John Brown (16 page)
There were to be more serious examples of opposition to Brown. One such became notorious in political circles. Queen Victoria intended to have John Brown ride on the box of her carriage at the Review of the Troops in Hyde Park on 5 July 1867. The Prime Minister, the 14th Earl of Derby, with some trepidation suggested to the Queen that the growing dislike for Brown might cause scenes of an ‘unpleasant nature’ if he took such a prominent place at the Review. Queen Victoria was immediately annoyed at the suggestion. She wrote of her irritation to her equerry Lord Charles Fitzroy: ‘The Queen [she usually wrote of herself in the third person] is much astonished and shocked at an attempt being made by some people to prevent her faithful servant going with her to the Review in Hyde Park, thereby making the poor, nervous shaken Queen, who is so accustomed to his watchful care and intelligence, terribly nervous and uncomfortable . . . What it all means she does not know . . .’
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Lord Derby wrote to General Sir Charles Grey that he had been informed by the erstwhile Liberal MP, Lord Edward Berkley Portman, that a hostile reception for Brown was being planned by the lawyer and political agitator Edmund Beales and his ‘roughs’ of the Reform League. How was such an embarrassment to be headed off, asked Derby? Could Brown have ‘some slight ailment’ which would necessitate his falling out of the duty? Should Brown be approached in such a way, Grey knew he would immediately complain to the Queen. Grey bit the bullet and told the Queen of the intent to hold anti-Brown demonstrations. ‘The Queen will not be dictated to’, she replied, using one of her favourite phrases of late. She did, however, withdraw her objections to Brown not being there. The problem resolved itself: Derby cancelled the Review as the Queen went into deep mourning following the assassination of her Hapsburg kinsman Ferdinand-Joseph Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, at Queretaro in Mexico on 19 July, by republican leader Benito Pablo Juárez.
Despite all this aggravation, the comforting presence of John Brown was always appreciated on Queen Victoria’s more poignant occasions. One such occurred on Tuesday 15 October 1867, the twenty-eighth anniversary of her ‘blessed engagement day’ to Prince Albert in 1839. On that rainy morning Queen Victoria was to unveil a statue of Prince Albert at Balmoral, just above Middleton’s Lodge. The statue was a gift from the Queen to the Balmoral tenantry. As Queen Victoria and Jane Ely, her Lady of the Bedchamber, sat in the royal carriage soaked by the deluging rain, with the 93rd Highlanders drawn up alongside the crowd of servants and tenants, John Brown’s stentorian voice rose above the others in a verse of the 100th Psalm. A bedraggled Revd Dr Taylor said a short prayer and the statue was unveiled after some snagging of the cover. After the soldiers had presented arms, the pipers played, and the Queen gazed sadly at ‘the dear noble figure of my beloved one, who used to be with us here in the prime of beauty, goodness, and strength’; the Balmoral Commissioner Dr Robertson then made a speech on behalf of the servants and tenants. As the gunsmoke of a
feu de joie
spread over the crowd, John Brown sprang on to the box and the royal party drove away to the sound of God Save the Queen, ‘sung extremely well’ noted the Queen.
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Anyone describing Queen Victoria’s life in 1868 would probably have settled on the word ‘sedentary’. By this date the Queen had become ruddy of complexion and obese of figure, with round bulging cheeks, more than one chin and exopthalmic eyes. Her lethargic days were regulated by a strict routine and a round of large meals interlarded with pralines, fondants and dainties ever to hand. Her life was one of selfindulgence and her idiosyncratic view of the world coloured her relationships with people. She did not welcome visitors gladly and became irritable if jolted from her daily habits. Her crankiness increased if she was not constantly attended by familiar faces – her daughters, her German dresser Emilie Dettweiler, her Scots wardrobe-maid Annie Macdonald and the ubiquitous John Brown. Some evenings she would sit at her spinning wheel in pure contentment with her favourite minister, the Revd Dr Norman MacLeod, reading to her from Scott or Burns. For those around her it was a life of relentless boredom; the one person who truly thrived on this humdrum existence was John Brown, content in his own ‘kingdom’.
At Balmoral the Queen often went to Glassalt Shiel (‘cottage of the grey burn’); the ‘cottage’ was really a fifteen-roomed house at the western end of Loch Muick, on Abergeldie land, which she had had built in 1868. The housewarming for Glassalt Shiel was a bittersweet occasion for the Queen. Amid the reels and merrymaking, the ‘whisky toddy’ and the oatcakes, the Queen ‘thought of the happy past and my darling husband’.
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She called the building ‘the first Widow’s House’, but brightened up when John Brown begged her to drink a toast to the ‘first fire kindling’. This was in accord with the old Highland superstition that a welltended and toasted first blaze in the hearth of a new house would assure ‘long life’ to all who dwelt therein.
At Glassalt Shiel the Queen kept house with just a few familiar servants to look after her and with her reluctant family to entertain her. All were guarded at night by a single policeman. Her secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, actively deplored her retirement to this secluded place, where the Glassalt Burn tumbled down the White Mounth of Prince Albert’s favourite wild spot. But regularly the Queen would issue from it with her tiny entourage to picnic in the hills with Brown fussing over the tea kettle or watching from a knoll with his telescope for the possible approach of unwelcome ramblers or – most hated of all – journalists. While muttering over the inconvenience of contacting the Queen on state business when she was at Glassalt Shiel, Ponsonby admitted she was brighter and more approachable after staying there. In the year she built Glassalt Shiel, the Queen was to give the world a remarkable insight into her private life.
A
LL THE
S
ECRETS OF THE
U
NIVERSE
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.
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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.
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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”.’
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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.’
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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 6
s
. 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 . . .
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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’.
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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 . . .’
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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.’
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