Louis Mountbatten – The Tragic Story of His Marriage

追加: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]On a clear morning in August 1979, off the coast of County Siggo in Ireland, a 79year-old man took his family out on a small fishing boat. A bomb hidden in the hull the night before, detonated when they were just a few hundred yards from shore.

[00:00:19]He had survived two world wars, commanded fleets, overseen the end of the British Empire in India, shaped the lives of kings, and the marriage at the center of his life had been one of the most unconventional, talked about, and quietly heartbreaking unions in 20th century British history.

[00:00:41]Before that morning on the water, there was a love story. Complicated, open, and impossible to categorize.

[00:00:51]This is the tragic story of Louis Mountbatton's marriage.

[00:00:56]The prince who had to earn everything.

[00:01:00]The story of Louis Mountbatton's marriage begins not with a love affair, but with a name and the stripping of that name. He was born on June 25th, 1900 at Frogmore House in the grounds of Windsor Castle and given a name so long it barely fit on paper. Louisie Francis Albert Victor Nicholas of Battenburg.

[00:01:24]His father was Prince Louie of Battenburg, a distinguished naval officer of German origin. His mother was Princess Victoria of Hessa, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria.

[00:01:37]From the very first moment of his life, he was a member of the royal family by blood, great grandson of Queen Victoria herself, and yet he occupied an unusual position within it. He was royal, but not quite central, close to the throne, but not on the direct line of succession. He had the bloodline without the guaranteed future that came with it.

[00:02:02]The family called him Dicki. It was a nickname that stuck for life, an oddly ordinary name for someone born into such extraordinary circumstances.

[00:02:13]He grew up steeped in naval tradition and royal expectation, and the Navy was always going to be his path.

[00:02:22]He began his formal naval training at the Royal Naval College at Osbborne on the aisle of White, following in his father's footsteps with an earnestness that people who knew him as a boy described as almost excessive.

[00:02:35]He was serious about his career, meticulous about his ambitions, and enormously proud of the family name he carried.

[00:02:44]Then in 1914, the war came and with it a wave of anti-German feeling in Britain that swept through every institution, including the royal family.

[00:02:58]The Battenburgg name, rooted in German aristocracy, became a liability almost overnight.

[00:03:05]In 1917, under pressure from public opinion and with King George V leading the way, the royal family dropped its German names. The Windsor family became Windsor instead of Sax Cobberg and Gotha. Lewis's father, Prince Louie of Battenburg, was compelled to resign as first seaord, the head of the Royal Navy, partly because of his German birth.

[00:03:32]The family changed their name from Battenburg to Mountbatton, an English translation of the German. It was a humiliation from which his father never fully recovered. He was a man who had dedicated his life to the British Navy, had risen to its very top, and was pushed out not because of anything he had done, but because of where he had been born.

[00:03:56]Louie watched this happen as a teenager and absorbed it deeply. The desire to restore the family name to prove that a Mountbatton belonged at the highest levels of British life became one of the driving forces of his entire career.

[00:04:13]He entered the First World War as a naval cadet and served on several ships before the conflict ended. He wasn't yet old enough to have a significant command, but he got his first real taste of what it meant to serve in wartime.

[00:04:29]By the time the war ended, he was 18 years old, determined, and ambitious in a way that had very little modesty about it. People who encountered him early in his career noted that he talked about his future plans with a certainty that was either inspiring or deeply irritating, depending on who you asked.

[00:04:50]It was into this world, the postwar London of 1920, full of glamour and relief and a determined refusal to think too hard about the generation that had just been lost. That Lewis Mountbatton attended a ball at Clarage's hotel and met a young woman who would change the entire direction of his life.

[00:05:12]The wealthiest woman in Britain.

[00:05:16]Her name was Edwina Cynthia Annette Ashley and by the time she met Louisie Mountbatton in October 1920, she was already one of the most talked about young women in London. She had been born on November 28th, 1901 into a world of privilege, but also into a childhood marked by loss and distance. Her father was Colonel Wilfred Ashley, a conservative member of Parliament who was more interested in politics and his own affairs than in his daughters.

[00:05:49]Her mother died when Edwina was only 10 years old, and her father remarried with a speed that left his two daughters largely to fend for themselves emotionally.

[00:06:00]Edwina was sent to boarding school, which she hated.

