Charles, the daughter he never had and the haunting saga behind this wedding photo
Farewell parties at Buckingham Palace for the members of the Queen’s household can be jolly affairs. when they said farewell the other day to retiring Graham Sharpe, her long-time director of property services, Prince andrew rose to the occasion with a speech including some good jokes about the leaky palace roof.
Joining in the in-house laughter, unusually, was an outsider — lady (Penny) Brabourne, 63, a butcher’s daughter who is the royal Family’s most intimate family friend.
So close is she that the Queen even loaned her Mr Sharpe to help with the renovation of Broadlands, the Hampshire estate where Penny lives and which, over the years, has been a home from home to the royals.
what binds the tall and willowy Penny to the family so affectionately is not just the muchdiscussed carriage-driving relationship she has with 95year-old Prince Philip, who was a prominent guest at Mr Sharpe’s farewell, guffawing at his son’s jokes.
It is the fact that both she and the royal Family have been enveloped by personal tragedies in recent times, some of which they share — though the royals’ suffering hardly compares to what she has endured.
This October marks the 25th anniversary of the death from kidney cancer of Penny’s daughter, leonora. The bright and happy child was just five.
Her son Nicholas, 35, once a mentor to Prince william at eton, was a victim of crack cocaine and heroin.
To cap it all, as she was nearing 60, her husband Norton — the 8th Baron Brabourne and grandson of earl Mountbatten of Burma — left her six years ago for another woman, only to return when his mistress dumped him four years later.
In his absence, Penny was left to run the 6,000-acre estate, and has been doing so brilliantly. Now a broken man in declining health, Norton lives in a cottage on the estate. They remain married.
earl Mountbatten was killed by an Ira booby-trap bomb in 1979 in his small fishing boat in Ireland in the blast that killed lord Brabourne’s younger brother Nicholas, who was 14, and his grandmother, as well as a local boy.
So just imagine the bittersweet emotions that Penny must have felt when sitting down to plan the wedding of her daughter alexandra, 33, to her fiance of some years, Tom Hooper, an IT entrepreneur.
at last, here was something to celebrate, but there was also a problem.
lord Brabourne, 68, a frail figure who is often accompanied by carers when out in the nearby town of romsey, would obviously be involved in his daughter’s wedding. But would he be able to walk her down the aisle and give her away?
The answer comes from the rev Canon Tim Sledge, the vicar, who conducted the service at romsey abbey.
‘He simply was not well enough,’ says the vicar. ‘what better than to have a family member to give her away.’
enter Prince Charles, lord Brabourne’s cousin and his best man in 1979, when Norton married Penny in a ceremony that had been delayed three months by the Ira bomb.
Charles volunteered to assume the father-of-the-bride duties. a month before the wedding, the Prince made it plain he would be honoured and delighted to take over the crucial role from his old friend. well, he owed him a favour. Norton was a year his senior at Gordonstoun, and helped Charles get through the school’s notoriously rigorous physical regime which he hated.
There was another connection, which goes to the very heart of how the Brabournes are so interwoven with the royals: Princess Diana was alexandra’s godmother.
as for Norton leaving Penny after 31 years of marriage for fashion entrepreneur Jeannie Nuttall (they briefly set up home together in Nassau in the Bahamas), Prince Charles is hardly blameless in allowing his passion for another women to destroy his marriage.
SO COMe the wedding day at the end of last month and there was Charles — albeit without Camilla, who spent the day with her grandchildren — the perfect stand-in, under the gaze of the Queen and the Duke of edinburgh as well as Princess anne.
To aesthete Charles’s satisfaction, no flowers decorated the ancient romsey abbey, founded in aD907 and rebuilt two centuries later.
No flowers at a wedding? as the vicar explains: ‘The family said they loved the beauty of the architecture, especially its arches, and didn’t want to detract from it.’
