The Heir Apparent (91 page)

The King had insisted on reading everything himself. Or at least that was what Benson and the publisher, John Murray, believed.
¹³
In fact, Bertie probably did not see the first draft. The manuscript was read and censored on his behalf by Esher and Knollys, both of whom were driven by overpowering anxiety about the risk of incurring
the King’s displeasure. As Knollys warned Esher: “If when the work appears anything in it strikes the King as inappropriate or in bad taste … the first person he will blame and fall foul of will be you, then Benson while I shall probably make a poor third.”
¹⁴
Invoking the name of the King (who was actually safely out of reach in Marienbad at the time), Knollys and Esher compiled a list of excisions that ran to nine foolscap pages, cutting every “objectionable and doubtful” passage. By striking out strong language, political bias, and references to living persons, they made the published letters as mild and bland as possible.
¹⁵
Only after this was the King shown the final proofs; and there is no evidence that he actually read them.
¹⁶

Arthur Bigge, who also read the proofs, urged caution, not just to protect Queen Victoria’s reputation but also to safeguard the monarchy. “If I were the King,” he wrote, “both from the point of view of son to mother and also for the sake of the monarchical idea and ‘culte’ I would publish nothing which would shake the position of Queen Victoria in the minds of his subjects.”
¹⁷

The
Letters of Queen Victoria
were published in three volumes in 1907. So successful were they that Esher considered publishing a further two volumes, covering the twenty years after Albert’s death. He eventually decided that the material was too controversial, especially the letters dealing with German unification. Bertie’s sigh of relief is almost audible. “I entirely agree,” he minuted. “A considerable time
must
elapse before it would be prudent to publish more of Queen Victoria’s letters.”
¹⁸

Esher’s work on the Queen’s papers allowed him to carve out a new position for himself as Keeper of the King’s Archives. He posed as a constitutional expert, producing plums from the papers on demand. As an archivist, he inclined toward a policy of burning. In making an “excellent” rearrangement, Ponsonby and Esher between them managed to destroy an estimated 50 percent of Queen Victoria’s political papers.
¹⁹
In this Bertie was a willing accomplice; in fact, Esher seems to have seen burning as a way of pleasing the King, offering up ritual sacrifices
of letters for incineration.
^†
Bertie was especially concerned by the papers relating to his childhood and education, some of which (said Esher) “the King made me burn.”
²⁰

Queen Victoria had written numerous frank letters to Disraeli. The copyright in these was, of course, the sovereign’s, but the physical letters—the originals—were in the possession of Disraeli. This worried Bertie dreadfully. When Monty Corry, Disraeli’s executor, died in 1903, Disraeli’s papers passed to Lord Rothschild, but Queen Victoria’s letters were referred to the King to vet.

Victoria had written to Disraeli at length and “on every conceivable subject,” both personal and political; her correspondence revealed Prince Leopold as persistently interfering in politics, often causing trouble.
²¹
When the journalist William Monypenny was appointed as Disraeli’s biographer in 1904, Bertie asked Rothschild to allow Esher and Knollys free access to Victoria’s letters at Rothschild’s bank, where they were held, “and they could then tell me if they consider there are any I should object to being published.”
²²
Three years later (these matters move slowly) Knollys formally requested Rothschild to send all of Queen Victoria’s letters to Windsor for the King to “look over.”
²³
Rothschild explained that the archive was in a horrible state of confusion, but Victoria’s letters had been arranged by a certain Mr. Scones, who was the head clerk of Disraeli’s solicitor, Sir Philip Rose. Mr. Scones’s brother had been “frequently employed at Windsor by Her Majesty’s permission making copies of letters.”
²⁴
When Esher heard this story, he could scarcely contain himself. That the “most confidential documents which can be imagined” should have been read by a lawyer’s clerk was an outrage. “I don’t think any right or reasonable claim can be put forward by the [Beaconsfield] trustees to retain the Sovereign’s
letters.” The affair seemed to him to show the necessity for an Act of Parliament giving the Crown power to recall documents. “I am having a short bill drafted,” he told Knollys.
²⁵
Esher’s bill was stillborn, but he had convention on his side. Queen Victoria had laid it down that letters written by the sovereign should be returned to the sovereign after the recipient’s death. This was often done during her reign.
²⁶

