Despite her selfish motives, she regarded the process of opening Parliament that year as a cruel affront and the public desire to see her as ‘unreasonable and unfeeling’. Expressing herself with characteristic forcefulness to Lord Russell, she cast herself in the light of a sacrificial victim: ‘a poor, broken-hearted widow, nervous and shrinking, dragged in deep mourning, alone in State as a Show, where she used to go supported by her husband, to be gazed at, without delicacy of feeling’.29 For five years she had withdrawn from public life, only occasionally venturing into the open to unveil or applaud some new memorial to Albert; once, in 1864, she travelled across London in an open carriage. She had forsaken the theatre, previously one of her chiefest pleasures, in the spring of 1861 during mourning for the Duchess of Kent, and determined never again to visit a London playhouse. Instead, as she discovered, she had herself become the spectacle: she would not accede with grace. Hereafter she regarded the pageantry of monarchy with enduring mistrust and a sense of begrudging. Yet she was still, as she insisted, Queen of England.
The commemorative poem that Tennyson wrote after Albert’s death took the form of an extended dedication to a new edition of his Idylls of the King, which Albert himself had told Tennyson he admired. In blank verse, the poet wrestled with the catastrophe. Dutifully he claimed, ‘The shadow of his loss drew like eclipse/ Darkening the world.’ No one living with Victoria after Albert’s death would have challenged that verdict. Victoria referred to ‘this dead home’;30 it was she, not Albert, who made it so. She had transformed the Blue Room at Windsor Castle into a secular shrine. Across the bed, flowers were strewn like wishes; water for shaving, clean clothes and ink for Albert’s pen were replenished daily. As with that blood-stained chair in which Frederick the Great had died and the glass case containing Victoire de Nemours’s hair, inanimate objects served as relics in the cult, memory made tangible. Too late Tennyson proffered tactful advice in the form of a quotation from Henry V: ‘O hard condition! Twin-born with greatness …/ What infinite heart’s-ease must Kings neglect/ Which private men enjoy!’31
To the Queen of Prussia, Victoria wrote, ‘My Angel was always so good and affectionate to his children, and always wanted them to be gay and happy.’32 With Albert dead, Victoria omitted to prioritise her children’s happiness. Alice criticised Helena’s marriage to Christian as tending more to Victoria’s wellbeing than Helena’s. The haemophiliac Leopold found himself locked in a battle of wills with a mother determined to view him as an angelic invalid yearning for death, too unspoiled for this world of torments and sin; instead he craved university and afterwards marriage. For Louise and Beatrice, the youngest of the daughters, there would be little gaiety at home: for a period, even laughter was forbidden, every pleasure contraband. Only Arthur, the favourite son, experienced affection that was recognisably maternal. Dominating Victoria’s relationships with all her children was that rivalry between the mother’s and the sovereign’s claims which she did not resolve. Her first thoughts were of herself, her requirements attentiveness and obedience. She had forgotten the unhappy years in Kensington; her loneliness, bereft of a father and companions of her own age; the daily impact of her painfully fissured relationship with her mother. She expected those children still young enough to live with her to enter fully into her suffering and otherwise to take comfort from the presence of their brothers and sisters; their older siblings she expected to support her in the insupportable burdens of her sadness and her work, ‘the hard, ungrateful task I have to go through’.33 ‘The Queen … never appears so queenly, so true a woman, as when surrounded by her children,’ wrote John Darton with unwitting irony in 1864, in Famous Girls Who Have Become Illustrious Women.34 For the children in question physical proximity to their mother was not enough, nor her queenliness, not even her womanliness. ‘How should England dreaming of his sons/ Hope more for these than some inheritance/ Of such a life, a heart, a mind as thine,/ Thou noble Father of her Kings to be,’ asked Tennyson. Albert’s sons, like his daughters, hoped for more. For questions she refused to hear, Victoria had no answers.
