A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  Within a couple of months of Brown’s arrival at Windsor, the Queen’s mood rapidly lifted, much of it down to the effect of his physical presence: she felt safe when he was around. Here was a strong arm on which she could depend, and whose every waking thought was concerned with her sole comfort, for, as she told Vicky, ‘God knows how I want so much to be taken care of.’ She poured out her admiration for Brown in a letter to Uncle Leopold, informing him that she had appointed the thirty-eight-year-old ‘to attend me always’. She accorded him the title of ‘The Queen’s Highland Servant’ on a generous salary of £120 per annum, making Brown second in rank only to Rudolf Löhlein, Albert’s former valet, who on his master’s death had been promoted by the Queen to Principal Personal Servant.9She was now riding daily, with Brown always at her side, and gave him sole responsibility for the organisation of her horses and carriages, as well as taking charge of her many dogs and even deciding which members of her household were allowed to ride which of her ‘dear little Highland ponies’ up at Balmoral.10Under Brown’s influence, Victoria’s adulation of all things Scottish – so far removed from the ‘mere miserable frivolities and worldinesses of this wicked world’ – swelled into panegyric. Highlanders, in her opinion, were ‘high bred’ and full of poetry, simplicity and truth, and ‘might be trusted with all the secrets of the universe’.11She revered Brown’s feral masculinity and brooked no criticism of him; he was ‘superior in feeling, sense and judgment’ to all her other servants, even her maids. She fretted when he got cold and wet out leading her pony in all weathers, bare-legged in his kilt and with no protective clothing. She was concerned that he never took proper care of himself and refused to take holidays, which is no doubt why she turned a blind eye to the essential whisky flask that accompanied him everywhere; in fact she issued a general order that all royal coaches should carry a bottle of whisky under the coachman’s seat, in case of emergencies. Victoria herself had long enjoyed her favourite brands of Auld Kirk and Lochnagar whisky (the latter brewed on her own estates). She had been in the habit of taking whisky in a glass or two of burgundy at dinner and of adding it to her tea; in later years she increasingly enjoyed the medicinal benefits of whisky with Apollinaris mineral water, supposedly on her doctors’ orders (whisky being considered beneficial in countering rheumatism). The comforts of whisky appear to have grown rather than diminished during her widowhood, no doubt easing the pain of her bereavement, but also conceivably triggering some of her more irascible and unreasonable behaviour.12

  But Brown’s meteoric rise to the position of favourite inevitably caused problems in the royal household. Her children remained stubbornly immune to his wholesome Scottish charms and were uneasy at his increasing influence over their mother. They were shocked to learn that she tolerated him – a mere servant – calling her ‘wumman’ with almost marital familiarity, and that she allowed him unprecedented access to her apartments. Soon Brown was gaining a say in everyday, domestic affairs, which alienated the other servants, who hated his gruff and autocratic manner. The Queen’s entourage also bridled at his brusqueness and his crude political and religious views, in the main dismissing him out of hand as ill-mannered, coarse and dictatorial. In so doing they failed to understand the value of John Brown’s essentially honest personality – which was so like the Queen’s – and his absolute fidelity to her, as head of the clan. None seemed able to comprehend the power of his natural magnetism (as the epitome of the Noble Savage), any more than those at the Russian court would understand the similar influence Rasputin had over Victoria’s granddaughter, the Tsaritsa Alexandra. The Queen’s equerry Henry Ponsonby (who came to know the Queen very well later on as her Private Secretary) was perhaps the most tolerant and came closest to understanding Brown’s charisma as a ‘child of nature’, but others, seeking to debunk him and his hold over the Queen, put it down to some kind of sinister mystic power – of supposed second sight – with Brown acting as the spirit medium through whom the Queen communicated with Albert on the other side.13

