A National Archives exhibition of centuries of correspondence

As Valentine’s Day approaches, a new public exhibition called “Love Letters” opens Saturday at Britain’s National Archives and runs through April 12. The display spans five centuries and features letters that show how love can be expressed through romance, family bonds and friendship.

Curator Victoria Iglikowski-Broad said the documents recount “legendary romances from British history” while also including “voices of everyday people.” She said the exhibition is trying “to open up the potential of what a love letter can be,” adding that “Expressions of love can be found in all sorts of places, and surprising places.”

The exhibition ranges widely in both genre and form. It includes early 20th-century classified ads seeking same-sex romance, love letters from sweethearts to soldiers at war, and a medieval song about heartbreak.

Iconic royal letter found at a bedside

Iglikowski-Broad highlighted “one of our most iconic documents” as a poignant letter to Queen Elizabeth I from her suitor Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. The letter was written days before Dudley’s death in 1588, and it conveys the intimacy between the “Virgin Queen,” who never married, and the man who called himself “your poor old servant.”

The missive, with “his last lettar” written on the outside—spelling described as idiosyncratic for the period—was found at the queen’s bedside when she died almost 15 years later.

Love beyond romance, from wills to pleas in court

In the exhibition, love is also presented through family connections and friendship. That includes Jane Austen’s handwritten will from 1817 leaving almost everything to her beloved sister Cassandra.

The show also presents a letter from 1956 in which the father of London gangster twins Reggie and Ronnie Kray implores a court to go easy on the brothers. The letter says: “all their concern in life is to do good to everybody.”

The documents span a range of social positions, from paupers to princes. In an 1851 petition, an unemployed 71-year-old weaver named Daniel Rush begged authorities not to separate him and his wife by sending them to workhouses.

The exhibition displays the Instrument of Abdication through which King Edward VIII gave up the throne in 1936 so that he could marry “the woman I love,” twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson. Iglikowski-Broad said there is “a lot of connection in these two items even though on the surface they seem very different,” describing it as “In common [they have] just this human feeling of love … that the sacrifice is actually worth it for love.”

Letters marked by loss and risk

Other documents describe love that comes with uncertainty, danger or tragedy. The exhibition includes a never-before-displayed 1944 letter from young British intelligence officer John Cairncross to his former girlfriend Gloria Barraclough, reflecting on what might have been. Cairncross wrote: “Would we have broken off, I wondered, if we had known what was coming?”

The report notes that some readers may think Barraclough had a lucky escape because years later Cairncross was unmasked as a Soviet spy.

Royal romance and tragedy also appear. In one letter, Lord Alfred Douglas asks—without success—for Queen Victoria to pardon his lover Oscar Wilde. Nearby, the exhibition displays a letter written in 1541 by Catherine Howard, fifth wife of King Henry VIII, to her secret beau Thomas Culpeper.

Archives historian Neil Johnston said the tone of Catherine Howard’s 1541 letter shows “restrained panic. She is warning him to be very, very careful.” The report says Catherine Howard signed the letter “yours as long as life endures,” and that the relationship was later discovered; both Catherine Howard and Culpeper were executed for treason.

A rare intimate royal letter transferred to the Archives

A letter by Queen Henrietta Maria to King Charles I appears as a rarity in the exhibition, since the royal family guards private papers closely. The report describes the letter as beginning with “my dear heart,” and says it was found among possessions left behind by the fleeing king in 1645 after a battlefield defeat for royalist troops in England’s civil war.

The report says Charles lost the war, was tried, convicted and executed in 1649, and that the letter ended up in Parliament’s archives. It adds that the archives were transferred to the National Archives last year.

Johnston described the letter as “a little gem within the disaster of the English Civil War.”