Queen Victoria and her favourite Scottish Servants

The acquisition of the Balmoral estate

In 1847 the Balmoral estate in Aberdeenshire was owned by the Earl of Mar but had been let, since 1830, to Sir Robert Gordon, a diplomat who had become the British ambassador to Austria in 1841.  Tragically, on 8 October 1847 Sir Robert died suddenly at breakfast in Balmoral castle, the result of him choking on a fish bone.  One consequence of Sir Robert’s untimely demise was that the 27-year balance remaining on the Balmoral lease devolved to his elder brother the Earl of Aberdeen, George Hamilton-Gordon.  He was aware that Queen Victoria was searching for a property in the Deeside Highlands and suggested to her that she might become the Balmoral tenant.  After some research by Prince Albert and his wife, the royal couple decided to acquire the Balmoral lease, which was duly assigned to Prince Albert in May 1848.  The contract included, in addition to the estate and the castle, the furniture in the castle, estate servants and even the late Sir Robert’s dog, “Monk”.

Sir Robert Gordon

Lord Aberdeen was keen to ensure that Queen Victoria’s and her husband’s entry into their new Scottish property was smooth, so he approached the local general practitioner, Dr Andrew Robertson, to assist the Queen and her consort in becoming established.  Dr Robertson did not live close to Balmoral at that time, but at Indego Cottage, a farm in the parish of Tarland and Migvie, some 16 miles distant, though he was mobile, travelling around his rural practice on horseback.  Andrew Robertson undertook the task and clearly impressed the Queen and Prince Albert as the doctor was appointed Queen’s Commissioner at Balmoral, responsible for managing the estate, in July 1848.

The first visit to Balmoral by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert was in early September of the same year.  They embarked at Woolwich on the Royal yacht “Victoria and Albert” to begin the journey to Aberdeen.  From there the itinerary was by coach along the Dee valley.  The royal couple received a rapturous welcome on debarkation in the Granite City and at each successive settlement on their westward journey.  At Ballater, the last significant village before Balmoral, Mr Farquharson, the laird of the Invercauld estate adjacent to Balmoral on its west side, gave the Queen and Prince Albert, a “Highland” welcome, he, his five sons and his clansmen being kitted out in full Highland attire. There was a further display at the gates to the castle, where a detachment of the 63^rd Highlanders mounted a guard of honour and the estate staff had erected a triumphal arch bearing the message, “Welcome to your Highland home, Victoria and Albert”.

Royal Flotilla, Aberdeen Harbour 1848

Over the next few days, the royal couple was very active in getting to know the new property, the estate staff and, at all social levels, the local inhabitants, through sampling local practices, such as religious observance at Crathie church, deer stalking on the Balmoral estate and attendance at the Braemar Gathering.  The Queen and her husband were enthusiastic promoters of the revival of traditional Highland culture, or at least the version of it that they perceived as being original.

The Balmoral Highlanders

Many of the Balmoral staff, both indoors and outdoors, had been inherited from the late Sir Robert Gordon and it was not long before the monarch started to comment upon their characteristics in her journal, which she normally wrote up daily.  On 22 September she said of the ghillies, “I like talking to the people here, they are so simple & straight forward & I like their curious Highland English”.  Subsequently, individuals started to receive compliments and by October 1850 the monarch’s praise was flowing freely.  “Speaking of Highlanders, I must say a few words about Peter Coutts our red-haired gillie, who is so well behaved, collected & grave in his manner, & though a man of few words, what he says is always to the purpose. All the Highlanders are so free from anything like bluster, so straightforward, — no flattery, so simple, & honest.  They are never vulgar, never take liberties, are so intelligent, modest & well bred. I also like the other gillie, John Brown, very much, a good-looking, tall lad of 23, with fair curly hair, so very good humoured & willing, — always ready to do whatever is asked, & always with a smile on his face. — Grant is an excellent simple, plain spoken man & I have a very high opinion of him. He is so much attached to those he serves. I enter into these details to show the people's characters, & our Mode of life amongst them here.”

Activities such as deer stalking, traversing precarious mountain paths on ponies, travelling the rough estate roads in horse-drawn vehicles and staying overnight in remote Highland cottages became the stuff of royal life at Balmoral, from which the Queen and her Consort derived much enjoyment.  Inevitably, such pursuits brought the royal couple into close and dependent contact with their servants.  They were the experts at stalking deer, handling shotguns and rifles, casting for salmon, navigating wild country, translating Gaelic names into English, driving carriages and leading ponies.  Perhaps it was inevitable that some of the relationships forged would be of a more personal and informal character than would normally be the case in the couple’s residences in England.  Indeed, the Queen appeared to confirm this view when she wrote in 1863, “We were always in the habit of conversing with the Highlanders, with whom one comes so much in contact in the Highlands”.  But there was an extra element in the mix of influential factors which contributed to the shaping of the interactions between the monarch, her spouse and the ordinary subjects employed as outdoor servants in Scotland, and that was their identity as Highlanders.  Continuing the Queen’s 1863 report, “The Prince highly appreciated the good breeding, simplicity, and intelligence, which make it so pleasant, and even instructive to talk to them”. 

The royal couple, in common with many others in the upper social reaches of society at the time, especially in England, had a romantic view of the Highlands, the Highlanders and the increasingly popular elements of Highland culture, such as tartan patterns, kilts and plaids, pibroch ( a musical form for the bagpipes), Highland dances, such as the reel and Highland athletic competitions.  The royal couple was quickly won over to a view of the Highlanders as a noble race, proud, independent, loyal, trustworthy and endowed with enhanced physical and mental characteristics.  This rose-tinted vision seemed to apply especially to those in their employ outdoors at Balmoral.

Queen Victoria with son wearing wearing a tartan kilt

One royal Highland servant, John Brown, has inevitably received much attention in the literature, because of the close and well-publicised relationship that evolved between attendant and monarch.  But there were other Balmoral servants who developed close bonds with their royal employers, too and whose royal relationships have not been so closely scrutinised by commentators on Queen Victoria’s life.  The dedication in Queen Victoria’s second volume of reminiscences about life in the Highlands is apposite.  

“To my loyal Highlanders and especially to the memory of my devoted personal attendant and faithful friend John Brown, these records of my widowed life in Scotland are gratefully dedicated.  Victoria RI”.  The monarch’s approach taken in “More Leaves” did not please everyone at Court.  Delia Millar commented, “Members of her household, however, were distressed by the footnotes which gave the life histories of her gillies in exactly the same way as those of the aristocracy or her family.  They (royal household) were also embarrassed by her obvious bias in favour of her Highland servants.”

In the present comparative study, the interactions between the monarch, her spouse and their Scottish servants have been examined.  Many striking parallels between different relationships have emerged, but also some marked contrasts and this helps to form a general view of interactions between the Queen, Prince Albert and their retainers.   The John Brown friendship then emerges from relative isolation and can be seen in the context of royal – servant relationships in general.

Frequently named servants

The starting point for this study was to compile a list of frequently named servants in the Queen’s journals and in her two publications about royal life in the Highlands, “Leaves from the journal of our life in the Highlands, from 1848 to 1861”, published in 1868, and “More leaves from the journal of a life in the Highlands, from 1862 to 1882, published in 1884, who served her at some time at Balmoral.  This compilation was then subjected to further analysis to quantify, as far as possible, the characteristics of the relationships and to examine the family circumstances of named employees.  This method of compilation is not comprehensive as, inevitably, many servants were never named, especially in the Princess Beatrice-edited journals, but at least the selection was made independently.

A whole gamut of friendship characteristics emerged which, individually, marked some, but not usually all, royal relationships with servants.  These markers of royal approbation were - the Queen naming and making positive remarks about individuals in her journals, making repeated visits to servants’ houses, giving presents to family members, taking tea and/or food at the home of a servant, having an interest in the children of a servant, employing servants’ relatives,  providing pensions and other benefits on retirement, making awards of medals and honours, building houses for the accommodation of particular servants, attending life ceremonies, such as christenings and funerals and placing memorials such as dedications, wall plaques and gravestones.  Another factor which correlated with regal friendship was the naming of servants’ children after members of the royal family.

Scottish employees could be divided fundamentally into two groups, those filling the most senior managerial positions on the Deeside estates and ordinary servants. The first group contained such employees as the royal commissioner (or factor), the clerk of works and, after 1880, the head forester.  The people filling these positions were more likely to have been recruited from locations away from Deeside, bearing in mind the need for a formal education, perhaps a professional qualification and relevant experience, usually with another estate owner, in order to fulfil these senior roles.  The ordinary servants, such as cooks, housemaids, dairymaids, laundrymaids, gardeners, ghillies, grooms, foresters, under-keepers, carpenters and labourers formed the remainder.  Setting aside servants who travelled with the monarch from the South, they were mostly Highlanders and from the vicinity of Balmoral, though two, William Ross and John McDonald were from Rossshire and Invernessshire respectively. 

It was necessary and thus perhaps inevitable that the Queen and Prince Albert should have a close relationship with the royal commissioners and clerks of works.  They were the people who, more than any others, translated royal commands into local actions between one visit to Balmoral and the next.  What is perhaps surprising is that the monarch and the Prince formed close relationships with individuals outwith the senior group, especially with those filling outdoor roles, such as keepers, ghillies and grooms.  These were the roles mostly performed by local Highlanders who had experienced only a village education and had then acquired their practical skills on the job.

In Victorian times, Crathie was part of a joint parish with Braemar and in the mid-19^th century this merged parish of Crathie and Braemar had a population of only 1700 people.  There were several prominent and extended families living in Crathie and their members regularly found employment on the royal estates and subsequently might find themselves in receipt of the Queen’s approbation.  Such families also intermarried.  While a significant relationship between the monarch and the servant class typically started with one individual, in time it usually extended to other family members, such as siblings, wives and children.  Occasionally, it was not clear with which family member a relationship was initiated.  Where several members of one family went into royal service, their family history has been dealt with collectively.  But, putting those complications aside for the moment, the identities and brief employment histories of the servants most frequently mentioned by the monarch were as follows.

Dr Andrew Robertson was the royal commissioner at Balmoral between 1848 and 1875.  He was born at Perth in 1799 and became a licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1818.  Andrew Robertson then set up a medical practice at Crathie and, at that time, there was only one other doctor within 50 miles of the village.  It was a necessity for Dr Robertson to travel about his territory by horse if he was to reach his patients, especially in winter.  He was a skilled horseman.  Andrew Robertson married his first wife, Anne, in 1828 and they had a family of six, the last child being born in 1842, shortly before her death.  A subsequent marriage in 1847 produced no children.  In 1833 he moved from Crathie to Blelack House, Logie Coldstone and then, in 1838, he settled at Indego Cottage, Tarland.  Later, in 1864, Dr Robertson bought the estate of Hopewell in Tarland.  He died in Aberdeen in 1881.  Andrew Robertson gave up his medical practice soon after being appointed royal commissioner.  Robertson helped the royal couple to settle in at Balmoral on their first visit in 1848 and then managed the major improvements to the estate over the next few years, including the construction of the new Balmoral Castle which was completed in 1855, the Brunel bridge at Crathie in 1856, the construction and improvement of various cottages on the estate and the erection of the new Glas-allt-Shiel retreat on the shores of Loch Muick in 1867 - 1868.  In 1858 he was awarded the degree of MD by Kings College Aberdeen.  Andrew Robertson frequently dined with Her Majesty at Balmoral.  The monarch said of him, “He is highly esteemed, and is a most amiable man, who has carried out all the Prince's and my wishes admirably.”

Dr Andrew Robertson

Dr Alexander Profeit became the royal commissioner, in succession to Dr Andrew Robertson, in 1875 and died in office in 1897.  Profeit was the son of a farmer from Towie, Aberdeenshire, where he was born in 1834.  Alexander Profeit studied at Aberdeen University, graduating MA in 1855 and then became a licentiate of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh two years later.  He set up a general medical practice based in his home village of Towie, subsequently moving to Crathie at the suggestion of Dr Andrew Robertson.  In 1854 Alexander Profeit was engaged to provide medical services to the employees at Balmoral.  He appears to have fathered an illegitimate child in Towie before marrying Isabella Anderson in 1842. The couple had five children born in either Logie Coldstone or Tarland up to 1875, followed by four children born at Crathie between 1876 and 1883.

    

Before the resignation of Dr Robertson in 1875 at the age of 76, Queen Victoria had been casting around for his replacement, but without success.  It is likely that Andrew Robertson then recommended Profeit, who came from a farming background, for the post of royal commissioner at Balmoral.  Profeit was appointed and Queen Victoria wrote, “I thought this would be the best solution & I hope it will answer.”  Alexander Profeit’s period of office covered the building of the Dantzig Shiel “cottage” in 1880 – 1882, the organisation of the Braemar Gathering at Balmoral for the first time in the Jubilee year of 1887, the establishment of the Balmoral Highlanders, which he commanded at that event and at the subsequent Gathering at Balmoral in 1890.  He was also responsible for founding the Queen’s Aberdeen Angus herd of beef cattle at Abergeldie Mains about 1880.

Dr Alexander Profeit

James Forbes was the third person to hold the post of commissioner to the monarch on the Deeside estates.  He was born in 1862 in Edinburgh and, from 1882, served for 13 years as assistant chamberlain on the Duke of Buccleuch’s Thornhill estate in Dumfriesshire, before being appointed as factor to the estate of Charles Morrison on Islay in 1895.  Forbes was a young man in a hurry and two years later came the call from Queen Victoria to fill the vacancy as commissioner at Balmoral.  For many, this post would have been the pinnacle of a career in estate management but not so with James Forbes, who resigned his post in late 1901 to become factor to the Duke of Atholl. 

In 1887 James Forbes married Barbara Jackson in Annan.  They had a family of four children, the first two born in Dumfriesshire, the third in Edinburgh in 1896 and the last, in 1898, at Crathie.

John Michie served as factor on the Balmoral estates from 1902, in succession to James Forbes.  Thus, he was not in post during the reign of Queen Victoria, who died in January 1901.  However, John Michie had been appointed as head forester at Balmoral in 1880, possibly on the recommendation of Lord Seafield, on whose estate in Banffshire he had previously worked.  Michie collaborated closely with James Forbes during the latter’s tenure at Balmoral.  On the completion of the Dantzig Shiel cottage at the foot of the Ballochbuie forest in 1882, the Michie family took up residence in the property, except for the rooms retained by Queen Victoria as a remote retreat.

John Michie married Helen Kitchen in 1878 and the couple had a family of seven between 1879 and 1892, all but the first child being born at Crathie.  During his time as head forester, John Michie was responsible for the clearing of thrown trees in the Ballochbuie forest following the storm of late 1879, much planting and replanting, both of crop trees and ornamentals on the estate and the creation and maintenance of roads and bridges throughout the royal Deeside property.  He also acted as standard-bearer, heading the Balmoral Highlanders on ceremonial occasions.

John Michie

John Beaton was born at Mortlach, Banffshire in 1809 and became a stonemason to trade.  At the 1851 Census, John was living in London and acting as the representative of a granite company but in 1853 he moved to Balmoral as masonry foreman for the construction of the new Balmoral castle.  This project was completed two years later.  He must have impressed his royal employers because in 1855 he was appointed as Clerk of Works for the estate, in succession to Alexander Clark.  John Beaton had undergone some architectural training and was involved in many building projects, covering all three Deeside estates, over the next 27 years.  He designed the Dantzig Shiel, Baile-na-Coille (possibly), Craiglourigan Cottage, Bridge Lodge, the new Glas-allt-Shiel, the two Gelder Shiels and the Obelisk memorial to Prince Albert.  He probably designed other estate buildings too.

In 1833, John Beaton married Cecilia Watt, a Chapel of Garioch girl and, between 1840 and 1850, before John’s involvement with Balmoral, the couple had five children. He suffered a stroke and died in Aberdeen in 1892.

John Beaton

John Alexander Macdonald was born in 1828 and is presumed, from his name, to have been a Highlander, though his place of birth has not been discovered.  He entered royal service in 1850 and later became a footman to the Queen, though the date of this appointment is unknown.  After 15 years of service John died prematurely of consumption in 1865.  In 1863 he had married Ann Mitchell from Clachanturn, Crathie, at Upton, Berkshire.  Her father was the blacksmith serving the Crathie area, for example shoeing horses.  Annie too was in royal service, having started about 1856.  It is not known if the couple met at Balmoral or at Windsor.  They had one daughter, born in 1864 at in Berkshire.  After the death of her husband, Annie was appointed as wardrobe maid to the Queen.  She served in that capacity for 31 years and died at Crathie in 1897.  The Queen described Annie McDonald as “an excellent person”.

John Morgan was a tailor who lived at the Genechal, an area near Crathie.  He only had a minor role in royal service.  At some date after the Queen acquired the Balmoral lease, she and Prince Albert built a cottage at the Genechal, though there was little evidence of them having made significant use of the property (see “Queen Victoria: Death and her wild abodes on the Balmoral estates”).  It was an unusual structure being single storey and consisting of two small, semi-detached, mirror-image dwellings, each with its own, but adjacent, front door.  The Morgans occupied one half of the property and the Queen retained the other, with the Morgans acting as housekeepers.  In 1823 John Morgan married Johanna Cameron and between 1824 and 1843 they had a family of ten children, several of whom saw royal service.

James Morgan, son of John Morgan (K Macleay)

James Bowman was the son of John Bowman who worked his whole life (he lived to be 99) on the Invercauld estate.  His last residence was the lodge at the foot of the Ballochbuie, where he acted as gamekeeper and he died there in 1866.  James Bowman was born in 1814, one of three sons in a family of 12 and began a career as a gardener in 1831 away from Invercauld.  By 1837 his father’s health was failing and he returned to Deeside, initially to assist his father and then to succeed him as gamekeeper in the Ballochbuie.  After Queen Victoria acquired the lease to Balmoral in 1848, she often visited the Ballochbuie or travelled through the area, for example to climb Lochnagar.  James Bowman guided the monarch and the Prince Consort on their first ascent of this Balmoral mountain, in September 1848.  It was a foggy day and expert guidance was essential.  The Queen noted, “Mr Bowman, Farquharson's Keeper & Mc Donald, who preceded us, looked like phantoms”.  Over the following years, James Bowman often accompanied royal stalking parties or groups exploring the wild country to the west of the Balmoral estate.  In 1849, on her second visit to Deeside, the Queen wrote of James Bowman, “J Bowman acted as guide & an excellent one he is …”. 

The Queen was greatly attracted to the Ballochbuie and in 1868 she leased the property from the Farquharsons to prevent the felling of some of the ancient Scots pines for which the area was famous.  James Bowman then become an employee of the Balmoral estate, still acting as gamekeeper in the Ballochbuie forest.  In his early adult years, the Ballochbuie keeper was an accomplished local athlete, winning throwing the hammer and tossing the caber at the Highland games organised by the monarch in 1849 for the employees of the Invercauld and Balmoral estates.  James Bowman died in tragic circumstances when he got inextricably tangled in a deer fence in September 1885 and was not discovered until a day after the accident.  He was still alive when found but died soon afterwards.  James Bowman never married.  The Queen said of him, “When I took the lease of the Balloch Bhui in 68, he became my Keeper. He was a fine tall man & had been a wonderful walker in his day.”

James Bowman (K Macleay)

Charles McIntosh succeeded James Bowman as gamekeeper in the Ballochbuie, after the demise of the latter.  He had been born in 1856 at Crathie, the son of a farmer.  After James Bowman’s relatives moved out of the lodge at the foot of the Ballochbuie, the Queen had the property refurbished, with one room reserved for her personal use and she first recorded visiting her new accommodation in September 1890.  At the time, Charles McIntosh was unmarried but three years later he acquired a wife, Jessie Riach, a schoolteacher.  Both were getting on in years, 38 and 37 respectively.  They subsequently had two children, in 1895 and 1900.

 

Charles Thomson was born at Crathie in about 1805 and in 1830 he married Elizabeth Smith, a local girl.  Over the next 22 years they had a family of eleven.  It is not clear if Charles Thomson was himself a royal servant but many of his offspring went into royal service, the details of which will be found below.  He knew the monarch well.   About 1840 Charles Thomson was working, possibly as a forester, on the Balmoral estate then leased to Sir Robert Gordon.  Following the introduction of the Universal Penny Post in that year, Charles recognised that a new business opportunity was about to emerge from the increase in letter traffic.  He built a new cottage, in traditional Aberdeenshire style, on a few acres of land adjacent to Crathie church and in 1842 a receiving office for mail was established there, with Charles as the person responsible.  He subsequently became postmaster and continued in this role until he died in 1887.  Initially, the post office paraphernalia were kept in a dedicated drawer in a wooden dresser but later an extension to the cottage was constructed, in about 1860, to provide for the postal functions.  The monarch may have been involved in this project since John Beaton, the Balmoral Clerk of Works appears to have designed the extension.  Initially, the job of postmaster must have been part time as, at the 1851 Census, Charles Thomson was described as “postmaster and labourer”.  Perhaps this reference is to the cultivation of his own parcel of land?  Later, the post office housed both the switchboard for the Balmoral telephone system and the office for the receipt of telegrams.  It also became a shop, very much a venue for the exchange of village tittle-tattle.

Crathie Post Office

After 1848, the year in which Queen Victoria leased the Balmoral estate, she became a frequent visitor to the village of Crathie and to its post office, which led to her becoming familiar with Charles Thomson and his family.  The first date on which Queen Victoria mentioned the Crathie post office in her journals, was 22 September 1851.  On 10 October 1879, the Queen wrote in her journal that she had ridden on her pony, “Maggie”, to the post office to ask after the health of Charles Thomson (who presumably had been unwell).  There she found his son John “in a dreadful state” of anxiety as he had given his father the wrong medicine and feared his parent would be harmed, “but it fortunately proved of no consequence, & he was decidedly better”.  The monarch also visited “old” Mrs Elizabeth Thomson frequently and in both 1881 and 1882 she gave her a dress.  On the death of Charles Thomson in 1887 the monarch wanted to see continuity in the operation of the post office and demanded that one of the family’s seven sons take it over.  However, the only male offspring available was Albert, born in 1850, who was pursuing a successful career as a banker in London and was earning far more than he could hope to gain by financial reward in the Crathie post office.  Undeterred, Queen Victoria paid him a pension to leave London and return to Deeside.  She was used to getting her own way.  Apparently, not everyone in the village was enamoured of the Queen’s patronising visits.  Charles Thomson’s great, great grandson recently said, perhaps a little harshly, “Queen Victoria was a major local busybody, she used to visit folk in their houses, and annoy them. She wanted to keep things as they were in the village.”

John McDonald, though a Highlander, did not hail from Deeside.  Instead he was “from the west” (Fort Augustus at the south western end of Loch Ness) and spoke the Gaelic fluently, unlike the Crathie chiels.  He was recruited into royal service in a quite unusual way.  In 1847, while the royal couple was undertaking its third Scottish trip and staying at the Ardverikie estate, Prince Albert on a visit to Loch Ness, was approached by John McDonald who had been sent with a present of game by his employers, Lord Digby and Colonel Porter.  Albert took an instant shine to this tall, handsome, bearded Highlander, clad in shooting jacket and kilt and, being without a Jaeger (German word for “hunter”, roughly the equivalent of “stalker” in Scotland) at the time, he immediately engaged him for this role.  John McDonald married Ann Fraser, a Scottish girl, about 1838.  Over the next 16 years seven children were born, the first five in Scotland and the final two at Windsor.  Sadly, John McDonald, who was in charge of the Royal Kennels, died at Windsor in 1860 from consumption (pulmonary tuberculosis).

Archibald F McDonald, son of John McDonald (K Macleay)

William Ross was another Highlander who entered royal service by a route other than employment on the Balmoral estates.  He was born on the Black Isle, Rossshire in 1823.  After the death of his mother when he was seven, his father remarried and emigrated to Canada, leaving young William in the care of his grandmother until he was old enough to join the Army.  He enlisted in the 42^nd Regiment, Royal Highlanders, better known as the Black Watch, where he learned to play the bagpipes at which he excelled.  He served in uniform for 17 years before being selected in 1854 to fill the role of Piper to Queen Victoria (the Queen’s first piper, Mackay, had “lost his mind” and died).  In his new role William Ross lived principally in London and Windsor, though he travelled with Her Majesty, including on her annual, then bi-annual, sojourns at Balmoral.  He gained the permission of the monarch to live outside royal premises in London so that he could conduct a bagpipe-making business.  In this enterprise he partnered with a German immigrant, Henry Starck, forming a company in 1876, which traded until 1962.  William Ross also published "A Collection of Marches, Strathspeys, Reels and Pibrochs" in 1864 and became recognised as an expert on bagpipe music.  Queen Victoria described Ross as “a very respectable, good man”.

In his role as royal piper, Ross was required to perform daily before breakfast for Her Majesty, as well as at many dinners and on a variety of ceremonial occasions, such as greeting visitors to Balmoral, heading the piping contingent of the Balmoral Highlanders and playing at balls.  He also played the pipes informally as opportunity presented itself, or the occasion required, such as at the housewarming party at the Queen’s new shiel at the Glasallt in 1868.

William Ross had a chequered marital life.  His first wife, Mary Davidson, died at the age of 26 at Windsor after bearing two children.  William then remarried in 1865 and his new wife, Margaret Withers produced two offspring before she too expired at Windsor in 1885.  Remarkably, William Ross then married for a third time to Jane Ann Smith, like him a native of the Black Isle, in 1888 when he was 65.  In Windsor, William Ross lived at 2 Crathie Villas, Clewer, where he was the next-door neighbour of Archie Brown, John Brown’s brother.  William Ross died in office and was buried at Windsor in 1891.

William Ross (K Macleay)

William Ross

Charles Duncan was born at Crathie in 1827 and, having trained as a carpenter, gained employment on the Balmoral estate by 1849.  He first came to the attention of Queen Victoria in that year when she and Prince Albert held a facsimile of the Braemar Gathering for employees of the Balmoral and Invercauld estates.  It took place at Balmoral in the month of August.  She noted in her Journal, “The Throwing of the Hammer was won by J. Bowman & the Tossing the Caber, as well as the running race, by a good-looking young man, employed as carpenter & a gillie, called Charles Duncan.”  Duncan quickly became a member of that group of ghillies, keepers and grooms that accompanied the royal couple on forays around their extensive estate and further afield, for example an expedition up Lochnagar on 22 September 1849.  At the Braemar Gathering of the following year, 1850, which Queen Victoria attended, Charles Duncan was the winner of the hill race, though he was spitting blood from his exertions by the conclusion of the race.  This horrified the Queen and, at her request, the hill race was discontinued in subsequent years.  By 1851 Charles Duncan had been appointed as a keeper at Balmoral and installed in a cottage built at the foot of the Glasallt burn where it runs into Loch Muick.  In that year, the Queen made a journey by pony along the loch.  On arrival at the shiel, she remarked, “We dismounted & went into the lodge. Duncan himself was there & when we entered our skiff, which ran close up to the lodge, to be called Shiel of Alt na Glassalt, his strong arm took the front oar.”  The monarch was attracted to muscled, good-looking Highlanders.

About the same year Charles Duncan married Jane Stewart, the daughter of a local crofter, and between 1852 and 1864 they had six children.   In 1859 the Duncan family moved to a new house, Rhebreck, which had been built for them.  At the census of 1871 they had moved again, to Birkhall cottage.  By the late 1850s Charles Duncan had become one of only a few ghillies who were trusted with the Queen’s personal safety when out in wild country, lifting her over wet ground or supporting her on steep paths.  Charles Duncan retired as a keeper in 1879, at the early age of 52, due to a diseased knee joint.  In his later years on the Balmoral estates, during the time that John Michie was Head Forester (1880 – 1902), Charles Duncan seems to have been employed again as a carpenter.  He was tasked with making such objects as sledges for transporting road metal, a garden frame, a shed and a wheelbarrow.  By 1893 Charles and his wife had made their final, retirement flit to Brochdhu, a cottage in Glenmuick, where both died in 1904, Jane Duncan predeceasing her husband by a few months.  Both were 67 years old.

Charles Duncan (K Macleay)


Charles Duncan

John Grant was born in 1810 at Auchindryne, Braemar, ten miles west of Crathie and in 1818 his family moved to the Balmoral estate, when his father took a position with Sir Robert Gordon.  John Grant was also employed at Balmoral as a ghillie in about 1828 and assisted his father for some years.  From 1839 he was a gamekeeper and he moved to royal employment in 1848, on Queen Victoria and Prince Albert taking assignment of the Balmoral lease.  He was appointed as head keeper, responsible for the management of the deer forest on the estate.  John played a major role in educating the new royal occupiers in the ways of the Highlands.  The Queen and Prince Albert arrived at their new Deeside estate for the first time on 8 September 1848 and two days later they attended divine worship at Crathie church.  The following Thursday was the day of the Braemar Gathering and another royal first attendance.  Friday 15 September was also a signal occasion.  Prince Albert had his introduction to deerstalking at Balmoral with John Grant.  This was the start of a close friendship between Prince Albert, who became an avid fan of this sport, and his head keeper.  So too with the monarch.  She later said of Grant, “He is an excellent man, most trustworthy, of singular shrewdness and discretion, and most devotedly attached to the Prince and myself. He has a fine intelligent countenance. The Prince was very fond of him.”  Thus, Grant’s royal employers were impressed by his devotion from the start.  When they left Balmoral at the end of their first visit in September 1848, John Grant accompanied the royal couple’s carriage to Ballater on his “funny little pony” where the monarch bade farewell to “good John Grant”.  Between 1848 and 1868 John Grant was almost constantly at Queen Victoria’s side, when she travelled out from the castle, as she with Prince Albert (to his death in 1861) and subsequently the monarch singly, with her entourage, explored the wild country of the Cairngorms.  The head keeper was deeply trusted for his solidity and good sense.

John Grant was living at Invergelder cottage in 1851 but in 1858 he and his family moved to The Croft, a substantial house which had been built for him on the Balmoral estate.  John retired in 1875 and removed from The Croft to Rhebrec, Easter Balmoral.  He died there four years later.  Queen Victoria described him as having been “Head Forester for 26 years, which implied that he was appointed in 1847.  But the job title awarded to Grant was confusing.  Perhaps, in those days, “forester” covered all aspects of forest management, including both game management and tree management?  John Grant was replaced after his death in 1879, by John Michie who was a forester, in the modern sense of forest crop manager, and not a gamekeeper.  The head keeper role was at that time undertaken by Donald Stewart, of whom much more below.

John Grant married Elizabeth Robbie, a local girl from Glenmuick, in 1841.  They had a family of seven children between 1842 and 1858, six of whom were boys.  Queen Victoria said of them, “… all are good, well-disposed lads, and getting on well in their different occupations.” 

John Grant (K Macleay)

John Grant

Donald Stewart was born in 1826 on the small farm of Buailteach, two miles south east of Balmoral Castle and part of the Abergeldie estate.  He entered service with Sir Robert Gordon at Balmoral in 1846, as a stable boy and assistant keeper and was taken on by Prince Albert in 1848 as an under-forester with responsibility for the deer hounds.  Both Donald Stewart and his boss, John Grant, were then regularly in attendance on the Queen and Prince Albert.  At the 1851 Scottish Census, Donald Stewart was lodging with John Grant at Invergelder Cottage.  The Grants were then employing a house servant, 18-year-old Margaret Thomson, a daughter of the Crathie postmaster, Charles Thomson.  Donald Stewart subsequently, in 1853, married Margaret.  The Donald Stewarts had a family of five between 1854 and 1868.

Prince Albert became very close to both John Grant and Donald Stewart, through their mutual involvement in deer stalking, and the princely regard for these two Highland servants also transferred to the monarch.  Over the following four decades and more, Queen Victoria paid many visits to Donald Stewart’s house, which marked the closeness of the relationship which developed, not just with Donald but also with his wife and children.  In 1861 Donald Stewart’s family was living at Balmoral West Lodge and it is likely that the Stewarts made this move after their marriage in 1853.  Queen Victoria’s friendship with the Donald Stewarts extended to Donald’s mother, Mary, who lived in Crathie village and whom the Queen referred to as “Old Mrs Stewart”.  Queen Victoria admired “Old” Mrs Stewart for her cleanliness, gratitude and sunny personality.  By 1863, Donald Stewart was trusted by the Queen to lead her pony in the absence of John Brown.

The Donald Stewarts had moved to a different house, Rhebrec, which lies about a mile south of Balmoral Castle by the year 1869.  In 1875, on the retiral of John Grant, Donald Stewart was appointed as Head Keeper (or Head Forester) and swapped houses with Grant, Donald Stewart going to live at The Croft and John Grant at Rhebrec.  Donald Stewart’s final household move was in 1902 to the Dantzig Shiel, when John Michie moved out of that dwelling on his appointment as the Balmoral factor.

 

In 1896 when the Czar and Czarina  of Russia visited Balmoral, Donald Stewart was given a prominent place at the head of the procession of the Balmoral Highlanders in the greeting party and he had a similar role at the end of May 1899 when the Queen arrived at her Highland home from the South.  In that year he had served Her Majesty for 48 years.  Two years later he reached his half-century of royal service and the occasion was marked by the presentation to the head keeper of two substantial presents.  Queen Victoria gave him a mantlepiece clock inscribed “To Donald Stewart, head forester at Balmoral in remembrance of his faithful service for 50 years to the Queen and Prince Consort – VRI October 8 1848 – 1898”.  The senior courtiers also joined in with a silver salver, captioned ““Donald Stewart, 8th September1898, Entered the Queen’s Service, 8th September 1848, From, Colonel the Right Hon Sir Fleetwood J Edwards KCB, Lieut – Colonel Sir Arthur Bigge KCB CMG, Colonel Lord Edward Pelham Clinton KCB, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Edmund Commerell GCB VC, Captain Walter Campbell MVO, Colonel Lord William Cecil MVO, Colonel the Earl of Strafford KCB KCMG VC, Major the Hon H Legge MVO, Captain Fritz Ponsonby MVO, Lieutenant-Colonel A Davidson MVO, Lieutenant J Clark CSL CVO, Sir James Reid Bart KCB, Mr Mather MVO”.    Donald Stewart was at that time the only survivor of the original cohort of ghillies, appointed after the acquisition of the Deeside estates by the monarch, who was still working.  Donald Stewart had become the most respected, even revered, servant at Balmoral.

 

Queen Victoria visited Donald’s house for the last time on 6 November 1900, to say goodbye at the end of her holiday.  It was less than two months before her death at Osborne House.  This admired, old retainer was one of the Balmoral servants commanded by King Edward VII to travel to the Isle of Wight to accompany his mother’s coffin on its journey back to Windsor Castle.

Donald Stewart (K Macleay)


Donald Stewart with wife Margaret and daughter Victoria

John Brown entered the world in the small settlement of Crathienaird, near Balmoral but north of the river Dee, in late December 1826.  His family moved to the farm of The Bush

about 1831.  The Bush was close to Crathie and the Balmoral estate but still north of the river.  John only benefitted from an education at the village school until about 1840 and he subsequently worked for a year at the Pannanich Wells inn, east of Ballater, as a stable lad.  He was then employed in a similar capacity by Sir Robert Gordon on the Balmoral estate.  After Queen Victoria and Prince Albert became the lessees in 1848 John Brown was kept on as a ghillie.

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert developed into inveterate travellers about their own Deeside estates, in the area local to Balmoral, more widely in the Cairngorm mountains and elsewhere in Scotland.  During these ventures, the couple but especially the Queen were attended by a group of servants, one being John Brown, upon whom they came to rely for both safety and comfort.  Brown was first reported by Her Majesty as attending in this supportive role on 26 September 1849.  The monarch took to her ghillies and made complimentary remarks about their characters, including John Brown, in her praise. In 1850 she referred to John Brown as a “nice, active lad”.  In October 1856, the Queen visited the Brown family farm at Bush for the first time, entering the kitchen where Margaret Brown, John’s mother was spinning wool.  She offered the monarch oatcakes and cheese which Victoria pronounced to be “very good”.  During the period to the end of 1861, when Prince Albert died, Queen Victoria came to rely on John Brown’s care and attention to an increasing degree.

After the premature death of her husband, Victoria went into a long period of mourning and suffered badly from depression. She became very needy for support both physical and emotional and John Brown was on hand to provide for those needs.  Attempting to cheer up the Queen, in 1864 her senior advisers sent John Brown down to Osborne House to lead the Queen’s pony on her daily outings.  The tactic worked and the following year Victoria decided that John Brown should remain with her permanently, whenever she travelled about Britain and abroad.  During the late 1860s John Brown’s position at Court became dominant, due to Queen Victoria’s developing blindness to his faults. John Brown’s manner was coarse and complaints to the monarch about his rudeness were simply dismissed as being untrue.  Powerful figures at Court and Victoria’s own children were alarmed by his elevation and started to despise Brown.  This championing of John Brown by the monarch led to rumour and tittle-tattle about the nature of the relationship between monarch and Highland servant.

John Brown’s lifestyle changed after his translocation from Balmoral.  Formerly he had led a physically active life but after the move and a life of relative indolence, his condition deteriorated.  He put on weight, drank heavily and ill-health started to plague him.  From having a youthful appearance and athletic disposition he started to age prematurely and by the 1880s he looked older than his years.  John Brown began to suffer from bacterial skin infections and from delirium tremens.  He died at Windsor castle in March 1883.

John Brown (K Macleay)


John Brown

William Paterson was born into a farming family in Marnoch, Banffshire in 1823.  When he reached 16, he was apprenticed to Christie’s nursery in Fochabers, subsequently worked at Roy’s nursery in Aberdeen and then took a position as gardener to the Duke of Leeds, at that time renting Mar Lodge.  In 1847, on the recommendation of Mrs Farquharson of Invercauld, William was recruited by Sir Robert Gordon as head gardener at Balmoral but only three days after the start of his appointment, Sir Robert attempted to swallow the fateful fishbone, which caused his death. But then good fortune intervened in William Paterson’s life.  In August 1848, after the assignment of the Balmoral lease to HM the Queen, he was confirmed in the job of head gardener to the monarch at Balmoral.  William held this post for 44 years, retiring through ill-health in 1892.

The Disruption of 1843 led to the Free Church of Scotland breaking away from the Established Church.  William Paterson was one of the dissenters, subsequently striving for the establishment of a Free Church in Crathie.  Initially the Crathie Free Church met in a granary at Abergeldie, with the permission of Dr Andrew Robertson, then the Balmoral Commissioner.  William Paterson became the first elected elder of the new church.

He married Mary McDougall, a Marnoch girl, about 1849.  They had a family of four between 1851 and 1861.  The family lived at the East Lodge, Balmoral.  William Paterson’s ill health was caused by an enlarged prostate gland and he underwent an operation by Alexander Ogston, the prominent Aberdeen surgeon who was also a frequent social visitor to Balmoral.  It is claimed that the operation extended the head gardener’s life but left him suffering constant pain from pyelitis (a bacterial infection of the kidneys and urinary tract).  William and his wife retired to one of the cottages adjacent to the dairy at Balmoral, where the former gardener died in 1896.  Mary Paterson remained at Dairy cottage until her demise in 1906.

Peter Coutts was born at the farm of Balnellan, Crathie in September 1814.  Several generations of his family had worked on the Invercauld estate.  From an early age he became proficient as a piper and playing this instrument would be a major preoccupation of his life.  After working for his uncle at Daldownie, Glengairn, he became a servant at Abergeldie Castle for Sir Robert Gordon and joined the service of Queen Victoria in 1848 on her accession to Balmoral.  The Queen spoke warmly of his character and his striking red hair.  When Edwin Landseer, the prominent painter, was working at Balmoral in 1850, he found Coutts’ appearance to be eye-catching and Coutts was introduced into the “Boat” picture (see below).  But Peter Coutts did not remain in royal service for long, possibly only for two years and in 1851 he was recorded as being a shepherd.  Two other servants by the name of Coutts, James and Charles, were in the service of the monarch in the early days at Balmoral, but their relationship to Peter is unclear, though James may have been a brother.

For a short while, Peter Coutts was piper to the Prince of Wales before being appointed as private piper to the Laird of Invercauld, a position he held for 20 years.  For the rest of his life he frequently appeared at events on Upper Deeside to demonstrate his art.  The Duchess of Kent, Queen Victoria’s mother, was in residence at Abergeldie Castle on 17 August 1858, her birthday.  The royal household with gamekeepers, ghillies and gardeners went along to start her day with a rendition of the national anthem.  This was followed by Peter Coutts playing “The Queen’s welcome to Deeside” from the top of the nearby hill, Craignaben.  In September 1864, Peter Coutts played his pipes at a ball given by the Earl and Countess of Fife at Mar Lodge.  On the return of Alexander Haldane Farquharson, the recently anointed laird and his new bride to Invercauld after their honeymoon in 1893, a banquet was held at which Peter Coutts both gave a speech and played “The Highland Laddie” and the “Invercauld March”.  Peter had also composed a tune for the new Mrs Farquharson, “Mrs Farquharson’s welcome to Invercauld”, which was played as the laird and his wife drew up to the house.  Peter Coutts became secretary and treasurer of the Bagpipe Association and was a regular judge at Highland gatherings.  Probably his best-known composition was a Strathspey, “Invercauld House”.  William McDonald, the Queen’s piper, composed a tune, “Tullochmacarrick’s March, which was dedicated to Coutts.

By 1861, Peter Coutts had become a tenant farmer on the Invercauld Estate.  His farm,Tullochmacarrick, was located in Glengairn.  Peter worked the property for more than 30 years and became a successful sheep master and grazier.  The marriage of Peter Coutts and Margaret Coutts took place in 1854 and they had a family of five between 1857 and 1869.  By 1893, Peter Coutts had retired from farming and removed to Ballater, residing at Gairn Villa, where he died in 1907.

John Symon was born in Crathie about 1815 and before 1851 he was running a shop selling groceries and drapery at Easter Balmoral cottages, close to the eastern entrance to the Balmoral estate.  Inevitably, Queen Victoria became a regular visitor and customer at the Symons’ shop, and she got to know the family well.  The first visit to this retail outlet may have been in September 1849 when the monarch “Came down by the merchant’s shop”.  In September of the following year the Queen certainly visited John Symon’s shop.  “He is a very civil, obliging, active man, & showed us all his goods, which consist of a little of everything, — tea, sugar, coffee, rice, some of the ordinary medicines, plaids, stuffs, hats, caps, sticks, & all kinds of rough things that might be asked for.”  The shop was owned by the Balmoral estate and in 1850 the Queen agreed to make some improvements to the structure.  Though John was never in royal service, his story is relevant to the present topic.  The shop is thought to have supplied the Balmoral estate with stockings and tweed garments.

 

Christina Edmonstone was a local girl and she and John Symon were wed in 1845.  They went on to have a family of six between 1846 and 1858. The Queen had a liking for the Symon children, amongst others.  In 1852, at the building of a cairn on Craig Gowan, the monarch noted, “All our little friends were there —Mary Symons and Lizzie Stewart, the four Grants, and several others.”  The Queen also got to know “old widow Symon”, the shopkeeper’s mother and the Symons were all on the Queen’s calling list to say “goodbye” at the end of a holiday.  In summer 1876, shortly after the death of John Symon, Queen Victoria called at Mrs Symon’s shop, “where we missed her good excellent husband so much”.  

Christina Symon carried on running the shop for many years, with Queen Victoria maintaining an interest in her welfare.  In January 1897, a message was sent to the Queen, telling her that Mrs Symon was seriously ill.  The monarch recorded, “… good old M^rs Symon at the shop at Balmoral, is hopelessly ill & sinking fast. The place will be quite changed with all the old ties breaking away.”  John Michie, who also thought Christina Symon was dying, appeared to have been taking responsibility for the external maintenance of the Symon shop, perhaps by direction, as in April 1897 he “sent Wilson to plant some ivy at Mrs Symons, The Shop, Easter Balmoral and a few shrubs at the little bridge in front.”  Miraculously, Mrs Symon became reinvigorated, if temporarily, and in May the Queen visited again and found her “wonderfully recovered”.  However, Christina Symon died in January 1898 and in the following May, the Queen again visited the Crathie shop, now being run by daughters Mary and Maria Symon, but “… missed much the greetings of good old M^rs Symon …”.

Peter Farquharson was the son of Harry Farquharson, who was a coachman and assistant gardener to the Gordons of Abergeldie and Peter was born at Crathie in 1804.  His first job appeared to be for Sir John Packington at Allt na Giubhsaich but in 1834 he entered employment as a gamekeeper with the Gordons at Abergeldie.  He then went to live at the small farm of Balnacroft on the estate and remained in residence there for the rest of his life.  Peter’s Farquharson line had diverged from the Farquharson of Invercauld line before the Invercauld estate was acquired.  In 1838 Peter Farquharson married Margaret McHardy, a girl from nearby Glen Muick.  They had a family of two, one of each gender.

The year 1849 saw Queen Victoria and Prince Albert lease the Abergeldie estate from the Gordons and Peter Farquharson entered royal employment maintaining the grouse shootings in Glen Girnock.  Subsequently, there was substantial afforestation in that glen and Peter then took responsibility for deer management too.  Peter Farquharson was first mentioned by Queen Victoria in her journals in August 1850, when he was observed in the welcoming party of servants who greeted the monarch on her arrival at Balmoral.  In May 1862 the Queen visited Mrs Farquharson at Balnacroft but did not record any account of their interactions.  Peter Farquharson served at Abergeldie for 40 years and in his royal gamekeeper role for 25 years, dying in office in 1874.  After the demise of Peter Farquharson, his son Francis was appointed keeper in his place and he continued to live at Balnacroft.

