Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people's beds.
- Lord Louis Montbatten
In 1922, a royal but impoverished naval officer called Louis Mountbatten proposed to a fabulously wealthy woman called Edwina Ashley in Delhi. Both in their early 20s, they had known each other only a few months, but were determined to spend their lives together. The day after Edwina accepted, her fiancé diarised how they had “motored out to King Humayun’s enormous tomb, which we saw at 3am by moonlight". It was all “wonderful and romantic", and, a month later, they made another trip to the 16th century mausoleum. This time, however, the bride-to-be was less impressed. “Edwina having just…seen the Taj Mahal," wrote Mountbatten, “was full of scorn for this poor little tomb."
In some respects the episode was a pithy description of their marriage years that lay ahead. In his new biography The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves, British historian Andrew Lownie has claimed that the late Lord Mountbatten and his wife Edwina spent their married lives engaging in a stream of affairs. Lownie relates how the last viceroy of India, who was assassinated in 1979 by an IRA bomb aged 79, was initially devastated by wife Edwina's affairs but came to terms with his wife’s hedonistic flings as he struggled with his bisexual impulses.
After a fumbling honeymoon, some of it spent in Hollywood, Mountbatten resumed his career as a naval officer.
Meanwhile, the stylish Edwina, described as one of the six best- dressed women in the world, shopped at Chanel, played bridge, and danced the Charleston until 3am, sometimes with Fred Astaire.
Edwina was also inordinately put out when — after ten years of her undisguised infidelities — he took a long-term lover of his own, the sparky, boyish Yola from France (on whom, claims Pamela, the novelist Colette based her fictional femme fatale, Gigi).
Mountbatten found ‘some contentment’ with Yola, as now did Edwina with a lover who became a permanent fixture in her life — ‘Bunny’ Phillips, a ‘thrillingly handsome’ (the words of their daughter Pamela) colonel in the Coldstream Guards.
On the surface, Edwina and her husband, Lord Louis Mountbatten, were the glitziest couple of their day — rich, high-born, debonair, de luxe. Beneath, the reality were separate beds, separate lives and a flurry of flings that set tongues wagging.
All their social gadding about came to a halt when war broke out in 1939. Mountbatten and Bunny Philliips had serious and all-consuming duties to perform for King and Country; Yola was trapped in enemy-occupied France.
And Edwina at last had something real to do. She put on a uniform and cap — albeit set at a jaunty, come-on angle — and threw herself, body and soul, into work with the St John Ambulance Brigade.
Pamela recalls her father looking at his wayward wife with a new sense of pride that she had at last found her purpose in life. Pamela felt the same when she saw her mother in action.
With the war over, Mountbatten was sent there to oversee the sub-continent gaining independence from British rule. His wife went with him and her charm was put to vital use in what the new Viceroy termed Operation Seduction — trying to bring the warring religious communities together.
She worked like a Trojan. Pamela, who went with them — for the first time finding herself at the very heart of the family with a distinct role to play — marvelled at her mother’s stamina and bravery, her ability ‘to forge through the heat of the day, impervious to physical hardship’. She was selfless and tireless, with a sensitivity to the suffering of others that made her a heroine in what was an increasingly volcanic and violent situation.
Edwina fell madly in love with India and its people. Of course tongues wagged at her close relationship with Indian nationalist leader Jawaharlal Nehru and India’s first post-independence Prime Minister.
In later years, their daughter Pamela would pore over Nehru’s letters to her mother, ‘and I came to realise how deeply he and my mother loved each other.’
But it was a spiritual and intellectual relationship, not a sexual one. Pamela is convinced of that. ‘Neither had time to indulge in a physical affair, and anyway the very public nature of their lives meant they were rarely alone.’ It seems Edwina had found her spiritual and intellectual match in the Harrow and Cambridge educated Nehru. ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten wisely gave his wife a wide berth as he increasingly came to terms with his own struggle with his bisexual feelings for young men in uniform.
What was remarkable in all this — as seen through Pamela’s eyes — was her father’s dignity and forbearance, as it had been through all the ups and downs of his marriage to Edwina. He remained loyal to the end.
In 1960, aged 58, she died of a stroke on a tour of the Far East for a charity. She had requested to be buried at sea. As the coffin slipped below the water off the south coast of England, Pamela recalls ‘my father standing with tears streaming down his face. It was the only time I had ever seen him weep. He then kissed his wreath (for her) before throwing it into the sea.’
It was the last act of a strange marriage but one which, in its own way, had worked. He had defied the gossip, kept up appearances and kept his family intact, however unconventional the method.
There were apparently no scenes, no public scandal and, best of all, no acrimonious divorce. It was all rather English.
**Lord Louis Mountbatten and his new bride, Edwina, in Charlie Chaplin’s Nice And Friendly (1922). Chaplin made the film as a gift for the newly weds while they were on their honeymoon in America.
