Sons, Servants and Statesmen (25 page)

While he was part of the royal household, they had ‘the best and worst of him’. It was a case of better the devil they knew, as a successor, if granted the same power, might not be so harmless.
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Everyone took it for granted that Her Majesty insisted so much on single-minded devotion from those who served her that Brown’s betrothal, if and when it happened, would be tantamount to his resignation.

However, he stayed with his royal employer. In 1876 she gave him a cottage, and his lease contained the customary clause of ‘Forfeiture & Irritancy’, against which she wrote in the margin, ‘what does this mean?’ If he became increasingly embittered with his lot in life and churlish towards those around her, it was hardly surprising. Dr Hal Yarrow, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine and an expert on skin diseases, believed that, from his forties onwards, Brown suffered from erysipelas. A sudden change from a healthy outdoor life to ‘comparatively soft living’ as the Queen’s personal attendant would have made him prone to more recurrent attacks, once the condition had manifested itself.
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His initial duties had increased, and he had become overseer of all general below-stairs work and management. He was in effect a kind of personnel officer to the servants, especially whenever they had any private problems that might affect their royal service. As if this was not enough, he acted as general courier or message-bearer to the Queen and to her equerries. When new staff were required at Balmoral, she generally asked him for his advice. He had a habit of choosing candidates whose ways resembled his. Once he was approached by a man who was keen to find his young son of twenty a position in the royal household. The proud parent told Brown that his son was a good lad who did not swear, drink or play cards. Brown shook his head apologetically, replying that this would-be employee sounded much too good to live long, ‘and the Queen disna like the quick-deeing kind’.
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Victoria was aware of how hard Brown worked, and on occasion she asked the equerries to refrain from sending him at all hours for ‘trifling messages’, as he was increasingly exhausted from such activities. His boorishness and inability to suffer fools gladly, and his increasing reliance on the bottle, could easily be understood. His love for whisky was legendary, and that the Queen cheerfully turned a blind eye towards over-indulgence in alcohol among her servants (provided they did nobody else any harm, such as causing embarrassment to her or anyone else in public) did nothing to discourage him from seeking such solace. If whisky was one of his few pleasures in life, so be it. Over a century later, the Queen’s great-great-granddaughter, Queen Elizabeth II, showed similar understanding in putting up with drunkenness and other lapses of etiquette from favoured members of staff. She was equally aware of the pressures they were under, and was ‘keen to keep a peaceful house’.
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The story is often told that on at least one occasion Brown was so drunk when he appeared in the Queen’s presence that he fell to the floor, and that she kept a perfectly straight face as she told everyone else that she had distinctly felt an earth tremor. Brown was increasingly accident-prone in his later years, but at least some of his problems were caused by the obvious. In August 1877, while accompanying the Queen on a tour of the warship HMS
Thunderer
, he fell through an aperture in a gun turret, sustaining severe bruising to his shins. On another occasion, at Balmoral, he was due to escort her out on a ride but was nowhere to be found. Ponsonby went and looked in his room, saw him sleeping off a binge and, without a word of explanation, mounted the carriage himself. The understanding Queen Victoria knew without asking what had happened. Ponsonby always got on well with Brown, admiring his honesty and lack of obsequiousness. His friendship with the Highland servant doubtless compensated for what Queen Victoria might have regarded as other shortcomings in Ponsonby’s character.

Though very different, both men were quite self-effacing and unpretentious in their own way. Neither relished display or grandeur for the sake of it, and neither were dazzled by awards or honours, which they regarded as something of a hollow charade. In 1872 the Queen wished to make Ponsonby a Commander of the Order of the Bath, which he declined gracefully on the grounds that it was a civilian order and he still considered himself a soldier.
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His real reason was that he regarded the addition of letters after one’s name with distaste. Getting things done was part of one’s job, and he had an egalitarian contempt for honorifics.

Though the Queen respected Ponsonby’s decision, the Garter King of Arms, Sir Albert Woods, took him to task on the grounds that it was ungentlemanly to refuse an honour from a lady. In 1879 Victoria proposed to make him a Knight Commander of the Bath. Realising that to decline an honour for the second time would create difficulties in his relations with her, he reluctantly accepted. For him and his wife to be Sir Henry and Lady Ponsonby was a distinction to be endured rather than relished.

That Ponsonby should find his political views making him something of a fish out of water in the atmosphere at Court is hardly surprising. Well aware that the Queen distrusted his political instincts, especially at this time when she was under Disraeli’s spell, there were times when he felt irritated at being ‘muzzled’ by her because of it. For Tory courtiers to make fun of Gladstone in his presence at Balmoral was a needless provocation which only made his work harder, and he did not hesitate to tell them coldly that such comments were all very well when they knew he must not speak.
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Sometimes the Queen made moves herself which were unnecessarily partisan. When Sir Thomas Biddulph died in 1878, she asked Montague Corry, Disraeli’s private secretary, whether he would be prepared to join her staff as her own private secretary, while appointing Ponsonby to the privy purse. Fortunately for all, Corry decided he did not wish to leave Disraeli’s household, while Ponsonby hinted he would rather resign than exchange his present position for another. As a result, the Queen made him keeper of the privy purse as well as her private secretary, promising that he would have assistants so his duties would be less onerous than before, and so that he could spend more time with his wife. Perhaps she had realised that he was too indispensable to her and that losing him from the household would be a grave mistake. As the only Liberal in a court of Tories of varying hue, he was the only one who could maintain friendly contact with Gladstone and his secretaries, something which would stand him in good stead after Disraeli’s last period in office came to an end.

