Sons, Servants and Statesmen (24 page)

Despite her reservations, his appointment was fortuitous, and not for a moment would she have good reason to take issue with Stockmar’s favourable impression of the man. By 1870 the Queen’s popularity in the country was at a low ebb. Ponsonby’s more progressive outlook put him naturally in sympathy with Gladstone, who had an unenviable task in trying to persuade the Queen to abandon her seclusion. Republicanism was on the rise, with journals such as the
National Reformer
warning that Her Majesty, ‘by doing nothing except receive her Civil List, is teaching the country that it can get on quite well without a monarch’.
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Enjoying a good relationship with Gladstone and the Liberal ministers, naturally self-effacing, with a dry wit and sense of humour which ensured that he never took life too seriously, Ponsonby performed an invaluable service to the monarchy by helping to keep the Crown above politics in a similar, if less overt, way as the Prince Consort had done.

Whereas the Queen had generally been more inclined towards the Whigs and Liberals, regarding her first Tory Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, as a Liberal in all but name, from around the age of fifty onwards she was becoming increasingly conservative and Conservative. Ponsonby and his equally progressive-minded wife helped to reduce the damage that might otherwise have been done. He had a natural dislike of ceremony and grandeur for its own sake. A spell in North America reinforced his liberal views and inbuilt admiration of a more egalitarian society, perhaps only serving to accentuate the importance he attached to what his biographer William A. Kuhn called ‘the smallness of attending to the whims of princes and princesses’.
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While he and Mary were never republicans, they were curious to learn more about the republican movement and studied the radical papers with keen interest, and their moderate yet unashamedly slightly left-of-centre attitudes went some way towards making Queen Victoria and her Court more acceptable to left-wing opinion in Victorian England. By their very presence at Court, they proved that the Crown could tolerate and even rise above political dissent, and it might not be overstating the case to suggest that the monarchy’s survival into the twentieth century owed more than a little to their presence.

Even so, Mary was not generally invited to what were described as ‘Court junketings’, or visits to members of the royal family in other European countries. Though the Queen and her household could claim that she did not have an automatic invitation to such occasions as she was merely the wife of the private secretary, she believed that this was being used as an excuse to keep her out of the way. She was said to be slightly embittered at being marginalised in such a manner, and thus had little compunction in seeking out and spreading dubious gossip about the family,
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though as the loyal wife of the Queen’s private secretary, there is reason to doubt whether she would ever have resorted to such questionable tactics.

Much as the Queen might disagree with Sir Henry Ponsonby or shake her head at the sight of his untidy clothes, his scruffy jackets and ill-fitting, too-long trousers, she respected his views and his patience. Gladstone must have counted himself fortunate that his dealings with a sovereign who disliked him, and was not anxious to conceal the fact, had in Ponsonby a ready friend and partisan so close to the royal presence. Ponsonby was not blind to the faults of the man who became prime minister four times, and when he was minister in attendance at Balmoral in August 1873 admitted that he sometimes thought him ‘earnestly mad, and taking up a view with an intensity which scarcely allows him to suppose there can be any truth on the other side’.
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However, Gladstone was the kind of honest, unaffected politician whom Ponsonby trusted as well as respected.

Ponsonby and Gladstone regularly compared notes and ideas on the contemporary power and influence of the Crown. After reading an article by Gladstone on the Prince Consort in 1875, Ponsonby wrote to him to say how struck he was by a paragraph ‘on the altered character of the Regal office’ and how they saw it as a substitute for the influence of power. He believed that the power still remained, though unused. In some ways, he went on, he thought the dormant power ‘is so great that it might almost be dreaded if we had a bad and clever King and a weak Minister’. While he thought such an occurrence unlikely, he considered that it supported his argument that the latent power still existed, ‘and though it is dormant indeed is the force which gives to the royal influence the strength it possesses’.
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Like many admirers of Gladstone, Ponsonby was a little suspicious of Disraeli, not just on political grounds, but because he found something unappealing, if not mildly distasteful, about his showmanship and flattery of the Queen. He could never be sure whether Disraeli really respected his sovereign or was just flattering her for the sake of it and exploiting her admiration for his own ends. He seemed ‘always to speak in a burlesque’ and was ‘cleverer than Gladstone with his terrible earnestness. But how anyone can put faith in Dizzy is what I don’t understand.’
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Ponsonby took a balanced view of the royal family. He was not above making gentle fun of them, enjoying the odd joke at their expense as long as nobody was offended in the process, or taking an objective analysis of their status. He was no sycophant, and like Brown he refused to be dazzled by the aura of monarchy. ‘If they had real determination and strong convictions they would be a danger to the state,’ he wrote to his wife in 1884. ‘As it is they are what they should be.’
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From the start of his duties, he had been reassured to learn that his predecessor, General Grey, had been no shrinking violet. Grey, he was aware, was in the habit of writing to the Queen boldly about his views on anything, and ‘tho’ it irritated her, it sunk in and did good’. While her ministers often thought he might have gone further, he had long since learnt exactly how far he could go, and as a result his advice was never disregarded.
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During the early years, Ponsonby himself was sometimes obliged to discuss with the Queen the delicate subject of gossip, rumours and greatly exaggerated reports on her seclusion. Had he been more brave and more clever, he said, he ‘might have read her a lecture on her duties’, but knew that for him to do anything of the sort would mean that he would ‘never have the subject approached again’. Whenever any contentious matter needed consideration, he took care never to open with a direct negative or contradiction. His manner of dealing with an employer unused to contradiction was masterly. If she insisted that two and two made five, ‘I say that I cannot help thinking that they make 4. She replies that there may be some truth in what I say, but she knows they make 5. Thereupon I drop the discussion. It is of no consequence and I leave it there, knowing the fact.’ Someone else in an identical situation, a woman to whom he referred as ‘X’, did not know when to let well alone, and would try to use arguments and other statements in order to prove her point. This the Queen found intolerable, as ‘no one can stand when they are wrong, women especially; and the Queen can’t abide it.’
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It is hard to imagine any of the men with whom she regularly came into contact at around this time telling her on such an occasion that it was rubbish to suggest that two and two made five. John Brown might have done so and got away with it; Gladstone would have argued to the contrary at inordinate length; Disraeli would probably have conjured up some ingeniously flattering explanation to suggest she was right after all. Ponsonby was astute enough to tread a middle path.

