Brown was that and more. He was legendarily blunt and outspoken (to the point of rudeness, according to the royal family), and soon became the queen’s gatekeeper. No one was admitted to see Victoria unless he approved. The devoted Brown, who never took a single day off in eighteen and a half years of service, saw to her every need. The two of them developed a daily routine that Victoria found very comforting.
A letter from the queen to her eldest daughter, Vicky, sums up her personal as well as psychological reasons for her devotion to John Brown: He comes to my room—after breakfast & luncheon to get his orders, & everything is always right—he has such an excellent head and 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 and 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.
When Victoria became morose, Brown, in his charmingly brusque way, would provide a reality check. Once, when he was trying to fasten her riding bonnet for her, the stalwart Scot demanded of the glum little monarch, “Hoots, Wumman! Can ye no hold yerr head up!” On another occasion, when she appeared for her morning ride in mourning, he exclaimed, “What are ye daeing with that auld black dress on again? It’s green-moulded.” Victoria rustled off to put on a different gown.
Not too many other people wanted Brown to be so ubiquitous. Her family, in particular the Prince of Wales, felt that the upstart servant took far too many liberties; his informality was an affront. Who else would dare to address the Queen of England as “Wumman”? Only Brown was permitted to smoke where Her Majesty might be exposed to the noxious tobacco fumes she detested. Not only that, he was frequently drunk. Victoria was well aware of this fault, but even when his inebriation prohibited him from attending to his duties, when he was found passed out on his bed at the hour appointed for her morning ride, she never dignified the reason with a reaction.
She often rode out with Brown to a little secluded cottage beyond Balmoral, bringing only a picnic hamper, as a few ladies-in-waiting trotted dutifully several paces behind her. A maid of honor was shocked to learn that the repast was neither terribly regal nor terribly ladylike. “She don’t much like tea. We take oot biscuits and spirits,” Brown told her. In fact, the distiller John Begg had created a special blend of Scotch whisky for Her Majesty, her beverage of choice when the occasion called for a little nip.
Her ministers and advisers feared Brown’s undue influence on an already vulnerable woman. Only Henry Ponsonby, one of Victoria’s personal secretaries, had a different perspective. According to Ponsonby, Brown “was the only person who could fight and make the Queen do what she did not wish,” which was viewed as a good thing by those who desperately sought to put her back into the public eye. And things could be worse, Ponsonby reminded the critics. At least Brown had no political agenda to press.
Ponsonby, like Brown, was in daily contact with Victoria, and better than most people, he understood the nature of their friendship. The secretary assured Brown’s detractors that “while certainly a favorite,” he was “only a servant and nothing more. One only had to know the Queen to realize how innocent” this odd-seeming relationship was. Although she despised the English class system as an artificial construct, when it came to her relationship with staff and retainers, Victoria had extremely rigid ideas about the natural order of things.
Nevertheless, the press disregarded anything approaching a kernel of truth. By 1866, word had gotten out that Victoria and her personal Highland servant had a special relationship, leading to a crop of salacious and unchecked rumors about Victoria’s inappropriate affection for John Brown. It was variously written and reported that Brown was “the queen’s stallion,” that she was “in an interesting condition” as a result of their love affair. It was also reported that he was the medium through which the queen contacted Albert’s spirit and that Victoria fervently believed that this spirit now inhabited John Brown’s body, making it perfectly acceptable to sleep with him. The most frequent comment was that Victoria and Brown were secretly married, thus inspiring the queen’s nickname, “Mrs. Brown.”
In 1868, Victoria published Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands. Dedicated to Albert, it was intended to be an instructive little volume on the royal family’s exemplar of domestic felicity and “kind and proper feeling towards the poor and the servants.” Footnotes discussing the particulars of the servants’ careers and characters shone a bright light on Brown and fueled speculation of an improper relationship between the gillie and the queen.
She had more or less made him one of the family. It galled her children that Brown even rode on the queen’s coach. But on one frightening day in 1872, if it hadn’t been for Victoria’s “big man in livery,” Her Majesty might have been assassinated.
