QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

by Christopher Hibbert

  By the beginning of 1865 Brown had been promoted to the office of 'The Queen's Highland Servant', with duties both indoors and out; and by the end of 1872, his salary having been raised to the most generous sum of £400 a year, the Queen was referring to him, in notes addressed to John Brown, Esq., as her 'friend' and 'most confidential attendant', who had not had 'a single day's holiday or been absent for a day or a night' from his post. 'He comes to my room - after breakfast & luncheon to get his orders,' the Queen told the Crown Princess, '& everything is always right - he has such an excellent head & memory ... is besides so devoted, & attached & clever ... It is an excellent arrangement, & I feel I have here always in the house, a good, devoted soul... whose only object & interest is my service, & God knows how much I want to be taken care of ... And in this house where there are so many people, & often so much indiscretion & no Male head now - such a person is invaluable.9 'He is devoted to me,' she told King Leopold. 'It is a real comfort.'10

  With most of the members of her Household, though, irritation with Brown and his domineering ways turned to detestation. He did not like being kept up late by smokers, so the smoking room had to be closed by midnight. Neither her sons nor her sons-in-law were permitted to smoke in her presence, but Brown puffed away on the solid cakes of tobacco he stuffed into his pipe. He did not like being sent for 'at all hours for trifling messages', so the equerries were told that 'he must not be made "a man of all work" - besides, it loses his position'.11

  He quarrelled with the Queen's chaplain; he quarrelled with her German librarian; he quarrelled with the factor at Balmoral; he quarrelled with Ministers, once causing astonishment by stopping Gladstone in mid discourse with the injunction, 'Ye've said enough'.12 He quarrelled with Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh, and when he was at last prevailed upon to apologize and was told that His Royal Highness seemed satisfied, he declared loftily, 'I am satisfied, too. '13 He quarrelled with the Queen's Assistant Private Secretary, Arthur Bigge, who was disturbed in his room at Balmoral one day by Brown who came in 'with a stern countenance' to say, 'You'll no be going fishing. Her Majesty thinks it's about time ye did some work. '14

  While not actually quarrelling with the Queen's daughters, he was resented by them not least because, in Princess Alice's words, 'he alone talks to her on all things, while we, her children, are restricted to speak on only things which do not excite her, or of which she chooses to talk.'

  There were those who believed that the Queen was sometimes rather frightened of Brown, particularly when he was drunk.[xlvii] Once he was discovered by Henry Ponsonby lying inebriated on his bed when the Queen was waiting in her carriage for him to take her on her afternoon drive. Ponsonby locked Brown in his room, went downstairs, 'mounted the box and drove off. 'The Queen knew what it was and knew that he knew. But on this, as on other occasions, she turned a blind eye.'15

  In 1867 Brown's attendance upon the Queen, who had been most reluctantly persuaded to be present at a review in Hyde Park, was insisted on by Her Majesty as a condition of her own appearance. When the Ministers protested against the man's being with her upon so important a public occasion - which was fortunately cancelled in the end for other reasons - the Queen declared angrily that she would 'not be dictated to' nor 'made to alter' what she had found answered 'for her comfort'. It was absurd to suggest, she told one of her equerries, that her carriage might have been attacked had she appeared in the Park with 'poor, good Brown'. The feeling against him was fostered by 'ill-natured gossip in the highest classes, caused by dissatisfaction at not forcing the Queen out of her seclusion'.

  So Brown's influence continued, and visitors to Balmoral and Osborne were astonished at its extent. At Osborne, a royal son-in-law, on going out to shoot one morning, found that Brown had been there before him and there were no birds left in the coverts. At Balmoral, so a member of the Royal Household related, 'he sends up to find out how the fish are. If he hears a bad report he does not go out and the Queen then offers the [fishing] to [one of her doctors].' His brusqueness was legendary. 'When the Mayor of Portsmouth came to ask the Queen to go to a Volunteer review, the Private Secretary sent in the request to her and hoped to get the reply privately so that he might convey it civilly to the Mayor,' Ponsonby recorded. 'As they both sat in the Equerries' room waiting, Brown put his head in and only said, "The Queen says saretenly not." '16 He was equally blunt when informing members of the Household which of them were to dine with the Queen, on occasions putting his head round the door, glancing from one face to the next, then announcing, 'All what's here dines with the Queen.'

  Brown's behaviour during the ghillies' balls was particularly objectionable. 'What a coarse animal that Brown is,' the Lord Chancellor once complained. 'Oh yes, I know the ball could not go on without him. But I did not conceive it possible that anyone could behave so roughly as he does to the Queen. '17 Lord Ribblesdale, a lord-in-waiting, described one of these rowdy balls which the Queen attended, 'following the revolutions of the dancers with a benevolent but critical eye':

  We had what seemed to be incessant reels, Highland schottisches, and a complicated sustained measure called the 'Flowers of Edinburgh'. Even with proficiency this dance requires constant attention, if not actual presence of mind, to be in the right place at the right moment - anyhow, more than I possessed in the mazy labyrinth. I was suddenly impelled almost into the Queen's lap with a push in the back and 'Where are you coming to?' It was Mr John Brown exercising his office as Master of Ceremonies. After a good many Caledonians, Mr Brown came to ask the Queen, 'Now, what's your Majesty for?' Mindful of her English subjects the Queen suggested a country dance. This did not find favour. 'A country dance,' he repeated, turning angrily on his heels.18

  Henry Ponsonby, who had joined the household as the Prince Consort's equerry in 1856, found these ghillies' balls as tiresome as did Lord Ribblesdale. He did not enjoy the company of the ghillies at the best of times. He found deer stalking extremely boring and, when compelled against his will to take part in the sport, he stuffed his pockets with newspapers and the Fortnightly Review so as to render the long waits less wearisome. At the end of the day there was sometimes a gruesome torch-lit dance round the slaughtered animals during which the ghillies absorbed torrents of whisky and sang songs. Further quantities of whisky were drunk around the huge granite cairn which had been erected to the memory of Prince Albert and which still bears the legend: 'Albert the Great and Good, raised by his broken-hearted widow.'

  Still more whisky was drunk at the ghillies' balls from which Ponsonby stole away whenever he could with the excuse that he had important work to do. But his absence was always noticed and remarked upon with 'some asperity'. Should he return, he was obliged, as a punishment, to dance a particularly rowdy sort of reel which was one of John Brown's favourites.19

  The Queen attended these balls regularly and appeared to enjoy them to the full, even insisting that they were not cancelled when the Court was officially in mourning: on the death of the Grand Duke of Hesse she declined to postpone the forthcoming ball for more than three days, giving as an improbable excuse that she did not 'regard it as gaiety'.20

  Exasperating as the gentlemen of the Household found John Brown's behaviour, they could not but agree that the man, 'exceedingly troublesome', though he was, had his uses.

  'I believe he was honest,' wrote Henry Ponsonby after Brown's death, 'and with all his want of education, his roughness, his prejudices and other faults he was undoubtedly a most excellent servant to her ... He was the only person who could fight and make the Queen do what she did not wish.'21

  He reminded her of 'former happy days', and knew well how to comfort her in the present with his rough and simple sympathy and loyalty. It meant so much to her, she said, to have 'one faithful friend' near her whose 'whole object' she was and who could 'feel so deeply for her' and 'understand [her] suffering'.

  Just as he felt perfectly at ease with her, so she did with him, quite without that shyness which so often
overcame her in the presence of others. She also felt protected. When she was working in her tent in the garden he would march about outside to make sure she was not disturbed; and when out in her carriage he would drive off anyone who came too close. 'I wish to take care of my dear, good mistress till I die,' he once said to her by her own account. 'You'll never have an honester servant.' She then 'took and held his dear kind hand' and said that she hoped he might long be spared to comfort her.

  Concerned that her pleasure in the company of John Brown was helping her to overcome the worst of her continuing grief at the loss of her husband, the Queen consulted the 'tender hearted' Gerald Wellesley. Wellesley reassured her: God sometimes placed sympathetic people in the path of those who mourned to comfort them; it was only right that the bereaved should turn to them for consolation.22

  Improbable as they were, the rumours of the Queen's supposedly passionate love affair with her ghillie continued to circulate, while she did nothing to conceal her reliance upon him and her affection for him. Regularly she sent him greetings cards at Christmas and New Year inscribed 'to my best friend J. B. from his best friend V. R.', 'to my kind friend from his true & devoted one', 'from a devoted grateful friend'.23 And at least one of her communications to him was addressed to her 'darling'. Edwin Landseer's painting, Queen Victoria at Osborne, showing her reading a letter as she sits side-saddle on a black horse whose rein is held by John Brown, was exhibited at the Royal Academy in the 1860s and sold engraved copies in large numbers. One of these engravings - in which at her insistence Brown's beard was shortened - she gave to Sir Howard Elphinstone with a note: 'It is beautifully engraved and the likeness of herself (rather a portly elderly lady) [in fact portrayed as a rather attractive 46-year-old one] and her good faithful attendant and friend are both, she thinks, very good.'24

  Soon after this picture was shown at the Royal Academy, there appeared the Queen's Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands in which John Brown figured prominently. In a long footnote devoted to Brown in this book, he is described as having 'all the independence and elevated feelings peculiar to the Highland race, and is singularly straightforward, simple-minded, kind-hearted and disinterested; always ready to oblige; and of a discretion rarely to be met with'. 'His attention, care and faithfulness cannot be exceeded,' the Queen added, 'and the state of my health, which of late years has been sorely tried and weakened, renders such qualifications most valuable and indeed most needful.'25

  John Brown is shown leading ponies up mountain tracks, rowing boats across lochs, speaking in praise of Prince Albert's patience, sitting on the box of the sociable, causing amusement by calling the Queen 'Your Majesty' when she was travelling incognito as Lady Churchill, being 'too bashful' to wait at table when the royal party were on one of their expeditions from Balmoral, being 'very merry' in the commercial rooms of the hotels where they stayed the night.

  The Queen's Leaves from the Journal of our Life in the Highlands first appeared in a privately printed edition; and there were many who thought that it should have remained in that edition if it were to be printed at all. Lady Augusta Stanley, for example, considered that it would 'do great harm to our dear One'. It was all very well for Arthur Helps - the Clerk of the Privy Council, who edited the book and wrote a preface to it - to claim that there was no one who wished 'more ardently than her Majesty that there should be no abrupt severance of class, but rather a gradual blending together of all classes'.26 Lady Augusta deplored the footnotes devoted to mere servants as though 'on the same footing' as gentlemen.27 Others regretted that the book gave the impression that the Queen's life was one long holiday. Yet others criticized the naivety of the writing, its ingenuousness, its occasional banalities and unintentional humour. Yet its very simplicity, the 'homeliness' which the author herself feared might prevent it being taken seriously, the atmosphere of happy enjoyment which pervades it, all contributed to its great success. When it was published by Smith, Elder & Co., one hundred thousand copies were sold within three months: it was estimated that the author eventually received more than £30,000 in royalties; and, while it was much parodied in such publications as John Brown's Legs or Leaves from a Journal in the Lowlands, it was not altogether undeserving of the high-flown praise which Disraeli cast upon it as possessing 'a freshness and fragrance like the heather amidst which it was written'. It gave him the opportunity to delight the Queen with his celebrated flattery - 'We authors, Ma'am!'

  So the Queen dismissed the objections of her critics. 'From all and every side,' she said, 'the feeling is the same, the letters flow in, saying how much more than ever I shall be loved now that I am known and understood.' 'It is very gratifying,' she wrote to the Crown Princess who, like most of the family, disapproved of the publication, 'to see how people appreciate what is simple and right and how especially my truest friends - the people - feel it. They have (as a body) the truest feelings for family life.' 'You have also never said one word about my poor little book,' the disgruntled Queen complained, 'my only book. I had hoped that you and Fritz would have liked it.'28

  'I know,' she told the Prince of Wales, 'that the publication of my book did me more good than anything else.'29

  Chapter 43

  'THE ROYALTY QUESTION'

  'It is impossible to deny that H. M. is drawing too heavily on the credit of her former popularity.'

  Despite the occasional cheers that greeted the Queen when she did appear in public, both her Household and the Government grew increasingly concerned by the resentment occasioned by the infrequency of those occasions on which she agreed to emerge from her purdah.

  In the summer of 1869 General Grey decided that the time had come to make a forceful effort to persuade the Queen to appear in public more often. He was not convinced that she was as ill as William Jenner said she was when there was some unwelcome duty to perform. She must be reminded by the Prime Minister in a peremptory manner of her duty. She was, with difficulty, persuaded by Gladstone to leave Osborne a few days before she had intended to do so in order to be in London to deal with important matters of state, though she insisted that this must on no account be considered a precedent. Also - performing both ceremonies on the same day that year - she opened Holborn Viaduct and Blackfriars Bridge; but these occasions were not a success: as she drove down the Strand her carriage was hissed.

  A few months later, in February 1870, she flatly refused to open Parliament. It was an unfortunate beginning to a most troublesome year. That same month the Prince of Wales was required to appear in court to give evidence in an unsavoury divorce case involving a pretty, unbalanced woman, Harriet Mordaunt, who had confessed to her husband that she had committed adultery 'often and in open day' with several men, including His Royal Highness. The Prince strongly protested his innocence; but he could not deny that he had written Lady Mordaunt several, fortunately quite innocuous, letters. Sir Charles Mordaunt's petition was dismissed on the grounds that since his wife was insane, and was by then consigned to a lunatic asylum, she could not be a party to the suit.

  The Queen was convinced of her son's innocence of the charge of adultery, but she did not hesitate to condemn his 'intimate acquaintance with a young married women' which could not fail 'to damage him in the eyes of the middle and lower classes'. She also strongly condemned the society in which he led his fast life, the 'frivolous, selfish and pleasure-seeking' rich. As Sir Charles Dilke observed, the Queen's Court was 'singularly dowdy by the side of the Prince of Wales's'. 'But on the other hand', Dilke added, 'though her servants are shabby, the people about the Queen are more uniformly gentlemen and ladies than those about the Prince. '1

  The Prince, booed at Ascot races and at the theatre, attacked in pamphlets and ridiculed in magazines, countered the Queen's criticisms of his conduct by tentatively admonishing her for hers. 'If you sometimes came to London from Windsor,' he wrote to her, 'and then drove for an hour in the Park (where there is no noise) the people would be overjoyed ... We live in radical times, and t
he more People see the Sovereign the better it is for the People and the Country.'2 This was precisely the view of the Royal Household; and, in particular, of Henry Ponsonby.

  Henry Ponsonby, who had been appointed one of the Queen's equerries after the Prince Consort's death, had often helped General Grey with his work, and, as a reticent, intelligent man with a fluent pen and a bold clear hand, he had for some time been recognized as his most likely successor. Ponsonby's appointment was not made, however, without considerable opposition from the Queen's family who objected to what they supposed to be his 'extreme radical tendencies'. General Grey had been a Liberal and had once sat in the House of Commons in the Liberal interest for High Wycombe. But Ponsonby's views were supposed to be far more extreme than those of Grey, while his wife's political opinions were notorious. Mary Ponsonby was condemned as being 'clever', a dreadful failing - she actually wrote articles for the Pall Mall Gazette - and she had, as even her devoted husband had to admit, 'peculiar views on everything'. Consequently both the Duke of Cambridge, the Queen's cousin, and her son-in-law, Prince Christian, were rigidly opposed to Ponsonby's appointment. But the Queen, as Ponsonby wrote, 'disregarded the remonstrances and was pleased to appoint me, sending me at the same time a hint through the Dean of Windsor that I was to be cautious in expressing my opinions and not to permit my wife to compromise me in her conversation' - a hint which, when conveyed to Mary Ponsonby, elicited the response that she herself had no intention of being compromised 'by being supposed to agree for an instant with the opinions of Court Officials'.

  Although Ponsonby's untidy clothes and far too long trousers were a disgrace, and although the Queen had occasion to rebuke him more than once for causing too much rowdy laughter in the Equerries' Room, she liked him from the beginning and recognized in him the kind of qualities which were to make him an exceptional private secretary. He had the ability to get to the root of a problem without wasting time with irrelevancies; he had a good knowledge of the world and of men; he was understanding, patient and industrious. While witty and possessed of a fine sense of the ridiculous, he was also capable of listening carefully to what was said to him by even the most tedious and stupid people without revealing a trace of irritation or boredom. He could express himself well in conversation and also in writing; and he had a lively sense of humour. He did not consider himself a gifted linguist, but he could converse and write letters in French, had a working knowledge of Italian and, though correspondence in German had to be left to the German secretary, he was usually capable, as he used to claim with some pride, of starting a German visitor off in his own language and then receiving 'the resultant prolonged monologue with sufficiently appropriate interjections' to put him at his ease.