The Prince of Wales was devoted to Skittles and commissioned the Austrian-born sculptor Joseph Edgar Boehm to prepare a bust of her for his collection. During her sittings Skittles gossiped with Boehm about Brown, as the sculptor had been commanded to Court around 1869/70 to create a bust of Brown for the Queen. John Brown referred to the sculptor thereafter as ‘Herr Bum’. Historians believe that Boehm was the main informant – spiced up with pillowtalk from ‘Harty Tarty’ and the Prince of Wales – via another of Skittles’ lovers, the diplomat, traveller and poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt, who himself kept a very indiscreet private diary.
Blunt recorded:
Brown was a rude unmannerly fellow . . . but he had unbounded influence with the Queen whom he treated with little respect, presuming in every way upon his position with her. It was the talk of all the Household that he was ‘the Queen’s Stallion’. He was a fine man physically, though coarsely made, and had fine eyes (like the late Prince Consort’s, it was said), and the Queen, who had been passionately in love with her husband, got it into her head that somehow the Prince’s spirit had passed into Brown, and four years after her widowhood, being very unhappy, allowed him all privileges. It was to be with him, where she could do as she liked, that she spent so much of her time at Balmoral, though he was also with her at Osborne and elsewhere . . . She used to go away with him to a little house in the hills where, on the pretence that it was for protection and ‘to look after the dogs’, he had a bedroom next to hers, ladies-in-waiting being put at the other end of the building . . . [There could be] no doubt of his being allowed every conjugal privilege.17
Blunt made no attempt to substantiate any of his comments.
Because Queen Victoria’s life was largely hidden from the public, it was hardly surprising that a whole range of myths about her were given undue credence and had some plausibility, being apparently based on sound sources. Four rumours in particular were given regular airings in scurrilous pamphlets such as Mrs John Brown.18 The first was that Queen Victoria and John Brown were married; second, that a child had been born to the Queen and John Brown; third, that John Brown was a spiritualistic medium who helped the Queen to keep in touch with her beloved Prince Albert; fourth, that the Queen had gone insane and John Brown was her ‘keeper’. The first two of these calumnies were given credence in the Swiss publication Gazette de Lausanne. Under an anonymous hand the offending paragraphs read:
On dit [They say] . . . that with Brown and by him she consoles herself for Prince Albert, and they go even further. They add that she is in an interesting condition, and that if she was not present for the Volunteers Review, and at the inauguration of the monument to Prince Albert, it was only in order to hide her pregnancy. I hasten to add that the Queen has been morganatically married to her attendant for a long time, which diminishes the gravity of the thing.19
The British Minister Plenipotentiary, the Hon. E.A.J. Harris, based at Berne, made an official complaint to the Swiss Federal Council about the paper’s allegations. The Swiss did nothing but Harris’s complaint inevitably gave the scurrilous nonsense a wider audience than it would have otherwise achieved.20 By and large the British press left the Swiss paper’s gossip alone, and even the socialist radical weekly Reynolds Newspaper, certainly no supporter of Queen Victoria, refused to follow up the story. Yet from such as the Swiss gossip branched a whole tree of slander and innuendo, and not just on the tongues of the lower classes.
These rumours are as alive today as they were in Queen Victoria’s own lifetime, and the 1998 film Mrs Brown gave them a new lease of life. What was the truth behind these persistent rumours? This book endeavours to unravel fact from fiction against the background of Queen Victoria’s courts at Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral.
INTRODUCTION
QUEEN VICTORIA’S SCOTTISH INHERITANCE
Early in the morning of Thursday 24 March 1603, Queen Elizabeth I of England died. Within eight hours of her death, 36-year-old James Stewart was proclaimed King of England in London. He had reigned in Scotland as King James VI ever since his mother, Mary, Queen of Scots, had been forced to abdicate on 24 July 1567. On 5 April 1603 James disappeared down the road to Greenwich, with his ‘gowff clubbis’, to be at the hub of his new United Kingdom. Thereafter royal visits to Scotland became rare for some 220 years.
James VI and I returned to Scotland once, in 1617, in an attempt to impose Anglican ritual upon the recalcitrant Scottish Kirk; he stayed for seven months. James’s second son Charles I, who was born on 19 November 1600 at Dunfermline, Fife, visited Edinburgh as monarch and on 18 June 1633 was crowned with Scotland’s own regalia. During June 1650 Charles II landed in Scotland and on 1 January 1651 was crowned King of Scots at Scone; he never returned to Scotland after his Restoration in 1660. In 1679 James, Duke of York, later King James II, stayed at Holyrood Palace, to the disgust of strict Presbyterians who loathed his religion and his predilection for drama and court entertainments. Nevertheless James returned to Edinburgh in 1680 as Lord High Commissioner, bringing with him his wife Anne Hyde and his daughter Princess Anne, who was to rule as Queen Anne, the last of the Stewart monarchs.
There were no further royal visits to Scotland until 1715, when Prince James Francis Edward Stewart, the only surviving son of James II landed at Peterhead in an attempt to win back the British throne from the grasp of the Hanoverian succession. Again in 1745, Prince James’s son Charles Edward Stewart, great-grandson of Charles I, took up the cudgels against George II, but all his hopes were strangled at Culloden field on 16 April 1746, when Charles’s Jacobite army was utterly destroyed by the forces of his cousin, the Hanoverian Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland. Prince Charles’s desperate flight to France from the shores of Loch nan Uamh aboard L’Heureux on 19 September marked the end of this phase of royal visits to Scotland.
Almost seventy years later, the Scots were startled to learn that their new monarch King George IV, who had succeeded his father George III in 1820, intended to visit Scotland. The Scots aristocracy were sent into a flurry of consternation and activity as no one could remember how a royal progress should be organised. As royal pageant-master, Sir Walter Scott dug and delved in the nation’s archives in order to create a tartan panorama to welcome the monarch. His efforts were based mostly on invented Highland mythology, customs and dress, but the jubilation, processions and presentations lasted for ten days from Tuesday 13 August. The Scots would never see their like again.
Twenty more years passed before Scotland received another visit from a British royal personage. In the meantime the exiled royal Bourbons of France, Charles X, Comte d’Artois and King of France, Louis and Marie Theresa, Duc et Duchesse d’Angoulême, Charles and Caroline, Duc et Duchesse de Berri, and Henri, the titular Henri V of France, along with his sister Princess Louise, were all state guests at Holyrood Palace variously during periods in 1796 and 1830. Five years after her accession to the throne of Great Britain, after the death of her uncle King William IV at twelve minutes past two in the morning of 20 June 1837, Queen Victoria herself decided to take an early autumn holiday in Scotland.
During June 1842 Queen Victoria asked her Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel to set in motion the arrangements for her Scottish jaunt. To the Queen’s great surprise she was told that Peel and the Tory ministers in the Cabinet did not advise such a journey. They noted that the areas of northern England through which she would have to travel were rife with ‘Chartist sympathisers’. These were the agitators who demanded a ‘People’s Charter’ of parliamentary reform; only a few years previously, in 1839, they had signed a petition in the major towns of England towards this end and riots had broken out when Viscount Melbourne’s Liberal government had supported the rejection of the petition. No, the Queen was told, a Scottish trip was neither feasible nor safe. However, backed by Lord Melbourne, the Queen persisted with her wishes. After a lengthy discussion with Sir James Graham, the Home Office Secretary, Prime Minister Peel agreed that the trip could take place if the initial l
eg of the journey was by sea. Thus on Monday 29 August 1842 Queen Victoria embarked on the royal yacht, Royal George, at Woolwich, and her squadron, led by the 36-gun vessel Pique, set sail for Scotland.
By 1 September the little fleet was anchored off Leith. The Queen was met at Granton Pier by Walter Francis Montague-Douglas-Scott, 5th Duke of Buccleuch and 7th Duke of Queensberry, joint Lord President of the Council and Privy Seal, Captain-General of the Royal Company of Archers, and Lord Lieutenant of Mid-Lothian and Roxburghshire, along with Prime Minister Peel. Her visit was to last until Thursday 15 September, with trips as far north as Taymouth Castle in Perthshire, the home of John Campbell, 2nd Marquess and 5th Earl of Breadalbane, Lord Lieutenant of Argyllshire. During this visit, the Queen recorded later in her Journal, at the Duke of Buccleuch’s home, Dalkeith House, she first enjoyed real Scottish ‘oatmeal porridge’ and ‘Finnan haddies’ – the latter being split and smoke-cured haddock, named after the village of Findon in Kincardineshire.1
On Prince Albert
‘It’s very pleasant to walk with a person who is always content.’
John Brown
Queen Victoria was to make two more visits to Scotland before her great love affair with the country and its people really began at Balmoral. In September 1844 she landed at Dundee for a month-long expedition to Blair Castle at Blair Atholl, hosted by George Augustus Murray, 2nd Lord Glenlyon, nephew of the mentally disturbed estate owner John Murray, 5th Duke of Atholl. While driving by the River Tummel Queen Victoria tasted ‘Athole Brose’ for the first time at the inn at Moulinearn. This was a local drink made from a mixture of honey, whisky and milk.2
Between 11 August and 19 September 1847 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert made a tour of the west coast of Scotland aboard the royal yacht Victoria and Albert, paying a visit to Ardverikie in Inverness-shire, where the Groom of the Stole to Prince Albert, James Hamilton, 2nd Marquess and 1st Duke of Abercorn, had rented a deer forest and holiday house. During these early visits Queen Victoria was able to see something, and learn more, of the Scottish inheritance she had received from her Stewart and Hanoverian forebears. Throughout her life Queen Victoria sustained her pride in the (albeit-very-diluted) Stewart blood that ran in her veins and felt as happy in Scotland as a Jacobite as she was in England as a fluent German-speaking Hanoverian.
At Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne Scotland was calculated by geographers to cover some 30,200 square miles, some nineteen million mostly uninhabited acres; its north–south length was nearly 280 miles, and its east–west breadth around 150 miles. It was divided into 33 counties, with 948 parishes.3 The 1831 Scottish census showed that Victoria ruled over 1.11 million males and 1.25 million females in her northern realm. The largest number of male employees in any single industry was among shoe and bootmakers at 17,307, while domestic service was the major employment for women at 109,512.4
The Scotland that Queen Victoria fell in love with had developed into two distinct regions by 1837. To the north lay the Highlands, where a separate culture had grown differently from that of the Lowlands. For centuries the Highlanders had lived in close-knit, Gaelic-speaking communities, with a strong loyalty to their (mostly) Tory chiefs, linked together by their proud heritage and all sustained by their Roman Catholic or Episcopalian faiths. The Lowlands were centred upon Edinburgh and favoured England in both speech and trade, their political and religious faiths being old Whig leaning to new Liberal and Presbyterian. As the nineteenth century progressed the Lowlands were more and more Anglicised, with the upper classes being educated to an increasing extent in English public schools and universities, with Scottish capital and industry falling under the influence of English boards of directors.
By the time Queen Victoria died in 1901, Scotland’s alignment had changed from north–south to east–west, with the industrialisation and ‘Hibernianisation’ of Clydeside. Yet the Victorian Age for Scotland was more than a regal division. The Queen brought to Scotland a truly British Age – she was the first monarch since the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 to achieve this. She also brought greater harmony to the Scottish and English nations and was instrumental in the wider acceptance of Scots south of the border, without automatic ridicule. Her Court in Scotland reflected all these influences.
Strictly speaking, Scotland had not had a royal court in residence for over two centuries, since that April day in 1603 when King James VI of Scotland, newly proclaimed James I of England, crossed the border at Lamberton Toll, just north of Berwick-upon-Tweed, on his long journey to London. Yet when Queen Victoria inherited the throne of what she called her ‘wicked uncles’, she became heiress to a ceremonial court of Scottish Officers of the Crown, Officers of State and a Royal Household whose functionaries jealously guarded their hereditary places. There were six Officers of the Crown under the Hereditary Grand Constable and Knight Marishal, William George Hay, 18th Earl of Erroll of Slains Castle, Aberdeenshire. This position was granted initially by King Robert I, the Bruce, to Sir Gilbert Hay, 5th Lord Erroll in 1306. It was made hereditary in 1314 after the Battle of Bannockburn. The duties were simple: to safeguard the sovereign’s person on Scottish territory. The other Officers of the Crown were the Lord-Justice General, James Graham, 4th Duke of Montrose; the Lord President, the Rt Hon. Charles Hope; the Vice-Marshal, William Schaw Cathcart, Viscount Cathcart; and two Standard Bearers.
