Queen Victoria trusted John Brown to be discreet, as she said, with ‘all the secrets of the universe’, her daily routines, highs and lows, arguments and happy events, Court intrigues and confidences, yet she herself was to hand to her nation titbits about her personal life, sanitised of course by her own romantic imagery. Not since the publication in 1832 of the volume Secret History of the Court of England, by Lady Anne Hamilton, had the curtains been parted on Court life.1
In 1867 Queen Victoria published privately her Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, From 1848 to 1861, dedicated to Prince Albert, and circulated it to selected friends. Recipients like Dean Gerald Wellesley urged her to make her writings available to a wider readership. With some hesitation, the Queen handed over her holograph manuscript to Arthur Helps, Clerk of the Privy Council. An accomplished writer, Helps had already assisted the Queen with the preparation of Speeches and Addresses of the Prince Consort, which appeared in 1862. Helps produced an edited manuscript, without ‘references to political questions, or to the affairs of government’, and this persuaded the Queen to go ahead with general publication, in 1868, including additional material on ‘Earlier visits to Scotland, and Tours in England and Ireland, and Yachting Excursions’.
The clincher for a wider publication of her writings is further thought to have come from a visit to Sir Walter Scott’s old home at Abbotsford, as part of a tour of the Scottish Borders during 20–4 August 1867. She was staying at the time at Floors Castle, near Kelso, the home of the 6th Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe. At Abbotsford the royal party was hosted by James Hope-Scott and his second wife, the Queen’s god-daughter Lady Victoria Fitzalan-Howard. In Sir Walter’s old study the Queen signed her name in the great man’s journal ‘which I felt it to be a presumption for me to do’, she later wrote.2 A press report of the time noted: ‘The royal party then proceeded to the dining-room, where fruits, ices, and other refreshments had been prepared, and Her Majesty partook only of a cup of tea and “Selkirk bannock”.’3
Queen Victoria had been introduced to the works of Sir Walter Scott by her German governess Baroness Lehzen, and included in her large collection of dressed dolls some inspired by his Kenilworth (1821). Reading aloud from Scott was very much a part of Balmoral evening pastimes. Sir Walter had met the Queen on 19 May 1828, during the festivities for her ninth birthday; Scott had dined at Kensington Palace at the invitation of the Duchess of Kent, and later wrote of the Princess Victoria: ‘She is fair, like the Royal Family, but does not look as if she would be pretty.’4
Scott’s descriptions of Scottish scenery greatly appealed to the Queen’s romantic sensibilities and his portrayal of the noble, independent, loyal Highlander, in books such as Rob Roy (1818), echoed the Queen’s opinions. For her, John Brown was the epitome of a Scott character. So taken was she by Scott’s way of looking at all things Scottish, and so interested in his life, especially after reading his son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart’s Narrative of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1848), that she was determined to have a Border Terrier dog like Scott’s own. So in 1850 two pups were delivered to the Queen at Windsor by the Lockhart family friend Sir Edwin Landseer from the kennels at Abbotsford.
Bound in embossed moss-green covers, decorated with antler motifs in gold, Queen Victoria’s Leaves appeared in January 1868 and rapidly sold 20,000 copies; it was to run through several editions, notching up 100,000 sales and several translations. The Queen dedicated the work to Prince Albert with the words: ‘To the dear memory of him who made the life of the writer bright and happy.’ The considerable royalties accrued were donated to various charities. On 1 January 1869 she wrote to Theodore Martin:
The Queen thanks Mr Martin very much for his two letters and for the cheque which she has sent this day to Mr Helps. She quite approves of what he intends doing with the remaining £4016 6s. Of this the Queen would wish him to send her a cheque for £50, which she wishes to give away. £2516 she wishes absolutely to devote to a charity such as she spoke of, and the remaining £1450 she wishes to keep for other gifts of a charitable nature, at least to people who are not rich. Would Mr Martin just keep an account of sums he sends her so that we may know how and at what time the money has been disposed of? The Queen will keep a copy of the names which she does not wish others to know . . .5
Among the ‘names’ mentioned were local Balmoral and Crathie folk brought to her notice by John Brown. Brown was in regular contact with his relatives around Crathie and had regular letters from them informing him about events at home. Snippets of gossip from these letters he related to the Queen.
