John Brown Read online

  JOHN BROWN

  QUEEN VICTORIA’S

  HIGHLAND SERVANT

  RAYMOND LAMONT-BROWN

  First published in 2000

  This edition published in 2010

  The History Press

  The Mill, Brimscombe Port

  Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

  www.thehistorypress.co.uk

  This ebook edition first published in 2011

  All rights reserved

  © Raymond Lamont-Brown, 2000, 2002, 2004, 2006, 2010, 2011

  The right of Raymond Lamont-Brown, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 6899 0

  MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 6900 3

  Original typesetting by The History Press

  CONTENTS

  Chronology

  Prologue: Birth of Royal Rumour

  Introduction: Queen Victoria’s Scottish Inheritance

  1. Child of the Mountains

  2. Fascinating Johnny Brown

  3. To Serve Her All His Days

  4. All the Secrets of the Universe

  5. To Kill the Queen

  6. Sickle of the Reaper

  7. Trial by Gossip

  Epilogue: Scenes at a Royal Deathbed

  Appendix 1: Holograph letter from Queen Victoria

  Appendix 2: Queen Victoria’s Children and Their Antipathy to John Brown

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  CHRONOLOGY

  THE LIFE AND ROYAL ASSOCIATIONS OF JOHN BROWN

  1819

  24 May Princess Alexandrina Victoria is born at Kensington Palace, only child of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn (1767–1820), and Princess Victoria Mary Louisa of Saxe-Saalfeld-Coburg (1786–1861), widow of Emich Karl, Prince zu Leiningen.

  26 Aug Prince Francis Albert Charles Augustus Emmanuel of Saxe-Coburg is born at Schloss Rosenau, Coburg, younger son of Ernest I, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (1784–1844), and his first wife Princess Louise of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1800–1831).

  1826

  8 Dec John Brown is born at Crathienaird, Crathie parish, Aberdeenshire, second of the eleven children of tenant farmer John Brown (1790–1875) and his wife Margaret Leys (1799–1876).

  1830

  John Brown begins his education at the local Gaelic-speaking school at Crathie and at home.

  1831

  The Brown family move to The Bush, a farm at Crathie.

  1838

  28 Jun Queen Victoria is crowned at Westminster Abbey.

  1839

  John Brown works as a farm labourer at Crathienaird and helps out at The Bush; he also works as ostler’s assistant at Pannanich Wells.

  1840

  10 Feb Queen Victoria marries Prince Albert.

  1842

  John Brown becomes a stable boy on Sir Robert Gordon’s estate at Balmoral.

  Queen Victoria’s first visit to Scotland (1–15 Sep).

  1844

  Queen Victoria’s second visit to Scotland (11 Sep–2 Oct).

  1847

  The royal family visit Ardverikie and tour the west coast of Scotland (11 Aug–19 Sep).

  1848

  Queen Victoria is advised to visit Deeside for her health by her Physician-in-Ordinary, Sir James Clark.

  8 Sep Queen Victoria visits Balmoral for the first time.

  1849

  11 Sep First mention of John Brown occurs in Queen Victoria’s Journal.

  John Brown is promoted to gillie at Balmoral.

  Typhoid sweeps Crathie; two of John Brown’s brothers and one sister die.

  1851

  John Brown takes on the permanent role of leader of Queen Victoria’s pony on Prince Albert’s instigation.

  1852

  Prince Albert buys the 17,400 acre estate at Balmoral for 30,000 guineas.

  1853

  28 Sep Foundation of a new castle at Balmoral to the designs of Prince Albert.

  1855

  7 Sep The royal family take possession of the new castle at Balmoral.

  1857

  26 Jun Prince Albert is created Prince Consort.

  1858

  John Brown takes Archibald Fraser Macdonald’s place as personal gillie to Prince Albert.

  1860

  First ‘Great Expedition’ by the royal family to Glen Fishie and Grantown, with John Brown in attendance (4–5 Sep).

  1861

  Second ‘Great Expedition’ to Invermark and Fettercairn, again with John Brown in attendance (20–21 Sep).

