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'Edwina Cynthia Annette Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma', CI, GBE, DCVO (28 November 1901–21 February 1960) was an English heiress, socialite, relief-worker, wife of the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma and last Vicereine of India.

Contents

Lineage and wealth

Marriage to Mountbatten

Life after marriage

Affairs

Titles and honours

Shorthand titles

Honours

Notes

References

Link

Lineage and wealth

Edwina Ashley was born 'Edwina Cynthia Annette Ashley' in 1901, the elder daughter of Wilfred Ashley, later 1st Baron Mount Temple (of the 1932 creation), who was a Conservative Member of Parliament.
(Paternally, she descended from the Earls of Shaftesbury who had been ennobled as barons in 1661, and ranked as baronets since 1622. She was a great-granddaughter of the reformist 7th Earl of Shaftesbury through his younger son, The Hon. Evelyn Melbourne Ashley (1836-1907) and his wife, Sybella Farquhar (d. 1886), a granddaughter of the 6th Duke of Bedford (though not, as erroneously alleged, a descendant of Pocahontas). From this cadet branch of the Ashley-Cooper peers would come inheritance of the estate of Broadlands, and of Classiebawn Castle in Sligo, Ireland.)
(Edwina Ashley's mother was Maude Cassel (1879-1911), daughter of the international magnate Sir Ernest Cassel, friend and private financier to the future King Edward VII. One of the richest and most powerful men in Europe, having lost the beloved wife (Annette Maxwell) for whom he had converted from Judaism to Roman Catholicism, as well as his only child, he left the bulk of his vast fortune to his elder granddaughter. After her father's re-marriage in 1914 to Molly Forbes-Sempill, she was sent away to boarding schools, first to The Links in Eastbourne, then to Alde House in Suffolk, at neither of which was she a willing pupil. Sir Ernest solved the domestic dilemma by inviting her to live with him and, eventually, to act as hostess at his London residence, Brooke House. Later, his other mansions, Moulton Paddocks and Branksome Dean, would become part of her Cassel inheritance.)

Marriage to Mountbatten

By the time Lord Louis Mountbatten first met her in 1920 she was a leading member of London society. Her grandfather died in 1921, leaving her £2 million, the country seat of Broadlands in Hampshire and the palatial London townhouse, Brooke House, at a time when her future husband's salary was £610 per annum. Ashley and Mountbatten were married on 18 July 1922 at St. Margaret's, Westminster. The Royal family were all present and the then-Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII) was best man.

Life after marriage

The Mountbattens had two daughters, Patricia (born 14 February 1924) and Pamela (born 19 April 1929).
Lady Mountbatten lived a fashionable and privileged life almost totally dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure — and indeed took off on an extended period at sea during the mid-1930s when for many months no one had any idea of her whereabouts: ''Publishers Weekly'' summarises the Janet Morgan biography of Lady Mountbatten: "Edwina Ashley wed Lord Louis ('Dickie') Mountbatten in 1922 at the age of 20, then embarked on two decades of frivolity. Not satisfied having two well-behaved daughters and an 'enthusiastic boy' of a husband, she took refuge in lovers and sparked scandals."^[1] But at the outbreak of the Second World War she acquired a new purpose in life and devoted her considerable intelligence and energy to the service of others. She is especially remembered for her service in the post-Partition period of India and Pakistan, when she was the vice-reine of the truncated India, Pakistan having been partitioned off as a result of the movement led by Mohammed Ali Jinnah.
Lord and Lady Mountbatten had very briefly been the last Viceroy and Vicereine of pre-Partition India; after Partition, Lord Mountbatten remained briefly as the first of the two Governors General of India — in 1950 the link with the monarchy was severed and India's governor general was replaced with a non-executive president. During his brief governor generalship Lord Mountbatten was accorded by the Government of India, to all intents and purposes, his former viceregal powers in the circumstances of appalling carnage and disruption attendant upon the Partition.
Lady Mountbatten in all renderings of the violent disruption that followed the Partition of India is universally praised for her heroic efforts in relieving the misery and to this day she remains a heroine in India of the Partition period — notwithstanding a certain amount of drollery regarding her well-known intimacy with Jawaharlal Nehru.
But Lady Mountbatten is universally regarded as a heroine: her efforts to relieve suffering during the Partition of the Punjab are remembered to this day, together with her modest demeanour in St John's Ambulance Brigade uniform: needless to say, it made a profound impression in juxtaposition with her official portraits in Viceregal grandeur in evening gown and tiara.
Lady Mountbatten continued to lead a life of selfless service after her Viceroyalty in India. She died in her sleep at age 58 of unknown causes in 1960 in Jesselton, Borneo while on an inspection tour for the St John Ambulance Brigade. At her request, Lord Mountbatten buried her at sea off the coast of Portsmouth off the HMS Wakeful on February 25, 1960; Nehru sent two Indian destroyers to accompany her body; Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury, officiated.