  Persistent and unsubstantiated rumour that the Queen sought the help of spiritualists and mediums during her widowhood first reared its head in the 1860s and has never entirely gone away.14Much was made of Victoria and (prior to his death) Albert’s passing interest in spiritism, mesmerism and magnetism, all of which had become fashionable when the cult of spirit-rapping and table-turning first arrived from the USA at the end of the 1840s. Since childhood Victoria had had a fascination for ghosts and hauntings, coupled with a tendency to be superstitious, and the enormous popularity of spiritualism fed into her natural curiosity. She and Albert had tried out table-turning, almost as a party game, when it had been all the rage, and they were said to have attended demonstrations by the sought-after medium David Dunglass Home, who was patronised by their friends Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie of France. But their interest in these and other such phenomena had been more as performance art – or, in Albert’s case, as pseudo-science – rather than out of religious conviction. Many Victorian notables, from Gladstone to Harriet Martineau to Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, had all, at one time or another, been drawn to psychic phenomena; as too were several ladies at court, such as the Queen’s close friend Madame Van de Weyer, who was fanatically devoted to spiritualism.15But Prince Albert was too great an admirer of science and the rational, and Victoria too practical, too grounded in basic common sense, to be taken in by a spiritualist movement that was rapidly becoming tainted by fraudulence and deception.

  The religious faith that Victoria and Albert had shared, and had openly discussed at length during their marriage, was based on a profound Christian belief in the spirit’s survival after the death of the body. From the moment of his death Victoria had had a strong sense of Albert’s continuing presence, both at home and especially in the mausoleum. In her widowhood she found her own very personal way of communing with him – often by sitting in front of his bust or holding some memento of him in her hand, such as the ivory miniature bust that she always carried in an oval case in her pocket. Before she signed any official documents Victoria was often seen to look up at Albert’s marble bust and ask him whether he approved. Sometimes, when she was out driving in Scotland, she would open a small brooch that she wore with Albert’s likeness in it and ‘show’ him an interesting view. She often talked out loud to him on a problem, or concentrated her thoughts on what he had said on a particular subject in a letter or memorandum in order to find inspiration.16With the reassuring presence of Brown close at hand (a man in whom Albert himself had invested great trust), she felt more connected to her dead husband and their former happy life together. Scotland – as represented by Brown – was the powerful, symbiotic link that bound her to Albert. She had no need, as the gossip alleged, of Brown’s supposed psychic power (or anyone else’s) to conjure Albert’s spirit for her; her husband was there with her at all times, as a life presence.

  John Brown’s therapeutic effect on the Queen was in fact a quite simple one: like Albert before him, he took no nonsense from her and spoke his mind, treating her with the kind of male machismo that she admired. His presence gave her a new grip on life and, thanks to him, her depression had lifted and her terrible sense of yearning was, at last, abating, so much so that after visiting the mausoleum one day in June 1865 she confided to her journal: ‘thank god! I feel more and more that my beloved one is everywhere not only there.’17Brown understood her loss; observing her at the mausoleum on Albert’s anniversary that December, he told Victoria how sorry he felt that there was ‘no more pleasure’ for her, with her husband now in the tomb. ‘I feel for ye but what can I do though for ye?’ he had asked, adding, ‘I could die for ye.’ He promised her she would ‘never have an honester servant’, and she knew it, which is why any connivance at Brown’s displacement failed dismally.18

  John Brown was Queen Victoria’s lifeline. Sensing the mounting resentment towards him in her household, she went to great pains to defend his posit
ion, even hiring a genealogist to trace his pedigree. An ancestral link with the Farquharsons of Inverey was discovered, which entitled Brown to carry a coat of arms and brought promotion and a role indoors, as well as out; soon afterwards Victoria further endorsed Brown’s position of favour by commissioning a bust of him by the sculptor Joseph Edgar Boehm. Gradually a new, lighter tenor emerged in her journal and her letters to her family. Eulogies to Albert still played their part, as too did the constant insistence on her state of desolation without him, but there was room too for reiterations of her deepening romantic admiration for John Brown and his fine, upstanding qualities: his simplicity, kindness, disinterest, devotion, faithfulness, attention, care, intelligence, discretion and common sense. The Queen’s comments were full of her usual, disarming truthfulness and innocence, yet there were already gossips on the lookout for something more sinister – if not sexually compromising.

  On a rare outing in April 1866 to visit the army barracks at Aldershot, the press first noted the presence of the ‘stalwart form and picturesque dress’ of the Queen’s ghillie John Brown ‘seated in the rumble of her majesty’s carriage’. ‘Gillie Brown’, it was noted, was to be seen in regular ‘respectful attendance’ on her; indeed, he seemed to already enjoy the unique position at court previously held by men such as ‘Rustan, the Mameluke slave who had loyally served Napoleon the Great’.19Brown was now always at the Queen’s side during her carriage drives or pony rides, morning and afternoon, whatever the weather. At Balmoral it was Brown, rather than her secretary, who brought Victoria each day’s mail and remained alone in her study with her, ready to fold and seal her responses. He became extremely protective, defending her from anyone whom he felt to be a time-waster. Increasingly the royal household found themselves held at arm’s length from the Queen, whilst Brown enjoyed unprecedented access to her behind closed doors. When she worked on official business in her sitting room at Windsor, Brown would stand outside, barring the way in and ‘fending off even the highest in the land’.20He would often be the one chosen to pass on orders and even reprimands from the Queen to members of her household, a fact that particularly rankled with her secretary, General Grey. Such unconscionable familiarity with the Queen, combined with Brown’s peremptory, tactless behaviour, provoked bitter complaints from the Queen’s children, especially Bertie, who detested him. It also inspired jealousy in the household and sometimes led to outright quarrels in which Brown always got the upper hand. The gentlemen at court were greatly annoyed to discover that while the Queen disapproved of their drinking and smoking – notably that of her own sons – with characteristic inconsistency she indulged Brown’s addiction to whisky and turned a blind eye to his regular bouts of inebriation and his stinking pipe, which she even allowed him to light in her presence.

  As Victoria’s friendship with Brown blossomed, the years 1865–6 were tempered by a succession of deaths. In October 1865 the loss of Lord Palmerston – who had doddered on in Parliament, dying in harness at the age of eighty-one – was a great sorrow, and another link with Victoria’s safer ‘happy past’ gone for ever.21The death of her ailing Uncle Leopold was another blow when it followed on 10 December, with Victoria feeling even more the loneliness of her position as head now of the Saxe-Coburg family. In her widowhood she became accomplished at the art of heartfelt womanly condolence, writing with great kindness always to the widows of those who had served her, and in turn remembering those, when they died, who had commiserated with her own earlier distress. She was quick to pick up her pen and write to Mary Lincoln when the US President was assassinated in April 1865, offering her own ‘deep and heartfelt sympathy’, while taking advantage of yet another opportunity to reiterate how ‘utterly broken hearted’ she remained at the loss of her own husband.22She likewise consoled the widow of Sir Charles Phipps when he succumbed to bronchitis at the age of sixty-five in February 1865, prematurely worn out in loyal and unstinting service to her. Victoria insisted on paying her respects to his laid-out corpse. She did the same for John Turnbull, Clerk of the Works at Windsor, whom both she and Albert had regarded highly, when he died in April. ‘I saw him lifeless in his coffin, looking like a fine old knight,’ she told Vicky, adding rather proudly, ‘It is the fifth lifeless form I have stood by within five months.’23

  The rituals of death and mourning were so much part and parcel of her life now that she found their celebration consoling. She liked to be told the deathbed details of those she knew, went to see them laid out and, when she could not, requested photographs of them in their coffins to be sent to her. Even the tragic death of Vicky’s two-year-old son Sigismund from meningitis that summer elicited requests for every last detail, which Vicky in her agony felt unable to write down. They discussed the power of sympathy and a comforting presence in their letters, but such was Victoria’s solipsism that even this exercise in condolence was more about her own than her daughter’s loss. ‘There is one person whose sympathy has done me – and does me – more good than almost anyone’s,’ she told Vicky, ‘and that is good, honest Brown.’ His positive presence in her life was, however, also provoking a crisis of conscience: her grief, she had to admit to Vicky, was ‘less poignant, less intensely violent’ and was giving way to a ‘settled mournful resignation’, for now at last she had someone to fill the void of her ‘dreadful loneliness’.24

  In the autumn of 1865 Queen Victoria came to a decision about the future of her third daughter, Helena. After considering the limited choice of candidates, she had plumped for the rather unprepossessing Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein. He was about the best husband she could hope to find for her daughter, who at twenty-four was not blessed with good looks and was rapidly getting past a decent marriageable age. The Prince was already looking old for his thirty-five years; he had been rendered stateless as a result of the recent war, and was penniless to boot. With Christian having little to offer, as well as an unwholesome addiction to tobacco, Victoria was sure that he would not mind the fact that poor Lenchen had ‘great difficulties with her figure’. She just wished he ‘looked a little younger’; he needed to get out and exercise more, and stop coddling himself and eating so much.25The engagement was a relief, but brought with it an unavoidable duty that filled Victoria with terror. In order to obtain government approval for a £30,000 dowry for Helena – as well as a £15,000 annual income for Affie, who came of age that year – she would have to make a major concession and open Parliament in February 1866. It would be the first time since Albert’s death that she would undertake a major state appearance. The cup of Victoria’s anguish and resentment overflowed in a letter to the Prime Minister Lord John Russell, in which she compared the ordeal to come as an ‘execution’. The public had a right to want to see her, she could not deny that, but it was unfeeling to insist on witnessing ‘the spectacle of a poor, broken-hearted widow, nervous and shrinking, dragged in deep mourning, alone in State as a Show, where she used to go supported by her husband’. The thought of being ‘gazed at, without delicacy of feeling’ filled her with horror. 26

  In retaliation, Victoria made the occasion as difficult as she could for everyone involved; she changed the date of the ceremony because it did not fit in with her settled plans for travelling between Osborne and Windsor. She refused to travel in the usual, gilded state coach, but went in the dress-carriage instead, accompanied by Helena and Louise – though she did allow a brief glimpse of herself through its open windows en route to Westminster, despite the cold wind. She gave a small bow to the enthusiastic crowds when she got out of the coach on arrival. Arthur Munby thought his monarch looked ‘very stout, very red in the face’ and, although she was well received, her reception was not as warm at that for the Princess of Wales, who followed in the next carriage.27Victoria entered, dressed in her habitual crape with white lace cap and veil, though on this occasion there was a surprising addition – the cap was edged at the front with diamonds, and topped with a small diamond and sapphire coronet. Even thus subdued, she had an
inescapable aura of queenliness, enhanced by the famous Koh-i-noor diamond, which she also wore, set as a brooch. But she refused to wear her ermine robe of state, which was instead draped across her chair; as she sat in it, Louise and Helena arranged it around her. Seeing Albert’s robe lying on the vacant seat beside her, she paused and touched it, ‘as a Catholic might a relic’.28

  Victoria sat there motionless as she waited for the members of the Commons to be admitted; ‘they came with a tremendous rush and noise and scrambling’, in contrast to the members of the Lords in their robes already assembled.29Never, since Victoria opened Parliament in 1837, had ‘so many peeresses applied for tickets for admission’, wrote one commentator, all of them eager to see ‘how the Royal widow would bear the sudden blaze of publicity’. To many, her presence that day seemed a long-awaited ‘resurrection of royalty’.30Here was a scene of pageantry on a far grander scale than Bertie’s wedding, of ladies in their finest jewels and court dress, the chamber ‘billowy with necks and shoulders’; and there was the Queen, ‘the only homely woman in the house’, whose drab appearance was accentuated all the more by the presence of the superbly dressed Princess of Wales.31