8
‘A Highland Widow’
IN THE WINTER of 1863, Victoria labelled a new photograph in her personal album ‘A Highland Widow’. The image was of herself, taken at Balmoral by George Washington Wilson on 20 October. She was mounted on a black pony called Fyvie. She was dressed entirely in black, her custom now, reins held loosely in gloved hands, eyes downcast, apparently unseeing. At the pony’s head, steadily outfacing the camera, stood John Brown.
Since 1858, John Brown had served as Victoria’s personal servant in Scotland, handy, surefooted and reassuring, as she thought him. He combined in one person ‘the offices of groom, footman, page and maid ’.1 That comprehensive remit was guaranteed to appeal to Victoria, with her need to be the exclusive object of the ministrations of those nearest to her; in that respect she did not distinguish between servants, courtiers or her family. An empiricist in personal relationships, she demanded proof of devotion in the form of wholehearted absorption in her own concerns. Brown had been engaged by Albert in 1851, before the building of the new castle, when the couple’s Highland home retained the romance of a dream; he was subsequently promoted to the role of Victoria’s ‘particular ghillie’. Maid of honour Eleanor Stanley, encountering him as such in 1854, apostrophised ‘the most fascinating and good-looking young Highlander, John Brown’.2 Albert’s choice could not be wrong. The Aberdeen Herald & Weekly Free Press later explained his initial recommendation as ‘his magnificent physique, his transparent honesty and straightforward, independent character’.3 Honesty and independence of character were also part of Victoria’s makeup; as her life-changing response to Albert’s appearance on a staircase at Windsor Castle in 1839 proved, she too was susceptible to a magnificent physique.
By 1863, like Victoria herself, Brown had become a relic of Albert’s Balmoral. In this he was doubly blessed for Victoria: associated with her ‘beloved Angel’ as well as with the ‘dear Paradise’ which husband and wife had hewn from glittering Aberdeenshire granite more than six hours from London. Albert’s death might easily have spelled a tailing off of Brown’s royal service. Instead, in the autumn of 1864, he travelled from Deeside to the Isle of Wight.
The idea was not Victoria’s. It amounted to little less than a plot, its conspirators Dr Jenner, Clark’s replacement as Personal Physician, and Sir Charles Phipps, Keeper of the Privy Purse. Adept in their mistress’s ways, they consulted Victoria before setting the plot in motion, making her a co-conspirator to her own reawakening at the hands of this burly deus ex machina. Their purpose was to rekindle Victoria’s interest in riding, and they correctly estimated that a familiar face would succeed where newer grooms were likely to fail. As Victoria commented complacently, ‘I am weak & nervous, & very dependent on those I am accustomed to.’4
Jenner and Phipps did not anticipate the rapid expansion of Brown’s sphere of activity. His usefulness to Victoria was soon more than that of coachman or groom. In February 1865, she wrote to Leopold of Brown’s promotion to attend her ‘always and everywhere out of doors, whether riding or driving or on foot; and it is a real comfort, for he is so devoted to me – so simple, so intelligent, so unlike an ordinary servant, and so cheerful and attentive’.5 He was appointed ‘The Queen’s Highland Servant’, at a salary of £120 a year. On 1 March, signalling the way the wind was blowing, Victoria informed her eldest daughter that Brown’s ‘observations upon everything he sees and hears are excellent and many show how superior in feeling, sense and judgement he is to the servants here!’6 She quoted an example of his homespun philosophy.
Once Victoria had valued the Highlands for their ‘retirement’, their ‘wildness’, ‘liberty’ and ‘solitude’, a romantic and picturesque landscape of innate superiority, which, like the landscape of poetry and novels, thrilled on an imaginative as well as a visual level. The constant presence of John Brown encouraged a similar conviction of the superiority of Highlander
s themselves, their unspoiled outlook untamed by the courtier’s moues and blandishments, free from cant and the oiliness of place-seeking. It was not what Jenner and Phipps had intended, although the quickening of the royal pulse, whatever its source, represented progress of a sort. In 1864, Victoria’s half-sister Feodore had cut short a visit intended to last four months. ‘I have not the moral strength to see you and hear you so constantly unhappy,’ she had offered by way of explanation.7 A year later, by contrast, Victoria not only countenanced a resumption of those theatricals the royal children had formerly staged at Osborne, but herself attended a rehearsal in the Council Room. In her journal, she reserved her commendations for her favourite son, fourteen-year-old Arthur.
