Queen Victoria defended, 1926
In February 1926, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Davidson, published an article defending the reputation of Queen Victoria.
This is the first of two loosely linked studies. It examines Davidson's motives in projecting a positive image of the monarch who had supported his own career in the Church of England. It also demonstrates that he skated over a number of potentially controversial topics, omitting less favourable evidence that he had included in an earlier and much longer memorandum about the Queen. The sequel to this study, "Archbishop Davidson, the General Strike and the Revised Prayer Book, 1926-28: a Victorian stranded out of his time?", discusses the two major setbacks in the final years of his Primacy, and explores the possibility that he was a symbol of the Victorian identity who had survived into a world that he could no longer understand or influence.[1]
Randall Davidson's concern for the public memory of Queen Victoria was prompted by the imminent publication of a second instalment of her private correspondence and journals, that would cover the years 1862 to 1878 when she was a grieving widow, almost invisible to the people over whom she reigned. The Archbishop feared that their appearance would generate unfriendly, even ribald, discussion of the great Queen's personality, demeaning her image in the public memory.[2] He pressured the Earl of Rosebery, the last surviving ex-Prime Minister from the Victorian era, to produce an appreciative sketch of the monarch they had both served, but Rosebery pleaded his "decrepit brain" and firmly declined. Eventually, Davidson decided to produce a tribute article himself. It appeared in The Times the day before the publication of the new edition of the Queen's correspondence.
Queen Victoria and the career of Randall Davidson Randall Davidson certainly owed a debt of gratitude to the memory of Queen Victoria, who had rescued his clerical career when it was thrown into uncertainty, in 1883, by the death of his original patron, Archibald Campbell Tait, the first Scotsman to become Archbishop of Canterbury.[3] Like Tait, Davidson was a Scot who had turned away from his Presbyterian background to embark on a career in the Anglican Church. In 1877, at the age of 29, he became Tait's private secretary; eighteen months later, he married the Primate's daughter Edith. Hard hit by a double bereavement in 1878 – the death of his only son, soon followed by the loss of his wife – Archbishop Tait became reliant upon his son-in-law, and Davidson acquired valuable knowledge of the inner workings of the Church of England, along with much candid information about the qualities of its leading personalities.
One of the chaplain's duties on Tait's death at the archiepiscopal country estate, Addington Palace, in December 1882 was to supply a description of his father-in-law's last hours to the Queen, who had a taste for deathbed narratives. Davidson provided a becomingly touching account which, of course, did not fail to omit the family's gratitude for "Your Majesty's gracious and touching kindness". The Queen was "deeply touched" by his "beautiful account of the last days and hours of the beloved Archbishop", which, she explained, "will help to reconcile me to the great disappointment of being unable to go and see him. Nothing but the distance from Addington and the overwhelming number of public duties could prevent me from doing so."[4] (In fact, the Queen rarely allowed public business to interfere with her travel plans, Addington was within thirty miles of Windsor Castle and the railway companies would have had no problem in providing her with a special train.)
Davidson had written privately to Lady Ely, one of the ladies-in-waiting, a recognised back channel of communication to the throne, outlining Tait's opinions on his possible successors as Archbishop. Indeed, the letter was so private that Davidson had suggested it should be put into the fire, which – of course – ensured that its contents were promptly communicated to the Queen, who decided that this young Scotsman would be her ideal eyes and ears in the Anglican cloisters. "I am most anxious to make your acquaintance, having heard so much of you," she informed him. He obeyed the summons and was closeted with his sovereign for so long that the Private Secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, became alarmed: "I don't know when the Queen has had such a long interview with anybody." She confessed herself "much struck" by her visitor, whom she found "singularly pleasing both in appearance & manner; very sympathetic & evidently v[er]y intelligent, wise & able".[5] Davidson was soon providing Her Majesty with independent advice on the candidates for Canterbury, counsel that she valued: "you have had such immense opportunities of knowing all the Clergy that I could not look to anyone more likely to help me than yourself".[6]
The problem in choosing a successor to Tait was that most of the bishops were too old for the job. In terms of popularity and saintliness, the veteran Harold Browne of Winchester was the front-runner. Failing Browne, there would be little choice but to leap a generation and appoint the 53-year-old Edward White Benson, who was energetically engaged in establishing the new Cornish diocese of Truro. Blurring his own assessment with the opinion of his late father-in-law, Davidson reported to the Queen that Benson's fast-track elevation would leave three or four of his brother prelates feeling "hurt and angry". However, the problem with Browne was that, at 71, he was thought to be showing his age. In what looks like a calculated manoeuvre, Davidson was commissioned to interview Mrs Browne about her husband's health – a convenient if brutal way of signalling that he was likely to be passed over. When the Prime Minister, Gladstone, duly appointed Benson, Browne philosophically acknowledged that he had felt "that it might be my duty not to refuse the call if it should be given me", but he had obviously been well prepared to grasp that there were three score and eleven reasons against his elevation.[7]
Queen Victoria obviously had her eye on Randall Davidson, but he returned to Lambeth Palace ("for the present at any rate", as the Queen put it)[8] to help ease the new Archbishop into his responsibilities. However, it was likely that the young Scotsman would soon be seeking some other role, for the energetic Benson would wish to build his own team to move forward from the torpor of Tait's declining years. For the time being, there was no obvious slot that Davidson might fill in the Queen's entourage, since the Church already provided her with a personal spiritual guide. Like Westminster Abbey, St George's Chapel at Windsor was (and is) a royal peculiar, a church under the direct control of the sovereign, forming part of no diocese and therefore subject to no bishop. Hence the Deans of Westminster and Windsor, who headed their chapters of clergy, enjoyed, if not a status, then at least a prestige equal to any members of the episcopal bench. In addition, the Dean of Windsor was regarded as a spiritual counsellor to the royal family, someone – so the Queen felt – "with whom she is pretty well acquainted, and whom she can confide in". When the post fell vacant in 1882, Gladstone had accepted that the Deanery was "a personal, and not a political appointment". She chose Canon George Connor, who was whisked from his Isle of Wight parish where he already served as one of the Queen's personal chaplains during her visits to her holiday palace at Osborne. The Queen regretted that he was "not of higher social and ecclesiastical rank" – Connor was Irish – but he was "universally respected" and his son-in-law was establishing a new Anglican diocese on Tyneside.[9] Dean Connor was a man of sound judgement: of young Davidson, he said that "he knew no man in the world, so unselfish and so self-sacrificing".[10] Unfortunately, Connor's health was not so robust as his goodwill. He lacked the energy to establish himself in his new role and, barely six months after his transfer to Windsor, he died at the Deanery. No doubt conscious of the role that Davidson had played in his own elevation, Benson tactfully assured the Queen that "youthfulness" was not an objection – hardly, since Windsor had lost two Deans of mature years within a few months of one another – and that, in any case, Davidson's relative youth exuded "spring and freshness, while it does not carry him into any intemperate expression even … much less into any rashness". As the Queen had mirthfully observed, youth was a "shortcoming" which "will be cured all too soon". In extending the formal offer of preferment, Gladstone fired a warning shot, reminding the new Dean that "you will preside in a Chapter, over most of whose members you have so much the advantage in point of age" although the Prime Minister expressed confidence that he would do so "with a courtesy and consideration which will show the circle of your gifts is complete".[11] Randall Davidson accepted the appointment. Just turned 35, he had netted one of the most senior offices in the Church of England. More to the point, he had made the transition from being Archbishop Tait's indispensable man of business to Queen Victoria's spiritual advisor. "I have appointed the son-in-law and right hand of the late Archbishop," she announced to her daughter in Germany. Although Davidson was "a young man", he was "full of experience and knowledge of men – most sensible and agreeable, with excellent judgement, and singularly kind and sympathetic which is what I want so much."[12]
Although the Deanery of Windsor was scathingly described by a radical newspaper as "perhaps the closest approximation to doing nothing in these days", by 1888 Queen Victoria was worried that Davidson was working too hard and putting his health at risk. One of his burdens was the self-imposed duty of writing the biography of Archbishop Tait, an exercise in step-filial piety that incidentally doubled as a kind of slow-motion job application for Canterbury.[13] As she grew older, the Queen became increasingly resistant to changes in personnel among her closest associates but, with Davidson now entering his early forties, it became increasingly likely that the Dean of Windsor would be in line for a bishopric. In 1890, she pressed for his appointment to Winchester: from the episcopal palace at Farnham, he could still be easily summoned to Windsor, and the diocese included the Isle of Wight, which would bring him to Osborne. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, proved unexpectedly resistant. His feline appreciation – the Dean's "high qualifications are not known much, outside his own acquaintance" – provided cover for a sweeping condemnation. Apart from work experience as a curate (in fact, a three-year stint), Davidson had no record at parish level, no standing as a theologian and "no celebrity as a preacher". To appoint somebody so young to such a senior post "would seem forced and unnatural. His moral strength in the Church would not be increased by an unexplained rapidity of promotion." Tipped off about the Prime Minister's reservations, Davidson had the good sense to press the humility button: "I entirely concur, and think he has stated the facts very correctly."[14] The bishop of Rochester was translated to Winchester, and in 1891 Davidson became his successor in one of the less prestigious episcopal slots. The diocese of Southwark had not yet been carved out, so that Rochester included much of south London, including some of its most challenging inner districts: Davidson's experience working for Tait at Lambeth prepared him for the task ahead.
