Queen Elizabeth II’s personal letters and diaries should be preserved in full in the National Archives, a leading academic has said.
Paul Whybrew, a retired footman and one of the late queen’s closest aides, has been appointed to sort through her private papers before they are transferred to the royal archive in Windsor, according to the Mail on Sunday.
The decision to assign Whybrew with the momentous task of filing through the documents has been criticised by academics and campaigners.
Scot Peterson, a researcher at the University of Oxford who specialises in constitutional matters, said he shared the concerns that someone without adequate training might get rid of things that should be preserved.
“I’ll go one step further and say I think it’s important to just preserve everything, and it should probably just be given to the National Archives,” Peterson said, “with the idea that all royal papers are subject to a 100-year embargo. Once 100 years has passed, it seems to me there isn’t very much reason to withhold things that were even scandalous at the time.”
Peterson said it was normal that most papers were deposited in the royal archives at Windsor. “Access to those papers is not completely uncontrolled or unlimited, so the royal family retains control over who has access to the papers and what they do with it after they have access to it.
“They have a right of approval, or they can refuse to approve publication of things that come from those records. I’m even aware of cases where they’ve delayed approval in what seemed like an effort to try to stop publication without actually explicitly rejecting publication.”
The fear that vital documents might be destroyed or suppressed is not unfounded. A classic example of this, Peterson said, was the case of Princess Beatrice, who was one of Victoria’s daughters. “We have published diaries of Queen Victoria, but they were all completely rewritten by her daughter, who then burned the originals to make sure that nothing ever came out that was embarrassing.”
Peterson said that therefore all documents – regardless of whether a historian or academic believed them to be important or not – should be preserved as the royal family was a public institution in the UK.
He said: “Even historians may well have a particular point of view that they’re trying to promote, either consciously or unconsciously. We’ve learned a lot about the unconscious kinds of biases that people can have over the last 20 years; and so it might be important to just preserve everything with the understanding that it’ll be embargoed for 100 years and held by the Public Records Office at what’s now the National Archives.”
The battle over if and when to release historical royal documents to the public is not new. Peterson points to some papers relating to the abdication of King Edward VIII, which were released in 2003. “It took a number of very strenuous efforts to get that stuff out into the public so that people can understand what happened in the 1930s,” Peterson said.
