Brown · 1864
John Brown beside Victoria
Prince Albert died at Windsor on the fourteenth of December 1861. Queen Victoria, forty-two years old, withdrew from public life and spent the next forty years a widow in mourning. From the autumn of 1864 the man who, more than any other, brought her out of the deepest of her seclusion was a Highland gillie of the Balmoral estate, John Brown of Crathie, son of a small farmer of Crathienaird, brought south by the household to be the queen's outdoor servant. He stayed in her service until his death in 1883. The court hated him for it, the Cabinet ministers patronised him, the press lampooned him as "the queen's stallion" in print so coarse that the Lord Chamberlain pulled it. The Queen of England wrote, in her journal of the day his obituary went to the papers, that her trust in him had been complete; that no one had ever done more for her than he had; and that in any society or any country he would have been counted a man.
It is the late afternoon of the fifteenth of October 1864, on the carriage-drive at Balmoral, by the iron gate at the head of the path down to Crathie Kirk, in low autumn light. She is forty-five years old. She is Queen Victoria, three years a widow, in a black bombazine dress and a black bonnet, in the dog-cart drawn up at the gate, with a writing-case open on her knees and a letter in her hand from Lord Russell that she has read once and not yet answered.
She is, by her own journal of two days ago, on the point of refusing the Cabinet's request that she open the new session of Parliament in person in February. She is on the point of refusing, again, the Princess Royal's invitation to come to Berlin in the spring. She has not opened a function at Windsor in three years. She has worn nothing but black for two years and ten months. She has, by the observation of the household, not laughed in eighteen months.
Brown is at the off-side of the cart, holding the reins. He is thirty-seven years old. He is in plaid and a shooting-jacket, with a billy-cock hat in his right hand. He has been the queen's outdoor servant for six weeks. He was brought down from Crathie when the prince's old gillie retired. The prince had personally trained him as a stalker in the 1850s, and the prince had liked him. The queen has, since the prince's death, had no Highland ground at all because she could not bear to take the ponies out without him.
She has, in the last six weeks, taken the ponies out fourteen times.
Brown speaks Doric and almost no other English. He has, this afternoon, told her that the road to Loch Muick is dry and the pony Lochnagar is sound, and that, if she wishes, he will take her up to the loch. He has spoken to her, since he came south, as he speaks to anyone, which is plain. He has not put on a court manner. He has not addressed her as Madam. He has called her, in passing, wifie, in conversation he did not know she could overhear, when the head coachman complained about the dew on the harness.
She thinks: the household are scandalised. The household will be more scandalised. Lord Lyon and the Lord Chamberlain have written letters that I have refused to answer.
She thinks: I am alive in the carriage in a way I have not been alive since the fourteenth of December 1861. The man who is responsible for my being alive in the carriage is Brown.
She thinks: I am the Queen of England and I will retain in my private service the men I choose to retain. The household will accept it. The country will not be told what is none of its business.
She picks up the pencil from the writing-case. She writes a note to Lord Russell that, on consideration, she will open the session of Parliament in February. She folds the note. She looks up at Brown.
She says: take me up to the loch, Brown. We will have an hour before the light.
John Brown remained the queen's principal personal servant from 1864 to his death from erysipelas at Windsor on the twenty-seventh of March 1883. The court resented him. The press ridiculed him. The republican papers, in the early 1870s, ran the unfounded "Mrs Brown" rumour. The young Edward, Prince of Wales, openly disliked him. None of it altered his with the queen. He drew the household salary of an upper servant, refused promotions, never married, lived in plain quarters, drank too much in his later years, and was, by every senior courtier's private testimony, the only person at Windsor or Balmoral who could speak to the queen as if she were not the queen, and the only person at Windsor or Balmoral who, in twenty years, ever made her laugh out loud. She wrote, in her journal of the twenty-seventh of March 1883: I have lost my dearest best friend, who no one in this world can ever replace. When she died at Osborne in 1901 she was buried, by her own instructions, with a lock of Brown's hair and a photograph of him in her left hand under the wedding ring of Prince Albert. The court of King Edward VII, on his accession, immediately destroyed the bulk of her correspondence about Brown. Two volumes of journal-entries about him were burnt at Frogmore on the twentieth of February 1901. The remainder is what survived in the publications of her early biographers and in fragments her granddaughter Princess Beatrice did not edit out. The cottage at Crathie where Brown was born is a private dwelling. The granite memorial to him at Crathie Kirk, beside the small chapel where he and the queen attended Sunday service, was put up by her in 1885 and bears the inscription she chose herself, in English: Friend more than servant, loyal, truthful, brave. Self less than duty, even to the grave.