Glimpses of Britain. Reader - стр. 20

by Stephen Bates

The Guardian, December 16, 2004

A newly discovered letter from Queen Victoria, revealing her innermost feelings for her Highland servant John Brown, reignited speculation yesterday that their relationship was more than platonic. The handwritten note, uncovered by accident by a PhD student in the family archives of Lord Cranbrook, one of Queen Victoria’s ministers, in the Suffolk record office indicates just how distraught she was when Brown died unexpectedly in March 1883. The letter was revealed in an article in History Today magazine by Bendor Grosvenor, its discoverer. It is not the magazine’s first royal scoop – it revealed how the royal doctor hastened the death of George V in 1936 so that it could be announced in the morning papers. Queen Victoria wrote – characteristically in the third person – to Cranbrook two days after the former ghillie’s death: “The Queen has let her pen run on… The Queen is not ill, but terribly shaken and quite unable to walk… missing more than ever her dear faithful friend’s strong arm.” The letter is written in the queen’s nearly indecipherable scrawl on black-bordered note paper and speaks of her “present, unbounded grief for the loss of the best, most devoted of servants and truest and dearest of friends.” Speculation about Queen Victoria’s 20 year relationship with Brown, following the early death of her husband Albert in 1861, started in court circles almost as soon as the unlikely friendship itself did when the queen was in her mid-forties. Victoria’s daughters joked about “Mama’s lover”, and the then Duke of Edinburgh (the queen’s second son) claimed he had been evicted from Buckingham Palace because he refused to shake the servant’s hand. A court source, probably the dean of Windsor, told Lord Derby, foreign secretary, that Brown had taken to sleeping in the room adjoining the queen’s bedroom, “contrary to etiquette and even decency.” The queen’s letter reads: “Perhaps never in history was there so strong and true an attachment, so warm and loving a friendship between the sovereign and servant… Strength of character as well as power of frame – the most fearless uprightness, kindness, sense of justice, honesty, independence and unselfishness combined with a tender, warm heart… made him one of the most remarkable men. The Queen feels that life for the second time is become most trying and sad to bear deprived of all she so needs… the blow has fallen too heavily not to be very heavily felt.” While the letter does not conclusively reveal whether the pair were lovers in the modern sense – the heightened sentiment was not unknown in the queen’s correspondence – it does show a strength of feeling that was disguised when her diaries were edited by her daughter Beatrice after Victoria’s death. Grosvenor believes the friendship was more than platonic. “The similarities between Victoria’s treatment of Albert and Brown in death are too numerous to ignore,” he writes. When the queen died, she left instructions that a lock of Brown’s hair, his photograph, a handkerchief and some letters should be placed in her coffin alongside mementoes of Albert. Any secrets in the letters will presumably remain firmly in the Queen’s mausoleum.