John Brown

by Raymond Lamont-Brown

Brown knew that the Queen disliked bishops, but she had particular respect for John Coleridge Patterson, the first missionary Bishop of Melanesia. To Brown she once said: ‘I am sure that the dear Bishop will go straight to Heaven when he dies.’ ‘Weel, God help him when he meets John Knox,’ replied Brown. Victoria’s dislikes also included babies and bright lights, the latter providing her main reason for being an unenthusiastic supporter of electricity. Yet she liked sermons, religious services and the activities of her grandchildren. She cared not for people with loud voices, hot rooms, coal fires, motor cars and telephones, although during the latter years of her life she found telephoning more efficacious than her famous written memos – usually of complaint – to Household staff. Of all the personalities at court, the Queen particularly disliked Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. Brown was aware of the fact that the Queen disliked Gladstone and had complained that the Prime Minister addressed her as if she were a public meeting. So at one audience when Gladstone was droning on longer than usual, Brown made an attempt to rescue the Queen by blurting out: ‘Ye’ve said enuff.’

  The Queen did not approve of the education or indulgence of the working classes, averring that education made them unfit for domestic service or industrial work. Education of women was anathema to her, as was female suffrage, and she was censorious of female fashion that did not please her. Although she never tired of telling people that she was the daughter of a soldier, she disliked anyone who brought what she construed as ‘military ways’ to her Household. Her interest was always of the keenest when discussing military matters; her involvement included personal approval of promotions of officers above the rank of colonel to changes of uniform; and she was well versed in the history of regiments. She took particular delight at military reviews, with John Brown sitting on the box of her carriage, in having a running conversation with him on what was happening.

  Death duties and income tax were of particular repugnance to the Queen, yet she ‘willingly’ paid the latter when it was introduced by Prime Minister Robert Peel in 1842. Under the influence of John Brown she became more ambivalent in her extreme disgust of tobacco, making courtiers and honoured guests alike go into the garden to smoke. John Brown arranged for a little ante-room at Balmoral to be used by smokers, and there could be found a group of courtiers in all their finery kneeling in a semi-circle around the fireplace blowing the fumes of their ‘filthy habit’ up the chimney.31 One man defied the Queen’s ‘No Smoking’ notices dotted around her homes. Albert, King of Saxony, was a heavy smoker and averred that he could not be without a cigar for long; pulling rank as a king he walked boldly down corridors and staircases puffing confidently, the Household cringing at the thought of the Queen’s wrath.32 Nevertheless, John Brown told the Queen that smoking was a ‘good thing’ when out in the hills to keep midges away, and at picnics the Queen and Princess Beatrice were seen puffing away at his direction for this purpose.33

  At Balmoral another of Queen Victoria’s dislikes, shooting, was indulged with fervour. Because Prince Albert had been fond of the pastime, it was indulged; because Brown said it was a vital part of Balmoral life for guests and courtiers alike it was humoured. When Princess Helena’s husband, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, lost an eye while shooting alongside the cack-handed Prince Arthur, the Queen was greatly upset and bought her son-in-law a boxed set of glass eyes; one of them was ‘bloodshot’ for when he had a cold or had indulged too enthusiastically the night before.

  From his first days at Osborne then, John Brown began a close study of his royal mistress and in this was to be found the fundamental key to any mystery about his rise to prominence. Queen Victoria craved friendship, and the best kind of all was defined as a knowledge and indulgence of herself; John Brown provided that.

  When conducting guests around royal properties like Windsor Castle, Brown would point out portraits and artefacts relevant to the Queen’s life, adding snippets of her biography. Pausing before pictures of her babyhood, coronation and marriage he would boom: ‘Her Maa-dj-esty was born on 24 May 1819 at Kensington Palace, she’s seven years older than me. She ascended the throne on 20 June 1837 on the death of her uncle, a silly buddy by all accounts, and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 23 June 1838. She married Prince Albert at the Crown room, St James’s Palace, on 10 February 1840; the Queen and me remembers all these anniversaries.’34

  Queen Victoria began to be more aware and more indulgent of John Brown’s ‘Highland sensibilities’. Curiously, she started to plot her foreign excursions to avoid places where he was not accepted or welcomed. For instance, after King Leopold of the Belgians died in 1865, she began to re-route her entourage on its way to the German Court, usually via Brussels, to Paris and Cherbourg instead. Why? John Brown’s true worth and position had not been recognised by the Belgian Court, which had not arranged for Brown to have his own suite of rooms near her own.

  John Brown disliked foreigners, their tongue, their scenery, their food and their effluvia. His distaste prevented the Queen from enjoying to the full the pleasures of her jaunts abroad, or from being adventurous, as he transplanted her routines of Balmoral to such locations as Baveno. The heat made him feel ill, and fearing the assassination of his royal mistress he discouraged the stopping of her carriage for her to enjoy vistas.

  Paris was quite different. The French, considering all rosbifs to be completely mad, understood what they took to be British royal eccentricity and treated Brown with dignity. In due time President François Paul Jules Grévy accorded John Brown a special bow of recognition. Brown was particularly taken with the English-educated Anglo-French National Assembly Member William Henry Waddington, who once called on the Queen at the British Embassy in Paris. Waddington’s wife recalled that Brown and Waddington ‘shook hands, and Brown begged him to come to Scotland, where he would receive a hearty welcome’.35

  From time to time John Brown would give the Queen little gifts. On one occasion he produced ‘a dozen cheap eggcups of gay and florid design’.36 To the complete surprise of her ladies, the Queen accepted the garish utensils with the delight that she had usually reserved for Prince Albert’s little Geschenk (gifts) which he usually inscribed Meiner theuren Victoria von Ihrem treuen Albert (To My dear Victoria from her faithful Albert). The egg-cups were used every Sunday on the Queen’s breakfast table, until they were finally all broken years after John Brown’s death.

  The year 1866 was to bring Queen Victoria many changes, which she had always hated. Yet it was also a turning-point in her widowhood. To a certain extent her grief for Albert was abating, but still she remained reclusive by temperament. It was her paramount wish, she informed her dearest friends, to ‘throw everything up and retire into private life’, with the intent of working for the ‘poor and sick’.37 She told her old friend Augusta of Saxe-Weimar, Queen-Empress of Prussia: ‘My political and queenly tasks are the hardest for me . . . Only a sense of duty and the knowledge that my Angel [Prince Albert] wishes it and that I must answer to him, force me to carry this out.’38

  The Queen’s sense of duty was strengthened by her disappointment in what she saw as the fatuous and immoral nature of her eldest son, the Prince of Wales; daily he convinced her of his unfitness to rule. Yet John Brown’s influence encouraged the Queen to see that her grief from the past could be a shrine to which she might return from time to time, but need not be a jail in which she permanently lived.

  Domestically the Queen now had to face important changes in her Household. Prince Albert’s former private secretary Sir Charles Phipps became a private secretary to her in parallel, but not very harmoniously, with General Charles Grey. Sir Thomas Biddulph, Master of the Household, was appointed joint Keeper of the Privy Purse with General Grey, with Biddulph concentrating on the financial aspects of the role, while Sir John Cowell took up the post of Master of the Household. All were to cross swords from week to week with John Brown, who remained well and truly secure from change as the Queen’s most trusted servant. Brown appea
red wherever she did in public, stood by her chair as she worked to keep her free from interruption, and to her other servants’ great amusement walked behind her with a plaid over his arm to which were pinned the Queen’s memos, messages and missives.39

  On 6 February 1866, in a state of nervous agitation, Queen Victoria went in procession to the opening of Parliament; this was the first time she had done so since Albert’s death. In March she attended a military review, again for the first time since the Prince died. She had once enthusiastically enjoyed these reviews, dressed in a scarlet tunic with a general’s sash and hat plume, and riding her bay ‘Alma’, a scene immortalised by the painter George Housman Thomas. This time she attended in her carriage, with John Brown on the rumble seat. One paper recorded: ‘Gillie Brown seems by degrees to have fallen into the position in the household of the Queen such as was occupied by Roustaen, the Mameluke, near the person of Napoleon the Great.’40

  More nervous agitation was to assail the Queen on Thursday 5 July, the wedding day of Princess Helena to Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, fifteen years her senior, at the private chapel at Windsor Castle. In the crowd massed in the corridor outside the Queen’s bedroom, where Princess Helena was dressing, stood John Brown in Highland dress. Queen Victoria was ‘firmer’ in her confidence when she travelled by royal train to Wolverhampton to unveil Thomas Thornycroft’s equestrian statue of Prince Albert on 30 November. Among the postilions in Ascot livery stood John Brown in Highland dress, this time wearing the black crape ribbon with its purple silk band bearing the legend ‘In Memory of Prince Albert’.

  In this year of 1866 the railway line to Ballater was opened, but for a long time the Queen would never use it, because Prince Albert had never been associated with it.41 The Queen did not have her own waiting room at Ballater until 1889. Throughout her life the Queen remained afraid of railway accidents, and commanded that the royal train should go no faster than 50 miles per hour. Once the Queen sent John Brown down the platform, when the royal train had stopped at Wigan, with a message for the driver to slow down; to this message Brown added: ‘Her Maa-dj-esty says the carriage was shaking like the Devil.’

  On 26 June 1866 the Liberal government led by John, 1st Earl Russell, fell over the defeat of the Reform Bill. The Queen put pressure on Russell to remain in his post; after all, Prussia had just declared war on Austria and the monarch insisted that her ministers ‘should not abandon their posts’ at this crucial time. Yet, even as the Tory Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, was forming a new government on 28 June the Queen departed for Balmoral. The establishment was appalled at what they regarded as the monarch’s hypocrisy and dereliction of duty; on every hand the Queen was criticised: ‘If she will not work, she should abdicate’, said many in high places. And placards bearing the words ‘What do we pay her for?’ appeared on London’s thoroughfares.

  ‘John Brown will not let her [leave Balmoral]’, the justresigned Prime Minister’s daughter-in-law Lady Russell wrote in her diary, echoing the growing awareness that the Highland servant was exerting power over the Queen. One who knew this to be untrue was Lord Derby’s Leader in the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer, the flamboyant 62-year-old Jew-turned-Christian Benjamin Disraeli, whom Queen Victoria elevated to the earldom of Beaconsfield in 1876.

  Disraeli was to become a prominent figure in the John Brown story; he knew how to handle Brown, as he did the Queen. Flattery was his main weapon. Queen Victoria’s grand-daughter Princess Marie Louise, daughter of Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, remembered a young woman being ‘taken in to dinner one night by Gladstone and, the following night, by Disraeli. She was asked what impression these two celebrated men had on her. She replied thoughtfully, ‘When I left the dining-room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr Disraeli I thought I was the cleverest woman in England!’43 Whenever they met, Disraeli, who succeeded Derby as Prime Minister in 1868, was more than polite to Brown, who was an ardent Tory and actually sent Disraeli salmon he had caught himself in the Dee. Disraeli and John Brown had one thing in common in their handling of the Queen: both treated her as a woman, they fussed over and cajoled her, and fed her titbits of gossip. And like her two ‘in-laws’, Princess Helena of Waldeck-Pyrmont, wife of Prince Leopold, and Prince Henry of Battenberg, husband of Princess Beatrice, they were not ‘overawed’ by her.

  As journalists looked round for stories to cater for the developing interest in royal activities, John Brown began to be talked about more and more. In July 1866 genuine stories were a little thin on the ground and the editors of the wellestablished weekly satirical magazine Punch; or the London Charivari, which had first appeared on Saturday 17 July 1841, thought they would pull the collective leg of the public with a spoof ‘Court Circular’. On 7 July they published this ‘royal bulletin’:

  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.

  Thus Punch was the first publication to sneer at John Brown. But the flames of gossip were to be further fanned as the crowds flocked to the 99th Royal Academy Spring Exhibition on 6 May 1867. Many people, who had never been to such an exhibition before, were perplexed by a large painting by Sir Edwin Landseer entitled ‘Her Majesty at Osborne in 1866’.44 For the first time that anyone could remember the Queen’s picture provoked sniggers and outright laughter as visitors stood before it. One critic wrote: ‘If anyone will stand by this picture for a quarter of an hour and listen to the comments of visitors he will learn how great an imprudence has been committed.’45

  The picture showed the Queen, dressed in severe mourning, facing right and reading a letter while mounted on her pony ‘Flora’. Behind, the viewer’s eye is directed up the path to the terrace at Osborne, where on the tower the clock stands at a minute or two after 3pm. The Queen’s gloves, letters and red state papers box lie on the ground and nearby are her Border collie ‘Sharp’ and her Skye terrier ‘Prince’. On a seat on the grass, behind, sit the Princesses Louise and Helena. But what people flocked to see was the black-kilted figure of John Brown holding the horse’s head.

  The gossip machine engaged a higher gear. So all the rumours were true? The secret was out; this was how Her Majesty spent her spare time, with the hired help! The critics were unanimous: ‘We trust it will be deemed no disloyalty either to the sovereign or to the reputation of the painter to say . . . there is not one of Her Majesty’s subjects will see this lugubrious picture without regret.’46 In contrast, the Queen was delighted with the picture and ordered that an engraving be made of it for immediate reproduction; for this John Brown’s beard was trimmed to suit his current shaving fashion! By the time the genre painter George Housman Thomas painted ‘The Visit to the Mausoleum’ in 1869, again showing Queen Victoria in mourning and riding on ‘Flora’ alongside Princesses Helena and Louise, with John Brown at the pony’s head, the public were becoming used to a more public persona for John Brown.47

  These were two of a series of ‘John Brown royal portraits’. In 1875 the Hungarian-born painter Heinrich von Angeli was commissioned by Queen Victoria to paint a head and shoulders portrait of John Brown; the likeness had to be taken from a photograph as Brown refused to sit. There were also several pictures of John Brown painted posthumously: ‘John Brown at Frogmore’ was produced in 1883 by the German portrait painter Carl Rudolph Sohn, while animal painter Charles Burton Baxter painted two versions of ‘John Brown with Dogs at Osborne’, again in 1883.48

  John Brown paid no attention to the increased gossip engendered by his portrait and got on with his royal duties, which included a self-appointed position as Queen’s entertainer when he felt she needed to be lifted out of depression. Brown was instrumental in introducing Queen Victoria to the subtleties of Scottish customs, many of them with disti
nct Highland variations. The Queen was to remember particularly the Hallowe’ens of 1866 and 1867. From the Revd Dr Norman MacLeod, the Queen was to learn that the early Christian Church in Scotland had grafted a Christian festival on to a pagan one. So the Scots Hallowe’en – the Feast of All Hallows’ (or All Saints’) Eve was grafted on to the ancient Celtic festival of Samhuinn, which marked the beginning of the Celtic year and the return of cattle to the fold from their winter grazing. It was a time in Scotland’s folklore year when ghosts, witches and fairies were deemed to be abroad. Underlining the eeriness of Hallowe’en John Brown read to the Queen Sir Walter Scott’s lines:

  On Hallowmass Eve, ere ye boune to rest,

  Ever beware that your couch be blest;

  Sign it with cross and sain it with bead,

  Sing the Ave and say the Creed.

  For on Hallowmass Eve the Nighthag shall ride,

  And all her nine-fold sweeping on by her side,

  Whether the wind sing lowly or loud,

  Stealing through moonshine or swathed in a cloud.

  He that dare sit in St Swithin’s Chair

  When the Nighthag wings the troubled air,

  Questions three, when he speaks the spell,

  He may ask and she must tell.

  As a true Calvinist John Brown had no truck with such ‘popish practices’ but he told the Queen that he remembered the Highland mothers singing this ditty in Gaelic at Hallowe’en:

  Hallowe’en will come; will come;

  Witchcraft will be set a-going;

  Fairies will be at full speed,

  Running in every pass.

  Avoid the road, children, children!49

  During a visit to Head Keeper John Grant’s mother on 31 October 1866, Queen Victoria noted how the local children paraded for her with burning torches and how Hallowe’en bonfires were lit across the Dee from Balmoral which ‘had a very pretty effect’. Next year the Queen, Jane, Lady Ely, Princess Louise and Prince Leopold, with the keepers and their wives and children, all led by John Brown, and carrying torches, processed around Balmoral Castle while Piper Ross played his bagpipes. It was Brown, too, who encouraged the Queen to keep up the age-old practice of ‘Burning the Witch’ at Balmoral. Quoting an old text, the folklorist Florence Marian McNeill recorded the event: