I’d been tracing the footsteps of each historians and historic individuals, and I used to be lastly satisfied that what I’d discovered got here near representing irrefutable proof of a outstanding secret – one providing a solution to a 160-year-old query. However making the breakthrough didn’t come with out danger – one confronted by practically each historian who had acquired thus far earlier than me, and who turned again on the ultimate hurdle, unable to carry their analysis to mild.
WATCH | Fern Riddell on her quest to find the secrets and techniques of Victoria’s later love life
So, earlier than I pushed forward, I known as a trusted pal and mentor to debate what I believed I’d found. “I’ve discovered it,” I exclaimed. “I’ve discovered the misplaced archive of Queen Victoria and John Brown.”
Royal inspiration
In direction of the top of 2021, my agent, Kirsty McLachlan, had set me a problem.
“You want a brand new challenge,” she declared. “What are you able to say about Queen Victoria?”
“I don’t do the royals,” I retorted, immediately rejecting the suggestion. “Anyway, most royal historians face censorship the second they discover something fascinating.”
My focus has at all times been on the tales of abnormal individuals – what we name ‘historical past from beneath’. These are the lives that fascinate me, not these of the rich and highly effective. Victoria felt like a misplaced trigger. In spite of everything, what might be left to find about certainly one of historical past’s most well-known girls?
However there has at all times been one thing fascinating about Queen Victoria. She is an enigma: a girl who grew to become the cornerstone of an empire, a queen, a spouse, a mom and an icon of a whole age. Her life together with her husband, Prince Albert, has been the topic of a number of dramas and documentaries, as has her grief-stricken widowhood after his loss of life in 1861, aged solely 42. However what this passionate mom of 9 did for her personal consolation within the lonely a long time that adopted has solely been whispered about, till now. There have lengthy been rumours surrounding Queen Victoria’s relationship together with her Scottish Highland servant, John Brown. Have been they lovers? Did they marry in secret? Did they also have a baby collectively? Nevertheless, nobody had been in a position to set up the reality. This, I made a decision, was one thing that piqued my curiosity – a thread to drag and see the place it led.
John Brown is commonly relegated to a footnote in Victoria’s historical past, glossed over as a servant, or awkwardly portrayed as ‘only a pal’. But for nearly 20 years he stood at Victoria’s aspect as her “robust proper arm”, her “greatest pal” – and, as I found, her “beloved John” and her “true and devoted one”. However as I fastidiously set out on my analysis, I had little comprehension of the journey I used to be about to take, nor the astonishing secret it might reveal.
Looking for sources
With the considered maybe writing about Victoria’s mid-life, I ordered each e book ever written about John Brown. Fashionable historians have lengthy believed this to be a pointless effort, understanding that the majority of John’s authentic paperwork – his diaries, letters and extra – have been destroyed by members of Victoria’s courtroom after his loss of life in 1883. However I felt positive that one thing should stay someplace.
I began with Queen Victoria’s John Brown by EEP Tisdall, which was revealed in 1938. It’s gossipy and enjoyable, however completely devoid of references or sources – ineffective for my functions, aside from insights into how John was seen 50 years after his loss of life. Subsequent up was Tom Cullen’s The Empress Brown: The Story of a Royal Friendship, launched some three a long time later. This turned out to be a goldmine. In its pages are a collection of letter facsimiles from Victoria, the unique paperwork faithfully reproduced for readers.
Historians believed that Brown’s diaries and letters have been destroyed by Victoria’s courtroom
They showcase such a tenderness between Victoria and John, in addition to his household, and I felt an itch – a historian’s twitch – that there was way more to this historical past than I had been conscious of earlier than. Whereas combing Cullen’s acknowledgements, I noticed a reference to John’s descendants, and a quick point out that they held a household archive. That is additionally hinted at by Raymond Lamont-Brown, writer of John Brown: Queen Victoria’s Highland Servant (2000).
That was when issues began to turn out to be fascinating. Though rumours of a household archive, stored secure by John’s surviving family members, have lengthy swirled, nobody would say the place it was held or if it nonetheless existed.
This felt like a thriller I needed to resolve. These letters should be actual, I believed – a couple of particular person claimed to have seen them – but solely Cullen supplied proof. No historian since had been in a position to carry them into the general public eye. Had they been destroyed? Misplaced? Or have been they nonetheless on the market, ready to be discovered?
I began by tracing John’s surviving household: the descendants of his brothers James, Donald, William, Hugh and Archie. Hugh and Hilda Lamond, grandchildren of John’s second-youngest brother Hugh, seem in historians’ acknowledgements greater than as soon as, and I grew to become satisfied that they should have been the guardians of the household archive. However their very own descendants emigrated to the US within the Seventies, and I had no thought easy methods to contact them.
I reminded myself that fashionable historians want to have the ability to utilise many various instruments and talent units for our analysis. Some of the highly effective sources we’ve in the present day is the web, offering entry to digitised information. Within the house of a single afternoon, utilizing the big international databases obtainable through Ancestry and Scotland’s Folks, I mapped out John Brown’s complete household – together with his brothers and cousins – by way of births, marriages, deaths and census information. This led me to Minnesota, and a burning query: did John Brown’s great-great-great-nieces nonetheless maintain on to their household’s valuable assortment, packed fastidiously in shifting crates, carried down the generations and now presumably on the opposite aspect of the Atlantic Ocean?
Lengthy shot
At that time, the pandemic continued to carry the world in its grip. How was I to get in contact with Brown’s family members some 4,000 miles away within the US? Family tree can get you solely thus far, and I had no up-to-date contact info. And but… would possibly they be on Fb? It appeared just like the longest of pictures however, as I typed their names into the search bar, a consequence flashed up immediately. A connection to the descendants of Hugh Brown – the one individuals who would possibly, simply presumably, maintain the keys to the John Brown household archive – was proper in entrance of me. I opened up Fb’s messenger app and commenced to kind, uncertain if I might get a response. Ultimately I hit ship – and sat again to attend.
Days and weeks glided by, with no response from Minnesota. So I returned to the paperwork I might entry – these letters uncovered by Cullen greater than 50 years in the past – for hints that a few of John Brown’s papers should have survived someplace. On a whim, I typed traces from the letters into Google – and, to my shock, a hyperlink to an archive in Aberdeen appeared. Immediately, there it was in excessive definition, staring again at me: an authentic letter, stored secure by Aberdeen Metropolis Archives.
As I gazed on the display, the realisation slowly dawned on me that I might affirm for the primary time the existence of a part of the John Brown household archive. Certainly it couldn’t be merely sitting there, ready to be found? However I realized a very long time in the past that, with a historical past and a nation as numerous as ours, and with correspondingly bulging archives, solutions are sometimes to be discovered sitting in plain sight.
Inside an hour I discovered two extra letters within the archives, digitised and perfunctorily labelled. There was nothing to present away their significance, no indication of their significance. But when I might affirm that at the least a few of the archive had survived, then would possibly that show there was extra on the market to search out? And why, after John Brown’s household had stored this secret for therefore lengthy, was a few of it now obtainable in a public archive with little info and no fanfare?
I booked a analysis journey to Aberdeen. In the meantime, I started the forensic work of raking by way of town’s complete on-line library, collections and archives. I realised that references to John Brown, each artefacts and letters, are scattered throughout Aberdeen’s new Treasure Hub, Aberdeen Artwork Gallery and City Home archive. On my first analysis journey to town, I held the unique letters in my fingers, studying in Victoria’s personal handwriting her recollections of John: “So typically I advised him nobody liked him greater than I did… and he answered, ‘nor you than me, no-one loves you extra’.” I used to be awestruck by this highly effective declaration between Victoria and John.
In City Home, the group allowed me to rifle by way of the gathering of the author, artist and historian Fenton Wyness. I’d discovered a passing reference that this included some materials on Brown, however what I discovered there astonished me. In some unspecified time in the future within the Fifties or Nineteen Sixties, Wyness – a neighborhood Aberdeenshire historian – determined to jot down about John Brown. Like Tom Cullen, he was given entry to the John Brown household archive, which he then proceeded to {photograph} in its entirety. Now, within the archive in Aberdeen, I realised {that a} report of the letters, paperwork, playing cards and presents from Victoria to John and his household was sitting in containers throughout me. It’s an unimaginable useful resource to check – a reference assortment that’s completely unmatched.
Items of the puzzle
Over the three years that adopted, as I travelled to Aberdeen and to different archives and personal collections throughout the nation, Victoria and John’s life collectively started to unfold. And the story is vastly totally different to the one we’ve been advised earlier than – as I reveal in my new e book, Victoria’s Secret: The Personal Ardour of a Queen. The paperwork I unearthed and studied present simple proof of an intense love affair and, I imagine, proof that John Brown and Victoria did certainly marry – in addition to of a decided and ongoing marketing campaign to eradicate him from her historical past after their deaths.
The language Victoria utilized in her letters to explain her relationship with John deepened because the years glided by. She known as him her “darling one”, “devoted and devoted”, whereas describing herself as his “true and devoted one”. Playing cards she despatched him, recorded within the John Brown household archive, are printed with the phrases “I’ve liked thee with an eternal love” and poems similar to “I ship my stitching maiden / with new yr’s letter laden, / its phrases will show / my religion and love, / to you my coronary heart’s greatest treasure, / then smile on her and smile on me, / and let your reply loving be / and provides me pleasure.”
Additionally revealed in Victoria’s Secret is the likelihood that Victoria and John had an ‘irregular marriage’, a authorized marriage below Scottish regulation that concerned an trade of vows and probably rings, the proof of which sits in portraits and pictures of John from 1873 onwards.
Add to this the truth that Victoria’s Scottish chaplain, Norman Macleod, confessed on his deathbed to marrying them, and that Victoria went to her grave carrying John’s mom’s marriage ceremony ring – some extent that was hidden from her kids on the time – and it feels to me like stable, irrefutable proof of their relationship.
Floored by pictures
Though I attempted to stay medical and dispassionate as I weighed the fabric that I used to be amassing, a few objects floored me. In Treasure Hub sits a photographic album Victoria devoted and gifted to John’s mom, Margaret Leys. It’s bursting with footage of each Brown’s household and her personal, aspect by aspect – a report of the entire individuals who mattered to them.
However nothing ready me for the revelation that, within the week after John’s loss of life, Victoria had his hand solid after which carved in stone. The {photograph} of this object in Fenton Wyness’s assortment – the tender placement of John’s hand on a pillow, the significance given to a signet ring that he wore day-after-day from 1873 onwards – felt like a intestine punch. Lastly, there’s a pair of four-leafed clovers that Victoria and John collected, and which he dried and taped right into a scrapbook, their stems crossed over each other for eternity. Within the Victorian language of flowers, this has a singular that means: Be Mine.
I nonetheless had unanswered questions, although – and the one individuals who may need been in a position to assist reply them have been hundreds of miles away in America. Happily, at that stage Angela, certainly one of Hugh Brown’s descendants whom I’d tried to contact through Fb, acquired in contact. She is bubbly and forthright – and, with the settlement of her household, was completely satisfied to debate their historical past and the tales she had heard whereas rising up.
Over a collection of calls, emails and texts, she slowly started to belief me with a secret her household had stored for a really very long time. Not solely have they got the ultimate remnants of the John Brown household archive, together with authentic paperwork, similar to Victoria’s personal investigation into John’s household historical past, however additionally they guard a narrative that’s fantastical and wonderful. Angela was sanguine, telling me that “it’s simply what I’ve at all times been advised – I don’t know if it’s true”. Even so, I couldn’t assist however surprise: might this be the ultimate lacking piece of the puzzle for which I’d been looking so lengthy?
All through my analysis, and throughout John’s life, certainly one of his siblings featured extra prominently than the entire others: Hugh, whose household grew to become the guardians of John and Victoria’s legacy. As I used to be writing and researching, it grew to become more and more clear that, although all of John’s brothers and their households mattered to Victoria, Hugh and his spouse, Jessie, have been most pricey to the queen. Unusually amongst John’s intensive clan, they’d just one baby – a daughter, Mary Ann, Angela’s great-grandmother. In accordance with Angela, Mary Ann was the key baby of John Brown and Queen Victoria.
Whispers of a love baby have swirled because the 1860s, however historians have at all times been fast to dismiss such rumours. They declare that Victoria was unable to have extra kids after the delivery of her final acknowledged daughter, Princess Beatrice, in 1857, as she suffered from a prolapsed uterus. Nevertheless, this situation was solely found after the queen’s loss of life in 1901. None of Victoria’s medical doctors reported any proof that she suffered it within the aftermath of Beatrice’s delivery. As a prolapsed uterus is widespread – practically half of ladies over 50 will expertise some type of pelvic organ prolapse throughout their lifetime – I imagine this ‘reality’ has turn out to be historic misinformation, used to discredit any likelihood of a kid between Victoria and John.
Furthermore, as I found throughout my analysis, though Victoria was suggested to not have extra kids after Beatrice, it had no connection to her bodily well being. After her repeated battles with extreme post-partum melancholy, together with hallucinations and presumably even psychosis, Victoria’s medical doctors have been terrified that one other being pregnant would ship her mad. This was the explanation why she was suggested in opposition to having any additional kids. However there may be even proof to counsel that she was planning to have one other child earlier than Prince Albert died in 1861.
Victoria’s medical doctors have been terrified that one other being pregnant would ship her mad
“Mama so longed for one more baby,” her eldest daughter, ‘Vicky’ (Victoria), wrote after Albert’s loss of life. So it’s completely doable that Victoria might have had a toddler with John in 1865, the yr of Mary Ann’s delivery. The queen was wholesome, fertile and solely 45. Lots of John’s feminine family members – certainly, Victorian girls extra usually – had kids into their mid- to late forties.
Journey of discovery
It was not the top of the story, after all. However that discovery set me on an extended journey to attempt to separate household reminiscence from historic reality. My analysis took me from the fantastic glens of the Scottish Highlands to the wildness of 1860s Otago in New Zealand’s South Island, and again once more. The truth of Victoria’s secret was lengthy buried by panicking politicians, authorities campaigns, cowardly courtiers and household insurrection. With out DNA proof, we could by no means know the reality – however, each time I converse to Angela, I discover myself surreptitiously in search of any resemblance to Victoria in her face.
The revelation that the queen selected the son of a Scottish crofter as her second husband, and probably had a toddler with him, would have rocked Victorian society like a nuclear explosion. Her world didn’t imagine {that a} widespread man might take a look at a king as an equal, not to mention marry a queen. But, based mostly on the proof I’ve discovered, I imagine that that is precisely what Victoria did. Removed from remaining the grieving widow for the remainder of her days, she spent her passionate mid-life privately joined to a person who noticed her as “his solely object in life”. Now it’s time for John and his household to take their rightful place in historical past as soon as once more.
Dr Fern Riddell’s new e book, Victoria’s Secret (Ebury Press), is out now in hardback. The e book has impressed a Channel 4 documentary, Queen Victoria: Secret Marriage, Secret Youngster?, which is on the market to stream now
This text is within the September 2025 situation of BBC History Magazine