by Julia Baird
Around the dining table, the wars made for awkward conversation. Vicky was married to a dovish Prussian prince who fought for the Prussians, Alice to a German prince who fought for the Austrians, Bertie to a Danish princess, and Helena to a German prince born in Denmark. When Victoria began to plan Louise’s future at the end of 1869, she abandoned Albert’s insistence on clever geopolitical matches. She wrote to Bertie: “Times have much changed; great foreign alliances are looked on as causes of trouble and anxiety, and are of no good. What could be more painful than the position in which our family was placed during the wars with Denmark, and between Prussia and Austria?” Instead, the beautiful Louise married a subject—a poetry-loving Liberal politician named John George Edward Henry Douglas Sutherland Campbell, Lord Lorne. (The couple lived separately and did not have children; rumors endure about Lorne’s sexuality. Louise, a talented sculptor, harbored her own secrets; she had allegedly had an affair with the sculptor Joseph Edgar Boehm, who is thought to have died while making love to her. A recent biographer claims she bore a child who was quietly sent out for adoption.) But Helena married Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, despite her mother’s political objections.
The royal brood continued to multiply. Bertie’s relationship with his mother improved after he married Alix, though Victoria still refused to allow him official responsibilities. Alice, a great admirer and friend of Florence Nightingale’s, worked as a nurse in the Austro-Prussian war of 1866 and was happily married, though she later became somewhat estranged from her mother when she angered her by suggesting that she go out in public more. When Vicky lost one of her children, Sigismund, at just twenty-one months to meningitis, Victoria was desperate that she could not be with her to comfort her. She continued to fret about the hemophiliac Leopold, and after he suffered a hemorrhage in 1868, Victoria decided he would be her “chief object in life.” She kissed him good night religiously. Even when he was well, Victoria felt “in constant anxiety about him.” The constant thought that nagged her throughout her children’s lives was how the loss of their father had affected them. She tried to compensate for his absence, but felt herself to be unequal to it. So instead she controlled, chastised, commanded, and adored her children, in a storm of moods. In her journal, she stopped drawing the cozy domestic scenes that had filled the pages when Albert was alive. From now, it was mostly the remote hills of Scotland that she etched in quiet moments.
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On December 10, 1865, four years after Albert’s death, Victoria’s beloved uncle Leopold died. She was “stupefied and stunned” by the loss of her surrogate father. At forty-six, to be a sovereign, a single parent of nine children, and the matriarch of a family often fractured by warring European countries was a heavy load to bear without the sage counsel and company of a close relative. In the absence of this, Victoria had determined that her north star would be Albert’s legacy, and she repeatedly vowed to carry out his wishes. But in truth, she found it easier to erect statues than to execute his ideas.
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Victoria’s grief was lengthy and noisy. The public wondered: Why could she not turn up at Parliament and fulfill her role as monarch? Why could she not briefly put aside her own suffering to do the work for which she was paid? But there are at least two things that must surely temper the scorn for a woman who failed to function properly for years. First, Victoria was not unwilling to work; she was unwilling to appear in public. The acute anxiety she experienced after Albert’s death resembled a kind of social phobia, of which she was conscious but which she was unable to control. Second, it is only in recent years (since the mid-1980s) that psychologists have begun seriously to examine the nature of enduring grief—a complicated, traumatic, or prolonged grief—to understand why some suffer more acutely than others. It is a controversial subject, as many resist pathologizing understandable grief, but it is now in the appendix of DSM-5 (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition), as Persistent Complex Bereavement Disorder (PCBD). Studies of this disorder, which affects an estimated 10 percent of the bereaved, shed light on why Victoria might have been especially vulnerable to a deep, consuming mourning.
Women are more likely to experience protracted grief than men, and they are particularly susceptible if they have lost a parent in childhood, have been bullied or had controlling parents, have lost a supportive spouse they were highly dependent on, or if the death was sudden and unexpected. Other contributing factors include a history of mood disorder and an insecure attachment style. Victoria was ripe to grieve. While Victorians tolerated extensive mourning, Victoria’s seclusion definitely exceeded what people thought appropriate for a widowed queen. The initial sympathy had faded by the mid-1860s, just a few years after Albert’s death.