Later on, when his patience was wearing thin with age and the increasing burdens of office, he was tempted to be more forthright with his employer. It would sometimes be necessary for his wife to warn him that when ‘the Queen makes a remark he must not say “It is absurd.”’
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In August 1871 the Queen was seriously ill, with symptoms which left her physicians baffled. These included a swelling in her throat which prevented her from swallowing and speaking properly, and at one point Dr Jenner feared she might have only twenty-four hours to live. An abscess followed soon afterwards, with flying gout and rheumatic pains. Her lady-in-waiting Lady Churchill wanted to know why the Queen’s children had not been sent for, only to be told promptly by Sir Thomas Biddulph that to do so would have killed her at once. Though his remark was widely taken as flippancy and indicated antipathy to her often-difficult progeny, for all her children to gather by her bedside might indeed have induced a presentiment in her, if it had caught her at the wrong moment, that she was indeed mortally ill. When Ponsonby saw her again on 13 September, he thought she looked ‘rather pulled down, thinner and paler’.

Unlike members of the Queen’s family, John Brown was allowed unrestricted access to her bedroom, lifting her from her bed to her couch, and delivering her orders to the household in his typically blunt manner. All of her sons and daughters bitterly resented him being accorded such privileges. The Prince of Wales had always been infuriated and humiliated by her taking Brown’s side against his in his quarrels with the servant. It particularly rankled with him that the Queen should consider there was ‘no male head’ in her family after the Prince Consort’s death, and that she should always bow to Brown’s judgement rather than that of the eldest son who would succeed her as sovereign was a gross insult. Princess Alice, who was married to Prince Louis of Hesse, complained to Ponsonby that while Brown was totally unfit for more than menial work, he alone talked to the Queen ‘on all things while we, her children, are restricted to speak on only those matters which may not excite her or which she chooses to talk about’.
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Her second son, Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, arrived at Balmoral in September and made a point of shaking hands with everyone on his arrival except Brown. There had been differences between both men since the previous summer, when they had been present at a ball and the Duke had ordered the music to be stopped after the revelry was showing signs of getting out of hand, and Brown had reputedly told him that he would not take orders from the Duke or any other man. The Queen sent word that the quarrel must be patched up at once, and the Duke agreed, as long as Ponsonby was present as a witness. If he saw a man on board ship on any subject, he argued, it was always in the presence of an officer. When the Queen heard about it, she was furious with her son: ‘This is not a ship, and I won’t have naval discipline introduced here.’
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In the end, a meeting was arranged at which Ponsonby persuaded Duke and servant, somewhat grudgingly, to patch things up.

In February 1872 Brown acquitted himself so well during what could have been an extremely serious incident that nothing could diminish the Queen’s confidence in him. While she was returning to Buckingham Palace from a drive, a youth named Arthur O’Connor pointed an unloaded pistol at her and came within inches of her face, ostensibly with the aim of attempting to frighten her into releasing Fenian prisoners. Prince Arthur tried to jump over the carriage and apprehend him but was too slow. Brown grabbed hold of O’Connor and kept him pinned until the police could come to arrest him. The weapon in itself was not a threat, for the flintlock was broken, and instead of being properly loaded the pistol was stuffed with wads of paper and bits of old leather. But this attempt on the Queen’s life, futile though it was, frightened her more than all the others.

For his efforts, Prince Arthur was presented with a gold pin, much to the Prince of Wales’s fury, while Brown became the recipient of a special award, the Devoted Service Medal. It included a specially designed medal and a life annuity of £25. Irreverently referred to as ‘The Greater Order of Brown’, it was thus awarded for the first and, so it seems, last time.

Brown had taken to sleeping with a loaded revolver under his pillow in order to protect the Queen. Security measures at Balmoral were not taken very seriously, as whenever she stayed there only a single policeman was on duty. Her devoted Highland servant would patrol the vicinity each night himself, to keep any eye out for any possible source of trouble. Queen Victoria had little fear of potential assassins, and those around her thought she was more concerned about disloyalty at the height of the republican agitation than any physical danger from lone gunmen or self-styled anarchists.

Within a few years, Brown was said to be threatening to leave the Queen’s service. Now nearing fifty years of age, he appeared to be tiring of his bachelor status, while becoming uncle to an ever-growing number of nieces and nephews. Ponsonby was aware of the rumours, and when his wife asked him if they were true, appeared reluctant to commit himself. He assumed that Brown would leave the Queen’s service if he did marry, and this he thought would be unfortunate. In theory, there was nothing to stop him from taking a wife without damaging his job security, apart from the fact that there were limited opportunities to form a close relationship with any eligible spinster at Court. He could easily have done so, as the Queen’s future physician James Reid was to do towards the end of her life. Admittedly, it would have risked her intense short-term displeasure, but he would still have been able to continue to serve Her Majesty, if not as single-mindedly as before. That he never did marry (or marry openly) has only served to add to the claims of those who maintain that he went through a secret ceremony with the Queen.