Dickie and Edwina Mountbatten are that trite old maxim made flesh: it’s not what you know that’s important — it’s who you know. And the Mountbattens knew them all. Queens and kings (well, they were related to most of them); industrialist giants and political heavyweights; entertainment kingpins and career socialites; wartime generals and all time villains (even Rasputin reared his bearded head at one point). Forget about soft power — this was the hard stuff. And in his

 of this extraordinary couple, Andrew Lownie shows us how the Mountbattens deployed it to dazzling — and often devastating — effect.

The building blocks were there from the start. Edwina (née Ashley) was hailed as the ‘the most beautiful woman in England’, after all. And Louis (known by all as Dickie) was one of the country’s most eligible bachelors. Their wedding, in 1922, was the society event of the decade. And from that moment on, with a baying Westminster crowd and an onslaught of flashbulbs, the scene was set. Across the span of their 38-year marriage, the Mountbattens’ influence was felt in political, naval, royal and celebrity circles alike — proof of the sheer power that volcanic charisma, an astronomical bank balance, and friends in the highest places can wield.

But it would be foolish to dismiss the couple’s history-changing achievements as solely the happy chance of nepotism or scandalous bed-hopping. In their own right, both Edwina and Dickie shaped the course of the most turbulent time of the last century, and left their distinctive mark. As a couple, they also proved a formidable combined force, glad-handing communal leaders and princes — particularly during Mountbatten’s tenure as viceroy of India, as the subcontinent careered towards independence.

Above all else, the Mountbattens exuded and encapsulated that most human of characteristics: contradiction. In equal parts decent and disdainful, compassionate and woefully self-absorbed, theirs is a story which came to symbolise the shifting nature of post-war society. It is a fable on the poisoned chalice of celebrity, and at the same time a window into the bygone glamour of a ruling aristocracy. More than anything, the story of Dickie and Edwina presents us today with a couple determined to be remembered. Here, we present the five moments in which — for better or worse — they unreservedly achieved their aim.

In August 1924, Dickie and Edwina joined the Prince of Wales on the Cunard liner 

 to New York. Dickie was taken ill with tonsillitis and spent much of the trip in bed, but Edwina wasn’t going to have her fun spoiled and continued to stay out until dawn at nightclubs. Attractive, rich and vulnerable, she was surrounded by admirers who she played off against each other. At the beginning of 1925, however, Edwina over stepped the boundary. Her first lover was Hugh Molyneux, a former army officer and the heir to the Earl of Sefton, described as “the best-looking man in society”. The affair lasted for ten months before she took up with Stephen “Laddie” Sandford. The heir to a $40 million fortune, he was a big game hunter whose recent lover had been the socialite Doris Delevingne.

In August, Laddie joined the Mountbattens for their annual holiday at Deauville and from then on he and Edwina were inseparable. Dickie suspected nothing until the Prince of Wales spelled it out. Even then he refused to believe it. (“Went to see David… He had a queer story about Edwina,” he wrote in his diaries.) Sandford was to remain one of Edwina’s principal lovers throughout the interwar period, but there were others, including Mike Wardell, a tall, dashing ex-cavalry officer. A close friend of Oswald Mosley, he had lost an eye in a riding accident and wore a black patch, which only made him more attractive to women. Dickie did his best to demonstrate his love for his wife: “I wish I knew how to flirt with other women, and especially with my wife,” he wrote to her. “I wish I had sown many more wild oats in my youth, and could excite you more than I fear I do.”

Further troubles lay ahead. The High Court heard a petition for divorce from Marjorie Hall Simpson against Henry Anthony Simpson, a naval colleague of Dickie’s, naming Lady Edwina Mountbatten as the co-respondent and alleging that he had “frequently committed adultery with Edwina Cynthia Annette, Lady Louis Mountbatten”. Simpson’s wife was paid off but it cost Edwina £13,000 with the legal expenses. He offered to pay back the Mountbattens, but for Dickie the money was immaterial. It was the scandal which counted. The papers had already been hinting that actor Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford would separate, with Edwina as the other woman. Now they declared Edwina was seeking to divorce Dickie.

He decided to confront her. As she sat weeping in the bath, she told him that she accepted they had to part but later that night she made an excuse to come to his bedroom and return a book. The marriage had been saved. They came to an arrangement. She would support him in his career and he would recognise her need for fulfilment elsewhere, as long as she was discreet. They would stay together, but in an open marriage. As Dickie would later claim, “Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds.”

Just before the outbreak of war, Dickie took command of his new ship, HMS 

 — the first of the new ‘K’ class destroyers armed with six 4.7-inch guns and two quintuple torpedo tubes — and one that had been fitted out to his exact specifications. War was declared on 3 September. Dickie, waiting for instructions in Portsmouth, was apprehensive. “It is only when one faces the prospect of death,” he wrote to Edwina, “that one realises how much one’s loved ones mean.” His first wartime duty was to collect his old friend Edward, Duke of Windsor, from exile in France, accompanied by Randolph Churchill in the uniform of a lieutenant of the 4th Hussars – the appearance slightly spoiled by the spurs being inside out and upside down.

