Beschreibung:

George Curzon, Marquess Curzon of Kedleston (1859-1925)c.70 autograph letters signed (“C”, “George”, etc.), to Lady Edward Cecil, later Lady Milner, on public and personal affairs, commencing when Curzon was Viceroy or India and continuing to his service as Foreign Secretary, c.240 pages, 4to and 8vo, Simla, Carleton House Terrace, London, Hackwood, Basingstoke, Naldera, Broadstairs, and elsewhere, 11 April 1902 to October 1922, many with envelopes   ...After every other Viceroy has been forgotten, Curzon will be remembered because he restored all that was beautiful in India... (Jawaharlal Nehru) A SUBSTANTIAL, UNPUBLISHED SERIES OF LETTERS BY THE VICEROY WHO HAS COME TO SYMBOLISE THE BRITISH RAJ AT ITS HEIGHT.
Curzon’s first letter dates from his time at Viceroy of India and was written during a tiger hunt in Hyderabad, at that time one of the autonomous Indian princely states, “in a tent in a jungle, temperature 100 degrees, tigers about”: he writes of his weariness at his work in India, but also of the contempt of British society when seen from a distance where “most people seem to be worshipping some idol of the market place […] I do not mean to elevate our selves, our lives or our standards here. But at least we are working not talking” (11 April 1902). A later letter from India expands on the Viceroy’s lot, and especially his loathing for the Raj’s Summer Capital of Simla (Shimla): “People at home imagine the Viceroy & his wife living in Oriental pomp in sumptuous palaces & marble halls. They little know that for 7 months of the year he is chained almost Prometheus like to a single hill top […] where he never see a soul except at official dinners or parties” (30 April 1903). He also writes of matters of policy (“…India cannot federate because she is a Dependency and in the last resort is under the heel of Downing Street often most unfeelingly and unscrupulously pressed down…”, 4 June 1902) and personality – especially his relationship with his military Commander in Chief, Lord Kitchener. Whilst initially Curzon observed the “spectacle” of Kitchener making the “veteran automations skip and hop” with an attitude of guarded admiration, he later expresses unreserved antipathy to a figure who has “pursued [him] with a torturous malevolence rare in the annals of politics & unprecedented in the annals of friendship”. The dispute with Kitchener was at the heart of Curzon’s resignation in 1905, although he explained to Violet that “The whole thing has come about from the lamentable incapacity of the govt to take a strong line about anything”
The years that followed Curzon’s return from India were marked by the death in 1906 of his beloved wife Mary, and he provides a moving tribute to Lady Milner’s sympathy in these letters: “one clings to any solace when the deep waters are moving over one’s soul. Thank you dear friend for your affection”. Over the years that follow, he writes to Violet on subjects including the Victoria League (of which she was one of the founders), Bodiam Castle, which Curzon purchased in 1917 (which was very close to Lady Violet’s home in Salehurst, East Sussex), and mutual friends (“…Your good faithful heart always beats in swift unison with the fortunes and feelings of your friends…” 25 October 1911). In one letter he writes of his concerns about Indian students in England in terms that reveal much about colonial anxieties (“…the Indian visitor does not as a rule come for a few weeks or even for a few months. He comes to study and to stay for a not inconsiderable time and the difficulty has always been to place him in good healthy moral surroundings where he will not fall a victim either of political intrigue or social corruption…”, 11 November 1907).
Although some of these letters undoubtedly expose Curzon’s complacent self-regard, his response to the outbreak of World War One reveals the shrew statesman. Far from taking the outbreak of hostilities as another opportunity to strike a heroic stance, and despite knowing that Violet’s son George was going into battle, he writes of being “one of those who is vexed and perturbed by the light-hearted way in which most people seem to regard this appalling convulsion”, warning that “very bad times lie before us: and if the Germans catch & cut up our Expeditionary Force, I do not like the prospect that lies before this country”. In the same letter he also writes with bitterness that his request to public service had been rebuffed: “I wrote & offered myself to the Prime Min[iste]r when war broke out, for any non-political work. But a man who at 39 was thought good enough to rule 300 millions of people - & did rule them – is apparently useless at 55” (22 August 1914). He reserves particular contempt for the baseless optimism of commentators from the British Press, who “shout as though it were all over before it has well-nigh begun”. Three months later Violet’s son George was missing in action, and Curzon writes in despair of “not so much the loss of individuals as the obliteration of a whole generation”, lamenting that there has “never been such a holocaust” and “such a monstrous sweep of the ardent and life-full & young” (13 November 1914).
Although Curzon continued to write to Violet well into the 1920s, their relationship cooled somewhat in its final years. In the early 1920s Curzon was in government as Foreign Secretary and Violet was married to her second husband, Lord Milner, who was Colonial Secretary. It seems that political differences between Curzon and Milner drove a wedge between Curzon and Violet. 
PROVENANCE:Sotheby’s, London, 22 July 1985, lot 411