The Queen, Her Lover and the Most Notorious Spy in History

by Roland Perry

  Naming it as such gave it more credibility for her. She had become aware that the Scots, at least the Highlanders with whom she mixed, were not afraid of celebrating natural culminations in intimacy. They were discreet enough but still different from the English, she believed, who seemed to hide the subject of sex away as some squalid thing. She felt that the god-fearing, superstitious Irish filled the most natural of acts with unnecessary guilt. Perhaps only the French, along with the Scots, enjoyed her appreciation of intimacy, for which she still had as much passion as riding and music.

  Brown’s boozing was not the only block on more fun for Victoria. One night on a quick autumn holiday in 1874 at Loch Ordie, she was just in the act of settling on Brown with anticipated pleasure when she cried in pain and fell off him.

  ‘Deary, what is wrong?’ Brown asked as he held Victoria,who gasped for breath. She could not speak but instead pointed to her vagina. He fetched a glass of water.

  When she had recovered she sat up on the bed.

  ‘Lately I have had pain down there,’ she said.‘It’s just more difficult for some reason.The pain is awful.’

  ‘What’s the wee problem? Can you explain it better?’

  She smiled and kissed him again,‘Has my favourite servant suddenly become a doctor?’

  ‘I’ve always been a natural vet. I know when the wee mares are having trouble.’

  ‘I am not a horse, Johnny Brown!’

  ‘Them that have done much foaling have certain problems. You probably have the same trouble, dearie.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Hernias.They damage the walls of the horse’s abdomen and cause a slippage of the uterus.Ya canna let the stallions near them.’

  Victoria was reflective. She knew of such animal problems and she always listened to Brown’s common sense, which often cut to the core of a problem.

  ‘I’ll be all right in the morning.’

  ‘Dearie, you should see a doctor.’

  ‘What? And have some specialist from Harley Street probing me? Never!’

  ‘Suit yourself, but it means less hochmagandy.’

  Victoria reached for her whisky glass on the bedside dresser and indicated Brown should top it up.

  ‘Not if I kill the pain,’ she said coquettishly.

  39

  VICTORIA UP: BROWN DOWN

  Disraeli, in his second stint as prime minister, kept his secret intention to involve Victoria with the less vital issues of state while making her believe they were of the highest importance. He pushed the Royal Titles Act 1876 through parliament and on 1 May Victoria took the title ‘Empress of India’. This ‘acquisition’ had much to do with her son’s eight-month tour of the subcontinent, mainly India, which had just finished. It had been even more successful than his first tour, of the United States, when he was just a lad. Now 34, Bertie was proving more impressive to foreigners than to British subjects, although he had become an acceptable figure at home. He complained in a letter to some ministers that British officials in India were not showing the Indians respect:‘Because a man has a black face and a different religion than our own,’ Bertie said, ‘there is no reason why he should be treated [poorly].’

  These were more direct extensions of his mother’s sentiments. Victoria still carried some contempt for her son and his pleasure-seeking, which blinded her appreciation of his achievements, yet she was bemused to discover that he was becoming popular with the masses.

  The Indian title thrilled Victoria but she was displeased over Disraeli’s failure to act against Russia in the Russo-Turkish War. She threatened to abdicate over the issue five times between April 1877 and February 1878, but she was ignored or talked out of it. No-one close to Victoria really believed that she would hand the reins over to Bertie, who continued to be hell-bent on avoiding work and embracing leisure pursuits. He had not helped his cause by clashing with John Brown, whom he thought had an undue influence over his mother. Victoria supported and encouraged Disraeli’s expansionist policies. They led to conflict, including the Anglo-Zulu War and the second Anglo-Afghan War.Victoria justified it all by saying that if Britain were to maintain its position as a first-rate power, it had to be prepared for attacks and wars at all times.

