He would want to be remembered as the debonair war hero who delivered Indian independence and became the royal family’s elder statesman. But something went wrong for Lord Louis Mountbatten. Andrew Roberts anticipated many modern historians when he called him ‘a mendacious, intellectually limited hustler’. Field Marshal Gerald Templer told him to his face he was so crooked that if he swallowed a nail, he’d shit a corkscrew.
As reputations go, the turnaround has been extraordinary. Since many approaches to ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten’s life have been tried, and the personal archival material is carefully curated, Andrew Lownie has sought to throw new light through a joint biography of him and his much wealthier wife, Edwina Ashley, heiress to the fortunes of her maternal grandfather, the financier Sir Ernest Cassel, and to Broadlands, now the Mountbatten family seat. It is 40 years since Mountbatten’s horrific assassination in Ireland — the period he himself suggested, with typical conceit, would be required to assess his place in history.
Lownie has garnered many pre-publication column inches with his revelations that Mountbatten was almost certainly gay, or rather bisexual, though his financial returns will be less than Philip Ziegler’s, who was paid £350,000 by the Sunday Times for extracts from his official biography in 1985.
As throughout, Lownie weighs the evidence. Ziegler doubted his subject was gay. FBI intelligence suggested otherwise, but is unconvincing. On balance, Lownie’s accumulation of anecdotes from former associates recalling his trysts with men swings the vote. The subject is undoubtedly interesting, but does it matter? There is no evidence it affected his decision making.
Edwina was basically a selfish rich girl who, bored with her frequently absent husband, indulged in distant travel and brazen affairs, often with unlikely figures such as the conductor Malcolm Sargent and (it seems) the entertainer Paul Robeson, before finding her life’s calling as wartime chief of the St John’s Ambulance Service and, afterwards, in India as the viceroy’s wife.
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