Charles knows the ancient abbey well. It is where his much-loved ‘honorary grandfather’ lord Mountbatten lies, and he likes to drop in to spend private moments at the gravestone set in the floor. at the wedding, the Queen and Prince Philip (Mountbatten’s nephew) also took the opportunity to spend time in silent contemplation at the resting place of ‘Uncle Dickie’, murdered by the Ira while on holiday with his family at Classiebawn, his holiday home in Ireland.
One is entitled to wonder to what extent those moments in romsey abbey were in the Queen’s mind when, just a few days later, on a visit to Northern Ireland, she was asked by Deputy First Minister and former Ira commander Martin McGuinness if she was well and the Queen replied: ‘well, I’m still alive.’
as for the bride’s father, lord Brabourne, watching the marriage ceremony while gripping the hand of his estranged wife, he may well have been wondering just what the future holds for Broadlands.
It is, famously, where the Queen and Philip — as well as Charles and Diana 34 years later — spent part of their honeymoon and endless weekends when their children were growing up.
locally, it is anticipated that Brabourne’s accountant daughter and her new husband will eventually move into the historic house to help her mother run the estate.
Penny, who studied at the london School of economics, arrived at Broadlands when it was left to lord Brabourne.
The expectation was that he would devote his life to maintaining an estate of unique provenance, where Noel Coward used to play the piano at Mountbatten’s weekend house parties (he was referred to as ‘the pianist’) when the Queen and Prince Philip were staying.
Becoming the chatelaine of one of the country’s most famous houses was a challenge for Penny, whose father, reg eastwood, moved on from being a butcher to founding the angus Steakhouse chain.
She took to it instantly. and one of the things that has particularly impressed the Queen is the way Penny has put aside her personal setbacks to
make sure that Broadlands is secured for the future.
The sudden disappearance of Lord Brabourne — making a mockery of the family motto ‘In Honour Bound’ — made no difference to the way things were run.
‘Not for one moment did Penny allow her husband’s departure to interrupt the smooth running of the estate,’ says a local figure. ‘She was impressive.’ Lord Brabourne hated the responsibility of running Broadlands. One of his old friends says: ‘The fact is Norton was always complaining that the estate had been foisted on him and was a dreadful burden.’
Not so Penny. She is devoted to Broadlands. It is a house that she never wants to leave because it is where her daughter, Leonora, is buried. Through the windows of the drawing room she can see the tall stone monument that stands on a plinth 100 yards from the house.
The mansion contains a fire-proof, bomb-proof and flood-proof archive that used to contain Lord Mountbatten’s papers until they were moved to Southampton University. It now holds precious photo albums and film that record Leonora’s tragically short life and have been described by Lady Brabourne as ‘my most treasured possessions’.
It was in August 1990 while Penny and Norton were on holiday in Majorca with the Prince and Princess of Wales that Leonora became ill. Penny wept on Charles’s shoulder.
Just 14 months later, Leonora was dead. There was a huge wave of public sympathy from millions who had watched Trooping the Colour that June on television and remembered the little girl on the Buckingham Palace balcony.
Dressed all in red, she wore a hat to cover the loss of hair she had suffered during her chemotherapy treatment.
Money poured into the Leonora Children’s Cancer Fund, which the Brabournes founded in their daughter’s memory. It was merged with the Edwina Mountbatten Trust in 2010, the year Norton took off.
Weddings are always a time for reflection and nostalgia, and there was much quiet talk at the reception (in the great house itself) of Penny’s resilience and sheer guts.
There was also discussion of how her son, Nicholas, having fought his way through years of addiction and rehabilitation, was looking better than he has for years. He was escorting his 90-year-old grandmother, Countess Mountbatten.
Working as a digital artist and living with a nurse in a Chelsea flat, Nicholas — the future Earl Mountbatten — is seen as unlikely ever to take over the running of the estate.
This week, Broadlands opens to the public for its annual summer season. Most great houses that the public can visit have an epic tale to tell, usually from the distant past.
At Broadlands, as Penny Brabourne makes her ritual daily visit to Leonora’s grave, the story is still unfolding.