Early in the morning of Thursday 24 March 1603, Queen Elizabeth I of England died. Within eight hours of her death, 36-year-old James Stewart was proclaimed King of England in London. He had reigned in Scotland as King James VI ever since his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been forced to abdicate on 24 July 1567. On 5 April 1603 James disappeared down the road to Greenwich, with his ‘gowff clubbis’, to be at the hub of his new United Kingdom. Thereafter royal visits to Scotland became rare for some 220 years.
James VI and I returned to Scotland once, in 1617, in an attempt to impose Anglican ritual upon the recalcitrant Scottish Kirk; he stayed for seven months. James’s second son Charles I, who was born on 19 November 1600 at Dunfermline, Fife, visited Edinburgh as monarch and on 18 June 1633 was crowned with Scotland’s own regalia. During June 1650 Charles II landed in Scotland and on 1 January 1651 was crowned King of Scots at Scone; he never returned to Scotland after his Restoration in 1660. In 1679 James, Duke of York, later King James II, stayed at Holyrood Palace, to the disgust of strict Presbyterians who loathed his religion and his predilection for drama and court entertainments. Nevertheless James returned to Edinburgh in 1680 as Lord High Commissioner, bringing with him his wife Anne Hyde and his daughter Princess Anne, who was to rule as Queen Anne, the last of the Stewart monarchs.
There were no further royal visits to Scotland until 1715, when Prince James Francis Edward Stewart, the only surviving son of James II landed at Peterhead in an attempt to win back the British throne from the grasp of the Hanoverian succession. Again in 1745, Prince James’s son Charles Edward Stewart, great-grandson of Charles I, took up the cudgels against George II, but all his hopes were strangled at Culloden field on 16 April 1746, when Charles’s Jacobite army was utterly destroyed by the forces of his cousin, the Hanoverian Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. Prince Charles’s desperate flight to France from the shores of Loch nan Uamh aboard L’Heureux on 19 September marked the end of this phase of royal visits to Scotland.
Almost seventy years later, the Scots were startled to learn that their new monarch King George IV, who had succeeded his father George III in 1820, intended to visit Scotland. The Scots aristocracy were sent into a flurry of consternation and activity as no one could remember how a royal progress should be organised. As royal pageant-master, Sir Walter Scott dug and delved in the nation’s archives in order to create a tartan panorama to welcome the monarch. His efforts were based mostly on invented Highland mythology, customs and dress, but the jubilation, processions and presentations lasted for ten days from Tuesday 13 August. The Scots would never see their like again.
Twenty more years passed before Scotland received another visit from a British royal personage. In the meantime the exiled royal Bourbons of France, Charles X, Comte d’Artois and King of France, Louis and Marie Theresa, Duc et Duchesse d’Angoulême, Charles and Caroline, Duc et Duchesse de Berri, and Henri, the titular Henri V of France, along with his sister Princess Louise, were all state guests at Holyrood Palace variously during periods in 1796 and 1830. Five years after her accession to the throne of Great Britain, after the death of her uncle King William IV at twelve minutes past two in the morning of 20 June 1837, Queen Victoria herself decided to take an early autumn holiday in Scotland.
During June 1842 Queen Victoria asked her Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel to set in motion the arrangements for her Scottish jaunt. To the Queen’s great surprise she was told that Peel and the Tory ministers in the Cabinet did not advise such a journey. They noted that the areas of northern England through which she would have to travel were rife with ‘Chartist sympathisers’. These were the agitators who demanded a ‘People’s Charter’ of parliamentary reform; only a few years previously, in 1839, they had signed a petition in the major towns of England towards this end and riots had broken out when Viscount Melbourne’s Liberal government had supported the rejection of the petition. No, the Queen was told, a Scottish trip was neither feasible nor safe. However, backed by Lord Melbourne, the Queen persisted with her wishes. After a lengthy discussion with Sir James Graham, the Home Office Secretary, Prime Minister Peel agreed that the trip could take place if the initial leg of the journey was by sea. Thus on Monday 29 August 1842 Queen Victoria embarked on the royal yacht, Royal George, at Woolwich, and her squadron, led by the 36-gun vessel Pique, set sail for Scotland.
