Censoring Queen Victoria Read Online Free PDF Page A

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,
    â€¦ 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 …
    â€˜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 bookbut 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