A Magnificent Obsession: The Death That Changed the Monarchy

by Helen Rappaport

  Victoria’s face remained stony and expressionless as her speech was read for her by the Lord Chancellor. She sat there stiff and erect, ‘as though carved on the throne’.32‘Not a nerve in her face moved…but her nostrils quivered and widened…Tears gathered on the fringe of the drooping eyelids. A few rolled down the cheeks.’33After it was over, she made a slight bow, then bent and kissed a respectful and dignified Bertie, who escorted her out via the back door to her coach and thence, post-haste, to the privacy of Osborne. The following day she was, she claimed, in a state of physical collapse: ‘shaken’, ‘exhausted’ and still reeling from the ‘violent nervous shock’ of it all.34But like it or not, during 1866 she was coaxed out into public again: to London Zoo, the South Kensington Museum, the Union Workhouse at Windsor and even a visit to the women’s wing at Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight, where she was shocked to see the number of women incarcerated for murdering their illegitimate babies. During her stay at Balmoral she attended the Braemar Gathering for the first time in five years, and opened the sluice of the new waterworks at Aberdeen. But none of it – even her social appearances at a Drawing Room, two garden parties at Buckingham Palace and the weddings of Helena and Princess Mary Adelaide – changed her determination to ‘lead a private life’.35She still felt hard done by, that she was being treated ‘as an unfeeling machine’ rather than the ‘poor weak woman shattered by grief’ that she really was.36The public had a rather different view of things: ‘What do we pay her for if she will not work?’…‘She had better abdicate if she is incompetent to do her duty’ were the kind of accusations now going round, according to Lady Amberley. Would it not be a good thing, pondered the Pall Mall Gazette, if the Queen could ‘find in the capital itself her Balmoral?…If she needs comfort and consolation, let her know them among the denizens of her metropolitan city. The gratitude of a million hearts is worth a good many miles of Highland scenery.’37

  The Pall Mall Gazette had good reason to carp: the Queen’s clear preference for the company of John Brown and Scotland was beginning to cost her public image dear. Rumour and salacious gossip were circulating about the nature of their relationship and his seemingly insidious control over her. Some suspected it of harbouring a familiarity that went way beyond the bounds of decency, and the rumours in Britain and on the Continent prompted much satirical comment. Punch, in a parody of the dreary and uneventful Court Circular so typical of the Queen’s sojourns at Balmoral, described a day in the life of Mr John Brown, who ‘walked on the slopes…partook of a haggis’ and in the evening ‘was pleased to listen to a bag-pipe’. The local Scottish press took delight in spreading stories about ‘The Great Court Favourite’ and his fondness for whisky.38With the Queen now being widely referred to as ‘Mrs Brown’, it was insinuated that Brown was not only the power behind the throne, but that he had also found his way into the royal bed. Other papers, seeking to undermine his position, spread a story that Brown was about to leave to get married.39

  Criticism of the Queen took a new turn in the summer of 1867 when a rival publication to Punch, the Tomahawk, launched a much more combative line on the Queen’s favouritism of Brown and her continuing abdication of her duty. A major controversy had broken in May, when Sir Edwin Landseer had exhibited a painting at the Royal Academy’s Spring Exhibition. Entitled ‘Her Majesty at Osborne, 1866’, this had depicted Queen Victoria sitting side-saddle in her widow’s weeds on her pony Flora and reading a letter, with Brown standing at its head holding the reins. Such an informal painting of the Queen in close proximity with a servant provoked much sniggering by onlookers, as well as disapproval in the press for its ‘imprudence’. ‘A more lugubrious, disagreeable, and vulgar production we seldom remember to have seen,’ remarked one reviewer.40