Affairs

The Mountbattens' non-traditional marriage, great wealth, and leftish politics seem to have elicited much speculation about their "decadent" escapades, despite the tender correspondence the couple maintained throughout their adult lives. Lady Mountbatten occasionally travelled with her husband's sister-in-law, Lady Milford Haven, whose bisexual liaisons are perhaps better documented than those attributed to Edwina. Along with Nancy Cunard, she was alleged to have been lovers with American Paul Robeson, although she successfully brought suit against a newspaper for printing the story since, she testified, she had never met the man. It was rumoured during Mountbatten's viceroyalty, and remains widely believed, that his wife had an affair with Jawaharlal Nehru, who became India's first prime minister during their stay in India, and that the pair may have resumed that connection on Nehru's subsequent visits to England.^[2] The allegation was made in Richard Hough's 1980 biography of Mountbatten, 'Hero of Our Times'. However, the affair is denied by the Mountbatten family, although other liaisons during the couple's open marriage have been admitted. Lord Mountbatten's son-in-law and former naval aide-de-camp, Lord Brabourne, citing the extensive, preserved correspondence between his mother-in-law and Nehru, was quoted on February 12, 2003 in the Indian news periodical ''The Pioneer'' to the effect that, "Philip Ziegler and Janet Morgan [biographers, respectively, of Louis and of Edwina Mountbatten] are the only two people who have seen the letters apart from the two families, and neither of them thinks there was anything physical."^[3]
Edwina was 44 when she came to India in 1947 with Lord Mountbatten, who was to guide India to independence as the last Viceroy. Pamela, who was taken out of school to accompany her parents, spent the next 15 months recording the birth of two nations.
Describing her mother as an introvert she says that her parents worked well as a team. "My father trusted her decisions implicitly... and of course, her special relationship with Pandit Nehru was very useful for him ever the pragmatist — because there were moments towards the end of our time in India when the Kashmir problem was extremely difficult.
"Pandit Nehru was a Kashmiri himself, so he was emotional about the problem. If things were particularly tricky my father would say to my mother, 'Do try to get Jawaharlal to see that this is terribly important...,'" she writes.
According to Pamela, the immediate attraction between her mother and Nehru blossomed into deep love because "Nehru was a widower and his daughter, Mrs Gandhi, was still married with a husband to look after... If you are at the pinnacle of power you are alone... you are lonely. She became a confidante".
But their relationship was "platonic". "...although it was not physical, it was no less binding for that. It would last until death," she writes.
The Mountbattens met Nehru in 1946 in Malaya — and Nehru rescued Edwina from under a table!
"My mother was already there with a group of Indian welfare workers. As she came forward to be introduced, a crowd of Panditji's admirers swarmed in behind him and she was knocked off her feet. She crawled under a table from where Panditji rescued her," writes Pamela, who was coaxed by her daughter to write about the time she spent in India.
Nehru — who wrote to Edwina over a period of 12 years —would never write to her until about two in the morning, when he had finished his work. He would start with a charming opening paragraph, very touching and personal, and he would end affectionately. The letters were a diary of everything he had been doing and the people he had seen, his hopes and fears, his disappointments and disillusions.
Even after the Mountbattens went back to London Edwina-Nehru met about twice a year. Edwina would include a visit to India in her overseas tours. And, Nehru would come to London for the Commonwealth Prime Ministers' conferences and spend the weekend with the Mountbattens.
When Edwina, aged 58, died in her sleep in 1960 shortly after visiting India a packet of letters from Nehru was found by her bedside.
"In her will she left the whole collection of letters to my father. A suitcase was crammed full of them. My father was certain that there would be nothing in the letters to wound him. However, a tiny doubt caused him to ask me to read the letters first. They were remarkable letters but contained nothing to hurt him," she writes.
On Edwina's death a frigate from the Indian Navy attended her funeral at sea and cast a wreath of marigolds into the ocean on behalf of Prime Minister Nehru.

Titles and honours

Shorthand titles

★ Miss Edwina Ashley (28 November 1901–18 July 1922)

★ The Lady Louis Mountbatten (18 July 1922–23 August 1946)

★ The Rt Hon. The Viscountess Mountbatten of Burma (23 August 1946–28 October 1947)

★ The Rt Hon. The Countess Mountbatten of Burma (28 October 1947–21 February 1960)

Honours

★ Lady of the Imperial Order of the Crown of India

★ Dame Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire

★ Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order

Notes

1. Publishers Weekly Review of ''Edwina Mountbatten: Life of Her Own'', quoted on Amazon.com Retrieved 25 November 2006.
2. A photo taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson in Delhi in 1948 shows Jawaharlal Nehru and Edwina Mountbatten sharing a joke as Louis Mountbatten stands uncomfortably. The photo, purchased by the National Portrait Gallery (UK) in 1990 (NPG item 434: http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/portrait.asp?LinkID=mp08029&rNo=1&role=art), may be viewed at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/chapatimystery/117956847/in/datetaken/.
3. [1] Website of ''The Pioneer''.

References

★ Morgan, Janet. ''Edwina Mountbatten: A Life of Her Own'', (1991) Scribners. ISBN 0-684-19346-9

★ Ziegler, Philip, ''Mountbatten: the official biography'', (1985) Collins

★ Hough, Richard, ''Mountbatten: Hero of our time'', (1980) Weidenfeld and Nicolson

Link

★ Tribute & Memorial website to Louis, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma