Queen Victoria's Mysterious Daughter 4.26.16

good evening everyone can you hear me thank you for coming we're a little darker this evening so that you can see the presentation a little better um I'd like to welcome you to the Hudson library and Historical Society if you've not been here before but most of you I think have been I want to take a moment and remind you about these awful things the awful terrible wonderful things please turn them off or put them to me it's a courtesy to our speaker into the other guests here please remember that the Linda Dell is in the entry way I should come in they will be selling Lucinda's books both there currently and later after the program in the rotunda we will have a signing and a little reception for this into where you're welcome to interact with her or have some coffee and perhaps purchase the book or just visit with her what else oh I need to tell you about forthcoming programs they're all in these little blue brochures in the back in case you haven't gotten them I shouldn't say they're all there I believe Alex are they through May in the brochure yes we're adding at least I know that you upcoming June and July programs are hopefully I hope you agree with me as wonderful as our immediate past programs have been and we have some tremendous speakers coming in the future so please take a minute and pick up a brochure and if you're interested in the program either call or register online for the program so we have an idea of how many people are coming I need to tell you about two quick programs tomorrow night we're hosting when you get this right I got to get to the right date yeah forgive me not tomorrow night tomorrow night is Joanna O'Connor many of you might be familiar she used to be a Plain Dealer reporter and she has written a new book and it's I'm told a wonderful amazing book to read however I have to tell you it's a very heavy topic I'm not sure if you know or not but Joanna had been sexually assaulted in Cleveland and then she spent three years of her life tracking down the person that committed the crime against her and the book is about that journey of hers to discover and confront the person that I saw that her so she is coming tomorrow to discuss that later in the week we have the world stage literary concert and they will be here and they are going to talk about the legacy of a very familiar poet hopefully to many of you Emily Dickinson that's on April 28 and then in the first part of May the other program we were telling people about is Peggy Orenstein Peggy it currently is on the New York Times bestsellers list she is a well known Women's Studies scholar her newest book out is about girls and sex and actually it's a very modern take on the subject and she interviews women of all ages of all sorts about how they feel about sex and their experiences and then she reports on what everybody says from the age of 14 until the age of 80 she interviewed women and she got some very surprising comments so she is coming and we're very fortunate to have a New York Times bestsellers list author coming all that being said please take a minute and look at the programs they're phenomenal I hope at least I try to make sure on my little part of the world that they are thank you again for coming and now I get to tell you about my wonderful dinner partner I had a delightful dinner with this lady over here Lucinda Hawksley many of you may know or may not know that she is the third or fourth three great granddaughters of three she is the third great-granddaughter of a certain mr. Dickens stand up so they can see your sweater this young lady has needed this sweater with Charles Dickens like to have someone walking around with my great-great-grandfather on their chest Lucinda is deeply involved in the Dickens fellowship listen is an author of multiple books both the nonfiction and she just told me at dinner she has written a young adult fiction book now - she also teaches two American students that visit London frequently about literature and art and she lives in London she is our second international speaker and many of you are some of you may have knowledge that Tracy Chevalier has been to Hudson a couple of times and actually wrote about Hudson briefly in one of her books and Lucinda and Tracy are actually very good friends so we're kind of delighted that our two international speakers are good friends so if she says some strange words like Laurie or other British words cut it a little slack now I have to tell you about this program it's about Princess Louise and yes I did read the book I was delighted to read the book I found the book to be a wonderful book please read it if you get the opportunity but I will make note of the fact that here at the Hudson library and Historical Society we tend to concentrate on American history in case you haven't noticed in my 18 years here at the library this is the first program we have done about an international subject and we have a young lady standing in the back of the room that's our reference librarian Alexandra Coley say hi Alex and in the time that I have known Alex she has been amazingly what do I want to say she knows the Royal fan like like nobody else I know you asked her who the great-great great-great-great granddaughter of Victoria is and she can tell you so I was delighted to finally find a book about the royal family that we could share with olive Hudson and Alex could also participate in so it's partially because it was such a great book and partially because we had a large fan of the royal family here without further ado I'm gonna let Lucinda tell you all about Princess Louise was a very fascinating character in history and both in North America and in Great Britain so without further ado please welcome Lucinda Hawksley now I just have to make sure that my phone is off because I suddenly had that awful feeling that maybe it wasn't it is I actually had a phone once when I was giving a talk in California and I turned it off and the microphone turned it on again and one of my friends rang me in the middle it was really embarrassing so now I'm totally paranoid about phones no one believed me that I had actually turned it off so I'm going to talk to you today about this woman and this by the way is her one of her self-portraits so you can see that she really was a great sculptor now I called this talk the mystery of Princess Louise which was the English book title I decided to stick with it for this one because whenever I talk about Princess Louise somebody says oh so you're like a detective and that's really what it felt like writing this book became the most fascinating journey it's the third of my biographies on female artists but this is the one in which I had to absolutely become Miss Marple or actual Poirot she was a fascinating woman and her life has been obscured very deliberately by whoever over the years now I had three years as a deadline to write this book and that had to be extended to six years that's how difficult she was to track down despite the fact that she was the daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and of course everything should have been out there in the public domain now the reason that I wanted to write about her is I I mentioned she was the third of my biographies this is because my first biography on Lizzie Sybil Princess Louise popped up in the research after Lucy littles death as she committed suicide Dante was Letty her husband was grieving everybody considered him quite mad and she had this princess went to his him in his studio and I thought well that's interesting when most people were shunning him who was this princess who was popping along and making sure Rosetti was okay my second biography was of Kate karijini who would be much better known today if she painted under her maiden name of Katie Dickens and she was also friends with many many great artists then Princess Louise popped up again which is when I decided to look into who she was now there was a biography of her in the 1980s but when I read this biography good though it was it didn't give me all the information of the rumors the things that I've been reading about these possible scandals and I decided that she needed a new biography a biography that would really tell the real story and interestingly two older more seasoned wiser who knows authors both fed to me within a few months when I told them what I was working on I tried to do her 10 years 20 years whatever ago you'll just come up against a brick wall I just gave up and this is what I discovered but I didn't give up so I'm going to start with reading an excerpt from a letter written by Princess Louise's mother and this was written when Louise was 20 in 1868 and it's written by Queen Victoria to her eldest daughter so Louise's eldest sister princess Vicky the Princess Royal but at this point living in Prussia now Germany married to the future Emperor of Prussia and Queen Victoria wrote to her eldest daughter about Louise she has in some ways clever and she certainly has great taste and great talent for art but she is very odd dreadfully contradictory very indiscreet and from that making mischief constantly they had a difficult relationship and Louise was certainly indiscreet her mother liked everybody to pander to her I do apologize now to any huge fans in the room of Queen Victoria I'm afraid you're going to find this talk a little bit upsetting she was a very different woman Queen Victoria from the one I learned about at school and in the history books and anybody who follows me on Twitter will know that I rant about her fairly regularly and then get trolled by fans of Queen Victoria Supreme Victoria and Prince Albert have nine children and Louise was the sixth child and the fourth daughter she was the youngest daughter until the very last baby came along because Arthur Louise there were two more sons and then Princess Beatrice now the arrival of Princess