Much as the Queen might disagree with Sir Henry Ponsonby or shake her head at the sight of his untidy clothes, his scruffy jackets and ill-fitting, too-long trousers, she respected his views and his patience. Gladstone must have counted himself fortunate that his dealings with a sovereign who disliked him, and was not anxious to conceal the fact, had in Ponsonby a ready friend and partisan so close to the royal presence. Ponsonby was not blind to the faults of the man who became prime minister four times, and when he was minister in attendance at Balmoral in August 1873 admitted that he sometimes thought him ‘earnestly mad, and taking up a view with an intensity which scarcely allows him to suppose there can be any truth on the other side’.11 However, Gladstone was the kind of honest, unaffected politician whom Ponsonby trusted as well as respected.
Ponsonby and Gladstone regularly compared notes and ideas on the contemporary power and influence of the Crown. After reading an article by Gladstone on the Prince Consort in 1875, Ponsonby wrote to him to say how struck he was by a paragraph ‘on the altered character of the Regal office’ and how they saw it as a substitute for the influence of power. He believed that the power still remained, though unused. In some ways, he went on, he thought the dormant power ‘is so great that it might almost be dreaded if we had a bad and clever King and a weak Minister’. While he thought such an occurrence unlikely, he considered that it supported his argument that the latent power still existed, ‘and though it is dormant indeed is the force which gives to the royal influence the strength it possesses’.12
Like many admirers of Gladstone, Ponsonby was a little suspicious of Disraeli, not just on political grounds, but because he found something unappealing, if not mildly distasteful, about his showmanship and flattery of the Queen. He could never be sure whether Disraeli really respected his sovereign or was just flattering her for the sake of it and exploiting her admiration for his own ends. He seemed ‘always to speak in a burlesque’ and was ‘cleverer than Gladstone with his terrible earnestness. But how anyone can put faith in Dizzy is what I don’t understand.’13
Ponsonby took a balanced view of the royal family. He was not above making gentle fun of them, enjoying the odd joke at their expense as long as nobody was offended in the process, or taking an objective analysis of their status. He was no sycophant, and like Brown he refused to be dazzled by the aura of monarchy. ‘If they had real determination and strong convictions they would be a danger to the state,’ he wrote to his wife in 1884. ‘As it is they are what they should be.’14
From the start of his duties, he had been reassured to learn that his predecessor, General Grey, had been no shrinking violet. Grey, he was aware, was in the habit of writing to the Queen boldly about his views on anything, and ‘tho’ it irritated her, it sunk in and did good’. While her ministers often thought he might have gone further, he had long since learnt exactly how far he could go, and as a result his advice was never disregarded.15
During the early years, Ponsonby himself was sometimes obliged to discuss with the Queen the delicate subject of gossip, rumours and greatly exaggerated reports on her seclusion. Had he been more brave and more clever, he said, he ‘might have read her a lecture on her duties’, but knew that for him to do anything of the sort would mean that he would ‘never have the subject approached again’. Whenever any contentious matter needed consideration, he took care never to open with a direct negative or contradiction. His manner of dealing with an employer unused to contradiction was masterly. If she insisted that two and two made five, ‘I say that I cannot help thinking that they make 4. She replies that there may be some truth in what I say, but she knows they make 5. Thereupon I drop the discussion. It is of no consequence and I leave it there, knowing the fact.’ Someone else in an identical situation, a woman to whom he referred as ‘X’, did not know when to let well alone, and would try to use arguments and other statements in order to prove her point. This the Queen found intolerable, as ‘no one can stand when they are wrong, women especially; and the Queen can’t abide it.’16
It is hard to imagine any of the men with whom she regularly came into contact at around this time telling her on such an occasion that it was rubbish to suggest that two and two made five. John Brown might have done so and got away with it; Gladstone would have argued to the contrary at inordinate length; Disraeli would probably have conjured up some ingeniously flattering explanation to suggest she was right after all. Ponsonby was astute enough to tread a middle path.