General readers – and in the Britain of the mid-nineteenth century, this meant the middle classes – were fascinated by the Queen’s revelations of her life in Scotland from 1842 to her widowhood in 1861, and were particularly interested in what she wrote in the footnotes, which included a range of gossipy details about her servants. The most controversy was caused by twenty-one separate references to John Brown, describing what she saw as his strong points – all ‘peculiar to the Highland race’. The Prince of Wales complained to his mother that Brown and other Highland servants were mentioned but he was not. He received a terse reply from the Queen listing the pages on which he was mentioned.
The Queen attributed the success of her ‘simple record’ of family life to the artlessness of its narrative, its obvious representation of married life and the cordial relationship with her Highland servants. Its popularity, she believed, was an endorsement of her way of life, which she was determined not to change. For these reasons Sir Howard Elphinstone suggested that the book should be issued in an inexpensive edition ‘to clinch the Queen’s love affair with the middle classes’.6
The book’s aristocratic detractors, such as the Whig peer Antony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, far outnumbered Elphinstone. Ashley-Cooper, a former junior minister, rubbished it at every opportunity at his London club. The royal family were appalled by such public comment and Lady Augusta Stanley summed up the feelings of most of the aristocracy. In particular they were dismissive of the book’s numerous footnotes detailing the lives of servants and giving them credibility as gentlefolk. The comment in the magisterial Tory literary and political magazine Quarterly Review singularly stung Lady Augusta; it had noted that ‘only with Scottish servants [sarcastically underlined] one could be on such blessed terms!’ Lady Augusta wrote: ‘These ignorant stupid remarks are calculated to do great harm to our Dear One . . .’7
Punch noted that the book was nothing more than the clash of tea trays. Because it dwelt mainly on her leisure moments the volume led to a public belief that Queen Victoria had little to do. In truth, a glance at John Brown’s daily schedules reveals that a large part of the Queen’s day was spent at her desk, with interludes for meals and exercise. Even her leisure time was rigorously organised, as ‘Dear Albert’ would have wished no moment to be idly spent.
Although there were numerous references to John Brown in the Leaves, certain incidents, all well known to the Queen, were left out. For example, during the autumn tour of the Scottish Borders in 1867, the growing national regard for John Brown did not go unnoticed. One journalist made it his particular brief to monitor the Highland Servant’s movements. As the royal train puffed into the ‘prettily decorated’ Kelso station, on the Berwick–Kelso branch of the North British Railway, the reporter noticed how John Brown leapt with great speed from his reserved railway compartment and ‘But for the intervention of the Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe, the Duke of Buccleugh, and other distinguished company on the platform, the stalwart Highlander would have conducted his sovereign across the platform and through the triumphal arch to the royal carriage at the outside of the station.’ Pushing his way through the crowd, the reporter kept his eye on John Brown: ‘John, who was dressed in full Highland costume, seemed immensely proud of his position; and it was certainly amusing in the extreme to see him now and again, with a broad grin, bowing his acknowledgements for the cheers raised for Her Majesty, some of which he probably thought were intended for himself.’8
To the consternation of the ‘duty’ courtiers Sir Thomas Biddulph, Keeper of the Privy Purse, equerry Lord Charles Fitzroy, and Colonel Charles Gordon, two prominent banners were stretched across the wool Market. They proclaimed: ‘WELCOME TO THE BORDERS – JOHN BROWN’ and ‘GOD SAVE THE QUEEN – JOHN BROWN’. A quick conversation with the Provost of Kelso elicited the fact that the said ‘John Brown’ was a local shopkeeper bent on opportunistic publicity. But the ‘real’ John Brown was now seen as good newspaper copy and when the Queen visited the nearby ruins of the medieval Cistercian Abbey of St Mary at Melrose, the journalists ignored the royal party and threaded their way through the tombstones in the wake of Brown who was getting ‘a good view of the abbey’s architectural beauties’.
Queen Victoria’s Leaves was to be parodied the year after John Brown’s death. In 1884 a 77-page satirical version appeared in New York under the pseudonym of ‘Kenwood Philp’ an Irish Land League member. Supported by a series of cartoons, the paperback volume was entitled John Brown’s Legs or Leaves from a Journal in the Lowlands. The publication carried the dedication: ‘To the memory of those extraordinary Legs, poor bruised and scratched darlings . . .’ as a direct sneer at Queen Victoria’s numerous mentions of John Brown’s legs being injured as he jumped down from her carriage.
The volume offered to the public a mockery of all that Queen Victoria held dear about her Highland servant, composed in the style of her own writings:
We make it a point to have breakfast every morning of our lives . . . Brown pushed me (in a hand-carriage) up quite a hill and then ran down again. He did this several times and we enjoyed it very much . . . He then put me in a boat on the lake and rocked me for about half an hour. It was very exhilarating.
The text reverses John Brown’s political views and has him declare: ‘I’m a Leeberal in politics.’7 It shows him swearing in the Queen’s presence, making her cry with his rudeness, and denouncing Benjamin Disraeli with the racist comment ‘d——d Sheeny’. Here too is Queen Victoria sending a command to the Poet Laureate, Lord Tennyson, to compose a sonnet commemorating Brown’s legs as ‘no nobler theme ever inspired the pen of genius’.
Picking up on Queen Victoria’s carriage accident in 1863, the author has Brown tending the Queen’s staved thumb. When he grows a wart on his own thumb, the Queen, escorted by forty-two Highlanders, processes to his cottage to give succour in ‘fine old whisky’. Brown’s excesses of familiarity are rewarded with a beating from the Prince of Wales. At last a missive is received from New York noting that the Fenian leader, one ‘O’Donovan Rossa’, is sailing to Britain to assassinate John Brown. Thus the Highland Servant – ‘The Legs’ – are seen scampering away from ‘Windsoral’, never to be seen again.
Despite her courtiers’ disparaging remarks, Queen Victoria continued to promote what she saw as the nobility of her Highland staff. Prior to the appearance of Leaves, she had commissioned the Royal Scottish Academician Kenneth Macleay Jr to produce a series of watercolours of her Balmoral retainers. This series developed into the published portfolio Highlanders of Scotland: Portraits illustrative of the principal Clans and followings, and the Retainers of the Royal Household at Balmoral. The text was written by the 6th Duke of Atholl’s cousin Miss Amelia Murray MacGregor, long-time companion and friend of Duchess Anne; the Queen had met Miss MacGregor on her jaunts to Blair Atholl.9
Herein John Brown is shown among the denizens of the great clans of Scotland, depicted in ‘the grey jacket, kilt and hose of half-mourning instituted for him by Queen Victoria after the death of the Prince Consort’.10 Sporting a royal blue cravat, gold watch and fob, a dirk in his right stocking and a folded plaid over his right arm, Brown looks more like a mannequin than a hard-working gillie. His brothers William and Archibald appear on other plates, both similarly dressed. If the volume raised eyebrows in royal circles because of its blatant promotion of Queen Victoria’s Highland servants, more was to come.
For some time before the publication of Leaves, Queen Victoria had been anxious to show her family and his detractors at Court that John Brown, with what she saw as his noble mien, was not of common stock. To this end she instructed her Commissioner at Balmoral, Dr Robertson, to prepare a biographical memorandum on Brown.
Dr Andrew Robertson knew John Brown well and crossed swords with him on a number of occasions. Dr Robertson had practised medicine in the Crathie area for many years and was probably the best-known individual within a radius of 50 miles from Balmoral.11 Originally from the Aberdeenshire village of Tarland, some 7 miles north of Aboyne, Dr Robertson had actually delivered John Brown as well as a generation of Crathie babies before his appointment as Queen’s Commissioner at Balmoral in 1848. Through the Shaws of Badenoch it is likely that the Robertson and Brown family trees shared a branch or two.