Towards the end of October, Mountbatten was ordered to the Norwegian coast to engage the German pocket battleship 

 and pick up some captured merchant seamen from the City of Flint. He pointedly ignored the advice of his signals and navigating officers, plotting a course that left him missing the German pocket battleship. “It is absolutely basic that in any intercepting situation like this you go to the position furthest on your target could have reached, and then work back,” the 

 signals officer, Edward Dunsterville, recollected. “But Mountbatten would have none of this. He wanted to make a splash.” The result was that 600 seamen spent five years in a German internment camp.

Returning, Mountbatten set a cruising speed of twice the safe rate given the weather conditions, leading to a seaman being swept overboard and the destruction of the starboard side when the 

 hit a huge wave. Shortly after repairs were completed, he hit a mine after being ordered into the middle of a minefield in the Tyne Estuary to rescue a sinking British tanker. 

 returned to dry dock for almost three months of repairs. It was ten days before Christmas and most men had used up their spare passes. Edwina offered to pay the return fares of any crew member who wished to go home for Christmas.

The episode was to provide one of the stories that would become part of the Mountbatten legend. All on board had felt the mine bumping under the bow, engine-room and ward room before it went off after touching the propellers. It had been too much for one of the stokers, who had deserted his post. The punishment for desertion was death but Mountbatten, addressing the lower deck, let the man off with a caution. “One caution to him, and a second one to myself, for having failed in four months to impress my personality and doctrine on each and all of you to prevent such an incident from occurring.” No member of the 

 crew ever again left their post and the stoker later won a gallantry medal.

The war had brought the Mountbattens together, not least by giving new purpose to the rather aimless life that Edwina had hitherto been leading. “I can never tell you what fun it has been,” Dickie told her in October 1939 after her fourth visit in six weeks. ‘”It has taken the war to realise all that you do mean to me — so at all events I have Hitler to thank for that.” She gave him presents of a small gold identification disc, a kitten, and a scarf she had knitted herself, and sent clean clothes and food. This was the sort of tender affection that Dickie had longed for. “We have had our ups and downs in our 17 years of married life,” he wrote, “but I wouldn’t marry anyone else if I had all my life over again – I can’t say more.”

Even before Mountbatten arrived in India in 1947, politicians had accepted that partition was inevitable, not least because of leader of the All-India Muslim League Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s insistence on a separate Muslim state and the paralysis in the Executive Council. Mountbatten’s challenge was to find a plan that all sides would accept.

The North-West frontier presented a particular problem, as 90 per cent of its population were Muslim, but it had elected a Congress government in 1945. Both factions therefore laid claim to it. At the end of April, Mountbatten decided he should visit. The evening before, Government House had been invaded and a shot fired through a window. A crowd of Pathans, all supporters of the Muslim League, awaited his arrival. Governor Sir Olaf Caroe requested he should make an appearance to try and diffuse the situation. Edwina insisted on accompanying him. From a railway embankment, hand-in-hand and silhouetted against the sky, the couple looked down on 70,000 people, any of whom, they were aware, could have killed them with a bomb or bullet.

By chance, they were dressed simply in bush shirts, the green matching the Pakistan national colour. “I neither spoke nor waved to them but simply stood there,” Mountbatten later reported. There was a moment’s silence and then cries of ‘Mountbatten Zindabad!’ (Long Live Mountbatten!) The shouting was too great for a speech, so for nearly an hour the Mountbattens simply stood waving to the crowd. The situation had been defused – but for how long? For Dickie it was confirmation that independence needed to come quickly, for Edwina an indication of the challenges that might soon be faced in terms of humanitarian aid. She was immediately galvanised into action, writing to officials recommending various practical measures, including setting up health clinics in refugee camps. She had found a role for herself again, no longer simply as an appendage to her husband.

“Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds.”

At the beginning of May, Chief of Staff Hastings Ismay presented a new plan in London. It allowed for each of the 11 provinces to decide their own future, Bengal and the Punjab to choose being split between India and Pakistan, to join one country entirely, or go it alone. Within a week, it had been approved by the Cabinet. The aim was to release the text 24 hours before Indian leaders next met on 17 May, thereby reducing the amount of time they could suggest amendments.

The Mountbattens left to spend a few days relaxing in Simla, where they were joined by the Indian Prime Minister Nehru. Encouraged by the relaxed atmosphere and keen to have Nehru’s views on the plan, Dickie put forward his proposed plan to read as he was going to bed. His response was immediate and negative, arguing that the plan would ‘Balkanise’ India, creating a series of independent states at loggerheads with each other. Mountbatten thought Nehru had accepted the plan; Nehru claimed he had never properly been shown it. It had been a humiliation – Mountbatten had told the Cabinet the plan was acceptable to the Indian leaders – but at least he had averted a greater embarrassment.

V.P. Menon now came up with a solution, one which saved face for both countries and Britain. Power would be handed over to two central governments, each with dominion status and a governor general, and each with its own constituent assembly. The plan, now labelled ‘Plan Partition’, ticked all the boxes providing for an early transfer of power, retained the essential unity of India and gave Jinnah his desired Pakistan. Edwina was not part of the discussions, but her persuasive powers were deployed by Dickie to bring round Nehru, who saw membership of the Commonwealth as at odds with his view that India should be a sovereign republic. “We have made real friends with him and whatever else happens, I feel this friendship is sincere and will last,” wrote Dickie about the four days Nehru had spent with them. Edwina had saved her husband’s career.

Edwina died in 1960, and Dickie found life as a widower difficult. “I know you think that I ought to be able to live alone and spend my weekends alone,” he wrote to his daughter Patricia two years after Edwina’s death, “but I feel so terribly lonely without someone.” Not that he was without admirers. He complained to a friend, Grace Stevens, that “it is curious that at the very time I am living a fairly secluded, hardworking life, that so many people who knew Edwina, but who I hardly know, should be descending on me.”

Attending the wedding of the future King Juan Carlos of Spain in May 1962, Mountbatten found “himself hotly pursued by a princess of considerable beauty and forty years his junior. She announced that she was madly in love and determined to marry him, and caused something of a scandal by rearranging the place-cards at the state banquet so that they were sitting side by side.” He was delighted: “the whole experience was pretty good for the morale of a sixty-two-year-old widower.”

But the person who had really captured his heart was a beautiful and vivacious Italian over 30 years younger. Blonde and with a stunning figure, which she showed off in very short minis, Sibilla Tomacelli was the daughter of the Duke and Duchess Della Torre and had recently married Columbus O’Donnell, nephew of the multimillionaire Huntington Hartford. Throughout the next two decades, Sibilla and Dickie met regularly – sometimes alone and sometimes with her husband – on Mountbatten’s annual trip to the Bahamas to stay with the Brabournes and Hicks at their holiday homes on Eleuthera, or on visits to London. “He was such a glamorous person. I was flattered by his attention,” she later remembered

There were to be many girlfriends after Edwina’s death. According to Patricia, they tended to be:

“youngish, very pretty with long legs and a small waist – rather Victorian figures really. Girls didn’t have to be intelligent either. He could be quite attracted to someone who wasn’t that bright, if it was going to be just a minor flirtation, but all his real, serious girlfriends were intelligent. “

President John F. Kennedy with Lord Louis Mountbatten and General Lyman Lemnitzer


Many of the girlfriends were the wives of men who had served with him. The couple would be invited down to Broadlands for the weekend and the men then distracted by the offer of a day’s fishing or shooting – or would have to return to work on the Sunday night and the wife would stay on until the following day. Sometimes the wife came down on Friday to be joined later by her husband. On one occasion, the husband:

“Arrived a few hours earlier than we had anticipated, while his wife and Lord Mountbatten were upstairs together in one of the spare bedrooms. I could see the husband coming, so I dashed upstairs and tried all the rooms until I found one that was locked. I called to Lord Mountbatten and explained the urgency of the situation, arranging to meet the lady at the side entrance. I found Lord Mountbatten’s labrador, Juno, and took her with me, so that the lady could slip outside with her and go round to the main entrance as though she had been for a walk with the dog.”

Mountbatten had a very old-fashioned, aristocratic view of marriage, partly shaped by his own marital experience, of it being separate from love. As long as one was discreet, anything was permitted. One of his girlfriends, at his request, even initiated a young member of his family into sex.

In the early 1960s, whilst visiting Los Angeles, Dickie had met the 30-year-old actress Shirley MacLaine through the producer Mike Frankovitch. She had been his escort to a dinner at Jack Warner’s home and then they had seen the film of John Fowles’ 

 together. That evening Dickie wrote in his diary, “I drove Shirley back in my car – she certainly is a very sweet girl.” MacLaine, in an open relationship with her businessman husband Steve Parker, was then at the height of her fame. Another guest, Christopher Plummer, remembered, “After dinner we were all marched into the screening room to watch a sneak preview of 

. Mountbatten and Shirley were two rows in front of me. His arm was around her and tsk! tsk! Was it the boozy haze clouding my heavy eyes or did I not catch sight of them spooning in the dark?”

Mountbatten loved to portray himself as a player on the world stage who had changed nations. He wanted to take credit for events, inventions, operations to which he was not fully entitled and even when they did not always reflect well on him. Always desperate for attention, even if it was not always admiring, he skilfully used PR agents to promote himself at the expense of others and together with colleagues and family carefully curated how he would be remembered.

Living longer than most of his wartime colleagues made it easier to shape the narrative as he wished. The reality, especially as Supreme Commander and Viceroy, was that he was subject to wider underlying historical currents. Given America called the shots in South East Asia, there was little Mountbatten could do except abide by their wishes. Given the positions adopted by Congress and Jinnah, partition was inevitable even before Mountbatten arrived in India. He was good at dressing up his role and spinning his apparent influence, but he was really just a front of house manager to make sure everyone remained happy. The irony is that the strings were being pulled elsewhere.

brilliant biography of the Mountbattens here

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