Victoria’s Secret, page 4
This frenetic race around Europe, first for wives and then for heirs, had done little to redeem the royals in the eyes of the British public. The Georgians were foreign, scandalous, abusive and mad. The regency had brought with it a clear feeling that the pomp and glamour of royalty was wearing thin on the ordinary and desperate. Two months after the celebrations of Victoria’s birth, the horror of the Peterloo Massacre saw the British cavalry charge down and murder ordinary working people at a protest in Manchester, simply because they had dared to call for parliamentary reform. It left a deep scar on the British psyche, a byword for the abuse of power and politics at home, rather than abroad.
Lord Byron’s longing for a female reign after a century of kings was widely shared. The idea of purity, modesty and restraint that a young princess, as heir, could embody was where the future of the monarchy lay. This was the world, and the expectations, that Victoria was born into. But shortly after her birth, her security was threatened. In January 1820, both George III and Victoria’s father, Edward, Duke of Kent, died. Left without male protection, Victoria’s mother, Victoire, Duchess of Kent, quickly fell under the devious and manipulative control of the duke’s private secretary, Sir John Conroy. It was a relationship that destroyed the young Victoria’s early life. Inveigling himself to the friendless, isolated widowed Victoire, Conroy’s control and influence over her was soon unmatched. The German duchess, with her young daughters and few friends, was desperately in need of guidance and companionship. This, Conroy convinced her, only he could provide. What followed was the well-known creation of a repressive and abusive regime that governed every waking moment of the young Princess Victoria’s life: Conroy’s ‘Kensington System’.
The rules of the ‘System’, as it was known, were designed to break Victoria’s spirit and place her at the complete mercy of her mother and Conroy. Victoria was never to be alone, always accompanied by either her mother or her governess, the Baroness Lehzen. She was not allowed to walk downstairs without someone holding her hand, or to sleep alone, and her only companions were her half-sister Feodora or Conroy’s own children. More than that, Victoria had to keep a daily list of all her faults and bad behaviour so that they could be brandished before her, in order to shame the child princess. She became desperate for love, wracked with guilt and shame at the smallest misdeed. And yet, it says far more about her indomitable spirit that she was not broken, or made compliant by these actions. Instead, her natural rebellious, determined stubbornness found a firm footing. She also found an ally in Baroness Lehzen, her German governess. Nearly 40 when she was appointed, Lehzen became Victoria’s second mother. She encouraged in the young princess a freedom of spirit, and soon found her own allies among Victoria’s uncles who loathed both Victoire and Conroy’s destructive, creeping influence.
Relations between the Royal Households became increasingly fractured. As Victoria was slowly established as the heir presumptive to the British throne, Conroy and Victoire’s demands for more money and more visible status began to irk the remaining royal princes. The king, now George IV, obese and drug-addled from his days as Prince Regent, was little help against the family infighting. Rumours began to persist, orchestrated by Conroy himself, that the black sheep of the family, Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, believed he should inherit the English throne instead of Victoria. From his palace in Hanover, it was whispered, he plotted the murder of his niece.10 Yet given Ernest’s suspected murder of his valet in 1810, and the latest rumours that he had fathered an illegitimate child with one of his sisters, Sophia, the British public were already of a mind that the duke would not be a fitting monarch – whatever designs he may have once had on the Crown.
~
When Victoria was only seven years old, far away from the perils and intrigues of the royal court, in one of the isolated crofting communities that lay scattered across the Scottish Highlands, John Brown was born. He was almost a Christmas baby, arriving on 8 December 1826, and spent the first few years of his life at Crathienaird, a small farm in the parish of Crathie and Braemar in Aberdeenshire, near Balmoral Castle. His father, John Sr, was a tenant farmer, while his mother, Margaret Leys, was the daughter of the local blacksmith. John was their second eldest son, arriving soon after James, and followed by Francis, Ann, Charles, Donald, Margaret, William, Francis again, Hugh and Archibald ‘Archie’ Anderson, the baby of the family. Much like Victoria, Margaret spent nearly 20 years bringing her family into existence. The land around them, with its grey-brown granite boulders, tumbling brooks, raging torrents and heady woods of fir, oak and ash, sits on the very edge of the Scottish Highlands in what is now the Cairngorms National Park. Nestled between the peaks of Lochnagar, Cairn Toul and Ben Macdui, the River Dee tumbles out of the glens, carving its way through the valley past Invery, Braemar, Balmoral, Crathie and Ballater, and out into the lowlands until it reaches the North Sea and the great city of Aberdeen. Here, alongside the Dee’s flint-flecked water, is where John Brown took his first wobbling steps, breathed in the crisp, clean air of the glens and heard the cry of his father’s new-born lambs every spring. But life had not always been so idyllic.
