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Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II by Sarah Tytler

S >> Sarah Tytler >> Life of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, (Victoria) Vol II




The betrothal of Princess Alice occurred within the week. Her Majesty
has given an account in the pages of her journal, transferred to the
"Life of the Prince Consort," how simply and naturally it happened.
"After dinner, whilst talking to the gentlemen, I perceived Alice and
Louis talking before the fireplace more earnestly than usual, and when
I passed to go to the other room both came up to me, and Alice in much
agitation said he had proposed to her, and he begged for my blessing.
I could only squeeze his hand and say 'Certainly,' and that we would
see him in our room, later. Got through the evening work as well as we
could. Alice came to our room ... agitated but quiet.... Albert sent
for Louis to his room, went first to him, and then called Alice and me
in...." The bride was only seventeen, the bridegroom twenty-three
years of age--but nearly two years were to elapse, with, alas! sad
changes in their course, before the marriage thus happily settled was
celebrated.

This winter her Majesty's old servant and friend, Lord Aberdeen, died.

In December the Empress of the French, who had recently lost her
sister, the Duchess of Alba, in order to recover health and
cheerfulness, paid a flying visit in private to England and Scotland.
From Claridge's Hotel she went for a day to Windsor to see the Queen
and the Prince. Towards the close of the year the Prince had a brief
but painful attack of one of the gastric affections becoming so common
with him.

In January, 1861, the Queen received the news of the death of the
invalid King of Prussia at Sans Souci. His brother, the Crown Prince,
who had been regent for years, succeeded to the throne, of which the
husband of the Princess Royal was now the next heir.

In the beginning of the year the Prince of Wales matriculated at
Cambridge.

In February the Queen opened Parliament. The twenty-first anniversary
of the royal wedding-day falling on a Sunday, it was celebrated
quietly but with much happiness. The Queen wrote to her uncle, King
Leopold, "Very few can say with me that their husband, at the end of
twenty-one years, is not only full of the friendship, kindness, and
affection which a truly happy marriage brings with it, but of the same
tender love as in the very first days of our marriage."




CHAPTER XXXIII.


DEATH OF THE DUCHESS OF KENT.

The Duchess of Kent was now seventy-five years of age. For the last
few years she had been in failing health, tenderly cared for by her
children. When she had been last in town she had not gone to her own
house, Clarence House, but had stayed with her daughter in the
cheerful family circle at Buckingham Palace.

A loss in her household fell heavily on the aged Duchess. Sir George
Cooper, her secretary, to whose services she had been used for many
years, a man three years her junior, died in February, 1860.

In March the Duchess underwent a surgical operation for a complaint
affecting her right arm and rendering it useless, so that the habits
of many years had to be laid aside, and she could no longer without
difficulty work, or write, or play on the piano, of which her musical
talent and taste had made her particularly fond. The Queen and the
Prince visited the Duchess at Frogmore on the 12th of March, and found
her in a suffering but apparently not a dangerous condition.

On the 15th good news, including the medical men's report and a letter
from Lady Augusta Bruce, the Duchess of Kent's attached lady-in-
waiting, came from Frogmore to Buckingham Palace, and the Queen and
the Prince went without any apprehension on a visit to the gardens of
the Horticultural Society at Kensington. Her Majesty returned alone,
leaving the Prince to transact some business. She was "resting quite
happily" in her arm-chair, when the Prince arrived with a message from
Sir James Clark that the Duchess had been seized with a shivering fit--
a bad symptom, from which serious consequences were apprehended.

In two hours the Queen, the Prince, and Princess Alice were at
Frogmore. "Just the same," was the sorrowful answer given by the
ladies and gentlemen awaiting them.

The Prince Consort went up to the Duchess's room and came back with
tears in his eyes; then the Queen knew what to expect. With a
trembling heart she followed her husband and entered the bedroom.
There "on a sofa, supported by cushions, the room much darkened," sat
the Duchess, "leaning back, breathing heavily in her silk dressing-
gown, with her cap on, looking quite herself"

For a second the sight of the dear familiar figure, so little changed,
must have afforded a brief reprieve, and lent a sense of almost glad
incredulity to the distress which had gone before. But the well-meant
whisper of one of the attendants of "_Ein sanftes ende_"
destroyed the passing illusion. "Seeing that my presence did not
disturb her," the Queen wrote afterwards, "I knelt before her, kissed
her dear hand and placed it next my cheek; but though she opened her
eyes, she did not, I think, know me. She brushed my hand off, and the
dreadful reality was before me that for the first time she did not
know the child she had ever received with such tender smiles. I went
out to sob.... I asked the doctors if there was no hope; they said
they feared none whatever, for consciousness had left her.... It was
suffusion of water on the chest which had come on."

The long night passed in sad watching by the unconscious sufferer, and
in vain attempts at rest in preparation for the greater sorrow that
was in store.

A few months earlier, on the death of the King of Prussia, the Prince
Consort had written to his daughter that her experience exceeded his,
for he had never seen any person die. The Queen had been equally
unacquainted with the mournful knowledge which comes to most even
before they have attained mature manhood and womanhood. Now the loving
daughter knelt or stood by the mother who was leaving her without a
sign, or lay painfully listening to the homely trivial sounds which
broke the stillness of the night--the crowing of a cock, the dogs
barking in the distance; the striking of the old repeater which had
belonged to the Queen's father, that she had heard every night in her
childhood, but to which she had not listened for twenty-three years--
the whole of her full happy married life. She wondered with the vague
piteous wonder--natural in such a case--what her mother, would have
thought of her passing a night under her roof again, and she not to
know it?

In the March morning the Prince took the Queen from the room in which
she could not rest, yet from which she could not remain absent. When
she returned windows and doors were thrown open. The Queen sat down on
a footstool and held the Duchess's hand, while the paleness of death
stole over the face, and the features grew longer and sharper. "I fell
on my knees," her Majesty wrote afterwards, "holding the beloved hand
which was still warm and soft, though heavier, in both of mine. I felt
the end was fast approaching, as Clark went out to call Albert and
Alice, I only left gazing on that beloved face, and feeling as if my
heart would break.... It was a solemn, sacred, never-to-be-forgotten
scene. Fainter and fainter grew the breathing; at last it ceased, but
there was no change of countenance, nothing; the eyes closed as they
had been for the last half-hour.... The clock struck half-past nine at
the very moment. Convulsed with sobs I fell on the hand and covered it
with kisses. Albert lifted me up and took me into the next room,
himself entirely melted into tears, which is unusual for him, deep as
his feelings are, and clasped me in his arms. I asked if all was over;
he said, "Yes." I went into the room again after a few minutes and
gave one look. My darling mother was sitting as she had done before,
but was already white. Oh, God! how awful, how mysterious! But what a
blessed end. Her gentle spirit at rest, her sufferings over."

By the Prince's advice the Queen went at once to the late Duchess's
sitting-room, where it was hard to bear the unchanged look of
everything, "Chairs, cushions ... all on the tables, her very work-
basket with her work; the little canary bird which she was so fond of,
singing!"

In one of the recently published letters of Princess Alice to the
Queen, the former recalled after an interval of eight years the words
which her father had spoken to her on the death of her grandmother,
when he brought the daughter to the mother and said, "Comfort mamma,"
a simple injunction which sounded like a solemn charge in the sad
months to come.

The melancholy tidings of the loss were conveyed by the Queen's hand
to the Duchess's elder daughter, the Princess of Hohenlohe; to the
Duchess's brother, the King of the Belgians--the last survivor of his
family--and to her eldest grand-daughter, the Crown Princess of
Prussia.

The moment the Princess Royal heard of the death she started for
England, and arrived there two days afterwards.

The unaffected tribute of respect paid by the whole country, led by
the Houses of Parliament, to the virtues of the late Duchess, was very
welcome to the mourners. The Duchess of Kent by her will bequeathed
her property to the Queen, and appointed the Prince Consort her sole
executor. "He was so tender and kind," wrote the Queen, "so pained to
have to ask me distressing questions, but spared me so much.
Everything done so quickly and feelingly."

The funeral took place on the 25th of March, in the vault beneath St.
George's Chapel, Windsor. The Prince Consort acted as chief mourner,
and was supported by two of the grandchildren of the late Duchess, the
Prince of Wales and the Prince of Leiningen. The pallbearers were six
ladies; among whom was Lady Augusta Bruce. Neither the Queen nor her
daughters were present. They remained, in the Queen's words, "to pray
at home together, and to dwell on the happiness and peace of her who
was gone." On the evening of the funeral the Queen and the Prince
dined alone; afterwards he read aloud to her letters written by her
mother to a German friend, giving an account of the illness and death
of the Duke of Kent more than forty years before. The Queen continued
the allowances which the Duchess of Kent had made to her elder
daughter, the Princess Hohenlohe, and to two of the duchess's
grandsons, Prince Victor Hohenlohe and Prince Edward Leiningen. Her
Majesty pensioned the Duchess's servants, and appointed Lady Augusta
Bruce, who had been like a daughter to the dead Princess, resident
bedchamber woman to the Queen.

