John Brown

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by Raymond Lamont-Brown


  When the snow came Queen Victoria wrote in her Journal: ‘I wished we might be snowed up, and would be unable to move. How happy I should have been could it have been so!’ She had no wish to leave Balmoral and confided in Princess Victoria that to do so was ‘more painful’ than in past years: ‘I know not why,’ she added. Her letters to Berlin expressed her need for the Highlands and she took to pondering the verses that the Revd Dr MacLeod had read to her from Robert Burns’s poem on the Highlands with the refrain:

  My heart’s in the Highlands, my heart is not here

  My heart’s in the Highlands, a-chasing the deer

  A-chasing the wild deer, and following the roe –

  My heart’s in the Highlands wherever I go.

  But was her heart ‘a-chasing’ something, or someone? Certainly she was in love with the Highlands. But biographer Tom Cullen believed that these outpourings to her eldest daughter were a code: ‘My Heart’s in the Highlands . . . Yes, that is my feeling, and I must fight and struggle against it.’ And the code suggested, opined Cullen, that Queen Victoria had become infatuated with ‘Fascinating Johnny Brown’, and her ‘fight’ was her struggle to put such feelings out of her mind.23

  John Brown settled rapidly into the duties of being the Queen’s ‘particular gillie’, which included taking a prominent place behind her at a variety of royal functions. Important events such as the fête for members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, on 22 September 1859, became commonplace for him. A few days before, Prince Albert had presided over a meeting of the prestigious British Association at Aberdeen; their work was of great interest to the prince. ‘Four weighty omnibuses’ filled with ‘the scientific men’, wrote Queen Victoria in her Journal, enjoyed an afternoon of Highland games; and the Queen particularly noted that ‘Brown’s father and brothers’ mingled with the official guests.

  Each of her Journal entries for royal jaunts in Scotland now seems to include some mention of John Brown for a while. The first to take place after the fête was on Friday 7 October, when the royal family made an ascent of 4,296ft Ben Macdhui, one of the Cairngorms, 19 miles west-northwest of Castleton of Braemar. They proceeded by ‘sociable’24 changing to post-horses at Braemar. At Shiel of the Derry their ponies were waiting for the ascent. Brown led the Queen on a pony called ‘Victoria’ up the stony track and into heavy mist on the top of Ben Macdhui. There the Queen, the Prince of Wales and Princess Alice took lunch in ‘a piercing cold wind’, which dispersed the mist to open up grand views of stupendous scenery. Whisky and water refreshed the Queen – Brown said ‘pure water would be too chilling’ – who partook of tea once they had descended back to Shiel of the Derry.

  This jaunt was a dress-rehearsal for four important ‘expeditions’ that the Queen and Prince Albert made to various parts of Scotland; they were dubbed the ‘Great Expeditions’ by Queen Victoria. The First Great Expedition was to Glen Fishie and Grantown-on-Spey. With John Brown and Keeper Grant on the box, Queen Victoria set off from Balmoral attended by General the Hon. Charles Grey, then Prince Albert’s Private Secretary, and Jane, Lady Churchill.

  Writing in her Journal at ‘Hotel Grantown’ – really a coaching inn – on Tuesday 4 September 1860, Queen Victoria traced their route in the ‘sociable’ via Linn of Dee, where they changed ponies for an exploration of the banks of the Geldie Burn as it enters the Dee, and thence on to the Fishie Burn and lunch. By this time John Brown was observing Queen Victoria’s dietary preferences and began to make sure that all the items she enjoyed were packed in the picnic hampers or were available at Balmoral whenever possible. He became an expert, for instance, in hunting down the Queen’s favourite pralines.25

  Chatting to Lord and Lady Alexander Ramsay, met along the way, the Queen’s party rode on to the ferry of the Spey and a fine view of Kinrara, some 3 miles south-west of Aviemore station, with the adjacent hill of Tor of Alvie then crowned only by the last Duke of Gordon’s monument. Grant and Brown helped negotiate the ferry across the Spey to where carriages waited. As was her wont, Queen Victoria had insisted that the party went on their expedition incognito. As she explained:

  We had decided to call ourselves ‘Lord and Lady Churchill and party’, Lady Churchill passing as ‘Miss Spencer’, and General Grey as ‘Dr. Grey’! Brown once forgot this, and called me ‘Your Majesty’ as I was getting into the carriage; and Grant on the box once called Albert ‘Your Royal Highness’; which set us off laughing, but no one observed it.26

