Victoria’s Secrets

Fifth in line to the throne at the time of her birth, Victoria was an ordinary woman thrust into an extraordinary role when she inherited the British throne at 18. As a girl, she defied her mother’s meddling and an adviser’s bullying, forging an iron will of her own. As a teenage queen, she eagerly grasped the crown and relished the freedom it brought her. In her new biography of Queen Victoria, Victoria: The Queen – An Intimate Biography of a Woman Who Ruled an Empire, journalist and ABC presenter Julia Baird has brought to life the story of a fascinating woman and the extraordinary world she ruled. In a talk which revealed details on new material on Queen Victoria, Julia Baird addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 2 November 2016.

VICTORIA’S SECRETS

JULIA BAIRD

First, I apologise to those disappointed by the fact that Heidi Klum is not about to burst out of the next room in a diamond encrusted bra, surrounded by lithe, insouciant supermodels dressed in lingerie, a kind of Trump-esque retro, clichéd paradise – or perhaps purgatory. I am not talking about those kinds of Victorian secrets tonight.

But another sort entirely. That of a tiny queen whose under garments are possibly the least secret thing about her, given she seems to have left behind an improbably large pile of improbably large bloomers. For someone so private, this is very strange and actually a mystery I have not yet managed to solve.

But to answer the question the title of this talk naturally poses: does Victoria have any secrets? Still, after more than being the subject of a dozen biographies, films, miniseries, and the eyeglass of many reputable, distinguished and scholarly historians?

The answer is yes.[i]

In 1919, the editors of the Arts Gazette decided to ask readers to nominate the ugliest statue in London. While he stressed that he admired Victoria’s determination and panache, George Bernard Shaw thought there were a number of statues of the now deceased queen that might qualify. He wondered, “what crime Queen Victoria committed that she should be so horribly guyed as she has been through the length and breadth of her dominions. It was part of her personal quality that she was a tiny woman, and our national passion for telling lies in every public subject has led to her being represented as an overgrown monster.” While Victoria  “was a little woman with great decision of manner and a beautiful speaking voice which she used in public extremely well”, and “she carried herself very well”, he lamented, “All young people now believe that she was a huge heap of a woman.”[ii]

The task of the historian is much like that of the archaeologist, though what we are chipping through is myth instead of rock, and we shed assumptions and errors instead of dust. Initially I thought my greatest responsibility as biographer was to expose how the many fictions about Victoria have clouded our understanding of her. I didn’t expect to be, 115 years after she died, still thwarted, censored and perplexed by the secrecy of the royal archivists entrusted with preserving the memory and, as it turns out, the respectability of the Queen.

For in truth the history of the royal family is blotted with bonfires. Vast piles of letters, mounds of correspondence piled in courtyards and set alight, thrown into fireplaces…..the evidence of the secret whisperings, the shameful liaisons, the deep prejudices, the embarrassing alliances. I have spent the better part of a year consulting lawyers on how to best preserve and publish the new fragments I found, while simultaneously marveling at how they managed to escape the flames. But I will come to this.

The traditional role of the archivist is one not of censorship but preservation. After all the rampaging destruction of large tracts of precious historical material makes the job of the archivist one of as protection – although the question then becomes, who are they trying to protect the archives from? The family or the historian?

As former Royal Archivist Sheila de Bellaigue wrote:

In a lecture on the Royal Archives, Sir Robin Mackworth-Young, Assistant Keeper from 1958 to 1985, his upon a memorable metaphor for the hazards facing personal archives, which he described as belonging to a world in which the normal processes of nature are reversed. “An archive springs into existence fully formed, like Athena from the head of Zeus. But, unlike Athena, it is not protected by armour. On the contrary, it is as defenceless as the baby turtle emerging from the egg and making its perilous journey across the sand, past numerous predators, to the relative, but by no means absolute, security of the ocean.” The predators lying in wait might be family members or executors, “armed with the weapon of fire”; or neglect and decay; or indeed archivists, practicing the principles of selective preservation.

The irony is that Victoria was not just a great communicator, writing many millions of words over her life time – it has been conservatively estimated that Victoria wrote an average of two and a half thousand words per day when she was Queen; a total of approximately 60 million words – but a great preserver of correspondence. She tried valiantly to get her Uncle George IV’s archives, and kept her eye on where her own letters ended up.

