Sons, Servants and Statesmen (22 page)

The British minister at Berne, the Hon. E.A.J. Harris, immediately lodged a formal complaint against the newspaper with the Swiss Federal Council, which did nothing. He would have been wiser to let the matter rest, for his action had the predictable but unfortunate effect of giving the gossip a wider audience throughout much of Europe, gossip which has continued almost unabated to the present day. However, most of the British press loyally ignored the story. Even the socialist radical weekly
Reynolds Newspaper
, which generally took a thoroughly anti-monarchist stance, refrained from mentioning it.

Henry Ponsonby, by this time an equerry, told his brother that they did not know what the libel was, and he imagined the Queen to be as ignorant as the rest of them: ‘I believe it to be a statement that she has married John Brown, and the idea that it could be said she was marrying one of her servants would make her angry and wretched.’
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Later he said that the Queen was aware of the libel and had laughed at it, saying she was sorry any notice had been taken of it. Though Queen Victoria had more of a sense of humour than she was often given credit for, it is open to question whether she would have treated such an undignified assertion as a laughing matter.

It was rumoured that Brown had a hold on the Queen because he had been endowed with unique psychic powers, and that she used him as a spiritualist medium to contact Prince Albert in the spirit world. Gossips averred that she was convinced the Prince’s spirit had somehow been passed on to her Highland servant, and she believed he was her late husband’s living embodiment. It was also said that John Brown was married to another woman altogether. At one time he was believed to have taken Miss Ocklee, one of the Queen’s dressers and his regular dancing partner at Balmoral, as his wife, a belief which persisted until she married a man from the Steward’s department in 1873. After Brown’s death, a pamphlet in general circulation stated that he had married a girl from his native valley.

At home, satirical journalists were beginning to take notice. The well-established, generally good-natured but sometimes quite sharp
Punch
and the shortlived, more anarchic
Tomahawk
, which was launched in May 1867 (and folded within three years), both lampooned the Queen and her servant mercilessly. In 1866 the former published a spoof Court Circular:

Such satire was mild when seen beside the savagery of its disrespectful young competitor. In August 1867
Tomahawk
published a cartoon entitled ‘A Brown Study’. This portrayed a sinister-looking John Brown leaning against the throne as he smoked a clay pipe, with the Queen’s Crown resting underneath a glass bell in the background. In the foreground, looking up somewhat meekly at Brown, was the British lion.

Though Victoria’s relationship with Brown gave rise to much unsavoury innuendo at the time, modern historians have taken a more detached view. As Dorothy Thompson has suggested, the reaction of a modern feminist to a widowed queen in her forties taking a lover would probably be on the lines of ‘So what?’ The choice would nonetheless have embarrassed or distressed members of Victoria’s own family. However, such a close liaison with a man who was a social inferior, yet who lacked political ambition and only made modest personal demands on the sovereign, would be far preferable to any such relationship with someone else from the upper classes or a member of a foreign royal family, around whom political suspicions would inevitably have gathered.
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Three of Victoria’s Hanoverian predecessors on the throne (Kings George I, II and IV) had mistresses during their married lives, and the latter two outlived their wives by several years, during which time the mistresses remained at Court. George II was said to have wept at his wife’s deathbed, and when she told him he should marry again, he reassured her brokenly between sobs that he would still have mistresses. It stretches the imagination considerably to picture Queen Victoria even contemplating, while Prince Albert was on his deathbed, that she would take lovers after he was gone.

The Queen’s fervent relationship with Brown was simply another instance of her constant quest for a father-figure. John Brown may have been seven and a half years younger than her, but she found in him as an adult, and a very handsome man in his prime, the qualities she needed. Her passionate nature probably did not require physical relief, and unless she was a hypocrite, it is difficult if not impossible to imagine her being unfaithful to the memory of her ‘beloved angel’. All she wanted and needed was intense, undivided attention and affection producing a sense of safety and comfort. ‘My poor old birthday, my 51st!’ she wrote in her journal in 1870. ‘Alone, alone, as it will ever be! But surely, my dearest one blesses me.’
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Herbert Tingsten believed that Elizabeth Longford’s theory of Queen Victoria’s lack of sensuality was not wholly convincing, and that it seems unreasonable to assume the Queen could never have allowed herself to fall into the arms of her servant without feeling she would have to marry him afterwards. It can hardly be assumed that, had the Queen felt obliged to marry a second time, a sense of propriety would have ruled out marriage with her Highland servant. On the contrary, to take this argument to its logical conclusion, had an intimate relationship developed between them, propriety would all the more have required her to marry him.
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The trickle of ‘Queen Victoria married John Brown’ stories, supported by new so-called evidence that has just miraculously been unearthed, has never abated and probably never will. At least they provide lively, if futile, speculation for those who are interested enough to indulge their somewhat over-developed imaginations.

In 1979 Dr Micheil MacDonald, curator of the Museum of Scottish Tartans, Perthshire, claimed after ten years’ research that the Queen and Brown were married and had a child. This rested partly on interviews with the relations of those who lived in or near the Queen’s residences, and particularly on a tape-recorded account of an eye-witness who heard the deathbed confession of a church minister who was said to have officiated at the marriage ceremony. This supposed child of the relationship lived as a recluse in Paris until the age of ninety, returning from time to time to visit Balmoral. Dr MacDonald saw the royal widow of forty-two as ‘a frightened little girl who hid behind the weeds of widowhood to avoid life’s realities’,
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and Brown was the only one who could guide her through this extremely difficult time.

