John Brown beside Victoria

A sovereign's grief is rarely lifted by those trained to manage sovereigns. The chamberlains who know the etiquette of mourning know also its perpetuation; the ministers who write the condolence despatches inherit the silence that follows. More often it is broken, without ceremony and without permission, by a man who has never learned the etiquette at all, who speaks as he was taught to speak on a hill farm in Aberdeenshire, and who, finding a widow in a carriage, addresses her as he would address any other woman with the reins idle in her lap.

THE WIDOW AT WINDSOR

Prince Albert died at Windsor on the fourteenth of December 1861, of typhoid, in the Blue Room. The Queen was forty-two. She ordered his clothes laid out each evening, hot water brought to his washstand each morning, and the room kept as he had left it. She wore black bombazine and weeping crape. She did not open Parliament. She did not receive ambassadors at audience. She did not laugh. For three winters the great machinery of constitutional monarchy, with its red boxes and its Privy Council and its drawing-rooms, ran on without the woman at the centre of it. Lord Palmerston wrote to Lord Russell that the Crown was, in effect, in abeyance. The republican papers began their counting. By the autumn of 1864 it was held, in the household and out of it, that the Queen of England would not be drawn out of her widow's room again.

THE GILLIE FROM CRATHIE

John Brown was thirty-seven years old that October. He was born at Crathienaird, on the upper Dee, the second son of a small tenant farmer, in 1826. He had been a stable-lad at Sir Robert Gordon's Balmoral before the Prince Consort bought the estate in 1852, and the Prince had kept him on, trained him as a stalker, walked the hills with him, and liked him. He spoke Doric. He read English with effort and wrote it with more. He was tall, fair, broad in the shoulder, with the still hands of a man who had handled ponies all his life. When the Prince's old personal gillie retired in the summer of 1864, the household, casting about for a man the Queen would tolerate on Highland ground, sent for Brown. He came south in September. He was, by the steward's note, to be the Queen's outdoor servant: to lead her pony, drive her dog-cart, walk at her stirrup. He brought one trunk and a plaid.

THE FIFTEENTH OF OCTOBER

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. The birch is yellow on the slope above the burn. The air carries peat-smoke from the cottages along the strath. The Queen is forty-five years old, in black bombazine and a black bonnet, in the dog-cart drawn up at the gate, with a writing-case open on her knees and a letter from Lord Russell in her hand that she has read once and not yet answered. She has, by her own journal of two days past, been on the point of refusing the Cabinet's request that she open the new session of Parliament in person in February. She has been on the point of refusing, again, the Princess Royal's invitation to Berlin in the spring. She has not opened a function at Windsor in three years. She has, by the household's observation, not laughed in eighteen months. Brown is at the off-side of the cart with the reins gathered in his left hand and a billy-cock hat in his right. He has been in her service six weeks. In those six weeks she has taken the ponies out fourteen times, on ground she had not crossed since the Prince was alive.

A SECOND OF TIME IN A REIGN

He has told her, in the plain Doric in which he tells her everything, that the road to Loch Muick is dry and that the pony Lochnagar is sound, and that, if she wishes, he will take her up to the loch before the light goes. He has not addressed her as Madam. He has not put on a court manner. He has called her, three days ago, in conversation with the head coachman about the dew on the harness, wifie, not knowing she could overhear, and she had heard it and said nothing and gone back into the house with a colour in her face she had not carried out of it. Now she sits with the letter from Russell on her knee, and the writing-case open, and the pencil loose in her fingers, and she considers the household, and Lord Lyon's letter, and the Lord Chamberlain's, both unanswered in her desk at Windsor, and the long architecture of mourning she has built around herself for two years and ten months, room by room and rule by rule, until it has become the house she lives in. She considers also that she is alive in the carriage in a way she has not been alive since the fourteenth of December 1861, and that the man responsible for her being alive in the carriage is standing at the off-side wheel with the reins in his hand, waiting for her answer in the manner of a man who has waited at the heads of ponies all his life and is in no hurry. She is the Queen of England. She will retain in her private service the men she chooses to retain. The household will accept it. The country will not be told what is none of its business. She picks up the pencil. She writes, on the back of Russell's letter, that on consideration she will open the session of Parliament in February. She folds the note. She looks up at Brown, and tells him to take her up to the loch, that they will have an hour before the light.

THE LOCH BEFORE DARK

They go up by the stalkers' path along the burn, the pony at a walk, Brown at the near-side rein. The wind has dropped. The water at Loch Muick lies black and unbroken under the corries of Lochnagar. She does not speak on the way up; he does not speak unless she speaks. At the loch he hands her down, sets the rug on a flat stone, fetches her tea from the flask in the cart-bag, and stands a little off with the pony's head over his shoulder, looking at the water. The light goes off the tops first and then off the slope above the path and last off the loch itself. They come back in the half-dark. At the iron gate by Crathie Kirk he hands her down again. In her journal that night she writes that she has been to Loch Muick with Brown and that the air did her good. She does not write the rest.

THE COURT IN ITS PROPER ROOM

The household understood within the month what had happened on the drive at Crathie, and set itself, in the manner of households, against it. Lord Lyon, the Lord Chamberlain, the equerries, Lady Augusta Stanley, the Dean of Windsor wrote letters of varying tact. The Prince of Wales, then twenty-three, complained openly to his friends. Punch in 1866 printed the Court Circular as if Brown were sovereign; the more vicious of the republican sheets in 1871 printed the Mrs Brown rumour, and printed it again, and a pamphlet in 1873 ran the phrase the Lord Chamberlain pulled at the printer's door. None of it altered the arrangement. Brown drew the salary of an upper servant, refused promotions, never married, lived in plain quarters at Windsor and at Balmoral, drank too much in his later years, and was, by every senior courtier's private testimony, the only person at either house who spoke to her as if she were not the Queen, and the only person at either house who, in twenty years, made her laugh out loud. She opened Parliament in February 1866 and again in 1867. She went, in time, back to Berlin, back to drawing-rooms, back to the public face of the Crown. The Crown, in the form she returned it to the country, was the form she had reassembled in a dog-cart at Crathie on the fifteenth of October 1864.

THE GRANITE AT CRATHIE

John Brown died of erysipelas at Windsor on the twenty-seventh of March 1883, aged fifty-six. She wrote in her journal that night that she had lost her dearest best friend, who no one in this world can ever replace. She raised a granite memorial to him at Crathie Kirk in 1885, beside the small chapel where they had gone to Sunday service together for twenty years, and chose the inscription herself: Friend more than servant, loyal, truthful, brave. Self less than duty, even to the grave. When she died at Osborne in January 1901 she was buried, by her own written instruction, with a lock of his 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, set immediately about the destruction of her correspondence concerning Brown; two volumes of journal-entries were burnt at Frogmore on the twentieth of February 1901, and the rest was edited, in the years that followed, by her granddaughter Princess Beatrice. What survives survives in fragments, in the early biographies, in the published letters, in the granite at Crathie. The cottage where he was born at Crathienaird is a private dwelling on the upper Dee. The memorial stands where she set it, in the kirkyard above the road, in plain grey stone, weathered now, with the inscription cut deep enough to read in winter light.