PREFACE
No apology need be made for this book, though perhaps a reason for publishing it may be given. In these pages I have endeavoured to show Queen Victoria in her natural setting during her youth, hoping thereby to present her as a really human person. For twenty-five years at least the tendency among those who write has been so to overwhelm the late Queen with adulation that the ordinary reader turns from the subject in disgust. We are not fit for perfection; we believe that perfection is only an ideal—one which would probably become insufferable were it to degenerate into actuality—and when biographers, whose line, it is true, has been more or less laid down for them, depict Queen Victoria without fault and possessing almost preternatural wisdom and virtue, then there must be danger of unpopularity for the great Queen.
As a child my loyalty was upset by the “I will be good” story, and in my childish heart I despised the childish utterer of that sentence. The fault of this lay not in the fact that the little Princess made an impulsive resolution, but in the further fact that that story has been used as an example for other children by all adults who know it. When, at the second Jubilee, I wrote an anecdotal life of the Queen, I was amused at the literature through which I had to wade for my facts. Taken in the mass, it became a pæan of praise with every trace of real human lovableness erased. Of course, the person really to blame for this in the last resort was the Queen herself. For her one great fault was an exaggerated, indeed a morbid, belief in the infallibility, not of herself as a person, but of the Crown. Nothing angered her more than dissent from, or criticism of, the Crown. It was a curious position, for she practically was the Crown, and therefore the criticism of any public acts of hers, was doubly displeasing to her, as she considered that it was the highest dignity of the State, and not a mere person, which was belittled. Under such pressure—even though it was unspoken its influence was felt—writers wrote naturally that which would please, certainly that which would give no offence; and they were not so much untrue to fact as vigilant that all adverse matter and circumstance should remain unchronicled.
But those who talk of the late Queen do so in an increasing spirit of criticism, and this prompted me to endeavour to show the young Monarch as she really was, surrounded by the somewhat cruel limitations of her time—a girl frank, loving, truthful, and admirable in many ways, yet one in whom the seeds of an undue pride had been planted and most earnestly fostered by those responsible—in spite of which fact, however, a person much more lovable than any counsel of perfection could possibly have produced.
My materials have been gathered largely from contemporary journals and newspapers, and among the books to which I am indebted I must mention Lady Bloomfield’s “Reminiscences” for some delightful pictures of Queen Victoria’s life at the beginning of her reign. Mr. Sidney Lee’s admirable “Life” has also been of use; while the correspondence of Her Majesty was more helpful in amplifying or supporting information already gained than in really supplying fresh facts. The trenchant remarks of Charles Greville and the terse, lively, and often amusing criticisms of Thomas Creevy also could not be ignored by any writer about public people in the ’thirties who wished to get a personal impression.
Hampton-on-Thames,
November, 1911.