Victoria’s Secret, page 36
Tennyson soon responded to her request. ‘I have in compliance with Your Majesty’s wish sent all the quotations, which occurred to me … I fear that no-one of them may exactly suit, but perhaps the single line from Pope is the best for the purpose, since though it misses some of the characteristics of J.B. no record can go beyond “the noblest work of God”.’49 He listed four quotations: one each from Byron, Shakespeare and Pope, and a few lines by his own hand which he attempted to disguise as an anonymous author, saying: ‘Friend more than servant, loyal, truthful, brave! / Self less than duty, even to the grave!’50 Victoria saw through the gentle ruse immediately.
‘I have to thank you very much for your kind letter and the quotations. I have chosen the second beginning “Friend more than Servant” which everyone thought is very applicable. Is it not perhaps by yourself? It struck me as so fine. Byron’s is very beautiful too, and will admirably suit one of the other memorials.’51
The following month, Victoria awarded her poet laureate, ‘so universally admired and respected’, a peerage, creating him Lord Alfred Tennyson as ‘a mark of recognition of the great services he has rendered to literature … The anonymous lines you sent me are admired by everyone who sees them and will be engraved on the Pedestal of simple unpolished Balmoral granite on which stands the statue of the brave, kind, good, honest man whom they so truly describe.’52 She then set about building John’s memorials. For a granite drinking fountain, which still stands in the grounds of Frogmore Cottage – most recently the home of Prince Harry and Meghan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex – Victoria chose an equally intimate quotation: ‘In affectionate remembrance of John Brown, Queen Victoria’s devoted personal attendant and friend, 1883. Remember what he was with thanking heart / The bright, the brave, the tender and the true.’53 At Osborne, a large granite seat was erected in the grounds, carved with John’s profile and bearing the inscription ‘A Truer, Nobler, Trustier Heart, More Loving and More Loyal, Never Beat Within A Human Breast’.54 It was a quote from Byron’s The Two Foscari, a poetical play he had written in 1821. The full passage, spoken by Marina, the wife of Jacopo Foscari, reads:
A truer, nobler, trustier heart,
more loving, or more loyal, never beat
within a human breast. I would not change
my exiled, persecuted, mangled husband,
oppress’d but not disgraced, crush’d, overwhelm’d,
alive, or dead, for prince or paladin.55
What an interesting passage for Tennyson to draw from.
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Victoria decided that the forthcoming publication of More Leaves from the Highlands, the second volume of extracts to be published from her Scottish journals, would be dedicated to John and cover the period of their life together, from 1862 to 1882. A printed frontispiece read, ‘especially to the memory of my devoted personal attendant and faithful friend, John Brown’. But now, six months on from John’s death, it was not enough. She began to believe that the best way to honour his memory was to tell the truth of their life together. Victoria intended to write a book, a follow-up to More Leaves, using extracts from her diaries to give chapter and verse of their shared history and of John’s life; a biography, just as Sir Theodore Martin had written for her after the loss of Albert. It would be a bombshell of revelations.
Sir Henry Ponsonby, Victoria’s private secretary, was deeply concerned. The Queen had to be controlled. At first, Victoria approached Sir Theodore to do the job, but to Ponsonby’s relief, he was easily dissuaded. Next, came a Miss Macgregor, who shaped Victoria’s initial roughly drafted memoranda into a working manuscript.56 Ponsonby, desperate to head off the Queen’s gathering pace, suggested Victoria should consult with a number of educated literary people to truly do the work justice, in the hope that cooler heads than his might prevail in convincing her of the unwise course of action she now embarked on.
