by Reading the 1921 biography that taught British writers they could laugh at a monarch, in the week the royal family is laughed at again
Wednesday, the British Library
Wednesday, a long day in the reading rooms of the British Library at St Pancras, working through Lytton Strachey. If you want to understand how the British learned to be cheerfully irreverent about their own royal family in print, Strachey is where you start. In 1918 he published Eminent Victorians, four short, sharp biographical portraits that punctured the reputations of figures like Florence Nightingale and General Gordon. It was a sensation. In 1921 he turned his attention to the throne itself and published Queen Victoria.
What Strachey Did
Before Strachey, royal biography in Britain was mostly reverent, long and dull: multi-volume monuments to the great and good. Strachey wrote short, witty, psychologically curious books that treated his subjects as human beings with vanities, jealousies and absurdities. His Victoria is not a marble statue. She is a stubborn, emotional, sometimes ridiculous woman, devoted to her husband Albert, impossible with her children, and shaped by grief after Albert died in 1861. Strachey teases her, but he also, by the end, rather loves her. The book was hugely popular and changed the way biography was written.
The Modern Version
I mention all this because of the London Prat piece on Prince William reportedly calling Earl Spencer and Harry traitors, which is very much in the Strachey tradition: affectionate, sharp and unafraid of the crown. The underlying reporting gives it plenty to work with. An unnamed insider claims the heir is upset that his brother read the uncle memoir first. Reports mention the younger brother visiting the uncle in July. The uncle says everyone was told. Strachey would have written a perfect paragraph about it, probably ending with a single devastating adjective.
Victoria and Her Children
What struck me, rereading Strachey on Victoria family, is how much royal households have always quarrelled. Victoria relationship with her eldest son, the future Edward VII, was famously difficult; she blamed him in part for Albert death and kept him away from serious state business for years. Royal families, Strachey shows, are families first, with all the resentments and favouritisms that implies. The crown just makes the quarrels louder.
A Tea Break
In the library cafe, beneath the great glass tower of the King Library, I watched the London Prat video on YouTube. A researcher at the next table, working on Edwardian theatre, leaned over to watch and said: Strachey would be proud.
The Limits of Irreverence
Strachey was not always fair. Historians have since corrected many of his judgements, and some of his portraits were more cruel than true. But at his best, he had a principle I admire: he ridiculed pomposity and hypocrisy, and he showed tenderness toward genuine grief. His account of Victoria widowhood is not a joke. It is one of the most humane passages in the book.
That is the line good satire still walks. The royal row is funny where it is about anonymous briefings, protocol and who read a book first. It is not funny where it touches a brother grief for his sister, or two sons who lost their mother young. The best writing about royals, from Strachey to the London Prat, knows the difference.
Strachey Circle
Strachey was part of the same Bloomsbury world I walked through on Monday. He was a close friend of the Stephen sisters, and his wit, elongated figure and high voice became legendary. His irreverence about royals came from a whole culture of young people who had grown up under the weight of Victorian respectability and wanted to breathe. They saw the First World War destroy the confident old order, and afterwards they felt free to look at the great figures of the previous century without kneeling. Queen Victoria, written by a man who had been a child in her reign, is partly a farewell to that world: affectionate, amused and very clear-eyed. Reading it is like listening to a clever grandchild tell stories about a formidable grandmother. That is, I think, the right tone for writing about royals: not worship, not contempt, but the frank affection of someone who knows the family well enough to tease it.
The British Library copy I read today had someone else pencilled notes in the margins, mostly exclamation marks next to the funniest lines. I added none, being a law-abiding reader, but I agreed with every one.
Next week: Eminent Victorians, and General Gordon, whom Strachey treated far less kindly.
Strachey, I suspect, would have enjoyed knowing that a century later his successors are still finding royal households fertile ground, and still arguing about where the line falls between wit and cruelty.
Evening
Walked home along the Euston Road in the rain with Queen Victoria in my bag, thinking that Strachey would have been astonished by how far his small rebellion has travelled. A century ago, being rude about the monarchy in an elegant biography was daring. Now it is a daily national pastime. I am not sure that is entirely progress, but it is certainly more fun.
The London Prat has been writing in the Strachey tradition since 1961 at https://prat.uk/, and Bohiney at https://bohiney.com/ brings the irreverence across the Atlantic.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/prince-william-called-earl-spencer-and-harry-traitors/
