Written in History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Letter writing was also more than practical—it was part of a new state of order, of law and contract, responsible government, accountable finance, and public morality. Above all, it was a new state of mind with fresh ideas and modern visions of how to live, an appreciation of privacy as well as a medium of promotion, and a growing sense of international society and personal consciousness.

  Some letters were intended to act as publicity; some were to remain absolutely secret. Their variety of usage is one of the joys of a collection like this. The vast majority of letters concerned mundane practicalities of little interest—ordering goods, paying bills, arranging meetings. At the height of letter writing as art and tool, literate people spent many hours a day at their desks, sometimes in failing light, writing obsessively. Catherine the Great self-deprecatingly called herself a “graphomaniac” (she also called herself a “plantomaniac” for her love of gardening) and the only way to run an empire, a war, a state was to do so by frenzied letter writing. It was a way for the writers to project their existence beyond their room, their house, village, country to reach other worlds and distant dreams. It was a physically exhausting duty and a pastime; emails and texts are much less arduous to produce, but they are perhaps too easy, so informal that we don’t respect the power of the words themselves, though of course brevity, speed, and excitement make texting as addictive as it is essential in all modern lives. Until the early twentieth century, few people, even heads of state, had offices to assist them with their vast correspondence, and most of them answered and sealed (for security, partly) their own letters—including letter writers who figure in this book, such as Lincoln, Catherine, and Nicholas II, who actually stamped his own letters.

  Of course, letter writers don’t always tell the truth in their letters, and there can be an editing process in the choice of which letters they destroy and which they preserve. But either way, a letter reflects a single moment in time and experience—what Goethe called “the immediate breath of life.” Many bonfires of letters were lit to destroy evidence of secret deals and forbidden loves. Such literary infernos happened frequently in Victorian and Edwardian families after the deaths of grandees—including in my own. But to destroy a letter, Goethe thought, even out of discretion, was destroying life itself.

  History writing—like contemporary journalism—is full of gossip, guesswork, mythology, lies, misunderstandings, and calumnies. When we read a tabloid newspaper or a gossip site, we know that perhaps half of what we read is false: the joy of private letters is that they are the real thing. We are not depending on gossip: we can hear the authentic words. This is the way Stalin spoke to his henchmen, the way Hurrem talked lovingly to Suleiman the Magnificent, or Frida Kahlo to Diego Rivera. And then of course there are Mozart’s outrageously scatological letters to his cousin Marianne.

  These letters fall into various types. First: public letters. Mao Zedong launches the Cultural Revolution with a letter to students ordering them to attack their superiors; Balfour promises a Jewish homeland; Émile Zola’s letter “J’Accuse!” confronts France about its racism and anti-Semitism. In the twenty-first century, I am afraid such a protest feels horribly contemporary—and absolutely necessary in our new venomous age of anti-Semitism on both sides of the Atlantic, not just from the right but increasingly, particularly in Britain, from the mainstream socialist left, a vile strain leading straight back to Stalin’s anti-Semitic purges. But it also goes further back: Marxism is in fashion again. I have added some priceless letters between the two creators of Marxism, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, whose vicious and shameless racism and anti-Semitism may surprise those who regard them as selfless and noble campaigners for ordinary decency and equality. Far from it: their letters are peppered with words like nigger and Yid as well as reflections on the Jewish genitalia of their rival Lassalle. These may shock some readers.

  In the centuries before the popularity of the press, many letters were designed to be copied out and widely distributed in society. Thus the public letters of great correspondents such as Voltaire and Catherine the Great were enjoyed in literary salons across Europe. Similarly with another sort of official letter: the announcement of a military victory or defeat. Even at the end of battles, when the fields were strewn with bodies quivering and shattered, exhausted generals would sit down in ruined cottages or at makeshift open-air desks to write letters throughout the night, announcing their victories to the world. After the victories of Poltava, Austerlitz, and Blenheim, Peter the Great, Napoleon, and Marlborough announced their news to the world—though they also boasted privately to their lovers and wives. “Come and celebrate with me!” writes Peter the Great to his wife.