By 1 September the little fleet was anchored off Leith. The Queen was met at Granton Pier by Walter Francis Montague-Douglas-Scott, 5th Duke of Buccleuch and 7th Duke of Queensberry, joint Lord President of the Council and Privy Seal, Captain-General of the Royal Company of Archers, and Lord Lieutenant of Mid-Lothian and Roxburghshire, along with Prime Minister Peel. Her visit was to last until Thursday 15 September, with trips as far north as Taymouth Castle in Perthshire, the home of John Campbell, 2nd Marquess and 5th Earl of Breadalbane, Lord Lieutenant of Argyllshire. During this visit, the Queen recorded later in her Journal, at the Duke of Buccleuch’s home, Dalkeith House, she first enjoyed real Scottish ‘oatmeal porridge’ and ‘Finnan haddies’ – the latter being split and smoke-cured haddock, named after the village of Findon in Kincardineshire.1
On Prince Albert
‘It’s very pleasant to walk with a person who is always content.’
John Brown
Queen Victoria was to make two more visits to Scotland before her great love affair with the country and its people really began at Balmoral. In September 1844 she landed at Dundee for a month-long expedition to Blair Castle at Blair Atholl, hosted by George Augustus Murray, 2nd Lord Glenlyon, nephew of the mentally disturbed estate owner John Murray, 5th Duke of Atholl. While driving by the River Tummel Queen Victoria tasted ‘Athole Brose’ for the first time at the inn at Moulinearn. This was a local drink made from a mixture of honey, whisky and milk.2
Between 11 August and 19 September 1847 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert made a tour of the west coast of Scotland aboard the royal yacht Victoria and Albert, paying a visit to Ardverikie in Inverness-shire, where the Groom of the Stole to Prince Albert, James Hamilton, 2nd Marquess and 1st Duke of Abercorn, had rented a deer forest and holiday house. During these early visits Queen Victoria was able to see something, and learn more, of the Scottish inheritance she had received from her Stewart and Hanoverian forebears. Throughout her life Queen Victoria sustained her pride in the (albeit-very-diluted) Stewart blood that ran in her veins and felt as happy in Scotland as a Jacobite as she was in England as a fluent German-speaking Hanoverian.
At Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne Scotland was calculated by geographers to cover some 30,200 square miles, some nineteen million mostly uninhabited acres; its north–south length was nearly 280 miles, and its east–west breadth around 150 miles. It was divided into 33 counties, with 948 parishes.3 The 1831 Scottish census showed that Victoria ruled over 1.11 million males and 1.25 million females in her northern realm. The largest number of male employees in any single industry was among shoe and bootmakers at 17,307, while domestic service was the major employment for women at 109,512.4
The Scotland that Queen Victoria fell in love with had developed into two distinct regions by 1837. To the north lay the Highlands, where a separate culture had grown differently from that of the Lowlands. For centuries the Highlanders had lived in close-knit, Gaelic-speaking communities, with a strong loyalty to their (mostly) Tory chiefs, linked together by their proud heritage and all sustained by their Roman Catholic or Episcopalian faiths. The Lowlands were centred upon Edinburgh and favoured England in both speech and trade, their political and religious faiths being old Whig leaning to new Liberal and Presbyterian. As the nineteenth century progressed the Lowlands were more and more Anglicised, with the upper classes being educated to an increasing extent in English public schools and universities, with Scottish capital and industry falling under the influence of English boards of directors.
By the time Queen Victoria died in 1901, Scotland’s alignment had changed from north–south to east–west, with the industrialisation and ‘Hibernianisation’ of Clydeside. Yet the Victorian Age for Scotland was more than a regal division. The Queen brought to Scotland a truly British Age – she was the first monarch since the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 to achieve this. She also brought greater harmony to the Scottish and English nations and was instrumental in the wider acceptance of Scots south of the border, without automatic ridicule. Her Court in Scotland reflected all these influences.
Strictly speaking, Scotland had not had a royal court in residence for over two centuries, since that April day in 1603 when King James VI of Scotland, newly proclaimed James I of England, crossed the border at Lamberton Toll, just north of Berwick-upon-Tweed, on his long journey to London. Yet when Queen Victoria inherited the throne of what she called her ‘wicked uncles’, she became heiress to a ceremonial court of Scottish Officers of the Crown, Officers of State and a Royal Household whose functionaries jealously guarded their hereditary places. There were six Officers of the Crown under the Hereditary Grand Constable and Knight Marishal, William George Hay, 18th Earl of Erroll of Slains Castle, Aberdeenshire. This position was granted initially by King Robert I, the Bruce, to Sir Gilbert Hay, 5th Lord Erroll in 1306. It was made hereditary in 1314 after the Battle of Bannockburn. The duties were simple: to safeguard the sovereign’s person on Scottish territory. The other Officers of the Crown were the Lord-Justice General, James Graham, 4th Duke of Montrose; the Lord President, the Rt Hon. Charles Hope; the Vice-Marshal, William Schaw Cathcart, Viscount Cathcart; and two Standard Bearers.
The Hereditary Bearer of the Royal Banner of Scotland in 1837 was H. Scrymgeour-Wedderburn of Birkhall. Sir Alexander Scrymgeour had carried the royal banner for Robert I in the Wars of Independence. When he became king, Robert I conferred the hereditary aspects of the position on the Scrymgeour family who became Earls of Dundee in 1660. The banner was defined by its armorial device of ‘lyon rampant’. The Hereditary Standard Bearer at this time was James Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale, of Thirlestane Castle, Berwickshire.5
The Officers of State were led by the Commissioners for the Custody of the Regalia, whose senior member was the Keeper of the Great Seal, George William Campbell, 6th Duke of Argyll. The Royal Household in Scotland was led by the Duke of Argyll as Hereditary Master, with two Deputy Masters in the shape of the Hereditary Usher, Sir Patrick Walker, and the Hereditary Carver, Sir William Carmichael Anstruther. The office of Master of the Household was given to Archibald, 2nd Earl of Argyll, in 1494. The position was made hereditary in 1528, and the Master was responsible for ‘below stairs’ and state function arrangements.
The Grand Constable and Standard Bearer were joined by Lady Seton-Steuart of Touch-Seton, the Hereditary Armour-bearer and Squire of the Royal Body, making up the three Marshals of the Royal Household. The Household was composed of twenty-two further appointments, ranging from the Falconer (Thomas Marshall Gardiner) to the Tailor (William Fraser). Many of these appointments were of great antiquity: the position of Dean of the Chapel Royal dated from 1120, while the Royal Limner (painter) was a later introduction in 1703. In 1837 forty-nine persons held warrants as suppliers to the court, ranging from the Royal Baker (James Aikman) to the Royal Wine Merchant (Alexander & Sons). Among the warrant holders for Scotland ranked the Queen’s Surgeon-in-Ordinary, Sir George Ballingall, and her Surgeon-Extraordinary, Mr John G.M. Burt. In the medical household they were joined by two Surgeon-Dentists, Robert Nasmyth and D.W. Johnston.6
Another important group within Queen Victoria’s Scottish ceremonial court were the still extant Royal Bodyguard, the Royal Company of Archers. Administered from Archers Hall, Edinburgh, they still appear at important royal occasions in their braided green doublets and Kilmarnock bonnets decorated with eagle feathers. Their Company was formally constituted in 1676, although tradition says they carry on the spirit of the archers who fell protecting King James IV of Scots when he and the Scottish army were routed at Flodden Field, Northumberland, by the English army under Thomas, Earl of Surrey, in the Anglo-Scots Wars of 1513.
Queen Victoria also inherited the ‘Honours of Scotland’, the Scottish Regalia or Crown Jewels, which themselves had had a colourful history, with bold adventures keeping them out of the hands of rapacious Englishmen like Oliver Cromwell. After the Act of Union of the Parliaments of 1707, the Honours were walled up in a vaulted chamber in Edinburgh Castle’s palace buildings; they were finally ‘re-discovered’ and placed on display by a warrant of the Prince of Wales (later King George IV) in 1818. The Honours comprise the crown, the sceptre and the sword of state. Tradition has it that the Scottish Crown incorporates the ‘circlet’ of King Robert I, the Bruce; made some time after 1314, it is known to have been used at the coronation of the five-year-old son of Robert the Bruce, King David II, in 1329. This crown has been subsequently altered at the behest of succeeding monarchs, and was ‘re-made’ for James V in 1540. The sceptre was presented to James IV by Pope Alexander VI in 1494; it was melted down and refashioned by James V. The Italian-wrought sword of state was a gift to James IV from Pope Julius II in 1507.
On Society
‘Me and the Queen pays nae attention to them.’
