John Brown (3 page)

Twenty more years passed before Scotland received another visit from a British royal personage. In the meantime the exiled royal Bourbons of France, Charles X, Comte d’Artois and King of France, Louis and Marie Theresa, Duc et Duchesse d’Angoulême, Charles and Caroline, Duc et Duchesse de Berri, and Henri, the titular Henri V of France, along with his sister Princess Louise, were all state guests at Holyrood Palace variously during periods in 1796 and 1830. Five years after her accession to the throne of Great Britain, after the death of her uncle King William IV at twelve minutes past two in the morning of 20 June 1837, Queen Victoria herself decided to take an early autumn holiday in Scotland.

During June 1842 Queen Victoria asked her Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel to set in motion the arrangements for her Scottish jaunt. To the Queen’s great surprise she was told that Peel and the Tory ministers in the Cabinet did not advise such a journey. They noted that the areas of northern England through which she would have to travel were rife with ‘Chartist sympathisers’. These were the agitators who demanded a ‘People’s Charter’ of parliamentary reform; only a few years previously, in 1839, they had signed a petition in the major towns of England towards this end and riots had broken out when Viscount Melbourne’s Liberal government had supported the rejection of the petition. No, the Queen was told, a Scottish trip was neither feasible nor safe. However, backed by Lord Melbourne, the Queen persisted with her wishes. After a lengthy discussion with Sir James Graham, the Home Office Secretary, Prime Minister Peel agreed that the trip could take place if the initial leg of the journey was by sea. Thus on Monday 29 August 1842 Queen Victoria embarked on the royal yacht,
Royal George
, at Woolwich, and her squadron, led by the 36-gun vessel
Pique
, set sail for Scotland.

By 1 September the little fleet was anchored off Leith. The Queen was met at Granton Pier by Walter Francis Montague-Douglas-Scott, 5th Duke of Buccleuch and 7th Duke of Queensberry, joint Lord President of the Council and Privy Seal, Captain-General of the Royal Company of Archers, and Lord Lieutenant of Mid-Lothian and Roxburghshire, along with Prime Minister Peel. Her visit was to last until Thursday 15 September, with trips as far north as Taymouth Castle in Perthshire, the home of John Campbell, 2nd Marquess and 5th Earl of Breadalbane, Lord Lieutenant of Argyllshire. During this visit, the Queen recorded later in her
Journal
, at the Duke of Buccleuch’s home, Dalkeith House, she first enjoyed real Scottish ‘oatmeal porridge’ and ‘Finnan haddies’ – the latter being split and smoke-cured haddock, named after the village of Findon in Kincardineshire.
¹

Queen Victoria was to make two more visits to Scotland before her great love affair with the country and its people really began at Balmoral. In September 1844 she landed at Dundee for a month-long expedition to Blair Castle at Blair Atholl, hosted by George Augustus Murray, 2nd Lord Glenlyon, nephew of the mentally disturbed estate owner John Murray, 5th Duke of Atholl. While driving by the River Tummel Queen Victoria tasted ‘Athole Brose’ for the first time at the inn at Moulinearn. This was a local drink made from a mixture of honey, whisky and milk.
²

Between 11 August and 19 September 1847 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert made a tour of the west coast of Scotland aboard the royal yacht
Victoria and Albert
, paying a visit to Ardverikie in Inverness-shire, where the Groom of the Stole to Prince Albert, James Hamilton, 2nd Marquess and 1st Duke of Abercorn, had rented a deer forest and holiday house. During these early visits Queen Victoria was able to see something, and learn more, of the Scottish inheritance she had received from her Stewart and Hanoverian forebears. Throughout her life Queen Victoria sustained her pride in the (albeit-very-diluted) Stewart blood that ran in her veins and felt as happy in Scotland as a Jacobite as she was in England as a fluent German-speaking Hanoverian.

At Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne Scotland was calculated by geographers to cover some 30,200 square miles, some nineteen million mostly uninhabited acres; its north–south length was nearly 280 miles, and its east–west breadth around 150 miles. It was divided into 33 counties, with 948 parishes.
³
The 1831 Scottish census showed that Victoria ruled over 1.11 million males and 1.25 million females in her northern realm. The largest number of male employees in any single industry was among shoe and bootmakers at 17,307, while domestic service was the major employment for women at 109,512.
⁴

The Scotland that Queen Victoria fell in love with had developed into two distinct regions by 1837. To the north lay the Highlands, where a separate culture had grown differently from that of the Lowlands. For centuries the Highlanders had lived in close-knit, Gaelic-speaking communities, with a strong loyalty to their (mostly) Tory chiefs, linked together by their proud heritage and all sustained by their Roman Catholic or Episcopalian faiths. The Lowlands were centred upon Edinburgh and favoured England in both speech and trade, their political and religious faiths being old Whig leaning to new Liberal and Presbyterian. As the nineteenth century progressed the Lowlands were more and more Anglicised, with the upper classes being educated to an increasing extent in English public schools and universities, with Scottish capital and industry falling under the influence of English boards of directors.

By the time Queen Victoria died in 1901, Scotland’s alignment had changed from north–south to east–west, with the industrialisation and ‘Hibernianisation’ of Clydeside. Yet the Victorian Age for Scotland was more than a regal division. The Queen brought to Scotland a truly British Age – she was the first monarch since the Union of the Parliaments in 1707 to achieve this. She also brought greater harmony to the Scottish and English nations and was instrumental in the wider acceptance of Scots south of the border, without automatic ridicule. Her Court in Scotland reflected all these influences.

Strictly speaking, Scotland had not had a royal court in residence for over two centuries, since that April day in 1603 when King James VI of Scotland, newly proclaimed James I of England, crossed the border at Lamberton Toll, just north of Berwick-upon-Tweed, on his long journey to London. Yet when Queen Victoria inherited the throne of what she called her ‘wicked uncles’, she became heiress to a ceremonial court of Scottish Officers of the Crown, Officers of State and a Royal Household whose functionaries jealously guarded their hereditary places. There were six Officers of the Crown under the Hereditary Grand Constable and Knight Marishal, William George Hay, 18th Earl of Erroll of Slains Castle, Aberdeenshire. This position was granted initially by King Robert I, the Bruce, to Sir Gilbert Hay, 5th Lord Erroll in 1306. It was made hereditary in 1314 after the Battle of Bannockburn. The duties were simple: to safeguard the sovereign’s person on Scottish territory. The other Officers of the Crown were the Lord-Justice General, James Graham, 4th Duke of Montrose; the Lord President, the Rt Hon. Charles Hope; the Vice-Marshal, William Schaw Cathcart, Viscount Cathcart; and two Standard Bearers.

The Hereditary Bearer of the Royal Banner of Scotland in 1837 was H. Scrymgeour-Wedderburn of Birkhall. Sir Alexander Scrymgeour had carried the royal banner for Robert I in the Wars of Independence. When he became king, Robert I conferred the hereditary aspects of the position on the Scrymgeour family who became Earls of Dundee in 1660. The banner was defined by its armorial device of ‘lyon rampant’. The Hereditary Standard Bearer at this time was James Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale, of Thirlestane Castle, Berwickshire.
⁵

The Officers of State were led by the Commissioners for the Custody of the Regalia, whose senior member was the Keeper of the Great Seal, George William Campbell, 6th Duke of Argyll. The Royal Household in Scotland was led by the Duke of Argyll as Hereditary Master, with two Deputy Masters in the shape of the Hereditary Usher, Sir Patrick Walker, and the Hereditary Carver, Sir William Carmichael Anstruther. The office of Master of the Household was given to Archibald, 2nd Earl of Argyll, in 1494. The position was made hereditary in 1528, and the Master was responsible for ‘below stairs’ and state function arrangements.

