Wednesday, May 26, 2010

Royal & political gossip

The press have been going rather over the top about the charms of Spanish women, part of their too close for comfort interest in the wives of our political leaders, & in particular in the suitably feisty Miriam González Durántez, who is married to Nick Clegg.

It is not the first time that the role of a Spanish woman in the life of a senior Liberal politician has been the subject of speculation & even of prurient gossip. George William Frederick Villiers fourth earl of Clarendon was appointed by Lord Palmerston as Minister plenipotentiary to Spain in 1833 where he stayed for 6 years & was, as they say, very popular with the ladies. In particular it was well known that he had been especially close to countess de Montijo who was the mother of Eugenie, the last Empress of France. People liked to tease him about the belief that he was the biological father of the empress & that this was the basis of his significant influence with Napoleon III; even Bismarck believed that Clarendon might have been able to avert the Franco-Prussian war had he not died suddenly in June 1870.

Queen Victoria had strongly objected to Clarendon being appointed as Foreign Secretary when Gladstone became prime minister after the 1868 election; she said that he was the only minister who had ever been impertinent to her & he had been gossiping about her relations with John Brown. Gladstone however stood by Clarendon as the best man for the job.

As well as feeling unhappy about the press treatment of political wives we are sometimes uneasy about the royal gossip which is served up to us – particularly the recent entrapment operation on the Duchess of York (whose younger daughter is coincidentally called Eugenie); sometimes we think this kind of thing an unhealthy symptom of our over intrusive age.

That the Victorian press may have been circumspect about marital & sexual peccadilloes does not mean that there was an absence of gossip – the interest in the stories about the Earl of Clarendon & about John Brown & Queen Victoria is testament to this.

The vehicle & the methods by which scandal & gossip are spread, & the degree to which we admit (even to ourselves) our interest may vary over time, but the interest is always there, part of our fundamental human condition.

The Trials of Frances Howard: Fact & Fiction at the Court of King James is an absorbing study by David Lindley of royal scandals from half a millennium ago . In it he makes comparison with our modern experience of stories of the collapse of royal marriages, the emotional investment we make in our own fairy tales, & how they have made us sharply conscious of the power of scandal & gossip. And our stories are nowhere near as hair raisingly shocking as that tale of impotence, murder, witchcraft & execution at the first Stuart court.

Fairy tales, even gossipy & scandalous ones teach us a lot. But as Phyllis Rose observed in Parallel Lives, her study of Victorian marriage ‘It is, of course, one of life’s persistent disappointments that a great moral crisis in my life is nothing but matter for gossip in yours.’

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