Beatrice was interesting and difficult for all of the other royal children because Princess Beatrice the very last baby was the first time but Queen Victoria really seems to have felt genuine maternal feelings on her very last child and so Princess Beatrice was extremely spoiled and most of the other children truly resented her particularly Louise and Bertie the eldest son the future Edward the seventh now this is probably an image that you may not have seen before of Queen Victoria and her husband now Queen Victoria came to the throne roller unexpectedly and just a quick run-through of British history I'm sure most of you know this but just in case you don't to explain how she came to the throne because it's quite an interesting journey so we had had the Hanoverians arrive the Hanoverian Kings the George's so George the first came over to England spoke no English wasn't the slightest bit interested in England at all george ii learned from english george the 3rd did learn english but was deemed mad so half the time people couldn't understand him and then george the fourth his son earlier known as the prince regent because he was really the king in Waiting when his father was going through periods of what were called insanity the prince regent would have to be the king in his stead and then he became the king finally King George the fourth by which point he was widely known to be an absolute rake and a dandy and very very dissolute and then he had one daughter he got married he had one daughter Princess Charlotte and she was the great new hope for the country there was sick of all these dissolute Hanoverian Kings Princess Charlotte the beautiful young heir to the throne everybody a daughter she married Leopold Belgian Prince who would later become the king of the Belgians and this was really exciting and then she happens having a baby which was even more exciting unfortunately Princess Charlotte died in child as did her baby son and suddenly the heir to the throne was gone he had no other legitimate children Princess Charlotte was the only one so the throne passed yet again to another of a dissolute Hanoverian princes he became King William the fourth and everybody knew that King William the fourth had 10 children the problem was they were all ITER's illegitimate with an actress and he and his wife had multiple pregnancies and babies but none of them survived and so Queen Victoria the young Princess Victoria the daughter of of George and Williams brother who died when she was a baby was suddenly thrust into the spotlight William was determined that he had to live although he was very ill beyond his nieces 18th birthday he only just made it so when she came to the throne she was hugely popular and I believed when I began researching this book that she was popular throughout to her reign because in Britain we have so many statues of Queen Victoria she's described as the mother of the nation and it was quite a surprise to me to discover that the popularity of Queen Victoria was huge at this time in the 1840s when she's here pictured dancing with her young husband her handsome husband a love marriage she fell in love with him and proposed to him this was all a wonderful fairy tale but she became extremely unpopular in the 1860s and 70s and it was only with her Jubilees in 1887 and 1897 that her popularity came back and it's really fascinating for me having recently lived through the present Queens to Jubilees 2002 2012 in Britain the royal family had an all-time low in the late 90s and early 2000s and exactly what happened with Queen Victoria has happened in Britain today so it was really interesting writing the book through that period but here you see her as her public early knew her and this is when Princess Louise was about to be born the Queen and Prince Albert had this wonderful fairytale wedding they they went on to have nine children and everything was going swimmingly except that she didn't like having children she found pregnancies awful childbirth was agonizing every time poor woman and she thought babies terribly ugly especially when being when they were when they were being washed when they were being bathed she thought they were hideous and she described the way that they moved as that awful spasms she thought they were they were ugly frog-like movements the prettiest baby is hideous when washed she was saying she didn't like any of them until she got to Princess Beatrice and she resented them to be honest to Queen Victoria children with a very very annoying result of a good relationship with her husband and she just wasn't interested in the production of them except for the fun bit now this is possibly meant to be Princess Louise this is an illustration of the time it's 1848 the year the Princess Louise was born welcome Royal stranger this was the kind of depiction that went into Illustrated magazines and newspapers this was how the people knew their royal family and so they were a myth Photography was in its infancy at this stage it wasn't in newspapers and everybody learned about the royal family from these kind of pictures but the real the reality of their life was really not so simple now some of you may recognize this you may have been there this is Buckingham Palace previously known as Buckingham house it's nothing like as lavish the other palaces and castles this was the Duke of Buckingham home and Queen Victoria was the first monarch to live in it as a monarch and Prince Albert and she raised their family here but it was not an ideal place being right in the heart of London very easily accessible and in 1848 the year that Princess Louise was born it was the time of revolution all over Europe small revolutions were taking place and royal families or aristocratic families were being deposed at the time that Princess Louise was born it was said that Buckingham Palace was almost bursting at the seams the children were sleeping not in the nurseries but in the servants bedrooms this is because Buckingham Palace was full of visiting Royals people who had fled their own countries or principalities often with only what they could carry applying for asylum to Queen Victoria because they were all related of course all the royal families of Europe because there was so many revolutions going on there were other revolutions too in Britain one of them Princess Louise would become a big part of the artistic revolution known as the pre-raphaelites they formed in 1848 by the late 1860's when Princess Louise knew them they were extremely well known they were very wealthy they were part of the art establishment but in 1848 there was symptomatic of all the terrifying things that were happening in Britain and what the Parliament feared was going to lead to a republic the other revolution of 1848 was chart ISM this had been going on since the 1830s its heartland was in Manchester in the north of England and just when Princess Louise was born the Chartists were preparing indeed were already on their way to London to give a petition to the Prime Minister and the Duke of Wellington was so terrified that the royal family was going to be murdered that he was convinced the Chartists were going to be these violent rioters and they were going to break into Buckingham Palace and kill the royal family in their beds but even though the Queen had just had another terribly difficult birth for which I might add she did not forgive Princess Louise ever she was constantly making reference to her awful birth and they all had to leave Buckingham Palace when Louise was three weeks old and they went to the Isle of Wight now I don't know if any of you have been lucky enough to go to the Isle of Wight an island off the south coast of England part a part of England and this is a section of Osborne House is too big to get the whole thing in and I wanted to show you the Italianate gardens now Prince Albert fell in love with this view from Oz born house he felt it was like the view of the Bay of Naples it's on an island is a small island it's very pretty the climate at this time of year which is exactly when they were down there mid April is not the warmest and this beautiful house that you see here and this kind of Italian Renaissance style Palace that wasn't finished yet so they literally moved into a building site and Queen Victoria maintained throughout Louise's life that the reason Princess Louise was so difficult so naughty so mischievous was because she was born 18:48 the year of revolution now this is princess Louise's allotment Osborne house is now a historic home open to the public and it was given to the nation in fact by King Edward the seventh and that Princess Louise his older brother son of Victoria and Albert when he became king he gave it to the nation and for some time it was used as a convalescent home for soldiers particularly in the war now all of the children's allotments were kept and Prince Albert was a truly fascinating man one of the things that he did was to insist that his children were extremely well educated so his sons and daughters learned how to work the land they they grew fruit flowers vegetables and they were bought by the Royal kitchens and the children had to learn budgeting they had to learn - they went out and bought their own seeds and then worked out how much profit they made and this was their pocket money and they also had the world's most fabulous Wendy house now you can actually walk around inside this is the Swiss Cottage which Prince Albert had built in the grounds but everything is child sized so you can walk around but you're stooping occasionally to get through doorways and there's a fully working kitchen where all of the princesses were taught how to cook how to bake and throughout Princess Louise's life people were amazed that she would she would cook for her own dinner parties quite often she would have grand parties then somebody would praise the the apricot tart that was one of her