Sons, Servants and Statesmen

by John Van der Kiste

  Worse was to follow. The Queen had agreed to attend a review in Hyde Park in July of that year, but to her fury Lord Derby, her Prime Minister, dared to suggest that she leave John Brown at home, as the sight of him might lead to incidents of an ‘unpleasant nature’. Derby asked the Queen’s secretary, Charles Grey, to recommend that Brown might develop ‘some slight ailment’ on the day and thus excuse himself. Knowing that such subterfuge would never work with anybody as honest as the Queen, he approached her saying that the Prime Minister’s greatest concern was for Brown’s own feelings and safety: what if he was to be exposed to public humiliation?

  Providentially, the impasse was resolved by a tragic event on the other side of the world. In June Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, brother of Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria and the husband of Queen Victoria’s cousin Princess Charlotte of Belgium, and whose so-called empire had been revealed as no more than an ill-conceived experiment in imperialism on the part of France, was captured by Mexican forces, given a show trial and executed by firing squad. The Hyde Park review was cancelled and the Court went into mourning, but not before the Queen had ensured that on any similar future occasion Brown’s position would be unchallenged. ‘The Queen will not be dictated to,’ she wrote angrily to her equerry, Lord Charles Fitzroy, ‘or made to alter what she has found to answer for her comfort.’21

  One reason Brown was so disliked in certain sections of the Queen’s entourage was that she would be dictated to – by Brown. If he did not approve of her clothing, he would ask disdainfully, ‘What’s this ye’ve got on today?’ Once she complained about a sketching table which she found inconvenient. He told her sharply not to grumble, ‘for I canna mak one for ye’.22 A tourist walking near Balmoral one day was startled to see Brown fastening the Queen’s cloak under her bonnet and scolding her: ‘Hoots then, wumman, can ye no hold yerr head up?’

  Members of the household, visitors and statesmen alike, were all open-mouthed at his rudeness not only to her, but also to them. Nobody around the Queen could be less of a well-spoken aristocrat or an obsequious courtier, and in this lay much of his appeal for her. To her, the ‘higher classes’ generally personified idleness, self-indulgence and frivolity, while the lower orders stood for industry and morality. Brown’s brusque, plain-speaking manner was a breath of fresh air. She was always a little shy in intellectual or aristocratic company, and her ladies noticed that she tended to give an involuntary nervous laugh on meeting anyone new. Among the poor and unsophisticated Highland folk she was always at ease, and to have one of them as a devoted companion, someone in whom she could trust, was a tonic.

  Brown’s manner masked a character capable of great tenderness. In June 1866 Queen Victoria was particularly worried about her eldest daughter Victoria, who was beside herself with grief after losing her 21-month-old son, Sigismund, to meningitis. She told Brown that she was ‘in great trouble’ about the Princess, and he told her that he wished to take care of his dear good mistress until he died: ‘You’ll never have an honester servant.’ Whatever he may have felt to the contrary during his remaining sixteen years, he honoured his promise faithfully.

  His physical strength was another advantage. After several carriage accidents and two attempted assassination attempts, Victoria was nervous about driving out. To have someone of Brown’s calibre on the box gave her a sense of security. When she sat working at home, he kept constant guard over her. He often prevented others from pestering her needlessly (in his view and hers, if not perhaps in the opinion of her illustrious would-be visitors), and ensured that she was properly wrapped up when they went out and that she did not tire herself.

  He disliked travelling abroad, had little time for foreigners, foreign languages (despite his mastering German) or foreign food. He disliked the heat of hotter climes and so feared attempts on the Queen’s life that he discouraged the stopping of her carriage for her to enjoy breathtaking views as she passed. Some foreign territories paid him little respect. The Queen never passed through Brussels on her way to the German Court after the death of King Leopold I and the accession of his son, who did not recognise Brown and thus refused to arrange for him to have his own suite of rooms close to those of the Queen.

  Never for one moment was he overawed by her status as a sovereign or afraid of her as a person. Unlike her family and her ministers, he could see that his monarch was at heart a helpless female, still fervently mourning her husband, in need of being pampered, looked after, even sometimes being ordered around. He could say things to her which no courtier, statesman or relative would ever dare – and with the death of King Leopold in December 1865, there was no relation who would even contemplate doing so. As her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, noted in a letter to his wife a few weeks after Brown’s death, he was ‘the only person who could fight and make the Queen do what she did not wish’.23

  Being on a pedestal was a lonely business, and sometimes the greatest queen of the nineteenth century was the most lonely of all. The only child who had never been certain of her mother’s love had the time-honoured Hanoverian aversion to her son and heir, and she had been widowed at an early age. It was hardly surprising ‘that she numbered her servants among her best friends’.24 In addition, she had spent a large part of her life among servants and thought very highly of them – far more of them, in fact, than of most of her family.

