TONY RENNELL TALK (2nd Feb 2001)
I am surprised and startled to be here alone at this table to speak to you today. You too have every reason to feel cheated.
When Andrew asked me to speak at this lunch it was as the junior member of a very distinguished top table, people who really know their stuff about Queen Victoria, not an upstart and a parvenu like me.
There was to be Lady Longford kicking things off - and who better? the doyenne - it was a thrill for me just to be included in her company. And then there was to be Christopher Hibbert, the Queen's latest biographer - a historian with a distinguished track record and a list of books to his name that I can only gawp at with admiration. And me.
I, having just published a book on the death of he Queen - on the last eight weeks of her life rather than the eight decades that had preceded them - was to be the afterthought - dessert - and happily so.
Then to my alarm I found myself he main course - and not just the main course but the only course. Promoted beyond my means, I only hope I can give you some food for thought.
I do not claim to be a biographer. I am essentially a journalist - that's what I've been for most of my working life - though now I'm trying now to become a historian and hoping in due course to be a biographer ...one day.
What brought me to Queen Victoria was not so much the person as the occasion. Her death. An extraordinary event. It still amazes me that the death of a woman in her eighties at a time when average mortality was in the late fifties and probably even younger for a woman who had been through child birth nine times... extraordinary that her death should have come as such a shock. But it was ... to her family. to her subjects, to the world.
Most of them had never known a time when she was not on the throne and a figure in their lives, familiar through her photographs and portraits on he wall on almost every home, her statue in the centre of almost every city and town. Her face was on postage stamps - and remember there hadn't been such a thing before her reign.
The public had even read her own account, in her own words of her life in Balmoral. It may have been dull to distraction but no monarch before… or since …. has opened up to the people in that way.
For the first time, the sovereign was a familiar in every household. And when she died, they wept. It was partly the speed. On Saturday January 19, 1901, the newspapers carried the first stories that she was not well - but couched in terms of optimism like a massive Get Well Soon, Ma'am card. On Tuesday night - the 22nd - she was dead. Suddenly it was all over. A life, a reign, an era.
No wonder it was hard to take in.
But they reacted as if a member of the family had died. Familiarity with her had bred not contempt but adoration.
She had written her Leaves from Her Journal about Our Life at Balmoral, she said, to try and put a stop to all the newspaper reports, monographs and books speculating about her life. All it did was increase the interest. While she was alive, biographies of the Queen cascaded off the presses.
I was in the London Library the other day, and there they are, shelf after shelf of them, written to mark a jubilee or some other great occasion - magisterial, effusive, loyal. The papers at the time of her death were just the same, and publishers seized the opportunity to sell even more books.
On the day after her death, hardly cold in her bed at Osborne, Cassells were advertising in the Daily Express "The history of the reign of Queen Victoria in upwards of 2,000 pages, profusely illustrated". It was a part work, with part one available in the bookshops that very day, price sixpence
There was no one with a bad word to say about her in the days around her death and leading up to the funeral. Authors like Conan Doyle did not know how the nation would survive without her. GK Chesterton wept buckets and was so upset he could not bear to leave the house to be among the millions on the streets of London to mourn her. A few people had their doubts - Arnold Bennett, down from the Midlands - suspected it was all got up by the press but he kept his thoughts to his private diary. To speak such thoughts aloud and in public would have been to invite retribution.
And so she was buried and, with a deep sigh, the world moved on - though, oddly, the first attempt to debunk the Queen's image came within a few months of her death. In April there was an article in the Quarterly Review, anonymous but in fact written by Edmund Gosse. It suggested - very gently it has to be said - that it was time to look at the old Queen as a human being rather than as a god, to look behind the Gloriana stuff for the real person.
And the real person, he suggested, tentatively, was a rather ordinary woman of no great intellect certainly and no great ability.
He based much of what he said on chit-chat from one of her ladies in waiting, and it was pretty accurate… But it was too soon. Gosse had got his timing wrong.
At that point nobody at all wanted to see the woman…they could only see the Queen and Empress. They only WANTED to see the majesty not the reality. It was comforting, I suppose, at a time when the new order under Edward VII, the new century, the new everything, was rather frightening.
And so there were a host of new books - another shelf at the London Library - of accolades, running on for years and years, like Queen Victoria As I Knew Her, by the unstoppable Sir Theodore Martin, the man who had written Prince Albert's authorised biography in five volumes and who had not got where he was by being a critic. You didn't get to be a Knight Commander of the Victoria Order - the poshest gong of all - by being anything other than deeply respectful. And so his book, printed in 1902 "for private circulation" - Don't you love the sheer exclusiveness of that - and then allowed out to a wider public in 1908 when the old boy was 92 years old if not actually dead is full of phrases like "The Queen's candour and love of truth.." "Her face serene and full of dignity."