[00:06:05]What saved her and what shaped the particular quality of determination and restlessness that defined her entire adult life was her relationship with her maternal grandfather. His name was Sir Ernest Cassell and he was one of the wealthiest men in Europe. A German-born Jewish banker of extraordinary financial skill, Cassell had built a fortune that made him a confidant to King Edward IIIth and a figure of immense social influence. He adored his granddaughter with a completeness that stood in sharp contrast to her father's emotional distance, and Edwina adored him back.

[00:06:44]She became his hostess at the age of 18, managing his lavish dinner parties at Brook House, the family's enormous mansion on Park Lane. She ran those gatherings with a poise and intelligence that left guests visibly impressed.

[00:07:00]One contemporary described her conversation as quick, clever, and full of questions. The conversation of someone who was genuinely curious about everything rather than simply performing interest. When Sir Ernest Castle died in 1921, he left the vast majority of his estate to Edwina. The inheritance was staggering, valued at what would today be many tens of millions of pounds. She became at the age of 19 arguably the wealthiest young woman in Britain. She had money, beauty, social confidence, and a freedom that most women of her era could barely imagine. Lewis Mountbatton, by contrast, was a naval officer living on a naval officer's salary. He was charming and handsome and unquestionably connected to royalty, but he had no fortune of his own. His family had status and history. What they lacked was money. When he met Edwina at Clarages that October evening in 1920, the attraction was immediate and mutual, but the landscape between them was dramatically unequal in financial terms.

[00:08:13]They courted through the following months, and Louie proposed to Edwina in Delhi in early 1922 during a royal tour of India. She had just inherited Cassell's estate. He was 21 years old. She was 20. Their engagement was announced, and London society immediately recognized it as one of the most glittering matches of the decade. The royal prince and the brought together in circumstances that seemed almost designed to produce headlines.

[00:08:45]Their wedding took place on July 18th, 1922 at St. Margaret's Westminster, the church that stands beside Westminster Abbey and has been the setting for some of the most significant society weddings in British history. More than 8,000 people gathered outside.

[00:09:04]The Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VIII, served as Lewis's best man.

[00:09:11]Queen Mary and the elderly Queen Alexandra both attended. Contemporary newspapers called it the wedding of the year, and for once the press was not exaggerating.

[00:09:23]As a spectacle of wealth, royalty, and youthful glamour, it was almost impossible to surpass.

[00:09:30]Their honeymoon was suitably extraordinary.

[00:09:33]They visited several European royal courts. They toured the United States.

[00:09:39]They went to Niagara Falls, which Edwina described with dry amusement as something all honeymooners did. While in California, they encountered Charlie Chaplain, who made a short private film featuring the two of them. A film that was never commercially released, but exists as a small, glittering footnote to one of the strangest and most consequential marriages of the 20th century. But the honeymoon had to end.

[00:10:08]And when it did, the shape of the life they were building together began to reveal its more complicated contours.

[00:10:17]Two people living separate lives.

[00:10:22]The early years of the Mountbatton marriage looked from the outside exactly as a marriage of their kind was supposed to look. They had two daughters, Patricia, born in 1924, and Pamela, born in 1929.

[00:10:38]They entertained lavishly, first at Brook House, Edwina's inheritance, where they hosted parties that were legendary in London social circles. They moved in royal circles. They traveled. They were, by any visible measure, one of the most enviable couples in Britain. Underneath something was fracturing almost from the beginning. Louie threw himself into his naval career with an intensity that left little room for much else. He was not simply a man who enjoyed his work. He was a man who needed it, who measured himself by it, who felt the shadow of his father's forced resignation every time he put on his uniform.

[00:11:22]The Navy was where he was going to prove something. He was methodical, detail obsessed, and demanding in ways that could tip from admirable into exhausting, depending on how close you were to it.

[00:11:36]His guests at dinner were reportedly expected to eat their strawberries in a particular way. His staff learned that he had specific systems for everything, and those systems were not optional.

[00:11:49]Edwina was his temperamental opposite in almost every direction. She was spontaneous where he was methodical. She was moved by people and places and experiences in a way that he simply wasn't. The restlessness that had defined her since childhood, the refusal to be contained, to stay still, to accept the life that was handed to her rather than building her own, expressed itself in ways that the conventional structure of an early 20th century aristocratic marriage had no framework for. By 1925, only 3 years after the wedding, Lewis discovered that Edwina had taken a lover. It was the first of many.

[00:12:34]Over the years that followed, the affairs became a known feature of the marriage. Known to Louie, known in certain circles, occasionally erupting into public scandal.

[00:12:47]Edwina's relationship with a black musician named Leslie Hutchinson, known professionally as Hutch, caused a particular sensation in a society that was deeply uncomfortable with interracial intimacy.

[00:13:01]A lawsuit filed by another woman over Edwina's involvement with her husband put Edwina's name in the papers in connection that required urgent management.

[00:13:12]Through it all, the Mount Batton marriage continued. The accommodation they reached was one that would be almost unthinkable in conventional terms, but was for them the only realistic path forward.

[00:13:27]By the late 1920s, it had become an arrangement. Edwina was free to pursue her relationships as long as she was reasonably discreet, and Louie would not make demands that she could not fulfill.

[00:13:40]In 1932, he began taking a mistress of his own, and Edwina, by various accounts, responded with a studied acceptance. She apparently invited one of his romantic interests to lunch. She had, in her own words, no objection.

[00:13:58]What made this possible, and what makes it interesting rather than simply sorted, was that underneath the arrangement, something genuine persisted.

[00:14:09]The two people who had walked into St. Margaret's in July 1922 continued to matter to each other in ways that neither of them could fully explain, and neither of them seemed able to walk away from. The affairs were real. So was the bond. Their income during these years was significant enough that the practical pressures of life barely touched them. Before the Second World War, they had a combined pre-tax income of 113,000 per year, an almost incomprehensible sum for the era. And Louie later told their elder daughter, Patricia, that they sometimes struggled to find ways to spend even their after tax income. They had homes. They had staff. They had the run of a social world that was among the most privileged in the world. But money, it turned out, was not the thing that was going to define this marriage. The thing that was going to define it was about to arrive in the form of a war.

[00:15:14]A war that changed everything.

[00:15:18]The Second World War did something to both of the Mountbattons that peaceime had not managed to do. It gave them separately and eventually together a purpose that went beyond the life they had constructed. Lewis's war career was complicated, spectacular, and sometimes catastrophic in equal measure. He commanded the destroyer HMS Kelly at the outbreak of war and led his flatillaa into some of the most dangerous operations of the early conflict. The Norwegian campaign, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean.

[00:15:53]The Kelly was sunk during the Battle of Cree on May 23rd, 1941, and more than a hundred of her crew died.

[00:16:02]Louie was pulled from the sea. The loss of the Kelly haunted him. The story of the ship was later immortalized in a 1942 British film called In Which We Serve, directed by Noel Coward, which drew heavily on Mountbatton's experiences.

[00:16:20]A piece of wartime mythology that cemented his reputation as a naval hero regardless of the outcome. His reputation within actual military circles was considerably more complicated. He was known, not always affectionately, as the master of disaster, a label attached to his tendency to end up in catastrophic situations.

[00:16:43]The DEP raid of August 1942, which he helped plan in his role as chief of combined operations, resulted in the deaths of nearly 900 Canadian soldiers and the capture of nearly 2,000 more. It was one of the worst Allied operations of the war. Mount Batton spent years deflecting his share of responsibility for it. But Winston Churchill, whatever his private reservations, needed Mount Batton's particular combination of royal connections, energy, and media friendly heroism.

[00:17:17]In 1943, Churchill appointed him Supreme Allied Commander, Southeast Asia Command. He oversaw the campaign to recapture Burma, Malaya, and Singapore from Japanese forces. A grinding, brutal campaign in a theater that received far less press coverage than the war in Europe, but was no less costly in human terms.

[00:17:42]By the war's end, he had presided over the liberation of those territories and accepted the formal Japanese surrender in Singapore in September 1945.

[00:17:54]Meanwhile, Edwina's war was transforming her in ways that were, in the long view, at least as significant as anything Lewis accomplished on the battlefield.

[00:18:04]She threw herself into humanitarian and relief work with an energy that people who had known her only as a socialite found remarkable and disorienting.

[00:18:15]She worked with the Red Cross and St. John Ambulance Brigade, traveling to field hospitals, relief operations, and disaster zones, including some that were genuinely dangerous, with a physical and emotional stamina that exhausted people half her age.