The Grand Constable and Standard Bearer were joined by Lady Seton-Steuart of Touch-Seton, the Hereditary Armour-bearer and Squire of the Royal Body, making up the three Marshals of the Royal Household. The Household was composed of twenty-two further appointments, ranging from the Falconer (Thomas Marshall Gardiner) to the Tailor (William Fraser). Many of these appointments were of great antiquity: the position of Dean of the Chapel Royal dated from 1120, while the Royal Limner (painter) was a later introduction in 1703. In 1837 forty-nine persons held warrants as suppliers to the court, ranging from the Royal Baker (James Aikman) to the Royal Wine Merchant (Alexander & Sons). Among the warrant holders for Scotland ranked the Queen’s Surgeon-in-Ordinary, Sir George Ballingall, and her Surgeon-Extraordinary, Mr John G.M. Burt. In the medical household they were joined by two Surgeon-Dentists, Robert Nasmyth and D.W. Johnston.
⁶

Another important group within Queen Victoria’s Scottish ceremonial court were the still extant Royal Bodyguard, the Royal Company of Archers. Administered from Archers Hall, Edinburgh, they still appear at important royal occasions in their braided green doublets and Kilmarnock bonnets decorated with eagle feathers. Their Company was formally constituted in 1676, although tradition says they carry on the spirit of the archers who fell protecting King James IV of Scots when he and the Scottish army were routed at Flodden Field, Northumberland, by the English army under Thomas, Earl of Surrey, in the Anglo-Scots Wars of 1513.

Queen Victoria also inherited the ‘Honours of Scotland’, the Scottish Regalia or Crown Jewels, which themselves had had a colourful history, with bold adventures keeping them out of the hands of rapacious Englishmen like Oliver Cromwell. After the Act of Union of the Parliaments of 1707, the Honours were walled up in a vaulted chamber in Edinburgh Castle’s palace buildings; they were finally ‘re-discovered’ and placed on display by a warrant of the Prince of Wales (later King George IV) in 1818. The Honours comprise the crown, the sceptre and the sword of state. Tradition has it that the Scottish Crown incorporates the ‘circlet’ of King Robert I, the Bruce; made some time after 1314, it is known to have been used at the coronation of the five-year-old son of Robert the Bruce, King David II, in 1329. This crown has been subsequently altered at the behest of succeeding monarchs, and was ‘re-made’ for James V in 1540. The sceptre was presented to James IV by Pope Alexander VI in 1494; it was melted down and refashioned by James V. The Italian-wrought sword of state was a gift to James IV from Pope Julius II in 1507.

Scotland retained its own Order of Chivalry in the Most Ancient and Most Noble Order of the Thistle, which had been revived and promulgated by statute of King James II on 29 May 1687. Tradition has it that the Order was founded in 809 by Achaius, King of Scots, to honour the Patron Saint of Scotland, the Apostle and Martyr St Andrew of Bethsaida in Galilee. The Order fell out of use in James II’s reign but was revived by Queen Anne on 31 December 1703. The purpose of the Order was to give Scotland an equivalent to the Most Noble Order of the Garter founded in England in 1348. When Queen Victoria came to the throne none of the sixteen Knights of the Thistle ranked below Viscount, and one of their number was her ‘wicked uncle’ Prince Augustus Frederick, Duke of Sussex.

All matters heraldic and armorial in Scotland were (and still are) under the jurisdiction of the Lord Lyon King-of-Arms, who settles questions of family arms in the Lyon Court. The office of Lord Lyon first appeared in the fourteenth century and historians aver that it was a successor to the Celtic
sennachies
, the tribal genealogists and reciters of family lore and history.

Queen Victoria’s Court always retained a rather stuffy formality of dress, particularly at levées, ‘drawing rooms’, presentations and state occasions. This meant that each special event saw a glittering assembly of court dress, wherein many of the men outdid the women in the splendour of their lace, gold braid, medals and feathers. Ministers of the Crown, lawyers, Lords Lieutenant, Governors General, officers and functionaries all wore special Court dress and colourful uniforms, each designed according to custom. In Scotland a specific court dress was formulated for Highlanders. It was thus formally gazetted in the Victorian
Dress Worn at Court
Guide: