Castles of Steel

by Robert K. Massie

  Beatty was not with the international expedition sent to relieve the besieged legations in Peking, but he was ashore in China, having landed with 150 men from Barfleur to bolster the defense of the beleaguered river port of Tientsin. Nine days after landing, Beatty was wounded twice within twenty minutes, first in the left arm below the shoulder, and then in the left wrist. He emerged from a local hospital with his arm in a sling and was ordered home for surgery to preserve the use of his arm. After the campaign, Beatty was one of four navy commanders who fought in China raised to the rank of captain. He was twenty-nine. The average age for promotion to captain was forty-two, and he had been promoted over the heads of 218 other Royal Navy commanders.

  Beatty returned to England a hero, and Ethel Tree moved quickly to reengage his attention. When he first left for China, they had exchanged letters, but during his two years in the Far East, rumors reached him that she was constantly being seen in the company of another man, although she remained married to Tree. Nevertheless, when he arrived in Portsmouth, he received a letter and telegram from her suggesting that they resume their relationship. His first response was to air his grievances: “Some months ago all letters from you ceased absolutely and entirely. And letters came from other people telling me that you and ‘X’ were never seen apart and continually in each other’s pockets and this by people who did not even know what you are to me so what was I to think? . . . I am not easy going and have an awful temper and I landed from China with my heart full of rage and swore I did not care if I ever saw you again.” Then he about-faced and accepted her offer: “So great is the joy at seeing you, to me, the sweetest creature on God’s earth, but you admit you are an awful flirt. . . . Unfortunately I shall go on loving you to the bitter end, and now if this operation does not go right what use to you is a one-armed individual?”

  The operation to restore full use of his left arm took place in September 1900. It was mostly successful, but Beatty was left with two permanently crippled fingers. Meanwhile, Ethel had forced her husband to file for divorce in America. “Dear Arthur,” she wrote him, “I have thought over your suggestion that we should live together again and I can never consent to it. There is no use discussing our differences. I shall never live with you again. Yours truly, Ethel F. Tree.” To speed the action, she accepted the charge of desertion, thereby losing custody of her child. On May 12, 1901, the divorce was granted. Ethel’s son Ronald Tree later condemned his “wilful and beautiful mother” for deserting him and his father, and said that the “divorce crushed my father’s spirit . . . he dropped out of the world.”

  [In 1914, when her former husband was dying at the age of fifty-two, Ethel, who had not seen her son Ronald for ten years, sent a woman to the hospital to tell the sixteen-year-old boy, “Your mother has sent me to take you away.” Appalled, Ronald sent the messenger away and returned to his father’s bedside. Arthur Tree died the next day.]

  Ten days after the divorce, David and Ethel were married in the London registrar’s office. Beatty was thirty; she was twenty-seven.

  No one knows how much this couple knew about each other before they married. Beatty had been given a glimpse, but he could not have fully recognized the nature of his new wife. Keenly aware of the power of her beauty and wealth to attract men, accustomed to their constant, devoted attention, she always acted as she pleased and expected to get what she wanted. Beatty’s nephew, on the other hand, is certain that Ethel never knew about her husband’s illegitimacy; had she known, he says, the fact would have placed a formidable weapon in her hands. Even so, their wedding marked the start of a long battle between Ethel and the navy, with Beatty struggling in the middle. She resented the separations that were part of service life and refused to be left behind like an ordinary navy wife when her husband went to sea. What he saw as attention to duty, she saw as deliberate neglect and selfish dismissal of her needs. Recrimination was constant. A pattern evolved: first a storm of rage, then tears, then, on both sides, an orgy of apology. Beatty’s affection for his wife was greater than hers for him, which equipped her with the greater power to hurt. In his constant effort to placate her, his letters became pleading, pitiable, sometimes almost childish.