[00:18:33]She visited hospitals in Burma. She traveled to parts of Asia where the conditions were desperate. She worked alongside people from entirely different backgrounds than her own and discovered in that work a version of herself that the Brook House dinner parties had never required. The war did not heal the fractures in the marriage, but it gave both of them a gravity that their pre-war lives had lacked. When the conflict ended in 1945 and the question of what came next arose, the answer arrived within a year.

[00:19:08]India and the man who changed everything.

[00:19:13]In December 1946, Prime Minister Clement Atley appointed Lewis Mountbatton as the last viceroy of India. His mandate was singular and enormous to manage the transfer of power from Britain to the Indian people and to do it faster than anyone had originally planned.

[00:19:32]What had been conceived as a process taking years was compressed ultimately into months. The mount battens arrived in Delhi on March 22nd, 1947.

[00:19:45]India was on the edge of something catastrophic.

[00:19:49]Hindu, Muslim, and seek communities that had lived uneasily alongside each other under British rule were now facing a future that required them to define themselves in national terms. And the violence that had already begun in various parts of the country was a warning of what a rushed partition could produce. For Louie, India was the largest stage of his life. A negotiation with historical forces that would determine the shape of a subcontinent.

[00:20:19]He dealt with Mahatma Gandhi, with Jawahalal Neu and with Muhammad Ali Jina, the leader of the Muslim League.

[00:20:28]His relationship with Jina was tense and often difficult. His relationship with Neu was something else entirely. Warm, productive, and shaded by the fact that Neu was developing a relationship with Edwina that would go on to be one of the most examined personal connections of the entire independence period. The circumstances of the first Edwina Neu meeting were almost cinematic.

[00:20:54]At a public rally in Singapore in 1946 before the Mountbattons had arrived in Delhi, a surge in the crowd knocked Edwina off her feet. Nou and Louie both pushed through the press of people to help her. The three of them ended up having dinner together that evening and by Mountbatton's own later account talked about everything under the sun.

[00:21:17]It was the beginning of a connection between Nou and Edwina that would grow over the following months in Delhi into something that was unmistakably profound.

[00:21:28]Nou was 57 years old and had been a widowerower since 1936.

[00:21:34]His wife Camela had died of tuberculosis after years of illness. He was brilliant, elegant, deeply read, and lonely in the particular way of a man who had spent decades in the service of a cause so large that his private life had been entirely subordinated to it.

[00:21:52]Edwina was 45, restless as ever, still carrying the internal hunger for genuine connection that years of London parties and carefully managed arrangements had never quite satisfied. When they found each other in the teeming crisis ridden atmosphere of New Delhi in 1947, something clicked into place for both of them. Their closeness became visible almost immediately to people around them. They were photographed together with a naturalness and ease that was striking given who they both were.

[00:22:27]A photograph from March 28th, 1947, just days after the Mount Battons arrived in Delhi, captured Nou sitting at Edwina's feet in a posture of ease and intimacy that was unusual for a man of his formal public bearing. They wrote to each other. They talked. Neu's daughter Indira Gandhi who had reservations about Edwina's presence in her father's life later described the relationship with a complicated mixture of acknowledgement and weariness.

[00:23:00]The nature of the relationship, whether it was romantic in a physical sense or whether it was the kind of emotional and intellectual intimacy that can be as powerful as anything physical, has been debated by historians for decades and never definitively resolved.

[00:23:18]Edwina's daughter Pamela who was in India during that period and has written about it with considerable cander in her memoir described it as a genuine love but one that she did not believe was physically consummated.

[00:23:33]She noted that her mother and Nou were almost never alone. they were always surrounded by staff and officials and that Nou who respected Louis Mountbatton would not have pursued a sexual affair with his wife as a matter of his own ethical code.

[00:23:50]Others including the biographer Andrew Looney have drawn on a wider range of sources to suggest the relationship was more complete than that. The truth, as is often the case with the most interesting parts of history, probably belongs to a zone that recorded evidence alone cannot fully illuminate.

[00:24:11]What is documented is this. Edwina and Nou exchanged letters from 1947 until her death in 1960.