The sequel was instructive. Ten days after his consecration, the new bishop was taken very seriously ill. A stomach ulcer forced him to take a three-month convalescence. Further illnesses followed in 1894 and 1895. That year Winchester fell vacant and, this time, the Queen was successful in persuading Lord Salisbury to appoint her favourite. In a candid public statement, Davidson explained that vital Church activities, such as Confirmation services, could only be carried out in working-class inner-city areas through evening engagements, but his poor health "proved that from such evening duty I must, for some time to come, be largely debarred". This problem would not arise at Winchester. Hence he slipped effortlessly into one of the five most senior jobs in the Anglican Church.[15] Backed by royal support, Davidson could only fall upwards. The Queen once shocked her entourage by remarking that she did not like bishops. Surely, one of her attendants asked, Randall Davidson was exempted from her antipathy. "Yes," she replied; "I like the man but not the Bishop!"[16]
The following year, the unexpected death of Archbishop Benson saw Her Majesty on patronage manoeuvres once again. Lord Salisbury wished to offer the post to Frederick Temple, the bishop of London, although with some misgivings: while his piety was much respected, Temple was seventy-five and suffered from a deficiency in charm.[17] Salisbury foresaw that the Queen would lobby for Davidson, whose merits the Prime Minister now recognised, although he insisted that they were still not yet known to the public. "He was not distinguished at the University (he only took a third class); he has had no important pastoral cure; and he has not published any work of note except the biography of his father-in-law; his speaking and preaching, though good, are not of unusual merit; he is the youngest of all the Bishops on the English Bench. If he were now made at once Archbishop of Canterbury, he will be thought to have gained the post entirely by favour; and such a suspicion, though very unjust, will detract most seriously from his authority and usefulness." At forty-eight and in poor health, Davidson could wait. The Queen was infuriatingly (but characteristically) inconsistent in her partisanship, asserting at one point that Davidson's health had improved so miraculously since his departure from Rochester that he could easily handle the burdens of the Primacy, before switching to an insistence that her favourite could not possibly succeed Temple in the demanding role as bishop of London. She interpreted the Prime Minister's position, so she confidingly reported to her candidate, as a strategic decision "that it would be an advantage to you if the Bishop of London became Archbishop for a short while".
Temple duly went to Canterbury, but the clumsy solution did not work well. The new Primate distrusted Davidson whom he regarded as a disappointed rival, and apparently resented being regarded as a seat-warmer for the upstart royal favourite.[18] Worse still, he survived for six years – Victoria had given him twelve months – during which time fading eyesight, declining energy and an inability to delegate meant that Lambeth lost its grip on the wider Anglican Communion. She had foreseen that on Temple's death, "my wishes would then be accomplished", although she did not live to see her victory. When Temple died at 81 in December 1902, Davidson – now in his mid-fifties – was the obvious choice to clean up the mess. (Although professing to doubt that he was the best candidate, he admitted that "I do know the ropes better than others.")[19]
It was not surprising that, four decades later, Randall Davidson should have felt the duty to defend Queen Victoria's memory. She had made him a Dean, she had made him a bishop, and she had ensured that he would be the diocesan who attended her deathbed at Osborne in 1901, when he was already positioned for Canterbury. His career was so solidly founded upon her patronage that any denigration of the Queen's character and judgement necessarily reflected on his own credentials.
Queen Victoria's memory under attack It was always likely that the veneration that gripped her loyal subjects during Queen Victoria's last years would tend to recede after her death. The combination of Time and Tum-Tum – the nickname of her eldest son and successor – would be enough to relegate and reduce her memory in a distant perspective. In his nine-year reign, Edward VII won a degree of affection from his people that he perhaps did not entirely merit, but by his very existence he demonstrated a different kind of monarchy, a sovereign who could reign from racecourses and who mixed the incense of royalty with clouds of cigar smoke. Not surprisingly, the biographical record soon began to excuse his useless decades as Prince of Wales by portraying him as Victoria's victim. The process began in 1912 with a massive essay in the Dictionary of National Biography by its general editor, Sir Sidney Lee. After Albert's death, Lee wrote, the Queen "regarded herself to be under a solemn obligation to fill his place in the family circle and to regulate all her household precisely on the lines that he had followed. … The notion of consulting their views or wishes was foreign to her conception of duty." Thus the Prince of Wales was trapped in "perpetual tutelage". Even when he reached adulthood, "[s]he claimed to regulate his actions in almost all relations of life…. The queen was very ready to delegate to him formal and ceremonial labours which were distasteful to her, but she never ceased to ignore his title to any function of government."[20] Victoria appeared as a mother who suppressed the talents of the man who would come to be regarded – again, with some exaggeration – as Edward the Peacemaker. The indictment broadened thirteen years later, when Sir Sidney Lee published the first volume of his official biography, taking Edward VII's life to his accession in 1901. The description of the young Prince's narrow and repressive education made his parents appear narrow and inhumane. "To those who were brought up to reverence Queen Victoria and to honor [sic] the memory of her husband", said a review in the Manchester Guardian, Lee's account of their eldest son's upbringing "comes rather as a shock".[21]
Sir Sidney Lee's strictures were the more damaging because they came from the pen of a very serious scholar. Even more subversive was the gadfly litterateur, Lytton Strachey, who introduced a new style of breezily disrespectful biography with his Eminent Victorians of 1918, in which the great Queen herself appeared incidentally as an enthusiast for the slain hero General Gordon. Three years later, he followed his success with a biography devoted solely to the woman whose name was attached to the age for which he felt so little regard. Read a century later, Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria seems a mild, even an affectionate, account of a complex and lonely woman, but to those who still cherished the values that she had embodied, its lack of reverence seemed shocking enough. Although Rosebery resisted Davidson's pleas to produce a sketch of the Queen, he did deplore "the carpings of those who never knew her", adding that he hoped "that no further attempt will be made to belittle her" – and it was no doubt Strachey that he had in mind. Whether or not the book as good history, Frank Hardie wrote in 1935, "it is from the study of Strachey's biography that the intelligent reading public of to-day is mainly to content to form its judgement of Queen Victoria".[22]
Strachey had probed two aspects of the Queen's life that were easy for her detractors to ridicule but almost impossible for her defenders to explain. It was well-known that she had not merely withdrawn from public life after her husband's death, but had thrown herself into what many regarded as exaggerated and self-indulgent mourning, for instance insisting on the preservation of Albert's various apartments precisely as they had been left on the day of his death. Sidney Lee had acknowledged that strange fact in the instant biography that he had produced after the Queen's death. "Nothing that reminded her of him was ever disturbed – no room that he inhabited, scarcely a paper that he had handled."[23] But Strachey, citing "Private Information", revealed that the practice was even more bizarre. Not merely were Albert's rooms at Windsor Castle frozen in time, "but the mysterious preoccupation of Victoria had commanded that her husband’s clothing should be laid afresh, each evening, upon the bed, and that, each evening, the water should be set ready in the basin, as if he were still alive; and this incredible rite was performed with scrupulous regularity for nearly forty years." Had Strachey invented the tale, or lazily recycled some irresponsible canard, establishment figures like Davidson and Rosebery would have had good reason to disapprove. Unfortunately, what made them impotently angry was that his account was completely accurate, and he had dragged into the open a ritual long veiled to protect the Queen's reputation. Indeed, Davidson privately conceded that "the facts were even more odd than most people had any idea of", for the absurdity extended far beyond the Queen's life at Windsor. He recalled confidential discussions with her at Osborne, with Prince Albert's evening jug of hot water "actually steaming" beside him.[24]
Lytton Strachey also cleverly probed another wound in Queen Victoria's reputation. It was part of the popular narrative of her life that the widowed monarch had not only withdrawn from public life but had become strangely dependent upon her Highland servant, John Brown, whom Strachey neutrally described as a "gruff, kind, hairy Scotsman". Brown accompanied his sovereign everywhere, and in 1872 managed to frustrate an attack on the Queen in a London street by grabbing the assailant. In Strachey's evocation of their relationship, Victoria came to see her kilted servant as "in some mysterious way, a legacy from the dead", who represented "a special connection with Albert. In their expeditions the Prince had always trusted him more than anyone…. She came to believe at last – or so it appeared – that the spirit of Albert was nearer when Brown was near."[25] The formula deftly hinted at two damaging rumours. One was that the Queen had made use of her servant to communicate with her lost husband: Highlanders, it was taken for granted, all possessed second sight. These reports seem to have been confined to elite circles, but they did place Davidson in a potentially difficult position. There seems to be no evidence that the Queen ever engaged in spiritualism, although it was a favourite recreation within the upper classes, but she did undoubtedly hold unorthodox views about communication with the dead. More to the point, Strachey's delicately vague portrayal was likely to revive more damaging stories – first in circulation half a century earlier – about the nature of the relationship between the widow and her devoted attendant. Had Brown replaced the Prince Consort in a less ethereal role?
