now about to explode across the whole of the subcontinent.
The line drawn across India in August of 1947 set some 15 million people walking in terror along the roads and left behind it, by the higher estimates, a million or more of them dead. It was one of the largest and most violent movements of human beings in all of recorded history, and Edwina Mountbatten walked directly into the center of it.
When British power was formally handed over and the subcontinent was split into the two new nations of India and Pakistan, the border drawn in haste by a lawyer who scarcely knew the ground cut straight through provinces where Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs had lived side by side for centuries. In an instant, millions of people found themselves on what had suddenly become the wrong side of a line. And a vast, terrified migration began.
Hindus and Sikhs fleeing one way, Muslims the other. Whole populations crossing on the roads at once. And as they moved, the killing began in earnest. 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 miles long were fallen upon and slaughtered on the open road.
The exact number of the dead has never been fixed and never will be, but the estimates run from several hundred thousand up into the millions, and the number driven from their homes reaches toward 15 million human souls. It was the bloody afterbirth of two new nations. And it happened on the Mountbattens' watch.
This was the catastrophe into which Edwina threw herself without hesitation. And it is here, in the very worst hours the region had ever known, that she rose to the full height of the person she had spent her whole life slowly becoming.
She took charge of the relief effort, leading the body that pulled together and directed the voluntary organizations struggling to cope with a disaster on a scale that no relief system anywhere on earth had ever been built to meet. She organized mass vaccination against the cholera that swept through the packed and filthy refugee camps. She fought day after day for clean water, for sanitation, for food and shelter, for people who had lost everything and everyone they had. And she did it as she had always done it, from the front and not the rear. She went into the refugee camps in person, into the overwhelmed hospitals and the makeshift shelters where the survivors of the massacres lay in their thousands. And she drove herself so hard that those around her began to fear openly for her health.
The Indians did not forget it, and they have not forgotten it since. In a moment when British rule was ending in blood and bitterness, when the departing imperial power might so easily have been remembered only for the catastrophe of a partition it had rushed through, here instead 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. She won in those months a respect and even a love among ordinary Indians and their leaders that no ceremony and no amount of money could ever have purchased.
Her relief work through the partition is, by any fair reckoning, the finest thing she ever did in her life, the clear moral summit of an existence that had known a great deal more glamour than goodness.
The particular horrors of those months were of a kind that numbers alone can never quite carry. Whole trainloads of refugees were stopped and slaughtered in open country between one station and the next, so that trains pulled in at their platforms carrying nothing but the dead, and sometimes a message daubed in blood on the side of a carriage for the other community to read. Wells were poisoned and villages burned and families cut down within sight of the very borders they had walked for weeks to reach. Into camps built to hold a few thousand there poured hundreds of thousands. And behind the refugees came the diseases that always follow the desperate and the crowded, cholera and dysentery and the slow, patient killer of simple starvation.
This was the daily material of Edwina's work now. Not the ceremonial suffering of a royal visit, but the real and unbearable thing hour upon hour, and she met it without illusion and without retreat, doing the cold arithmetic of clean water, and vaccine, and floor space, by which, in a catastrophe, it is decided who will live and who will not.
Set the two Edwinas down side by side one last time, because the distance between them is the entire meaning of her story. There was the heiress of the 1930s, worth a fortune approaching 400 million pounds in today's money, drifting between penthouses and yachts and lovers, chasing a feeling she could never name and never keep. And there was this other woman in the dust and the cholera and the grief of the partition camps in 1947, spending herself without measure or limit for people who had nothing at all and could give her nothing back but their remembrance.
It had taken a fortune, a hollow marriage, a world war, and the collapse of the greatest empire on earth to bring the second woman out of the first. But she was fully out now, and she was unmistakable.
When the Mountbattens finally left India in the summer of 1948, their impossible task complete and two new nations standing where one empire had been, Edwina left a piece of herself behind in the country. She left the work that had given her whole life its meaning. And she left Nehru, the man who had given her heart its long-delayed answer. She would spend the 12 years that still remained to her trying, across thousands of miles of sea and land and in thousands of letters, to keep her grip on both of them at once.
For 12 years after she left India, the two of them kept the thing between them alive in the only way that remained open to them, in ink. The letters crossed the world in both directions month after month and year after year. A private correspondence between the widowed prime minister of a vast new nation and the aging countess of a dying empire. And it lasted faithfully right up to the very end of her life.
Nehru now carried on his shoulders the whole staggering weight of governing a subcontinent of some hundreds of millions of people, newly free and desperately poor and pulling in a dozen directions at once. Edwina was back in England, taking up her public duties again, still superintendent-in-chief of the St John Ambulance Brigade, still traveling the country and the world, still working herself to the bone. They could not simply be together, however much both of them plainly wished it. So they wrote, and by every surviving account, the letters became the sustaining thread running through both their lives. An unbroken conversation carried on quietly above the heads of two great nations and across half the globe.
And when they could contrive to meet, they met. Here once more the strange and generous figure of the husband appears in the tale. 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, making the visits easy for them, exactly as he had promised her in writing that he always would.
Through the whole of the 1950s, Edwina did not slow her pace, though her body had begun, quietly, and then less quietly, to send up its warnings. From around 1956, she suffered from angina, the gripping pain of a heart starting to fail. In 1958, she suffered a small stroke, which for a time stiffened one whole side of her face. And later in that same year, she was laid low by a severe attack of chickenpox caught from a grandchild.
The warnings were plain enough for anyone who cared to read them. Edwina did not care to read them. She had spent far too much of her early life bored and idle and searching to spend its last years sitting still and minding her heart.
There is something almost defiant in the way she drove herself onward through those final years, and it goes to the very core of who she had at last become. The young Edwina had feared nothing in the world except stillness. The old Edwina feared it no less. To stop working now, to sit quietly in a beautiful room and nurse her failing heart, would have been to hand back the one thing that had ever truly filled the empty place inside her. She had found her purpose far too late in life, and had paid far too much to reach it, to set it down again merely because her body was beginning to give way beneath her.
The correspondence itself has become, in the years since, a kind of contested treasure, precisely because so little of its most private part has ever been allowed into the light. What has surfaced shows two people talking as complete equals across every subject under the sun. Politics and books and loneliness and the running of whole nations. The letters of a prime minister who had at last found the one person he could be wholly himself with, and of a countess who had found the one man who wanted nothing from her but herself.
Whatever passed between them in the flesh, and the question will not be settled in this account, the letters record something rarer than an affair and a great deal harder to name. A meeting of two solitary and remarkable minds that neither distance nor duty nor the watching eyes of two nations could ever manage to break. For 12 years it was conducted almost entirely on paper. And paper, in the end, is where it survived.
In November of 1959, Nehru came again to London, and Edwina was there among those who gathered to mark his 70th birthday. It was, though neither of them can have allowed themselves to know it, very near the end of everything. Within a few short months, she would be gone, and the correspondence that had carried the two of them across a decade and half a world would fall silent for good.
She died as she had lived those last 20 years, far from home, in harness, at work to the very end. In February of 1960, on an inspection tour for the St John Ambulance Brigade, Edwina Mountbatten traveled to North Borneo on the far side of the world from everything she had been born to, 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 21st of February, dead in her bed at 58 years old. She had gone in her sleep, her worn-out heart finally giving way after years of warnings she had steadfastly refused to heed. And all around her, scattered across the bedclothes where they had fallen from her hands as she drifted off, 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, it seems, in the last waking hours of her life.
Of all the images that her long and glittering existence threw up, the wedding of the year, the palaces, the courtrooms, the jungle camps, this is the one that lingers longest in the mind. The richest heiress in England, dying alone in a jungle town with the letters of an Indian prime minister strewn like fallen leaves across her bed.
What followed was every bit as unusual as the woman it honored. Edwina had asked to be buried at sea, and her wish was carried out to the letter. 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 himself, Geoffrey Fisher, speaking the words of the committal, she was given to the deep.
It was a naval farewell for the wife of a great Admiral of the Fleet, solemn and cold and thoroughly English, the kind of ending her husband's world understood. And then into that gray and orderly English scene came the most extraordinary gesture of the entire story, and it came from India.
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 at last beneath the waves, the Indian frigate stood by in the Channel, and onto the water where she had gone down, it cast a wreath of marigolds, the very flowers of Indian mourning and Indian honor.
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. There is no more eloquent proof anywhere of what she had come to mean, and of what she and Nehru had truly been to one another, than those bright marigolds turning on the cold gray swell of the English Channel.
For a moment in that gray water, two worlds that had spent three centuries locked in the unequal grip of ruler and ruled stood together as something close to equals, an English frigate and an Indian one, come out onto the same sea to bury the same woman. It was a scene that no protocol had ever imagined and that no official on either side would have dared to arrange. And it came to pass only because one grieving man in Delhi had willed it into being from half a world away.
Whatever the historians would later decide about the exact temperature of the love between Edwina and Nehru, the wreath of marigolds on the Channel settled, once and for all and past any further argument, the only question about it that finally mattered, which was whether the thing had been real.
Even in death, she drew the perfect line beneath her own character, though it fell to another to speak it. When the news of her death reached the royal family, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who had known Edwina the whole of her life, and had by no means always approved of the way she lived it, offered a verdict that was half exasperation and half admiration, and entirely true. "Dear Edwina," she said, "she always liked to make a splash."
It was, in its dry way, the truest single thing that anyone said of her. She had made a splash at her wedding and again in the courtrooms and again in the camps and again in the great forbidden friendship of her later years. And now she had made one final splash, quite literally sliding into the sea off Portsmouth with an Indian warship standing solemn guard and marigolds scattering across the water above her.
The letters, in a sense, went down with the story, but they did not go out of it. For the most intimate part of the correspondence between Edwina and Jawaharlal Nehru did not perish with her. It survived her death, and it was locked away, and the question of what precisely it contained passed clean out of the reach of the living and into the keeping of history itself. She had carried the secret with her to the very edge of her life, reading it over one last time in a jungle bungalow on her final night on earth. And then she took it, exactly as the beginning of this story promised she would, down with her into the sea.
When Edwina's affairs were finally settled, her personal estate was valued at something close to £600,000, and against it, the taxmen 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 at the very last cut cleanly and almost exactly in half by the country that had spent 40 years watching her spend it.
The houses told the very same story of an age passing out of the world. Brook House, the great mansion above Hyde Park, belonged already to a vanished order and would not long survive her. But Broadlands endured and endures to this day, the graceful Hampshire house passing quietly down through her family, so that one unbroken thread of the old grandeur runs on into the present. It was at Broadlands, some 20 years after Edwina's death, that a young Prince of Wales would bring his own new bride, another restless and unhappy woman, married into a life that would never quite fit her, for the first nights of a honeymoon.
But the truest monument Edwina left behind her was not a house, and it was not a sum of money. It was a reputation, hard-won and desperately late, as one of the great relief workers of her century, and it lived on in the St John Ambulance Brigade she had served for 18 years, and in the memory of the 90,000 men she had helped bring home out of the camps, and of the countless refugees she had fought for in the dust of the partition.
And there was one more thing she left. The strangest and the most enduring of all of them. She left the letters. The most private part of the long correspondence between Edwina and Jawaharlal Nehru was never published, never opened to the eyes of the world. It passed into private keeping in India, held under lock and key, and there by every account it remains to this day. Seventy years on from her death, the central question of her whole life sits exactly where she left it, sealed and silent.
Consider the whole long arc of her one final time. She was born to a fortune worth close to £400 million in the money of today and could not find in the whole of it a single thing that made her happy for longer than an evening. She married a cousin of the king before 8,000 onlookers and then turned the marriage into a cold and modern truce. She was chased through the courts and the gossip columns and cleared by a frightened king's own command of a scandal that had pointed at the wrong man while hiding a truer one. And then when a war and the end of an empire finally handed her something worthy of her whole enormous strength, she poured herself out without stint in the camps of the Far East and the ruins of the partition, and lost her heart at last and for good to the widowed prime minister of the very country her own had so long ruled.
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, in the reckoning, 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 30 restless years learning the single lesson her money could never teach her. That freedom bought with a fortune is not at all the same thing as a life worth the living. And she learned it in the end, not in a palace, but in a refugee camp, and she sealed it away in letters that she carried across the world to a jungle bungalow at the edge of everything.
And so she went down into the sea off Portsmouth on a gray February morning with an Indian warship standing guard and marigolds scattering on the waves above her, a countess buried like a common sailor, mourned by a nation that had once been her own country's possession. 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.