by A. N. Wilson
There was, moreover, a perfectly respectable reason why this single mother of a haemophiliac son might not have the time or inclination to be performing public duties when she had the prime care of Prince Leopold. On her German tours, she had watched him nearly bleed to death. He was now fifteen, and she must have known that it was touch-and-go whether he would survive to adulthood; or, if he did so, whether he would be able to lead a normal life. In one of her strange mixtures of German and English she wrote to Alexandrine, ‘Er wird für die Zukunft mein first object in life sein, und ich werde ihn nie verlassen oder mich von ihm trennen ausser wenn es absolut nöthig sein müsste.’19 (‘For the future, he will be my first object in life, and unless it is absolutely necessary, I will never be separated from him.’)
It was typical of Victoria’s approach to any family problem from now on that she saw the best possible solution was to turn to John Brown. In July 1865, she engaged Brown’s younger brother Archie as a ‘brusher’, or junior valet, to Prince Leopold. It was Archie’s task to carry the prince if he ever suffered a collapse or found himself in difficulties. Leopold detested Archie – indeed, loathed John Brown too. ‘J. B. is fearfully insolent to me, so is his brother [Archie] hitting me on the face with spoons for fun, etc.’ Not the best treatment for a haemophiliac. ‘You may laugh at me for all this; but you know I am sensitive. I know you will feel for me – their impudence increases daily towards everyone.’20 The poor boy was writing sorrowfully to Walter George Stirling, a young adjutant of the Royal Horse Artillery, who had been appointed Leopold’s governor. Stirling and Leopold developed a real rapport, as did Leopold and a servant named Sutherland, but when both fell foul of Archie Brown, it was Stirling and Sutherland who were dismissed and the hated Archie who remained.
Moreover, family, Court and friends were all expected to share the Queen’s love of the Browns. When Brown’s sister died, for example, it was no doubt very sad for him. But even the Court at Coburg was expected to enter into the spirit of bereavement over the matter, and Duchess Alexandrine was thanked for her polite expressions of sympathy for ‘mein guter treuer Brown’ (‘my good, loyal Brown’). The hatred felt by her courtiers for the Brown family seemed to act as an incentive for the Queen to give the Browns more and more power and influence. Victoria, with one side of her nature, loved defying the Establishment. Besides, it was questionable whether she ever realized just how bizarre her devotion to Brown appeared to the outside world. The longer she stayed away from public view, moreover, the harder the Queen herself found it to contemplate engagements which made her into a public spectacle. When she did make one of her rare public appearances, she scandalized the politicians by invariably having Brown in tow. Lord Stanley had plaintively written in 1867, ‘The Queen parades this man about London behind her carriage, in his Highland dress, so that every street boy knows him.’21
If all the Queen’s circumstances are considered, the clearer it seems that the Establishment and the Court were alarmed, not by the Queen’s general slackness, as General Grey claimed to be, but by the figure of Brown and the amount of time she spent with him. True, she missed the State Opening of Parliament in 1867, but she attended it on other years – and she never had been brave enough to read the Queen’s Speech – it was always read for her, usually by the Lord Chancellor of the day. She took a close interest in procedures in Parliament, in diplomatic endeavours in Europe, and in the colonies. It would be perfectly reasonable, in these circumstances, for her politicians to have seen, given her nervous disposition and her son Leopold’s illness, that allowances had to be made. And this, surely, is what they would have done had they not in fact been chiefly worried by Brown. All the things which made Brown attractive to Victoria – his lack of side, his directness, his breeziness – offended their sense of decorum. And of course they suspected him of sleeping with her. Lord Stanley, Foreign Secretary in his father Lord Derby’s Third Cabinet, asked in his journal, ‘Why is the Queen penny wise and pound foolish? Because she looks after the browns and lets the sovereigns take care of themselves.’22
