While leading Queen Victoria’s pony John Brown would pass on any gossip he had heard around the court to the Queen, and tell her any new jokes he had gathered. One which amused the Queen – who had a keen sense of humour – concerned a coach service. In Victorian times horse-drawn public service vehicles linked the main towns of Scotland. The carriage which ran between the Perthshire towns of Blairgowrie and Dunkeld was called the ‘Duchess of Atholl’ and was based at the ‘Duke of Atholl’s Arms’ in Dunkeld. John Brown told the Queen that at the terminus was the notice: ‘The Duchess of Atholl leaves the Duke’s Arms every lawful morning at six o’clock.’
As they settled back into their usual routines at Balmoral, following the departure of the royal family, back at Windsor Castle Prince Albert descended into a state of gloom. For him 1861 was an annus horribilis. His hopes for a new democratic era developing from the ‘Coburg Plan’ for Prussia had faded. That country’s new monarch, William I, who would become Emperor of Germany in 1871, father-in-law of his beloved daughter Princess Vicky, had promoted a militaristic policy and had crowned himself with Teutonic splendour at Königsberg as the royal family had holidayed at Balmoral. Poor Vicky’s role in Prussia as Crown Princess was being sadly undermined as the British press attacked everything German. The Prince had suffered much private grief over the death of his mother-in-law and more was to come when his cousin Prince Ferdinand of Coburg’s son, King Peter V of Portugal, died of typhoid, along with two brothers. Albert’s aspirations for a Coburg-Braganza dynasty to democratise Portugal were thus dashed.
At home Prince Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, had returned in shame from the Curragh Camp, Dublin, where he had been serving with the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards. The errant Prince of Wales had had a sexual fling with the loquacious Burlington Arcade tart-cum-‘actress’ Nellie Clifden. News of the affair could easily scuttle plans for the Prince’s engagement to Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Prince Albert’s interview with the Prince of Wales, who had returned to Cambridge, on 25 November, had been unpleasant for both despite the Prince of Wales’s contrite attitude. Added to this the outbreak of the American Civil War had caused the Union Navy to intercept the British vessel SS Trent and the arrest on board of two Confederate States envoys threatened to cause a diplomatic row. Prince Albert had worked hard through the night to water down the peremptory communiqué from the Liberal government of Lord Palmerston, which demanded reparation from President Abraham Lincoln’s administration. Prince Albert’s conciliatory phrases allowed Lincoln to save face and war with the Union States was averted.
Prince Albert was exhausted, depressed and ill. As Christmas approached he became weaker and weaker in body and spirit. Although he insisted that he was not ill, his physicians, the doddering Sir James Clark and the obsequiously compliant Dr William Jenner, realised that typhoid had him in its grip. Nevertheless they advised the Queen that there was no cause for alarm and Prince Albert remained untreated.
Lying in the Blue Room of Windsor Castle, Prince Albert began to drift in and out of consciousness; he was delirious, but in a moment of clarity he asked that Princess Alice play his favourite Lutheran hymn Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. All who gathered in the anterooms to the Blue Room, which only Queen Victoria and Princess Alice were allowed to enter, could now hear the Prince’s tortured, laboured breathing. As the Prince sank into his final unconsciousness he lapsed into German. Wer ist da? he said to an unrecognised Queen Victoria. Es ist das kleine Frauchen, she whispered. He responded: Gutes, kleines Frauchen. His clutching hand, which Queen Victoria was holding, went limp, and Prince Albert died at around 10.45pm on Saturday 14 December 1861.
Only in later years was Queen Victoria able to write about the final scene:
Two or three long but perfectly gentle breaths were drawn, the hand clasping mine and . . . all, all was over . . . I stood up, kissed his dear heavenly forehead & called out in a bitter and agonising cry ‘Oh! my dear Darling!’ and then dropped on my knees in mute, distracted despair, unable to utter a word or shed a tear. Ernest Leiningen & Sir C. Phipps lifted me up, and Ernest led me out . . .39
On 23 December, the day of Prince Albert’s funeral at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, London was described as being like ‘a city struck by the Plague’.40 Sir William Hardman reflected: ‘all shops shut or partially so, and all private houses as much closed as if each owner had lost a near relative’.41 Stunned as they were at Balmoral, the nation was doubly shocked since no official medical bulletins had been issued concerning Prince Albert until a few days before his death. Queen Victoria had retired to Osborne on 19 December and was unable to face attending the funeral service. Instead she buried herself in her grief amid the relics she had gathered of Prince Albert’s life. His memory was to be her future cult; her grief a prison for members of her Household.
At Balmoral John Brown and the other retainers laid out the decorations of mourning. They were all conscious of the passing of an era. For John Brown it was the beginning of a new stage in the enhancement of his career.
CHAPTER THREE
TO SERVE HER ALL HIS DAYS
During the spring of 1862, Queen Victoria made her first visit to Balmoral after the death of Prince Albert. Her grief was still raw on that rainy day as she was greeted at the door of the castle by Commissioner Dr Andrew Robertson and Head Keeper John Grant. She wrote of her feelings to her eldest daughter Princess Victoria in Prussia:
Oh! darling child, the agonising sobs as I crawled up with Alice and Affie! [Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh and Saxe-Coburg] The stag heads – the rooms – blessed, darling Papa’s room – then his coats – his caps – kilts – all, all convulsed my poor shattered frame!1
The Queen felt suicidal. She felt a surge of her feared Hanoverian madness; she wrote her will.
There was no spot in Queen Victoria’s kingdom that was as well preserved in Prince Albert’s organisational aspic as Balmoral. A new strict disciplinary directive was issued from whichever room the Queen happened to be in. Every hour footmen, ladies-in-waiting and maids were dispatched with notes, memos and letters conveying the royal instructions on how Balmoral and its occupants were to function. The message-carrying entered the realms of farce: the Queen was known to pen notes to Sir Henry Ponsonby, her secretary, who might be only yards away.
From 1862 a new Balmoral practice – dubbed ‘Balmorality’ by those who felt its sting – came into use. The list of rules was endless. The Queen’s ladies were not to leave the castle unchaperoned, and certainly not alone on unsupervised picnics with gentlemen of the court. Again no one was to quit Balmoral until the Queen had gone out – lest she need them. The long-suffering princesses – daughters and grand-daughters – were not to hobnob with gentlemen of the Household, and there were to be no unchaperoned walks in the grounds for them either.
John Brown was to play a prominent part – not always decorously – every 26 August from 1862, the anniversary of Prince Albert’s birth. The gillies, the estate tenants in their best clothes and the entire Household in morning dress were expected to assemble at the obelisk presented to the Queen by the estate workers to the memory of Prince Albert.2 Here they would toast the departed Prince in whisky. Queen Victoria only stayed long enough to hear a short prayer of thanksgiving and quietly returned to the castle in her carriage, perhaps because she knew what would happen next. John Brown and the other gillies set up a trestle table by the wood and generous libations were handed out. Queen Victoria turned a blind eye to the state of her gentlemen as they slowly returned to the castle, while John Brown was known to sleep off his indulgence in the woods, sometimes lying alongside courtiers in frock coats and top hats. Although abstemious herself, and critical of those who over-indulged, Queen Victoria was to retain a curious myopia about her gillies and their drunkenness. Her laxity was to cause her further grief.
When it came to choosing new ‘below-stairs’ staff at Balmoral, the Queen often asked John Brown’s advice; his candidates tended to be in his own
image. Once he was approached by a man wishing to obtain a position for his son in the Royal Household. ‘He’s a good lad who does na’ swear, drink or play cards,’ said the father proudly of his twenty-year-old son.
‘Weel,’ replied Brown. ‘I’m verra sorry, but he sounds too guid tae live lang – and the Queen disna like the quick-deeing [dying] kind.’
On another occasion, a young footman cackhandedly dropped a silver salver, rattling the Queen’s nerves. She ordered that he be demoted to the kitchens. Brown, who had an eye on the young man and thought that he had potential as a royal servant, brought up the subject with the Queen: ‘What are ye daein’ tae that puir laddie? Hiv’ ye never drappit onything yersel?’ Next day the young servant’s livery was restored.
One incident stands out in the story of John Brown. During the evening of Wednesday 7 October 1863, around 7pm, Queen Victoria was travelling in a two-horse ‘sociable’ landau. The hoods of the carriage were down to enable the Queen and her daughters, the Princesses Alice and Helena, to enjoy the mountain road scenery as they sped from Loch Muick to Balmoral. On the two-seater box sat John Brown and the coachman William Smith, and behind the royal ladies sat Princess Alice’s blackamoor servant Wilhelm, from the household at Darmstadt. As John Brown had handed them into the carriage, Queen Victoria noticed that William Smith was ‘confused’ – one of her idiosyncratic definitions of drunk.
From time to time Smith swerved the carriage off the road on to the rough verges. This so alarmed Princess Alice that for a while John Brown led the horses. As this made progress too slow, he remounted and held a lantern aloft to assist Smith’s vision of the road. Some 2 miles from Altnaguithasach another swerve caused the ‘sociable’ to tip over, throwing its occupants on to the verge. The princesses escaped unhurt, but Queen Victoria sustained minor facial injuries and a staved thumb. Brown hurt his knee as he jumped clear. Quickly recovering himself Brown assisted the Queen to her feet with a characteristic: ‘The Lord Almighty have mercy on us! Who did ever see the likes of this before? I thocht ye were all kilt!’3
At last they reached Balmoral at about 10pm, where they were tended by Dr Jenner. In her Journal the Queen lamented that she had no Prince Albert to tell of the adventure; but she was sure, she told her daughter Alice, that the Prince knew of the mishap and ‘I am sure he watched over us.’4 She also noted: ‘We are agreed that Smith was quite unfit to drive me again in the dark’, and the coachman was pensioned off in 1864. Later she was admonished by W.E. Gladstone, then Chancellor of the Exchequer and Minister in Attendance at Balmoral, for taking drives along the darkened roads. She closed her ears to his lecture, but was later furious that Gladstone recounted the accident to Prime Minister Palmerston.
But that was all in the future. During September 1862 Queen Victoria visited Prince Albert’s childhood haunts at Coburg, a few months after the Second Great Industrial Exhibition to honour the Prince Consort, who had been the ‘titular father’ of the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations at the Crystal Palace in May 1851.5 John Brown travelled down with other gillies to view the vast range of artefacts exhibited. Meanwhile at Windsor Queen Victoria’s mood was darkening.
‘Oh! to think of my beginning another year alone,’ wrote the Queen in her Journal on 14 December 1862.6 It was the first anniversary of Prince Albert’s death and she attended a service conducted by the Very Revd Dr Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, Dean of Westminster, in the Blue Room at Windsor Castle where the Prince had died. Queen Victoria’s reaction to Prince Albert’s death was to promote a caricature of royal mourning. For her Household and family court mourning lasted a year; for the Queen it endured the whole of her remaining years. She even had the Blue Room photographed so that every item was logged, never to be moved. Above her bed was always hung a photograph of Prince Albert on his deathbed, and on her bedside table rested a plaster cast of his right hand. For years she slept clutching Albert’s nightclothes.
On 18 December 1862 Prince Albert’s remains were transferred from St George’s Chapel at Windsor to the royal mausoleum that Queen Victoria had commissioned at Frogmore, to be entombed in the presence of the royal family while the Dean of Windsor, the Very Revd & Hon. Dr Gerald Wellesley, intoned prayers. The royal mausoleum, with its white marble effigy of Prince Albert by Baron Carlo Marochetti, was to be a place of sanctuary for Queen Victoria, who kept the keys to the sepulchre always with her.
Queen Victoria’s sense of loneliness increased, particularly after the weddings of two of her children. On 1 July 1862 her second daughter Princess Alice married Grand Duke Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, and on 10 March 1863 the Prince of Wales married Princess Alexandra (‘Alix’) of Denmark, in St George’s Chapel, Windsor. The Queen, dressed entirely in black except for the blue ribbon of the Order of the Garter, watched the proceedings from Catherine of Aragon’s closet. On their wedding day Queen Victoria wrote in her Journal: ‘Here I sit lonely and desolate, who so need love and tenderness . . .’7 Queen Victoria craved the presence of a loving, caring man to alleviate her bitter sense of loss of Prince Albert, and her depression brought on a further bout of fear that she was losing her mind. But just such a man as she needed was about to step on to the royal stage, to form with her an enduring relationship of mystery and scandal.
On the way to her autumn 1863 holiday at Balmoral, the Queen decided to break her journey at Perth to visit her old friend Anne, Duchess of Atholl, who had been Mistress of the Robes from 1852, then one of the Ladies of the Bedchamber since 1853. The Queen had heard that Anne’s husband, the 6th Duke, was gravely ill. The Duchess had been at Windsor when Prince Albert died and the Queen was anxious to comfort her friend in her trial. On 15 September the Queen travelled with General Grey, Princess Helena and Lady Augusta Bruce from Perth to Blair Atholl by special train on the newly opened Perth & Inverness Railway Company line. Although desperately ill, the Duke managed to accompany the Queen and party to Blair Atholl station on their departure. The Duke died on 16 January 1864.
The Blair Atholl trip plunged the Queen once more into gloom, but with John Brown to fuss over her she soon began to brighten up. The growing influence of John Brown at Balmoral was largely due to the fact that the castle and estate were run in entirely different ways from Queen Victoria’s other homes. Because it was not regulated by the rigid and ancient protocol of, say Windsor or Buckingham Palace, Queen Victoria presided over a kind of ‘Scullery Court’ at Balmoral, which allowed her to fret over the details and trivia of its daily life. In all this John Brown encouraged the Queen to be involved. When the Queen visited the stables John Brown was always there to answer questions and involve her in sentimental fuss over her ‘dear little Highland ponies’. He gave advice as to which beast should be given to which rider, and together they worked out a system of five categories of pony, based on mettle and stamina, linked to guests’ and Household members’ riding skills. This led to many quarrels between John Brown and the keepers and fishing beat organisers, for John Brown offered his advice freely on matters beyond his basic duties. The sound of Head Keeper John Grant and John Brown arguing – usually about Brown’s outspoken opinions about how the gun room and fishing rights on the Dee should be organised – became a regular occurrence.
During the summer of 1864 Princess Alice, who had not yet been replaced by her youngest sister Princess Beatrice as her mother’s close companion, was concerned at the Queen’s brooding and lack of animation outside her state papers and domestic activities. She discussed the situation with Dr Jenner and Sir Charles Phipps, the Keeper of the Privy Purse. Jenner averred that the Queen needed more exercise and fresh air. The Queen, opined Princess Alice, had always enjoyed the pony cart rides at Balmoral; perhaps these could be introduced at Windsor and Osborne as a regular feature of the daily routine. The two courtiers agreed that the suggestion had some merit. Was not the pony cart led by that handsome Johnny Brown?, recalled the Princess. She further pointed out that since her mother hated change or the appearance of unfamiliar
faces around her, why not bring down Johnny Brown from Balmoral to organise the pony rides. It was agreed to make the suggestion to the Queen, who gave her permission and John Brown was summoned to Osborne House in December 1864.
Back in 1843 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert had talked about securing for themselves a retreat which would give them privacy and freedom to relax. On hearing that the Osborne estate, near East Cowes on the Isle of Wight, was up for sale they decided to investigate further. The Queen knew and liked the Isle of Wight; she had been taken there by her mother in 1831 and 1833, and had already ridden in her carriage through the estate and inspected the three-storey eighteenth-century old Osborne House, with its splendid views of Southampton water, Cowes Roads and the Royal Navy anchorage at Spithead. The asking price was £28,000, and on Prince Albert’s prompting they decided to rent the place for a year, at £1,000 p.a., to see if it was suitable; this they did on 1 May 1844.
The royal couple made their first visit to Osborne in October, sailing across the Solent in blustery showers, and were immediately struck by the property’s potential for privacy. Osborne was seen to be ideal in every way and negotiations to purchase were begun with the vendor, the unpredictable Lady Isabella Blachford. By the end of December 1845, despite Lady Blachford’s mercenary nitpicking, the 342 acre Osborne estate was secured, along with the house, its furniture and contents and various neighbouring farms and properties to make up a new estate of 1,727 acres, all for £67,000.8
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