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1894 WINDSOR CASTLE, Mary Ponsonby, (Wife of Sir Henry Ponsonby, Queen Victoria's Private Secretary), Giving an account of Witnessing QUEEN VICTORIA - SWAZI Conference with envoys, 4 page letter to Her Son John (her nickname for him "Kin", while he was serving as A.D.C. to the Governor and Commander-in-Chief, South Africa, and while serving in operations in Matabeleland (Medal)). An interesting insight to Mary's determination to see the Swaziland Envoys, and listen in to the Conference while standing close to Princess Ena, describing the Queen on a Throne Chair just outside her dining room & looked very digne (dignified), mention Henry Battenberg, Lord Ripon, then she mentions the very severe flooding in Windsor, then Mary Biddulph, Lady Caroline Courtney's Death , mention also made of Arthur Benson was going to marry Miss Gordon, daughter of Lord Gordon of Aberdeen, etc. signed off "Your Loving Mother"

On 22 November 1894, Queen Victoria held a formal conference at Windsor Castle with Swazi envoys. This meeting was a critical moment in the history of Swaziland (now Eswatini) and the British Empire's involvement in Southern Africa.

Context of the Conference

The Swazi delegation had travelled to England to appeal directly to the Queen regarding the Swaziland Convention of 1894. At the time, the British and the South African Republic (Transvaal) were negotiating the future administration of Swaziland. The Swazi leaders were deeply concerned that their independence was being undermined by these colonial arrangements.

Key Details of the Meeting

Location: Windsor Castle.

The Delegation:

The envoys represented the Swazi nation during the reign of King Mbandzeni and the regency of the Queen Mother, Labotsibeni Mdluli.

The Request:

The envoys sought British protection and protested the proposed transfer of administrative powers over Swaziland to the Boer-led South African Republic. Outcome:

While Queen Victoria received the envoys with traditional royal courtesy, the British government ultimately proceeded with the 1894 Convention, which placed Swaziland under the "protection and administration" of the South African Republic without the consent of the Swazi people.

This event is often cited as a significant example of indigenous leaders using direct diplomacy with the British Crown to resist colonial encroachment, even when such efforts were ultimately overruled by imperial policy

MARY PONSONBY

Mary Bulteel was born in 1832 at Lyneham House, a country house near Yealmpton in the South-West of Devon, but the family moved to the nearby but grander house of Flete, near Holbeton in 1837. The Bulteels were of Huguenot origin, but had been established in Devon since the 1620s; they were also connected with the aristocracy, and Mary’s grandfather was Lord Grey, who had brought in the Great Reform Act. In 1843, Mary’s father died and she moved with her mother and sisters to a house in Eaton Square, London. Although not well-off, the Bulteels were connected to some of the richest families, and Mary spent a lot of time at Woburn Abbey and Wrest Park, where she and her friends ‘acted, danced, flirted and enjoyed ourselves’. When she was twenty, she went on a visit to her uncle General Grey, who was private secretary to Queen Victoria, to whom she was presented. Victoria took an immediate liking to her because of her interest in acting and music and made her a Maid of Honour. Mary’s daughter Magdalen suggests that ‘they attracted each other, not because they were alike, but because they were startlingly unlike’. While she was young, Mary was in the grip of a religious fervour and wanted to join or even found an Anglican order of nuns. She wrote that when she joined the court, she ‘was rather odious … I found the Court atmosphere exceedingly dull. I am sure I was rather superior and pompous … [and] I made strenuous efforts to keep up a high standard of religious practice.”

However, she also made the first of a long line of female friends at court, in particular Lady Margaret Canning and Lady Frances Jocelyn, both Ladies in Waiting. She also made friends with Magdalen ‘Lily’ Wellesley, wife of Gerald Wellesley, Dean of Windsor, and “Lily showed her what it was like to live a deeply Christian life without shutting oneself away in a cloister”. Her reading also coloured her views; brought up as a Liberal, she was influenced by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859: I 26.7) and the works of George Eliot (whose letters show a significant correspondence with Mary: D 9.2-4). In 1855 she rejected marriage to the future Chancellor and Home Secretary William Harcourt because of his ‘religious heterodoxy’ (‘1855 was the most exciting, the most disappointing, the happiest and the most miserable year of my life’ she wrote in retrospect). In 1860 she gave up her position as Maid of Honour when she married Henry Ponsonby, who was a colonel in the Grenadier Guards and equerry to Prince Albert (and from 1870 private secretary to Queen Victoria which kept Mary close to court circles). During the 1860s she lived in Canada, Ireland and London, had five children (the youngest, Arthur Ponsonby, became a Labour MP), and briefly had an intense friendship with Agnes Courtenay, the daughter of the Earl of Devon. She was also very active in her concern for justice and equality. She was a member of the committee which set up the first women’s college in Cambridge, Girton, and contributed both her time and her money to this cause, particularly in the early 1870s. She also joined both the general and the executive committee of the Society for the Employment of Women on 1867, and remained on both for thirty years. An advocate of education for women, Mary supported Elizabeth Garrett (as she then was) as a candidate for the London School Board, and when Mary fell ill in the 1890s, was determined that Mrs. Garrett Anderson (as she had become, the first women to qualify as a physician and surgeon in Britain), would be her doctor.

However, her views changed over the decades. In religious terms, she gradually abandoned her enthusiasm for High Church Anglicanism, helped in part by her correspondence with the agnostic, George Eliot (‘I thought that to speak to her of all that was lying deepest in one’s heart and mind without reserve, and to be received in the kindest and most sympathetic way was a rare delight’.). She also became interested in ‘molecular physics and evolutionary biology,’ corresponding with Thomas Henry Huxley, one of the leading scientist of the late Victorian age, and taking a great interest in the work of Marie Curie. However, she still enjoyed the music and ritual of the church, and felt that George Eliot did not always take account of spirituality. She had always been influenced by the work of the French religious philosopher Blaise Pascal, who ‘taught her how a life sternly devoted to loving God might destroy self-love’. She wished to write a book about him but felt that by 1901 she was too old for such a vast undertaking, contenting herself with writing an article on him in 1903 for the periodical Nineteenth Century (Bay 37). Although still believing in justice and equality, she also moved somewhat to the right, disagreeing with her husband over the significance of the death of General Gordon in 1885, and with Gladstone’s home-rule policy, which she felt would lead to the ‘dismemberment’ of the British Empire. She also had a public but not acrimonious correspondence with H.G. Wells about the nature of socialism, a subject on which she wrote an unfinished and unpublished article (she was influenced by the French utopian socialists Fourier and Saint-Simon).

After her husband’s death in 1895, her biographer, Michael Kuhn, wrote ‘In the last two decades of her life, the flame of MP’s passions burnt very hot. In her sixties, she began a triangular friendship with two women who broke down the barriers of reserve and reciprocated her affection with an intensity she had not expected.’ These two women were Ethel Smyth, the very accomplished musician who composed the suffragette anthem, ‘The March of the Women’ and Violet Paget, a forgotten but in her time, popular author who wrote as Vernon Lee. Ethel Smyth wrote that her ten years with Mary Ponsonby, were ‘the happiest, the most satisfying and for that reason, the most restful of all my many friendships with women’.

Before her death in 1916 at the age of 84, she also wrote nostalgically about women in two articles in the Nineteenth Century, not about their rights and education, but about the decline of the great salons, run by the great political and cultural hostesses of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. She argued that ‘noblewomen at Versailles, or in mid-Victorian Mayfair, had more power, position and place than modern women did in the year 1900’. She also supplied the notes for Edmund Gosse’s article on Queen Victoria which appeared in the Quarterly Review in 1901, ‘the first critical piece on the queen to be based on privileged, inside information.’

Mary Ponsonby was, in the words of Lady Constance Lytton, ‘an unusually clever and cultivated woman’. She had known fervent religious belief only to lose it gradually over time. She had worked for equality and justice particularly for women, but regretted the decline of the salons run by the great women of the time. She felt superior to many of her contemporaries, but was determined not to show off, as her self-examination diaries show. She embraced both socialist and conservative beliefs, and wrote about both. She was a devoted wife and mother, but developed a wide array of intense friendships with women. So, a complex, difficult, passionate human being, whose diaries and letters give us a fascinating insight into the concerns, philosophical, political and cultural, of a very well read, intellectual and dynamic Victorian woman.

Fresh to the Market Place, from Major-General Sir John Ponsonby's Autograph Letter Collection, For more from this collection see our shop category for SIR HENRY & JOHN PONSONBY COLLECTION

John Ponsonby (British Army officer)From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Major-General Sir John Ponsonby KCB CMG DSO (25 March 1866 – 26 March 1952) was a British Army officer who commanded 5th Division during World War I

Born the son of Sir Henry Ponsonby (Queen Victoria's Private Secretary), his Mother Hon. Mary Elizabeth Ponsonby, Maid of Honour to Queen Victoria and a daughter of John Crocker Bulteel.

His brothers were Frederick Ponsonby,PC (16 September 1867 – 20 October 1935) Assistant Private Secretary to Edward VII & GV, and Arthur Augustus William Harry Ponsonby, 1st Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede, (British politician, writer, and social activist).

His Two Sisters were Alberta Victoria Ponsonby (6 May 1862 – 15 October 1945) and Magdalen Ponsonby (24 June 1864 – 1 July 1934) Author

Sir John was educated at Eton College, He was gazetted to the Royal Irish Rifles 16 November 1887, and to the Coldstream Guards 15 August 1888, becoming Lieutenant 29 June 1891. He was ADC to the Governor and Commander-in-Chief, South Africa, 10 August 1891 to 30 January 1895; served in operations in Matabeleland (Medal); was promoted to Captain 7 September 1898, and in that year served in Uganda (Medal), and again in 1899, during the operations against Kabarega (clasp). Captain Ponsonby served in the South African War, 1899-1902, on special service with the Rhodesian Field Force, 19 February 1900 to 7 July 1901. He was Adjutant, 5th New Zealand Regiment, 8 June 1900 to 1 January 1901; afterwards in command 1 January to 18 January 1901. From February to May 1900, be was employed with Mounted Infantry, and he took part in operations in the Transvaal, west of Pretoria, from July to 29 November 1900; operations in the Transvaal, February to June 1901; operations in Cape Colony, February to 31 May 1902. He was mentioned in Despatches [London Gazette, 10 September 1901]; received the Queen's Medal with four clasps, the King's Medal with two clasps, and was created a Companion of the Distinguished Service Order [London Gazette, 27 September 1901]: "John Ponsonby, Captain, Coldstream Guards. In recognition of services during the operations in South Africa". The Insignia were presented by the King 27 October 1901. He was promoted to Major 23 January 1904, and commanded the Guards' Depot 1 March 1905 to 28 February 1907. He became Lieutenant Colonel 28 October 1913.

Lieutenant Colonel Ponsonby served in the European War, 1914—18; Landed in France 13th August 1914 in charge of 1st Coldstream Guards,Wounded 15th September & returned to unit 21st November. commanded the 2nd Guards Brigade, BEF, 26 August 1915 to 19 November 1916: was given the Brevet of Colonel 1 January 1916; commanded the Special Reserve Infantry Brigade 28 November 1916 to 7 March 1917; commanded the 21st Infantry Brigade, BEF, 8 March to 20 March 1917; became Colonel 20 March 1917; commanded the 2nd Guards Brigade, British Armies in France, 21 March to 21 August 1917; commanded the 40th Division, British Armies in France, 22 August 1917 to 3 July 1918; subsequently commanded the 5th Division, British Armies in France, 4 July 1918 to 1 April 1919; was promoted to Major General 1 January 1919. He was mentioned in Despatches; created a CMG in 1915, a CB in 1918, and was given the Brevet of Colonel.

He went on to become General Officer Commanding, 5th Division remaining in that role until the end of the War. After the War he became General Officer Commanding the Madras District of India. He retired in 1928.

He lived at Haile Hall near Beckermet in Cumbria

In 1894, Princess Victoria Eugenie of Battenberg (affectionately known as Princess Ena) was a seven-year-old member of the British Royal Family living under the care of her grandmother, Queen Victoria.

Key Events and Context in 1894

Pony Accident: In February 1894, the young Princess made headlines in The Illustrated London News after being injured by a fall from her pony. Royal Portraits:

During this year, she was featured in volume 41 of the Portraits of Royal Children (1893–1894). An official photograph from January 1894 is held in the Royal Collection Trust. Family Life:

She lived primarily at Windsor Castle, Balmoral, and Osborne House. Her mother, Princess Beatrice, was Queen Victoria's youngest daughter and constant companion, meaning Ena grew up in the heart of the Queen's private household.

Background and Legacy

Full Name: Victoria Eugenie Julia Ena.

Lineage:

She was the daughter of Prince Henry of Battenberg and Princess Beatrice. She was a first cousin to both King George V of the UK and Tsarina Alexandra of Russia. Future Queen:

Though just a child in 1894, she would later become the Queen Consort of Spain (1906–1931) after marrying King Alfonso XIII. Haemophilia:

Like her grandmother, she was a carrier of the haemophilia gene, which she later passed to some of her Spanish royal descendants