If she had been a widowed King who had bedded one of his servants, the Court would have politely turned a blind eye and even affected a certain manly amusement. But she was a woman, and so the fact that she was behaving just like her reprobate son Bertie made her ‘self-indulgence’ intolerable. Grey, as a responsible and loyal royal servant, would never have been so incautious as to spell out in writing what he meant. But he was as blunt as can be in his language that nothing less than the future of the monarchy was under threat. He would not have supposed this to be the case if the Queen were simply work-shy. Monarchies do not fall merely because a sad, sick Queen is unwilling to open a bridge. Grey had discussed ‘the evils of the present state of things’ with two of Victoria’s daughters. ‘They both, Princess Louise in the strongest language, expressed their entire concurrence in every word I said to them – and also in my belief of the Government alone having the power to put a stop to a system of running away from her duties, which may at last terminally affect the safety of the Monarchy itself if it goes on.’23
If what goes on? Clearly, the supposed affair with Brown is meant. If a prize were to be awarded to the courtier or Royal Family member who most hated Brown, that hotly contested award would probably have been given to General Charles Grey. The Queen once conveyed a message to him via her Highland servant; it was delivered in such an offhand manner that Grey, no doubt pompously, ‘refused to accept the message in this rude form’, as his daughter recalled.24 Naturally, General Grey could not commit to paper, when writing to the Prime Minister, his fear that the rumours were true. But by comparing his monarch to the notorious womanizer the Prince of Wales, and saying that they both displayed the same levels of selfish self-gratification, it is clear what the old soldier feared.
A quarter of a century later, in June 1894, the Marquess of Queensberry would say to Oscar Wilde, whom he suspected of having a sexual relationship with his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘I do not say you are it, but you look it and you pose at it, which is just as bad.’ Although no one would ever use the word ‘pose’ in connection with such a creature of impulse and passion as Queen Victoria, the rest of the sentence would neatly summarize the fears felt by the political classes when contemplating the relationship between their monarch and this drunken, loud-mouthed Highlander, John Brown. In some senses, whether she was actually sleeping with him was irrelevant. The Queen’s infatuation with her servant and the man’s unruly behaviour at Court were enough to cause the scandal. ‘Servants are often the best friends to have,’ she told her sister-in-law Alexandrine. She wrote these words in German, and then broke into the weird macaronic ‘was die Highlanders von allen anderen Dienen auszeichnet [‘what distinguishes the Highlanders from all other servants’] – their great independence of character, and feelings of a gentleman, often far more as, than [sic] gentlemen of the highest rank. Sie sind geborene Gentleman [‘They are born Gentleman’].’25
‘It was the talk of all the Household,’ said that notoriously unreliable tittle-tattler Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, ‘that he was “the Queen’s stallion” . . . He was a fine man physically, though coarsely made, and had fine eyes (like the late Prince Consort’s, it was said) and the Queen, who had been passionately in love with her husband, got it into her head that somehow the prince’s Spirit had passed into Brown, and four years after her widowhood, being very unhappy, allowed him all privileges . . . She used to go away with him to a little house in the hills where, on the pretence that it was for protection and to “look after the dogs”, he had a bedroom next to hers, ladies in waiting being put at the other end of the building . . . [There could be] no doubt of his being allowed every conjugal privilege.’26
If Blunt wants us to believe this, we must test his words as stringently as possible. Victoria’s letters and journals supply abundant evidence, in the years 1862–6, of her need for love, her sense of being bereft. Of that there is no doubt.
Nor can it be questioned that in the companionship of Brown, she found something approaching consolation for her intolerable bereavement and sense of loss.
Yet, consider the letter, quoted in the last chapter, in which she told Vicky of her walk to the Frogmore Mausoleum with the other children and Brown, and of Brown’s tearful expressions of sympathy. (‘I felt for ye; to see ye coming there with your daughters and your husband lying there – marriage on one side and death on the other.’)
Only a dissembler, which Victoria never was, could have penned such a letter if Brown had not been, at this date, purely and simply what she claimed: her friend, a man who was able to sympathize with her inmost sorrows and to weep with her. Vicky, together with the other children, might cringe at the intimacy which had sprung up between Brown and their mother, but Victoria made absolutely no attempt to cloak it. He was ‘so simple, so intelligent, so unlike an ordinary servant and so cheerful and attentive’.
He was cheerful and attentive to her, but he did not extend such courtesies widely. Her nature was a mixture of tenderness and shrillness; with Brown, as whisky was imbibed (and whisky does increase hot-temperedness and lack of charity), she came to catch some of his abrasive spirit. His violent Presbyterianism helped fuel her own prejudice against bishops. ‘I’m sure the dear Bishop will go straight to heaven when he dies,’ she remarked of a missionary, John Coleridge Patterson, first Bishop of Melanesia. ‘Weel, God help him when he meets John Knox,’ was Brown’s answer. The Queen was a timid railway passenger, terrified by newspaper reports of crashes and accidents. She commanded that no royal train should travel faster than fifty miles per hour. She once sent him down the platform when the train stopped at Wigan with a message for the driver to go slower, to which Brown added, ‘Her Maa-dj-esty says the carriage was shaking like the Devil.’27 It is not difficult to see how ill the courtiers, diplomats and politicians would take such amusing translations of royal injunctions. When ‘The Queen requests that the train should travel more slowly’ is translated into the sentence just quoted, it was comic. But when she herself began to share some of Brown’s abrasiveness and to discard her habitual courtesy, it is not surprising that feathers were ruffled.
As early as July 1866, Punch printed a mock Court Circular: ‘Balmoral, Tuesday. Mr John Brown walked on the slopes. He subsequently partook of haggis. In the evening Mr John Brown was pleased to listen to a bagpipe. Mr John Brown retired early.’ At the Royal Academy Spring Exhibition on 6 May 1867, crowds flocked to see Her Majesty at Osborne in 1866, a huge oil painting by Sir Edwin Landseer, in which Brown takes pride of place holding the head of the Queen’s pony. One critic wrote, ‘If anyone will stand by this picture for a quarter of an hour and listen to the comments of the visitors he will learn how great an imprudence has been committed.’28
The horrified inference of Sir Charles Grey and the other courtiers was that the pair were sleeping together. They were certainly drinking together – which is surely the simplest explanation for the collapse of either legibility or sense in her blue-pencilled scrawls.
If – and it is a very big if – Victoria and Brown entered into some indiscreet pact or union, it was surely during this strange phase of what seems likely to have been the Queen’s menopause.
When it is known that a biographer is at work on Queen Victoria, there is one question which friends and strangers alike will be sure to ask. What was the nature of the Queen’s relationship with Brown? Having worked on the subject of Queen Victoria for many years, I have to confess to the rather unsatisfactory answer that I still feel unable to make up my mind. My instinct is to believe that it was what it appears to be in her letters to Vicky: namely an embarrassingly close monarch-and-servant relationship. Brown meant it when he said he would die for her, and the Queen meant it when she called him her ‘treuer’ Brown. If I were forced to say what did or did not happen, I would point out the impossibility of carnal relations between them in the early years of her widowhood, when she was plainly fixated on the memory of Albert, and he was plainly no more than her Highland servant.
Nothing can be proved about the later period – say, from 1868 onwards. Scawen Blunt’s tittle-tattle was not proven – that Brown was the Queen’s stallion. But there is a much soberer witness in the person of Lewis Harcourt, son of Gladstone’s Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer. Harcourt, known as Loulou, died in 1922, aged fifty-three, while implicated in a case of child-molestation. (The child was the twelve-year-old Edward James of West Dean Park, the aesthete and wit whose mother, in a scurrilous rhyme, ‘will entertain the King’ – that is, Edward VII.) Loulou’s sad end should not cloud our judgement of his journals, which paint a vivid and realistic picture of the mid- to late Victorian political world.
