Private lives
Robert Blake
Disraeli's Reminiscences ed. Helen and Marvin Swartz (Hamish Hamilton £5.95)
Advice to a Grand-Daughter, Letters of Queen Victoria to Princess Victoria of Hesse ed. Richard Hough (Heinemann £4.90)
Queen Victoria and Benjamin Disraeli were as closely linked as any Sovereign and Prime Minister have ever been. It was, as has often been observed, a strange and incongruous friendship, between the representative of a monarchical family one thousand years old and a man whom the Queen herself described as "risen from the people." They had one thing in common. Each was totally unlike anyone else. To talk of "a man like Disraeli" or "a woman like Queen Victoria" would be absurd. Of course we are all of us unique, but some are more unique than others — and this distinguishing quality emerges from virtually any letter or memorandum that either of them ever penned. Who but the Queen could have written: Lastly let me add one word as your Godmother as well as Grandmama I may. It is not to neglect going to Church or to read some good and serious religious book, not materialistic and controversial ones, for they are very bad for everyone — but especially for young people.
And who but Disraeli could have written: Next day, Peel still lying on his couch, there was a great morning fête at Rosebank; a thatched cottage on the banks of the Thames surrounded by groves of the flowers which gave it a name; and where, to render the romantic simplicity complete, Lady Londonderry, in a colossal conservatory, condescended to make tea from a suite of golden pots and kettles.
These extracts are taken from two highly enjoyable books which, while they do not much alter our views of the Queen and her Prime Minister, add a certain colour and detail to the pictures that have come down to us. Disraeli's Reminiscences have never been
published in full, although his biographers have made much use of them and they have long been available to researchers among his papers at Hughenden Manor. His purpose in jotting down these notes with their comments on people and events is unknown. The editors suggest that he may have been stimulated into doing so because in 1860 two authors, independently engaged on biographical sketches of him, wrote to ask for information. Disraeli was courteous in his replies, though he warned one of them: "I am not an admirer of contemporary biography, and I dislike to be the subject of it." He may have been making notes for an autobiography which was never 'Written, or he may have been assembling material for a future biographer.
Whatever his purpose he seems to have started the work in the early 1860s when he was in opposition and his political fortunes were at a low ebb. In those enviable days Parliament only sat from February to August and the opposition front bench had plenty of time on their hands. In 1865, however, Palmerston died, and the political situation again became fluid. Disraeli plunged once more into the battle, and gave up his writing. The next time he was in opposition he preferred the novel to autobiography.
The editors rightly warn us against accepting Disraeli's accounts of this or that episode as being "true." He had a chronic inability to distinguish fact from fiction. He is no more reliable guide in this respect than the late Dick Crossman, to pick a recent example.
But unlike him he had a warmth, humour, wit and fundamental kindness which endears him.
He also had style and panache, and he was an acute observer of people and character. The editors do not attempt to point out the errors.
To do so would require as many words in footnotes as in text. They prefer to treat the Reminiscences as Disraeli's own vivid, highly personalised version of characters whom he knew and events in which he took part. Taken as such it is immense fun and very readable.
Queen Victoria's letters to her grand-daughter, Princess Victoria of Hesse (1863-1950) who married Prince Louis of Battenberg and was thus the mother of Earl Mountbatten and grandmother of the Duke of Edinburgh, were written for the most part after Disraeli's death in 1880. They have been made available for the first time by Lord Mountbatten. Insofar as one can judge without seeing the originals, Mr Richard Hough has edited them admirably and his comments are terse and shrewd. There is a pleasant foreword by Lady Brabourne. It is a pity that what we have is one-way traffic, and that there are no letters from the Princess to her grandmother; perhaps they have not survived.
Of Princess Victoria's three sisters, one married a reactionary Russian Grand Duke who was assassinated in 1905, the second married Prince Henry of Prussia and the third became the ill-fated Tsarina who perished with most of the Russian royal family, including elder sister, at Ekatarinburg in 1918. The Queen could have forseen none of these tragedies, but she was strongly opposed both to the Romanovs whom she regarded as too rich and extravagant, and the Hohenzollerns whom she considered to be .too stuffy and stuck-up. "Russia I could not wish for any of you," she wrote on one occasion. As for the old Empress of Germany she was capable de tout in the Queen's eyes, including successful pressure on the Almanach de Gotha to down-grade the Tecks and Battenbergs from Part I to Part II — "Where they now rubbed shoulders with lesser Dukes like Atholl and Beaufort, and even Counts like the loathed Bismarck," as Mr Hough puts it.
This book is an intriguing sidelight on the births, marriages and deaths (especially births in which the Queen took a keen obstetrical interest), of the gigantic royal cousinhood spread over Germany and much of Europe. It is an utterly vanished world, but it mattered in its day and deserves the attention of historians.
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