Today, psychotherapy and antidepressants would probably be prescribed, as well as regular exercise and a good diet. Instead, the queen who could control an empire but not her own heart gathered other sad women around her and wallowed in misery. She hated being told that she would be happy again. To suggest that things would improve seemed grossly disloyal to the memory of Albert. And the thought of a replacement was impossible, making the loss even starker. When a senior religious figure told Victoria she must think of herself as a bride of Christ from now on, she replied, “That is what I call twaddle.”
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Time lessened the anguish. But Victoria missed it when it faded, writing to Lady Waterpark: “The violent grief is past—I almost grieve for that, for there is sweetness even in that, but the constant black and the constant cloud are ever abiding.” Still, she said, she was ready to “struggle on cheerfully.” She had spent almost three years saying she wanted to die, but now said she wanted to live for her family and friends. As she grew stronger and happier, she was able to delight in nature again. Slowly she resumed recording beautiful scenes in her journal. In the thick of night in November 1866, Affie asked Victoria’s maid to wake his mother to tell her the sky was full of falling stars. She rolled out of bed reluctantly and wrapped her dressing gown around her. When she stood at the window, she saw an extraordinary spectacle of large, bright stars, and meteors shooting like rockets across the sky. She remained there for half an hour and sent her servants to wake as many people as possible. She did not want anyone to miss it.
* * *
* Helena was given a dowry when she married in 1866, Louise was awarded a dowry in 1871, Arthur was given a grant when he turned twenty-one in July 1871, and Prince Alfred an annuity at turning twenty-one, then again when he married in 1873.
CHAPTER 23
The Queen’s Stallion
Brown was a rude unmannerly fellow…but he had unbounded influence with the Queen whom he treated with little respect….It was the talk of all the household that he was “the Queen’s Stallion.” He was a fine man physically, though coarsely made.
—WILFRED SCAWEN BLUNT
God knows, how much I want to be taken care of.
—QUEEN VICTORIA, 1865
John Brown was, most of all, a physical presence. When the ghillie was with Victoria, he rowed her boats, steered her around dance floors, and guided her up steep Highland paths. He lifted her onto her horse, tackled assailants, carried her when she was unable to walk, and perched on top of her carriages. There is little left of Brown in the diaries Victoria’s daughter Beatrice edited; he emerges suddenly as though from the shadows, summoned when needed, when rivers were too deep, horses too stubborn, tracks too rocky, roads too wet. A reader would not be able to tell, though, from these scattered entries, that Brown was almost always nearby. He traveled with the queen everywhere: in just a few years, she would be unashamed to declare him her best friend. Gossips suggested he was more than this; even Victoria’s children called the strapping Scot “the Queen’s Stallion.” How else to view the remarkably unusual relationship between a sovereign and a servant? As a ruler, Victoria was a firm adherent of protocol. But as a woman, she obeyed her instincts. The muckrakers could rot. John Brown made he
r happy.
Always drawn to the direct, the unassuming and unaffected, Victoria had been instantly impressed by the young ghillie working at Balmoral. In 1850, when she was thirty-one, she described him as “a good looking, tall lad of 23, with fair curly hair, so very good humored & willing.” He was wholly obliging when asked to come and care for the queen more than a decade later, after Albert had died. He was to be the most intimate friend of her life—more than Lehzen, Melbourne, or any of the others who had come and gone. Victoria spent eighteen years in the company of John Brown, almost as long as she spent with her beloved Albert.
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In the late 1860s, Victoria was still something of a recluse. When she appeared at a garden party at Buckingham Palace in 1868, the crowds disoriented her. She had been in seclusion for almost seven years. Her journal entries in those years were flat, dull, and repetitive, devoid of her usual enthusiasm and curiosity (with occasional exceptions, such as her description of the visit of two conjoined girls from South Carolina, the children of slaves, who sang duets for her). The sediment of grief had compressed her world; even dramatic foreign events were, at least initially, described in the context of her feelings. Her days were still dogged by death. In 1870 alone, she lost Countess Blücher, General Grey, her doctor James Clark, and her old loyal governess, Lehzen. In 1872, the loss of her sister Feodora was “irreparable.” The sad but resilient Victoria was surviving so many of the important figures in her life. As her old intimates slowly vanished, the queen ate too much, let out her skirts, and battled with rheumatism, toothaches, and headaches.
