The first mention of John Brown in the Queen’s journals appears in the entry for 11 September 1849. One day on their second holiday at Balmoral, she and Albert were setting out from Altnaguithsach to the hills behind Glen Muich. During their previous excursions they had been slightly unnerved by the passage of their carriage on narrow mountain roads, and Albert decided that they would be safer if an undergroom was to ride on the box and keep the vehicle steady. At twenty-two years of age, Brown, the youngest and sturdiest of the ghillies, was chosen for the task. Two years later, he was entrusted with leading the Queen’s pony on all the royal couple’s Highland expeditions.
Even at this stage, he was taking on further responsibilities with regard to Her Majesty’s well-being. When the royal family went out for picnics, he usually brewed the Queen’s pot of tea. On one such outing during his earlier years, she commented that he had given her the best cup of tea she had ever tasted. He answered that it should have been, as he put ‘a grand nip o’ whisky in it’.1
As a local newspaper later remarked, Prince Albert was ‘struck by his magnificent physique, his transparent honesty, and straightforward, independent character’.2 If Queen Victoria was impressed by the good looks of this young man, so were some of her contemporaries. Five years later a young lady-in-waiting, the Hon. Eleanor Stanley, was writing home with enthusiasm to her family about ‘the most fascinating and good-looking young Highlander, Johnny Brown’.3
When the royal family left Balmoral in the autumn of 1861, Brown seemed strangely reluctant for the family to go south. He told them that he hoped they would have no illness during the winter and return safely the following year, and above all trusted that there would be no deaths in the family. Earlier that year Victoria had lost her mother, the Duchess of Kent. Within a few weeks, the Prince Consort would have passed away as well.
In the dark days immediately following her husband’s death, the Queen saw very little of Brown except at Balmoral. He distinguished himself with his level-headed behaviour one evening in October 1863 when they were returning to the castle from a carriage ride to Loch Muick. The driver had evidently fortified himself on that cold autumn day with something from his flask more interesting than the broth and boiled potatoes of which everybody else had partaken. As Queen Victoria noted afterwards, he was ‘quite confused’, lost his way in the darkness and drove so badly that he took the carriage onto very rough ground. It overturned with the passengers inside, and only the quick thinking of John Brown, who leapt clear as soon as he saw what was happening, saved the situation. He rescued the ladies, cut the traces to release the horses, produced some more alcoholic refreshment to soothe jangled nerves and sent the driver (possibly sobered up after seeing the gravity of what he had done) back on foot to procure some ponies. The bruised Queen had to have her head bandaged afterwards, while the negligent driver’s royal employment was terminated forthwith; John Brown was very much the man of the moment.
Towards the end of 1864 he began to assume a more significant role in Victoria’s life. That winter she was at Osborne, and her personal physician, Dr William Jenner, thought it would be good for her to take up riding again. It was agreed that a new groom would never do, and Brown, with his many years of invaluable service to the Queen and the Prince Consort in the Highlands, would probably be the most suitable aide. As someone who had been so well thought of by Prince Albert, he might be able to raise her spirits and ease her chronic mood of depression.
In December 1864 he arrived, ostensibly in order to lead her pony, Flora. Within two months he had proved his worth, and in her journal she noted that he ‘should remain permanently & make himself useful in other ways besides leading my pony as he is so very dependable’.4 A memorandum dated 4 February 1865 conferred on Brown the official status of ‘The Queen’s Highland Servant’, to take orders from nobody but Her Majesty, and to attend her indoors and out. He was to continue cleaning her boots, skirts and cloaks, unless this proved too much. Some of these menial tasks which he was expected to perform, such as looking after her dogs and cleaning her boots, were dropped by the end of the year. Already she had promised him a cottage at Balmoral in the event of his marriage. Now, if he was to marry and wanted a cottage in the south, her promise would be strictly honoured.5 He was engaged at a salary of £120 per annum, raised to £150 at the end of 1866, to £230 plus £70 for clothes in 1869, and £310 shortly afterwards.