  In 1867 a limited edition volume of extracts from the Queen’s private journal, Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, was produced for her family and courtiers. Her editor was Arthur Helps, clerk to the privy council and the uncredited editor of a volume of the Prince Consort’s principal letters and speeches published in 1862. It described many of her Highland expeditions in great detail, with what some of her family and household thought was undue emphasis on the presence and role of John Brown. ‘His attention, care and faithfulness cannot be exceeded,’ she wrote, ‘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

  When Leaves was issued for private circulation, Helps was foremost among those who persuaded the Queen that it should be given the benefit of general publication. However carefully the recipients of this edition were selected, he advised her, parts of the text, ‘or incorrect representations of its contents, might find their way into the public journals’.26 Some of the household thought general publication would be unwise. In particular, her lady-inwaiting Lady Augusta Stanley feared the reaction of ‘the more educated classes’ and that reviewers would serve the Queen ill, with ‘ignorant, stupid remarks [which] are calculated to do great harm to our dear One’.27 The view of Helps and others prevailed. In 1868 Smith, Elder & Co. issued an edition for the public which proved an instant success, with 100,000 copies sold within three months.

  That same autumn, during the annual royal visit to Balmoral, John Brown was absent for a week. It was announced that he was suffering from a chill. When he reappeared, his face was battered and bruised. The staff whispered among themselves that the Prince of Wales and one or two friends had arranged for a prize-fighter from Aberdeen to pick a quarrel with Brown and give him a thrashing. This, it was alleged, was payback time for an incident earlier that year when the Prince had arrived at Windsor to see his mother, only to be told by Brown that he would not be seeing the Queen until five o’clock that afternoon, and he would have to go and amuse himself for a couple of hours. The idea that the Prince of Wales would stoop to such tactics to get his way seems absurd to say the least, but the story was widely believed on Deeside for many years afterwards.28

  EIGHT

  ‘Absolutely fair and lucid’

  The height of the Brown controversy coincided with the appointment of a new private secretary to Queen Victoria. For some years the position had been filled by General Charles Grey, who had served as a Whig member of parliament from 1831 to 1837. On his re-election to the seat of High Wycombe in 1834, he was the victorious opponen
t of Disraeli. Becoming an equerry to the Queen on his departure from political life, he was appointed private secretary to the Prince Consort in 1849, and on the latter’s death continued to serve Queen Victoria in the same capacity, though the title was not officially conferred on him until 1867.

  After Albert’s death, the Queen proclaimed she was unable to receive ministers personally for a while and gave orders that they must be received instead by her second daughter, Princess Alice, who had initially been her mother’s greatest prop in the family since the onset of her father’s last illness, or Grey, on whom she had become increasingly dependent for help. Despite her determination, expressed in a letter to King Leopold ten days after Albert’s death, that ‘no one person, may he be ever so good, ever so devoted among my servants – is to lead or guide or dictate to me’,1 she needed a permanent official who was in a position to speak to her ministers with full authority. After twelve years of faithful service to her husband, it was clear to the Queen that nobody was better qualified than Grey to fill the role, and she became more reliant on him for help. In January 1863 she wrote to him that he was her ‘main support’, and whenever he was away ‘she always feels additionally anxious’.2

  Grey continued to act as her secretary, though ministers had looked askance at the Prince Consort’s increasing influence over his wife, regarding him as king in all but name. Some of them, particularly Lord Palmerston, wrongly suspected that Grey was eager to assume a similar role. Grey knew that some thought he was becoming ‘a power behind the throne’ and defended himself by saying he would never venture an opinion without the Queen’s approval; he merely obeyed her orders. Not for another six years did the Queen manage to persuade her ministers that it was vital that Grey’s position as her chief helper with government business be recognised, by his formal appointment as her private secretary; Prime Minister Lord Derby accordingly did so in 1867.

  Sometimes Grey felt he was being asked to undertake tasks beyond the call of duty. When a young lady-in-waiting appeared at court wearing too much make-up, the Queen said that ‘Dear General Grey will tell her.’ When the message was passed on to him, he murmured, ‘Dear General Grey will do nothing of the kind.’3

  Under the Queen’s direction, Grey had helped to prepare for publication a biography, The Early Years of the Prince Consort, which covered Albert’s life from birth to marriage. She had hoped Grey would complete the work in a second volume, but by the time it was published his health was beginning to fail. (Perhaps fortuitously for Grey, the task of completing the biography of the Prince Consort, again very much under the Queen’s direction, devolved on Theodore Martin, but far from requiring one further volume, it took five. They were published between 1874 and 1880.)

  Nevertheless, Grey was not uncritical of his mistress. He felt her seclusion was unwarranted and believed she was taking advantage of ill-health to evade some of her duties as a sovereign. As she reportedly declined to open parliament at the beginning of 1870 on the grounds that it was ‘a very unwholesome year’,4 his complaints were not unjustified. To him, her excesses of grief were little more than self-indulgence. In a moment of impatience he once referred to her to Gladstone as ‘the royal malingerer’ and urged him to try to counteract the strong feeling against the Queen by ordering her in a more peremptory tone to do her royal duty. Her moans, said Grey, might satisfy her doctor, the complaisant Sir William Jenner, but they had no effect on him whatsoever.5

  To add to Grey’s problems, he had shared the general detestation of Brown ever since being sent one of his very rudely worded messages, which he refused to accept because of the tone, and both men had always borne each other a grudge afterwards as a result. Towards the end of his years of service, his own health was failing, and increasing deafness made it difficult for him to do the job properly. By 1869, the year of his sixty-fifth birthday, he was keen to retire, but only after he had suffered several small strokes did the Queen realise that a successor would need to be found.

