Lord Mountbatten

• 1. Introduction

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  Lord Mountbatten sat alone in his study at the Viceroy's House as midnight arrived on the 15th of August 1947. India and Pakistan were becoming independent nations, and he reflected that for a few minutes more he remained the most powerful man on Earth. Then he allowed himself one last piece of showmanship. He made Joan Falkiner, the Australian wife of the Nawab of Palanpur, a highness. By report it was one of his favourite duties, and the honour was annulled at the stroke of midnight.

  Mountbatten was a British admiral, a statesman and a member of the royal family. He served in both world wars and rose to the highest posts in the British armed forces. Admirers praised his energy, his charm and his skill at administration. Critics accused him of vanity and poor judgement.

  How did the youngest child of a family with a German name come to hold that kind of power? What did he do with it, and who paid for his speed? Why do the people who knew him describe such different men? And what happened to him in the summer of 1979?

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• 2. Battenberg Roots

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  Frogmore House, in the Home Park at Windsor, was where the future Lord Mountbatten was born on the 25th of June 1900. He was styled Prince Louis of Battenberg, the youngest child and second son of Prince Louis of Battenberg and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine. His mother's parents were Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, and Princess Alice, a daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.

  His father's side carried a flaw in royal eyes. The marriage of his paternal grandparents, Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine and Julia, Princess of Battenberg, was morganatic, because Julia was not of royal lineage. As a result, Mountbatten and his father were Serene Highnesses rather than Royal Highnesses. They could not be Princes of Hesse and held only the lesser Battenberg designation. Three siblings were older than him. Princess Alice later became the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. Princess Louise became Queen Louise of Sweden, and Prince George became the 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven.

  On the 17th of July the baby was christened in the large drawing room of Frogmore House by Philip Eliot, the Dean of Windsor. Queen Victoria, his maternal great-grandmother, was a godparent. So was Nicholas II of Russia, represented by the child's father, and so was Prince Francis Joseph of Battenberg, represented by Lord Edward Clinton. The infant wore the original royal christening gown of 1841.

  Family and friends called him Dickie, although Richard was not among his given names. Queen Victoria had first suggested Nicky. That name was already everywhere in the Russian imperial family, especially for Nicholas II, so it was changed to avoid confusion.

  For the first ten years of his life he was educated at home. He then went to Lockers Park School in Hertfordshire, and in May 1913 he entered the Royal Naval College, Osborne.

  St Petersburg was a regular stop of his childhood, because his mother's younger sister was the Russian Empress Alexandra Feodorovna. He grew close to the imperial family there. He also developed romantic feelings for his first cousin, Grand Duchess Maria Nikolaevna. He kept her photograph at his bedside for the rest of his life.

  The surname Mountbatten exists because of the First World War. From 1914 to 1918 Britain and its allies fought the Central Powers, led by the German Empire. In 1917 King George V issued a proclamation changing the name of the royal house from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor, to soothe British nationalist feeling. His British relatives with German names followed suit. Mountbatten's father took the surname Mountbatten, an anglicised form of Battenberg, and was created Marquess of Milford Haven. The son became Lord Louis Mountbatten, the courtesy title of a marquess's younger son, and used it until he was made a peer in his own right in 1946.

  The Russian connection from those childhood visits would resurface decades later, awkwardly, in front of Joseph Stalin.

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• 3. Master of Disaster

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  In July 1916, at the age of sixteen, Mountbatten reported to a battlecruiser as a midshipman. He saw action there in August, then moved to a battleship for the closing phase of the war. In July 1918 he spent ten days visiting the Western Front. On the 13th of October 1918, while still an acting sub-lieutenant, he became first lieutenant of the sloop HMS P. 31.

  Two terms at Christ's College, Cambridge, from October 1919 filled the gap the war had left. He studied English literature, including John Milton and Lord Byron, in a programme for junior officers whose studies had been cut short. He served a term on the Standing Committee of the Cambridge Union Society and was suspected of sympathy for the Labour Party.

