Censoring Queen Victoria (5 page)

Esher's complex private and public lives are revealing: they tell us much about his perception of men, women and children, his ideas about domestic life, and his obsessions with pleasure, influence, beauty, knowledge and information. Although he declared that the Queen's published letters should project Victoria's own voice, his penchant for secrecy, and the intricate gentlemanly networks through which he maintained his position of power, prevented this. They influenced all of Esher's decisions, from the selection of
Benson as co-editor to his assessment of which materials were fit for publication. Such extreme secrecy and unrelenting control are not the qualities an historian would wish for in the editor of a key primary source. Yet it was through this filter that the Queen was to ‘speak for herself'.

A
RTHUR
B
ENSON WAS ALWAYS
introduced as the son of his father. Edward White Benson had made a dazzling rise from schoolmaster-priest to Archbishop of Canterbury, despite having been orphaned at sixteen, the son of a bank-rupt chemical manufacturer. He had a short career teaching at Rugby with Dr Arnold before being selected as the first
headmaster of Wellington College
, a new school being created under royal charter. He worked closely with the Prince Consort to establish the new school, and Queen Victoria maintained a keen interest in the college after Albert's death.

Edward married his cousin Mary Sidgwick. They were a well-connected family: Mary's three brothers all went on to become Oxbridge dons, and one married the sister of a future Prime Minister. As Edward's career progressed, both Mary and Edward developed networks of influential friends and colleagues. Thus Arthur grew up within the most eminent circles of Victorian and Edwardian England. He later recorded a conversation with Sir Philip Burne-Jones, the son of
the artist Edward Burne-Jones, about ‘the difficulty of being sons of famous men, and how it overshadowed one with inevitable comparisons'.

Born in 1862, Arthur was the second son of Edward and Mary's six children. After attending Eton and then King's College in Cambridge, he returned to Eton as a housemaster for twenty years. He became a fellow and, later, the Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. He was a published writer of poetry, biography and memoir, and a member of the Athenaeum Club and of the Royal Society of Literature and the Academy of Letters. He was a friend of the Master of the Queen's Music, Sir Walter Parratt, and wrote verses and hymns for Queen Victoria and other royals. In 1904, when he began work on Victoria's letters, he was unmarried and forty-two years of age. Despite his many achievements, Benson sadly described himself as ‘a good case of an essentially second-rate person who has had every opportunity to be first rate, except the power to do so'.

Benson's own personality and achievements were inextricably linked with those of his family, especially his father. In his biography of Arthur, David Newsome described the father, Edward, as having a ‘prodigious physical energy and intellect, [with a] self-righteous and domineering personality'; he was a ‘constant and imposing presence' in the lives of his children. In his diary Arthur wrote, ‘Papa was, of course, strict, severe and moody, and believed in anger as the best way of influencing people – and he never knew how terrible his anger was.' He expected his children (and his wife) to be perfect; they must be examples of their father's principles in action and models to the boys in his care. They must spend all of their time in useful and improving occupation. Arthur recalled the books he was given to read: no novels, as writing
fiction equated to telling lies, but ‘books like
Philosophy in Sport
, where the boy cannot even throw a stone without having the principles of the parabola explained to him with odious diagrams'. The children never knew which innocent remark or act of childish impetuosity might be taken seriously amiss. The eldest son, Martin, came close to achieving perfection in his father's eyes but died when he was seventeen. As the biographer Brian Masters puts it, the remaining children were
‘constantly reminding themselves what a disappointment they must be
to their revered, faultless, fierce and dominating father'.

Arthur's mother, Mary (or ‘Minnie'), was the only surviving daughter of the Reverend William Sidgwick, a second cousin to Edward. Reverend Sidgwick had been the headmaster of the Skipton Grammar School in Yorkshire but died of consumption in 1841, just two months after Mary's birth. In a state of prolonged bereavement, her mother eventually settled her family in Rugby, so that her sons could attend school there. Edward Benson joined the Sidgwick household in 1853 upon his appointment as a master at Rugby, and in 1859 he and Mary were married. The same year, he was appointed headmaster of Wellington College, which had just been built on a desolate heath near the criminal lunatic asylum of Broadmoor. This is where Arthur Benson spent his childhood.