Peter Farquharson

  

How did Queen Victoria address her Balmoral servants?     

It is generally not known how the monarch addressed her servants in speech, but there is a multitude of records of her addressing them in writing, mostly found in her many volumes of journals.  However, since those journals were edited by her daughter Beatrice, it is necessary to ask if Beatrice changed the form of address used by her mother.  One way to approach this matter is to compare the incidents which were recorded both in the volumes “Leaves” and “More Leaves”, where there had been no intervention by Beatrice, with the same events which appear in the Beatrice-edited journals.  While there is no doubt that Princess Beatrice eliminated or reduced many servant references during the editorial process (see for example “Queen Victoria: Death and her Wild Abodes on the Balmoral Estates” on this blogsite) she did not change the form of address used by her mother.

 

No evidence has been found of servants addressing the Queen other than as “Your Majesty”, except, of course, for John Brown who is known, on occasion, to have referred to her as “Wumman”!  Prince Albert was addressed as “Your Royal Highness”.

The written form of address employed by the monarch when referring to her servants varied from the totally formal, eg “Grant”, through various stages, eg “J. Brown”, “Arthur Farquharson”, “Charlie Coutts”, to the thoroughly informal, eg “Francie” (Francis Clark, John Brown’s cousin).  In the early years of her acquaintance with a particular servant, she varied her form of address, eg “J. Brown”, “John Brown” and “Brown” were all used to refer to John Brown and a maid of honour, Eleanor Stanley, even referred to him as “Johnny Brown”.  However, over time, the monarch settled upon one form of address which was subsequently used almost without variation and that form could be from any point in the formality - informality spectrum described above.  But the degree of formality - informality employed did not show an obvious correlation with the closeness of the relationship.  John Brown probably had the closest association with the Queen of any servant, and he was referred to predominantly as “Brown”.  John Grant, another retainer favoured by the Queen over several decades was also addressed only by his surname, but Francis Clark was almost always called simply “Francie”.  It is also worth noting that Abdul Karim, the Indian servant (not Scottish or primarily based at Balmoral and so outside the scope of the present work) whom she was close to in her later years, after the death of John Brown, was almost always referred to as “Abdul”.

Employment of relatives of favoured servants during Queen Victoria’s reign.

The collection of meaningful statistics on royal employment of the relatives of Queen Victoria’s favourite Scottish servants is rendered problematical by several factors.  Although extensive searches have been made, it is likely that the data on family structure and employment history for this group of servants are incomplete.  Further, the type of family relationship involved varied from family to family.  While employment of children was the most frequent category, there were also cases of children of children of favourites gaining royal jobs. The “children of children” group also contains many individuals who could never, or did not, gain employment during the Queen’s reign, because they were born too near to its end.  Birth after about 1880 would have rendered royal service well-nigh impossible.  There is also the further problem of children dying at a relatively young age, which again limited or precluded the opportunity of employment with the monarch.

While many ordinary servants married and had large families early in the monarch’s time on the throne, creating the best opportunities for royal service, John Brown, the Queen’s first Scottish attendant and James Bowman did not marry or have families.  No example has been found of a Bowman sibling, uncle or cousin being in service of the crown.  In marked contrast, four brothers, a nephew and a cousin of John Brown were so engaged, making the Brown family unique in this regard. Although brother William Brown, born 1835, remained a farmer at The Bush, he and his wife were close to the Queen and one of their children, William, born 1876, became the monarch’s third Scottish attendant on the death of John Brown’s cousin, Francie Clark (second Scottish attendant) in 1895.

Lumping together the families of John Grant, Donald Stewart, Charles Duncan, William Ross, John McDonald, Charles Thomson, John Morgan, Peter Farquharson, William Paterson and John Alexander McDonald (all ordinary servants), 56 children were identified of whom 19 (34%) were known to have undertaken royal duties at some time.

Some of the children of ordinary servants had career horizons more elevated than those pursued by their parents.  John Grant’s son, Andrew Robertson Grant, became a doctor, as did Albert Brown, the son of William Brown.  John McDonald’s son, John, became attaché at the British Legation in Japan, Charles Thomson’s son Albert became a banker and Alexander Thomson’s son Charles became a stockbroker.  However, gamekeeper and forester positions were much more prevalent callings for this group, whether with the royal family or not. 

One distinction between the high-ranking servants and the ordinary servants emerged with great clarity when the employment of relatives was examined.  Only a single instance was found of a relative of the first group having been in royal employment, whereas, as demonstrated above, it was a frequent practice with the ordinary servants and could involve several members of the same family.  The individuals in the former group were more extensively educated and this trend continued with their children, the result being that their career aspirations generally focussed on the professions, the military, or estate management and, as a result, they were probably not much interested in the menial (though relatively well-rewarded) jobs available on estates, such as Balmoral and in the royal palaces.  The one exception which was found to this generalisation was Annie Michie, John Michie’s oldest child who entered domestic service at Balmoral and went on to become housekeeper at Sandringham, after Queen Victoria’s death.

In spite of the informality that Queen Victoria exhibited towards some of her servants, she maintained a sense of rank and hierarchy between the members of her Court, her family and royal relatives, members of the aristocracy, landed proprietors and senior members of the professions and her estate employees.  Formal dining invitations illustrate one boundary.  The only Balmoral estate employees granted this privilege were the Royal Commissioners, Dr Robertson, Dr Profeit and Mr Forbes and of the three, only Dr Robertson was a frequent dinner guest.

Wives and children of servants

Many of the friendships established between Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their servants at Balmoral began in the early years of the royal stewardship of the Deeside estates.  Most of these men were young, got married and had numerous children while in post.  Associations initially generated with these servants, particularly during outdoor activities with either or both halves of the royal couple, often then translated to a relationship between the Queen and the wives and children of employees.  Sometimes, the mothers of servants were also in receipt of royal friendship  The degree of proximity in such relationships can be judged from such items as the frequency and purpose of visits to servants’ homes and the interest shown by the monarch in the children of the family.  It is immediately clear that a few wives and families enjoyed close relationships extending over many years and even decades.

Upper servants tended to be older when they came into post and their child-bearing was largely complete before they reached Balmoral.  John Beaton, the Clerk of Works was one such example, his offspring all having been born by 1853 when construction of the new Balmoral Castle began.  Dr Andrew Robertson was in a similar position and, additionally, he did not live close to the estate, though the monarch did occasionally call on him in Tarland, when out and about on her jaunts through the countryside. 

Visits to Alexander and Isabella Profeit.  Alexander Profeit arrived at Balmoral in 1875 with five children already born but he and his wife Isabella went on to have a further four children while he was in royal service.  Queen Victoria was a frequent visitor to the Profeit house, Craiggowan, on the Balmoral estate, 52 calls being recorded in the royal journals between 1875 and August 1888, when Mrs Profeit died.  Frequently, the Queen went specifically to see Mrs Profeit, a lady she described as “a most kind good, gentlewoman”.  These visits were often routine calls, for example at the start or at the end of a period of residence on Deeside, though they were never recorded as involving the taking of tea, an activity avidly pursued in some other relationships (see below).

Although the purpose of a visit was often not recorded, there were occasions on which the Queen was seeking information on the status of a sick child, for example, four separate visits in September 1884 when one of Dr Profeit’s sons was seriously ill.  On two occasions in autumn 1876, Queen Victoria used the Profeit’s house as a vantage point from which to sketch the scene from a window.  In November 1894, the monarch called casually at Dr Profeit’s house and found the artist Homerville Hague completing a portrait of her Commissioner and on one occasion the Queen’s purpose in visiting Craiggowan was to give presents to the Profeit children.  On some occasions, the Queen specifically mentioned meeting the Profeit children, for example in September 1889 she recorded, “Went in my pony chair up to Dr Profeit’s, Alicky walking.  The pretty little girl (Victoria Helen Profeit) came out to speak to us.”

Visits to James and Barbara Forbes.  James Forbes came into post as Balmoral Commissioner in 1897, after Alexander Profeit had died in office.  The Forbes family, too, lived at Craiggowan.  Queen Victoria recorded nine visits to the Forbes’ house between 1897 and 1900.  This was a similar frequency to her visits to his predecessor.  Also, it resembled those visits in that the purpose was not always stated in the Queen’s journals. On one occasion the intention was to give instructions to James Forbes, at another time the Queen gave presents to the Forbes children and on some occasions the visit was specifically to see Barbara Forbes, a lady described by the monarch as, “a nice, pretty, young woman”.

James Bowman and Charles McIntosh, successive occupiers of the Ballochbuie Lodge.  The Queen was very fond of driving or riding her pony through the Ballochbuie and she made a very large number of references to passing “Bowman’s house” or driving to nearby “Bowman’s Moss”, a favourite location for al fresco tea drinking, during the period between 1868, when she acquired the Ballochbuie, and 1885, the year of James Bowman’s tragic death.  However, in that interval the monarch never recorded actually calling on James Bowman though, on two occasions, Queen Victoria and her party gratuitously used his house, in his absence, to shelter from the rain and to dry their clothing in front of the fire.  Although she had in earlier years expressed her liking for Bowman, his house appeared to lack the draw of the abodes of some other servants (see below).  James Bowman never married, so there was no wife with small children in residence to whom she could relate.

After the death of James Bowman, the monarch refurbished the Ballochbuie Lodge and retained one room for her own use.  The bulk of the property was then let to Charles McIntosh, the newly appointed Ballochbuie keeper.  Queen Victoria’s attitude towards the Ballochbuie lodge immediately changed.  Between 1890 and 1898 she visited “McIntosh’s house” on 24 occasions, always to take tea.  On several occasions the monarch stated specifically that she had consumed her beverage “in the charming little room” that she had caused to be fitted out for her own use.  But it is not clear if Mrs Jessie McIntosh provided tea, or if the Queen brought her own materials.  It is not possible to conclude whether the change in the Queen’s demeanor was due to the refurbishment of a room for her use, or if the new tenant, his wife and, from 1895. their infant son, whom she might have found more interesting, was the true reason.  These two possible explanations are not mutually exclusive.  However, the parallel with the Queen’s accommodation at the nearby Dantzig Shiel, where the bulk of the house was for the use of the Michie family but with some accommodation reserved for royal use, should be noted.  Although Princess Beatrice never acknowledged the involvement of the Michies, it is estimated that on at least 50% of occasions that the Queen visited the Dantzig Shiel, she looked to the Michies to provide food and/or beverages.

The allure of Charles and Jane Duncan’s children.  Charles Duncan became a Balmoral keeper about 1851 and was installed in the newly built cottage, which included a small room for royal use, near the outflow of the Glasallt burn into Loch Muick.  He married Jean Stewart the same year and children were born at two-year intervals until 1858, then in 1861 and again in 1864.  Only the last child was a boy.  Throughout the 1850s, the Queen and Prince Albert spent much time in Glen Muick.  They made frequent calls at the Duncan’s cottage.  Entries in the Queen’s journals are particularly notable for their glowing remarks about Mrs Jane Duncan and a succession of babies.  October 1852, “The little kitchen looked so nice & truly Highland, with Mrs Duncan a pretty, nice clean young woman with her magnificent Baby, standing by the fire. I gave her a cloak for it”.  October 1854, “Stopped there for a short while as it rained &admired a splendid Baby of Mrs Duncan's which was asleep in its cradle. Those old fashioned Highland wooden cradles are so picturesque”.  September 1856, “We got off our ponies at the Shiel, & stopped a little while, Mrs Duncan's little girls & fine baby being much admired”.  After Charles Duncan moved to Rhebreck in 1859, the Queen continued to make occasional visits and on two occasions took “presents for Mrs Duncan”, though it is likely that they were gifts for her children.  Queen Victoria was clearly attracted by the physical beauty of these youngsters.

The Michie family and the Dantzig Shiel.  John Michie’s family was one of three, whose heads were in the service of Queen Victoria, which received far more visits from the monarch than any of the others analysed in the present study.  In addition to the Michies, the loved ones of John Grant and of Donald Stewart were also heavily favoured.  These families are particularly informative in understanding the factors which attracted the Queen’s attention to certain servants.

John Michie was appointed as Head Forester in 1880 but it was 1882 before the construction of the Dantzig Shiel had been completed and the Michie family could move into the bulk of the accommodation there, the monarch reserving three rooms for her own use.  Between the year of completion and 1900, the last year in which Queen Victoria visited Balmoral, her journals record 274 visits to the Dantzig Shiel.  The entries describing this plethora of social calls, the product of the editorial pen of Princess Beatrice, only rarely mention when Queen Victoria’s destination was her own accommodation at the Dantzig and never recorded if she was intruding upon the Michie family space.  However, in this instance there is an independent source of information available in the form of diaries kept by John Michie.

 

The Michie diaries may have started at the beginning of his period of employment in 1880 but not all volumes have survived.  The relevant years which remain are 1884 – 1886 and 1890 – 1897, though there are some gaps within the extant volumes.  The diaries show that on 49.7% of visits by the monarch, where data are available from both sources, the visit was to the Michie family.  It is reasonable to assume that this proportion applies to the whole population of royal visits to the Dantzig Shiel.  John Michie’s descriptions of the monarch’s interactions with his household are illuminating.  The Queen never came alone but always with a party, often including her “ladies”, Princess Beatrice and other family members and even high-ranking visitors to Balmoral, such as the King of Portugal in 1895.  The Michie diaries also reveal, remarkably, that, in addition to taking tea, which happened on 77% of visits, the monarch also came to take lunch on a further 11% of calls.  Interactions between the Michie family and these august visitors, where reported, seem to have been remarkably informal, even friendly, with the Michies clearly operating above the roles of cook and waiter.  On 24 May 1892, the Queen’s 73^rd birthday, she was happy to take her tea at the Michies, along with her daughters, the Marchioness of Lorne, the Princess Louise and Princess Beatrice with her husband and children.  She had done so on her previous anniversary too.  This state of informality and welcome between the Michies and the Queen extended to others in the royal family and even to some of their guests at Balmoral who also visited the Michies in the absence of the monarch, usually partaking of tea.  John and Helen Michie were regular guests at the Castle when cultural or dramatic events were on offer.  For example, in September 1894, the Michies attended a play there, “The Ballad Monger and The Red Lamp”, but John Michie had not then reached a social level where he could be entertained at the monarch’s dinner table.

After the death of Prince Albert in 1861, the Queen took extended holidays twice a year at Balmoral and with her local servant favourites, including the Michies, she routinely visited to re-establish contact at the start of a Balmoral sojourn and again, at the termination of a stay, she called to say goodbye.  She also visited on many occasions over the years to give presents to John and Helen Michie and to their children.  A typical example, from June 1892, was “HM gave Annie and Beatrice a shawl each”.  Indeed, the Michie children seemed to have held a fascination for the monarch.  It appears that she asked to see the children on most occasions that she visited the Dantzig.  For example, in May 1887 Her Majesty’s journal records, ““Drove with Lily, Beatrice, & Liko to the Dantzig, where we took tea, & found all the dear little children there.”  In September 1886, the monarch recorded actually having tea with the Michie children.  John Michie wrote in his diary in November 1894, “The Queen on bidding goodbye had to see the children as usual.  Said Oh the darlings said goodbye, & the same to Mrs M & I, remarking "I hope you will have a good winter & that there will be no more storms" referring to the hurricane of 17th Nov. last thence they left”.  At the time, the seven Michie children ranged in age from 15 years down to two years. 

Helen Michie seems to have suffered from an unspecified illness for many years and this caused the Queen some concern.  In September 1892, John Michie recorded, “The Queen with 2 of her maids of honour came up in the evening and spoke very nicely to me.  She went after the most considerate questioning of me as to whether I thought her seeing Helen would excite or disturb her in any way.”  Queen Victoria’s own thoughts have been lost concerning this call and all we are left with from the royal perspective is a typical, po-faced, Beatrice entry, “Drove with Harriet P. & Rosa H., taking tea at the Dantzig”.  It appeared that occasionally there was some tension between Princess Beatrice and John Michie, as she was unwilling to accept his advice on landscaping.  Michie reported a strained interaction with the Princess in October 1892.  “The Queen and Princess Beatrice had tea at the Danzig when the Princess began another attack on the line of young conifers between the Police box and the East Lodge, which were planted in order to fill up the ground behind a line of older trees placed too near, and must come in contact with the roadway in a very few years’ time.  I thought I had succeeded in fixing this.”  It is said that, “A man convinced against his will/Holds the same opinion still.”  That adage appeared to apply to Beatrice too.

John Grant and his family.  John Grant was employed on the Queen’s Balmoral estate, from the earliest days of her occupation, as head keeper, head stalker or head forester.  It is not clear exactly what the scope of his remit was and perhaps it changed with the time of year.  In the autumn he was mostly involved in red deer stalking, driving the woods for roe deer and grouse shooting on the moors, all activities in which Prince Albert revelled.  Grant struck up a good working relationship with the Royal Consort, which endured for the rest of Prince Albert’s life.  The Queen too was an admirer of John Grant and she made an early call at his house, Invergelder Cottage, during the first royal visit to Balmoral in September 1848, when she remarked in her journal, “I walked with Lady Coming to J. Grant's house, & saw his wife a nice person, & their little boy”.  The identity of this boy is not clear since at the time the Grants had three boys ranging in age from one to six years.

Right from the earliest days of his employment at Balmoral, the interest of the Queen extended from the servant to his wife and family and over the subsequent years she made many comments which reinforced this initial conclusion.  August 1849, “Walked back from Grant's house, where we saw his 3 fine little boys …”.  The monarch’s admiration for the Grant family was expressed in regular present-giving, both to Mrs Elizabeth Grant and to the children.  September 1851, “after stopping at Mr Grant's to give the children some little presents …”.  September 1852, “Walked with Lenchen to Grant's & gave presents to his wife & children …”.  The developing feelings between monarch and servant were clearly mutual.  On the departure of Queen Victoria from Balmoral in November 1851, the Queen wrote, “Good Grant, whom I took leave of with much regret was hardly able to speak & the Keepers & Gillies stood dolefully outside”.

The Queen also came to know old Mrs Ann Grant, John Grant’s mother, who lived in Crathie village.  In September 1852, the monarch said approvingly of the old lady, “Stopped to make some little purchases at the shop, & lastly, gave old Mrs Grant stuff for a dress. She is the tidiest, cleanest old woman possible, & was so pleased, saying: "Your Majesty keeps me in dresses. This is more than I expected, I am sure, & it is dark, like for the likes of me" & that it would make her so "braw" (good or pleasing).”

Thus, a pattern was established which persisted not only during John Grant’s working life (he retired in 1875 after 27 years of royal service) but continued after his death in 1879 with visits to his widow.  The house of the Grant family became one of Queen Victoria’s regular calls both on arrival at Balmoral and shortly before departure at the end of a sojourn on Deeside.  There were many other visits by the monarch too.  The Queen’s journals record 227 separate calls between 1848 and 1887 (about 7.6 visits per year).  The bald average disguises the fact that the Queen’s visits to the Grants were quite infrequent until the mid-1860s, after the death of Prince Albert in 1861.  In this early phase, calls ranged from 0 to 3 annually.

In 1859, the Queen visited the Grants’ house and took tea for the first time.  This familiarity across the social classes was not repeated until 1864 but, from 1866, taking tea at Mrs Grant’s (always “at”, never “with”) rapidly grew to become a standard feature of a Balmoral holiday.  Over the two Balmoral stays in 1868 there were eight such sessions, in 1869, 16 and in 1870, 22.  Part of the reason for this growth was likely due to Queen Victoria’s interest in food and her substantial appetite.  Mrs Grant was clearly an accomplished cook, as can be gauged from the monarch’s comments following visits.  October 1865, “tea at Grant's where she made us excellent scones”.  October 1869, “taking our tea at M^rs Grant's, who gave us excellent scones & jams”. Elizabeth Grant also introduced the Queen to another classical item in Highland culinary practice – “whisked cream”.  This is traditionally prepared on Halloween, 31^st October and has oatmeal sprinkled on top.

During the early 1870s the Queen’s visits to the Grant household to take tea declined and from 1875 they were down to penny numbers each year, with none in 1878 and 1879, the last two years of John Grant’s life.  His increasing ill-health must have been a factor in modulating the monarch’s visiting pattern.  During the autumn of 1879, Queen Victoria made ten calls to the Grant abode, mostly to see John or to enquire about the state of his health.  Her comments in her journal tell the tragic story succinctly.  2 September, “In the afternoon, walked with Beatrice, & Janie Ely up to Grant's house, & saw him for a moment. He knew me at once, & appeared glad to see me, & then spoke of his being "so tired, & having travelled so far." He is losing his memory.”  4 November, “Walked to Brown's house, & then to Grant's, where I saw him in the kitchen. He cried a good deal, & could not get up, out of his chair, but he knew me quite well.”  8 November, “Afterwards walked with Mary P. through the wood, up to Grant's house, to enquire after him. His wife seemed in great distress & said, he had become worse, & was much changed.”  13 November, “Walked with Ethel C., as far as Grant's house, & there was quite deep snow. Went up to see him. He knew me & said "Oh! Your Majesty" — & then began to cry, so I left the room. He is quite helpless now.”  Two days later he lapsed into unconsciousness and died on 17 November, terminating a long and mutually respectful relationship with the monarch.  The Queen’s friendship with Elizabeth Grant continued until her death in 1887, though the monarch no longer took tea with her so frequently.

Donald Stewart and his family.  There was a close parallel between the careers of John Grant and Donald Stewart, with the latter acting as understudy to the head keeper and then, in 1875 taking over his role.  A marked similarity also obtained in the regard in which each was held by both Prince Albert and Queen Victoria.  Donald Stewart was 16 years junior to John Grant and he particularly came to the attention of the Queen in October 1852 when he rescued Princess Victoria, the Queen’s eldest child, from a wasps’ nest.  Her mother first visited the Stewart home in September 1853 to give presents and again the following September after the birth of the Stewarts’ first child.  Her Majesty described the infant, Mary, as “a beautiful, merry baby, 5 weeks old, to whom I gave a little frock”.  Thereafter the monarch made occasional visits to see Mrs Margaret Stewart and her growing family, usually on one or two occasions each year to 1868.  Subsequently, the incidence increased progressively, and the Queen continuing this pattern for the rest of her life.

Complimentary remarks about Mrs Stewart, her tidiness and the beauty of her children were regularly entered in the Queen’s journals.  In May 1868, she remarked that Margaret Stewart’s children were “really splendid”.  Present giving was a frequent reason for a house visit with the family and Mrs Stewart’s baking also received the royal accolade.  June 1871.  “Walked with Janie E. up to M^rs Stewart's where we had our tea, with every sort of good things she had made for us. Her children are really charming & so handsome.”  Margaret Stewart also gave the Queen “whisked cream”.  In 1879, when Empress Eugenie was staying at Balmoral, Queen Victoria took her to visit the Donald Stewarts.  The monarch was clearly confident everything would be in order in the house as she “showed her the rooms the kitchen, & she spoke most kindly to all”.

