Inside Queen Victoria’s ‘stimulating’ bond with her ghillie John Brown

For a century and more, there’s only ever been one question when it comes to Queen Victoria and her ghillie John Brown.

Did they – or didn’t they?

Brown was the craggy-jawed Scottish he-man who strode into Victoria’s life after her beloved Price Albert died in 1861 at the age of 42.

Most famously he was portrayed on the big screen by Billy Connolly, with Judi Dench playing Victoria, the queen-empress, who died 125 years ago today. In the 1997 movie there’s lots of moody looks at each other – but, disappointingly, no hanky-panky.

Brown was handsome, blue-eyed, rugged, no-nonsense, and called his royal boss – who after all ruled nearly half the globe – ‘wumman’. Victorian jokers called him ‘the Queen’s stallion’.

And they called her ‘Mrs Brown’.

But whether the couple, who were rarely apart from the day he was introduced into the royal household in 1866 till his death in 1883, ever went to bed together has never been proved. Either way.

Certainly at night they were as close as could be – Her Majesty insisted that for 17 years the rough-mannered schoolmaster’s son had the bedroom next to hers.

Certainly they flirted – the Queen’s doctor James Reid recorded a coded, intimate and flirtatious exchange between them involving the lifting of skirts.

And Victoria wrote of regarding Brown ‘with an everlasting love’, equating his death with the loss of Prince Albert.

He loved her back – in all the time they were together he never took a single day off.

And despite those rough edges he had his admirers and was no fool – ‘His shrewd judgement and curt wit made him a stimulating companion,’ wrote Victoria’s biographer Giles St Aubyn. Indeed, one of the Queen’s maids of honour confessed she had the hots for him – the fact that he was ‘a child of the mountains was all part of his charm,’ he wrote.

Certainly theirs was an intense, emotionally intimate and close bond which fuelled the widespread rumours and jealousy which spiralled among the royal court. Senior courtiers – men and women of aristocratic birth who’d served the crown often for generations – hated the way Brown had become Victoria’s gatekeeper, choosing who she should see and who not.

They hated his lack of polish – the way he told the Queen how to behave, the way he ordered her to straighten her back and keep her head up – which they felt undermined the dignity of the crown.

And the Queen’s children – in particular her son Bertie, the future King Edward VIII – hated to see the Highlander at court. In fact the prince was said to have hired a boxer to pick a fight with him

The Lord Chamberlain reportedly called him a ‘coarse animal,’ while many staff found him ‘bossy and arrogant’. There were plots by members of the household to have him dismissed. 

But John Brown was bullet-proof, showily wearing the protection of the Queen’s adoration. She plainly – embarrassingly – adored him.

So did they – or didn’t they?

Historian Dr Fern Riddell, author of a recent book Victoria’s Secret, is in no doubt. They had sex, she says.

More than that, she adds, Victoria’s private chaplain actually made a deathbed confession that he had MARRIED the odd couple. ‘It is called an irregular marriage,’ she explains, ‘and in Scottish law this carries just as much weight legally as a regular marriage south of the border.’ She adds such unions were commonplace in the Aberdeenshire area where Brown came from.

That secret went with Brown to his grave when he died in 1883, aged 56, of a skin infection. ‘Now all, all is gone from this world!’ sobbed the queen. ‘Weep with me, for we have lost the best, the truest heart that ever beat!’

Hysterically she ordered a distinguished writer, Sir Theodore Martin, to write Brown’s biography – but a horrified Martin, wondering how he could fill a chapter let alone a book, ducked out of it. 

Victoria pressed on, deciding to write the book herself, but she was so emotionally charged it was feared she would compromise herself, the crown, and the empire with the revelations which were likely to spill forth and the idea was finally dropped.

But Brown remained fixed in her thoughts – right up to her own death eighteen years later.

Britain’s greatest queen-but-one (can you imagine Elizabeth II compromising herself with a ghillie?) went to that great empire in the sky leaving behind specific instructions which may finally tell us whether she did – or didn’t – enjoy an affair with John Brown.

In her coffin alongside her body, she ordered, were to be placed her wedding veil, a number of family photographs, a plaster cast of Prince Albert’s hand, and his favourite dressing-gown.

But there was one, final – and highly secret – instruction, given.

A lock of Brown’s hair alongside a photo of him were to be buried with her, which were carefully hidden in her left hand behind a bunch of flowers. 

And amongst the jewellery worn by Victoria was the wedding ring of his mother, which Brown gifted to her in 1883.