The editorship of the new instalment of the Queen's correspondence had been entrusted to George Earle Buckle, the former editor of The Times who had completed the official biography of Benjamin Disraeli, in four massive (and not always deeply revealing) volumes. An establishment figure, Buckle was certainly not likely to dish any royal dirt, and Davidson – who had read the proofs of the forthcoming edition – knew that he could safely assure the public that no scandal was about to be revealed. Indeed, Buckle boldly faced, and faced down, the Brown issue, acknowledging the Highlander's courage in the 1872 incident, and including among the illustrations a captioned picture of the two together, Victoria riding a pony with her servant in a deferential supportive role.[26] [This picture is reproduced at the close of the text.] Unfortunately, as Davidson well knew, Buckle's discreet exercise in damage limitation would have only a limited effect on public opinion. Few would read his scholarly volumes in detail, but the publicity aroused by their publication, which was accompanied by a considerable marketing effort, would mean that "everyone will be set talking about the Queen".[27] Determined to defend the memory of his early benefactor, the Archbishop set himself a delicately balanced target. As a tactical move, he would endorse, even embrace, the widespread impressions that the Queen was given to eccentricity and embarrassingly devoted to the rituals of bereavement, while insisting that she was both religious and sagacious. By giving the impression that he was sharing secrets, Davidson would reassure his readers that their former sovereign was a fundamentally sensible person.
Naturally, he faced a challenge in masterminding an article that would illuminate the fading and caricatured memory of the late Queen in a more sympathetic light. A quarter of a century after her death, "there are not more than three or four men now alive who had close and continuous personal relation to her during even the last decades of her reign".[28] In addition to himself and Rosebery, presumably he had in mind Lord Stamfordham who, as Sir Arthur Bigge, had acted as the Queen's private secretary during the final six years of her reign, and Arthur Balfour, a cabinet minister for a dozen years from 1885. Stamfordham was serving George V in the same office and was hardly likely to lift the veil on the monarchy, past or present. In any case, as the Archbishop acknowledged, anything written by "Bigge" (as he still called the King's adviser) "would be looked upon as belonging to the clique of her own people and not to English life as a whole".[29] Balfour was still nominally in public life, and had recently joined Baldwin's cabinet as an inactive elder statesman. (The Archbishop presumably dismissed Asquith, briefly Home Secretary between 1892 and 1895, as he seems to have had few dealings with the Queen.[30]) Hence Davidson's preferred choice of a neutral authority was Lord Rosebery, who had established a kind of political impartiality by quarrelling with his own party over the decades since leaving Downing Street in 1895. But – as noted above – Rosebery ducked the task by pleading old age: "I could no more extract from my decrepit brain a piece worthy of Queen Victoria than I could jump over the moon." If the Archbishop wanted an article written in her defence, he would have to do it himself. As an Edwardian establishment figure, Lord Esher, put it to him, "no one carries so much conviction as you do – standing outside the political arena".[31]
Fortunately, Davidson did not have to work from scratch. His biographer, Bishop Bell of Chichester, quoted extensively from a much longer memorandum in which he discussed the character and foibles of the woman he had encountered in 1883. Unfortunately, Bell supplied little information about its provenance, but it was apparently written in 1906, when Davidson's memories of the Queen were still fresh but could be assessed through the perspective of the five years that had passed since her death.[32] The article in The Times was obviously quarried from the longer document. For instance, the Archbishop defended the Queen against the charge of "mawkish sentimentality" by recalling her indignant dismissal of an inappropriate letter of condolence as "twaddle". In the memorandum, he gave more information: the Queen often indignantly referred to the letter, sent by a clergyman at the time of Albert's death. The writer had used what Davidson called "an atrociously wrong expression", urging the grieving widow: "Henceforth you must remember that Christ Himself will be your husband." The Times article would have carried greater impact had Davidson quoted this absurdity: perhaps he did not care to take the name of the Lord in vain, but maybe he was simply constrained by a word limit.[33] The point to be made here is that private memorandum evidently preceded the newspaper article. Hence it is of value in revealing aspects of Queen Victoria's character and behaviour that the Archbishop chose not to emphasise in his appeal to public opinion.
Randall Davidson provided the readers of The Times with a deftly crafted portrayal of Queen Victoria that gave the impression of revealing more than it really did. Indeed, almost the only specific detail was the revelation that she had never seen a train ticket, a gap in her experience that a moment's reflection would have indicated was hardly a surprise. It was included as part of a strategy that seemed frank in its acceptance of the fact that the Queen could seem eccentric, but which argued that her remoteness from real life was both harmless and easily explained.[34] Davidson laid considerable stress on her charm, tactfully linking the force of her personality to her diminutive stature, although without specifying that she was only four feet eleven inches (1.52 metres) tall.[35] Having encountered his sovereign during her later years, the Archbishop could also write with awed respect that she had dealt with the great public figures of half a century earlier and, thorough them, was in touch with the world of the eighteenth century, all of which remained real and sometimes strangely relevant in her animated conversation.
Davidson's glimpses of Queen Victoria combine to project a sympathetic portrait of someone who was both a woman and a sovereign. Yet there is an element of assumption underlying his interpretation that should put us on our guard. Although he had the good fortune of a partnership in life with the charming and intelligent Edith Tait, like most Victorian males, the Archbishop filtered his perceptions of the opposite sex through unflattering stereotypes. His main aim in the Times article was to play down the stories about the Queen's self-indulgent grief for her lost husband and to make light of her idiosyncratic behaviour. Essentially, he challenged his readers: what else would they expect from somebody who was female? He provided a revealing insight into his own assumptions when he reviewed the Queen's keen interest in ecclesiastical appointments, and her ability to weigh the suggestions placed before her. "I remember being struck by hearing her blurt out with reference to an appointment at Manchester: 'The man seems to think he is making an appointment to Wells or Ely and not to a great industrial capital'."[36] Davidson's astonishment tells more about his own limitations. Queen Victoria was noted for her shrewdness (if sometimes intermingled with more wayward judgements). Even in the era that bore her name, there was no valid reason to assume that possession of a Y chromosome was necessary for an appreciation of the special needs of the northern metropolis.[37]
Randall Davidson produced a charming sketch of Queen Victoria, still worth reading a century after its publication. But he portrayed the Queen within the terms of his own gender stereotypes. And, as discussed below, he omitted much inconvenient evidence.
Randall Davidson on Queen Victoria, 1926.[38] The Times headlined Davidson's article: QUEEN VICTORIA AS SHE WAS. MODERN ERRORS OF JUDGMENT. I reproduce the text here, with some minor emendations to punctuation, summarising the brief postscript in which the Archbishop quoted some general remarks by Lord Rosebery, all that he had been able to extract from the former Prime Minister.
The text, as it stands, requires little comment. Although himself a Scot, Davidson conformed to the casual usage of the time that described the United Kingdom as "England" and its people, of both genders, as "Englishmen". In confidently predicting that the forthcoming selections from the Queen's correspondence would redound to her credit, he did not let his readers know that he had read the entire text in proof.
The article alludes to two public episodes. The first was the assumption of the title of Queen of India in 1858 as a result of the abolition of the East India Company and the transfer of its powers to the Crown. Albert vetoed, and The Queen insisted that the proposed Proclamation to the people of India drafted by Lord Derby's government should be re-written to reflect the generous sympathies of "a female Sovereign" speaking to her Asian subjects. Perhaps more might have been made of her wish that the message "should breathe feelings of generosity, benevolence, and religious feeling". The Archbishop might have underlined his wider arguments by citing the Queen's reliance upon "the truth of Christianity" and "the solace of religion" which led her to disclaim any intention "to impose our conviction on any of her subjects" – a potential embarrassment for a Primate who was committed to missionary work overseas. However, the major obstacle to making more of the Proclamation episode was the fact that Sir Theodore Martin's biography of the Prince Consort – a project closely monitored by the Queen herself – made clear that it was Albert who had vetoed the original draft, a point that undermined Davidson's emphasis upon Victoria's close involvement and personal initiative in public affairs.[39]
There was also a surprising lack of detail to back his second example, the allusion to Queen Victoria's "gallant spirit" during the Boer War. In a single week of December 1899, the planned three-pronged invasion of the Afrikaner republics faltered as the advance of each of the British columns was checked. Arthur Balfour was sent to Windsor to offer the government's "consolatory reassurance" that the reports of military disaster were exaggerated. "But he was at once cut short with the characteristic, quick little bend of the head in which all regality seemed concentrated: 'Please understand that there is no one depressed in this house. We are not interested in the possibilities of defeat. They do not exist.'" Davidson probably knew of this incident, which he presumably regarded as still bound by the seal of confidentiality. The Queen's stirring reproof to Balfour was not published until 1939. Her best-known initiative in relation to the war in South Africa was to send all her soldiers a specially monogrammed tin of chocolate, a gesture that perhaps the Archbishop decided not to mention since it lacked gravitas.[40]
Davidson's bald comparison of the "aloofness" that surrounded Her Majesty with "the varied daily experiences of the younger generation" of the royal family indicated that he appreciated that the British people would contrast their vanished monarch with her very visible great-grandsons, the popular Prince of Wales, later briefly Edward VIII, and his shy brother, the Duke of York, who had served at Jutland and recently found himself a warm and personable bride who would retain her place in public affection for the next eight decades. His invocation of the mythic view that Queen Victoria had single-handedly cleaned up the moral atmosphere of the upper classes was perhaps a warning shot to the Empire's darling that there were standards of behaviour that he could not flout. For convenience, I italicise Davidson's text.
During the next few weeks Queen Victoria, her life, her character, her peculiarities, perhaps her politics and her beliefs, will be the subject of general conversation in almost every English home. The forthcoming volumes of her letters will cover, it is to be presumed, the first half of her forty years of widowhood, the period comprising, among countless other things, the American Civil War, the Franco-Prussian War, the emergence of the Eastern question into the front rank of political problems, and in English life the Premierships and rivalries of Gladstone and Disraeli.