But as her subjects waited for the queen to appear, the rumors swirled about the man who had captured her affection and monopolized her attention. Had this tall Scot spirited her away? Victoria felt no sense of guilt when she was charged with neglecting her queenly duty up in Scotland: she saw herself as the sole arbiter of what that duty entailed. She refused to defer trips to Balmoral, even when needed to open Parliament or manage a ministerial crisis. Sir Thomas Biddulph, the Keeper of the Privy Purse, said, “The Queen will talk as if she were Mrs. Jones and might live just where she liked.” The men of state scratched their heads as the queen’s carriage rattled through the streets with a familiar six-foot-four figure on top of it: Brown, in his kilt, glaring protectively at anyone who might approach his queen.
What shocked people most was Brown’s familiarity. It was unthinkable that a man could address a queen in such a fashion as he did. The Tory lord chancellor, Lord Cairns, was dumbstruck while watching him at a Ghillies’ Ball—where royals and aristocrats danced with servants—in Balmoral: “I did not conceive it possible that anyone could behave so roughly as he does to the Queen.” A barrister once observed Brown trying to pin a plaid shawl on the queen, when Victoria moved and the pin grazed her chin. Brown then cried, “Hoots, wumman, canna ye hold yer head still!” The empress of Russia reported that Brown treated Victoria “like a small child.”
Yet what others saw as impertinence was to Victoria a refreshing lack of reserve. And this frankness was a hallmark of the intimacy she had craved from the moment she had lost Albert. When walking on steep slopes in the Highlands with Victoria and her other ladies, Jane Churchill fell, having tangled her feet in the hem of her dress. Picking her up, Brown said bluntly, “Your Ladyship is not so heavy as Her Majesty!” Victoria laughed at this: “I said ‘Am I grown heavier do you think?’ ‘Well, I think you are,’ was the plainspoken reply.”
Many found the queen’s blatant disregard for propriety and gossip galling. An indignant Lord Derby listed in his journal all that the queen was doing to “create suspicions”:
Long solitary rides, in secluded parts of the park: constant attendance upon her in her room: private messages sent by him to persons of rank: avoidance of observation while he is leading her pony or driving her little carriage: everything shows that she has selected this man for a kind of friendship which is absurd and unbecoming her position. The Princesses—perhaps unwisely—make a joke of the matter, and talk of him as “Mamma’s lover.”
Victoria even tolerated and ignored Brown’s alcoholism. When he lay passed out, drunk, in his room one afternoon, unable to take her riding, Henry Ponsonby* simply hopped onto the carriage instead. Not a word was spoken. (Victoria overlooked her servants’ drinking. When she received a report that a footman who was an alcoholic had dropped a lamp on the stairs, she just wrote “poor man” in the margin.) Brown increasingly acted as an intermediary, annoying those of high rank. Instead of seeing the queen as hoped, they met with a blunt, bearded Scotsman who had little time for niceties. When the mayor of Portsmouth came to see her, to ask if she could come to a military review, Brown simply stuck his head in the room and said, “The Queen says sartenly not.” The mayor retreated, stung. Derby worried that no one was willing to tell the queen about how the rest of the world perceived Brown, and her relationship with him.
What Victoria failed to recognize was the impact Brown had on her children, who despised him and would devote considerable energy to destroying any record of their mother’s intimacy with a ghillie. His drinking, cussing, and bossing were not as appealing to the younger people in the house. Bertie, Alfred, Louise, and Leopold particularly grew to loathe Brown. They thought him coarse and presumptuous, and they were irritated by their mother’s fondness for him. When Louise was engaged and planning her household, she told Ponsonby, “I won’t have an absurd man in a kilt following me about everywhere.”