Initially, Victoria consulted one of her Scottish chaplains, the Reverend James Cameron Lees, on an early draft. He was a man she believed she could trust. Writing to him in October, Victoria had poured out her heart, obsessively repeating the same sentiments she shared so many times, just as she did in the aftermath of Albert’s death. ‘The Queen could not trust herself to speak of all she has gone thro’ this year; – or of the very heavy cloud which still rests on her; which she wished to do. – But she cannot refrain from saying now … the loss of one of the truest best, & most devoted of friends weighs very heavily on her. The brave, true loving honest Highland heart that served her –, watched over her, took care of her … for so long, & is totally irreplaceable! She can only pray that God who gave her this friend in the time of her grief … & has now taken him from her – May give her strength & courage to bear up against the loss of such a help & comfort when it was sent.’57 She then sent him a draft of the manuscript. Like Ponsonby, he was terrified by what he had read. Lees, however, was not a brave man. He had no wish to do battle with such formidable temper and will as Victoria’s. So, in turn, he sought out another man of faith, believing that God’s authority might go some way to tempering royal might.
Randall Davidson, Victoria’s newly appointed dean at Windsor, was a young man with a lot of ambition. He revelled in his entry to the highest circles and saw his new role as making the most of a life dedicated to God and the Church. He was also deeply naive, never having dealt with Victoria before or having any knowledge of her character. To him, she was the saintly image of widowhood, a lonely, diminutive woman in her sixties who needed his young, guiding hand.
His diaries and memoranda, held by Lambeth Palace Archives, show a young man eager to please yet desperately struggling to find his feet. His first chance to truly impress Victoria came at her traditional December service at Albert’s Mausoleum, where he was horrified to learn she would expect explicit reference to John. ‘A very difficult task,’ he wrote. ‘But it must be done.’58 It brought him into direct communication with Horatia Stopford, who had served Victoria as a lady-in-waiting since 1857. She knew many of the Queen’s secrets, as Davison was about to discover. ‘Long and very confidential interview with Miss Stopford,’ he wrote, attempting to finalise his sermon. ‘I had submitted for her inspection my draft of a paper. But she was sure there was not in it enough definite reference to J.B – [in Greek:] Woe is me! What shall I write next? The whole subject is fraught with difficulties which Miss Stopford told me of. But which I do not commit to paper even here. Miss Stopford has a difficult task. May God give her grace & wisdom for the burden she has to bare.’59
Happily for Davidson, the service passed without a hitch and Victoria was well satisfied with his references to John. But it’s easy to understand that for a man like the dean, who had believed John was solely a servant, the revelations were coming thick and fast. And, like many Victorians who hoped to orbit the Queen, he had little interest or desire for idolising a servant who seemed, to him, to have strayed out of their place in the natural order.
He was let in on the secret of Victoria’s memoranda to John’s life, which he duly committed to his diary in a code using Greek letters as a substitute for English, hiding his thoughts and Victoria’s confidences from prying eyes. At Osborne, Victoria confided her plans to him. ‘We talked love,’ he wrote in English.60 Victoria even shared the sorrow she felt at how John’s memory was treated by those at court and in her family, translated here from his code, the italicised letters showing what was supposed to be hidden: ‘the Queen who talked much on many matters. & especially about her past sorrows and the sympathy or lack of sympathy she has found. I returned to speak with freedom + very strongly … [explaining] the heart to those who don’t understand and then she spoke freely about the books and I told her all I felt.’61
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The memoranda were duly passed to Davidson, excited at the intrigue and palpable concern of those around him. It was as if he was being shown behind the curtain, with the system and construction of monarchy being revealed. ‘I at once felt that publication or even the printing of anything of the sort was absolutely out of the question,’ he recalled, dismissive of Lees’s inability to say so to Victoria. ‘It was obvious that he was afraid to express to her his opinion about it, though as a matter of fact he shared my view about the character of some of the Memoranda in question.’62 His reasoning was not just what Victoria had written, but that the words she had used to describe John were so shocking; ‘the terms which she used respecting him were such as to be painfully, almost ludicrously inappropriate with respect to such a man, and unsuitable in any case for the Queen to use about one of her servants. I felt quite sure that the publications of such papers, even if they were toned down and modified, would be really harmful, and that to print them, even for the most private circulation, would be in the highest degree dangerous.’63
The tone of Davison’s recollection, the pompous self-confidence, the classic classist arrogance that fixated on John’s status as his defining characteristic, is perhaps enough to stir revolutionary wrath in even the staunchest of monarchists. If Victoria had loved him and wanted the world to know, what right had any of these courtiers to deny it? Who were they covering up for? Not Victoria, ready to defend John in death just as she had in life. She was incensed at a review of the newly published More Leaves in the Athenaeum, in which a writer – attempting to defend the Queen from the rumours that she had married John – proclaimed: ‘Naturally enough, Brown became essential to the Queen, whose health, sorely tried and weakened, stood more immediately in need of such simple-minded personal devotion as he could give … It is easy to feel a good deal of honest admiration for a man of Brown’s robust independence and simple usefulness. We do not gather from these memorials that he was more than a kind-hearted and devoted servant whose devotion and faithfulness were rewarded by gratitude and even friendship.’64 Writing to Sir Henry Ponsonby and attaching the hated review, Victoria was determined her new book would make the truth clear. ‘Now [he] was much more than that,’ she argued, ‘and it is this which The Queen would wish to show.’65 So not only did Victoria reject the official line, that John was just a devoted servant or friend, she wanted the world to know that the truth was very different.
Determined to go ahead with her plan, now Victoria decided her book would also include extracts from John’s personal diary, the journals he so often had written into at her request. That his private papers were to be exposed, his thoughts and deeds levelled alongside Victoria’s own as equals in the life they shared, could not be allowed. It also tells us that, rather than being passed to John’s family after his death, his personal papers had remained with her.
Ponsonby drafted a letter, asking Victoria’s forgiveness, ‘if he expresses a doubt whether this record of Your Majesty’s innermost feelings should be made public to the world. There are passages which will be misunderstood if read by strangers and there are expressions which will attract remarks of an unfavourable nature towards those being praised’.66 For days, he, Randall Davidson, and Miss Stopford held countless ‘important – momentous – conversations’ over the ‘troublesome book’.67 Deciding to write a letter of his own, Davidson sat up all night carefully composing just the right words to make Victoria see sense.68 ‘I should be deceiving Your Majesty,’ he wrote, carefully, ‘were I not to admit that there are, especially among the humbler classes, some, (perhaps it would be true to say many) who do not shew themselves worthy of these confidences, and whose spirit, judging by their published periodicals, is one of such unappreciative criticism as I should not desire your Majesty to see. – These facts, which are, I fear, beyond dispute … I feel I should be wanting in my honest duty to Your Majesty who has honoured me with some measure of confidence were I not to refer to this, for Your Majesty’s consideration.’69
It was somewhat more obsequious than Ponsonby’s attack, but it made a similar point. If Victoria were to reveal to the world her intimate relationship with John, she would be laughed at and made a fool of. For such a delicate, wounded ego as Victoria had, now without the careful protection offered by John, it was a dangerous opinion to offer.
‘[The Queen] replied through Miss Stopford,’ Davidson recalled, ‘that she was surprised that I should think so, that she felt that I was mistaken and that she would like me to reconsider the matter. This was conveyed to me to the best of my recollection by word of mouth, and I was further privately assured by some of those around her that the thing would go forward notwithstanding what I had said. Thereupon I took a stronger line; I told her that I felt it my duty to speak quite plainly and that such publication or printing was in my opinion so inappropriate that I should feel bound to take every means of persuading her, if possible, to desist; I therefore asked her to depute anyone she liked to see me on her behalf and learn confidentially the grounds on which I based my opinion. In the meantime, I procured from some disreputable newshops certain scurrilous pamphlets and woodcuts about John Brown and herself, basing their unseemly gibes upon harmless things which were already published in her “Journal of Life in the Highlands”. This I was prepared to show to anyone whom she might send. My letter was strong and decided, and I knew it must give her pain but I felt it to be right.’70
He had bought a copy of ‘John Brown’s Legs: Leaves From a Journal in the Lowlands’, a satirical popular pamphlet imported from America that was now doing the rounds in 1884. It spanned more than 90 pages, full of parodies and the worst rumours that had drifted out of the Palace. There were woodcuts of John and Bertie boxing as an infuriated Victoria looks on, of John and Victoria in compromising positions, surrounded by an unfaltering and rude commentary on their relationship. For Victoria, to see such a vulgar portrayal of the man she loved would have been deeply upsetting. We don’t know if the pamphlet was ever placed in her hands, but a copy does lie in the Royal Collection.71 And on receipt of Davidson’s second letter, Victoria flew into a wild and uncontrollable rage. It’s doubtful that his words alone would have been enough to trigger such an explosion and suggests that the pamphlet had indeed been passed to her. But she refused to discuss the subject with anyone, leading Sir William Jenner to warn all that she was in a ‘tantrum of wrath and excitement’.72
