Mountbatten: ruling class casualty (1979)

From the October 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Violence, within and between individual states, is inescapable under the social system of capitalism. States often disagree over their mutual boundaries; each, in normal circumstances, wishes to preserve, or to extend if possible, its frontiers. The larger the territory, the greater the chance of profit. The ideas of ‘race’ or nationalism, of separate language-groupings or cultures, or the traditions of such groupings, are often called on by both sides in such disputes. So is religion. Among capitalists in Great Britain and Ireland at the present time, and among those who take up the banners of either the British or the Irish capitalist class, there is such a dispute. Should Northern Ireland become part of Irish capitalism, or should it remain part of British capitalism? Cultural and racial traditions are appealed to by both sides. The slogan of a ‘united Ireland’ is opposed by the cry that the six counties are really British. Catholics are exhorted to support one side, and Protestants the other.

Many Northern Irish workers, deceived by the ever-active propagandists of capitalism, have strong views as to whether they would rather be exploited by Irish or British capitalism. Capitalist boundary disputes cannot be ‘solved’, except by the forcible transportation of thousands or even millions of people such as we saw, for example, in eastern Germany and eastern Poland after 1945.

In the capitalist struggle over Northern Ireland, twenty-two people were killed by the IRA on Monday August 27. As a single day’s casualty list, it was high by Ulster standards, being rivalled only by the numbers of demonstrators killed in Londonderry on one day in 1972 by the British army, and by some massacres in public houses caused by bombs planted by the other side. Among the twenty-two dead in August was Earl Mountbatten of Burma. Why was his death greeted with such grisly satisfaction on one side, and such ostentatious horror on the other?

Unemployed royalty

Mountbatten was by descent a member of a kind of condottieri of minor German royalties who ranged over Europe in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seeking new positions, new countries, and (with luck) new thrones While in northern and western Europe the feudal barons had given way to kings and eastern and south-eastern Europe was split among the Russian, Austrian and Turkish Empires, in the middle of Europe the barons had evolved into petty princelings of small states, mostly German-speaking. Some were consolidated by Napoleon, and the 160 principalities of 1789 became only thirty-eight in 1815. Nevertheless, that still meant a lot of royal families, all with younger sons and daughters to be provided for as improved medical care led to the survival of more babies.

At the same time, two careers opened to the fortunate: marriage into the more important royal houses of Europe, or the filling of new thrones in the east of Europe as the older empires crumbled and new independent states were established. Others of the successive ducal broods followed their more fortunate brothers and sisters, and commanded armies or navies or found other well-paid niches — or rich spouses, or both — within the ruling hierarchies of the larger European countries. Some had to try two or even three different states before finding a satisfactory position for themselves.

The royal base from which these adventurers set out was obliterated in 1871 when Prussia swallowed up most of these petty territories in the creation of the new greater Germany. But the destruction of the thrones did not mean the destruction of their occupants, and for many decades after 1871 these ex-royalties continued their ancestral occupations.

British connection

Mountbatten came from the line of dukes of Hesse. Already very well connected, the Hesse royal family came into the British royal family's circle of acquaintance, and two of the four sons of Alexander and his Polish countess (Louis, Alexander, Henry, Francis) decided to become British and make their fortunes in the UK; Prince Louis of Battenburg was chosen as the husband for another of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters, and Prince Henry was accented as the husband for Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter. Honours quickly flowed in: Louis became Admiral of the Fleet, personal aide-de-camp to Victoria, Edward VII and George V, and First Sea Lord.

Jackpot

Another of the Battenburg boys seemed to have hit an even bigger jackpot. In 1879, the Bulgarian capitalist class established its de facto independence from the Turkish sultan and invited Prince Alexander of Battenburg to become the country’s monarch as Prince of Bulgaria. Immediately, Alexander’s younger brother, Prince Francis, the fourth of the Battenburgs, turned up as a colonel of Bulgarian cavalry, only too ready to swear undying allegiance to Bulgaria as soon as he could find it on the map. After Alexander had enjoyed only seven years as front man for the Bulgarian ruling class, however, Russia decided the country was getting too big for its boots and kidnapped Alexander, forcing him to abdicate. This nasty experience subdued him, and he returned to Hesse, still financially well provided for, and settled down there as an ex-monarch. Prince Francis, however, was not beaten yet. He married the daughter of Nicholas I, King of Montenegro; but his efforts to learn the Montenegrin national anthem were in vain, as the country, and its royal house with all the perks attaching to it, disappeared in the First World War.

