John Brown (28 page)

 4.    
Royal Archives
, Vic.Add.MSS.A.4/213, 14 May 1901.

 5.    
Royal Archives
, Vic.Add.MSS.U32 ‘Kronberg Letters’ to Empress Frederick of Germany, 12 April 1865.

 6.    
Discreet
: her writings show that Queen Victoria had her own vocabulary of meanings for words she used. For her ‘discreet’ was applied to anyone thinking as she did on any subject, although she also used it to define foresightedness, unobtrusiveness and bashfulness. She also used the word ‘bashful’ of gillies who were intoxicated.

 7.    Queen Victoria’s ‘published indiscretions were so blatant that they carried with them an aura of innocence’; thus averred Taylor Whittle in
Victoria and Albert at Home
. The Prince of Wales did not see it that way.

 8.    Christopher Hibbert,
Edward VII: A Portrait
, p. 143.

 9.    Giles St Aubyn,
Edward VII: Prince and King
, pp. 140–1. On one occasion at Balmoral Edward’s sons Prince Albert and Prince George tied a string across a staircase and not seeing it John Brown tripped over it and fell headlong. Cursing the boys (who were giggling nearby) he soundly thrashed them both. The Prince of Wales was furious that a servant should handle his children thus and complained bitterly to the Queen. ‘It was a silly prank and I think the boys thoroughly well deserved what they got,’ she replied.
See
Tisdall, p. 183.

10.  The Duchess of Westminster told the diarist Charles Grenville of Queen Victoria’s awareness of her mother’s supposed infatuation for Conroy. Cecil Woodham-Smith,
Queen Victoria: From Her Birth to the Death of the Prince Consort
, p. 73.

11.  G.E. Buckle (ed.),
The Letters of Queen Victoria
, Series II, 1862–85, 26 July 1867, p. 434;
see also
pp. 449–50.

12.  
Elgin Courant and Morayshire Advertiser
, August 1866.

13.  
John O’Groats Journal
, established 1836, published at Wick.

14.  Giles St Aubyn,
Queen Victoria – A Portrait
, p. 361.

15.  E.P. Thompson,
William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary . . .

16.  Edmund Yates (ed.), ‘English Photographs (IX), by ‘An American’.
Tinsley’s Magazine
, October 1868.

17.  Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Unpublished Diaries, within
Blunt Papers
, MS9 4–6–1909.

18.  Sir Frederick Ponsonby,
Recollections of Three Reigns
, p. 95.

19.  
Gazette of Lausanne
, September 1866.

20.  The Foreign Office was somewhat embarrassed by Harris’s intervention and officially withdrew the complaint through the Swiss ambassador to the Court of St James.

 1.    David Duff,
Victoria in the Highlands: The Personal Journal of Her Majesty Queen Victoria
, p. 31.

 2.    
Ibid
, p. 52.

 3.    
New Edinburgh Almanac
, 1837. Part IV, p. 265.

 4.    
Ibid
, Census Summary 1831, p. 267.

 5.    The office of Hereditary Bearer of the Saltire (St Andrew’s Cross) was not instituted until 1901 in favour of the 15th Earl of Lauderdale.

 6.    
New Edinburgh Almanac
, pp. 268–9.

 7.    Both Dunfermline and Linlithgow were ruined (as they are still), but the latter is listed in the
New Edinburgh Almanac
(1837) as having a ‘Keeper’ in Sir Thomas Livingstone of Westquarter. In 1837 Falkland was also ruined, but when the Hereditary Keeper, John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquis of Bute, inherited the position in 1877 he laid plans for the palace’s rebuilding and restoration.

 8.    Sir Herbert Maxwell,
Holyroodhouse
, p. 186.

 9.    The Keepership of Stirling Castle had fallen into disuse with the attainder of the 6th Earl of Mar and Kellie. This family’s rights dated from the 1500s when they were foster parents to child sovereigns and heirs to the throne. The office was restored by King George V in 1923 on the 14th Earl. Dunconnel Castle, near Pladda Isle, Firth of Clyde, had been in the hands of the Macleans from before the fifteenth century but they were deprived of it in 1691. The Keepership was recovered in 1980 with Brigadier Sir Fitzroy Maclean of Dunconnel being appointed 11th Hereditary Keeper.

10.   Balmoral Estates Factor’s Office: figures as at August 1998.

11.   
Thüringerwald
: the mountains of East Saxony. On the north side of the Thüringerwald lay Gotha, the capital of the duchy of Saxe-Gotha, the home at Schloss Friedenstein of Prince Albert’s mother, Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, first wife of Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg.

12.   John Stirton,
Crathie and Braemar: A History of the United Parish
.

13.   ‘Notes and Queries’,
Aberdeen Journal
, Vol. IV, 1911, p. 87.

14.   In time Queen Victoria bequeathed Balmoral and its estates to ‘the Sovereign of the country’, as confirmed on 9 May 1901 in a House of Commons statement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach.

15.   Catherine Caulfield,
The Emperor of The United States of America & other magnificent British eccentrics
, p. 128.

16.   Queen Victoria bought the furniture which had been in the Old Balmoral of Sir Robert Gordon’s day.
See
John Marius Wilson,
Imperial Gazeteer of Scotland
, entry for ‘Balmoral’.

17.   Arthur Ponsonby,
Henry Ponsonby, Queen Victoria’s Private Secretary
p. 124.

18.   
Ibid
.

19.   Henry Reeve (ed.),
Greville: the Greville Memoirs 1817–60
. Various entries for Balmoral.

20.   B. Asquith,
The Lytteltons
.

21.   
Ankers
: kegs holding twenty pints.

22.  ‘Progress of the Queen’s Residence’,
The Scotsman
, October 1852.

23.   Frank Pope Humphrey,
The Queen at Balmoral
, pp. 69–82.

24.   
Ibid
, pp. 62, 124.

25.   Three messengers were always on duty in London in case papers had to be sent to Balmoral. It cost the Privy Purse £4 19
s
6
d
rail fare to send a messenger in 1855.

26.   Queen Victoria’s body servants (dressers and so on) included ladies several of German origin like Sophie Weiss, Frieda Müller and Lydia Waetzig. The more staid of her court ladies were stunned on first taking up duties to find the Queen joining in the singing of songs such as
Von meinen Bergen muss klich scheiden
as the servants worked around her.

A number of Crathie-born servants were to be found on Queen Victoria’s permanent staff which moved around with her from the later 1850s to 1901. Besides John Brown’s family other Crathie families represented were: McDonalds; Stewarts; Michies; Clarks (John Brown’s cousins); Reids; Lamonds; Frasers; and Thomsons. Other Scots servants came from Ayr, Banff, Kelso, Logierait, Montrose, Corgarff, Glencairn and Stonehaven among other places. Sampling,
British Census 1881
for Windsor Castle, RG11.1325.f98, pp. 1–3.

27.   Reeve,
Greville
.

NOTE
:   The supposed ancestry and early life of John Brown was put together in the first published biography, and issued days after his funeral, by Henry Llewellyn Williams. The ‘One Penny Complete’, sixteen-page
Life and Biography of John Brown Esq
(British Library Shelf Mark: 10803g6(7)) is so littered with errors as to be a most unreliable source. Alas E.E.P. Tisdall reproduced Williams’s errors in his
Queen Victoria’s John Brown
of 1938. In Tom Cullen’s
The Empress Brown
of 1969, Williams’s assertions are dubbed ‘controversial’.

 1.   Margaret Ley’s entry in the Registrations of Death for Crathie and Braemar, Ref: 183/19–7 Aug 1876, lists her father as Charles Leys, a farmer.
Scottish Record Office
. Williams Henry
Life and Biography of John Brown Esq
, identifies the father as the ‘Aberarder blacksmith’, p. 2. Williams also gives John Brown’s date of birth as 22 December 1826.

 2.   Parish Register, Marriages 1820–1854, Crathie & Braemar, Ref: 183/2.
Scottish Record Office
.

 3.   
Bundling
: Largely a Highland practice, this form of courtship persisted as a tradition into the early twentieth century in such places as the Shetland Isles and the Western Isles.

 4.   Parish Register, Baptisms 1820–1854, Crathie & Braemar, Ref: 183/2.
Scottish Record Office
.

 5.   ‘Early reminiscences’, written by Queen Victoria in 1872, as quoted in A.C. Benson and Viscount Esher,
The Letters of Queen Victoria
, Vol. I, p. 11.

 6.   
Ibid
, Vol. I, p. 12.

 7.   
Ibid
, Vol. I, p. 13.

 8.   This was probably effected after Old John Brown died in 1875 at Wester Micras; the lairs were filled when John Brown’s mother, Margaret Leys Brown, died at Craiglourachan Cottage in 1876.