  In 1920 he accompanied Edward, Prince of Wales, on a royal tour of Australia aboard HMS Renown. Early in 1921 he commanded a platoon of stokers in Northern England, during fears of industrial unrest. Many of the men had never handled a rifle. In March 1921 he joined another battlecruiser and again travelled with the Prince, this time to India and Japan. The two men formed a close friendship.

  By the end of 1923, fifty-two percent of the officers of Mountbatten's year had left the Royal Navy under the defence cuts known as the Geddes Axe. He survived them. His superiors rated him highly, though rumour held that wealthy and well-connected officers were more likely to be kept.

  Gadgets drew him to the Portsmouth Signals School in August 1924. He then briefly studied electronics at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and became a Member of the Institution of Electrical Engineers. In January 1927 he became Assistant Fleet Wireless and Signals Officer of the Mediterranean Fleet under Admiral Sir Roger Keyes. He returned to the Signals School as Senior Wireless Instructor in July 1929, and in August 1931 he became Fleet Wireless Officer.

  His first command came in 1934. It was a new destroyer he had to sail to Singapore and exchange for an older ship, Wishart, which he successfully brought back to Malta. In January 1936 he attended the funeral of George V. On the 23rd of June 1936 he became a personal naval aide-de-camp to Edward VIII, and in May 1937 he attended the coronation of George VI and Elizabeth. Within the Admiralty he was known as "The Master of Disaster" for his penchant for getting into difficult situations.

  When war broke out in September 1939, he became Captain (D) of the 5th Destroyer Flotilla aboard HMS Kelly, a ship that soon gained a reputation for daring exploits. In late 1939 he brought the Duke of Windsor back from exile in France. In early May 1940 he led a convoy through fog to evacuate Allied forces at Namsos during the Norwegian campaign.

  On the night of the 9th-the 10th of May 1940, a German E-boat, S 31, torpedoed Kelly amidships off the Dutch coast. On the 29th of November 1940 the flotilla fought three German destroyers off Lizard Point, Cornwall. Mountbatten turned to port to match a German course change, a move later called "a rather disastrous" one. The directors swung off and lost their target, and the destroyer Javelin was struck by two torpedoes. By December 1940 Kelly's torpedo damage was repaired and he rejoined her.

  German dive bombers sank Kelly on the 23rd of May 1941 during the Battle of Crete. Noël Coward, a personal friend, turned the episode into the film In Which We Serve and worked some of Mountbatten's speeches into it. Mountbatten was mentioned in despatches in August 1940 and again in March 1941, and he received the Distinguished Service Order in January 1941.

  In August 1941 he took command of an aircraft carrier that lay in Norfolk, Virginia, for repairs after action at Malta. From there he made a flying visit to Pearl Harbor, three months before the Japanese attack. He was appalled at the base's lack of preparedness. Japan's history of opening wars with surprise attacks, the British success at the Battle of Taranto and the proven power of aircraft against warships all pointed one way. He accurately predicted that the United States would enter the war after a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.

  Winston Churchill was fond of him, and on the 27th of October 1941 Mountbatten replaced Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes as Chief of Combined Operations Headquarters. He was promoted to commodore. His duties included devising technical aids for landings against opposition. Achievements credited to him and his staff included PLUTO, an underwater oil pipeline to Normandy. They also built an artificial Mulberry harbour from concrete caissons and sunken ships, and developed tank-landing ships.

  He also pitched Churchill on Project Habakkuk, an unsinkable aircraft carrier 600 metres long, to be made of reinforced ice known as Pykrete. Its enormous cost ended the idea.

  The Bruneval raid of the 27th of February 1942 captured part of a German Würzburg radar installation, along with one of its technicians. Mountbatten had recognised that surprise and speed were essential, and concluded that only an airborne assault could succeed. On the 18th of March 1942 he became an acting vice admiral, with the honorary ranks of lieutenant general and air marshal to give him the authority his job required. General Sir Alan Brooke, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, had misgivings, but Mountbatten took a seat on the Chiefs of Staff Committee.

  The St Nazaire Raid of the 28th of March 1942, which he largely planned and organised, put one of the most heavily defended docks in Nazi-occupied France out of action until well after the war. That helped Allied supremacy in the Battle of the Atlantic.

  The Dieppe Raid of the 19th of August 1942 went very differently. Mountbatten was central to planning and promoting the assault, and casualties reached almost 60 percent, the great majority of them Canadians. In Canada he became a controversial figure. The Royal Canadian Legion distanced itself from him on later visits, and his relations with veterans who blamed him for the losses remained frosty.

  Mountbatten claimed the lessons of Dieppe were needed for the Normandy invasion nearly two years later. Military historians such as Major General Julian Thompson, a former Royal Marine, answered that those lessons should not have required such a debacle. Yet the failings did produce innovations. The best known was Hobart's Funnies, specialised armoured vehicles that undoubtedly saved many lives on the Commonwealth beachheads of Gold, Juno and Sword.

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• 4. Supreme Commander

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  In August 1943 Churchill appointed Mountbatten Supreme Allied Commander of South East Asia Command, with promotion to acting full admiral. His less practical ideas were sidelined by an experienced planning staff led by Lieutenant-Colonel James Allason. One proposal, an amphibious assault near Rangoon, still reached Churchill before it was quashed.

  The Potsdam Conference supplied an episode he would have preferred to forget. The interpreter Hugh Lunghi recounted that Mountbatten, hoping for an invitation to the Soviet Union, repeatedly tried to impress Joseph Stalin with his old links to the Russian imperial family. Stalin dryly asked whether "it was some time ago that he had been there". Lunghi later recalled: "The meeting was embarrassing because Stalin was so unimpressed. He offered no invitation. Mountbatten left with his tail between his legs."

  General Sir William Slim recaptured Burma from the Japanese under Mountbatten's command. The personal high point came at Singapore on the 12th of September 1945. British troops returned to the island in an operation codenamed Tiderace and accepted the formal surrender of Japanese forces in the region, led by General Itagaki Seishiro.

  Mountbatten supported the nationalist movements that grew up in the shadow of Japanese occupation. His priority was stable, practical government, but he held an idealistic belief that every people should control its own destiny. Critics said he was too ready to overlook nationalist faults, especially communist influence. His biographer Philip Ziegler judged that in Malaya, where the main resistance came from Chinese groups under communist influence, Mountbatten was "naïve in his assessment". Ziegler blamed an over-readiness to assume the best of people, not softness on communism. He added that Mountbatten expected a long, bloody struggle and needed every anti-Japanese group on his side.

  South East Asia Command was disbanded in May 1946, and Mountbatten returned home with the substantive rank of rear-admiral. That year he was made a Knight Companion of the Garter and created Viscount Mountbatten of Burma, a victory title for war service. In 1947 he was created Earl Mountbatten of Burma and Baron Romsey.

  After the war he largely shunned the Japanese, out of respect for his men killed in the conflict. In keeping with his will, Japan was not invited to send diplomatic representatives to his funeral in 1979. In 1971, though, he met Emperor Hirohito during the emperor's state visit to Britain, reportedly at the urging of the Queen.

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• 5. The Last Viceroy

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  V. K. Krishna Menon had one name to offer in clandestine meetings with Sir Stafford Cripps and Clement Attlee, and it was Mountbatten's. Menon weighed his experience in the region, his perceived Labour sympathies and the long friendship and collaboration between Menon and Mountbatten's wife. On the 20th of February 1947 Attlee advised King George VI to appoint Mountbatten Viceroy of India. His task was to oversee the transition to independence no later than the 30th of June 1948. His instructions were to avoid partition and preserve a united India. He was authorised, however, to adapt to events in order to secure a prompt British withdrawal with minimal reputational damage.

  Mountbatten arrived by air from London on the 22nd of March and took the viceregal oath two days later. His arrival coincided with large-scale communal riots in Delhi and Bombay, and with massacres in Rawalpindi. Advisers favoured a gradual transfer of power. Mountbatten concluded that waiting even a year risked civil war, and he chose a quick, orderly handover by the end of 1947. He also wanted to hurry so that he could return to the Royal Navy.

