John Brown (14 page)
Brown was to have a cottage at Balmoral should he marry. Although he never did marry, Queen Victoria still gave him a cottage ‘for retirement’;
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it is called in Gaelic
Bailena-Coile
(‘Town-of-the-Woods’) and is situated near Craig Gowan. Although it was furnished with gifts that John Brown accumulated while in royal service he never lived there, yet after his death his coffin rested at the house the night before he was buried at old Crathie churchyard.
By the end of 1866 John Brown’s salary was raised to £150, and to £230 in 1869, with an allowance of £70 for clothes; the basic salary was later raised to £310. In 1872, the year John Brown was officially designated ‘Esquire’, his salary was raised to equal the Household rank of Page of the Backstairs at £400.
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All this was in accordance with Queen Victoria’s growing affection for John Brown: ‘You will see’, she wrote to him in 1872, ‘in this the great anxiety to show more & more what you are to me & as time goes on this will be more & more seen & known. Every one hears me say you are my friend & most confidential attendant.’
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While all this was solid advancement for John Brown, it must be remembered that he was always considered by Queen Victoria to be of lesser rank as a servant than Rudolph Löhlein.
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Because he closely resembled Prince Albert in figure and face, courtiers believed the gossip from Coburg that Löhlein was the Prince’s half-brother, the illegitimate offspring of Prince Albert’s father Ernest I, Duke of SaxeCoburg-Gotha. Löhlein had been brought up by a forester on the family estate of Fullbach, near Coburg, and came to Queen Victoria’s court in 1847 as Prince Albert’s
Jäger
, being promoted to valet in 1860.
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After Prince Albert’s death Queen Victoria made Löhlein her ‘Extra Personal Attendant’, a post he held until he retired in 1884; he died in 1886. Brown’s title, ‘The Queen’s Highland Servant’, did not entirely die with him; on his death it was assumed by his cousin Francis Clark and Brown’s brother Hugh became ‘Extra Highland Attendant’ to assist Clark; on the latter’s death the post passed to William Brown.
Brown was a walking encyclopedia of Queen Victoria’s likes and dislikes, the latter greatly outweighing the former. What is more, he understood what made the Queen feel
gemütlich
, a word she often used. It has been long rumoured that John Brown kept a ‘secret diary’ of his life in royal circles.
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If he did, it has never been publicly identified. Certainly he very soon realised that Queen Victoria was a complex character, her personality shaped in her youth when she was subject to the manipulations of royal factions at her Court, particularly the machinations of her mother’s Comptroller Sir John Conroy.
Brown came to understand the Queen’s many contradictions of character. She was a fundamentally courageous woman, but Brown found her nervous of a whole range of things, from meeting people she did not know when she was out driving, to simply being alone. In a single morning Brown might observe her being selfless and thoughtless, diplomatic and insensitive, understanding and unloving, forebearing and mean, serene and convulsive. Though clingy, she was every inch a Queen, and an English one at that, though she admitted feeling ‘Scotch’ at Balmoral. Yet Brown had been surprised, as many others were, that she spoke and wrote flawless German and her Court had many Teutonic aspects.
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Brown knew that the Queen disliked bishops, but she had particular respect for John Coleridge Patterson, the first missionary Bishop of Melanesia. To Brown she once said: ‘I am sure that the dear Bishop will go straight to Heaven when he dies.’ ‘Weel, God help him when he meets John Knox,’ replied Brown. Victoria’s dislikes also included babies and bright lights, the latter providing her main reason for being an unenthusiastic supporter of electricity. Yet she liked sermons, religious services and the activities of her grandchildren. She cared not for people with loud voices, hot rooms, coal fires, motor cars and telephones, although during the latter years of her life she found telephoning more efficacious than her famous written memos – usually of complaint – to Household staff. Of all the personalities at court, the Queen particularly disliked Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone. Brown was aware of the fact that the Queen disliked Gladstone and had complained that the Prime Minister addressed her as if she were a public meeting. So at one audience when Gladstone was droning on longer than usual, Brown made an attempt to rescue the Queen by blurting out: ‘Ye’ve said enuff.’