  The British very much believed their own publicity about their racial and national superiority. Victoria had become the empire’s standard-bearer. She expounded on the propaganda by professing that the acquisitions worldwide were civilising and benign. Native peoples were being ‘protected’ from more ‘aggressive and cruel rulers’, such as the Dutch, French and Germans. A case in point was Australia. The British had taken over the entire continent, an area bigger than China, dispossessing the many Aboriginal tribes, who had inhabited the land for 50,000 years or more. The Dutch, and the French in particular, had explored the huge island’s west coast, but the British had taken over the lot and garrisoned it, making any part of it untenable for any other empire, unless they were prepared to go to war.Victoria claimed it was not Britain policy or custom to annex countries, unless obliged or forced to do so, yet she was well aware that obligation and retaliation were easy to arrange.

  Victoria enjoyed this period of her reign more than any other with the agreeable empire-builder Disraeli at the helm for a six-year stretch. She became so confident and comfortable with him that his defeat at the polls in 1880 dismayed her. Worse, she had never had time for his successor, William Gladstone, who had already appalled her for six years as prime minister from 1868 to 1874.

  In 1881,Victoria was devastated by the news that Disraeli was on his deathbed, and she wished to visit him. He told an aide: ‘No, it is better not. She would only ask me to take a message to Albert.’

  Disraeli died aged 77. Victoria was ‘blinded’ by ‘fast-falling tears’. As was usual for those who had pleased her, he received a monument. A memorial tablet to Disraeli was created. The inscription said it had been ‘placed by his grateful Sovereign and Friend,Victoria R.I.’

  Once more she used the ‘friend’ label. This sobriquet bracketed Disraeli with Elphinstone and Melbourne.The classification continued to have a special significance in the royal court and within Victoria’s most intimate circle.

  Victoria’s popularity had stabilised in the two decades since her post-Albert, prolonged mourning from late 1861 to early 1866. Even with Gladstone taking much of the limelight, by early 1882 the 62-year-old Victoria was a broadly acceptable figure. Talk of a republic had died away. Suggestions of abdication were muted. More than half the British population had been born after her accession. She was the only monarch they had known and, along with the older members of society, they were content with her reign. Still, the odd disgruntled individual emerged. On 2 March 1882, Roderick Maclean, a poet, was so upset that Victoria would not accept one of his poems that he took a shot at her as her carriage left Windsor railway station. Two Eton schoolboys, who knew their Tennyson but not Maclean’s works, attacked him with their umbrellas until he was apprehended by the police. Maclean was charged with attempted murder and taken to court.There was outrage when he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. This was poetic injustice to many. Victoria was unhappy at this ‘excuse’ for his actions but took solace in the huge amount of positive mail she received. Most letters expressed sympathy for her and discontent that Maclean had not been hanged.

  ‘It was worth being shot at,’ Victoria said, ‘to see how much one is loved.’

  A year later, Victoria fell down stairs at Windsor and was hurt, but it was nothing like the pain she suffered ten days later when John Brown died from a severe skin complaint, erysipelas, on 27 March 1883, aged 56. They had been companions and lovers for more than twenty years, which was about the length of time she had been with Albert. It had been a more sedate relationship, but a more contented one than with the always preoccupied and busy prince consort.Victoria, 63, wrote to Viscount Cranbrook, saying that perhaps never in history had there been a stronger, truer, warmer or more loving friendship between ‘the s
overeign and servant’.Victoria went on to describe Brown’s strength of character and power’. She mentioned his ‘fearless uprightness, kindness, sense of justice, honesty, independence and unselfishness combined with a tender, warm heart’.This made him ‘one of the most remarkable men’.Victoria felt she had been deprived ‘of all’ she needed for a ‘second time’.The blow had ‘fallen too heavily not to be very heavily felt’.

  On 8 April, amidst a torrent of exchanges with Vicky, she wrote:

  He protected me so, was so powerful and strong—that I felt so safe! And now all, all is gone in this world and all seems unhinged again in thousands of ways!—I feel so discouraged that it requires a terrible effort to bear up at all against it.This forces me to revisit the loss of dear papa in 1861.