  Jawaharlal Nehru won his affection. Through Menon, Mountbatten and Edwina developed a depth of feeling and intimacy with the Congress leader. His feelings about Muhammad Ali Jinnah were different, yet he recognised Jinnah's influence. He said that Jinnah was the man who "held the future of India in the palm of his hand in 1947". At their meeting on the 5th of April 1947, Mountbatten argued for a united India and pointed to the difficulty of dividing the mixed provinces of Punjab and Bengal. Jinnah stayed unyielding in his goal of a separate Muslim state called Pakistan.

  Mahatma Gandhi insisted emphatically on a united India. He asked Mountbatten to invite Jinnah to form a new central government, but Mountbatten never conveyed the proposal to Jinnah. Meanwhile Mountbatten's accelerated timeline offered the prospect of independence soon, and political sentiment shifted. Nehru and Sardar Patel could not reach an accommodation with the Muslim League, and Jinnah would not budge. All the Indian party leaders except Gandhi accepted the division. Mountbatten resigned himself to partition and fixed a date. A set timeline, he argued, would show his sincerity and that of the British government, and would stop anyone stalling.

  The Indian princes ruled the parts of India outside direct British administration. Mountbatten built a strong relationship with them, and his intervention was decisive in persuading the vast majority to join the Indian Union. Hyderabad, Jammu and Kashmir, and Junagadh refused to join either dominion, and that refusal contributed to later wars between Pakistan and India.

  He brought the date of partition forward from June 1948 to the 15th of August 1947. Uncertainty about the borders sent Muslims and Hindus toward areas where they hoped to be in the majority. A boundary committee chaired by Sir Cyril Radcliffe drew the lines through Punjab and Bengal, with a mandate to leave as many Hindus and Sikhs in India, and as many Muslims in Pakistan, as possible. The map left 14 million people on the "wrong" side of the line.

  His own record is regarded as very mixed. The economist John Kenneth Galbraith, an intimate of Nehru who served as American ambassador from 1961 to 1963, was a harsh critic. One common view holds that Mountbatten hastened independence recklessly, foreseeing disruption and wanting it off his watch, and thereby helped bring it about, especially in Punjab and Bengal. Historian Lawrence James argued the opposite. In his view Mountbatten had no option but to cut and run, since law and order was breaking down and Britain would otherwise face a civil war with no exit. The book Freedom at Midnight, by Dominique Lapierre and Larry Collins, drew on Mountbatten as its principal quoted source.

  Many British leaders never accepted the creation of Pakistan emotionally, and Mountbatten was among them. Jinnah refused his offer to serve as Governor-General of Pakistan. When Collins and Lapierre asked whether he would have sabotaged Pakistan had he known Jinnah was dying of tuberculosis, Mountbatten replied: "Most probably".

  At Nehru's request, Mountbatten became the first Governor-General of independent India on the 15th of August 1947 and served until the 21st of June 1948. Life magazine reported that "The people gathered in the streets to cheer Mountbatten as no European had ever been cheered before." On his advice, India took Kashmir to the newly formed United Nations in January 1948. Accounts of his wishes for Kashmir differ. Pakistani sources say he favoured accession to India, while Mountbatten said he simply wanted Maharaja Hari Singh to decide. After the tribal invasion, he suggested India secure Hari Singh's accession before sending in troops.

  During an official trip in March 1956 he was welcomed by India's leaders as a former governor-general. The Pakistani government, which saw hostility toward Pakistan in him, declared him persona non grata and barred him from its airspace.

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• 6. Admiral at Peace

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  The rank of vice-admiral came to Mountbatten on the 22nd of June 1949, after he took command of the 1st Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean Fleet. In April 1950 he became Second-in-Command of that fleet, and in June 1950 he was appointed Fourth Sea Lord. From June 1952 he served as Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean Fleet, and as NATO Commander, Allied Forces Mediterranean. He became a full admiral on the 27th of February 1953, and a personal aide-de-camp to the Queen the following month.

  April 1955 brought him the post of First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff, which he held until July 1959. His father had held the same office some forty years earlier. It was the first time in Royal Navy history that a father and son had both reached such high office. He became Admiral of the Fleet on the 22nd of October 1956.

