QUEEN VICTORIA A Personal History

by Christopher Hibbert

  Over government changes the Queen could exercise no such control as she endeavoured to exercise in her Household; and the prospect of having to deal with a new Minister always filled her with the utmost alarm and foreboding. When Lord Palmerston died in October 1865 and Lord Russell succeeded him as Prime Minister she was distraught, dreading the change more than words could express, although, so she now told King Leopold, she had never really liked Palmerston any more than she did Russell. 'He had many valuable qualities,' she wrote of 'Pilgerstein', 'though many bad ones, and we had God knows! terrible trouble with him ... I never could the least respect him, nor could I forget his conduct on certain occasions to my Angel.'3

  No sooner had she found Russell not nearly as difficult as she had feared he might be than his Government was defeated. Aghast at the thought of having to accept a Conservative Government under Lord Derby, she at first refused to accept Russell's resignation; and, when she was persuaded that she would have to do so, she gave way with a decidedly ill grace, complaining that all these changes were 'very trying'. It was trying even having to accept Benjamin Disraeli, a man whom Prince Albert had described as being 'without one single element of the gentleman in his composition', as Chancellor of the Exchequer once again, though she had recently had cause to modify her earlier view that Disraeli was 'detestable, unprincipled, reckless, & not respectable'. He had certainly paid a most admirable public tribute to her husband whose acquaintance, he privately assured her, was 'one of the most satisfactory incidents of his life'. The Prince was, he had said, 'the only person' whom he had 'ever known who realized the Ideal... There was in him an union of the manly graces and sublime simplicity of chivalry with the intellectual splendour of the Attic Academe.'4

  Mr Disraeli had also spoken most movingly about the Albert Memorial, and, when he had become Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons for the first time under Derby, he had impressed the Queen by the clarity and vividness of the parliamentary reports which it was his duty - his 'pleasure', he said - to send her. But he was a very odd person; so was his wife; and, while she felt assured of his devotion to herself and the Crown, she had never been quite at ease in his presence. This was soon to change.

  In February 1868, after Lord Derby's resignation, Disraeli became Prime Minister. It was, the Queen thought, 'a proud thing for a Man "risen from the people" to have obtained!'5 And if he was scarcely 'a man of the people', his father being a distinguished and well-to-do man of letters and his mother descended from one of the most ancient of Jewish families, it was certainly a remarkable achievement for Disraeli to have reached, as he put it himself, 'the top of the greasy pole'. For he was undoubtedly an outsider in the hierarchy of his party. Not only his race and tastes and manner but even his education separated him from his colleagues: apart from the Lord Chancellor, Lord Chelmsford, who had been educated at a naval school at Gosport, he was the only member of his Cabinet who had not attended a well-known public school: two had been to Rugby, one to Shrewsbury, the remaining nine to Eton.

  From the beginning he set out to woo and flatter the Queen with an infallible instinct for the phrase, the gesture, the compliment, the overture that would most delight her. He was later to tell a colleague who had asked for advice as to how to handle the Queen, 'First of all, remember she is a woman.' He never forgot this himself. She responded by sending him a valentine card depicting cherubs lying on clouds.

  'The present Man will do well,' she told the Crown Princess with complacent satisfaction, 'and will be particularly loyal and anxious to please me in every way.6 He is vy peculiar ... most singular - thoroughly Jewish looking, a livid complexion, dark eyes and eyebrows and black ringlets. The expression is disagreeable, but I did not find him so to talk to. He has a very bland manner, and his language is very flowery ... but he is vy clever and sensible and vy conciliatory, He is full of poetry, romance & chivalry. When he knelt down to kiss my hand wh[ich] he took in both his - he said: "In loving loyalty and faith." '7