  Rising to the occasion, the Tomahawk – which was subtitled A Saturday Journal of Satire and featured cartoons in the tradition of the Regency satirist Gillray – responded with a caricature of the Landseer painting, entitled ‘All is black which is not Brown!’41The joke was picked up by Punch soon afterwards, but it was the Tomahawk that continued to lead the fray in ever bolder, more scurrilous challenges to the Queen, running a front-page leader entitled ‘Where is Britannia’ and a cartoon of the same title in its issue of 8 June; it followed on 10 August with a double-page pull-out cartoon, ‘A Brown Study?’, highlighting the Queen’s symbolic abdication by showing a vacant throne with the discarded robes of state lying on it, the disused crown under a bell jar, and a nonchalant Brown, leaning against the throne, pipe in hand. The issue sent Tomahawk’s sales rocketing to a massive 50,000 copies. Yet another Tomahawk cartoon followed soon after, entitled ‘The Mystery of the Season’, with Brown again leaning against an empty throne, accompanied by an article calling for a regency of the Prince of Wales: the Queen should retreat permanently ‘to an honourable retirement’ while she still had the affection of her people. She could then revel in the ‘congenial solitudes of Osborne and Balmoral without any reproach’. With the Tomahawk putting the Queen’s behaviour down to her ‘deplorable mental health’, the old rumours about madness once again surfaced, fanning the flames of gossip.42Some, like Harriet Martineau, rose to her defence: ‘If the widowed grandmother of a dozen children is not safe from London tongues, the less we say about English morals and manners the better.’43But this was as nothing compared to the innuendo circulated on the Continent by the Gazette de Lausanne. The Swiss newspaper not only alleged a secret morganatic marriage between the Queen and Brown, but suggested that she was in an ‘interesting condition’. This, in the view of the British consul in Berne, so seriously impugned the Queen’s reputation that he lodged an informal complaint, but was forced to withdraw it by the Foreign Office because it had not been submitted through the proper channels. The British press respectfully declined to comment, though the republican-minded Reynolds’s Newspaper could not resist the teasing remark, ‘We do not care to reproduce in our columns the many extraordinary causes that are assigned for the Queen’s seclusion in the pages of our foreign contemporaries.’44

  Queen Victoria was kept in ignorance of this latest scandal on the Continent; as for the rest, she was adamant on the issue of Brown’s incorruptibility. None of the gossip, or the publication of scurrilous penny pamphlets such as ‘John Brown, or, The Fortunes of a Gillie’, deterred her from her continuing preference for Brown’s close attendance on her at all times. ‘He is only a servant and nothing more’, attested Henry Ponsonby. In his opinion, what had begun as a joke had been ‘perverted into a libel’; the Queen understood only too well her unique position as monarch, and Brown’s as her social inferior.45Nevertheless, yet another crisis involving Brown soon followed. In May 1867 he had been much talked about when he had appeared in the procession behind the Queen when she laid the foundation stone for the Royal Albert Hall of Arts and Sciences. Shortly afterwards Victoria announced that he would accompany her on the box of her open carriage to a Military Review in Hyde Park. Her Prime Minister, Lord Derby, and the Duke of Cambridge, as C-in-C of the Army, objected most forcefully, seeing such an appearance as seriously compromising to the integrity of the throne, in the light of so much unfavourable recent gossip. But all attempts to dissuade the Queen from taking her ‘faithful Brown’ with her that day failed – even warnings of anti-Brown demonstrations. Victoria professed herself ‘astonished and shocked’ at being ‘plagued by the interference of others’ and refused to go without him.46The monarchy was, however, spared a major public embarrassment when shortly afterwards Victoria’s Hapsburg relative, Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, was executed by rebels during an uprising. An immediate – and in this case merciful – retreat into court mourning saved Victoria’s face. But she made her feelings clear in no uncertain terms: ‘The Queen will not be dictated to, or made to alter what she has found to answer for her comfort.’ She put the whole affair down to ‘ill-natured gossip in the higher classes, caused by the dissatisfaction at not forcing the Queen out’.47The more pressure was put upon her
, and the more lies circulated about her ‘poor good Brown’, the more her hackles rose. Digging in her heels, she continued to punish them all for hounding her, and locked herself away at Balmoral.

  The Queen’s stubbornness about spending five months of the year at her Scottish home – 600 miles and a twenty-four-hour train journey away – involved her ministers in long and tedious journeys to Scotland in order to conduct essential business with her and was creating serious administrative problems. In the summer of 1866 political crisis in London had broken over the stormy passage of the 2nd Reform Bill to extend the voting franchise. Victoria had failed to remain in the capital to exercise her constitutional role as figurehead during the debates, instead decamping to Balmoral on 13 June in order to avoid the ugly experience of ‘that stupid reform agitation’.48Lord John Russell’s Liberal government fell on 20 June when they lost the vote by a narrow margin of eleven votes. Greatly inconvenienced by this turn of events and not wishing to leave Balmoral, Victoria insisted that, because the division had been so close, Lord John Russell should for the present remain in office. The Cabinet, however, pressed for him to do the right thing and resign. Constitutionally the Queen was obliged to return to accept her retiring ministers’ seals of office, but she refused to budge until she was ready. Such a wilful reversion to the kind of old-style absolutism that she had first displayed as an inexperienced young queen in the late 1830s, and which Albert had worked so hard against, sent her household into despair. The Queen had been ‘forgetting her duties in the pleasant breezes of Scotland’, commented Henry Ponsonby. Lucy Cavendish, normally so loyal and defensive of her mistress, was shocked at ‘the poor Queen’s terrible fault in remaining (or indeed being) at Balmoral’, for it had ‘given rise to universal complaint, and much foul-mouthed gossip’.49This was not an action that would ‘gratify the spirit’ of her late husband, argued the Tomahawk, ‘any more than it is consonant with the spirit of your people’. The Queen’s behaviour was ‘unbusinesslike’ and ‘childish’, railed The Economist. The popular explanation was simpler: ‘John Brown would not let her come.’50

  At a public meeting in support of electoral reform held at St James’s Hall in London, the Liberal MP Acton Smee Ayrton condemned the Queen’s continuing retirement, only to be chastised by the Quaker John Bright, who like many in the middle classes was still prepared to defend her womanly grieving ‘for the lost object of her life and affection’.51Bright’s response rallied the crowd that night to loyal choruses of ‘God Save the Queen’, but dissent did not die down. Abandoned by its monarch, the capital seethed and buzzed with republican talk, as hopes of reform collapsed and the country was left in limbo until Victoria finally returned on 26 June. General Grey was no longer able to conceal from her the very strong feeling among the public that, in her retirement from view, the ‘tone of society is much deteriorated’. The situation had been further exacerbated by the continuing absence of state ceremonial; already that year Victoria had adamantly refused to entertain Tsar Alexander II and the Khedive of Egypt when they were in London; and now she was doing her damnedest to avoid the Sultan of Turkey, who was due on a visit. Faced with this latest and most unwanted of duties, Victoria called on good Dr Jenner to produce a royal sick-note. He could always be relied upon to extricate her from duties that she did not wish to undertake, and obliged in the most lurid tones. The Queen’s health simply was not up to it. ‘Any excitement produces the most severe bilious derangement, which induces vomiting to an incredible extent,’ Jenner told Grey. Just to be doubly certain, he waved the madness flag that always silenced Victoria’s critics: any further undermining of the Queen’s health might precipitate complete mental breakdown. At Victoria’s request, Jenner also inserted an announcement about her indisposition in The Lancet.52In the end the Queen did not entirely wriggle out of entertaining the Sultan. The bulk of her duties were offloaded onto Bertie and Alix, but despite it being ‘extremely inconvenient and disadvantageous’ for her well-being, she grudgingly agreed to meet the Sultan on board the royal yacht at a naval review off Spithead, during which, despite all her protestations of ill health, her own sea legs proved a great deal stronger than his.53

  By the end of 1867 it was clear that anti-monarchical, if not outright republican sentiment was mounting in Britain. Victoria had been hissed and booed en route to the state opening of Parliament, which she had once more deigned to undertake that year. She saw at last the ugly faces of anger in the crowd, and even admitted to Grey that she felt ‘something unpleasant’ might happen ‘with the existing agitation about Reform, and the numbers of people out of employment’. Yet still she failed to connect the pattern of overt public disapproval with her own stubborn behaviour; still she clung to power and her royal prerogatives, while increasingly lauding the homely Scots as being infinitely superior to the English people who clamoured for her presence in London.54She remained wilfully oblivious to the everyday realities of hunger and urban poverty at a time when cholera was once more rife; of political unrest and increasing class divisions. ‘The Queen is teaching the people to think too little of her office,’ observed the Daily News. In the House of Commons, Viscount Cranbourne went further, stating that in Britain ‘the monarchy was practically dead’.55By no means, responded Reynolds’s Newspaper: the monarchy ‘lives, eats, drinks, and breeds as vigorously as ever’. In all, the royal family plus ‘the shoal of German and English parasites’ connected to it accounted for one million pounds of public spending per annum.