John Brown
Scotland retained its own Order of Chivalry in the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, which had been revived and promulgated by statute of King James II on 29 May 1687. Tradition has it that the Order was founded in 809 by Achaius, King of Scots, to honour the Patron Saint of Scotland, the Apostle and Martyr St Andrew of Bethsaida in Galilee. The Order fell out of use in James II’s reign but was revived by Queen Anne on 31 December 1703. The purpose of the Order was to give Scotland an equivalent to the Most Noble Order of the Garter founded in England in 1348. When Queen Victoria came to the throne none of the sixteen Knights of the Thistle ranked below Viscount, and one of their number was her ‘wicked uncle’ Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex.
All matters heraldic and armorial in Scotland were (and still are) under the jurisdiction of the Lord Lyon King-of-Arms, who settles questions of family arms in the Lyon Court. The office of Lord Lyon first appeared in the fourteenth century and historians aver that it was a successor to the Celtic sennachies, the tribal genealogists and reciters of family lore and history.
Queen Victoria’s Court always retained a rather stuffy formality of dress, particularly at levées, ‘drawing rooms’, presentations and state occasions. This meant that each special event saw a glittering assembly of court dress, wherein many of the men outdid the women in the splendour of their lace, gold braid, medals and feathers. Ministers of the Crown, lawyers, Lords Lieutenant, Governors General, officers and functionaries all wore special Court dress and colourful uniforms, each designed according to custom. In Scotland a specific court dress was formulated for Highlanders. It was thus formally gazetted in the Victorian Dress Worn at Court Guide:
Black silk velvet Full Dress DOUBLET. Silk Lined.
Set of Silver CELTIC or CREST BUTTONS for Doublet.
Superfine Tartan Full Dress KILT.
Short TREWS.
Full Dress Tartan STOCKINGS.
Full Dress long SHOULDER PLAID.
Full Dress white hair SPORRAN – silver mounted tassels.
Patent leather and silver chain STRAP for SPORRAN.
Full Dress silver mounted DIRK with Knife and Fork.
Full Dress silver mounted SKEAN DHU with Knife.
Patent Leather SHOULDER BELT, silver mounted.
Patent Leather WAIST BELT, silver clasp.
Silver mounted SHOULDER BROOCH.
Silver KILT PIN.
Lace JABOT.
One pair BUCKLES for instep of SHOES.
One pair small ankle BUCKLES for SHOES.
Full Dress BROGUES.
Highland CLAYMORE.
Glengarry or Balmoral [bonnet], CREST or ORNAMENT.
The Skean Dhu was the Highlander’s short-bladed, blackhilted sheath-knife or dagger. The Claymore reference is an error: a Claymore is a two-handed sword but the English author of the Guide meant a ‘basket-hilted’ sword.
The castles, palaces and houses of Queen Victoria’s Scottish inheritance which were dubbed ‘royal’, or had played some part in royal history, were myriad; they ranged from Dumbarton Castle, rising precipitously on its rock at the junction of the Rivers Clyde and Leven in Dumbartonshire, to Tarbert Castle, its walls already ruined by Queen Victoria’s day, standing 60 feet above sea level on the shores of the small creek called Loch Tarbert on the west side of the Loch Fyne, Argyllshire. From her forebears Queen Victoria inherited four palaces, at Dunfermline, Linlithgow, Falkland and Holyrood, but it was only at Holyrood that Queen Victoria ever occupied the royal apartments. She first stayed there in 1850, but in later years she often made Holyrood a resting place on her way to and from Balmoral. Prince Albert designed the modern approaches to the palace, which superceded the ancient processional way through Edinburgh’s Canongate thoroughfare. Albert also caused the area to the east of the ruined abbey church, abutting the palace, to be levelled and laid out in garden form. In 1854 the palace’s ‘Historical Apartments’ were opened to the public and much restoration work was undertaken by 1872, when a private suite was established for Queen Victoria’s visits.8
Two of the palaces and seven castles had hereditary Keepers who were required from time to time to appear at Queen Victoria’s Scottish Court. The Keeper of Holyrood in 1837 was Alexander, 10th Duke of Hamilton and Brandon, the premier duke of Scotland. The office had been bestowed on the 1st Duke in 1646. The Keeper still ‘maintains order’ through the blue-coated, top-hatted High Constables of Holyrood, who are in turn answerable to the Bailie of Holyrood. At the Palace of Falkland the Keeper in 1837 was Mr Oneisiphorous Tyndall-Bruce. The royal castle of Dunstaffnage, the fifteenth-century fortress commanding the entrance to Loch Etive in Argyllshire, was in the Keepership of the 6th Duke of Argyll, who also held in his remit the ruined castles of Dunoon and Carrick. Rothesay Castle, founded in the eleventh century on the Isle of Bute, had been in the Keepership of the Stewarts since 1498, with John Crichton-Stuart, 2nd Marquis of Bute, as Keeper in 1837. At Lochmaben Castle, the Keeper was Mr J.J. Hope-Johnstone of Annandale. Edinburgh and Dumbarton castles were deemed military buildings with a tradition of soldier governors.9 Despite all these properties at her command Queen Victoria established a new royal estate at Balmoral, further north than the ancient royal properties.
