Censoring Queen Victoria

by Yvonne M. Ward

Esher

  Esher thus set out his goals for the project in a form that would both appeal to the King and be persuasive of Benson. Before he did so, however, eighteen months of selecting, rejecting, incorporating and cutting had already taken place. It is impossible to ascertain whether Esher was simply restating previous decisions or whether it was the first time he had conceptualised the parameters so clearly. He also wrote with conspiratorial bravado to Knollys, ‘As you say, Arthur Benson is undecided as to what the general purpose of the book is to be. I am quite clear that it ought to be what I have said …’ Even so, Esher made a copy of his letter for his own records, something he rarely did. (He retained and filed thousands of letters, but very few letters written by him are in his archive.) Esher clearly attached great significance to this document.

  Benson was pleased to have such a succinct summary of the book. He replied:

  3 vols!!

  Your analysis of the object of the book is masterly; I will, if I may, embody your points in the introduction. I wholly and entirely concur, … but to aim at bringing out her character and not illustrating history that is the exact aim.

  When I go through the second vol again, which I shall do in the next few days, I shall ask myself not ‘Is this important?’ but ‘Is this characteristic?’

  At the same time, as you say, it must be dramatic.

  Esher had given Benson a useful framework, a checklist against which he could judge the relevance of each letter and justify its inclusion or excision. By now, the two editors had come a long way from allowing the Queen to speak for herself. Most ‘Life and Letters’ biographies were, as Strachey complained, shapeless. But if they contained all or most of the subject’s letters, readers could at least form their own opinions. The Queen’s correspondence, however, was so immense that the editors had now decided firmly against shapeless comprehensiveness: the book was to tell a dramatic story, the shape and significance of which they would determine.

  PART II

  THE QUEEN

  NOT TO GIVE OFFENCE AND NOT TO CREATE scandal, but to make each of the three volumes of the book dramatic: these were the aims of the editors. Episodes which might have added drama to the book were sacrificed in order to avoid scandal and the King’s displeasure. Benson grasped this dilemma early in the process: ‘We are between the devil and the deep blue sea. The King will be furious if we violate confidence, and displeased if the book is dull.’ The task was made even more difficult because they were not dealing with the authoritative, older woman they had both known; instead they had to portray a much younger Victoria, in her first forty-two years.

  Benson and Esher generated drama by producing a romantic idealisation of Victoria’s life – of a young girl, pure, petite and innocent, under some duress; then her awakening as she flowered as a constitutional monarch, under the fortunate tutelage of particular and gifted gentlemen. To highlight this process, they portrayed Victoria’s girlhood as one of feminine isolation. Her queenship they depicted as one of youthful vitality and a keenness to learn from older men, especially from Lord Melbourne, the Prime Minister of the first years of her reign. In this narrative, the throne brought liberation from her mother’s control, but this independence was soon overtaken by marriage and a husband’s influence. Victoria’s correspondence with other women was omitted, Benson said, to avoid triviality. Her European correspondence was minimised in order to avoid suggesting undue foreign influence. There was little mention of her children.

  And so the image of the Queen that emerged was shaped by a series of factors: by the documents that survived and were readily available; by omissions resulting from loss, oversight or rejection; and then by further excisions and deletions as the editing proceeded.

  Chapter 6

  SIR JOHN CONROY AND THE GHOST OF LADY FLORA

  VICTORIA’S FATHER, EDWARD, DUKE of Kent, had died suddenly when she was eight months old. On his deathbed he had asked his equerry, John Conroy, to care for his widow and child. The Duchess of Kent had very limited English and even more limited funds. Her husband left her with an income of £6000 per year and debts of £50,000. Her brother Leopold, later to be named King of the Belgians, provided her with some financial assistance and her brother-in-law, King George IV, allowed her to keep some of her husband’s rooms at Kensington Palace. The Conroy family lived nearby and the children played frequently with Victoria.

  John Conroy was a very ambitious man. He later came to be comptroller of the affairs of Victoria’s two unmarried aunts, who also lived at Kensington Palace. As Victoria moved closer to the throne, he insinuated himself further into her mother’s affairs. Conroy sought to direct Victoria’s education and began to suggest that she had various infirmities that would preclude her ruling alone. He organised tours through the provinces to ‘show her to the people’; she was made to stand on platforms and podiums but, as was the custom of the day, was not allowed to say anything. Many years later, in a letter to Lord John Russell, she vividly described her abhorrence of being ‘a spectacle’ to be ‘gazed at, without delicacy or feeling’. Being ‘on display’ was something Victoria would dislike for the rest of her life. When her older half-sister, Feodore (her mother’s daughter from her first marriage), left England to marry the Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, Victoria – then nine years old – became even more isolated and came to rely on her governess, Louise Lehzen, for company and support.

  The division within the household increased when Lady Flora Hastings became the Duchess of Kent’s Lady of the Bedchamber. Lady Flora colluded with Conroy and the Duchess to enforce what came to be known as the ‘Kensington System’. This strict program for the Princess’s education was designed to distance her from the Court, and became a vehicle for the political aspirations of the Duchess and of Conroy. Two factions now developed within the household: the Duchess and her allies versus Victoria and Lehzen. The factions were irrevocably established by the time Victoria was sixteen. While on holiday at Ramsgate that year, Victoria contracted an illness. Elizabeth Longford suggested that it was typhoid fever but other historians, such as Stanley Weintraub, have attributed it to the psychological warfare in the household. During this illness Conroy tried to persuade Victoria to sign a statement asking that her mother rule as regent until Victoria was twenty-one and guaranteeing that Conroy would be given the post of private secretary when she acceded the throne. With Lehzen’s help Victoria resisted his bullying, but the episode remained with her. The steely resolve noted throughout her life was forged during this time.

  The situation persisted for the next two years. In the months before Victoria’s eighteenth birthday, her uncle King William IV offered financial help to establish her own household. In doing so, he may have hoped to relieve her of Conroy’s influence. There is a series of letters between Queen Adelaide, Feodore and the Duchess of Northumberland (Victoria’s official governess, a ceremonial role distinct from the day-to-day duties of Louise Lehzen) expressing their grave concerns for Victoria’s mental and physical wellbeing. In 1836, Feodore hid a note to the Duchess of Northumberland in a letter to Queen Adelaide, which she sent in the care of a private citizen; she hoped to avoid it being intercepted by Conroy. In this note she urged the Duchess to try to ascertain Victoria’s ‘health and spirits’; she ‘has suffered a good deal, as you will know … her caracter [sic] might be completely spoiled by this continual warfare’.

  By late 1836 or early 1837, Uncle Leopold in Belgium had also heard about the ‘Kensington System’. He too began to discuss the logistics of creating a separate household for the Princess. But King William’s health was deteriorating. Less than a month after Victoria’s eighteenth birthday, he died and Victoria acceded the throne in her own right. Almost immediately, she moved decisively to isolate herself from her mother and from Conroy. Her handling of the delicate situation of Lady Flora Hastings showed how high tensions ran.

  In 1838, Lady Flora developed an abdominal swelling which Queen Victoria and Lord Melbourne attributed to pregnancy
. They cast their suspicions upon Conroy; Flora and Conroy were flirtatious with one another and had shared a long coach journey several months prior. As rumours flew around the court, Victoria’s doctor, Sir James Clark, was consulted and Lady Flora was persuaded to agree to a medical examination. The exam confirmed that she was a virgin. The doctors were puzzled and met with Lord Melbourne, who passed their reports on to the Queen. Victoria told her mother that ‘though [Flora] is a virgin … there was an enlargement in the womb like a child’. Lady Flora’s family criticised Victoria and Melbourne in the press for casting such scurrilous aspersions on Flora’s reputation, and for subjecting a lady to the indignity of such an examination. Sadly Lady Flora died several months later from a liver tumour.

  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 p
raising 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.

  Chapter 7

  KING LEOPOLD: THE FOREIGN ADVISER