Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  Having begun the subject, she really spread herself, pointing out that grants should be given to the children of the Prince of Wales. She spelt out the sums she considered should be set aside for various minor members of the Royal Family. She tried to remember and thought that the Duke of Cambridge received £12,000 a year and Princess Mary £3,000 a year when their father died.

  The next matter she asked the Prime Minister to consider was her youngest daughter, Beatrice. As it was ‘most likely’ that Baby would not marry ‘or leave her Mother during her declining years’, the Queen was ‘extremely anxious’ that money should be forthcoming for her too. She suggested £6,000 a year as a satisfactory sum. Whichever method is used to convert this into modern currency – using the retail price index, it comes to £471,000; using the criterion of comparison with average earnings, it rises to something much higher – the Queen was expecting Parliament to devote quite a lot of public money to supply the income for someone who was, in effect, a lady’s companion. The annual going rate for such a role in Cheltenham or Eastbourne at the period would probably have been around thirty guineas.

  ‘Of course the Queen will do all she can for her – but this would not be enough to secure her a position fitting her status [?illegible], and the place she holds as the Queen’s constant companion.’ She closed this long epistle with an account of how well she felt, how beautiful were the scenery and vegetation of Menton and how clear the air. She then added an abrupt PS: ‘Is it true that Sir C. Dilke [Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs] and Mr Fawcett [postmaster general] did not vote for Pce Leopold’s annuity? If so, the Queen thinks it vy unfortunate that such people shd be in the Govt & it must put an effectual bar to their ever being Cabinet Ministers.’15 Gladstone was either too busy – with the affairs of Ireland, Afghanistan and Egypt, and the extension of the British franchise – or too charitable – to repeat the arguments of G. O. Trevelyan’s notorious pamphlet What Does She Do with It? that, whereas the Queen’s arguments might have been applicable to her father’s generation when the politicians really did hold the purse strings of the Royal Family, it was no longer the case that the outright owners of Osborne, Balmoral and Sandringham, with all their estates and rents, could truthfully say, ‘we have no property’. It was also the case, which was not true even for the very richest of the landed proprietors, that the Royal Families of Europe could expect, when they married, or marked important anniversaries, to collect very substantial capital in terms of gifts – ‘particularly’, as David Duff memorably pointed out in his book Hessian Tapestry, when ‘such royalty were on friendly terms with the imperial House of Russia or the potentates of the East’.16 Huge amounts of loot, in gold, diamonds and other precious stones, were accumulated on such occasions. ‘In one day,’ Duff wrote, ‘more capital gain could be accrued than many worthy citizens accumulated in a life-time.’17 Just as her physical greed, her need to guzzle grossly, became almost a pathology for Queen Victoria, she never showed any consciousness of how dangerous it might seem, in republican times, for royal personages to shovel away so much of the world’s goods. Whether this aspect of her character was to be explained in terms of her mother, a stranger in a foreign land, having been genuinely strapped for cash, who can say?

  Given the condition of Leopold’s health, it was in some ways surprising that he had chosen to marry; but he craved to be as the healthy are, and he was everlastingly looking out for useful appointments. In April 1877, when Leopold was twenty-four, Beaconsfield – quite improperly – had given him a key for opening the Government Red Boxes; the surreptitious gift being necessary to avoid trouble with Leopold’s brothers. From then onwards, the Queen used Leopold as an extra secretary, but he had no constitutional right to such a position, and his avowed, open support for the Conservatives raised more than a few eyebrows.