On John Brown
‘Remember John Brown? Aye, that I do; and a very good fellow he was too. Sometimes when I was a-mowin’ the lawns – it used to take me fourteen days to go right over all of ’em – anywhere near the house if he seed me, he’d put up his hand in the air an’ call “Hi, Jackman,” and then he’d say when I come up: “Don’t you stay thirsty out in the sun an’ heat; you just go in the hall and say I sent you in for a good draught.”
‘Ah, the servants lost a good friend when John Brown died. You’ve seen the granite chair what the Queen put up in memory of him in that side walk just before you comes to the House, haven’t ye? Well it was put there in that particular spot, because Mr Brown used to walk up and down there reading his letters from home. I don’t rightly recollect the inscription on the seat. I know there’s when he was born and when he died, and I think it goes on something like this: “To the truest and most faithful servant and friend that any monarch ever had . . .” But the granite that it is made of was brought all the way from Scotland. Yes, I liked John Brown. He was a bit hasty and outspoken, but always just and kind he was. Fine voice he had, an’ a very fine-looking man in his kilt.’
William Jackman,
Osborne Estate Worker
Today the estate of Balmoral runs to some 50,000 acres in total, plus 7,000 acres of grouse moor; there are a further 10,000 acres rented from a neighbour, with 190 acres farmed and 272 acres let. The castle itself sleeps in excess of 100 people, attended by 56 full-time staff. A further 100 or so work part-time during the visitor season, when 80,000 people view the castle and its policies.10 The 1998 film ‘Mrs Brown’, about the relationship between Queen Victoria and John Brown, has increased the number of interested visitors to the area.
While Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were visiting the west coast of Scotland in the lashing rain of 1847, across the Cairngorms Balmoral was basking in a prolonged spell of sunshine. John Clark, the 27-year-old son of the Queen’s physician Sir James Clark, was convalescing on Deeside from a long illness; he was a guest of the diplomat Sir Robert Gordon, brother of George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen, who had been British Ambassador to Vienna and was now lessee of the Balmoral estate. Young Clark reported to his father how his health had improved through the purity of the air. Sir James, an expert on the influence of climate on health, mentioned this to the Queen who, together with Prince Albert, was seriously considering establishing a ‘Scottish home’. Deeside, Sir James continued, would be a good place for the Queen to rest from her frequent twinges of rheumatism.
Prince Albert ordered a report on Deeside, its environs and climate. He was informed that it was ‘one of the driest areas in the country’. Coupled with Aberdeen artist James Giles’s sketches of the surrounding scenes, also commissioned by Albert, this report persuaded the royal couple that their autumn holiday should be spent on Deeside. And here fate took a hand. On 8 December 1847 Sir Robert Gordon collapsed and died at the breakfast table at Balmoral. Learning that the Queen was in search of a Deeside residence, Sir Robert’s brother, Lord Aberdeen, suggested Balmoral, which still had twenty years to run on the lease from the Earl of Mar.
James Giles was dispatched to do some further drawings – ‘I never made any money working to royalty’, he grumbled. Queen Victoria was delighted with the pictures and immediately agreed to take the lease sight unseen. On 5 September 1848 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert arrived off Aberdeen aboard the royal yacht Victoria and Albert. The next day they disembarked to a civic welcome and processed through triumphal arches of evergreens, heather, thistles and wild flowers. They breakfasted at Cults and lunched at Aboyne, and cannon welcomed them at Ballater. At Crathie there stood a triumphal arch which proclaimed: ‘Welcome to your Highland home, Victoria and Albert’, and at 2.45pm they arrived at Balmoral.