Frogmore had been much frequented by Queen Charlotte and her
daughters, and was the place where they held many of their family
festivals. It had been the country house of Princess Augusta for more
than twenty years. On her death it was given to the Duchess of Kent.
It is an unpretending white country house, spacious enough, and with
all the taste of the day when it was built expended on the grounds,
which does not prevent them from lying very low, with the inevitable
sheet of water almost beneath the windows. Yet it is a lovely, bowery,
dwelling when spring buds are bursting and the birds are filling the
air with music; such a sheltered, peaceful, home-like house as an
ageing woman well might crave. On it still lingers, in spite of a
period when it passed into younger hands, the stamp of the old
Duchess, with her simple state, her unaffected dignity, her
affectionate interest in her numerous kindred. The place is but a
bowshot from the old grey castle of Windsor. It was a chosen resort of
the royal children, to whom the noble, kind, grandame was all that
gracious age can be. Here the Queen brought the most distinguished of
her guests to present them to her mother, who had known so many of the
great men of her time. Here the royal daughter herself came often,
leaving behind her the toils of government and the ceremonies of rank,
where she could always be at ease, was always more than welcome. Here
she comes still, after twenty years, to view old scenes--the chair by
which she sat when the Duchess of Kent occupied it, the piano she knew
so well, the familiar portraits, the old-fashioned furniture, suiting
the house admirably, the drooping trees on the lawn, under which the
Queen would breakfast in fine weather, according to an old Kensington
--an old German--custom.

The long verandah was wont to contain vases of flowers and statues of
the Duchess's grandchildren, and formed a pleasant promenade for an
old lady. Within the smaller, cosier rooms, with the softly tinted
pink walls covered with portraits, was led the daily life which as it
advanced in infirmity necessarily narrowed in compass, while the State
rooms remained for family and Court gatherings. The last use made of
the great drawing-room by its venerable mistress was after her death,
when she lay in state there.

Half-length portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Kent are in the place
usually occupied by the likenesses of the master and mistress of the
house. Among the other pictures are full-length portraits of the Queen
and Prince Albert in their youth, taken soon after their marriage--
like the natural good end to the various pictures of her Majesty in
her fair English childhood and maidenhood, with the blonde hair
clustering about the open innocent forehead, the fearless blue eyes,
the frank mouth. The child, long a widow in her turn, a mother,
grandmother, great-grandmother, must look with strange mingled
feelings on these shadows of her early, unconscious self.

There are innumerable likenesses of the Queen's children such as a
loving grandmother would delight to accumulate, from the baby Princess
Royal with the good dog Eos curled round by her side, the child's tiny
foot on the hound's nose, to the same Princess a blooming girl-bride
by the side of her bridegroom, Prince Frederick William of Prussia.

The Duchess's other children and grandchildren are here on canvas,
with many portraits of her brothers and sisters and their children. A
full-length likeness of the former owner of Frogmore, Princess
Augusta, Fanny Burney's beloved princess, hangs above a chimneypiece;
while on the walls of another room quaintly painted floral festoons,
the joint work of the painter, Mary Moser, and the artistic Princess
Elizabeth, are still preserved.

Frogmore was for some years the residence of Princess Christian of
Schleswig-Holstein. When she removed to Cumberland House, the
furniture which had belonged to the Duchess of Kent was brought back,
and the place restored as much as possible to the condition in which
she had left it, which implies the presence of many cherished relics--
such as the timepiece which was the last gift of the Queen and the
Prince, and a picture said to have been painted by both representing
Italian peasants praying beside a roadside calvary. There are numerous
tokens of womanly tastes in the gay, bright fashion of the Duchess's
time, among them a gorgeously tinted inlaid table from the first
Exhibition, and elaborate specimens of Berlin woolwork, offerings from
friends of the mistress of the house and from the ladies of her suite.
In one of the simply furnished bedrooms of quiet little Frogmore, as
it chanced, the heir of the Prince of Wales first saw the light. For
here was born unexpectedly, making a great stir in the little
household, Prince Victor Albert of Wales.




CHAPTER XXXIV.


LAST VISIT TO IRELAND--HIGHLAND EXCURSIONS--MEETING OF THE PRINCE OF
WALES AND THE PRINCESS ALEXANDRA OF DENMARK--DEATH OF THE KINO OF
PORTUGAL AND HIS BROTHERS

In the retirement of Osborne the Queen mourned her mother with the
tender fidelity which her people have learnt to know and reverence.