  Third ‘Great Expedition’ to Glen Fishie, Dalwhinnie and Blair Atholl (8–9 Oct), again with John Brown in attendance.

  Fourth ‘Great Expedition’ to Ca-Ness (16 Oct), with John Brown in attendance. ‘It was our last one,’ Queen Victoria wrote poignantly in her Journal.

  14 Dec Death of Prince Albert at Windsor Castle.

  1862

  1 Jun John Brown travels south (with other gillies) to the Second International Exhibition.

  Aug John Brown goes to Germany in Queen Victoria’s entourage.

  1863

  7 Oct Carriage accident involving Queen Victoria, Princess Alice and Princess Helena en route from Altnagiuthasach. John Brown ‘indefatigable in his attendance and care’, writes Queen Victoria in her Journal.

  1864

  Oct In conversation with Princess Alice, the Keeper of the Privy Purse Sir Charles Phipps and Royal Physician Dr William Jenner discuss Queen Victoria’s sustained depression and reluctance to appear in public since Prince Albert’s death. It is suggested that John Brown be brought from Balmoral to help remind the Queen of ‘happier times’ on vacation in Scotland.

  Dec John Brown arrives at Osborne as groom.

  1865

  3 Feb Queen Victoria decides to keep John Brown ‘permanently’ on her immediate staff.

  2 Jun Dr Robertson prepares a memorandum of John Brown’s ancestry at the Queen’s instruction.

  Aug John Brown is in the royal entourage at Darmstadt, Germany.

  1866

  30 Jun Punch ridicules John Brown.

  Aug Ridicule is followed up in John o’Groats Journal.

  John Brown’s salary reaches £150 p.a.

  1867

  May Tomahawk lampoons John Brown.

  The Royal Academy Spring Exhibition includes a picture of John Brown and Queen Victoria by Sir Edwin Landseer.

  Queen Victoria’s ‘Tour of the Borders’ (20–24 Aug), with John Brown in attendance.

  1868

  Stories circulate about John Brown being beaten up at Balmoral.

  1872

  29 Feb Queen Victoria is attacked by Arthur O’Connor. John Brown assists in restraining assailant and is rewarded with a ‘Faithful Service Medal’ and a ‘Devoted Service Medal’, plus an annuity of £25 p.a.

  17 Nov John Brown is designated ‘Esquire’.

  John Brown’s salary reaches £400 p.a.

  1875

  John Brown’s portrait is painted by Heinrich von Angeli for Queen Victoria, from a photograph as Brown refuses to pose.

  Queen Victoria’s trip to Inveraray (21–29 Sep), with John Brown in attendance.

  18 Oct Death of
John Brown Sr, at Wester Micras, Crathie.

  1876

  Queen Victoria gives John Brown a substantial cottage at Balmoral.

  Queen Victoria approves the Bill that will make her Empress of India.

  2 Aug John Brown’s mother dies at Craiglourican Cottage, Balmoral.

  1877

  1 Jan Queen Victoria is proclaimed Empress of India.

  1879

  Queen Victoria visits France and Italy. Brown is in attendance, but suffering from erysipelas.

  1881

  John Brown is awarded a ten year service ‘bar’ to his ‘Faithful Service Medal’.

  1882

  2 Mar Queen Victoria is attacked by Roderick Maclean at Windsor. John Brown is upstaged by Eton scholars assailing the culprit.

  1883

  27 Mar John Brown dies at Windsor Castle.

  5 Apl John Brown is interred at Crathie churchyard.

  1884

  Feb Queen Victoria publishes More Leaves from the Journal of a Life in the Highlands. The Prince of Wales is indignant at references to John Brown.

  Mar Queen Victoria abandons her ‘memoir’ of John Brown and publication of extracts of their correspondence and his diary.

  Queen Victoria erects a plaque to John Brown at the royal mausoleum at Frogmore.

  1887

  20 Jun Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee Year begins.

  The Queen sustains contact with John Brown’s siblings.