With Brown a permanent fixture, Victoria’s life surrendered that wholly sedentary character it had assumed after Albert’s death. To carriage drives was added suitably sedate riding; in the Highlands there were picnics and even excursions on foot. The kilted Highlander, rugged in appearance and expression, was always to hand. Given Victoria’s inability to live entirely in the moment, there were inevitably photographs to transform the troubling present into the black-and-white safety of the past. There were more photographs like Victoria’s ‘A Highland Widow’. And then in 1867, a painting unlike any other which preceded it, an attempt to unite in a single image Victoria’s roles of grieving widow and abandoned mother, and royal bureaucrat. The painting in question depicts black-clad Victoria on a stationary black pony, the artist tactful in the matter of his sitter’s expanding girth. Again John Brown, suitably funereal in black kilt and stockings, holds the pony’s head. Brown stares at the pony; Victoria, with a suggestion of a frown, reads a letter. In the background Osborne House, lumpen above broad terraces. At the pony’s feet, Victoria’s discarded gloves, a confetti of letters and envelopes, a dispatch box, two dogs. Studies in lassitude, Princesses Helena and Louise occupy a nearby bench. It is a striking and peculiar painting. Its questionable success lies in its portrayal of a startling if unsettling intimacy between rider and ghillie.
In her journal, Victoria recorded her intention that the picture present her ‘as I am now, sad & lonely, seated on my pony, led by Brown, with a representation of Osborne’.8 In his London studio, her chosen artist, Edwin Landseer (since 1850 Sir Edwin) worked from photographs, requesting assistance with the faulty view of the house and blaming the city’s blanket-like fogs for his slow progress. Hypochondriac, tormented by demons, suffering with his eyes, nervous, depressed and hard-drinking, he struggled to complete on time what he called ‘the Widow’s Picture’. It would be displayed with the innocuous title Her Majesty at Osborne in 1866. Landseer claimed for it the distinction of conveying, as Victoria intended, a ‘truthful and unaffected representation of Her Majesty’s unceasing grief’,9 as once upon a time his paintings had celebrated her joy. But neither Victoria’s intentions nor Landseer’s assertions – not even its noncommittal title – could safeguard the fate of what became the most controversial painting Victoria commissioned: on public view at the Royal Academy in May 1867, it caused a sensation.
Contemporary audiences with a taste for narrative painting, accustomed to ‘reading’ and forensically decoding such images, interpreted Landseer’s vignette of work-oppressed grief in quite a different light. Correctly they dismissed the curious artifice of Victoria’s equine workstation ringed by fallen papers. They were not distracted by the predictable charm of the begging terrier. Overlooked were the figures of Helena and Louise, modest chaperones. ‘All is black that is not Brown,’ quipped a new satirical weekly. For the public gazed … and the public saw. And what they saw appeared to amount to confirmation from Victoria herself of a rumour which explained more convincingly than grief the reason for her malingering absences from London. Here was the truth of her widow’s life in the Isle of Wight and the Highlands, away from prying eyes. In 1863, Victoria had explained, ‘It is not the Queen’s sorrow that keeps her secluded … it is her overwhelming work and her health.’10 Landseer’s painting suggested alternative motives for Victoria’s withdrawal from public view; it suggested a dilettantish quality to her work; in the stoutness of her figure it suggested the return of health.