On Friday 8 September Queen Victoria made the first entry in her Journal concerning her new home:
We arrived at Balmoral at a quarter to three. It is a pretty little castle in the old Scottish style. There is a picturesque tower and garden in front, with a high wooded hill; at the back there is wood down to the Dee; and the hills rise all around.
After lunch they made their first exploration of the policies. All that they saw was delightful: the hills surrounding Lochnagar and the glen towards Ballater were given the royal seal of approval as it reminded them of Thüringerwald.11
The servants at Balmoral also more than passed muster. John Grant, the Head Keeper – an employee of Sir Robert Gordon for over twenty years – was approved for his ‘fine, intelligent countenance’, and ‘singular shrewdness and discreetness’; William Paterson, gardener, was more than acceptable, while gillie Macdonald made a fine figure in his kilt. Somewhere in the stables worked one John Brown. Many of Sir Robert Gordon’s retainers were kept on, as well as his dog ‘Monk’.
While Prince Albert was piecing together the history of their new home, Queen Victoria was learning about the subtleties of the gillie system of Highland society. Gillies were first introduced into general literary parlance thanks to the popular novels of Sir Walter Scott. In Waverley (1814), he refers to the barefoot Highland lads as ‘gillie-wet-foots’. The word gillie, gilly or ghillie had started to appear in general Scots vernacular in the seventeenth century to describe a youth. But by the eighteenth century it had developed into a term meaning specifically a male servant, especially an attendant on a Highland chief.
Prosperous chieftains would have a gillie-casfliuch (Gaelic for the man who carried the chief over fords and burns), a gillie-comstrain (who led the chief’s horse over difficult places), and perhaps even a gillie-trusharnich (a baggage carrier). Most respected of all was the gillie-more, the chief’s armour bearer. Victoria and Albert’s growing penchant for the sturdy Highland gillie they first encountered at Balmoral gave these retainers a new role in the nineteenth century as sportsmen’s attendants for both deerstalking and angling.
As they relaxed in their sitting-room – formerly Sir Robert Gordon’s drawing-room, as Queen Victoria noted in her Journal – Prince Albert recounted what he had found out about the history of Balmoral. The estate first appears in written records in the fifteenth century as ‘Bouchmorale’.12 When the estate was let to Sir Alexander Gordon of nearby Abergeldie Castle, at £8 18p p.a. in 1484, it was known as ‘Balmorain’. It was the Gordons who first built a small castle at Balmoral, but by 1662 the family had fallen so deeply into debt that the Crown allowed the Farquharsons of Inverey to foreclose on the mortgaged Balmoral. In their turn, however, the Farquharsons were themselves to be financially embarrassed, largely because of their support of the Jacobite cause in the risings of 1715 and 1745, and in 1798 the estate of Balmoral was bought by James Duff, 2nd Earl of Fife, for letting. The 2nd Earl died in 1809 but there were no heirs of his marriage to Lady Dorothy Sinclair and he left his whole estate to an illegitimate son. The ensuing legal challenge to the will caused the estate, including Balmoral, to be invested in the Fife Trustees. Balmoral was leased first to Captain James Cameron, who became a friend of Prince Albert, thence to Sir Robert Gordon and his sister Lady Alicia Gordon. Sir Robert spent much time improving the estate; he established a deer forest in 1833 and made many alterations to the house during the period 1834–9. On 20 May 1848 the Fife Trustees assigned the lease of Balmoral to Prince Albert.
Prince Albert now began a programme of acquisition in Deeside. The process of estate purchase (or leasing) was a slow one. First, the royal family purchased the 6,500 acre Birkhall estate, at the head of Glen Muick, with its house built in 1715, for use by Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, then aged eight. The Gordons refused to sell their early fourteenth-century property at Abergeldie, which abutted Balmoral, but Prince Albert accepted instead a forty-year lease. This was to be the home of Queen Victoria’s mother, also Victoria, Princess of Saxe-Saalfeld-Coburg and Duchess of Kent, from 1850 to 1858; from 1858 until her death in 1861 illness prevented the duchess from making the long journey north. It was not until 22 June 1852 that Prince Albert signed the papers of purchase for the 17,400 acre Balmoral estate, for £31,500.13 Prince Albert had also had his eye on the Forest of Ballochbuie, owned by the Farquharsons; they were unwilling to sell and Queen Victoria had to wait until 1875 to acquire it. Three years later she bought Abergeldie for around £100,000.14
Then, in August 1852, a fortuitous event took place. On the death of the miserly and eccentric barrister James Camden Neild (b. 1780), it was found that he had left his entire fortune of £500,000 to Queen Victoria. This greatly helped to fund developments at Balmoral.15 A lengthy programme of alterations was set in motion, from stables and cottages to workshops and even a prefabricated ballroom. William Smith, the City Architect for Aberdeen, whose 1847 design for the Trinity Hall of that city had so impressed Prince Albert, was summoned to prepare plans for the new schloss the prince wanted at Balmoral.
