The phrase allegedly said by the British Queen to her daughter before her wedding night is widely known. We checked whether the “grandmother of Europe” said this.
In March 2006, the famous Ukrainian politician Yulia Tymoshenko admitted: “I am often asked on the Maidan: “Where is your pride as a woman if, after everything that happened, you are ready to extend your hand to the president?” And I’ll tell you one story about this. Queen Victoria admonishes her daughter before her wedding night with a not-so-attractive man: “Close your eyes and think of England.” So I am ready to close my eyes.”
This quote is also attributed to Queen Victoria by writer and journalist Denis Dragunsky (repeatedly) and authors of such resources as “Peekaboo", "Pulse" And "Express newspaper" It can be found in the books "Mysteries of history. Long-lived monarchs", "Bad girls who changed the world" And "The continent that has ceased to be a legend" Nowadays in the West, this attribution is known largely thanks to Margaret Atwood’s acclaimed novel “The Handmaid's Tale"
About the morals of the era, which was still alive during the queen's lifetime called Victorian, many books have been written and a huge number of films have been shot. A special place in this system of foundations occupied a woman whose life was burdened with a huge number of regulations and restrictions. The families of monarchs were no exception, because dynastic marriages, as is known, were rarely concluded for love, but were of great strategic importance for both countries. And in relation to the princess who appears most often in this story (Queen's eldest daughter, also Victoria), the quoted approach would be very understandable. After all, she married the future German Emperor Frederick III and became the mother of Wilhelm II. Needless to say, how important relations with Prussia, which later became the core of a unified German state, were for Great Britain.
But if we try to trace the history of the appearance of this statement in print, we will find that it is not found there either in the 19th century (and Victoria ruled until 1901), or even at the beginning of the 20th century. It is widely believed (for example, this asserts famous researcher of quotes Konstantin Dushenko) that such an entry first appeared in the diary of the aristocrat Lady Hillingdon (1857–1940) in 1912: “I am glad that now Charles calls my bedroom less often than before. <…> And when I hear his steps at my door, I lie down on the bed, close my eyes, spread my legs and think about England.”
However, modern researchers skeptical also apply to this second attribution. It dates back to Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy's 1972 book The Rise and Fall of the British Nanny, where the above phrase became the epigraph of one of the chapters. The author of the quote named there is a certain “Lady Hillingham”, who in later books turned into a real historical figure - Lady Hillingdon. But experts did not find any diary of Lady Hillingdon, so such a statement should be considered unreliable.
But reliably knownthat on May 18, 1943, an article appeared in The Washington Post about the family of former British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. It read, in part: “Stanley Baldwin's son tells a story about the time his sister dated a young man who wanted to marry her. She asked her mother for advice in case the young man wanted to kiss her. “Do what I did,” my mother said, recalling the beginning of her affair with the man who was to become prime minister. “Just close your eyes and think about England.”
To date, no one knows whether this conversation actually took place. However, it was an article in a leading American publication that became the first sign in the popularization of the statement, in which over time the characters changed, and it itself became winged.
Cover photo: Wikipedia.
Incorrect quote attribution
If you find a spelling or grammatical error, please let us know by highlighting the error text and clicking Ctrl+Enter.