Comparatively few people among the population of this island will read the volumes as a whole, but everyone will be set talking about the Queen. What is at present the general estimate of that august lady among the younger generation of average Englishmen? Is it a true estimate? I think not. It underrates her real greatness both as woman and as Queen. The younger people in any general circle are apt, so far as I can judge, to picture her as a good and kind-hearted old lady, with a high moral standard, a decided will of her own, a widespread but rather eccentric sympathy with human sorrow, and a narrow old-fashioned outlook upon contemporary life, both secular and religious. Just a quarter of a century has passed since she died, and it happens that there are not more than three or four men now alive who had close and continuous personal relation to her during even the last decades of her reign; I am one of these, and I have been invited to try to express in a few sentences my own estimate, based as it is, upon the intimacy with which she honoured me during the last eighteen years of her life. That kind of intimate knowledge is popularly supposed to kill whatever glamour may attach to the public life of a great man or woman. I record quite definitely the contrary experience. As time passed I felt more and more the reality and forcefulness of the powers which had come to be hers. I claim for her no genius, even of intuition, though intuition she certainly had. But the gifts of vivid and unfailing memory and of tireless diligence applied with straightforward commonsense for sixty years to opportunities unique in their range and character could not be other than effective. It was her commonsense which welded together her other attributes and enabled her – though not in the ordinary meaning of the words a clever woman – to do far more than most clever women could have accomplished. When a Queen who was thus equipped was able to maintain also an unswerving honesty of speech and purpose, a lofty moral standard, an imperative sense of duty, and an intense human sympathy, and when, furthermore, the whole was permeated by genuine religious earnestness, the combination became one of quite extraordinary strength.
What exactly it was which constituted the irresistible charm attaching to her I have never been able quite clearly to define, but I think it was the combination of absolute truthfulness and simplicity with the instinctive recognition and quiet assertion of her position as Queen and of what belonged to it. I have known many prominent people, but with hardly one of them was it found by all and sundry so easy to speak freely and frankly after even a very long acquaintance. I have sometimes wondered whether the same combination of qualities would have been as effective in a person of stately or splendid appearance. May it have been that the very lack of those physical advantages, when combined with her undeniable dignity of word and movement, produced what was in itself a sort of charm? People were taken by surprise by the sheer force of her personality. It may seem strange, but it is true that as a woman, she was both shy and humble. Abundant examples will occur to those who knew her. But as a Queen she was neither shy nor humble, and asserted her position unhesitatingly.
I have spoken of her power of memory. It was not the mere recollection of far-off days. It was the power of applying to the facts of the moment the knowledge which she drew at will from every shelf in the full storehouse of her past. One statesman after another, in speaking of her when she died, drew attention to her literally unrivalled knowledge of the political and international events and personalities of a long and stirring period of European history. She could quote and refer to politicians of 50 years back, or of 20 years back, or of ten years back, as easily as to the politicians of the hour. And these memories were brought to light not as curious recollections, but as a fund of practical experience. This is what is meant, I think, by the recurring reference to the range and depth of her practical knowledge of affairs.
In conversation I had sometimes to shake myself into the recollection that the lady who was talking to me with eager interest about the public life and personalities of the hour, or the outlook into European problems, had within her own crisp recollection the holding of similar conversations with, say, the Duke of Wellington, or Lord Melbourne, or Lord Palmerston, or Sir Robert Peel. The statesmen with whom she had chiefly to do at the beginning of her reign, and whose letters and dispatches and conversations occupied her, as we now know, so closely, were men whose experience ran back into the 18th century; some of them were born before the French Revolution; some of them had, I think, sat in Parliament with Charles James Fox, if not with William Pitt, and had voted for or against Mr Wilberforce on the slave trade. And her active brain brought those early memories to bear upon conditions of life and politics so entirely different as those which marked the closing of the 19th or the dawning of the 20th century. I well remember that when speaking of Lord Roberts's difficulties in the Boer War she illustrated one of her statements by something the Duke of Wellington had told her about his experiences in the Peninsular War almost exactly a century before.
About one of her characteristics there is no possible question. It was not a small thing to have transformed, if I may use a very colloquial phrase 'off her own bat' the moral standard of the highest stratum in our social life.
Eccentricities, of course, she had; how could it be otherwise? No one ever grew up with so little of the help an ordinary citizen has of being 'broken in' to political and social changes by rubbing shoulders daily with friends and critics of all sorts in the rough-and-tumble of ordinary life. It was by the merest trifles that one realized sometimes the curious aloofness of her experiences from those of ordinary folk. For example, in the year before she died, it came out casually in conversation that she supposed a railway ticket to be a thin sheet of paper, for 'I do not think I ever saw a railway ticket'. Contrast with that aloofness the varied daily experiences of the younger generation of her house.
Eccentricities, too, there certainly were in deeper things affecting personal conduct and belief. Strange legends found currency about her supposed sentimentality of a rather morbid kind about the dead. I had much to do with her on those matters, and while I am not prepared to endorse every opinion or prejudice which was hers, I can say this: I should like those who attribute to her in a wholesale fashion mawkish sentimentality or odd beliefs to have heard what she had to say on those very matters. I recall her comments on some of the letters of a would-be consolatory sort whereof she had plenty. One letter I remember she quoted to me more than once as an example of unreal and mawkish sentimentalism; she said with hot indignation, 'Now that is what I call twaddle. The man must have known, or ought to have known, that he was talking nonsense. How can people like that comfort others or teach anybody?' Her thoughts in that field were bigger and sounder than was supposed by those who merely noted usages which were open to the charge of being fanciful or over-strained.
I should like to add a word about her courage. The gallant spirit which she showed, for example, in the Boer War during the last year of her life was of a piece with her robust vigour in other things.
Her likes and dislikes were robust too, and it is easy to criticize the expression she sometimes gave to them in public action. But it is mere justice to remember that some of her dislikes or prejudices were shown as years passed to be subject to deliberate revision. My contention is that there was nothing petty or small in her handling of her vast responsibilities. She accepted and discharged them without fear or flinching. Nor did she attempt to shift to other shoulders the answerableness for what as a Constitutional Sovereign she said and did. Again, the notion has I hope been dissipated that she depended so much on the Prince Consort that she stumbled or blundered when he was gone. I shall be surprised if the forthcoming volumes show in her letters and counsels any falling off from what these had been when he was at her side. Nor did the years of her so-called 'retirement' under the cloud of overmastering sorrow involve any real abandonment of concentrated thought or action. The diligence with which she persevered to the very last days, almost the very last hours, of her life in the immense daily labour she had imposed upon herself from her accession onwards in the study of dispatches, and in ceaseless and full personal correspondence, in her own handwriting, with her Ministers, remains as an example and stimulus which none of us who watched it will belittle or forget. The personal reward for herself of all this toil came in the glad interest which she was thus able thoughtfully and competently to take in whatever was going on at home and abroad. There can be no question of her vivid sense of what the British nation or Empire stands for in the life of the world, and of the duty which devolved upon her for making it clear to the eyes of men. In preparing the great proclamation to her Indian subjects in 1858, she reminded her Ministers 'that it is a female Sovereign who speaks to more than one hundred millions of Eastern people.' Hers was no outside or merely official interest in it all. It was the careful participation therein of one whose persevering industry, clear memory, shrewd sense, and kindly heart had combined to fashion for her with absolute verity the character which history will endorse the character of a devoted servant and mother of her people, a wise ruler, a redoubtable Queen.
The Rosebery postscript Davidson rounded off his article by quoting Lord Rosebery's admiration for the Queen, taken from the letter in which he had regretfully but firmly declined the task of producing a full article. Despite the Archbishop's insistence that it would have been "a loss to contemporary English history" not to have quoted the opinion of a Scottish statesman shared with a Scottish Primate, in reality Rosebery simply recycled conventional historical verdicts. It was something of a cliché to say that Queen Victoria had "rescued the Monarchy from a fate which might have overtaken it after two such Kings as George IV and William IV". Nor was it especially perspicacious to liken her to Elizabeth: Britain had seen only six reigning female monarchs, and no claim to greatness could be tendered on behalf of Anne or the three Marys, one whose memory was besmirched by religious persecution in England, one driven into exile from Scotland who died on the block, and the third overshadowed by her Dutch husband, William III. In calling Victoria "our second great Queen, second to Queen Elizabeth", Rosebery did not even make clear whether his comment was qualitative or merely chronological, although he did add the intriguing aside that "for that illustrious predecessor she had no respect or affection". (Perhaps Victoria disapproved of Elizabeth's refusal to marry and secure the succession to the throne.) Like Davidson, he sought to interweave the sovereign with the woman. "The real adjective for her would be 'devoted'. She was a devoted wife, a devoted mother, and a devoted Queen.… Glory, honour, and power were hers, but we seem to see the true woman through them all, the mother of her people."