  The Suez Crisis of 1956 put his advice to the test. His old friend, Prime Minister Anthony Eden, planned to seize the Suez Canal together with France and Israel. Mountbatten strongly advised against it. He argued that it would destabilise the Middle East, undermine the United Nations, divide the Commonwealth and diminish Britain's standing. Eden did not take the advice but insisted Mountbatten should not resign. Mountbatten instead prepared the Royal Navy for war with characteristic professionalism and thoroughness.

  The Bikini Atoll tests exposed a gap in his knowledge. Despite his rank, he was at first ignorant of the physics of a nuclear explosion and had to be reassured that the fission reactions would not spread through the oceans and destroy the planet. As he learned more, he grew increasingly opposed to using such weapons in combat, though he saw value in nuclear energy for submarine propulsion. His article "A Military Commander Surveys The Nuclear Arms Race" appeared in International Security in the winter of 1979-1980, shortly after his death.

  As Chief of the Defence Staff, a post he held for six years, he oversaw the consolidation of the three service departments into a single Ministry of Defence. Ian Jacob, co-author of the 1963 Report on the Central Organisation of Defence, described him as "universally mistrusted in spite of his great qualities". After the Wilson ministry took office in October 1964, Defence Secretary Denis Healey interviewed the forty most senior officials in the ministry. Only one, Sir Kenneth Strong, a personal friend of Mountbatten, recommended reappointing him. Healey recalled that Mountbatten "slapped his thigh and roared with delight" at the news, but "his eyes told a different story."

  Other appointments filled the years that followed. On the 29th of January 1965 he became Colonel of The Life Guards and Gold Stick in Waiting, and later that year Life Colonel Commandant of the Royal Marines. He became Governor of the Isle of Wight on the 20th of July 1965 and the island's first Lord Lieutenant on the 1st of April 1974. In 1968 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and received an honorary doctorate from Heriot-Watt University.

  From 1967 until 1978 he was president of the United World Colleges Organisation, which then consisted of one school, Atlantic College in South Wales. He encouraged heads of state and other public figures to share his enthusiasm. The United World College of South East Asia opened in Singapore in 1971, followed by the United World College of the Pacific in Victoria, British Columbia, in 1974. In 1978 he passed the presidency to his great-nephew, Charles, Prince of Wales. In 1971 he also presented the first International Baccalaureate diplomas, in the Greek Theatre of the International School of Geneva.

  His diplomacy had a family flavour. In 1969 he tried and failed to persuade his second cousin, the exiled Infante Juan, Count of Barcelona, to sign a declaration of abdication. That would have eased the eventual accession of Juan Carlos to the Spanish throne. The following year, at a White House dinner, he talked for twenty minutes with Richard Nixon and Secretary of State William P. Rogers. In 1975 he finally visited the Soviet Union, leading the British delegation to the Moscow celebrations of the 30th anniversary of Victory Day, as the Queen's personal representative.

  Peter Wright's 1987 book Spycatcher claimed that in May 1968 Mountbatten attended a private meeting with the press baron Cecil King and the government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Solly Zuckerman. Wright alleged that "up to thirty" MI5 officers had joined a secret campaign against Harold Wilson's crisis-stricken Labour government, and that King was an MI5 agent. King allegedly urged Mountbatten to lead a government of national salvation. Zuckerman called the idea "rank treachery", and it came to nothing because Mountbatten was reluctant to act. Andrew Lownie has suggested instead that the Queen had to step in to dissuade him.

  A 2006 BBC documentary, The Plot Against Harold Wilson, alleged a second plot during Wilson's term of 1974-76. It centred on right-wing former military figures supposedly building private armies, who believed Wilson was a Soviet agent or at least a communist sympathiser. Wilson strongly denied the claim. The first official history of MI5, The Defence of the Realm, published in 2009, implied that a plot had existed and that MI5 kept a file on Mountbatten. It stressed that the activity was entirely unofficial and centred on a small group of discontented officers. Lord Hunt, a former cabinet secretary, had concluded in a secret inquiry in 1996 that the stories came from "a few, a very few, malcontents in MI5" with serious personal grudges.

