Sons, Servants and Statesmen (26 page)

Not only was Reid obliged to look after the Queen’s health, but also to an extent that of her family overseas. Any letter about ailments from her children or grandchildren throughout Europe would generally be shown to him, with an appeal for advice.

Reid appeared at a crucial time in Queen Victoria’s life. In July 1881 she was still mourning the loss of Disraeli, and her only real confidant was John Brown, slowly but surely becoming a shadow of his former self. As Randall Davidson noted, she had a tendency to form ‘unwise’ relations with servants, as she did twice during her widowhood. Like most women, he was convinced, she needed a man in her life, someone to cherish and in whom she could confide.
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While her relations with Brown and later with ‘the Munshi’ (see chapter 9) were fundamentally innocent, they did not always appear that way to others, and led to no little detrimental speculation which threatened to damage her image and her reputation.

In March 1882 Queen Victoria was once again the target of a would-be assassin. Riding into Windsor on a train from London, she heard a noise which she thought was the train letting off steam, but then she saw people running in all directions and a man being led away. The man responsible for the commotion, a mediocre Scottish poet named Roderick Maclean, had fired at her once with a revolver and was preparing to shoot a second time when he was overpowered.

Brown was in the carriage, but in stark contrast to his heroic behaviour during O’Connor’s attempt on her life, he was very slow to react. His leg might have been troubling him, or he might have been slightly drunk. He seemed slow to understand what had happened and could only repeat afterwards in some amazement that ‘That man fired at Your Majesty’s carriage.’
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Maclean was sent for trial and found not guilty on grounds of insanity, a verdict which enraged Queen Victoria, who told Gladstone, her Prime Minister at the time, that ‘the law must be altered’.

One is tempted to speculate as to whether John Brown would have been relieved of some of his more arduous duties if his physical condition had declined much further. It was perhaps fortunate for him that the end came fairly suddenly.

In March 1883 Lady Florence Dixie, who lived near Windsor Castle, claimed that she had been assaulted on her estate by two men dressed as women, possibly Fenians, and only saved from serious injury by the appearance of her St Bernard dog, Hubert. Lady Dixie’s colourful reputation was not calculated to make her a favourite with the Queen. A sister of the notorious 8th Marquess of Queensberry and aunt of Lord Alfred Douglas, both of whom would play conspicuous roles in the downfall of Oscar Wilde a few years hence, she was a big game huntress, an outspoken advocate of equality between the sexes and a champion of the right of women to wear trousers. She and her husband also had a marked love of the bottle.

A thorough police investigation of the incident, including a forensic examination of Lady Dixie’s clothing, found major discrepancies in her account, which was quickly ascribed to her hysterical imagination. However, any possibility of Fenian outrages or cut-throats near Windsor was enough to alarm the Queen. It was less than a year since Lord Frederick Cavendish, her Secretary of State for Ireland, and his deputy, had gone to Dublin to take up their appointments and been assassinated in broad daylight shortly after their arrival, and only fifteen years since the Duke of Edinburgh had been shot and wounded by an Irish republican sympathiser in Australia. Brown was sent to conduct a thorough search of the plantation where Lady Dixie had allegedly been attacked.

Hours of tramping around in damp undergrowth revealed nothing, but by the time Brown returned to the castle he was thoroughly chilled. The Queen was suffering from a wrenched knee and had to be carried everywhere for a time, so he had no respite. His cold rapidly worsened, erysipelas set in and, on the afternoon of 27 March, he sank into a coma from which he never regained consciousness. His brothers William and Archibald were summoned to his bedside, just in time to see him die late that evening.

At first, Victoria’s family avoided breaking the news to her directly. On the following morning, Leopold, her youngest son, undertook (or was chosen) to go to her dressing-room and tell her. ‘We can feel for her, & her sorrow, without being sorry for the cause,’ he wrote to his brother-in-law Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, on behalf of the family. ‘At least I can’t be a hypocrit [
sic
].’
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None of his brothers showed any hypocrisy at the death of their mother’s favourite, or inclination to observe any period of mourning. It did not escape the notice of the press that the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh seemed to be attending an unusually large number of stage plays and after-dinner parties that week.

Ironically, Dr Reid’s father had died the previous day after a short illness. Reid was kept informed by telegram by his family and a fellow practitioner of his father, but the Queen felt unable to release him to be with his father at such a time. However, she wrote a letter of condolence, saying that she felt ‘doubly grieved and distressed at this great sorrow and trouble which have come upon him’.
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The grief which the Queen felt at the loss of this most devoted servant and companion was almost as intense as that which she felt after the death of her husband. She felt ‘utterly crushed’, she told Ponsonby, and her life had ‘again sustained one of those shocks like in ’61 when every link has been shaken and torn’.
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To Jessie, the wife of Hugh, another of the Brown brothers, she declared that her grief was ‘unbounded, dreadful, and I know not how to bear it, or how to believe it possible’. Many years later, when her daughter Beatrice came to rewrite her journals for publication and destroy the originals, the reference to Brown’s death read: ‘Am terribly upset by this loss, which removes one who was so devoted and attached to my service and who did so much for my personal comfort. It is the loss not only of a servant, but of a real friend.’
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Similar phrases appeared in the Court Circular, which Victoria helped to draft, announcing that ‘the death of this truly faithful and devoted servant has been a grievous stroke to the Queen’.
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From Downing Street, Gladstone wrote a letter of condolence to the Queen. Kindly though his intentions were, the letter betrayed his habitual tactlessness. He could understand, he wrote, how she would miss ‘the aid and attention of an attached, respected and intelligent domestic’, and he hoped she would ‘be able to select a good and efficient successor, though it would be too much to hope that anyone, however capable, can at once fill the void’.
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One can hardly imagine the bereaved sovereign appreciating references to an ‘intelligent domestic’, let alone the references to a successor to ‘fill the void’. One could never imagine Disraeli writing such a note. Later she appointed Brown’s cousin, Francie Clark, to the position, though there could never be a second John Brown.

