Victoria’s Highland LOVE affair
Raised on nursery tales of Rob Roy and Bonnie Prince Charlie, Queen Victoria fell in love with Scotland from early childhood. And it was a romance that was to last after her death...
She also commissioned paintings, including an 1850 sketch of the Queen at Loch Muick by Sir Edwin Landseer. Victoria described it as ‘a beautiful historical exemplification of the independent life we lead in the dear Highlands’.
Some of their tastes would have stretched even the most ardent of Scots. In 1851, Albert presented Victoria with a holly brooch set with stag’s teeth and a Royal Stewart tartan ribbon.
Life at Balmoral, with its relentless tartan, pipes and Highland romance, was a vision of Scotland that most Scots would have been hard pushed to recognise.
Art historian John Morrison, writing in an essay for the Royal Collection, remarked that ‘the couple had a love affair with a fantasy, a myth. With tremendous enthusiasm they immersed themselves in a fanciful notion of Scotland, believing it utterly.’
Perhaps that is why, following Albert’s death in 1862, Victoria retreated to Balmoral to mourn him, enrobing herself in the myth that had fuelled much of their romance. Writing to her daughter Victoria, Crown Princess of Russia, she poured her heart out.
‘Oh! Darling child… the stag’s heads – the rooms – blessed, darling Papa’s room – then his coats – his caps – kilts – all, all convulsed my poor shattered frame!’
Immersing herself in grief, she shut herself away in the castle, making a visit to a cairn they had built together at Craig Gowan.
The year after Albert’s death, she made a pilgrimage to the spot near Lochnagar where he had shot his last stag, to make a sketch. But that year was also pivotal in other ways. A diary entry from October 7, 1863, relates a near-fatal incident where the Queen fell off her horse at Balmoral.
SHE spent days in bed applying raw meat to her black eye and nursing a sprained thumb, which would remain crooked for the rest of her life. But when her doctor ordered Victoria to continue to ride, she found a new zest for life – not least because of the man leading her, John Brown.
By February 1864, Brown had acquired the permanent title of the Queen’s Highland Servant. Recently published diary extracts show the extent of Victoria’s devotion to him. On one trek she said: ‘Brown with his strong, powerful arm, helped me along wonderfully.’ She even referred to him as her ‘heart’s best treasure’.
For the rest of her life, Balmoral
was to be Victoria’s retreat. When Brown died in 1883 after a week of carrying a knee-injured Victoria in his arms while battling a cold that developed into the painful skin condition erysipelas, the Queen was devastated.
She wrote: ‘Often my beloved John would say, “You haven’t a more devoted servant than Brown” – and oh! How I felt that!’
Victoria’s final visit to Balmoral came in the autumn of 1900. She was mourning the death of her second son Alfie earlier that year, and was suffering terribly from rheumatism in her legs, but she still went through her usual routine of picnics and pipers, and enjoying the peace she always found in her beloved Highlands.
She died at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, in January 1901. She was buried with a photograph of Brown in her left hand, along with a lock of his hair and a sprig of Balmoral heather. Her sarcophagus is made of Aberdeen granite.
Even in death, the Queen’s love for Scotland could not be broken.
AT 12.45 on the morning of Thursday, September 1, 1842, the Royal George yacht dropped anchor at the port of Leith. Inside her luxurious state apartment, Queen Victoria lay wide awake, listening to the sound of the crowds cheering onshore.
Young, newly married and eager to see every corner of the kingdom that was now hers, she was on her very first visit to Scotland and she could not have been more excited.
Even as a child, Victoria had dreamed of Scotland. Shut away in the Royal nursery behind the gates at Kensington Palace, the young princess had pored over novels by Sir Walter Scott and read books about Rob Roy and Bonnie Prince Charlie, conjuring up in her mind a wild and beautiful landscape that represented everything which her stuffy, regimented childhood was not.
That inaugural trip in 1842, four years after Victoria was crowned Queen, did not disappoint. In her diaries she recorded that Edinburgh was ‘quite beautiful, totally unlike anything else I have seen’.
Glen Farg was ‘really lovely’. The Grampians were declared ‘a grand range of mountains’. Even the children running alongside the carriage were ‘very picturesque’, while the oatmeal porridge and Finnan haddie served for breakfast was ‘very good’. It was official: Queen Victoria was bewitched by Scotland, and she was to return here again and again over the next 59 years of her reign.
Her complex relationship with the country, and in particular with the Highlands, has fascinated historians for more than a century. Some of them claim she did not inhabit the real country at all but an idealised myth of heather, bagpipes and misty moors.