The Queen did not approve of the education or indulgence of the working classes, averring that education made them unfit for domestic service or industrial work. Education of women was anathema to her, as was female suffrage, and she was censorious of female fashion that did not please her. Although she never tired of telling people that she was the daughter of a soldier, she disliked anyone who brought what she construed as ‘military ways’ to her Household. Her interest was always of the keenest when discussing military matters; her involvement included personal approval of promotions of officers above the rank of colonel to changes of uniform; and she was well versed in the history of regiments. She took particular delight at military reviews, with John Brown sitting on the box of her carriage, in having a running conversation with him on what was happening.
Death duties and income tax were of particular repugnance to the Queen, yet she ‘willingly’ paid the latter when it was introduced by Prime Minister Robert Peel in 1842. Under the influence of John Brown she became more ambivalent in her extreme disgust of tobacco, making courtiers and honoured guests alike go into the garden to smoke. John Brown arranged for a little ante-room at Balmoral to be used by smokers, and there could be found a group of courtiers in all their finery kneeling in a semi-circle around the fireplace blowing the fumes of their ‘filthy habit’ up the chimney.
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One man defied the Queen’s ‘No Smoking’ notices dotted around her homes. Albert, King of Saxony, was a heavy smoker and averred that he could not be without a cigar for long; pulling rank as a king he walked boldly down corridors and staircases puffing confidently, the Household cringing at the thought of the Queen’s wrath.
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Nevertheless, John Brown told the Queen that smoking was a ‘good thing’ when out in the hills to keep midges away, and at picnics the Queen and Princess Beatrice were seen puffing away at his direction for this purpose.
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At Balmoral another of Queen Victoria’s dislikes, shooting, was indulged with fervour. Because Prince Albert had been fond of the pastime, it was indulged; because Brown said it was a vital part of Balmoral life for guests and courtiers alike it was humoured. When Princess Helena’s husband, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, lost an eye while shooting alongside the cack-handed Prince Arthur, the Queen was greatly upset and bought her son-in-law a boxed set of glass eyes; one of them was ‘bloodshot’ for when he had a cold or had indulged too enthusiastically the night before.
From his first days at Osborne then, John Brown began a close study of his royal mistress and in this was to be found the fundamental key to any mystery about his rise to prominence. Queen Victoria craved friendship, and the best kind of all was defined as a knowledge and indulgence of herself; John Brown provided that.
When conducting guests around royal properties like Windsor Castle, Brown would point out portraits and artefacts relevant to the Queen’s life, adding snippets of her biography. Pausing before pictures of her babyhood, coronation and marriage he would boom: ‘Her Maa-dj-esty was born on 24 May 1819 at Kensington Palace, she’s seven years older than me. She ascended the throne on 20 June 1837 on the death of her uncle, a silly buddy by all accounts, and was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 23 June 1838. She married Prince Albert at the Crown room, St James’s Palace, on 10 February 1840; the Queen and me remembers all these anniversaries.’
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Queen Victoria began to be more aware and more indulgent of John Brown’s ‘Highland sensibilities’. Curiously, she started to plot her foreign excursions to avoid places where he was not accepted or welcomed. For instance, after King Leopold of the Belgians died in 1865, she began to re-route her entourage on its way to the German Court, usually via Brussels, to Paris and Cherbourg instead. Why? John Brown’s true worth and position had not been recognised by the Belgian Court, which had not arranged for Brown to have his own suite of rooms near her own.
John Brown disliked foreigners, their tongue, their scenery, their food and their effluvia. His distaste prevented the Queen from enjoying to the full the pleasures of her jaunts abroad, or from being adventurous, as he transplanted her routines of Balmoral to such locations as Baveno. The heat made him feel ill, and fearing the assassination of his royal mistress he discouraged the stopping of her carriage for her to enjoy vistas.
Paris was quite different. The French, considering all
rosbifs
to be completely mad, understood what they took to be British royal eccentricity and treated Brown with dignity. In due time President François Paul Jules Grévy accorded John Brown a special bow of recognition. Brown was particularly taken with the English-educated Anglo-French National Assembly Member William Henry Waddington, who once called on the Queen at the British Embassy in Paris. Waddington’s wife recalled that Brown and Waddington ‘shook hands, and Brown begged him to come to Scotland, where he would receive a hearty welcome’.