  During their overnight stay at the coaching inn at Grantown, the Queen noted: ‘Grant and Brown were to have waited on us [at table], but were bashful [ie, drunk] and did not’. The Journal entry included a description of the ‘very fair’ dinner of Highland cuisine that was served:

  soup, ‘hodge-podge’ [a pudding of indeterminate contents], mutton-broth with vegetables, which I did not much relish, fowl with white sauce, good roast lamb, very good potatoes, besides one or two other dishes, which I did not taste, ending with a good tart of cranberries.27

  The next day, Wednesday 5 September, Queen Victoria’s maid reported to her that Grant and Brown, along with the other attendants, had spent a ‘very merry’ night in the commercial travellers’ accommodation. Throughout their stay the proprietress of the inn was fooled by the various aliases of the party and did not recognise her monarch. The party moved on to Castle Grant, Morayshire, the home of the wealthy Earl of Seafield, just over a mile from Grantown, which the Queen described as looking like a ‘factory’. When they passed through Grantown on their return, the royal party had been unmasked and the town was thronged with waving, cheering people, their erstwhile hostess still in her paper curlers waving a flag from the window of her hostelry.

  Travelling in her carriage with the leather cover drawn up – because of the midges – Queen Victoria and her party made a slow pace, because of tired horses, to Tomintoul in Banffshire, noted as the highest village in the Highlands at 1,160ft above sea level and much patronised for its angling. Queen Victoria was not impressed by its ambience; she wrote:

  Tomintoul is the most tumble-down, poor-looking place I ever saw – a long street with three inns, miserable dirtylooking houses and people, and a sad look of wretchedness about it. Grant told me that it was the dirtiest, poorest village in the whole of the Highlands.28

  This was an uncharacteristically negative entry for the Queen to write of her beloved Highlands, but she may have been irritated by the inn incident. She went on:

  While Brown was unpacking [their picnic lunch] and arranging our things, I spoke to him and to Grant, who was helping, about not having waited on us, as they ought to have done, at dinner last night and at breakfast, as we had wished; and Brown answered, he was afraid he should not do it rightly; I replied we did not wish to have a stranger in the room, and they must do so another time.29

  In the future Brown would regularly be inebriated while on duty, yet he learned the lesson about the Queen not liking strangers around her and became protective. After lunch, the party travelled along the banks of the River Avon in southern Banffshire. Time was getting late so the party sped up, and the Queen was astonished at the rate John Brown could stride out as he led a trotting ‘Fyvie’. Later that day the Queen wrote in her Journal how her Highland servants’

  willingness, readiness, cheerfulness, indefatigableness, are very admirable, and make them most delightful servants. As for Grant and Brown they are perfect – discreet, careful, intelligent, attentive, ever ready to do what is wanted; and [Brown], particularly, is handy and willing to do everything and anything, and to overcome every difficulty, which makes him one of my best servants anywhere.30

  Brown’s interpretation of the Queen’s ‘wants’ often raised eyebrows among her courtiers. For instance, John Brown was once asked by one of the Queen’s Maids-of-Honour if he had tea in the picnic basket. He replied: ‘Well no, Her Maa-jd-esty, don’t much like tea. We tak oot biscuits and speerits [whisky].’

  Safely back at Balmo
ral the Queen declared that her ‘First Great Expedition’ had been ‘delightful’ and ‘successful’.

  Invigorated as she usually was at Balmoral, Queen Victoria returned to Windsor unprepared for the cruel blows of fate that lay in the immediate future. On 9 March 1861 the royal physicians decided to operate on a growth on the Duchess of Kent’s arm. At seventy-four she seemed to make a good recovery, but a turn for the worse brought the Queen hurrying to her mother’s bedside at Frogmore Lodge, Windsor. There she kept vigil until the Duchess died on the morning of 16 March. Immediately Queen Victoria went into a ‘nervous decline’. She had only recently been reconciled to her mother after years of rancour, the Duchess having bitterly resented her daughter’s decision to rule without her mother’s interference.

  On Deeside the Duchess would be remembered for years as a plump but attractive old lady, readily recognised, as she drove out of Abergeldie Castle in her carriage, since she insisted on wearing her hair in bunches of ribboned ringlets on either side of her face. In her grief the Queen recalled that when they had left Balmoral the last time, John Brown had been almost reluctant for them to go. He had declared to her his hope that they would have no illness during the winter and return safely to Balmoral. Above all, he had emphasised, that there be no deaths in the family. It had been a strange vorbedeutung (prophecy), mused the Queen, of what was to come. First the Duchess’s old Comptroller, Sir George Couper, had died, then a few days later ‘dearest mama’. When would it end?

