Queen Victoria--Twenty-Four Days That Changed Her Life

by Lucy Worsley

  Mr. John Brown walked on the Slopes [of Windsor Castle]. He subsequently partook of a haggis.

  In the evening, Mr. John Brown was pleased to listen to a bagpipe.

  Mr. John Brown retired early.28

  The reason that Brown caused such a scandal was the unspoken belief that a widowed woman of middle age, as Victoria was, must inevitably become sexually insatiable. ‘Many women,’ claimed one medical authority, ‘even those of the most irreproachable morals and conduct, – are subject to attacks of ovario-uterine excitement approaching to nymphomania.’29 ‘The Queen was insane,’ ran one magazine’s round-up of British society gossip, ‘John Brown was her keeper.’30 She did indeed find herself desperately missing the touch of another human. ‘I am alas! not old,’ she wrote, ‘and my feelings are strong and warm.’31 But human touch need not have been sexual to give her comfort. Brown helped her, lifted her, gave her a strong arm to lean on. It was an important relationship, even if it wasn’t the full-blown torrid affair that some modern historians may have hoped for.

  Biographer Jane Ridley points out that the queen’s relationship with Brown seems to us to stand out as unique, but that’s partly because other intimate relationships between Victoria and her servants, particularly her dressers, have been obliterated by time and propriety.32 When Victoria’s daughter Beatrice came to transcribe her journals, destroying many of the originals as she went, she often missed out the names of servants, thinking it improper or unnecessary to include them. For example, Victoria’s original entry for 9 August 1845 mentions by a mixture of surnames and forenames her maids Singer, Peneyvre, Rebecca, Dehler, Skerrett and Margaret. These were people the queen knew well. She was more truly intimate with them than with her upper courtiers or members of her extended royal network. Beatrice, though, brutally summarises them all in her version of the journal as just ‘the maids’.33

  When it came to Brown, Victoria’s relationship was not just physical. It also came to be emotional. She described him as her ‘dearest & best friend’ who ‘for 18 years & a ½ never left me for a day’.34 He never left her, he was always there: it was servants who gave her the continuity their social superiors could not provide. Victoria took care not to become dependent upon the aristocratic maids-of-honour and ladies-in-waiting who rotated on and off duty. They had their own lives and, often, to her annoyance, they took themselves off to get married or look after their children. Some of them wrote indiscreet letters; others kept indiscreet diaries. She could not afford to become too close to them. With Brown, though, it was different. In some respects, Ridley concludes, their relationship resembled a marriage. He devoted his life to her, and their partnership ‘was healthier than her marriage to Albert. Brown did not undermine Victoria’s confidence, he never infantilized her in the way that Albert did.’35

  Brown also helped his mistress by acting as a sounding board on political issues. He’d interested himself in the Eastern Question, for example, causing Disraeli once to joke that all new legislation should have ‘the approval of the two J.B.s’. These were John Brown and that shorthand name for the great British public: John Bull.36

  And John Bull loved hearing about the domestic detail of Victoria’s life. One of the ways in which she marked her return to something like normal life was with a commemoration and celebration of her and Albert’s mutual love of the Scottish Highlands. She published some selections from the daily journals she’d kept on visits to Balmoral, and Scottish tours further afield, in a book called Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, from 1848 to 1861 (1868). Its contents were pretty innocuous, heavy on descriptions of picnics and scenery. But it became a huge bestseller, a fact that pleased Victoria enormously. She proudly sent copies to friends and relatives. ‘The book has been wonderfully well received by the public,’ wrote Dr Clark, one of the recipients.37 ‘The publication of my book,’ she claimed, ‘did me more good than anything else.’38 It benefitted not only Victoria’s sense of achievement, but also her reputation. A woman who wrote so rawly about having loved and lost seemed sympathetic, relatable. Although her subjects now rarely saw her in public, the queen’s book kept her alive. It showed that she enjoyed simple pleasures: hot tea and a rug on a cold day. But it was also blunt and sincere about her real grief and devastating sense of loss. In short, it made her human.