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From time to time John Brown would give the Queen little gifts. On one occasion he produced ‘a dozen cheap eggcups of gay and florid design’.
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To the complete surprise of her ladies, the Queen accepted the garish utensils with the delight that she had usually reserved for Prince Albert’s little
Geschenk
(gifts) which he usually inscribed
Meiner theuren Victoria von Ihrem treuen Albert
(To My dear Victoria from her faithful Albert). The egg-cups were used every Sunday on the Queen’s breakfast table, until they were finally all broken years after John Brown’s death.
The year 1866 was to bring Queen Victoria many changes, which she had always hated. Yet it was also a turning-point in her widowhood. To a certain extent her grief for Albert was abating, but still she remained reclusive by temperament. It was her paramount wish, she informed her dearest friends, to ‘throw everything up and retire into private life’, with the intent of working for the ‘poor and sick’.
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She told her old friend Augusta of Saxe-Weimar, Queen-Empress of Prussia: ‘My political and queenly tasks are the hardest for me . . . Only a sense of duty and the knowledge that my Angel [Prince Albert] wishes it and that I must answer to him, force me to carry this out.’
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The Queen’s sense of duty was strengthened by her disappointment in what she saw as the fatuous and immoral nature of her eldest son, the Prince of Wales; daily he convinced her of his unfitness to rule. Yet John Brown’s influence encouraged the Queen to see that her grief from the past could be a shrine to which she might return from time to time, but need not be a jail in which she permanently lived.
Domestically the Queen now had to face important changes in her Household. Prince Albert’s former private secretary Sir Charles Phipps became a private secretary to her in parallel, but not very harmoniously, with General Charles Grey. Sir Thomas Biddulph, Master of the Household, was appointed joint Keeper of the Privy Purse with General Grey, with Biddulph concentrating on the financial aspects of the role, while Sir John Cowell took up the post of Master of the Household. All were to cross swords from week to week with John Brown, who remained well and truly secure from change as the Queen’s most trusted servant. Brown appeared wherever she did in public, stood by her chair as she worked to keep her free from interruption, and to her other servants’ great amusement walked behind her with a plaid over his arm to which were pinned the Queen’s memos, messages and missives.
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On 6 February 1866, in a state of nervous agitation, Queen Victoria went in procession to the opening of Parliament; this was the first time she had done so since Albert’s death. In March she attended a military review, again for the first time since the Prince died. She had once enthusiastically enjoyed these reviews, dressed in a scarlet tunic with a general’s sash and hat plume, and riding her bay ‘Alma’, a scene immortalised by the painter George Housman Thomas. This time she attended in her carriage, with John Brown on the rumble seat. One paper recorded: ‘Gillie Brown seems by degrees to have fallen into the position in the household of the Queen such as was occupied by Roustaen, the Mameluke, near the person of Napoleon the Great.’
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More nervous agitation was to assail the Queen on Thursday 5 July, the wedding day of Princess Helena to Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, fifteen years her senior, at the private chapel at Windsor Castle. In the crowd massed in the corridor outside the Queen’s bedroom, where Princess Helena was dressing, stood John Brown in Highland dress. Queen Victoria was ‘firmer’ in her confidence when she travelled by royal train to Wolverhampton to unveil Thomas Thornycroft’s equestrian statue of Prince Albert on 30 November. Among the postilions in Ascot livery stood John Brown in Highland dress, this time wearing the black crape ribbon with its purple silk band bearing the legend ‘In Memory of Prince Albert’.
In this year of 1866 the railway line to Ballater was opened, but for a long time the Queen would never use it, because Prince Albert had never been associated with it.
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The Queen did not have her own waiting room at Ballater until 1889. Throughout her life the Queen remained afraid of railway accidents, and commanded that the royal train should go no faster than 50 miles per hour. Once the Queen sent John Brown down the platform, when the royal train had stopped at Wigan, with a message for the driver to slow down; to this message Brown added: ‘Her Maa-dj-esty says the carriage was shaking like the Devil.’