Others have argued that had she not retreated to Balmoral following the death in 1862 of her husband, Prince Albert, she might never have survived her grief and gone on to reign for another four decades. Some more roguish biographers even believe she fell in love with the Highland ghillie John Brown – a relationship portrayed in the film Mrs Brown, starring Billy Connolly and Judi Dench.
Now an exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland, exploring history’s romantic fascination with the Highlands, is displaying a number of Queen Victoria’s treasured Scottish keepsakes, including a tartan dress she wore as a young woman, a brooch gifted to her by a famed piper and a mourning pin she had made to commemorate her servant John Brown.
According to the exhibition’s organisers: ‘The young Queen took this royal fascination [with the Highlands] to new heights. Following royal visits to the Highlands, the Queen and Prince Albert acquired the Balmoral estate. With the death of Prince Albert, the estate became a Highland retreat from the realities of court and government for Queen Victoria. Balmoral helped ensure the ideal of the Highlands that emerged from the culture and politics of the late 18th century would endure.’
Yet the small items on display tell just a fragment of Victoria’s Scottish story, which continued until her death in 1901 and which she documented forensically in her diaries, a number of which were published during her lifetime. Desperate to give her subjects an insight into her gilded life and experiences, she recorded every horse change on a long journey, every grand dinner, every woman she met by the side of the road.
Historian Jane Ridley told her Chalke Valley History Festival audience last month: ‘Victoria would have been even better than Meghan Markle at constructing a narrative on Instagram.
‘Her story was of the grieving widow, who shuns society, who refuses to go to parties and never goes out... she was a woman who was suffering and to some extent sharing her story with the nation.’
That first trip to Scotland, arranged by her devoted husband Prince Albert, came partly out of necessity for the Queen’s mental health. By 1842 she had given birth to her second child Edward, later King Edward VII, and was suffering from post-natal depression.
There had also been a recent and terrifying attempt on her life, when Albert spotted a man aiming a gun at the Queen while they were on a carriage ride through London.
Victoria’s nerves were frayed and Albert, keen to keep his wife happy, focused on holidays and trips to get her out of London. In Scotland they travelled extensively, staying with such aristocratic families as the Mansfields at Scone Palace and the Marquess of Breadalbane at Taymouth Castle.
THE latter hired an English firm to kit his castle out with suits of armour for the occasion, and arranged for bagpipers to serenade the Royal couple. The pair were so taken with the notion they soon hired their own Royal piper, Angus Mackay.
But often, it was the behaviour of ‘ordinary people’ that captured the Queen’s attention. At Taymouth, she met ‘a fat, good-humoured little woman’ who cut flowers for her. Later, the Queen spotted a woman in the river ‘with her dress tucked up almost to her knees, washing potatoes’.
To the young Royal couple, Scotland was a haven, a world away from the constraints of court life, where they could freely be themselves. In 1844 they returned and spent three weeks at Blair Castle, home of the Duke of Atholl, a place that particularly enchanted the Queen.
She was so pleased with the trip that she granted the Duke and the Atholl men who had protected her the Queen’s Colours, creating the Atholl Highlanders, who remain the only private army in Europe.
In 1847, Victoria and Albert took the Royal yacht up the West Coast as far as Staffa, revelling in the peace and quiet. The pair would read to each other, go for rides, and they enjoyed formal dinners and Scottish country dances. Victoria developed a taste for porridge and also loved brose – oatmeal, honey and whisky – as well as neat whisky.
The couple purchased Balmoral in 1848. It was, the Queen wrote in her diary, a ‘paradise in the Highlands. All seemed to breathe freedom and
peace, and to make one forget the world and its sad turmoils.’
Day to day life at Balmoral for Victoria and Albert stood in stark contrast with their life in London and their other Royal residences. Members of staff were expected to wear Border tartan, except on holidays when they wore Stewart tartan. Keepers and ghillies were required to wear kilts at all times.
While Balmoral mealtimes were regimented, and remain so today, much to some younger members of the family’s chagrin, the menu featured porridge, salmon, smoked fish, venison and other Scottish foods.
But while the castle still held some trappings of the gilded Royal life, including four bathrooms reserved for use by family members only, the Royal couple also enjoyed mixing with the locals. They would visit residents of the Royal Deeside area in their cottages, went on picnics and even stayed incognito at inns.
One of Victoria’s pursuits at Balmoral was painting watercolours, and she produced several depicting the Highlands and the castle itself.