In April the Court returned to Buckingham Palace, when the Queen
announced the marriage of the Princess Alice to the Privy Council It
was communicated to Parliament, and was very favourably received. The
Princess had a dowry of thirty thousand, and an annuity of six
thousand pounds from the country.

The Queen's birthday was celebrated at Osborne without the usual
festivities. During the Whitsun holidays Prince Louis, who was with
the family, had the misfortune to be attacked by measles, which he
communicated to Prince Leopold. The little boy had the disease
severely, and it left bad results.

In June King Leopold and one of his sons paid the Queen a lengthened
visit of five weeks. The Princess Royal, with her husband and
children, arrived afterwards, and there was a happy family meeting,
tinged with sorrow.

In July the most exalted Order of the Star of India was instituted,
and conferred first on the Maharajah Dhuleep Singh, Lord Clyde, Sir
John Lawrence, &c., &c. That summer saw the death of two statesmen who
had been men of mark in the Crimean war--Count Cavour, the Sardinian
Prime Minister, and Lord Herbert of Lea. The royal visitors in London
and at Osborne included the Archduke Maximilian and his young wife,
and the King of Sweden and his son.

Towards the close of August the Queen went to Frogmore with the Prince
and Princess Alice, in order to keep the birthday of the late Duchess
of Kent, whose remains had been already removed from St. George's
chapel to the mausoleum prepared for them in the grounds of her former
home. The Queen wrote of the first evening at Frogmore as "terribly
trying;" but it comforted her in the beautiful morning to visit the
grand simple mausoleum, and to help to place on the granite
sarcophagus the wreaths which had been brought for the purpose.

The day after the return of Prince Alfred from the West Indies, the
Queen and the Prince, their second son and the Princesses Alice and
Helena, sailed from Holyhead in the _Victoria and Albert_ for
Kingstown. This visit to Ireland meant also the royal presence on a
field-day in the Curragh camp, where the Prince of Wales was serving,
and a run down to Killarney in very hot weather. At the lakes the
Queen was the guest of Lord Castleross and Mr. Herbert. The wild
luxuriant scenery, the size and beauty of the arbutus-trees, and the
enthusiastic shriek of the blue-cloaked women, made their due
impression. In a row on one of the lakes her Majesty christened a
point. The Prince's birthday came round during the stay in Ireland,
and was marked by the usual loving tokens, though the Queen noted
sadly the difference between this and other anniversaries: the lack of
festivities, the absence from home, the separation from the younger
children, and the missing the old invariable gift from the Duchess of
Kent.

Balmoral was reached in the beginning of September. Prince Louis came
speedily, and another welcome guest, Princess Hohenlohe, who travelled
north with Lady Augusta Bruce. Dr. Norman Macleod gives a glimpse of
the circumstances and the circle. He preached to the Queen, and she
thanked him for the comfort he gave her. Lady Augusta Bruce talked to
him of "that noble, loving woman, the Duchess of Kent, and of the
Queen's grief." He found the Queen's half-sister "an admirable woman"
and Prince Alfred "a fine gentlemanly sailor."

The Queen's greatest solace this year was in long days spent on the
purple mountains and by the sides of the brown lochs, and in a second
private expedition, like that of the previous year to Grantown, when
she slept a night at the Ramsay Arms in the village of Fettercairn,
and Prince Louis and General Grey were consigned to the Temperance
Hotel opposite. The whole party walked out in the moonlight and were
startled by a village band. The return was by Blair, where the Queen
was welcomed by her former host and hostess, the Duke and Duchess of
Athole. Her Majesty had a look at her earlier quarters, at the room in
which the little Princess Royal had been put to bed in two chairs, and
saw Sandy Macara, grown old and grey.

After an excursion to Cairn Glaishie, her Majesty recorded in her
journal, "Alas! I fear our last great one." Six years afterwards the
sorrowful confirmation was given to words which had been written with
a very different meaning, "It was our last one."

The Prince of Wales was on a visit to Germany, ostensibly to witness
the manoeuvres of the Prussian army, but with a more delicate mission
behind. He was bound, while not yet twenty, to make the acquaintance
of the Princess Alexandra of Denmark, not quite seventeen, with the
probability of their future marriage--a prospect which, to the great
regret of the Prince Consort, got almost immediately into the
newspapers. The first meetings of the young couple took place at
Speyer and Heidelberg, and were altogether promising of the mutual
attachment which was the desired result.