  Vicky wrote back letters of sympathy and her own sadness did not help a heavy flu that forced her to hospital in Berlin with ‘a neuralgia in my forehead and eye’. During her short stay, her son Willy came to see her. She was asleep when he arrived and Willy sat for a minute sipping tea. He noticed an envelope with Victoria’s royal seal on it. Realising it was from his grandmother, he opened the letter and began to read it.

  Vicky stirred and saw Willy quickly place the letter back in the envelope.

  ‘You have no right to read my private correspondence!’ she snapped, trying to sit up.

  ‘Mama, it is from the queen and you know how much I love her!’

  ‘No excuse!’ Vicky said.

  ‘But I have a right to know about her! The rumours about the stress she is under—’

  ‘Of course she is under stress! She lost her mother, E and Albert all in a short time . . .and now the passing of her favourite manservant.’ Willy wanted to ask more but she waved a dismissive hand, turned over and went back to sleep. Willy was keen to ask her who ‘E’ was. He sat quietly finishing his tea, his eyes flicking from his mother to the letter. Was the answer in there, he wondered. He was even tempted to take it with him when he left but thought better of it. Instead, he wrote his mother a letter that she received a few weeks later at her home in Potsdam. He apologised for reading Victoria’s letter in the hospital and asked about her reference to ‘E’.Vicky was stunned. She wrote back a blistering missive, attacking her son for his ‘prying, devious, suspicious ways’. But Willy persisted, saying that he would write and ask Victoria herself if his mother did not tell him what it meant. That ‘blackmail’ forced Vicky’s response. She did not trust her son, but she did not want her mother to know that Willy knew ‘the secret’. In the end, she composed herself and wrote to him, telling him in the barest detail of what Victoria had written to her of the Elphinstone affair. Willy was pleased to have the upper hand with his mother, yet he swore to her that he would never divulge the ‘tale’ of his beloved grandmother’s ‘adventure’.

  Victoria, in her anxiety over Brown’s demise, turned to writing, which in the past had helped salve grief. But her aim was distorted by her feelings. She began composing Brown’s biography. It was a lengthy eulogy, which acted more like an emotional purging than an exercise to inform readers. Her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, and the Dean of Windsor, Randall Davidson, fretted over her desire to have the book published. They became alarmed when they read her first draft and others as she reworked and massaged passages like a professional. Disraeli had been her earlier consultant on how to create books and he had encouraged her to write a second tome.This was it. Ponsonby and Davidson thought the narrative was too revealing.They approached her, hand-wringing and with apologies, suggesting that the book would fuel the old and lingering rumours of a love affair with Brown.Victoria, still with a perspective distorted by her deep emotion, tried to edit through the changes. Ponsonby read them and delivered the bad news: her story was still too intimate. It had to be destroyed. Victoria was angry, frustrated and depressed. What was the point of being a queen if she could not even publish a memoir of a worthy servant? She salvaged a little of her intentions by publishing a sequel to her first work, calling it: More Leaves from a Journal of a Life in the Highlands, which she dedicated to her ‘devoted personal attendant and faithful friend John Brown’. It was not nearly enough.Victoria’s burst of commissioning statues, busts and memorials to him threatened to match that for Albert. It placed the Highlander alongside him, Melbourne, Disraeli and Elphinstone. Bertie was furious. He vowed to destroy them all when he became king. His anger that year saw him make some remarks that were indirectly aimed at his mother and her attitudes.

  ‘Class can no longer stand apart from class,’ he said in his capacity of founder of the Royal College of Music, which he opened in 1883, ‘I claim . . .that music produces that union of feeling, which I desire to promote.’ But if Bertie were true to his word, there were contradictions. Soon after this enlightened comment he ordered the clocks at Sandringham to run half-an-hour fast to create more time for shooting. He had some way to travel if he ever seriously intended to break down class barriers beyond music.