[00:24:21]13 years of correspondence that was intimate, affectionate, and that she kept close to her throughout the rest of her life. When she was briefly hospitalized in 1952 and feared she might not survive, she passed Nou's letters to Louie for safekeeping, describing them as a mixture of his characteristic reflections and genuinely historic documents.

[00:24:47]It was an act that speaks to how seriously she took the correspondence and to how far outside conventional jealousy Louie had placed himself in relation to his wife's deepest connection.

[00:24:59]As for Louie himself, his response to the Edwina Nou relationship was not one of anguish or confrontation.

[00:25:08]By various accounts, he accepted it, possibly even welcomed it. He had long since made peace with the shape of his marriage and practically speaking at one of the most delicate and dangerous moments in the history of the British Empire. Having a close personal friendship between the viserne and the man most likely to become India's first prime minister was not something a strategically minded man would quickly dismiss. The partition of India which took effect on August 15th 1947 came at an enormous human cost. The borders drawn by a British lawyer named Sirill Radcliffe who had never previously been to India and completed the task in 5 weeks divided communities that had lived intertwined for generations.

[00:25:59]The resulting violence was catastrophic.

[00:26:03]Estimates of those killed during the partition violence range from 200,000 to 2 million. Over 10 million people were displaced. Edwina, in the immediate aftermath, threw herself into relief work with everything she had, traveling to refugee camps, mobilizing resources, doing the work on the ground that no amount of political negotiation could substitute for.

[00:26:29]She was widely praised for it, including by Indian leaders who had no particular reason to be generous toward anyone connected to the colonial administration.

[00:26:39]Lewis and Edwina left India in June 1948 after Lewis had served briefly as the country's first governor general following independence.

[00:26:50]The India chapter was over. But for Edwina, the connection it had produced with the country and with Nou would not end for the rest of her life.

[00:27:02]The later years and an arrangement that held in the years following India, the Mount Batton returned to British life carrying the weight and the glory of what they had been part of. Louie resumed his naval career, eventually rising to become first sea lord, the position from which his father had been forced out 30 years earlier. It was a restoration of sorts, and he felt it has one. He served as chief of the defense staff until 1965, making him the longest serving holder of that position in its history. He was by the end of his active career one of the most decorated and senior military figures in British life. He was also by the accounts of almost everyone who worked closely with him an extraordinarily difficult man to work for. The vanity that had been part of his character from youth had calcified into something harder.

[00:28:04]He planned his own funeral in advance with a level of ceremonial detail that left the people helping him somewhat stunned. He kept meticulous records of his own achievements and made sure those records were accessible to biographers.

[00:28:19]He promoted his own legacy with a dedication that some found admirable and others found deeply unseemly.

[00:28:26]But the marriage, still the most discussed and least easily categorized aspect of his personal life, continued.

[00:28:35]Edwina's public life after India centered increasingly on humanitarian work. She became deeply involved with the St. John Ambulance Brigade, traveling constantly to inspect operations, to visit hospitals, to do the unglamorous hands-on work that had revealed itself as her genuine calling during the war.

[00:28:56]She was no longer the socialite who had scandalized London in the 1920s and 1930s.

[00:29:03]She had found in the second half of her life a seriousness and a purpose that the first half had never quite produced.

[00:29:12]Nou visited Broadlands, the Mount Batton's estate in Hampshire in the years after India. The letters continued. The relationship, whatever precise form it took, was ongoing and significant to both of them. Edwina bought him small gifts when she traveled. He sent her things from India.

[00:29:32]They saw each other when his duties and her travels brought them to the same places.

[00:29:38]Louie, by accounts of those close to the family, was at ease with all of it. And through this period, something about the marriage that had always been difficult to name became a little clearer. It was not a conventional marriage and had never been one. But it was a real one.

[00:29:56]Real in the way that two people who have been through enough together, who have children together, who have navigated the 20th century's most consequential events together, are real to each other.

[00:30:10]They were not, in any of the usual senses, romantic partners, but they were something, something that neither of them was willing to relinquish, and that the arrangement they had built together, unusual, often painful, occasionally scandalous, had somehow sustained. In February 1960, while on an inspection tour for the St. John Ambulance Brigade in Jesselton, North Borneo, a place that is now known as Kota Kinabalu in what is today Malaysia's Saba state. Edwina Mountbatton died in her sleep. She was 58 years old. She was found with a pile of Nou's letters beside her.

