The brooch was gone. Queen Victoria, now in her seventy-eighth year, had been climbing into her carriage when one of the footmen reported that he had seen Abdul Karim’s brother-in-law, Mohammed Ali, hovering about the scene. Somebody then told Mrs. Tuck, the Queen’s dresser, that Ali had taken the brooch and sold it to a jeweler in Windsor.

A note from the jeweler arrived to prove it. Victoria’s reaction astonished everyone. She was not furious with the alleged thief. She was furious with Mrs.

Tuck. In India, the Queen explained, it was perfectly normal to pick up things that did not belong to you; it was not considered dishonesty at all. Then she rounded on her dresser. “This is what your English call justice,” she said.

“You English. ”

The Queen who had built an empire, who had spent fifty years on the throne, who had once fled to Germany when times grew hard, evidently had never really felt at home in Britain itself. And now, in the final years of her life, she had found her most unlikely attachment yet: a twenty-four-year-old Muslim clerk from Agra named Abdul Karim. Her courtiers called him John Brown in a turban.

Victoria called him her Munshi, her Indian secretary, her teacher, her comfort. And she would defend him against her entire household, her doctors, her ministers, and her children, no matter the cost. —

It had not always been this way. In 1861, Queen Victoria’s annus horribilis, the deaths of her mother and her husband left her distraught.

She fled London. It was presumed that her absence from the capital meant she was doing nothing, left inept by grief. In her journal she wailed over the loss of her lover, her friend, her crutch: “He did everything; everywhere nothing did I do without him, from the greatest to the smallest. My first word was I must ask Albert.

” In her delirium, she turned the man she had often resented and fought with into a demigod. What Victoria did not realize, at forty-two years old, was that marriage had infantilized her. She had come to rely on Albert for absolutely everything. She would see him first thing in the morning and ask what dress she should put on.

In politics and in personal life, he had restrained her and controlled her. Now his life was over, but her life was not. Little by little, she would flap her wings and become free. Her first small steps to freedom were taken in Coburg, in modern-day Germany, the homeland and birthplace of Albert and her mother.

She confessed her enduring love affair with Germany in her journal: “If I were not who I am, my real home would be here. ” Victoria was three-quarters German. She idolized the land and the people. The very air smelled like Albert, and she breathed it in.

When she came back to Coburg, her brother-in-law Ernst, Albert’s brother, expected her to stay with him in his grand palace in the middle of town, Schloss Ehrenburg. But she preferred the Rosenau, a beautiful hunting lodge about five miles out of town where Albert was born, a place full of his childhood memories, surrounded by quiet hills and forests. Inconsolably bereaved she certainly was. A page from the visitors’ book she wrote in 1862 survives, signed “Victoria Regina, the desolate widow of my beloved Albert.

” A direct descendant of Prince Albert keeps the line alive today; Hubertus, the hereditary Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, still shows visitors the rooms where the family relationships between the Saxe-Coburgs and the British are laid out. There is a marvelous winter house, and a painting of Prince Albert after he arrived in Britain. The prince noted that Victoria did not dress very well, but she had stupendous jewels. That was what the French noticed when she went to Paris.

After she was widowed, Victoria became even more attached to Germany, even more conscious of her German roots. She was definitely fluent in the German language, and even after the early death of Prince Albert, she remained very much in love with Germany, and especially Coburg. She came back to open a monument for Albert in 1865 on the marketplace. It was one of the very few public appearances she made after his death.

Victoria had always loved melodrama, since her days as a young Queen. Now, in her mourning, she made her loss blindingly clear to see. She dressed always in black and desired everyone to enter into her grief. Dr.

Karina Urbach, an expert in Anglo-German relations, saw it clearly: Albert had told her, “Don’t overdo it, please, when I’m gone. ” And she did exactly the opposite. She put him on a pedestal, dragged her children into the room where he died once a year, and kept preaching to them about how wonderful he was. It was, in Urbach’s view, absolutely ridiculous, because the children came to hate it, and resented everything about this idealized father.

It achieved the absolute opposite of what she intended. Victoria went back to Coburg again and again. She would have loved to live in the little cottage in Germany with Albert. That was her idea of home.

She felt relaxed there because when she talked German she could be a different person. In her English identity she had to be the Queen. In Germany she was just “Vicky,” as Albert called her. Grief-stricken Victoria may have been, but inept she certainly was not.

She was about to demonstrate her political astuteness in Germany, then not a unified country as it is known today, but a mere patchwork of duchies and city-states. The question was whether they would come together in a peaceful federation or allow themselves to be bullied by the northern Kingdom of Prussia into becoming a modern, militaristic nation. That was the central political drama of Victoria’s times, and in that drama she stood plumb center stage. In the summer of 1863, the Queen came to Schloss Ehrenburg.

While she was there, she thrust herself between the twin camps of Prussia and Austria, before any of her diplomats. It was her first major political activity since she was widowed. She felt nervous: “So nervous, all being in state, and I alone. I have no longer my beloved Albert to guide, cheer, advise, and pilot me through the great difficulties.

”

In the Hall of Giants, where Victoria’s parents were married, she met with no less a person than the Emperor of Austria, and together they drank a toast to the unity of Germany. So early in her widowhood, we find Victoria alone but nonetheless an independent woman, negotiating not particularly on behalf of England, but on behalf of a peaceful Europe. She had found the inner strength to exert her power and carry out Albert’s political work on her own. She acted as an arbiter, wanting to bring together the Emperor of Austria and William of Prussia, hoping for some approach, some understanding between the two.

She still hoped for a peaceful solution to the German question. If you had asked many English newspaper editors what the Queen was doing, they would have said she was drawn into sleep, drawn into hiding, not doing anything. As a matter of fact, she was deeply politically engaged in Germany. She was hiding in black, and one did not understand that she had her back channels and was very much into this back-channel work.