Queen Victoria was also solicitous of the Stewart family when illness struck.  In 1882, daughter Elizabeth, whom the monarch had known since she was a small child, became ill “with an affection of the lungs, which it is feared may develop into something serious”.  Subsequently the Queen often asked about Lizzie’s condition.  Sadly, Lizzie was suffering from the early stages of pulmonary tuberculosis and she died of the infection at the early age of 46 in 1904.

Donald Stewart was an ever-present servant between 1848, when the Queen first entered Balmoral and her death in 1901.  During this long association of more than 52 years, Queen Victoria recorded visiting the Stewart household 177 times.

Mrs Donald Stewart and children

John Brown and his relatives.  John Brown never married and did not have children.  Thus, the circumstances surrounding the relationship between Queen Victoria and him differed fundamentally from the bonds which developed between the monarch and the likes of John and Helen Michie, John and Elizabeth Grant and Donald and Margaret Stewart, and their respective children.  However, elements of these other monarch – servant relationships did develop between the Queen and the families of John Brown’s brothers.

John Brown’s parents, John senior and his wife Margaret, had a family of eleven children, all but two being boys.  However, of six brothers surviving to adulthood, only five married, James, Donald, William, Hugh and Archie.

James Brown (1825 – 1922).  James Brown was born at Crathienaird in November 1825, just six months after his parents’ wedding, a not uncommon occurrence in the Highlands!  At the 1841 Scottish Census he was found working as a shepherd for John Lamont, a farmer at Towleys in the parish of Leslie, about 30 miles north-east of Crathie.  John Lamont had also been born at Crathie.  James then emigrated to Australia but could not have remained there for long because he had returned to marry Helen Stewart at Inverurie, Aberdeenshire in 1855.  The early 1850s were marked by a rush of emigrants to Australia, drawn by the discovery of gold.  Some made a fortune, but many others were not so lucky.  At the next Census in 1861 James was back in Aberdeenshire occupying the farm of Bad Fiantaige, north of Crathie adjacent to the family farm of The Bush.  He was described as a shepherd.  By that year, the James Browns had a family of a boy and two girls.  They did not have any further children.

Before October 1868, James Brown had moved to Royal employment as the Queen’s shepherd and in 1871 he was living at Townhead, a farm on the Balmoral estate, though he might have commenced his position at Balmoral as early as 1864.  He worked for the monarch for 27 years and died in 1922 at Townhead, having attained the remarkable age of 97.

Donald Brown (1832 – 1918).  The sixth Brown child seems initially to have worked as a coachman in Aberdeen but in the 1850s, like brother James, he emigrated to Australia where he met Isabella Stewart, a Scottish girl who had been born in Coldstream, Berwickshire.  The couple appears not to have had any children.   Between 1871 and 1875 the Donald Browns returned to Britain and to royal service by him. Sir James Reid, the Queen’s, Physician reported that Donald was a disagreeable and disgruntled person, who upset the monarch with his truculence.  He appeared to have been a livery porter, occupying the Royal Lodge, Osborne House on the Isle of Wight where he fell out with his workmates.  To accommodate his moaning, he was then moved to a rather cushy job on the main gate at Windsor Castle, but he was still dissatisfied, refused orders and, additionally, he did not fulfil the needs of the position.  This annoyed Queen Victoria, but she did not dismiss him from service, “entirely out of regard for his excellent eldest brother John”.  Queen Victoria had obviously forgotten that John Brown was only the second oldest of the Brown boys.

Donald must subsequently have been moved back to Osborne House, because in 1881 he was described as the Queen’s Porter living at Osborne Lodge, a position he still occupied in 1883, and in 1891 he was called a livery porter at Osborne.  After retirement, he and Isabella Brown moved back to Australia.  In 1908 the couple was living at Beechworth, Victoria, where Donald’s income was from “independent means”.  Donald Brown died at Beechworth in 1918 and Isabella departed this life two years later.

William Brown (1835 – 1906) was the son who remained at home, farmed at The Bush and did not see royal service.  However, Queen Victoria was a frequent visitor to the Brown family farm and William and his wife Elizabeth, whom he married in 1869, were on familiar terms with the monarch.  In “More Leaves”, when describing an incident which took place in June 1872, the Queen referred to William as “Willie Brown” and she would later address William’s wife by letter as “Dear Lizzie”.  William and Elizabeth Brown had a family of four between 1869 and 1876.

William Brown retired from farming at the Bush in May 1884, when a displenish sale was held to dispose of the stock and implements.  He then went to live at Baile-na-Coile.  This was the house built on the Balmoral estate for John Brown by Queen Victoria and which passed to the Brown family in 1883 on the death if the Queen’s Highland attendant.  In 1884 William Brown was only 49 and subsequently seemed to spend his time swanning around the Balmoral estate, occasionally doing odd jobs for John Michie, the head forester.  Mrs Elizabeth Brown died at Baile-na-Coile in 1900 and her husband, William expired six years later at the farm of Tomidhu on the Balmoral estate.  William Brown seems to have moved there after Baile-na-Coille had been returned to the royal family about 1905.

William Brown (K Macleay)

Hugh Brown (1838 – 1896).  At the 1861 Census, Hugh Brown was a 22-year-old ploughman working at Strathdon, Aberdeenshire and in 1863 he married Jessie M’Hardy there. “M’Hardy” is a Strathdon surname and it is presumed that Hugh and Jessie met while he was working at the farm of Wester Corryhoul.  Between the year of marriage and 1866, the couple emigrated to the South Island of New Zealand, where Hugh bought a 50 acre dairy farm, which he called “Abergeldie”, at Signal Hill in the North-East Valley near Dunedin, that most Scottish part of the colony.  Daughter Mary Ann was born there in 1866.

 

Hugh Brown had been well-known from childhood by Queen Victoria’s children.  When Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, visited New Zealand on HMS Galatea in 1869 (the first member of the British Royal Family to call at the colony), he spotted Hugh Brown, who was a Highland fling competitor, at the Caledonian Games held in Dunedin in July and they had a friendly conversation.  The Prince’s mother had just sent Brown a copy of her publication “Leaves”, which he acknowledged to the Prince, with gratitude.  Hugh Brown was a competent Highland dancer and at the Caledonian Society of Otago annual Gathering in 1873 he was a prominent participant, coming second to the local champion, James Murray, in the Highland Reel, Highland Fling and Reel o’Tulloch, but triumphing in the Ghillie Callum.  (James Murray junior would, ten years later, upset Donald Dinnie the famous Deeside heavy athlete by beating him in a dancing competition – see “The Life of Donald Dinnie (1837 – 1916) Revisited” – on this blogsite).

The first indication that Hugh Brown was contemplating a return to Great Britain came in December 1875, when he advertised his farm for sale in the Otago Daily Times.  Hugh’s departure was confirmed the following February when a displenish sale was held at the property, all sale items being offered without reserve.  More of the circumstances of Hugh Brown’s departure became known in March 1876, in an article in the Evening Herald.  “A short time ago Mr Hugh Brown received a communication from his brother Mr John Brown stating, by direction of her Majesty that if he returned home the Queen would pay all his expenses to Britain and would pay his expenses back should he desire to return to New Zealand.  A telegram was also forwarded to him by Mr John Brown and in compliance with the Queen's request he has made arrangements to go home.  It is understood that he will come in for a large share of his father's property (John Brown senior had died in October 1875).  He has already been offered a post as a servant to her Majesty but it is unlikely that he will accept it - his present intention in going home being to see after the affairs of his father's estate and what his ultimate intentions are he is unable to say.  Mr Brown is well known for his industry and steadiness.” A factor behind the Queen’s intervention may have been the declining health of Mrs Margaret Brown, the widowed mother of the Brown brothers, but it is also possible that the machinations of John Brown were involved.

Hugh Brown, his wife and daughter left Dunedin on the sailing ship “Canterbury” in April for London, arriving about 28 May 1876.  Curiously, Brown had been entrusted with looking after a pair of New Zealand Blue Ducks, destined for the London Zoo.  Sadly, one of his avian charges died soon after attaining its destination.  On reaching London, the Browns made their way back to Scotland, arriving at Ballater on the evening of 6 June.  The Queen had sent a waggonette to meet them at the station and they reached Balmoral just in time to join the monarch’s birthday ball.  Truly, Hugh Brown was treated royally on his return.

Hugh Brown, his wife and daughter initially went to live at Baile-na-coille, the house built by the Queen on the Balmoral estate about 1877 for brother, John.  The first Royal position undertaken by John Brown’s brother was on the royal estate.  In June 1879, when the Queen left Balmoral to go to Windsor, she called “at Brown’s house, to take leave of the Hugh Browns”, implying that this was his place of permanent residence.  At the 1881 Census the Hugh Browns were still occupying Baile-na-coille.  The same situation probably held in June 1883, on the award of probate following John Brown’s death, when Hugh’s address was given as “Balmoral”. Entries in John Michie’s diary show that on 4 November 1884 Hugh Brown was still at Balmoral but on 11 of November Mrs and Miss Brown left for Windsor and this appears to have been the time of change for the main address of the Hugh Brown family.  In June 1886, John Michie visited Windsor Castle at the invitation of the Queen and, while there, lodged with the Hugh Browns.

 

After the death of John Brown in 1883, Hugh was appointed as Extra Highland Attendant to Her Majesty, and it may be that he then moved with Her Majesty as she travelled around the country.  In September 1887 Hugh Brown and Francie Clark, his cousin, occupied the rumble seat on the Queen’s carriage when she visited the Braemar Gathering.  John Michie’s diary for March 1890 was the source of information on Hugh Brown’s living accommodation at Balmoral.  “Heard through McKenzie, Old Bridge that Jane Abercrombie who kept Mrs Brown's or rather Mr Hugh Brown's house at the East Lodge is dead, jaundice is said to be the cause.”  This implies that the Hugh Browns had acquired new Balmoral accommodation.  On 14 July of the same year, a time when Queen Victoria was not in residence at Balmoral, Hugh Brown and John Michie went fishing in the Dee together.  Hugh and Jessie Brown travelled south with the Queen on 18 November 1890, when Her Majesty returned to Windsor after her autumn break at Balmoral and that may have been the time of the definitive move of the Hugh Brown family from Balmoral to Windsor. In 1891 Hugh was Keeper of the Royal Kennels at Windsor, living at Royal Kennels Cottage, though in mid-August before the Queen’s arrival on Deeside for her autumn break, Mrs Hugh Brown was already in residence there.  In February 1894, Hugh Brown was in residence on the Balmoral estate and was there again in February 1896.  The whole saga of Hugh Brown’s royal employment is confusing, as he seemed to move backwards and forwards between Windsor and Balmoral in a pattern which did not always fit with the monarch’s travels.

Hugh Brown, like several of his brothers and, indeed, many Highlanders, consumed large amounts of whisky.  He died early on Sunday morning, 29 March 1896 at Approach Lodge, Balmoral.  According to his death registration he died of alcoholism and syncope (low blood pressure resulting in unconsciousness).  When she heard the news, the Queen told Sir James Reid that he was not to tell the ladies and gentlemen of the Court that Hugh Brown had died of alcoholic poisoning.  Queen Victoria had continued covering for the excesses of the Brown brothers in her service to the last!

Archibald Anderson Brown (1841 – 1912).  Archie Brown was the last of the Brown family, being 15 years younger than his brother John.  Archibald also entered royal service at a younger age than any of his siblings, being appointed as a Steward’s Room waiter at Windsor Castle in 1863 at 22 years old.  In 1865 his position changed to that of Junior Valet to Prince Leopold and in 1868 he rose to the position of Valet to the Prince.  Leopold was, sadly, afflicted by haemophilia and, as a result, he suffered from ill-health throughout his short life.  For this reason, an Army officer, Lieutenant Walter George Stirling, was appointed as his tutor or governor in early 1866.  Prince Leopold became attached to this new source of guidance in his life but after only four months in post, Lieutenant Stirling was dismissed.  The official reason for Stirling’s removal, that the role of tutor should be filled by someone with experience of dealing with young people with delicate health, was clearly contrived.  The true reason is currently not known with certainty.  One possibility, supported by no more than circumstantial evidence, is that Stirling had a liaison with Princess Louise, the other is that Stirling had a blazing row with Archie Brown, which led, in turn to Archie petitioning his older brother John.  He is alleged to have interceded with the Queen to get Stirling removed from post.

What is certainly true is that both John Brown and Archie Brown behaved in a brutal and demeaning fashion towards the delicate Prince.  Leopold had stayed in touch with Stirling after his dismissal and in September 1868 he wrote to Walter Stirling as follows.  “I am rather in the grumps just now about everything, the way in which I am treated is sometimes too bad (not Mr Duckworth, of course not, he is only too kind to me) but other people.  Besides that "J.B." is fearfully insolent to me, so is his brother; hitting me on the face with spoons for fun, etc - you may laugh at me for this; but you know I am so sensitive, I know you will feel for me - their impudence increases daily towards everyone."  The fundamental question arising from this situation is, “How could John Brown and his brother Archie get away with such bad behaviour against the afflicted son of the monarch?”

Despite his boorish and uncaring attitude, Archie Brown continued to progress in royal service.  In 1869 he was promoted to Gentleman Porter, the year 1871 saw his role changed to Valet at Windsor Castle and, in 1875, to Page of the Presence.  At the time of the 1881 Census he was located at Buckingham Palace with the title of Gentleman Porter.  In 1883, his brother John died at Windsor Castle and Archie was called to visit him just before he expired.  The credit of the Brown family with the monarch remained strong, despite the demise of her favourite Highland servant.  Further role changes came the way of Archie Brown.  In 1886, “on account of his excellent conduct and devotion to Prince Leopold’s service”, Archie was promoted to be Leopold’s valet.  Presumably, Prince Leopold was not consulted by his mother before this change was made.

Emma John was born at Cowbridge, Glamorgan in 1841.  She later became a wardrobe maid at Windsor Castle, where she met and married Archibald Brown in 1872.  The couple only had one child, a daughter born in 1874.  By 1901 Archie and Emma were living at 1 Cambridge Villas, Windsor, when Archibald was described as the King’s Piper (transcription error for “porter”?).  He retired soon afterwards and died in Windsor in 1912.

Archie Brown (K Macleay)

Francis (Francie) Clark (1841 – 1895), cousin of the Brown brothers.  Francis Clark was related to the Brown brothers on their mother’s side.  Barbra Leys, mother of Francis, was the sister of Margaret Leys, the wife of John Brown senior.  Francie was born at Crathie in 1841.  In 1861, he was working on the farm of Tullochmacarrick, Glenmuick as a ploughman for former Balmoral ghillie, Peter Coutts (see above), but in 1870 Francie entered the monarch’s employment as a Highland servant.  It is likely that his cousin, John Brown, was instrumental in securing the post for him.  Francis Clark frequently drove carriages for the Queen.  In 1879 he was put in charge of the Royal Kennels, no trivial task.  The Queen would often take a bevvy of canine companions with her on the daily drive and Francie’s job was to keep them under control.  In 1901, at the time of Queen Victoria’s death, she had 88 dogs in residence at Windsor.  At the 1881 Census, Francie Clark was living at Windsor Castle and was described as the Queen’s Highland Servant.  On the death of his cousin, John Brown in 1883, Francie Clark took over the role that Brown had previously fulfilled.

The 1890 Braemar Gathering was held at Balmoral and Francis Clark was judged to be the best dressed Highlander, which would have pleased Queen Victoria enormously.  In 1892, Francie was awarded a house at Balmoral, Garbh Corrie Cottage, which had been occupied by John Michie, Head Forester, at some previous stage and to which substantial modifications were made before Clark’s occupancy.  John Michie wrote the following in his diary in March 1893.  “The masons are heughing stone for F Clark's house - Garbh Corrie while labourers are excavating the foundation.”  John Michie was also tasked with arranging for the manufacture of some furniture for Francis Clark in Braemar.  Gargh Corrie appears to have been intended as a retirement home.  If so, like brother John, he never got to occupy his Balmoral property.  In early July 1895, Francis Clark had an operation for a cancer of the tongue and throat at Buckingham Palace.  It was not successful, and he died on 7 July.  Francie’s addiction to tobacco and alcohol had caught him out.  Francis Clark never married.

Francis Clark

Queen Victoria and the Balmoral Head Gardener, William Paterson.  William Paterson was the Head Gardener at Balmoral for 45 years, 44 of them during Queen Victoria’s reign.  At the 1881 Census, he was reported as employing eight men, which presumably meant he had that number of under-gardeners.  The Balmoral garden, responsible for growing all fruit, vegetables and flowers for the estate, was thus a big operation.  Given these circumstances, it would be expected that the Queen would have met the Head Gardener frequently and would have been on familiar terms with him.  Indeed, his obituary in the Aberdeen Journal implied as much.  “Naturally, from his long connection with Balmoral, he was known to all the members of the Royal Family and there is reason to believe he was held in great respect by Prince Albert.”  It is therefore puzzling that in the Princess Beatrice edited journals of the monarch, the only mention of William Paterson before his death was in 1850 when he was present in a group of other servants welcoming the Queen.

It is certainly true that the Queen was concerned about Mrs Mary Paterson in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s demise.  8 October.  “Out with Beatrice & Thora, & went to see M^rs Paterson, whose good husband, for so many years gardener at Balmoral, died peacefully yesterday after a long & painful illness. She was much distressed, but very calm & full of gratitude. He was 74.”  9 October.  “Out with Ethel C., & went to see M^rs Paterson, who was full of gratitude for my kindness.”  Queen Victoria also visited Mary Paterson during her own final illness.  14 June 1900.  “Went to enquire after old M^rs Paterson, who is quite bedridden now …”.  There is thus a lack of evidence concerning the closeness of the Queen’s relationship with William Paterson, which does not apply to some of the other senior, long-serving retainers.  Perhaps this is another indication that the Princess Beatrice version of the monarch’s journals may be as remarkable for what it doesn’t say as for what is included?

“There were a lot of Alberts”

It has been noted elsewhere that people associated with Queen Victoria often named their children after the monarch or after her consort, Prince Albert and a casual scan of the names used by her favourite servants listed here supports that notion and also suggests that the names of the monarch’s children and other relatives seemed to occur from time to time.  But proving such a correlation and, if present, explaining its causation is not a simple matter, as the following analysis shows.

How close a relationship?  The scope of any study has first to fix limits on the degree of relationship to be included.  Queen Victoria was the only child conceived jointly by her father and mother, though she did have a much older half-sister and half-brother from her mother’s previous marriage. So, Queen Victoria had no full siblings to be considered, but her parents might be included.  She married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha and he, too, is a clear candidate for consideration.  The Queen and her consort had a family of nine children whose names would likely be retained in any study.  Thus, a minimal evaluation would cover 13 people.  However, a wider study, covering half-siblings, cousins, uncles, grandchildren and spouses of children would be very difficult to conduct, because of the numbers involved and the plethora of their given names.

How many names?  Members of royal families, to this day, tend to endow newborns with multiple given names.  Queen Victoria and her relatives conformed with this generalisation, as the following list, covering the monarch’s parents, spouse and children, confirms.

Queen.            Victoria, Alexandrina

Parents.          Edward, Augustus

  Marie, Louise, Victoria (in English)

Spouse.          Francis, Albert, Augustus, Charles, Emmanuel (in English)

Children.        Victoria, Adelaide, Mary, Louise         (1840 – 1901)

                        Albert, Edward                                    (1841 – 1910)

                        Alice, Maud, Mary                              (1843 – 1878)

                        Alfred, Ernest, Albert                          (1844 – 1900)

                        Helena, Augusta, Victoria                   (1846 – 1923)

                        Louise, Caroline, Alberta                    (1848 – 1939)

                        Arthur, William, Patrick, Albert            (1850 – 1942)

                        Leopold, George, Duncan, Albert       (1853 – 1884)

                        Beatrice, Mary, Victoria, Feodore       (1857 – 1944)

The total population of given names for these 13 individuals numbers 42, an average of 3.2 per person.  Further, they are not 42 different names but 30, if exact spellings are used, 27 if same sex alternative spellings are merged and 25 if male and female variants of the same name are joined.  Even ignoring the actual German spellings of Prince Albert’s and Queen Victoria’s mother’s given names, the situation is still complex.  To reduce the analysis to manageable dimensions, only one given name per person, which was employed in daily life by Queen Victoria, Prince Albert and their nine children was included for analysis.  The resulting name list then condenses to - Victoria, Albert, Alice, Alfred, Helena, Louise, Arthur, Leopold, Beatrice - nine in total, which will be referred to collectively as the “royal given names”.  Separately, a few individuals were found with more than one “royal given name”, or with given names originating with more distant royal relationships, or with the names of another prominent individual.

For the purpose of clarity, the members of the “favourite servant” group were – Andrew Robertson, Alexander Profeit, James Forbes, John Michie, John Beaton, John Alexander McDonald, John Morgan, James Bowman, Charles McIntosh, John McDonald, William Ross, Charles Duncan, John Grant, Donald Stewart, John Brown, William Paterson, Peter Farquharson and Peter Coutts.  Two members of the group – James Bowman and John Brown – did not marry or have families.  Some servants who were favoured were excluded from this initial analysis because they were the children of “favourite servants”.  The offspring of the group of “favourite servants” identified above have been divided into two groups, those born before the parent servant started royal service (called “before”) and those born after the start of royal service, but within Queen Victoria’s reign (called “after”).  Their first given names have then been classified as being members of “royal given name” or “other” names.

The numbers in the cells of the resulting 2 x 2 table are striking.  If royal service had no influence on choice of a child’s first given name, then the proportions of “royal” and “other” should not be significantly different between the “before” and “after” groups.  The numbers were as follows.  “royal, before” = 0, “other, before” = 39, “royal, after” = 20, “other, after” = 19.  The probability of getting such a result by chance is less than 1 in 100,000.  Without doubt, royal service had a strong influence on the choice of first name of favourite servants’ children. 

Other data from this survey, though limited, are consistent with this finding.  Six children of Charles Thomson (b 1805), Andrew, John, Charles, Alexander, William and Albert saw extensive royal service, married and had families, which collectively contained 21 children, all born during royal service.  Of this total, seven were given royal names and 14 other names.

John Brown and his brothers were remarkably lacking in fecundity for the times, having the following numbers of offspring.  James – 3, John – 0, Donald – 0, William – 4, Hugh – 1, Archie – 1.  Pooling these nine children gave “royal, before” = 0, “other, before” = 4, “royal, after” = 3, “other, after” = 2, penny numbers, but consistent with the more extensive data from the “favourite servant” group.