What Davidson omitted Comparison of Davidson's article in The Times with the much longer memorandum written twenty years earlier reveals some notable omissions. Some of the excisions can be explained by constraints of space, but in other cases the Archbishop left out reservations that would have considerably qualified his benign portrait. Take, for example, his statement that, among the "many prominent people" whom he had encountered, "I have never known one of them with whom it was so easy and so natural to speak freely and frankly after even a very short acquaintance," a characteristic that he thought particularly valuable in a constitutional monarch. But there was a major qualification. She hated conversational controversies about matters wherein she differed acutely from the person to whom she was speaking. It was not exactly resentment against contradiction; she disliked contradicting as much as being contradicted, and if the subject was really an unpleasant one, on which one was bound to point out that she was mistaken or wrong (and I had several such marked occasions), she obviously disliked it very much, and would be apt to end the conversation and then write a note about it. Similarly, she would not find fault with people directly, but made somebody else do it for her. This came out oddly when she wished severely to criticize things done by e.g. one of her sons or daughters, and she would make me, for my sins, go to them with peremptory statements of her emphatic objection to something they had done or said. I could give examples of this – some of them funny – some of them almost tragic.[41]
To illustrate Queen Victoria's detachment from everyday life, Davidson had regaled readers of The Times with the trivial but vivid example of the train ticket.[42] However, there was a far wider area of English national life of which Davidson found her surprisingly ignorant in the eighteen-eighties. Victoria described herself as "Protestant … to the very heart's core". She was "shocked and grieved" to learn that "the higher classes and so many of the young clergy" were "tainted" with ritualistic worship, "this leaning towards Rome! For it is nothing else".[43] But she had no idea how far the outward garb of ritualism had permeated the mainstream of the Church of England. She had grown up in what was still essentially an eighteenth-century ecclesiastical culture, where clergy demonstrated their seriousness of purpose by wearing the black gowns that identified them as Masters of Arts of Oxford or Cambridge. She occasionally attended services in cathedrals and great minsters like Westminster Abbey, where ceremonial had always reigned, but generally pursued her devotions in private chapels under her own control. Almost the only ordinary parochial worship that she ever experienced was at Whippingham, the local church that served Osborne. At Balmoral, of course, the issue did not arise, since north of the Border she became a Presbyterian. Hence she simply had no idea that almost all clergymen garbed themselves in the surplice, whatever their Anglican factional identification. Davidson was struck by the extent to which she was out of touch.
The curious aloofness of her life from the ordinary current of English ways showed itself in her wishes and arrangements about Divine Service. When she came to the Throne, English Ritual, in the large sense of the word, was at its lowest ebb and ordinary Church services were dreary in the extreme. The Prince Consort brought with him the traditions of Lutheran services, which he liked, and what was called the Ritual Revival, then in its mildest forms, surplices, chanted psalms, eastward position, turning eastward at the creed, found no recognition or even toleration in the Royal chapel.
Forty years later, when I began my Windsor life, these things had become usual elsewhere, but the Queen never saw them, and I remember her incredulous surprise one day when I was discussing these matters with her and contrasted the usages of the Private Chapel at Windsor with common usages elsewhere. Even the very Protestant ritual of Whippingham Parish Church was thought by herself to be rather advanced because the clergy preached in a surplice. The black gown never departed from the Private Chapel at Windsor, though bishops of course preached in their episcopal dress.[44]
As her spiritual adviser, Davidson struggled to assess the depth of Queen Victoria's attachment to her faith. Propriety obviously impelled him to insist that she was a good Christian, but it was evident that she had no profound grip upon theological questions. The Archbishop was not entirely convincing in attributing this defect to those who ought to have guided her – her mother, her tutor and her husband. The publication in 1907 of the first instalment of Queen Victoria's correspondence included a thoughtful and detailed memorandum of 1830 on the education of the young princess which showed that her mother, the Duchess of Kent, had in fact duly emphasised the importance of religious training.[45] Her tutor, George Davys, was a man of simple piety and his Village Conversations on the Liturgy of the Church of England, an attempt to explain Anglican dogma to a rustic readership, probably explain why he was thought qualified to instruct a young girl.[46] In dismissing the influence of the Prince Consort, Davidson slipped into contradiction: Albert's religious views were was probably "very nebulous" but, even so, the Queen would not have understood his theology – another reflection of the Archbishop's fundamental misunderstanding of the feminine intellect. The problem for the man whose career had so notably benefited from Queen Victoria's patronage was that, if her grasp of the fundamentals of the Christian faith was so weak, then her assessment of the merits of those charged with its advancement was necessarily of little value. Davidson sought to escape from this trap by asserting a miraculous paradox: the Queen may have seemed theologically illiterate but, in reality, she was a deeply religious person.
People entitled to put the question have sometimes asked me 'Do you think that the Queen, besides being a good woman, was a really religious one?' and I have never had any hesitation in answering 'Yes'. The talks I have had with her were much too genuine, too unconventional, too simple in diction, too untheological, I might almost say too matter-of-fact, to justify one in doubting that the religious impulse in her life was definite as well as deep. She had not I think been very wisely taught as a child in these matters. I do not suppose that her mother had much religion in her character, though perhaps I have no right to say so, and from the account she has given me of her other instructors, male and female, I should not expect to learn that any of them really helped her in religious matters. Bishop Davys, of Peterborough, who taught her many things, she evidently never liked. She used to say he had two or three daughters on whom he practised the lessons he was going to give her, and that they were so stupid that he was in a bad temper by the time her lesson began. How far this corresponds with fact I have no means of knowing.
The Prince Consort brought into her life a large religious element, but I should think it was, in his case, of a very nebulous sort so far as Christian dogma goes. His intellectual powers were, of course, far greater than hers, and she would not, I think, have attempted to follow him in metaphysical speculations on credal subjects. ...
I should certainly say that her life was fashioned and carried on upon a religious basis, and that her shrewdness and common sense combined with her genuine and prayerful anxiety to do right at every juncture, made religion a more potent force in her conduct, both public and private, than either she herself or some of her family and friends probably realised.[47]
Yet Davidson's attempt to portray Queen Victoria as a person of simple and unquestioning faith was considerably complicated by her heterodox view that it was possible to communicate with the dead. Her unusual views seem to have been widely known among the political and social elite. On his deathbed in 1881, Disraeli declined the honour of a farewell visit from his sovereign, wearily remarking: "She would only ask me to take a message to Albert."[48] Queen Victoria had no sympathy with the Anglican ritualists who ingeniously argued that, although bowing and chanting were not authorised by the Church of England, such practices were not formally banned either. However, she seems to have held flexible views about those aspects of doctrine that she found inconvenient. Did she really believe that she was in communication with her dead husband? At an audience in March 1862, Lord Clarendon reported her "adverting constantly to the Prince’s opinions & acts as if he was in the next room", but that was an understandable form of self-protection as she began to handle ministerial business on her own in the early months of widowhood. A year later, writing in the more intimate context of a letter to her daughter, Victoria seemed to face the reality that her husband was gone. "He remains my sole object & ever will – but he can't give me a sign of it – & that is so fearful to bear."[49] This was a complicated aspect of the Queen's thinking that evidently left Davidson perplexed.
I was often surprised by the definiteness with which she held her beliefs about the intercourse in the other world of those who have been friends here. It did not correspond with the sort of common sense test which she liked to apply to theological teachings even about matters upon which we have ampler biblical authority than we have about this. She used to denounce as amazing any disbelief or hesitation about the assurance we ought to have of such maintenance beyond the grave of the relations we have held to one another upon earth.
Upon many other subjects she used to say, ‘I suppose the orthodox belief is so and so; do you think we have really ground for holding it firmly? Do you really and truly believe it yourself or is it only a pious opinion?’ But about this particular branch of ordinary Christian opinion or belief she never seemed to have any hesitation or questioning.[50]
This led to a topic which, even in his private memorandum, Davidson found embarrassing, describing it "one little point to which I ought to allude". This was the Queen's resolve to perpetuate Albert's memory by preserving his rooms as if he were still alive. A Whig minister, Lord Clarendon, had been struck by this at his audience in March 1862: "it was difficult not to think" that Albert was close by "for every thing was set out on his table, the blotting book open with a pen upon it, his watch going … just as I have seen them a 100 times."[51] In those early months of her bereavement, a sentimental attachment to objects associated with Albert could be seen as part of the grieving process. But, by the time Davidson encountered it two decades later, the practice had become a puzzling ritual, one that treated the Prince Consort's apartments as a tomb without a corpse. The daily routine was not only followed at Windsor, as Lytton Strachey believed, but at other palaces too: Davidson encountered one of its odder manifestations at Osborne. Nor was Albert the only focus of this strange cult: at Frogmore on the Windsor estate, where the Duchess of Kent had died, the Queen had also pressed the freeze button, to create the illusion that her mother had simply slipped out for a few minutes but would eventually return.
People were constantly puzzled or irritated by the Queen’s rather morbid dwelling upon the details of the past, and especially upon the actual physical surroundings of those who were gone. About this I would say, first, that the facts were even more odd than most people had any idea of, secondly that the explanation is more reasonable and less morbid than is ordinarily realised. As to the facts – nothing that the Prince Consort had had or used in daily life was allowed to be set aside, and his room at Windsor remained as he had left it, with his old-fashioned white hats and gloves and canes lying about. Odder still at Osborne – I do not know whether it was so at Windsor – hot water was actually brought to his dressing-room at dressing-time forty years after his death, and this room she used as a sitting-room or interview-room for intimate people as it was conveniently situated next to her own set of rooms, and I have again and again had talks to her there before dinner with the hot water actually steaming.
