John Brown

by Raymond Lamont-Brown

  Queen Victoria was more than grateful to John Brown for his gallantry during the episode and caused this public announcement to be written by Secretary Ponsonby:

  The Queen, who had contemplated instituting a medal as a reward for long and faithful service among Her Majesty’s domestic servants, has inaugurated the institution by conferring on Mr John Brown, the Queen’s personal attendant, a medal in gold, with an annuity of £25 attached to it, as a mark of her appreciation of his presence of mind and of his devotion on the occasion of the attack made upon Her Majesty in Buckingham Palace Gardens on 29 February 1872.9

  On a much-disliked equerry

  One of Queen Victoria’s equerries, General Sir Lyndoch Gardiner, was held in particular dislike by John Brown. While Gardiner was perfectly polite to Brown, the Highland Servant was irritated by Gardiner’s being a stickler for everything being just so before he could write up an order. At the beginning of one duty he enquired of Brown how the Queen was keeping. ‘The Queen’s very well,’ replied Brown. ‘It was only the other day that she said to me “There’s that dommed old fool General Gardiner coming into waiting and I know he’ll be putting his bloody nose into everything that doesn’t concern him”.’ The general’s reply is not recorded.

  The Prince of Wales was annoyed at his mother’s gesture. Had not Prince Arthur been just as gallant? He received only a tie-pin. The Queen once more exhibited her strategic deafness to the Prince of Wales’s opinions.

  John Brown was the hero of the hour and the public clamoured for news of the incident and to learn what was to happen to O’Connor. It was soon announced that O’Connor was to appear before the Senior Magistrate at Bow Street, barrister Sir Thomas Henry. Huge crowds blocked Bow Street and Long Acre, and the little streets to the east of Covent Garden, and extra police were called in. A delay in the legal procedures held up the start of the hearing which added to the tension. Prince Leopold, summoned as a witness, was cheered when he entered the court buildings with his party, while O’Connor was hissed. The crowd reserved its heartiest welcome for John Brown.

  The charge against O’Connor was read out by Harry Bodkin Poland, a leading counsel and adviser to the Home Department. Then he read out the curious petition written by O’Connor and which he had intended to force Queen Victoria to sign. John Brown was now called to the witness box. On the public benches people craned their necks to get a view of the Queen’s personal attendant. Journalists’ pencils scribbled and all was attention when Brown’s gruff Scottish voice was heard for the first time in any court of law:

  I am in the service of the Queen. Yesterday, after the Court, I went with her Maa-dj-esty for a drive. It was an open carriage. Lady Churchill sat on the right-hand side and the Queen sat on the left. Opposite Lady Churchill sat Prince Leopold and opposite the Queen sat Prince Arthur. Lord Charles Fitzroy and General Hardinge were riding on each side of the carriage. There were two outriders in front and two grooms behind . . . We drove through the garden gate, after driving through the enclosure. The carriage stopped at the entrance for the purpose of allowing Her Maa-dj-esty to alight. The left side of the carriage was towards the entrance. I got off to open the door when the carriage stopped and the Equerries also dismounted. The prisoner was between the Equerries about a yard from the carriage door. I shifted him back. The prisoner then ran round the back of the carriage to the side where the Queen was sitting. I followed him. He reached the door where the Queen was sitting and raised his hand. He placed his hand upon the carriage and I seized his neck. He dropped a pistol from his right hand. I fancy General Hardinge picked up the pistol. I kept the boy in custody until the police arrived. The Queen stood up in the carriage during the proceedings.10

  Following the witness testimony of Prince Leopold, General Hardinge and Charles Tomkins, Sir Thomas Henry committed O’Connor for trial at the Central Criminal Court. John Brown and the other main witnesses were charged to attend. Against his counsel’s advice O’Connor pleaded guilty and although Dr Harrington Tuke of the Chiswell Lunatic Asylum testified to hereditary insanity, the jury found O’Connor fit to plead; judge Sir Anthony Cleasby sentenced him to one year in prison with hard labour, and twenty strokes of the birch.

