John Brown (23 page)
On Monday 17 March Queen Victoria descended the stairs from her private apartments at Windsor Castle to prepare for her afternoon ride. For a moment her attention strayed and she stumbled on the last step. In trying to save herself she twisted her knee. She wrote: ‘I could not move for a moment. Then Brown came, and helped me with great difficulty into the carriage.’
15
When she arrived back at Windsor Castle her leg was too sore to support her so John Brown, with the assistance of Lockwood, the footman on duty, half carried and half walked her back to her room. While this was going on, some 3 miles away a strange scenario was purportedly taking place involving one Lady Florence Dixie.
Whether or not Queen Victoria knew Lady Florence Dixie personally before 2 March 1883 is not clear, but on that date a rather hysterical letter to the Queen arrived at Windsor Castle from Lady Florence. Now in her twenty-sixth year, Lady Florence had written to the Queen to express her rising dismay at how the peasants of Western Ireland were starving. The subject was one about which Lady Florence, as an absentee Irish landlord herself, had made a particular study. Her penchant for such pursuits set her apart from other aristocratic women of her day in the intensity of her eccentric notions, such as taking up such causes as sex equality and the reform of fashion. Lady Florence and Queen Victoria were at opposite ends of the scale of opinion – the Queen looked upon gender parity as a ‘mad, wicked folly’, and was outraged by the idea of women wearing trousers and monocles to copy men.
Certainly the Queen had ‘heard’ of Lady Florence. She was the sister of John Sholto Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensbury. (His son Lord Alfred Douglas, ‘Bosie’, was the notorious friend of Oscar Wilde, and caused the latter’s downfall.) Like her brother, Lady Florence was an excellent hunter, earning herself the nickname ‘female Nimrod’; she regularly walked around Windsor Castle Great Park with a jaguar which she had captured on a hunting trip to Patagonia with her husband Sir Alexander Beaumont Churchill Dixie, whom she married in 1875.
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About the time Brown and Lockwood were carrying Queen Victoria to her boudoir, Lady Florence Dixie arrived back at her Windsor house, The Fishery, with her clothes dishevelled and spattered with mud and her hands bleeding from several wounds. According to her testimony, while she was walking her St Bernard dog Hubert in the rough ground that bordered her estate, she had been set upon by two transvestites. Lady Florence told the press:
One of them seized me roughly by the neck, pushed me backwards, and threw me to the ground with great violence. The other man, his confederate . . . was standing over me . . . I saw in his hand a sort of dagger . . . I saw a momentary flash of steel, and then I felt the blade go through the upper part of my dress . . . Luckily the blade came in contact with one of the steel stays of my corset and glanced off . . . the wretch withdrew it, and plunged at me again with the dagger. As it descended I caught hold of the blade with my left hand, and held it for a moment. The weapon cut through my glove, and inflicted a deep but clean cut. He wrenched the weapon from me, and as it slipped from my left I caught it with my right hand . . . Then I lost my hold upon the knife . . . He was about to deliver the third [stab] when the dog must have pulled him off . . . Then I became unconscious . . . When I regained consciousness I found myself quite alone.
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When the story broke it created a sensation. Yet Lady Florence’s account of what happened, and her subsequent assertion that the perpetrators were Fenians, did not stand up to close scrutiny. As the pressmen investigated the story each of its strands was contradicted by a number of eye-witnesses only too willing to talk. Private Bates of the Scots Guards, the regiment then on guard duty at Windsor, was one. He was walking in nearby Maidenhead Road and had kept his eye on Lady Florence because of her noteworthy dog. Bates had seen nothing of the assailants. A gardener on the nearby estate to Lady Florence’s, one Mr Groves, had been working close to where she had passed but heard nothing of Lady Florence’s purported cries for help. An Eton College schoolmaster averred that he had had Lady Florence in sight during the whole of her walk, and had seen her return to The Fishery unhurt. Why was Lady Florence lying? Queen Victoria was intrigued. She also shared Lady Florence’s fear of Fenian assassination and suspected that a gang of Irish terrorists were forming in the area of Windsor. She sent John Brown to gather evidence.