But now so much of her own work has been tampered with that a researcher needs to spend almost as much time pondering what is not there as what is there; like trying to read invisible ink by holding a page over a flame, or the childhood trick of writing on paper with a stick then shading over it as letters emerge.

Oddly enough, I first began thinking about Queen Victoria in the aftermath of the 2008 presidential election campaign, when working for Newsweek in New York. Our editorial team had vigorously debated the way we talk about women in positions of power, and I had been writing about the unlikely appearance of Sarah Palin in the race as John McCain’s running mate, as well as Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful bid for the presidency. One of the more robust arguments we had was about how we are still seemingly unable to reconcile women and power; it too often seems an awkward, surprising, unlikely and often troubling pairing. Given the latest poll out by Vox is saying one of the major indicators of support for Trump is hostility to women – I know we will be thinking about this for some time – Victoria would totally be a nasty woman! After all William Gladstone once said being alone in a room with the queen is enough to kill any man – and Otto von Bismarck walked out of a meeting with her mopping his brow, crying : Mein  Gott, what a woman! One could do business with her! She was also the subject of more violence than other monarchs were, as the subject of eight assassination attempts – she ended up at the opera once sporting a black eye – but this is a subject for another time.

After one of these conversations, my editor, Jon Meacham, suggested that Queen Victoria had not been examined properly for some time; and the six months I spent reading in the New York Society Library confirmed this; the unvarying repetition of the same views about Victoria, with rare fresh interrogation of new material, piqued my interest.

There were a series of repetition of myths under which a funny, sprightly, progressive and robust mother and woman had been buried. The myths were created by observers, sycophants, monarchists, republicans and herself, and bolstered by the royal family ever since. Myths like: when Albert died, she died too. That she was an impeccably constitutional, well behaved Queen. That she was a simple product of the men who advised and shaped her; like a walking, talking Galatea. And, of course, that her servant John Brown was just a good friend. A myth that she only ruled with the help of her husband, that she believed women had no place in the public sphere, that she was a bad and cruel mother – a domestic tyrant as one series called her recently – that she was a severe, stout and humorless woman perennially unamused, who mourned without effectively ruling for four decades, a black-clad sad lump on top of the coal heap of political life. The other myth is that she smoked cannabis to relieve cramps (sadly untrue) and that she said she did not believe lesbians existed – entirely possible, but no evidence of this. She is also unfairly associated with Victorian puritanism – which in fact her husband championed – some of the saucier pieces of art they gave each other put paid to that.

So off I went.

Since I began this project, I have dug through material from archives in London, Scotland, Oxford, Sydney, Germany and America in a bid to find out who Victoria was: poring over dusty documents, deciphering appalling handwriting and decoding hieroglyphics in ageing leather journals. I walked slowly and repeatedly through the rooms she lived in at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace, and Balmoral Castle in Scotland. Osborne House has been snap frozen and is still crammed with mementoes, virtually unchanged from the moment Victoria died: sculptures of baby’s limbs, snippets of children’s hair, paintings commissioned by a young, wealthy husband and wife for each other’s delight. Windsor, which Victoria hated, contains little remaining evidence of her. Balmoral was most revealing not for the tartan furnishings, or many portraits of her beloved dogs, but for its sense of soothing, wild remoteness, even in the 21^st century.

In all of this exploration, I found Victoria grappled with many of the matters we do today – managing uneven relationships, placating resentful spouses, trying to raise decent children, battling bouts of insecurity and depression, spending years recovering from childbirth, yearning for loves that were lost, and then found, and longing to make decisions about your own life, and shape the world we live in. I was surprised by her wicked, often slapstick sense of humor, her dislike of pretension, her candour, her tolerance of different religions and her intense, enduring involvement in politics, ordering around ministers, trying to keep Lord Melbourne in power, and later, William Gladstone out, and directly corresponding with generals in the field. I found that she had adored her husband, completely, and yet her belief that he was superior in every way had undermined her self esteem so that when he died, she was entirely lacking in self confidence and anxious about public appearances.

I also found that she loved her Highland servant John Brown – one of the most speculated on relationships in history. Deeply truly loved him to the extent that when she guiltily consulted a priest about missing Albert a little less. She called him her best friend. When he died she was bereft for the second time in her life – spoke about the relationship like it was the second major one of her life, it was a loss she likened to the loss of Albert. And in my quest to find out what the true nature of her relationship with this much gossiped about man was – a giant of a man who called her “woman” and teased her the tiny queen about her weight, who drank and swore and devoted his life to his queen – I ended up in a large stone home in a village called Lanton, in the Scottish lowlands.

Here there are meticulous records of a Sir James Reid’s two-decades of service of the Queen, of newspaper clippings and funeral services and, most importantly, his diary. I read his account of Victoria’s death and was incredibly moved – his grief was palpable. I read his report of the queen having a prolapse and ventral hernia, something he only discovered after examining her for the first time on her death bed. And I found that this doctor had taken a particular, careful interest in her relationship with Brown. Part of this was doubtless due to the fact that he was later entrusted by Edward VII, Victoria’s eldest son Bertie, with purchasing some very “compromising” letters from Victoria to her estate manager about Brown from a blackmailer with a large wad of money.  Part of this was due to things he had witnessed, exchanges between the pair. One day he walked in on them playing a strange sort of game, which he recorded in tiny print in the corner of one of his pages. This had never been published before, for fear of scandalising the royals. As I wrote in the book:

“Opening the door to Victoria’s room on Thursday 22 March 1883, [Reid] saw her flirting with John Brown as she “walked a little”.

Brown says to her, lifting his kilt: “Oh I thought it was here?”

She responds, laughing, and lifting up her own skirt: “No, it is here.”

It is unclear, from the note, exactly what “it” might be. What is clear is that Sir James was sufficiently interested in this exchange, and thought it significant enough, to record it in his little black journal – in code – and that it revealed an extraordinary level of intimacy. We will never know the precise nature of that intimacy, but this snippet suggests there was a closeness that exceeded not just what was normal for a lady and her servant – let alone a Queen – but also a male and female friend.

(The Scotsman reported this recently as “New book reveals Queen Victoria and her Scottish servant John Brown exposed themselves to each other”, which is certainly one way to look at it – though not quite mine).

Part of Sir James’ interest in John Brown was the fact that he was the person the Queen trusted with her deepest secrets – what she would be buried with. She wrote out instructions to her dresser, to be kept in her pocket at all times and only shared with Dr Reid upon the Queen’s death. This, too, is in the good doctor’s archives. As I write on the book:

In it she included a long list of objects she wanted placed in her coffin: mementos from her children, photographs of her grandchildren, On her hands she wanted five rings from Albert as well as rings from Feodore, her mother, Louise and Beatrice. She also wanted: “a plain gold wedding ring which had belonged to the Mother of my dear valued servant & friend J. Brown, and was given him by her in 75 – which he wore for a short time and I have worn constantly since his death – to be on my fingers.”

The Queen also requested framed photographs of Albert, and all of her children and grandchildren, be put in her coffin. She also wanted, as she explained in detail:

A colored profile Photograph in a leather case of my faithful friend J. Brown his gift to me – with some of his hair laid with it & some of the Photographs which I have marked with an x – and have often carried in a silk case, (worked by my faithful Annie McDonald) in my pocket, to be put in the case, in my hand, and the cast of my beloved Husband’s hand which is always near me to be placed in my coffin near me – All these objects which have been so dear to me during my life time and have never left me – I should wish to be near my earthly remains –

Dr. Reid was instructed to wrap her hand in gauze after placing Brown’s hair in it; then flowers were discreetly arranged over it.[iii]

What I did not expect was how hard it would be to get in.

So I was discovering a lot of things. But there was one important obstacle in my research that was proving impossible to hurdle: I could not get access to her correspondence and personal notebooks contained in the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle: the most important records of all. I sent three requests; one that was not answered, and two that were denied, on the grounds that this was my first biography and I had not previously published a book on the royal family. I had continued to press, pointing out that I had a PhD in history, as well as a book contract, and I would take a careful, scholarly approach to any material. But it was not until mid-2013, after the Governor General of Australia, Quentin Bryce, and her secretary, Stephen Brady, lobbied the Queen’s secretary on my behalf – vouching for my character – that I was allowed entry. I was thrilled, if discombobulated by the fact that neither my project, nor the nature of my qualifications had changed; it was only the status of my advocate that had pushed open the doors.

