John Brown Read Free

1869/70 to create a bust of Brown for the Queen. John Brown referred to the sculptor thereafter as ‘Herr Bum’. Historians believe that Boehm was the main informant – spiced up with pillowtalk from ‘Harty Tarty’ and the Prince of Wales – via another of Skittles’ lovers, the diplomat, traveller and poet Wilfred Scawen Blunt, who himself kept a very indiscreet private diary.
    Blunt recorded:
    Brown was a rude unmannerly fellow . . . but he had unbounded influence with the Queen whom he treated with little respect, presuming in every way upon his position with her. It was the talk of all the Household that he was ‘the Queen’s Stallion’. He was a fine man physically, though coarsely made, and had fine eyes (like the late Prince Consort’s, it was said), and the Queen, who had been passionately in love with her husband, got it into her head that somehow the Prince’s spirit had passed into Brown, and four years after her widowhood, being very unhappy, allowed him all privileges. It was to be with him, where she could do as she liked, that she spent so much of her time at Balmoral, though he was also with her at Osborne and elsewhere . . . She used to go away with him to a little house in the hills where, on the pretence that it was for protection and ‘to look after the dogs’, he had a bedroom next to hers, ladies-in-waiting being put at the other end of the building . . . [There could be] no doubt of his being allowed every conjugal privilege. 17
    Blunt made no attempt to substantiate any of his comments.
    Because Queen Victoria’s life was largely hidden from the public, it was hardly surprising that a whole range of myths about her were given undue credence and had some plausibility, being apparently based on sound sources. Four rumours in particular were given regular airings in scurrilous pamphlets such as Mrs John Brown . 18 The first was that Queen Victoria and John Brown were married; second, that a child had been born to the Queen and John Brown; third, that John Brown was a spiritualistic medium who helped the Queen to keep in touch with her beloved Prince Albert; fourth, that the Queen had gone insane and John Brown was her ‘keeper’. The first two of these calumnies were given credence in the Swiss publication Gazette de Lausanne . Under an anonymous hand the offending paragraphs read:
    On dit [They say] . . . that with Brown and by him she consoles herself for Prince Albert, and they go even further. They add that she is in an interesting condition, and that if she was not present for the Volunteers Review, and at the inauguration of the monument to Prince Albert, it was only in order to hide her pregnancy. I hasten to add that the Queen has been morganatically married to her attendant for a long time, which diminishes the gravity of the thing. 19
    The British Minister Plenipotentiary, the Hon. E.A.J. Harris, based at Berne, made an official complaint to the Swiss Federal Council about the paper’s allegations. The Swiss did nothing but Harris’s complaint inevitably gave the scurrilous nonsense a wider audience than it would have otherwise achieved. 20 By and large the British press left the Swiss paper’s gossip alone, and even the socialist radical weekly Reynolds Newspaper , certainly no supporter of Queen Victoria, refused to follow up the story. Yet from such as the Swiss gossip branched a whole tree of slander and innuendo, and not just on the tongues of the lower classes.
    These rumours are as alive today as they were in Queen Victoria’s own lifetime, and the 1998 film Mrs Brown gave them a new lease of life. What was the truth behind these persistent rumours? This book endeavours to unravel fact from fiction against the background of Queen Victoria’s courts at Windsor, Osborne and Balmoral.

INTRODUCTION
QUEEN VICTORIA’S SCOTTISH INHERITANCE
    Early in the morning of Thursday 24 March 1603, Queen Elizabeth I of England died. Within eight hours of her death, 36-year-old James