Victoria’s Secret, page 10
‘My dear Augusta, for me everything is finished now! I only lived through him, my heavenly Angel … He was my entire self, my very life and soul, yes, even my conscience if I can describe it thus! My thoughts were his, he guided and protected me, he comforted and encouraged me … Now I feel as though I am dead! … Disheartened, I continue my gloomy sorrowful life alone. I can feel no interest or pleasure and my one desire is that I may go to him soon, very soon! … I try to comfort myself by knowing that he is always near me, although invisible, and that our future union will be even more perfect and eternal! But my nature is too passionate, my emotions are too fervent, and I feel in sore need of someone to cling to securely, someone who would comfort and pacify me!’68
Although popular culture likes to paint the Victorians as repressed and sexually immature, it is very clear in any reading of Victoria’s letters after Albert’s death that her grief fixated heavily on the loss of physical pleasure, joy and sexual connection that she experienced with her husband. It was his physicality that she missed, the comfort that it gave her, leaving her with desires that would now be forever unfulfilled. This is what had been taken from her, not by doctors or Albert’s fears around her postnatal depression, and long before she had expected it, damning her to an eternal, celibate widowhood. ‘What a dreadful going to bed!’ Victoria had written in her little book of ‘Remarks – Conversations – Reflections’, when she arrived at Osborne soon after Albert’s death. ‘What a contrast to that tender lover’s love! All Alone! Yet – The blessings of 22 years cast its reflection!’69 Vicky, now in her second trimester and able to travel, had arrived at Osborne on Valentine’s Day, 1862. She had collapsed into her mother’s arms and they sobbed together on the floor of Victoria’s room. Yet while her eldest daughter’s company was deeply comforting, it also reminded Victoria of all that was now lost to her. ‘Poor mama,’ Vicky wrote to Fritz, ‘has to go to bed, has to get up alone – for ever. She was as much in love with papa as though she had married him yesterday.’ In a final, heartbreaking line, she confessed, ‘Mama so longed for another child’.70
By June, Bertie had returned, having successfully persuaded the courts of Europe and his mother that he was both maturing and leaving his youthful errors behind him. ‘I can give you a very good report of Bertie,’ Victoria wrote to Vicky. ‘He is much improved and is ready to do everything I wish, and we get on very well. He is much less coarse looking and the expression around the eyes is so much better.’71 It is an essential part of Victoria’s nature to feel an extreme of passion about those she loved, moving from hatred and despair to love and affection with a force and speed that could give its recipient whiplash.
Her horror at the part Bertie had played in Albert’s death, however unwittingly designed, certainly gave Vicky the impression that her mother – in her extremes – may consider putting him aside, casting him out not only of the family, but also of the line of succession as punishment. She had become her younger brother’s gentle yet persuasive defender in the face of Victoria’s anger and bitterness. ‘In 20 years time,’ she had written to her mother in the weeks after Albert’s death, ‘all that causes us such alarm with Bertie may be changed and soften.’72 Her words, it seems, may finally be ringing true. Victoria, widowed and solely responsible not only for her empire but also the marital prospects of one of the most powerful European royal families, could only hope that her eldest son might finally be able to live up to her expectations.
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Nine months into her widowhood, Victoria felt as if her resilience had been lost forever. What she needed was to see her remaining family, scattered across Europe though parts of it may be. A visit was arranged for her to Albert’s brother, Ernest, in Coburg, and, of course, Vicky. It was a mourner’s progress. ‘On waking thought of the impending journey,’ she wrote on 1 September, ‘which made me very nervous … Felt dreadfully agitated & Low … Feel so lonely & desolate.’73 As the royal yacht, the Victoria & Albert, left Woolwich Docks, Victoria was unable to stop the memories from overwhelming her. She cried as they docked at Antwerp, and again when she found herself in the arms of her favourite uncle, Leopold I. But a few days later, now staying with Ernest and surrounded by her family at Reinhardsbrunn Castle, Victoria drew comfort from the sight of a familiar Scottish face. John Brown had been dispatched from Balmoral to care for the widowed queen. He had travelled the long distance from Scotland to Gotha to lead her pony, just as he had done with such care and dedication while Albert was alive. As the young widow, still wrapped into her suicidal depression, grieved the loss of her husband in his homeland, it was John who took her out into the countryside, leading her pony through the ‘glorious pine woods’.74 It was the first time in the entire trip that Victoria’s despair seems, even momentarily, to have left her. With this man, in the sanctuary of the woods and mountains, rivers and streams, life was somehow less bleak than she imagined.