  General Grey had no doubt that unless something was done, the situation would get worse and ‘very serious consequences may be the result’. The Queen was the only person, he told her, who had the power to stem the growing tide of her own public disfavour, ‘by resuming the place which none but Your Majesty can fill’. But he knew that putting pressure on her would only undo what little power he had to do any good.56Before Sir Charles Phipps’s death, Grey had concurred with him that ‘The Queen is perfectly aware of what her subjects wish, nor can she be ignorant of what her position requires.’ But so far none in government had had any sway over the vagaries of her volatile temperament and her stubborn self-interest. Only Prince Albert had known how to handle what Dr Clark had called the Queen’s propensity to ‘mental irritation’. Albert himself had said as much to Lord Clarendon. ‘It is my business,’ he had told him, ‘to watch that mind every hour and minute – to watch as a cat watches at a mousehole.’57John Brown might be able to boil potatoes and cups of tea by the roadside in Scotland, and bully the Queen into wrapping up warm when out in her carriage, but only Prince Albert had had the moral power to induce her to fulfil her much more important constitutional duties when she least wished to.

  Victoria meanwhile remained breathtakingly impervious to the criticism, confident as ever in the unassailability of her position. She thought the country ‘never more loyal or sound’. ‘I would throw myself amongst my English and dear Scotch subjects alone…and I should be as safe as in my room,’ she told Vicky, shrugging off a recent Fenian plot to kidnap her that had been uncovered by the Home Office. ‘There has been a great deal of nonsense and foolish panic, and numberless stories which had proved sheer inventions!’ she continued, knowing full well that the hysteria generated by her household at the lack of security at her country residences was just another ploy, along with all the criticism of Brown, to get her to spend more time in London. With public disfavour mounting, she continued vigorously to fight off her critics, without the slightest inkling that help was about to come from the most unexpected of sources: the publication the following January of her ‘poor little Highland book’.58

  Chapter Thirteen

  ‘The Queen Is Invisible’

  From the moment Prince Albert died it had always been Queen Victoria’s intention to commemorate his life, not just in visible monuments to him, but also in words. The process had begun soon afterwards, with her request to Alfred Tennyson to write a tribute in verse. This had been followed by a collection of The Pri
ncipal Speeches and Addresses of HRH The Prince Consort, edited by Arthur Helps, which had been released for public consumption in 1863 after a private printing for the royal family the previous year. The speeches had rapidly sold thousands of copies, but Victoria was keen to establish a fuller written legacy of her beloved Albert and had herself embarked on a project to ‘put down an exact account of our happy life’ – again for family use.1

  With this in mind, she started sorting through her mass of personal papers, but soon felt overwhelmed by the task and passed the commission over to General Grey, whose post as her Private Secretary had finally been officially ratified in 1866. Having already written a biography of his father, Grey was the obvious choice to write the first account of the Prince’s life, although The Early Years of the Prince Consort would only cover the story up to the birth of Vicky in 1840. Grey’s name might be on the title page, but in fact the book was written under Victoria’s close instruction and supervision, using translations from the German of Albert’s journals and letters provided by herself and Princess Helena. During the process Grey had had to tolerate the Queen’s constant interference, to the extent that the bulk of the work – even down to the footnotes – was largely hers, with Grey fulfilling little more than the role of dutiful compiler, adding the Queen’s personal interpolations in many places.2Having so much sensitive material put at his disposal, Grey worried that some of the book’s candour, even for private circulation within the family, should be modified. As a former military man – bluff, stolid and formal, with a strong sense of his own independence – he found the experience of working on the book with the Queen a trial that had tested his patience to the limit.