On 17 February 1885, Harcourt wrote that Lady Ponsonby – wife of the Queen’s private secretary – ‘told the Home Secretary a few days ago that Miss Macleod declares that her brother Norman Macleod confessed to her on his deathbed that he had married the Queen to John Brown and... had always bitterly regretted it. Miss Macleod could have no object in inventing such a story, so that one is almost inclined to believe it, improbable as it sounds.’29
All these urgent requirements pressed upon the new Prime Minister and his Liberal Government, which consisted in a coalition of old-fashioned Whigs and new radicals. As Gladstone, a hyper-energetic fifty-eight-year-old, began his task, it soon became clear that while some of the reforms dear to his heart could be effected purely by parliamentary measures, there were others which involved at the deepest level a consideration of the monarch and her role in the new order.
Two of the most fundamental changes which his Government wanted to bring about were a reform of the army and a change to the position of Ireland. Everyone (except the military top brass) had known since the disasters of the Crimean War that the army needed root and branch reform. By the end of the 1870s, it would be required to fight wars in North and South Africa, and in Asia, as well as to be on standby if the inflammatory situation in Ireland grew worse. The expansion of the Empire made it necessary for a vast military expansion and reorganization. This was all now in the hands of the new Secretary of State for War, Edward Cardwell – and he would have his work cut out.
In Ireland, Gladstone believed in the urgency of land reform to assuage the discontents which had led to small tenants being driven from their land. He intended a twofold approach: on the one hand the introduction of a new Land Act to guarantee tenants’ rights, and also, in recognition of the fact that most Irish people were not Anglicans, he wanted to bring in a Bill which disestablished the Irish Church and put the Church of Ireland bishops on the same footing as the Roman Catholics or the ministers of the Protestant Churches – namely merely religious leaders of their own community, rather than bishops of an Established Church appointed by the Crown and allowed to collect, as were bishops in the largely Nonconformist Wales, the hated tithe, or tax, to pay for Church expenses.
Here, as in the case of army reform, Gladstone would come up against formidable opposition from the Establishment. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York were furiously opposed to the idea of losing the Irish Church, and they had no difficulty in enlisting to their viewpoint the centre of the Establishment spider’s web herself, Queen Victoria.
So, in two of the most fundamental parts of his reforming programme, Gladstone, though a loyal monarchist, knew himself from the first to be facing a formidable problem. The whole complex structure of the British Establishment, with its unwritten Constitution, was an organic thing, which changed as it grew. Would it be possible to bring about these radical reforms – a modern efficient army, an Ireland shorn of an Establishment Church – without in turn bringing about some reform to the monarchy itself? And, indeed, in a world where democracy was on the march, what was the function of the British monarch?
PART FIVE
SEVENTEEN
A PEOPLE DETACHED FROM THEIR SOVEREIGN
Gladstone, in one of the strangest manifestations of detachment ever perpetrated by a Prime Minister, wrote an anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review denouncing the foreign policy of his own Government. That oddly divided personality was a different person, as he sat in his ‘Temple of Peace’, the study at Hawarden Castle, from the devious politician of Westminster. Scratching with his steel-nibbed pen on the page, and looking like a mad clergyman, this scholarly recluse could attack the very Government of which the politician Gladstone was the leader. He described France as ‘motivated by a spirit of perverse and constant error’, he questioned Bismarck’s ‘scrupulousness and integrity’, and concluded by talking of ‘Happy England’ endowed by God with ‘a streak of silver sea to separate it from the conflicts of less fortunate peoples’. Lord Kimberley confided to his diary when he read the article that Gladstone ‘could not guide safely the foreign relations of this country’.2
When Gladstone had formed his First Cabinet in December 1868, a new world, beyond the shores of the United Kingdom, was waiting to be born. The war between France and Prussia, which broke out in 1870, would result in the abject defeat of France, a period of appalling civil violence and the arrival of the Paris Commune. The spectre of communism, which had been ‘haunting’ Europe, according to Marx and Engels in 1848, would be a living political reality in Paris by 1871. Prussia, triumphant, militarized and led by Bismarck, pushed onwards to the creation of the new nation of Germany, which absorbed all the former princedoms, duchies and kingdoms of Victoria and Albert’s youth, including Saxe-Coburg. By September 1870, the troops of Victor Emmanuel would enter Rome and the new united nation of Italy would be a reality, after the long dreams of Italian patriots.
