John Brown

by Raymond Lamont-Brown

  A poignant highlight of the autumn Balmoral visit that year was a drive which the Queen took with Empress Eugénie to Glen Gelder Shiel, bynamed in Gaelic Ruidh na Bhan Righ (‘Queen’s Shiel’). The Queen had invited the Empress to stay at Abergeldie after her tragic bereavement. It was a fine interlude and the Queen wrote that she had walked with the Empress by the Gelder Burn, and:

  When we came back to the little Shiel, after walking for an hour, we had tea. Brown had caught some excellent trout and cooked them with oatmeal, which the dear Empress liked extremely, and said would be her dinner. It was a glorious evening – the hills pink, and the sky so clear.40

  But for the Queen the skies were soon to darken again in a way they had not done for twenty years.

  CHAPTER SIX

  SICKLE OF THE REAPER

  In the 1880s Queen Victoria suffered a series of blows which deeply disturbed her state of mind. The first came in April 1880 when Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, whom she had made Earl of Beaconsfield on 12 August 1876, was thrown out of office. The Queen received the news at Baden-Baden, and the prospect of having the Liberal statesman W.E. Gladstone as Prime Minister filled her with gloom. She wrote to Henry Ponsonby on 4 April that she would ‘sooner abdicate than send for or have any communication with that half-mad firebrand who would soon ruin everything & be a Dictator’.1 On 27 April Disraeli paid a personal farewell as Prime Minister to his monarch in sad audience, and ‘she presented him with statuettes of herself, John Brown, the royal pony and the dog “Sharp”’.2

  At Christmas 1880 Queen Victoria gave John Brown a silver pipe case. He used it daily for his well-worn pipe. The case was engraved with the monogram ‘JB’, and the legend: ‘FROM VR CHRISTMAS 1880’.3

  Despite a great deal of unconstitutional jockeying on Queen Victoria’s part, Gladstone did form a Liberal ministry and confirmed her worst fears. At Windsor Castle she wrote in her Journal for 1 January 1881:

  Another year past, and we begin one with heavy clouds. A poor Government, Ireland in a state of total lawlessness, and war in the Cape [the Transvaal Boers had risen under Paul Kruger] of a very serious nature. I feel very anxious and have no one to lean on.

  To Disraeli she wrote: ‘I often think of you – indeed constantly – and rejoice to see you looking down from the wall after dinner. [Disraeli’s portrait by Heinrich von Angeli, 1877, hung in the dining room at Windsor Castle.] Oh! if only I had you, my kind friend and wise counsellor and strong arm to help and lean on.’

  John Brown also missed Disraeli and sent him gifts of salmon from the Dee. Disraeli expressed to the Queen his feelings about Brown’s generosity: ‘No man has been more faithful to me in my fallen fortunes . . .’4

  The Queen particularly felt the loss of Disraeli’s sympathetic male support; after all, he and John Brown had between them filled the vacuum in her life left by Prince Albert’s death. But worse was to come. On 19 April Disraeli died at his home at 19 Curzon Street, London. The Queen penned the death notice for the Court Circular herself and her wreath of wild primroses with the words ‘His favourite flowers; from Osborne, a tribute of affection and regret from Queen Victoria’ was placed on his coffin as it travelled to burial in the private vault on his estate of Hughenden, Buckinghamshire. On the bier rested another wreath from his old friend John Brown.5

  Queen Victoria always took an interest in the development of the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh, which establishment Lord Provost George Drummond had pressed for in 1721. By 1870 the infirmary’s third phase was completed, the foundation stone laid by the Prince of Wales; enlargement had taken place in 1879. In the autumn of 1881 the Queen visited the infirmary to review progress. Among those invited to view the proceedings was the deaf and almost blind Dowager Lady Ruthven, who had met the Queen on her first visit to Scotland in 1842. Lady Ruthven had a piercing stentorian voice, and during a moment when the waiting dignitaries fell silent she bellowed: ‘Tell me Bailie Mucklewaite, why is she so tardy?’ Oblivious to the Bailie’s reply she went on: ‘I love the Queen – I long to see the Queen – but I came to see John Brown.’6

  At Windsor station, on 2 March 1882, there waited a more sinister interested party. Queen Victoria, Princess Beatrice and the Duchess of Roxburghe were greeted with the ‘huzzahs’ of a crowd of boys from nearby Eton College as the royal party arrived on the 5.30pm train from London. They kept up their greeting until the royal group, including Henry Ponsonby and with John Brown on the box, made to depart. The royal carriage had hardly gone two dozen paces when the Queen heard an explosion which she thought came from the royal train’s engine. The report was to mark the seventh and final attempt on the Queen’s life, and came from a six-chambered rapid-fire revolver.7

  Luckily, the bullet missed the Queen and before the putative assassin could reload, two Eton boys rushed forward and belaboured him with their umbrellas. For once John Brown was upstaged and stared bemused watching the events. He rather languidly opened the carriage door to announce to the Queen: ‘That man fired at your Maa-dj-esty’s carriage . . .’ The culprit was arrested and subsequently revealed to Superintendent George Hayes of the Windsor police that he was a starving Scots poet called Roderick Maclean.

  Next day Brown brought the revolver, which had been delivered from the police station, for the Queen to see. Three days later Queen Victoria received the nine hundred Eton scholars in their college quadrangle and thanked her young ‘protectors’ personally. In due course Roderick Maclean was tried at Reading Assizes in Berkshire for High Treason. His attack on the Queen seems to have been the result of his disaffection with the Liberal government for not subsidising him as a poet. In his effects a letter was found summing up his grievances. Addressed to the government, it said:

  On John Brown

  ‘Brown was a commonplace rather coarse type of man with little of the shrewdness and humour usually found in the Scottish character in the humbler classes, although on occasions he showed good sense. His head was naturally turned by the attention the Queen paid him and by her employment of him in a peculiarly privileged position. To his rudeness, his overbearing manner and his contributions to quarrels and altercations in the Household there are several references in the correspondence [between Sir Henry Ponsonby and Queen Victoria].’

  Arthur Ponsonby,

  after reading the ‘Ponsonby Papers’

  I should not have done this crime, had you, as you should have done, allowed me the 10s per week instead of offering me the insultingly small sum of 6s [probably parish relief] per week and expecting me to live on it. So you perceive the great good a little money might have done, had you not treated me as a fool and set me more than ever against those bloated aristocrats ruled by the old lady, Mrs Vic, who is a licensed robber in all senses. Roderick Maclean. March 2nd, 1882. Waiting Room, G.W.R.8

  The court learned that Maclean had suffered a brain injury following a fall in 1866, and that he had been discharged from the Bath and Somerset Lunatic Asylum in 1881. Dressed in a green greatcoat with a worn velvet collar, Maclean was defended by barrister Montague Stephen Williams QC, who recalled: ‘With a vacant, imbecile, expression he kept glancing hither and thither about the crowded Court.’9 Maclean was found ‘not guilty on the ground of insanity’ and was ordered to be detained. Once more the Queen was enraged by the verdict: ‘If that is the law,’ she berated the hapless Prime Minister, W.E. Gladstone, ‘the law must be altered.’10

  On 15 March 1882 the Queen and her entourage were off to Menton, the former Italian and now French town in the department of Alpes Maritimes on the Riviera. As usual John Brown had packed for her, as usual making sure that her travelling case of medicines was included. As she grew older this case was the Queen’s constant companion and John Brown was delegated to be apprised of sources of supplies should she run out of opiates, or vin marianne (a wine laced with cannabis sativa), among the bottles of spirits of rosemary (for hair loss), tincture of arnica (to rub on bruises) and belladonna (for her irritable bowels) that the case
contained. But there was more than the salving of the royal bowels to disturb Brown on this trip.

  The British policemen travelling with the Queen received a message that three members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood were on their way to Menton to assassinate the Queen. The police thought the message a hoax; the Queen, too, made light of it when John Brown told her of the message’s receipt. Brown, who was loathing Menton, not least because his presence in the town in full Highland dress was causing great interest, agitated for special precautions to be taken. Safety measures were put in place and the Queen wrote to Henry Ponsonby about her sympathy for Brown’s apprehensiveness:

