Royal Feuds at Kensington Palace and Beyond
Royal Residents of Kensington Palace About 200 years later, two royal widows would battle it out at Kensington Palace. The women were sisters and their mother was Queen Victoria. In one apartment was Princess Louise, a feminist, chain-smoking, free-spirited sculptor who liked a drink. Next door was Princess Beatrice, Victoria’s coddled youngest child, who was her mother’s meek literary executor. It was too close for comfort. “Louise…disliked her sister Beatrice, who lived in the apartment next door to Louise’s,” Judith Morris, the daughter of Princess Louise’s maid Edith, recalled. “Mum would hear shouting late in the evening and assumed it was the two sisters arguing through the walls. Louise also liked a drink too, and when she was tipsy, she would bang on her sister’s wall and shout abuse.” As Kensington Palace filled up with more and more minor royals during the 20th century, earning it the nickname “the aunt heap,” the battles between the neighbors became increasingly petty. “Because none of the royal residents were, in reality, as important as members of the immediate …