Disraeli was scrupulously fair to the man who might have been regarded as something of a political adversary, albeit a very discreet one. Ponsonby, he said, used to be a Whig, but whatever his politics, he said that he could not wish his case ‘better stated to the Queen than the Private Secretary does it. Perhaps I am a gainer by his Whiggishness as it makes him more scrupulously on his guard to be absolutely fair and lucid.’
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While accompanying the Queen on her holiday in Italy in the spring of 1879, Brown suffered his first severe attack of erysipelas, an acute skin disease which on this occasion affected his legs and spread to his face. Within a fortnight he had recovered enough to take his place on her carriage box, but he remained out of sorts for the rest of the holiday. From then on, he was never in good health.

Whatever his failings where personal charm was concerned, Brown was always very generous to others. While they were at Osborne in the winter of 1868, unemployment was particularly severe, and when the Admiralty closed the dockyard at Portsmouth, many shipwrights and mechanics were thrown out of work; some were reduced to selling all their possessions or begging in the streets. Brown wasted no time in starting a collection among the servants at Osborne, and in February 1869 he donated £22 to the Committee of the Portsmouth Dockyard Discharged Workmen’s Relief Association. Ever sociable to people of all classes, sometimes he would invite visiting dignitaries and their valets to his room for an evening of whisky, tobacco and informal ‘committee on the state of the nation’.
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When Disraeli died in April 1881 and the Highland servant was chosen to break the news to his royal mistress, she found he was ‘quite overcome’. After he had got over the shock, he personally started a subscription among the other servants and Royal Household to erect a monument to her hero. On other occasions he was always the first to pass the hat, whether subscribing to a wedding present for one of the royal family or helping out a needy servant down on his luck.

In July 1881 another young man entered the employment of Queen Victoria. Though he shared nothing with John Brown except Scottish blood, he too would become indispensable to her and, by virtue of his personality, would ultimately take on a greater and far more supportive role than his conditions of service would ever have suggested.

Earlier in the year, Queen Victoria had sought a resident medical attendant to Dr William Marshall to take responsibility for her personal health and that of the royal household. He was to be a Scotsman, if possible a native of Aberdeenshire, with suitable medical qualifications, and a fluent German speaker, so he would be able to converse easily with her visiting relations from Germany. Her Commissioner at Balmoral was asked to find a suitable local candidate, and James Reid, a young doctor of thirty-one, was recommended.

The son of a country doctor, Reid had gone to university at the age of sixteen and began reading arts subjects for three years before he was old enough to begin studying medicine. He travelled widely in Europe, completing medical studies in Vienna and spending a short time as tutor to the young Count de Lodron. He therefore knew something of the atmosphere of court life, an experience which would make him exceptionally well qualified in his role in the royal household.

After audiences with the Queen at Balmoral and with Sir William Jenner in London, Reid was duly appointed and took up his duties at Windsor Castle. For the remaining nineteen years of his life, by virtue of his character and peacemaking skills, he was to be a valued confidant of the Queen and many members of her family and household. He was quick to discover that she could be a demanding taskmistress who laid down extraordinarily precise routines. ‘Let Dr Reid go out from quarter to 11 to one, unless the Queen sends before to see him, and from 5 till
near
8’, ran one of her earliest written instructions. ‘If he wishes on any particular occasion to go out sooner he shd. ask. These are the regular hours. But I may send before to say he is not to go out before I have seen him shd. I not feel well or want anything. This every Doctor in attendance has done and must be prepared to do.’
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In time he would play almost as important a role as Ponsonby, especially after the latter’s death, in speaking his mind and fearlessly telling the Queen what she did not necessarily wish to hear. During her last few years, there were few people, if any, whom she would trust more than Sir James Reid, as he had become by then.

Ponsonby and Reid soon became the best of friends. Both men not only had the capacity to get on well with others, but also infinite tact, patience and a sense of humour which enabled them to cope with life under a woman who could be exceptionally demanding. Though the Queen was in remarkably robust health for a woman of her age, with stamina and energy envied by many of those around her younger than she was, she still worried endlessly about her health. She persistently complained she was a martyr to ‘sick headaches’ and indigestion, though she still ate too much and took no exercise, with subsequent disastrous effects on her figure. The young sovereign who had told Lord Melbourne how much she disliked walking never overcame this particular aversion. With Reid, she had daily consultations about her generally exaggerated or imagined ailments. A more self-assertive doctor might have risked her wrath by telling her she was talking nonsense much of the time, but his tenure of employment would have been correspondingly short.