Dr Robertson’s memorandum survives in a fine four-page copperplate edition.12 It is dated ‘Balmoral, June 2nd, 1865’, when Dr Robertson began his researches, and is written in the third person. Dr Robertson fashioned the content to appeal to the Queen’s sensibilities. This is what it says:
The following is a brief outline of the Ancestry of John Brown –
Dr R. is unable to extend this history beyond the G.G.Father of John James Shaw, better known on Deeside by the cognomen of Captain Shaw, was the second son of a small proprietor in Badenoch. The paternal Acres were not very numerous, but they were deemed sufficient to allow him to rejoice in the title of Laird Shaw – The family consisted of two sons and one daughter – The second son James, was the G.G.Father of John Brown, and Janet the Daughter, was the Maternal Grand Mother of Dr Robertson.
James Shaw was a remarkably handsome man, and in his younger days, was celebrated for his prowess in all the Athletic Games and Exercises of the day. He was of a warm generous disposition, possessing all the high and chivalrous feelings of the Highland Gentlemen. It was said of him, that he was never known to desert a ‘friend or turn his back on a foe’.
Dr Robertson when very young remembers seeing him, and he retains to this day a vivid recollection of his fine Aristocratic appearance.
Dr R. has also seen many of his letters which displayed much shrewdness, high intelligence, and knowledge of the world – yet with all these noble qualities he was always in difficulties, he would direct his best energies to the business and interests of others, but neglected his own.
It is from the blood of this man, that John has derived those qualities which have recommended him to Your Majesty – he is every inch a Shaw.
Captain Shaw when a young man obtained a commission in a Highland Regt, he was present in most of the actions during the War of Independence, in America, was taken prisoner by the rebels, but broke out of Prison, and after many hardships, and adventures, made his escape. On his arrival in England, the Regt was disbanded and he retired to his native glen, upon the half pay of a Lieutenant. He soon after married a Miss McDonald, a Woman of good Family and considerable personal attractions, as famous for attention and good management of her domestic concerns, as her husband was neglectful. They had a family of four children, three sons and a daughter. The sons were all handsome, fine looking men – Two of the sons entered the Army, the eldest Lieut. Alexdr. Shaw was killed in a duel in Aberdeen – the second Hugh, died a Captn in the 73rd Regt. The third son Thomas died young – Janet the daughter, married Donald Brown who lived for many years in the Croft of Renachat [sic], opposite Balmoral Castle.
Mrs Brown, Dr Robertson knew well, a shrewd sensible woman, she had two sons John and James Brown. The former married M. Leys – daughter of Charles Leys in Aberarder, who became the Mother of John Brown.13
Dr Robertson was clearly struggling to promote John Brown into a higher social class than that to which he actually belonged. Robertson ignored the Brown family tree, which he clearly knew, and concentrated on his own, and better, Shaw connections. The key words ‘handsome’, ‘prowess’, ‘noble’, ‘Highland Gentleman’ were all the Queen wanted to read. The memorandum managed to get Robertson out of an awkward position, and copies of it were circulated to members of the Royal Household and to the Queen’s friends and family. The Prince of Wales tore his copy to shreds; his rage seethed until the Queen’s autumn visit to Balmoral in 1868. On that occasion John Brown was inexplicably missing for a whole week. When he did appear his face was battered and bruised. The explanation, said the other staff, was not hard to find. A few months before, the Prince of Wales had arrived at Windsor to see the Queen. On walking into the royal sitting room he encountered John Brown:
‘What dae ye want?’ Brown had asked in his usual bluff manner.
‘I wish to see the Queen,’ the Prince of Wales had replied equally brusquely.
