The English diarist Charles Cavendish Fulke Greville, erstwhile Clerk to the Privy Council, was nervous about the lack of security at Balmoral: ‘There are no soldiers and the whole guard of the sovereign, and of the whole Royal Family is a single policeman who walks about the grounds to keep off impertinent intruders or improper characters.’
19
And Sarah Spencer, Lady Lyttleton, the royal governess commented: ‘Scotch air, Scotch people, Scotch hills, Scotch rivers and Scotch woods [are] all far preferable to those of any other nation in or out of this world [to the Queen] . . . The chief support to my spirits is that I shall never see, hear or witness these various charms.’
20
The construction of the new Balmoral Castle was a slow process: a fire broke out in the workmen’s wooden barracks; the building granite was difficult to quarry; and the labourers were quarrelsome, downing tools at regular intervals for increased wages. Good relations seem to have been restored with the appearance of Charlie ‘Princie’ Stewart with ‘ankers’ of illegally distilled whisky for the workers’ refreshment.
21
Soon
The Scotsman
was able to report:
The Queen’s residence at Balmoral is making considerable progress, and promises, without great pretensions, to be a place of solid and real construction. A correspondent comments on the circumstances, that the Highlanders seem to have a contempt for scaffolding, ropes, or windlass. He says that every block of granite – from two to three feet long – is transported singly on a Highlander’s shoulders. Up a narrow platform of boards and tressels to the place where it is to be set, and with considerable celerity, larger blocks are conveyed by four Highlanders, on a couple of poles. Primitive certainly.
22
With a libation of oil and wine bringing to a close the ceremonial part of the programme, Queen Victoria laid the foundation stone of the new Balmoral Castle on 28 September 1853. By September 1854 a journalist from the
Morning Chronicle
filed this report:
The last portion of the main building . . . is now ready for being roofed. On the ground floor of the west and north sides are the public rooms, and over them are the principal bed-rooms and other accommodations for the Royal Family. The other two sides are three stories in height, and will be reserved chiefly for the accommodation of the suite. [That is, Queen Victoria’s courtiers.] On the east side, a wing is being built seventy feet in length, and in connection with a very prominent part of the edifice, viz., a tower forty feet square, which will be about eighty feet high, with a circular staircase on one angle, making the height 100 feet. It will be surmounted with a flag staff . . . The south and west fronts especially are very handsome, there being some very fine carving and moulding in the details. There are very fine oriel windows for the principal rooms . . . The whole is to be fireproof, according to Barrett’s patent.
The new Balmoral was occupied by the royal family on 7 September 1855, although many of the courtiers and servants still had to live at the old house or rough it in cottages on the estate. One Court lady took a dim view of the fact that her breakfast was delivered to her cottage accommodation each morning in a wheelbarrow. Queen Victoria recorded: ‘An old shoe was thrown after us into the house, for good luck, when we entered the hall.’ The throwing was done by the French steward in charge of the house, François d’Albertançon, who had filled the same role for Sir Robert Gordon. To enhance the royal family’s privacy, a new bridge was opened over the Linn of Dee on 8 September 1857, thus diverting the old road which used to pass close by Balmoral. By 1859 Prince Albert’s improvements for the gardens and grounds were complete, with new cottages for retainers and beds of roses flanked with white poplars from Coburg.
In time Balmoral was to formulate its own ‘Court’. Day-today administration, while the Queen was in residence on her twice-yearly visits, was carried out by the Lord Chamberlain and his staff, supplemented by a Commissioner and Factor at Balmoral. They would all regularly cross swords with John Brown in the future. Brown became an expert in Queen Victoria’s ‘Balmoral routine’, any variation of which made her cross. She was an early riser and often preferred to take her breakfast at 9am in a former gardener’s cottage near the castle. Here she would scan the albums of newspaper cuttings, trimmed and pasted in each day by her wardrobe maids. Lunch was at 2pm, tea at 5.30pm and dinner at 8.45pm, with pipers playing outside the windows at all meals. Interspersed with the meals were morning, afternoon and evening drives as the Queen fancied, with the outside staff meeting her after the latter with flaming torches in winter.
23
Although at Balmoral she was hundreds of miles from the heart of government, Queen Victoria was a stickler for detail in preparing her letters and dispatches. Two extra trains ran from Aberdeen to Ballater for this purpose at 11pm and 4pm, and there was always a Balmoral courier waiting at the station to meet the trains, with a distinctive yellow gig.