  1897

  20 Jun Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. John Brown’s brothers are still in royal service.

  1901

  22 Jan Death of Queen Victoria at Osborne. She had reigned for sixty-three years.

  4 Feb Queen Victoria interred in the royal mausoleum at Frogmore; in her coffin are placed mementoes of John Brown.

  PROLOGUE

  BIRTH OF ROYAL RUMOUR

  At last King Edward VII could take his revenge. It was petulant, infantile and undignified, but it was immensely satisfying. Not many months after his mother’s death at 6.30pm on 22 January 1901, at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, HRH Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, now King Edward VII, ordered his obliteration, or forced removal, of all the artefacts, busts and statues of Queen Victoria’s favourite Highland servant John Brown.1 On the morning of the Queen’s death shepherds on the hills above Balmoral noticed that the cairn of stones the Queen had had raised to the memory of John Brown was flattened and the stones spread around. Such desecration was too much even for the gales on these airy slopes, and all who saw the site believed that new royal orders from Osborne had been carried out.2 At Windsor, the Keeper of the Royal Pictures received an unequivocal order. Carl Rudolph Sohn’s lifesize portrait of John Brown in black coat, dark brown tweed kilt and brown horsehair sporran, which had been commissioned by Queen Victoria in May 1883 (two months after John Brown’s death), was to be removed from its place of honour, deleted from the inventory at Windsor Castle and sent gratis to John Brown’s brother William at Crathie.3 Queen Alexandra testified to her husband’s wrathful revenge and expunging of all sentimentality in a letter to her sister-in-law the Empress Frederick of Germany: ‘Alas! during my absence [in Copenhagen] Bertie had had all your beloved Mother’s rooms dismantled and all her precious things removed.’4 King Edward’s ultimate insult to Brown’s memory was the conversion of his apartment at Windsor Castle into a billiard room.

  As hammers smashed plaster busts, scissors rent keepsakes and photographs buckled and hissed on bonfires, no one in the inner royal circle had any doubt about the reasons for the new sovereign’s ire against the famous Scot. Those with the longest memories recalled stories of how John Brown had smacked the backside of the errant young Prince of Wales. Surely these vicious attacks on the memory of John Brown by a sixty-year-old man could not be traced back to such a minor indignity, however painful? No, there was more to it than that. King Edward had been deeply humiliated by his mother’s taking Brown’s side in the quarrels he had had with the Highland servant. Yet there was a deeper insult in Edward’s eyes. After Prince Albert’s death in 1861, Queen Victoria looked upon her family as having ‘no Male head’, thus degrading her son’s position.5 The fact that John Brown was ‘discreet’ gave him manly qualities in Queen Victoria’s eyes and won him a position of virile gentlemanliness in her household. A deeply insecure man, King Edward was further blisteringly offended that his mother should consider a servant to have finer qualities than himself.6

  Although Edward was more than aware that his mother was ‘amazingly indiscreet’, he had been very dismayed at her impropriety, as he saw it, in ‘expressing her private life to the world’ in her volume More Leaves from the Journal of a Life in the Highlands.7 He even told her so in a letter of 1884 thanking her for an advance copy of the book, and alluding to the mention of Brown in the text.8

  Edward had long been irritated by his mother’s attitude towards servants. Queen Victoria had spent a large part of her life among servants, and held most of them in great esteem – higher than she did many of her friends and family. Edward looked upon his mother’s regard for servants as a part of her eccentricity, but he thought that in rebuking her offspring, and members of her immediate household, for being haughty to servants she was going too far. He had some sympathy with his brother Prince Arthur, whose Governor Sir Howard Elphinstone had been constantly bombarded with terse and lengthy letters from the Queen about ‘the boy’s offhand manner [to servants]’.9 Edward’s own epistolary tactlessness over the Queen’s More Leaves revelations sprang as much from his fear that the public would deride his mother’s sentimentality about servants in general, and John Brown in particular, as from his active hatred for Brown. Despite his own serial adultery as Prince of Wales, Edward was always stung by the rumours that persisted for decades about his mother and John Brown.