Later on, when his patience was wearing thin with age and the increasing burdens of office, he was tempted to be more forthright with his employer. It would sometimes be necessary for his wife to warn him that when ‘the Queen makes a remark he must not say “It is absurd.”’17
In August 1871 the Queen was seriously ill, with symptoms which left her physicians baffled. These included a swelling in her throat which prevented her from swallowing and speaking properly, and at one point Dr Jenner feared she might have only twenty-four hours to live. An abscess followed soon afterwards, with flying gout and rheumatic pains. Her lady-in-waiting Lady Churchill wanted to know why the Queen’s children had not been sent for, only to be told promptly by Sir Thomas Biddulph that to do so would have killed her at once. Though his remark was widely taken as flippancy and indicated antipathy to her often-difficult progeny, for all her children to gather by her bedside might indeed have induced a presentiment in her, if it had caught her at the wrong moment, that she was indeed mortally ill. When Ponsonby saw her again on 13 September, he thought she looked ‘rather pulled down, thinner and paler’.
Unlike members of the Queen’s family, John Brown was allowed unrestricted access to her bedroom, lifting her from her bed to her couch, and delivering her orders to the household in his typically blunt manner. All of her sons and daughters bitterly resented him being accorded such privileges. The Prince of Wales had always been infuriated and humiliated by her taking Brown’s side against his in his quarrels with the servant. It particularly rankled with him that the Queen should consider there was ‘no male head’ in her family after the Prince Consort’s death, and that she should always bow to Brown’s judgement rather than that of the eldest son who would succeed her as sovereign was a gross insult. Princess Alice, who was married to Prince Louis of Hesse, complained to Ponsonby that while Brown was totally unfit for more than menial work, he alone talked to the Queen ‘on all things while we, her children, are restricted to speak on only those matters which may not excite her or which she chooses to talk about’.18
Her second son, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, arrived at Balmoral in September and made a point of shaking hands with everyone on his arrival except Brown. There had been differences between both men since the previous summer, when they had been present at a ball and the Duke had ordered the music to be stopped after the revelry was showing signs of getting out of hand, and Brown had reputedly told him that he would not take orders from the Duke or any other man. The Queen sent word that the quarrel must be patched up at once, and the Duke agreed, as long as Ponsonby was present as a witness. If he saw a man on board ship on any subject, he argued, it was always in the presence of an officer. When the Queen heard about it, she was furious with her son: ‘This is not a ship, and I won’t have naval discipline introduced here.’19 In the end, a meeting was arranged at which Ponsonby persuaded Duke and servant, somewhat grudgingly, to patch things up.
In February 1872 Brown acquitted himself so well during what could have been an extremely serious incident that nothing could diminish the Queen’s confidence in him. While she was returning to Buckingham Palace from a drive, a youth named Arthur O’Connor pointed an unloaded pistol at her and came within inches of her face, ostensibly with the aim of attempting to frighten her into releasing Fenian prisoners. Prince Arthur tried to jump over the carriage and apprehend him but was too slow. Brown grabbed hold of O’Connor and kept him pinned until the police could come to arrest him. The weapon in itself was not a threat, for the flintlock was
broken, and instead of being properly loaded the pistol was stuffed with wads of paper and bits of old leather. But this attempt on the Queen’s life, futile though it was, frightened her more than all the others.
For his efforts, Prince Arthur was presented with a gold pin, much to the Prince of Wales’s fury, while Brown became the recipient of a special award, the Devoted Service Medal. It included a specially designed medal and a life annuity of £25. Irreverently referred to as ‘The Greater Order of Brown’, it was thus awarded for the first and, so it seems, last time.
Brown had taken to sleeping with a loaded revolver under his pillow in order to protect the Queen. Security measures at Balmoral were not taken very seriously, as whenever she stayed there only a single policeman was on duty. Her devoted Highland servant would patrol the vicinity each night himself, to keep any eye out for any possible source of trouble. Queen Victoria had little fear of potential assassins, and those around her thought she was more concerned about disloyalty at the height of the republican agitation than any physical danger from lone gunmen or self-styled anarchists.
