The definition of ‘compromising’ with regard to correspondence between Queen Victoria and John Brown is open to debate and should be assessed from the point of view of Queen Victoria’s character and personality rather than in prurient twentieth-century terms. Anything relating to the friends, especially the Queen’s gushing words of familiarity and amity – which is probably the best explanation of the Queen’s use of ‘love’ and ‘darling one’ to John Brown – would be considered ‘compromising’ by the paranoid Edward VII who himself was drawn into one episode concerning such letters.
In late September 1904 Dr James Reid was contacted by Edward VII’s private secretary, Francis Knollys, who said that the monarch wished to consult Reid on a private matter. The late Dr Alexander Profeit’s son George was in the process of threatening the King with blackmail concerning letters written by Queen Victoria to Dr Profeit about John Brown. George Profeit had opened a black trunk of his father’s and discovered in excess of three hundred letters, ‘many of them most compromising’ noted Dr Reid.9 The King wanted Reid to obtain the letters from George Profeit.
Dr Reid was perplexed about how to proceed. During November 1904 he asked for a meeting with Princess Beatrice at Kensington Palace to talk over the problem. The King was willing to pay for the letters; the important point was that the monarch must have them. Shortly after the interview with Princess Beatrice, George Profeit met Reid to negotiate the sale. It took several visits from the difficult vendor to complete the negotiations, but on 8 May 1905 George Profeit handed over the letters for an undisclosed sum. Reid personally gave them to the King.10 The ‘compromising’ letters thereafter disappeared, adding one more twist to the mystery surrounding the relationship between Queen Victoria and John Brown, the fine detail of which is unlikely ever to be known for certain.
APPENDIX 1
Holograph letter from Queen Victoria, expressing her grief at the death of John Brown, addressed to his sisters-in-law ‘Lizzie’ (Mrs William Brown) and ‘Jessie’ (Mrs Hugh Brown). [See p. 142]
APPENDIX 2
QUEEN VICTORIA’S CHILDREN AND THEIR ANTIPATHY TO JOHN BROWN
1. VICTORIA ADELAIDE MARY LOUISA, Princess Royal. Born 21 November 1840. Married: 1858, Prince Frederick William of Prussia (1831–88). Became Crown Princess of Prussia and Empress Frederick of Germany. She had eight children including the autocratic and mentally unstable Wilhelm II (1859–1941), ‘Kaiser Bill’ of the First World War. She died 5 August 1901.
Princess Victoria was embarrassed and resentful over gossip at the German court regarding Queen Victoria and John Brown. She sent the queen a ‘rather formal message’ of sympathy on John Brown’s death.
2. ALBERT EDWARD, Prince of Wales.
Born 9 November 1841. Married: 1863, Princess Alexandra of Denmark (1844–1925). They had five children. Died 6 May 1910, having acceded to the throne on the death of Queen Victoria as Edward VII.
Harboured a lifelong hatred of John Brown, substituting the phrase ‘that brute’ for his name in conversation.
3. ALICE MAUD MARY.
Born 25 April 1843. Married: 1862, Prince Louis IV, Grand-Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt (1837–92). She had seven children. Died 14 December 1878.
Supported her elder brother and sister in trying (unsuccessfully) to get John Brown sacked.
4. ALFRED ERNEST ALBERT, Duke of Edinburgh and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
Born 6 August 1844. Married: 1874, Grand Duchess Marie of Russia (1853–1920). They had five children. Died 30 July 1900.
Resented John Brown’s ‘power and confidence’ at court, and was the centre of many ‘Brown rows’ with Queen Victoria.
5. HELENA AUGUSTA VICTORIA.
Born 25 May 1846. Married: 1866, Prince Frederick Christian of Schleswig-Holstein (1831–1917). She had five children. Died 9 June 1923.
Admitted to being ‘wholeheartedly’ German and was irritated by ‘John Brown gossip’ in Prussian imperial circles.
6. LOUISE CAROLINE ALBERTA.
Born 18 March 1848. Married: 1871, John Douglas Campbell, 9th Duke of Argyll (1845–1914). No issue. Died 3 December 1939.
Looked upon John Brown as a ‘mischief-maker’ and believed that he ‘tittle-tattled’ about her private life to Queen Victoria. Gave her an aversion to Highland gillies.
7. ARTHUR WILLIAM PATRICK ALBERT, Duke of Connaught and Strathearn.
Born 1 May 1850. Married: 1879, Princess Louise Margaret of Prussia (1860–1917). They had one son and two daughters. Died 16 January 1942.
Shared his siblings’ distaste for John Brown’s ‘interference’.
