by Julia Baird
One oft-repeated tidbit came from one of Bertie’s notorious lovers, Catherine Walters. When Bertie commissioned the sculptor Joseph Edgar Boehm to capture her beautiful features, Boehm told Walters he had seen much suspect activity in the three months he spent at Balmoral carving a statue of Brown at the queen’s request. Walters then confided in a friend:
Brown was a rude unmannerly fellow….He had unbounded influence with the Queen whom he treated with little respect, presuming in every way upon his position with her. It was the talk of all the household that he was “the Queen’s Stallion.” He was a fine man physically, though coarsely made, and had fine eyes (like the late Prince Consort’s, it was said) and the Queen, who had passionately been in love with her husband got it into her head that somehow the Prince’s spirit had passed into Brown and 4 years after her widowhood being very unhappy allowed him all privileges….She used to go away with him to a little house in the hills where, on the pretence that it was for protection and “to look after her dogs” he had a bedroom next to her, the ladies-in-waiting being put at the other end of the building….Boehm saw enough of his familiarities with her to leave no doubt of his being allowed “every conjugal privilege.”
Rumors of a marriage have been found not just in newspapers but in the diaries of the prominent and powerful. One minister who had served as Victoria’s chaplain, the Reverend Norman Macleod, confessed on his deathbed in 1872 that he had married the queen and John Brown—a story that was recorded by someone several points removed. Given Victoria’s belief that widows should not remarry, and the fact that Brown had almost married someone else in 1870, this is unlikely. But it is entirely possible there was some kind of promise or exchange or ritual, in which Brown gave his queen his mother’s wedding ring; he had, in effect, renounced marriage to serve and love only her.
What we can also be certain of, though, is that the royal family has taken every measure possible to destroy any evidence of the relationship between Victoria and Brown, both when Victoria was alive and after her death. Bertie’s hatred of his mother’s Highland servant survived his accession as Edward VII, and the family was deeply embarrassed that their matriarch and monarch was besotted with a commoner who drank and swore. Much has been lost. Which is why even the faintest new shred of information can tell the loudest story.
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In a small town near the southernmost tip of the Scottish Lowlands, not far from Berwick-upon-Tweed, the archives of Sir James Reid, Victoria’s doctor for twenty years, are kept in a stone mansion. Dr. Reid was a solid, respected man whom Victoria trusted and relied on from 1881 to the end of her life; she died in his arms. She had given strict instructions that Sir James alone—known for his tact and discretion—would lift and move her body after her death. He kept immaculate diaries in a tiny, neat hand, where he recorded daily movements and medical appointments. On one day, in 1883, he recorded a most curious sight. Opening the door to Victoria’s room at Windsor Castle, he saw her flirting with John Brown as she “walked a little.”
Brown says to her, lifting his kilt, “Oh, I thought it was here?”
She responds, laughing, and lifting up her own skirt, “No, it is here.”
It is unclear from the note exactly what “it” might be. What is clear is that Sir James was sufficiently interested in this exchange, and thought it significant enough, to record it in his little black journal. It revealed an extraordinary level of intimacy. We will never know the precise nature of that intimacy, but this snippet, which has not been published before, suggests there was a closeness that exceeded what was normal not just for a queen and her servant but for any male and female friend. Elizabeth Longford, the first to have full access to Victoria’s diaries, and author of a remarkably insightful biography published in 1964, has long insisted Victoria would have had only a platonic relationship with Brown. She wrote recently that if Brown had been Victoria’s lover, “one or other of her numerous courtiers, equerries, ladies-in-waiting, dressers, ‘rubbers,’ readers or other attendants would at some point have accidentally seen something.” What Longford did not know is that Sir James did.