At least two more instances have been recorded since 1979. One was by a daughter of one of the Queen’s chaplains who allegedly married her to Brown (how many different clergymen have been reputed to have performed this ceremony, one wonders), and another was by the diarist James Lees-Milne, who lunched with an elderly daughter of the late royal doctor Sir James Reid who claimed that she was confident the Queen slept with Brown.
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Another rumour came into circulation more than a century after the Queen’s death. While rummaging in the Royal Archives at Windsor, the historian Sir Steven Runciman had apparently found a marriage certificate confirming that Victoria had been through such a ceremony with John Brown. He showed it to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, who grabbed it and threw it on to a blazing fire. Runciman and Queen Elizabeth had both died not long before this story appeared in the press, but such an account could surely convince none but the most gullible. Any scholar or researcher granted access to the Royal Archives is only permitted to see specific documents relevant to their particular area of interest. As a medieval historian, Runciman would not have been handed any Victorian documents, let alone had the freedom to ‘rummage’ through unsorted piles which might have contained such a controversial item – if indeed such an item had ever been preserved, let alone existed in the first place.
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As Queen of Great Britain, and answerable to nobody else in the kingdom, she could in theory marry any man she wanted to, now that she was a widow. A few years later, in 1880, her fellow-sovereign, Tsar Alexander II of Russia, secretly married his mistress, Catherine Dolgorouky, and the mother of his three youngest children, six weeks after his Empress consort died and in the face of severe disapproval, if not outright condemnation, from most of his family. Queen Victoria could therefore have disregarded the weight of family and public opinion and made Brown her husband.

Yet in practice, she would never have gone against the grain in such a way. Any theory of a secret marriage does not fit the pattern of the portrait of her which has emerged from her journals and letters over the years. Tempting and highly amusing as it might be for gossips and republicans to imagine one of the great icons of British monarchy in bed with a Highland servant, whether she was wearing his ring on her finger or not, even her worst enemies would never have accused her of such hypocrisy.

Perhaps the last word, for now, should go to Sir Frederick Ponsonby, an assistant private secretary to Queen Victoria at the time of her death and devoted (though not always uncritical) servant to King Edward VII and King George V until his own death in 1935. In his posthumous memoirs, he noted that while the numerous stories about the Queen and John Brown were untrue, he did not completely rule out ‘some grain of truth’ in the idea that he might have been something more than a faithful servant to her. When he mentioned the rumour to several people in the household that they were secretly married, they all laughed at the idea. The Duchess of Roxburghe, who was said to have been present at a secret marriage ceremony, told him emphatically that it was a mere fabrication inspired by those who wished to ridicule the monarchy. While there was something to be said for the ‘no smoke without fire’ theory, Ponsonby said, he was convinced that if there had ever been ‘any quite unconscious sexual feeling’ in Queen Victoria’s regard for John Brown, he believed it was unconscious on both sides, and ‘their relations up to the last were simply those of employer and devoted retainer’.
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In May 1867 the Royal Academy of Arts Spring Exhibition included an equestrian picture by Sir Edwin Landseer, entitled ‘Her Majesty at Osborne, 1866’. It showed Queen Victoria reading a despatch while sitting side-saddle on her pony, Flora, while the red despatch boxes, other documents and her gloves lay on the ground. Holding the horse’s bridle was the unmistakable form of the Queen’s Highland servant. The
Saturday Review
felt it was a great mistake for such a painting to be exhibited, remarking in its review of the show that while they respected the privacy of Her Majesty, Landseer was inadvertently doing more harm to her popularity than he could imagine. The
Illustrated London News
agreed that it was an unfortunate painting, and that they hoped it would not be deemed disloyal to the sovereign or to the painter’s reputation to say that none of Her Majesty’s subjects would see ‘this lugubrious picture without regret’,
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while the
Saturday Review
wrote that if anyone was to stand beside it for a quarter of an hour and listen to visitors’ comments, ‘he will learn how great an imprudence has been committed’.
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Far from sharing such views, the Queen was so impressed by the painting that she ordered Landseer to make an engraving of it. Ironically, Landseer was one of the favourites at Court who had been suspected of passing anti-Brown remarks to
Punch
and
Tomahawk
.

Worse was to follow. The Queen had agreed to attend a review in Hyde Park in July of that year, but to her fury Lord Derby, her Prime Minister, dared to suggest that she leave John Brown at home, as the sight of him might lead to incidents of an ‘unpleasant nature’. Derby asked the Queen’s secretary, Charles Grey, to recommend that Brown might develop ‘some slight ailment’ on the day and thus excuse himself. Knowing that such subterfuge would never work with anybody as honest as the Queen, he approached her saying that the Prime Minister’s greatest concern was for Brown’s own feelings and safety: what if he was to be exposed to public humiliation?

Providentially, the impasse was resolved by a tragic event on the other side of the world. In June Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, brother of Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria and the husband of Queen Victoria’s cousin Princess Charlotte of Belgium, and whose so-called empire had been revealed as no more than an ill-conceived experiment in imperialism on the part of France, was captured by Mexican forces, given a show trial and executed by firing squad. The Hyde Park review was cancelled and the Court went into mourning, but not before the Queen had ensured that on any similar future occasion Brown’s position would be unchallenged. ‘The Queen will not be dictated to,’ she wrote angrily to her equerry, Lord Charles Fitzroy, ‘or
made
to
alter
what she has found to answer for her comfort.’
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