As the queen’s carriage was about to pass through the Golden Gate to Buckingham Palace, the eagle-eyed Scotsman caught sight of the pistol-waving Arthur O’Connor, a seventeen-year -old Fenian—one of the revolutionaries committed to independent rule in Ireland—and hopped off the coach.
“It is to good Brown and his wonderful presence of mind that I so greatly owe my safety, for he alone saw the boy rush round and followed him,” a relieved Victoria acknowledged. She awarded Brown a special gold medal for devoted service—which was never bestowed on anyone else during her sixty-three years as queen—and an annuity of £25 (a measly $3,069.54 today). Albert Edward, the Prince of Wales, who was always jealous of his mother’s attentions to Brown, grumpily complained that his younger brother, Prince Arthur, had behaved just as bravely and their mother had only given him a gold pin.
In the middle of March 1883, Brown caught a severe cold after the queen sent him out in an icy wind, traveling by dog cart on the hunt for a pair of assailants who had threatened one of the queen’s ladies in Windsor Great Park. Although he insisted on returning to his duties, by March 25, Brown had developed a high fever. Fluid-filled swellings had broken out on his face and head, a relapse of the bacterial disease erysipelas from which he had suffered in the past.
The fifty-seven-year-old favorite remained gravely ill in the Clarence Tower at Windsor. Delirium tremens set in, probably owing as much to Brown’s inability to sneak a drink of whisky as to his fever.
Rheumatic complaints prevented Victoria, now sixty-three, from climbing the tower stairs to visit her beloved Brown. So as not to aggravate her, the queen was not told how ill he was until the end was inevitable.
On March 27, John Brown died. Victoria was distraught. It was like losing Albert all over again. Her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, helped her up the winding steps to Brown’s room, where the funeral service was performed. Placed atop the coffin were a wreath of white flowers and myrtle, and a card reading “from his best and most faithful friend, Victoria R.I.” He was buried at Craithie, his birthplace.
Brown’s room in Clarence Tower was to remain exactly the way he had left it, just as Victoria had insisted on enshrining Albert’s Blue Room at Windsor. A fresh flower was to be placed on his pillow every day. The eulogy in the Court Circular was fives times the length of the one written for Victoria’s favorite prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli. She commissioned monuments to Brown at each of her royal residences, and his was the only memorial at Frogmore not commemorating a member of her family. The celebrated sculptor Joseph Edgar Boehm created a life-sized statue of the Scot; its plinth bore an inscription written by England’s poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson: Friend more than servant, Loyal, Truthful, Brave! Self less than Duty, even to the Grave.
The agonized queen wrote to her daughter Vicky: I feel so stunned and bewildered. He protected me so—that I felt safe! And now all, all is gone in this world and all seems unhinged again in thousands of ways . . . the shock—the blow, the blank, the constant missing at every turn of the one strong powe
rful arm and head . . . This anguish that comes over me like a wave . . . is terrible. . . . God’s will be done, but I shall never be the same again.
In 1884, Victoria published a sequel to her Leaves from a Journal covering the years from 1862 to 1882 and dedicated to her “Loyal Highlanders, and especially to the memory of my devoted personal attendant and faithful friend, JOHN BROWN. He is daily, nay hourly, missed by me, whose lifelong gratitude he won by his constant care, attention, and devotion.”
The public devoured the book, but the royal family was not amused. The queen and “Bertie,” the Prince of Wales, had tussled over its publication. Bertie had advised her to stick to private circulation because her memoir cast unpleasant speculation on the nature of her relationship with Brown, a comment that his mother found distinctly hypocritical, given her son’s notoriously rakish behavior.
When Victoria died on January 22, 1901, she was wearing (among other rings) Brown’s mother’s wedding band, which he had given her in 1883. As soon as the royal family had paid their last respects, her physician, James Reid, placed Brown’s photograph and a lock of his hair in the queen’s left hand, discreetly concealed by a small bouquet. Nestled amid numerous totems belonging to members of the royal family, she was buried clutching these mementos.