  It would, he assured Her Majesty, 'be his delight and duty to render the transaction of affairs as easy as possible'. In 'smaller matters', he hoped he would succeed in this endeavour; but he ventured to trust that, in the great affairs of state, Her Majesty would deign not to hold from him the benefit of her wise guidance. 'Your Majesty's life has been passed in constant communion with great men,' he continued in the same tone of complimentary blandishment, 'and the knowledge and management of important transactions. Even if Your Majesty were not gifted with those great abilities, which all must now acknowledge, this rare and choice experience must give Your Majesty an advantage in judgement, which few living persons, and probably no living prince, can rival.'[xlv]8 Disraeli himself recognized that he did lay it on 'rather thick' with her. When he received a box of primroses from Windsor, for example, he told her that 'their lustre was enhanced by the condescending hand which [had] showered upon him all the treasures of Spring'. As he said to Matthew Arnold, 'you have heard me called a flatterer, and it is true. Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to royalty, you should lay it on with a trowel.'9 But he never underestimated the Queen's astuteness; he grew genuinely fond of her; in treating her with elaborate courtesy and deferential flirtatiousness he was behaving towards her as he did towards all women he liked. In writing those long, amusing, informative, gossipy letters which meant so much to her, he was indulging a whim to please her rather than performing a necessary and arduous duty.

  Disraeli's letters certainly delighted her. She told Lady Augusta Stanley that she 'had never had such letters in her life', that she 'never before knew everything'.10 'No Minister,' she wrote, 'since Sir R. Peel (excepting poor dear Lord Aberdeen) has ever shown that care for my personal affairs, or that respect and deference for me which he has.'

  There were, of course, things she was not told; but Disraeli was always anxious to ensure that she was given the impression of constantly being consulted except on trivial matters not worth her consideration. On suggesting, for example, that the Duke of Atholl might be appointed a Knight of the Order of the Thistle, he wrote, 'Your Majesty is a much better judge of these matters than himself; and indeed there are very few public matters on wh[ich] he feels more and more every day Your Majesty is not much more competent to advise than be advised.'11 'I never deny,' he once said, explaining his method of dealing with her. 'I never contradict, I sometimes forget. '12

  Attentive towards her in his fulsome correspondence, Disraeli was as careful to charm her whenever they met. He did not much like going to Windsor, that 'castle of the winds' as he called it, remembering with a shudder the icy draughts that blew under doors and through ill-fitting window frames; but he never showed his discomfort to her. He resented having to go to Balmoral, being forced to travel so many miles from London to a place where it rained almost continuously throughout his first visit and where he caught a cold on his second: he never paid a third. But he displayed no irritation. He 'seemed delighted with his visit,' the Queen wrote of the first occasion, '& made himself most agreeable'.13 On a subsequent visit to Osborne it was the Queen who made herself most agreeable to him.

  Osborne was lovely [Disraeli told his friend, Lady Bradford], its green shades refreshing after the fervent glare of the voyage, and its blue bay full of white sails.

  The Faery [Disraeli's less mocking than affectionate nickname for the Queen] sent for me the instant I arrived. I can only describe my reception by telling you that I really thought she was going to embrace me. She was wreathed with smiles, and, as she tattled, glided about the room like a bird. She ... said, 'To think of your having the gout! How you must have suffered! And you ought not to stand now! You shall have a chair!'

  Only think of that! I remember that Lord Derby after one of his severest illnesses, had an Audience of her Majesty, and he mentioned it to me, as a proof of the Queen's favour, that Her Majesty had remarked to him, 'how sorry she was she could not ask him to be seated'.14

  Disraeli was Prime Minister,
however, for less than a year. In December 1868 she was obliged to part with him and to accept a Liberal Government under the leadership of the 59-year-old William Ewart Gladstone.