Perhaps the incident that gives the greatest pause, only discovered through the preservation of the doctor’s notebooks outside the Royal Archives, is the report of Bertie being blackmailed with a cache of letters between Victoria and Alexander Profeit, the manager of Balmoral, who was thought to have intensely disliked Brown. There were about three hundred letters in total between Victoria and Profeit, and Profeit’s son knew how significant and potentially lucrative his discovery was in the years after Victoria’s death. Sir James Reid was dispatched to procure the letters from Profeit’s son on Bertie’s behalf, which he did successfully in 1905, after six months of negotiations. It is not known how much money was exchanged for these missives, nor their contents. They were burned immediately. Reid took some notes on the letters in a green notebook, which was destroyed upon his death. All we have is his remaining description of these notes in his journal. These letters, he wrote, were “very compromising.”
Despite all this, researchers have shied from concluding Victoria was in love with John Brown. To do so, it is implicit, would be to suggest that Victoria and John Brown had a burning, consuming, and enduring sexual relationship. Victoria never hid her relationship with Brown—surely she would have been less defiant if they were full-blown lovers. But their relationship was undeniably flirtatious, intense, and proximate. They spent many hours alone on the moors, drinking whisky—or what John Brown called “sperruts”—and stayed in remote locations with rooms near each other. It is difficult to imagine that such a passionate, lonely woman could have been immune to the attraction of a rugged Scot. We will never know what actually occurred; whether he held her hand, or put his arms around her as they sat, isolated and miles away from human eyes in the mountains near Balmoral. There are a thousand possibilities for intimacy on the spectrum between lover and friend. Victoria might have curled up against him once or twice to remind herself what it was like to feel the heat of another body next to hers; she was more than a full foot shorter than Brown. To those who imagine that perhaps brief moments of tenderness would not conflict with the morals and manner of a monarch, it is of little significance what form their physical relationship took.
What is certain is that Queen Victoria was in love with John Brown. This, in fact, is the true scandal. It was not a love she had known with Albert, in which she was the devoted inferior who worked on “improving herself,” under the guidance of a man she saw as a god, not an equal. She never knew the love of her father, for a long time she distrusted the love of her mother, and Lord Melbourne was more of a mentor than a jovial companion. Her love for John Brown was unique. He was seven years younger than Victoria, and an impossible chasm stood between them socially. Even so, he treated her like a woman, not a queen. Victoria thought of marriage as something between a “master” and an adoring, ostensibly subservient wife. The thought that a marriage could occur between a woman who ruled the world and a man who tended her horses was absurd to her and would violate her basic conception of the relationship. But she loved him, as a woman who loves the man who protects and adores her.
Because the relationship was so improbable, Victoria could allow herself to think of it as an ardent best friendship. It is clear, from Reid’s glimpse into their private world, that there was a level of intimacy between them that would have scandalized society. The extent or nature of their physical relationship we will never know. Victoria’s relationship with Brown was like a second marriage, with a remarkably different power dynamic—and one that, much as she would have refused to admit it, suited the queen very well. Gradually, the color crept back into her life. When Louise got married the next month, her mother wore rubies as well as diamonds.
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Over in Europe, Otto von Bismarck was dreaming of a united Germany that would emerge as a continental superpower. Bismarck’s appetite had been whetted by the 1866 Austro-Prussian war, aft
er which twenty-two northern German states formed a confederation, led by Prussia. Now he wanted to exploit any opportunity to draw the states together more tightly under a centralized government, encompassing those in southern Germany that were still independent, including Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt. He believed one way to achieve this was to provoke neighboring France into a war, in order to force the southern German states to join with the militarily muscular northern states to fight their common enemy. France was threatened by Bismarck’s overt ambition, and when a Prussian prince was considered as a possible king of Spain, France roared with disapproval. The Prussian prince’s name was eventually withdrawn, but subsequent diplomatic slights (exaggerated by a manipulative Bismarck, who redrafted a crucial dispatch) convinced France to attack: it declared war on Germany in July 1870. After South Germany joined with the North, the Prusso-German army had roughly twice as many soldiers as the French.