But Sir Theodore was no fool and as I tripped my way through his deference and charm, I came across this perceptive passage.
"In November 1896," he writes, "Her Majesty gave me the opportunity of expressing briefly my views of what an authentic Life of herself should be, of which I was not sorry to avail myself.
On the 10th of that month, she wrote to him thanking him for agreeing to a shortened version of his Life of Albert… which made me stop and think. What was wrong with the five-volume job? Was she tiring of it? Or even of Albert? I find that hard to believe. Perhaps her eyes were giving her trouble - her sight was certainly very poor by this stage - so maybe it wasn't waning interest in the dear departed Albert after all.
Anyway … glad that there was a new book on Albert on the way, the Queen went on:
"She much wishes that something should be done about her own life, as so many people have published and are publishing her Life, full of extraordinary fabrications and untruths…..
"Some further communications on the subject took place and on the 22nd of that month Sir Theodore wrote as follows:
"Sir Theodore Martin is much impressed by what the Queen says as to the desirableness of a Life of Her Majesty, which might put a stop to the gossiping fabrications which have of late become so current. While the Queen lives, he fears the inventors of these fictions must have their way. But that the story of Her Majesty's Life should be truthfully and sympathetically told for posterity is a matter of the highest importance.
"In a great measure the work must be historical and will demand the skill of someone capable of dealing with the events of Her Majesty's reign, and of the political history of the civilized world. It would be most desirable to lay the foundation of such a work with Her Majesty's direct assistance, if a biographer with the necessary qualifications can be found. Until then, would it be possible for Her Majesty to suggest the lines on which the Life should be written and to furnish to some trusted person the facts and incidents of which Her Majesty would wish a record to be made?
"The materials must be abundant in Her Majesty's diaries and correspondence, and they would form the basis of a work of infinite value and instruction to future times.
"So much that is false and misleading is sure to be written in these days of reckless and unscrupulous writing that every loyal subject of Her Majesty must wish that it should, in Her Majesty's case, be crushed at the outset. Nothing would do this so effectively as the knowledge that the true story would be told, based upon authentic information as to the private as well as public life of the Queen."
That was Sir Theodore's letter to the Queen. In his book, he then went on:
"The Queen, I believe, so far concurred with my suggestion that she endeavoured to persuade at least one writer of distinction as a historian to agree to become her biographer. He came to the conclusion that the task of dealing with a subject so vast and also with a character so complex as that of Her Majesty, was one with which he could not grapple…"
A subject so vast he could not grapple with it….
And that, I think, is the truth of it - and it also explains another strange paradox about Victoria. The fact is not that there are so many biographies of her but that there are so few in the hundred years since her death that have tried and succeeded in capturing the fullness of the person and the reign.
There have been re-appraisals - Lytton Strachey's in 1921, took a scalpel to the image, putting Victorianism in its place, casting a sceptical, modern eye over the achievement - and there have been many others since him.
There have also been lots of books that have concentrated their gaze on aspects of her life - Victoria and Albert, Victoria and the prince of Wales, Victoria and her daughters, Victoria and her prime ministers, the young Victoria, Victoria in exile in Balmoral. My own book is in this mould. It is one aspect of her life.
My Victoria is a little old lady, frail, eyesight gone, not eating, sleeping at all the wrong times - snoozing in her chair or out in her carriage so that her ladies in waiting have to rustle their petticoats or cough loudly to wake her up, but at night unable to sleep, tossing and turning and worrying.
She is troubled by all the death she has seen - husband, sons, a daughter, grandchildren, servants, friends. Just like any old lady in her eighties. And yet she was not like anyone else, allowed to just fade away. There was still work to do. There was the commander-in-chief of the army to see when in truth she should have been confined to her bed. But Lord Roberts had come to tell her about the progress of the Boer War. Her daughters sought to protect her from over-tiring herself, and arranged among themselves to turf Lord Roberts out after five minutes. When she heard of their plan, she told them not to be so silly. The Queen had matters of importance to discuss and he would stay as long as he needed. And so he did.
She was old and tired and lonely and ready to die - but still the country revolved around her. When Arthur Balfour, the deputy prime minister of his day, arrived at Osborne on the very day of her death he was appalled at the red boxes he saw lined up in the entrance hall, unopened. Army and navy commissions and promotions, appointments of judges and bishops, orders for assize courts to sit, all had come to a halt. When he came to the throne, King Edward found his first month taken up with signing papers she had been too ill to deal with.
