Censoring Queen Victoria Read online

  [Davidson agreed] that memoirs pour servir in the shape of ‘The Correspondence of Queen Victoria from 1837–1861’ is what is required, connected more or less by notes and introductory passages, and that in reference to the editorship, Arthur Benson would be superior [to the other candidates] – more capable, more suitable and more trustworthy; [and] that it would be desirable, perhaps necessary, that I should be associated with him in the joint editing of the book.

  The gentlemanly networks were in full swing. There were deep family and church connections between the Bensons and the Davidsons, and as Benson’s biographer, David Newsome has described, Benson had become deeply discontented with his work at Eton. Davidson knew this and was able to tell Esher. But there were protocols to be observed. Esher had to ask Knollys for permission ‘to privately ascertain if – in the event of the suggestion being made – Arthur Benson would consent to undertake the task’. Knollys, in Dublin for the State visit of the King and Queen, replied that the King ‘fully approves your sounding [out] Mr Arthur Benson as to whether, together with you he should be willing to undertake the work. Should he be so, you are at liberty to talk the matter over generally with him.’

  Esher wasted no time in summoning Benson to his home, Orchard Lea, in Windsor. Benson had no inkling of the nature of the visit. He sent his acceptance but, like Eeyore, worried lest it should rain. In his diary he recorded the invitation from Lord Esher: ‘the King wished him to speak to me on a matter of importance! It must be that Lord Churchill wants me to take his boy next year …’ In accepting the invitation, he joked to Esher that he felt like a prisoner summoned to the guillotine: ‘I am wondering what it can be that H.M. can want to have me spoken to about, as it feels as if I should be arrested by lettres de cachet and committed to the Tower!’ In fact, he was to be taken captive by letters and committed to a tower – but to the Round Tower at Windsor rather than the Tower of London.

  Benson ‘byked’ over to Orchard Lea and found his way in. Esher was in the garden reading with his son, Maurice, alongside him. Benson described the garden in full beauty and observed that ‘in the whole of the long talk that followed, my thoughts and recollections are curiously knit with the colours and textures of flowers in the beds we paced past’. He had no premonition of what Esher was to ask him:

  Esher made me a statement at once, with a kind of smile, yet holding it back for effect. The King was going to bring out Correspondence and letters of Q.V. and would I edit it, with him. (Esher). I was to be sounded and then offered it. He had seen the Archbishop who entirely approved.

  This opportunity was something of a godsend to Benson, as he confided in his diary:

  Here am I crushed with work at Eton, hardly strong enough to wriggle out and yet no motive to go at any particular minute. Suddenly in the middle of all my discontent and irritability a door is silently and swiftly opened to me. In the middle of this quiet, sunny garden, full of sweet scents and roses, I am suddenly offered the task of writing or editing one of the most interesting books of the day, of the Century. I have waited long for some indication – and was there ever a clearer leading?

  The afternoon continued with an examination of Esher’s collection of biographies, another stroll, tea, listening to opera on a gramophone (a marvellous novelty to Benson) and further talk as Esher walked some of the way back to Eton with Benson. During this walk, Esher revealed more interesting snippets about the project, which Benson duly recorded in his diary. He was interested to learn that ‘there are two rooms full of letters and papers at Windsor,’ and that Princess Beatrice was ‘engaged in copying from the Diary what she thinks of public interest’ – which Benson supposed to mean ‘the dullest part’. This rather bland description of Beatrice’s task, omitting any mention of the original journals being burned, is intriguing. If Esher had told Benson about the burning, Benson would surely have said so in his diary. The omission suggests that Esher may not have known about Beatrice’s incendiary activities at this stage.

  Esher was pleased with his efforts and wrote the next day to Knollys, reporting that Benson was ‘humbly grateful to the King’ for his ‘gracious proposal’. Esher also reported to Davidson that ‘Benson seemed very captivated by the idea’. Davidson replied that he was sure Benson’s appointment would be ‘a wise one’. But Benson, despite his initial excitement, became unsure as darkness fell. Back at Eton, he sat through a meeting about fire precautions (there had been a fatality in a fire the previous month). The performance of the headmaster, Edmond Warre, disillusioned him further about the school’s leadership, but he remained unsure what to do. He ‘had a bad night – and no wonder – shirked Chapel, and then wrote two letters – one to Warre resigning as simply as I could – and one to Esher accepting’.