  Queen Victoria had been brought up with sexual tittle-tattle in her mother’s entourage. Had she not herself once glimpsed the tender whispering, the touched hands, the arm around the waist, that had suggested intimacy between the Duchess of Kent and her Household Comptroller Sir John Conroy? It was a scene that she had described to her devoted German friend Baroness Späth, her mother’s Lady-in-Waiting.10 And then there was all the ‘horrid gossip’ about her randy Hanoverian uncles, the sons of her grandfather King George III. Now it was her turn.

  Queen Victoria was well aware of the scandalous rumours that circulate about her and John Brown. In a letter to her equerry Lord Charles Fitzroy, she wrote about ‘those wicked and idle lies about poor, good, Brown which appeared in the Scotch provincial papers last year’.11 The Queen was referring to one paper in particular which circulated in the Balmoral area.12 It had run this story:

  THE GREAT COURT FAVOURITE

  The London correspondent of the John o’Groats Journal13 says: ‘I suppose all my readers have heard of the great favourite John Brown. His dismissal some weeks ago was generally talked about at the time, and I observe that the fact has now found its way into print, coupled with the suggestion of John Brown’s probable restoration to power before long. The reason assigned for his dismissal is an inordinate indulgence in the national taste for whisky, and the restraining of that appetite is mentioned as a likely condition of his re-admission to favour. Far be it from me to question Mr Brown’s power of suction . . . [yet] it is easy to suppose that a Highland gillie, who has achieved a practical realisation of his compatriots’ with ‘a Loch Lomond of whisky’ will certainly not be a teetotaller. But Brown’s fall has been more commonly ascribed to Mr Punch than to any shortcoming of his own. A few weeks ago Punch gave us the following as ‘Court Circular’:

  “BALMORAL, Tuesday.

  Mr John Brown walked on the slopes.

  He subsequently partook of a haggis.

  In the evening Mr John Brown was pleased to listen to a bagpipe.

  Mr John Brown retired early.”

  Those few lines gave rise to an immense deal of gossip and in a few days we heard that Brown was dischar
ged. It is said his insolence to every person he came in contact with about the Court was latterly quite intolerable, and some friends of mine, who were near Windsor fishing, not long ago, who frequently saw the favourite, not then disgraced, gave me the benefit of a good deal of local gossip about the lusty gillie.

  Queen Victoria was suspicious about who was spreading gossip about John Brown and herself, and she concurred with her Prime Minister Edward George Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, who believed that certain courtiers were leaking anti-Brown comments to such journals as Punch and Tomahawk. He cited names to the Queen, including George Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon, and Sir Edwin Landseer.14

  Scandalous rumours about Queen Victoria were nothing new. Soon after her accession to the throne she had become increasingly dependent upon her Prime Minister, William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne. He became her ‘indispensable father figure’. Yet, although ‘there was never the least impropriety’ between them, Queen Victoria was soon gossiped about as ‘Mrs Melbourne’. And there was another soubriquet. The pre-Raphaelites, that group of ‘natural form’ painters and others, were to call her ‘Empress Brown’.15

  An anonymous American visitor noted:

  Englishmen do not scruple to sully the fair name of their Queen . . . Soon after my arrival in England, at a table where all the company were gentlemen by rank or position, there were constant references and jokes about ‘Mrs Brown’ . . . I lost the point of all the witty sayings, and should have remained in blissful ignorance throughout the dinner had not my host kindly informed me that ‘Mrs Brown’ was an English synonym for the Queen . . .16

  Rumours that John Brown and Queen Victoria had a sexual relationship were well established during her reign and there is a curious royal link which gave them substance. Tradition had it that from time to time the Prince of Wales shared the bed of the Victorian trollop Catherine Walters, known in loose society as ‘Skittles’ because she had once worked in a Liverpool bowling alley. She was ‘kept’ for many years by Spencer Compton Cavendish, Marquess of Hartington, the eldest son of the 7th Duke of Devonshire. ‘Harty Tarty’ – as the peer was known in the Prince of Wales’s set – was a prominent procurer of society ladies and tarts for the Prince’s bed and was privy to his indiscretions – as was Skittles.