There was obviously a challenge here for someone who wished to portray Queen Victoria as a rational being who brought a careful judgement to the discharge of her constitutional responsibilities. Belief that the dead maintained a protective watch over those they had loved was a harmless form of nostalgia. When William Temple, son of Archbishop Frederick, accepted the bishopric of Manchester in 1920, Davidson sent him an affectionate letter, in which he regretted that "your dear Mother" had not lived to witness his elevation – but perhaps she knew of it anyway. "Who knows what measure of actual fellowship there is across the sundering stream?"[52] It is unlikely that the Archbishop would have wished that kindly thought to be treated as mainstream Anglican doctrine. In any case, it was possible to believe in the benign proximity of friendly spirits without putting out soap and towel and a bowl of hot water for them to help them change for dinner each night.
Davidson's attempt to make sense of these strange rituals was remarkably unpersuasive. Distraught with grief, the Queen had ordered that Albert's possessions should not be touched. As the years passed, her household servants would have liked to tidy his rooms, but Her Majesty never got around to issuing the necessary instructions. Davidson's apologia focused upon Albert's possessions and ignored his posthumous ablutions. Servants continued to arrange a wash-and-brush-up in Albert's rooms for thirty-nine years. On over fourteen thousand occasions, a flunkey – and maybe more than one – traversed the staircases and the passages of Windsor or Balmoral or Osborne, carrying a steaming bowl of water that had been heated on a kitchen range in the depths of the palace.[53] The continuance of such nonsense had to be explained by something more than forgetfulness. But Davidson made a brave attempt:
...the explanation is not any fantastic or morbid idea about retaining memorials of the dead, still less, as was sometimes suggested, a sort of spiritualistic notion of their still haunting the rooms. It was simply this. She had at the time of these successive deaths given orders that nothing was to be moved or touched until she gave orders to that effect. Then these orders were not given. There was nothing to bring pressure to bear upon her, nothing to force her, so to speak, to make a decision, yes or no, by one particular day. The rooms were not wanted for any other purpose, and it rested therefore with her to take the initiative in directing any change to be made. I remember two of the old pages, Searle and another, speaking to me about it in the nicest way. ‘Such a pity Her Majesty does not give us orders to stop this; it makes people mock, and yet nobody likes to say anything to her about it.’
Such is, I am convinced, the simple explanation of what was sometimes ignorantly exaggerated by those who described it as a morbid craze. It is exactly one of the cases I have before referred to in which a sovereign suffers from having nobody on the appropriate terms with her for friendly remonstrance or even raillery of a kindly sort.[54]
There is something about this specious pleading which invokes the legendary marginal annotation to a controversial sermon that advised "Argument weak here. Shout." Surely somebody close to the Queen could have broached the subject with her, if only to suggest that her pertinacity placed the servants in an invidious position. Throughout the eighteen-sixties, Gerald Wellesley, the Dean of Windsor for whom she cherished the greatest affection, offered her spiritual counsel on the subject of grief as her sense of loss began to ease. His recommendation of a "settled mournful resignation" might well have been accompanied by a hint that it was time to return Albert's hats and gloves to a wardrobe.[55] Perhaps such suggestions were indeed made and indignantly rejected, a possibility that would undermine Davidson's already implausible claim that a busy monarch simply never got around to countermanding her own instructions. He was certainly prepared to press the Queen into unpalatable actions – for instance, persuading her to read Henry George's social reform manifesto, Poverty and Progress, "which she found difficult".[56] But perhaps the Queen's advisers kept their powder dry: why antagonise her over a harmless piece of nonsense, when it might one day be necessary to tackle her head-on over something that would matter a great deal?
John Brown Such was the 1884 court crisis over Queen Victoria's project to produce a memoir of her devoted Highland servant, John Brown, who had died the previous year, unmourned by almost everyone who had ever encountered him. (The Queen would eventually insist that she had not planned to publish a biography, but merely to compile a tribute for private circulation. This was a delusion that indicated how far out of touch she was with the ruthlessness of late-nineteenth century journalism, since her thoughts would quickly have leaked into the public domain. Private circulation of a memoir honouring John Brown would also have been pointless, since most of the likely recipients detested the man.) The Queen had just published More Leaves from the Journal of a Life in the Highlands, a second volume of generally harmless self-revelation, mostly about excursions from Balmoral. The volume was dedicated to "my loyal Highlanders" and "especially to the memory of my devoted personal attendant and faithful friend, John Brown". He was mentioned over one hundred times in the text, and his picture appeared in uplifting profile, a distinction that he shared with Noble, the Queen's collie. The generally polite reception of More Leaves encouraged her to attempt the specifically biographical sequel. However, courtiers well knew that the further away one moved from the royal presence, the less respectful was the response to her authorial pretensions. The project had to be stopped – but how?
Dean Davidson handled the John Brown issue, his first major crisis, with steely cunning.[57] He owed the Queen a letter of thanks for a presentation copy of More Leaves, which had fortuitously reached him while he was absent from Windsor, thus providing the opportunity both to read her thoughts with great care and to take soundings that would measure the real public response to her writing. The first half of a long missive laid on the flattery with the proverbial trowel: many of its uplifting stories in More Leaves would "have a powerful effect for good in more than one class of Society". He had also dug around, using "all such means as are available without direct enquiry" to explore "the actual reception with which the volume has been met among the thousands who are reading it". Here he revealed a shrewd awareness that the respectable broadsheets did not necessarily reflect the whole range of popular attitudes. "The ordinary upper class newspapers of course convey some picture of this public opinion, but, as Your Majesty is aware, it is usually possible to know pretty accurately beforehand what such newspapers will say, and they write under a conventional restraint which diminishes to some extent the value of their testimony." Publications that were fit for middle-class breakfast tables showed appropriate respect for the revelations of a Queen who was prepared to lift the veil on the magic of monarchy. Unfortunately, their deference was not typical. "I should be deceiving Your Majesty were I not to admit that there are, especially among the humbler classes, some, (perhaps it would be true to say many) who do not shew themselves worthy of these confidences, and whose spirit, judging by their published periodicals, is one of such unappreciative criticism as I should not desire your Majesty to see." Hence it was his "honest duty" to warn her against proceeding with the "further publication which Your Majesty has in contemplation".
Davidson's homily was not well received. The Queen indicated her surprise and made it clear that the project would go ahead. Dean Davidson wrote again, making clear that he would do everything in his power to persuade her to desist. The long-suffering Lady Ely was mobilised to instruct him to withdraw his opposition and to apologise for the offence he had caused. Davidson expressed regret at the pain his comments had inflicted, but he not only stood by his objections but raised the odds by offering to resign. His sweet assurance that his departure could be "quite easily arranged … without giving anyone a word of explanation" was, of course, a complete fantasy. The Queen was placed on the back foot: Davidson tactfully excused himself from preaching the Sunday sermon in St George's Chapel, and for two weeks Victoria had no contact with her previously tame Dean.
Meanwhile, Sir Henry Ponsonby had also refused his imprimatur. Davidson felt that the Private Secretary "lacked courage, and seldom, if ever, stood up bravely to oppose the Queen in things in which he thought she was wrong".[58] This condemnation did less than justice to Ponsonby's skills at managing a quirky employer. His basic technique was to signal dissent from her more eccentric pronouncements and then leave matters to resolve themselves. "When she insists that 2 and 2 make 5 I say that I cannot help thinking they make 4. She replies there may be some truth in what I say, but she knows they make 5. Thereupon I drop the discussion."[59] But that was not the end of the story, as Ponsonby's widow zestfully related to the diarist Arthur Benson. "Well, Ma'am," the Private Secretary would comment on one of Her Majesty's more bizarre decisions, "you are right no doubt, as I think you generally are". However, he would add that "there was this and this to be said" for an alternative point of view, tactfully adding that "they are considerations of a kind that generally prevail with you". The Queen was habitually unmoved: "I am quite decided; my mind is made up." Sir Henry would surrender with appropriate deference – "Very well, Ma'am" – well knowing that this was merely Round One. A week later, she would broach the subject again herself: Ponsonby had suggested "that there were some points on that matter which I should be likely to consider. I do not mean to change my mind, but I should like you just to note down what the points were." A memorandum in favour of Plan B would be duly submitted, and the original impracticable position silently abandoned.[60]
It is a measure of the John Brown biography crisis that even the deferential Ponsonby decided that two and two could not be allowed to add up to five for even the standard licensed period of regal obstinacy. Invited to comment on the first draft of the memoir, he adopted much the same approach that Davidson had built upon his appreciation of More Leaves, praising the Queen's own writing before expressing some concern that her proposed extracts from Brown's private diaries might be read out of context. Having softened up his recipient, he moved in for an unexpected kill: "as Sir Henry proceeds he becomes more bold and asks the Queen’s forgiveness if he expresses a doubt whether this record of Your Majesty’s innermost and most sacred feelings should be made public to the world". Some passages would "be misunderstood if read by strangers" while there were "expressions which will attract remarks of an unfavourable nature…. Sir Henry cannot help fearing that the feeling created by such a publication would become most distressing and painful to the Queen."[61] To be confronted, however deferentially, by Sir Henry Ponsonby was the equivalent of being bitten by Noble in a Scottish glen. Her Majesty tacitly backed off.