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• 7. Private Life

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  On the 18th of July 1922 Mountbatten married Edwina Cynthia Annette Ashley, daughter of Wilfred William Ashley, later 1st Baron Mount Temple. She was the favourite granddaughter and principal heir of the Edwardian magnate Sir Ernest Cassel. The couple spent heavily on households, luxuries and entertainment. Their honeymoon took in European royal courts and North America, including Niagara Falls because "all honeymooners went there". In California they appeared in a silent home movie by Charlie Chaplin, Nice And Friendly, which was never shown in cinemas.

  Mountbatten later admitted: "Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people's beds." For several years he had an affair with Yola Letellier, wife of Henri Letellier, the publisher of Le Journal and mayor of Deauville. Her life story inspired Colette's novel Gigi. After Edwina's death in 1960, his daughter Patricia, his secretary John Barratt, his valet Bill Evans and William Stadiem all described relationships with young women. He also had a long affair with the American actress Shirley MacLaine, whom he met in the 1960s.

  In 2019 Ron Perks, Mountbatten's driver in Malta in 1948, alleged that Mountbatten visited the Red House, an upmarket gay brothel in Rabat used by naval officers. Historian Andrew Lownie wrote that the FBI kept files on Mountbatten's alleged homosexuality, and he interviewed several young men who claimed relationships with him. John Barratt, who served as his secretary for twenty years, said Mountbatten was not homosexual and that this could not have been hidden from him.

  Files opened in 2019 showed that the FBI had heard allegations in the 1940s. The file began after he became Supreme Allied Commander in 1944 and called him and Edwina "persons of extremely low morals". It recorded a claim by the author Elizabeth, Baroness Decies, that he was homosexual and sexually interested in boys. A former driver, Norman Nield, told a tabloid that he had transported boys aged eight to twelve to Mountbatten's official residence. Robin Bryans made further claims in the Irish magazine Now. Former residents of the Kincora Boys' Home in Belfast asserted that they were trafficked to Mountbatten at Classiebawn Castle. The Northern Ireland Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry dismissed these claims, saying the original article gave no basis for linking the named people to Kincora.

  In October 2022 Arthur Smyth, a former Kincora resident, waived his anonymity to allege that Mountbatten raped him twice. His allegations form part of a civil case against the state authorities responsible for the home. In 2025 the journalist Chris Moore published Kincora: Britain's Shame, detailing allegations by five men that Mountbatten raped them as children.

  Edwina's fortune shaped the couple's finances. As a lieutenant, Mountbatten earned £310 a year, which his private income doubled. He later confided to his elder daughter that in the early years he and Edwina sometimes struggled to spend their £60,000 post-tax income. In the 1930s their combined income before tax was an estimated £113,000, but rising tax rates cut the post-tax figure toward £40,000. As Supreme Allied Commander he earned £6,000 and paid £2,400 in Indian income tax. A £1,500 entertainment allowance brought his net employment income to £5,100.

  By the end of the Second World War the top income tax rate had reached 97.5 percent, and Edwina's fund yielded only £4,500 after tax. In 1949 the Mountbattens promoted the Mountbatten Estate Bill to relax the limits her grandfather's will placed on borrowing against the capital. They argued that an exceptionally large number of public duties drained their private wealth. After Edwina's death in 1960, death duties of £333,153 were levied on her estate, and Mountbatten reportedly complained that his net inheritance came to about one shilling on the pound. His own estate was valued for probate at £2,196,494 in 1979.

  The couple had two daughters. Patricia Knatchbull, born on the 14th of February 1924 and who died on the 13th of June 2017, sometimes served as a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Lady Pamela Hicks, born on the 19th of April 1929, went with her parents to India in 1947-48 and also served as a lady-in-waiting. Because he had no sons, the letters patent for his peerages were drafted so the titles could pass to his daughters in order of seniority.

  Genealogy was a passion, and from 1957 until his death he was Patron of the Cambridge University Heraldic and Genealogical Society. He was equally keen on orders, decorations, uniforms and military ranks. He regarded that interest as vanity and tried, with limited success, to distance himself from it. He also designed clothes, and introduced trouser zips, a tail-coat with broad, high lapels and a "buttonless waistcoat" that could be pulled on over the head. In 1949 he designed new flags, insignia and uniform details for the Indian Armed Forces, and many of his designs remain in use.