The planned schloss comprised two rectangular blocks, united corner to corner by a five-storey square tower. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert spent much time deciding what materials to use for the buildings, both outside and in. For the main structure a fine-grain Glen Gelder granite was chosen and specially quarried from the Balmoral estate by local labourers overseen by surveyor James Forbes Beaton, who matched slates from the Foudland quarries at Strathbogie. For the interior decorations Prince Albert invented the Balmoral Tartan – black, red and lavender, on a grey background – for use in the new Balmoral colour schemes; to this Queen Victoria added Victoria Tartan for the furnishings, interlarded with Royal Stewart (red and green) and Hunting Stewart (green, with red and yellow stripes) tartans.16 Prince Albert designed everything from curtain ties to door knobs and the whole was dubbed by courtiers a ‘feast of tartanitis’. On a number of occasions John Brown helped Queen Victoria to pin her tartan shawl around her shoulders. If she fidgeted while he was doing so, he would upbraid her with ‘Hoots, wumman, canna ye hold yer head still?’ At other times he would be disparaging about her dress: ‘What are ye daeing with that auld black dress on again? It’s green-moulded!’ He was also stern with her when she couldn’t decide what to wear: ‘Ye dinna ken yer ain mind for two minutes together.’
The development of a ‘Scottish home’ at Balmoral – which Prince Albert regarded as a Jägersrühe (hunting lodge) – was not welcomed by the dismayed courtiers. Balmoral was a long and tedious 5671⁄2 miles from London, and thus an inconvenient place from which to rule an empire. There was therefore a reluctance to visit. Arthur Ponsonby remarked: ‘Lord Salisbury [Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, three times Prime Minister], unlike some other ministers did not “attempt to conceal his disgust with the place” and was “heartily glad” when the time came for him to get away. Campbell Bannerman [Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Liberal Cabinet Minister], in a letter to his wife wrote, “It is the funniest life conceivable: like a convent. We meet at meals and when we are finished, each is off to his cell.”’17 Lord John James Robert Manners, later 7th Duke of Rutland, averred of Balmoral: ‘Yes, this is a very curious place and more curious things go on here than I should have dreamt of . . .’18
The English diarist Charles Cavendish Fulke Greville, erstwhile Clerk to the Privy Council, was nervous about the lack of security at Balmoral: ‘There are no soldiers and the whole guard of the sovereign, and of the whole Royal Family is a single policeman who walks about the grounds to keep off impertinent intruders or improper characters.’19 And Sarah Spencer, Lady Lyttleton, the royal governess commented: ‘Scotch air, Scotch people, Scotch hills, Scotch rivers and Scotch woods [are] all far preferable to those of any other nation in or out of this world [to the Queen] . . . The chief support to my spirits is that I shall never see, hear or witness these various charms.’20
The construction of the new Balmoral Castle was a slow process: a fire broke out in the workmen’s wooden barracks; the building granite was difficult to quarry; and the labourers were quarrelsome, downing tools at regular intervals for increased wages. Good relations seem to have been restored with the appearance of Charlie ‘Princie’ Stewart with ‘ankers’ of illegally distilled whisky for the workers’ refreshment.21 Soon The Scotsman was able to report:
The Queen’s residence at Balmoral is making considerable progress, and promises, without great pretensions, to be a place of solid and real construction. A correspondent comments on the circumstances, that the Highlanders seem to have a contempt for scaffolding, ropes, or windlass. He says that every block of granite – from two to three feet long – is transported singly on a Highlander’s shoulders. Up a narrow platform of boards and tressels to the place where it is to be set, and with considerable celerity, larger blocks are conveyed by four Highlanders, on a couple of poles. Primitive certainly.22
With a libation of oil and wine bringing to a close the ceremonial part of the programme, Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone of the new Balmoral Castle on 28 September 1853. By September 1854 a journalist from the Morning Chronicle filed this report:
The last portion of the main building . . . is now ready for being roofed. On the ground floor of the west and north sides are the public rooms, and over them are the principal bed-rooms and other accommodations for the Royal Family. The other two sides are three stories in height, and will be reserved chiefly for the accommodation of the suite. [That is, Queen Victoria’s courtiers.] On the east side, a wing is being built seventy feet in length, and in connection with a very prominent part of the edifice, viz., a tower forty feet square, which will be about eighty feet high, with a circular staircase on one angle, making the height 100 feet. It will be surmounted with a flag staff . . . The south and west fronts especially are very handsome, there being some very fine carving and moulding in the details. There are very fine oriel windows for the principal rooms . . . The whole is to be fireproof, according to Barrett’s patent.