These royal adventurers often fought loyally for ‘their’ countries, despite relatives on the other side. Nor did they worry too much about how repressive or otherwise the regime they served turned out to be: relatives of the British royal family ran anti-Semitic pogroms and jailed or executed opponents in Russia and elsewhere, and other relatives of British royalty fought for the Nazis in the last war — Prince Charles has a German cousin, born in the 1930s, named Adolf after Hitler. The international background of this stratum of ex-German royalties contrasts strangely with the jingoism and chauvinism — ‘my country, right or wrong’ — which each state shoves down its workers’ throats in war and peace.

Mountbatten

The British Battenburgs found themselves under suspicion in 1914 when a wave of anti-German hysteria swept the country. Prince Louis of Battenburg, whose brother-in-law was a Grand Admiral in the Imperial German navy, was forced to resign as First Sea Lord. They avoided all such future complications by changing their name to Mountbatten. George V further anglicised his cousin’s husband by creating him Marquis of Milford Haven. Prince Louis had four children: George, second marquis; Louis, later Earl Mountbatten; Victoria, who married Prince Andrew of Greece and was the mother of Prince Philip; and Louise, who married Gustav VI of Sweden, becoming Queen of Sweden. Louis entered the British navy and eventually became an admiral, filling many top posts in the armed forces and elsewhere. He was personal aide-de-camp to Edward VIII, GeorgeVI and Elizabeth II. He was Chief of Combined Operations in 1942-3, Supreme Allied Commander in south-east Asia in 1943-6, Viceroy of India in 1947, Governor-General of India in 1947-8, First Sea Lord in 1955-9, and Chief of Defence Staff in 1959-65.

He chaired a committee investigating security in British prisons, and recommended the formation of new high security units. His personal fortune was greatly extended by his marriage to the Hon. Edwina Ashley; her father was a Conservative MP, a government minister and a peer, and her mother the only daughter of Sir Ernest Cassel, who made much money out of publishing. Mountbatten’s personal record of prominent positions in the service of British capitalism, particularly in the titanic struggles (so costly in destruction and in human suffering) of the British state earlier this century against its rivals, together with his close relationship to the royal family, ensured him the panegyrics which duly appeared in every national newspaper on his death.

Slaughter

It is true that some past criticisms were mentioned in the obituaries. Some recalled the heavy loss of life, allegedly through faults of advance planning, in the Dieppe raid of 1942 which Mountbatten masterminded. Others referred to the slaughter which followed when he went to India in 1947 (the British ruling class not being able any longer to keep such a vast country as its own private possession), pushing through the partition into India and Pakistan so quickly that many minorities were caught on the wrong side of the new frontier and were promptly massacred; perhaps half a million died.

Northern Ireland

Both sides in the Northern Ireland dispute stand aghast at violence — when it is committed by the other side. The IRA deplore British violence, but they have not only killed British soldiers and prominent men like Mountbatten; they have frequently killed also mere bystanders. The Mountbatten bomb also killed a local boy who worked on the yacht. British newspapers were horror-struck at such indiscriminate homicide, but the British army in Northern Ireland has also killed innocent bystanders who got in the way of gun-battles (apologising afterwards, like the IRA does). And during the Second World War, while Mountbatten played a leading part in the direction of the British war effort, many innocent German women and children were deliberately slaughtered in bombing raids. The 100,000 killed in a single Allied raid on Hamburg (many of them burned alive in a fire-storm) must have included thousands of babies, boys and girls, women and old people, as well as hundreds of foreign conscripted slave-workers — besides all those left mutilated, crippled and disfigured. Nor was any apology considered necessary. Where were the horrified newspaper articles and broadcasts then?

If you handle pitch, you get dirty fingers. If you support and work for capitalism, violence — committing it and suffering it, as Mountbatten did — is likely to be part of the deal.

Alwyn Edgar