Censoring Queen Victoria (11 page)

Readers in 1907 already had access to published accounts of these episodes. One such, to which Esher referred when he discussed the issue with Benson, was the diaries of Charles Greville. Edited by Henry Reeve, these were published in 1874 in three volumes; a second series was brought out in 1885. Greville was well known to Victoria as the clerk of the Privy Council from 1821–59 and as a leading figure in London society, and Victoria herself enjoyed his journals. Characteristically, she declared them to be ‘very exaggerated' but nevertheless ‘full of truth'.

In recounting the Flora Hastings affair, in a one-page entry dated 2 March 1839, Greville observed that ‘it is not easy to ascertain what and how much is true'. He was critical of Lord Melbourne's role, accusing him of advising the Queen badly: ‘It is inconceivable how Melbourne can have permitted this disgraceful and mischievous scandal,' he wrote. Flora Hastings does not appear again in the diaries until July, when Greville recorded her death. If Greville recorded the many other instalments in the affair that occurred in the intervening months, Reeve did not include them. In a footnote, Reeve apologised for including this ‘painful transaction which had better be consigned to oblivion' but explained that he did so ‘because it contains nothing which
is not to be found in the most ordinary books of reference; but I shall not enter further on this matter'.

Not everyone blamed Lord Melbourne for the affair. In 1902, Sir Sidney Lee had published a biography of the Queen. He devoted three pages to the demise of Lady Flora and the subsequent public hostility towards Victoria. Citing the Greville memoirs as one of his sources, Lee declared them to be ‘outspoken but in the main trustworthy'. He divided the blame for the Hastings affair between the Queen's ‘youth and inexperience' and the malice of Lehzen, rather than Lord Melbourne.

Lee sent the recently crowned King Edward VII a copy of his
Queen Victoria
and Lord Knollys replied on the King's behalf: ‘The King thanks Sir Sidney for the copy of the
Life of Queen Victoria
. He admires very much the binding of the volume. His Majesty feels sure that he shall read your history of the late reign with great interest.' The King probably never got past the binding. He was notoriously uninterested in reading and was utterly dismayed when Esher spoke to him of matters that were detailed in Lee's book. Esher reported to Benson:

the King was very
uncertain
, going backwards and forwards according to what the last person said. Sometimes utterly regretting that he had ever allowed the letters to be published. All the old scandals, the Duke of Kent's debts, the Conroy business, the Lady Flora Hastings business & so on – the King has never heard of them. He doesn't read memoirs & of course no one dares talk to him of such things – so that when he hears about them, or gathers that there is anything about them in the letters, he is first of all horribly concerned at the thought that even
you
should see them –
and upset at the bare idea that ordinary people should read about them – it is no good telling him that everybody who knows anything knows far more about them than he does himself; & that they won't arouse comment simply because they are so stale …

When Esher showed the King the letters relating to the Flora Hastings affair, the King was ‘astonished at the precocious knowledge shown by the Queen [aged nineteen] and the outspokenness of Lord Melbourne'.

In March 1904, when Benson sent off the first instalment of the manuscript to John Murray, Murray admitted that he could not resist spending the evening reading through the selections from the Kensington period:

many of the letters are of the greatest importance. I am struck by some of those from the Queen to her mother. Her position was a most delicate one in regard to the Duchess of Kent both shortly before and after her Coronation, and these letters display much firmness of character and sense of justice.

Within two months, however, Benson was asking Murray to return these sections, as he had been directed by Esher that ‘certain matters' had to be eliminated. Benson told Murray, ‘I fear that the Duchess of Kent Correspondence will have to disappear – it seems to be a particularly sensitive point. It cuts out a sidelight, of course, but that can't be helped …' Benson and Esher eventually decided to remove all references to the affair. This reflected not only the King's wishes but also their own gentlemanly sense of propriety. Esher advised the King to burn any papers concerning
Lady Flora. Benson was fascinated by the business but was seemingly happy to omit all mention of it.