  Polo was another love. He introduced the sport to the Royal Navy in the 1920s, wrote a book on it, and in 1931 received US patent 1,993,334 for a polo stick. He was also Commodore of Emsworth Sailing Club in Hampshire from 1931. Apart from official documents he read little, though he enjoyed P. G. Wodehouse. His favourite film stars included Fred Astaire, Rita Hayworth, Grace Kelly and Shirley MacLaine.

  Instead of a memoir, he presented a television series. Thames Television made the 12-episode documentary The Life and Times of Lord Mountbatten for ITV in 1969, produced by his son-in-law Lord Brabourne. On the 27th of April 1977 he became the first member of the royal family to appear on This Is Your Life. In Britain, 22.22 million viewers watched.

  His great-nephew, the future King Charles III, called him "Honorary Grandfather", and Mountbatten called Charles "Honorary Grandson", according to Jonathan Dimbleby's biography. Ziegler's biography and Dimbleby's account both suggest the mentorship had mixed results. Mountbatten scolded the Prince for the idle, pleasure-seeking tendencies of Edward VIII. He also encouraged Charles to enjoy bachelor life while he could, and then to marry a young, inexperienced girl.

  He was unusually qualified to advise on royal romance. On the 22nd of July 1939 he arranged for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth to visit Dartmouth Royal Naval College, taking care to invite the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. He assigned his nephew, Cadet Prince Philip of Greece, to entertain the girls while their parents toured. It was the first recorded meeting of Charles's future parents. A few months later his efforts nearly came to nothing, when his sister Alice wrote from Athens that Philip had agreed to settle permanently in Greece. Within days King George II of Greece ordered Philip to resume his naval career in Britain, and Philip obeyed.

  In 1974 Mountbatten began corresponding with Charles about marrying his granddaughter Amanda Knatchbull, Charles's second cousin. He also advised the 25-year-old prince to get on with "sowing some wild oats". Charles wrote to Amanda's mother, Lady Brabourne, who was supportive but thought her daughter still rather young to be courted. In February 1975 Mountbatten showed Charles around Rashtrapati Bhavan, the former Viceroy's House, during a visit to New Delhi to play polo.

  Four years later Mountbatten secured invitations for himself and Amanda to accompany Charles on his planned 1980 tour of India. Their fathers objected. Prince Philip thought Indian crowds would respond to the uncle more than to the nephew, and Lord Brabourne feared press scrutiny would drive Charles and Amanda apart. Charles was rescheduled to tour alone, but Mountbatten did not live to the planned date of departure. When Charles finally proposed later in 1979, Amanda refused him.

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• 8. Shadow V

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  Classiebawn Castle, on the Mullaghmore Peninsula in County Sligo, was Mountbatten's usual summer home. The village lay only twelve miles from the border with County Fermanagh in Northern Ireland, near an area known as a cross-border refuge for IRA members. In 1978 the IRA had allegedly tried to shoot him while he was aboard his boat, but poor weather prevented the sniper from taking the shot.

  On the 27th of August 1979 he went lobster-potting and tuna fishing in his 30-foot wooden boat, Shadow V, moored in Mullaghmore harbour. The IRA member Thomas McMahon had slipped aboard the unguarded vessel the night before and attached a radio-controlled bomb weighing 50 pounds. When the boat was only a few hundred yards from shore, the bomb was detonated. The blast destroyed the boat and all but severed Mountbatten's legs. Aged 79, he was pulled alive from the water by nearby fishermen but died before reaching the shore.

  Also aboard were his elder daughter Patricia, Lady Brabourne, her husband Lord Brabourne, their twin sons Nicholas and Timothy Knatchbull, Lord Brabourne's mother Doreen, Dowager Lady Brabourne, and Paul Maxwell, a young crew member from Enniskillen. Nicholas, aged 14, and Paul, aged 15, were killed in the explosion. Doreen, aged 83, died of her injuries the following day. The others were seriously injured.