Her respite was short-lived. Victoria returned to England at the end of October and immediately took refuge at Osborne. Her ministers at once boarded their trains and boats, and appeared at its doors with the business of state; ‘saw Lord Grenville & felt very nervous & anxious, then Lord Palmerston & Lord Stanley … they had shortened the business for me, but still, short as it was, I found it very trying.’75
Victoria had little interest in being queen: what was the point without Albert at her side? But her visit to Coburg, the change of scene, had lit a very small spark, a reminder that a world outside her pain and grief existed, and was full of those who loved and cared for her. Anxious and uneasy as she was at facing the future without Albert’s guidance, Victoria tentatively began to reach out, although still unable to disguise her sadness. ‘I long to see you again, dear Augusta,’ she wrote to the empress, ‘although I would be sad, boring company, for you! … Would it not be possible for you to come here next summer for a few days (if I am still alive)? … I went to the dear holy chamber (as I do every evening before going to bed). I felt overwhelmed by the most acute pain and longing and desire.’76 That holy chamber was Albert’s bedroom. It was the nights that hurt her the most, where the absence of her husband’s intimacy was at its most obvious.
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Throughout 1862 and 1863, Victoria was preoccupied by her grief, while the handsome Highlander whose company she so enjoyed at Balmoral seemed to be relegated to the background. Perhaps the memory of her earlier fascination with John led Victoria to feel guilt in the aftermath of Albert’s death and to fixate on her family. These two years saw the successful marriage of a contrite Bertie to the dependable and amiable Princess Alexandra, while Vicky, now Crown Princess of Prussia, gave birth to her third child and Alice married Prince Louis of Hesse. Surrounded by her younger children, Victoria could only see the hole their father had left in their lives. ‘All is over,’ she confided to her journal, on Bertie’s wedding day, ‘& this (to me) most trying day is past, as a dream, for all seems like a dream now & leaves hardly any impression upon my poor mind & broken heart! Here I sit lonely & desolate, who so need love & tenderness, while our 2 daughters have each their loving husbands & Bertie has taken his lovely pure sweet Bride to Osborne, – such a jewel whom he is indeed lucky to have obtained. How I pray God may ever bless them! Oh! what I suffered in the Chapel, where all that was joy, pride & happiness … which brought back to my mind, my whole life of 20 years at his dear side safe, proud, secure & happy, – I felt as if I should faint.’77
Confiding in Augusta, she wrote letters repeatedly preoccupied with her own ‘hopeless eternal longing’ that resulted in ‘my poor vitality wasting gradually away’.78 And as she approached the second anniversary of Albert’s death, Victoria was far from the restrained, controlled, passive widow we expect. She was tortured, not by the absence of Albert’s character and personality, but by the loss of his body and his touch:
Dear Augusta,
I cannot describe how sad, desolate and melancholy I feel. My life is without joy, and nothing, nothing can ever bring back one shred of my lost happiness! Oh God, why must it be so? This yearning is such torture! … I could go mad from the desire and longing!79
Victoria was a woman who lived life through her emotions, governed by her passions and rebelling against any attempts to restrain them. Now in her early forties – alone, aching with unfulfilled desire and need, and trying desperately to live up to Albert’s legacy and his strict, disciplinarian ways – a dam was building inside of her, threatening to burst under the pressure.
Twelve days after Victoria wrote to Augusta that she was on the verge of madness, the Queen’s carriage overturned on its way back to Balmoral. Pulling her to safety, determined to protect her at all costs, was John Brown. He alone rescued Alice and Helena from the crash and cared for the injured queen. From the wreckage, both literal and metaphorical, this was the man who altered the course of Victoria’s widowhood, the one man who cared for her every whim, for whom no request or order was to be ignored. ‘Yesterday I spoke to Brown,’ she wrote happily to Vicky. ‘There is nothing like the Highlanders – no, nothing.’80
Victoria’s body had survived nine pregnancies, her desires were unchanged, her need for love, affection and strength unmatched. Why should we believe, for a single moment, that she would willingly subject herself to the loneliness and solitude that caused her such pain, to a celibate life, and one which felt entirely unnatural? Her life with Albert had been a constant power struggle, marred by his puritanical nature and her emotional fragility. But Victoria was a survivor; she had a resilience that often only ever emerged when she believed herself to be at her most defeated. As a queen, she could never have an equal. What she needed was someone who could serve.
So now, the man who called her ‘Mistress’ was to take his place in history.
CHAPTER FIVE
‘The fascinating Johnny Brown’
On 26 October 1864, Victoria made a decision that would alter the course of both her life and her reign. It had been a misty day, beset with that occasional rainy weather the Scottish refer to as ‘dreich’ – damp and disillusioning, even against Balmoral’s autumnal leaves of greens and golds. She could not face the thought of returning to England without comfort:
‘Saw Sir C. Phipps & desired him to arrange for Brown to come south, when we are at Osborne in the winter & remain till the spring, in order to lead my pony, as Dr Jenner is so anxious I should keep up my riding, & I am so accustomed to Brown always leading the pony. A stranger would make me nervous. Sir C. Phipps thinks it a very good idea. Alas! I am now weak & nervous, & very dependent on those I am accustomed to & in whom I have confidence.’1
Three years after Albert’s death, and a year since John rescued Victoria and her daughters from the carriage crash near Balmoral, Victoria felt she had found a new man on whom she could depend. Sir Charles Phipps, who had previously been Albert’s private secretary and now ran the Queen’s Household, made the arrangements. John was to be sent south.
He would be joining the Royal Household, the caravan of courtiers and servants, royal children, governors, governesses, dressers and doctors that travelled with Victoria wherever she went. Until now, we have always been told that that they hated him from the start, but the real history gives us a very different story. Alice, Victoria’s third child, was clearly fond of John and believed his influence on her mother, grief-stricken in her widowhood, was to be encouraged. ‘We are both very much pleased at the arrangements about Brown and your pony,’ Alice wrote to Victoria in 1864, from her married home of Darmstadt, ‘and I think it so sensible. I am sure it will do you good, and relieve a little the monotony of your out-of-door existence, besides doing your nerves good. I had long wished you would do something of the kind; for, indeed, only driving is not wholesome.’2
Alice had long loved the Highlands and the wild Scottish life her family found there.3 Aged only seven years old, she had written to her father, Prince Albert, asking ‘My Dear Papa, May I be one of your Balmoral Gillies, I have found the horn of a stag.’4 The most pragmatic of Victoria’s children, she had nursed her father on his deathbed as Victoria, overwhelmed and overwrought, refused to accept Albert was dying. Although Alice didn’t have quite the same beauty as Vicky or Louise, she had developed a tender heart and a deeply compassionate nature. Happiest in the company of her brothers, she was known to be ‘merry, full of fun and mischief’, and from childhood was as ‘bold and fearless as a boy’.5 It’s clear the Highlands were where she felt the most at home. ‘Please remember me to Grant, Brown, and all of them at home in dear Scotland,’ she wrote to Victoria, shortly after her wedding in 1862.6
Alice had been married at 19 to Prince Louis of Hesse, part of the lower rungs of the large German royal family and, much like Vicky in Berlin, had had to make a new life in her husband’s country. Victoria, so used to Alice being at her beck and call, had not taken the separation well. ‘In today’s letter you mention again your wish that we should soon be with you again,’ Alice pointedly told her mother. ‘Out of the ten months of our married life five had been spent under your roof, so you see how ready we are to be with you.’7 But she was soon desperately homesick. ‘You can’t think how much I am interested in every little detail of your daily life,’ she wrote to Victoria in the new year of 1865. ‘Besides you know it cannot be otherwise. Please say kindest things to Brown, who must be a great convenience to you.’8
John had been part of their lives for more than 15 years, always attentive, always ready. ‘I at last get what I always wanted,’ Victoria wrote to Alice, ecstatic at John’s new appointment. ‘The same servant always to attend on me … & it is so nice to have a Highland servant.’9 Alice was well aware of her mother’s descent into suicidal ideation since Albert’s death, as well as Victoria’s desperation for comfort and affection, both physically and emotionally. ‘May God strengthen and soothe you, Beloved Mama,’ she had implored Victoria, ‘and may you still live to find some ray of sunshine on your solitary path.’10 Perhaps, in Alice’s practical mind, it was clear that John held the answer.