‘Ye’re no’ seein’ yer mother till five o’clock,’ Brown commented rudely; the Queen was having her afternoon nap. ‘Ye’ll need to gang an’ amuse yersel’ for twa hours’, Brown suggested, sitting down with newspaper raised in front of the dressing-room door where the Queen napped. Purple with rage the Prince of Wales left. The incident, gossip averred, caused the Prince (and maybe a few others) to hire an Aberdeen bruiser to give Brown a ‘going over’ in a discreet part of Balmoral estate.14
As the years passed Queen Victoria’s interest in events at Balmoral never dimmed and John Brown encouraged her to share every aspect of estate life. Her Journal entries are full of such incidents. On 21 October 1868 she went to The Bush Farm, then the residence of John Brown’s brother William, to witness the ‘juicing’ of the sheep. It was the practice in the Highlands, before the sheep went off to their low country winter quarters, to ‘juice’ – or dip – the sheep in a mixture of liquid tobacco and soap. Queen Victoria witnessed the process, with Princess Louise and Prince Leopold, as John Brown’s elder brother James and William dipped the sheep. Sheep clipping was done in due season by the womenfolk of the shepherds’ families and Queen Victoria greatly admired their expertise.
Such events were mixed with more personal occasions. Three days after the ‘juicing’, the Queen, with Princesses Louise and Beatrice, was taken by John Brown to the home of forester John Thomson for the christening of his three-weekold baby, named Victoria, by the Revd Dr Malcolm Taylor. Queen Victoria considered the simple ceremony ‘impressive’, and added: ‘I gave my present (a silver mug) to the father, kissed the little baby, and then we drank to its health and that of its mother [Barbara] in whisky, which was handed round with cakes. It was all so nicely done, so simple, and yet with such dignity.’15
Queen Victoria knew the names of all her estate workers and their families and visited them regularly, particularly if there was illness in the house. Yet she was selective in her generosity and tended to favour individuals for her bounty rather than being broadly munificent of spirit. John Brown had a great deal of the latter in his character. At the turn of the year 1868/69 the winter brought hardship to many and unemployment with its accompanying social distress had not been as severe since 1842 – the so-called ‘Year of the Locust’, when twenty-one manufacturers were declared bankrupt in a month and five thousand hands were thrown out of work.16
Not far across the Solent from Osborne House, some six thousand dockyard employees, from shipwrights to mechanics, were thrown on the unemployment scrap heap when the Admiralty, under the First Lord, Liberal Hugh Culling Eardley, closed the dockyard at Portsmouth. Queues formed at the pawn shops and beggars lined the streets of Southampton and Portsmouth in order to raise a few pence to buy relief.17 At Osborne John Brown set up a fund of moneys collected from below stairs staff. Under the headline ‘HER MAJESTY’S SERVANTS AND THE DISCHARGED DOCKYARD WORKERS’, The Times published an item about the fund: ‘The Committee of the Portsmouth Dockyard Discharged Workmen’s Relief Association thankfully acknowledges through the medium of The Times the receipt of £22 16s 6d subscribed by Mr John Brown and the Queen’s servants at the Royal establishment now at Osborne, and forwarded to the chairman of the committee.’18
As John Brown’s fame spread, a number of anecdotes, imagined and real, sprang up concerning his activities, and over the years dozens of Deeside folk have added their ‘memories’ of him. One such was Mary Henderson who lived at Crathie, and remembered the Queen’s visits with John Brown to her family’s cottage. She recalled one occasion:
I am afraid that as children we had little appreciation of the honour of the Queen’s visits and the Queen’s interest in our life and doings. Not seldom if when playing about we spotted the distant approach of the grey horses, did we bolt and hide behind a stone dyke lest royal eyes should see us. The carriage was stopped and we were called, grubby and reluctant, to the royal presence.
And of John Brown:
I recall clearly that John Brown, who apparently had been sent into [our] cottage on some errand, came suddenly out behind us, and snatching my brother’s tam-o’shanter from his head, demanded what he meant by standing before the Queen with his bonnet on. The truculent youngster, nothing daunted, turned round and grabbed his tammy back, declaring that he had taken it off, as he had done on being greeted by the Queen, but was too young to know he should have kept it off.