  40

  GLADSTONE OMNIPOTENT

  Victoria’s youngest child, Beatrice, planned to marry Prince Henry of Battenberg in April 1883, but Victoria objected.The thought of her last child departing distressed her. It was a sense that had haunted Victoria. As she aged, the emotion around losing family or friends had increased. Victoria never felt she was being selfish, believing her emotional needs as queen overrode the lives and sensitivities of others. Beatrice was denied her happiness for a year until a compromise was reached. In return for being allowed to marry, she would remain living at court and close to her mother. Henry may have been concerned with living so close to such a demanding and domineering mother-in-law, but he was willing to make the sacrifice, which was wise. Keeping Victoria happy would mean she would fight the government for a sizeable Civil List payment to keep him and his bride in the manner of the more salubrious members of the royal family.

  Victoria was inconsolable at the death of Leopold, who was 30 when he died of haemophilia. He was the second of her children—Alice having died in 1878—to die young.Victoria told her diary that she was grateful for ‘the good Lord’ having given him three decades on earth.

  Gladstone continued to undermine Victoria’s regal powers, which was his constitutional and democratic right, aided by his unmatched popularity as leader. He was renowned for his scruples, which gave him a moral authority. In this way, he rivalled the authority of the Church and the monarchy. Gladstone could never grasp why he was so exalted by the public. It was in part to do with his inspirational speaking style, and not a little to do with his reputation as a principled individual. His reforms too, had endeared him to the masses. It all irritated Victoria, who craved public adulation and being loved more than anyone else in her empire. Gladstone was more secure, despite his appeal even at times unnerving him. He claimed not to have courted popularity, and that in fact he was disturbed by nightmares about halls of people waiting for him to address them.

  Throughout history, people in any country yearned for a strong, believable leader they could trust. In England in the first half of the 1880s it was William Ewart Gladstone.Victoria remained discontented at being a distant second in her nation, as his influence spread through all the key institutions of politics, Church and army at the expense of the monarch’s. He had an impact on the constitution; his word carried more weight than Victoria’s in Ireland, Europe, Africa and even India. He stretched his prerogative and power over the entire empire at the expense of his queen who was powerless under the British system to diminish it. Perhaps if Albert had been alive there may have been more checks and balances to this creeping democratic development, but even he would have been required to bow to the growing democratisation of the nation. En route to this zenith of influence, Gladstone did not simply refuse to listen to what she said; he did not bother to even give her a hearing.Worse, he did not make time to tell her what his ministers were saying about issues. On occasions, they were under orders to withhold information.

  Victoria was n
ot yet an imitation of the country’s leader, but Gladstone’s strength and integrity had enhanced the office of prime minister to being far superior to that of the monarch.

  ‘His [Gladstone’s] first allegiance should have been to the Sovereign,’ she remarked often to courtiers with a distinct bitterness borne of years of frustration with the prime minister and his cabinet. This first consistent and emphatic breaking of the nexus between a dominant monarch and a subservient government changed the arrangement of the constitutional monarchy in Britain forever. A new paradigm had emerged. In her hurt and frustration, Victoria cried wolf once more about abdication because she hated being, or being seen as, a rubber stamp.Again, no-one believed her. Since recovering from Albert’s death, she had given the impression of being engaged to a point. But she could never match Gladstone, who was deeply involved with every aspect of running the nation and empire. There was much news of her grand production line of children and grandchildren; their comings and goings across Europe, the empire and the world; their good behaviour and bad; their births, deaths and marriages. This could not be compared to the important affairs of state, which Gladstone and his experienced cabinet were handling to the electorate’s satisfaction.Victoria’s disappointment at these developments was in some measure balanced by her own attitude. She was proud of being a constitutional monarch as opposed to most of her royal colleagues and family on the Continent, despite her thinking at times that she had power where she did not.There was little wonder that she rejoiced when Gladstone retired late in 1885 after his budget was defeated, saying his government was the worst she had ever had. Victoria blamed him for the death of General Gordon of Khartoum, reflecting a popular press cry. It was claimed that the government was responsible for abandoning the Sudan, and then for not acting quickly enough to send troops to Gordon’s aid in a siege.