Censoring Queen Victoria

How Two Gentlemen Edited a Queen and Created an Icon

Yvonne M. Ward

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781780744285
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

'Fascinating' BBC History 'Remarkable and clever' New York Times 'Original and important' Sir David Cannadine When Queen Victoria died, two gentlemen were commissioned with the monumental task of editing her vast correspondence. It would be the first time that a British monarch's letters had been published, and it would change how Victoria was remembered forever.The men chosen for the job were deeply complex and peculiar characters: Viscount Esher, the consummate royal confidant, blessed with charm and influence, but hiding a secret obsession with Eton boys and incestuous relationship with his son; Arthur Benson, a schoolmaster and author, plagued by depression, struggling to fit in with the blue-blooded clubs and codes of the court. Together with King Edward VII these men would decide Victoria's legacy. In their hands 460 volumes of the Queen's Correspondence became just three, and their decisions and – distortions – would influence perceptions of Victoria for generations to come.

PART I

THE EDITORS

Chapter 1

TO PUBLISH THE QUEEN’S LETTERS

ON VICTORIA’S DEATH IN 1901, Reginald Brett, the second Lord Esher, was charged with organising her funeral and the coronation of her eldest son, Edward VII. These tasks fell to him not because of the official position he held at court, which was minor; he was merely the Secretary of the Office of Works. But Esher had developed a reputation at court and in political circles: if a job had to be done well or if judicious advice was needed, Esher was your man. He was, as his biographer James Lees-Milne described, a person of wide and considerable influence, an advantage he maintained by refusing all offers of higher office. At various times he declined to be ambassador to Paris, the governor of the Cape (in South Africa) and the viceroy of India. He had been briefly an MP but refused to return to politics, even though he was twice offered a position in the Cabinet. He explained to his son:

It is not in my line to go back into politics and become identified with party strife. I can do more good outside, and heavens how much happier the life. Just imagine what the tie would be. I am purely selfish in the matter, and really I do not think I can bring myself to sacrifice all independence, all liberty of action, all my intime life for a position which adds nothing to that which I now occupy.

As the historian William Kuhn notes, his ‘private life’ had it been known would hardly have ‘borne the inspection of his friends, let alone the public’. He was tempted by the offer of the governorship of the Cape, but eventually declined, recording in his journal, ‘Were it not for Maurice I would go at once. As it is, I cannot.’ Maurice was his son, with whom he was infatuated.

Esher inevitably became secretary of the Memorial Committee, which was charged with building monuments to the dead Queen and commemorating her life. With his understanding of theatre, Esher recognised the power of royal ritual and ceremony. Victoria had died at her summer residence, Osborne House, on the Isle of Wight. Esher canvassed the idea of the government purchasing the house from the King in order ‘to keep it as a shrine, uncontaminated by domestic uses and to fill it with memorials to the Queen’. (Not only would this appeal to the masses, he suggested; it would also ‘have a good practical effect on the King’s financial position’.) Another idea was to construct a triumphal, ceremonial way to Buckingham Palace, with a monument to Victoria as its focus. This monument was finally unveiled by King George V in 1911; the project also entailed the construction of Admiralty Arch, a widening of the Mall and the redevelopment of the façade of Buckingham Palace, including the construction of the eastern balcony that has since become a stage for many royal events.

Esher was opposed, however, to the production of an official biography of the Queen:

Such a task is impossible during the lifetime of certain persons and until the shadow of passing events grows longer. Justice could not be done to the Queen’s character, unless her later years were thrown into strong relief, for it was during her later years that her judgement mellowed, and her influence over her people and over the Empire became so powerful.

Esher had another idea, totally novel: to publish the Queen’s correspondence. There have since been published volumes of the letters of various monarchs. But this was to be the first such collection, and it was to appear immediately after the demise of the royal letter-writer. Pondering the task, Esher recorded in his journal that ‘the only possible thing to do was to (1) collect and arrange all her papers, (2) print selections from her journals up to a certain date, (3) print correspondence very fully up to a certain date’. The main purpose as he saw it at this stage was ‘pour servir the historians of the future’. This he believed would be ‘far more interesting than any expurgated biography’. Indeed, ‘the truest service to the Queen is to let her speak for herself’.

