The Queen's Houses

by Alan Titchmarsh

  The couple’s enthusiasm for all things Scottish prompted the effusion of Scots themes in which Albert swathed the interiors of the new house. Tartans (including several new ones designed largely by Albert himself) were spread over carpets, linoleum, curtains, chintzes and upholstery. Wallpapers were decorated with motifs of thistles and heather – the thistles were in such profusion ‘as would rejoice the heart of a donkey’, according to Lord Clarendon, then Foreign Secretary. Stags’ antlers were tortured into a variety of candelabra and other light fittings. Figures of highlanders covered in plaid were incorporated into a variety of furnishings. The walls were hung with drawings by Edwin Landseer and multiple prints of his paintings, largely of Highland scenes.

  The Balmoral (Royal) tartan

  ‘The deadening slime of Balmorality’ was a term coined by disaffected Scots who sought to blame Victoria and Albert and their devotion to all things Scottish for the trivialization of such matters as the Scottish national dress. In fact, the mania for Scottish tartan had begun 20 years before Victoria and Albert’s first visit to Scotland when, in 1822, Victoria’s uncle George IV paid the first visit of a reigning monarch north of the border since Charles I in 1641 (in 1633 he had been crowned King of Scots). George IV’s visit was also a chance event. Invited to attend a congress in Verona his government ministers, wishing to keep the control of foreign affairs in their own hands, proposed he visit Edinburgh instead. This led the civic authorities to search frantically through old documents to uncover the protocols, precedents and pageantry for such a visit.

  Fortunately, that living repository of Scottish lore, real and invented, Sir Walter Scott, was at hand to advise and he headed a small committee to plan the festivities. Walter Scott was author of the hugely successful novel Waverley, published anonymously in 1814, in which an officer in the Hanoverian army changes sides and fights for the Jacobite cause in the 1745 rebellion. This popularized a romantic image of the Scottish Highlands. Intrigued, the following year George, then Prince Regent, invited Scott to dinner where he was reminded by Scott of his Stuart lineage and his entitlement to ‘wear the garb of old Gaul’.

  Sir Walter Scott posing in traditional Scottish national dress

  Accordingly, in July 1822 The King placed an order with George Hunter and Co. for a complete Highland outfit in the bright red Royal Stuart tartan complete with all the necessary accessories and weaponry, which set him back about £100,000 in today’s money – his considerable girth requiring more than the usual yardage of plaid. The following month he spent two weeks in Scotland, staying with The Duke of Buccleuch at Dalkeith Palace (Bonnie Prince Charlie had spent two nights there in 1754), just outside Edinburgh, as Holyrood Palace was in poor repair. His visit was a triumph, celebrated with scenes of magnificence and traditional pageantry, much of it including the ‘revised ancient dresses’ invented for the occasion by Scott’s committee.

  The committee had produced a prescriptive booklet advising on etiquette, general behaviour and style of clothing: ‘HINTS addressed to the INHABITANTS OF EDINBURGH AND OTHERS in prospect of HIS MAJESTY’S VISIT’. Not all Scots were enthusiastic: One wrote: ‘Sir Walter Scott has ridiculously made us appear to be a nation of Highlanders, and the bagpipe and the tartan are the order of the day.’

  Clearly memories of the events of scarcely a generation before, when tartan had been outlawed, had faded. An ordinance issued by George II two years after the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 declared: ‘no man … will wear or put on the clothes commonly called Highland Clothes … and that no tartan … shall be used’. The penalty for a first offence was six months in prison, for a second, transportation for life. It was repealed in 1782 and since then seems to have been totally overlooked by the Scots.

  The culmination of the royal visit was a Highland Ball in which the portly King was to be present in his Stuart tartan and the committee’s manual demanded that, save those who were in uniform: ‘no Gentleman is to be allowed to appear in any thing but the ancient Highland costume’. As Lytton Strachey observed, ‘This can be seen as the pivotal event when what had been thought of as the primitive dress of mountain thieves became the national dress of the whole of Scotland.’ And it sparked a fashionable frenzy – tartan became à la mode in Paris.

  So the adoption of the tartan by Victoria and Albert at Balmoral some 20 years later was hardly a first. With his zeal for design, Albert created in 1853 a completely new tartan, the Balmoral, in three colourways. The Royal was in pale grey with overchecks in red and black to echo the rough-hewn granite of the castle, and is still used by The Queen today during her annual Balmoral holiday. The tartan can only be worn by the sovereign, the sovereign’s personal piper and other members of the royal family with permission. The other two were Green and Lavender, each with the same background grey. Later a Victoria Stuart was created, Victoria’s personal take on the Dress Stuart, with a red stripe added.

  When Albert came to design the interiors of Balmoral, tartan was everywhere. Lytton Strachey again:

  Queen Victoria in her private rooms at Balmoral

  ‘the floors were … covered with specially manufactured tartans. The Balmoral tartan, in red and grey, designed by the Prince, and the Victoria tartan, were to be seen in every room: there were tartan curtains, and tartan chair-covers, and even tartan linoleums. Occasionally the Royal Stuart tartan appeared, for Her Majesty always maintained that she was an ardent Jacobite. There were … innumerable stags’ antlers, and the head of a boar, which had been shot by Albert in Germany. In an alcove in the hall, stood a life-sized statue of Albert in Highland dress.’

  Victoria declared that it was all perfection. ‘Every year,’ she wrote, ‘my heart becomes more fixed in this dear paradise, and so much more so now, that ALL has become my dear Albert’s own creation, own work, own building, own layout … and his great taste, and the impress of his dear hand, have been stamped everywhere.’ It is clear that Queen Victoria’s feelings on anything were never less than intense.

  The tartan kilt has since become embedded deep in the psyche of the royal family and successive generations have worn it as a matter of course when travelling north of the border. Bertie, later Edward VII, even sported a miniature kilt and sporran when, aged nine, he accompanied his parents to the opening of the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace in London in May 1851. As a young man ten years later, he again chose to wear the kilt as he walked behind his father’s coffin in St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.

  Queen Victoria and her family at Balmoral. From left to right: Alexandra, Tsarina of Russia, her baby daughter Grand Duchess Tatiana, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Queen Victoria and Edward, Prince of Wales

  From then on The Queen and The Prince travelled to Balmoral each year for their autumn Highland holiday. They much enjoyed the freedom they found there and went on daily expeditions, come rain or shine, into the mountains and forests, Victoria walking or riding her pony, sketching and painting as she went, whilst Albert darted off, rifle in hand, to shoot whatever moved.

  Every year they would also make longer expeditions by carriage and train to stay with friends in grand houses and castles in other parts of the Highlands. Sometimes, under assumed names, they would stay in small hotels in picturesque locations, travelling a hundred miles or more by coach. Each landmark, loch, mountain, moor, battlefield, house (and its owner) was assiduously noted. Often, like a location scout for a television company, Victoria’s private secretary would have gone ahead to discover people she might like to have ‘presented’ – that is, introduced to the royal presence, during the course of her journeys. The descriptions in her diaries and in the two books she published on her Highland excursions make constant reference to rain and cold and wind. Victoria seemed to positively relish the cold and even in winter windows were required to be left open. Her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, attempting to play billiards, once found frost on the cushion of the billiard table.

  For her staff, the annual visits to Balmoral were not
eagerly anticipated. The Castle was variously described as cheerless, dreary and, despite the reduced household that travelled to Balmoral, cramped.

  Victoria also micro-managed all activities – which were compulsory. Apart from walks and excursions in the inevitable rain there was simply not enough to do to amuse and entertain her household or the Minister in Attendance. This was Victoria’s one concession to affairs of state – apart from her red boxes. At Osborne on the Isle of Wight she and Albert had built state rooms to accommodate the rituals of government required of a monarch. At Balmoral, her private hideaway, there were no such rooms and a single government minister was in attendance at all times. In order to escape into even greater solitude Victoria and Albert refurbished and added onto a small cottage far up Glen Muick. Known as ‘The Hut’, they would retreat there for days at a time with the minimum of servants.

  Victoria the Jacobite

  The royal claim to the Stuart tartan

  Victoria was right to declaim herself a Stuart, but perhaps not a Jacobite – if the Jacobite cause had won the day she would not have been Queen of England. Seven generations before, Elizabeth Stuart, daughter of James IV of Scotland (James I of England) and sister of Charles I, had married Frederick V, the Elector Palatinate. Their grandson became George I of England at the age of 54 in succession to his cousin Anne, youngest daughter of James II. So the first of the Hanoverian Kings of England was in fact one-quarter Stuart (but definitely not a Jacobite) and our present Queen is Elizabeth Stuart’s ninth great-granddaughter.

  The ‘Jacobite succession’, the descent from Charles II as opposed to the descent of Queen Elizabeth II from his sister Elizabeth Stuart, is in fact the most senior line of descent but it was nullified by the Act of Settlement of 1707, which required the next in line to the throne after Anne’s death to be a Protestant.

  When Charles II’s brother James converted to Catholicism there was widespread disquiet and the fabricated ‘Popish Plot’, current in the late 1670s, which proposed that Charles should be killed and James would reign in his stead, produced anti-Catholic hysteria. When James succeeded his brother a succession of controversial measures stoked the fires and when he produced a Catholic heir in 1688, a group of noblemen invited James’s nephew (and son-in-law), the Protestant William of Orange, to invade England. The ‘Glorious Revolution’ deposed James in favour of William and his wife Mary, James’s eldest daughter, and the last Catholic sovereign of England was exiled and died in France in 1701, at the age of 77.

  Victoria, the inconsolable widow

  Prince Albert made his final visit to Balmoral in 1861, just months before his death of typhoid in December while at Windsor Castle. He was just 42. The Queen was in shock and deep mourning, for she had become to rely on Albert in every way – she had granted him the title Prince Consort in 1857 as he had become ‘King to all intents and purposes’ and a ‘necessary and useful part of the mechanism of the State’. Victoria virtually abandoned Buckingham Palace and lived alternately at Windsor and, for increasing periods, in Scotland. From then on it was her custom to stay at Balmoral for nearly a month in early summer and for up to three months in the autumn. In the nearly 50 years of her occupation it has been calculated that she lived 12 complete years at Balmoral.

  She wrote to her Uncle Leopold: ‘My LIFE as a HAPPY one is ENDED! The world is gone for ME! … Oh! to be cut off in the prime of life – to see our pure, happy, quiet, domestic life, which ALONE enabled me to bear my MUCH disliked position, CUT OFF at forty-two.’ She added, ‘it is my firm resolve … his wishes, his plans about everything, his views about everything are to be my law’.

  The unveiling of Prince Albert’s statue, 1876

  There were no changes to the fabric of Balmoral after this date:everything was kept as it had been ordered by the hand of Albert. Memorials were in due course erected, the pyramid, and also a copy in bronze of the marble statue of Prince Albert in highland dress, gun in hand and dog at his side, was placed on a rocky eminence near the Balmoral bridge. At the unveiling on 15 October 1876 (they had become engaged on that day 28 years before) all the servants, tenants, the household and a detachment of Highlanders attended. The pipes were played and the soldiers loosed off a ‘feu de joie’. The whole ceremony took place, of course, in pouring rain. Nearby there is a granite obelisk erected to his memory by the tenants and servants on the Balmoral estate.

  ‘The Hut’ being the repository of too many happy memories, and seeking further seclusion, Victoria built a cottage for herself on the opposite end of the Loch in 1868. This she called the ‘Widow’s House’ and she would retreat there with only a few servants who knew her well, including John Brown. It was after Albert’s death that she came to rely more and more on her abrasive Highland servant.

  John Brown in tartan, 1870

  Brown, from a local family, had been a ghillie but had recommended himself to Victoria and Albert by his untiring devotion. Given to drinking (complications from which he eventually died), informal in manner to The Queen and others, and rude and divisive amongst the other servants, his general competence and the important role he played in The Queen’s life were nonetheless recognized by her private secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby. Sir Henry had shared the driver’s ‘box’ with Brown on many of The Queen’s arduous excursions and came to observe his qualities at first hand. When he died in March 1883 she was again distraught: ‘Perhaps never in history was there so strong and true an attachment, so warm and loving a friendship between the sovereign and servant … the Queen feels that life for the second time is becoming most trying and sad to bear deprived of all she so needs … the blow has fallen too heavily not to be very heavily felt.’

  During his lifetime, Victoria had built Brown a cottage in the grounds of Balmoral and after his death erected a cairn and statue to his memory. Every year on her birthday she would place flowers on Albert’s statue and on the grave of John Brown. To perpetuate his memory she began to write the story of his life but her staff advised her against publication as the contents might be ‘misunderstood’. Victoria was buried with mementoes of both men: Albert’s dressing gown and a plaster cast of his hand; a lock of John Brown’s hair, his photograph and also a ring he had given to her, which was put on a finger of her right hand. All the Brown memorabilia was hidden, covered discreetly by flowers. On his accession Edward VII destroyed most of Victoria’s memorials to Brown and had his statue at Balmoral moved into the woods some distance from the castle.

  A few years later, in 1887, she took an interest in two Indian servants selected in her Jubilee year to become her personal servants. She transferred the personal attachment she had felt for Brown to one of them, Mohammed Abdul Karim, known as ‘the Munshi’. He was allocated Brown’s room at Balmoral and in due course a cottage in the grounds. Surprisingly, he had none of Brown’s qualities, was even more divisive, loathed by the other servants and regarded as taking advantage of his position for personal gain. Ponsonby also thought little of him, by comparison with his cautious approval of John Brown: the Munshi ‘was a thoroughly stupid and uneducated man, and his one idea in life seems to be to do nothing and to eat as much as he can’. During her Balmoral visit in September 1889, she and Karim stayed for one night at the ‘Widow’s House’, Glassalt Shiel at Loch Muick, which caused consternation in the household. On her death, however, he was allowed by Edward VII to be the last to view her body and then took part in her funeral procession. He was subsequently dismissed and returned to India.

  During their lifetimes, Victoria and Albert had found solace at Balmoral from the formalities of court life at Buckingham Palace and Windsor. They revelled in the seclusion – The Queen could drop into the cottages of the local people without ceremony, Albert could disappear into the woods with his rifle in the mornings and they could explore together the surrounding forests and mountains on foot or by pony in the afternoons. After his death and her withdrawal from much of her role as head of state, the seclusion of Balmoral was even more precious a
nd she spent much longer periods of time there. It became, for others, a considerable trial to serve her as she enforced her regime of ‘seclusion, silence, 30-minute meals, non-smoking and open windows’.

  Edward VII and Queen Alexandra

  After Victoria’s death, Balmoral continued to be used by succeeding generations for their autumn holidays. Bertie, the future Edward VII, had become an enthusiastic sportsman as he grew up – he was an exceptional shot, a keen and skilful fisherman, a successful yachtsman and his horses won many of the classic races. A convivial man, he delighted in large house parties, and for him the epitome of sport was to take groups of friends to the heather and forests of Balmoral in search of deer, grouse and ptarmigan and to the fields. His induction had started early. At the age of not quite seven he had been included in a deer-stalking party led by his father in the hills above the castle and witnessed his father claim his first Balmoral stag that day. Victoria wrote: ‘a magnificent stag, a Royal [a stag with more than twelve branched antlers], which had dropped soon after Albert had hit him’. Two years later Bertie witnessed the Balmoral tenants fishing, or rather spearing and netting, salmon on the Dee, and in 1858, at the age of 16, he shot his first stag.

  Edward VII poses with a deer shot on the Balmoral estate

  Birkhall had been purchased in Bertie’s name when he was seven but with his large circle of friends he in due course found it too small, and from his marriage in 1863 he was lent Abergeldie, where he would entertain his large shooting parties, avoiding Balmoral as much as he could. The future Edward VII had an ‘intense and commanding personality’ and led a decidedly rackety life where he entertained lavishly, kept mistresses, was addicted to the theatre, smoked, drank, gambled at baccarat (then illegal) and became mired in scandal. Victoria had disapproved of him from a very early age, blaming him for Albert’s early death. For all of her long reign she allowed him no formal role and excluded him from any responsibility with the almost inevitable result he lived a life of pleasure and excess.