At this point, the King of England heard from his great-aunt Beatrice: ‘I congratulate you on the tremendous victory in Tunisia, which fills me with thankfulness and pride. It must be such a relief to you, and make you look with so much further confidence to the ultimate complete victory of our army’.¹

With the world in flames, and the future of the free world in the balance, the King could have been forgiven for not devoting too much attention to letters from an old lady, concerning the papers of his Victorian ancestors. That was her reason for writing. ‘Your daughters know that I have been engaged in translating my Father’s correspondence with his stepmother’.² War fever is a strange group psychosis. This old lady was translating some harmless letters from German at a time when there were British people, whipped up by the war, who felt it was unpatriotic to read Goethe or listen to Beethoven; and when even a more reasonable majority, for years after the Second World War, associated the very word ‘Germany’ not with that nation’s great poets, musicians and philosophers, but with the criminals of the Third Reich.

The old lady writing to George VI, a woman who was herself three quarters German, and who had been married to a German prince, was the King’s Great-aunt Beatrice, the youngest daughter of Prince Albert and Queen Victoria. She was spending the war at Brantridge Park, Balcombe, Sussex. She had been born in 1857, before there even was a country called Germany. Her father, Prince Albert, had come to London from Coburg, the small town in Thuringia where his father was Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. His aunt Victoire had come to London in 1818 as the bride of the Duke of Kent. Their daughter, Victoria, became Queen of England in 1837 and Albert’s bride in 1840.

Between them, Victoria and Albert had rescued the British monarchy from grave crisis. They had nine children, of whom Beatrice was the last. They established a dynasty. Almost from the beginning they were, as well as being real people in an actual historical context, semi-legendary figures. This was partly because they really did save the monarchy, and therefore established the kind of country Britain would become over the next century. Moreover, Albert was a person of prodigious gifts. Not only was he politically astute. He had administrative gifts which could have made him a great general. He was scientifically informed. He understood, and was enthused by, modern technology. He was a knowledgeable art collector. He was a musician – himself a composer. He designed his two houses, Balmoral in Aberdeenshire and Osborne House on the Isle of Wight. He was the father of a family. Unlike the royal personages and aristocrats they had known as they were growing up, Victoria and Albert were true to their marriage vows. So unusual was this, that they were considered ‘bourgeois’ or middle class for doing so. The solidity and moral rectitude of the Royal Family was something which greatly strengthened the standing of the monarchy in the Victorian age, as the middle classes – upper middle and lower middle – burgeoned in number and political strength.

It all came to an end, the idyll of Victoria and Albert’s marriage, when they were just forty-two years old. For the next forty years, Victoria was a widow. She still exercised a busy role as a constitutional monarch behind the scenes. Public shows of majesty, however, were not emotionally possible for her without her ‘Angel’, as she called him, without any irony, at her side. She was lonely, and increasingly dependent on her companions. The burden fell heaviest on the youngest child, ‘Baby’, as Beatrice was known by her mother. The Queen regarded it as a betrayal when Baby announced her desire to marry Prince Heinrich von Battenberg, and made it a condition of the marriage that the bridal pair should remain at the mother’s side. Baby was the Queen’s dogsbody for the last decades, and Victoria made Baby her literary executor.

This was a formidable task, since Queen Victoria was a prolific diarist and letter-writer, leaving behind written records which, it has been estimated, would fill a library of 700 volumes if ever printed and bound in book form. Victoria had been in love with Albert. There was no doubt about the Queen’s love for her Angel, and her love did not diminish with the years. She it was who had masterminded and, almost certainly, largely written the five-volume tribute The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort, which was co-authored by a Germanist called Sir Theodore Martin.

Victoria had the intensely shy person’s belief in, and use of, the written word as a means of self-expression. She was not someone whose instincts were to suppress or disguise the truth. From her girlhood onwards, she had poured out her impressions of life into copious journals and she was not one to hide her often changeable feelings. Beatrice, for reasons which do not have anything to do with us in this present study, was a very different person. She conceived it as her duty, when her mother died, to ‘edit’ Queen Victoria’s journals. Admittedly one reason for this was that the Queen’s handwriting was semi-legible, and Beatrice wrote a good clear hand. The chief reason, however, as she copied out the words her mother had written, was to discard passages likely to cause pain and embarrassment to herself and her siblings. Victoria had been candid in her often acerbic views of her children, and about the wider reaches of her and Albert’s dynasty – nine children, forty-two grandchildren and innumerable cousinage. She somehow always knew when one of them was getting into a scrape or making a fool of themselves, either politically or in the area of private scandal. Down it all went into her letters and diaries. We know this because Beatrice was unable to censor, for example, the copious correspondence Victoria had with her eldest child Vicky – eventually the German Empress. And there are still notebooks and other remains in the Royal Archives which give us some clue as to the sort of material which has been lost from the official, censored, Princess Beatrice-version of the journals which we can now all read online.³

Princess Beatrice probably acted from motives which she considered good ones. She was, however, the archivist’s dread. Those of us who take an interest in the past want the truth. Without all the material to hand – the damaging, as well as the adulatory, the good and the bad – the truth can never be told. Often it is painful and complicated. The art of biography, as demonstrated in its finest forms, is akin to that of Tragedy and the Novel. Writer and reader learn to take heed of the tragic flaws of our heroes and heroines. Queen Victoria is herself a case in point. She would have been the first to acknowledge her faults. Indeed, she was in fact the first, as is witnessed by a sad but revealing volume which escaped the attention of Princess Beatrice, which the Queen entitled Remarks, Conversations, Reflections,⁴ in which she chronicled her tempestuous relationships with her mother, her husband and her children, all of whom she loved in different ways, but with none of whom did she enjoy a relationship of pure sunshine.

When I came to write her biography, I found my admiration for Queen Victoria deepen, because she was a woman who confronted her demons and, on the whole, who overcame them, without the help of therapy, or even of much advice from friends. The often only just legible scribble was her outlet, her psychiatrist’s couch, her confessional, her secret beehive to which she disclosed her inmost heart. Not everyone liked her, and she was aware of that. Not everyone likes her to this day. It is hard, however, to dismiss her. She undertook a gigantic political and symbolic role when she was only a teenager – the Head of State of the most powerful economy in the world, the figurehead of what would become a global empire. She did her job throughout the next sixty years and she handed on the family business in good shape, when most of the European powers that seemed to be so powerful in 1901 (the year she died) were in fact great liners heading for the iceberg.

The success story of the British Royal Family was unquestionably to be laid at the door of Prince Albert, who, since his death in 1861, had been canonized. After he died, the Angel turned into a man who could do no wrong. His statues were to be seen all over the Empire. Albert Halls, Albert Squares, Albert Streets filled every Englishspeaking town, and many of the towns in India. He had, of course, been perfect. Baby really had been little more than a baby when he had died in 1861. She was just four. And the world in which she found herself during the Second World War was one which her father could not have envisaged in his most vivid nightmares. From his early years, as the young son of a German prince in a small Duchy in Thuringia, Albert and his brother had yearned for a united Germany. ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles!’ was not a song of triumph when it was written. It was a Hymn to Liberty. It was an aspiration for the benign unity of German-speaking peoples which had been the wish, not only of German-speakers, but of all enlightened Europeans since the Middle Ages. How that benign union was to be achieved, that was the question. It was the hope that one day, the scattered princedoms, duchies, city-states and electorates of the Holy Roman Empire (which had been disbanded by Napoleon), together with the Kingdom of Prussia and the Empire of Austro-Hungary, could fashion some new political entity. The peace and prosperity of Europe depended upon it. Albert and Victoria’s marriage plans for their children reflected their desire to infiltrate the autocracies of Russia and Prussia with their brand of political liberalism: not liberalism with a capital L, but a form of constitutional monarchy which allowed for parliaments to have their say, and for an enfranchised electorate to be represented in those parliaments. Neither Victoria nor Albert were democrats in the modern sense of the term, but they had the political nous to adapt the monarchy for a world where democracy in its varied forms would one day be adopted.

Albert would die in 1861. He would not live to see the decade in which all these dreams were ruined: Austria, which might have provided an umbrella of some sort for such states as Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, where Prince Albert was born, had been defeated in a painful, bloody war with Prussia. The north German kingdom had triumphed, and the new united German Empire, created after the defeat of France in the war of 1870, was a Germany dominated by a Prussia of militaristic ideology and autocratic political ideas. The journey from 1871, when the Germans triumphantly declared themselves an empire in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, had been escorted by the gods and Valkyries of war. It had seen the humiliation of the Germans in that same Hall of Mirrors, when France exacted its revenge in 1918–19. The reparations which the Germans were forced, in that mirrored hall, to pay to the French for the next decades led directly to the German desire for further reprisal, the rise of the extreme right and the tragedy of the Second World War, in which Britain was now engaged.

Beatrice’s war work, translating the letters of Prince Albert’s stepmother, opened a little window into a heart-rendingly different time, in which Germans and British intermarried, in which the Germans looked to Britain for political inspiration, and in which the British Royal Family – admittedly having to endure a certain degree of xenophobia from the press and the diehard politicians – was seen to be an entirely benign German import.

And the marriage of Victoria and Albert was, of course, seen as almost sacred; it was a picture of the ideal marriage, a pattern to be followed by all the good, decent families of the Empire. It would seem likely that Baby, who lived so close to her mother, and who had witnessed the canonization of her father, took this version of events entirely literally; all the more so because her own marriage had been far from idyllic, and her husband – Prince Henry of Battenberg as he was known in England – was not always faithful.

When she had finished her latest batch of translation work, she wrote to the librarian at Windsor asking if there was anything else which she might see.

Let the librarian at Windsor Castle of that time, O. F. Morshead, take up the tale, in a letter he dispatched, with some anxiety, to the King’s Private Secretary, Tommy Lascelles. He told Lascelles that Beatrice had been translating the letters of Queen Adelaide to the Queen of Prussia. ‘They were very dull, as it happens,’ Morshead confided. Then she had turned her attention to the Prince Consort’s letters to his stepmother. ‘The contents were quite innocuous.’ So far, so good. The aged Princess was kept busy, and no damage was being done to the Royal Archives. The librarian had then sent a box down to Surrey, labelled ‘Diary &c. Prince Consort’s notes on the birth of the Royal Children’.

The Prince’s handwriting, which in youth had been so neat, and which still could be neat when writing to statesmen, has become, in these passionately angry, buttoned-up expressions of marital hate, sprawling. His hand was shaking as he wrote. Victoria had every opportunity in her lifetime to destroy these letters from her husband, which also contain, among their sentences of cold reproach, attempts at reconciliations, and expressions of joy when rapprochements are achieved. What she left behind to be read by posterity was a record of a marriage which was extremely difficult. Both she and her husband were strong characters, and they were often at odds, especially in the last decade of their lives together when she hated the loss of control and the crippling depression which the repeated experience of...