  At an audience with Queen Victoria, Prime Minister Gladstone was assailed by royal disapproval of the ‘extreme leniency’ of the sentence. She implored Gladstone to set in motion the process that would have O’Connor transported lest he attack her again. The Queen’s anxiety was well founded. After he had completed his sentence O’Connor was persuaded to go to Australia, but he soon returned to Britain. On 5 May 1874 he was arrested for loitering with intent outside Buckingham Palace. He was then committed under court order to Hanwell Lunatic Asylum.11

  Following the excitement of the trial and John Brown’s obvious enjoyment of his high public profile, the Highland servant attended Queen Victoria on her fortnight’s visit to Baden-Baden, on the Rhine valley slopes of the Black Forest. The Queen visited her ailing half-sister Princess Feodore of Leiningen. Once again she was using the pseudonym ‘Countess of Kent’ while travelling – no one was fooled – and she stayed at a villa outside the town.12 John Brown attended while she viewed the casinos of Baden-Baden which were dubbed the second homes of ‘the worst characters of both sexes in Europe’. Then it was back to a welter of ‘domesticity’ and junketing in Scotland.

  One afternoon John Brown came to the Queen to tell her that a ‘bairn had fallen into the water’ and that estate workers and local folk were searching for him along the banks of the River Dee, then in spate. The Queen immediately set off with Princess Beatrice and her Lady of the Bedchamber, Jane, Marchioness of Ely, to help in the search. The Rattray boys, ten-year-old Jemmie and three-year-old Sandy from nearby Cairn-na-Craig, had been fishing when the younger lad had fallen into the Monaltrie Burn that feeds into the Dee. Jemmie had dived in to help his little brother, and both had been swept away. The body of poor Sandy was found next day; his brother remained missing. With John Brown the Queen paid a visit to the grieving family. Jemmie’s body was found a few days later. On the day of the children’s funeral Queen Victoria watched the ‘very sad sight’ of the cortège from her discreetly parked carriage.

  On Wednesday 14 August 1872 Queen Victoria and her entourage arrived at Edinburgh from Osborne for an official visit. Escorted by a troop of Scots Greys, and with John Brown on the box, the Queen’s carriage made for what she called ‘the old, gloomy, but historical Palace of Holyrood’. Accompanied by John Brown, carrying her plaid wrap, Queen Victoria and Princess Beatrice were taken on a tour of the palace and the ruined abbey by Duncan Anderson, Keeper of the Chapel Royal. He related the history of the old palace, built next to the 1128 abbey of the Augustinian canons of Holyrood by King James IV of Scots from 1498. Its place had been etched in history by his grand-daughter Mary, Queen of Scots, whose colourful court had breathed life, murder, skulduggery and mayhem into its stones. Queen Victoria had not stayed at the palace since 1850, when she and Prince Albert were en route to and from Balmoral. This time she included a carriage drive around the old city, and visited St Matthew’s Chapel, 7½miles away at Roslin where she relaxed in the garden and read from a volume of the collected poems of James Hogg, the renowned ‘Ettrick Shepherd’, a gift from John Brown a few years earlier. After more lengthy drives around Edinburgh and its environs the Queen and her entourage left for Balmoral on Saturday 17 August.

  During Friday 6 September a large party of relatives and retainers, with John Brown ‘who supervised everything’ wrote the Queen in her Journal,13 set off from Balmoral to visit Dunrobin Castle. The thirteenth-century ancestral pile of the Dukes of Sutherland had been extended in 1856 and now sported a new wing and frontage of towers, turrets and extinguisher roofs to delight the eye. Set on a natural terrace by the sea, just to the north of Golspie, the castle was one of the most stunning in Scotland. As the royal train approached Keith, John Brown and two railwaymen disturbed the Queen’s peace when they had to break through a ja
mmed carriage interior door. With her ears still ringing from the din, the Queen stepped down at Elgin for a tour of the sights on this ‘broiling hot day’. At Bonar Bridge they were met by their Dunrobin host, George Granville Leveson-Gower, 3rd Duke of Sutherland, who escorted them to Golspie station and thence to Dunrobin, whose approach road was bedecked with banners carrying Gaelic sentiments:

  Ar Buidheachas do’n Bhuadhaich

  (‘Our gratitude to Victoria’)

  Na h-uile lath ch’s nach fhaic, slainte duibh’is solas

  (‘Every day see we you, or see we not, health to you and happiness’)

  Ceud mile failte do Chattaobh

  (‘A hundred thousand welcomes to Sutherland’)

  Failte do’n laith Buidhe

  (‘Hail to the lucky day’)

  Better lo’ed you canna’ be

  Will ye no come back again?