It remained for her to rehabilitate the Dean of Windsor. A few days after Davidson's unacknowledged offer to resign, she sent for him "on some matter of a totally different nature, and was more friendly than ever". Nothing further was ever said about the book. Davidson privately noted that the clash over the planned biography of John Brown "was only one, though the most serious, of several occasions of difference or remonstrance on my part towards her". Fortunately, the Queen possessed too much "sound common sense judgement" to bear grievances. "My belief is that she liked and trusted best those who occasionally incurred her wrath provided that she had reason to think their motives good."[62] For all her irritating eccentricities, Queen Victoria comes out of the story – or, at least, the second half of it – moderately well. But it was hardly an episode that the Archbishop felt able to share with the readers of The Times.
Eulogy and elegy? Randall Davidson's 1926 article in The Times may be primarily interpreted in the terms in which he offered it, as a eulogy for a misunderstood monarch. But it can be persuasively read in elegiac terms, one that was intended to celebrate not just Queen Victoria herself, but also – incidentally, perhaps, but by necessary extension – as a validation of his own career as one of her favoured clerics. There was a touch of nostalgia implicit in Davidson's evocation of the last years of the reign of the great Queen-Empress. But in 1926, most people in Britain were far more focused on the developing class confrontation that would explode into the General Strike two months later. The publication of the next instalment of the Queen's correspondence the very next day overtook his article as a news story, and it does not seem that his comments were reported elsewhere.[63] During Davidson's twilight years in the Primacy – he would retire in 1928 – he would experience two chastening setbacks as the political world of the nineteen-twenties refused to heed his calls first for industrial peace and then for liturgical flexibility. The second part of this study, "Randall Davidson, 1926-28: a Victorian in a changed world?", examines these episodes.
G.E. Buckle, editor of the second tranche of Queen Victoria's private correspondence, boldly confronted the ribald rumours about her reliance upon her Highland attendant, John Brown. The illustration was intended to make clear that he was her servant, and no more.
William Nicholson's unflattering portrait of Queen Victoria in 1897 explains why a young spectator at her funeral four years later recalled a square coffin.
ENDNOTES I owe thanks to Eamon Duffy, Andrew Jones and Jonathan Tompkins. For a glimpse of the monarch at work earlier in her reign, Ged Martin, ""How Queen Victoria named British Columbia – and Queensland": https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/354-naming-british-columbia.
[1] "Archbishop Davidson, the General Strike and the Revised Prayer Book, 1926-1928: a Victorian stranded out of his time?":
https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/421-archbishop-davidson-the-general-strike-and-the-revised-prayer-book-1926-1928
[2] The first instalment of the Queen's private papers, published in three volumes in 1907, had covered her life to the death of Prince Albert in 1861. Victoria was portrayed as an innocent young woman who escaped the clutches of manipulative courtiers and her first Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, to become a cog in the Victoria-and- partnership with her husband. This constituted a challenge for the editor of the second instalment, initially covering 1862 to 1878, years when the Queen was barely visible and much criticised: G.E. Buckle boldly insisted that "[w]herever she might be, the Queen was always at work". G.E. Buckle, ed., The Letters of Queen Victoria… second series, (3 vols, London, 1926-8), i, viii-xv, esp. xii-xiii [cited as QVL, ii/and volume number]. It has been argued in recent years that the editors of the first series, A.C. Benson and Lord Esher, distorted the evidence to make the Queen conform to the conventional image of a helpless female: Y.M. Ward, Censoring Queen Victoria ... London, 2014. Sir David Cannadine had previously challenged this simplification in "The last Hanoverian sovereign?...", in A.L. Beier et al., eds, The First Modern Society … (London, 1989), 127-66. By 1932, Buckle had completed the task of producing six volumes of Queen Victoria's correspondence, incidentally providing the ammunition for Frank Hardie's revisionist work, The Political Influence of Queen Victoria, 1861-1901, published that year. Recent reappraisals of the Queen have been usefully discussed in M. Taylor, "The Bicentenary of Queen Victoria", Journal of British Studies, lix, 2020. H. C. G. Matthew and K. D. Reynolds, "Victoria (1891-1901)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is comprehensive but a little bland. Biographies of the Queen continue to appear: A.N. Wilson, Victoria: a Life (London, 2014) is both broad and breezy.
[3] S. Mews, "Davidson, Randall Thomas, Baron Davidson of Lambeth (1848–1930)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Davidson's career was extensively (and sympathetically) documented in G.K.A. Bell, Randall Davidson… (3rd ed., Oxford, 1952, cf. 1st ed. 1935).
[4] Bell, Randall Davidson, 53-5.
[5] QVL,ii/iii, 365-9; Bell, Randall Davidson, 56; P. Guedalla, ed., The Queen and Mr Gladstone 1880-1898 (London, 1933), 220.
[6] QVL, ii/iii, 380-1.
[7] QVL, ii/iii, 375-8, 381-2.
[8] QVL, ii/iii, 386.
[9] QVL, ii/iii, 341-2.
[10] QVL, ii/iii, 372.
[11] QVL, ii/iii, 421; Bell, Randall Davidson, 64-6.
[12] R. Fulford, ed., Beloved Mama… (London, 1981), 139. The Queen here used 'want' in its strict meaning of 'lack' or 'need'.
[13] A.C. Benson, The Life of Edward White Benson… (abridged ed., London, 1901), 340; Bell, Randall Davidson, 383.
[14] Bell, Randall Davidson, 188-96. For Salisbury's views on episcopal creations, A. Roberts, Salisbury: Victorian Titan (London, 2000 ed., cf. 1st ed. 1999), 676-80. Salisbury assumed that any clergyman who wished to be made a bishop was unfit for the job.
[15] Bell, Randall Davidson, 204-6, 244-6.
[16] Princess Marie-Louise, My Memories of Six Reigns (London, 1957), 146.
[17] On Temple's appointment in 1896, the journalist W.T. Stead observed that his Archbishopric would produce "plenty of the fortiter in re, but the suaviter in modo will probably be to seek". Review of Reviews, n.d., quoted Sydney Daily Telegraph, 26 December 1896 (via Trove, the National Library of Australia's online newspaper archive). The story was told of Temple hiring a cab one evening to take him from the House of Lords to Fulham Palace, his official residence as bishop of London. On arrival, he tendered the exact legal fare of two shillings, bluntly refusing a request for a tip. In a reference to Temple's cathedral, the cabby angrily reproached him. "D'ye think St Paul, if he were alive, and were living here with £10,000 a year, would try and do a poor cabby by giving him only two shillings for a drive from Westminster to Fulham?" "No," replied Temple; "if St Paul were alive he would live at Lambeth Palace, where the fare from Westminster is only one shilling." Sydney Daily Telegraph, 6 February 1897. The fact that this anecdote was related (and widely published) as admiring evidence of Temple's character is revealing.
[18] For Temple's jealousy of his younger colleague, Bell, Randall Davidson, 288-9. After Benson's death, Davidson and Temple were widely reported as leading candidates for Canterbury. A provincial newspaper compared their merits: "there had been a general feeling that the Bishop of Winchester might be chosen because of his confidential relations with the Court and his association with the See of Canterbury as chaplain, and son-in-law of Archbishop Tait. However, Dr Randall Davidson is still a junior in the rank of Bishops, and in addition, his health at present would hardly be considered equal to the duties of the Primacy.... Those intimately connected with Bishop Temple declare that, though nearly 75, he is at least 10 years younger than his age, and full of indefatigable activity, energy, and ability, both mental and bodily, while they contend that for years he has been the most active force on the Bench of Bishops. His lordship's eyesight does not get worse, and is described as quite good enough for ordinary purposes. The peculiarity is he cannot see his steps clearly, and needs a little guidance, but he reads and writes as well as ever." Huddersfield Chronicle, 31 October 1896. It is a tribute to Temple's legendary toughness that he achieved so much (including presiding over a Lambeth Conference) but, by the time he turned eighty, it is hardly surprising that the Primacy became too much for him. A.C. Benson, son of his predecessor, recorded censorious clerical gossip: Temple "never answered letters, played patience half the day, and read schoolboy stories in bed". D. Newsome, On the Edge of Paradise… (London, 1980), 113. In August 1902, the outspoken London journal Truth predicted that Temple's "infirmities" would soon force him to resign, and that Davidson would be his successor, a story widely reported in the Australian press. A political diarist of the 1920s noted that the (undated) story that Temple had commented of Davidson's influence with Queen Victoria and his rapid rise in the Church: "My only doubt is whether so much political sagacity is altogether compatible with perfect piety." Diary of Ruth Lee, A. Clark, ed., 'A Good Innings'… (London, 1974), 236 (1923).
[19] G.E. Buckle, ed., The Letters of Queen Victoria… third series, iii (London, 1932), 98-101; Bell, Randall Davidson, 282-92, 383. Davidson's Third Class degree at Oxford was the result of a collapse in his health during his Final examinations.
[20] Dictionary of National Biography, Second Supplement (London, 1912), i, 546-610, esp. 557-8.
[21] Manchester Guardian Weekly, n.d., widely quoted in the Australian press, e.g. Adelaide Advertiser, 18 April 1925. (Quoted via Trove, the National Library of Australia's online newspaper archive.)
[22] F. Hardie, The Political Influence of Queen Victoria 1861-1901 (2nd ed., Oxford, 1938, cf. 1st ed., 1935), 16.
[23] The Times, 24 February 1926; S. Lee, Queen Victoria… (London, 1902), 321.
[24] L. Strachey, Queen Victoria… (London, 1921), 404; Bell, Randall Davidson, 84.
[25] Strachey, Queen Victoria, 372.