Within a few years, Brown was said to be threatening to leave the Queen’s service. Now nearing fifty years of age, he appeared to be tiring of his bachelor status, while becoming uncle to an ever-growing number of nieces and nephews. Ponsonby was aware of the rumours, and when his wife asked him if they were true, appeared reluctant to commit himself. He assumed that Brown would leave the Queen’s service if he did marry, and this he thought would be unfortunate. In theory, there was nothing to stop him from taking a wife without damaging his job security, apart from the fact that there were limited opportunities to form a close relationship with any eligible spinster at Court. He could easily have done so, as the Queen’s future physician James Reid was to do towards the end of her life. Admittedly, it would have risked her intense short-term displeasure, but he would still have been able to continue to serve Her Majesty, if not as single-mindedly as before. That he never did marry (or marry openly) has only served to add to the claims of those who maintain that he went through a secret ceremony with the Queen.
While he was part of the royal household, they had ‘the best and worst of him’. It was a case of better the devil they knew, as a successor, if granted the same power, might not be so harmless.20 Everyone took it for granted that Her Majesty insisted so much on single-minded devotion from those who served her that Brown’s betrothal, if and when it happened, would be tantamount to his resignation.
However, he stayed with his royal employer. In 1876 she gave him a cottage, and his lease contained the customary clause of ‘Forfeiture & Irritancy’, against which she wrote in the margin, ‘what does this mean?’ If he became increasingly embittered with his lot in life and churlish towards those around her, it was hardly surprising. Dr Hal Yarrow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and an expert on skin diseases, believed that, from his forties onwards, Brown suffered from erysipelas. A sudden change from a healthy outdoor life to ‘comparatively soft living’ as the Queen’s personal attendant would have made him prone to more recurrent attacks, once the condition had manifested itself.21
His initial duties had increased, and he had become overseer of all general below-stairs work and management. He was in effect a kind of personnel officer to the servants, especially whenever they had any private problems that might affect their royal service. As if this was not enough, he acted as general courier or message-bearer to the Queen and to her equerries. When new staff were required at Balmoral, she generally asked him for his advice. He had a habit of choosing candidates whose ways resembled his. Once he was approached by a man who was keen to find his young son of twenty a position in the royal household. The proud parent told Brown that his son was a good lad who did not swear, drink or play cards. Brown shook his head apologetically, replying that this would-be employee sounded much too good to live long, ‘and the Queen disna like the quick-deeing kind’.22
Victoria was aware of how hard Brown worked, and on occasion she asked the equerries to refrain from sending him at all hours for ‘trifling messages’, as he was increasingly exhausted from such activities. His boorishness and inability to suffer fools gladly, and his increasing reliance on the bottle, could easily be understood. His love for whisky was legendary, and that the Queen cheerfully turned a blind eye towards over-indulgence in alcohol among her servants (provided they did nobody else any harm, such as causing embarrassment to her or anyone else in public) did nothing to discourage him from seeking such solace. If whisky was one of his few pleasures in life, so be it. Over a century later, the Queen’s great-great-granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II, showed similar understanding in putting up with drunkenness and other lapses of etiquette from favoured members of staff. She was equally aware of the pressures they were under, and was ‘keen to keep a peaceful house’.23
The story is often told that on at least one occasion Brown was so drunk when he appeared in the Queen’s presence that he fell to the floor, and that she kept a perfectly straight face as she told everyone else that she had distinctly felt an earth tremor. Brown was increasingly accident-prone in his later years, but at least some of his problems were caused by the obvious. In August 1877, while accompanying the Queen on a tour of the warship HMS Thunderer, he fell through an aperture in a gun turret, sustaining severe bruising to his shins. On another occasion, at Balmoral, he was due to escort her out on a ride but was nowhere to be found. Ponsonby went and looked in his room, saw him sleeping off a binge and, without a word of explanation, mounted the carriage himself. The understanding Queen Victoria knew without asking what had happened. Ponsonby always got on well with Brown, admiring his honesty and lack of obsequiousness. His friendship with the Highland servant doubtless compensated for what Queen Victoria might have regarded as other shortcomings in Ponsonby’s character.