[00:30:52]The death of Edwina and what came after.

[00:30:58]Louie was in England when he received the news. Edwina had been in North Borneo on another working tour. She had always pushed herself relentlessly, often to the alarm of the people around her, and she simply did not wake up. He had her brought back to Portsmouth, and in accordance with her wishes, wishes she had expressed with the particular decisiveness that had characterized everything she did. She was buried at sea.

[00:31:26]On February 25th, 1960, her coffin was taken aboard HMS Wakeful and committed to the deep about 12 miles off the coast of Portsmouth.

[00:31:37]Jeffrey Fischer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, officiated at the ceremony.

[00:31:42]Louie and their daughters, Patricia and Pamela, were present along with members of the family.

[00:31:50]Queen Elizabeth the queen mother on hearing the news of Edwina's death is said to have remarked that dear Edwina had always liked to make a splash in India Jawahalal Neu heard the news and sent the Indian Navy frigot INS Trishul as an escort to the burial at sea on Neu's instructions after the family's vessel had moved away from the spot where Edwina had been laid to rest the ns s. Trishell quietly took their place and scattered maragolds on the water above her.

[00:32:26]Pamela Mountbatton, watching from the family's ship as the Indian frigot moved into position, said afterward that it was one of the most moving things she had ever seen. Nou himself survived Edwina by 4 years, dying in May 1964.

[00:32:44]His health had declined noticeably after her death in ways that people close to him attributed, at least in part, to grief. He never remarried and is reported to have kept her photograph near him until his own death. Lewis survived his wife by 19 years. He continued his public duties, his naval interests, and his role as mentor to the young Prince Charles, whom he treated with a particular warmth and affection.

[00:33:13]a relationship that Charles has described as among the most significant of his life. Louie was, in Charles's own words, the person he turned to for guidance and counsel in the years when he was navigating what it meant to be the heir to the throne.

[00:33:30]The years after Edwina were productive ones for Louie in terms of public duty and institutional influence, but his private life had lost the person who had given it whatever color and friction and genuine vitality it had possessed. His daughters, Patricia and Pamela, maintained their own lives and their own recollections of a childhood that had been unconventional in ways that required in adulthood some complex reckoning. Both of them in their different ways spoke about their parents' marriage with honesty, acknowledging its difficulties, while also acknowledging that something in it had been real and durable in ways that more conventional arrangements often weren't.

[00:34:16]By the late 1970s, Louie was 79 years old and still a figure of considerable public prominence. He kept a summer retreat at Classibborn Castle on the Malagmore Peninsula in County Siggo in the northwest of Ireland, a remote and beautiful stretch of Atlantic coast just 12 miles from the border with Northern Ireland.

[00:34:39]The security services had warned him.

[00:34:41]They had been warning him for years.

[00:34:44]The provisional Irish Republican Army in the middle of its sustained campaign of violence in Northern Ireland considered him a significant symbol of British imperialism.

[00:34:55]He was Queen Victoria's great grandson, the last viceroy of India, the man who had overseen the end of an empire. He was exactly the kind of target that an organization seeking to send a message would target.

[00:35:11]In 1978, there had already been an attempt. An IRA sniper had aimed at him from the shore as he was aboard his boat, but rough weather had made the shot impossible.

[00:35:24]He continued to go to Classibborn. He preferred minimal security. He liked the coast, liked the local people, and had been coming to that part of Ireland long enough that he felt perhaps the kind of familiarity that can become its own form of complacency.

[00:35:43]The Shadow V.

[00:35:47]On August 27th, 1979, a bank holiday Monday, the weather had cleared after days of rain. Lewis and members of his family who were staying at Classyorn decided to take his 30-foot wooden boat, Shadow V, out to check the lobster pots.

[00:36:04]The night before, an IR member named Thomas McMahon had slipped aboard the unguarded vessel in Mulligmore Harbor and attached a radiocontrolled bomb containing 50 pounds of jelligite beneath the deck, positioned below the spot where Mount Batton was known to sit. McMahon and an accomplice were arrested at a routine police checkpoint 80 miles away just two hours before the bomb was detonated.

[00:36:32]But neither man was connected to the boat in time to prevent what was coming.