  But then, in 1883, John Brown’s role in bringing the queen back to life came to a sudden end. He died, of a skin disease but also, it’s been suggested, of complaints related to alcoholism. Victoria was devastated, yet it’s doubtful that his fellow household members shared her feelings. Her favour had caused him to rise to an almost untouchable position within the royal establishment. No one had felt able to challenge him on his notorious drinking, and he’d taken to issuing orders and commands to his fellow servants. He’d also been highly unpopular with the royal children. They resented his privileged access to their mother, and joined in the general mockery. Among themselves they called him ‘Mamma’s Stallion’. Prince Leopold, for example, who was frequently ill and required physical help, hated the ‘dreadful Scotch servants’, by which he meant Brown and his family. He found John Brown ‘fearfully insolent to me, so is his brother, hitting me on the face with spoons for fun’.39

  Victoria later described Brown’s death in 1883 as being as cataclysmic as the loss of a husband: ‘one of those shocks like in 61 when every link has been shaken & torn’. It affected her physically. She described how (in the third person) ‘The Queen can’t walk the least & the shock she has sustained has made her very weak – so that she can’t stand.’40 She was already in a poor physical condition that year because of her accident on the stairs at Windsor Castle on 17 March. Because Brown was himself ill at the same time, he wasn’t available to help rehabilitate her, and after spending a week on a sofa, her mobility was greatly reduced.41 Brown’s death later the same year removed not only someone Victoria had trusted to give her physical support, but also the one person who had been able to cajole her into taking exercise. From 1883 onwards, the queen’s visitors could expect to ‘see Her Majesty enter either leaning on one side on a stick’, or else she might be ‘slowly propelled into the room in an amply-cushioned wheel chair’.42 ‘I presume all the Family will rejoice at his death,’ wrote Sir William Knollys, ‘but I think very probably they are shortsighted.’43 Brown had, after all, been keeping her young. Without him, she began to grow old.

  At the end of the year of Brown’s death, Victoria commemorated him in the same way she’d commemorated Albert: by publishing a second book. It was called More Leaves from the Journal of a Life in the Highlands. As she put the finishing touches to the text, she dedicated it to ‘the memory of my devoted personal attendant and faithful friend John Brown’. This second volume contained even more than its predecessor about her servants, including personal notes on each one as if they were high-born lords and ladies. Readers are introduced, for example, to Löhlein (Albert’s valet), Mayet (the second valet) and Nestor Tirard (‘the Queen’s hairdresser’). The three of them were included in the list of names present at the unveiling of a statue of Albert, a list that also included Prince Leopold. This sort of thing appealed to her wider audience, making them feel that she was really ‘one of them’. But the court circle found it regrettable. It left the impression that there really was very little difference between the queen’s son and her hairdresser.

  Leaves had been a huge success in terms of sales, and so too was More Leaves. But this second book exposed Victoria to slander and malice in a way that the first had not. She showed a certain naivety in publishing, for example, her distress upon learning that on a rainy day ‘poor Brown’s legs’ had been ‘dreadfully cut by the edge of his wet kilt’.44 John Brown appears perhaps too often in More Leaves: he suggests that everyone ‘ought to drink the health of Princess Beatrice’; he is ‘so distressed’ at the death of a French prince; he dances a reel with Princess Louise; he begs the queen to drink whisky-toddy.45 When given an oxidised silver
biscuit box he is pathetically grateful, weeps and says ‘it is too much.’46 Just like Albert, Brown is given the privilege, when the queen is signing papers, of ‘always helping to dry the signatures’.47

  John Brown, in Victoria’s book, becomes a second consort. This explains the rumours of a covert marriage, or indeed the obsession, which still exists in the present day, with trying to prove that queen and servant also had a conventional sexual relationship. Historian Dorothy Thompson has pointed out the double standard at work here. A king’s having a mistress was regrettable, but ultimately acceptable. The possibility, though, of a female ruler having a sexual relationship outside marriage, causes dismay and prurient ridicule.48

  After the wet-kilt injury, John Brown’s ‘poor’ legs make a second appearance in the text when he suffers ‘a severe hurt on the shin’ while travelling on a boat.49 This unfortunate coincidence led to the publication of a spoof of the queen’s second book, called John Brown’s Legs. It was dedicated, its satirical author declared, ‘to the memory of those extraordinary Legs – poor bruised and scratched darlings’, those ‘inexpressibly lovely’ appendages, ‘which bore their Sovereign through many a rushing, mountain torrent (often as deep as an inch and a half)’.50

  Clearly, Henry Ponsonby thought, if the queen published any more of her artless recollections of John Brown’s physical body, there would be further trouble. But then, in February of 1884, she’d sent him a third work of her pen, a memoir specifically about the life of John Brown, and with it a proposal to print Brown’s private diary.

  Ponsonby’s immediate reaction was to equivocate. Before coming to court he’d been a soldier, and had fought in Crimea. He hadn’t survived fourteen subsequent years of palace life without developing a good sense of which battles were worth fighting. He pronounced that literary matters were beyond his sphere of expertise. When pressed, he was forced to admit to the queen that he had a sense of unease. ‘There are passages,’ he wrote, delicately, ‘which will be misunderstood if read by strangers.’ He concluded that the ‘feeling created by such a publication would become most distressing and painful to the Queen’.51

  Henry Ponsonby’s reaction against publication, his instinct to protect, and to preserve the monarchy’s mystique, is understandable but not entirely correct. As so often when it came to members of the establishment of Victorian Britain, there were things that she could see that he could not.

  All the time that officials like William Gladstone or Henry Ponsonby were imploring her to appear more often in public, Victoria had in fact bypassed them with the immensely powerful, simple and popular appeal contained in her books about life in Scotland, or through the occasional article she published in ‘worthy’ media organs like Good Words.52 Trivial details of picnics, trite letters to the papers, made her real to her millions of subjects in a way that attending countless openings of Parliament in person could not. But this fact the court and government elite could not grasp.

  Even so, there’s no doubt that Victoria inspired devotion from people like Henry Ponsonby, whose respect for her underlaid his jokes. Those whom she trusted sometimes witnessed what the wider world did not: that the queen has ‘an enormous appreciation of any fun’. The photographs through which her subjects knew her did not do justice to this side of her character. Her whole life, she looked her best in motion. When she started to talk, ‘the kind, sad eyes light up, the nostrils distend, the cheeks glow, the curves of the mouth turn up in smiles’.53 Victorians generally felt that they ought to look serious during the serious business of having a photographic portrait taken. But some smiling photos of the queen do exist, and in them she is almost unrecognisable. Those images of her animated face help explain why – despite her demanding, irrational behaviour – clever and capable people devoted their lives to her service.

  As Private Secretary, Ponsonby operated from a plainly furnished suite leading off the Marble Hall at Windsor. He had a staff of clerks ‘always at work’, and access to the ‘telegraph office through which pass in cipher the secrets of all nations’.54 ‘Don’t Knock – Walk In’, said a sign on Ponsonby’s door, and within he ran a relaxed regime alongside his younger assistant Arthur Bigge. (Bigge was discretion embodied, to the extent that his colleagues called him ‘Better NOT’.55)

  Whenever he could, though, Henry Ponsonby escaped from his office to his home in the Norman Tower, a suite of rooms hollowed out from the medieval fabric of the castle’s walls. This was an excitingly Gothic place to live, with its steep garden, ‘deepset windows’ and ‘narrow winding passages … like the linked excavations of a mine’.56 Ponsonby was extremely uxorious, and people believed that ‘his chief joy, relaxation and refreshment’ was to ‘steal half an hour’ with his wife Mary.57 ‘Your advice is worth more than anyone’s,’ he told her. Being apart, as they often were when he was required to travel to Osborne or Balmoral, ‘is the unhappiness of my life and makes me often long to give up everything’.58

  Henry was very open with his wife, and he ‘told her everything and consulted her about everything’.59 The walls of the Norman Tower must therefore have witnessed some discussion of the proposed Brown biography. Mary was small in stature but had an enormous brain. She was considered almost ‘alarmingly’ intelligent.60 Henry Ponsonby sometimes got on the wrong side of Victoria because he did not quite share her straightforwardly conservative instincts, and it was the same with his wife. The essential fault that Mary was thought, in royal circles, to possess was that of being a ‘clever woman’.61 As the Ponsonbys’ biographer William Kuhn points out, Mary was a member of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, a student of Nietzsche and a proponent of medical training for females (Victoria found this one utterly inimical). It’s funny to think of such a woman living in a home from which so many details of the queen’s life across the courtyard – her coming in, her going out, her lights being extinguished – could be observed.62

  Mary was thought by a friend to have a ‘feverish longing for a wider sphere of action than has been allotted by circumstances’.63 And yet, living quietly here at Windsor, she was actually playing a significant role in the history of the monarchy. ‘Do burn my letters,’ she would implore correspondents, knowing that she had been indiscreet.64 This was advice that was often ignored, meaning that her words survive as witnesses to the ludicrousness, as well as the splendour, of the queen’s later court. Mary and Henry between them, in their correspondence and published writings, show us the richly ridiculous side of life at Windsor. Although Victoria would certainly not have approved, they actually did their queen a service by making her sound so intriguing.

  In all their many surviving words, though, Henry and Mary are naturally silent on the super-sensitive topic of Brown. Doubtless Mary, decisive and energetic, encouraged Henry to take positive action. But he argued it wasn’t that simple. ‘People constantly say “Why don’t you advise The Queen?”’ he once explained. ‘One can do so once, but she takes care you shan’t press unwelcome advice upon her by preserving strict silence on the subject.’65 He resorted to dodges such as drafting letters for her to consider, including sentences he’d crossed out as if he’d had second thoughts. Sometimes she’d do exactly what he had intended, which was to reinstate them.66 Sometimes she couldn’t even be bothered to put pen to paper, and would send verbal messages instead, through servants. Never strong on verbal communication, Victoria was growing increasingly lazy about talking face-to-face to people she didn’t like. Her officials believed that this ‘odious practice of doing everything through a third person makes endless difficulties and misunderstandings’.67

  Just a year prior to this conundrum of the John Brown memoir, a new person had walked into this claustrophobic community at Windsor Castle. Randall Davidson, the recently appointed Dean of Windsor, had first become Ponsonby’s colleague, and then his firm friend.

  When she’d started the search for a new Dean, Victoria had stipulated that she wanted someone ‘whom she can confide in’.68 Upon mee
ting the thirty-four-year-old Randall Davidson, with his smooth, egg-shaped head and receding hairline, she at once found him ‘sympathetic and evidently very intelligent’.69

  In return, Davidson could see something that for all their virtues the urbane, sophisticated Ponsonbys could not. He had a firm appreciation of what he called Victoria’s ‘common sense’, which ‘enabled her (though not in the ordinary sense of the words a really clever woman) to do far more than most clever women could have accomplished’.70 Unlike Albert, unlike even the Ponsonbys, Davidson appreciated her talent for identifying how mainstream opinion among her subjects would respond to almost any issue. Elsewhere in Europe, when revolutions succeeded, it was because middle-class people and the oppressed workers made common cause. In Britain, though, this never quite happened. Perhaps it was because the middle classes somehow believed that the middlebrow queen was ‘on their side’.

  Randall Davidson, a future Archbishop of Canterbury, was himself an excellent temperature-taker of public opinion. He arrived in 1883 at the castellated Deanery hidden behind St George’s Chapel, a little way down the hill from Ponsonby’s place. He at once felt at home. Before Davidson had been at Windsor a year, he and Ponsonby would ‘pace up and down in the Castle walks discussing most things in the Castle and out of it’.71 ‘My dear Dean,’ Henry wrote, in one of the frequent letters that flew between the Private Secretary’s office and the Deanery, ‘Do we officially believe in Purgatory?’72

  But although Davidson was perhaps more in tune with Victoria’s intentions than Ponsonby was, in the matter of the John Brown memoir they came to an essential agreement that the publication should not proceed.

  The difference between them was that they had contrasting ideas of how to stop it. Ponsonby now explained that he lacked the courage to confront the queen. ‘When she insists that two and two make five,’ he said, ‘I say I cannot help thinking they make four. She replies there may be some truth in what I say, but she knows they make five. I drop the discussion.’ What she couldn’t abide was ‘proofs, arguments’.73