My History

by Antonia Fraser

  The look of surprise and horror on my friend’s face remains with me to this day. He had heard me say: “I’m going to marry you!”

  There were other reactions which were rather less striking. It was my fellow Basement-dweller Henrietta who remembered my telling her that I had voted Tory, and put the two things together. But that would be wrong. Hugh Fraser and I first met at a fancy-dress ball which used to be given regularly on New Year’s Eve at the Royal College of Art: the sort of party where that chic young couple Mark Boxer and Arabella Stuart went in Chinese dress as the Boxer Rebellion. I cannot remember what I was supposed to be except that it involved wearing a pair of large thick pinned-on plaits: pinned on, that is, until I passed a man sitting out in the passage with a girl—he tweaked one of them off. This was Hugh, a Highlander whose fine head held high and tall frame should have been commemorated up a glen by Landseer. Hugh was unabashed by my annoyance. To tell the truth, the spirit of adventure that caused him to tweak the pigtail off one girl while sitting with another was another thing which impressed me. Shortly after that our romance began.

  I remained frankly uninterested in politics and at the beginning of our relationship barely noticed that Hugh was a member of the House of Commons (he was first chosen when he was still wearing his dashing parachutists’ beret, and elected in July 1945). Reading one of my mother’s letters left out half-finished at Bernhurst—as one does—I was rather surprised to find her addressing her sister-in-law Mary Clive in the following slightly ambiguous terms: “I’m sure that with time Antonia will come to enjoy the life of a Tory MP’s wife.” Tory MP’s wife—Moi? as one would say now. At the time, I was merely surprised at the odd things people wrote in letters on occasions like this and went on planning my super wedding dress. This was of course a tribute to Mary Queen of Scots herself, in off-the-shoulder white satin and tulle (subsequently criticized by the Daily Express for its daring) and that proper heart-shaped headdress, admired since childhood, with the single drop pearl hanging down in the centre of the forehead.

  It was a piece of wonderful good luck that my last task as a Weidenfeld editor was with Cecil Beaton. It was a singularly happy one. Of course he was not, strictly speaking, a writer although he obviously enjoyed the process of writing and kept profuse diaries and records. Here was the famous photographer whose picture of the ruins of the Blitz through an arch or the bandaged little girl with her teddy bear in Great Ormond Street Hospital were among the most vivid wartime images of my youth. But he was also known to me as the author of The Book of Beauty, lurking in the family bookshelf with its portraits of pre-war socialites; like the Tatlers in Aunt Mary’s attic, I found this an intoxicating study, if at times puzzling.

  Did Lady Pamela Berry, my parents’ terrifying friend, daughter of his old patron F. E. Smith, with her obsidian black eyes, really look like this when a girl? Already I had begun to distinguish between the two celebrated hostesses of my new life in London. Vital and amusing as she was, Pam Berry was frightening because she made her assessment—not necessarily a favourable one—of you and your appearance surprisingly obvious: I dreaded the moment when her beady gaze was turned on me. Ann Fleming I much preferred: there was something mischievous about her which suggested a conspiracy, a conspiracy to enjoy yourself if you were the right sort of person and, since you were in her salon, you must be the right sort of person. I do not mean to suggest that I was a constant visitor in either salon, merely that I caught the eagerly roving eye of these ladies from time to time, and was tried out for being—just possibly—the Right Stuff.

  The experience with Cecil Beaton was a happy one because of his gratifying professionalism; that is to say, he wanted the work well done, knew what he could do and what he couldn’t, and was prepared to be exceptionally charming to anyone who helped him bridge the gap. The memory stays with me of that moment around noon when he would call out to his gracious widowed mother, generally in attendance somewhere in the house in Pelham Place: “Mummy, could you fix us two gins-and-tonic.” I hear the slightly precious voice issuing the request. At the same time, I am still meditating on Beaton’s use of the plural of gin, the singular of tonic: affected or upper-class correct in a Nancy Mitfordish way? A bit of both is probably the answer. I have never quite dared copy it.

  Our meetings generally took place at about nine o’clock in the morning: Beaton had the workaholic’s desire to use every moment of the day and in this case his glamorous subjects were probably not awake so early. Around this time, he had his celebrated sittings with Marilyn Monroe, who could certainly be trusted not to arrive before gins-and-tonic time. Cecil Beaton (a marvellous if waspish raconteur) made a good story out of Arthur Miller’s reaction to the result. He told me that the celebrated playwright stood gazing at the image and finally pronounced in his wonderful mellow baritone: “That’s my loony babe.”

  For me, however, there was a hidden peril to this nine o’clock rendezvous: I needed to get to my Chelsea hairdresser first, not only to impress Cecil Beaton but also because immediately after our sessions I would go on to the office in Cork Street. One has to face the fact—I had to face the fact then—that a freshly achieved Fifties hair-do, that cramped and crimped affair when blow-drying was unknown, was singularly unaesthetic. I swear that Cecil Beaton’s voice rose a little when he saw me, although his words were always kind. And then there was the occasion when I decided to gamble on a striking auburn rinse to brighten up my unaccountably mousey hair…His voice as he welcomed me sounded almost strangled.

  On the other hand, Cecil’s behaviour to me at the time of my marriage was immaculate. Not only did he volunteer to take the wedding photographs, but his loving bodyguard of a secretary Miss Eileen Hose informed me in her precise style that the pictures were to be a wedding present. Working so often in the Beaton household, I understood for myself that this lavishness was not universal practice. Faced with this generosity, I have to overcome the memory of Beaton’s words when he stood, gazing at me styled as Mary Queen of Scots, about to take the picture.

  “Open, piggies,” said the famous man. At the time I was left anxiously wondering whether he issued the command to all his sitters (the Queen Mother, for example?) as the equivalent of “Say cheese,” or whether it was a special need he felt, contemplating me and my tiny half-closed eyes beneath the iconic headdress.

  Having said that it was not Hugh’s politics which attracted me, I should stress that his commitment to the political issues which interested him—mainly the colonies and defence within the bounds of the then Empire—was in itself an attractive quality. This was especially true for one who had been brought up against a political background, even if from across the party boundary. I was delighted to find that the old canvassing days were back (I might have grown bigger, but so had the barking dogs). It was however his high spirits, a certain wildness coupled with good humour, which provided the key to his character. At thirty-eight, he was nearly fifteen years older than me; but that was not unusual for the time. In any case, coming from such a large family I had no rigid sense of generation. Hugh, slightly closer to my parents’ age than mine, was about the same distance from me as my youngest brother Kevin. In turn, Kevin was far closer to my children’s age than my own. To try and sort it all out would have been much too confusing.

  For our wedding Hugh wore a kilt of Fraser tartan and a velvet jacket with a lace jabot. Son of the man who had raised the Lovat Scouts for the Boer War, and brother of the war hero Shimi Lord Lovat, himself a decorated soldier, he cut a wonderfully romantic figure. The effect of the war had been to leave a lot of young men unmarried into their thirties. Hugh, as a second son (like my father), had no family money, which probably helped to keep him a highly popular bachelor, always in great demand with his friends. In 1956 he had an MP’s salary of roughly fifteen hundred pounds a year, with expenses limited to postage, secretarial help, and travel to the constituency. In theory, it had to do for both of us.

  When Hugh told his mother he was get
ting married to me, he added cheerfully: “She hasn’t a bean” (Laura, Lady Lovat, was a good deal less cheerful about it than he was). It was perfectly true. My Weidenfeld salary had obviously come to an end. A small legacy from my great-grandmother went towards extinguishing my Oxford overdraft. What was I to do? It was back to the moment when my mother found that to her amazement I had just left school and asked me what my plans were. As I had answered her then and repeated to myself now: “I’ll think of something.” I didn’t exactly think about History, but then, in one way or another, I was always thinking about History. In short, like Hugh, I too felt tremendously cheerful.

  EPILOGUE

  READER, I WROTE IT

  We now leap forward seven years.

  Gibbon wrote a classic account of his original inspiration for The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, that book which had imbued my adolescent reading with magic. “It was at Rome, on the 15th of October 1764,” he began, “as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.” Two hundred years later, my own Capitoline moment took place in the somewhat less august surroundings of my own London house; for barefooted friars, we have to substitute two little girls in ballet shoes; but for ruins, a house in which books and children and a basset hound tumbled over each other, will do very well.

  Sometime in 1965 my mother paid one of her ritual teatime visits. That is to say, the children enacted King Babar and Queen Celeste dancing at the circus or some such drama, while she and I chatted about her work. This was following the recent phenomenal success of her biography of Queen Victoria, published when she was nearly sixty. My mother had been lunching with her agent, the agreeable, headmasterly Graham Watson of Curtis Brown. She rambled on about the intricacies of the world of royal and aristocratic biography in which she now appeared to live. Then: “Graham suggested I should do a biography of Mary Queen of Scots,” said Elizabeth brightly.

  There was a terrible silence. I realized that she was quite unaware of the gravity of what she had just said. Eventually: “You can’t do that!” I cried in a strangled voice. “She’s my Mary Queen of Scots!” Still my mother seemed ignorant of the fact that a lifetime of love and passion had gone into my words. How to convince her? Suddenly, I knew.

  “You can’t do that,” I said. “You’re far too moral.” This was a judgement which it was surely impossible for my mother to contradict: for how could this good woman argue that she was not in fact all that moral?

  “Oh well, maybe I’ll do the Duke of Wellington…Gerry Wellington suggested…that is, Philip Magnus has just done King Edward VII…” With this superior chit-chat, I realized that the danger had passed. It was time for a decision. Like the few important decisions in my life, it was immediate, thrilling and irreversible.

  “I will do it,” I said.

  It is tempting to conclude by merely adapting the immortal words of Charlotte Brontë at the end of Jane Eyre: “Reader, I wrote it.” Nothing of course is that simple.

  At this point in my life—I was thirty-two—I had written two non-fiction books for Weidenfeld, following the children’s books I had written for the Heirloom Library before my marriage; I had five children. Dolls was a short illustrated book in a series, which included Early Cars, Chessmen and Oriental Rugs. A History of Toys was rather more elaborate. Both these books derived from that extended childhood preoccupation which I shared with Flora Carr-Saunders: those beloved dolls, Gilberta, Priscilla and the rest of them. I had even bought—for nothing—Victoria, an antique doll at the original Oxfam shop in Oxford, after reading about the young Queen and her dolls.

  In short I was offered the opportunity to write about something that interested me, within certain parameters, and took it. We also needed money badly and my efforts to supplement Hugh’s income by journalism were not very successful. Unfortunately my merry little articles about visits to country houses for the shooting parties to which Hugh, an excellent shot, introduced me, displeased our generous hosts without earning enough money to make it worthwhile—a fatal combination.

  Neither of the “plaything” books owed as much to maternal concern for my children’s toys as might have been expected, although there were obvious connections. Visiting the Doll Museum of Graham Greene’s separated wife, Vivien, in Oxford, I burst out instinctively: “Oh, I do wish my children could see this!” Mrs. Greene shuddered. “No, no, we don’t want children here, making a mess and upsetting everything.” I did not go quite that far. But it was the subject of play rather than the players which came to interest me. Councillor Patrick Murray of the Museum of Childhood in Edinburgh had made a study of “emergent toys”—the toys of poor children which they made themselves out of the material available, such as a wooden pestle or a wooden spoon wrapped in flannel or an orange box tacked on to the wheels of an old pram. It was the universality of the instinct to play throughout history, and in surprisingly similar ways, which fascinated me. Here was the spoon in its flannel, and there was the exquisitely flounced and frilly doll à la Watteau from Cremers, the most famous nineteenth-century London toyshop, both fulfilling the same primitive need.