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As the end of 1864 arrived, Victoria travelled from Balmoral to Windsor and then to Osborne for the Christmas season. The country was covered in snow as she made her way, first by train and then by boat, to the isolated seclusion of her winter palace on the Isle of Wight. Four days after she reached Osborne, the snow vanished and a familiar face appeared on the morning of 20 December, leading her pony, Flora, ‘just as at Balmoral’.11 John Brown had arrived. Victoria, still dwelling on Albert’s absence, found she could do little to raise her ‘tired and depressed’ spirits, even surrounded by her family.12 ‘Felt very sad & low,’ she confessed to her journal, ‘to think that this is the third year that ends like this and that I have managed to live through them & through this awful loneliness.’13 But she still managed to ride, finally coaxed out into the New Year’s January sun, with its fresh snow and sparkling drifts, by the knowledge that John would be with her.
Victoria was 45. Held captive by her loss and sorrow, little brought her joy or persuaded her there was a reason to keep living. For those who loved her, the situation was desperately sad. For those who needed their queen to oversee the business of state, it was deeply frustrating. Victoria was shirking her duty, reliant on the defence of her nerves and widowhood to keep everyone at arm’s length. The precocious, resilient spirit that had served her so well in childhood was buried from view.
Only one thing could reach her: curiosity. And, for all her flaws, Victoria was an insatiably curious person. While other monarchs had devoted their interests to war, literature, the arts or even farming, for Victoria it was people themselves who had always held the utmost fascination. Not only did John look different to the staid respectability of the court, dressed in his kilt and tartan in all weathers, but he also spoke with an Aberdonian accent, mixing his English with Dorician phrases – such as ‘foggy’ for mossy – which Victoria, in her inquisitiveness, adored and dutiful recorded in her journals.14 He was also fluent in Gaelic, which she found ‘very wild and singular; the language so guttural and yet so soft’.15 Within weeks of his arrival at Balmoral, it was clear he brought an ease to her life, a comfort which wore away at the sharp edges of her widowhood and reminded her of the beauty that could be found in living. Victoria was, and had always been, a child of nature, in love with the natural world and the joys that she could find there. At her best, she was delightful company – sparkling, funny, earthy and deeply passionate. What she needed now, more than ever before, was to be reminded of who she was; not as a queen, not as a mother, but as a woman.
By February, Victoria decreed that John would remain with her permanently. He was now 38, his leggy boyhood gone, and instead a thick-set man, with the look of a bare-knuckle fighter, glowered and stalked down the corridors of Osborne and Windsor Castle. Although he had travelled with Victoria before, this was different. He would not be returning to Scotland, his homeland and family, without her. Victoria’s reasoning was very simple: no-one made her feel as safe and secure, or attended to her needs with the same devotion as this stern-faced Highlander. ‘He is,’ she confessed to her journal on 3 February, ‘so very dependable’.16 The next day, he was awarded the moniker of ‘The Queen’s Highland Servant’, answering only to Victoria, and, to all intents and purposes, beholden to no-one else at court.
For them both, the ramifications of this decision would echo across the centuries. Victoria would credit him with saving her life.17
Memorandum For John Brown:
John Brown is to be appointed to the situation of ‘The Queen’s Highland Servant’. He is to remain constantly in attendance upon The Queen, as Her Personal Servant out of doors, where Her Majesty may reside or wherever she may travel, unless his services are specially dispensed with for a time …