His parents were born in the 1790s, the tail end of a century that had seen Scotland steeped in the blood of its Highland clans – the families who lived and roamed across the glens of Scotland’s mountains, surviving in an ancient system of clan rights, allegiances and betrayals. In many ways, Scotland is a country of two parts: the soft undulating lowlands that hold the cities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, and the might and power of the Highland mountains, glens and islands sitting above them. With the Act of Union in 1707, Scotland had been yoked to England as the Kingdom of Great Britain, but for the people of the glens, this was a far from happy situation. Brutal war with the English had raged for centuries, seeing families murdered, lands stolen by the English aristocracy and entire clans decimated by either the English crown or one another.
A hundred years earlier, James VI had sat on the Scottish throne. He had been King of Scotland for more than 30 years when he inherited the English crown after the death of his cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, in 1603. Now James VI of Scotland and James I of England, he had little care or respect for the people who lived in the beautiful but unrepentant wildness of the Highlands. His obsession with demonology, his promotion of the hysteria of witch hunts, and his near-assassination by Guy Fawkes and followers in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, marked his reign as one of rumour, paranoia and instability. He and his family are known as the Stuarts. They ruled England and Scotland, divided by two crowns, and two countries, until the Act of Union in 1707. But in 1714, James’s final surviving legitimate descendant, Queen Anne, died without an heir. For the English, Anne was the last of the Stuart royal line and Parliament decided the Crown would be offered to her closest living Protestant relative, a Hanoverian German prince who became George I. Although his grasp of English was limited, he was duly crowned on 20 October 1714 in Westminster Abbey.
This, however, ignored the existence of Anne’s half-brother, James Francis Edward Stuart, the Catholic great-grandson of James I. He had spent his life in exile in France, supported by the French king, Louis XIV, and barred from the Protestant English crown due to his religion. But for some in Parliament, and across Scotland, he was the rightful heir to the throne. The time for rebellion, for civil war, had arrived. John Erskine, the 6th Earl of Mar, raised the Stuart banner at Braemar, less than ten miles from Balmoral, on 6 September 1715. His Jacobite Army marched into England to raise support for James and to rally the country to his cause, only to suffer a painful defeat at Preston two months later. The Jacobites tried again in 1719, this time with the support of a Spanish invasion fleet, but again they were defeated by the English army and an angry, determined king. In retaliation, George I ordered his army to move into the Highlands, establishing forts and roads in an attempt to ‘civilise’ the country around them and to eradicate the memories of the Highlanders’ folk heroes, such as Rob Roy and William Wallace. It was a dark and desperate time, often ignored by English history.
After 20 years, James’s son, Prince Charles Edward Stuart, was ready to try again. Known as Bonnie Prince Charlie, this beautiful, rash young man raised the Stuart banner once more in 1745, drawing more than 6,000 Highlanders to his cause. He managed to get as far as Derby, roughly 120 miles from London and the terrified new king, George II. London’s popular press quivered in horror, imagining hordes of Highland gangs invading the city streets.11 ‘Houses burnt down,’ screamed the pages of Henry Fielding’s The True Patriot: And the History of Our Own Times, predicting ‘dead Bodies of Men, Women and Children, strewed every where … great Numbers of Highlanders … a young Lady of Quality, and the greatest Beauty of this Age, in the Hands of two Highlanders … her hair was dishevelled and torn, her Eyes swollen with Tears, her Face all pale, and some Marks of Blood both on that and her Breast, which was all naked and exposed.’12 None of it was true, of course. This was just Fielding’s lurid vision of what might happen should Bonnie Prince Charlie succeed in reaching the capital. But when the brutality of the government troops, under the command of Victoria’s great uncle (and George II’s son) William Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, met his exhausted Jacobites, Bonnie Prince Charlie was forced into a retreat. Through the freezing snow and harsh winter, the Highlanders fought their way back to Inverness, fortifying the ancient city as they prepared for the final battle.
