QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

REFERENCES

The Queen's letters to her daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia, later Empress, are kept, bound in some sixty blue volumes, at Friedrichshof, the house near Frankfurt which the Empress built and named in honour of her husband. They are the property of the Kurhessische Hausstiftung. The copyright, as all Queen Victoria's letters, belongs to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Selections from these letters, about a third of them, were skilfully edited by Sir Roger Fulford and published in five volumes by Evans Brothers (later Bell & Hyman) between 1964 and 1981. A sixth volume, edited by Agatha Ramm, was published in 1990 by Alan Sutton.

The Queen's letters to King Leopold are to be found in the earlier of the nine volumes of The Letters of Queen Victoria: A Selection from Her Majesty's Correspondence, published in three series of three volumes each by John Murray between 1907 and 1932. The first series of these letters was edited by Arthur Christopher Benson and Viscount Esher, and the second and third series by George Earle Buckle. They contain some two million words, both from the Queen's letters and her journals, extending over five thousand pages; and even so they represent but a small proportion of the papers which the Queen methodically collected and had bound for preservation in the Royal Archives at Windsor.

Regrettably, not all of the Queen's papers survived intact. For, in fulfilment of a charge imposed upon her by her mother, Princess Beatrice transcribed passages from the journals and burned the originals when she had finished with them. She often, in fact, went further than this, destroying whole entries which she thought unsuitable for transcription and substantially altering numerous passages which she did transcribe. But fortunately, unknown to her, Lord Esher made a copy of the earlier journals so that from the time they were begun in 1832 to the death of the Prince Consort in 1861 a complete typed version of them does exist. Princess Beatrice was not alone responsible for the mutilation of Queen Victoria's papers. On the instructions of her brother, King Edward VII, letters from his mother to Lord Granville and papers concerning the Lady Flora Hastings affair were also destroyed, as were letters written by the Queen to Disraeli about various members of her family. The papers which survive, however, far outnumber those that were burned, and in addition to the material contained in the volumes mentioned above there are the letters from the Queen to the Empress Augusta in Further Letters of Queen Victoria from the archives of the House of Brandenburg-Prussia, edited by Hector Bolitho (Thornton Butterworth Ltd, 1938); the Queen's correspondence with Lady Canning in Virginia Surtees's Charlotte Canning (John Murray, 1972); extracts from her correspondence published in Monypenny and Buckle's six-volume Life of Benjamin Disraeli (John Murray, 1910-1920), in John Morley's Life of William Ewart Gladstone (three volumes, Macmillan, 1903), and in Arthur Ponsonby's Henry Ponsonby, Queen Victoria's Private Secretary (Macmillan, 1942). There are also entries from her journals published in the two volumes of Lord Esher's The Girlhood of Queen Victoria (John Murray, 1912) and in the five volumes of Theodore Martin's Life of the Prince Consort (1875-1880).

As well as at Windsor, there are large numbers of the Queen's papers at Broadlands. Brian Connell used a selection of these for his Regina v. Palmerston: The Correspondence Between Queen Victoria and Her Foreign and Prime Minister, 1837-1865 (Evans Brothers Ltd, 1962); and Richard Hough made use of the Queen's letters to a much loved grandchild in Advice to a Grand-daughter: Letters from Queen Victoria to Princess Victoria of Hesse (William Heinemann Ltd, 1975). To these editors and their publishers I am most grateful for permission to reprint extracts in this book.

Several excellent biographies have been published since the appearance of Lytton Strachey's Queen Victoria in 1921. Among the most recent are Elizabeth Longford's splendid Victoria RI (1964), the first volume of Cecil Woodham-Smith's regrettably unfinished Queen Victoria: Her Life and Times (1972), Stanley Weintraub's Victoria (1987), Giles St Aubyn's Queen Victoria: A Portrait (1991), Monica Chariot's Victoria: The Young Queen (1991) and Juliet Gardiner's Queen Victoria (1997).

For full bibliographical details see Sources, pp. 523-33.