  On the same day the IRA ambushed and killed eighteen British soldiers at the gates of Narrow Water Castle, near Warrenpoint in County Down. Sixteen of the dead were from the Parachute Regiment, and the attack became the deadliest on the British Army during the Troubles.

  The bombing prompted outrage around the world. Queen Elizabeth II received condolences from leaders including US President Jimmy Carter, who expressed "profound sadness", and Pope John Paul II. Many Irish-Americans were appalled, partly because American soldiers had served under Mountbatten in the Second World War. Jim Rooney, son of the Pittsburgh Steelers president Dan M. Rooney, recalled that his parents remembered Mountbatten for the role he played in defeating the Axis. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher said: "His death leaves a gap that can never be filled." Tánaiste George Colley promised that "No effort will be spared to bring those responsible to justice."

  The IRA's statement began: "The IRA claim responsibility for the execution of Lord Louis Mountbatten." Six weeks later Sinn Féin vice-president Gerry Adams said it was unfortunate that anyone had to be killed. He also said: "In my opinion, the IRA achieved its objective: people started paying attention to what was happening in Ireland." In 2015 Adams told an interviewer he stood over what he had said then.

  India declared a week of national mourning, and Burma announced three days. Prime Minister Charan Singh said that in India Mountbatten would be remembered as a Viceroy and Governor General who gave abundantly of his wisdom and goodwill. "His drive and vigour helped in the difficult period after our Independence," he said.

  On the 5th of September 1979 Mountbatten received a ceremonial funeral at Westminster Abbey, which he had planned himself. It was the first major royal funeral at the Abbey since the 18th century. Queen Elizabeth II, the royal family and members of the European royal houses attended. The procession began at Wellington Barracks and included contingents from all three British services, and from Burma, India, France and Canada. The United States sent 70 sailors of the US Navy and 50 US Marines. His coffin was drawn on a gun carriage by 118 Royal Navy ratings. Charles read the lesson from Psalm 107. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Donald Coggan, spoke of Mountbatten's "lifelong devotion to the Royal Navy". He was buried at Romsey Abbey.

  Two hours before the bomb went off, Garda officers had arrested Thomas McMahon at a checkpoint between Longford and Granard on suspicion of driving a stolen vehicle. He was tried in Ireland and convicted on the 23rd of November 1979. Forensic evidence from James O'Donovan showed flecks of paint from the boat and traces of nitroglycerine on his clothes. He was released in 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.

  Malcolm Williamson, Master of the Queen's Music, composed the Lament in Memory of Lord Mountbatten of Burma for violin and string orchestra. The 11-minute work was first performed on the 5th of May 1980 by the Scottish Baroque Ensemble, conducted by Leonard Friedman. A bequest in Mountbatten's will funded the Mountbatten Brailler, a modern, low-cost, portable brailler.

  Philip Ziegler wrote that Mountbatten's faults, like everything about him, "were on the grandest scale". His vanity, though childlike, was "monstrous, his ambition unbridled". Yet Ziegler concluded that his virtues outweighed his defects. "He was generous and loyal," he wrote, and "His tolerance was extraordinary." Ziegler saw him as an executor of policy rather than an initiator, who pursued each policy with such energy that it became identified with him. Field Marshal Sir Gerald Templer was blunter and told him he was crooked.

  In 1984 the Mountbatten Institute was established, with his elder daughter as patron, to give young adults experience abroad and build intercultural understanding. The Institution of Engineering and Technology awards the Mountbatten Medal each year for outstanding contributions to electronics or information technology. Ottawa named Mountbatten Avenue for him. In Kuala Lumpur, Java Street became Jalan Mountbatten after the war and was renamed Jalan Tun Perak in 1981. In Singapore, the Mountbatten estate and Mountbatten MRT station carry his name. In 1980 the Lord Louis Mountbatten Memorial Loyal Orange Lodge 781 was created in his memory.

  His personal papers, about 250,000 documents and 50,000 photographs, are held in the University of Southampton Library, where the competing verdicts on his life can still be tested.

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