Sons, Servants and Statesmen

by John Van der Kiste

  When Disraeli died in April 1881 and the Highland servant was chosen to break the news to his royal mistress, she found he was ‘quite overcome’. After he had got over the shock, he personally started a subscription among the other servants and Royal Household to erect a monument to her hero. On other occasions he was always the first to pass the hat, whether subscribing to a wedding present for one of the royal family or helping out a needy servant down on his luck.

  In July 1881 another young man entered the employment of Queen Victoria. Though he shared nothing with John Brown except Scottish blood, he too would become indispensable to her and, by virtue of his personality, would ultimately take on a greater and far more supportive role than his conditions of service would ever have suggested.

  Earlier in the year, Queen Victoria had sought a resident medical attendant to Dr William Marshall to take responsibility for her personal health and that of the royal household. He was to be a Scotsman, if possible a native of Aberdeenshire, with suitable medical qualifications, and a fluent German speaker, so he would be able to converse easily with her visiting relations from Germany. Her Commissioner at Balmoral was asked to find a suitable local candidate, and James Reid, a young doctor of thirty-one, was recommended.

  The son of a country doctor, Reid had gone to university at the age of sixteen and began reading arts subjects for three years before he was old enough to begin studying medicine. He travelled widely in Europe, completing medical studies in Vienna and spending a short time as tutor to the young Count de Lodron. He therefore knew something of the atmosphere of court life, an experience which would make him exceptionally well qualified in his role in the royal household.

  After audiences with the Queen at Balmoral and with Sir William Jenner in London, Reid was duly appointed and took up his duties at Windsor Castle. For the remaining nineteen years of his life, by virtue of his character and peacemaking skills, he was to be a valued confidant of the Queen and many members of her family and household. He was quick to discover that she could be a demanding taskmistress who laid down extraordinarily precise routines. ‘Let Dr Reid go out from quarter to 11 to one, unless the Queen sends before to see him, and from 5 till near 8’, ran one of her earliest written instructions. ‘If he wishes on any particular occasion to go out sooner he shd. ask. These are the regular hours. But I may send before to say he is not to go out before I have seen him shd. I not feel well or want anything. This every Doctor in attendance has done and must be prepared to do.’28

  In time he would play almost as important a role as Ponsonby, especially after the latter’s death, in speaking his mind and fearlessly telling the Queen what she did not necessarily wish to hear. During her last few years, there were few people, if any, whom she would trust more than Sir James Reid, as he had become by then.

  Ponsonby and Reid soon became the best of friends. Both men not only had the capacity to get on well with others, but also infinite tact, patience and a sense of humour which enabled them to cope with life under a woman who could be exceptionally demanding. Though the Queen was in remarkably robust health for a woman of her age, with stamina and energy envied by many of those around her younger than she was, she still worried endlessly about her health. She persistently complained she was a martyr to ‘sick headaches’ and indigestion, though she still ate too much and took no exercise, with subsequent disastrous effects on her figure. The young sovereign who had told Lord Melbourne how much she disliked walking never overcame this particular aversion. With Reid, she had daily consultations about her generally exaggerated or imagined ailments. A more self-assertive doctor might have risked her wrath by telling her she was talking nonsense much of the time, but his tenure of employment would have been correspondingly short.

  Not only was Reid obliged to look after the Queen’s health, but also to an extent that of her family overseas. Any letter about ailments from her children or grandchildren throughout Europe would generally be shown to him, with an appeal for advice.

  Reid appeared at a crucial time in Queen Victoria’s life. In July 1881 she was still mourning the loss of Disraeli, and her only real confidant was John Brown, slowly but surely becoming a shadow of his former self. As Randall Davidson noted, she had a tendency to form ‘unwise’ relations with servants, as she did twice during her widowhood. Like most women, he was convinced, she needed a man in her life, someone to cherish and in whom she could confide.29 While her relations with Brown and later with ‘the Munshi’ (see chapter 9) were fundamentally innocent, they did not always appear that way to others, and led to no little detrimental speculation which threatened to damage her image and her reputation.