Esher felt justified in extracting from the Rothschild archive four packets of confidential Disraeli letters, including one packet that contained almost all of Bertie’s letters to Disraeli. He showed them to Bertie, who ordered them to be destroyed.
²⁷

The same happened when George Profeit, the son of Queen Victoria’s agent at Balmoral, Dr. Profeit, attempted to blackmail Bertie over letters about John Brown. Bertie entrusted Sir James Reid with the job of retrieving the letters. Reid eventually succeeded in persuading Profeit to surrender a tin box containing more than three hundred letters from Queen Victoria concerning Brown, many of which were “most compromising,” which he handed in person to the King.
²⁸
These were presumably destroyed.

When the Munshi died in India in 1909, Bertie worried about Victoria’s letters. He wrote to the viceroy: “I am
not
satisfied in my mind that there may not be still letters in Queen Victoria’s handwriting in their possession—and I should be glad if further discreet investigations could be made, informing the Munshi’s family that … they must at once return them or they will be the sufferers thereby!”
²⁹

Bertie had successfully destroyed many of Queen Victoria’s papers, and he made certain that his own documents were similarly censored. In his will, he directed that all letters to him from his mother and from his wife, and all private letters and papers, should be destroyed by his private secretary immediately after his death.
³⁰

Knollys was seventy-four in 1910. He had served Bertie as private secretary for forty years. He was eventually asked by George V to retire in 1913, for political reasons—his strong Liberal sympathies clashed with the politics of the King and his advisers.
³¹
Knollys wrote that he
had one task yet to complete: “It is necessary that I should first look over, sort and when advisable, destroy the great mass of letters and papers of all descriptions which accumulated at Marlborough House and which have since accumulated at Buckingham Palace—in fact from the year 1863 to the present day.”
³²

Not only were the letters in what Esher described as a state of “dire confusion,”
³³
but Knollys himself was becoming confused. Since King Edward’s death his colleagues had complained about his “mental apathy.”
³⁴
Ponsonby observed that “his memory has completely gone,” and by 1914 he was referring to him as “gaga.”
³⁵
Senile or not, Lord Knollys was undoubtedly disaffected as he set about obeying his dead master’s last orders. Baron Hermann von Eckardstein, the German diplomat, found him “greatly aged” and “almost tired of life,” sifting through the King’s papers, deciding which to keep and which to burn. The papers contained much both of a political and a personal nature: “Owing to their political content they should be handed down to posterity,” but “due to their very delicate private character they should be withheld from future generations and should be burned.” Knollys erred on the side of caution and inclined to “destroy too many rather than too few of such papers.”
³⁶
It took him only one month to complete this work. He wrote to George V on 17 March 1913: “Sir I have finished the papers and am vacating my room here today.”
³⁷
How much he destroyed can never be known, but posterity has accused him of a bonfire.

Meanwhile, a fuse was lit in the unlikely form of the
Dictionary of National Biography
. The 1912 supplement carried an extended article on King Edward by the editor, Sidney Lee. Lee was a hollow-eyed Shakespeare scholar who had contributed 820 articles to the
DNB
by dint of working seven days a week and living as a recluse. His
DNB
article on Queen Victoria, which he expanded and published as a book, had pleased the royal family, so his article on King Edward came as a thunderbolt.
³⁸

Lee claimed that the King possessed neither statesmanship nor
“originating political faculty” (in my view, untrue), that he read no books (true), “lacked the intellectual equipment of a thinker and showed unwillingness to exert his mental powers” (untrue), was a poor conversationalist (true), and had no responsibility for the Entente Cordiale (untrue).
³⁹

From Marlborough House, where he now worked for Queen Alexandra, Sir Arthur Davidson, Bertie’s former assistant private secretary, began a campaign to clear his master’s reputation. He consulted Knollys and Esher, but both were oddly opposed to taking action. Esher reluctantly agreed to write an article, but he claimed that it would be said that he was “a sycophant and a courtier” and his views would carry little weight. He did all he could to “wriggle out” of it.
⁴⁰
Loftily declining to descend into the gutter of literary quarrels, he suggested that instead he should write an article on some grand theme such as the philosophy of kingship.
⁴¹