So that is my snapshot of Queen Victoria…but it is just one part of a much bigger picture and one that is harder to capture.
But is it surprising that the bigger picture has remained so difficult, so elusive? What a life it was!! Eighty one years in which the world she inhabited changed utterly. In one lifetime, sail was replaced by steam, wooden ships by metal ones. An agricultural base gave way to an industrial one, the country, the village, gave way to the city and the slum.
Just think how communications had been revolutionised. The stagecoach and the cart were overtaken by the train and the motorcar. The telegraph system made news instantly available to everyone. Victoria's death was known in the same instant in Aberdeen as it was in London. One of the incredible things about that amazing fortnight a hundred years ago was that it brought Britain together for the first time as a single community, a village .
There has never been a century like the nineteenth century for change, expansion, progress, call it what you will - and Victoria was there, at the hub, for nearly all of it. Her grandson, the German Kaiser, found it pretty amazing. Gathering with his uncles and aunts and cousins at Osborne, as she lay dying in her bedroom, he told the Bishop of Winchester as they waited in the drawing room below: “Just think of it, she remembers George III, and now we are in the Twentieth Century. And all that time what a life she has led."
But it's not just the long life that makes Victoria so difficult to grasp. It is that for all those years, she was an important figure. For most subjects of a biography there are the years you can skip over, either as a writer or a reader. For professional reasons, I've read more than my fair share of modern political biographies and autobiographies, and you learn pretty quickly to identify the chapters headed "My days on National Service" or "A steep learning curve as minister for pensions". In all lives of all great people, there are times before the spotlight shines on them and times when it has moved on.
But not Victoria.
She was a centre of attention from the day she was born to the day she died and long after too. There are no pauses, no down-time, nothing you can ignore.
As she came back from her coronation in 1837, a slip of a girl, Thomas Carlyle saw her go by in her golden coach and back into Buckingham Palace. “Poor little Queen, she is at an age at which a girl can hardly be trusted to choose a bonnet for herself; yet a task is laid upon her from which an archangel might shrink, ” he wrote. Sixty years on, nine children, dozens of grandchildren, family members on the thrones of Germany, Russia, Belgium, 40 years of widowhood, 10 prime ministers behind her, eight archbishops of Canterbury, not just a country to reign over but an empire… it is that vast continuum that the biographer has to contain.
Lady Longford did it magnificently. It's a moot point whether anyone has managed it as well since. I hope the likes of Giles St Aubyn and Stanley Weintraub will forgive me if I say that I turned to the Lady for the definitive work and I was not disappointed.
But it is now nearly 40 years since she wrote and published it, and things have changed … both in information available and in biographical style. Her book is so controlled and yet so vivid, so well told and yet so finely researched. And in the end she resolves the unresolveable by making Victoria a mass of contradictions.
Now, I'm not sure that's allowed in biography writing any more. Surely everything has to add up, be psychologically explainable. The whole person is what we're after, what we expect…the map to the maze, not just the maze itself.
Maybe Christopher Hibbert has pulled it off. I intend no disrespect to him, but his biography came out after I had finished my book and I have to confess I have not read it. But I know it has been very well received. The reviewer in the Financial Times praised him for making her "a more real, complex and fascinating figure than ever before", so he may indeed have done what I have suggested is so difficult . But since that same reviewer dismissed my book as "accomplished tittle-tattle", I don't know what to think!
Tittle-tattle - when I thought about it, I wasn't that hurt. Because it's largely the "accomplished tittle-tattle" that fascinates us all these days. Yes, there are big issues to consider - Was she really a constitutional monarch? Did she or did she not understand the role of political parties? - these are fascinating historical subjects, I know.
But so is the precise nature of her relationship with John Brown, and with her children, and the Munshi… her craving for ice cream, her refusal to have the fires lit at Balmoral… her ban on smoking so that even the Prince of Wales would puff his cigar smoke up the chimney at Windsor rather than be caught and accused by that glare of hers.
The centenary of her death has undoubtedly stimulated a new fascination with Queen Victoria, and it will go on because it is these aspects of her - Victoria the human being - that are bringing her back to life for people. Perceptions are changing, preconceptions breaking down. We have even seen pictures of her smiling which for the women for ever tainted with "We are not amused" - something she never actually said - is a breakthrough.
Long live the old Queen, I say… and long may she go on challenging her biographers.
