The Skean Dhu was the Highlander’s short-bladed, blackhilted sheath-knife or dagger. The Claymore reference is an error: a Claymore is a two-handed sword but the English author of the
Guide
meant a ‘basket-hilted’ sword.
The castles, palaces and houses of Queen Victoria’s Scottish inheritance which were dubbed ‘royal’, or had played some part in royal history, were myriad; they ranged from Dumbarton Castle, rising precipitously on its rock at the junction of the Rivers Clyde and Leven in Dumbartonshire, to Tarbert Castle, its walls already ruined by Queen Victoria’s day, standing 60 feet above sea level on the shores of the small creek called Loch Tarbert on the west side of the Loch Fyne, Argyllshire. From her forebears Queen Victoria inherited four palaces, at Dunfermline, Linlithgow, Falkland and Holyrood, but it was only at Holyrood that Queen Victoria ever occupied the royal apartments. She first stayed there in 1850, but in later years she often made Holyrood a resting place on her way to and from Balmoral. Prince Albert designed the modern approaches to the palace, which superceded the ancient processional way through Edinburgh’s Canongate thoroughfare. Albert also caused the area to the east of the ruined abbey church, abutting the palace, to be levelled and laid out in garden form. In 1854 the palace’s ‘Historical Apartments’ were opened to the public and much restoration work was undertaken by 1872, when a private suite was established for Queen Victoria’s visits.
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Two of the palaces and seven castles had hereditary Keepers who were required from time to time to appear at Queen Victoria’s Scottish Court. The Keeper of Holyrood in 1837 was Alexander, 10th Duke of Hamilton and Brandon, the premier duke of Scotland. The office had been bestowed on the 1st Duke in 1646. The Keeper still ‘maintains order’ through the blue-coated, top-hatted High Constables of Holyrood, who are in turn answerable to the Bailie of Holyrood. At the Palace of Falkland the Keeper in 1837 was Mr Oneisiphorous Tyndall-Bruce. The royal castle of Dunstaffnage, the fifteenth-century fortress commanding the entrance to Loch Etive in Argyllshire, was in the Keepership of the 6th Duke of Argyll, who also held in his remit the ruined castles of Dunoon and Carrick. Rothesay Castle, founded in the eleventh century on the Isle of Bute, had been in the Keepership of the Stewarts since 1498, with John Crichton-Stuart, 2nd Marquis of Bute, as Keeper in 1837. At Lochmaben Castle, the Keeper was Mr J.J. Hope-Johnstone of Annandale. Edinburgh and Dumbarton castles were deemed military buildings with a tradition of soldier governors.
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Despite all these properties at her command Queen Victoria established a new royal estate at Balmoral, further north than the ancient royal properties.
On John Brown
‘Remember John Brown? Aye, that I do; and a very good fellow he was too. Sometimes when I was a-mowin’ the lawns – it used to take me fourteen days to go right over all of ’em – anywhere near the house if he seed me, he’d put up his hand in the air an’ call “Hi, Jackman,” and then he’d say when I come up: “Don’t you stay thirsty out in the sun an’ heat; you just go in the hall and say I sent you in for a good draught.”
‘Ah, the servants lost a good friend when John Brown died. You’ve seen the granite chair what the Queen put up in memory of him in that side walk just before you comes to the House, haven’t ye? Well it was put there in that particular spot, because Mr Brown used to walk up and down there reading his letters from home. I don’t rightly recollect the inscription on the seat. I know there’s when he was born and when he died, and I think it goes on something like this: “To the truest and most faithful servant and friend that any monarch ever had . . .” But the granite that it is made of was brought all the way from Scotland. Yes, I liked John Brown. He was a bit hasty and outspoken, but always just and kind he was. Fine voice he had, an’ a very fine-looking man in his kilt.’
William Jackman,
Osborne Estate Worker
Today the estate of Balmoral runs to some 50,000 acres in total, plus 7,000 acres of grouse moor; there are a further 10,000 acres rented from a neighbour, with 190 acres farmed and 272 acres let. The castle itself sleeps in excess of 100 people, attended by 56 full-time staff. A further 100 or so work part-time during the visitor season, when 80,000 people view the castle and its policies.
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The 1998 film ‘Mrs Brown’, about the relationship between Queen Victoria and John Brown, has increased the number of interested visitors to the area.
While Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were visiting the west coast of Scotland in the lashing rain of 1847, across the Cairngorms Balmoral was basking in a prolonged spell of sunshine. John Clark, the 27-year-old son of the Queen’s physician Sir James Clark, was convalescing on Deeside from a long illness; he was a guest of the diplomat Sir Robert Gordon, brother of George Hamilton-Gordon, 4th Earl of Aberdeen, who had been British Ambassador to Vienna and was now lessee of the Balmoral estate. Young Clark reported to his father how his health had improved through the purity of the air. Sir James, an expert on the influence of climate on health, mentioned this to the Queen who, together with Prince Albert, was seriously considering establishing a ‘Scottish home’. Deeside, Sir James continued, would be a good place for the Queen to rest from her frequent twinges of rheumatism.
Prince Albert ordered a report on Deeside, its environs and climate. He was informed that it was ‘one of the driest areas in the country’. Coupled with Aberdeen artist James Giles’s sketches of the surrounding scenes, also commissioned by Albert, this report persuaded the royal couple that their autumn holiday should be spent on Deeside. And here fate took a hand. On 8 December 1847 Sir Robert Gordon collapsed and died at the breakfast table at Balmoral. Learning that the Queen was in search of a Deeside residence, Sir Robert’s brother, Lord Aberdeen, suggested Balmoral, which still had twenty years to run on the lease from the Earl of Mar.
James Giles was dispatched to do some further drawings – ‘I never made any money working to royalty’, he grumbled. Queen Victoria was delighted with the pictures and immediately agreed to take the lease sight unseen. On 5 September 1848 Queen Victoria and Prince Albert arrived off Aberdeen aboard the royal yacht
Victoria and Albert
. The next day they disembarked to a civic welcome and processed through triumphal arches of evergreens, heather, thistles and wild flowers. They breakfasted at Cults and lunched at Aboyne, and cannon welcomed them at Ballater. At Crathie there stood a triumphal arch which proclaimed: ‘Welcome to your Highland home, Victoria and Albert’, and at 2.45pm they arrived at Balmoral.
On Friday 8 September Queen Victoria made the first entry in her
Journal
concerning her new home:
We arrived at Balmoral at a quarter to three. It is a pretty little castle in the old Scottish style. There is a picturesque tower and garden in front, with a high wooded hill; at the back there is wood down to the Dee; and the hills rise all around.
After lunch they made their first exploration of the policies. All that they saw was delightful: the hills surrounding Lochnagar and the glen towards Ballater were given the royal seal of approval as it reminded them of Thüringerwald.
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The servants at Balmoral also more than passed muster. John Grant, the Head Keeper – an employee of Sir Robert Gordon for over twenty years – was approved for his ‘fine, intelligent countenance’, and ‘singular shrewdness and discreetness’; William Paterson, gardener, was more than acceptable, while gillie Macdonald made a fine figure in his kilt. Somewhere in the stables worked one John Brown. Many of Sir Robert Gordon’s retainers were kept on, as well as his dog ‘Monk’.
While Prince Albert was piecing together the history of their new home, Queen Victoria was learning about the subtleties of the
gillie
system of Highland society. Gillies were first introduced into general literary parlance thanks to the popular novels of Sir Walter Scott. In
Waverley
(1814), he refers to the barefoot Highland lads as ‘gillie-wet-foots’. The word gillie, gilly or ghillie had started to appear in general Scots vernacular in the seventeenth century to describe a youth. But by the eighteenth century it had developed into a term meaning specifically a male servant, especially an attendant on a Highland chief.
Prosperous chieftains would have a
gillie-casfliuch
(Gaelic for the man who carried the chief over fords and burns), a
gillie-comstrain
(who led the chief’s horse over difficult places), and perhaps even a
gillie-trusharnich
(a baggage carrier). Most respected of all was the
gillie-more
, the chief’s armour bearer. Victoria and Albert’s growing penchant for the sturdy Highland gillie they first encountered at Balmoral gave these retainers a new role in the nineteenth century as sportsmen’s attendants for both deerstalking and angling.
As they relaxed in their sitting-room – formerly Sir Robert Gordon’s drawing-room, as Queen Victoria noted in her
Journal
– Prince Albert recounted what he had found out about the history of Balmoral. The estate first appears in written records in the fifteenth century as ‘Bouchmorale’.