Worked at Windsor – found & read an extraordinary long correspondence & memorandum from M.H. Conroy (Daughter of Sir J. Conroy), for the Queen, with the hope of reinstating the family in favour. Sir J.C. was a really mischievous, unscrupulous, intriguing man. He established such an ascendancy over the Dss of Kent that he was thought to be her lover. He embezzled her money, and he hoped that when the Queen came to the Throne, he would rise too & be all-powerful. He re-invented the idea of the Duke of Cumberland wishing to poison the Queen in order to increase the idea of his own fidelity.

The Queen had a perfect horror of him; as soon as she came to the Throne she gave him a baronetcy and a pension of £3000 a year – & refused ever to see him. The horror of him appears (tho' this is very mysterious) to date from a time when the Duke of Cumberland with characteristic brutality said before her, when she was just a girl, that Conroy was her mother's lover.

This memorandum was placed in the Queen's hand. She read it with great disgust & made the frankest comments in pencil all through, ‘Certainly untrue', ‘never', ‘a shameful lie', ‘we had good reason to think he stole mother's money', and so forth. It is one of the most curious papers I have seen. The document itself is a clever one trying to make out C. to have been an old, faithful, pathetic and slighted servant whose only reward was the consciousness of his good service.

Subsequent research by Dormer Creston and Katherine Hudson has borne out these details – but this was no thanks
to Benson and Esher, who did not include it in their book. In the published correspondence, Conroy is mentioned only once, in a letter from Victoria to Lord Melbourne. In a footnote, the editors explain vaguely that Conroy had made certain claims on the Queen that ‘it was not considered expedient to grant', but that he did receive a baronetcy and a pension.

By these exclusions, the editors hid Victoria's knowledge of sex and her decisive dealings with Conroy. They masked her difficult and fraught adolescence and gave the impression that in the first years of her reign, and in her relationship with Melbourne, she was a spoilt, attention-seeking child who had come through young adulthood unscathed.

Benson and Esher both greatly admired Lord Melbourne. In 1904 Benson wrote to Esher, ‘I am so glad that you like Lord M. I
adore
him – the delicious mixture of the man of the world, the chivalrous man of sentiment, the wit, the softhearted cynic appeals to me extraordinarily.' In the first volume, they included excerpts from thirty-five letters from Victoria to Melbourne – and 139 of Melbourne's letters to the Queen. There is no reason to suppose that this reflected an attempt to represent the original materials proportionally. In most of the published letters, Melbourne acknowledged the receipt of a letter (or several) from Victoria. Rather, the imbalance in the selection reflects the delight Benson and Esher shared in his letters. They even included excerpts from letters written by other men praising Lord Melbourne. For example, they quoted King Leopold enthusing to Victoria:

Lord Melbourne … is so feeling and kind-hearted that he, much more than most men who have lived so much in the
grand monde
, has preserved a certain warmth and freshness of feeling …

Their adulation of Lord Melbourne and their desire to keep his and the Queen's reputations unsullied led the editors to err on the side of caution and exclude the Flora Hastings affair altogether. As Elizabeth Longford pointed out, it is questionable whether such silence has in fact enhanced the Queen's reputation, for it gave the impression that she was unmoved by Lady Flora's death, when ‘in reality she was tortured by the affair … for many months'. Omitting the story also meant forfeiting some fascinating material. When Lytton Strachey published his biography of Victoria in 1921 he created great drama from the Hastings incident. He used the Greville diaries as his source, drawing on both the published and unpublished entries. Although Benson and Esher had also hoped to provide drama, they lost a great deal of it by excluding these events.

Perhaps Esher remembered a letter from his old Eton tutor William Cory (Johnson), who in 1875 had written:

Great politicians must be judged with much latitude. It is quite certain that Melbourne is one of the few public men who have not had justice done to them. The Queen can, no doubt, help greatly towards making his claims known; … But it must be remembered that the ghost of Lady Flora haunts that part of her memory.