  At first, these problems were submerged in the early joys of marriage, aided by the fact that David remained ashore. Two years passed between his being wounded in China and an Admiralty medical board passing him as fit for duty at sea. During these years, he learned to live as she preferred him: a gay, extravagant man of fashion in hunting circles and London society, posing next to his wife. Nevertheless, the reckoning came; once certified fit for sea duty, he was posted to three years in the Mediterranean Fleet. At first he tried to confront his wife’s anger. She was staying at the Bristol Hotel in Paris when he wrote, “You have done a great deal of grumbling in your letters of late. Of course you have been brought up differently and like all American wives do not understand why their husbands should be anywhere else but with them.” Then, succumbing to his own ambition, he turned to her for help, making a distasteful appeal that she use her charms to help him advance his career. “My darling Tata,” he wrote,

  I had hoped that by going to Dunrobin you would have made a friend of the old Duke and that therefore in the future, should I ever require any outside assistance, he would be more likely to take an interest in someone he knew than someone he knew little about, and therefore might be of the utmost assistance to me. One has to think of these things when one lives a public life and if one wants to get on and not throw a chance away and no one can afford to let slip opportunities of making friends with those who can assist you.

  Eventually Ethel followed him to Malta, where the Mediterranean Fleet was based, and there, in 1905, their first son, David, was born. Their relationship seemed close; when he was with her, he indulged her whims; when he was away, they wrote or telegraphed every day. He always wanted more. “Well, love, you might be a little more communicative,” he wrote to her. “It’s only twopence a word. Give me a shilling’s worth and say how the weather is. It brightens me up.” Most of his letters pleaded for signs of attention and affection; he asked endless questions about her feelings and activities. Her letters to him were less frequent, less intimate, more gossipy, and filled with tart, derogatory opinions of the navy and navy people. Professionally, he always did well: he commanded the cruisers Juno, Arrogant, and Suffolk; he was a strict, forceful, efficient captain, not overly popular, but his ships routinely won prizes in weapons competitions. Among his fellow captains and other officers, however, his youth and wealth stirred jealousy; and Ethel’s behavior sometimes caused embarrassment. She never completely lost her Chicago accent, and her habit of shouting for her husband in a piercing voice—“J-aaack!”(her nickname for him)—grated on English ears. Once when Beatty drove Suffolk too hard returning to Malta, thereby damaging her engines, there were rumors of disciplinary action. A story passed around the fleet that Ethel had said, “What? Court Martial my David? I’ll buy them a new ship.” She never gave up urging him to leave the navy. Even in 1905, while she was making an effort to please him, she wrote, “I have thought for a long time that your abilities where you are, are wasted. I am sure you would succeed in another trade and would, I am sure, satisfy your ambition quite as much, if not more, and our life would certainly be much happier. Sometimes I feel as if I really could not stand the strain of these terrible partings very much more.”

  As the years went by, Beatty struggled to balance his ambition and the burden of his unusual marriage. He had made an almost Faustian bargain: Ethel’s wealth had brought him mansions in London, halls in Leicestershire and Scotland for shooting, and a private yacht. She helped his career by enabling him to enter higher political and social circles—although still not the court circle—but she often reduced him to private despair. Shane Leslie, a Beatty biographer, who knew both Beattys well, wrote that she was “beautiful, opulent, ambitious and unhinged by her hereditary fortune and by an insane streak. She brought him many g
ifts; great beauty, a passionate and jealous love, sons, wealth, houses, and a personality he could not conquer, for against him was arrayed a distraught spirit which brought their home life to utter misery.” Beatty told Leslie that he was “the most unhappy man in the world”: “I have paid terribly for my millions,” he said.

  At the end of 1905, he returned to London, where, to Ethel’s delight, he settled down for three years as Naval Adviser to the Army Council. In December 1908, he went back to sea as captain of the predreadnought battleship Queen, in the Atlantic Fleet, which was commanded by Prince Louis of Battenberg. In his letters to Ethel, he attempted to please her by belittling the officers around him: “We have eight admirals and there is not one among them, unless it be Prince Louis (who is lazy and has other disadvantages) who impresses one that he is capable of great effort.” Ethel was scarcely interested. The Atlantic Fleet was based at Gibraltar, a socially barren place. When the fleet spent Christmas week in that harbor, she did not come to join him. Instead, chagrined by his absence, she began seeing other men. These relationships, she insisted, were innocent: “As you know, ‘Lion’ and I were a great deal together and I became very fond of him . . . although not the way I care for you, dear. I honestly say I like the companionship of other men but that is because most women bore me.” In reply, Beatty blamed himself: “I felt as if I was an ogre dragging you to some fearful place that you dreaded. You see, dear, your happiness is the one thing I have to live for and if only you are happy and contented, so am I. But I fear I am making a hash of it somehow.” Nevertheless, he went on, “If you have come to the decision that you want to go your own way without interference from me, as apparently is the fashion nowadays, would it not be fairer to say so? I have many faults. No one can see them more than you. Won’t you in kindness point out where I fail and in what I upset you, as it would appear I do at times?”