John Grant, the long-serving Head Keeper, had a family of seven, the last child, a girl, being called “Victoria Alexandrina”, Queen Victoria’s two given names.  Grant’s sixth child, a boy, was named “Andrew Robertson”, the name of the Royal Commissioner at the time (1858).  The fifth child (born 1867) of John Thomson was also given the names “Andrew Robertson”.  Of course, Dr Andrew Robertson, the Queen’s Commissioner, was medically qualified and had previously run a general medical practice at Crathie.  Did this naming honour indicate that Andrew Robertson had delivered these two children?  It is interesting that none of Peter Coutts’ children was endowed with a “royal given name”.  These five children were all born after Peter’s service with Queen Victoria had ended and his farm was remote from Balmoral.  Queen Victoria would have had little opportunity to influence name choice in this family.  Although John Symon was not a royal servant, he knew the Queen well and was visited by her frequently.  Two of the Symon children were given decidedly royal names, Victoria Alice, born 1855 and Helena Louisa, born 1857.  A third child, Maria Isabella, born 1853, also sounds rather regal, though it has not been established if this name too, had a possible royal derivation.  The contrast between the circumstances of Peter Coutts and John Symon and the correlation with the bestowal of royal names is striking.  The former saw royal service but his child-bearing was at a distance from Balmoral, whereas the latter did not see royal service but lived in Crathie and had frequent contact with the monarch.

An analysis of the 32 “royal” names given to the children of favourite servants, plus the Browns, Symons and  Thomsons, showed that while ten different names were present (Louis/Louise, Arthur, Alice, Alfred, Caroline, Helena, Beatrice, Victoria/Victor, Leopold, Albert/Alberta) only three names achieved more than a single citation, Helena – 5, Albert/Alberta – 7, Victoria/Victor – 13.  Also, the 32 citations were scattered throughout the period 1850 – 1898.

Why did servants give their children “royal” names? 

None of the above statistics helps with deciding what caused the change in naming behaviour after servants started royal service (or came under royal influence), except that chance selection of names cannot plausibly account for the skewed results.  The other alternative hypotheses are firstly, that the honour of working for the monarch led the parents of children to be more likely to select royal names, and secondly, that Queen Victoria either persuaded, or commanded, parents to give their children certain names of her choosing.

There were a few cases where it was possible to identify, or to infer, the reason for servants’ children being given royal names.  John Michie’s diaries, as with other issues, are a rich source of enlightenment.  John Michie’s fourth child and second daughter was born on 25 November 1883, rather more than a year after his removal to Balmoral.  Her birth was initially registered with the Crathie Registrar, William Michie, Tullochroy, (not a relative) on 15 December 1883 as “Margaret Shiach Michie”.  This was subsequently changed on 11 March 1884, almost three months later, to “Beatrice Michie”.  The authority for the change was a certificate under the hand of Rev Archibald A Campbell, the Minister of Crathie, dated 8 March.  John Michie’s diary for 1884 survives and explains how this change came about.  7 February 1884.  “Dr. P (Profeit, the Balmoral Commissioner) came up and informed my wife that the Queen enquired at him if our baby was baptised.   We assumed that HM asked the name as he mentioned Beatrice and acceded.”  8 February 1884.  “I am now going to see after revoking the registration of our baby's birth as Margaret Shiach and substituting Beatrice for The Queen.  After the Princess.”  11 February 1884.  “Called on Dr Profeit and finally arranged to name our baby Beatrice, according to Her Majesty's wish.”

The most likely explanation of the events surrounding the naming of this little girl is as follows.  She was born at the Dantzig Shiel on 25 November 1883, which was after the monarch’s departure from Balmoral. Much later, possibly on 7 February 1884, the Queen enquired of her Commissioner if John and Helen Michie’s baby had been baptised and what the name was.  At the time the monarch was at Osborne House and no record has been found of Dr Profeit visiting the Isle of Wight before or about this date, so it is likely that the communication was by telegraph.  It is possible that the Queen actually told Profeit that she wanted the baby to be called Beatrice after her own youngest daughter.  Profeit, knowing that the Michies’ baby’s birth had already been registered with another name, immediately went to see the Michies to pass on the Queen’s message.  John Michie, only in post in his dream job for shortly over a year, and his wife had little option but to go along with Queen Victoria’s wishes.  He may then have gone to see his friend William Michie the Registrar to ask for his help.  William would have then told John that he needed a certificate from Rev Campbell to authorise the change.  Campbell, on hearing the story, would have agreed to cooperate, not wishing to get across the monarch, one of the heritors of his church, and so the deed was done.  The baby was christened at Crathie church on 5 March 1884 and Margaret Shiach Michie became Beatrice Michie, on the whim of Queen Victoria.

Mrs Elizabeth Grant, wife of John Grant, bore a male child on 10 August 1852.  The baby was christened “Albert” on 24 August.  Queen Victoria visited Mrs Grant’s house on 26 September of that year and “told her their Baby should be called Albert”.  The Queen also called on 10 October, under the impression that baby Albert had been christened that afternoon.  Perhaps no one dared to correct a misunderstanding by the monarch?  Perhaps also Queen Victoria had communicated her naming preference at an earlier date and had forgotten her action?  Whatever the true explanation, this entry in the monarch’s journal proves that, on occasion, she was quite prepared to deliver what amounted to a command to servants regarding the naming of their children.  A year later the Queen pronounced “little Albert” a “magnificent baby”.

Princess Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, married Prince Henry Maurice of Battenberg on 23 July 1885 at Whippingham near to Osborne House on the Isle of Wight.  The Queen, accompanied by the Prince and Princess Henry of Battenberg, arrived at Balmoral on 25 August for the monarch’s late summer – autumn break in the Highlands.  Preparations were made in advance, largely involving John Michie, to receive the royal party, including sprucing up the estate, erecting a triumphal arch at the estate entrance, and building a bonfire on the top of Craig Gowan. The bonfire was to be followed by a procession of 100 men with torches down to the castle and then the dancing of reels in front of the building.  On the day, the estate workers were all turned out in the kilt.  John Michie, in his usual modest style, noted that these celebrations “gave satisfaction”.  The following day, there was an informal presentation of a phaeton and pony, subscribed by the tenants and estate workers, to Princess Henry (Beatrice).  John Michie’s fifth child and third son had been born on 30 August 1885 at the Dantzig Shiel and the following day the Queen “asked the child's name to be Henry Maurice”.  Prince Henry subsequently took a continuing interest in the welfare of Henry Maurice Michie.  On 31 August 1895, John Michie wrote as follows.  “To Balmoral in the morning.  Saw Prince Henry of Battenberg who asked me to bring my boy Henry Maurice, his name son, to the Castle at 4 pm which I did when His Royal Highness, presented him with a silver watch, in case, bearing the inscription "Henry Maurice Michie from Henry of Battenberg, August 1895".”  Six months later, Prince Henry tragically died of malaria on the Ashanti expedition, prematurely ending his association with Henry Maurice Michie.

The Michies’ last child, a girl, was born on 17 August 1892 at the Dantzig Shiel.  This baby was baptised on 21 October at Crathie church and John Michie recorded the event in his diary.  “Had our youngest baby baptised and named Alexandrina for the little lass's grandfather on the mother's side (Alexander Kitchin, 1831 – 1902).  The Revd. A A Campbell Minister of Crathie and Domestic Chaplain to the Queen performed the ceremony.”  So, on this occasion, the Queen did not intercede to dictate the new baby’s name, though she would hardly have been displeased at the Michies’ choice of one of her own given names.  Were the Michies killing two birds with one stone by their choice of name? 

Queen Victoria’s practice of sometimes requiring servants to name their children according to her wishes must have been well-known in her family.  It was certainly the case that her granddaughter, Princess Alix (who was born in 1872, was also known as “Alicky” and who died tragically at the hands of the Bolsheviks in 1918), the 4^th daughter of Princess Alice, was caught out employing the practice in unusual circumstances.  Princess Alix married Nicholas II of Russia but prior to the marriage she was suffering badly from sciatica and was advised to take a health cure in Harrogate, the fashionable Yorkshire health resort, famous for its mineral springs.  She stayed at a discreet location in the spa town, Cathcart House, an upmarket guest house.  This establishment was managed by Emma Allen, who was married to Peter, a plumber and sanitary engineer.  Mrs Allen gave birth to non-identical twins, a boy and a girl, in 1895, at the time that Princess Alix was an incognito guest, masquerading as a Baroness Starkenburg.  However, she soon gave the game away by insisting that Mrs Allen’s new-borns be named Nicholas Charles Bernard Hesse and Alix Beatrice Emma, after her and her future husband, and she also appointing herself as the children’s godmother.  Subsequently, she sent Nicholas a confirmation present of a set of Fabergé cufflinks.  With all these clues it did not take long for canny Yorkshire people to draw the obvious conclusion about her true identity.

Dr Alexander Profeit’s 7^th child was a boy, born on 7 April 1877, the same birthday as Prince Leopold, Queen Victoria’s youngest son (born 7 April 1853).  Queen Victoria attended the christening of the child, as she noted in her journal.  “Was present in the afternoon at the Christening of D^r Profeit's little boy, who received the name of Leopold …”  This was a special honour for the Profeit family, the ceremony taking place at Craiggowan on 16 June 1877.  Queen Victoria also attended two other village christenings, both being described in the monarch’s book, “More Leaves”, as illustrations of Highland life.  The first involved the daughter of John and Barbra Thomson and the ceremony, conducted by the Rev Dr Taylor, took place in the wood forester’s house and was attended by a few friends, in addition to Queen Victoria.  The Queen found the occasion moving.  “The service was concluded with another short prayer and the usual blessing. I thought it most appropriate, touching, and impressive. I gave my present (a silver mug) to the father, kissed the little baby, and then we all drank to its health and that of its mother in whisky, which was handed round with cakes. It was all so nicely done, so simply, and yet with such dignity.”  Almost inevitably, the child was christened “Victoria”.  The second christening also took place in 1868, on 1 November, when the monarch attended at the Brown family farm for the naming of the first child, a son, of Willie and Lizzie Brown.  The monarch took her children Louise, Beatrice and Leopold, with Lady Ely in attendance, by carriage (driven by John Brown) to The Bush.  “I gave my present. It was a touching and impressive sight to see the young father holding his child with an expression of so much devotion and earnestness.”  The child was named “Albert”!  The circumstances of all three christenings suggest that the monarch may well have been responsible for the choice of names.

A tragic event occurred at Balmoral in June 1872 when a small child fell into the Monaltrie burn and was drowned.  The Queen was so moved by this tragedy that she drove to The Bush to warn Lizzie Brown “… never to let dear little Albert run about alone, or near to the burn …”.  She clearly felt a special attachment to little Albert Brown bearing, as he did, the name of her late husband.  It was almost as though she thought the infant harboured the spirit of her departed spouse.
  

Servants and their families as art subjects

Queen Victoria was herself a keen and competent artist.  Sketching was one of her favourite activities, especially while at Balmoral and her subjects included both people portraits and landscapes.  The monarch also invited a succession of artists to visit Balmoral to depict individuals, events and scenery.  After the invention of photography, this new art form was also embraced.  Favourite servants, their wives and, especially, their children were frequently captured and being deemed worthy of representation was clearly a mark of royal favour.

In September 1850, the Queen wrote to Edwin Landseer, who visited Scotland each year, inviting him to Balmoral.  An important product of this first visit during the Queens tenure was an allegorical picture illustrating royal life in the Highlands and based upon a trip along Loch Muick in a coble rowed by her ghillies, which had taken place two years previously.  The composition was described by the Queen following a further journey along the loch.  “The lake was like a mirror & the extreme calmness, with the bright sunshine, hazy blue tints on the fine bold outline of hills coming down into our sweet loch, quite enchanted Landseer.  We landed at the usual landing place, where there was a haul of fish, & upwards of 20 trout were caught.  Albert walked round & we got into the boat and picked up Landseer, who was sketching a little further up. … It is to be thus: I, stepping out of the boat at Loch Muick, Albert in his Highland dress, assisting me out, & I am looking at a stag which he is supposed to have just killed.  Bertie is on the deer pony with McDonald (whom Landseer much admires) standing behind, with rifles and plaids on his shoulder.  In the water holding the boat, are several of the men in their kilts, salmon are also lying on the ground.  The picture is intended to represent me as meeting Albert, who has been stalking, whilst I have been fishing, & the whole is quite consonant with the truth.”  On the same visit, Landseer also produced head-and-shoulders portraits of four of the most prominent ghillies, John McDonald, John Grant, Peter Coutts and Charles Duncan.  The favoured ghillies also played bit-parts in the composition of paintings.  John Grant, Charles Duncan and Peter Coutts were added to the “Boat picture”. 

In 1853 and 1854, the Bavarian artist Carl Haag produced two paintings illustrating life at Balmoral, “Evening at Balmoral” showing Albert returning after a successful stalk with several dead stags which Victoria is examining with delight and “Morning in the Highlands” showing an ascent of Lochnagar by the royal entourage.  Various ghillies, including John Brown and John Grant are depicted.  Many ghillies are also present, though not named, in Haag’s preliminary study of salmon leistering (spearing with tridents) on the Dee in 1854.  Following the death of Prince Albert in 1861, the Queen became depressed and withdrawn and she stopped sketching.  However, in 1863 her interest in art revived.  Carl Haag had by this time become one of the Queen’s favourite artists and he was invited to Balmoral several times.   Another Carl Haag painting, The Forest (1863), of the late Prince Albert returning from a deer-stalking expedition has John Grant and James Morgan in the background, the essential companions for this Highland sport. At the end of his 1863 visit, Haag produced an excellent study of John Grant, rifle slung over his shoulder, hat pressed firmly on his head and ammunition bag slung at his waist, a man au fait with his job after decades in the hills and forests of Deeside.  The year 1865 saw the production of a picture called Corrie Buie, which was a study of the Queen with daughters Louise and Helena sitting on a heather bank at one of her favourite Balmoral locations, two of her favourite retainers, John Grant and John Brown in the background.

By the beginning of October 1849, the Queen and Prince Albert had returned to Windsor from Balmoral. One day in that month, while Albert was out shooting, the Queen walked down to the Castle Kennels and “sketched the dogs, & McDonald's Children”.  Landseer visited in December of the following year and, watched by the monarch, also produced a sketch of the children of John McDonald, Archie and Annie, then aged eight and five respectively.  Queen Victoria herself portrayed Annie in 1852 with a Balmoral tartan shawl covering her head.  The monarch had also drawn two young girls, Lizzie Stewart (3), the daughter of a carrier in Crathie village and Mary Symon (2), daughter of John Symon who kept a grocer’s and general merchant’s shop in Crathie in 1850 and three years later Carl Haag painted the same sitters, as a commission from the Queen.

Other servant families gave enduring fascination to the Queen and one of them was that of Donald and Margaret Stewart.  In September 1856, on one of her tours around favoured servant families, the monarch “Visited Mrs Grant, sketched Mrs Donald Stewart's 2 fine little children, the one in its primitive wooden cradle, which was so picturesque”.  A month later, the family of Charles Duncan got a similar visitation.  “Walked up to the Falls, to have a look at them, & then walked down again. Went into the little Sheil for a few minutes to make a sketch of Duncan's eldest child, a dear little girl of 5 years old, with a complexion of lilies & roses, & bright blue eyes & perfectly flaxen curls. The Baby is also a beautiful child.” 

Thirteen years would pass until Edwin Landseer painted for the Queen again.  At Osborne in 1866, at the Queen’s bidding, he produced two portraits which contrasted life in the Highlands with Albert to her present, lonely condition.  The Highland picture was called “Sunshine, or the death of the Royal stag with the Queen riding up to congratulate His Royal Highness” and showed the Prince, rifle over his shoulder with a stag at his feet.  Incongruously, he does not look dressed for crawling through the heather and certainly does not look as though he has just done so!  The dead stag, with 16-point antlers (a “royal”), is being examined by John Grant and with the Queen riding up in the background.  The gloomy, post Albert picture was titled “Shadow, or Her Majesty at Osborne 1866”.  The Queen is sitting, po-faced, on her pony, which is held at the head by John Brown.

Joseph Edgar Boehm was a prolific Viennese sculptor, born in 1834, who moved to England in 1862.  He achieved considerable fame, exhibiting 123 pieces at the Royal Academy and attracting a number of high-status clients, including Queen Victoria, for whom he produced many works, some of monumental size.  He was a regular visitor to Balmoral castle where he crossed paths with John Brown, then in his rude and arrogant phase.  Brown used to refer to him as “Bum”.  After John Brown’s death in 1883, Victoria immediately commissioned Boehm to produce a life-size bronze sculpture of her most favourite servant.  In the middle of April, she wrote, “Boehm is making a bust of Brown for me, which is getting very like”.  The work was initially installed in 1883 near to the Garden Cottage, where the Queen often worked with Brown in attendance.  On the death of the Queen in 1901, King Edward VII, who despised Brown, immediately had the work removed to an insignificant location in the woods behind Baile-na-Coile, where it languishes to this day.  It could be said that Boehm had the last laugh on Brown.
 
Sir JE Boehm



John Brown statue by JE Boehm

   

Kenneth Macleay (1802 – 1878) Highlander portraits
  
Kenneth Macleay

Kenneth Macleay, born in Oban, was a painter in watercolours who, in 1864, was commissioned by Queen Victoria to produce a portrait of her sons Alfred, Arthur and Leopold.  The finished work met with royal approval leading to a further contract to depict Prince Alfred in miniature.  Although monarch and artist disagreed about a detail in this work, he still received a further assignment to produce likenesses of leading Highlanders, including her Highlander servants, mostly from the Balmoral estate, for her own collection.  Thirty-one of the portraits were reproduced and published in 1870 in the volume, “Highlanders of Scotland: portraits illustrative of the principal clans and followings and the Retainers of the Royal Household at Balmoral, in the reign of Queen Victoria”.  The selected Highlanders are divided into two sections, Royal servants and clan representatives and the order, since it was probably commanded by the Queen, in which they appear looks suspiciously like an order or precedence, which would be interesting, if true, because it would give an insight into the monarch's thoughts in the late 1860s.  The order is John Grant (Head Keeper), John Brown (Highland Attendant), William Ross (Queen's Piper), Archie Brown (Valet to Prince Leopold), Donald Stewart (Balmoral Keeper in charge of Deer Hounds) and Charles Duncan (Keeper at Birkhall), Archibald Fraser McDonald (Jaeger to the Prince of Wales),  William McDonald (Piper to the Prince of Wales), James Morgan (Highland Servant and Footman to the Prince and Princess Christian).  Her Majesty managed to slip in two further Highlanders to whom she was close, both as Farquharson men,  James Bowman (Ballochbuie Keeper and royal employee from 1868) and William Brown (Farmer at The Bush, Crathie and brother of John Brown).  If this order is significant, it is interesting that John Grant was at this time still considered to take precedence over John Brown.  However, the presence of three Brown brothers in the list does indicate the significance of the family to the Queen.  

John Grant, John Brown, William Ross, Charles Duncan, Donald Stewart, Peter Coutts and James Bowman are common to both the present list and the Macleay list.  Several other subjects in the Macleay list are related to individuals in the present compilation and thus appear in the section dealing with the employment of offspring and other relatives.  Archibald Brown and William Brown were brothers of John Brown and Archibald Fraser McDonald was a son of John McDonald.    William Macdonald, Piper to the Prince of Wales was another sitter but was unrelated.

 

It is interesting that of the Macleay Highlander portraits only John Grant is not wearing the kilt.  In September 1858, Queen Victoria noted in her journal that John Grant was not wearing Highland dress on the arrival of the royal party for the start of the autumn break at Balmoral.  However, he had been excused because he had “only lately recovered from a very severe illness, but he is quite well again”.  It has been suggested by some authors that John Grant was permanently excused from wearing the kilt on account of his age (he was 50 in 1860).  Not surprisingly, keepers were excused from wearing the kilt when out on the hill stalking red deer.  However, some of the outdoor servants clearly preferred not to wear this allegedly traditional garment and in 1870 the monarch upbraided these non-conformists for wearing knickerbockers instead of the kilt of Balmoral tweed that she had mandated. She fired off an irritable memorandum demanding that her keepers and ghillies should wear the kilt of Balmoral tweed, unless given special dispensation to don trousers.  Occasionally, outdoor servants were portrayed in trousers, for example in Carl Haag’s cartoon of salmon leistering.

Many of the Macleay Highlanders are portrayed with a hint of menace, upright stance, piercing eyes, uniformed, bearded and bearing arms - a dignified, warrior race and one not to be trifled with.  Two of the portraits, of John Brown and his younger brother Archie, have a more cultured, even effeminate, bearing and decidedly delicate features.  About the time that Macleay was painting his Highlander portraits, Queen Victoria was urging Dr Andrew Robertson to investigate the genealogy of the Browns in the hope of establishing a link to some family with an established status, which could then transfer to the tenant family at The Bush.  In such circumstances, it would be more appropriate for the Brown brothers to be portrayed in a way that suggested they were both cultured and mannered.  A case of gross artistic licence! 

Photography.  The invention of photography about the middle of the 19^th century dramatically changed the way scenes and events, but especially portraiture, were recorded and preserved.  Artistic skills, such as portrait and miniature painting declined as the use of the camera took hold.  Professional photographers appeared and were employed by the monarch but amateurs, including visitors to Balmoral, members of the royal household and even Queen Victoria’s own daughters joined the movement.

George Washington Wilson was an Aberdeen artist who converted to photography in the early 1850s.  He quickly established a reputation for both artistic and technical excellence and first took photographs around Balmoral in 1853 and 1854.  In 1855 the Queen invited him to stay on the estate for a week doing both landscape and portrait work.  Another invitation was issued in 1859, with the monarch giving Wilson a list of subjects in the built and natural environment to be studied, but also included several servants and their relatives.  The servants included John Grant, his wife, children and mother, as well as a number of other stalkers and ghillies and some of the village children.  The portraits would be purchased by Her Majesty but GWW was free to sell the views around Balmoral.  Wilson was appointed Photographer Royal in 1860 and Photographer to the Queen in Scotland a decade later.

George Washington Wilson

Attending life ceremonies

Queen Victoria would occasionally attend baptisms and funerals in the families of her favourite servants, but only if it was convenient for her to do so.  That is, if the event was close to her then current location.  In the case of baptisms, in addition to the event being close by, it seems likely that the Queen’s presence also correlated with the child being given a royal name and, likely also, that she had commanded that that name be bestowed on the infant concerned.  The four baptisms in servant families that she is known to have graced with her presence were Albert Brown (born 1868, the son of William and Elizabeth), Victoria Thomson (b 1869, the daughter of John and Barbra), Leopold Profeit (born 1877, the son of Alexander and Isabella) and Henry Maurice Michie (born 1885).  This last case is interesting because the John Michie diary and the Princess Beatrice version of the Queen’s journal for the relevant day (Sunday 27 September) are both available.

