Our fourth Prime Minister, Sir John Thompson, and his wife Annie, had perhaps the most passionate and loving relationship of any Right Honourable couple. They married in 1870 and remained in love for the rest of their lives. With Thompson often away in Ottawa, Annie and he used a special code in their letters and wrote risqué (for those Victorian times) notes to one another, expressing their love and passions.
“So now my old baby you must not be such an awful baby until you get home and then I’ll see how far you can be indulged,” Annie wrote Sir John, using their secret code, on one occasion.
“I am so fond of you that I want to give you a good licking,” he wrote in kind to her once.
You get the picture.
The late Professor P.B. Waite is Thompson’s most important biographer. His 1980s biography, The Man From Halifax, remains the standard work on the Nova Scotian who became PM. You can learn more about the passions of John and Annie Thompson at this link to a Canada’s History article about their affair, and the shorthand they used in their love letters to express it, at this link: https://www.canadashistory.ca/explore/prime-ministers/love-in-code
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.