On 18 March John Brown braved the bitter cold and drove to The Fishery in an open dog-cart. There he met Sir Henry Ponsonby, engaged in making his own investigations. Lady Florence seemed perky enough after her supposed ordeal and infused tea for her guests with a gusto that belied her injured hands. After making a fuss of Hubert, and demanding of Lady Florence that he have a photograph of the magnificent beast – at his own expense of course! – John Brown set off to examine the circumstances of the crime that Lady Florence had recounted to him just as she told it to the journalists.
John Brown had noted from the newspaper reports that the slashes on Lady Florence’s outer clothing did not correspond with tears on her under garments. There was no mud on the back of her clothing, which one would have expected if she had been thrown to the ground. Despite a minute investigation of the scene of the supposed crime John Brown could come up with nothing original; he reported his failure to his royal mistress. ‘The whole case so puzzled Mr Brown that he spent considerable time in the open air making his enquiries, thus exposing him to the bitter cold,’ reported a journalist.
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On 30 March 1883, in replying to a question in the House of Commons, the Liberal Home Secretary, Sir William Harcourt closed the case by stating that none of Lady Florence’s assertions had been corroborated. What did it all mean? The Queen remained puzzled and studied closely the usual distillation of the news on the subject prepared for her by Sir Henry Ponsonby.
One paper commented that Lady Florence had been beset by ‘sturdy beggars’ and that fear of Fenian assassination had affected her ‘imagination’ and coloured ‘her narrative of events’.
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A medical paper used the case to talk about examples of ‘hallucination’ and the work done on the subject by Professor Legrand du Saulle of the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris.
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Yet the whole business was summed up for the Court gossip network by Louisa, Countess of Antrim, who opined that Lady Florence had been under the influence of alcohol at the time of her supposed attack. After all, said the Countess, it was common knowledge that Lady Florence and her husband were referred to in Court circles as ‘Sir Sometimes and Lady Always Tipsy’.
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The brouhaha engendered by Lady Florence soon died away, but the chilling he had received as a consequence of his open air investigation of her case caused John Brown to develop a severe chest cold. His devotion to royal duties kept John Brown out of a sick bed. The Queen needed him. Her twisted knee was followed by rheumatic twinges that kept her carriage and chair-bound, but she still insisted on daily ‘walks’. On Saturday 24 March the Queen declared herself well enough for a longer drive and Brown and footman Lockwood carried her down to the pony-chair which had been a favourite conveyance at Balmoral. Wrapped in ‘a huge assortment of wraps, known to her ladies as “the White Knight’s paraphernalia”,’ as the Countess of Antrim recalled, Queen Victoria and John Brown set out down the Long Walk at Windsor Castle. It was the last time.
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That Saturday evening, press reports noted, John Brown was seen around the castle ‘apparently in fair health, although still suffering from a cold’.
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But his condition declined and Dr Sir William Jenner was called by Brown’s anxious brother Archie. By the morning of Easter Sunday, 25 March, erysipelas had extended over the right side of John Brown’s face and he developed a high fever. In those days of no antibiotics, his condition deteriorated fast and by the evening he had lapsed into delirium tremens.
The Queen was enjoying her Easter, but wrote with a slightly petulant undertone: ‘Had a good night. Vexed that Brown could not attend me, not being at all well, with a swollen face, which is feared is erysipelas.’
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It is clear that Queen Victoria did not realise the gravity of John Brown’s illness. On Monday 26 March, leaning heavily on footman Lockwood, she went to the private chapel at Windsor Castle to attend the christening of Princess Alice Mary Victoria Augusta Pauline, born to the Prince and Princess Leopold on 25 February. This Princess Alice was to be the longest-surviving of Queen Victoria’s thirty-seven grandchildren; she died in 1981.
During the morning of Tuesday 27 March, Dr James Reid, who had been constantly monitoring John Brown’s condition at the request of Queen Victoria, was handed a telegram from his father’s medical partner, Dr Andrew Fowler, informing him of his own father’s serious illness. Dr Reid senior died shortly afterwards. As John Brown was so ill, Queen Victoria deemed herself unable to allow Dr Reid to leave his bedside.
By Tuesday afternoon John Brown had sunk into a deep coma from which he never regained consciousness. According to the death certificate signed by Dr Reid, John Brown died at Windsor Castle at 10.40pm that night.
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Who was to tell the Queen of Brown’s death? Her family shirked the task until Prince Leopold reluctantly agreed. The Queen wrote of the event:
Leopold came to my dressing-room and broke the dreadful news to me that my good, faithful Brown had passed away early this morning. [
sic
] Am terribly upset by this loss, which removes one who was so devoted and attached to my service and who did so much for my personal comfort. It is the loss not only of a servant, but of a real friend.
