Died: 27 March 1883 (Windsor Citadel)
Dad and mom: John and Margaret (nee Leys) Brown
What was John Brown’s background, childhood and formative years like, and the way did he enter royal employment?
John Brown was born right into a farming household at Crathie, close to Balmoral, the second of 11 kids. His father was a former schoolmaster who later took up farming. As soon as John the youthful was sufficiently old to discover a job, he labored at a neighborhood teaching inn taking care of visitors’ horses, then as a pony herder on the Balmoral estate leased by Sir Robert Gordon, who lived there till his dying in 1847. He retained his put up after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert leased the property. In September 1849, Albert determined that for security causes they wanted somebody to journey on the field of their carriage on a few of their extra slender mountain journeys, and Brown was chosen as one of many youngest and sturdiest of the servants.
What duties did his position within the royal family contain?
Inside two years he was additionally requested to steer Queen Victoria’s pony on their Highland expeditions. He was conscientious, hardworking, all the time able to do something, and Albert admired his “clear honesty and simple, impartial character”. Different tasks included brewing the pot of tea that she took on picnics. She as soon as advised him he had given her one of the best cup she ever tasted, and he advised her it ought to have been, as he put “a grand nip o’ whisky in it”. The truth that Albert had all the time spoken and thought so extremely of Brown meant that he remained excessive in her estimation after Albert, by then Prince Consort, died at Windsor Citadel in 1861.
In October 1863 the queen was getting back from a carriage journey to Balmoral one night when the driving force, who was drunk, misplaced his method within the darkness and took the automobile over some very tough floor. It overturned with the passengers inside, however Brown had had the foresight to leap clear as soon as he noticed an accident was about to occur. He rescued the queen and her girls, lower the traces to launch the frightened horses, and despatched the driving force on foot to fetch some ponies for them to journey again. The queen was badly shaken, bruised and needed to have her head bandaged. With out his intervention her accidents would undoubtedly have been extra extreme.
Why did Brown’s closeness to Queen Victoria grow to be so scandalous, and is there any reality in a number of the extra vibrant rumours about them?
The presence of Brown quickly threatened to grow to be a legal responsibility to the queen. In June 1866 he was thought chargeable for delaying her return from Balmoral to London throughout a ministerial disaster. Just a few months later, a Swiss newspaper reported that she had cancelled appointments as she was anticipating a baby by Brown, to whom she had been morganatically married for “a very long time”. The British minister at Berne lodged a proper criticism in opposition to the newspaper for spreading misinformation, which solely exacerbated the gossip. The British press, even the extra radical journals, confirmed nice restraint in ignoring the story. Rumours continued that Brown had a maintain on the queen as a result of he had been endowed with distinctive psychic powers, and that she used him as a spiritualist medium to contact Albert within the spirit world. Whereas newspapers could have ignored the hypothesis, some satirical journals, particularly Punch and the short-lived Tomahawk, a Victorian forerunner of Non-public Eye, revealed lampoons and cartoons making enjoyable of them.
Some trendy historians have recommended that in a extra trendy age, folks may need accepted a widowed queen taking a lover, however for her to have finished so would undoubtedly have embarrassed or distressed members of her circle of relatives. Nonetheless, a liaison with a person who was socially inferior however with none political ambitions would have been preferable to an aristocrat or a member of a overseas royal household, who may need tried to exert political affect over her. The widely accepted idea is that Queen Victoria – who had misplaced her father when she was only some months previous, and her husband when each had been of their early forties – all the time desperately wanted a robust supportive male determine in her life. Through the years, some researchers have claimed that the queen and her servant had a morganatic marriage and had a baby, often on the flimsiest of proof from individuals who accepted unsubstantiated gossip as a case of ‘no smoke with out fireplace’. Brown by no means married, though he was keen on his nephews and nieces.
What was Brown’s perspective in direction of Queen Victoria? Was it a traditional servant-employer relationship, or did he attempt to take liberties which may have been thought-about unacceptable?
Most of Queen Victoria’s workers had been barely in awe of her, or not less than feared her explosive mood if anyone tried to thwart her, though they often managed to discover ways to handle her with an acceptable diploma of tact. Brown was the exception, and might be very impolite to her every so often. If he disapproved of her clothes, he would ask coldly, “What’s this you have acquired on right this moment?” He was as soon as heard scolding her as he fixed the cloak below her bonnet, “Hoots then, girl, are you able to not maintain your head up?” When she complained a couple of sketching desk that she disliked, he advised her to cease, “for I can not make one for you”.
Victoria appears to have accepted Brown’s brusque, plain-speaking method as a refreshing change from the obsequiousness of others, maybe amused that somebody dared to talk to her so forcefully, whereas she apparently by no means tried to reply him again. Flattery was not a part of his nature, however he recurrently assured her of his devotion, saying she would “by no means have an honester servant” than him. In 1872 he acquitted himself nicely when a person pointed an unloaded pistol at her whereas she was on a carriage drive and got here inside inches of her face. Brown swiftly grabbed the person and held him till the police might come and arrest him.
How nicely did Brown get on with Queen Victoria’s household and others round her?
Most of them hated him for his uncouth method, and the truth that she granted him privileges denied to them. When she was unwell in the summertime of 1871, he had unrestricted entry to her bed room as he lifted her from her mattress to her sofa (one thing her sons had been forbidden to do), whereas delivering her orders to the family in his customary tactless method. The Prince of Wales was livid that she all the time accepted Brown’s judgment, saying there was “no male head” within the household after her husband’s dying. His sister Alice, later Grand Duchess of Hesse, complained that he alone might talk about something he needed together with her, “whereas we, her kids, are restricted to talk on solely these issues which can not excite her or which she chooses to speak about”. On one go to to Balmoral their brother Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, pointedly shook palms with everybody on arrival besides Brown, as they’d beforehand had their variations.
The prime minister William Gladstone as soon as tried at a cocktail party to clarify to her intimately why he believed she was mistaken about one thing. Seeing how aggravated she was turning into, Brown tapped him sharply on the shoulder, telling him “You’ve mentioned sufficient”. He all the time acquired on nicely with Victoria’s non-public secretary, Sir Henry Ponsonby, who admired his honesty and fearlessness, and typically coated up for him when he was absent from responsibility after sleeping off one dram too many.
Did John Brown ever retire, or did he die in service?
In later years he suffered from erysipelas, maybe prompted partly by heavy consuming. In March 1883 Brown caught a extreme chill which quickly worsened, sank right into a coma and died with out regaining consciousness.
Victoria advised Ponsonby that she felt “totally crushed” after Brown’s dying. To the tip of her life, she wore his mom’s marriage ceremony ring that he had given her. Earlier than her dying, she requested her doctor Sir James Reid to make sure that he would secretly place her favorite {photograph} of Brown and a lock of his hair inside her coffin together with her earlier than it was sealed, needs that he faithfully carried out.
John Van der Kiste has written extensively on British and European royal biography from the later Stuarts to the early twentieth century.