special recipes or the pate or whichever dish it was and quite often she would say I am so pleased you like that one that was my contribution and they couldn't believe they thought oh she must have told the cook to make it no she was in the kitchen cooking herself all of the royal princesses knew how to sew on buttons how to mend how to iron how to do domestic tasks this was because Prince Albert believed that they all had to be in touch with the people he was fully aware that the government was very frightened of a revolution of a republic and he wanted all of his children to be able to have that common touch and he succeeded they also all learned basic medical kind of nursing skills and indeed Princess Louise spent much of her childhood and teenage years seeing her younger brother Prince Leopold who was haemophiliac haemophilia was very little understood and it was not diagnosed until Leopold was about five or six and Princess Louise was his absolute preferred nurse princess his Alice and Vicky both of who married Germans or Prussians as they were at the time both ended up becoming nursing pioneers in their adopted country and in fact Alice was particularly interesting in that she really started something of a nursing revolution almost all the princesses apart from Beatrice were very interested in women's rights Louise being the most notable suffrage campaigner totally against Queen Victoria's will Queen Victoria did not believe in suffragists as they were known then she was totally against any other women having power and she was very angry that she produced all these incredibly independent forward-thinking daughters largely because of the fact that Prince Albert was you know so forward-thinking by the way the chap you can see that I don't know who he is but there was always someone there when I was trying to take the photograph but I quite like the fact that he gives you a sense of scale that you can see it was this really was a Wendy house but it was no full-size the boys learned things like woodworking and all of them learned National Natural Sciences so inside the swiss cottage there's that it's full museum where all the there were all children pressed flowers and leaves collected fossils all those kind of things which they kept inside there just to give you a quick rundown of the children we've got Vicki the Princess Royal Victoria she was born in 1840 very you know nine months after her parents marriage really Albert Edward who would later become Edward the seventh named Albert after his father and Queen Victoria was convinced that Albert would become a British royal name he was determined not to mainly to thwart his mother so when he became king he was firmly Edward the seventh he was known in the family as Bertie and he was extremely close to Princess Louise they were real allies because they both felt that they were the most despised by their mother Bertie was and by the way only grew up he wasn't very intelligent he possibly had some form of learning difficulty that was never diagnosed Vicki however exceptionally bright very very clever and Burt he had to be told by a rather surprised tutor or governor as the the male equivalent of a governess was known but Bertie had to be told that he was going to be king because he just assumed that Vicki would be queen just as his mother was and his teacher was rather shocked that Bertie didn't realize he had to be prepared to be king one day after Bertie came Alice who he was also very close to but when she moved to Germany he grew even closer to Louise she was born in 1843 and she would marry again a Russian Russian Prince Louis the fourth of hesse-darmstadt and of their seven children one of their daughters was the czarina of Russia Alix the czarina of Russia then comes Alfred he married Marie of Russia a very very unhappy marriage and he sadly became an alcoholic he was extremely close to Louise Louise was very close to all of her brothers actually much more than her sisters then you have Helena known in the family as lankan most of them had German diminutives for their names and in fact it might surprise you to know that their first language was German Prince Albert of course being German and Queen Victoria was half German her mother was German and her father was of course German by heritage Queen Victoria was passionate about Germany and she got really angry when her children spoke to each other in English Louise was the sixth child Hellena by the way it was deemed by Queen Victoria far too ugly to find a husband and she kept saying these old shoes you know she's got a face like a horse how could I possibly marry off this don't you know how could I possibly marry off this princess with a huge dowry I mean terribly difficult and when she did in fact Mary as she married a Danish Prince called Christian and Queen Victoria insisted that they had to stay living in Britain and they had to stay very close to Windsor Castle so that she could always rely on her Lena to be with her Louise was the sixth child and I'll tell you more about her life later on Arthur then came next also very close to Louise then came Leopold that the child who was haemophiliac and then the last baby Beatrice who was born in 1857 this lithograph was made in the year that Princess Louise was born and it shows idealized image of the royal family and this was what most people saw in their minds when they thought about the royal family now Louise and her siblings grew up knowing that they were living a life of privilege but it was also a life of great danger and Prince Albert was very very aware of this he was terrified of anything happening to his children and this was not just paranoia as you may be aware Queen Victoria had eight assassination attempts made on her throughout her life seven is normally recognized but actually there was a kind of a more recent document suggest that there was a very serious eighth attempt made and Prince Albert kept the keys to the Royal nursery in his possession at all times he was so scared that some kind of Nutter would get into the into Buckingham Palace and get access to the children and this is because there were regular death threats made against him and his wife and the children's they grew up knowing that this was a precarious time and I think that most people today don't realize just how much anger there was directed against the royal family one of the particular fears throughout Princess Louise's life and particularly when she was living in North America was the Fenian risk the Fenians then became the IRA and this was because of all the political problems between Britain and Ireland and always there was a risk of the royal family being targeted in fact one of her brothers was shot in Australia by Athenian he did survive but this was something they grew up always aware of now this is taken on the terrace at Osborne House this is when Prince Albert is still alive and if you can see her face here this is Princess Louise I don't know how well you can see it in this which is in little white bonnet and she's looking over her mother's shoulder almost wistfully at baby Beatrice who has just become the youngest princess so princess Louise is now not even the youngest daughter she's just an awkward middle child and I think it was this quite a poignant image because she's almost kind of going oh she has taken my place this is Princess Louise seated with Princess Helena the closest sister in age to her of all her sisters Helaine olen him was the closest to Princess Louise and if the interest that here you see Princess Louise sketching now it wasn't unusual to be a good artist in Queen Victoria's family Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were both excellent artists princess Vicky was also really good so when Princess Louise was was seemed to be a very good artist that was nothing unusual she really had to stand to help hugely to be accepted as an artist in Queen Victoria's eyes because they were all so good at it and when Princess Louise decided at a very young age that she wanted to be a sculptor Queen Victoria was not happy because sculpting was a very masculine occupation and now it took a long time for Princess Louise to be accepted in the art form that she chose but but it did happen eventually now here you see Queen Victoria and Prince Albert they were photographed in 1861 just a few months before he died now he died of what was believed at the time to be typhoid fever recent research by medical historians has been suggesting that he could have died of something else there are various different schools of thought it's very hard to know we won't ever know for certain but recently medical historians have suggested that perhaps he had stomach cancer or or colon cancer he could perhaps have had Crohn's disease there are various other things that could have been all that we know is that he had been ill for a very long time now when he did die in December of 1861 Louise was 13 years old and not only did she lose her father very dramatically and traumatically and her mother closed herself off from everybody except Beatrice and the other great sadness in the family was the huge rift as a result between the Queen and her eldest son Bertie the heir to the throne just before Albert died he had been to visit his son who was in the army and he had but the reason they had been to visit him was it had got into the newspapers that Bertie had lost his virginity and not only had this got into the newspapers but it had been with an actress about you didn't realize that nineteenth-century newspapers were just as scandalous as newspapers today now the Queen and Prince Albert might have had an extremely active sex life but they were extremely loyal and they both were fervently again any kind of adultery for Prince Albert this was particularly poignant his father had been repeatedly unfaithful and abusive to his mother his mother had then taken a lover perhaps