24
Before the railway system was developed it took two days for dispatches from London to reach Balmoral; a twelve-hour journey by train carried the mail and couriers to Perth, before another half a day’s journey by postchaise brought them to Balmoral.
25
There were many reasons why Balmoral became a special place for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. It was a place of refuge and recreation, in the latter’s true meaning of being refreshed and fashioned anew. At Balmoral they could be themselves without the constant fear of giving offence by making the wrong move publicly. Certainly in the early years of their marriage, Queen Victoria was aware that her German consort was not popular. At Balmoral they were away from the sneering glances of criticism; at Balmoral they had no necessity to be always circumspect. More than that, it was a place that they had found themselves, in a home they had created themselves, with a household they had formed themselves, with no age-old traditions to be adhered to under the creakingly archaic control of the Royal Household at Buckingham Palace or Windsor. Balmoral gave them an escape from the awful world of lackeys-in-waiting who were more keen to be ladies and gentlemen than servants. The Scots staff at Balmoral were willing, honest and openly sincere, and were not shocked by what the southern courtiers might regard as the Queen’s eccentricities.
26
It was Charles Greville who first noted Queen Victoria’s delight ‘in the simplicities and sincerities that she found in Scotland’.
27
This was to lead to a certain naivety in her acceptance of all things ‘Highland’, but Balmoral gave her much-needed relief from the ceremonial and court routines. She loved the lack of obsequiousness on the part of the Highlanders: one gillie’s mother – Old Mrs Grant – welcomed the Queen to her home with the words ‘I am happy to see you looking so nice’, which made the Queen glow with affection. At Balmoral then, Queen Victoria had a sense of
gehören
(belonging).
John Brown was born at Crathienaird in Crathie parish, Aberdeenshire, on 8 December 1826, the second son of John Brown (1790–1875), a tenant farmer, and his wife Margaret Leys (1799–1876), who also came from farming stock.
1
They married at Crathie on 25 August 1825, when Margaret was five months pregnant.
2
John and Margaret courted and were betrothed through the old Highland custom of ‘bundling’, a practice in which the sweethearts slept together, without undressing, in the same bed or couch. According to the tradition, should the ‘bundling’ prove fruitful and the baby seemed likely to go to full term, the couple married.
3
So John and Margaret Brown already had a year-old son, James, born on 15 November 1825, when John arrived.
4
When John Brown was born his future royal employer and friend had entered her eighth year; Victoria was born on Monday 24 May 1819 at Kensington Palace. Her father Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, died on 23 January 1820, just six days before his blind and insane father King George III. So little Alexandrina Victoria, the new heir to the throne, was brought up in reduced circumstances by her affectionate but impulsive and quarrelsome mother, the Duchess of Kent, the former Princess Victoria Mary Louisa, widow of Emich Karl, 2nd Prince zu Leiningen.
In 1826 Princess Victoria, along with her mother and eighteen-year-old half-sister Princess Feodore of Leiningen, made her first visit to Windsor to call on her uncle King George IV, who lived at Royal Lodge. ‘Give me your little paw’, he had said on their first meeting, and Victoria remembered him as ‘large and gouty but with a wonderful dignity and charm of manner’.
5
The next day Victoria was out walking with her family from their apartments at Cumberland Lodge when they were overtaken by a royal phaeton in which rode the King with his sister Princess Mary, Duchess of Gloucester. ‘Pop her in’, he ordered, and to the Duchess of Kent’s no little anxiety – she feared that the monarch would kidnap her daughter – they sped away with Victoria for a visit to ‘the nicest part of Virginia Water’.
6
Because of their straitened finances Princess Victoria’s early years at Kensington Palace were not luxurious. She remembered:
We lived in a very simple, plain manner; breakfast was at half-past eight, luncheon at half-past one, dinner at seven – to which I came generally (when it was no regular large dinner party) – eating my bread and milk out of a small silver basin. Tea was only allowed as a great treat in later years.
7
Victoria was to remain a stickler for the exact timing of her meals when John Brown served her, but while the Princess enjoyed tea as a ‘treat’, that beverage was hardly seen at Crathienaird.
In all, the Brown family of Crathienaird increased to eleven children: nine boys and two girls. The eldest son, James, emigrated to Australia; on his return he became a shepherd on the Balmoral estate and married Helen Stewart (1824–1904). After John came Francis (b. 1828), who died aged three, and then Anne (1830–67). Charles (b. 1831), Margaret (b. 1834) and a second child named Francis (b. 1839) all died in the typhoid epidemic that swept through this part of Deeside in the winter of 1849. They were buried together at Crathie churchyard and John Brown raised a stone to them years later.
8
Donald, the sixth child, was born on 9 September 1832. He went on to become a porter at Windsor Castle and Keeper of the Queen’s Lodge, Osborne. William, the eighth, was born on 18 March 1835 and was gifted the tenancy of the farm of Tomidhu by Queen Victoria; he married Elizabeth Paterson (1838–1900) in 1869 and died at Torridoes, Crathie, in 1906. Hugh Brown was born on 21 December 1838 and emigrated to New Zealand; on his return he became Keeper of Her Majesty’s Kennels at Windsor and Extra Highland Attendant after his brother John’s death. Hugh was succeeded in this position by his nephew William. Hugh Brown married Jessie McHardy (1840–1914) in 1863 and died at the East Approach Lodge, Balmoral, in 1896. Queen Victoria insisted that nothing be made of the fact that the main cause of his death was alcoholism.
9
The last sibling of John Brown was born on 6 September 1841 and christened Archibald Anderson Brown; he became valet to Prince Leopold and thence Page of the Royal Presence. He died in 1912.
10
The Browns of Crathienaird had originated within the Highland clan grouping of Lamont (Gaelic,
MacLaomainn
). A clan of great antiquity, the Lamonts owned considerable parcels of territory in Argyllshire, but owing to the encroachment of the Campbells of Argyll and other clansmen, their territories were confined mainly to Cowal, that large district of Argyll which includes lands between Loch Fyne and the boundary with Perthshire; of this area John Lamont became ‘Bailie’ in 1456.
11
At Toward Castle, in South Cowal, north-east of Rothesay, Sir John Lamont of Inveryne entertained Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1563.
During the seventeenth-century outbreaks of civil war in Scotland, the Campbell chiefs ravaged the lands of the Lamonts and destroyed their main bases at the castles of Toward and Ascog on the Isle of Bute, and in 1646 they treacherously massacred two hundred Lamont leaders at Dunoon. When Toward Castle was sacked the principal clan residence became Ardlamont, near the Kyles of Bute and Loch Fyne, and the dispersed clansfolk became connected by marriage to many titled families of Scotland. John Lamont, 19th Chief of the Clan Lamont, commanded the Gordon Highlanders at Corunna in 1809.
As the Lamont clansmen scattered from their foes, the rapacious Campbells of Loudoun, they adopted new disguising names, Black, White and Brown being popular. They settled in safe havens, such as those in south-west Scotland. John Brown’s forebears, though, are likely to have been among the clansmen who settled in the Highland area of Strathspey, that broad lower valley of the River Spey just the other side of the Cairngorm Mountains from Crathie. Some time in the early eighteenth century John Brown’s immediate forebears moved from Strathspey to become tenants of the Ogilvys, Earls of Airlie, who lived at Cortachy Castle, Angus. The Browns now farmed Ogilvy land in the neighbourhood of the old handweaving town of Kirriemuir.
The Ogilvys were descendants of the ancient Earls of Angus. They were Royalists and Jacobites who engaged actively in Scotland’s civil wars and the Jacobite Risings of 1715 and 1745. During the latter rising John Brown’s great-grandfather and his brothers joined the Forfarshire Regiment led by David Ogilvy, 5th Lord Airlie (the son of John, 4th Earl of Airlie), in support of the Jacobite leader Charles Edward Stewart. He had landed in Scotland in order to help win the throne of Great Britain from the Hanoverian succession for his father, Prince James Francis Edward Stewart (whom the Jacobites dubbed King James VIII & III). Consequently the Browns were with David Ogilvy at the Battle of Culloden in April 1746 when Prince Charles Edward Stewart’s cousin, Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, vanquished the Jacobite army. Along with the whole Clan Ogilvy, David Ogilvy was attained and fled to France; he would not return until he was pardoned in 1783.