John Brown by Raymond Lamont Brown

Author:Raymond Lamont Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: John Brown: Queen Victoria’s
ISBN: 9780752468990
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2011-09-21T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

ALL THE SECRETS OF THE UNIVERSE

Queen Victoria trusted John Brown to be discreet, as she said, with ‘all the secrets of the universe’, her daily routines, highs and lows, arguments and happy events, Court intrigues and confidences, yet she herself was to hand to her nation titbits about her personal life, sanitised of course by her own romantic imagery. Not since the publication in 1832 of the volume Secret History of the Court of England, by Lady Anne Hamilton, had the curtains been parted on Court life.1

In 1867 Queen Victoria published privately her Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, From 1848 to 1861, dedicated to Prince Albert, and circulated it to selected friends. Recipients like Dean Gerald Wellesley urged her to make her writings available to a wider readership. With some hesitation, the Queen handed over her holograph manuscript to Arthur Helps, Clerk of the Privy Council. An accomplished writer, Helps had already assisted the Queen with the preparation of Speeches and Addresses of the Prince Consort, which appeared in 1862. Helps produced an edited manuscript, without ‘references to political questions, or to the affairs of government’, and this persuaded the Queen to go ahead with general publication, in 1868, including additional material on ‘Earlier visits to Scotland, and Tours in England and Ireland, and Yachting Excursions’.

The clincher for a wider publication of her writings is further thought to have come from a visit to Sir Walter Scott’s old home at Abbotsford, as part of a tour of the Scottish Borders during 20–4 August 1867. She was staying at the time at Floors Castle, near Kelso, the home of the 6th Duke and Duchess of Roxburghe. At Abbotsford the royal party was hosted by James Hope-Scott and his second wife, the Queen’s god-daughter Lady Victoria Fitzalan-Howard. In Sir Walter’s old study the Queen signed her name in the great man’s journal ‘which I felt it to be a presumption for me to do’, she later wrote.2 A press report of the time noted: ‘The royal party then proceeded to the dining-room, where fruits, ices, and other refreshments had been prepared, and Her Majesty partook only of a cup of tea and “Selkirk bannock”.’3

Queen Victoria had been introduced to the works of Sir Walter Scott by her German governess Baroness Lehzen, and included in her large collection of dressed dolls some inspired by his Kenilworth (1821). Reading aloud from Scott was very much a part of Balmoral evening pastimes. Sir Walter had met the Queen on 19 May 1828, during the festivities for her ninth birthday; Scott had dined at Kensington Palace at the invitation of the Duchess of Kent, and later wrote of the Princess Victoria: ‘She is fair, like the Royal Family, but does not look as if she would be pretty.’4

Scott’s descriptions of Scottish scenery greatly appealed to the Queen’s romantic sensibilities and his portrayal of the noble, independent, loyal Highlander, in books such as Rob Roy (1818), echoed the Queen’s opinions. For her, John Brown was the epitome of a Scott character.

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