 9.   His Registration of Death, Crathie Parish, ref. 183/2, describes him as a ‘fisherman’ and Dr W.G. Mitchell ascribes the cause of death as Alcoholism and Cardiac Syncope.
Scottish Record Office
. Dr James Reid confirmed that he was ‘commanded by the Queen on no account to tell the Ladies and Gentlemen [of the court] that Hugh Brown had died of alcoholic poisoning’. Michaela Reid,
Ask Sir James
, pp. 158–9.

10.  All relevant entries in the Parish Registers for Births, Marriages and Deaths for the Registration District of Crathie & Braemar. Ref: 183.
Scottish Record Office
.

11.  
Bailie
: an officer of a Barony (lands of a baron) or Regality (Crown Land appointment) during the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries; thereafter a town magistrate.

12.  Maxwell Gordon, ‘The Browns of Crathie’, article in
The Scottish Annual & The Braemar Gathering Book
, 1960, p. 251. Williams,
Life and Biography
, avers that Donald Brown farmed at ‘Renachat’, across the Dee from Balmoral. He also has Janet Shaw as a daughter of Lieutenant ‘Captain’ Shaw who had fought with British troops during the American War of Independence, p. 2.

13.  
Ibid
. Williams (p. 2) opines that Old John Brown claimed descent through the Covenanting soldier Sir John Brown of Fordels (
sic
), Fife. He goes on that one of Sir John’s sons secured the Chair of Divinity at Marischall College, Aberdeen, and his large family founded the Browns of Aberdeenshire. Tisdall expands Williams’s assertions that Old John Brown had been a schoolmaster, following education as ‘a poor student at a Scottish University’, and to him is credited authorship of a guide book called
Deeside Guide
. Tisdall,
Queen Victoria’s John Brown
, p. 16. A recent search of records of teachers in Aberdeen at this date, and matriculation records of Scotland’s oldest universities, St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen, give no substance to these assertions.

14.  James E. Johnston,
Place-Names of Scotland
, p. 144.

15.  William Watt,
A History of Aberdeenshire & Banff
, p. 16.

16.  See entry for Colonel Francis Farquharson (1710–90) in Alistair & Henrietta Taylor,
Jacobites of Aberdeenshire & Banffshire in the Forty Five
, p. 158.

17.  
Ibid
, p. 167.

18.  Modern Crathienaird farmhouse was built around 1862. Correspondence between owner Dr Alistair Thomson and the author.

19.  The Bush Farmhouse was near Bush Crathie on modern Ordnance Survey maps.

20.  Benson & Esher,
Letters
, Vol. I, p. 20.

21.  
Raithes
: Gaelic for a term at school – really three months of full-time education.

22.  Stirton,
Crathie and Braemar
, pp. 324, 326.

23.  
Ibid
, p. 327.

24.  Act 43: George III, c54. James Scotland,
The History of Scottish Education
, Vol. I, p. 194. Teachers received £16 22
s
per annum at this date.

25.  Benson & Esher,
Letters
, Vol. I, p. 48.

26.  
Ibid
, Vol. I, p. 49.

27.  
Ibid
, Vol. I, p. 188.

28.  Marquis of Huntly,
Auld Acquaintance
, pp. 23–4.

29.  The Deeside Water Co. Ltd, correspondence with the author. For John Brown’s wages see Tom Cullen,
Empress Brown
, p. 54. The Pannanich Wells Hotel has retained its name since the 1760s, but under different spellings.

30.  Recollections of Anita Leslie, Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill’s great-niece, and biographer, quoting Peregrine S. Churchill.

31.  Tisdall,
Queen Victoria’s John Brown
, p. 32. A copy of the
Book of Common Prayer
, given to John Brown by Queen Victoria in 1878, was handed over to Brown’s brother Hugh on his death. The volume had been found in Brown’s room at Windsor Castle and the Queen added the inscription that Brown was ‘a dear and much lamented friend . . . in remembrance of December 14, 1883, by Victoria R.’ It is now in the collection of Aberdeen Museums.

32.  Story filed on Friday 8 September 1848, for the 11 September columns in the
Illustrated London News
.

33.  ‘Hours of Idleness’, 1807. George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824) had been taken by his mother to Aberdeen in 1879 so that she would be near her relatives, the Gordons of Gight, and away from creditors. Byron was educated at the Aberdeen Grammar School and his childhood trips in the area gave him the imagery for his poem.

34.  Queen Victoria,
Journal
, Saturday, 6 September 1848, on Lochnagar; 18 September for Ballochbuie.
A royal
: a stag with twelve ‘tines’ (points) to his antlers.

35.  In honour of the occasion she created the Prince of Wales Earl of Dublin, 10 September 1849.

36.  Queen Victoria,
Journal
, 30 August 1849.