Books: Memoirs of a Courtier

RECOLLECTIONS OF THREE REIGNS—(509 pp.)—Sir Frederick Ponsonby—E. P. Dutton ($5).

Sir Frederick Ponsonby was “a courtier to his fingertips.” Three British sovereigns —Queen Victoria, King Edward VII and King George V—employed him as private secretary, equerry and Keeper of the Privy Purse, and in the last year of his life (1935) he was rewarded with a peerage. Ponsonby could speak bluntly or subtly to all kinds of men, and he could ride a horse as smartly as he could snub an upstart. But he was no stick; he dreamed of writing film scripts and was “always interested in the possibility of raising King John’s treasure from the Wash.”*

Historians will be thankful that neither Hollywood nor the Wash engulfed Secretary Ponsonby. His notes on life in the royal household from 1894 to 1935 are more tangible than King John’s treasure, and quite as well written as most film scripts. They succeed in disclosing a great deal while simultaneously concealing a lot more—a combined operation that came easily to the man who noted sagely that “it is easy to be discreet when one knows everything.”

Queen Victoria. For most well-born Victorians, says Ponsonby, the Victorian era was a “serene, unhurried existence.” For the old Queen’s courtiers, it was a rat race. Protocol ruled, for example, that when the Queen took an airing in her pony chair she must meet nobody on the way, and as nobody in the household could foretell what route she intended to take, her stately advance over the royal gravel was marked by the incessant scuttling of courtiers racing for cover.

This Alice-in-Wonderland atmosphere was thickened by the mixture of formality and laxity that prevailed at court. No one dined with the Queen without invitation —but this might come in the form of a cockney footman’s brisk bark to a roomful of ladies-in-waiting: “All what’s ‘ere dines with the Queen.” Ponsonby was not allowed to smoke, even when decoding dispatches in his own room; the stench, complained the Queen, permeated the papers. But, on occasion, footmen and Highland servants could get so drunk that a royal dinner was punctuated by .the crash of china and the splash of wine from wavering bottles.

Ponsonby soon became well drilled in the royal crotchets. When he wrote a memo concerning the Duchess of Connaught (wife of the Queen’s grandson), he got it back with the note: “Always put ‘H.R.H.,’ otherwise it would look as if she was an ordinary Duchess.” When he made a helpful suggestion about a maid of honor, it came back with the words: “The Queen has yet to learn that Capt. Ponsonby has anything to do with the Maids of Honor.” Much the same snub was inflicted on an earnest clergyman who tried to rouse Victoria’s sympathy for the poor by mentioning a house where seven had to use one bed. “Had I been one of them,” observed the Queen, “I would have slept on the floor.”

For three years the Queen refused to allow Secretary Ponsonby to marry; “A man,” he explains, “always [tells] his wife everything.” At length she reluctantly gave her consent and bought him a silver tea service. When one of her ladies questioned the royal choice, the Queen fell back on the language of her humblest subjects and demanded: “Am I giving this present or are you?”

Edward VII. Ponsonby found Edward VII a more congenial master. Indoors, Edward loved to be surrounded by pretty women, outdoors by “masses of pheasants.” His great joy lay in presenting medals and, oddly enough, in paying off his gambling losses—”[He] did so as if he were making his opponent a present.” Even his most intimate friends were terrified of him and his explosive temper, but, unlike his mother, he did his best to make things easy for his household.

Ponsonby learned to speak out. He questioned the wisdom of the King’s attending a performance by a dancer who was reputed to wear “only two oyster shells and a five-franc piece.” He persuaded the King to pay more attention to the music that was churned out on ceremonial occasions. The King appreciated Ponsonby’s frankness, but considered that he had a royal right to dodge it if he possibly could. He would let Ponsonby hear that he had a date with a lady at 4 o’clock, then skip off secretly and keep it at 3.

George V. Ponsonby rated King Edward “by far the biggest man and the most striking personality in Europe.” His son was less flamboyant. Where Edward had amassed an imposing collection of pretty women, scrupulous, hard-working George V built up “the best collection of British stamps in the world.” He had a strong sense of responsibility, but it was early made clear to him that his chief responsibility was to be a figurehead. When he once asked Prime Minister Asquith for time in which to ponder a decision, he was bluntly ordered to give “an immediate answer.”

Ponsonby was still working up his notes on George V when he died. Editor Colin Welch has supplied numerous explanatory footnotes, based, he explains, on the assumption that a good many readers may be as ignorant of the cast of characters as was Queen Victoria’s new German secretary, Herr von Pfyffer. When he and Ponsonby settled down to work on Victoria’s papers one day, Pfyffer asked: “Who is Gladstone?”

*The shallow bay in East Anglia where King John’s treasure-laden baggage train, including the crown jewels, was lost in 1216 during one of John’s campaigns against the barons. Much sought, but never located, the treasure has presumably been carried miles from its original grave by the Wash’s shifting sands and tides.