We Two: Victoria and Albert (75 page)

Brown soon won notoriety in the royal household for his familiar ways with the Queen, whom he sometimes was heard addressing in his deep
brogue as “wummin.” He lifted her down from her pony and wrapped her shawl around her. Once he was heard ordering her to keep her chin up, for heaven’s sake! On another occasion he chided her for her ratty old dress. Brown was capable of denying the Prince of Wales access to his mother, since she was taking her nap. At Balmoral, Brown and the Queen would go off on excursions in the pony chaise, fortified against the cold by wraps, shortbread cookies, and flasks of whisky, which, Brown declared, Her Majesty vastly preferred to tea. At the annual Gillies Ball, Victoria shocked her family by trimming her dress and hair with plaid and whirling happily on Brown’s sinewy arm, looking shockingly young and happy again. That Brown had a taste for whisky and was often too inebriated to perform his duties did not improve his stock with the royal family.

Between 1865 and 1870, rumormongers and scandal sheets in Europe spread the word that the Queen of England was secretly married to Mr. Brown. Perhaps she had even had a child by him. In Great Britain, the Queen’s officers were able to protect Her Majesty’s reputation in the mainstream press. However, the public was fascinated by Brown, and anyone with access to the court watched him and the Queen attentively. One cartoonist in a short-lived radical periodical called the
Tomahawk
dared to show the British lion lunging at a kilted gentleman smoking a pipe, his back
to the throne. However, the decision made by the Queen’s advisers was to simply keep a lid as far as possible on the rumors and make sure that nothing substantive came out. Brown, for all his faults, kept the Queen happy, and he had no political agenda and no political base. He depended on the Queen’s good favor, his loyalty was exclusively to her, and though he became arrogant and difficult, he posed no real threat. When, following Brown’s death, Queen Victoria formed a not dissimilarly close attachment to her Indian servant Abdul Karim, even the Prince of Wales, who had loathed the Highland Servant, looked back on the Brown era with nostalgia.

“A Brown Study,” 1867

Were Victoria and John Brown lovers? A number of people in the nineteenth century thought so, but the eyewitness reports are all at third-or fourth-hand. The excellent 1997 movie, starring Judi Dench and Billy Connolly, is provocatively titled
Mrs. Brown
and establishes how much affection bound Victoria to John, how he protected her, and what fun they had together, but it refrains from showing the two in bed. The most authoritative twentieth-century biographies of the Queen—Elizabeth Longford’s in 1964 and Christopher Hibbert’s in 2000—deny the possibility of physical intimacy. Hibbert, a scrupulous scholar, devotes a long footnote to the sources that claim to have evidence that the Queen had allowed John Brown “every conjugal privilege,” but his text comes to the orthodox conclusion that the Queen was “innocent.” Longford declared: “That the Queen was neither John Brown’s mistress nor his morganatic wife should be clear from a study of her character.”

What Longford and Hibbert meant was that Queen Victoria would be lessened in their eyes had she slept with John Brown and that they are relieved to report that there is absolutely no hard evidence that she did. However, writers with no loyalty to the monarchy such as Dorothy Thompson assert that the lack of hard evidence is in itself a proof of intimacy. If the memorial that the Queen prepared for the dead Brown, and wished to publish, was so “innocent,” why did her staff burn it, along with Brown’s own diary? Hibbert drily confirms Thompson’s sensational claim that, at the Queen’s express wish and deliberately without the knowledge of her family members, Victoria’s doctor, Sir James Reid, placed a picture of John Brown in her coffin, and put a lock of his hair in her dead hand. This indicates that Prince Albert and John Brown had a certain equivalency to Victoria as a woman.

ANOTHER KEY ELEMENT
in Victoria’s successful new life as a widow was her career as an author. Writing was almost as vital to the Queen as eating,
and the most important monument she constructed to the dead Albert was not in stone but in text—the six tightly spaced volumes of biography she commissioned, supervised closely and partly wrote. Within months of Albert’s death, she began her collaboration with Sir Charles Grey, and they completed the one-volume
The Early Years of the Prince Consort
by 1867. Victoria then went on to guide Professor (later Sir) Theodore Martin through the arduous five-volume
The Life of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort
. Emboldened, and encouraged by her staff, Victoria then published two volumes of extracts from her Highland diaries in her own name, a paean to the dead prince that became an international best seller.

Victoria’s authorized biography of her husband is rarely read today, even by nineteenth-century experts, but it still offers more hard information on the prince consort than any other. It also has a massive bias. Martin states explicitly in his introduction that his job was to present Queen Victoria’s view of the prince consort, not his own. The great strength of the work is that Martin is a kind of ventriloquist’s dummy through which Victoria, the person closest to Albert for twenty-one of his forty-two years, speaks to us.

The great weakness of the biography, especially of the first volume, with which the Queen was most intimately associated, is that it paints the portrait of a man who is very difficult to like or sympathize with. As a young wife, Queen Victoria chose to worship her husband as the perfect man. As an insecure young husband, Albert found it both natural and pleasant that his wife should constantly descant on his perfections. Both husband and wife constructed a narrative whereby Albert from infancy was without stain, impervious to carnal temptation, a modern Galahad.

But once these private fictions were committed to print, they looked suspiciously like hagiography masquerading as biography, and hagiography had a waning hold over the public even in the nineteenth century. The stated intent of Victoria’s biographical project was to set her husband among the great of history, but in this she failed. The Queen made strenuous claims for her husband and praised him to the skies, but simply by taking possession of his life and placing her stamp upon it, she set the prince consort in her shadow. He emerged from her account as a passive creature, cast in the image of a powerful woman’s desire.

Furthermore, by portraying her husband as Albert the Chaste, Queen Victoria feminized the prince, the last thing he would have wanted. Across cultures, lifelong sexual continence has been a virtue required of women, not men. The great male saints—Paul, Augustine, Jerome, Francis, Dominic— were not virgins or monogamous married men but reformed libertines. They
constructed their own narratives and commanded the respect of their peers and posterity by showing how hard won had been their battles for purity. Albert and Victoria collaborated in constructing a myth that fatally denied all evidence of struggle and thus all dramatic interest.

The kindest interpretation Victoria placed on her husband’s death for the public was that he was an angel, too good for a wicked world, and now happy in heaven. Her harshest judgment in private was that he had lacked “pluck” and given in to death, instead of fighting. In their married lives, they had been partners as well as lovers, and the rhetoric of her submission always hid a subtext of competition and rebellion. By 1855, at the height of the Crimean War, the marriage had begun to fray as Victoria reveled in her new prominence with the public as a wartime queen. This encouraged her to assert her will in family affairs. How things would have gone between the two had Albert lived is impossible to imagine, but it is clear that by 1859 Victoria was already chipping away at Albert’s pedestal.

If the marriage of Victoria and Albert was as much a power struggle as a love story, then Victoria proved to be the stronger. If their partnership was also a contest, then she was the winner. She took possession of the prince in death as he had taken possession of her in life. In her black dress and widow’s cap, she lived to play the tragedy queen, Victoria, Regina et Imperatrix, for forty more years. Albert had staked his life on becoming
the
Eminent Victorian, and yet he would find no place in Lytton Strachey’s famous book. His was the tragic role. The power and the glory were hers.