  In March 1882 Queen Victoria was once again the target of a would-be assassin. Riding into Windsor on a train from London, she heard a noise which she thought was the train letting off steam, but then she saw people running in all directions and a man being led away. The man responsible for the commotion, a mediocre Scottish poet named Roderick Maclean, had fired at her once with a revolver and was preparing to shoot a second time when he was overpowered.

  Brown was in the carriage, but in stark contrast to his heroic behaviour during O’Connor’s attempt on her life, he was very slow to react. His leg might have been troubling him, or he might have been slightly drunk. He seemed slow to understand what had happened and could only repeat afterwards in some amazement that ‘That man fired at Your Majesty’s carriage.’30 Maclean was sent for trial and found not guilty on grounds of insanity, a verdict which enraged Queen Victoria, who told Gladstone, her Prime Minister at the time, that ‘the law must be altered’.

  One is tempted to speculate as to whether John Brown would have been relieved of some of his more arduous duties if his physical condition had declined much further. It was perhaps fortunate for him that the end came fairly suddenly.

  In March 1883 Lady Florence Dixie, who lived near Windsor Castle, claimed that she had been assaulted on her estate by two men dressed as women, possibly Fenians, and only saved from serious injury by the appearance of her St Bernard dog, Hubert. Lady Dixie’s colourful reputation was not calculated to make her a favourite with the Queen. A sister of the notorious 8th Marquess of Queensberry and aunt of Lord Alfred Douglas, both of whom would play conspicuous roles in the downfall of Oscar Wilde a few years hence, she was a big game huntress, an outspoken advocate of equality between the sexes and a champion of the right of women to wear trousers. She and her husband also had a marked love of the bottle.

  A thorough police investigation of the incident, including a forensic examination of Lady Dixie’s clothing, found major discrepancies in her account, which was quickly ascribed to her hysterical imagination. However, any possibility of Fenian outrages or cut-throats near Windsor was enough to alarm the Queen. It was less than a year since Lord Frederick Cavendish, her Secretary of State for Ireland, and his deputy, had gone to Dublin to take up their appointments and been assassinated in broad daylight shortly after their arrival, and only fifteen years since the Duke of Edinburgh had been shot and wounded by an Irish republican sympathiser in Australia. Brown was sent to conduct a thorough search of the plantation where Lady Dixie had allegedly been attacked.

  Hours of tramping around in damp undergrowth revealed nothing, but by the time Brown returned to the castle he was thoroughly chilled. The Queen was suffering from a wrenched knee and had to be carried everywhere for a time, so he had no respite. His cold rapidly worsened, erysipelas set in and, on the afternoon of 27 March, he sank into a coma from which he never regained consciousness. His brothers William and Archibald were summoned to his bedside, just in time to see him die late that evening.

  At first, Victoria’s family avoided breaking the news to her directly. On the following morning, Leopold, her youngest son, undertook (or was chosen) to go to her dressing-room and tell her. ‘We can feel for her, & her sorrow, without being sorry for the cause,’ he wrote to his brother-in-law Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, on behalf of the family. ‘At least I can’
t be a hypocrit [sic].’31 None of his brothers showed any hypocrisy at the death of their mother’s favourite, or inclination to observe any period of mourning. It did not escape the notice of the press that the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh seemed to be attending an unusually large number of stage plays and after-dinner parties that week.

  Ironically, Dr Reid’s father had died the previous day after a short illness. Reid was kept informed by telegram by his family and a fellow practitioner of his father, but the Queen felt unable to release him to be with his father at such a time. However, she wrote a letter of condolence, saying that she felt ‘doubly grieved and distressed at this great sorrow and trouble which have come upon him’.32

  The grief which the Queen felt at the loss of this most devoted servant and companion was almost as intense as that which she felt after the death of her husband. She felt ‘utterly crushed’, she told Ponsonby, and her life had ‘again sustained one of those shocks like in ’61 when every link has been shaken and torn’.33 To Jessie, the wife of Hugh, another of the Brown brothers, she declared that her grief was ‘unbounded, dreadful, and I know not how to bear it, or how to believe it possible’. Many years later, when her daughter Beatrice came to rewrite her journals for publication and destroy the originals, the reference to Brown’s death read: ‘Am terribly upset by this loss, which removes one who was so devoted and attached to my service and who did so much for my personal comfort. It is the loss not only of a servant, but of a real friend.’34 Similar phrases appeared in the Court Circular, which Victoria helped to draft, announcing that ‘the death of this truly faithful and devoted servant has been a grievous stroke to the Queen’.35

  From Downing Street, Gladstone wrote a letter of condolence to the Queen. Kindly though his intentions were, the letter betrayed his habitual tactlessness. He could understand, he wrote, how she would miss ‘the aid and attention of an attached, respected and intelligent domestic’, and he hoped she would ‘be able to select a good and efficient successor, though it would be too much to hope that anyone, however capable, can at once fill the void’.36 One can hardly imagine the bereaved sovereign appreciating references to an ‘intelligent domestic’, let alone the references to a successor to ‘fill the void’. One could never imagine Disraeli writing such a note. Later she appointed Brown’s cousin, Francie Clark, to the position, though there could never be a second John Brown.

  Any doubt that the Queen loved Brown in her own way is dispelled by a letter she wrote to his brother Hugh. She had come across, and was enclosing a copy of, the entry in her journal referring to his words of comfort to her after the death of her grandson Prince Sigismund of Prussia, and his promise to take care of her until he died. ‘Afterwards so often I told him no one loved him more than I did or had a better friend than me: and he answered “Nor you – than me.” “No one loves you more”’.37

  Perhaps even more significant were her comments to the Earl of Cranbrook that ‘perhaps never in history was there so strong and true an attachment, so warm and loving a friendship between the sovereign and servant as existed between her and dear faithful Brown’. (Close examination of the letter suggests that the words ‘between the sovereign and servant’ were added as an afterthought.) She went on to pay tribute to his strength of character, ‘the most fearless uprightness’ and other qualities which made him, in her estimation, ‘one of the most remarkable men who could be known’. Even more significantly, she added that ‘the Queen feels that life for the second time is become most trying and sad to bear deprived of all she so needs’, words which could be interpreted as expressing a relationship on a deeper level than had been previously thought.38

  For the rest of her life, she ordered that two small salt cellars, a gift from Brown, should be placed on her luncheon table, and that a fresh flower should be put daily on the pillow of his bedroom in Balmoral. There was a plethora of In Memoriam memorabilia, including statuettes and plaster of Paris busts of Brown, funeral brooches and gold tie pins set with diamonds around images of his head, distributed to his relatives and to courtiers alike. Dr Alexander Profeit, who had always been one of Brown’s most outspoken enemies at Balmoral, was among the recipients of a tie pin. He knew he would be a laughing-stock among the household if he wore it more than necessary, so, in order not to offend the Queen, he kept it in his coat pocket so he could wear it correctly whenever he had to go and see her.

  The Times acknowledged Brown’s popularity among his own countrymen. ‘Deep regret is felt on Deeside, particularly in the Balmoral and Braemar districts,’ it noted on his death. ‘There he was widely known and widely respected. He was loved among his own people, and they regarded his good fortune as an honour reflected upon them.’39

  A funeral service was held at Windsor on 3 April, attended by the Queen, before Brown’s coffin was taken north for another ceremony and burial at Crathie cemetery two days later. Among the tributes and memorials to John Brown was a lifesize bronze statue by the Viennese-born sculptor Edgar Boehm, initially placed alongside the Queen’s garden cottage at Balmoral until removed after her death, on the orders of King Edward VII, to a suitably remote hillside. Brown might not have appreciated the statue, for the ample Boehm was one of those who had incurred his wrath some years previously during a ‘Great Pony Row’ in Scotland, when he complained that some of the more portly members of the Queen’s German entourage were riding her small Highland ponies almost to death. Thereafter he referred to the sculptor as ‘Mr Bum’.

  In February 1884 the Queen published a second volume based on entries from her diary: More Leaves from a Journal of a Life in the Highlands. It covered the first twenty years of her widowhood, and, as she wrote in the preface, it was intended to show ‘how her sad and suffering heart was soothed and cheered by the excursions and incidents it recounts’.40 Again, the sales were considerable, and it found favour with the public, though it caused embarrassment within the family and some of the household. In particular, its dedication to ‘My Loyal Highlanders and especially to the memory of my devoted personal attendant and faithful friend John Brown’, the frequent references to him and its effusive conclusion, in which she dwelt on her ‘irreparable loss’ and how he was ‘daily, nay hourly, missed by me’,41 deeply rankled with most of them. The Prince of Wales begged her to confine circulation to friends and family instead of allowing general publication, but she refused to listen. The German Crown Princess, who was no less critical of Brown but preferred to keep a more discreet silence than her brother, merely remarked to her mother than it described the charm of Balmoral ‘so well’.

  Much worse was to come. The family were aghast to learn that the Queen planned to write a ‘little memoir’ of her faithful Highland servant. She approached Sir Theodore Martin, the Prince Consort’s official biographer, to assist, a task from which he excused himself with the utmost tact on the grounds that his wife’s delicate health would not allow him to give the task sufficient attention. Next she contacted a Miss MacGregor, who read through the manuscript and struck out what she called ‘unnecessary repetitions’.

  The Queen sent the result to Ponsonby, who was appalled. Knowing that any recommendation from him not to proceed further would almost certainly produce the opposite effect, he recommended that she should send it to William Boyd Carpenter, Bishop of Ripon and Dr Cameron Lees of St Giles in Edinburgh, as they both had some experience of authorship. Neither of them wanted anything to do with the project. Ponsonby wrote diplomatically to the Queen that he doubted the wisdom of Her Majesty making public such ‘innermost and most sacred feelings’, which might easily be misunderstood by less sensitive readers. She told him firmly that the account was intended for private circulation only and asked him to return the manuscript so she could send it to Disraeli’s private secretary, Montagu Corry, Lord Rowton. Rowton’s reaction was similar, but he had an even better idea. Why not send the manuscript, he suggested, to a printer who would take at least six months to set it, by which time – if indeed she had
not lost interest in the project, which was quite possible – they would all have had a better chance to persuade her of the inadvisability of publication.

  Less of a shrinking violet than his peers, the new Dean of Windsor, Randall Davidson, tried a blunter approach – to reason with the Queen and talk her out of it that way. Through her lady-in-waiting Lady Ely, she asked Davidson to withdraw his remarks and apologise for the pain he had caused her. He readily offered his apologies, but at the same time said he would resign his post rather than withdraw his remarks. That Sunday, the sermon at Windsor was preached by another clergyman, and Davidson heard nothing from the Queen for a fortnight. Then he was summoned to a royal audience and found the Queen as friendly as ever. No reference was made to the notorious memoir.

  The Dean of Windsor was not the first man to discover that Her Majesty admired, liked and trusted best those who were prepared to incur her wrath for the sake of what they believed was right. The memoir was postponed, and later destroyed by Ponsonby. Obstinate the Queen may have been, but she knew better than to defy the advice of half a dozen well-respected men who all said much the same thing, even if they told her in varying degrees what she did not wish to hear.

  The early 1880s were a difficult time on a personal level for Queen Victoria, with the loss in 1881 of Disraeli, in 1883 of John Brown and one year later of her youngest son, Leopold, Duke of Albany. During these years she came to rely more and more on the support of Sir Henry Ponsonby, whose political opinions might conflict with hers but whom nevertheless she respected and trusted. All the family valued his advice and presence, and her children often depended on him to choose the right moment to propose something to their mother on which they did not dare to approach her themselves.