Censoring Queen Victoria Read Online Free PDF

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:
    â€˜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 frequentlywith 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 ofBenson 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
I T’S V ERY R EMARKABLE : A.C. B ENSON
(1862—1925)
    A RTHUR B ENSON WAS ALWAYS introduced as the son of his father. Edward White Benson had made a dazzling rise from schoolmaster-priest to Archbishop of Canterbury,