At this early stage he had some idea how prolific a correspondent the Queen had been. His plan was to publish her correspondence up to 1861, the year of Albert’s death. To publish the correspondence ‘very fully’ even for this comparatively short period was to prove impossible, however. It has been estimated that Victoria wrote an average of two and a half thousand words each day of her adult life, and that she may have written sixty million words in the course of her reign. Giles St Aubyn calculates that ‘if she had been a novelist, her complete works would have run into seven hundred volumes, published at the rate of one per month!’

Unique among British monarchs, Victoria had published edited extracts from her journals while she was on the throne. (In recognition of this, Disraeli, who himself was unusual in combining the positions of politician and novelist, flatteringly addressed her as ‘We authors, m’am …’) Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands (1868) was an instant success, selling twenty thousand copies and spawning several subsequent editions and a sequel in 1884. Letters between Victoria and the Dean of Windsor, Randall Davidson (later the Archbishop of Canterbury), show that the Queen had also wanted to publish a memorial to her highland servant, John Brown, following his death in 1883, but was persuaded to forego the project. In a masterfully subtle letter, Davidson outlined the likely public response to such a panegyric, noting that ‘I should be deceiving Your Majesty were I not to admit that there are, especially among the humbler classes, some (perhaps it would be true to say many) who do not shew themselves worthy of these confidences …’ The Queen’s children had never liked even the most innocuous confidences of the Highland Journals being made public, so were relieved when the Queen was persuaded by the Dean.

Victoria had appointed Princess Beatrice, her youngest child, as her literary executor, with instructions to destroy anything liable to ‘affect any of the family painfully’. The Princess turned her attention first to her mother’s journal, which spanned almost seventy years (commencing when Victoria was thirteen years old) and filled 122 volumes. Beatrice copied the entries into thick, blue-lined exercise books, censoring and altering as she went, and then burnt the originals. She proceeded in this way for thirty years, filling 111 copybooks. These are held at the Royal Archives in the Round Tower of Windsor Castle and are now available online. King George V (Victoria’s grandson) and Queen Mary tried to stop the destruction of the originals, but failed. The journal exists in its original form only until February 1840, although some later entries had appeared with the Queen’s permission in the authorised five-volume biography of Prince Albert, published between 1875 and 1880.

Immediately after the Queen’s death, Esher kept his plan to publish a selection of her letters secret. As a consummate political operator, he knew he would have to clear the ground, quite a lot of ground, to ensure there was no opposition from Princess Beatrice, Victoria’s other children, the King or his senior courtiers. Esher needed to establish his credibility with each of them personally and within the court. He waited more than two years before he broached the subject with the King.

Within weeks of the Queen’s death, however, he began to lay the foundations. Possibly after being given access to her papers in order to clarify matters of protocol for her funeral and the coronation, Esher observed that they ‘were not well kept after the Prince Consort’s death’. This was, he thought, due to the Queen’s insistence on relying only on Prince Albert’s German secretary, Maurice Müther, and on a cataloguing system, instituted by the Prince, that was incapable of dealing with the avalanche of papers over Victoria’s long reign. At the end of April 1901 Esher recorded that he had, at last, had an opportunity to speak to the King about arranging the Queen’s papers in a more orderly fashion.

The extent of Esher’s access at this point is unclear, but he seems to have been rankling under restrictions. He expressed his frustration in his typically gentlemanly manner: ‘The King will possibly become less tenacious and secret as time goes on. It is impossible to avoid trusting a private secretary if a man, King or subject, wishes to be well served.’

The King was soon won over. During the months following Victoria’s death, Esher quickly became a key figure in the domestic life of the royal family. In March he recorded that he had spent most days with King Edward and Queen Alexandra ‘most intimately, fussing about their private affairs’. Much of the next two years were taken up with such arrangements. Between these duties and his role on the Memorial Committee, Esher was kept very busy – and in the process made himself the obvious man for the job of sorting the Queen’s papers.