After the ugliness of the Crimean War sixteen years earlier, Victoria was desperate to maintain Britain’s neutrality. She pored over the accounts of the wounded in newspapers, and repeatedly urged Gladstone to increase the number of British troops as an “absolute necessity.” She demanded to know the readiness for war, numbers in the army and navy, and the state of the dockyards.
Victoria could see little point to the conflict, and was miserable about her sons-in-law going to war. She insisted, “The only way is to leave matters as quiet as possible, and to let people quiet down. For me to attempt to do anything, beyond preaching neutrality and prudence would be useless.” Her heart, though, was with Germany. (This did not stop her from agreeing to Britain’s continuing sale of arms and horses to France, though, which outraged Prussia.) She prayed only for the war to end, and comforted Vicky and the heavily pregnant Alice; both daughters tended to the wounded in hospitals as they waited for news of their soldier husbands. Back in the Highlands, Victoria stopped at the Balmoral local store and bought calico for bandages.
The war lasted less than a year. After the Battle of Sedan in September 1870, the French leader Napoleon III surrendered and was captured along with 104,000 of his men. Prussia’s win was decisive. Their numbers were superior, thanks partly to the use of conscription as well as to their railways, their use of Krupp steel artillery, and their well-coordinated mobilization. This marked the end of the balance of power in Europe, whereby Britain and France had been dominant for half a century. Now the German empire was rising. Germany scooped up Alsace and half of Lorraine, which France would try to win back in the First World War. Germany was now officially unified under King William I of Prussia; it became a single country in January 1871. At the same time, Italy captured and annexed the Papal States, which had been under the direct rule of the Pope since the 700s and had lost their protector in Napoleon III. The landscape of European power was shifting every year.
In the midst of the war, France had become a republic when the revolutionary Paris Commune staged a coup on September 4, 1870. The French empress Eugénie came to hide in England. A sympathetic Victoria went to meet her, recording the story of her flight and horror in exacting detail—from the gamin who recognized her under her hat and cloak and called out “À la guillotine!” to the hellishly uncomfortable trip, riding sandwiched in a carriage on rocky roads. The British Isles were once again spared revolution; their stout queen was in no danger.
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As Victoria grew older, she gradually leaned more toward conservatism. In her youth, she had taken a keen interest in the life of the poor as described by Charles Dickens, but she had not gone on to take an interest in the causes of poverty and frequently blamed those protesting against it. She supported the first of the Irish Land Acts in 1870, which meant tenants would be compensated for any changes they made to their property, but she hastened to point out to the prime minister the “apparent want of sympathy with the landlords.” It was unfair, she wrote, to cast the “entire blame” of the problems with the landlords, and said the tenants should not be led to think that they could misbehave.
This did not mean the queen did not wish for the lot of the poor to improve. When she met Charles Dickens in March 1870, she described him as “very agreeable, with a pleasant voice and manner.” When Dickens died, just three months later, at age fifty-eight, Victoria wrote: “He had a large, loving mind and strongest sympathy with the poorer peoples. He felt sure that a better feeling, and much greater union of classes would take place in time. And I pray earnestly it may.” Yet the queen did not suggest or contemplate any steps that might alleviate this poverty, as her husband might have done when he was alive.
Victoria favored escape over exploration. She wrote enormously popular books about her time in Scotland—Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands in 1868 and More Leaves in 1884—that were domestic and sweetly focused on her family, and the books fomented a belief that she was idling. But as Arthur Ponsonby pointed out, Victoria was as opinionated as ever:
It would not require much research to pick out a date recording some colorless, unimportant incident and to find it in her correspondence on the same day some letter to the Prime Minister or the Private Secretary expressing in her most vehement language her desire to interfere in high matters of national importance. But this was all excluded from the volumes and the general public, including radicals and even republicans for a short time, were satisfied there could be no harm whatever in a monarch who spent all her days so innocently in a Scottish retreat.
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As a single parent, she felt the weight of her children’s welfare acutely. Her correspondence continued with her adored Vicky. Victoria had also warmed to Bertie since he married the sweet-natured, elegant Alexandra of Denmark, and she praised his popularity while still warning him off his fast, reckless behavior. Bertie, who lived in Sandringham House at Norfolk, continued to drink, gamble, and woo women as his wife battled through a series of illnesses and pregnancies. The queen’s attempted control of Bertie’s and Alexandra’s social life was the subject of much chatter.
In 1869, the husband of one of Bertie’s alleged lovers—Harriet Mordaunt—exposed his peccadilloes in what would be a scorching scandal. As he sat to write a letter to his mother, Bertie felt sick, remembering how disappointed his father had been about Nellie Clifden just before his death. On February 10, 1870, he wrote to the queen: “It is my painful duty (I call it painful, because it must be so to you to know that yr eldest son is obliged to appear as a witness in a court of justice) to inform you that I have been subpoenaed by Sir C. Mourdaunt’s Counsel to appear as a Witness on Saturday next at Lord Penzance’s Court.” The queen supported her son, and believed him to be innocent. The prime minister, W. E. Gladstone, followed suit. After confident testimony from Bertie in court, the judge declared Harriet insane. Bertie went on blithely carousing and womanizing. He was unconcerned by the slanders made against his name, but he was widely considered a roué.
It was now her middle children Victoria was struggling with. At twenty-six, Affie drank heavily and had indulged in an affair with a young woman at Malta when he was stationed there. His mother distrusted his reserved manner and found him “touchy, vague and willful.” She and twenty-seven-year-old Alice, though, had reached a rapprochement of sorts. Victoria criticized Helena for producing “excessively plain” babies, for ill health and pudginess, and for looking older than her twenty-four years. Louise’s marriage was fraught and unhappy. The intellectual Leopold was straining against his confinement at home as he fought off various hemorrhages and leg injuries. His siblings protested what they saw as their mother’s overprotective attitude toward their sickly, stifled brother; Victoria staunchly insisted they would do better not to think of what Leopold was missing out on, but everything he could still do. Her children were ungrateful, and foolish to not take her advice, she thought. Being head of a family and sovereign at once was almost more than a person could bear. It was too bad Bertie was such a disappointment.
The youngest children were still sw
eet and adored. Arthur, who still strongly resembled his father at twenty, troubled his mother only when he parted his hair down the middle. Beatrice, thirteen, was the most overtly favored, and the child Victoria was most intent on keeping home with her. Victoria tried to delay her adulthood, preventing her from going out at night and postponing her societal “coming out” as long as she could. “She is the last I have,” Victoria wrote plaintively, “and I could not live without her.” As grandchildren ran giggling around her palaces, Victoria doted on them—especially the good-looking ones—while simultaneously complaining about how many there were. She experienced diminishing returns when it came to her grandchildren: she was interested in perhaps two to three of them, but “when they come at a rate of three a year,” she told an apologetically maternal Vicky, “it becomes a cause of mere anxiety for my own children and of no great interest.”
In the decade after Albert died, Victoria became increasingly selfish. Her grief and depression, unchecked, led her to view all interactions through a self-centered lens—even foreign affairs were, initially, assessed according to the impact on her state of mind. Those who were most attuned to her needs, like John Brown and Beatrice, were praised. Those who weren’t, like Gladstone, were shut out. She accused her children of not understanding her burden. When her daughter Louise got engaged, Victoria wasn’t happy for her; she was saddened by the thought of losing another daughter. When Affie got married in St. Petersburg, she refused to go. It was just depressing, she wrote to Vicky, when the children married. It was the first wedding of one of her children that she missed, but she confided in Vicky, “I dislike now witnessing marriages, very much, and think them sad and painful, especially a daughter’s marriage.” She also missed her grandchild Willy’s confirmation in Prussia. When Willy’s mother, Vicky, protested, Victoria responded, “I am very tired.”