  Benson’s formal letter of acceptance was accompanied by a less formal one, which showed some of the traits that Esher’s biographer, James Lees-Milne, says Esher found especially irritating. Benson began breathlessly:

  I don’t see why I should keep you waiting any longer for the answer, which is YES. I had not really any doubt when you asked me, but one ought, like Robinson Crusoe, to make a careful list of the cons in a serious matter like this. There are one or two cons, but not to be weighed for a moment against the pros …

  And he continued:

  I enjoyed my visit to you yesterday very much and thought myself a great fool for not having been before; but I don’t think that Fortunate Princes like yourself know the pangs of diffidence suffered by blonde persons of the Walrus type! I want to say elaborately how grateful I am to you, whose kind hand I trace in this matter; but it is all there!

  Yours ever,

  Arthur C. Benson

  Esher, according to Lees-Milne, ‘looked on Benson as an over-credulous old woman’ who fussed over details. Benson’s letters were apt to be written as if he were flustered, in stark contrast to Esher’s cool and polished tone. For Benson, minor items often preceded more important ones, which were frequently tacked on as afterthoughts, the opposite of Esher’s to-the-point modus operandi. In the letter of acceptance quoted above, Benson added a postscript: ‘One other minute point – may I mention in the circular I shall have to write to the parents the cause of my resignation?’ One can almost hear Esher spluttering as he reached for his pen to provide some suitably oblique wording for the parents’ circular. A royal appointment was not to be publicly announced in a note from a housemaster! Announcements of such importance had to be carefully planned. There must have been some further discussion on this point, as in a later letter Benson wrote:

  I quite understand about not putting H.M.’s name forward; but it is a great relief to me to be able to speak freely about the work. To say I was leaving and then to nod and wink and jerk the thumb over my shoulder and say I would if I could &c. is not to my taste. Many thanks for making it all square.

  Very sincerely yours,

  Arthur C. Benson

  Esher, with his experience of royalty and his awareness of the bigger theatre of Court, found Benson’s myopia tedious.

  Despite Esher’s efforts, the news began to spread. On 1 August, Benson wrote again to Esher, telling him rather naively that he ‘had told only two or three of my most intimate friends about the nature of the work I am undertaking, and they are sworn to secrecy, yet it is bound to get out – “a bird of the air will carry the matter” – and that would be a bore …’ Esher would not have wished to be held accountable for the news leaking before it was officially announced. On 15 August Benson reported that their mutual friend Edmund Gosse had told him ‘it was a matter of common knowledge that you [Esher] had had the editing entrusted to you’. Meanwhile Esher’s publisher, Frederick Macmillan, wrote to remind him that if a life of Queen Victoria was to be ‘done’, Esher had promised that Macmillans would be considered. Obviously a ‘little bird’ had flown and was now twittering freely along the branches of the gentlemanly networks.

  Esher wrote to Lord Knollys, suggesting that a notice to ‘dispose
of unauthorized rumours’ would be a good idea. He then wrote to his secretary, Stanley Quick, in London, with the wording for a formal announcement and instructions to ‘Send a copy of the enclosed to The Times before 12 o’clock on Saturday morning and to all the principal papers, and to the Press Association so that it appears on Monday.’ The message was succinct:

  H.M. the King has commanded the publication of selections from the correspondence of Queen Victoria between the years 1837–1861. The work will be edited by Arthur Christopher Benson M.A. and Viscount Esher K.C.B. and will be published by John Murray.

  Two and a half years had passed since Esher had first conceived of the publication. Now that it was approved, he moved quickly. At their first meeting, Esher had directed Benson to organise a meeting with the publisher, John Murray. This business, founded in 1768, was now in the hands of John Murray IV, who was reviving its fortunes. Another old Etonian – he had been at school with Benson – Murray had published several books about the royals as well as several of Benson’s previous works very successfully. When he and Benson met to discuss Victoria’s letters, just a week after Benson accepted Esher’s offer, Murray brought out ledgers to show how profitable his previous royal publications had been. The impressionable Benson recorded: ‘the Speeches of the Prince Consort had been £1500 and the Life of Princess Alice over £5000. It looks as if this ought not to be less.’ They also discussed what form the book should take. Murray recommended two volumes but allowed that three would be possible. There was no mention of the projected number of pages or word length. Murray recommended pricing the book at 42/-, or two guineas for two volumes. ‘I liked sitting in his big, dingy panelled room,’ Benson told his diary with satisfaction, ‘and being treated with the respect due to a distinguished author.’

  The contract between Murray and the editors (who were referred to as ‘the Authors’) read:

  The entire proceeds of sales shall in the first instance be devoted to the repayment of the cost of the production; if after meeting this liability they yield a surplus all such surplus shall be treated as profit and divided between the Authors and the Publishers in the proportion of 2/3 to the authors and 1/3 to the publisher. If the cost be never covered by the yield, the publisher shall bear the loss.

  On 21 August Benson accepted these terms and forwarded them to Esher. There was subsequently a separate agreement between the two editors. Esher proposed to Benson that:

  of our share of the profits you should take the whole up to £1200, and that of the nett profit over and above that amount you should take 2/3 leaving 1/3 at my disposal for any purpose to which I may apply it. Will you let me know if this suggestion meets with your approval, and if not what you would propose …

  These terms Benson accepted ‘gratefully and unhesitatingly’. But he also understood that this was not mere generosity on Esher’s part. In his diary he reminded himself: ‘This means, of course, that I shall have to do all the work.’

  Chapter 2

  A PECULIAR GENIUS: THE SECOND VISCOUNT ESHER

  (1852—1930)

  WHO WERE THE TWO editors? The first Lord Esher (1818–1898) was a newcomer to the aristocracy. He had made his name and fortune as a lawyer and married a French aristocrat. He became one of the Lord Justices of Appeal and was rewarded with the title ‘Viscount Esher’. When his son, Reginald Brett, left for Eton, the first Lord told him: ‘You will make your friends of nice, good, gentlemanly fellows and will not let anyone persuade you to do anything that is wrong … You will at every period of your life be thrown with the boys who are now at Eton with you …’ Yet he cautioned: ‘Remember what I told you that, as you and I were not born Dukes with large estates, we must work.’ Regy did not learn to work hard at school, but he did make extremely useful contacts.

  Esher’s adolescence at Eton set the parameters of his life. His grandson, Lionel, wrote:

  At Eton his charm, wit and good looks caught the eye of William Johnson (later William Cory). This remarkable teacher, who left under a cloud a few years later, implanted in his disciples the two complementary ideals of romantic homosexual love and high-minded service to the Empire. The model was classical Greece, the myth that of Achilles and Patroclus. Floating in a dodger on the silent Thames, then at the height of its elmy beauty, friendships were formed which were to last a political lifetime.

  A modern reading would be that Johnson was a paedophile who groomed boys with his charm and used his rooms for procuration, sexual assault and voyeurism. But Esher and many of his contemporaries did not think of their boyhoods being spoilt; they wanted endlessly to return to their school-days. The eternal youth of Peter Pan epitomised this (Esher was a great fan of the play, which opened in London in 1904).

  Regy went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, and took his degree in 1874, but he never recovered from having to leave the ‘hedonist’s paradise’ of Eton. His grandson recalled: ‘Years later, the recollection [of his departure from Eton] reduced him to tears.’ His is a classic case of the syndrome Cyril Connolly described as ‘arrested development – permanent adolescence’ in public-school boys. Esher spent much of his time after Cambridge trying to recapture his boyhood, visiting and corresponding with William Johnson and other friends from those days. He even took a house near Eton with the writer Julian Sturgis, a popular and athletic old Etonian, where they befriended and courted new Eton boys, including the future Viceroy of India, George Curzon. While at Cambridge, Regy gave up a term in order to return to Eton and help Johnson following the latter’s shameful departure (the parents of a student found a compromising letter from Johnson to their son, and Johnson was immediately dismissed).

  After Esher left Cambridge, his father threatened to cut his allowance if he did not get a job. So at the age of twenty-two, he accepted without enthusiasm the position of private secretary to the Whig leader, Lord Hartington (the future Duke of Devonshire). Oscar Wilde’s biographer, Neil McKenna, observed that there was something of a tradition of wealthy aristocrats inviting handsome young men to become their private secretaries, ‘with all the ambiguities that surrounded such an invitation’. There were erotic possibilities in this relationship for men of homosexual or homosocial propensities. In the case of Esher and Lord Hartington, their letters suggest that by the time they parted, they had become more than employer and employee.

  Esher’s friends congratulated him on the appointment, welcoming it as a wise career move. Albert Grey wrote:

  As my father was Private Secretary [to Prince Albert and later to Queen Victoria] for a large part of his life, I know pretty well what this means … the advantage of the position is this, that so long as you retain the confidence of your Chief, you will be the possessor of a whole host of interesting secrets, but beyond this, you will obtain an influence – the amount of which will be unsuspected from without … It is the consciousness of this unacknowledged influence in which much that is of the highest importance, that makes the chief and dearest reward of a Private Secretary.

  Another friend, Alfred Lyttelton, recognised that Esher had the diplomacy and discretion to make a success of the position:

  You will now have a real opportunity of displaying what is your peculiar genius (for no other word expresses it) the great faculty you have for influencing people, upon a man who will be worth influencing, and this too in matters about which you have special knowledge.

  Esher did indeed enjoy meeting influential people and speaking on behalf of his employer. According to the radical politician Charles Dilke, Esher conducted himself as though he ‘held delegated authority from Hartington to represent Hartington’s conscience when it would not otherwise have moved, and Hartington’s opinion when the Chief had none’. Esher would later adopt a similar stance with Arthur Benson and John Murray, behaving as if he were representing the views of the King.

  As a young man moving in the best circles in the 1880s, Regy was bound to meet the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII. The Prince may have taken an interest in him be
cause of their shared interest in horse racing, but the foundation of the Prince’s confidence in Esher was the latter’s role in averting a scandal involving the Prince’s friend Lord Arthur Somerset.

  Somerset was the second son of a Tory magnate, the Duke of Beaufort. He was also a member of the Prince’s intimate circle, a major in the Royal Horse Guards, superintendent of the Prince’s stables, an excellent horseman, an experienced soldier and an accomplished sportsman – seemingly the epitome of virile masculinity. In August 1889, he was questioned by police investigating a homosexual and under-age brothel in Cleveland Street, London. When the Prince of Wales heard the allegations, he was incredulous. ‘I won’t believe it, any more than I should if they had accused the Archbishop of Canterbury’, was his first response. He later said that any man addicted to such vice must be regarded as an ‘unfortunate lunatic’.

  Anyone found to have visited a male brothel would face criminal charges. Somerset’s friends were desperate that he not stand trial, where he might reveal not only details of his own visits to Cleveland Street but also the names of men who had accompanied him, or of the boys he had met there. The scandal would have brought the Prince’s household and Somerset’s regiment into disrepute. (The Prince’s eldest son, the Duke of Clarence, was also implicated in the affair, according to the historian Theo Aronson.) Various cover-ups were effected, involving officials as high up as the Prime Minister. Somerset eventually escaped to the Continent, narrowly avoiding arrest.

  Esher used his connections to keep the story out of the newspapers and to drum up financial help for Somerset, soliciting loans from men whose reputations were at stake. Over the next thirty years he collected his correspondence with friends and contacts about the affair, having it bound and stored in his extensive archive. He remained in touch with Somerset and with Somerset’s parents for many years, which enabled him to reassure the royals that Somerset remained abroad. King Edward VII would have been well aware of Esher’s ongoing role in avoiding a public scandal. The whole business was typical Esher. As the historian David Starkey has mused, Esher always ‘emerged smelling of roses (but not too much)’.