  Until recently, all negotiations or commands, particularly political or military ones, would be borne in letters not to be read by the public. In this book is Rameses the Great’s disdainful note to the Hittite king Ḫattušili III. A millennium after that, Mark Antony writes to Octavian (the future emperor Augustus) to complain that his “screwing” Cleopatra is not politically significant—even though it clearly is. Leap a millennium again: Saladin and Richard the Lionheart negotiate to partition the Holy Land. Then forward another five hundred years: Philip II is ordering his admiral Medina Sidonia to command the Armada against England—even though the latter believes the enterprise will fail. Another four centuries and we are admiring Lincoln’s generosity of spirit in a letter to General Grant. And there is no more important correspondence in the twentieth century than that between Roosevelt and Churchill during the desperate months of 1940. On the night before he invades Soviet Russia, Hitler reveals his motives in a letter to his ally Mussolini at the height of his hubristic swagger. And there’s one letter here that was never sent: Eisenhower’s draft addressed to the troops in case D-Day failed.

  Then there is a special sort of letter that is both political and personal—and these are especially relevant in autocracies, where the intimate life of the ruler is political. As we can see in many of the new autocracies of the twenty-first century, when the ruler is absolute, everything personal is political. Henry VIII’s love letter to Anne Boleyn and James I’s to his handsome male favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, are of political importance—the ruler’s amorous preferences guide national government. The repulsive entertainments, usually involving anuses and sausages, laid on for Kaiser Wilhelm II by his courtiers reveal the coarse incompetence that threatened European peace. Catherine the Great and Prince Potemkin, lovers as well as political partners, are passionate romantics yet clear-eyed politicians. Among their letters are some, ten to fifteen pages long, that discuss every aspect of power—diplomacy, war, finance, personnel. But they also cover domestic matters—art-collecting, building houses, their sexual affairs, and of course their health: no eighteenth-century letter is complete without a discussion of hemorrhoids. But their short love letters resemble modern emails or texts. Letters like these were never meant to be read by anyone but the recipients, but most were kept after their deaths. Potemkin died on a wild steppe in Moldova, gripping a packet of Catherine’s letters wrapped in a ribbon, weeping as he read them.

  Such really private correspondence celebrates love and sex, but these were letters that their writers kept under lock and key. Alexander II and his mistress (later wife) Katya exchange the most erotic letters ever written by a head of state. At the time they would have presumed that no one would ever see them—yet here we are, reading the letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf; Napoleon and Josephine; Emma Hamilton and Horatio Nelson. Balzac’s correspondence with his Polish fan, the beautiful Countess Hánska, is so fervent, they fall in love before they meet—just by the power of letters. Anaïs Nin’s correspondence with Henry Miller is so ablaze with sexuality, so awash with lubricity, it almost tastes of carnality. “More than kisses,” wrote John Donne, “letters mingle souls.” And bodies.

  Naturally I have chosen intimate letters of pain as well as pleasure,
of the end of love as well as the beginning: one of the most remarkable and little known is Thomas Jefferson’s “conversation” between his Head and his Heart, sent to his young mistress who is leaving him. It must be one of the most brilliant analyses of the craziness of love ever written—and the acuity is not surprising, because this is the author of the American Declaration of Independence.

  Similarly, Simón Bolívar tries to end his affair with the fabulous Manuela Sáenz. The married beauty “Henriette,” returning to her husband, breaks the heart of the quintessential womanizer Casanova. Just before his own death, Leonard Cohen wishes farewell to his dying lover who inspired his greatest songs, including “So Long, Marianne.” My favorite goodbye is the letter of the triumphant caliph of Islamic Spain, Abd-al Rahman III, who reflects on his deathbed that, out of fifty years of glory, he has enjoyed just fourteen days of happiness. Few letters are more heartbreaking than Alan Turing’s agony over the persecution of his homosexuality. And of course there is the unbearable horror of a rare goodbye letter from wife to husband within the death camps of the Holocaust.