Though very different, both men were quite self-effacing and unpretentious in their own way. Neither relished display or grandeur for the sake of it, and neither were dazzled by awards or honours, which they regarded as something of a hollow charade. In 1872 the Queen wished to make Ponsonby a Commander of the Order of the Bath, which he declined gracefully on the grounds that it was a civilian order and he still considered himself a soldier.24 His real reason was that he regarded the addition of letters after one’s name with distaste. Getting things done was part of one’s job, and he had an egalitarian contempt for honorifics.
Though the Queen respected Ponsonby’s decision, the Garter King of Arms, Sir Albert Woods, took him to task on the grounds that it was ungentlemanly to refuse an honour from a lady. In 1879 Victoria proposed to make him a Knight Commander of the Bath. Realising that to decline an honour for the second time would create difficulties in his relations with her, he reluctantly accepted. For him and his wife to be Sir Henry and Lady Ponsonby was a distinction to be endured rather than relished.
That Ponsonby should find his political views making him something of a fish out of water in the atmosphere at Court is hardly surprising. Well aware that the Queen distrusted his political instincts, especially at this time when she was under Disraeli’s spell, there were times when he felt irritated at being ‘muzzled’ by her because of it. For Tory courtiers to make fun of Gladstone in his presence at Balmoral was a needless provocation which only made his work harder, and he did not hesitate to tell them coldly that such comments were all very well when they knew he must not speak.25
Sometimes the Queen made moves herself which were unnecessarily partisan. When Sir Thomas Biddulph died in 1878, she asked Montague Corry, Disraeli’s private secretary, whether he would be prepared to join her staff as her own private secretary, while appointing Ponsonby to the privy purse. Fortunately for all, Corry decided he did not wish to leave Disraeli’s household, while Ponsonby hinted he would rather resign than exchange his present position for another. As a result, the Queen made him keeper of the privy purse as well as her private secretary, promising that he would have assistants so his
duties would be less onerous than before, and so that he could spend more time with his wife. Perhaps she had realised that he was too indispensable to her and that losing him from the household would be a grave mistake. As the only Liberal in a court of Tories of varying hue, he was the only one who could maintain friendly contact with Gladstone and his secretaries, something which would stand him in good stead after Disraeli’s last period in office came to an end.
Disraeli was scrupulously fair to the man who might have been regarded as something of a political adversary, albeit a very discreet one. Ponsonby, he said, used to be a Whig, but whatever his politics, he said that he could not wish his case ‘better stated to the Queen than the Private Secretary does it. Perhaps I am a gainer by his Whiggishness as it makes him more scrupulously on his guard to be absolutely fair and lucid.’26
While accompanying the Queen on her holiday in Italy in the spring of 1879, Brown suffered his first severe attack of erysipelas, an acute skin disease which on this occasion affected his legs and spread to his face. Within a fortnight he had recovered enough to take his place on her carriage box, but he remained out of sorts for the rest of the holiday. From then on, he was never in good health.
Whatever his failings where personal charm was concerned, Brown was always very generous to others. While they were at Osborne in the winter of 1868, unemployment was particularly severe, and when the Admiralty closed the dockyard at Portsmouth, many shipwrights and mechanics were thrown out of work; some were reduced to selling all their possessions or begging in the streets. Brown wasted no time in starting a collection among the servants at Osborne, and in February 1869 he donated £22 to the Committee of the Portsmouth Dockyard Discharged Workmen’s Relief Association. Ever sociable to people of all classes, sometimes he would invite visiting dignitaries and their valets to his room for an evening of whisky, tobacco and informal ‘committee on the state of the nation’.27
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