Content area
Full text
Henry and Mary Ponsonby: Life at the Court of Queen Victoria, by William M. Kuhn; pp. xvi + 302. London: Duckworth, 2002, L20.00, $29.95.
Henry Ponsonby (1825-95) was the oldest son of a military general who died when he was eleven. He was a model son, deferential to authority yet popular with his peers at Sandhurst. After a spell as an aide-de-camp in Ireland, the Crimea, and Canada, Ponsonby became an equerry in Queen Victoria's court. From 1870 until his death he served as the Queen's private secretary. As William M. Kuhn astutely notes, the position originated "not in the sovereign's readiness for business, but in the sovereign's incapacity for business" (140). Ponsonby served during the years when Victoria's extended mourning was used as an excuse to neglect much official business. The position demanded the utmost tact; Ponsonby's responsibilities ranged from acting as the Queen's go-between with prime ministers to delivering reprimands to her adult children. He always traveled with the royal retinue and could rarely command his own time. Yet he seems to have enjoyed the post. Kuhn makes us appreciate, even like, this talented man who subsumed his personality and ambition to an increasingly difficult queen, whilst always remaining slightly apart, humorously mocking the codes of behavior he did so much to uphold.
But Kuhn rarely questions whether Ponsonby might have been too diplomatic, too willing to bend to the irascible demands of the Queen. Kuhn, along with Ponsonby himself, clearly disapproves of her infatuation with Benjamin Disraeli, but he does not...