Although Victoria herself was pleased with the painting, promptly entrusting Landseer with a commission to engrave it and a fresh dispatch of photographs recording Brown’s new shorter beard to ensure maximum accuracy, she could hardly have judged popular feeling less adroitly. As The Saturday Review commented with some asperity, ‘If anyone will stand by this picture for a quarter of an hour and listen to the comments of visitors he will learn how great an imprudence has been committed.’11 Even The Illustrated London News expressed disappointment: ‘there is not one of Her Majesty’s subjects will see this lugubrious picture without regret’.12 The following year, an American visitor to London claimed in Tinsley’s Magazine that he had been shocked by ‘constant references to and jokes about “Mrs Brown” … an English synonym for the Queen …’13 It was a joke which had been current in court circles for some time. In June 1865, at Windsor Castle, Lord Stanley had expressed his reservations at Victoria distinguishing Brown ‘beyond what is customary or fitting in [his] position’, treatment which had earned her the nickname ‘Mrs Brown’. ‘If it lasts,’ Stanley warned, ‘the joke will grow into a scandal.’14 So it would prove.
Once, in the dark days after December 1861, Victoria had shed tears for the loss of the physical aspect of Albert’s love. ‘I am, alas! not old, and my feelings are strong and warm; my love is ardent,’ she had protested.15 The romantic flutterings of her youth – that girlish heart set aquiver by the Tsarevitch or the exiled Duke of Brunswick – had found fuller satisfaction in her marriage to Albert. Understandably Victoria’s lament encompassed more than the withdrawal of what she labelled Albert’s ‘finer feelings’. That she satisfied this shortfall after an interval with a square-jawed, sturdy-limbed Highland servant so devoted to her that in eighteen years he did not take a single day’s holiday from his continual duties is an evergreen rumour. No evidence supports it, bar those testimonies she herself left to her affection for John Brown: in her letters and her journal, in those memorials she created to him in print and solider matter. She called him ‘darling one’; ‘… so often I told him no one loved him more than I did or had a better friend than me: and he answered “Nor you – than me … No one loves you more.”’16 She gave him Valentine’s Day cards of cloying winsomeness. The very artlessness of such tokens – incriminating to modern ears – are proof of Victoria’s innocence, this woman whose candour and iron truthfulness so often expose her meagreness and folly.
In the beginning John Brown was another servant, although he consistently found particular favour following his journey south. In letters to Vicky during the spring of 1865, Victoria referred to him as ‘J. Brown’, an address lacking in intimacy. She praised him as ‘one in a thousand’ on account of his ‘unflinching straightforwardness and honesty; great moral courage; unselfishness and rare discretion and devotion’,17 and thus forged a bond between them for these were in part her own virtues. To her daughter she expressed without dissimulation her pleasure in the ‘excellent arrangement’ of her affairs since Brown had taken on the role of maid-of-all-work. But she explained that role with reference to other servants, no suggestion that Brown had stepped outside his allotted sphere. The key to the ghillie’s success was his willingness to focus exclusively on Victoria: it provided grounds for what became her unshakeable conviction of Highlanders’ loyalty.
‘I feel I have here and always in the house a good devoted soul,’ she wrote to Vicky on 5 April 1865, ‘whose only object and interest is my service, and God knows how I want so much to be taken care of.’18 Initially Vicky congratulated her mother on an arrangement that suited her so admirably. Three years later, as Victoria prepared for a holiday in Switzerland, Brown’s inclusion in the party arose partly at Vicky’s suggestion.19 Brown himself loathed the experience of being abroad. His fondness for the count
ry would not have been increased by an article published in the Gazette de Lausanne in September 1866. The paper’s anonymous correspondent claimed that a pregnant Victoria had been forced to cancel engagements. The child’s father was John Brown, the couple having previously contracted a morganatic marriage. Victoria would have been forty-seven at the time. John Brown was seven years her junior.
Victoria’s future private secretary Henry Ponsonby stated matter-of-factly that Brown was conspicuous on account of his Highland dress: riding on the box of Victoria’s carriage during her few public engagements, he presented a distinctive figure. The distinctive treatment Victoria accorded her Highland servant, however, took place within royal precincts, out of sight of a curious public. She consistently singled him out from her other servants, her courtiers and her children too. Brown received his orders direct from Victoria: he attended her in her room after breakfast for that purpose and was understood to come and go without knocking, as once Lehzen had done.
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