John Brown

by Raymond Lamont-Brown

  A huge bonfire was kindled in front of the castle, opposite the main doorway. The clansmen were mustered, arrayed in Highland garb. At a signal, headed by a band, they marched towards the palace. The bonfire was kindled so as to be in full blaze when the procession reached it. The interest of the promenade was centred on a trolley on which there sat the effigy of a hideous old woman or witch called the Shandy Dann. Beside her crouched one of the party holding her erect while the march went forward to the bagpipes’ strain. As the building came in sight, the pace was quickened to a run, then a sudden halt was made a dozen yards or so from the blaze. Here, amid breathless silence, an indictment is made why this witch should be burned to ashes, and with no one to appear on her behalf – only this advocatus diaboli, paper in hand – she is condemned to the flames. With a rush and a shout and the skirling of bagpipes, the sledge, and its occupants are hurled topsy-turvy into the fire, whilst the mountaineer springs from the car at the latest safe instant. There follow cheers and hoots of derisive laughter, as the inflammable wrappings of the Shandy Dann crackle and splutter out.

  All the while the residents of the Castle stand enjoying this curious rite, and no one there entered more heartily into it than the Head of the Empire herself.50

  By 1867 resentment towards John Brown was growing both at court and in political circles. Most of the Queen’s immediate family disliked John Brown and his brothers, with the Prince of Wales and Prince Leopold being his chief opponents. Princess Louise, the Queen’s fourth daughter and sixth child, also had a grumbling resentment of the Highland Servant. This was to come to a head around the time that the Queen summoned Edgar Boehm to Balmoral to prepare a bust of John Brown. Boehm was there for three months and formed a distinct and negative opinion of Brown.51 At this time Princess Louise was unmarried, in her twenties and delighted in flirting. She formed a certain passion for Boehm while he gave her ‘modelling lessons’ and ‘they became intimate, though not to the extent of actual love-making’.52

  On Politics

  As a staunch Highland Tory, John Brown had little time for Liberal Prime Minister Gladstone. He was particularly incensed by government policy in 1872 and during a discussion with Sir Henry Ponsonby on the subject remarked in reply to Sir Henry’s observation that Brown wanted the Liberals out: ‘A good thing too, the sooner they go the better. That Gladstone’s half a Roman [Catholic] and the others had better be gone. We canna have a worse lot.’

  It seems that on one occasion Queen Victoria joined John Brown to witness Boehm at work on the servant’s bust, and they walked in on the sculptor and the Princess embracing. The Queen was furious and upbraided her daughter. Princess Louise, in her anger, accused John Brown of spying on her and running to the Queen with tittle-tattle. The Princess added that she would not put up with Brown’s insolence. John Brown’s supposedly impertinent remarks were the subject of regular complaints brought to the Queen by her children.

  This incident added some urgency to Queen Victoria’s determination to get the highly sexed Princess Louise safely married. Her choice of husband, however, was a disastrous one for the Princess. John Ian Campbell, Marquis of Lorne (1845–1914), eldest son of George, 8th Duke of Argyll and his Duchess Elizabeth, was widely accepted as a homosexual. Life together after their marriage at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on 21 March 1871 was a long trail of misery. To their wedding present from the royal domestic servants John Brown contributed a hefty 30 guineas, whereas Sir Henry Ponsonby only added 10 guineas. Should Brown’s generosity have been intended to impress the Princess, it failed, and the reverse was the result. Pointedly she commented: ‘I don’t want an absurd man in a kilt following me everywhere.’53 Princess Louise was to remain childless and in 1900 Lorne became the 9th Duke of Argyll.

  Although she was probably entirely innocent of adultery, or even of fornication before marriage, the hot-house atmosphere of Queen Victoria’s court gossip, wherein John Brown was a leading contributor, linked Princess Louise with a series of men as well as Boehm. There was Colonel (later General Sir) John McNeill, one of their suite when her husband became Governor-General of Canada, architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, and Colonel William Probert, her equerry. There was also another man who would regularly cross swords with Brown and later became a principal Brown detractor. This was Colonel (later Sir) Arthur Bigge, whom Queen Victoria had appointed as groom-in-waiting.54 Bigge’s duties at Balmoral, in particular, were undemanding and were an easy billet after his career in the Royal Artillery. On one occasion Bigge was relaxing in a Balmoral ante-room when John Brown entered and smugly announced: ‘Waal, ye’ll not be going fishing today,’ adding, ‘Her Maa-dj-esty thinks it’s about time ye did some work.’55 From that day Bigge bore Brown a grudge.