The Hereditary Bearer of the Royal Banner of Scotland in 1837 was H. Scrymgeour-Wedderburn of Birkhall. Sir Alexander Scrymgeour had carried the royal banner for Robert I in the Wars of Independence. When he became king, Robert I conferred the hereditary aspects of the position on the Scrymgeour family who became Earls of Dundee in 1660. The banner was defined by its armorial device of ‘lyon rampant’. The Hereditary Standard Bearer at this time was James Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale, of Thirlestane Castle, Berwickshire.5
The Officers of State were led by the Commissioners for the Custody of the Regalia, whose senior member was the Keeper of the Great Seal, George William Campbell, 6th Duke of Argyll. The Royal Household in Scotland was led by the Duke of Argyll as Hereditary Master, with two Deputy Masters in the shape of the Hereditary Usher, Sir Patrick Walker, and the Hereditary Carver, Sir William Carmichael Anstruther. The office of Master of the Household was given to Archibald, 2nd Earl of Argyll, in 1494. The position was made hereditary in 1528, and the Master was responsible for ‘below stairs’ and state function arrangements.
The Grand Constable and Standard Bearer were joined by Lady Seton-Steuart of Touch-Seton, the Hereditary Armour-bearer and Squire of the Royal Body, making up the three Marshals of the Royal Household. The Household was composed of twenty-two further appointments, ranging from the Falconer (Thomas Marshall Gardiner) to the Tailor (William Fraser). Many of these appointments were of great antiquity: the position of Dean of the Chapel Royal dated from 1120, while the Royal Limner (painter) was a later introduction in 1703. In 1837 forty-nine persons held warrants as suppliers to the court, ranging from the Royal Baker (James Aikman) to the Royal Wine Merchant (Alexander & Sons). Among the warrant holders for Scotland ranked the Queen’s Surgeon-in-Ordinary, Sir George Ballingall, and her Surgeon-Extraordinary, Mr John G.M. Burt. In the medical household they were joined by two Surgeon-Dentists, Robert Nasmyth and D.W. Johnston.6
Another important group within Queen Victoria’s Scottish ceremonial court were the still extant Royal Bodyguard, the Royal Company of Archers. Administered from Archers Hall, Edinburgh, they still appear at important royal occasions in their braided green doublets and Kilmarnock bonnets decorated with eagle feathers. Their Company was formally constituted in 1676, although tradition says they carry on the spirit of the archers who fell protecting King James IV of Scots when he and the Scottish army were routed at Flodden Field, Northumberland, by the English army under Thomas, Earl of Surrey, in the Anglo-Scots Wars of 1513.
Queen Victoria also inherited the ‘Honours of Scotland’, the Scottish Regalia or Crown Jewels, which themselves had had
a colourful history, with bold adventures keeping them out of the hands of rapacious Englishmen like Oliver Cromwell. After the Act of Union of the Parliaments of 1707, the Honours were walled up in a vaulted chamber in Edinburgh Castle’s palace buildings; they were finally ‘re-discovered’ and placed on display by a warrant of the Prince of Wales (later King George IV) in 1818. The Honours comprise the crown, the sceptre and the sword of state. Tradition has it that the Scottish Crown incorporates the ‘circlet’ of King Robert I, the Bruce; made some time after 1314, it is known to have been used at the coronation of the five-year-old son of Robert the Bruce, King David II, in 1329. This crown has been subsequently altered at the behest of succeeding monarchs, and was ‘re-made’ for James V in 1540. The sceptre was presented to James IV by Pope Alexander VI in 1494; it was melted down and refashioned by James V. The Italian-wrought sword of state was a gift to James IV from Pope Julius II in 1507.
On Society
‘Me and the Queen pays nae attention to them.’
John Brown
Scotland retained its own Order of Chivalry in the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, which had been revived and promulgated by statute of King James II on 29 May 1687. Tradition has it that the Order was founded in 809 by Achaius, King of Scots, to honour the Patron Saint of Scotland, the Apostle and Martyr St Andrew of Bethsaida in Galilee. The Order fell out of use in James II’s reign but was revived by Queen Anne on 31 December 1703. The purpose of the Order was to give Scotland an equivalent to the Most Noble Order of the Garter founded in England in 1348. When Queen Victoria came to the throne none of the sixteen Knights of the Thistle ranked below Viscount, and one of their number was her ‘wicked uncle’ Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex.
John Brown Page 2