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Prince Leopold conveyed his feelings in a letter to his brother-in-law Prince Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt: ‘I have deep sympathy with [the Queen]. We can feel for her, & her sorrow, without being sorry for the cause. At least I can’t be a hypocrit.’
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As the Queen wept alone at Windsor Castle, Prime Minister Gladstone prepared a letter of condolence at Downing Street:
Mr Gladstone presents his humble duty and presumes to lay before Your Majesty the expression of sincere concern with which he had learned that Your Majesty has been deprived, by a sudden and fatal illness, of the services of Mr J Brown. He is able in some degree to understand how the aid and attention of an attached, respected, and intelligent domestic prolonged through many years, and naturally productive of an ever-growing confidence, must, when withdrawn thus abruptly, leave a sense of serious loss, and this most of all in Your Majesty’s elevated sphere, and closely occupied life. Even in his own contracted circle of personal relations, he has had occasion to feel how much more of proximity may be the natural growth of such services than the outer world would readily suppose.
Mr Gladstone trusts Your Majesty may be able to select a good and efficient successor, though it would be too much to hope that anyone, however capable, can at once fill the void.
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This was typical of the pedantic twaddle that Queen Victoria expected of Gladstone. The Prime Minister’s hope that a ‘successor’ be selected to replace the ‘intelligent domestic’ grated with the Queen, whose low opinion of Gladstone descended a further notch or two. Benjamin Disraeli would never have made such a ‘pitiless’ blunder. Nevertheless in due course Queen Victoria appointed John Brown’s cousin Francie Clark to his former position. She had moulded John Brown into the servant she required and would endeavour to form Francie Clark in his image.
Laid out by the royal undertakers, John Brown’s body rested in state in his ‘untidy room’ in a temporary ‘shell’ while a ‘handsome State coffin was constructed’.
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The Queen’s hand was undoubtedly behind the entry in the
Court Circular
reporting John Brown’s death. After detailing a short comment on Brown’s royal service it went on:
This melancholy event has caused the deepest regret to the Queen, the Royal Family, and all members of the Royal Household. To Her Majesty the loss is irreparable, and the death of this truly faithful and devoted servant has been a grievous stroke to the Queen . . . An honest, faithful, and devoted follower, a trustworthy, discreet, and straightforward man, and possessed of strong sense, he filled a position of great and anxious responsibility, the duties of which he performed with such a constant and unceasing care as to secure for himself the real friendship of the Queen.
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The Queen’s emotions as reported in the official announcement were not shared by the Prince of Wales and his siblings. Searching out ‘social items’ in the
Court Circular
, author E.E.P. Tisdall noted that the Prince and Princess of Wales and Prince and Princess Alfred, among others, embarked on a flurry of theatre trips and after-theatre parties to an unprecedented extent.
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Sadly, the Prince of Wales’s reaction to the Queen setting out in her pony carriage the day after John Brown’s death went unrecorded, but teeth must have been on edge when Francie Clark was seen walking in his cousin’s usual place.
On Tuesday 3 April all the preparations were completed for John Brown’s funeral. His body, still in its inner lead ‘shell’, was lifted into a polished oak coffin, with layers of charcoal placed between the two containers. Unsealed, the coffin was laid upon the bed in which he had died and a short service was conducted by the Revd Thomas Orr, the Independent Minister at Windsor, attended by Queen Victoria and Princess Beatrice.
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Following this private service, the coffin was sealed and carried down to the visitors’ reception area in Clarence Tower, where the Revd Orr repeated the service in the presence of a gathering of the Royal Household.
Queen Victoria placed her wreath of myrtle and arum lilies on the coffin, where it was joined by another floral tribute from the Empress Eugénie. The Queen then retired to the Oak Room, from the window of which she watched the hearse bear John Brown to Windsor station. The town’s streets were quiet, the shops closed in respect. The bells of the parish church of St John, Windsor, and the bell in the Curfew Tower, were tolled as Brown’s coffin made its last journey. For once, at the Queen’s command, the pipers did not play under the castle walls.
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John Brown’s body was conveyed by train from Windsor to Ballater and thence by hearse to Bailena-Coile, the house Queen Victoria had given him for his retirement and in which he had never lived.
