Big John Brown still suspected of wanton shenanigans with monarch

Queen Victoria was famously “not amused”, except by her personal manservant. While appearing to us as frumpy and devoted to her late husband’s memory, Victoria undoubtedly found Brown saucy. 

Presiding over the era of “Victorian values” – upright, uptight, nae nookie, which was for foreign types – she also oversaw a vast empire, even if an online book review describing her as “a zombie warlord who ruled Great Britain for more than 1,000 years” is probably wide of the mark.

Brown, for his part, was of peasant stock and over-fond of a dram. A photograph shows him standing beside a stag’s heid, while sporting a massive sporran and Argyll socks, Scotia’s sartorial shame.

What brought such socially distant individuals together? Well, geographical proximity for a start. Brown was born on December 8, 1826 near Crathie, just a caber’s toss away from Balmoral, the royal schloss on Deeside, Aberdeenshire.

His father was a farmer whose main hobby resulted in 11 children. Young John started work as a farm labourer and ostler’s assistant, before progressing to stable boy and pony herder on the Balmoral estate, at that time leased by Sir Robert Gordon. 

He retained his post after Victoria and her man, Prince Albert, took over the lease, shortly before buying the joint.

Whisky galore
Albert chose Broon, as one of the youngest and sturdiest servants (sturdy, eh? uh-oh), to ride shotgun on the royal carriage during mountain outings, and later promoted him to leader of the Queen’s pony.

Other executive responsibilities included brewing Her Majesty’s tea on picnics. When she said he made the best cuppa ever, he explained his secret ingredient: “a grand nip o’ whisky”.

After Albert’s death aged 42 in 1861, Victoria was devastated, wearing black habiliments and becoming reclusive.

Brown stepped in, becoming her special friend, accompanying her on pony-related palaver to Windsor and the Isle of Wight. Supposedly, he brought laughter back into her life (cut to picture of Broon staring grimly at camera). Victoria gave him wee pressies and created two gongs for him, the Faithful Servant Medal and the Devoted Service Medal, neither of which caused him shame. 

It was Victoria’s children, as well as sundry courtiers and statesmen, who felt ashamed, as rumours of impropriety spread. Victoria dismissed these as “ill-natured gossip in the higher classes”. She would, wouldn’t she?

Oddly enough, despite shying away from the public generally, she published extracts from her diaries, which became a bestseller. Broon was depicted heroically, while Victoria’s bairns were barely mentioned. Eldest daughter Princess Vicki of Prussia thought the whole business scandalous. 

A potential third journal prompted courtiers and statesmen to demand Victoria step away from the pen.

A pamphlet in New York, titled John Brown’s Legs, carried an illustration of the Queen attending said limbs. 

A Swiss newspaper claimed she was expecting a child by Brown, to whom she’d long been married morganatically (without him getting any of her money). The British Embassy complained, which resulted in the gossip spreading. 

Ouija believe it?
As today, however, the British press exercised restraint in covering the royals, not even reporting a true-style story that the Queen was a spiritualist who used Broon as a medium to contact Albert in yonder afterlife. 

Brown was the only person allowed to carry and hug the Queen. When she was unwell in 1871, he had unrestricted access to her bedroom, lifting her from bed to couch. 

All the while, he was forthright to the point of rudeness. One tale claims that, while fastening her cloak, he exclaimed: “Hoots then, woman, can you not hold your head up?”. The story is undermined by the fact that no Scot in history has ever uttered the word “Hoots”.

Brown’s “informal manner” extended to tearing into the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), Victoria’s son and heir. When Prime Minister William Gladstone corrected her on something, Brown tapped him on the shoulder, intoning gruffly: “You’ve said enough.”

Fate had enough of Brown on March 27, 1883, when he died aged 56 at Windsor Castle from a bacterial infection, possibly hastened by heavy drinking. 

Victoria told her private secretary she felt “utterly crushed” and, to the end of her life, wore his mother’s wedding ring that he’d given her. 

At her own death, she was buried with this, plus a lock of his hair, a photograph, several letters, and a plaster cast of Albert’s hand. I see.

In a letter to Viscount Cranbrook, Victoria says: “Perhaps never in history was there … so warm and loving a friendship between the sovereign and servant.” 

She goes on to note his “strength of character as well as power of frame”. 

Erk. 

In a letter to the poet Tennyson, she gushed: “The comfort of my daily life is gone – the void is terrible – the loss is irreparable!” Jeez, enough already!

After Victoria’s death, her daughter Princess Beatrice burned all 120 volumes of her diaries. Her son and heir, Edward VII – “Edward the Caresser”, a voluptuary with 12 mistresses – ordered everything connected with Brown to be destroyed, with only one statue saved from his wrath after being moved to a hidden part of the estate.

Widow’s peaks
So, did Victoria and Broon engage in recreation of a horizontal nature? Believers point out that, after Brown’s death, she became similarly attached to an Indian servant, Mohammed Abdul Karim. 

In the Daily Mail this week, Christopher Wilson makes the educated guess that “probably both men were intimate with her”. He also cites a claim in Giles St Aubyn’s biography that she was “tormented by unfulfilled desires” and “wild longings”. Disgraceful.

Meanwhile, biographer Julia Baird has said she found “evidence of a real intimacy, a physical closeness (to whom else would a monarch lift her skirt?)”, adding: “But we do not really know what form this intimacy took …” 

Okely-dokely. The jury is out. But tittering.