Lord Mountbatten’s outrageous claim about royal affairs: ‘I spent my life in other people’
Lord Mountbatten: India Hicks recollects day of IRA assassination
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Mountbatten’s relationships will likely feature in tonight’s ITV documentary My Years with the Queen, which will see his daughter Lady Pamela Hicks detail her life within the Royal Family. He is the Queen’s third cousin, and Prince Philip’s uncle, and his life was recently reexamined as part of the Netflix drama The Crown. Greg Wise and Charles Dance have both portrayed Lord Mountbatten across the show’s four seasons, which takes a fictionalised look at the world’s most famous family.
During the latest season, it appears Prince Charles – played by Josh O’Connor – opens up to Lord Mountbatten about his own infidelities when he talks about an encounter he had with Camilla Parker Bowles.
Although some of the series is dramatised, Lord Mountbatten himself was open about the affairs he conducted while with Edwina Ashley, who would become Lady Mountbatten.
The couple married in 1922, when Lord Mountbatten – also known as Dickie – was 22, and they remained wedded until Lady Mountbatten passed away some 38 years later in 1960.
But Philip Ziegler’s 1985 book Mountbatten: The Official Biography notes how the Royal Navy officer and statesman did not always stay faithful during the marriage.
According to the book, Lord Mountbatten said: “Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds.”
According to a 2019 report from The Washington Post, an insider claimed they “would stay together with separate beds and, to some extent, separate lives”.
They added: “But they would remain loving, mutually supportive chums. Above all, they would be discreet.”
Among the affairs reported to have happened with Lord Mountbatten, included with Yola Letellier, the wife of Henri Letellier, publisher of Le Journal.
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The details are examined further by Lady Hicks in her 2012 book Daughter of Empire: Life as a Mountbatten.
But the infidelity occurred on both sides, with Lady Mountbatten herself guilty of having affairs.
Lady Hicks wrote: “When my father first heard that she had taken a lover, he was devastated.
“But eventually, using their reserves of deep mutual affection, my parents managed to negotiate a way through this crisis and found a modus vivendi (way of life).”
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The 91-year-old noted that the couple would begin an open marriage, and that Lord Mountbatten’s “total desire for my mother’s happiness” was a driving factor behind why the marriage survived.
She added: “To her dying day, he was always worrying that Mummy would divorce him.
“But although she said she had no time for royalty and that she was a true socialist, Mummy would never have left him.
“Try keeping her away from a party at Buckingham Palace.”
In 1979, Lord Mountbatten was assassinated during an IRA bomb attack in Ireland.
The explosion killed his 14-year-old grandson Nicholas, his daughter Patricia’s mother-in-law Lady Bradbourne, as well as a 15-year-old crew member called Paul Maxwell.
The incident occurred while he was on holiday at Classiebawn Castle near Mullaghmore in County Sligo in the Republic of Ireland, where he stayed each summer with both his daughters’ families.
Lord Mountbatten’s granddaughter, India Hicks, was just 12 when the bomb struck, and spoke of how moving the recreation of the moment was in The Crown.
According to the Daily Star, India added: “The Crown, I know the first two episodes, maybe the first three – focus on the murder of my grandfather, by the IRA.
“Apparently, it’s very, very powerful those first two episodes. So this whole series of The Crown, for me, is a deeply personal one.”
‘My Years with the Queen’ is on ITV1 tonight at 9pm.
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