Long after their deaths, the titillating gossip about Brown and the queen persisted, and it can’t be entirely dismissed. Catherine Walter, a popular prostitute colorfully known as “Skittles” (who numbered the Prince of Wales among her customers) , shared information with another one of her clients, a politician and poet named Wilfred Scawen Blunt, regarding conversations she had with the sculptor Edgar Boehm at the time Boehm was creating (on Victoria’s commission) a bust of John Brown. Having witnessed firsthand the interactions between his patron and his subject, Boehm told Skittles that he didn’t doubt for a moment that there was a very special spark between them.
The alleged conversations between courtesan and artisan seem to suggest that Her Majesty was intimate with John Brown. Blunt’s “Secret Diary,” sealed according to the terms of his will until 1972, revealed Boehm’s belief (as told by Skittles) that the queen had allowed Brown “every conjugal privilege” during their jaunts to the little house in the hills.
More than two decades after Brown’s death, Dr. James Reid was asked by King Edward VII to retrieve a box containing more than three hundred letters referencing John Brown that had been written by his late mother to her factor at Balmoral, Dr. Alexander Profeit. Profeit’s son was threatening to blackmail the king with the contents of the correspondence. Reid read the letters after collecting them, and in his diary noted that “many of them” were “most compromising.” After Edward read the letters, they disappeared; presumably he burned them.
A thorough reading of Victoria’s character would probably lead to the conclusion that the passionate letters were heartfelt and sincere expressions of her own devotion to the one person who had been her closest confidant and had known her best in the years after her beloved Albert’s death. Believing that her late husband omnisciently watched her every moment from his lofty cloud beside St. Peter, it is highly doubtful that Victoria knew John Brown carnally, or even that she hinted at—much less graphically alluded to—that level of intimacy in her correspondence with a third party. And surely, from the Leaves to the monuments, Victoria would never have publicly trumpeted her admiration if their friendship had been improper. This was not a case of hiding an indiscretion in plain sight.
Edward VII himself had enough infidelities to fill several volumes of memoirs, and though his aged mother’s epistolary effusiveness over a man not his father may have given him the creeps, the king’s reaction to the letters might not have had very much to do with middle-class morality. Bertie, who never liked Brown, probably could not countenance the idea that his widowed mother, who had never been fond of him, had instead, in the wake of his father’s demise, embarrassingly lavished every shred of her devotion on a servant.
SAXE-COBURG-GOTHA 1901–1910
EDWARD VII
1841-1910 RULED 1901-1910 KING OF THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND AND THE BRITISH DOMINIONS BEYOND THE SEAS EMPEROR OF INDIA
IT WAS QUEEN VICTORIA’S WORST NIGHTMARE THAT HER eldest son and heir would end up emulating George IV’s excesses. Not only did Albert Edward—known as Bertie—live up to her fears, he exceeded them. His behavior was so decadent that for the first time in British history, there was serious, and open, talk of a republic.
On March 5, 1863, at the age of twenty-one, the five-feet-seven -inch Bertie wed one of his fourth cousins, a daughter of Prince Christian of Denmark, the slightly taller eighteen-year-old Princess Alexandra Caroline Marie Charlotte Louise Julie of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksberg—mercifully known as Alix. Like her husband, the slender and lovely Alix was not an intellectual. But her sweet temperament and ubiquitous grace made her an instant favorite among her new subjects. Unfortunately, she had inherited a form of deafness (otosclerosis) , and by the time she’d given birth to her last child, Alix had lost almost all her hearing. As a result, it was difficult for her to keep pace with their witty and vivacious social set or to converse in any meaningful way with her husband.
Considering him an indolent wastrel and not very bright, for decades Victoria shut Bertie out of all state affairs. Not until the 1890s, in the last years of her life, did she allow him access to official papers. Several of Victoria’s prime ministers suggested a role for him in Ireland, but the queen always scotched the idea.