On the 18th of October the King of Prussia was crowned at Koenisburg--a
splendid ceremonial, in which the Princess Royal naturally, as the
Crown Princess, bore a prominent part.

On the return of the Court to Windsor, Prince Leopold, then between
eight and nine years of age, was sent, with a temporary household, to
spend the winter in the south of France for the sake of his health.

Suddenly a great and painful shock was given to the Queen and the
Prince by the news of the disastrous outbreak of typhoid fever in
Portugal among their royal cousins and intimate friends, the sons of
Maria de Gloria. When the tidings arrived King Pedro's brother, Prince
Ferdinand, was already dead, and the King ill. Two more brothers, the
Duke of Oporto and the Duke of Beja, were in England, on their way
home from the King of Prussia's coronation. The following day still
sadder news arrived--the recovery of the young king, not more than
twenty-five, was despaired of. His two brothers started immediately
for Lisbon, but were too late to see him in life. The younger, the
Duke of Beja, was also seized with the fatal fever and died in the
course of the following month. The Queen and the Prince lamented the
King deeply, finding the only consolation in the fact that he had
rejoined the gentle girl-wife for whose loss he had been inconsolable.




CHAPTER XXXV.


THE DEATH OF THE PRINCE CONSORT.

The news of the terrible mortality in the Portuguese royal family,
especially the death of the King, to whom the Prince was warmly
attached, had seriously affected his health, never strong, and for the
last few years gradually declining, with gastric attacks becoming more
frequent and fits of sleeplessness more confirmed. At the same time
the Prince's spirit was so unbroken, his power of work and even of
enjoyment so unshaken, while the patience and unselfishness which
treated his own bodily discomfort as a matter of little moment had
grown so much the habit of his mind, that naturally those nearest to
him failed in their very love to see the extent of the physical
mischief which was at work. Nevertheless there is abundant evidence
that the Queen was never without anxiety on her husband's account, and
Baron Stockmar expressed his apprehensions more than once.

Various causes of care troubled the Prince, among them the
indisposition contracted by the Princess Royal at the coronation of
her father-in-law, the King of Prussia, and the alarming illness at
Cannes of Sir Edward Bowater, who had been sent to the south of France
in charge of Prince Leopold. After a fortnight of sleeplessness,
rheumatic pains, loss, of appetite, and increasing weakness, the
Prince drove in close wet weather to inspect the building of the new
Military Academy at Sandhurst, and it is believed that he there
contracted the germs of fever. But he shot with the guests at the
Castle, walked with the Queen to Frogmore and inspected the mausoleum
there, and visited the Prince of Wales at Cambridge afterwards.

Then the affair of the _Trent_ suddenly demanded the Prince's
close attention and earnest efforts to prevent a threatened war
between England and America. In the course of the civil war raging
between the Northern and Southern states the English steamer
_Trent_ sailed with the English mails from Savannah to England,
having on board among the other passengers several American gentlemen,
notably Messrs. Mason and Slidell, who had run the blockade from
Charlestown to Cuba, and were proceeding to Europe as envoys sent by
the Confederates to the Courts of England and France. A federal vessel
fired on the English steamer, compelling her to stop, when the
American Captain Wilkes, at the head of a large body of marines,
demanded the surrender of Mason and Slidell, with their companions. In
the middle of the remonstrances of the English Government agent at the
insult to his flag and to the neutral port from which the ship had
sailed, the objects of the officer's search came forward and
surrendered themselves, thus delivering the English commander from his
difficulty.

But the feeling in England was very strong against the outrage which
had been committed, and it was only the most moderate of any political
party who were willing to believe--either that the American Government
might not be cognisant of the act done in its name, or that it might
be willing to atone by honourable means for a violation of
international law--enough to provoke the withdrawal of the English
ambassador from Washington, and a declaration of war between the two
countries.

Fidel and Che: a revolutionary friendship

After last week's fairly open theme, I thought I'd go with something a bit more structured this time. As I type this, I'm listening to Steeleye Span and thinking about the great ballad traditions of Britain and Ireland. What is a ballad? I suppose the most inclusive definition would be that it's a singable narrative poem: that covers a multitude but will do for the moment.

Ballads in English stretch back to the middle ages, with fine examples to be found among the Scottish border ballads and the English Robin Hood poems. These early ballads are among the best-known poems and stories in the language, and form part of the common heritage of English speakers everywhere. They gave rise to a tradition of ballad-making that endures down to the present day.