Culloden is a name that has echoed down the centuries. This vicious and deadly fight was the last battle fought between opposing armies on British soil. The 25-year-old Duke of Cumberland celebrated his birthday the night before, giving his government army of Red Coats extra rations and alcohol to warm them through the night, unaware the Jacobites were attempting to launch a night raid, which failed in the early hours. It was a rain-drenched April, and the moor of Drummossie stretched before the tired and exhausted Scottish Army. Canon, mortar bombs, bayonets and swords rang out across the afternoon of 16 April, as close to 2,000 Jacobite soldiers lost their lives and Bonnie Prince Charlie lost his claim to the throne.13 The government casualties stopped at a few hundred. The last of the Stuart monarchy had watched his dreams of a restoration crumble in the space of an hour. And for the English, the Highlanders were now seen as little better than animals, rebels to be bayoneted where they lay or hunted down and murdered as their Bonnie Prince fled back to France.
The consequences for those left behind were utterly brutal. For the English monarchy, the independent spirit of the Highlands needed to be crushed, once and for all. After the infamous Battle of Culloden, English soldiers had murdered their way across the glens, razing entire villages to the ground as they went: women were raped in front of their husbands and families, farms and settlements burnt to the ground and livestock belonging to any survivors stolen.14 The violence was so unhinged, and so horrifying, that it earned the Duke of Cumberland the nickname of ‘the Butcher’.15 One famously horrific story reported that ‘he ordered a barn, which contained many of the wounded Highlanders, to be set on fire; and, having stationed soldiers round it, they with fixed bayonets drove back the unfortunate men who attempted to save themselves into the flames, burning them alive in this horrible manner, as if they had not been fellow-creatures’.16 That beautiful and untameable land watched as its people were brutalised by an English government determined to finally bring them to heel. Gaelic, the traditional language of the Highlands, had been banned by James I, but now so too was their traditional outfit of kilts, tartan, plaid and Highland dress. Their culture and customs were to be annihilated.
This was the legacy that John Brown was born into. According to the historian Fenton Wyness, John’s paternal grandfather, Donald Brown, was the son of a Jacobite rebel. His father, and all his uncles, had joined the Forfarshire Regiment under Lord Ogilvie, fighting throughout the rebellion and witnessing the brutality of Culloden first-hand.17 John’s paternal grandmother, Janet Shaw, was the daughter of a Captain James Shaw who had also fought in Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army, alongside several of his immediate relatives.18 And yet, just a few generations later, John Brown was standing at Queen Victoria’s side. What could have caused such an alteration in allegiances, such a rejection of his own family’s history?
The answer, of course, is love.
~
When George IV died in 1830, Victoria’s uncle, the Duke of Clarence, became King William IV. He and his wife Adelaide had no surviving heirs, and from this moment, Victoria’s inheritance of the throne was assured. But as family politics began to turn increasingly nasty, Victoria’s health began to suffer and soon she found herself confined to a wheelchair.19 The young princess felt her emotions acutely and often found herself struck down by physical illness during times of mental anguish. It is not surprising that this began in her teens. We do not know Victoria’s thoughts about this period of her life – her dedicated and religiously kept journals begin in 1832 – but it is not difficult to imagine the toll that the Kensington System and the repression of her own sense of self was having.
During a holiday to Ramsgate in 1835, Sir John Conroy, head of Victoire’s household, made his most determined grasp for ultimate control. Victoria, now 16, was approaching her majority and his window of opportunity to increase his own power at court was closing. His ‘ambition’, according of one of Victoria’s doctors, Robert Ferguson, ‘was to make the Duchess Regent by proclaiming her daughter an idiot!’20 Through Victoire, Conroy would rule in secret. Yet, in spite of his campaign of abuse (disguised under the ‘System’), Victoria had grown into a stubborn, deeply loving and determined girl, prone to violent temper tantrums – a reflection of her Hanoverian genes – with a sweet bell-like voice and a habit of injecting the end of her sentences with a demonstrative ‘Zo!’21 Now that she was aware of the great destiny that awaited her, Conroy’s System had begun to show cracks. Victoria’s spirit was not as easily broken as he had hoped.
The Isle of Thanet was a tourist destination for the wealthy and fabulous. Rolling fields and quiet flint-fronted houses lined the small villages scattered between Margate, Broadstairs and Ramsgate, while the vibrant ports of Dover and Deal nearby brought a steady stream of both news from the continent and travellers from distant lands. On a clear day, you can see all the way to the cliffs of France, almost close enough to touch.
The duchess and her household took up residence at Ramsgate’s Albion House, a well-made eighteenth-century townhouse on the corner of Albion Place, facing out to the sea. It was built in the early 1790s and was owned by one of England’s first female architects, Mary Townley. Here, the duchess, Conroy, Victoria, Lehzen, Feodora and a host of servants made their home. They were soon joined in Ramsgate by Victoire’s brother, Leopold I, King of the Belgians, and Victoria’s favourite uncle. He was the widower of Princess Charlotte, whose death had sparked the succession crisis resulting in Victoria’s birth, and was still greatly loved by the British people, even though he had since remarried to Louise of Orléans, the daughter of the exiled French king, Louis Phillippe I.
As both sets of royalty descended on the town on 29 September 1835, they were greeted with crowds of well-wishers, streets decked with flowers, and gun salutes. It was far from the quiet, relaxing, sandcastle-building visits Victoria would have remembered from her youth, but she was at least offered a week’s respite from Conroy’s harsh enforcement of the System, lessened to a small degree by the arrival of her uncle and new aunt.
Until 7 October, Victoria spent every moment she could with her relatives, visiting Broadstairs and Canterbury Cathedral (hearing a ‘shocking’ Sunday service full of ‘unchristian-like’ anti-Catholic propaganda), while also taking joy in the company of those she loved so much. ‘Uncle Leopold came up to my room and sat talking with me till a ¼ to 6,’ Victoria earnestly recorded. ‘He gave me very valuable and important advice. We talked over many important and serious matters. I look up to him as a Father, with complete confidence, love and affection. He is the best and kindest adviser I have. He has always treated me as his child and I love him most dearly for it.’22 It was a brutal contrast to her life at the mercy of Sir John Conroy. During this week, he seemed almost to fade into the background, a dark spectre lurking in the shadows unable to reach Victoria, surrounded by the love of her extended family. But she could not hold him at bay forever and, within a few short days, Leopold and Louise left for the continent. Victoria was faced with a return to the endless parade of dinners and decorum, of public performance and private pain. Something inside her snapped. She had had enough.
‘I cried very much in the carriage,’ she wrote, after waving Leopold off, ‘and was in great grief. I felt very ill coming home. Dear Uncle Leopold is so kind and good and so clever, and with all that so funny and always so amusing … Felt very unwell, lay on my bed and did not come down to luncheon. Our parting from dear Uncle and dear Aunt was indeed terrible … all will appear terribly fade and dull without them. Sat up. Felt wretched and cried bitterly … I felt so ill and wretched, that I did not leave my room for the rest of the evening. Went to bed early.’23
For the next three weeks, Victoria was unable to leave her room at all. She had a high fever, her hair fell out and she lost a dangerous amount of weight. Most of these weeks were spent in a state of delirium and, around her, the claustrophobic household of Conroy and Victoire erupted into all-out-war between her governess – the Baroness Lehzen, Victoria’s protector – and those who seemed determined to do her harm. In the first few days of her sudden illness, demands were made that Victoria see the household’s physician, Dr Clark, only for Victoire to reveal that he had been sent away by Conroy, his services deemed unnecessary. It was just a teenage fit, Conroy had persuaded Victoire, a dramatic temper tantrum; Victoria was simply making herself ill. But as her symptoms persisted, Dr Clark was finally summoned back from London. Victoire, unconvinced her daughter was suffering anything serious, refused to allow Lehzen to describe Victoria’s illness to the doctor in any detail. ‘Nothing but Victoria’s whims,’ she reportedly snapped, ‘and your making believe.’24 Dr Clark was sent away once again, and Conroy resumed his attempts to unhinge the young princess’s mind.25