Henry Maurice Michie’s baptism was entirely dictated by the monarch at rather short notice, as the Michie diaries show.  Thursday 24 September.  “Saw Dr Profeit who informed me that the Queen would like the baptism of our baby boy on Sabbath next at 4.30.”  Friday 25 September.  “Arranged with Mr Campbell to baptize our baby on Sunday first at 4.30 pm which is as the Queen asked.”  Saturday 26 September.  “Drove to Crathie down the North side and asked her to attend the Christening tomorrow.  Also invited Mrs Hugh Brown to be present.”  Monday 28 September.  “Yesterday we had our baby (born 30th August last) baptized Henry Marice for HRH Prince H M of Battenberg.  The Queen, Prince & Princess Henry & the Hereditary Gd Duke of Hesse were present.  The Revd A A Campbell officiated.  Our ordinary guests were Dr & Mrs Profeit, Mr & Mrs Hugh Brown, Mr John McKenzie and Mrs McLaren.”  In the Queen’s journal for the afternoon of Sunday 27 September, the only activity recorded was, “Drove in the afternoon, with Beatrice, Liko, & Ernie, & took tea at Abergeldie, with Helen, Arthur & Louischen joining us there.”  Surely, the Queen would have recorded the baptism in her journal?  If so, Princess Beatrice appeared to rate a tea party as a more significant event than the baptism of Henry Maurice Michie in the editing process.

Interestingly, Princess Beatrice and Prince Henry of Battenberg were married on 23 July 1885, just a few weeks before the baptism of Henry Maurice Michie.  Prince and Princess Henry went on to have a family of four before the untimely death of the Prince in 1896.  Their fourth child, a boy, was born on 3 October 1891 at Balmoral and was baptised there on 31 October.  John and Helen Michie were guests at the ceremony.  The child was christened Maurice Victor Donald and this was the first royal christening in Scotland for 300 years, hence the addition of the Highland name.  Aberdeen-born artist George Ogilvy Reid (later Sir George Reid, PRSA) was brought to Balmoral to immortalise the event.  He was still at Balmoral in the middle of November and, on the 18^th of that month, John Michie went down to the castle to sit for Reid.  John Michie wrote, “He made a passible sketch of me in about half an hour's time.”  Reid and Michie seemed to have formed a brief friendship during the former’s sojourn on Deeside.  On 19 November, John Michie recorded the following.  “Drove to the Castle and saw G O Reid, Artist by appointment who commenced to take a sketch of Mr Muther, the Queen's Librarian - Mr Reid has asked me to give him a call at his studio, 18 Shandwick Place should I be to Edinburgh about the new year time and he has promised to pay me a visit should he come here for part of his holidays next summer.”  Prince Henry also visited the Michies the same afternoon.  “Prince Henry who has been shooting hinds in Glen Beg came round, and as he was wet I gave him dry shoes & stockings of mine on as well as a dry cap (the one given me by my father last new year).” 
 
Prince Henry of Battenberg

Only one example has been found of the monarch attending the marriage ceremony of a servant.  Victoria McDonald was the only child of Annie McDonald, the Queen’s dresser and John McDonald the footman who died of consumption at the age of 38.  This Victoria married at Crathie in 1897.  The monarch recorded the event in her journal.  “Was present at the marriage of poor Victoria M^c Donald, (my good Annie's only child), with a young Englishman in the Excise, of the name of Blaker. It had had the entire approval of her mother. M^r Sibbald performed the ceremony & gave a very nice short address with excellent advice. When the service was over, I shook hands with both the couple & gave Victoria a small brooch.”

Generally, Heilan weddings were noisy, drunken affairs and young adulthood was not a period of life that the Queen found interesting in the progression of servant families.  Rather, she could relate to new life, possibly with hints of reincarnation, when a royal name was bestowed.  Also, she was moved by the death of valued retainers, who had given a lifetime of loyal service, their wives and mothers.  Funerals seemed to be a significant preoccupation of Queen Victoria, especially towards the end of her own life but the families of only three servants are known to have been blessed with her presence at their departure.

William Paterson, the long-serving Balmoral Head Gardener, was a case in point.  On this occasion, John Michie’s diary provides an independent check on the events of the day.  Proceedings started at the Patersons’ home.  Tuesday 6 October 1896.  “Mr. William Paterson, late gardener died at the dairy cottage (his passing was at the Dairy Cottage, not Daisy Cottage, as mis-reported in the Aberdeen Journal – a mutation which was subsequently replicated widely on the internet) on Monday morning the 5th (yesterday) at 3.10 o'clock.”  Wednesday 7 October.  “Drove to Balmoral in the morning taking Mrs M with me to pay her last respects to poor old Mr Paterson and to see his widow.”  Thursday 8 October.  “Attended Wm Paterson's funeral in a downpour of rain. The Queen was present at the service in this wise - we carried out the Coffin & placed it on a table covered with a white cloth at the door, the Queen's carriage being drawn up near.  The Revd Mr Souper of the Free Church officiated as the deceased belonged to that sect.  Still it rained and the Queen who scanned the proceedings through an opera glass, sent round word to keep on hats, in consequence of the rain, while the service was going on.  There was no hearse, the company carrying the coffin shoulder high, in changing fours, proceeded to the graveyard.  HM following as far as the bridge in her carriage.”  Princess Beatrice’s take on proceedings - “A hopelessly wet day with a very high wind. — Good old Paterson was buried today & I saw his funeral passing.  It was largely attended & Sir A. Bigge, Fritz Ponsonby & Sir J. Reid followed.” – was brevity itself, but consistent with the Michie version.  It is to be wondered if the monarch would have put down her opera glass and stepped out of the carriage, if the skies had not opened?

John Grant was for 25 years the head keeper on the Balmoral estate and was much esteemed by HM the Queen and by the late Prince Consort.  He retired in the winter of 1873, due to deteriorating health and finally died on Monday 17 November 1879.  The monarch recorded in her journal, “Soon after I came home from my drive, heard that poor Grant had breathed his last.”  The Queen had been due to depart for Windsor on Friday 21 November but, because she especially wanted to pay her respects to her late servant, who had served faithfully for so long, she delayed her departure to Tuesday 25 November.  The Court Circular for 18 November contained a prominent paragraph about the death of the late head keeper.

The funeral took place on Friday 21 November, the mourners gathering at Rhebreck Cottage, the home of the Grants.  Queen Victoria, accompanied by Princess Beatrice and attended by the Ladies Erroll and Drummond, took a carriage to the house where the brief funeral service was conducted by Rev Campbell, with the Queen present along with many gentlemen of the Household, including Sir John Clark, Dr Andrew Robertson and Dr Alexander Profeit, relatives, friends, estate tenants and other servants.  A cortege then formed to take the coffin to St Andrew’s churchyard, Braemar (where John Grant had been born) but the rain began to pour down.  The followers included three royal carriages and four private vehicles, the Queen taking her place.  The procession moved off slowly along the North Deeside Road to the turn for Balmoral, where the Queen’s own carriage peeled off and returned to the castle.  The remainder of the cortege continued westward.  After the interment, half a dozen wreaths of everlasting flowers from the Queen and other members of the Royal Family were arranged on the grave.  The monarch visited widow Elizabeth Grant to comfort her before the Royal company departed for the South. 

John Brown senior, the father of the Queen’s Highland servant, died at Wester Micras, Crathie, part of the Invercauld estate, on 18 October 1875.  The day of the funeral was 21 October and the weather was foul.  It had rained for nine days in a row and the unmade track to Wester Micras was a mire.  As the monarch’s carriage approached the house it met a large crowd of attendees.  The Queen’s tally was as follows.  “All my keepers, Mitchell the blacksmith (from Clachanturn), Symon, Grant, Brown’s five uncles, Leys, Thomson (postmaster), and the forester, people below Micras and in Aberarder, and my people; Heale, Lohlein (returned this day from a week’s leave), Cowley Jarrett, Ross and Collins (sergeant footman), Brown and his four brothers including Donald … also the Hon. M. West, Mr. Sahl, Drs. Marshall and Profeit, Mr. Begg, and Dr. Robertson …”.  John Brown (still being referred to as “Brown”) was also present.  The monarch was escorted through the throng and into the kitchen, where she found Mrs Margaret Brown in a distressed state.  The coffin was in the other small room of the cottage and the crowd spilled out through the only door.  Rev Campbell conducted the service, beginning with a prayer and at that point old Mrs Brown got up and went to stand near the Queen, “able to hear, though, alas! not to see”.  On completion of the service, the Brown brothers carried the coffin to the hearse, which from the state of the track was some distance off the house and the crowd, with the exception of the monarch’s “gentlemen”, who followed in their carriages, walked to Crathie churchyard.  The Queen did not follow but re-entered the farmhouse to comfort Margaret Brown, who was “sobbing bitterly”.  “I went back to the house, and tried to soothe and comfort dear old Mrs. Brown, and gave her a mourning brooch with a little bit of her husband’s hair which had been cut off yesterday, and I shall give a locket to each of the sons.”  Queen Victoria then took diluted whisky and farm cheese “…according to the universal Highland custom, and then left, begging the dear old lady to bear up. I told her the parting was but for a time.”  The Queen then departed and watched proceedings in the churchyard from her carriage, using opera glasses, before returning to the castle.

It is a remarkable fact that Queen Victoria attended Brown senior’s funeral in person, since he was not an employee, or a former employee and he was not a tenant of the Royal estates on Deeside.  Royal involvement in the funeral was announced in the Court Circular.  The monarch’s extensive account of the event, in her own hand and unmodified by the pen of Princess Beatrice, was presented in in her journal compilation, “More Leaves”.  She had no qualms about revealing to the public the closeness of her relationship with the Browns.  It was an inevitable conclusion that John senior’s qualification for Royal patronage, so publicly displayed, was simply that he was the father of the son.  Through their second oldest son, the Brown family had a standing with the monarch which was much higher than that enjoyed by other Highlander families in her employ, no matter how long, or dutiful, their service.

The incongruity of the monarch’s conduct did not go unnoticed by the press and some newspapers gave stinging critiques of the occasion.  The London correspondent of the Ulster Gazette reported as follows.  ““The paragraph in the Court Circular a day or two ago gravely and officially announcing as an important fact that the Queen had attended the funeral of John Brown’s father was not altogether pleasant reading for the English people.  That the Sovereign of England with her youngest daughter should trudge through the mud and slush of a flooded Highland road after the remains of an obscure tenant would not have been believed but for this court paragraph to which I have referred.  Good, is it not, to be a relative of “Her Majesty’s personal attendant, Mr John Brown?” for so the lucky ghillie is described in the interesting communique in question., which also informs the public that four of the Brown family are in the Queen’s service.  We have been wondering here how the Marchioness of Ely who attended the Sovereign liked her walk and how her ladyship appreciated tramping through the mire after the coffin of a dependent of Balmoral Castle, “much respected in the country” though the old gentleman may have been.  Really, we in London have no patience over such stuff as this.  On our side of the Border persons of eminence in various walks of life, who must have been personally known to the Queen for years, die and are buried but when did Her Majesty appear at any of their funerals? … As to the family Brown, let them bask in the Royal favour during the present reign, for should the Prince of Wales be called upon to exchange Abergeldie for Balmoral you may depend upon it that he will make very short work of them.”  This prophesy proved to be devastatingly accurate after the Queen’s demise in 1901, as far as John Brown’s memorials were concerned.

Unmoved by criticism in the newspapers, the Queen continued to make occasional visits to Mrs Margaret Brown.  On 21 October she found Mrs Brown was still distressed and kept uttering “Old John's awa!" and on 22 November, shortly before her departure for Windsor, she made a final visit, finding the old lady, “better & more cheerful, though rather upset at wishing us goodbye”.

Donald Stewart was in the service of Queen Victoria and King Edward VII for over 60 years.  He died at Dantzig Shiel in 1909, in the reign of King Edward.  However, the prestige that he accumulated during this long period of service was almost entirely in the time of the Queen, as he retired in late 1901.  Nonetheless, the conduct of and representation at his funeral showed that King Edward too appreciated this lifetime of faithful service.  The funeral took place on 13 August 1909 from the Stewart home to Crathie churchyard and the pomp of the occasion was elevated by the attendance of the Balmoral Highlanders, dressed in Royal Stuart tartan.  None of the royal family was present but they were represented by very senior courtiers, Sir Dighton Probyn (Keeper of the Privy Purse) on behalf of King Edward, Earl Howe (Lord Chamberlain to Queen Alexandra) attended for Her Majesty, with Colonel Harry Legge in place of the Prince and Princess of Wales.  Wreathes were sent by the Queen and the Princess Royal and the coffin was carried by four Balmoral gamekeepers.  Unlike the funerals of many Balmoral retainers, the weather remained fine.

The death and funeral of John Brown, Highland attendant.  John Brown died on 27 March 1883 at Windsor Castle, but it was inevitable that he would be returned to Deeside for burial alongside his parents (his mother had died in 1876) in Crathie churchyard and this prevented the monarch from being present both at the funeral service and at the graveside.  She was, in any case, immobilised at the time, due to a damaged knee sustained when she fell down a flight of stairs.  However, it did not preclude her deep involvement in either the mourning of John Brown’s demise, or the events leading up to his interment, or his subsequent memorialisation.

Dr James Reid was an Aberdonian, born at Ellon in 1849.  He attended Aberdeen Grammar School and then Aberdeen University, graduating MA in 1869 and MB, CM in 1872.  Dr Reid practised in Edinburgh and then London before being appointed as Resident Physician to Queen Victoria in 1881 and Physician-in-Ordinary in 1889.  In addition to overseeing the health of the monarch, James Reid also ministered to John Brown.
 
Sir James Reid

The Queen’s Highland Attendant had a long history of recurrent bacterial skin disease, possibly from as early as 1865.  In “More Leaves”, the Queen noted on 11 October of that year, “Was much distressed at breakfast to find that poor Brown’s legs had been dreadfully cut by the edge of his wet kilt on Monday, just at the back of the knee, and he said nothing about it; but to-day one became so inflamed, and swelled so much, that he could hardly move.”  In 1877, HMS Thunderer, 9,480 tons, was commissioned into the Royal Navy and in August the Queen visited the vessel, accompanied by John Brown.  He proceeded to fall through an open hatch in a gun turret and damaged his shins which took a long time to heal.  Also, by this time Brown was drinking heavily and suffering from both erysipelas and cellulitis.  Thus, James Reid’s Highlander patient was already in poor health at the time of Reid’s appointment.

In early March 1883, John Brown had noticeably declined and on 25^th of the month, he woke up to find that erysipelas had flared up on his face again.  Brown was seen by James Reid but, in those pre-antibiotic days, there was little Reid could do to help.  The following day, Brown’s skin condition had deteriorated and, additionally, he was displaying the symptoms of delirium tremens.  It was clear to James Reid that Brown was seriously ill, but the monarch did not fully appreciate the gravity of his situation, even suggesting to her physician that Dr Alexander Profeit be brought up from Balmoral to help with nursing Brown.  The following day, 27 March, was a trying time for James Reid.  He was informed that his own father had expired the previous evening, but he could not be released to travel to Scotland with Brown being so ill.  In fact, James Reid thought that John Brown was dying, and his demise came at Windsor Castle late that same day.  He had served the monarch for 34 years.

 

John Brown’s death had a devastating impact on the Queen.  Her own words were that she was “Utterly crushed”.  She had already been temporarily immobilised by her damaged knee, but the psychological impact of Brown’s passing left her unable to walk for many weeks.  She was grief-stricken.  James Reid said of his Royal patient, “The Queen is in a great state of grief about him”.  John Brown’s body was placed in a double oak coffin and the Queen instructed that several items should be confined within its recess, perhaps the most significant being a plain gold wedding ring which had belonged to Mrs Margaret Brown.  It had been passed on to her son and, in turn, given by John Brown to the monarch.

Arrangements were made to transport the coffin to Deeside by rail but before the departure from Windsor Castle two religious events were held.  Firstly, a Presbyterian service conducted in Brown’s apartments, in the presence of the Queen and Princess Beatrice and secondly, at the visitors’ entrance to the castle involving the Royal household and officials.  Just before 17.00 on 3 April 1883 John Brown’s coffin, festooned with floral tributes from the Queen and others, left the castle for the Windsor train station, being taken in through the Queen’s private waiting room.  A van (for the coffin) and a saloon (for the travelling mourners) were attached to a London and North West Railway train.  Those making the journey north included brothers Donald, William, Hugh and Archie, Dr Profeit, Balmoral Commissioner, Mr Overton, Head Gamekeeper and Mr Tait, Royal Bailiff, Mr Newel, Page of the Back Stairs, Mr Power, Sergeant Footman,  Mr Thomson, Gentleman Porter and Mr Hutchinson, Royal Stables.

The coffin’s journey along the Deeside line on Wednesday 4 April was met at every station by crowds of the curious.  At the thronged Ballater terminus, John Brown’s remains were transferred to a hearse for the final leg to Balmoral.  There the coffin entered Baile-na-Coile and rested overnight on a table in the middle of the dining room.  After the safe arrival on the estate, Dr Profeit, as commanded by Her Majesty, telegraphed the news to Windsor Castle.  John Brown had never spent a night in the Queen’s gift-house while he was alive.  There were many wreathes, including three from Queen Victoria, and others from both royalty and nobility.  This “lying in state” afforded an opportunity for the nosey to view the house as well as the coffin.  Visitors were received by Dr Profeit and one of the brothers’ wives and then conducted into the house.  The dining room was festooned with pictures of members of the Royal Family, including a signed proof portrait of the Queen, dated 1877.  There were also pictures of hunting scenes.  The room was elaborately furnished, the chairs all bearing the royal arms in relief.  At the front of the house were two spruce trees planted respectively by the monarch and by Princess Beatrice, both on the same day, 24 Nov 1879.  This was the Queen’s last day at Balmoral that autumn, but the tree planting was not mentioned in her journal.

 

Twelve noon was the official time on 5 April for the start of the service but, in accordance with local custom, the attendees straggled in over the next hour.  In addition to those representing the monarchy there were large numbers of local residents, servants and tenants on the Royal estates present.  It was estimated that between 400 and 500 persons made an appearance.  The mourners were greeted with an offer of cheese, biscuits and whisky, as was the custom and some visitors subsequently retired to the back of the property for a smoke while they waited for the service to begin.  At 12.45 the hearse, an especially elaborate vehicle sent from Aberdeen and pulled, at the Queen’s command, by a pair of bays from Braemar, appeared.  The massive coffin, weighing over half a ton, had to be measured to check that it would fit inside the transport.  Dr Profeit gave the order to move the body in its oak casing from its resting place to the space immediately outside the front door, where it was placed on tressels, the head pointing to the house.  By command of the Queen, a Balmoral tartan plaid, specially despatched from Windsor, was cast over the coffin to form a pall.

Rev Archibald Campbell, Minister of Crathie, then conducted a brief service, opening with a reading from the 15^th chapter of St Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, which deals with the mystery of the Resurrection and finishing with a prayer, from the doorstep of Baile-na-Coile.  The coffin was then lifted into the hearse by the Brown brothers and the monarch’s wreaths placed on top.  Remaining wreaths were carried by the walking mourners and the cortege moved off to the Crathie burial ground about half a mile away.  There, in the middle of the enclosure, where John Brown’s parents and his then dead siblings were interred, a brick vault had been prepared to receive his coffin.  Rev Campbell then conducted a further service at the grave, ending with an “impressive prayer”, in conformity with the Queen’s wishes, but contrary to the norms of the Presbyterian church, before the coffin was lowered into the ground and the wreathes added.  The tomb was then sealed with heavy slabs of slate which were mortared, soil added, and the sod restored to ground level.  Dr Profeit then placed a massive metal wreath, of artificial violets in a setting of leaves, on the grass.  This last emblem was by command of the Queen, who had sent the two-foot diameter object in a case from Windsor, with the instruction that it should not be opened until the hour of the funeral.  It bore the same, hand-written and highly personal message as her ephemeral, floral tribute, which had been entombed.  The mourners then paused in silent remembrance for a few minutes before dispersing, an emotional James Brown, the eldest brother and the Balmoral shepherd, being one of the last to depart.

It must have been with great relief that Alexander Profeit trudged home to Craiggowan that afternoon, happy in the knowledge that this important and significant event, under his charge, had passed off smoothly.  As instructed, he telegraphed Queen Victoria to give her the news that her commands had been accomplished.

Servant house building

Queen Victoria and Prince Albert took over an estate which, in 1848, was not particularly well maintained and the existing castle inadequate for royal needs.  The access roads were rough and limited in extent and the estate cottages required repairs and improvements.  Between their visits in September 1848 and the same month of the following year, in addition to the major improvements to Balmoral Castle and Birkhall House, some works were carried out to the estate, for example, various roads, paths and the access to Allt na Guibhsaich were improved.  Two new huts were also added to that property.  However, it was probably not until their 1849 visit that they realised how poor the accommodation was that some of their tenants occupied.  The Queen visited Mrs Frazer in Crathie village and found her “in her miserable little place which is all she has to live in”.  The royal couple also “went 1^rst, to see old Francois' cottage, Albert being shocked at the miserable place, & old M^rs Grant's, which also lets the wet in. We intend to improve some of these cottages a little.”  Prince Albert and Dr Robertson subsequently toured some of the cottages together, presumably to agree a programme of work for the following year.  In fact, by September 1850, a new cottage was being constructed for Mrs Grant.  Shortly after her arrival at Balmoral in September 1852, the Queen remarked, “We took a charming long walk, round by the village, where D^r Robertson has made such improvement”.  And, “We went round by Balnacroft, where there are several nice new Cottages, & old ones repaired, with new roofs, which makes them look quite well. Peter Farquharson has a Charming house, — the best built of any, but not yet quite finished.” 

In 1852, the Queen received £500,000 from the estate of James Camden Neild and this money was used to fund the building of the new castle and an ongoing programme of improvements throughout the estate, extending over many years.  The Queen noted in early September, “… the money in the fund amounts 337,500, & odd pounds, & the landed estates to 5,300, so that altogether I shall have £ 12,000 a year by it!! This is as much as the Duchy of Lancaster yields.”

Bridge Lodge, a new school near the distillery and the new bridge at Invercauld were completed in 1859.  New farm buildings had been built at Invergelder by August 1860.  Subsequent projects on the estate provided accommodation for use by the monarch but, at the same time provided a home for a servant.  Some of these ventures were new builds (eg Glas-allt-Shiel new build completed in 1868) and others were upgrades (eg Ballochbuie Lodge modified in 1885) of existing properties.  However, the Queen and the Prince also provided new accommodation for both senior and valued servants.  Very often these new properties were designed in unusual architectural styles.  Almost all were constructed in local grey granite, like the new castle.  The following examples have been uncovered.

The Croft was built for John Grant, the head keeper, and his family, construction beginning in 1858.  He had previously lived at Invergelder Cottage which had been “enlarged and made very nice” for him between September 1849 and September 1850.  The Grants lived in the Croft until John retired in 1875, when his replacement, Donald Stewart and his family moved there.  Donald Stewart ended his career in 1901 and moved to the Dantzig Shiel, which allowed Arthur Grant, the new head keeper and son of John, to occupy the Croft.