  Some of these letters recount great events or spectacles—Columbus reports to his monarchs on the “discovery” of America; the Battle of Britain is recounted in a young pilot’s letter to his parents, which is especially poignant because the pilot is killed soon afterward; Chekhov observes the suffering of the desperate criminals of Sakhalin; Pliny sees the destruction of Pompeii; Voltaire reflects on the Lisbon earthquake of 1755.

  A subset of what we might call tourism tells of sexual adventures in interesting places, a popular type of letter in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the modern experience of travel as leisure expanded from the Grand Tours of wealthy aristocrats to middle-class travel by train, shrinking the world in a way never before achieved: Chekhov and Flaubert cheerfully describe encounters with Japanese prostitutes and Egyptian youths in beautiful prose.

  Then there are letters of family, where we witness the intimate relationships of great men with their children, such as these two Mughal emperors: Babur advises his son on tolerance, and Aurangzeb writes to his son from his deathbed as his empire falls apart. As he awaits his own trial, Charles I tells his son how to be a king. Empress Maria Theresa warns her daughter Queen Marie Antoinette that her arrogance will destroy her. Or the other way around: Svetlana Stalina plays at being the dictator and gives orders to her father—including one to ban homework in the entire Soviet Union for a year. There is also the awkwardness of families, which among royalty is magnified to epic proportions. The future Queen Elizabeth I begs for her life from her sister Queen “Bloody” Mary. Joseph II comes to Paris as sex adviser to his sister Marie Antoinette, when Louis XVI is unable to consummate their marriage.

  The anonymous warning of the Gunpowder Plot is itself decisive in defeating the conspiracy—it changes history at a stroke. Rasputin in his letter to Nicholas II tries to stop the First World War breaking out, but fails. Some of the letters are themselves orders to kill: Stalin’s notes encourage his secret policemen to execute “enemies” who are actually innocent, and Lenin frenziedly orders executions of random victims. Three thousand years ago, an Egyptian ruler tells his wife to murder two junior officials and “disappear” their bodies. One of my favorites is Tito’s laconic note to Stalin, threatening to send an assassin if Stalin tries to kill him again.

  One special category covers self-destruction: Oscar Wilde receives the insulting letter from his lover’s father calling him a “Somdomite”; Alexander Hamilton and Alexander Pushkin write their way toward the duels that kill them. Another particular species of letter is the last goodbye: for instance, Sir Walter Raleigh’s letter to his wife before his execution. Emperor Hadrian, realizing he is dying, writes to his adopted son and successor Antoninus Pius. Bolívar, ailing and exhausted, damns the Americas. Kafka orders his works destroyed. And it is not just Kafka who doubts the value of his works: another theme is the torment and disappointment of creativity seen in such letters as Keats’s on love and death; Michelangelo’s stress as he paints the Sistine Chapel; or T. S. Eliot turning down George Orwell’s new novel Animal Farm.

  Here you will also read timeless letters that tell of the brave struggles for freedom in the modern era, such as the liberation of slaves, votes for women, and African American civil rights. Toussaint L’Ouverture, who has led the Haitian slave revolt against the French that leads to the first independent black republic of the Americas, now begs for his family’s life. Nelson Mandela tells his wife, Winnie, how to live with hope, even inside a prison cell. Rosa Parks challenges racial segregation in Alabama. Abram Hannibal, a slave captured, probably, in West Africa, then sold to the slave markets of Istanbul and on to the Russian tsar, becomes the first black general in Europe. Gifted women defy their shackles: Ada Lovelace writes about her love of science; Fanny Burney and Manuela Sáenz defy the necessity of boring, male-centered marriage; Emmeline Pankhurst defends violent action in order to win the vote for women.