  George William Frederick Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon and erstwhile Foreign Secretary, was among those courtiers exasperated by what he saw as the Queen’s self-indulgence in being ‘determined to cherish her grief’. He commented to Louise, Duchess of Manchester: ‘I hope this state of things won’t last, or [the Queen] may fall into the morbid melancholy to which her mind has often tended and which is a constant cause of anxiety to Prince Albert.’31 Following the interment of the Duchess of Kent at the royal mausoleum at Frogmore, Prince Albert took the Queen, still in deep mourning, off to Balmoral to try to stimulate once more her will to survive and to encourage her to ‘take things as God intended them’.

  On Friday 20 September 1861 the royal family set off for the ‘Second Great Expedition’ to Invermark and Fettercairn. With Grant and Brown in their usual positions on the ‘sociables’, and accompanied by Princess Alice and her new fiancé, Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, the royal party set off for Bridge of Muick where they transferred to ponies. By peat-road and glen they rode to Corrie Vruach where they encountered the 11th Earl of Dalhousie, a two-term Secretary at War, who welcomed them to his Scottish ‘March’ and joined them for lunch at Invermark, Angus, where John Brown unpacked the Queen’s sketching materials.

  Later, her easel folded away, the party rode on past ruined Invermark Castle and on to Lord Dalhousie’s shooting lodge for a rest and then on to the village of Fettercairn in south-east Kincardineshire. They stayed at the Ramsay Arms, with their courtiers lodging at the Temperance Hotel opposite. This time Grant and Brown controlled their drinking in order to wait at table sensibly, for fear of being banished to the Temperance establishment. The Queen remarked that they ‘were rather nervous, but General Grey and Lady Churchill carved, and they had only to change the plates, which Brown soon got into the way of doing’.32

  A moonlit walk took them to the Town Cross. This was the stump of the medieval cross of Kincardine which still bore ancient marks indicating the length of the old Scottish ‘ell’, a measurement of cloth. Prince Louis paused at this relic, which had once enjoyed pride of place in the now-vanished ancient county town, in the shadow of the royal residence of Kincardine Castle, and read out the weathered proclamation on charities.

  Again the party was travelling incognito and Brown and Grant managed to keep other guests away from the rooms being used by the Queen. ‘What’s the matter here?’, one had asked, only to be informed that the royal group was ‘a wedding party from Aberdeen’. The enquirer was entertained to breakfast by Brown and Grant. Queen Victoria noted that Brown ‘acted as my servant, brushing my skirt and boots and taking any messages’.33

  The journey continued past Fasque, the home of Sir Thomas Gladstone, the estranged brother of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, W.E. Gladstone, and on to the magnificent views of Cairn o’Mounth. Dog-carts succeeded ponies and carriages in carrying the royal party on their way through the open country with its fine vistas towards Aberdeen. In order to rest the horses, wrote Queen Victoria, ‘Alice, Lady Churchill, and I, went into the house of a tailor, which was very tidy, and the woman in it most friendly, asking us to rest there; but not dreaming who we were’.34

  Through Glen Tanar the royal party made their way back to Balmoral. At Ballater the former Duchess of Kent’s carriage waited to take them on the last lap of their journey. The Queen admitted to feeling sad at the sight of her mother’s carriage but declared that the scenery had done her good.

  The ‘Third Great Expedition’, this time to Glen Fishie, Dalwhinnie and Blair Atholl, began on Tuesday 8 October. By Braemar and the Linn of Dee to the Geldie Water they rode in carriages to be met by the royal ponies which had gone on ahead with General Grant, the main organiser of this jaunt. With the Queen safely mounted on ‘Inchrory’, and led by John Brown, they forded the river and went through beating rain and wind into Glen Fishie. Brown waded her horse through Etchart Water while the Queen watched in dismay as a gillie dropped their bundle of dry cloaks into the water.

  After a hurried lunch they made their way over rough ground, through myriad burns, and past the ruins of crofters’ cottages, their inhabitants long gone as a consequence of the Highland Clearances. Meeting up with the carriages, which had come by the road route, they drove on to Kingussie where Brown and Grant kept a crowd away as they paused for refreshment. They drove on through Newtonmore to the inn at Dalwhinnie. Travelling incognito meant roughing it in these sparsely populated areas and the Queen recorded that they had a frugal supper of ‘two miserable, starved chickens, without any potatoes’ or pudding. The main task of the evening was taken up with drying clothes for the morning and John Brown and the rest of the servants picked at what remained of the scraggy chickens for their even more meagre supper.

  On 9 October the party awoke to find Highlander Cluny Macpherson, through whose lands they were passing, with a piper and Volunteers drawn up at the inn to salute them. He had been apprised of their coming. Then it was off through Drumochter Pass from Inverness-shire into Perthshire. Near Dalnacardoch they were met by George Augustus Frederick John Murray, 6th Duke of Atholl, who rode with them into the heart of his estates and his home at Blair Castle which the Queen had visited some seventeen years earlier.

  The royal party were met at the door of Blair Castle by the Queen’s old friend Anne, Duchess of Atholl, along with Miss McGregor, who was to help the Queen in the future with her controversial writings about her life in Scotland, which included comments on John Brown. After coffee with the Duchess, the royal party climbed into carriages, with the Queen in a curiously shaped four-wheeled ‘boat carriage’, and drove off to Glen Tilt, a narrow glen extending from Blair Atholl, with its guardian summit of Ben-y-Gloe. The royal ponies had been taken to the Earl of Fife’s shooting lodge at Beynoch, where the Duchess of Atholl left the party as it went on its way, guided by the Duke and escorted by a dozen of his ‘private army’, the Atholl Highlanders, preceded by two pipers. On rough ground the duke offered to lead the Queen’s pony, but she demurred as John Brown took the reins. Laughingly she said to the Duke: ‘Oh no, only I like best being led by the person I am accustomed to.’35

  While Brown and the others unpacked lunch at Dalcronarchie the Queen sketched, then they were off again to ford the rain-swollen River Tarff. Again the Duke offered to lead the Queen’s pony across, but she insisted that John Brown – ‘whom I have far the most confidence in’ – should take her across. The soaked party followed the precipitous road with John Brown struggling to help the Queen’s po
ny keep its footing on the slippery terrain. At the border between Perthshire and Aberdeenshire the party stopped. The Duke called on all present to toast the Queen and Prince Albert with the Gaelic toast: ‘Nis!-nis!-nis! Sit air a-nis! A-ris – a-ris – a-ris! (Now, now, now! That to him, now! Again, again, again!’) On behalf of the Queen, Keeper Grant proposed three cheers for the Duke of Atholl, and the Queen’s pony became restless at ‘the vehemence of Brown’s cheering’.

  The party was met at Beynoch shooting lodge by the Countess of Fife who gave them tea. Saying farewell to the Duke of Atholl the royal party returned to Balmoral, having covered 129 miles in two days. The Queen reflected in her Journal:

  This was the pleasantest and most enjoyable expedition I ever made; and the recollection of it will always be most agreeable to me, and increase my wish to make more! Was so glad dear Louis [Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt] (who is a charming companion) was with us. Have enjoyed nothing as much, or indeed felt so much cheered by anything, since my great sorrow [the death of the Duchess of Kent].36

  The ‘Fourth Great Expedition’ began on Wednesday 16 October 1861. Their route this time took them from Balmoral to Loch Callater and thence Ca-Ness, and home by Cairn Lochan and Shean Spittal Bridge. The Queen rode ‘Fyvie’ and the party included Princess Helena, then fifteen, who had never been on a ‘Great Expedition’ before. The Queen was delighted with the scenery which, she said, ‘gave me such a longing for further Highland expeditions!’37 Sadly, there were to be no more with Prince Albert at her side.

  At the end of their holiday, and just before she left for Windsor Castle, the Queen wrote to her uncle, King Leopold of the Belgians, expressing her first written appreciation of John Brown:

  We have had a most beautiful week, which we have thoroughly enjoyed – I going out every day about twelve or half-past, taking luncheon with us, carried in a basket on the back of a Highlander, and served by an invaluable Highland servant I have, who is my factotum here, and takes the most wonderful care of me, combining the offices of groom, footman, page, and maid, I might almost say, as he is so handy about cloaks and shawls, etc. He always leads my pony, and always attends me out of doors, and such a good, handy, faithful, attached servant I have nowhere; it is quite a sorrow for me to leave him behind.38

 

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