The Croft

 

Rhebreck, which means “Speckled cattle run”, was started in 1859.  It was designed by John Beaton, the Balmoral Clerk of Works. Rhebreck was built to accommodate keeper, Charles Duncan who had been appointed at Balmoral in 1851 and who initially lived in a cottage built where the Glasallt burn runs into Loch Muick.  Charles Duncan left the Queen’s service in 1868 to work for the Prince of Wales at Birkhall.  The property was then occupied by keeper Donald Stewart.   In 1875 John Grant moved to Rhebreck, swapping with the Stewarts.  After the death of John in 1879, his widow remained there with her son Arthur, then an under-keeper.  He married in 1881, remaining at the family home with his wife until 1902, while his mother went to live in a “little cottage”, Craiglourigan, near to Crathie.

Rhebreck

 

Craiglourigan Cottage, East Balmoral, was built about 1865 and at an early stage was occupied by PC Ogston.  In 1875 the cottage was let to Mrs Margaret Brown, John Brown’s mother, whose husband, John senior, had died that year.  Margaret Brown herself died at Craiglourigan cottage after less than a year’s occupation.  At a subsequent date, Mrs Elizabeth Grant, widow of John Grant moved into Craiglourigan, though the exact year is uncertain.  In 1881, the Queen noted visiting Mrs Grant at Rhebreck but she may have moved the same year to Craiglourigan.  She died at Craiglourigan in 1887.

Craiglourigan Cottage

Baile-na-Coile, which means House of the Woods, was built as a retirement home for John Brown, with construction starting in either 1876 or 1877.  It is unclear who was the architect responsible for the design.  It may have been Mills and Shepherd of Dundee, or it may alternatively have been the work of John Beaton.  The house must have been completed in 1877, because Hugh Brown, John Brown’s brother, was living there in that year and continued his occupation until at least 1881.  John Brown, who died in 1883 never lived at Baile-na-Coile, though his body lay in state there on the night before his funeral.  Because the house was gifted to John Brown by the monarch, it formed part of his estate when he died and was inherited collectively by his brothers.

William Brown was the brother who did not enter royal service but farmed at The Bush, the Brown family farm.  In 1884, possibly as a result of his inheritance from brother John’s estate, William retired from farming and a displenish sale was held at The Bush.  Subsequently, William and his wife Lizzie occupied Baile-na-Coile until at least 1900, when Lizzie died and possibly much later, perhaps to 1904.  About 1905, when the house was returned to the ownership of the monarch, it was let to John Michie, who by then was estate factor for Balmoral.  It appears to have been used as the factor’s house ever since.  Alterations to the building took place in 1902 – 1903 under the authorship of Sir Rowand Atkinson, the well-known Edinburgh architect.

Interestingly, Baile-na-Coile receives no mention in the Princess Beatrice edition of her mother’s journals.

Baile-na-Coile

Glas-allt-Shiel was planned as early as 1866, construction started in mid-1867 and it was ready for occupation in late 1868.  Although called a “cottage” by the monarch, it was a substantial house of 15 rooms, all for the use of Queen Victoria.  Additionally, there was accommodation for a keeper at the rear of the property.  So, the principal purpose of creating the Glas-allt-Shiel was to provide the Queen with a wild retreat and only incidentally to create accommodation for a keeper.

Glas-allt-Shiel about 1870

Craiggowan.  The date of construction is unclear.  Year 1871 has been claimed for the start of building work but looks much too early.  The late 1870s – early 1880s would be a more believable period, since the first known occupant of Craiggowan was Dr Alexander Profeit, who became Royal Commissioner in 1874 on the retiral of Dr Andrew Robertson.  However, Profeit’s initial accommodation at Balmoral was at Abergeldie Mains, the home farm on the Abergeldie estate and he was still there in 1881, but he had moved to Craiggowan by 1882.  It could be that Craiggowan was built specifically to accommodate the new Commissioner, as his predecessor’s permanent home was not at Balmoral and he did not require a grand presence on the estate.

Dr Profeit died at Craiggowan in early 1897.  He was succeeded by James Forbes, who lived in the house until his resignation in late 1901.  John Michie, on his appointment as factor, must then have had the expectation that Craiggowan would be his next domestic destination, but King Edward VII decided otherwise.  The house would instead be enlarged for the use of the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Michies went to live at Abergeldie Mains until Baile-na-Coile became free.

Craiggowan

Dantzig Shiel.  This “cottage” was actually a substantial, albeit single-storey, house, which was designed by John Beaton.  It was a new-build, though there were some ruins in the vicinity.  Work on it began in 1880.  The building has extended roof overhangs in a Swiss chalet style.  A contemporary newspaper report suggested that the purpose was to provide the Queen with rooms but also to accommodate the head keeper.  In fact, on completion in 1882, it became the family home of John Michie, his wife Helen and their children for the next 20 years.  Michie was appointed in 1880, so it is possible that the Dantzig was built with him in mind, but it is not clear that this was the royal intention.  Finally, only a small number of rooms, between one and three, was retained for royal use.  When the Michies moved out in 1901, the recently retired Donald Stewart replaced them.

Dantzig Shiel

Karim Cottage, which was built for Munshi Abdul Karim, the Queen’s Indian teacher and secretary, close to Balmoral Castle in 1893, should be mentioned, though Karim himself does not qualify for inclusion in the present study.  Modifications were made to Karim Cottage in 1899.  This cottage, unlike all the other residences mentioned here, was of less substantial construction, consisting of lathe timber on a concrete base.  Queen Victoria also provided two further cottages, Frogmore at Windsor and Arthur at Osborne, for the use of Karim and his family.

It will be clear from the illustrations of these buildings, that their design and construction was not skimped and several of them – Craiggowan, Danzig Shiel, Glas-allt-Shiel, Baile-na-Coile and The Croft were grand in scale and superior in design.  They were intended to impress, and they did so.  Craiggowan, The Croft and Baile-na-Coile were a reward for service or a recognition of the status of the first occupants, worthy recipients of the monarch’s largess.  But one of them, Baile-na-Coile stands out as being different from all other servant housing, because it was gifted to John Brown, though it subsequently returned to royal ownership as part of the Balmoral estate.  It should also be born in mind that John Brown never married or had a family and that Baile-na-Coile, a very substantial two-storey house, was for his sole use.

Karim Cottage


Abdul Karim

Memorialisation 

From her earliest days at Balmoral, Queen Victoria indulged in cairn building to commemorate events which to her were significant, including deaths, marriages and property acquisitions.  The Balmoral land, strewn as it was with granite boulders deposited during the last ice age, lent itself to this process.  Cairns now adorn local promontories dedicated to the life events of several of her children - Princess Helena, Princess Louise, Prince Leopold, Prince Arthur, Princess Alice and, most magnificent of all, the pyramidal monument to the memory of her late husband, Prince Albert.  But that was not the limit of the monarch’s memorialisation.  A visit to Crathie churchyard is also fascinating and instructive for anyone interested in Queen Victoria and her life at Balmoral.  Within a few hundred square metres, the graves of many of the servant characters mentioned here, or at least a cenotaph, will be found.  These granitic tablets were mostly sponsored by the Queen as a mark of respect for faithful servants.  Sometimes Queen Victoria made clear by the wording on a memorial that she was the instigator.  In other cases, her hand is not explicit, but still suspected.  Such graveyard memorials were not the limit of the monarch’s memorialisation of her favourite servants.  She found other ways, too, to record her thoughts on their characters, such as the presentation of medals, honours and inscribed gifts.

Prince Albert's cairn

Peter Farquharson’s gravestone is typical of those commanded by the Queen.  Part of its inscription reads, “Erected by the Queen in memory of Peter Farquharson who served Her Majesty faithfully as gamekeeper for 27 years and who died at Balnacroft 25 May 1874 aged 70 years”.  Often, as in this case, the inscription was extended, after the Queen’s death, on the interment of other family members.

Peter Farquharson gravestone

 

James Bowman died in tragic circumstances, entangled in a wire fence and the event is recorded on a plaque set into the boundary wall.  “This tablet has been placed here to the memory of James Bowman by the Queen whom he served faithfully for 17 years as gamekeeper who died 9 Sep 1885 from a sad accident in the Balochbuie aged 71 years and whose remains rest in this kirkyard.  In the midst of life, we are in death”.  Her Majesty also placed a memorial stone at the site of the accident. 

Annie McDonald, the Queen’s long-serving wardrobe maid, is commemorated with another massive red granite gravestone.  “This stone is placed by Queen Victoria in grateful and affectionate remembrance of Annie McDonald daughter of William Mitchell of Clachanturn and widow of John McDonald”.  

John Morgan junior’s gravestone does not identify its sponsor but, from the poetic addition to the inscription, it looks likely that it was the Queen.  “Erected in memory of John Morgan junior who died at West Lodge Balmoral 23rd July 1890 aged 62 who was 39 years gamekeeper in the service of Her Majesty the Queen.  He rests beneath the shadow of his native hills, the hills he loved in youthful days to climb, where wave the graceful birch, the dark pine tree, where grows the purple heather, the fragrant thyme, he calmly rests asleep till that great day when everlasting hills shall melt away”.  Is it possible that the author was Tennyson, a close confidant of Queen Victoria?  The verse certainly has a style similar to that of the then poet laureate.

John Grant, who was born in Braemar, chose to be buried in St Andrew’s churchyard there and his gravestone was instructed by Queen Victoria.  It reads, “To the beloved memory of John Grant, for 26 years the faithful head forester to the Prince Consort and Queen Victoria who died at Rebrake, 17^th November, 1879 aged 69 years.  Loved one, thou’rt gone before; Thy pilgrim days are done; We soon shall meet thee on that shore, Where partings are unknown.”  The monarch, not fully satisfied with this display, also placed a granite tablet in the boundary wall of Crathie churchyard, dedicated to both John and Elizabeth Grant which reads, “In memory of John Grant for 26 years the faithful head forester to the Prince Consort & Queen Victoria, d Rebreck 17 Nov 1879 aged 69; his wife Elizabeth Robbie d Craig Lourigan Cottage 29 Nov 1887 aged 70.  Much beloved by Queen Victoria and all the Royal Family.  Erected by Her Majesty Queen Victoria.  Their remains are interred in Braemar”.

John Grant cenotaph, Crathie

John Brown, Highland Servant.  The father and mother of John Brown, John senior and Margaret, and his five younger brothers and sisters who had predeceased him were all buried in the family plot in Crathie churchyard.  After his mother had died in 1876, John Brown junior raised a granite headstone over their graves.  By this time, he had become relatively wealthy and could afford such a memorial.  The inscription reads as follows.  “Here lie the remains of John Brown sometime farmer in Bush of Crathienaird who died at Wester Micras 18 Oct 1875 aged 86 years; and of Margaret Leys, his wife, who died at Craiglourican Cottage 2nd Aug 1876 aged 77 years; also of their five children: Francis died 1 Mar 1831 aged 3 yrs, Francis died 27 Nov 1849 aged 10 yrs, Margaret died 12 Dec 1849 aged 14 yrs, Charles died 27 Dec 1849 aged 17 yrs, Anne died 1 Nov 1867 aged 37 yrs.  This Stone is erected in affectionate remembrance of his parents, brothers and sisters by John Brown.  Two other Brown brothers are also buried at Crathie, William Brown, the farming brother who remained at The Bush, is buried with his wife, Elizabeth and son Albert.  Hugh Brown is buried together with his wife, Jessie and the form of his memorial inscription suggests that Queen Victoria may have been involved, due to the reference to royal service by both Hugh and John.  “In loving memory of Hugh Brown Highland attendant to Queen Victoria for 7 years brother of John Brown the Queen’s Personal Attendant.  Died at East Lodge, Balmoral March 29^th 1896, aged 57 years”.

John Brown, Highland servant, was also interred in the family plot and his gravestone sits, side-by-side, with his own memorial to his parents but Brown’s monument was raised by Queen Victoria and it shows.  “This stone is erected in affectionate and grateful remembrance of John Brown the devoted and faithful personal attendant and beloved friend of Queen Victoria in whose service he had been for 34 years.  Born at Crathienaird 8 Dec 1826 died at Windsor Castle 27 Mar 1883.  That friend on whose fidelity you count that friend given you by circumstances over which you have no control was God’s own gift.  Well done good and faithful servant thou hast been faithful over a few things I will make thee ruler over many things enter thou into the joy of the Lord”.  This dedication goes way beyond any of the other memorial offerings of the Queen to long-serving retainers.  John Brown was not just a faithful servant but a “beloved friend” and “God’s own gift”.  And what was the monarch referring to with “I will make thee ruler over many things”?

The Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore in Windsor Great Park has been used for royal burials since it was consecrated in 1928.  Also, within its boundary are two mausoleums, one containing the coffins of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert and the other containing the remains of the Duchess of Kent, Queen Victoria’s mother.  When John Brown died in 1883, Queen Victoria had a large brass plate commemorating him mounted in the Royal Mausoleum.  However, the Highland servant only temporarily achieved royal status in death.  When Prince Albert Edward rose to the throne in 1901, he immediately had this metal plaque removed.  It is said that one should not make enemies on the way up in life, because you never know when such people may be needed as friends.  Perhaps John Brown did not hear, or never understood such advice?  Another illustration of John Brown’s unpopularity, which surfaced immediately after his death concerned the issuing of funeral tie-pins to courtiers.  According to Raymond Lamont-Brown, Alexander Profeit, who was hostile to Brown and his influence, received such a tie-pin and wore it, of necessity, when he went to see the monarch, but put it in his pocket when out and about at Balmoral in case it induced mirth in those he met.

John Brown gravestone

Medals and Honours

The Faithful Service Medal.  In 1871 this silver medal was introduced by Queen Victoria to reward John Brown for his long royal service.  Ten years later, Brown was able to add a bar to his award denoting the additional decade of attendance on the monarch.  This award was transmogrified into the Royal Victorian Order (RVO) in 1896.  It is in the gift of the monarch and is used to reward personal service, with five hierarchical grades.  John Michie received the bronze medal of the RVO in 1887 and the silver medal in 1897.  He also received the Victorian Medal from King Edward in 1901 for services to the late Queen as Forester.  John Troup, the Balmoral gardener received the bronze medal in 1903 from King Edward.  James Forbes, the Balmoral Commissioner was admitted to the Fifth Class of the RVO in 1901.  Of all the royal servants, Munshi Hafez Abdul Karim received the highest grade, being appointed a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in 1899, having already been created a Companion of the Order of the Indian Empire.  It is likely that some of the Faithful Service Medal awards to servants have not been uncovered.

The Devoted Service Medal.  The Queen created and bestowed a quite different medal, the Devoted Service Medal (pressed in gold) on her Highland servant.  This award followed an attempt on the life of Her Majesty by one Arthur Connor outside Buckingham Palace.  John Brown spotted the intending assailant, who jumped onto the monarch’s carriage.  Brown grabbed the intruder and prevented any attack.  The Queen believed that John Brown had saved her life.  This medal bears the following inscription on its reverse side.  “To John Brown, Esq., in recognition of his presence of mind and devotion at Buckingham Palace, February 29, 1872.”  The award is now defunct.

The Golden Jubilee Medal (1887).  This medal celebrated the 50-year anniversary of Queen Victoria’s accession to the throne.  It was granted to those involved in the official celebrations.  Queen Victoria’s crowned head, designed by JE Boehm, adorns one side.  The Queen recorded making personal presentations of the medal to Alexander Profeit, the Balmoral Commissioner, Donald Stewart, the Head Keeper and to Mrs Grant, the widow of John Grant the former Head Keeper.  Again, this may only be only a partial list of Balmoral recipients.

Diamond Jubilee Medal (1897).  Presentation of this medal followed the precedent established a decade earlier to reward those involved in the celebrations instituted to mark the 60-year reign of the monarch.  Anyone who had already received the Golden Jubilee Medal was awarded an inscribed bar to be worn on the ribbon.  It appears to have been extensively distributed to the staff at Balmoral, as John Michie wrote in October 1897, “Almost everybody now connected with the place must have got one”.  Michie himself was a recipient of the medal, both in 1887 and in 1897.  He was sent around the Deeside estates to collate a list of all those who had received such medals, presumably because so many had been distributed that no reliable official tally had been kept.  He wrote in October of the latter year, “Went to the Castle by command & in the drawing room along with a few more was presented by the Queen with a silver jubilee medal for 1897 by Her Majesty”. 

The special position of John Brown

There were several actions taken by Queen Victoria which emphasised that John Brown was a servant in a separate category from all others.  The earliest such indicator was probably the initiative she took in 1865 to urge her then commissioner, Andrew Robertson, to investigate the family history of John Brown, with the aim of placing the Browns at a higher social station than that warranted by their working of a Deeside farm.  Robertson managed this, nigh impossible, task by finding a link between the Browns and his own family through a family called Shaw which hailed from Badenoch, the area around Kingussie in the Spey Valley.  By investing the Shaws with characteristics such as “handsome” and “noble”, and describing one of them as a “Highland gentleman”, whether justified or not, Andrew Robertson skilfully provided the monarch with social straws for her to clutch.  In truth, the connection was so remote as to be almost insignificant, but that did not matter to Queen Victoria.  She grasped the “proof” she had sought, and her belief would not be shaken.  By the end of 1872 John Brown had been invested with the courtesy title of “Esquire”, which denoted someone of a higher social standing, below that of Knight but above a mere Gentleman.

Following the death of John Brown in 1883, in addition to the memorialisations at Crathie and Frogmore, mentioned above, the monarch took other opportunities to pour out both her grief and her rose-tinted descriptions of her Highland servant’s personal qualities.  Almost immediately after Brown’s funeral she instructed JE Boehm to create a life-size bronze statue of the Highlander in full attire.  Once completed it was installed near to the Garden Cottage but did not survive the purge by King Edward in 1901, when it was moved to an obscure location in the wood behind Baile-na-Coile, where it stands to this day.  The base of the statue bears the inscription “Friend more than Servant. Loyal. Truthful. Brave. Self less than Duty, even to the Grave.  It is thought that Alfred Lord Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, may have composed this caption.

Just as she had done in the aftermath of the death of Prince Alfred, Queen Victoria planned a further volume of extracts from her journals to illustrate her life in the Highlands during her widowhood. This volume, “More Leaves” was published in late 1883 and contained the following dedication.  “A few words I must add in conclusion to this volume. The faithful attendant who was so often mentioned throughout these Leaves, is no longer with her whom he served so truly, devotedly, untiringly.  In the fulness of health and strength he was snatched away from his career of usefulness, after an illness of only three days, on the 27th of March of this year, respected and beloved by all who recognised his rare worth and kindness of heart, and truly regretted by all who knew him.  His loss to me (ill and helpless as I was at the time from an accident) is irreparable, for he deservedly possessed my entire confidence; and to say that he is daily, nay, hourly, missed by me, whose lifelong gratitude he won by his constant care, attention, and devotion, is but a feeble expression of the truth.  A truer, nobler, trustier heart, more loyal, and more loving, never beat within a human breast.  Balmoral: November 1883”.  John Brown is not mentioned by name, but no further aid to the identification of the subject is needed.  These were the types of words which the monarch did not use about any other servant.

Queen Victoria conceived an even more ambitious project to assuage her feelings of hopelessness after the Highlander’s death.  She decided to publish a memoir of John Brown’s royal service.  Her senior advisers were horrified at the potential of such a volume to excite the prurient interest of the public and did everything possible to deflect the Queen from her intended goal.  Although the work was produced, skillful manoeuvring by her advisers steered the volume away from the publisher and the printing press and, like other embarrassing royal materials, it “disappeared”.

The impediments to studying Queen Victoria’s friendships with her Scottish servants

Any work of biography has to contend with the problem of incomplete data and the picture which emerges from any study might be likened to a jig-saw puzzle which has an unknown number of missing pieces.  The deficient areas may be significant or insignificant in terms of absent content, but much of the time the investigator is unaware that an important occurrence has not been portrayed.  Certainly, the present work suffers from such knowledge gaps.  On the one hand, Queen Victoria has left behind a vast array of biographical material which has in turn generated many works of royal biography.  On the other hand, she employed and interacted with a vast army of servants, not all of whom, even in the circumscribed context of employment at Balmoral, or of a Scottish origin, are known by name.  The more than twenty servants included here are thought to contain all those with significant interactions with the monarch, but that statement is not made with complete confidence.

 

The limited information available on individual servants usually arose incidentally from a relatively detailed account of some event involving the Queen.  Thus, the biographical information presented on almost all the named servants inevitable contains major data gaps.  The one exception to this generalisation was John Michie, who, mercifully, left behind his diaries.  Without the information in those diaries, the estimation of the status of the Michie family in the eyes of the Queen would have been diminished.

Another major impediment to the present study relates to the published version of Queen Victoria’s journals, which has been severely and selectively truncated by Princess Beatrice.  Not only have incidents embarrassing to the Royal Family been extirpated but matters which it is suspected Beatrice considered to be insignificant have also been trimmed, or even completely removed by the royal editorial scalpel.  This certainly applies to information relating to servants, as shown by the reports on the same set of events available from sources independent of the royal journals.

Princess Beatrice

Despite these limiting circumstances, the remaining data which have been accumulated show that the Queen had several close relationships with her Scottish servants (mostly Highlanders), over and above the well-studied and publicised friendship with John Brown.  These friendships are important in themselves in filling out our knowledge of the monarch, but they also allow John Brown’s relationship with her to be seen in a broader context.

The 1848 cohort of Scottish servants.

The list of favoured servants compiled here contains a preponderance, not merely of Highlanders, but of Deeside natives who were either inherited from Sir Robert Gordon or who were recruited in the accession year.  John Grant, Donald Stewart, William Paterson, Peter Coutts and John Brown constituted that group.  John McDonald had been inducted into royal employment a year earlier.  Several others were recruited soon afterwards, including John Beaton, John A McDonald, Charles Duncan and Peter Farquharson.  Close relationships between the monarch and her servants were frequently formed within this group.

Princess Beatrice and the editing of Queen Victoria’s journals

Back in 1848, Queen Victoria was at the height of her adulation of all things Highland and the Deeside natives were included in that circle of admiration.  The earliest indicator of special approbation of individual servants came from comments made in the royal journals and many examples have been cited above.  But there remains a nagging worry about using data from this source and that concerns the editorial activities of Princess Beatrice, the Queen’s literary executor.  In truncating the diaries, Beatrice was following instructions to remove embarrassing content but in generating brevity, how zealous was she in carrying out this instruction?  What caveats should be placed on the use of data from the edited journals?  Is there any way of investigating Beatrice’s editorial work, especially relating to the early years at Balmoral when servant friendships were being formed and before any hint of scandal in such relationships?

After the death of Prince Albert in December 1861, Queen Victoria published a memoir, in early 1868, of their life together in the Highlands, consisting of extracts from her journals.  It was entitled “Leaves from a Journal of our Life in the Highlands”.  These extracts were not edited by Beatrice (born 1857) but by Arthur Helps, a talented literary personality who had been secretary to the Privy Council.  While Helps’ editorial work involved selection and truncation, at least it was subject to a different and possibly less prescriptive, set of instructions from those later imposed on Princess Beatrice.  A comparison of dated items from “Leaves” with entries for the same dates in the Beatrice version of the “Journals” may therefore be instructive.  It is unlikely that Helps included or excluded references to named servants on the basis of any personal prejudice about them, so the “Leaves” entries may provide a check on the later editorial activities of Beatrice in this regard.

Arthur Helps

In all cases there is a close similarity between members of paired entries and, in most cases, the entries in “Leaves” are much fuller than their counterparts in the Beatrice journals, suggesting that the former are more adjacent and perhaps much closer to the Queen’s original work.  A full textual analysis of the paired versions would be ideal, but that would be excessively time consuming.  What has been done here is to compare the servant names and frequency of mentions between Helps and Beatrice.  As might be expected, the Beatrice versions typically contain fewer mentions of a, sometimes smaller, number of servants.  Rarely, the opposite occurred, indicating that in some items in “Leaves” there had been extreme selection by Helps from the original generated by the monarch.  The visit to Loch Muick on 16 September 1850 is the most prominent example of this phenomenon, where four servants with five mentions in “Leaves” is matched by nine servants with 15 mentions in the “Journals”.

Two servants, John Brown and John Grant, have high numbers of citations, throughout the period 1848 – 1861, in both “Leaves” (37, 46) and the matching entries in the “Journals” (15, 21), the average reduction in mentions being to 41% and to 46% respectively.  This difference between Brown’s and Grant’s mentions is not statistically significant at the 5% level, suggesting that there was no marked name bias by Beatrice in removing servant references from the “Journals”.  This is interesting, because there was a marked contrast between the two men.  John Brown has been repeatedly linked to the monarch through an alleged inappropriate personal relationship, whereas John Grant was a model of probity throughout his long royal service.

Two obvious examples of bias by Princess Beatrice have been uncovered.  Queen Victoria and Prince Albert undertook four “Great Expeditions” through the Highlands from their Balmoral base in 1860 and 1861, involving staying away overnight.  The “First Great Expedition to Glen Fishie and Grantown” extended through 4 and 5 September 1860.  Both John Brown and John Grant were present and played leading roles, both as carriage drivers and as personal servants in the overnight hotel.  The two are mentioned 11 times on the first day and 12 times on the second day in the report in “Leaves”.  In contrast, the entries for 4 September and 5 September in the “Journals” name the two individuals 7 times on the first day and not at all on the second day.  This apparently deliberate omission by Princess Beatrice was repeated in her edited version of the report of the “Second Great Expedition to Invermark and Fettercairn” on 20 and 21 September 1861, when John Brown and John Grant were again the principal ghillies and were extensively referenced on the first day but omitted from the “Journals” report on the second day.  But this suggests a partiality against both servants and not just Brown.

The only possible case of predisposition by Princess Beatrice against John Brown related to an expedition to Morven, a mountain near to Balmoral, on 14 September 1859.  In that year, Prince Albert was president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, which was holding its annual meeting in Aberdeen.  Albert had gone to Aberdeen that day to attend the assembly of the “savants” and to make his presidential address.  Meanwhile, his wife essayed forth without her Consort but with her trusted Highland servant, John Brown, on the ascent of this unspectacular local Munro (Scottish mountain over 3,000 ft).  In the report in “Leaves”, Brown’s name is mentioned twice but in the “Journals” Brown’s name is replaced by “with ghillies”.  Did Princess Beatrice consider that this pairing of monarch and servant on the expedition might be deemed inappropriate in the absence of Prince Albert?

The above analysis suggests that it is probably safe to tread the reduction of servant mentions in the “Journals” generally as arising from truncation of the Queen’s original diary entries.  Twenty-nine different Balmoral servants were named in the Beatrice version of the Queen’s journals between 1848 and 1861 but only a few achieved significant numbers of mentions.  The hierarchy is as follows.  John Grant – 129, John McDonald – 71, John Brown – 55, Charles Duncan – 28, Mackenzie – 19, Donald Stewart – 19 and James Coutts – 15.  John McDonald was the Prince’s Jaeger and normally based at Windsor Castle, but he travelled to Deeside annually with the royal party.

There is a curious, but systematic, variation in the total number of servant-mentions per annual Balmoral visit entered in the Queen’s journals.  The peak years were 1849 and 1850 (60, 66), followed by a progressive decline to a trough in 1854 and 1855 (8,6) and a subsequent rise to another peak in 1859 and 1860 (38, 35).  The length of the late summer stay at Balmoral in 1848 – 1861 and the pattern of activities on Deeside did not vary much from year to year. It is not certain if this strange citation pattern was generated by the Queen or by her literary executor but quite possibly it was the former.  In the early Balmoral years, when the Queen and her Consort were excited by the novelty of Highland life and were getting to know their bevvy of ghillies, the first peak might have been generated by the monarch recording more detail of her daily activities, including the names of her outdoor attendants.  A major component of the early Balmoral times was Prince Albert’s deer stalking, under the guidance of John McDonald, his Jager, which was often closely followed by the monarch  The progressive decline in citations which followed may then reflect the growing familiarity and routine of outdoor life in the Highlands.  The second peak, which started its ascent in 1856 may be explained by the rise to prominence of John Brown and the undertaking of more adventurous expeditions, especially those taking the royal party away from Balmoral. 

   

Concentrating on those servants listed above with 15 or more total mentions, two, John McDonald and James Coutts had their observations concentrated in the first peak but then they declined to zero observations in subsequent years, in McDonald’s case because he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis and eventually died, in James Coutts’ case because he left the Queen’s employment.  Excepting John Brown, all the rest, John Grant, Donald Stewart, Charles Duncan and Mackenzie remained at about the same proportionate level of mentions in a varying total population each year.  John Brown was different to all the other servants.  He remained at a low proportion of total servant-mentions until1858.  Between this year and 1861 he consistently achieved between 26% and 37% of total observations.  In contrast, John Grant regularly achieved in excess of 30% of total servant-mentions every year of the period.  These data suggest that John Grant routinely caught the Queen’s eye between 1848 and 1861, while John Brown did not do so until about 1858, but maintained his prominence thereafter.  The Queen’s footnote on John Brown’s history and character, written in late 1863 and included in “Leaves”, is entirely in line with 1858 being the key year for the blossoming of John Brown’s fortunes in the royal entourage.  “The same who, in 1858, became my regular attendant out of doors everywhere in the Highlands” … “He has all the independence and elevated feelings peculiar to the Highland race, and is singularly straightforward, simple-minded, kind-hearted, and disinterested; always ready to oblige and of a discretion rarely to be met with”.

Conclusions 

It is immediately obvious within the diverse collection of data amassed here that Queen Victoria established many friendships with her Scottish employees and some of these associations lasted for decades, five (Annie McDonald, nee Mitchell, William Ross, Charles Duncan, Donald Stewart and William Paterson) for an even longer period that her much-publicised, 35-year involvement with John Brown.  The Queen put a high premium upon loyalty and service, and this was reflected in the inscriptions on gravestones and cenotaphs with which she memorialised such servant devotion.  In truth, loyalty was also aided by the influx of royal money to Upper Deeside, where farming was a struggle against the rough terrain and a harsh climate and the main alternative of employment on sporting estates was largely seasonal.  Work on the royal Deeside estates probably gave better rewards, both financial and in-kind, such as housing, than the other options available locally.  For much of the 19^th century, as in the rest of the Highlands and Islands, work prospects were so poor that emigration became a commonly taken escape route with the decline of crofting. Three of John Brown’s brothers took this path in the hope of a better life.

The Queen had a clear predilection for Highlanders, arising from the rehabilitation of Highland culture after its suppression following the Jacobite rebellions and the promotion of the symbols of Highlandism as fashionable, especially by the upper classes, including in England.  Life at Balmoral was focussed on the outdoors and, as the monarch herself admitted, such activities brought her and the Prince into much closer contact with their servants than was the case in England. The favourable predisposition of the monarch was fed by the exotic aspects of the Scottish servants she encountered, especially on Deeside.  Many of them were tall, bearded, handsome, muscular and knowledgeable concerning the Highland countryside.  They spoke a foreign language and even their use of English was curious, employing dialect words and grammatical quirks, which the Queen found amusing but was happy to copy.  They were former enemies now become devoted retainers.  It was an exotic and attractive mixture for Victoria.

But royal – Scottish servant relationships were not random.  The Queen’s friendships with her Highlanders were almost all, at least initially, with men.  Even devoted female servants, such as Annie McDonald, who served the monarch for 41 years, got barely a mention in the Queen’s journals.  Deeside Highlanders were not cultured, in a general sense, having only had a village education and having seldom venturing beyond Aberdeenshire and the adjacent counties.  What they did have in abundance were the practical skills necessary to support the Prince in his sporting pursuits, especially stalking red deer stags and for keeping their royal employers safe in an environment replete with hazards.  Anyone reading the Queen’s journals today cannot fail to be impressed by the risks taken by the Queen, who was not always physically robust, her Consort and sometimes her children in ascending some of the highest mountains in the land or in traversing mountainous terrain by poorly formed tracks, often many miles from help in case of emergency.  These shared challenges moulded many of the monarch’s associations with her servants and brought employer and employee closer together.

Contact with the Queen in the context of work often led to royal visits to a servant’s home, especially in the case of ghillies, keepers and foresters.  Consequentially, the monarch then met the wives and children of her employees and she would often record her thoughts about servant families in her journals.  Cleanliness and tidiness were attributes which indicated the Queen’s approval of wives and the subsequent application of the adjective “good” to such women confirmed continuing approbation.  The gift of presents was another sign of royal approval of wives, children and occasionally husbands too.

Queen Victoria was particularly attracted to the young children of her servants, especially if they were beautiful.  Her own youngest child, Princess Beatrice, had been born in 1857 and, perhaps, the children of servants fed her maternal instincts, once her own offspring had grown beyond the cute infant stage.  She sought to preserve images of such offspring by making her own sketches of them and she also instructed artists such as Edwin Landseer to make drawings and paintings for her of child subjects.  However, despite her befriending several servant wives, she never sought to make drawings of their likenesses, or to require guest artists to do so.  On the other hand, both male servants and the children of retainers were often art subjects at Balmoral.

It is a very interesting observation that, once a favoured servant married and had a family, while in royal service, or arrived in royal service with an incomplete family, the likelihood that children born during that service would be given a royal name, in the sense defined above, became very high.  In some cases it can be shown that the Queen was the agent of name choice, in other cases the cause is not directly known and in only one case is there evidence that the monarch was not directly an influential factor, even though the given name was Alexandrina, one of the Queen’s own appellations.  The statistical inference is that the Queen was probably the causative agent in most such name choices.  Why did the monarch pursue this practice?  Perhaps she thought she was conferring an honour on favoured servant families?  The most frequent royal names employed were Victoria (or Victor) and Albert (or Alberta).  Was she also, or alternatively, seeking to perpetuate these names as a kind of immortality?  Certainly, in Victorian times many aristocratic, or even merely landed families, saw great merit in perpetuating the family surname by any means available when they lacked a male heir, even though this might involve a break in genetic contiguity between generations.

Often servant families were recognised through a child, or children, or the children of children, also taking the royal shilling.  Perhaps this involved royal favouritism?  This was probably the case to some degree, especially where several members of one family gained jobs, for example, John Grant’s children.  However, other denizens of Crathie, some without a pre-existing royal connection, also ended up in the monarch’s pay, as a perusal of census returns for Windsor and Buckingham Palace readily demonstrates.  It may have been the case that simply living in Crathie, or on the Balmoral estate, gave privileged access to information on royal job vacancies.

The Queen only rarely attended servant life events (baptisms, weddings and funerals), which is unsurprising on logistical grounds, given her crowded schedule and her numerous employees.  If the monarch did attend it was a rare honour for the family, or families, and, in truth, also happened to be convenient for Victoria in time and place.  The four servant baptisms discovered, which were favoured with the royal presence, all involved the bestowal of a royal name, which probably indicated a close interest in the parents on the part of the monarch.  The marriage of Victoria Alberta, daughter of John and Annie McDonald, both royal employees, took place at Crathie in November 1897, during the Queen’s residence.  This was the only servant marriage at Balmoral that the Queen is known to have attended.  John McDonald, a footman, died young of consumption, his widow then served the Queen for decades as her dresser and the couple’s only daughter bore the names of both the monarch and her dead husband.  It seemed that all the ingredients necessary to induce royal attendance were coincident in this case.  Servant funerals marked by the Queen’s presence were also rare, the only two known examples being the interments of John Grant, Head Keeper and William Paterson, Head Gardener, respectively at Balmoral.  In John Grant’s case, Queen Victoria exceptionally delayed her departure from the Deeside estate by a few days, in order to attend.

The Queen’s relationships with her most senior Balmoral retainers, the commissioners and clerks of works, were extensive but seemed to be more professional and less personal than the relationships with some servants in lesser roles. A high level of warmth or informality did not generally seem to exist, though the Queen and Mrs Isabella Profeit appeared to get along well and Dr Robertson was a frequent dinner guest at the castle.  What is truly remarkable is the close and enduring nature of the relationships with three senior outdoor servant families, those of John Grant, Donald Stewart and John Michie.  In both length and intensity, all three associations exceeded the Queens friendships with her most senior group of Balmoral employees.

The Balmoral careers of John Grant, Donald Stewart and John Michie were in many ways similar.  The three of them were all in royal employment, during the Queen’s reign, for many years, 27, 53 and 21 years respectively, all produced substantial families while resident on Deeside, all deployed royal names for some of their children, all the families had youngsters who excited the Queen’s interest, severa childrenl were deemed worthy of portraiture by the monarch and all the families had offspring who subsequently entered royal service.  John Grant, Donald Stewart and John Michie were also rewarded for their loyalty and the seniority of their roles by, either having substantial houses built specifically for their occupation on the estate, or occupying such superior homes once a previous tenant had vacated a property.  But the characteristic that the three families shared together, but with no other, was the large number and high frequency of the Queen’s home visits.  These occurred over decades and involved the taking of both tea and food in the homes of these servants.  The totals of known visits were substantial, 227, 177 and 274 respectively.

In the case of the Michie family, the survival of the Head Forester’s personal diaries gives an indication of the informality of the interactions between the monarch, with her entourage and the servant family.  Although the same level of insight is not available for the other two families, it must have been the case that the monarch actually enjoyed these visits and possibly not just for the lunches, tea, scones, home-made jams and whisked cream, or for the presence of bright, pretty children, otherwise the relationships would surely not have been so enduring.  Perhaps these visits could be likened to regular calls from a rather imperious but well-meaning aunt?

But one servant relationship which was initiated at Balmoral, the friendship between John Brown and the monarch, remains to be considered.  To what extent did this association resemble the relationships with John Grant, Donald Stewart and John Michie and in what ways was it unique?

Between 1848 and the mid-1850s, John Brown was one of several young Balmoral ghillies who caught the monarch’s attention.  He was good-looking, pleasant, willing and attentive, but then so were others.  This situation was reflected in the frequency of mentions of his name in the Queen’s (edited) journals.  The scatter of “Brown” citations is similar to the data for Charles Duncan, Mackenzie and Donald Stewart but substantially lower that mentions of John McDonald (the Prince’s Jager) until his illness and early death, James Coutts (until he left royal employment) and John Grant.  In this initial phase of his royal employment John Brown’s status was prominent but not pre-eminent.

It was not until about 1857 that John Brown gained the attention and confidence of the monarch to the extent that he was preferred to other ghillies in leading the Queen’s pony and, along with John Grant, in driving her carriage.  Brown and Grant were also trusted by the monarch to serve at table and to provide other indoor servant functions on the “Great Expeditions of 1860 – 1861. This royal preferment of John Brown progressively intensified up to the death of Prince Albert at the end of 1861.

The demise of the Royal Consort was devastating for Queen Victoria.  She became helpless, hopeless, depressed and needy.  She had lost her closest male companion on whom she leaned for many kinds of support and her sense of purpose in life deserted her.  But John Brown, who was very skillful in supporting the Queen emotionally, to some extent filled the void.  In August 1862, Queen Victoria travelled to Reinhardsbrunn, which lay in hilly country in Thuringia, Duchy of Saxe-Coburg, Prussia, to visit some of her relatives.  She decided to send John Brown, the pony called “Malakov” and her pony chair to Prussia in advance.  This combination would give her sufficient confidence to travel about while in Thuringia.  A similar arrangement was made for her Prussian visit the following August and a month later she rode her pony, under Brown’s supervision for the first time since Albert’s death.  During her autumn visit to Balmoral in 1863, the Queen was involved in two carriage accidents, where John Brown’s presence of mind and decisive action rescued both situations.  At this time, the monarch was still lacking in confidence and very nervous about appearing in public so, in 1864, her senior courtiers decided to send John Brown down to Osborne House for the following winter in an attempt to cheer up the Queen by having him lead her pony on her daily forays into the grounds and the countryside.  This tactic was an almost instant success and in February 1865 John Brown was granted the title of “The Queen’s Highland Servant” and subsequently travelled with her wherever she went.

Not only did the mid-1860s see the rise of John Brown’s status, the standing of the Brown family was also elevated.  Because John Brown was not married and did not have a wife and family, the kind of friendship developed with John Grant, Donald Stewart and John Michie was precluded, even if the Queen had wanted such a replica.  In the stead of a John Brown spouse and offspring, the Queen started to lavish attention on John Brown’s brothers.  In 1863, the youngest Brown brother, Archie, entered royal employment as a Steward’s Room waiter but did not long languish at this lowly level as, two years later, he became a Junior Valet to Prince Leopold.  Sometime in the mid-1860s, another brother, James, was recruited as the Balmoral shepherd.  Other Brown family appointments and promotions would follow.

In 1864 two events occurred which illustrated the Queen’s desire to see the social standing of the Brown family raised.  Firstly, she recruited Kenneth Macleay to paint pictures of Highlanders from various clans, including some of her own retainers at Balmoral.  This selection included both John and Archie Brown but both were portrayed, not with an outdoor warrior-like mien, but in a dignified, elegant pose, implying that their origins were from a more elevated societal stratum than that of a mere farming family.  The second occurrence which indicated the monarch’s desire to dignify the Brown family was her instruction to Dr Andrew Robertson to investigate the Brown family genealogy, with a view to establishing a link to any other line with a more prominent reputation.  Andrew Robertson found a distant link and skilfully persuaded the monarch that it was of significance.  But why did Queen Victoria want to achieve this end?  It seems as though her friendship with John Brown had by this date progressed to a point where she considered his relatives to be “family”, which leaves open the question of what was the precise nature of her relationship with John Brown.

The mid-1860s also witnessed a marked change in John Brown’s demeanour.  He was transmogrified from a couthy, if coarse, Highlander into a blunt, rude, disrespectful and vengeful guardian of the Queen’s privacy and person.  Members of the Court and offspring of the monarch were, alike, spoken to brusquely and treated with disdain.  His behaviour towards the monarch herself was also beyond belief, chiding her and addressing her as “Wumman”.  Almost no one crossed John Brown with impunity.  Two of his brothers, Archie and Donald took on their brother’s distasteful mantle and started to behave in unpleasant and unreasonable ways too.  Queen Victoria herself refused to believe, or to act on, the complaints made to her about her Highland servant.  One well-documented story allows a time to be placed on the completion of this behavioural transformation.  Lieutenant Walter Stirling was appointed to act as tutor to the sickly Prince Leopold in 1865 but was dismissed four months later.  Leopold and Stirling had got along well and stayed in touch after the latter’s dismissal.   In 1868 Leopold wrote to Stirling complaining about the brutality and rudeness of both John and Archie Brown, such as hitting the young prince on the face with spoons.  But there was no comeback on the Brown brothers.  Indeed, in a sick irony, the Queen went on to promote Archie Brown to the position of Leopold’s valet the same year.  John Brown was widely hated, except by a coterie of other servants who sucked up to him.  He had become untouchable.

How John Brown had achieved such a position is not known for certain, though speculation has been rife for over 150 years about the degree of intimacy which characterised this monarch-servant relationship.  The most direct evidence indicating that there was a considerable degree of bodily intimacy between the two comes from an entry in Sir James Reid’s diary when he inadvertently came upon the Queen and John Brown holding a deeply personal conversation in her room five days before Brown’s death on 27 March 1883.  Had such a relationship existed since the mid-1860s, Brown’s hold over the Queen from that time might then become explicable.  One piece of evidence supporting this timing concerns the planning and building of the new Glas-allt-Shiel, a “cottage” (actually a substantial 15 – room house) located on the shore of Loch Muick.  This wild retreat had become necessary after the death of Prince Albert in 1861 as the monarch could no longer face staying overnight at Allt na Giubhsaich, another wild “cottage”, on a modest scale, near Loch Muick, since it was redolent with memories of her departed husband.  But the Glas-allt-Shiel was of a much greater size than Allt na Guibhsaich.  The plans were formulated as early as February 1866 and the building was completed by May 1868.  Queen Victoria’s first overnight stay was in October the same year when her servants, including John Brown held a raucous housewarming party.  The monarch and her lady companions, attended by John Brown and other servants, subsequently overnighted at the property for about seven nights per year, until John Brown’s death in 1883.  The Queen’s overnight visits to Glas-allt-Shiel were then essentially terminated.  The parallel with Allt na Giubhsaich is impressive.  Glas-allt-Shiel appeared to hold memories of John Brown for Victoria, which would have been painful for the monarch to re-awaken.  A full account of the Queen’s use of the Glas-allt-Shiel can be found in “Queen Victoria: Death and her Wild Abodes on the Balmoral Estates” on this blogsite.

The special nature of John Brown’s relationship with Queen Victoria continued to be emphasised by the monarch’s behaviour in the aftermath of his death.  She could not be present at Crathie for the funeral but she issued commands from afar about how every detail of the event was to be conducted, principally through her Balmoral commissioner, Alexander Profeit and requiring him to report back quickly by telegraph on the events of the day.  On that day, her person was in Windsor, but her heart was in Crathie.  Queen Victoria’s subsequent memorialisation of her Highland attendant used language so unrestrained and personal that no one could be left in any doubt that this relationship, so recently brought to an end, was special to her and outside the boundaries of any orthodox monarch-servant friendship.

The present survey of the Queen’s relationships with her Scottish retainers shows that only a few such associations were long-lasting, truly close and shared several characteristics.  However, the relationship with John Brown, while sharing some of those properties with other close servant friendships, still stands out as being different.  No wonder it still excites interest and speculation almost 140 years after John Brown’s death.

Don Fox

20200704

donaldpfox@gmail.com