Arthur was always much more at his ease with his mother. He was born in the third year of their marriage, when Mary was twenty and his father thirty-two. In contrast to Edward, Mary was tender, light-hearted and sympathetic. Arthur's letters to his mother during his years at Eton are much more expressive than anything he could have written to his father. They show him relating to her more as a peer than as a mother. For example, as a twelve-year-old, he wrote:

WRETCHED MOTHER

GRACELESS REPROBATE

This is from your pining son whose bones are starting through his skin, who can neither eat nor drink for want of

YOUR LETTERS.

If the writing is not legible, it is probably owing to the tears which are steeping the paper at this instant.

Yet though so wasted by not getting your letters, I have managed to

PASS

Arthur later recalled that as children, ‘our relations [with our mother] were perfect. We trusted her, we turned to her for everything; she was the gayest and liveliest, as well as the most perceptive of companions'.

The children were also very close to one another, perhaps because of their father's ferocity. None of them married. In adulthood, the two sisters gravitated to female networks, and all three of the Benson brothers were most comfortable in predominantly male surroundings. To assume the role of paterfamilias as discharged by their father was inconceivable to them.
They could see no connection between romantic love
and the emotional and material demands of women. In their youth they all experienced passionate friendships with their contemporaries and with older males; as adults they maintained many of these friendships, but constantly looked for companionship with increasingly younger men. By the age of thirty-five, Arthur had already discounted himself from being able to continue the Benson line and thought it lost unless his novelist brother, Fred, could be persuaded to marry. Only homosocial circles could provide the Bensons
with the type of company they craved. The youngest brother, Hugh, sought it in the Roman Catholic church; Fred in literature and leisure; and Arthur in public schools, universities and literature.

Arthur's literary output was prodigious, running to over sixty published volumes. He was occasionally made the butt of satire by his family, which he took in good part. In 1906 his sister Maggie wrote to their brother Hugh:

Did you see ‘Signs of the Times' in
Punch
?

‘Self-denial week. Mr A.C. Benson refrains from publishing a book'!

In addition to his published books and family memoirs, Arthur maintained a diary for almost thirty years. It comprised 180 volumes, calculated by David Newsome to be more than four million words. Seven years after commencing the diary, he confessed:

I reflect that, intimate in some ways as this diary is, there are at least two thoughts often with me, that really affect my life, to which I never allude here. I suppose people's ideas of privacy differ very much … I don't think my sense of privacy is very general – but it is very strong about one or two things – and I have a carefully locked and guarded strong room. Anyone might think they could get a good picture of my life from these pages but it is not so.

Benson demonstrated the same capacity to keep things hidden in his published works. Brian Masters has observed that Benson often concealed emotionally laden episodes behind writing that was ‘bland, truthful but completely
locked against the inquisitive'. His treatment of the courtship and marriage of his parents, which he described in his biography of his father, was typical.

Edward Benson, at the age of twenty-three, had fallen ‘hopelessly and devotedly in love' with Minnie, who was then just eleven; she was ‘a fine and beautiful bud,' Edward wrote rather pruriently in his diary. Then, according to Fred Benson's transcription of the journal, Edward took ‘refuge in cipher' before continuing his account:

It is not strange that I should have thought first of the possibility that some day dear little Minnie might become my wife. Whether such an idea ever struck the guileless little thing herself I cannot tell. I should think it most unlikely.

The following year, Edward went to live in the Sidgwick household of his widowed cousin. He was studying at Rugby to take orders and was only required to teach one hour each day. He ‘desired Minnie's company constantly, was never happy away from her and dreamed of nothing else but of some day making her his wife'. He tutored her and wanted her to accompany him on his frequent horse-rides and walks, which created tension within the household – she was still a little girl. Edward waited another year before he asked Minnie's mother if he could speak to her on ‘The Subject'. In his diary, he described the proposal in lengthy detail:

Let me try to recall each circumstance: the arm-chair in which I sat, how she sat as usual on my knee, a little fair girl with her earnest look, and then [I] got quietly to the thing, and asked if she thought it would ever come to pass
that we should be married. Instantly without a word, a rush of tears fell down her cheeks, and I really for a moment was afraid. I told her that it was often in my thoughts, and that I believed that I should never love anyone so much as I should love her if she grew up as it seemed likely … [Accepting Edward's handkerchief] she made no attempt to promise, and said nothing silly or childish, but affected me very much by quietly laying the ends of my handkerchief together and tying them in a knot, and quietly putting them into my hand.

Ambitious young men grooming
‘young girls to adorn the blessed position of their future wives' was not unusual, but only rarely were the girls this young. Once they were married, Edward continued to take Minnie on his lap, particularly when he was finding fault with her. Yet he also sought emotional refuge in her company, casting her as a more mature, wifely figure, like Coventry Patmore's ‘Angel in the House'. In his black depressions, he longed to ‘lay my head on your breast and be comforted', surely a bewildering role for a young girl-wife.

Soon after their marriage, Edward and Mary were living in a new house in the grounds of a new school where Edward, an inexperienced headmaster, was trying to bring the staff and boys up to the exacting standards of the Prince Consort. At home, Mary was dealing with servants, budgets, sex, pregnancies and babies.

Arthur read his father's diary in preparation for writing his biography but declared the entries ‘too sacred for quotation'. In the two-volume book he took just one paragraph to describe his parents' courtship and marriage:

And here I must touch, however gently, upon what was the central fact of my father's life – the companionship of my mother. From the time when he was at the University, and played with her as a little child, he desired some day to make her his wife. When he came to live with the Sidgwick household at Rugby, and, in the intervals of his schoolwork, found time to teach her, this desire was formulated not only to himself but also to others. Before he began his first independent work, when she was just eighteen, they were married, and the camaraderie of the Rugby household was exchanged for the close companionship of married life among the wild and heathery solitudes of Wellington. Thus her life was bound up with his in a way which is seldom possible to a wife. There was not a single thought or plan or feeling which he did not share with her: and from first to last her whole life and energies were devoted to him. For many years she was his sole secretary. He consulted her about everything, depended on her judgement in a most unusual way, and wrote little for public utterance that he did not submit to her criticism. My father had an intense need of loving and being loved; his moods of depression, of dark discouragement, required a buoyant vitality in his immediate circle. One cannot constantly recur to the fundamental facts of life, but without a knowledge of this it would be impossible to understand my father's character and career.

Arthur's limited and rather adolescent understanding of adult heterosexual relationships is shown in his simplistic belief that there ‘was not a single thought or plan or feeling which he did not share with her: and from first to last her whole life and energies were devoted to him'. Arthur glossed over
and perhaps did not comprehend the suffocating effect of the childhood courtship and the inherent loneliness, for Mary, of ‘the close companionship of married life among the wild and heathery solitudes of Wellington'. What was he then to make, as editor, of the young Victoria's passion for Albert, or her need for companionship and love? Of her ‘bad nerves' after the birth of her second baby, or even of Albert's sense of isolation?

While writing his father's biography, Arthur had no knowledge that his mother had written a diary. It contained her anguished recollection of the courtship and the emotional pain within the marriage. She described her sense of entrapment, having been married at such an early age. She believed this had stifled the growth of her feelings for Edward and her ability to express such emotions. She longed to satisfy her masterful and demanding husband but her lack of heterosexual feelings, and anxiety about having left her mother alone, tore at her. Her account of their honeymoon in France and Switzerland, written in a fractured style many years later, poignantly expresses her attempts to make sense of the events: