When writing a book about Victoria's daughter Louise, Lucianda Hawksley was warned off even trying the archives by other authors. “You will come up against a brick wall,” she was told. Princess Louise, an artist and a beauty, married a man assumed to be gay and enjoyed a storied love life：her lovers are believed to have included her brother-in-law and a prominent sculptor said to have died in her presence.
When Ms. Hawksley requested Louise's file, she was simply told it was closed. She thinks this is pure censoriousness - and that Louise, famously candid, would have been “horrified” at this Bowdlerization.
The purpose of my book on Victoria was to hack through the thicket of cliches around the great queen：that she was an implacable puritan, a harsh mother who hated her children, a reluctant monarch, a puppet and a creature of the men around her, and a widow who refused to rule. But what I learned through my interactions with the Royal Archives was that their control of vital records make it hard for historians not to hew to the myths.
I have great respect for the archival librarians, who are careful, rigorous and exacting, and I was very grateful for the opportunity to study there. But after a senior archivist read my final manuscript to check any references to material in the Windsor collection - a precondition of entry - I was asked to remove information for which I ham uncovered evidence outside the archives. This concerned Victoria's burial instructions and other evidence of her loving intimacy with John Brown, her personal servant in the Scottish Highlands. My reference to an episode of postpartum depression was also queried.
After months of consultation with lawyers and rewriting to avoid any breach of “crown copyright”, which lasts 125 years for unpublished documents, I decided not to take out the material. But I suddenly understood the reason for the exclusion of such material from other, approved works on Victoria.
Still there is hope.
One historian who has recently been researching in the archives (but wished not to be named for fear of repercussions) reports signs of “more openness” at Windsor, since the appointment in 2014 of the respected Oliver Urquhart Irvine as the royal librarian. But there is a long way to go.
The Times of London has been campaigning to see documents relating to correspondence between the royal family and the Nazi regime before World War II. The Guardian fought a decade-long battle (which it won in 2015) for access to Prince Charles's secret “black spider memos,” so named for his distinctive handwritten ink annotations, in which he lobbied government ministers.
“Without compelling individual reason otherwise,” a Times editorial argued, “there should be a systematic presumption that royal documents will be made public. Royal history is British history.”
And not just British history but the history of the Commonwealth, and of the countries of the former British Empire. Australia's prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, wants to shed light on the 1975 constitutional crisis when Sir John Kerr, the governor general, dismissed one prime minister and appointed another. Mr. Turnbull wants historians to be able to view the correspondence between the queen's representative and the palace.
It is as though the archives' keepers have taken too literally the words of the Victorian constitutional historian Walter Bagehot：“We must not let in daylight upon magic.” He meant only that the queen must be kept above politics, not that she should be kept a mystery.
By rationing access and suppressing evidence, the Royal Archives have accomplished the very reverse of their intention. In the absence of the full historical truth about the British monarchy, sensationalism, suspicion and spin have reigned for too long.