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When the estate was let to Sir Alexander Gordon of nearby Abergeldie Castle, at £8 18p p.a. in 1484, it was known as ‘Balmorain’. It was the Gordons who first built a small castle at Balmoral, but by 1662 the family had fallen so deeply into debt that the Crown allowed the Farquharsons of Inverey to foreclose on the mortgaged Balmoral. In their turn, however, the Farquharsons were themselves to be financially embarrassed, largely because of their support of the Jacobite cause in the risings of 1715 and 1745, and in 1798 the estate of Balmoral was bought by James Duff, 2nd Earl of Fife, for letting. The 2nd Earl died in 1809 but there were no heirs of his marriage to Lady Dorothy Sinclair and he left his whole estate to an illegitimate son. The ensuing legal challenge to the will caused the estate, including Balmoral, to be invested in the Fife Trustees. Balmoral was leased first to Captain James Cameron, who became a friend of Prince Albert, thence to Sir Robert Gordon and his sister Lady Alicia Gordon. Sir Robert spent much time improving the estate; he established a deer forest in 1833 and made many alterations to the house during the period 1834–9. On 20 May 1848 the Fife Trustees assigned the lease of Balmoral to Prince Albert.
Prince Albert now began a programme of acquisition in Deeside. The process of estate purchase (or leasing) was a slow one. First, the royal family purchased the 6,500 acre Birkhall estate, at the head of Glen Muick, with its house built in 1715, for use by Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, then aged eight. The Gordons refused to sell their early fourteenth-century property at Abergeldie, which abutted Balmoral, but Prince Albert accepted instead a forty-year lease. This was to be the home of Queen Victoria’s mother, also Victoria, Princess of Saxe-Saalfeld-Coburg and Duchess of Kent, from 1850 to 1858; from 1858 until her death in 1861 illness prevented the duchess from making the long journey north. It was not until 22 June 1852 that Prince Albert signed the papers of purchase for the 17,400 acre Balmoral estate, for £31,500.
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Prince Albert had also had his eye on the Forest of Ballochbuie, owned by the Farquharsons; they were unwilling to sell and Queen Victoria had to wait until 1875 to acquire it. Three years later she bought Abergeldie for around £100,000.
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Then, in August 1852, a fortuitous event took place. On the death of the miserly and eccentric barrister James Camden Neild (b. 1780), it was found that he had left his entire fortune of £500,000 to Queen Victoria. This greatly helped to fund developments at Balmoral.
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A lengthy programme of alterations was set in motion, from stables and cottages to workshops and even a prefabricated ballroom. William Smith, the City Architect for Aberdeen, whose 1847 design for the Trinity Hall of that city had so impressed Prince Albert, was summoned to prepare plans for the new
schloss
the prince wanted at Balmoral.
The planned
schloss
comprised two rectangular blocks, united corner to corner by a five-storey square tower. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert spent much time deciding what materials to use for the buildings, both outside and in. For the main structure a fine-grain Glen Gelder granite was chosen and specially quarried from the Balmoral estate by local labourers overseen by surveyor James Forbes Beaton, who matched slates from the Foudland quarries at Strathbogie. For the interior decorations Prince Albert invented the Balmoral Tartan – black, red and lavender, on a grey background – for use in the new Balmoral colour schemes; to this Queen Victoria added Victoria Tartan for the furnishings, interlarded with Royal Stewart (red and green) and Hunting Stewart (green, with red and yellow stripes) tartans.
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Prince Albert designed everything from curtain ties to door knobs and the whole was dubbed by courtiers a ‘feast of tartanitis’. On a number of occasions John Brown helped Queen Victoria to pin her tartan shawl around her shoulders. If she fidgeted while he was doing so, he would upbraid her with ‘Hoots, wumman, canna ye hold yer head still?’ At other times he would be disparaging about her dress: ‘What are ye daeing with that auld black dress on again? It’s green-moulded!’ He was also stern with her when she couldn’t decide what to wear: ‘Ye dinna ken yer ain mind for two minutes together.’
The development of a ‘Scottish home’ at Balmoral – which Prince Albert regarded as a
Jägersrühe
(hunting lodge) – was not welcomed by the dismayed courtiers. Balmoral was a long and tedious 5671⁄2 miles from London, and thus an inconvenient place from which to rule an empire. There was therefore a reluctance to visit. Arthur Ponsonby remarked: ‘Lord Salisbury [Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, three times Prime Minister], unlike some other ministers did not “attempt to conceal his disgust with the place” and was “heartily glad” when the time came for him to get away. Campbell Bannerman [Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, Liberal Cabinet Minister], in a letter to his wife wrote, “It is the funniest life conceivable: like a convent. We meet at meals and when we are finished, each is off to his cell.”’
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Lord John James Robert Manners, later 7th Duke of Rutland, averred of Balmoral: ‘Yes, this is a very curious place and more curious things go on here than I should have dreamt of . . .’
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