[00:36:36]The party that went out on Shadow 5 that morning included Louie, his 14-year-old grandson Nicholas Natchel, Nicholas's grandmother, Dorene, the Daager Lady Brayborn, who was 83 years old, and a 15-year-old local boy named Paul Maxwell from Eniskllin who was crewing for them.

[00:36:58]Several other family members were also on board. When the boat had moved only a few hundred yards from the shore, the device was triggered remotely from the land. The explosion was devastating.

[00:37:11]The boat was destroyed.

[00:37:14]Louie was pulled alive from the water by fishermen who were nearby, but he died from his injuries before he could be brought to shore.

[00:37:23]His grandson Nicholas and the young deckhand Paul Maxwell were killed immediately by the blast.

[00:37:30]The elderly Daaja Lady Bro died from her injuries the following day. That same afternoon, the IRA detonated two additional roadside bombs near Warren Point in County Down, ambushing a British Army convoy and killing 18 soldiers. The deadliest single attack on the British army during the entire period of the Troubles. The world reacted to Mount Batton's death with a shock that had a particular quality to it.

[00:37:59]the shock of something that felt simultaneously unthinkable and in hindsight foreseeable.

[00:38:07]Leaders across the world issued statements. In India, a week of national mourning was declared. In Burma, 3 days of mourning.

[00:38:18]American President Jimmy Carter expressed his profound sadness. The IRA issued a statement describing the killing as a deliberate act to draw attention to the British presence in Northern Ireland.

[00:38:32]On September 5th, 1979, Louisie Mountbatton received a ceremonial funeral at Westminster Abbey, a ceremony that his great nephew, Prince Charles, who read from the Psalms during the service, has described as one of the most difficult experiences of his life.

[00:38:50]The procession from Wellington barracks to the abbey included representatives of all three branches of the British armed forces.

[00:38:59]The abbey itself was filled with royalty, heads of state, and dignitaries from across the world. It was the most significant state funeral held at Westminster Abbey since the 18th century. He was buried afterward at Romy Abbey in Hampshire near his home. He was laid to rest facing the sea.

[00:39:20]Thomas McMan was convicted of the murders in November 1979 on the basis of forensic evidence, traces of gelignite and flakes of green and white paint from the shadow vy found on his clothing. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and was released in 1998 as part of the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

[00:39:44]What remained?

[00:39:48]The marriage of Louisie and Edwina Mountbatton was never going to be easy to explain to anyone who measured marriages by conventional standards. It had been built on an unequal foundation from the start. Her money, his title, and the cracks that appeared within 3 years of the wedding never fully closed.

[00:40:08]They had affairs separately and without real secrecy among the people who knew them.

[00:40:14]They made an arrangement that most people of their era would have found incomprehensible, and they made it work. Not perfectly, not without cost, but in a way that lasted 38 years until Edwina's death in North Borneo in 1960.

[00:40:32]Their daughters, Patricia and Pamela, grew up in households that were unusual, even by the standards of wealthy aristocratic families of the period.

[00:40:42]Both have spoken in later life with a cander about their parents that is sometimes tender and sometimes complicated.

[00:40:50]Pamela's memoir describes her mother's relationship with Nou with sensitivity and grief. Patricia, who inherited the Mountbatton Erldum when Louie had no male heir, carried the family name forward into the 21st century. What the marriage produced beyond two daughters and a great deal of historical drama was something that it is genuinely difficult to name.

[00:41:16]Louie needed Edwina in ways he was not equipped to articulate. She needed him in ways that her other relationships, however intense, never fully substituted for. They wrote to each other during their longest separations.

[00:41:32]When she was seriously ill, she chose to give his letters, Neu's letters, the most intimate correspondence of her life, to Louisis for safekeeping, not to a friend, not to a lawyer, to her husband.

[00:41:50]That says something about what he was to her that all the accounts of their arrangement, all the named and unnamed affairs, all the decades of complicated distance cannot entirely undo.

[00:42:03]Edwina went into the sea off Portsmouth with marolds from India scattered on the water above her. Louie went into the ground at Romsey facing the ocean. The marriage that had started at St. Margaret's on a July afternoon in 1922 with 8,000 people watching and the Prince of Wales as best man and Charlie Chaplain waiting in California ended not with a formal ceremony but with two separate silences 19 years apart each one framed by water.

[00:42:37]It was in the end a love story just not a simple one. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe to our channel so you never miss out on more fascinating stories.