Matthew Dennison’s book about the youngest daughter and constant companion of Queen Victoria *** 3 Stars
By Gabrielle Pantera

The Last Princess, Queen Victoria demanded she never leave her

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 10/22/2009 – “Many people continue to feel that, by re-writing Queen Victoria’s journals and destroying the originals, Beatrice committed an unforgivable act of historical vandalism,” says The Last Princess author Matthew Dennison. “An octogenarian peer, whose family has a long tradition of royal service, began our conversation about the Princess by shouting very crossly at me, ‘That bloody woman!”.

The Last Princess is about Beatrice Mary Victoria Feodore, the last child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Born four yeas before her father died, she only had four years with both her parents. Her older sisters got married and escaped to some degree their mother’s demanding presence. Queen Victoria was determined that Beatrice would stay by her side unmarried until she died. The Queen did relent on that, but nothing more. What was Beatrice’s life like? Did she have any happiness and joy? Or was it all duty?

“The Last Princess contains significant quantities of new material, including many letters which have not previously been seen or quoted,” says Dennison. “In the first instance, I wrote to the head of every family who had ever held an official position at Queen Victoria’s Court. I also worked extensively from paintings. The portraits Queen Victoria commissioned of her favourite daughter tell us so much about the mother’s perceptions of and feelings about her daughter.”

“One of my great breakthroughs with this book came quite by accident. In an obscure auction catalogue, I spotted a cache of letters written by a servant of the Empress Eugenie of France,” says Dennison. “The letters revealed the servant girl’s observations on Beatrice’s marriage.”

“Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s summer house on the Isle of Wight, off the south coast of England, has a very powerful atmosphere, a sense of vanished laughter and past joys,” says Dennison. “I felt there were unlaid ghosts there, untold stories. Princess Beatrice was Victoria and Albert’s real ‘Osborne’ child. Her story is inextricably wrapped up with that extraordinary house.”

Dennison’s book was almost lost forever. “As the book neared completion, I took a train journey from my house in the country to my flat in London,” says Dennison. “I was travelling with the manuscript, which was partly handwritten, a sheaf of photocopies of letters from one of the German archives, and my dog, a Pekingese called Ludo who was a birthday present from my wife. I took an Underground train across London. Ludo began to feel sick. I jumped off the tube train at the next station and realised, as the train disappeared at speed into the darkness, that the case containing my manuscript and papers, without my address or phone numbers on it, was still on the train. I had not backed it up on my computer.”

“Several frantic days later, I had a telephone call from a gallery owner whose exhibition I had reviewed,” says Dennison. “An Albanian builder calling himself Ben claimed to have my legal documents. I couldn’t imagine what he meant. Then I realised. Ben had found my name in the case and Googled me.”

Dennison met Ben who handed back all his materials. Ben had seen two guys playing football with his case on the train and taken it from them. When he first came to Britain, he’d lost his passport in the same way until a fellow traveller had returned it to him. Ben was paying forward the favour. Dennison, with quiet understatement, says he was “immensely relieved.”

In his mission to get his book published, Dennison first found his publisher. At a dinner party, a friend said that only one man in London will publish this book: Ion Trewin of Weidenfeld & Nicolson. “I wrote to him and he was discouraging,” says Dennison. “Undaunted, I entered my synopsis for an annual British competition, The Daily Mail Biographers’ Club Prize.”

When his book was short listed for the prize, Dennison went back to Trewin. “He told me to get an agent and suggested his four favourite British agents,” says Dennison. “I chose Georgina Capel of Capel & Land, because she represents a bevy of successful British historians including Andrew Roberts, Simon Sebag Montefiore and Tristram Hunt. We get on very well. Her office, in a crooked early Eighteenth Century house in Soho, has wooden floors which are happily dog proof.”

The Last Princess was almost a TV movie. “The Last Princess was with British Channel Four for a long time, being handled by independent production company Lion TV,” says Dennison. “They wanted to turn it into a psychological drama, examining how the nature of Queen Victoria’s love shaped Beatrice’s personality, but no funding came through.”

The Last Princess has had seven British editions to date and was a number one bestseller at Hatchards.

Matthew Dennison next book, Empress of Rome: The Life of Livia, releases in the UK spring of 2010. He and his wife wrote together At Home with Colour, published in Britain and the U.S. by Ryland Peters & Small.

Dennison grew up in Durham in the north of England, an ancient cathedral city built, like Rome, on seven hills. He currently lives mostly in the country in North Wales.

The Last Princess: The Devoted Life of Queen Victoria’s Youngest Daughter by Matthew Dennison

Trade paperback, 265 pages, St Martin’s Griffin, November 2009, ISBN: 9780312564971