The new Balmoral was occupied by the royal family on 7 September 1855, although many of the courtiers and servants still had to live at the old house or rough it in cottages on the estate. One Court lady took a dim view of the fact that her breakfast was delivered to her cottage accommodation each morning in a wheelbarrow. Queen Victoria recorded: ‘An old shoe was thrown after us into the house, for good luck, when we entered the hall.’ The throwing was done by the French steward in charge of the house, François d’Albertançon, who had filled the same role for Sir Robert Gordon. To enhance the royal family’s privacy, a new bridge was opened over the Linn of Dee on 8 September 1857, thus diverting the old road which used to pass close by Balmoral. By 1859 Prince Albert’s improvements for the gardens and grounds were complete, with new cottages for retainers and beds of roses flanked with white poplars from Coburg.
In time Balmoral was to formulate its own ‘Court’. Day-today administration, while the Queen was in residence on her twice-yearly visits, was carried out by the Lord Chamberlain and his staff, supplemented by a Commissioner and Factor at Balmoral. They would all regularly cross swords with John Brown in the future. Brown became an expert in Queen Victoria’s ‘Balmoral routine’, any variation of which made her cross. She was an early riser and often preferred to take her breakfast at 9am in a former gardener’s cottage near the castle. Here she would scan the albums of newspaper cuttings, trimmed and pasted in each day by her wardrobe maids. Lunch was at 2pm, tea at 5.30pm and dinner at 8.45pm, with pipers playing outside the windows at all meals. Interspersed with the meals were morning, afternoon and evening drives as the Queen fancied, with the outside staff meeting her after the latter with flaming torches in winter.23
Although at Balmoral she was hundreds of miles from the heart of government, Queen Victoria was a stickler for detail in preparing her letters and dispatches. Two extra trains ran from Aberdeen to Ballater for this purpose at 11pm and 4pm, and there was always a Balmoral courier waiting at the station to meet the trains, with a distinctive yellow gig.24 Before the railway system was developed it took two days for dispatches from London to reach Balmoral; a twelve-hour journey by train carried the mail and couriers to Perth, before another half a day’s journey by postchaise brought them to Balmoral.25
There were many reasons why Balmoral became a special place for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. It was a place of refuge and recreation, in the latter’s true meaning of being refreshed and fashioned anew. At Balmoral they could be themselves without the constant fear of giving offence by making the wrong move publicly. Certainly in the early years of their marriage, Queen Victoria was aware that her German consort was not popular. At Balmoral they were away from the sneering glances of criticism; at Balmoral they had no necessity to be always circumspect. More than that, it was a place that they had found themselves, in a home they had created themselves, with a household they had formed themselves, with no age-old traditions to be adhered to under the creakingly archaic control of the Royal Household at Buckingham Palace or Windsor. Balmoral gave them an escape from the awful world of lackeys-in-waiting who were more keen to be ladies and gentlemen than servants. The Scots staff at Balmoral were willing, honest and openly sincere, and were not shocked by what the southern courtiers might regard as the Queen’s eccentricities.26
It was Charles Greville who first noted Queen Victoria’s delight ‘in the simplicities and sincerities that she found in Scotland’.27 This was to lead to a certain naivety in her acceptance of all things ‘Highland’, but Balmoral gave her much-needed relief from the ceremonial and court routines. She loved the lack of obsequiousness on the part of the Highlanders: one gillie’s mother – Old Mrs Grant – welcomed the Queen to her home with the words ‘I am happy to see you looking so nice’, which made the Queen glow with affection. At Balmoral then, Queen Victoria had a sense of gehören (belonging).