Censoring Queen Victoria: How Two Gentlemen Edited a Queen and Created an Icon

CENSORING

QUEEN

VICTORIA

CENSORING

QUEEN

VICTORIA

HOW TWO GENTLEMEN

EDITED A QUEEN AND

CREATED AN ICON

Yvonne M. Ward

A Oneworld Book

First published in North America and Great Britain by

Oneworld Publications, 2014

First published in Australia by Black Inc., an imprint of Schwartz Media Pty Ltd

This ebook edition published in 2014

Copyright © Yvonne M. Ward 2013

The moral right of Yvonne M. Ward to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

All right reserved

Copyright under Berne Convention

A CIP record of this title is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78074-363-9

eISBN 978-1-78074-428-5

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CONTENTS

Preface

PART I: THE EDITORS

CHAPTER 1

To Publish the Queen’s Letters

CHAPTER 2

A Peculiar Genius: The Second Viscount Esher

CHAPTER 3

It’s Very Remarkable: A.C. Benson

CHAPTER 4

Preparing the Ground

CHAPTER 5

The Editing

PART II: THE QUEEN

CHAPTER 6

Sir John Conroy and the Ghost of Lady Flora

CHAPTER 7

King Leopold: The Foreign Adviser

CHAPTER 8

The Welcome Foreigner: Prince Albert

CHAPTER 9

Women’s Business

CHAPTER 10

The Queen and Her Ministers

CHAPTER 11

The King’s Censors

CONCLUSION

The Editors’ Queen

Acknowledgments

References

Index

To my family

and other teachers

Reginald Brett, 2nd Viscount Esher.

A.C. Benson

John Murray IV (seated) and his brother Hallam in their London offices, 1903.

PREFACE

QUEEN VICTORIA, AS SHE has come down to us, is the product of her biographers. For over sixty years these biographers did not have access to the Queen’s original correspondence, which is held in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle. They had to rely instead on the published selections of letters produced by ‘royal command’ of Victoria’s son, King Edward VII, and her grandson, George V. The first of these selections appeared in 1907 and, in three volumes, covered the Queen’s life until the death of Prince Albert in 1861.

I consulted this publication when I was writing about the Queen as a wife and a mother. The dearth of letters dealing with Victoria’s personal and domestic life made me question the selection itself. Who were the editors and on what principles had they operated? The senior editor was Lord Esher, who was an influential figure in the court of Edward VII; his colleague was Arthur Benson, not so highly placed but very well connected. Both had known the Queen as a matron and matriarch – but what would these two gay men have made of the letters of a young woman, a young wife in love, a new mother? How much would they have understood of Victoria’s dilemma as a female ruler: the challenges of being sovereign over men to whom she was meant to be inferior?

Such questions are not just a byway in the study of Queen Victoria. Esher and Benson’s work still influences our view of the Queen. Their selections provided a template for the Queen’s life and very few biographers have been able to escape their influence.

*

At her birth in 1819, Victoria was fifth in line to the throne. Her grandfather, King George III, had since 1810 been prevented from ruling by bouts of madness now attributed to hereditary porphyria. Her father was the King’s fourth son, Edward; her mother was Princess Victoria, daughter of the German Duke of Saxe-Coburg.

The heir apparent was the King’s eldest son, George, who served as regent during his father’s illness. The line of succession continued down the family tree to the King’s second son, Frederick, Duke of York, then to his third son, William, Duke of Clarence, then to Victoria’s father, Edward, Duke of Kent. Next in line was Victoria, followed by the King’s fifth, sixth and seventh sons. If George, the Prince Regent, were to remarry and produce an heir, that child would usurp all claimants in the line of succession, although this was deemed unlikely given his age, his health and his prodigious girth.

However, Victoria’s position in the line of succession was to change rapidly. In 1820, when she was eight months old, her father suddenly caught cold, was treated by cupping and bleeding, and died. Within a fortnight, King George III also died, and the Prince Regent acceded as King George IV. The next in line, the Duke of York, developed dropsy and died of heart failure in 1827. On the death of George IV in 1830, the Duke of Clarence became King as William IV.

He had married Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen and they had several babies, but none had so far survived. If a child of his were to live, he or she would supplant Victoria’s claim. Thus, during Victoria’s childhood, becoming Queen was a possibility but never a certainty. It was not until the passing of the Regency Act in 1830 that she was formally deemed the heir apparent. Even then, the Act acknowledged the possibility that Queen Adelaide might yet give birth to William’s child, even after the King’s death. As the Secretary of the Privy Council, Charles Greville, explained, ‘in the event of the King’s death without children, the Queen [Victoria] is to be proclaimed, but the oath of allegiance taken with a saving of the rights of any posthumous child to King William’. That is, Victoria would be deposed from the throne should Adelaide subsequently give birth to a royal heir.

As it was, despite much speculation as to how to ascertain whether or not Queen Adelaide was ‘with child’, King William died without children in 1837. Victoria acceded to the throne one month after her eighteenth birthday. (The Regency Act also allowed for Victoria’s mother, the Duchess of Kent, to rule on Victoria’s behalf should she accede the throne before she was eighteen. Greedily, the Duchess and her comptroller, Sir John Conroy, had lobbied without success to have this extended until Victoria turned twenty-one.) When she became Queen, Victoria was barely 148 centimetres tall (or four feet ten inches) but hopeful that she might grow taller. Thanks to the training she had received as a child, whereby sprigs of holly were pinned to the neckline of her dress to improve her posture, she walked with a dignified grace.

In the third year of her reign she married her cousin, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg; they went on to have nine children before he died in 1861, aged forty-two. She died thirty-nine years and one month later, in January 1901, after reigning for more than sixty-three years.

*

These are the bare facts. Our impression of the woman behind them, however, has been distorted by the decisions of the men who compiled and edited the primary sources. By better understanding these men and their motivations, we can achieve a clearer view of the Queen and of how her story has been told.

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