  He had fallen for several girls, with varying degrees of seriousness. People spoke of him, when he was an undergraduate, as a possible beau for Alice Liddell, but it was really with Alice’s sister Edith, one year his junior, that he had enjoyed a mild flirtation. He had been in love with Mary Baring, daughter of Lord and Lady Ashburton, the great bankers. The woman with whom he fell most conspicuously in love was a beautiful Highlander called the Countess of Breadalbane, a country-house crush which came to nothing. And there was a moment when his mother had tried to marry him off to Princess Caroline Mathilde of Schleswig-Holstein (‘Calma’) – an idea which seemed to annoy everyone else in the extended family: Affie and Marie, because Calma had been promised to Marie’s brother Sergei; the Schleswig-Holstein parents, because they did not want their daughter married to a haemophiliac. His actual choice was an acceptably round-faced German, Princess Helen of Waldeck and Pyrmont. Princess Helen came from a little principality near Darmstadt, and if the frail English prince was not an obviously alluring prospect as a husband, he was at least young; her sister Emma, aged twenty-two, had been married off to King Willem II of the Netherlands, who was sixty-four. Leopold and Helen had two babies, Alice and Charlie, and Queen (‘We have no property’) Victoria gave them as a wedding present the beautiful house and small estate of Claremont in Surrey, where she herself had spent happy childhood months, and which she purchased from her uncle King Leopold.

  In 1883, the Queen had a slight fall. As she told Gladstone, ‘she slipped her foot going down stairs on Saturday after luncheon, and in saving herself strained the other leg near the knee but without injury to the joint’. She trusted ‘that it will soon be cleared up’.18 At sixty-four, it was perhaps not surprising that the increasingly obese Queen should have fallen, especially if she had been applying herself to her heroic admixtures, at the table, of whisky poured into the claret. Her doctor, James Reid, was clearly the man who had advised her that there was no cause for alarm.

  Reid had been appointed as Resident Medical Attendant upon Her Majesty in July 1881, at the age of thirty-one. It was one of her shrewdest appointments, since Reid was an excellent doctor – indeed, almost ludicrously overqualified for his role – the soul of discretion, and an affectionate man who quickly saw what was undoubtedly always there, the loveable side of his royal employer’s character.

  In looking for such a figure, Victoria had a list of requirements which would not, at first sight, seem easy to satisfy. First, she wanted a Scotsman – no difficulty there, since the medical training in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow was legendarily good. Preferably, the second point, she wanted the man to be from Aberdeenshire. Thirdly, he must be conversant in German. This was a revealing requirement. When she had spelt out to Lady Waterpark, in 1864, the qualifications for a lady-in-waiting, she had merely needed someone who spoke French. But the family had now grown prodigiously, and nearly all the in-laws and foreign visitors to the royal houses and palaces were German-speaking. Reid, a man of relatively humble beginnings and high intellectual accomplishment, had begun his studies at Aberdeen University and the Infirmary in that city and, upon specializing in ear, nose and throat medicine, had taken himself off to Vienna. There he had become an expert in the field, and acquired fluency in German. He also studied pathology.

  When Reid was appointed, he was offered £400 per annum to be in constant attendance, with six weeks’ leave of absence a year. He was not a part of the Royal Household. He was to take medical and surgical charge not only of the Queen, but also of all her attendants, her dressers and maids, the Royal Family, the Household servants and any visitors. He did not form any part of the medical hierarchy, Physicians and Surgeons Extraordinary, and so forth, who, like Sir William Jenner, were rich and distinguished doctors brought in from their own practices to attend royal emergencies.19

  So, Reid was a new character in the day-to-day life of the Queen, and in 1883, following the slight fall of his employer on the stairs at Windsor Castle, he was about to witness one of the most conspicuous dramas of her later years.

  Reid was a fairly strait-laced man, and he could hardly fail to be struck by the positi
on in the Household of his fellow Scotsman, the fifty-six-year-old John Brown. Reid was to be the Queen’s closest medical adviser for the rest of her life, but in all the years he served her, he never once saw her undressed, and he was barely allowed to touch her: all the information he gleaned from her about her physical condition was gathered from question and answer – much of it written. The physical ease and intimacy of the monarch and Brown was clear for all to see, especially after she had slipped on the stairs. He carried her everywhere, as Reid noted laconically in his tiny handwriting. On 21 March, she was a little better, and the Queen took his arm as she came into the room. But then Brown lifted her up. ‘Oh, I thought it was here,’ she said, obviously alluding to a bruise on her upper thigh, because she lifted up her dress, and moved Brown’s hand as she did so – ‘No it is here.’20

  Reid, after the Queen’s death, was probably one of the very few people in the world who ever knew the full truth about her relationship with Brown. It was the faithful Reid who was entrusted by King Edward VII to track down and purchase letters which were being used as blackmail by George Profeit, the son of Dr Alexander Profeit, the resident doctor at Balmoral from 1874 onwards. Reid noted in his diary on 11 May 1905, ‘At 6.30 went to Buckingham Palace and had an audience of the King and delivered to him the box with over 300 letters of the late Queen to Profeit which after 6 months of negotiations I have got from George Profeit, many of them most compromising. Thanked by the King and also Lord Knollys.’

  We must assume that King Edward VII destroyed these documents, and that the mysterious relationship between Queen Victoria and her Highland servant will therefore forever remain mysterious. Whether it was a marriage, as the Ponsonbys, other courtiers and the Home Secretary evidently believed, or whether it was merely an intense intimacy which embarrassed her children, will never fully be known. We do know that George Profeit had written evidence, in the form of those letters which Victoria’s son wanted to be destroyed. In November 1990, the diarist James Lees-Milne had a ‘delicious nursery lunch of soup, ragout and creamy pudding’, with Reid’s daughter, Victoria Ingrams. ‘Talked of her doctor father who was sixty when she was born and died in 1923. She remembers as a child seeing the green file in which reposed all the letters from John Brown to Queen Victoria. Its contents were eventually destroyed. She is confident that the Queen slept with Brown, and thinks it possible they were married.’21

  Brown was not to survive that cold March of 1883. A puzzling incident, worthy of the attention of Sherlock Holmes, had occurred in Windsor Great Park at the beginning of the month. Lady Florence Dixie, a celebrated explorer and author, resided at a house called the Fishery in Windsor. She was the daughter of the Marquess of Queensberry (and sister of the later celebrated Lord Alfred Douglas). She was often to be seen in the Great Park, exercising her jaguar, which she had captured on a hunting trip to Patagonia. An absentee landlady of Irish lands herself, the twenty-six-year-old Lady Florence had written to the Queen warning her that the Irish peasantry were starving.

  At about the time that the Queen had her slight fall, Lady Florence was walking her St Bernard dog Hubert when she believed herself to have been waylaid by two transvestites, men who ‘pushed me backwards and threw me to the ground with great violence’. One had a knife, and she believed them to be Fenians. She claimed that they had slashed her clothing with a dagger, and it was only the dog which had saved her.

  The case aroused obvious interest, not least because of the claim that Irish terrorists might be prowling so near the Castle. On the other hand, witnesses, who had seen Lady Florence walking her dog that day, reported that they had seen no assailants, and the more cynical of the courtiers recalled that they nicknamed the Dixies ‘Sir Sometimes and Lady Always Tipsy’.

  The Queen asked Brown to investigate, and although he was suffering from a cold, he set off across the park on a very cold day. He made a great fuss of Hubert, and asked for a photograph of the dog. Lady Florence allowed him to examine the torn clothing, and he noted that there were slashes on the outer garments, none on the under garments. Also, if she had been thrown to the ground, Brown thought it strange that there was no mud on the back of her dress, only on the front. He returned to the Queen no wiser than the police.

  Wrapped in a ‘huge assortment of wraps, known to her ladies as the White Knight’s paraphernalia’, the Queen still wanted her walk on Saturday, 24 March; and even though Brown’s cold was by now much worse, he carried her down to the pony chair and accompanied her down the raw, windy Long Walk. By the next day, which was Easter Sunday, erysipelas had extended over the right side of Brown’s face and he had developed a raging fever.

  He drifted into delirium tremens. Brown’s brother Archie insisted upon sending for Sir William Jenner, but the Queen still showed no suspicion that anything was seriously amiss. By Tuesday afternoon, he sank into a deep coma and at 10.40 pm, 27 March 1883, John Brown died. Prince Leopold was given the unenviable task of going to his mother’s dressing room and telling her the news. Later, he wrote to his brother-in-law the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, ‘I have deep sympathy [with the Queen]. We can feel for her, & her sorrow, without being sorry for the cause. At least I can’t be a hypocrit [sic].’22

  The Queen must have noticed, a little, that her children and her courtiers took this attitude, but it is the mark of the true eccentric that she does not see the world as others do; and since her heart had once again been broken, she was unselfconscious in her expressions of grief. She poured out her sorrow for Brown to anyone who would give a sympathetic ear, and often to those who did not. The strength of her expressions were just as vivid as when she had spoken in the past of Prince Albert. Two months after Brown’s death, while staying at Balmoral, Lord Carlingford,23 the Lord Privy Seal, remarked, ‘This infatuation is wonderful. It is painfully absurd to hear his [Brown’s] name pronounced when one would expect another.’24 If she sensed such supercilious snobbisme among the Establishment class, she cared not a fig. Her Maid of Honour Marie Mallet noted, a good dozen years after Brown’s death, that the Queen defied all royal protocols while in Scotland and attended a family funeral of one of Brown’s relations.25

  Her new friend of this period, Randall Davidson, was perhaps professionally qualified to offer consolations. But the young clergyman was no substitute for Brown, with his rough humour, his strong arms, his lack of side and his consoling fondness for the whisky bottle. Indeed, Davidson had not been her friend for long before the two came into conflict over the matter of Brown.

  The Deanery at Windsor became vacant again in 1883. Old Dean Wellesley had been the Queen’s closest ecclesiastical confidant and adviser until his death the previous year. His successor, a man named Connor, was too old for the job and died after only six months. Who should the new dean be?

  Gladstone, an old Christ Church man, suggested his dean, the lexicographer Dean Liddell; but the Queen would not hear of it. Perhaps recalling her fury when Prince Leopold cut up rough, and refused to take Presbyterian Communion, she dismissed Liddell’s name with ‘Oh, no, he is quite out of the question and too old.’26 A few other candidates were touted around, but there was no doubt on whose head the Queen’s blessing would be bestowed. She wrote from the Isle of Wight that there was ‘no other clergyman better fitted for the combined appointment of Dean of Windsor and Resident Chaplain to the Queen’ than Randall Davidson. She wrote this on 8 May, and by 9 May was impatient for a reply, so followed it up with a telegram in cipher: ‘Her Majesty will be much obliged if you will make formal offer at once.’ Perhaps to keep her on tenterhooks a little longer, Gladstone did not make the formal offer to Davidson until 10 May.27

  It was a good appointment, and with young Reid as her Scottish doctor, young Davidson as her Scottish dean, young Baby as her surely irremoveable companion and dogsbody, and the indispensable Ponsonby, she was, however heartbroken by the death of Brown, now laying down a stalwart circle of young friends for her old age. The l
ess satisfactory she found her older children, the more she could rely upon these younger friends. When asked for his advice about the advisability of appointing Davidson, Archbishop Benson gave the memorable counsel: ‘His youth has all the advantage of spring and freshness . . . besides, it is a shortcoming of which he is daily being cured, as Your Majesty says.’28

  Davidson and she hit it off almost from the first. ‘It was her common sense which welded together the other attributes and enabled her (though not in the ordinary sense of the words a really clever woman) to do far more than most clever women could have accomplished.’ He came to believe that her charm stemmed from her ‘absolute truthfulness and simplicity . . . I have known many prominent people,’ he said when he looked back from a position of high eminence as Archbishop of Canterbury, ‘but I have never known one of them with whom it is so easy and so natural to speak freely and frankly after even a very short acquaintance. I imagine it would be difficult to name any attribute more valuable to a sovereign than the possession of this particular power.’29

  Those who realized this always got the best out of Queen Victoria, even if it meant that sparks flew along the way. Those who did not realize it, or who shrank into sycophancy or cold hostility, could only watch her shrink into shyness or stubborn silence. Those who knew how to deal with her – Melbourne, Disraeli, Brown, Davidson, Ponsonby – could duck when the sparks flew but gave her trust. She could be haughtily conscious of the dignity of her office, but paradoxically, she was not pompous or proud.