In fact, most poets since have tried their hand at the ballad at one time or another, and the result has been to deny any definition more specific than the one I ventured in my first paragraph. If you look around the internet, you'll come up with a wide selection of poems that are called ballads but have little in common formally. Stanza length varies from two to 10 or more lines, and all sorts of metrical and rhyming patterns are used. A good number will be singable in only the loosest possible sense, and at times the narrative tends to get lost in a mesh of more-or-less successful verbal embroidery.

So, what should a ballad be? Well, "proper" ballad stanzas are quatrains in which the first and third lines have four stresses and the second and third have three. The lines will rhyme A-B-C-B or A-B-A-B. It's as simple, and as difficult, as that. Here's an example, from Robert Burns's extremely singable Comin Thro' the Rye:

Gin a body meet a body
          Comin thro' the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body –
          Need a body cry.

Burns wrote a good number of ballads, and his lead was followed by many 19th-century poets. Two examples that I particularly like are Robert Browning's Confessions and Christina Rossetti's Up-Hill, but you can find ballads by just about any Romantic or Victorian poet if you look for them.

There is a long, strong tradition of ballads and ballad singers in Ireland, too. It is hardly surprising, then, that the great appropriator of tradition, WB Yeats, tried his hand at the form. At least four of his poems have the word "ballad" in the title; the pick of the bunch, for my money, is The Ballad of Father Gilligan, which may have benefited from having been written with a specific tune in mind.

Ballads continued to be written in the 20th century; perhaps the most unexpected exponents were Ezra Pound, with his Ballad of the Goodly Fere, and WH Auden. In fact, the ballad The Quarry is probably my favourite Auden poem.

And so, this week I invite a chorus of balladeering. You may choose to go the whole hog and write in ballad stanzas or you might prefer to take a more liberal view of the formal requirements. Either way, sing up and – as they say at all the best Irish sessions when calling for a bit of hush for the singer – one voice please.

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Obituary: Donald Westlake

The disputed Holocaust memoir, written by Herman Rosenblat, which was dropped from Penguin Group's publication schedule at the end of December is now set to appear as a work of fiction.

Rosenblat's memoir - which Oprah Winfrey called "the single greatest love story" she had heard in two decades in television - recounted how as a teenage boy in a Nazi concentration camp, he was kept alive by the food which was thrown to him by a young girl, Roma Radzicky. Penguin's US imprint Berkley Books had planned to publish the story, which sees Rosenblat reunited with Radzicky on a blind date years later, as Angel at the Fence: the True Story of a Love That Survived, next month.

But a Holocaust historian said it would have been impossible to approach the fence in the Schlieben concentration camp to throw food over it, concluding that this part of the story was made-up. Berkley initially defended the book, saying it was a work of memory, but then decided to cancel its planned publication, and demanded the return of the advance it had made to Rosenblat. A $25m film based on the book, to be called The Flower of the Fence, is still going ahead, with production due to start this year.

Publisher York House Press based in White Plains, New York, has entered into a tentative agreement with the film production company to publish a novel based on the film script early this spring. It said the book would be "grounded in fact", and would rise "to the proper levels of artistic value, ethical conduct and social responsibility".

A spokesperson for York House Press condemned the attacks which were made on the 80-year-old Rosenblat after the veracity of his story was questioned, describing them as a "savage" response to what was otherwise "a credible, heart-wrenching, and verifiable account" of his time in the concentration camp.

"No deliberate untruth is permissible, but beneath any fabrication is motivation and intent. We believe Mr. Rosenblat's motivations were very human, understandable and forgivable," the spokesperson said. "It is beyond our expertise to know how Holocaust survivors cope with their trauma. Do they deny, try to forget, rationalise or fantasise and promote fiction along with truth? Perhaps the coping mechanisms are as individual as the survivors themselves."

The president of the company producing the film, Harris Salomon from Atlantic Overseas Productions, said the book, "regardless of its shortcomings", would "challenge, educate and enlighten" readers about the horrors of the Holocaust. "The documented fact, acknowledged by his critics, is that Herman is a survivor of concentration camps," he said.

But Rosenblat's agent, Andrea Hurst, said that neither she nor Rosenblat were involved with this version of his story. "Usually book rights from films come out after the movie is released," she told guardian.co.uk. "I think the timing on this is very insensitive."

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Theatre review: Three Women / Jermyn Street, London
Obituary: Prolific crime novelist, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and man of many pseudonyms