8. LEOPOLD GEORGE DUNCAN ALBERT, Duke of Albany.
Born 7 April 1853. Married: 1882, Princess Helena Frederica Augusta of Waldeck and Pyrmont (1861–1922). They had two children. Died 28 March 1884.
As a child he seems to have been on fairly friendly terms with John Brown, who took him and his brother Arthur fishing. Hatred of Brown (and his brothers) was demonstrated in the ‘Stirling Dismissal’ episode.
9. BEATRICE MARY VICTORIA FEODORE.
Born 14 April 1857. Married: 1885, Prince Henry Maurice of Battenberg (1858–96). She had four children. Died 26 October 1944.
To her John Brown was ‘the ever present faithful servant’ and when he was around ‘one was safe’. Princess Beatrice and Prince Arthur were the executors to Queen Victoria’s will, and as her mother’s literary executor Princess Beatrice ‘edited’ her personal papers and vast collection of correspondence, deleting and destroying any mention of John Brown that might be construed as ‘compromising’ and open to misinterpretation.
NOTES
PROLOGUE: BIRTH OF ROYAL RUMOUR
1. Philip Magnus-Allcroft, King Edward VII, p. 359.
2. E.E.P. Tisdall, Queen Victoria’s John Brown, pp. 232–3.
3. Catalogue: British and Continental Paintings and Watercolours, Christie’s Scotland, 28 May 1998, p. 92. The canvas, signed by Carl Rudolph Sohn (1854–1908) was catalogued as picture 2066 (1884). It was duly sent to William Brown and was stored in a byre for forty-three years; it was sold in 1944 and 1963 and in 1965 was acquired by the Scottish Tartan Society who sold it on in 1998.
4. Royal Archives, Vic.Add.MSS.A.4/213, 14 May 1901.
5. Royal Archives, Vic.Add.MSS.U32 ‘Kronberg Letters’ to Empress Frederick of Germany, 12 April 1865.
6. Discreet: her writings show that Queen Victoria had her own vocabulary of meanings for words she used. For her ‘discreet’ was applied to anyone thinking as she did on any subject, although she also used it to define foresightedness, unobtrusiveness and bashfulness. She also used the word ‘bashful’ of gillies who were intoxicated.
7. Queen Victoria’s ‘published indiscretions were so blatant that they carried with them an aura of innocence’; thus averred Taylor Whittle in Victoria and Albert at Home. The Prince of Wales did not see it that way.
8. Christopher Hibbert, Edward VII: A Portrait, p. 143.
9. Giles St Aubyn, Edward VII: Prince and King, pp. 140–1. On one occasion at Balmoral Edward’s sons Prince Albert and Prince George tied a string across a staircase and not seeing it John Brown tripped over it and fell headlong. Cursing the boys (who were giggling nearby) he soundly thrashed them both. The Prince of Wales was furious that a servant should handle his children thus and complained bitterly to the Queen. ‘It was a silly prank and I think the boys thoroughly well deserved what they got,’ she replied. See Tisdall, p. 183.
10. The Duchess of Westminster told the diarist Charles Grenville of Queen Victoria’s awareness of her mother’s supposed infatuation for Conroy. Cecil Woodham-Smith, Queen Victoria: From Her Birth to the Death of the Prince Consort, p. 73.
11. G.E. Buckle (ed.), The Letters of Queen Victoria, Series II, 1862–85, 26 July 1867, p. 434; see also pp. 449–50.
12. Elgin Courant and Morayshire Advertiser, August 1866.
13. John O’Groats Journal, established 1836, published at Wick.
14. Giles St Aubyn, Queen Victoria –
A Portrait, p. 361.
15. E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary . . .
16. Edmund Yates (ed.), ‘English Photographs (IX), by ‘An American’. Tinsley’s Magazine, October 1868.
17. Wilfred Scawen Blunt, Unpublished Diaries, within Blunt Papers, MS9 4–6–1909.
18. Sir Frederick Ponsonby, Recollections of Three Reigns, p. 95.
19. Gazette of Lausanne, September 1866.
20. The Foreign Office was somewhat embarrassed by Harris’s intervention and officially withdrew the complaint through the Swiss ambassador to the Court of St James.
INTRODUCTION: QUEEN VICTORIA’S SCOTTISH INHERITANCE
1. David Duff, Victoria in the Highlands: The Personal Journal of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, p. 31.
2. Ibid, p. 52.
3. New Edinburgh Almanac, 1837. Part IV, p. 265.
4. Ibid, Census Summary 1831, p. 267.
5. The office of Hereditary Bearer of the Saltire (St Andrew’s Cross) was not instituted until 1901 in favour of the 15th Earl of Lauderdale.
6. New Edinburgh Almanac, pp. 268–9.
7. Both Dunfermline and Linlithgow were ruined (as they are still), but the latter is listed in the New Edinburgh Almanac (1837) as having a ‘Keeper’ in Sir Thomas Livingstone of Westquarter. In 1837 Falkland was also ruined, but when the Hereditary Keeper, John Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquis of Bute, inherited the position in 1877 he laid plans for the palace’s rebuilding and restoration.
8. Sir Herbert Maxwell, Holyroodhouse, p. 186.
9. The Keepership of Stirling Castle had fallen into disuse with the attainder of the 6th Earl of Mar and Kellie. This family’s rights dated from the 1500s when they were foster parents to child sovereigns and heirs to the throne. The office was restored by King George V in 1923 on the 14th Earl. Dunconnel Castle, near Pladda Isle, Firth of Clyde, had been in the hands of the Macleans from before the fifteenth century but they were deprived of it in 1691. The Keepership was recovered in 1980 with Brigadier Sir Fitzroy Maclean of Dunconnel being appointed 11th Hereditary Keeper.
10. Balmoral Estates Factor’s Office: figures as at August 1998.
11. Thüringerwald: the mountains of East Saxony. On the north side of the Thüringerwald lay Gotha, the capital of the duchy of Saxe-Gotha, the home at Schloss Friedenstein of Prince Albert’s mother, Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, first wife of Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg.
12. John Stirton, Crathie and Braemar: A History of the United Parish.
13. ‘Notes and Queries’, Aberdeen Journal, Vol. IV, 1911, p. 87.
14. In time Queen Victoria bequeathed Balmoral and its estates to ‘the Sovereign of the country’, as confirmed on 9 May 1901 in a House of Commons statement by the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Michael Hicks-Beach.
15. Catherine Caulfield, The Emperor of The United States of America & other magnificent British eccentrics, p. 128.
16. Queen Victoria bought the furniture which had been in the Old Balmoral of Sir Robert Gordon’s day. See John Marius Wilson, Imperial Gazeteer of Scotland, entry for ‘Balmoral’.
17. Arthur Ponsonby, Henry Ponsonby, Queen Victoria’s Private Secretary p. 124.
18. Ibid.
19. Henry Reeve (ed.), Greville: the Greville Memoirs 1817–60. Various entries for Balmoral.
20. B. Asquith, The Lytteltons.
21. Ankers: kegs holding twenty pints.
22. ‘Progress of the Queen’s Residence’, The Scotsman, October 1852.
23. Frank Pope Humphrey, The Queen at Balmoral, pp. 69–82.
24. Ibid, pp. 62, 124.
25. Three messengers were always on duty in London in case papers had to be sent to Balmoral. It cost the Privy Purse £4 19s 6d rail fare to send a messenger in 1855.
26. Queen Victoria’s body servants (dressers and so on) included ladies several of German origin like Sophie Weiss, Frieda Müller and Lydia Waetzig. The more staid of her court ladies were stunned on first taking up duties to find the Queen joining in the singing of songs such as Von meinen Bergen muss klich scheiden as the servants worked around her.
A number of Crathie-born servants were to be found on Queen Victoria’s permanent staff which moved around with her from the later 1850s to 1901. Besides John Brown’s family other Crathie families represented were: McDonalds; Stewarts; Michies; Clarks (John Brown’s cousins); Reids; Lamonds; Frasers; and Thomsons. Other Scots servants came from Ayr, Banff, Kelso, Logierait, Montrose, Corgarff, Glencairn and Stonehaven among other places. Sampling, British Census 1881 for Windsor Castle, RG11.1325.f98, pp. 1–3.
27. Reeve, Greville.
CHAPTER ONE
NOTE: The supposed ancestry and early life of John Brown was put together in the first published biography, and issued days after his funeral, by Henry Llewellyn Williams. The ‘One Penny Complete’, sixteen-page Life and Biography of John Brown Esq (British Library Shelf Mark: 10803g6(7)) is so littered with errors as to be a most unreliable source. Alas E.E.P. Tisdall reproduced Williams’s errors in his Queen Victoria’s John Brown of 1938. In Tom Cullen’s The Empress Brown of 1969, Williams’s assertions are dubbed ‘controversial’.
1. Margaret Ley’s entry in the Registrations of Death for Crathie and Braemar, Ref: 183/19–7 Aug 1876, lists her father as Charles Leys, a farmer. Scottish Record Office. Williams Henry Life and Biography of John Brown Esq, identifies the father as the ‘Aberarder blacksmith’, p. 2. Williams also gives John Brown’s date of birth as 22 December 1826.
2. Parish Register, Marriages 1820–1854, Crathie & Braemar, Ref: 183/2. Scottish Record Office.
3. Bundling: Largely a Highland practice, this form of courtship persisted as a tradition into the early twentieth century in such places as the Shetland Isles and the Western Isles.
4. Parish Register, Baptisms 1820–1854, Crathie & Braemar, Ref: 183/2. Scottish Record Office.
5. ‘Early reminiscences’, written by Queen Victoria in 1872, as quoted in A.C. Benson and Viscount Esher, The Letters of Queen Victoria, Vol. I, p. 11.
6. Ibid, Vol. I, p. 12.
7. Ibid, Vol. I, p. 13.
8. This was probably effected after Old John Brown died in 1875 at Wester Micras; the lairs were filled when John Brown’s mother, Margaret Leys Brown, died at Craiglourachan Cottage in 1876.
9. His Registration of Death, Crathie Parish, ref. 183/2, describes him as a ‘fisherman’ and Dr W.G. Mitchell ascribes the cause of death as Alcoholism and Cardiac Syncope. Scottish Record Office. Dr James Reid confirmed that he was ‘commanded by the Queen on no account to tell the Ladies and Gentlemen [of the court] that Hugh Brown had died of alcoholic poisoning’. Michaela Reid, Ask Sir James, pp. 158–9.
10. All relevant entries in the Parish Registers for Births, Marriages and Deaths for the Registration District of Crathie & Braemar. Ref: 183. Scottish Record Office.
11. Bailie: an officer of a Barony (lands of a baron) or Regality (Crown Land appointment) during the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries; thereafter a town magistrate.
12. Maxwell Gordon, ‘The Browns of Crathie’, article in The Scottish Annual & The Braemar Gathering Book, 1960, p. 251. Williams, Life and Biography, avers that Donald Brown farmed at ‘Renachat’, across the Dee from Balmoral. He also has Janet Shaw as a daughter of Lieutenant ‘Captain’ Shaw who had fought with British troops during the American War of Independence, p. 2.
13. Ibid. Williams (p. 2) opines that Old John Brown claimed descent through the Covenanting soldier Sir John Brown of Fordels (sic), Fife. He goes on that one of Sir John’s sons secured the Chair of Divinity at Marischall College, Aberdeen, and his large family founded the Browns of Aberdeenshire. Tisdall expands Williams’s assertions that Old John Brown had been a schoolmaster, following education as ‘a poor student at a Scottish University’, and to him is credited authorship of a guide book called Deeside Guide. Tisdall, Queen Victoria’s John Brown, p. 16. A recent search of records of teachers in Aberdeen at this date, and matriculation records of Scotland
’s oldest universities, St Andrews, Glasgow and Aberdeen, give no substance to these assertions.
14. James E. Johnston, Place-Names of Scotland, p. 144.
15. William Watt, A History of Aberdeenshire & Banff, p. 16.
16. See entry for Colonel Francis Farquharson (1710–90) in Alistair & Henrietta Taylor, Jacobites of Aberdeenshire & Banffshire in the Forty Five, p. 158.
17. Ibid, p. 167.
18. Modern Crathienaird farmhouse was built around 1862. Correspondence between owner Dr Alistair Thomson and the author.
19. The Bush Farmhouse was near Bush Crathie on modern Ordnance Survey maps.
20. Benson & Esher, Letters, Vol. I, p. 20.
21. Raithes: Gaelic for a term at school – really three months of full-time education.
22. Stirton, Crathie and Braemar, pp. 324, 326.
23. Ibid, p. 327.
24. Act 43: George III, c54. James Scotland, The History of Scottish Education, Vol. I, p. 194. Teachers received £16 22s per annum at this date.
25. Benson & Esher, Letters, Vol. I, p. 48.
26. Ibid, Vol. I, p. 49.
27. Ibid, Vol. I, p. 188.
28. Marquis of Huntly, Auld Acquaintance, pp. 23–4.
29. The Deeside Water Co. Ltd, correspondence with the author. For John Brown’s wages see Tom Cullen, Empress Brown, p. 54. The Pannanich Wells Hotel has retained its name since the 1760s, but under different spellings.
30. Recollections of Anita Leslie, Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill’s great-niece, and biographer, quoting Peregrine S. Churchill.
31. Tisdall, Queen Victoria’s John Brown, p. 32. A copy of the Book of Common Prayer, given to John Brown by Queen Victoria in 1878, was handed over to Brown’s brother Hugh on his death. The volume had been found in Brown’s room at Windsor Castle and the Queen added the inscription that Brown was ‘a dear and much lamented friend . . . in remembrance of December 14, 1883, by Victoria R.’ It is now in the collection of Aberdeen Museums.
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