What the archives are like:

Finally, in 2014, I walked up the 100-odd steps to the Round Tower of Windsor Castle. The materials there are rich, beautifully preserved and carefully guarded: every time you go to the bathroom, an escort accompanies you so you don’t try to smuggle out precious documents. Glorious, hazy summer days passed in a blur as I sat reading in the cool stone tower. The staff members were polite, helpful and their knowledge of the material was impeccable. I read deeply, inhaling correspondence, going cross-eyed over her illegible spidery writing. I found some great, fresh little nuggets – in correspondence to and from Gladstone, her secretary, and memorandums to Albert (yes they wrote each other memoranda when they fought). And also found a telling exchange between Beatrice and the librarians, where she asked them to destroy this memoranda, and they assured the king they would – but someone photographed them before destroying them, an archivist with a rebel’s heart, or perhaps just the spirit of a historian.

Before starting work at the Royal Archives, run by the Royal Household, you must sign a contract that ensures you are aware they have absolute control of the material you are about to see. You need to agree to send them any sections of your text which are based on Royal Archives material, showing the relevant passages in the context of the surrounding paragraph or two of your commentary. As I had used a great deal of archival material I sent my full manuscript.

Several months later, I received a reply that revealed an attempted level of control of the historical record – to this day – that I find remarkable. Of greatest concern was Dr Reid’s material about John Brown, a concern more likely to arouse suspicion than bury them, especially given these events occurred more than a century ago. I was asked to remove several sections of my manuscript but have outlined my reasons for including all available evidence in my book.

The keepers of the Royal Archives, which span more than two centuries, from George III to the present day, are authoritative, properly fastidious and concerned with accuracy. But the secrecy and lack of transparency regarding crucial material is at odds with the pursuit of history: of a rigorous, exhausting analysis of primary evidence that will enable a better understanding of events as they unfolded and the people who drove, witnessed or were swept away by them.

And I remain convinced of the view that letting daylight in upon magic does not destroy an enchantment with the monarchy, it merely allows us to more fully understand some of the more remarkable and curious royal characters in our history. Including that of one of the world’s most powerful and fascinating women. Indeed I would argue the case for a more informed kind of enchantment; one rooted more in rigorous research than spells, mystery and intrigue. In openness and transparency rather than censorship presented as simple privacy.

After hearing all of this, it may not surprise you that I have a lingering suspicion Victoria has more secrets. But, after considerable and extended exertion, these were the ones I was able to unearth – and publish.

NOTES

THE ROYAL LIBRARIAN STARED AT THE LETTER, annoyed with himself. Why had he not read through the papers before sending them out to Princess Beatrice? Now she had demanded they be destroyed. How discomfiting. Four decades earlier, Beatrice, Victoria’s youngest daughter, had been charged with the unfortunate task of editing the queen’s voluminous diaries. She did this over ten years, writing them out in her own hand into blue copybooks and burning the originals, in one of the greatest acts of historical censorship of the century. Now she was an elderly woman who was occupying herself with translating her family archives to distract herself from the “anxieties” of war. She had happily worked through her father’s letters to his stepmother, translating from German to English, but this most recent batch of archives appalled her.

It was May 10, 1943 and the Second World War was raging. On this day Adolf Hitler extended his dictatorship indefinitely, American troops were preparing to oust Japan from islands in Alaska and Winston Churchill was arriving in Washington to meet for his first war meeting with Franklin D Roosevelt, a day before the Axis powers surrendered to the Allies in North Africa. The 86 year old Beatrice sat down in her home in Sussex, England, trembling, to write a beseeching letter to her great nephew, King George VI, the father of Queen Elizabeth II. She called him “Bertie”, and wrote:

I have now received from the Librarian a book with short letters from my Father to my Mother, both in English & German, but of such an intimate nature, dealing with little personal momentary squabbles, which I cannot possibly undertake or deal with. There were also jottings about my mother’s various confinements. These papers are of no historical or biographical value whatever, & if pried into could only be misconstrued to damage her memory.  You may not know that I was left my Mother’s library executor, & as such, I feel I must appeal to grant me the permission to destroy any painful letters. I am her last surviving child & feel I have a sacred duty to protect her memory. How these letters can ever have been … kept in the Archives, I fail to understand.[iv]