[26] In a third volume, covering 1879 to 1885, which was published two years later, Buckle was equal open in quoting the Queen's journal on the death of "my good, faithful Brown…. who did so much for my personal comfort. It is the loss not only of a servant, but of a real friend." QVL, ii/iii, 418. The editorial message was 'move along, nothing to see here' – but, of course, there was a great deal more that could have been said about her grief and her determination to cherish Brown's memory. However, Sir Henry Ponsonby insisted that Brown was "only a servant and nothing more – and what I suppose began as a joke has been perverted into a libel". G. St Aubyn, Victoria… (London, 1991), 362.
[27] The Times, 24 February 1926.
[28] In this instance, Davidson's gender-specific categorisation may be forgiven. Queen Victoria had used one of her most favoured ladies-in-waiting, the Marchioness of Ely, as a confidential messenger, but Lady Ely had been reliable precisely because she was politically innocent. She had no real successor among female courtiers after her resignation in 1889. She seems to have lived in terror of her mistress, and had died in 1890, K. D. Reynolds, "Loftus [née Hope-Vere], Jane, marchioness of Ely (1821–1890)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
[29] Bell, Randall Davidson, 1215.
[30] Asquith does not seem to have registered with his sovereign until he received his seals of office in 1892, when she described him as an "intelligent, rather good-looking man …. pleasant, straightforward, and sensible". His stock fell when he supported the bill to disestablish the Anglican Church in Wales, hinting that the measure represented the first stage of a wider assault on its privileges. Gladstone wearily commented that "Her Majesty’s studies have not yet carried her out of the delusive belief that she is still by law the 'head' of the Church of England." In his various memoirs, Asquith rarely referred to the Queen, and generally defined her by quoting from her published letters. J. A. Spender and C. Asquith, Life of Herbert Henry Asquith Lord Oxford And Asquith (2 vols, London, 1932), i, 78; R. Jenkins, Asquith (rev. ed., London, 1978, cf. 1st ed. 1964), 67.
[31] Bell, Randall Davidson, 1215-17.
[32] Bell, Randall Davidson, 164.
[33] The memorandum is quoted in segments, Bell, Randall Davidson, 77-86. The "twaddle" letter is at 83.
[34] A word of explanation may be needed for 21st-century readers. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, railway operators sold tickets printed on small pieces of stiff card, their shape and size making them suitable for purses and wallets, or even to be tucked into hatbands. From c. 1970, these began to be replaced by tickets that resembled airport boarding cards or bookmarks. Queen Victoria, who had first travelled by train in 1842, thought that tickets were printed on thin sheets of paper. Two days after the appearance of Davidson's article, The Times published a letter from an enthusiast who thought the story "inapt" as an example of the Queen's alleged eccentricity. "It was not necessary for her Majesty to be provided with a ticket when she travelled by train, but doubtless, when making her first railway journey, the usual procedure was explained to her". In the early days of rail travel, tickets were in fact printed on thin sheets of paper, "the small cardboard type now usual not being then in general use". The Times, 26 February 1926.
[35] Another clergyman, Cosmo Lang, recorded the impact that Queen Victoria made upon him when he saw at Osborne in 1898, "so small in stature, yet clothed with such unconscious but unmistakable dignity". J.G. Lockhart, Cosmo Gordon Lang (London, 1949), 130. Six-year old Nellie Newcombe, who watched the Queen's funeral from a window near Green Park, remembered that "it seemed such a little square coffin as the snow fell on it". (Information from J.J. Tompkins: Nicholson's sketch of the Queen in 1897 explains the allusion to a square coffin.)
[36] The episode probably dated from 1885, when a successor had to be found for the impressive James Fraser, bishop of Manchester. The "man" referred to was perhaps the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. Bell, Randall Davidson, 164. In 1920, when William Temple was appointed to Manchester, Davidson described the post as "one of the greatest in the Church of England or perhaps in the whole Church of Christ", which seems a touch exaggerated. F.A. Iremonger, William Temple… (London, 1948), 284.
[37] Arthur Balfour similarly belittled the Queen's judgement when he noted her concern for peace during the confrontation with France in the 1898 Fashoda incident. "She has the utmost horror of war, on the simple but sufficient ground that you cannot have war without a great many people being killed. No better reason can be given for this laudable sentiment, but she expresses it with singular naïveté." The bachelor Balfour was writing to one of his female correspondents. B.E.C. Dugdale, Arthur James Balfour 1848-1905, 274.
[38] The Times, 24 February 1926.
[39] A.C Benson and Esher, eds, The Letters of Queen Victoria … 1837-1861 (3 vols, London, 1907), iii, 298, 304; T. Martin, The Life of … the Prince Consort, iv (London, 1879), 284-7. For the Proclamation, A.B. Keith, ed., Speeches & Documents on Indian Policy … (2 vols, Oxford, 1922), I, 382-6.
[40] G. Cecil, Life of Robert, Marquis of Salisbury (3 vols, London, 1922-31), iii, 191 (punctuation amended). The Queen's gift was particularly appreciated by Private Humphrey of the 2nd Lancashire Regiment, whose life was saved when a Boer bullet lodged in the chocolate which he was carrying in his knapsack.
[41] Bell, Randall Davidson, 77-8.
[42] In 1895, Queen Victoria "regretfully" acknowledged that she had never ridden in a hansom cab. J. Lees-Milne, The Enigmatic Edwardian… (London, 1988 ed., cf. 1st ed. 1986), 119.
[43] QVL, ii/ii, 302 (20 January 1874),
[44] Bell, Randall Davidson, 85.
[45] Benson and Esher, eds, The Letters of Queen Victoria … 1837-1861, i, 14-16.
[46] George Davys was Dean of Chester from 1831 but, as he had apartments at Kensington and a daily teaching schedule, Chester Cathedral presumably managed without his supervision for most of the eighteen-thirties. He was fond of his charge if not over-impressed by her scholarly potential. Victoria's references to him in her girlish journals were formally respectful, but it is unlikely that her diary was a private document. Lord Melbourne made Davys bishop of Peterborough in 1839, without much enthusiasm but probably to spare the Queen the obligation of paying him a pension. Biographical dictionaries work hard to say anything about Davys at all. M.C. Curthoys, "Davys, George (1780–1864)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; E. Longford, Victoria R.I. (London, 1966 ed., cf. 1st ed. 1964), 37-8. Princess Victoria's comments on Davys as a preacher were quoted in Lord Esher's The Girlhood of Queen Victoria (2 vols, London, 1912): they are not very revealing.
[47] Bell, Randall Davidson, 83-4. The omissions, indicated by ellipses, are Bell's.
[48] R. Blake, Disraeli (London, 1969 ed., cf. 1st ed. 1966), 747.
[49] A.L. Kennedy, 'My dear Duchess' … (London, 1956), 188-9; Longford, Victoria R.I., 420. Lady Longford's biography established that the Queen did not engage in spiritualism.
[50] Bell, Randall Davidson, 83-4. The Queen subscribed to the standard Christian belief in reunion with loved-ones after death, but she seems to have assumed that her status would be respected in the afterlife. When one of her ladies-in-waiting diplomatically observed that "We will all meet in Abraham’s bosom", she indignantly responded: "I will not meet Abraham." Marie-Louise, My Memories of Six Reigns, 145.
[51] Kennedy, 'My dear Duchess', 188-9.
[52] Iremonger, William Temple, 285.
[53] In 1896, Reginald Brett (later Lord Esher) witnessed the delivery of a meal to the Queen by a personal servant accompanied by three footmen in scarlet livery. The repast was a cup of tea and a plate of sandwiches. M.V. Brett, ed., Journals and Letters of … Esher, i (London, 1934), 197-8.
[54] Bell, Randall Davidson, 84-5.
[55] Longford, Victoria R.I., 408-9.
[56] F.G. Bettany, Stewart Headlam… (London, 1926), 84.
[57] This account of the John Brown memoir affair is based on Longford, Victoria R.I., 569-71 and Bell, Randall Davidson, 92-5.
[58] Bell, Randall Davidson, 80.
[59] A. Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby… (London, 1943), 134-5.
[60] D. Newsome, On the Edge of Paradise… (London, 1980), 98-9.
[61] Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby, 146-7.
[62] Bell, Randall Davidson, 95. The fact that Davidson was a Scot (although from an Edinburgh professional background that contrasted with John Brown's Highland croft) may help to explain why the Queen tolerated a more abrasive approach from him. When A.C. Benson was commissioned to edit the first tranche of Queen Victoria's letters in 1903, Davidson gave him "much shrewd advice" about handling the Royal Family: "always defer to their opinion… They are indolent, he says – & if they once trust one’s discretion, one will have a free hand." (The quotation will appear in the [2025] forthcoming volume of extracts from A.C. Benson's diaries, edited by Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam. I am grateful to Professor Duffy for supplying it to me.) The comment probably refers primarily to Edward VII, who did not share his mother's enthusiasm for Davidson. But Queen Alexandra had a roguish fancy for the Archbishop, whom she had once persuaded to smoke a cigarette. Brett, ed., Journals and Letters of … Esher, i, 346.
[63] As I argue in https://www.gedmartin.net/martinalia-mainmenu-3/316-australian-new-zealand-and-canadian-newspapers-as-resources-for-research-in-modern-british-history, newspapers in the overseas Commonwealth filled their columns with recycled material from the British (and especially, London) press. I can find no example from Australia or New Zealand newspapers of either a reprint or even a report of Davidson's article in The Times.