  When she had first met Mr Gladstone, whose character Prince Albert had held in high regard, she had esteemed him too. 'He is very agreeable,' she had written at that time, 'so quiet & intellectual, with such a knowledge of all subjects, & is such a good man.' But since then she had changed her mind about him, comparing his 'cold loyalty' to the throne with the 'warm devotion' of Disraeli and agreeing with the Hon. Emily Eden that Gladstone did not converse, he harangued: 'and the more he says,' Miss Eden added, 'the more I don't understand ... if he were soaked in boiling water and rinsed until he was twisted into rope, I do not suppose a drop of fun would ooze out. '15

  He spoke to the Queen at great length with what Henry Ponsonby described as that 'terrible earnestness', which he brought to the most trivial activities, even to the rattling of dice, giving the impression that, while he revered the monarchy, he did not set great store by the intelligence of its present representative who, he considered, had to have everything explained to her in the most exhaustive and exhausting detail. Yet, when the Queen made some comment, so she complained, he would merely say, 'Is that so? Really?' 'He does not care what you say. It makes no difference.'

  The Queen grudgingly recognized Gladstone's talents, granted that he had a fine, commanding presence and a sonorous voice; yet she could not bring herself either to like or to respect him. Lacking Disraeli's ingratiating tact and sensitivity, he addressed her, as she said herself, as though she were a public meeting rather than a woman and was quite incapable of following the advice of his wife who sensibly said to him, 'Do pet the Queen, and for once believe you can, you dear old thing.' Similar advice was given to him by Dean Wellesley who had been at Eton with him: 'Everything depends upon your manner of approaching the Queen ... You cannot show too much regard, gentleness, I might say, even tenderness towards her.' But it was not in Gladstone's nature to 'pet' her; nor could he bring himself to flatter her. On the contrary, he gave her the impression that he did not think her worthy of such attentions. 'The Queen,' she once told her Private Secretary, 'must complain bitterly of the want of respect and consideration of her views which ... ought to be regarded on the part of the Government ... She feels hurt and indignant. '16 She often felt humiliated as well as exasperated by Gladstone's clever, tedious, high-minded discourses and took refuge in the conclusion that he was a humbug. She would have concurred both with Mary Ponsonby, who complained that, marvel of erudition though Mr Gladstone might be, he could 'never understand a man, still less a woman', and with Henry Labouchere who said that he did not object to Gladstone's always having the ace of trumps up his sleeve, but only to his pretence that God had put it there. Mr Gladstone, the Queen eventually decided, was 'a mischievous firebrand', 'arrogant, tyrannical and obstinate'.

  One of Gladstone's principal preoccupations on coming into office was how best to deal with what he termed the 'Royalty question', how to persuade the Queen to appear more often in public, a problem which gave him what he called 'the blue devils'.

  Chapter 42

  JOHN BROWN

  'She is really doing all in her power to create suspicions which I am persuaded have no foundation.'

  The feelings running high against the Queen - despite her occasional public appearances in the late 1860s - and what was perceived as her selfishness and greed as well as her wilful refusal to perform more public duties, were fanned by certain newspapers and magazines which brought up other more scurrilous charges against her: she was showing exceptional partiality to one of her Highland servants. This 'great Court favourite', as John O' Groats Journal referred to him, was said to be far more than an indulged servant: he was the Queen's lover; she was 'in an interesting condition'; they were secretly married; he was her medium in spiritualist seances; he was her keeper, for she had gone mad. Curiosity about the man consumed society. One day in March 1867 A. J. Munby saw 'a long line of carriages near the Achilles statue in the Park waiting to see the Queen go by to Windsor ... And then the Queen drove by, with outriders & hussars, her younger children with her, looking plump & matronly and pale, in widow's weeds; and that John Brown, of whom there is so much foolish talk, sat behind, a big man in livery. '1

  Most of the members of the Royal Household, although reputedly referring to Brown as 'the Queen's stallion', were convinced, as Henry Ponsonby told his brother, that while 'certainly a favourite', the man was 'only a Servant and nothing more'; and what Ponsonby supposed had begun as a joke had been 'converted into a libel'.2 Randall Davidson, who saw much of her in his capacity as Dean of Windsor and her domestic chaplain, said that 'one had only to know the Queen to realize how innocent' her relationship with the man was.3 Yet he was such an extraordinarily indulged favourite that it was not surprising that caricatures depicted him standing proprietorially in front of an empty throne, that defamatory pamphlets referred to the Queen as Mrs Brown, or that parodies of the Court Circular appeared in the press:

  Balmoral, Tuesday.

  Mr John Brown walked on the Slopes. He subsequently partook of a haggis. In the evening, Mr John Brown was pleased to listen to a bag-pipe. Mr John Brown retired early.4

  She is really doing all in her power to create suspicions which I am persuaded have no foundation [Lord Stanley commented on the Queen's relationship with Brown]. 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 that is unwise and unbecoming in her position. The Princesses - perhaps wisely - make a joke of the matter, and talk of him 'as mama's lover'.[xlvi]5

  John Brown was a blunt, strong, good-looking and excessively self-assured man with thick curly hair and a beard that did not fully conceal a determined, emphatic chin. One of nine sons bought up on a small farm, he had started life as a stableboy at Balmoral and had later been employed by the Queen and the Prince Consort as a ghillie. Seven years older than Prince Albert and the Queen, he had treated them both without a trace of either subservience or disrespect. The Prince had liked him and had picked him out from the other ghillies as the one to be trusted with the special duty of watching over the Queen's safety and seeing to her comfort. He had performed his duties to her entire satisfaction, combining, as she put it herself, 'the offices of groom, footman, page and maid, I might almost say, as he is so handy about cloaks and shawls'.6 Indeed, before her husband's death she had already come to regard him as indispensable. When Sir Howard Elphin-stone proposed one day that Brown should accompany Prince Arthur on some expedition she quickly put a stop to that idea: 'Impossible. Why, what should I do without him? He is my particular ghillie.'7

  Since her husband's death the Queen had come to rely on Brown more and more whenever she was at Balmoral and she had taken him and her pony-chaise with her on her visit to Germany in 1862. A link with her precious past, he had further recommended himself to the Queen by his presence of mind in two carriage accidents. He was so dependable, so faithful, so comforting and so much at ease in her presence. He was also most generous, often contributing considerably more towards the cost of wedding presents to the Balmoral staff or to funds for servants in distress than the gentlemen of the Household. He was also habitually outspoken and not infrequently drunk. The Queen, however, seemed to take pleasure in his rough, masculine assertiveness - he was so unlike Arthur Stanley, the Dean of Westminster, who appeared to her to be 'of no sex' - and she affected not to notice Brown's inebriation or, when it was obvious, attributed it to 'bashfulness'. 'Hoots, then, wumman,' Brown had been heard to snap at her when he pricked her chin while fixing the strap of her bonnet, 'Can ye no hold yerr head up.' Or, if he did not approve of her dress, he would comment derisively, 'What's this ye've got on today, wumman?' When she made some com
plaint about her sketching table he told her to stop complaining, silencing her with the words, 'I canna mak one for ye.' Once a maid-of-honour, seeing him with a picnic hamper, asked him if it was tea he was taking out. 'Well, no,' he told her. 'She don't much like tea. We tak oot biscuits and spirits.' As the months passed Brown became increasingly indulged, increasingly assertive and - with the other servants who were jealous of him and the courtiers who were exasperated by him - increasingly disliked. He was 'all powerful', so Lord Carlingford was led to believe. 'No servant had a chance of promotion except through him, and he favoured no man who didn't like his glass ... Some of the courtiers were full of attention to J. B., gave him presents, etc. - and he despised them for it. He was, however, unwearied and devoted in his attention to the Queen.'8 And since he was so, and since Her Majesty was so dependent upon him and refused to go out driving with any other servant, Dr Jenner and Sir Charles Phipps, with her immediate agreement, decided towards the end of 1864 to have Brown brought down from Balmoral to Osborne for her health's sake. At least he would get her out into the open air when no one else could.