There was still, however, the problem of Princess Beatrice. It was not clear exactly how far Beatrice’s responsibility extended – just to her mother’s journals, or to all of her documents? That the King had asked Esher to arrange his mother’s papers suggests that Beatrice’s responsibilities rested primarily with the journals and perhaps also with ‘private, family letters’. The King himself may have been uncertain. In October 1902, however, there was a break-through for Lord Esher. Princess Beatrice wrote to him, asking if he could spare some time to assist her: ‘I feel I ought finally to go through all that remains for as I have my dear Mother’s written instructions to be solely responsible for the arranging and retaining of them in the manner she would have wished, I must not leave it to others …’ Esher seized the opportunity to familiarise himself with the Queen’s papers.

He soon realised that to produce a publishable collection for the reading public, he would need assistance. The ideal co-editor would be a scholar of literary attainments and would of course be a man, a gentleman, from a suitable social and educational background. The ideal candidate soon emerged.

Lord Esher had come to know Arthur Christopher Benson during his frequent visits to Eton College, where Benson was a housemaster and a close friend of Esher’s own former housemaster, A.C. Ainger. Esher also knew Benson for the verses he had written for various royal occasions. ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ is the best remembered of these, originally written for the Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1 by Sir Edward Elgar for the coronation of Edward VII. Benson was also a published writer, and it was his acclaimed biography of his father, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, that brought him to Esher’s attention as a potential co-editor. After consultation with the King’s secretary, Lord Knollys, Esher met with the current Archbishop, Randall Davidson, to discuss the project. Esher reported back to Knollys:

[Davidson agreed] that memoirs pour servir in the shape of ‘The Correspondence of Queen Victoria from 1837–1861’ is what is required, connected more or less by notes and introductory passages, and that in reference to the editorship, Arthur Benson would be superior [to the other candidates] – more capable, more suitable and more trustworthy; [and] that it would be desirable, perhaps necessary, that I should be associated with him in the joint editing of the book.

The gentlemanly networks were in full swing. There were deep family and church connections between the Bensons and the Davidsons, and as Benson’s biographer, David Newsome has described, Benson had become deeply discontented with his work at Eton. Davidson knew this and was able to tell Esher. But there were protocols to be observed. Esher had to ask Knollys for permission ‘to privately ascertain if – in the event of the suggestion being made – Arthur Benson would consent to undertake the task’. Knollys, in Dublin for the State visit of the King and Queen, replied that the King ‘fully approves your sounding [out] Mr Arthur Benson as to whether, together with you he should be willing to undertake the work. Should he be so, you are at liberty to talk the matter over generally with him.’

Esher wasted no time in summoning Benson to his home, Orchard Lea, in Windsor. Benson had no inkling of the nature of the visit. He sent his acceptance but, like Eeyore, worried lest it should rain. In his diary he recorded the invitation from Lord Esher: ‘the King wished him to speak to me on a matter of importance! It must be that Lord Churchill wants me to take his boy next year …’ In accepting the invitation, he joked to Esher that he felt like a prisoner summoned to the guillotine: ‘I am wondering what it can be that H.M. can want to have me spoken to about, as it feels as if I should be arrested by lettres de cachet and committed to the Tower!’ In fact, he was to be taken captive by letters and committed to a tower – but to the Round Tower at Windsor rather than the Tower of London.

Benson ‘byked’ over to Orchard Lea and found his way in. Esher was in the garden reading with his son, Maurice, alongside him. Benson described the garden in full beauty and observed that ‘in the whole of the long talk that followed, my thoughts and recollections are curiously knit with the colours and textures of flowers in the beds we paced past’. He had no premonition of what Esher was to ask him:

Esher made me a statement at once, with a kind of smile, yet holding it back for effect. The King was going to bring out Correspondence and letters of Q.V. and would I edit it, with him. (Esher). I was to be sounded and then offered it. He had seen the Archbishop who entirely approved.

This opportunity was something of a godsend to Benson, as he confided in his diary:

Here am I crushed with work at Eton, hardly strong enough to wriggle out and yet no motive to go at any particular minute. Suddenly in the middle of all my discontent and irritability a door is silently and swiftly opened to me. In the middle of this quiet, sunny garden, full of sweet scents and roses, I am suddenly offered the task of writin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Part I: The Editors
• Part II: The Queen
• Conclusion: The Editors’ Queen
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Index