  These were translated by Brown, who added his usual gratuitous comment: ‘Aye, they’re pleased to see you.’

  The visit lasted until Monday 9 September, the day they visited Monument Hill, where the huge statue of George Granville Leveson-Gower, 1st Duke of Sutherland, still gazes out over his vast estates. The duke, dubbed the ‘great improver’, was a hate figure for decades as a result of the infamous ‘Highland Clearances’.14 En route John Brown ordered the royal carriage to stop when he spotted a clump of white heather; he jumped down and picked a spray for the Queen. Knowing her companions’ irritation at John Brown stopping the royal progress at will, Queen Victoria wrote in her Journal for that day: ‘No Highlander would pass by [white heather] without picking it, for it is considered to bring good luck.’ On this trip the Queen was to sample the Highland delicacy of boiled sheep’s head – ‘really very good’, she commented. A somewhat pushy host, the Duke of Sutherland had invited the Welsh explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley to meet the Queen; some years before, Stanley had ‘found’ the explorer Dr David Livingstone at Ujiji, Tanganyika. At the time Stanley was in some bad odour for his presumed opportunistic ‘self-advertisement’, and the Queen was annoyed that she was forced to greet him. The tour ended on a sour note.

  For some time Queen Victoria had been contemplating emulating her relatives in the courts of Prussia and the Grand-Duchy of Hesse by awarding a special medal to her servants. She now gave attention to the creation of a Faithful Service Medal. Her main aim was to reward John Brown for his devotion to her, and to honour his de facto superior Rudolph Löhlein. Both Ponsonby and Princess Alice, who represented the opinions of the Queen’s children, thought the idea set a dangerous precedent. They feared that she would hand out the medal willy-nilly to her beloved Highlanders to the detriment of the morale of her English servants.

  After due reflection Queen Victoria decided that acts of bravery by servants should be marked with a higher honour than a basic Faithful Service Medal, and the Devoted Service Medal was introduced. John Brown was thus awarded the silver Faithful Service Medal for his twenty-one years in Queen Victoria’s employment, to which in 1881 a ‘bar’ was added for another ten years’ service. His gold Devoted Service Medal, designed and engraved by Joseph Shepherd Wynn, chief engraver of seals, bore the inscription: ‘To John Brown Esq, in recognition of his presence of mind and devotion at Buckingham Palace, February 29, 1872.’ This was awarded in recognition of the O’Connor attack. The Faithful Service Medal was to survive as the Royal Victoria Medal for royal service, but the latter, dismissed by courtiers as ‘The Greater Order of Brown’, seems to have lapsed.15

  For those in society who paid attention to such things – most of the County Set and London Club members and Salon devotees – the steady elevation of John Brown Esq. was an eyebrow-raising event. Even the Almanac, first published by the bookseller and editor Joseph Whitaker in 1868, lists ‘John Brown, Her Majesty’s Personal Servant’ as a member of the Royal Household, hob-nobbing on the page with the Queen’s relatives, such as Count Albert Edward Gleichen. Brown’s privileges also included not only the organisation of shoots at the royal estates, but also the right to take part; this also applied to salmon fishing on the Dee where Brown would proprietorially restrict the best beats to himself.

  On John Brown

  ‘To my regret I had no personal acquaintance with Mr John Brown, but my valet often told me of pleasant evenings in his company. He appeared to be a favourite and Mr Brown invited him to his room, where over whisky and tobacco, they went into committee on the state of the nation.’

  4th Lord Ribblesdale,

  Lord-in-Waiting and Master of Buckhounds

  Brown’s duties had expanded greatly in the preceding ten years. He was now overseer of all below-stairs work and management and he acted as personnel officer when servants’ personal problems tipped over into their royal service. Brown monitored the servants’ lives from appointment to death. His keenness to know all that was going on meant that he was also message-bearer not only to the Queen but to her equerries, too. It led to a gruelling day. The Queen wrote tersely to Lady Biddulph, wife of the Master of the Household, on this subject with underlined emphasis:

  It is, that my poor Brown has so much to do that it wd be a gt relief if – the Equerries received hint not to be constantly sending him at all hours for trifling messages: he is often so tired from being so constantly on his legs that, he goes to bed with swollen feet and can’t sleep from fatigue! You see he goes out twice with me – comes then for orders – then goes with messages to the pages, and lies [ladies]. – & often to the Equerries & then comes up with my bag twice . . . he must not be made ‘a man of all work’ – besides it loses his position . . . [One of the Equerries is] an extra fidget, but some of the others do the same & it must be put a stop to . . .16

  All this was to take its toll. Wherever he went John Brown was a source of great interest to high and low alike, and those who were closest to the Royal Household began to see a decided physical change in him. From time to time his face swelled up, adding to the gossip that he was an alcoholic, and both his face and legs were subject to blotching. He was growing old and grey in his royal mistress’s service; his muscular leanness was now turning to fat and his famed thighs and legs, which had so set off the kilt he always wore, were causing him problems. Brown, who could once easily stride up hills with the Queen’s bag of paints and her easel, now tired more quickly, and he found difficulty in sleeping because of his swollen limbs and aching joints. It is certain that John Brown repeatedly jarred his legs jumping down from the royal carriages. From now on Brown’s health became a factor in the Queen’s planning of future jaunts and state visits.

  Yet life went on, with the Queen’s mood swinging between melancholy and cheerfulness. The year 1873 was another bittersweet one. There was great sorrow for the Queen on the death of her brother-sovereign Napoleon III in English exile on 9 January, although she maintained her friendship with his Empress Eugénie. Brown was to accompany the Queen on the first visit to the Empress’s home at London’s Camden Place soon after the Emperor’s death. The Queen was also to share her sister-in-law’s grief after the tragic death of her son, the Prince Imperial, killed on 19 June 1879 while on scouting duties during the Zulu War. Brown broke the news to her at Balmoral and the Queen travelled south to comfort in person ‘the Poor, poor, dear Empress! her only, only child – her all gone!’17

  This tragedy, however, lay in the future. Queen Victoria continued her regular pattern of life. Now that she suffered more from rheumatism, John Brown pushed her in a wheelchair around the gardens of Balmoral, Osborne and Windsor, with the patient Princess Beatrice chatting to her as they negotiated the flowerbeds. On Tuesday 9 September 1873 they were off to Inverlochy. Again Brown accompanied the Queen with her usual large retinue as they travelled from Ballater station on the main Aberdeen line south to join the Highland Railway. On such jaunts there was a respectful informality between sovereign, servants and courtiers; for instance, the Queen’s German maid Emilie Dittweiler shared a carriage with Henry Ponsonby, w
hile Brown sat next to the Queen on the train.

  Carriages awaited them at Kingussie. At Laggan Bridge they changed horses, and a little girl presented the Queen with a nosegay. This was a common occurrence on royal progresses, and ‘the innkeeper gave Brown a bottle with some wine and a glass’.18 People turned out along the way to cheer the Queen amid triumphal arches of heather, Gaelic inscriptions and pipers. The gentry, too, turned out, standing at the gateways of their estates to greet the Queen. At Ardverikie, an estate and deer forest not far from Loch Laggan, the new owner Sir John Ramsden, MP for Monmouth and erstwhile Under-Secretary for War 1857–8, stood at the roadside with his family and servants to salute the Queen.19

  The Queen’s base for exploring this part of Invernessshire was the then modern Inverlochy Castle, some 3 miles from Fort William. Not far away were the ruins of the old Inverlochy Castle made famous by Sir Walter Scott in The Legend of Montrose (1819). Each day was to bring extensive and tiring excursions in the area known as Lochaber. At Loch Arkaig the Queen was hosted aboard a screw steamer owned by Cameron of Lochiel, chief of the Clan Cameron. His presence recalled a story that was to be often repeated in the ‘Brown anecdotage’. It seems that one day Cameron of Lochiel was making his way to a ‘drawing-room’ at Buckingham Palace, when his carriage, which had been delayed in the horse traffic, was surrounded by urchins clamouring ‘’Ooray! ‘Ere’s John Brown!’ Indignantly the chieftain lowered the sash-window of the carriage, brandished his glengarry bearing the eagle’s feather of his clan position and shouted: ‘I’m no John Brown. I’m Cameron o’Lochiel!’20 Many a Highland gentleman in full dress was similarly accosted on the streets of London.