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.
Where the king went, Cassel's money quietly 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 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. Through her father, she stood to inherit Broadlands, the graceful house in Hampshire that the Ashley family had held for generations.
Set the inheritance against the world it landed in and the scale of it becomes almost obscene. 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, and she was worth the better part of £400 million. It is a very great deal of money to hand a person who has not yet found one solid reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Edwina's childhood had been a strange compound of splendor and neglect. Her mother died when Edwina was 9 years old, and the loss cut something loose in the girl that was never afterwards quite fastened. Her father 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 and made her, in the end, the heir to his empire of money.
So she grew up rich beyond ordinary counting and lonely beyond ordinary telling. 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, 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. 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.
He had charm, royal blood, boundless ambition, and almost no money of his own. 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 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.
The ceremony at St. Margaret's Westminster was less a wedding than a state occasion. Queen Mary was there, and the aged Queen Alexandra, and the Prince of Wales himself 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. It was the marriage of new money to old blood staged as public spectacle.
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 and were taken up by its first great stars. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks entertained them. Charlie Chaplin 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. 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.
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. The Mountbattens spent more on flowers and motorcars and traveling than whole streets earned between them.
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, 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. 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.
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.
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. 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. Edwina was young and beautiful and rich and permanently dangerously bored. She began to take lovers, and she did not take them quietly.
Her name was linked 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.
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. 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 ante-room, 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. 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. 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: "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 a panic. The paper was called The People. It spoke of a scandal 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. 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.
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: 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.
The story carried the charge it did because 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. That the woman accused should be one married into the royal family itself made it a matter of the standing of the crown.
When King George V grasped what had been printed, he ordered the Mountbattens home from abroad and he ordered them to sue. So it was that on a July morning in 1932, the case came before the Lord Chief Justice himself. Edwina's counsel was Norman Birkett, the finest advocate of his generation. 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 collapsed completely. 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.
The case had been won on the wrong man. Paul Robeson she had almost certainly never so much as met. 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.
The rumor had named the wrong man, but there had been a man. 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 performed for the smartest set in London, 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.
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: a jeweled gold cigarette case, a gold ring with her own coat of arms engraved on the inside, a watch of gold and diamonds.
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. The taboo which terrified the monarchy seems simply not to have registered with her as a limit at all.
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. She found at last a use.
As the war came on, she threw herself into the work of the St John Ambulance Brigade. 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.
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. 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 felled a cabinet minister. 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. Her trouble was that she was a person of real ability and real physical courage with absolutely nothing to spend either upon. 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.
She was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1943. Photographs of Edwina in uniform in these years reveal a woman who has stopped searching because she has finally found the thing that was missing.
In the last year of the war, Edwina flew into the wreckage of Japan's collapsing empire to bring the dying home. As the long war against Japan ground toward its end in 1945, 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.
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.
What she found in those camps marked her for the rest of her days. She walked among men reduced to bone and fever and a despair beyond speech. 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.
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.
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. 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.
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. The India they flew into was a country holding its breath before a catastrophe. 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.
Into this, London sent Lord Louis Mountbatten as the last viceroy with plain orders to get Britain out and to do it quickly. At his side went Edwina, the last vicereine India would ever have.
They took up residence in 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.
From the very first, Edwina threw herself into India exactly as she had thrown herself into the Blitz and the camps. She toured hospitals and welfare centers. She met the Indian leaders and the Indian women and the poor of the teeming cities. The Indians noticed it and marked her out because of it.
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. 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.
And in the very middle of those last frantic and sleepless months, 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.
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. He was also a widower, his wife long since dead, his years scarred by long stretches inside British jails.
In Edwina he found at last an equal, a woman as quick as he was, as tireless, as unimpressed by convention. 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.
The two of them became very quickly inseparable. They toured the relief camps side by side. They talked long into the Indian nights. 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.
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. Others have leaned hard the other way.
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.
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. When British power was formally handed over and the subcontinent was split into the two new nations of India and Pakistan, the border 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. A vast, terrified migration began. 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.
This was the catastrophe into which Edwina threw herself without hesitation. 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. And she did it from the front and not the rear. She went into the refugee camps in person, into the overwhelmed hospitals and the makeshift shelters.
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, 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.
Her relief work through the partition is, by any fair reckoning, the finest thing she ever did in her life. The girl who had once been bored by everything the world could offer had found in the very worst that history was able to show her the one arena finally large enough to hold the whole of her.
When the Mountbattens finally left India in the summer of 1948, 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.
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.
Nehru now carried on his shoulders the whole staggering weight of governing a subcontinent of some hundreds of millions of people. 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. They could not simply be together. So they wrote.
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. In 1958, she suffered a small stroke, which for a time stiffened one whole side of her face.
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.
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.
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. 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. 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.
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.
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.
When the news of her death reached the royal family, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who had known Edwina the whole of her life, offered a verdict that was half exasperation and half admiration, and entirely true. "Dear Edwina," she said, "she always liked to make a splash."
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.
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.
The houses told the very same story of an age passing out of the world. Brook House 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.
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. 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.
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.
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. 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.