  His marriage wobbled, but Beatty’s career continued to prosper and by the end of 1909, he had reached the top of the list of captains. But because of the periods spent ashore, first when he was recovering from wounds and later when he served on the Army Council, he had not served the time at sea required for promotion to admiral. Jacky Fisher intervened and, on his recommendation, an exception was made. On January 1, 1910, by a special Order in Council, David Beatty became, at thirty-eight, the youngest British admiral since Nelson. “Rear Admiral Beatty,” The Times pointed out, “will not only be the youngest officer on the flag list, but will be younger than over ninety percent of the officers now on the captains’ list.”

  None of this gave Ethel what she really wanted. Her husband’s spectacular success and the presence of her two sons were not much good to her as long as she was barred from the summit of society.

  [On April 2, 1910, a few months after Beatty became an admiral, a second son, Peter, was born. In his infancy, Peter’s eyelids stuck together when he slept, a condition called ophthalmia neonatorum. This condition, probably acquired from his mother during the process of birth, suggested meningitis. Treated by frequent eye irrigation, the infection cleared up, but, according to Beatty’s nephew, complications over the years indicate that the problem may have been of venereal origin. An even more surprising statement by Charles Beatty is that “David must have known that he could not have been the boy’s father. This was generally accepted in later years and I was told who the other man was: [he came from] a well-known family of the British aristocracy.”

  As a mother to David Junior and Peter, Ethel was little better than she had been to the abandoned Ronald. When Peter was two, Ethel left him and went to gamble in Monte Carlo. Beatty, remaining with the boys in London, wrote her that Peter kept saying, over and over, “Mum, Mum, come!” As he grew older, Peter became practically blind, and “meningeal symptoms made it difficult for him to control the nerve reflexes of his head and neck, making him slobber and appear uncouth.” He lived into adulthood, but Ethel, says Charles, “made no secret of her embarrassment at his conspicuous disability in company and in private she often ignored or even mocked him.”]

  Her wealth had opened many doors, but her status as a divorced woman had kept the highest door firmly closed. Now Ethel fixed on this new objective: she was determined to be presented at court; if she was not, her husband would quit the navy. As Beatty explained his situation to another officer, “My little lady likes the good things of this world including the gay side of it. She has a nice house in town and is sufficiently supplied with the necessary to be able to live in London and enjoy the entertaining and being entertained that a season produces. And it has undoubtedly struck her that my being in the service precludes her from participating in what to her provides something of the joy of life.” Their friends saw the situation more baldly. “David was threatening to leave the Navy,” said Eugenie Godfrey-Fausset. “Ethel was putting on one of her hysterical acts . . . she would force David to leave the Navy unless she was received at Court.” In 1911, Eugenie’s husband, the naval aide-de-camp and close friend to the new monarch, George V, arranged that Ethel Beatty, formerly Ethel Tree, be formally presented to the King of England.

  Even as Ethel triumphed without forcing her husband to leave the navy, Beatty was risking his career on his own. He already had imperiled it by marrying a divorced woman; now he risked it again by refusing a major sea command. In 1911, as a new rear admiral, he was offered the respectable assignment of second in command of the Atlantic Fleet, a command that Jellicoe before him had automatically accepted as a necessary rung on the ladder of promotion. Beatty turned it down. The Atlantic Fleet was based at Gibraltar; Beatty had asked for the Home Fleet, which was more likely to be involved in any coming war with Germany—and which was based closer to home and to Ethel. His refusal, once known, stirred bitterness. Sea commands were scarce; to turn one down seemed almost unthinkable. Many officers senior to him also preferred the Home Fleet and were waiting in line for an appointment. The Sea Lords were shocked by Beatty’s effrontery and Captain Ernest Troubridge, the First Lord’s naval secretary, wrote to him, “The fact is that the Admiralty view is that officers should serve where the Admiralty wish and not where they themselves wish.”

