On 26 June 1866 the Liberal government led by John, 1st Earl Russell, fell over the defeat of the Reform Bill. The Queen put pressure on Russell to remain in his post; after all, Prussia had just declared war on Austria and the monarch insisted that her ministers ‘should not abandon their posts’ at this crucial time. Yet, even as the Tory Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, was forming a new government on 28 June the Queen departed for Balmoral. The establishment was appalled at what they regarded as the monarch’s hypocrisy and dereliction of duty; on every hand the Queen was criticised: ‘If she will not work, she should abdicate’, said many in high places. And placards bearing the words ‘What do we pay her for?’ appeared on London’s thoroughfares.
‘John Brown will not let her [leave Balmoral]’, the justresigned Prime Minister’s daughter-in-law Lady Russell wrote in her diary, echoing the growing awareness that the Highland servant was exerting power over the Queen. One who knew this to be untrue was Lord Derby’s Leader in the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer, the flamboyant 62-year-old Jew-turned-Christian Benjamin Disraeli, whom Queen Victoria elevated to the earldom of Beaconsfield in 1876.
Disraeli was to become a prominent figure in the John Brown story; he knew how to handle Brown, as he did the Queen. Flattery was his main weapon. Queen Victoria’s grand-daughter Princess Marie Louise, daughter of Princess Christian of Schleswig-Holstein, remembered a young woman being ‘taken in to dinner one night by Gladstone and, the following night, by Disraeli. She was asked what impression these two celebrated men had on her. She replied thoughtfully, ‘When I left the dining-room after sitting next to Mr. Gladstone I thought he was the cleverest man in England. But after sitting next to Mr Disraeli I thought I was the cleverest woman in England!’
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Whenever they met, Disraeli, who succeeded Derby as Prime Minister in 1868, was more than polite to Brown, who was an ardent Tory and actually sent Disraeli salmon he had caught himself in the Dee. Disraeli and John Brown had one thing in common in their handling of the Queen: both treated her as a woman, they fussed over and cajoled her, and fed her titbits of gossip. And like her two ‘in-laws’, Princess Helena of Waldeck-Pyrmont, wife of Prince Leopold, and Prince Henry of Battenberg, husband of Princess Beatrice, they were not ‘overawed’ by her.
As journalists looked round for stories to cater for the developing interest in royal activities, John Brown began to be talked about more and more. In July 1866 genuine stories were a little thin on the ground and the editors of the wellestablished weekly satirical magazine
Punch; or the London Charivari
, which had first appeared on Saturday 17 July 1841, thought they would pull the collective leg of the public with a spoof ‘Court Circular’. On 7 July they published this ‘royal bulletin’:
Balmoral, Tuesday.
Mr John Brown walked on the slopes.
He subsequently partook of haggis.
In the evening Mr John Brown was pleased to listen to a bagpipe.
Mr John Brown retired early.
Thus
Punch
was the first publication to sneer at John Brown. But the flames of gossip were to be further fanned as the crowds flocked to the 99th Royal Academy Spring Exhibition on 6 May 1867. Many people, who had never been to such an exhibition before, were perplexed by a large painting by Sir Edwin Landseer entitled ‘Her Majesty at Osborne in 1866’.
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For the first time that anyone could remember the Queen’s picture provoked sniggers and outright laughter as visitors stood before it. One critic wrote: ‘If anyone will stand by this picture for a quarter of an hour and listen to the comments of visitors he will learn how great an imprudence has been committed.’
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The picture showed the Queen, dressed in severe mourning, facing right and reading a letter while mounted on her pony ‘Flora’. Behind, the viewer’s eye is directed up the path to the terrace at Osborne, where on the tower the clock stands at a minute or two after 3pm. The Queen’s gloves, letters and red state papers box lie on the ground and nearby are her Border collie ‘Sharp’ and her Skye terrier ‘Prince’. On a seat on the grass, behind, sit the Princesses Louise and Helena. But what people flocked to see was the black-kilted figure of John Brown holding the horse’s head.
The gossip machine engaged a higher gear. So all the rumours were true? The secret was out; this was how Her Majesty spent her spare time, with the hired help! The critics were unanimous: ‘We trust it will be deemed no disloyalty either to the sovereign or to the reputation of the painter to say . . . there is not one of Her Majesty’s subjects will see this lugubrious picture without regret.’
