Censoring Queen Victoria Read online

  Esher’s own private life was intriguing. For anyone wishing to hide his homosexuality during this period, marriage was, as biographer Brenda Maddox puts it, ‘the best closet’. In 1877 Esher’s mother had urged him to marry, but he declared that taking a wife was ‘one risk he would not like to take’. In 1878, however, his Eton mentor, William Johnson, married, and Esher had decided by early 1879 that he too should wed, writing of ‘the icy shroud of matrimony which is creeping nearer and nearer …’ Perhaps he realised, as Christopher Isherwood later had a character explain, that ‘being married does make a lot of things easier, because the world accepts marriage at its face value, without asking what goes on behind the scenes – whereas it is always a bit suspicious of bachelors!’

  Young Regy had first met his future wife, Eleanor Van de Weyer, when she was barely thirteen years old. Nellie was the youngest of the four daughters of Sylvain Van de Weyer, the Belgian minister at the Court of St James. In her diary, with some perspicacity, Nellie discussed both Regy’s character and her own ideas about marriage. She noted Esher’s tendency to offer advice and help to people of influence and power; she wished that the same opportunities might be given to her too, but noted that ‘men were not strong enough’ to allow them. Two years later, in 1877 (while he was sharing a house with Julian Sturgis near Eton), Regy began visiting the Van de Weyers frequently; Regy and Nellie married in September 1879, when Nellie was seventeen. They had four children in quick succession: Oliver, born in March 1881, Maurice in April 1882, Dorothy in November 1883 and Sylvia in February 1885.

  As a thirteen-year-old Nellie had declared, ‘The greatest praise a husband of mine could give would be to say that he did not feel in the least tied down; or in any way encumbered than when he was a bachelor.’ She was not to tie Regy down. Before their marriage, Esher hinted at his secrets:

  Why you have thrown yourself away upon one who is the converse of you in all things still remains a mystery. Very sincerely I feel quite unworthy of you, and I think you must be a kind of St. Theresa, a reforming soul. Someday, like [George Eliot’s] Romola, you will find me out and you will hate me. Are you prepared for this?

  It astonishes me that I can write to you so easily and in this strain. You are the only girl with whom on writing I have felt on equal terms. I mean that I am sure of your not misunderstanding me and there is no necessity for elaborate detail. Does this please you or not? It is, I am sure, very unusual between a man and a woman who have anything to hide. True confidence is a very heavy burden and very few men and women can bear that of those they love. But you have led me to think you stronger than most women and I have very little fear for the future.

  Do nothing and say nothing to weaken my faith in you … Do not, I ask you, start thinking too well of me, for I dread the disenchantment.

  Throughout her life, Nellie carried this letter in her reticule everywhere she went. It may have been her credo, something which set out the rules as she had agreed to them and upon which she could rely, although she may well have only understood them by degrees as the years went on.

  By alluding to secrets and double lives, Regy may have been preparing to exonerate himself from subsequent revelations. On the eve of their wedding, Nellie wrote to him, ‘Do not think to frighten me with your two-sided character – show me which side you please. I should like you as much when your whole life was laid bare as I do now, when as you say, you humbugged me.’

  Brenda Maddox has observed that women who accepted homosexuality in their husbands in this era tended to have particular traits:

  It is no accident that they choose homosexual men as husbands, unwittingly or not. As a type, they tend to be virgins when they marry or close to it. No critics of performance, but rather nice, plain girls, who want to have a home and children, who are sexually inexperienced and have never wanted sex so much that they could not do without it, and who are prepared to overlook a lot for a nice companionable man …

  For whatever reasons, Nellie happily accepted marriage to Regy on his terms. She tolerated his dalliances, even welcoming into the household the various adolescent boys who infatuated him throughout their marriage.

  Upon their wedding, Esher’s employer, Lord Hartington, sent him a telegram expressing condolence rather than congratulations: ‘When does your melancholy event come off?’ From their honeymoon in Paris, Esher reassured Hartington: ‘I am pretty well considering; not feeling much worse for the gloomy events of two days ago … I am beginning to feel that the worst is over … Marriage is a curious game to play at.’

  Esher confided in his journal: ‘It is difficult to describe the past ten days, sown as they have been with conflicting emotions’, adding later, ‘I have written sub sigillo [under seal] to my two best friends, an account of this first month of our married life.’ During the honeymoon he also corresponded with one of his young paramours, Ernlé Johnson.

  This would set the pattern for his epistolary activities and his relationships for all of his married life. If one obsession with an adolescent languished, he began another. Of longest duration was that with his youngest son, Maurice. It flourished when Maurice first went to Eton and continued for the rest of Esher’s life.

  Esher’s obsession with Eton also continued, reaching fever pitch during the 1890s while Maurice was a pupil there. It seems Esher had a dual fixation with the boys and with the place. As many paedophiles before and since, Esher went to great lengths to contrive situations that would feed his fetish. Eton boys feature in almost every one of Esher’s diary entries from this period and Esher haunted the college at every opportunity, seeking glimpses of his old favourites and scouting the new arrivals for potential paramours. He organised for a group of Eton boys to take part in Gladstone’s funeral in 1898 and wrote in his diary, ‘it was one of the pretty episodes of the ceremony’. For Queen Victoria’s funeral, he persuaded the King to ‘insist’ that Eton boys had a ‘privileged position’, again extolling the beauty of the sight in his diary. In his rooms at Windsor Castle, which he and Maurice nicknamed the Nest, he filled a whole closet with Eton blazers. In 1902, when the King unexpectedly asked to be taken to these rooms to see some photographs of Maurice (who, at twenty, had just received a commission into the Coldstream Guards), he asked that the closet doors be opened and then wondered to whom all the blazers belonged. ‘Fancy,’ Esher wrote conspiratorially to Maurice, ‘if you and the kids had been there, I should have conveniently lost the key.’

  Esher bestowed on Maurice the pet name ‘Mollie’, which was also an old colloquial term for a homosexual man. While describing how he daily kissed the King’s hand upon arrival and departure, Esher reassured Maurice that ‘I only thought how little it all meant … compared with a kiss upon another hand, and a few words of affection and appreciation from other lips.’ When Maurice was twenty-five, Esher wrote to him:

  Dearest,

  I was very much hurt last night by your too obvious boredom, when I fetched you from the station. It was, I suppose, tactless of me, but as you must know, well meant. Whenever you are away, I look forward to your return, perhaps too eagerly, and I suppose I was a little too demonstrative last night …

  Esher wrote many letters to Maurice of a romantic nature, recollecting intimate times they had shared as well as describing his activities at court; many of his views on the royals and politics have survived thanks to the deluge of notes he sent to ‘Mollie’. As a schoolboy, Esher too had been assailed by letters from his father, who addressed him as ‘My own darling Regy’ and ‘Darling of my soul’ and demanded his company. Esher’s father took him away on his court circuits, travelling alone with him for extended periods of time until Regy was old enough to refuse. Contemporary research suggests that sexual abuse of children is frequently transmitted from generation to generation, and a boy who was a victim of homosexual incest may go on to become a perpetrator. Esher may have been such a victim.

  Esher believed that boys and men had needs and desires and were justified in seeking
gratification; he saw no comparable capacity or need in women and girls. Women existed to lavish affection upon him, and in return to be improved, charmed and educated by him. But he had accepted that there was a place for marriage in a man’s life. In March 1907 he wrote to Maurice:

  Dearest,

  … By the winter you must have found someone to marry. It will fit in well with your new existence … it will give you an anchor in life, and under conditions, which should leave your great powers (for they are great) untrammelled. You will throw yourself heart and soul into the details of that great profession to which you belong, if you have safe moorings at home, with a quiet harbour in which to lie, untossed by distracting waves, and scattered before the winds that blow round every one of us …

  In January 1911 Maurice finally married one of his father’s favourites, the beautiful, boyish actress Zena Dare (she had impressed Esher playing Peter Pan in Manchester). They eloped to a registry office in London, which Esher found ‘rather romantic’. He continued to write nostalgic poems to Maurice, yearning to go:

  Back to the sunny days that never more may be,

  Just a little longer let me wreathe your hair,

  Just a little longer let me hold your hand …

  ‘No human relations were ever much more perfect than ours,’ he reminded his son.