  Beatty’s friends thought his behavior foolishness, a reckless gamble with his whole future; others described it as insufferable arrogance. Despite his physical courage in the Sudan and China, Beatty’s rapid promotions had not endeared him to his seniors and contemporaries. Many dismissed him as merely a dashing officer suddenly endowed with great wealth whose heart was not in the service. It was said that he had too many interests ashore—a millionaire wife, a place at society dinner tables, polo and foxhunting. Everyone was aware that, without his wife’s money, he could never have challenged the Admiralty. Now, despite his record, he appeared to have gone too far; it was rumored that Beatty would never be offered another assignment. Indeed, for almost two years after his early promotion to admiral, Beatty remained unemployed.

  Then, once again, Fortune handed him a prodigious gift. In 1911, when he refused the Atlantic Fleet appointment, Reginald McKenna was First Lord of the Admiralty. In October of that year, Asquith reshuffled his Cabinet, McKenna moved on, and Winston Churchill arrived at the Admiralty. Beatty still had no assignment when Battenberg suggested to the new First Lord that the prickly young admiral had talent and might be useful. Churchill had heard the prevailing gossip that Beatty preferred the life of a wealthy socialite to service in the navy. But the new First Lord was familiar with Beatty’s exploits and navy record and invited the rebellious admiral in to see him. According to Churchill, this was not their first meeting. In his book My Early Life, he recalled that fifteen years before, on the eve of the Battle of Omdurman and his own extravagantly self-publicized charge with the 21st Lancers, he was strolling along the west bank of the Nile when he was hailed from a white gunboat anchored twenty or thirty feet from the shore. “The vessel was commanded by a junior naval lieutenant named Beatty. We had a jolly talk across the water while the sun sank. Then came the qu
estion, ‘How are you fixed for drinks? Can you catch?’ And a large bottle of champagne was thrown from the gunboat falling into the river near the shore. Happily, a gracious Providence decreed the water to be shallow and the bottom soft.” Churchill promptly “nipped into the water up to my knees and bore the precious gift in triumph back to our Mess.”

  Beatty did not remember the episode, but before their late 1911 meeting at the Admiralty, he had no high opinion of Winston Churchill, whom he considered a flamboyant, irresponsible political maverick. In 1902 he had written to Ethel: “You are quite right, Winston Churchill is not nice; in fact, he is what is generally described as a fraud.” His point of view had not changed in December 1909 when it seemed that Churchill might be named to lead the Admiralty: “I see in the papers that Winston Churchill will become First Lord of the Admiralty. No greater blow could possibly be delivered to the British Navy.” Now, at their meeting in Churchill’s office, the thirty-seven-year-old politician and the forty-year-old admiral appealed to each other. (There is an apocryphal story that when Beatty entered his office, Churchill looked up and said, “You seem very young to be an admiral.” Whereupon Beatty is said to have replied, “And you seem very young to be First Lord of the Admiralty.”) In any case, Churchill immediately set aside the Sea Lords’ opinions of Beatty. “My first meeting with the Admiral,” he said, “induced me immediately to disregard their unfortunate advice. He became at once my Naval Secretary.” Privately, Beatty still regarded Winston as an enthusiastic amateur. Writing to Ethel, he said, “I had two hours solid conversation with W.C. . . . I think he had rather a shock at first but in the end he saw things with my eyes.” In April 1913, he wrote, “I hope to be able to squeeze some sense into him.”

  Beatty’s new position gave him plenty of opportunity to influence Churchill. By tradition, the First Lord had at his disposal the Admiralty yacht Enchantress, a 4,000-ton miniature ocean liner with an exceptional wine cellar, which allowed the political head of the navy to act as seagoing host to any persons he chose. During a Mediterranean cruise in May 1912, Churchill’s guests included Asquith, Asquith’s daughter Violet, Prince Louis of Battenberg, Kitchener, Jacky Fisher, and other senior politicians and military officers on board to participate in decisions about Britain’s strategy in the Mediterranean. Beatty, with unparalleled access to the political and military chieftains of the British empire, nevertheless wrote to Ethel,