It was characteristic of the Queen that she should at once interpose – ‘Yes, Brown, he did take it off,’ and to my brother – ‘Put it on again, my dear, you might catch cold.’
So we rather scored off the great John Brown that day, and the more so that when the Queen told him who we were, he replied, ‘Damn it, your Maa-dj-esty, I could ‘a’sworn it was twa laddies.’
I was inclined to be a pious young party in those days, and I reported later in shocked tones, that John Brown had sworn before the Queen. Indeed, so horrified was I that (so I was often told after) I did not even say swore, but spelt it, ‘S.W.O.R.E.’ – it was too awful a word to repeat! One lady-in-waiting was said to have complained that John, having been sent to fetch her, happened to meet her on the staircase and remarked, ‘Ye’re the very wumman I want.’ Much on her dignity, the outraged lady complained to the Queen that John Brown had called her a woman, on which Her Majesty replied: ‘Well, aren’t you a woman?’19
On 1 September 1869 the Queen set off with Princesses Louise and Beatrice, her Lady of the Bedchamber, Jane, Lady Churchill, John Brown and a staff of fifteen, by train, for a five-day visit to Invertrossachs House near Callander, Perthshire. The house was lent to her for her visit to The Trossachs by Mr and Lady Emily Macnaghten. Invertrossachs House had previously been known as Drunkie House, but this was changed because ‘Drunkie’ was not considered a suitable name for a dwelling in which the Queen was to spend some time.
Queen Victoria and her entourage, with John Brown leading the way, embarked on what was to prove a pioneering tour. News of the Queen’s adventures led to the creation of ‘The Trossachs Tour’, which was to see thousands of visitors from the south following in the Queen’s carriage ruts to see what she had seen. The travellers on the tour were introduced to a region of spectacular scenery, made famous in the Queen’s mind by episodes in Sir Walter Scott’s poem The Lady of the Lake (1810) and the novel Rob Roy (1818). The tour would take its own ‘traditional form’, leading from Callander via The Trossachs (‘bristly country’ in Gaelic) at Loch Achray to Loch Katrine and thence by steamers on Loch Katrine and Loch Lomond to Balloch at the lower end of Loch Lomond. Aboard the little steamer Rob Roy – on which the Queen and Prince Albert had travelled when they opened the Glasgow Waterworks in 1859 – the royal party viewed the majestic scenery and the Queen dipped into Scott’s prose as she went. Tears were shed when the Queen boarded the steamer Prince Consort at Loch Lomond; ‘that that dear name should have carried his poor little wife’, she grieved and indulged bittersweet memories of her trips aboard the Winkelreid with Prince Albert on Lake Lucerne. Refreshed, though, by Ben Lomond and the varied scenery, the Queen prepared to return home after meeting a Highland woman, Mrs Ferguson, who had become ‘quite rich’ on the sale of whisky.20
In November 1870 a piece of gossip circulated at Balmoral that John Brown had secretly married Miss Ocklee, the personal maid to Princess Beatrice. Certainly at this point in his life Brown was broody and, although still devoted to his growing circle of nieces and nephews, he seems to have been thinking that his chances of marrying and fathering children were receding: in fact he was only forty-four. In the event he did not marry Miss Ocklee, who, if she was enamoured of Brown, wasted no time in fastening her attentions on another and in 1873 she married an estate steward called Lawson. John Brown was to remain a bachelor.21
The parish kirk of Crathie, in which John Brown worshipped man and boy, was the ‘old church’ of 1804. Up to 1878 Crathie and Braemar were a large single parish. Presbyterianism and Sabbatarianism still loomed strongly in the area where the Kirk Elders, imbued with the legacy of severe discipline of the eighteenth-century church, had great influence. Queen Victoria was by no means conventional in her religious beliefs; disliking both Evangelicals and High Church elements in the Anglican communion she followed the ‘simple piety’ of her Lutheran mother. The fact that Prince Albert had found parallels in the church service at Crathie with the Lutheranism of his childhood also influenced the Queen to attend Crathie Church. She did, however, find Presbyterians ‘tiresome’ in their narrow-mindedness and bigotry. Yet although she was head of the Church of England, she had no such status in Calvinist Scotland and was largely free to worship as she pleased in her northern realm. In years to come the Queen’s visits to Crathie Church became fewer as the pews became crammed with visitors bent on seeing the Queen at prayer. Instead she worshipped in a private chapel set up at Balmoral.