  His eldest son, Oliver, and his two daughters, Dorothy (an artist who eventually lived with Frieda and D.H. Lawrence in New Mexico) and Sylvia (who married Charles Vyner Brooke, the last Raj of Sarawak in Borneo), enjoyed little attention from Esher, whose preference for Maurice had long been obvious to all of them. Oliver did not discover the truth about his father’s relationship with Maurice until after Esher’s death, whereupon he wrote a short but bitter book but decided not to publish it, according to his son, Lionel.

  Esher’s friendships, love affairs and fixations were always to dominate his life, but he accepted an ever-increasing number of offices and trusteeships of the second order – none of which took him away from London or Maurice. He was Secretary to the Office of Works from 1895 until 1902; from 1901 he was Lieutenant-Governor of Windsor Castle; he was appointed to the South African War Inquiry Commission in 1902; he became a director of the Royal Opera House from 1903 and was the King’s nominee on various bodies including the British Museum, the Wallace Collection, the Commission of the Exhibition of 1851 and later the London Museum; he was the Chairman of the Committee on War Office Reconstruction from 1904; he was made a permanent member of the Commission of Imperial Defence from 1905; and he was the Keeper of the King’s Archives from 1901, although the position was not made official until 1910. All of these positions were royal appointments; not one was elected. In December 1901 he was offered a partnership in Cassel’s financial house at a salary of £5000 a year and 10 per cent of any profits. Although he resigned from Cassel’s after two years, finding the work not to his taste, he remained on friendly terms with the Cassel brothers, one of whom was an intimate friend of the King.

  In 1896, writing as Reginald Brett, he had published a book, Yoke of Empire: Sketches of the Queen’s Prime Ministers. In handling the emotionally charged subject of Prince Albert, as well as Victoria’s relationships with Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone, Esher solidified his reputation for discernment and discretion. Gladstone wrote to congratulate him:

  Dear Mr Brett,

  I have now read your book with real interest and pleasure. To dispose at once of the part in which I am personally concerned let me say that, were I to raise it absolutely in my own cause, I should issue from the ordeal with less to the Credit and more to the Debit side than you have liberally awarded me.

  I cannot but regard as the central object of interest in the work the relations between the Queen and Lord Melbourne in the early years of her reign. But elsewhere, I think, as well as there, you have exhibited much care, tact and good taste.

  Gladstone also wrote to the future King, recommending that he read Brett’s book, but, according to Sir Sidney Lee, there were ‘few signs that his anticipation was fulfilled’.

  Esher was not without his critics. The German Emperor, objecting to an assessment Esher once made about naval shipbuilding, referred sarcastically to Esher’s experience at the Office of Works, querying ‘whether the supervision of the foundations and drains of the Royal Palaces is apt to qualify somebody for the judgment of Naval affairs in general’. Benson quoted a contemporary in his diary, meanwhile, who lamented:

  ‘What is there he doesn’t do? He has a great financial position in the city; he spends all his days smoking with the King; he reorganises the army in his intervals of leisure and now he is editing this vast mass of documents …’

  By the time Esher began editing Victoria’s letters, however, he was well established as a Court favourite. He met frequently with the King and Queen. He lived most of the time at Orchard Lea and had his own rooms within Windsor Castle. He also kept a house in Mayfair and had built a retreat, ‘Roman Camp’, in the Scottish Highlands near Balmoral. He maintained a huge correspondence and a complex social life with friends from both sides of politics, from Eton and Cambridge, through his various London club memberships and his associations with the military establishment.

  When Esher died in 1930, his will stipulated that his papers not be opened for fifty years. His grandson Lionel remembered: ‘His library darkly panelled and lined with his portentously secret correspondence was out of bounds at all times.’ Here, among many other items, was the specially bound volume of papers on the Cleveland Street brothel, which could have destroyed many men, including several royals. Maurice was appointed his literary executor and edited the first two volumes of Esher’s journals and letters, which were published in 1934. Upon Maurice’s death the same year, his older brother, Oliver, decided to complete the work, and so discovered the real nature of their relationship. Selflessly, Oliver still prepared the third and fourth volumes for publication in 1936. Esher’s deepest secrets, however, remained hidden until 1986, when James Lees-Milne published his biography, The Enigmatic Edwardian.

  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’.

  Chapter 3

  IT’S VERY REMARKABLE: A.C. BENSON

  (1862—1925)

  ARTHUR BENSON 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 compa
risons’.

  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’.