For days, the volcano blew. And then, as always, it simply ceased. The pressure and consistent rejection of her wishes, the way in which they made her love and devotion to John seem silly and small, had all become too much. Victoria gave in. There was no-one to protect her now, no barrier to the manipulations of the court, which supposedly sought to defend her from herself and instead worked hard to eradicate and remove all trace of her relationship with John, which was deemed unacceptable. In the aftermath, Sir Henry Ponsonby destroyed all of John’s surviving papers and Victoria’s memoranda; his diaries, journals, letters – everything that Hugh, Donald, Francis and Archie had not been able to salvage from his rooms – was burned.73 With it, so too was the true history of the man who stood at Victoria’s side for nearly 20 years. And, without him, the court now knew Victoria could be defeated.
Randall Davidson would always be proud of his role in removing John from Victoria’s public record. Writing a memorandum in 1913, he recalled: ‘I was in absolutely constant intercourse with the Queen and her secretaries. Neither Ponsonby, nor Edwards, nor Bigge, did anything relating to ecclesiastical or educational matters without asking me first, and the constant use of cypher telegrams when the Queen was at Balmoral or Osborne shows conclusively (for cyphers are troublesome things) that they thought it worthwhile. To come to deeper matters still, the episodes, some of which I have recorded elsewhere, of my recurrent, though rare, controversies with the Queen, secret as they necessarily are, show that I was genuinely able to stimulate some things, and to prevent others, which were, or would have been, of really grave consequence. I would refer specially to my successive objections to the publication of an intended book. These were really deeds of important service to the nation, but, once more, how many people in the land, and even in the inner circles, knew anything about those talks and letters and their usefulness.’74 Even 30 years later, he worried about revealing such a secret. The final two sentences were marked with pencil and the caveat that they were ‘not fit for publication’.75
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As the first anniversary of John’s death loomed closer, Victoria received support from an unexpected quarter. ‘Dearest Mama,’ Louise wrote, ‘I know that tomorrow will be a trying day to you all, the sad recollections of last year coming back to you, accept my warmest sympathy dear Mama, the loss of a friend no other can replace though they may be as devoted and true, yet of course they are not the same. Yet I trust with time you may find comfort from those around you, who think but of your happiness and good. Ever your dutiful and devoted daughter. Louise.’76 It was a tellingly honest reflection of the needs of a married woman. Louise, who had fought so bitterly and resented John as a young woman, understood her mother’s passions better now she was a wife herself. Lorne was not the husband she longed for and he had stayed in Canada as governor while she returned to England in 1880. Once home, Louise had quickly resumed her affair with the sculptor Edgar Boehm, who died in her arms some years later.77 ‘I cannot cease lamenting,’ Victoria wrote in her journal, as John’s anniversary arrived.78
Yet it was to be a moment of greater tragedy still. The following day, Leopold, now married and holidaying in Cannes with his pregnant wife, Princess Helen of Waldeck and Pyrmont, died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage. ‘Dearest Child,’ Victoria wrote to Vicky, ‘this is an awful blow. For him we must not repine; his young life was a succession of trials and sufferings though he was so happy in his marriage. And there was such a restless longing for what he could not have; this seemed to increase rather than lessen.’79 Her reaction was sanguine, controlled. Somehow, the death of her own child did not warrant the same outpouring of grief as she had shown her Highland Servant. Then, in astonishing ignorance, or perhaps simple dismissal of her son’s loathing of John and his brothers, Victoria instructed that Hugh and Archie should join Sir James Reid to witness the closing of Leopold’s sarcophagus.80 His childhood enemy was now Leopold’s final caretaker in death.
