Victoria’s close relationship with servant

Victoria doubled Brown’s salary, gave him a house for his retirement at Balmoral, and decorated him with awards.

She ordered the Balmoral property manager to trace Brown’s family tree and was thrilled when he linked him to Scotland’s most prestigious clans.

Brown’s final service to his Queen was to be the death of him. In March 1883, worried by an unsolved attack on 26-year-old Lady Florence Dixie in Windsor, the Queen asked Brown to investigate.

Her faithful servant combed the area for hours in the wintry air, looking for answers. He then spent a week carrying around the Queen, whose knee was swollen from a sprain.

All the while, Brown was battling a severe cold. The next weekend, Brown came down with erysipelas, a painful syndrome wherein the entire face swells, including ears and eyelids. Two days later, at the age of 56, he was dead.

Victoria, who spent 18 years in the company of John Brown, almost as long as she spent with her beloved Albert, was inconsolable with grief.

After Brown’s death, Victoria copied out an extract from a diary or journal entry from 1866, and this was found among his brother Hugh Brown’s things when he died.

“Often my beloved John would say, ‘You haven’t a more devoted servant than Brown’ –andoh!HowIfeltthat!

“Often I told him no one loved him more than I did or had a better friend than me: and he answered ‘Nor you – than me. No one loves you more’.”

Her book More Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, published in 1884, was dedicated to Brown, and she continued to mourn him until her own death in 1901, erecting a full-size bronze statute at Balmoral.

She was also buried with a gold wedding ring that had belonged to Brown’s mother, which she had worn constantly since his death.

There was also a coloured photograph of John Brown in profile, in a leather case with some locks of his hair, and other photographs of him, which she carried in her pocket, placed in her hand.

And finally “a pocket handkerchief of Brown, whom she praised for his faithfulness and singular devotion, to be placed not near but on her”.

Victoria – The Queen, by Julia Baird, is published by Little, Brown.