The Prince of Wales finally ascended the throne at the age of fifty-nine on January 22, 1901. He ruled as Edward VII, declaring that his father was the only Albert who should be enshrined in his subjects’ memories. Edward VII was the first English king to be ruler of “the British Dominions beyond the seas,” a reference to the colonies of the vast British Empire, which he continued to build and struggled to maintain.
Edward’s cosmopolitan sensibilities, affinity for people of other colors and religions, and his genial bonhomie made him an ideal roving ambassador. It was a good fit for the portly prince for whom restlessness had always led to boredom. As king, he was instrumental in achieving what no English monarch before him could do: the 1904 Entente Cordiale marked the end of centuries of Anglo-French rivalry and cemented a lasting peace between the two countries. And he achieved it in large measure due to a compliment he’d paid the previous year to a pretty French actress!
And yet it’s not as a skilled diplomat, but as “Edward the Caresser”—the nickname bestowed by the expat novelist Henry James—that Bertie entered the pages of history.
His flirtations were legion—from Cockney chorus girls to the grandes cocottes of Parisian brothels, and from the Brooklyn-born mother of Winston Churchill (the former Jennie Jerome) to Sarah Bernhardt. A passing naval officer on the royal yacht once overheard Bertie through the walls of his cabin exhorting his latest conquest to “Stop calling me ‘Sir’ and put another cushion under your back!” Although there were three women who qualified as a maîtresse en titre—Lillie Langtry, Daisy Brooke, and Alice Keppel—there were countless others, simultaneously and in between.
Bertie never lost his slight German accent, but he frequently lost his temper. He loved yachting and blood sports, fat cigars, fast motorcars, and fast women. He specialized in killing time while waiting for the crown by patronizing racetracks and theatres, country house parties, casinos, and brothels.
After suffering a series of colds in April 1910, Bertie died at Buckingham Palace on the night of May 6. His last sentient expression was that of gladness that his racehorse Witch of Air had won the 4:15 at Kempton Park. Edward’s second son succeeded him, as George V.
His nine-year reign, known as the Edwardian era, epitomized a world of glamour and gaiety, country tweeds, shooting parties, and roast beef with Yorkshire pudding on Sundays. A welcome escape from the dark, restrictive decades of Victorianism and a return to the pageantry of the monarchy, it was
England’s last Age of Innocence. Just four years after Edward’s death, the winds of war would reek of mustard gas, thanks to his nephew, Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany.
EDWARD VII and Lillie Langtry 1853-1929
Emilie Charlotte Le Breton was born on the Channel Island of Jersey to the Dean of Jersey, a handsome serial philanderer, and the beautiful but impoverished Londoner for whom she was named. A tomboyish hoyden who regularly roughhoused with her six brothers, she hated her French-sounding moniker, much preferring her nickname, Lillie, earned because her skin was so unusually fair.
In 1874 at the age of twenty-one, the tall, long-legged beauty with waist-length russet hair and deep blue eyes married the twenty-six-year-old Irish landowner Edward Langtry, the owner of a rather spiffy vessel. She had known him for only six weeks. “To become mistress of the yacht I married the owner,” Lillie admitted. She had a lifelong fascination with sailing and racing, but her big dream was to take London’s social world by storm.
A chance meeting at the Westminster Aquarium with a former neighbor from Jersey resulted in an invitation to a house party. Lillie’s looks, wit, and unaffected mien utterly charmed the guests and soon she and Ned were mingling with London’s smart set. Lillie bloomed, but Ned, an outdoorsman, hated every minute of it.
Lillie’s beauty, her vivacious spirit, and her perfect hourglass figure, daringly unsupported by stays in an age when women corseted themselves practically to asphyxia, captivated London society, from socialites to artists. Oscar Wilde idolized her to the point of walking around the streets of London with a lily in his hand, and worshipfully sleeping on her doorstep until her husband tripped over him. Edward Millais’s portrait of her in a simple black dress, titled A Jersey Lily (which became her nickname) , was so popular when it was exhibited to the public that the Royal Academy had to rope it off.
Royal Affairs: A Lusty Romp through the Extramarital Adventures that Rocked the British Monarchy Page 33