The real reason for Esher’s prevarication soon became apparent: He himself had supplied Lee with material for the
DNB
piece.
⁴²
He was up to his usual tricks, hunting with both the hare and the hounds. “Oh! Esher! Esher!” wailed Davidson. “I am sick of Esher and the way he has behaved over this.”
⁴³
“Manly men,” as the royal archivist Owen Morshead recalled, “did not like Lord Esher.” He was like a “medicated tom cat,” and honest men such as George V and Lord Stamfordham “felt their skin prickle when he entered the palace, as some people react to the unseen presence of a cat in the room.”
⁴⁴

Esher’s treachery seemed the more dishonorable because he owed a debt of gratitude to Bertie.
⁴⁵
Meanwhile, Sidney Lee agreed to write a letter of apology to Queen Alexandra. Alix replied (via Esher himself) regretting the damage that Lee had done to her husband’s reputation, but it was never clear how much she understood or how much she wanted to know.
⁴⁶
She read the
DNB
article and it upset her, but she was oddly disengaged, and so dilatory that Davidson despaired of ever being able to persuade her to give her attention to the matter of Bertie’s biography.
⁴⁷

When Davidson and Probyn, Alix’s comptroller, cabled to warn her
that Lee’s
DNB
article was being published as a stand-alone book, she wired: “I regret extremely that the same wretched and untruthful author should be allowed to repeat himself on that to me sacred subject.”
⁴⁸
The courtiers, thinking she had misunderstood, wrote explaining at length that Lee was not composing a new work, merely issuing a cheap edition. The Queen Mother snapped back: “Very many thanks long letter understand everything perfectly have done so all the time—don’t tire yourself writing so much … your Blessed Lady.”
⁴⁹

Henceforth, it was Davidson, not Alix, who played the part of the wronged widow, while Alix was kept in the dark. As Davidson explained to Probyn, the Queen “would not take it in and would not appreciate it.… The Queen has absolutely
no
idea of logic, that if you
say
a thing is wrong, you must
prove
it so, and also the Queen has no sense of appreciation. I mean it’s a constitutional deficiency, and she will only think—whatever she may say—a great deal of unnecessary fuss—‘much better have told Lee he was mistaken and get him to alter his article.’ All the paraphernalia of the
means
of getting him to do so will be so much
Sanskrit
to her.”
⁵⁰

Davidson’s next move was to interview some politicians and ask them to write contradictions of Lee’s article. Most were helpful in conversation, but they all seemed “to get very cautious and disappointing on paper.”
⁵¹
Asquith wrote a one-page letter which Davidson thought “rather in the style of a master’s character to a servant than that of the Prime Minister to his late Sovereign.”
⁵²
As for Balfour, “nothing could be more sympathetic” than his manner, but he declared that he had not read the article.
⁵³
His dictated letter was typically evasive, avoiding detail but criticizing the article for its failure to convey the King’s personality.
⁵⁴

Armed with these letters from Balfour and Asquith, Davidson confronted Sidney Lee, who explained that he had interviewed fifty people for his article. He was “
amazed
” at the letters Davidson showed him. He “could not understand” Balfour’s letter, as Balfour had clearly told him that “the King’s influence was absurdly overrated.”
⁵⁵
He had notes to prove it. Lee’s typed notes of his interview with Balfour still survive
in his papers today. Entente Cordiale: “King had nothing to do with it … qualities not great.”
⁵⁶
Balfour’s remarks went straight into the
DNB
article.

The duplicity of Balfour and Asquith made Davidson “feel rather sick.”
⁵⁷
Ponsonby agreed. “What [Lee] said about Asquith does not surprise me but Balfour beats me. I now see his reluctance to read the article or commit himself in any way.”
⁵⁸
Balfour protested that he had been “ill-used”: He had given Lee an off-the-record interview and kept no notes, and now his remarks were quoted against him.
⁵⁹