John Brown invariably preceded the Queen into the church to shoo away any, including her suite, who might crowd the Queen as she prepared to sit in the royal pew. Those selected to sit with the Queen were often gripped firmly by the elbow, irrespective of their rank, as the Highland Servant directed them to their positions. From her seat in the gallery, which was raised round three sides of the old kirk, the Queen listened to a range of prominent Scots divines, invited to preach by the incumbent from 1840, the Revd Archibald Anderson. Communion was enacted only twice a year at the kirk by the 1870s and it was only after 3 November 1873 that the Queen took the Scots Sacrament.22 From her perch the Queen was able to observe her neighbours. On Communion Sunday, 13 November 1871, she wrote of the scene and mentions various members of John Brown’s family, describing how his uncle, Francis Leys, an Elder, assisted with the communion elements, and how she saw John Brown’s parents – ‘he eighty-one and very much bent, and she seventy-one’ – his father dressed in the ‘large’ plaid of the old-time Highlander.
From late September 1870 Queen Victoria was in a depressed state again. Within seven months she lost several old friends: Countess Blücher, formerly lady-in-waiting to Augusta of Saxe-Weimar, Queen of Prussia; General Charles Grey, Prince Albert’s old secretary; Sir James Clark, her Physician-in-Ordinary, and Baroness Louise Lehzen, her old governess. European events also depressed the Queen. In 1870 France had declared war on Prussia; in Britain the royal family were attacked as a ‘pack of Germans’ by republicans, and in Germany her daughter Vicky, along with the royal family, was denounced in Berlin by the Prusso-German statesman Prince Otto von Bismarck as pro-French. It was all very unsettling. At length, on 2 September 1870, Queen Victoria’s brother-monarch, Napoleon III Emperor of the French, with whom she had enjoyed reciprocal state visits, was captured at the Battle of Sedan. Within days his Second Empire gave way to the Third Republic. Gloom descended on Queen Victoria, not because she supported French activities, but rather because she feared for her own throne. Yet she put forward no protest either to the exile in Britain of Napoleon III’s Empress Eugénie and the French Prince Imperial and their suites, or to them being joined by the Emperor on his release.
All this time the Queen’s health was deteriorating: she had difficulty in swallowing; she had an abscess which was tardy in healing; and she had been suffering for months from painful gout, and all her joints ached: ‘Never . . . have I felt so ill,’ she wrote in her Journal on 22 August 1871. Her illness, news of which was not communicated to her subjects, made her more reclusive and subject to increased attacks in the press for her ‘invisibility’.
Even though she was unwell the Queen did not send for her children. Courtiers like Sir Thomas Biddulph were aware that her children’s presence and opinions irritated the Queen, and like Sir Henry Ponsonby, he noted how much more dependent on Brown she had become. The fact that Brown was a kind of messenger-cum-nursemaid-cum-guardian was bitterly resented by her children. At length the powder keg exploded at Balmoral.
The quarrels between John Brown and various members of the Queen’s family were often extremely complex in origin. The latest one, between John Brown and Prince Alfred, can be explained in this way. The Gillies’ Ball of 1870 had been extremely noisy and bibulous. When the dancing and jollities seemed likely to get out of hand, Prince Alfred ordered the music to stop. Brown was furious, and made his opinions known in no uncertain terms. Brown was reported to have barked at the prince – ‘I’ll not take this [order] from you or from any other man.’ He disliked Prince Alfred, whose head gillie John Grant refused to take orders from Brown, and the Prince now openly started to ignore Brown and deliberately to snub him because of his outburst at the Ball. It is certain that John Brown complained to the Queen when Prince Alfred refused to shake hands with him on his arrival at Balmoral in September 1870. Summoning Ponsonby to her sitting-room, Queen Victoria insisted that the quarrel with Brown be ‘patched up’ immediately and that Ponsonby should arrange it.