The Windsor Castle librarian, Owen Morshead, apologised to Sir Alan Lascelles, the Keeper of the Royal Archives, for having inadvertently sent “inflammable material”. “I know that the Prince and the Queen did not always agree during their early married years,” he wrote matter-of-factly, “but I suspected no revelations within these particular covers.” The book was returned, and Beatrice quickly burnt it. She was relieved to be told the archives would be kept private and confidential. In the following year, 1944, she died. What she had not been told before her death was that someone had taken photographs of these documents, and slid them carefully into a box in the royal archives. Why this happened is unclear – was it the librarian who rebelled against orders and did not get caught? Or was it the order of the King to humor the old lady but keep the evidence of his great grandmother’s marital conflicts? We know that George V and Queen Mary had been frustrated when watching Beatrice destroying her mother’s private papers – and disinfecting the remaining records. As some glimpses of her original diary still exist in the work of Theodore Martin, who she commissioned to write a biography of Albert, it is clear Beatrice made her mother tamer, less emotional and more sensible in her rewriting.[v]

Then there was the work done by the editors of her letters. As Yvonne Ward has so adeptly demonstrated, Arthur Benson and Lord Esher, the two men entrusted with the task of culling and editing Victoria’s correspondence presented a skewed version of the queen. It was not just the obvious trims – removal of too sharp a criticism of the French, or her children, or deletion of words like “vulgar” to sanitise her language, but that “[k]nowledge and particularly sharp or terse opinions which the Queen held were downplayed so that she might seem feminine and innocent. Her correspondence with women was omitted in order to avoid triviality. Her European correspondence was minimised to moderate any perception of foreign influences upon her.”[vi] They cut any words “which showed Victoria to have been excessively assertive, unfeminine or insulting; and those which show political bias.”[vii] Even worse, men wrote most of the letters in her official volumes; only four out of ten letters were in the Queen’s hand.[viii] They also cut out most letters to other women and reference to her children, so Victoria’s female friendships were scrubbed out, and her maternal confidences gone.

The photographs taken of the documents Beatrice destroyed during World War II are rare gems that provide insight into the intimate relationship between Victoria and Albert, where he called her “child” and told her how to behave. But this correspondence also illuminates the extraordinary difficulty in trying to capture the mind and heart of a queen, when her words were crafted then rewritten, cut, hidden and burnt. Yet much of this material has been polished, glossed, or vanished. Countless reams have been burnt by her family, especially any correspondence relating to her Scottish intimate, John Brown, her Indian servant, Adbul Karim and her most shameful episode as a young queen – the bullying of Lady Flora Hastings.

ENDNOTES

[i] (A journalist asked me the other day if I could ask Victoria one question what would it be: it would be; “what are the secrets only you know?”)

[ii] (As I write in my introduction): “How could they think anything else, with a statue at every corner shrieking these libels at them?” George Bernard Shaw, “The Ugliest Status in London”, Arts Gazette, May 31, 1919, p. 273. Cited by Stanley Weintraub, Exasperated Admiration: Bernard Shaw on Queen Victoria. Victorian Poetry, Vol. 25, No. 3/4, Centennial of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (Autumn-Winter, 1987), p. 131.

[iii] (These instructions were kept in her maid’s pocket, at all times, and now are in the archives of Sir James Reid, the doctor who was with Victoria when she died. The Royal Archives tried to obtain this document so it could be kept with the rest of Victoria’s archives, privately, but

[iv] RA/AEC/GG/012/FF2/13

Beatrice to Bertie

May 10 1943

Braubridge Park

Sussex,

[v] Ward, p. 32 – Benson wrote in his diary that Esher had told him – that Beatrice was “engaged in copying from the [Queen’s] Diary what she thinks of public interest” – which Benson took to mean “the dullest part”. Benson Diary, vol. 35, 25 July 1903, pp. 81-83.

[vi] Ward p. 188

[vii] Ward p. 309

[viii] Ward, p. 327. They had a particular bias in favor of Lord M, whom both Benson and Esher adored “adored”. In the first volume there were excerpts from 35 letters Queen Victoria to Lord Melbourne and 139 of his letters in return. In 1837, six of LM’s letters were published versus four of Victoria’s. In 1838, three of her letters were included, 20 of Melbourne’s. Ward, p. 191.