Any doubt that the Queen loved Brown in her own way is dispelled by a letter she wrote to his brother Hugh. She had come across, and was enclosing a copy of, the entry in her journal referring to his words of comfort to her after the death of her grandson Prince Sigismund of Prussia, and his promise to take care of her until he died. ‘Afterwards so often I told him no one loved him more than I did or had a better friend than me: and he answered “Nor you – than me.” “No one loves you more”’.
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Perhaps even more significant were her comments to the Earl of Cranbrook that ‘perhaps never in history was there so strong and true an attachment, so warm and loving a friendship between the sovereign and servant as existed between her and dear faithful Brown’. (Close examination of the letter suggests that the words ‘between the sovereign and servant’ were added as an afterthought.) She went on to pay tribute to his strength of character, ‘the most fearless uprightness’ and other qualities which made him, in her estimation, ‘one of the most remarkable men who could be known’. Even more significantly, she added that ‘the Queen feels that life for the second time is become most trying and sad to bear deprived of all she so needs’, words which could be interpreted as expressing a relationship on a deeper level than had been previously thought.
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For the rest of her life, she ordered that two small salt cellars, a gift from Brown, should be placed on her luncheon table, and that a fresh flower should be put daily on the pillow of his bedroom in Balmoral. There was a plethora of In Memoriam memorabilia, including statuettes and plaster of Paris busts of Brown, funeral brooches and gold tie pins set with diamonds around images of his head, distributed to his relatives and to courtiers alike. Dr Alexander Profeit, who had always been one of Brown’s most outspoken enemies at Balmoral, was among the recipients of a tie pin. He knew he would be a laughing-stock among the household if he wore it more than necessary, so, in order not to offend the Queen, he kept it in his coat pocket so he could wear it correctly whenever he had to go and see her.

The Times
acknowledged Brown’s popularity among his own countrymen. ‘Deep regret is felt on Deeside, particularly in the Balmoral and Braemar districts,’ it noted on his death. ‘There he was widely known and widely respected. He was loved among his own people, and they regarded his good fortune as an honour reflected upon them.’
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A funeral service was held at Windsor on 3 April, attended by the Queen, before Brown’s coffin was taken north for another ceremony and burial at Crathie cemetery two days later. Among the tributes and memorials to John Brown was a lifesize bronze statue by the Viennese-born sculptor Edgar Boehm, initially placed alongside the Queen’s garden cottage at Balmoral until removed after her death, on the orders of King Edward VII, to a suitably remote hillside. Brown might not have appreciated the statue, for the ample Boehm was one of those who had incurred his wrath some years previously during a ‘Great Pony Row’ in Scotland, when he complained that some of the more portly members of the Queen’s German entourage were riding her small Highland ponies almost to death. Thereafter he referred to the sculptor as ‘Mr Bum’.

In February 1884 the Queen published a second volume based on entries from her diary:
More Leaves from a Journal of a Life in the Highlands
. It covered the first twenty years of her widowhood, and, as she wrote in the preface, it was intended to show ‘how her sad and suffering heart was soothed and cheered by the excursions and incidents it recounts’.
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Again, the sales were considerable, and it found favour with the public, though it caused embarrassment within the family and some of the household. In particular, its dedication to ‘My Loyal Highlanders and especially to the memory of my devoted personal attendant and faithful friend John Brown’, the frequent references to him and its effusive conclusion, in which she dwelt on her ‘irreparable loss’ and how he was ‘daily, nay hourly, missed by me’,
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deeply rankled with most of them. The Prince of Wales begged her to confine circulation to friends and family instead of allowing general publication, but she refused to listen. The German Crown Princess, who was no less critical of Brown but preferred to keep a more discreet silence than her brother, merely remarked to her mother than it described the charm of Balmoral ‘so well’.

Much worse was to come. The family were aghast to learn that the Queen planned to write a ‘little memoir’ of her faithful Highland servant. She approached Sir Theodore Martin, the Prince Consort’s official biographer, to assist, a task from which he excused himself with the utmost tact on the grounds that his wife’s delicate health would not allow him to give the task sufficient attention. Next she contacted a Miss MacGregor, who read through the manuscript and struck out what she called ‘unnecessary repetitions’.

The Queen sent the result to Ponsonby, who was appalled. Knowing that any recommendation from him not to proceed further would almost certainly produce the opposite effect, he recommended that she should send it to William Boyd Carpenter, Bishop of Ripon and Dr Cameron Lees of St Giles in Edinburgh, as they both had some experience of authorship. Neither of them wanted anything to do with the project. Ponsonby wrote diplomatically to the Queen that he doubted the wisdom of Her Majesty making public such ‘innermost and most sacred feelings’, which might easily be misunderstood by less sensitive readers. She told him firmly that the account was intended for private circulation only and asked him to return the manuscript so she could send it to Disraeli’s private secretary, Montagu Corry, Lord Rowton. Rowton’s reaction was similar, but he had an even better idea. Why not send the manuscript, he suggested, to a printer who would take at least six months to set it, by which time – if indeed she had not lost interest in the project, which was quite possible – they would all have had a better chance to persuade her of the inadvisability of publication.