Victoria, a woman who believed that her deceased husband still had a presence in the physical world, was drawn to Brown’s seeming sixth sense, thought to be common to Highlanders. When the royal family left Balmoral in 1861, Brown told her he hoped she would keep well and that “above all, that you may have no deaths in the family.” There were three that year, including Albert’s. Brown’s words circled repeatedly in Victoria’s mind, “as if they had been a sort of strange presentiment.” This convinced her of his mystical powers. Many still believe she used Brown as a medium during séances to try to reach Albert; this is possible, given her interest in spiritualism, but has never been proved. One writer called Brown “Rasputin in a kilt.” (The empress Alexandra Feodorovna, who would later be captivated by the real Rasputin, met John Brown when she visited her grandmother Victoria with her mother, Alice.)
Victoria doubled Brown’s salary, gave him a house for his retirement at Balmoral, promoted him to “the Queen’s Highland Servant,” and decorated him with awards. She ordered the Balmoral property manager to trace Brown’s family tree and was thrilled when he linked him to Scotland’s most prestigious clans. She knew Brown came from fine stock.
—
For five years after Albert’s death, the queen remained hidden to the public. But in 1867, thousands flocked to the annual Spring Exhibition of the Royal Academy. On display was a large canvas, a painting, by Sir Edwin Landseer, titled Her Majesty at Osborne, 1866. In it, the queen sat sidesaddle on a sleek dark horse, dressed in her customary black. She was reading a letter from the dispatch box on the ground, next to her dogs. Opposite was a tall figure in a black kilt and jacket solemnly holding the horse’s bridle. Was this what the queen had been doing with her time in the years since Albert’s death?
It caused a scandal. The Saturday Review art critic wrote: “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.” It was not long before the gossip became crude: Were the queen and Mr. Brown lovers? Was she pregnant with his child? Had they secretly married? In 1868, an American visitor said he was gobsmacked by constant, crass jokes about the queen commonly referred to as “Mrs. Brown.” “I have been told,” he wrote, “that the Queen was insane, and John Brown was her keeper; the Queen was a spiritualist, and John Brown was her medium.”
Victoria adored the painting and ordered an engraving. She refused to change her behavior. When it was delicately suggested to her in 1867 that she not ta
ke Brown with her to a military review in Hyde Park, because they expected crowds to mock him, she was furious. She crushed the idea with her customary mix of self-pity and obstinacy, claiming it would make her nervous and upset, that Brown was a comfort to her. The Cabinet, after a lengthy discussion about her mental health, decided not to press her. Her physician Dr. Jenner had informed them that any “strong excitement (and very little excites her) would cause her to vomit violently.” And that if she had not been provided this relief by “Nature,” “the effect on her mind might be dangerous.” The men of state stared at one another across the Cabinet table: The queen would have a vomiting fit if they asked her to leave Brown at home? And if she could not vomit, then she might go mad? The review was postponed.
In quiet moments, staring out at the misty Highlands or the green lawns of Windsor, Victoria felt a nagging sense of guilt. Did the fact that her grief was easing mean that she was being disloyal to Albert? Was it wrong to take consolation in another’s company? She confided in Dean Wellesley, who assured her that “a settled mournful resignation” was entirely appropriate, and was a more enduring evidence of love than initial, blinding grief. He went further, telling her that she should consider this comfort a gift from God.
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There are few subjects as wildly speculated about and poorly documented as Queen Victoria’s relationship with John Brown. Most of the rumors are unfounded. The story of Victoria popping out of a carriage, disappearing into a cottage to give birth to John Brown’s child, then emerging beaming and bearing champagne, for example, is risible for anyone who has ever given or witnessed birth. Most of the accounts rest on tantalizing tales of documents that have mysteriously disappeared over the years. The author E. P. Tisdall claims to have received a version of a letter allegedly in Victoria’s writing telling John Brown she adored him, pieced together from the rubbish bin where Brown had allegedly left it after tearing it up. But this letter has been lost, and its veracity and claimed semblance to Victoria’s writing were never tested.