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In contrast, the Queen was delighted with the picture and ordered that an engraving be made of it for immediate reproduction; for this John Brown’s beard was trimmed to suit his current shaving fashion! By the time the genre painter George Housman Thomas painted ‘The Visit to the Mausoleum’ in 1869, again showing Queen Victoria in mourning and riding on ‘Flora’ alongside Princesses Helena and Louise, with John Brown at the pony’s head, the public were becoming used to a more public persona for John Brown.
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These were two of a series of ‘John Brown royal portraits’. In 1875 the Hungarian-born painter Heinrich von Angeli was commissioned by Queen Victoria to paint a head and shoulders portrait of John Brown; the likeness had to be taken from a photograph as Brown refused to sit. There were also several pictures of John Brown painted posthumously: ‘John Brown at Frogmore’ was produced in 1883 by the German portrait painter Carl Rudolph Sohn, while animal painter Charles Burton Baxter painted two versions of ‘John Brown with Dogs at Osborne’, again in 1883.
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John Brown paid no attention to the increased gossip engendered by his portrait and got on with his royal duties, which included a self-appointed position as Queen’s entertainer when he felt she needed to be lifted out of depression. Brown was instrumental in introducing Queen Victoria to the subtleties of Scottish customs, many of them with distinct Highland variations. The Queen was to remember particularly the Hallowe’ens of 1866 and 1867. From the Revd Dr Norman MacLeod, the Queen was to learn that the early Christian Church in Scotland had grafted a Christian festival on to a pagan one. So the Scots Hallowe’en – the Feast of All Hallows’ (or All Saints’) Eve was grafted on to the ancient Celtic festival of
Samhuinn
, which marked the beginning of the Celtic year and the return of cattle to the fold from their winter grazing. It was a time in Scotland’s folklore year when ghosts, witches and fairies were deemed to be abroad. Underlining the eeriness of Hallowe’en John Brown read to the Queen Sir Walter Scott’s lines:
On Hallowmass Eve, ere ye boune to rest,
Ever beware that your couch be blest;
Sign it with cross and sain it with bead,
Sing the Ave and say the Creed.
For on Hallowmass Eve the Nighthag shall ride,
And all her nine-fold sweeping on by her side,
Whether the wind sing lowly or loud,
Stealing through moonshine or swathed in a cloud.
He that dare sit in St Swithin’s Chair
When the Nighthag wings the troubled air,
Questions three, when he speaks the spell,
He may ask and she must tell.
As a true Calvinist John Brown had no truck with such ‘popish practices’ but he told the Queen that he remembered the Highland mothers singing this ditty in Gaelic at Hallowe’en:
Hallowe’en will come; will come;
Witchcraft will be set a-going;
Fairies will be at full speed,
Running in every pass.
Avoid the road, children, children!
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During a visit to Head Keeper John Grant’s mother on 31 October 1866, Queen Victoria noted how the local children paraded for her with burning torches and how Hallowe’en bonfires were lit across the Dee from Balmoral which ‘had a very pretty effect’. Next year the Queen, Jane, Lady Ely, Princess Louise and Prince Leopold, with the keepers and their wives and children, all led by John Brown, and carrying torches, processed around Balmoral Castle while Piper Ross played his bagpipes. It was Brown, too, who encouraged the Queen to keep up the age-old practice of ‘Burning the Witch’ at Balmoral. Quoting an old text, the folklorist Florence Marian McNeill recorded the event:
A huge bonfire was kindled in front of the castle, opposite the main doorway. The clansmen were mustered, arrayed in Highland garb. At a signal, headed by a band, they marched towards the palace. The bonfire was kindled so as to be in full blaze when the procession reached it. The interest of the promenade was centred on a trolley on which there sat the effigy of a hideous old woman or witch called the Shandy Dann. Beside her crouched one of the party holding her erect while the march went forward to the bagpipes’ strain. As the building came in sight, the pace was quickened to a run, then a sudden halt was made a dozen yards or so from the blaze. Here, amid breathless silence, an indictment is made why this witch should be burned to ashes, and with no one to appear on her behalf – only this
advocatus diaboli
, paper in hand – she is condemned to the flames. With a rush and a shout and the skirling of bagpipes, the sledge, and its occupants are hurled topsy-turvy into the fire, whilst the mountaineer springs from the car at the latest safe instant. There follow cheers and hoots of derisive laughter, as the inflammable wrappings of the Shandy Dann crackle and splutter out.
All the while the residents of the Castle stand enjoying this curious rite, and no one there entered more heartily into it than the Head of the Empire herself.
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By 1867 resentment towards John Brown was growing both at court and in political circles. Most of the Queen’s immediate family disliked John Brown and his brothers, with the Prince of Wales and Prince Leopold being his chief opponents. Princess Louise, the Queen’s fourth daughter and sixth child, also had a grumbling resentment of the Highland Servant. This was to come to a head around the time that the Queen summoned Edgar Boehm to Balmoral to prepare a bust of John Brown. Boehm was there for three months and formed a distinct and negative opinion of Brown.
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At this time Princess Louise was unmarried, in her twenties and delighted in flirting. She formed a certain passion for Boehm while he gave her ‘modelling lessons’ and ‘they became intimate, though not to the extent of actual love-making’.
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On Politics
As a staunch Highland Tory, John Brown had little time for Liberal Prime Minister Gladstone. He was particularly incensed by government policy in 1872 and during a discussion with Sir Henry Ponsonby on the subject remarked in reply to Sir Henry’s observation that Brown wanted the Liberals out: ‘A good thing too, the sooner they go the better. That Gladstone’s half a Roman [Catholic] and the others had better be gone. We canna have a worse lot.’
It seems that on one occasion Queen Victoria joined John Brown to witness Boehm at work on the servant’s bust, and they walked in on the sculptor and the Princess embracing. The Queen was furious and upbraided her daughter. Princess Louise, in her anger, accused John Brown of spying on her and running to the Queen with tittle-tattle. The Princess added that she would not put up with Brown’s insolence. John Brown’s supposedly impertinent remarks were the subject of regular complaints brought to the Queen by her children.
This incident added some urgency to Queen Victoria’s determination to get the highly sexed Princess Louise safely married. Her choice of husband, however, was a disastrous one for the Princess. John Ian Campbell, Marquis of Lorne (1845–1914), eldest son of George, 8th Duke of Argyll and his Duchess Elizabeth, was widely accepted as a homosexual. Life together after their marriage at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on 21 March 1871 was a long trail of misery. To their wedding present from the royal domestic servants John Brown contributed a hefty 30 guineas, whereas Sir Henry Ponsonby only added 10 guineas. Should Brown’s generosity have been intended to impress the Princess, it failed, and the reverse was the result. Pointedly she commented: ‘I don’t want an absurd man in a kilt following me everywhere.’
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Princess Louise was to remain childless and in 1900 Lorne became the 9th Duke of Argyll.
Although she was probably entirely innocent of adultery, or even of fornication before marriage, the hot-house atmosphere of Queen Victoria’s court gossip, wherein John Brown was a leading contributor, linked Princess Louise with a series of men as well as Boehm. There was Colonel (later General Sir) John McNeill, one of their suite when her husband became Governor-General of Canada, architect Sir Edwin Lutyens, and Colonel William Probert, her equerry. There was also another man who would regularly cross swords with Brown and later became a principal Brown detractor. This was Colonel (later Sir) Arthur Bigge, whom Queen Victoria had appointed as groom-in-waiting.
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Bigge’s duties at Balmoral, in particular, were undemanding and were an easy billet after his career in the Royal Artillery. On one occasion Bigge was relaxing in a Balmoral ante-room when John Brown entered and smugly announced: ‘Waal, ye’ll not be going fishing today,’ adding, ‘Her Maa-dj-esty thinks it’s about time ye did some work.’
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From that day Bigge bore Brown a grudge.
Sir Frederick Ponsonby, Treasurer to King George V and Keeper of the Privy Purse to King George VI, recalled a ‘JB incident’ concerning Princess Louise’s supposed lover Colonel McNeill. John Brown entered the equerries’ room at Osborne House one day with a message from the Queen concerning a set of carriages that she wanted made ready. Brown hovered, waiting for a reply after delivering the message, and was told by the brusque McNeill to wait outside while he prepared the order for the coaches.
Brown complained to the Queen that McNeill had been ‘over-bearing in his manner’ and ‘had shouted at him as if he was a common soldier’. A few hours later McNeill received a memo from Queen Victoria enquiring if he wished for a posting to India. She suggested that such a position was a definite demotion. Puzzled by the Queen’s memo, he took it to his father, Sir John Carstairs McNeill, an old Indian campaigner. Sir John worked out the Queen’s intent and advised his son to reply to the Queen accepting the post. He should add that as colleagues and friends would enquire why he was leaving royal service, could the Queen supply him with the reason for his being offered India. The Queen made no response and Colonel McNeill remained at his post. For a number of years thereafter the Queen did not speak to him and made sure that his duties never brought him to Balmoral or Osborne where she would have to meet him.
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