  The Queen thanks Sir Henry Ponsonby for his kind letter which has much reassured her tho’ she cannot say she felt so much alarmed but it gave her a great shock as she was forgetting the 2nd of March [when she was shot at by Maclean] & she trusts Sir Henry will also reassure Brown who was in such a state heightened by increasing hatred of being ‘abroad’ which blinds his admiration of the country even. The Queen thinks that one principal cause of all this (wh. was not the case in Switzerland) is that he can communicate with no one when out, nor keep anyone off the carriage nor the coachmen either. At Lucerne we always had Hoffman & now when Greenham [one of the London policemen] is not with us [when we are out] walking we have no one and that is what puts Brown so out and makes him so anxious.11

  On 27 April ‘the Scot of the family’, Prince Leopold, who sported Duncan among his Christian names, was married at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, to Helena of Waldeck and Pyrmont. The radical weekly paper The World, whose journalists had monitored John Brown since his first appearance in public, added to the accounts of the wedding by reporting that among the guests were ‘a good many local tradesmen who were known to be John Brown’s friends’.12 Over the years many tradesmen sought to curry favour with John Brown in the hope that this would bring them to a useful connection with the Queen. One assiduous practitioner of such flattery was Sir John Bennett, watchmaker and jeweller in London’s Cheapside from 1846 to 1889. After showing cases of jewellery to the Queen on one occasion, although she bought nothing, Bennett was advised by an equerry that he should share his lunch, which the Queen had authorised in the Stewards’ Room at Windsor Castle, with John Brown and do a little marketing. So Bennett invited Brown and during the meal he obsequiously expressed his love for Deeside and all things Scottish. For his part John Brown supplied wine from the Queen’s cellars to accompany the meal and a convivial afternoon resulted. Thereafter courtiers noted that the Queen became a good customer of Bennett’s.13

  On John Brown

  ‘Brown understood the Queen. But even he could not always have his way or satisfy her whims and fancies. One winter when she was angry because her sleigh stuck in the snow he told Ponsonby that it did not matter what sleigh you had, six large people must weigh heavily and “ye canna go like lightning as she wants to do”.’

  Arthur Ponsonby,

  after reading the ‘Ponsonby Papers’

  In the autumn of 1882 Queen Victoria continued her round of Balmoral activities with visits, picnics, walks and sketching trips, her mind taken up with the war in Egypt, where revolution had been sparked off in September 1881. Arabi Pasha, the Egyptian soldier and nationalist leader, overthrew the Khedive, Tewfik Pasha, and helped to establish a nationalist government with himself as Minister of War. The British intervened to protect their interests in the Suez Canal area. On 11 September John Brown brought the Queen a Reuters telegram, in which she read about the recent events in Egypt in the words of Major-General Sir John McNeill, an Equerry in Ordinary, who was serving in the campaign.

  The Queen was anxious about Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught, who was in command of the Brigade of Guards in the Egyptian theatre. On such occasions she asked Brown to rummage among her music scores to find something soothing for her to play. This time she chose a song by Karl Theodor Körner which Prince Albert used to sing: Gebet vor der Schlacht, ‘Vater, ich rufe Dich’ (‘Prayer before battle, ‘Father I call to Thee’). On 13 September Arabi Pasha was defeated at Tel-el-Kebir and the war came to an end. This was followed by a happy visit to Balmoral by Prince Leopold and Princess Helena, just returned from their honeymoon. After meeting the royal couple at Ballater station, John Brown and the kilted gillies led the Queen’s entourage back to Balmoral for an alfresco toast in whisky, proposed by John Brown. He intoned: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, let us join in a good Highland cheer for the Duke and Duchess of Albany; may they live long and die happy!’14 Brown’s hopes were not fulfilled: Prince Leopold died at Cannes in March 1884, just one year later.

  March 1883 was one of the worst on record for inclement rainy weather. Those who were out walking in Windsor Great Park began to notice how John Brown was greatly slowing in his reactions to the sudden showers of rain. No longer did he jump with alacrity from the box to offer umbrellas to the Queen and her usual companion Princess Beatrice. They were usually soaked before he finally unfurled the umbrellas and tugged the rugs over the royal knees. John Brown was entering the last months of his life but did not shirk his duties and the Queen was about to encourage him in the role of detective. But first there was an accident.

  On Monday 17 March Queen Victoria descended the stairs from her private apartments at Windsor Castle to prepare for her afternoon ride. For a moment her attention strayed and she stumbled on the last step. In trying to save herself she twisted her knee. She wrote: ‘I could not move for a moment. Then Brown came, and helped me with great difficulty into the carriage.’15 When she arrived back at Windsor Castle her leg was too sore to support her so John Brown, with the assistance of Lockwood, the footman on duty, half carried and half walked her back to her room. While this was going on, some 3 miles away a strange scenario was purportedly taking place involving one Lady Florence Dixie.

  Whether or not Queen Victoria knew Lady Florence Dixie personally before 2 March 1883 is not clear, but on that date a rather hysterical letter to the Queen arrived at Windsor Castle from Lady Florence. Now in her twenty-sixth year, Lady Florence had written to the Queen to express her rising dismay at how the peasants of Western Ireland were starving. The subject was one about which Lady Florence, as an absentee Irish landlord herself, had made a particular study. Her penchant for such pursuits set her apart from other aristocratic women of her day in the intensity of her eccentric notions, such as taking up such causes as sex equality and the reform of fashion. Lady Florence and Queen Victoria were at opposite ends of the scale of opinion – the Queen looked upon gender parity as a ‘mad, wicked folly’, and was outraged by the idea of women wearing trousers and monocles to copy men.

  Certainly the Queen had ‘heard’ of Lady Florence. She was the sister of John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensbury. (His son Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Bosie’, was the notorious friend of Oscar Wilde, and caused the latter’s downfall.) Like her brother, Lady Florence was an excellent hunter, earning herself the nickname ‘female Nimrod’; she regularly walked around Windsor Castle Great Park with a jaguar which she had captured on a hunting trip to Patagonia with her husband Sir Alexander Beaumont Churchill Dixie, whom she married in 1875.16

  About the time Brown and Lockwood were carrying Queen Victoria to her boudoir, Lady Florence Dixie arrived back at her Windsor house, The Fishery, with her clothes dishevelled and spattered with mud and her hands bleeding from several wounds. According to her testimony, while she was walking her St Bernard dog Hubert in the rough ground that bordered her estate, she had been set upon by two transvestites. Lady Florence told the press:

  One of them seized me roughly by the neck, pushed me backwards, and threw me to the ground with great violence. The other man, his confederate . . . was standing over me . . . I saw in his hand a sort of dagger . . . I saw a momentary flash of steel, and then I felt the blade go through the upper part of my dress . . . Luckily the blade came in contact with one of the steel stays of my corset and glanced off . . . the wretch withdrew it, and plunged at me
again with the dagger. As it descended I caught hold of the blade with my left hand, and held it for a moment. The weapon cut through my glove, and inflicted a deep but clean cut. He wrenched the weapon from me, and as it slipped from my left I caught it with my right hand . . . Then I lost my hold upon the knife . . . He was about to deliver the third [stab] when the dog must have pulled him off . . . Then I became unconscious . . . When I regained consciousness I found myself quite alone.17

  When the story broke it created a sensation. Yet Lady Florence’s account of what happened, and her subsequent assertion that the perpetrators were Fenians, did not stand up to close scrutiny. As the pressmen investigated the story each of its strands was contradicted by a number of eye-witnesses only too willing to talk. Private Bates of the Scots Guards, the regiment then on guard duty at Windsor, was one. He was walking in nearby Maidenhead Road and had kept his eye on Lady Florence because of her noteworthy dog. Bates had seen nothing of the assailants. A gardener on the nearby estate to Lady Florence’s, one Mr Groves, had been working close to where she had passed but heard nothing of Lady Florence’s purported cries for help. An Eton College schoolmaster averred that he had had Lady Florence in sight during the whole of her walk, and had seen her return to The Fishery unhurt. Why was Lady Florence lying? Queen Victoria was intrigued. She also shared Lady Florence’s fear of Fenian assassination and suspected that a gang of Irish terrorists were forming in the area of Windsor. She sent John Brown to gather evidence.

  On 18 March John Brown braved the bitter cold and drove to The Fishery in an open dog-cart. There he met Sir Henry Ponsonby, engaged in making his own investigations. Lady Florence seemed perky enough after her supposed ordeal and infused tea for her guests with a gusto that belied her injured hands. After making a fuss of Hubert, and demanding of Lady Florence that he have a photograph of the magnificent beast – at his own expense of course! – John Brown set off to examine the circumstances of the crime that Lady Florence had recounted to him just as she told it to the journalists.