  Email and the telephone may have ended the golden age of letters, but they have kept their power—for example, in diplomacy. In 2018, when President Donald Trump cancels his planned Singapore summit with the young and murderous North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, he does so in a very Trumpian letter. It sparks an energetic correspondence. The summit takes place in Singapore after all. A few days later, on 6 July, Chairman Kim writes to Trump: “The significant first meeting with Your Excellency was indeed the start of a meaningful journey.” Trump soon went further, boasting to a rally about his North Korean epistolary affair: “I was being really tough and so was he. We would go back and forth. And then we fell in love, okay? No, really—he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters.” Whatever the future of North Korean nuclear weapons, this at least proves the emotional and political power of the letter. While on the subject of the new brazen, vicious age of authoritarian swagger, ruthless bombast, and vicious hostility in public life, personified by Trump’s presidency, I have added to this paperback the charming, elegant letter left by President George H. W. Bush (who had called for a “kinder, gentler” politics) for his successor, Bill Clinton, in the Oval Office: it neatly and warmly puts aside petty insecurity and political malice to celebrate their shared American ideal. That’s a sentiment sadly missing today.

  Letters are returning to favor among those looking to be more discreet in their communication. Politicians, spies, criminals, and lovers have all learned, many the hard way, that emails and texts can be read and exposed; they are never destroyed. But they often vanish. Their impermanence makes them unsatisfying as a medium. They make life feel more transient while letters make it feel more enduring. Even the most heavily encrypted messages can be decrypted. Intelligence services like the CIA, GCHQ, or FSB, aided by renegade ghostly armies of plundering freelance hackers, are harvesting vast caches of messages. For this reason, people are starting to use pen and paper again, especially in government: letters can be preserved, but ironically they are safer, because they exist only once and can be physically destroyed. Top Russian officials now tell me that in the Kremlin today, all affairs of any importance are conducted by letter and note, on old-fashioned paper, with traditional ink or lead, nib or ballpoint, dispatched by loyal courier. No more sleek electronic devices! We should take note: no one knows like the Kremlin court of President Putin, that crenelated hive of cyber espionage, how insecure and dangerous are those easy texts and swift emails. Yet, as this anthology shows, letters often have a much longer life than their writers ever imagined.

  I hope the readers of this collection wonder at the bravery, beauty, and visceral authenticity of these letters. While the surfer of the Internet feels more alone than ever amid invisible millions, the writer of a single letter to a correspondent is never lonely. Lord Byron, whose daughter Ada appears in this anthology, understood this when he mused that “letter writing is the only device combining solitude and good comp
any,” for the letter writer is enriched by the sensation of warmth that someone far away will soon share his or her sentiments. May it encourage you to write your own letters, inspired by the brilliance of these examples of the art.

  Yours sincerely,

  Simon Sebag Montefiore

  May 2019

  P.S. I hope you may also enjoy the companion volume of this book: Voices of History: Speeches That Changed the World.

  P.P.S. In some cases, where the texts are too long, the detail too obscure, or the sex too repetitive, I have edited letters for the ease of the reader. Also, I have used the regnant names for all ruling monarchs, even if they were not yet sovereigns at the time of writing. This is to make it easy to recognize them: Elizabeth I was a princess of dubious prospects when she wrote the Tide Letter to Queen Mary—but the letter appears in the table of contents as “Elizabeth I to Mary I.” Apologies if this bothers anyone.

  Love

  Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn, May 1528

  This is one of the love letters that changed history. Henry was the second son of Henry VII, who had seized the throne for his newfangled Tudor dynasty in 1485. Only the death of his elder brother Prince Arthur brought Henry VIII to the throne, in 1509. Arthur left a young widow, Catherine of Aragon, daughter of the Spanish monarchs. On his accession, Henry suddenly decided to marry Catherine. Now, almost twenty years into their marriage, the king desperately needed a male heir. So far, only a daughter, Mary, had survived. After an affair with a young courtier named Mary Boleyn, he started to notice her sister, Anne, a lady-in-waiting to the queen. By 1528 Henry is in love with Anne Boleyn, eleven years younger than him. Although it is unlikely that their love affair has yet been consummated, he is already utterly enraptured by her. She is resisting his attempts at seduction. Her mix of chastity, sophistication, her ambition to marry the king and not be seduced like her sister, and her cool, haughty allure intensify Henry’s fervor. Her personality makes him doubt her love—“I hope on yours also”—but later he would bitterly resent her wiles and take a terrible revenge.