She died as she had lived her final years—far from home, in harness, working to the end. In February 1960, Edwina Mountbatten, the Countess Mountbatten of Burma, traveled to North Borneo on an inspection tour for the St. John Ambulance Brigade. She went to sleep one night in a bungalow at the edge of the jungle and never woke again.
She was 58. Around her, slipped from her hands in the night, lay a scattering of letters. Every one had been written by Jawaharlal Nehru, the prime minister of India. Her life had begun with a fortune so vast it defied ordinary reckoning.
When her grandfather, 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 nineteen. Cassel had arrived in England from Germany as a teenager with, by legend, little more than a bag of clothes and a violin. Within a single lifetime he had made himself the private financier of Edward VII, his money flowing quietly into railways, mines, steelworks, and armaments across the world. Edwina inherited a trust valued at around seven and a half million pounds—close to four hundred million in today’s money—along with the houses that came with it: Brook House overlooking Hyde Park, and through her father, the Hampshire estate of Broadlands.
The girl at the center of it all had done nothing to earn a penny beyond being loved by a lonely old man. Her childhood had been a strange compound of splendor and neglect. Her mother died when Edwina was nine, and her father, a cool and conventional member of Parliament, remarried into a distant, often frozen relationship. The one steady warmth came from Cassel himself, who doted on the clever, difficult child and made her his heir.
Those who knew her described the same quality again and again: she was quick, fearless, incapable of sitting still, hungry for a life larger than the one arranged for her. As one friend put it, 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 cousin of the king.
The groom was Lord Louis Mountbatten—known to everyone who loved him as Dickie—a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, a serving naval officer, and a man of charm, royal blood, and boundless ambition with almost no money of his own. In Edwina he found the thing his lineage could not supply; in him she found a name that opened the last doors even her fortune could not. Queen Mary attended, and the Prince of Wales himself stood as best man. The crowds were so dense that mounted police had to clear a path.
The honeymoon lasted six months—Europe, then the United States, where they were received at the White House and entertained by Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin, who made a short comic film with the young couple purely for their amusement. Beneath the surface, the arithmetic of the marriage was strange from the start. It was Edwina’s fortune that paid for the yachts and villas, and Mountbatten’s blood that gave her rank. Each had brought to the altar precisely what the other lacked.
Within a decade, the passion drained away, replaced by something colder and more modern. They made a private treaty: an open marriage in which Edwina would loyally support her husband’s career while both sought pleasure elsewhere. Mountbatten carried on a long attachment to a French woman; Edwina took lovers openly. Her own daughter later told a story of a servant reporting on the state of the house as a roll call of waiting men—one in the drawing room, another in the library, a third in the boudoir, a fourth in the anteroom, and a fifth he did not know what to do with.
Mountbatten summed it up with a sailor’s bluntness: “Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds. ”
The cost hidden inside the freedom was paid by Edwina alone. An open marriage removed the walls, and the restlessness had nothing left to push against. She could have any man she chose, and she chose a great many, and still the ache did not lift.
In the summer of 1932, a Sunday newspaper printed a story that sent the king of England into a panic. It named no one, but it described a woman of great wealth and the highest connections whose association with a “colored man” had become the talk of the West End. The name everyone supplied was Edwina Mountbatten, and the man was the American singer and actor Paul Robeson. King George V ordered the Mountbattens home and ordered them to sue.
In court, Edwina’s counsel called the article “the most monstrous and most atrocious lie” he had ever heard. Both Mountbattens swore on oath there was not a word of truth in it, and the newspaper collapsed with a groveling apology. She won, declined damages, and lunched at Buckingham Palace the next day. The rumor had named the wrong man.
But there had been a man, and he played piano in the small hours in the private rooms of the very rich. His name was Leslie Hutchinson—Hutch—a cabaret singer from the West Indies who was one of the most sought-after entertainers in the country. The persistent whisper has always placed Edwina near the front of the many women said to have lost their heads over him. The details that survive are the kind gossip cherishes: she was said to have kissed the back of his neck as he played, and led him through closed doors while the party pretended not to see.
She was said to have showered him with gifts—a jeweled gold cigarette case, a gold ring with her coat of arms engraved inside. The exact truth of it has never been established. But the pattern it reveals is the whole point: through the 1930s, Edwina moved from man to man and continent to continent with a hunger that never once managed to feed itself. When the bombs began to fall on London in 1940, the heiress found the one thing her fortune could never buy her: a use.
She threw herself into the work of the St. John Ambulance Brigade, and did the work itself with her own hands. By 1942 she was superintendent-in-chief of the entire brigade, a post she held for the remaining eighteen years of her life. During the Blitz she went wherever the bombs had been, building 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 those years show a woman who has stopped searching because she has finally found the thing that was missing—and it turned out not to be a lover or a jewel, but work that mattered, done for people who could never pay her back a penny. 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 captivity from around 230 camps scattered across a region three thousand miles wide.
Edwina herself flew roughly thirty-three thousand miles in the course of it, walking into camp after camp to see with her own eyes what had been done to the men inside. She came out of those camps a graver woman, marked for the rest of her days by the knowledge of what human beings will do to one another when the restraints are taken off. In the spring of 1947, the Mountbattens were sent to India to end an empire, and were given roughly fifteen months to do it. India was holding its breath before a catastrophe: the Indian National Congress under Jawaharlal Nehru and Gandhi dreamed of a single united India, while the Muslim League under Muhammad Ali Jinnah demanded a separate homeland to be called Pakistan.
Mountbatten, as the last viceroy, took the fateful decision to bring the transfer of power forward, and the whole machinery of ending an empire and dividing a subcontinent had to be driven through in weeks. Edwina threw herself into India as she had thrown herself into the Blitz and the camps. She toured hospitals and welfare centers, came into the wards herself, asked hard questions, and remembered the answers. Among the Indian leaders who moved through the viceroy’s house was one who looked at her and saw her for the first time in years as a woman being truly and fully seen.
Nehru stood on the edge of the greatest achievement of his life, and was profoundly alone within it—a widower, cultured and bookish, scarred by long stretches in British jails. In Edwina he found an equal; in him she found a man who valued her not for her fortune, rank, or beauty, but for her mind. The letters—hundreds upon hundreds of them—began to flow and did not stop for the rest of her life. The question of whether they were lovers has never been settled, and the people best placed to know never agreed.
Edwina’s own daughter called it plainly platonic. Others have leaned the other way. What is not in doubt is that Mountbatten blessed the whole thing outright, writing to Edwina that he knew and had always understood the special relationship, and that among his many defects, God had chosen not 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.
Edwina walked directly into the center of it. She took charge of the relief effort, organized mass vaccination against cholera, fought for clean water and food and shelter, and went into the refugee camps in person. She drove herself so hard that those around her began to fear for her health. It was, by any fair reckoning, the finest thing she ever did in her life.
For twelve years after she left India, she and Nehru kept the thing between them alive in ink. He governed a vast new nation; she worked herself to the bone in England. Whenever he came to London, it was her own husband who quietly saw to it that they should have their time together. From around 1956 she suffered from angina, and in 1958 a small stroke.
She did not slow her pace. In November 1959 Nehru came to London for his seventieth birthday, and Edwina was there. Within a few months, she was gone. Her body was borne out from Portsmouth aboard the frigate Wakeful, and with the Archbishop of Canterbury speaking the words of committal, she was given to the deep.
And then came the most extraordinary gesture of the entire story. Nehru 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 and cast onto the water a wreath of marigolds—the flowers of Indian mourning and Indian honor. A nation her own country had ruled for three centuries had sent a warship halfway around the world to lay flowers upon the sea for an English woman.
Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, offered the truest verdict: “Dear Edwina, she always liked to make a splash. ”
When her affairs were settled, her personal estate was valued at close to £600,000, and death duties took more than half of it. The fortune that had once made her the richest heiress in England was cut cleanly in half by the country that had spent forty years watching her spend it. The most private part of the correspondence between Edwina and Nehru was never published.
It passed into private keeping in India, held under lock and key, where it remains to this day. The central question of her life sits exactly where she left it—sealed and silent. She had everything, and something was always missing. The thing that had been missing turned out not to be a lover, or a jewel, or a journey, but a purpose large enough to spend herself upon.
She found it only when the world she had been born to rule was falling to pieces around her. 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. The sea, which keeps its secrets far better than any archive, has never once given them back.