in refuge and as a result was shunned he knew full well the results of a man's infidelities his brother was also absolutely debauched in Albert's mind and so they were horrified at this story about their son now Albert had been to visit Bertie they had had a long talk it was November it was raining and cold and they went walking for a long time Queen Victoria despite all of the medical evidence telling her that her husband had died of typhoid fever refused to believe it she told everybody that her eldest son had killed his father by his behavior she refused to speak to Bertie and she wrote to Vicki in Prussia saying tell everybody at the court that your brother killed your father as you can imagine Louise was traumatized by this her mother would not speak to her brother in fact when she heard the news of her husband's death Queen Victoria raced to the nursery picked up Princess Beatrice and ran back to her bedroom where she dressed her daughter in her husband's clothing so that she smelt like Albert and the lay down and slept beside her and this went on for a long time you can understand that she was suffering from severe depression grief this was not understood at the time had she not been queen she would almost certainly have ended up in an asylum women were seen as insane for any form of depression at the time and this really within a couple of years is what turned the public tide against Queen Victoria she was initially sympathized with this was terrible her husband had died young but when she continued to mourn for years and years she wore black widows weaves for 40 years people were angry most people in Victorian Britain suffered many traumatic young deaths one in five children in Britain died before their fifth birthday in the most populous cities London Birmingham Manchester Glasgow one in three children died this was just a fact of life the Queen had nine children still alive one may have been very ill but he was alive and felt that the queen was self-indulgent in her grief and this is really when the tide starts to turn against the Queen so by the late 1860's she's not nearly as popular as I and I'm sure many other people imagined that she was throughout her reign now the Queen wanted all of her family to go into extended mourning and was very angry if any of them didn't this is Princess Louise a year after her father's death actually defying her mother by not wearing full mourning for this kind of photo shoot she's got the the black accents but she's not wearing full black and Princess Louise less there was 13 when her father died 14 when this picture was taken and she was already being seen as a great beauty she was always described as the most beautiful of the princesses which it has to be said in the Queen Victoria's family wasn't that hard as we said but she she was seen as the great beauty of the time and she was also from a very early age a fashion icon she was known to be artistic and by the time she got to her late teens she was the it girl she was the poster girl for the royal family most of her sisters got married off quite young princess Vicky was actually engaged at 16 although the Queen would not let her marry so young and Queen Princess Louise was always seen as the bohemian chic a slightly naughty one she was desperate to live a normal life much of her life was spent attempting not to be royal now when she was seventeen four years after her father's death she should have had her coming-out dance the ball that all the debutantes let alone princesses would have and she was denied that by Queen Victoria the Queen basically said you know she the ballroom at Windsor Castle had been closed off for four years since Albert died and she wasn't prepared to open it up for her daughter she could be confirmed instead and wherever a nice dress and that would be it and that was the first time in the Princess Louise suffered from what was seen as a nervous I wasn't called a nervous breakdown but an attack of nerves it would probably be seen as its severe stress and possibly depression today but from that time onwards she went through these regular periods where she was really debilitated and she seems to have suffered a great deal from depression not surprisingly been given the lack of love from her very early on the ladies waiting found Princess Louise are quite a sad figure and there's very one very poignant letter from her at around this time from a lady-in-waiting saying poor Princess Louise is so desperate for affection that any sign of someone paying attention to her is just lapped up right from the start she was just longing for someone to take notice of her now this is the royal wedding group of 1863 this is Queen Victoria with her family and as you can see in the middle there this is the boss - Prince Albert in the middle so he has to be at every royal occasion if you could see the Queen's face which unfortunately you can't but here she is you know it looks more like a funeral than a wedding this is the marriage of Bertie to Princess Alex from Denmark who Princess Alexandra and the daughter of the king and queen of Denmark and she was wonderful to Louise they were really close when Princess Alex arrived this is the first time that Louise had a really great relationship with one of her sisters as it were her sister-in-law rather than her sisters her actual sisters were normally crossed with Louise she was very naughty she was always causing trouble and princess Alex just was kind to her and she couldn't believe how much Princess Louise responded by somebody who Alex had arrived didn't really know anyone was speaking a totally other language was bewildered by the fact that she'd come to England and was being expected to speak German and just found life really tough and Princess Louise was longing to be friends and they were very close throughout their lives Prince birtija the Prince of Wales was finally trying to please his mother by making a good marriage he was incredibly unfaithful throughout his marriage but in some ways it was a good marriage and Alex was extremely popular this is Princess Louise on the right and Hellena on the left with Prince Arthur sat next to them and this is the opening of the Royal Infirmary now here as you can see the princesses are dressed identically but by this time by the time she's in her late teens Princess Louise is starting to set the fashion here of course it's a very formal occasion but she was renowned for wearing what was described then as pre-raphaelites she was part of the aesthetic group of artists she would wear her hair long when she was permitted to very scandalous women always had to put their hair up it was seen as much too sexual to have your hair down once you were out of the schoolroom and that one pointed around this time a local family was invited to Osborne house on the Isle of Wight to meet some of the princesses and the daughters arrived all of a flutter with excitement and in came Beatrice in Hellena and they were really disappointed they wrote in their diaries that these were two very didn't use the word Audi but something along those lines very dowdy princesses they weren't like princesses and then Princess Louise came in dressed completely differently very bohemian and wearing a beatin silver cross around her neck that she'd made herself and this was what princesses were meant to be like she saved the royal family's opinion in the eyes of this family and as you can see her hair this is a hand tinted photograph looking rather startled I think it's not the most flattering of images and this is the kind of image that was taken by photographers celebrities at the time were were given free photo sessions where they could take as many of these images as they wanted but they were giving the photographers permission to sell these images on and this is just like people today would buy posters of their favorite pop band or their favorite actor in a film so writers actors celebrities such as princesses were pictures were bought of them and put on people's walls here you see Queen Victoria and Princess Louise and also Princess Beatrice is there but quite obscured riding out in a carriage this is just after the marriage of Princess Helena and Princess Louise would have been feeling rather glum at this point she and Helena had been fairly close but the biggest problem for all of the princesses was their older sister getting married this is because Queen Victoria insisted that she needed to have one of her daughters as her her right-hand woman really um she needed them to be her secretary she had many personal secretaries but she needed one of her George daughters always with her to deal with all the personal correspondence she wouldn't trust anybody else this was an extremely full-time job and all of them dreaded the sister of them getting married and leaving it to them the kind one of the reasons for Queen Victoria would often call Princess Helena back was as I mentioned earlier in that quotation the quick that Princess Louise was rather indiscreet one of my favorite reported comments that princess louise said in the mid 1860s when Queen Victoria had not come to the State Opening of Parliament and had sent her daughter instead which happened frequently Princess Louise was heard to remark rather publicly in a loud voice muammar was not too unwell to open Parliament simply too unwilling as you can imagine that didn't go down very well with the Queen she said it very deliberately this is um you can see Princess Louise here in dress in in white this is the ghillies ball up in Scotland and Balmoral Prince the Queen Victoria fell in love with the Scottish Highlands and this is of course some years after Albert's death when she's begun her relationship with John Brown and not your John Brown the other one very confusing here to talk about John Brown I realized and I could totally change the course of history could and doing quite interesting edge that could be a whole novel I'd like to talk to Tracy Chevalier about that she's hands with all the Roth elaborate E's the clothes that Princess Louise wore were copied they were written about they were sketched in newspapers and they became deeply fashionable and Princess Louise was always seen as the most fashionable of princesses if you read newspapers at the time anything she attended minut detail would be taken of her clothing now this is Princess Louise with Prince Leopold the closest of all her siblings they were they really adored each other and whenever he was ill he was desperate for Louise to be with him he had a tough life and if that would die quite young very sadly when his wife was about to give birth to their second baby and so he was only in his 30s when he died but he did manage to make it to his 30s which nobody expected because haemophilia as I say was so little understood and Princess Louise calmed him when she was with him and when he was ill it was noted by everybody in the royal family that she needed to be there Queen Victoria hated this and engineered keeping them apart she was she never forgave them for loving each other more than they loved her as she perceived it and now this patrollers to show you because in the mid-1860s this was taken in 1868 and a couple of years earlier Prince Leopold had a new tutor or governor now this was a man named Walter Stirling he was an exceptionally good-looking man from the household cavalry an army regiment and Queen Victoria noted in her diary she was a great appreciator of good-looking men how very handsome Walter Stirling was now Louise and Leopold spent much of their time together and Leopold adored Walter Stirling everybody noted in their Diaries how the prince was absolutely blossoming under the care of Walter Stirling who taught him but also was a great friend to him he carried him around you know took care of him when he was ill and then four months after his arrival Walter Stirling was dismissed nobody was allowed to talk about it and it was it's impossible to find anything out about it today one of Queen Victoria's Belgian cousins wrote that for months as though it so two years later after this dismissal after four months two years later he was having dinner with the royal family at a big party in Windsor and he quite innocently asked he'd heard gossip about the dismissal of this man why had water sterling been sent away the Queen reportedly blushed and the young Belgian cousin realized he had made a huge faux pas and according to legend was never ever invited to visit Queen Victoria again and this was a story that intrigued me that wasn't in the official biography that was written that was really really hard to find anything about now at this time Princess Louise had been wanting to live by herself she wanted to have her own studio and to be a professional sculptor her mother had forbidden it says she was spent a lot of time in her brother's school room getting to know his tutor this is her again at the time a fashionable young woman and I believe that in the late eighteen sixty six or early 1867 oops princess Louise had a baby she had a baby boy and this sculpture is possibly by her this is in the family of a family called the low family still owned by them today and I managed to track them down when I writing this book they have twice been through the highest courts in Britain to try and get a DNA sample from the tomb of one of their ancestors the man I spoke to most of mine called Nick Lowe Crockett's his grandfather and his niece obviously her great-grandfather they have been through the high courts twice both times they have been denied access and they have been told they can never fight the case again it's been through twice now this baby is a little boy called Henry low and he was known to be adopted he was adopted everybody knew he was adopted there was no adoption certificate but he was adopted by the son of Queen Victoria's gynecologist Sir Charles LOCOG had a son who was engaged and unfortunately when Sir Charles's wife died of course the marriage had to be postponed because you had to be in mourning for at least a year he preferably two after the death of a parent or sibling Queen Victoria enforced this and yet for some reason she gave the young man such as no son permission to marry his his fiancee six weeks after his mother's death and they married specifically to adopt save they've already engaged but they married specifically to adopt a baby and this was the baby henry low now when Henry low grew up he told his own children that he was the son of Princess Louise and had regular access to her until he was 16 years old this story has been covered up to such an extent it is so hard to find out anything about it I saw the local family's family albums it's hilarious they all look like members of the royal family there is somebody I thought was dead with the seventh but it was some cousin Vickie Lowe caught the niece of Nick who who was the first person I met she told me she's constantly being told she looks like Princess Anne and she says well I think there's a reason for that however the matter will have to remain shrouded in mystery hey I know definitely her baby but anyway so we get on to another man who feature prominently in Princess Louise's life this was not the father of the baby that I firmly believed was Walter sterling but this was her sculpting tutor now Princess Louise is sculpting original salting tutor was a woman called Mary Thorneycroft who worked with all of the royal children as a kind of art tutor and a sculpting tutor and she eventually said to Queen Victoria I have taught Princess Louise everything I know she is good enough to be a professional and she needs to go and study with this new man arrived in London Josef Edgar berm he teaches at the National Art Training School in Kensington which was a public art school open to everybody who could pay the fees and who had the talent Queen Victoria's had absolutely no way but luckily Mary Thorneycroft knew the Queen very well and she wasted her with her own petard she said well of course mom the National Art Training School in Kensington was Prince Albert's idea and the Queen couldn't do anything about it so this was the chap under whom Princess Louise studied under who actually was a fairly good way of putting it though she wasn't intentional but I realized that I said it that there could be a double entendre and so Joseph Erica berm was married and he had several children and there was no possibility even if he'd been single that he could have married Princess Louise and he had come into that their lives at a time when Princess Louise was desperate for love and affection she had been forced to give up her baby it's interesting that Bertie and Alex had a daughter shortly after the local baby was adopted and they called that daughter Louise I believe it was their way of saying to Louise you could have a baby you can have our baby as your as your namesake Queen Victoria was so angry by the way that they hadn't named their daughter Victoria she hit the roof she went on about it the years never forgave them however Joseph Edgar Bowman came into Lewis's life at this time and he was a hugely important part of her life now the Queen was determined that Louise needed to be married it was said that and when Joseph ed gruberman was invited to Balmoral to sculpt John Brown the Queen and John Brown walked into the sculpting studio one day and discovered something other than sculpting going on there was an enormous rail and at this time which the Queen never did of any other time she called in Bertie now Bertie was her least favorite child but she knew that the only person who could talk Louise out of her fury was Bertie and according to legend gossip one of Bertie's mistresses Diaries which she threatened that Louise that she would never see Joseph etiqa Burma again and Louise turned around and said you can't do that because I know about you and John Brown that's the gossip of the time anyway if Louise had to be found a husband now the general public knew none of this by the way this is not something that anybody outside the rule circle would have known but what they did know was that they were sick of their princesses marrying foreign princes and going off to live elsewhere when Princess Louise and it was reported in the papers said that she was not going to marry a foreigner they loved her even more she was known as the people's princess long before Princess Anna was even thought of this is a sculpture of Queen Victoria by Joseph edgar Berman I wanted to show you this so that I could also show you the work that Princess Louise again I showed you this earlier that she did under his direction so you can see that he was teaching her now there were some very cruel people who said that Princess Louise never finished any of her work that was all done by Berman she took credit but after his death she still continued to produce amazing work so she really was a very talented sculptor this is firm as she knew him he but he became her lover and remained her lover for very many years as she did get married but all throughout her marriage they retained their relationship but as you can see he's a real dandy he was a huge part of the aesthetic movement he was one of the most important artists in Britain at the time and he brought to Britain a very exciting new sculpting medium terracotta was all the rage in Paris and he brought it over he was Hungarian Viennese by birth he had been exceptionally poor when he was younger talked about days when he couldn't afford to eat as a starving artist in Paris in Vienna and suddenly he came to London and was immensely popular and made very wealthy Queen Victoria did the intelligent thing this was the one point she could not bully her daughter on so she made him a sculptor in ordinary the top sculptor in the land and this meant that it was quite acceptable for Louise who everybody knew he was her tutor to be with him at all times this is she at around the time of her engagement and as you can see very pretty very fashionable again this is one of my favorites of her actually a whole series of images of her wearing this lace mantilla and I'd love to know if that's the Silver Cross that she's made herself this is the man that she became engaged to he was the Marquess of Lorne this is obviously a cartoon he was very handsome and very proud of the fact that he was very handsome probably tell there he's a Scottish Queen Victoria described their engagement and wedding as the most popular act of my reign and this is their official engagement portrait a very handsome man and Louise is probably thinking yeah this is great I get to marry a good-looking man but he was totally against the marriage he was normally on Louise's side and everything I think that Bertie knew something he couldn't even dare tell Louise about I think that he knew before anybody else that the Marquess of Lorne Lorne was how he was he was known was not interested in women now Queen Victoria presided over a very harsh homophobic Society Queen Victoria herself had helped introduce laws that meant that gay men would live in absolute fear and peril we all know the story of what happened to Oscar Wilde gay women weren't legislations against by the way did you know that Queen Victoria didn't believe in lesbians so they women wouldn't do that apparently that's why there was no legislation gay men were very very heavily legislated against and were in danger of imprisonment and severe physical punishment so the Marquess of Lorne as with many other men of the time had absolutely no choice but to marry and even though it was never a physical marriage it was an extremely successful marriage eventually initially it was hell in the mid a they got married in 1871 in the in the mid 1870s princess Louise was already talking about a separation 1874 she was talking about the separation and the Queen was writing letters to her other children saying there will be absolute no separation we will not have this kind of scandal in the family but it was really a really serious issue this is their wedding and she was as I say incredibly popular every time the Queen didn't turn up to something Louise and Bertie would go princess Alex was constantly incapacitated by pregnancies and she had severe rheumatic fever so she had terrible early arthritis from a very young age so it was often Bertie in Louise and they were adored they were the kind of golden couple they were both interested in ordinary people they found dealing with the kind of royalty and the aristocrats really quite dull they had a great deal in common they were both educationalists long before he met Louise lon even at university was interested in women's suffrage he tried really hard to get women accepted into universities which was a huge step forward at the time didn't happen for many years but he was really trying they were both interested in education reform for men and women in health reform and in helping people of all social classes so in that way it was a very successful marriage but it took a long time before they reached that kind of sympathy with each other this made me laugh this is this allegedly them to commemorate their wedding they were both blonde I have no idea what this was but I found this online it was being sold it was then it just made me laugh I don't know if any of you saw a few years ago at the recent royal wedding and there was a manufacturer in China who was supposed to be manufacturing mugs of William and Catherine and they put Harry on it by mistake I think whoever created these have never seen an image of Louise and lon it was so funny and so I just had to show you that I think they look as if they're from a different century as well it's hilarious now this is Louise with one of her dogs dogs were very very important to Louise I can't find out the National Portrait Gallery doesn't know but I'm hoping that this this dog is frisky who was the dog she took on her honeymoon with her and believe you me it was the only frisky thing on the entire honeymoon however particularly after Queen Victoria turned up after three days and took them back again I'm going to tell you a few more images of how the public knew Princess Louise at the time and you can see what a terribly fashionable it girl she was this is one of my favorites it is actually the jacket for the for the British version of the book and I just think she looked so wistful and you can see why she was adored and seen as a as a fashion icon she felt people felt that she was so accessible they would write to her she wasn't this is actually not her wedding dress this was the State Opening event of Parliament she was so accessible that everybody was talking why have I no babies in this marriage why has she not had a child and women would write to her the fact that they felt able to do this is astounding they would write to her about tricks of how they had managed to get pregnant women who had been childless for many years the very fact they felt able to do this they would never have dreamt of doing it with any of the other princesses and God forbid Queen Victoria but they knew that Princess Louise was an empathetic person and this is her it just a fancy dress she looks like a child she looks tiny in this and the fancy dress balls were extremely popular at the time and this is from the cover of the book in America I love this image it shows her as an aesthetic young woman part of the aesthetic movement it's by a very fashionable photographer Alexander Pisano is gorgeous velvet outfit and this again was the kind of thing that would have been sold everybody would have wanted this image of Princess Louise by the time this was taken in the 1880s she was widely known as a prophet well she couldn't use the term professional because she was royal but as a sculptor and a very successful sculptor and this is from the same photographic session the this backdrop by the way and all of the photographic studios had these kind of props they were like theatrical sets now this I couldn't find many pictures of the Marquess of Lorne so you've got him much later than I wanted to talk to you about him but I wish to give you some more images about him so and by the time this was taken his father had died and he was the ninth duke of argyll but before that happened he lived out his political dreams and he became an MP he became a liberal the royal princess flurries as a princess was absolutely not allowed to take part in politics but the royal family is traditionally more Tory or right-wing she was fully liberal if she'd been allowed to be such a thing and the fact that a princess's husband not only became a member of parliament but for the Liberal Party was astounding and at the start of their marriage it was very obvious that he wanted to make changes and that was one of the things that they worked on together they worked on a number of projects that he was told in the 1870s that he had been chosen for an overseas post and this did not surprise him because in 1877 he had had a vision now the Marquess of Lorne was renowned to have second sight many and his family were deemed to do so it's a very oval part of the Campbells family many people in the Campbell clan was said to have second sight he was on his own on a boat in the middle of a loch in scotland and he realized that he was going to be sent overseas and he became Governor General of Canada this is one before they left for Canada this is one of their projects in Britain what became known as the Princess Louise Children's Hospital in Kensington North Kensington not smart Kensington the area if any of you have been to London which is now known as White City an extremely impoverished part of London and this was one of their many projects that they set up this is the State Opening of Parliament apologies for their very out-of-focus picture it's a bad photograph from the Ottawa archives of this newspaper article you can see there are two Thrones hers is smaller than his and this is because they had to make a second throne they'd never had the spouse of a governor-general who was there for the State Opening she was always deferring to him she was very very good at accepting that when they were in Canada she was his subject he was Queen Victoria's representative in Canada I think this was the happiest time in their marriage for him not for her they were there for fight war he was there for five years she spent at least two of them overall back in Britain or traveling around America or in Bermuda many people in Canada felt that it was because she couldn't bear to be near her husband which is possibly true her lover burn was in Britain of course and also in her very first year in Canada the very first winter she was in a terrible sleigh crash they both were they had an inexperienced British driver who is not used to driving on ice the whole of the carriage was a sleigh carriage was overturned she was kind of mothered underneath her husband who could not get away from her he was trying not to crush her and part or possibly even the whole of one of her ears was ripped off in the accident now because they were so worried about Queen Victoria's reaction they downplayed her injuries she suffered from the rest of her life from terrible headaches and every picture of her afterwards her ears are completely covered so we don't know the extent of her disfigurement because the the injuries were downplayed the Canadian newspapers had a field day writing about how she was shirking her duties when it was eventually discussed in Parliament and it was admitted that she was in danger of dying they felt really really bad anyway she recovered but she hated Canadian winters and she would always go away after then this is one of her sculptures in Montreal it's outside McGill University if any of you know it she was always being asked to sculpt images of her mother as a young woman which of course was before she knew her this is Lake Louise in Canada and if you've ever wondered who it was named after it's her alberto is also named after her people think it's named after Prince Albert Alberta was one of her middle names and they wanted to call the province Louise and she said please can we call it Alberta use my middle name and then it will honor my father as well she adored her father by the way very very close to him this is Louise with her mother after she returned to England now and they had a very difficult relationship but later in life they became very close in fact when Queen Victoria's John Brown died princess Louise was the only one who wrote her a really kind letter the Royal children hated John Brown you may have seen the film mrs. Brown yeah John Brown was nothing like Billy Connolly at all I was shocked by what a nasty piece of work John Brown was and however during her time in Canada Louise had had a really wonderful time as well as a bad time she had had the kind of freedom she was never allowed in Britain one of her favorite pastimes as well as her art was fishing and she was bought her fishing rod and she used to get taken out on to all the best places to go fishing she was made a portable kind of artists to do a bit like a bird hide because of the inclement weather she would kind of wheel it around the grounds of their home all of those security people were terrified she was going to get shot at and she was of course threatened by Fenians many times she travelled around parts of North America she had to stop on our way to San Francisco because of the Fenian threat she was traveling with Leopold who would come and stay with her and she went to Bermuda she went to Bermuda more than once and in fact she was credited with being the island's first tourist and there's some wonderful stories about her time there so somebody asked me about that in questions because I'm running out of time this is joseph edgar berm in his studio and here an actual photograph of him in his studio now I'm showing you this because in December of 1890 Joseph Edgar berm died rather suddenly in his fifties in his studio if you read the newspapers of the time there are multiple different versions of his death some say that Princess Louise and his aunt her lady-in-waiting were there when he died others say that he was alone in his studio and Princess Louise walked in and found him others later ones say that princess Louise was heard knocking on the door and the sculptor from next door Alfred Gilbert very famous sculptor came round with a spare key and let her in this version was the official version eventually given out because initially the version had been princess Louise have been in the studio with her tutor and he died then it was discovered that her lady-in-waiting had left and they couldn't say that so they said well actually Princess Louise walked into the studio and found him dead and then some bright sparks said but isn't he in one of those new studios with those special new Yale locks that you can only open from the inside it seems according to yet more royal gossip and Diaries that they were actually together making love in the studio when he died a according to the artist Duncan grant the great Bloomsbury artist who heard about it from obviously someone else cuz he was a not even born when it happened according to this princess Louise had had two and these are his words not mine get him out of her and off her before she could go and get the Royal physician to come and help her with the body now all of these different rumors were flying around she'd sent her lady-in-waiting away why was she on her own my favorite by the way my very favorite version of this was one of the newspaper stories that said he died of an aneurysm from exertion and it said that he had died whilst lifting a heavy bust they meant to cross a marble bust but I thought it was a rather wonderful piece of an intent unintended wit and alfred gilbert was became louise the sculpting shooter after Berman died she was a great patron to many artists she was an exceptionally generous patron any artists in financial trouble she would rally around get all her friends to buy their works the only one she gave her very own studio to was Alfred Gilbert her beautiful studio purpose-built for her in the grounds of Kensington Palace some years later and Gilbert was desperate trouble and declaring bankruptcy she gave him the entire studio as his home and studio and I believe it was her thank you to him for this incredibly important apps that he had done now this is probably the most famous if princess luisa sculptures anyone who has been to Kensington Palace in London would have seen this it's outside its most people don't know it's by Princess Louise it made her the very first female artist to have a memorial in London in Britain in fact it's damaged quite a lot that's from Second World War shrapnel it was put up to commemorate Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1897 and the Queen unveiled it herself this is her other if you've been to simple's Cathedral this is the only image they could send me I couldn't get a picture and this is her memorial to the Boer War and again a rather wonderful story associated with this one of the of the model who had to be pretty much naked dressed in a little piece of loincloth he was kind of Arnold Schwarzenegger of his day Princess Louise enjoyed this job this is in when she's really in her aesthetic Faye's and it's an angel raising up the body of the dead Christ and this was absolutely adored but it's quite hard to find and if you go to some Paul's Cathedral please asks to see it because even though I keep telling them they they've got this wonderful thing there most of the guards don't even know where it is this is the Duke of Argyll and as he became now the Duke of Argyll her husband she's often known of course as the Duchess of Argyll because when he became the Juke her title changed and he died in 1914 nothing to do with the war he was by this point a fairly elderly man not not elderly by today's standards but by Victorian standards and he was suffering from possibly Alzheimer's or some form of dementia which I think actually came on much much earlier than anybody realized he was seen as eccentric Queen Victoria also said that he had a fairly possible relationship with soap and water he was not somebody who did anything the same as everybody else and these eccentricities made him a bit of a laughingstock at times but I think they also made him quite interesting to Louise she nursed him tirelessly at the end and went into a great depression after he died of course her the great love of her life had died in 1890 then her husband died and life was really quite tough 1914 was also a particularly awful year because not only was there a war but the Kaiser was her nephew he was her eldest sister's son if you think about how awful that must have been for the royal family this is the last kind of known painting I don't know what's coming out quite blurred here this is by Philip de lászló who if you've never seen his work look him up he's the most amazing Hungarian portrait painter who moved to Britain I think this is absolutely beautiful we don't know the exact date of this possibly around the first world war or into the 1920s I just think it's gorgeous I love this so much and it shows Louise that she was still a very very beautiful woman she was determined never to become what she called a German hausfrau as she deemed her mother and sisters had become she possibly even had an eating disorder she she ate very little and she was she had her own personal trainer an Austrian woman named Madame clip who sounds like something out of a James Bond film and she was seen in Battersea Park in London bicycling around and bicycling became all the rage and she received in kind of taking this this exercise they would close off a section of the park for journalists would stand and watch her as she cycled up and down this is a wonderful photograph of her taken in 1927 of her reading and again incredibly elegant by this point about to be 80 I just think it's the most fabulous foot photograph of her she had done by this appoint an incredible amount towards women's rights and women's education she'd help set up the girls public day school trust multiple hospitals she didn't have much money her husband was technically a commoner and compared to her sisters who will married foreign princes and emperors and czars however she would badger her wealthy friends into supporting hospitals and other fundraising efforts she would do spot checks and turn up at factories where women worked to make sure they were treated properly she was a truly remarkable woman and this is I'm going to end with this picture I always hope that someone in the audience is going to recognize one of these children and give me information about this I'm assuming it's some kind of vet charity benefit or for children's fancy dress party this was taken in the 1930s by the studio Alexander Pisano who took that image that's on the front of the American version of the book Alexander pisano was long dead but this is the studio that had still bore his name she was always a champion of the little people she was remarkably popular and yet when she died in 1939 at the age of 91 her death was almost unremarked upon and this is because of course the Second World War had begun she went against convention even in death because she left in her will instructions to be cremated it was highly unusual very unorthodox even in general let alone for a member of the royal family and she was as if they'd barely remarked on and yet by this time she had been a vitally important helper to Queen Victoria who reluctantly admitted towards the end of her reign how much princess Louise had done she then and was a hugely important helper - Bertie as I mentioned his wife Alex wonderful though she was was incapacity physically a lot of the time by her terrible rheumatism and she and Bertie by the way used to take great joy in smoking in Windsor Castle after Queen Victoria's death they've been banned all the way through Princess Louise was an inveterate smoker throughout her life and had to hide this from her mother and when King George the sixth came to the throne she was a hugely important help to him Edward the eighth by the way she was very cross about Wallis Simpson absolutely cross her brother Arthur wrote to her a letter I wish I'd seen her original in which he said that that joke that you sent me about Wallis Simpson it's very strong about the only throne she's ever likely to sit on throne obviously has the same implications here as it does in England that I have to explain that joke that's good I mean but she was she was David as he was known in the family Edward the eighth was it was he wrote to her all the time she was one of his confessors and then George the sixth and I missed out George the fifth I think George the fifth as well all of these people the present Queen actually went to her funeral doesn't really have memories of her but remembered going to her funeral so she was hugely important so I hope I've given you an insight into this woman whose life has been deliberately whitewashed I mean I was astounded at how much effort there had been to cover up her tracks to pretend that everything she said was a lie and to make her out use the word to make her out to be a total that's the word you hear again and again all you hear is the negative they say that she was unfaithful that's the word they used a lot which meant she couldn't be relied on that she was a liar and actually I was worried I wouldn't like her and you have to like your biography subject but actually she was really wonderful and I was so fond of her by the end and I felt very angry it would have been done by to her memory very deliberately by the Royal archives and the powers that be by the way I don't implicate the royal family in that I really do mean the Royal archives not the royal family so thank you very much for listening and stay happy question sorry I have overrun I'm sorry yeah my fault sorry yes somebody here in the stripy top you know I don't know but she may well have been I don't know if that is the but it was definitely that opinion at the time yes yeah interesting point I'd have to look that up thank you yes the lady in blue oh god I'm so glad you asked that question I do not know because the rumors of the baby gay husband you know married lover Joe the vodka bomb dying making love to her all of these things were widely discussed in the early 20th century the Bloomsbury group jokes about Verne's death they had all these different outlandish things about it the local baby was widely discussed as being Princess Louise's son I have no idea and I would love to know what else is in there I couldn't get into did you see the Downton Abbey episode of the highlands ward where they went to that fabulous castle that was her husband's ancestral home not the one that you saw cause it burned it's burned out twice especially so that what you've seen is a recreation they have an archive and I was not allowed into that either they made multiple though they are got that and the dukes of Argyll family make made so many excuses again the archivists over undergoing a massive refurbishment you can't get in for at least a year oh that's fine I've got a long deadline oh no we're still undergoing refurbishment my last two queries just were ignored and when I went up there incognito to go around the castle itself got chatting to one of the curators who I'd asked a question about the painting of Princess Louise that wasn't labeled and she stole she's my favorite Knight so she's mine too and she said it was really exciting I've heard someone's writing a book about her so I had to say so she got really excited and then I said well I couldn't get into the archive she said I can't get into the archives it's really fascinating I recently gave a talk last Friday night in England and a young man was in the audience and he seemed to be really kind of aware of everything he came up afterwards that he's doing a PhD on Prince Leopold he cannot get into Princess Louise's files he's in the Royal archives he's there every day they gave him a letter by mistake a very innocuous letter between Leopold and Louise and they realized and came and took it away again Princess Margaret lived in Princess Louise's apartments in Kensington Palace in the 1960s and discovered that one of the windows the French windows were bricked up now this is the story that Princess Louise had been bricked up to stop her husband getting out and cruising soldiers in the park at night Princess Margaret attempted to get into the Royal archives the Queen's own sister to research Princess Louise she was denied access so I didn't feel quite so bad about being denied so who knows what's in there I would love to know but the Freedom of Information Act which is the act in Britain that permits you to see information after 70 years or in some cases 50 years there is a clause in it that it doesn't apply to the Royal archives yeah to Princess Louise great-great aunt yeah Oh your great-great niece obviously but Princess Louise her Great Britain yeah I think that's why I alex is that right and who else had a question yes well it's a good question I don't know I if interested you don't hear the question do the archivists know what's in those files and you may have heard of a man called Hugo Vickers who's a British biographer brilliant writer and he wrote a biography of Princess Alice not not Louise's sister the current Prince Philip's mother who's a fascinating woman it's a really good read and he has great friends with Prince Philip and he's been into the archives multiple times he contacted me he's friends with my agent and he said I'd never met him I was very pleased to get this email he said would you like to meet up and good rant about the Royal archives because I've just been denied access now he has been in multiple times he wanted to write a book about the Queen Mother and they knew that he would write a very genuine but King knew her very well he liked her very much but he also knew some of the bad stories and they refused to let him in and he was forbidden to write the book and the Royal archives the royal archive spent me a letter saying you are very welcome to come in but printer services files are closed they sent this wonderful letter after eight months I might add and I thought all great I finally got in and then they're literally almost as an aside Princess Louise his father closed and I was going to go it was very welcoming letter and luckily another author said to me you mustn't go when you go in you have to sign a form you know disclaimer let you do with all thy breezy way you know eat or take chewing gum or use pens or anything in this one you have to give them your manuscript and they can veto publication now you might have got things from other sources they will take them out the biography of Bertie I think it was delayed by five years and about the 50% of the things were taken out apparently this is this is hearsay according my publisher was the same publisher and it's very very hard to get so I was so glad I was told that so as a result I could put in the LOCOG family research and all the other things I'd found I wouldn't have been able to if I'd gone through the Royal archives yeah yes the book jackets there the spelling is different that's the biggest difference its Americanized so the text is Americanized but no there aren't other differences and the jacket choices the publishers choice so normally as an author you get some input and when the English publisher email means that we've done your jacket I thought have you really and actually I loved it so much that was fine but yes no they it's very hard to get input on it I liked the Alexander Bassano picture that they chose for the American ones so I was pleased about that though I the one in Britain is hand tinted in blue and I think it makes it a more leap out of the of the shelves book but the biggest problem is the different title because people buy both thinking it's a new book and I've had cross emails from people saying I thought you'd want another book on Lizzy Siddal and I'm really sorry it's not my decision and bilious know that it's a different title and that really confuses people Charles Dickens in his circle is the same jacket in the same title by the way there the other one that's just come out in America which they couldn't get very many copies of the book shop because it's only been out for two days but yes it's a different title different cover jacket and Americanized text but it's not different in any other way yeah a one at the back do you have time for that yes oh you know I don't know the exact number because most of them are in the Royal Collection or there's a lot in Canada if you go online to the Royal Collection and sometimes it's quite hard to see overseas there are some beautiful sculptures she did of her baby sister Beatrice and of Leopold both of which were presents for Queen Victoria remarkably beautiful in fact they were the presents that Queen Victoria really appreciated absolutely stunning I mean there's such beautiful works of art but most of the ones are in the royal collections it's quite hard to know I don't have an exact figure but Canada has quite a lot of them and it burns as well he was very popular in Canada - thank you

Channel: Hudson Library & Historical Society

Views: 141,739

Rating: 4.5263157 out of 5

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Id: A2kvUygeZQg

Length: 78min 43sec (4723 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 28 2016