  Fortunately, the right man was not far away. Henry Ponsonby, a former Army officer who had served in the Crimean war with the Grenadier Guards and been promoted to lieutenant-colonel, had been in royal service since his appointment as equerry to Prince Albert in January 1857. While he found the Prince oddly humourless, he was impressed by his intellectual seriousness and welcomed the chance to accompany him to various lectures, exhibitions and meetings of the Fine Arts Commission. Such activities opened his eyes and his mind to the gaps in his education: he took to spending many of his days off in visiting the British Museum, or long periods as an equerry, when he might have been waiting around and doing nothing, by making profitable use of his time, going to read and study in the Royal Library at Windsor. All this turned him into a much more bookish, better-informed man than many others at Court.

  In April 1861 he married one of the Queen’s maids of honour, Mary Elizabeth Bulteel, Colonel Grey’s niece. Later that year she was expecting their first child, and he received the unwelcome news that as a result of the heightened tension between Britain and the United States of America, he might be ordered to serve with his regiment in Canada. The tension soon subsided, but it was shortly followed by even more shocking news – the sudden illness and death of the Prince Consort. His salary ended with the Prince’s death, but after a short period of uncertainty as to his prospects, he was given the news that he and the other three equerries to the Prince would be reappointed equerries to the Queen, though with a reduction in salary.

  In March 1870 Ponsonby was informed by Sir Thomas Biddulph, Keeper of the Privy Purse, that the Queen planned to offer him the post of private secretary. After a short illness, Grey died on 31 March, and on 8 April Ponsonby was gazetted to the office. At the same time he was placed on half-pay of the Grenadier Guards, in accordance with arrangements which he had already made. The appointment was not generally popular. The Queen’s notoriously reactionary cousin George, Duke of Cambridge, expressed regret that ‘one who was known to have such extreme radical tendencies should be placed in such a position’, while her son-in-law Prince Christian was opposed to it for similar reasons, especially as he regarded Mary Ponsonby as a holder of ‘extreme views’.6

  The Queen was cautious about Ponsonby’s ability to fill the post. She already knew him well enough, she wrote to Princess Victoria, to be aware of his ‘excellent abilities, great facility in writing, great discretion and very good temper’. General Grey’s experience could never be replaced, ‘but that is the dreadful misfortune as they grow old and no one feels this more acutely than I do’. Fortunately, she recalled the words of Baron Stockmar many years before, advising her to ‘make more and more use’ of Ponsonby.7

  Despite her reservations, his appointment was fortuitous, and not for a moment would she have good reason to take issue with Stockmar’s favourable impression of the man. By 1870 the Queen’s popularity in the country was at a low ebb. Ponsonby’s more progressive outlook put him naturally in sympathy with Gladstone, who had an unenviable task in trying to persuade the Queen to abandon her seclusion. Republicanism was on the rise, with journals such as the National Reformer warning that Her Majesty, ‘by doing nothing except receive her Civil List, is teaching the country that it can get on quite well without a monarch’.8 Enjoying a good relationship with Gladstone and the Liberal ministers, naturally self-effacing, with a dry wit and sense of humour which ensured that he never took life too seriously, Ponsonby performed an invaluable service to the monarchy by helping to keep the Crown above politics in a similar, if less overt, way as the Prince Consort had done.

  Whereas the Queen had generally been more inclined towards the Whigs and Liberals, regarding her first Tory Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, as a Liberal in all but name, from around the age of fifty onwards she was becoming increasingly conservative and Conservative. Ponsonby and his equally progressive-minded wife helped to reduce the damage that might otherwise have been done. He had a natural dislike of ceremony and grandeur for its own sake. A spe
ll in North America reinforced his liberal views and inbuilt admiration of a more egalitarian society, perhaps only serving to accentuate the importance he attached to what his biographer William A. Kuhn called ‘the smallness of attending to the whims of princes and princesses’.9

  While he and Mary were never republicans, they were curious to learn more about the republican movement and studied the radical papers with keen interest, and their moderate yet unashamedly slightly left-of-centre attitudes went some way towards making Queen Victoria and her Court more acceptable to left-wing opinion in Victorian England. By their very presence at Court, they proved that the Crown could tolerate and even rise above political dissent, and it might not be overstating the case to suggest that the monarchy’s survival into the twentieth century owed more than a little to their presence.

  Even so, Mary was not generally invited to what were described as ‘Court junketings’, or visits to members of the royal family in other European countries. Though the Queen and her household could claim that she did not have an automatic invitation to such occasions as she was merely the wife of the private secretary, she believed that this was being used as an excuse to keep her out of the way. She was said to be slightly embittered at being marginalised in such a manner, and thus had little compunction in seeking out and spreading dubious gossip about the family,10 though as the loyal wife of the Queen’s private secretary, there is reason to doubt whether she would ever have resorted to such questionable tactics.