Gerald Wellesley: A Victorian Dean
Georgina Battiscombe introduces the Dean of Windsor; the wisest of Queen Victoria’s private counsellors and a relation of the Duke of Wellington.
‘The Queen thanks Sir Henry Ponsonby for his letter sympathising in a universal and irreparable loss—it is crushing to her! Irreparable! The last of her husband’s old friends and the most intimate of all.
The dear Dean was with her for thirty-three years, knew all our Children from their earliest years and three from their birth, shared every joy and sorrow as well as every trouble and anxiety; was large-minded, understood everything so well, made allowance for everything.
He was such a wise, excellent adviser, a peace-maker, with great knowledge of the world, and Windsor without him will be strange and dreadful!!’
The exuberance of Queen Victoria’s style must never be allowed to obscure the shrewdness of her judgement. When Dean Wellesley died in 1882, she indeed found herself bereft of one of the wisest and most intimate of her counsellors; the loss to her was, as she so emphatically declared, irreparable.
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