  These “plaything” books, unlike Mary Queen of Scots, had been suggested to me as part of a general publishing programme; my own initiative did not feature. There was indeed that proposed work on the summer of 1914 to which I have alluded earlier, an idea left over from my studies at Oxford. But that did not have the strength of passion behind it which a mother of a growing—fast-growing—family (in the end I had six children in ten years) needed to carry it through. I soon abandoned it. Now the moment had come. The imaginary bells of my childhood, my Desert Island choice, were pealing to celebrate a new direction, as once they had lured me into the social centre of Oxford away from my studies.

  Where serious research for a historical biography was concerned, I learnt the hard way, but it was also a time of intense excitement. Our leader Churchill had been my childhood hero. Now I began to appreciate the comment he made while originally working on The History of the English-Speaking Peoples in 1939: it had been a comfort to him “in these anxious days” to put a thousand years between himself and his own century. The distraction which History brings from the inevitable ordeals of life at every stage was an unexpected but enduring discovery.

  It was now for the first time that the pleasure of what for tax purposes I came to term (perfectly accurately) Optical Research was revealed to me. It also could be called Going to Places and Looking at Them. But what an essential process it is in the making of a historical biography! With the respectful handling of the original documents, it ranks as one of the major ways of reaching what G. M. Trevelyan in his Autobiography called “the poetry of history”: “the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another…”

  To myself, in the early stages of my research, I used to recite a similar kind of mantra: “On the one hand Mary Queen of Scots is exactly like me: she feels love, pride, gratitude, jealousy and all the rest of it. On the other hand she is totally unlike me, being not only royal but Queen of Scotland in her own right from six days old, unable to remember any other existence. Even the present Queen only became heir to the throne when she was twelve years old.” I knew that the secret of a successful historical biography lay in the reconciliation of these two contradictory statements.

  With time, hearing the music of the period while I worked became important to me in this connection. With The Gunpowder Plot, there was William Byrd, the recusant Catholic who was nevertheless employed by Queen Elizabeth I: those private Masses for only four and five voices conveyed the secrecy of the times, with rituals hidden away in upper rooms. With the Court of Versailles under Louis XIV, I felt that listening to
Lully and Marais helped me to recreate the stately grandeur of the time. And with Marie Antoinette, her patriotic championship of Gluck from the Viennese Habsburg Court (as opposed to the Italian opera previously popular in France) illustrated perfectly her alien status. She was thought to be introducing sensibility to the French: as I played Iphigénie en Tauride, I bore in mind that one French courtier had taken the precaution of weeping his way loudly through the entire opera, so as not to be found with dry eyes at the crucial moment. Did he love his Queen the more for this presumed obligation? I imagine not—just as I would not have loved him if I had sat next to him at the opera.

  The subject of Mary Queen of Scots also allowed me to discover first-hand one problem about attempting to write History which is part of the fascination of it all. This is the vital question of structure. After a glamorous childhood in France, the young Queen then lived through seven dramatic years in Scotland: so far, so good, from the biographer’s point of view. After that she endured nineteen years of captivity: how to deal with that, convey the sheer, wearisome length of it all, during which she degenerated from an eager, optimistic young woman into a sad middle-aged one with health problems, without making the readers want to break out of their own chains and throw away the book? Yet it is essential in order to capture the character and her development: too many biographies, in my opinion, bring the story to a virtual end with the flight from Scotland. ( Just as Marie Antoinette’s crucial Austrian upbringing, the values she imbibed, is often ignored, as if she was actually born in France.) Once again, it is the biographer’s duty to reconcile two timescales effectively for the reader.

  There is another allied problem of course: how to relate the subject to the great events of her or his time. No biography can be successful which does not at least attempt this, even when the events themselves are likely to be overwhelming. My worst experience was during the writing of The Six Wives of Henry VIII: how I longed to state quite simply: “And so the Reformation took place.” Foiled of this possibility, I took comfort from the fact that, of the first two professional readers, one thought there was too much about the Reformation, and one too little.