In deciding how to deal with Lady Flora's ghost, Benson and Esher were worried about more than the image of the young Queen. At stake was the reputation of their great favourite, Lord Melbourne. For Esher, ever cautious, the safest course was concealment.

O
N THE NURSERY LANDING
at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight hangs a collection of portraits of the Coburg uncles and aunts of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. In contrast to the massive, door-sized portraits of her father's family still on view in the Waterloo Room at Windsor Castle, these are smaller and more domestic in character, hung at child's eye-level. They fit the space perfectly and are displayed in matching frames. One might assume they were painted specifically for the spot, which was Victoria and Albert's first family home. There is no equivalent display of Victoria's paternal ancestors, the Hanovers, in Osborne House. It was important to Victoria, as a young mother, that her children know their Coburg relatives and respect the heritage of their father. Victoria wrote to her Uncle Leopold following the birth of her first son: ‘I
hope
and
pray
he may be like his dearest Papa. He is to be called Albert and Edward is to be his second name.' He must not be like her
‘wicked' Hanoverian uncles
.

King Leopold I of Belgium was the strongest influence on both Victoria and Albert for the whole of their lives. He
was the younger brother of Victoria's mother and Albert's father (the Duchess of Kent and the Duke of Saxe-Coburg), both of whom encouraged and even depended upon Leopold's influence on their children.

The youngest child of his generation
, Leopold was a champion of the family's influence, reputation and wealth. Using the skills imparted to him by his mother, he negotiated many of the marriages of his nephews and nieces into the major royal houses of Europe and beyond. He maintained a home in England and extensive British contacts. He corresponded with many foreign ministers. Belgium was ideally suited for stopovers and Leopold encouraged visitors. Even within the French royal family of his wife, Leopold saw himself as a leader, describing himself, curiously, as
ce qu'on appelle la loi et les prophètes
[One who calls himself the law and the prophets]. He saw himself as the peacemaker of Europe, something after Metternich, and maintained a huge correspondence in order to keep up with dynastic gossip and political events. Much of this information he passed on to Victoria and Albert.

In order to temper any perception of excessive Germanic or ‘foreign' influences upon the Queen, Benson and Esher wrote in their introductory chapter that the Queen ‘instinctively formed an independent judgment on any questions that concerned her … [Her advisers'] opinions were in no case allowed to do more than modify her own penetrating and clear-sighted judgment'. They emphasised this point throughout the book. The picture that emerges from the letters themselves, however, is not so clear-cut. Time and again it is evident that Leopold, Albert, Lord Melbourne and various ministers sought to influence her decisions and direct her responses.

The correspondence between Leopold and Victoria was among the first that Benson read. He immediately recognised its richness and suggested that it could have been published on its own. Leopold and Victoria corresponded weekly, using both official and private messengers. They alerted each other when they were able to use private letter carriers, as this enabled them to write more candidly, and they often requested replies by the return of the same messenger. Other letters went through the Foreign Office mail systems of their respective countries, and privacy was not assured. They wrote even more frequently after Victoria became Queen.

Although the published letters give a very strong sense of Leopold's influence, less than one tenth of the available correspondence was published, and the full character of their relationship was obscured. Throughout Victoria's childhood, as it became more likely that she would become Queen, Leopold tutored her in the arts of sovereignty. He preceded Lord Melbourne in this role. During the first year of her reign, he advised her on the procedure to be followed immediately after the death of the King, and sent his old adviser and mentor, Baron Stockmar, to be on hand to guide her. He exhorted her to heed all of Lord Melbourne's advice, which she dutifully did. He also facilitated close contacts between Victoria and her Coburg relations.

One of these was Ferdinand, a cousin of Victoria and Albert who had married
the Portuguese queen, Dona Maria da Gloria II, in 1836
. All four of these young people were students of Leopold's ‘school' of constitutional monarchy, and they corresponded with one another frequently. To Dona Maria, Leopold wrote: