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by Edith Katherine Smith

Source: The Avonlea Traditions Chronicle, Issue No. 26, Winter 1998/9.

On the accession of Edward VIII, January 1935, L. M. Montgomery wrote to her pen-pal, George MacMillan, "Isn't it odd that there is a King but no Queen? I doubt if he will ever marry now. If not, I believe there will be another 'Queen Elizabeth' one day."

That same Queen Elizabeth, whose reign L. M. Montgomery predicted, is known to have tapped her toes at the Charlottetown Festival in the 1960s, while listening to the title song of Anne of Green Gables-the Musical. Her subsequent request to see more of the show, which had never before been produced on stage, having been originally a television production, led to the birth of the highly successful and long-running stage musical.

L. M. Montgomery's fascination with royalty sparkles throughout her novels and journals. On June 8, 1931, she recorded reading Hackett's Henry VIII and His Wives, remarking "Henry is one of the enigmas of the race."

In October 1930, she had been amused to hear that a high school pupil in the Canadian West had, among other names, listed "Anne of Green Gables" as one of the wives of Henry VIII.

Reading L. M. Montgomery's journals leads one to believe that no more dramatic and theatrical Canadian author than L. M. Montgomery existed. On February 20, 1929, she described an "Old Time Night" in Norval for which she rented and wore a Mary, Queen of Scots costume. "A gorgeous affair-I wore a diamond crown and recited 'Mary, Queen of Scots.'" (MY DEAR MR. M., P. 140) This event was reworked into Anne of Windy Poplars.

The monarch most deeply connected to PEI was George III, whose Queen gave her name to Charlottetown. George III granted, by royal charter, the crown land on which was enacted much of L. M. Montgomery's ancestral story. In 1769 he commissioned Sir Samuel Holland to survey PEI into lots of 20,000 acres each, to encourage settlement in the colony. The Ile St. Jean had become St. John's Island and in 1799 when the Duke of Kent was visiting Halifax and Charlottetown, he gave his name to the Island-Prince Edward. But it was the reign of his famous daughter, Victoria Regina, which shaped the ethics, morals and sensibilities of L. M. Montgomery's world in her formative years.

In the year of her birth, the light that beats upon a throne shone into every corner of the British Empire, including Cavendish and Park Corner. On July 1, 1867, the Fathers of Confederation created the Dominion of Canada in Province House, Charlottetown. Robert Harris' famous portrait of the Fathers shows a patriarchy certainly, but each of the Fathers had sworn allegiance to Victoria whose reign gave new meaning to the term 'Matriarchy.'

On June 28, 1923, L. M. Montgomery reminisced in her journal: "When I was a child and young girl the Victoria myth was in full flower. We were brought up to believe that 'the queen'...was a model for all girls, brides, wives, mothers and queens to follow. In those days every home boasted a framed picture of the queen-a luridly coloured photo sent out as a 'supplement' by a popular weekly. There was a crown and lace veil on her head, a broad blue ribbon over her breast and jewels plastered on thickly everywhere… Poor Victoria hadn't any chance to be bad even if she wanted to be."

In the same journal passage, L. M. Montgomery recorded Grandfather Macneill's loyalty to his Queen. Perhaps because she had been raised in the patriotic and loyal Macneill home, she later had Anne and Diana discover and name an island in the Avonlea brook as Victoria Island, "because we found it on the Queen's birthday." In her teenage years, L. M. Montgomery likely would have read Lord Tennyson's tribute to Queen Victoria, written in March 1851, in which the often quoted line occurs, "Compass'd by the inviolate sea."

In The Golden Road, L. M. Montgomery offers a comic portrait of Queen Victoria through Peg Bowen's eyes. "I'm short of change just now, not being as rich as Queen Victory. There's her picture up there-the one with the blue sash and diamint crown and the lace curting on her head. Can any of yez tell me this-is Queen Victory a married woman?"

In 1879, Victoria had been on the throne for forty-two years and had been married for twenty of them. Her beloved husband, Prince Albert, had died in 1861. Also in 1879, L. M. Montgomery's Grandfather Montgomery's new home in Park Corner was taking shape-truly a senator's home built appropriately in the style known as unadorned 'Victorian Gothic.' In the front hall of this home, now the L. M. Montgomery Heritage Museum, is the 1897 Diamond Jubilee portrait of "Victoria, Queen of Great Britain and Empress of India," facing a portrait of "the great man himself" whom Victoria had knighted, Sir John A. Macdonald, first prime minister of Canada.

Grandfather's original letter of appointment to the Senate of March 1873 is signed by William P. Stelle, clerk of the Crown in Chancery. In the patriotic fervour following the Queen's death in January 1901, fulsome biographies and tributes appeared. One of these, a 1901 maroon-covered, deeply tooled book remains in the Montgomery home. Its preface, lavish with Victorian rhetoric, claims that although Victoria had the "frail body of a woman, she had the vigorous heart and brain of a man."

In Emily Climbs, "The Woman Who Spanked the King" features the Highland Scots raconteur Mistress McIntyre who identifies with Emily as a fellow storyteller. Balmoral Castle, the heathered hills of Royal Deeside, Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and the erring Prince Bertie spring charmingly into domestic comedy in the story that Emily eventually publishes.

As a charismatic Prince of Wales, Bertie's 1861 Royal visit to Charlottetown is mentioned in chapter six of Anne's House of Dreams. One of the former ladies of the House of Dreams, Elizabeth Russell, had danced with the Prince of Wales at the government ball in Fanningbank. "Elizabeth was always very proud of that dance. Mean folks said that was why she never married-she couldn't put up with an ordinary man after dancing with a prince." This-from Miss Cornelia, who couldn't put up with a man of any description!

The Charlottetown Guardian's headline of November 23, 1900, declared "Home from the War: The City Ablaze with Joy!" In that edition, a copy of which lies yellowed with age in the bay window of the Montgomery home is found a list of soldiers. Among them, Hedley Buntain and Hedley McKinnon, both former Prince of Wales college classmates of L. M. Montgomery's were returning from South Africa on "Her Majesty's Service."

L. M. Montgomery's journal entry of November 23, 1901 reveals the author as one of the early twentieth-century royalty watchers. "Awaiting the arrival of the Duke and Duchess of York, Halifax fairly stood on its head," she wrote. From her perch at the Provincial Building, L. M. Montgomery observed: "Our future king is an insignificant man with a red nose. The duchess looks to be the best man of the two. She was a big, rather fine-looking woman dressed rather dowdily in black." What had probably escaped the youthful journalist's sensibility was that the British court was still in official mourning for Queen Victoria, whose death on January 22, 1901, inspired L. M. Montgomery's comment, "Who ever thought that Queen Victoria could die? The Queen seemed about as enduring and unchangeable as the everlasting hills. The sense of loss seems almost personal."

Fast-forwarding to June 1911, Coronation fever had gripped the British Empire on the crowning of George V, the "future king" L. M. Montgomery glimpsed in Halifax. The journal of this month, however, records no royal fever, as her thoughts were focussed on packing her trousseau for her honeymoon in England, "this royal throne of Kings, this sceptred isle."

Twenty years later, on August 6, 1927, L. M. Montgomery met the Prince of Wales and George, Duke of Kent at a garden party at Government House in Toronto. She didn't know it , but she was looking into the faces of destiny. David, Prince of Wales, was to become Edward VIII, who exchanged the British crown for the divorcée from Baltimore-Wallis Simpson. The Duke of Kent would lose his life in a flying accident in Scotland the same year of the author's death-L. M. Montgomery in April 1942 and the Duke in August. The gloves she wore to shake hands with the Prince were laid away as heirlooms for her grandchildren.

In the Canadian State Chamber, the Senators hold numbered seats in view of the Speaker's chair and the Throne. In 1891, while touring the Parliament Buildings with her Grandfather Montgomery (whose seat was #15), an elated teenage L. M. Montgomery wrote, "I sat down for a minute in the governor-general's chair." It was a sweet and sparkling moment in the bond between granddaughter and grandfather. "The light that beats upon a throne" had momentarily shone upon her. The governor-general represents the Crown in Canada

Little could L. M. Montgomery or her grandfather have known that exactly forty-five years later, another governor-general, Lord Bessborough, would invest her in the Throne Room at Rideau Hall as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, the warrant signed by His Majesty King George V acknowledging his "trusty and well-beloved Lucy Maud Montgomery Macdonald." The OBE medal is "a gold maltese cross with the King's monogram on it attached to a bow of the royal purple ribbon." (MY DEAR MR. M., MARCH 1, 1936)

Anticipating the Royal Visit of 1939, Canada's Canadian Pacific Railway commissioned a commemorative booklet, The Spirit of Canada. L. M. Montgomery contributed a chapter on PEI, her loyal, royal Island. Inspired perhaps by Shakespeare's metaphor celebrating the island kingdom of Richard II, "This precious stone set in the silver sea," L. M. Montgomery's lines turned to lyric: "I was born, praise to the gods, in this colourful little land of ruby and emerald and sapphire." Is it any wonder that while pondering an apt analogy for her royal Island, her imagination would turn to the colours of the crown jewels?

Dr. Edith Katherine Smith is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at McMaster University and curator at the Lucy Maud Montgomery Heritage Museum in Park Corner, PEI.

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