Prince Alfred reluctantly deferred to his mother, but insisted that he would resume conversation with Brown but only with Ponsonby as witness. This irritated the Queen further when she was told that the Prince had insisted on a witness. In the Royal Navy, when he was commander of the cruiser HMS Galatea, he explained, he always saw inferior ranks in the presence of an officer witness. ‘This is not a ship, and I won’t have naval discipline introduced here,’ the Queen retorted, on hearing her son’s comment.
Of John Brown
After watching John Brown perform his duties as MC at a Balmoral Gillies’ Ball, Cairns said: ‘What a coarse animal that Brown is . . . of course, the ball couldn’t go on without him . . . Still, I did not conceive it possible that anyone could behave so roughly as he does to the Queen.’
1st Lord Cairns,
Lord Chancellor
In a letter to his wife, Sir Henry Ponsonby recounted the resultant exchange between the Prince and the servant at the subsequent interview:
JOHN BROWN: Am I right, Sir, in thinking that you are annoyed with something I have done in the past? If so, please tell me, for it is most painful that any of Her Maadj-esty’s children should be angry with me.
PRINCE ALFRED: It’s nothing you have done in the past. But I must confess that I was surprised at the extraordinary language you used at the Gillies’ Ball last May.
JOHN BROWN: Her Maa-jd-esty put the whole arrangements for the Ball into my hands . . . At first I did not know that it was Your Royal Highness who had stopped the music, and I was very angry and lost my temper. I cannot think it possible that I used any nasty words, but if Your Royal Highness says so then it must have been so, and I must humbly ask your forgiveness.
PRINCE ALFRED: Thank you, I give you my forgiveness. [To Ponsonby] I am satisfied with the outcome of this meeting.
JOHN BROWN: I’m quite satisfied too.23
As a fragile calm descended once again on Balmoral, Queen Victoria’s tender sensibilities were to be assailed by a more poignant worry. On 9 November 1871 the Prince of Wales returned to Sandringham from a pheasant shoot at Londesborough Lodge, Scarborough, where he and a ‘fast group’ of his cronies from his ‘Marlborough House Set’ had been the guests of William Henry Forester Denison, Earl of Londesborough. While at the insanitary lodge – the drains were in a fearful state of neglect – several of the guests had complained of stomach upsets and had been treated for diarrhoea by the earl’s physician Dr George Dale. As he prepared to host the visit of Maharajah Dhuleep Singh, the Prince of Wales was stricken with typhoid. A week later another of the Londesborough guests, George Philip Stanhope, 7th Earl of Chesterfield, died, as did the Prince’s groom.
As soon as the Prince of Wales’s condition was deemed life-threatening the royal family descended on Sandringham in their usual squabbling mass. Never before had a royal illness stirred up such fear and anguish in the nation. An observer of the age, Joseph Irving, wrote in Annals of Our Time, 1837–91:
Bulletins were posted up in all places of resort; newspapers were eagerly bought up, edition after edition, as they were hourly brought out; and whenever two or three friends met, the condition of the Prince was not only the first but the single topic of discussion . . .
The public anxiety grew as the tenth anniversary of the death of Prince Albert approached. From the Reynolds News (‘an epidemic of typhoid loyalty’) to the Daily Telegraph (‘the dreaded approach of death’), the press stirred up a public panic which brought huge sympathy and increased popularity for the royal family. Slowly the Prince of Wales rallied and the nation rejoiced with a great service of Thanksgiving for his life on 27 February 1872 at St Paul’s Cathedral. Round the corner, though, lurked a greater danger for the Queen.