  Sir Frederick Ponsonby, Treasurer to King George V and Keeper of the Privy Purse to King George VI, recalled a ‘JB incident’ concerning Princess Louise’s supposed lover Colonel McNeill. John Brown entered the equerries’ room at Osborne House one day with a message from the Queen concerning a set of carriages that she wanted made ready. Brown hovered, waiting for a reply after delivering the message, and was told by the brusque McNeill to wait outside while he prepared the order for the coaches.

  Brown complained to the Queen that McNeill had been ‘over-bearing in his manner’ and ‘had shouted at him as if he was a common soldier’. A few hours later McNeill received a memo from Queen Victoria enquiring if he wished for a posting to India. She suggested that such a position was a definite demotion. Puzzled by the Queen’s memo, he took it to his father, Sir John Carstairs McNeill, an old Indian campaigner. Sir John worked out the Queen’s intent and advised his son to reply to the Queen accepting the post. He should add that as colleagues and friends would enquire why he was leaving royal service, could the Queen supply him with the reason for his being offered India. The Queen made no response and Colonel McNeill remained at his post. For a number of years thereafter the Queen did not speak to him and made sure that his duties never brought him to Balmoral or Osborne where she would have to meet him.56

  There were to be more serious examples of opposition to Brown. One such became notorious in political circles. Queen Victoria intended to have John Brown ride on the box of her carriage at the Review of the Troops in Hyde Park on 5 July 1867. The Prime Minister, the 14th Earl of Derby, with some trepidation suggested to the Queen that the growing dislike for Brown might cause scenes of an ‘unpleasant nature’ if he took such a prominent place at the Review. Queen Victoria was immediately annoyed at the suggestion. She wrote of her irritation to her equerry Lord Charles Fitzroy: ‘The Queen [she usually wrote of herself in the third person] is much astonished and shocked at an attempt being made by some people to prevent her faithful servant going with her to the Review in Hyde Park, thereby making the poor, nervous shaken Queen, who is so accustomed to his watchful care and intelligence, terribly nervous and uncomfortable . . . What it all means she does not know . . .’57

  Lord Derby wrote to General Sir Charles Grey that he had been informed by the erstwhile Liberal MP, Lord Edward Berkley Portman, that a hostile reception for Brown was being planned by the lawyer and political agitator Edmund Beales and his ‘roughs’ of the Reform League. How was such an embarrassment to be headed off, asked Derby? Could Brown have ‘some slight ailment’ which would necessitate his falling out of the duty? Should Brown be approached in such a way, Grey knew he would immediately complain to the Queen. Grey bit the bullet and told the Queen of the intent to hold anti-Brown demonstrations. ‘The Queen will not be dictated to’, she replied, using one of her favourite phrases of late. She did, however, withdraw her objections to Brown not being there. The problem resolved itself: Derby cancelled the Review as the Queen went into deep mourning following the assassination of her Hapsburg kinsman Ferdinand-Joseph Maximilian, Emperor of Mexico, at Queretaro in Mexico on 19 July, by republican leader Benito Pablo Juárez.

  Despite all this aggravation, the comforting presence of John Brown was always appreciated on
Queen Victoria’s more poignant occasions. One such occurred on Tuesday 15 October 1867, the twenty-eighth anniversary of her ‘blessed engagement day’ to Prince Albert in 1839. On that rainy morning Queen Victoria was to unveil a statue of Prince Albert at Balmoral, just above Middleton’s Lodge. The statue was a gift from the Queen to the Balmoral tenantry. As Queen Victoria and Jane Ely, her Lady of the Bedchamber, sat in the royal carriage soaked by the deluging rain, with the 93rd Highlanders drawn up alongside the crowd of servants and tenants, John Brown’s stentorian voice rose above the others in a verse of the 100th Psalm. A bedraggled Revd Dr Taylor said a short prayer and the statue was unveiled after some snagging of the cover. After the soldiers had presented arms, the pipers played, and the Queen gazed sadly at ‘the dear noble figure of my beloved one, who used to be with us here in the prime of beauty, goodness, and strength’; the Balmoral Commissioner Dr Robertson then made a speech on behalf of the servants and tenants. As the gunsmoke of a feu de joie spread over the crowd, John Brown sprang on to the box and the royal party drove away to the sound of God Save the Queen, ‘sung extremely well’ noted the Queen.58

  Anyone describing Queen Victoria’s life in 1868 would probably have settled on the word ‘sedentary’. By this date the Queen had become ruddy of complexion and obese of figure, with round bulging cheeks, more than one chin and exopthalmic eyes. Her lethargic days were regulated by a strict routine and a round of large meals interlarded with pralines, fondants and dainties ever to hand. Her life was one of selfindulgence and her idiosyncratic view of the world coloured her relationships with people. She did not welcome visitors gladly and became irritable if jolted from her daily habits. Her crankiness increased if she was not constantly attended by familiar faces – her daughters, her German dresser Emilie Dettweiler, her Scots wardrobe-maid Annie Macdonald and the ubiquitous John Brown. Some evenings she would sit at her spinning wheel in pure contentment with her favourite minister, the Revd Dr Norman MacLeod, reading to her from Scott or Burns. For those around her it was a life of relentless boredom; the one person who truly thrived on this humdrum existence was John Brown, content in his own ‘kingdom’.

  At Balmoral the Queen often went to Glassalt Shiel (‘cottage of the grey burn’); the ‘cottage’ was really a fifteen-roomed house at the western end of Loch Muick, on Abergeldie land, which she had had built in 1868. The housewarming for Glassalt Shiel was a bittersweet occasion for the Queen. Amid the reels and merrymaking, the ‘whisky toddy’ and the oatcakes, the Queen ‘thought of the happy past and my darling husband’.59 She called the building ‘the first Widow’s House’, but brightened up when John Brown begged her to drink a toast to the ‘first fire kindling’. This was in accord with the old Highland superstition that a welltended and toasted first blaze in the hearth of a new house would assure ‘long life’ to all who dwelt therein.

  At Glassalt Shiel the Queen kept house with just a few familiar servants to look after her and with her reluctant family to entertain her. All were guarded at night by a single policeman. Her secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, actively deplored her retirement to this secluded place, where the Glassalt Burn tumbled down the White Mounth of Prince Albert’s favourite wild spot. But regularly the Queen would issue from it with her tiny entourage to picnic in the hills with Brown fussing over the tea kettle or watching from a knoll with his telescope for the possible approach of unwelcome ramblers or – most hated of all – journalists. While muttering over the inconvenience of contacting the Queen on state business when she was at Glassalt Shiel, Ponsonby admitted she was brighter and more approachable after staying there. In the year she built Glassalt Shiel, the Queen was to give the world a remarkable insight into her private life.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ALL THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE

  Queen Victoria trusted John Brown to be discreet, as she said, with ‘all the secrets of the universe’, her daily routines, highs and lows, arguments and happy events, Court intrigues and confidences, yet she herself was to hand to her nation titbits about her personal life, sanitised of course by her own romantic imagery. Not since the publication in 1832 of the volume Secret History of the Court of England, by Lady Anne Hamilton, had the curtains been parted on Court life.1

  In 1867 Queen Victoria published privately her Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, From 1848 to 1861, dedicated to Prince Albert, and circulated it to selected friends. Recipients like Dean Gerald Wellesley urged her to make her writings available to a wider readership. With some hesitation, the Queen handed over her holograph manuscript to Arthur Helps, Clerk of the Privy Council. An accomplished writer, Helps had already assisted the Queen with the preparation of Speeches and Addresses of the Prince Consort, which appeared in 1862. Helps produced an edited manuscript, without ‘references to political questions, or to the affairs of government’, and this persuaded the Queen to go ahead with general publication, in 1868, including additional material on ‘Earlier visits to Scotland, and Tours in England and Ireland, and Yachting Excursions’.

  The clincher for a wider publication of her writings is further thought to have come from a visit to Sir Walter Scott’s old home at Abbotsford, as part of a tour of the Scottish Borders during 20–4 August 1867. She was staying at the time at Floors Castle, near Kelso, the home of the 6th Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe. At Abbotsford the royal party was hosted by James Hope-Scott and his second wife, the Queen’s god-daughter Lady Victoria Fitzalan-Howard. In Sir Walter’s old study the Queen signed her name in the great man’s journal ‘which I felt it to be a presumption for me to do’, she later wrote.2 A press report of the time noted: ‘The royal party then proceeded to the dining-room, where fruits, ices, and other refreshments had been prepared, and Her Majesty partook only of a cup of tea and “Selkirk bannock”.’3

  Queen Victoria had been introduced to the works of Sir Walter Scott by her German governess Baroness Lehzen, and included in her large collection of dressed dolls some inspired by his Kenilworth (1821). Reading aloud from Scott was very much a part of Balmoral evening pastimes. Sir Walter had met the Queen on 19 May 1828, during the festivities for her ninth birthday; Scott had dined at Kensington Palace at the invitation of the Duchess of Kent, and later wrote of the Princess Victoria: ‘She is fair, like the Royal Family, but does not look as if she would be pretty.’4

  Scott’s descriptions of Scottish scenery greatly appealed to the Queen’s romantic sensibilities and his portrayal of the noble, independent, loyal Highlander, in books such as Rob Roy (1818), echoed the Queen’s opinions. For her, John Brown was the epitome of a Scott character. So taken was she by Scott’s way of looking at all things Scottish, and so interested in his life, especially after reading his son-in-law John Gibson Lockhart’s Narrative of the Life of Sir Walter Scott (1848), that she was determined to have a Border Terrier dog like Scott’s own. So in 1850 two pups were delivered to the Queen at Windsor by the Lockhart family friend Sir Edwin Landseer from the kennels at Abbotsford.

  Bound in embossed moss-green covers, decorated with antler motifs in gold, Queen Victoria’s Leaves appeared in January 1868 and rapidly sold 20,000 copies; it was to run through several editions, notching up 100,000 sales and several translations. The Queen dedicated the work to Prince Albert with the words: ‘To the dear memory of him who made the life of the writer bright and happy.’ The considerable royalties accrued were donated to various charities. On 1 January 1869 she wrote to Theodore Martin:

  The Queen thanks Mr Martin very much for his two letters and for the cheque which she has sent this day to Mr Helps. She quite approves of what he intends doing with the remaining £4016 6s. Of this the Queen would wish him to send her a cheque for £50, which she wishes to give away. £2516 she wishes absolutely to devote to a charity such as she spoke of, and the remaining £1450 she wishes to keep for other gifts of a charitable nature, at least to people who are not rich. Would Mr Martin just keep an account of sums he sends her so that we may know how and at what time the money h
as been disposed of? The Queen will keep a copy of the names which she does not wish others to know . . .5

  Among the ‘names’ mentioned were local Balmoral and Crathie folk brought to her notice by John Brown. Brown was in regular contact with his relatives around Crathie and had regular letters from them informing him about events at home. Snippets of gossip from these letters he related to the Queen.

  General readers – and in the Britain of the mid-nineteenth century, this meant the middle classes – were fascinated by the Queen’s revelations of her life in Scotland from 1842 to her widowhood in 1861, and were particularly interested in what she wrote in the footnotes, which included a range of gossipy details about her servants. The most controversy was caused by twenty-one separate references to John Brown, describing what she saw as his strong points – all ‘peculiar to the Highland race’. The Prince of Wales complained to his mother that Brown and other Highland servants were mentioned but he was not. He received a terse reply from the Queen listing the pages on which he was mentioned.

  The Queen attributed the success of her ‘simple record’ of family life to the artlessness of its narrative, its obvious representation of married life and the cordial relationship with her Highland servants. Its popularity, she believed, was an endorsement of her way of life, which she was determined not to change. For these reasons Sir Howard Elphinstone suggested that the book should be issued in an inexpensive edition ‘to clinch the Queen’s love affair with the middle classes’.6