At first he reported to her twice a day, after breakfast and after luncheon, for ‘his orders – & every thing is always right – he is so quiet, has such an excellent head & memory’, she wrote to her eldest daughter, Victoria, the Crown Princess of Prussia. ‘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.’6
It was only a matter of time before these meetings took on a more personal atmosphere, as the Queen found herself taking more and more pleasure in Brown’s company. He was reliable, plainspoken and intelligent, if not exactly learned or intellectual, and ready to devote himself entirely to her. Within a year or two, he started learning German, so he could understand what her relations were saying. Any who thought they could get away with conversing in their second language and leaving him in the dark were in for a surprise. Lord Melbourne and Prince Albert had both willingly given her their undivided attention. For the first time since she had become a widow, another man was prepared to do the same.
It was ‘a real comfort,’ she wrote to King Leopold soon after his appointment, ‘for he is so devoted to me – so simple, so intelligent, so unlike an ordinary servant’.7
Perhaps, she believed naively, he was not really an ordinary servant. If there was a way of dispelling his ordinariness, she would do so, or at least find somebody who could assist in the matter. Accordingly, she asked Dr Andrew Robertson, the Crathie physician who had originally delivered the illustrious second child of John and Margaret Brown in the family cottage at Crathienaird in 1826. Robertson knew as well as anybody else that Brown was of peasant stock, and that his forebears had been agricultural workers. Aware that this would not do for Her Majesty, he applied some artistic licence to a supposed link between his own, rather more exalted, family tree and John Brown’s grandmother Janet Shaw.8 With a little imagination he produced a four-page copperplate account for the Queen, demonstrating that her Highland servant was indeed of rather better birth than had been previously supposed.
Within two years, the Queen’s friendship with Brown was laying her open to serious criticism. In June 1866 he was blamed for delaying her at Balmoral during a ministerial crisis and keeping her from returning to London. This in itself may have seemed trivial to some. But it was a different matter entirely when a Swiss newspaper, the Gazette de Lausanne, published a report that September. In it an anonymous correspondent wrote that the Queen had cancelled diary appointments because she was expecting a child by John Brown, to whom she had been morganatically married ‘for a long time’.9 If she was not present for the Volunteers Review and at the inauguration of the monument to Prince Albert, the report continued, it was only in order to hide her pregnancy.
The British minister at Berne, the Hon. E.A.J. Harris, immediately lodged a formal complaint against the newspaper with the Swiss Federal Council, which did nothing. He would have been wiser to let the matter rest, for his action had the predictable but unfortunate effect of giving the gossip a wider audience throughout much of Europe, gossip which has continued almost unabated to the present day. However, most of the British press loyally ignored the story. Even the socialist radical weekly Reynolds Newspaper, which generally took a thoroughly anti-monarchist stance, refrained from mentioning it.
Henry Ponsonby, by this time an equerry, told his brother that they did not know what the libel was, and he imagined the Queen to be as ignorant as the rest of them: ‘I believe it to be a statement that she has married John Brown, and the idea that it could be said she was
marrying one of her servants would make her angry and wretched.’10 Later he said that the Queen was aware of the libel and had laughed at it, saying she was sorry any notice had been taken of it. Though Queen Victoria had more of a sense of humour than she was often given credit for, it is open to question whether she would have treated such an undignified assertion as a laughing matter.
It was rumoured that Brown had a hold on the Queen because he had been endowed with unique psychic powers, and that she used him as a spiritualist medium to contact Prince Albert in the spirit world. Gossips averred that she was convinced the Prince’s spirit had somehow been passed on to her Highland servant, and she believed he was her late husband’s living embodiment. It was also said that John Brown was married to another woman altogether. At one time he was believed to have taken Miss Ocklee, one of the Queen’s dressers and his regular dancing partner at Balmoral, as his wife, a belief which persisted until she married a man from the Steward’s department in 1873. After Brown’s death, a pamphlet in general circulation stated that he had married a girl from his native valley.
