By 1929, it was decided that Edwina was free to engage in her romances so long as it was done quietly, and in 1932 he himself took a mistress. More than once, a disgruntled wife took Edwina to court for her dealings with married men, even as society was scandalized by her affair with Leslie Hutchinson, a musician who also happened to be black.īut as we learn from Lownie, Mountbatten learnt to look at marriage unsentimentally. In 1925, Mountbatten first learnt about her lovers, and over the next decades there would be many more. While he sailed off to build his career, revelling in uniforms and pageantry, Edwina became something of a “poor little rich girl" who partied her time away even as she sought something resembling purpose. In public, Mountbatten constructed an attractive personality and a reputation for leadership, but, in private, Dickie (as he was called) knew this came more naturally to his glamorous wife, in whose eyes he was a bore. It didn’t take too long, then, for strains in the marriage to emerge. He was methodical and exact to the point of being difficult-his guests were taught precise ways to consume even strawberries-while she was all zest and spontaneity. Edwina was the granddaughter of a Jewish banker, who left her such an enormous inheritance that she received in a month ten times what her husband earned in a year. On the one hand, husband and wife represented vastly different temperaments and characters: Mountbatten was Queen Victoria’s great grandson, and while he held a title, his purse was tiny. In some respects, the incident is reflective of the heady but also inconsistent marriage that lay ahead, a subject explored delectably in The Mountbattens: Their Lives And Loves by Andrew Lownie. “Edwina having just…seen the Taj Mahal," wrote Mountbatten, “was full of scorn for this poor little tomb." This time, however, the bride-to-be was less impressed. It was all “wonderful and romantic", and, a month later, they made another trip to the 16th century mausoleum. The day after Edwina accepted, her fiancé diarized how they had “motored out to King Humayun’s enormous tomb, which we saw at 3am by moonlight". Both in their early 20s, they had known each other only a few months, but were determined to spend their lives together. In 1922, a naval officer called Louis Mountbatten proposed to a fabulously wealthy woman called Edwina Ashley in Delhi.
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