At home, satirical journalists were beginning to take notice. The well-established, generally good-natured but sometimes quite sharp Punch and the shortlived, more anarchic Tomahawk, which was launched in May 1867 (and folded within three years), both lampooned the Queen and her servant mercilessly. In 1866 the former published a spoof Court Circular:
Balmoral, Tuesday.
Mr John Brown walked on the slopes.
He subsequently partook of a haggis.
In the evening Mr John Brown was pleased to listen to a bagpipe.
Mr John Brown retired early.11
Such satire was mild when seen beside the savagery of its disrespectful young competitor. In August 1867 Tomahawk published a cartoon entitled ‘A Brown Study’. This portrayed a sinister-looking John Brown leaning against the throne as he smoked a clay pipe, with the Queen’s Crown resting underneath a glass bell in the background. In the foreground, looking up somewhat meekly at Brown, was the British lion.
Though Victoria’s relationship with Brown gave rise to much unsavoury innuendo at the time, modern historians have taken a more detached view. As Dorothy Thompson has suggested, the reaction of a modern feminist to a widowed queen in her forties taking a lover would probably be on the lines of ‘So what?’ The choice would nonetheless have embarrassed or distressed members of Victoria’s own family. However, such a close liaison with a man who was a social inferior, yet who lacked political ambition and only made modest personal demands on the sovereign, would be far preferable to any such relationship with someone else from the upper classes or a member of a foreign royal family, around whom political suspicions would inevitably have gathered.12 Three of Victoria’s Hanoverian predecessors on the throne (Kings George I, II and IV) had mistresses during their married lives, and the latter two outlived their wives by several years, during which time the mistresses remained at Court. George II was said to have wept at his wife’s deathbed, and when she told him he should marry again, he reassured her brokenly between sobs that he would still have mistresses. It stretches the imagination considerably to picture Queen Victoria even contemplating, while Prince Albert was on his deathbed, that she would take lovers after he was gone.
The Queen’s fervent relationship with Brown was simply another instance of her constant quest for a father-figure. John Brown may have been seven and a half years younger than her, but she found in him as an adult, and a very handsome man in his prime, the qualities she needed. Her passionate nature probably did not require physical relief, and unless she was a hypocrite, it is difficult if not impossible to imagine her being unfaithful to the memory of her ‘beloved angel’. All she wanted and needed was intense, undivided attention and affection producing a sense of safety and comfort. ‘My poor old birthday, my 51st!’ she wrote in her journal in 1870. ‘Alone, alone, as it will ever be! But surely, my dearest one blesses me.’13
Herbert Tingsten believed that Elizabeth Longford’s theory of Queen Victoria’s lack of sensuality was not wholly convincing, and that it seems unreasonable to assume the Queen could never have allowed herself to fall into the arms of her servant without feeling she would have to marry him afterwards. It can hardly be assumed that, had the Queen felt obliged to marry a second time, a sense of propriety would have ruled out marriage with her Highland servant. On the contrary, to take this argument to its logical conclusion, had an intimate relationship developed between them, propriety would all the more have required her to marry him.14
The trickle of ‘Queen Victoria married John Brown’ stories, supported by new so-called evidence that has just miraculously been unearthed, has never abated and probably never will. At least they provide lively, if futile, speculation for those who are interested enough to indulge their somewhat over-developed imaginations.
In 1979 Dr Micheil MacDonald, curator of the Museum of Scottish Tartans, Perthshire, claimed after ten years’ research that the Queen and Brown were married and had a child. This rested partly on interviews with the relations of those who lived in or near the Queen’s residences, and particularly on a tape-recorded account of an eye-witness who heard the deathbed confession of a church minister who was said to have officiated at the marriage ceremony. This supposed child of the relationship lived as a recluse in Paris until the age of ninety, returning from time to time to visit Balmoral. Dr MacDonald saw the royal widow of forty-two as ‘a frightened little girl who hid behind the weeds of widowhood to avoid life’s realities’,15 and Brown was the only one who could guide her through this extremely difficult time.
At least two more instances have been recorded since 1979. One was by a daughter of one of the Queen’s chaplains who allegedly married her to Brown (how many different clergymen have been reputed to have performed this ceremony, one wonders), and another was by the diarist James Lees-Milne, who lunched with an elderly daughter of the late royal doctor Sir James Reid who claimed that she was confident the Queen slept with Brown.16
Another rumour came into circulation more than a century after the Queen’s death. While rummaging in the Royal Archives at Windsor, the historian Sir Steven Runciman had apparently found a marriage certificate confirming that Victoria had been through such a ceremony with John Brown. He showed it to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who grabbed it and threw it on to a blazing fire. Runciman and Queen Elizabeth had both died not long before this story appeared in the press, but such an account could surely convince none but the most gullible. Any scholar or researcher granted access to the Royal Archives is only permitted to see specific documents relevant to their particular area of interest. As a medieval historian, Runciman would not have been handed any Victorian documents, let alone had the freedom to ‘rummage’ through unsorted piles which might have contained such a controversial item – if indeed such an item had ever been preserved, let alone existed in the first place.17
As Queen of Great Britain, and answerable to nobody else in the kingdom, she could in theory marry any man she wanted to, now that she was a widow. A few years later, in 1880, her fellow-sovereign, Tsar Alexander II of Russia, secretly married his mistress, Catherine Dolgorouky, and the mother of his three youngest children, six weeks after his Empress consort died and in the face of severe disapproval, if not outright condemnation, from most of his family. Queen Victoria could therefore have disregarded the weight of family and public opinion and made Brown her husband.
Yet in practice, she would never have gone against the grain in such a way. Any theory of a secret marriage does not fit the pattern of the portrait of her which has emerged from her journals and letters over the years. Tempting and highly amusing as it might be for gossips and republicans to imagine one of the great icons of British monarchy in bed with a Highland servant, whether she was wearing his ring on her finger or not, even her worst enemies would never have accused her of such hypocrisy.
Perhaps the last word, for now, should go to Sir Frederick Ponsonby,
an assistant private secretary to Queen Victoria at the time of her death and devoted (though not always uncritical) servant to King Edward VII and King George V until his own death in 1935. In his posthumous memoirs, he noted that while the numerous stories about the Queen and John Brown were untrue, he did not completely rule out ‘some grain of truth’ in the idea that he might have been something more than a faithful servant to her. When he mentioned the rumour to several people in the household that they were secretly married, they all laughed at the idea. The Duchess of Roxburghe, who was said to have been present at a secret marriage ceremony, told him emphatically that it was a mere fabrication inspired by those who wished to ridicule the monarchy. While there was something to be said for the ‘no smoke without fire’ theory, Ponsonby said, he was convinced that if there had ever been ‘any quite unconscious sexual feeling’ in Queen Victoria’s regard for John Brown, he believed it was unconscious on both sides, and ‘their relations up to the last were simply those of employer and devoted retainer’.18
In May 1867 the Royal Academy of Arts Spring Exhibition included an equestrian picture by Sir Edwin Landseer, entitled ‘Her Majesty at Osborne, 1866’. It showed Queen Victoria reading a despatch while sitting side-saddle on her pony, Flora, while the red despatch boxes, other documents and her gloves lay on the ground. Holding the horse’s bridle was the unmistakable form of the Queen’s Highland servant. The Saturday Review felt it was a great mistake for such a painting to be exhibited, remarking in its review of the show that while they respected the privacy of Her Majesty, Landseer was inadvertently doing more harm to her popularity than he could imagine. The Illustrated London News agreed that it was an unfortunate painting, and that they hoped it would not be deemed disloyal to the sovereign or to the painter’s reputation to say that none of Her Majesty’s subjects would see ‘this lugubrious picture without regret’,19 while the Saturday Review wrote that if anyone was to stand beside it for a quarter of an hour and listen to visitors’ comments, ‘he will learn how great an imprudence has been committed’.20 Far from sharing such views, the Queen was so impressed by the painting that she ordered Landseer to make an engraving of it. Ironically, Landseer was one of the favourites at Court who had been suspected of passing anti-Brown remarks to Punch and Tomahawk.
Sons, Servants and Statesmen Page 15