She saw herself, partly because of Albert, as a diplomat in many ways. At this time, the British politicians complained that their monarch was too weepy, too reclusive, not doing her work, not interested in the main political questions. But Victoria was looking at the future of Europe itself. That seemed far less parochial, far less narrow, than the things many of her cabinet ministers wanted.

The future of Germany was quite literally being fought out between members of her own family: her eldest daughter Vicky was married to the Crown Prince of Prussia, and Bertie was married to the Princess of Denmark. Victoria was caught in the middle of the war between these neighboring states. “Oh, Bertie’s wife is only a good German and not a Dane,” she wrote. “Not as regards the influence of the politics, but as regards the peace and harmony of the family, it is terrible to have the poor boy on the wrong side.

”

The personal was the political. Intensely German, Victoria nonetheless felt, as all mothers would, grief that her family stood on opposing sides of the political divide. —

While Victoria showed her fortitude on the world stage, she was also finding freedom at home in her personal life. As a young woman she had always sought father figures, from the flirtatious Lord Melbourne to her angel Albert.

Now she had another man by her side. “I feel I have here, and always in the house, a good devoted soul whose only object and interest is my service,” the forty-five-year-old Victoria wrote, “and God knows how much I want so to be taken care of. ”

These were the words she wrote about Albert’s Highland servant, a Mr. John Brown, brought down from Balmoral to attend Victoria in 1864.

Raymond Lamont Brown, the Highland servant’s official biographer, believed that if it had not been for the Highlands of Scotland and the friendship of John Brown in those ten years after Prince Albert died, Queen Victoria would have gone stark staring mad. She had always loved Scotland since her early visits with Albert. The unaffected character of the Highlanders made such a refreshing change after the stuffiness of Windsor and Buckingham Palace. So it was that the bearded and kilted John Brown, seven years her junior, became Victoria’s next male dependency, her closest companion and best friend.

She spent far more time with John Brown than with any other person, certainly more than with any member of her family. He attended her whenever she needed him. He understood her very well, something her family and ministers did not understand: although she was surrounded by people all the time, she was very lonely. John Brown said to her quite openly, “I think you’re just a lonely wee thing that needs to be brought out of herself.

” That was exactly what he did. He pulled her out of her depression. He became a walking encyclopedia of Queen Victoria’s likes and dislikes, her neuroses and so on. He devoted his life to her.

He never went on holiday, and he was always there for her. In some ways it was an even greater commitment than Albert had made in his marriage vows. Albert, of course, had had his own agenda; from dawn to dusk, John Brown’s agenda was Queen Victoria. Alongside Brown’s devotion came an abruptness and complete disregard for court etiquette.

The Queen translated these qualities, behind her steely appearance, into something she rather enjoyed. They enraged the household, but they were precisely the things that made him the ideal companion for Victoria. Albert, great man that he had been, had always been sickly and fussy; he did not share his wife’s love of gosling and drinking. Brown loved his whiskey, was often tipsy, and liked pouring whiskey into the Queen’s milk.

Brown released Victoria from Albert. He released her into a capacity for hedonism and fun, and she reveled in it. She found freedom in her friendship with this most unlikely of characters, out riding and laughing in the grounds at Osborne with Brown, where she had been suppressed in her childhood by the cruel workings of Sir John Conroy and had struggled with an overbearing and scheming husband. She loved Brown’s openness and dedication to her, and her alone.

“It is a real comfort,” she wrote, “for Brown is devoted to me, so simple, so intelligent, and so unlike an ordinary servant. ”

No one could talk to Victoria as John Brown did. He held her in check. There was once an occasion when a footman came into the room carrying a tray, and the poor boy dropped it.

The Queen erupted in a rage and said he should be dismissed to the kitchens. John Brown intervened immediately: “Woman, what are you doing that for? Did you need anything yourself? ” The footman was reinstated.

The straight-talking Scotsman had put the Queen of England in her place, and she enjoyed it. But it was not just Brown’s frankness she relished. He also filled a deep emotional need. On the fourth anniversary of Albert’s death, she completely defied convention by bringing Brown to pay his respects at Albert’s mausoleum at Frogmore.

Her writings that day showed just how significant Brown’s response was. “When he came to my room later, he was so much affected,” she wrote. “He said in his simple expressive way with such a tender look of pity, while the tears rolled down his cheeks, ‘I didn’t like to see you at Frogmore this morning. I felt for you.

But what could I do for you? I could die for you. ’”

Nobody could ever have replaced Prince Albert, but Victoria needed some kind of male crutch, and John Brown supplied it. What came next showed the contradictory nature of Victoria’s character.

The woman who shied away from the public decided to share her thoughts with everyone. Her decision to publish extracts of her private diaries, under the title *Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands*, came out in 1868 and was an instant bestseller. No monarch had ever published a book before. This one was wholly at odds with the image of Victoria the weeping widow.

The journals chronicled her life of outdoor frivolity. She felt truly elated out in the open Highland landscape, at local dances and the annual Highland Games. “The games began about three o’clock,” she wrote. “One throwing the hammer, two tossing the caber, three putting the stone.

A pretty wild sight, but the men looked very cold. There was nothing but their shirts and kilts on. They ran beautifully. ”

The journals were pretty mild stuff.

The remarkable thing about them was that they were published at all. They were nice books, bound in green, tooled in gold, and pretty soon they had sold over a hundred thousand copies. One person, however, might be named as the hero of the book: John Brown. Her children hardly got a look-in, and were not best pleased.

Victoria seemed unaware. Instead, she wrote to her eldest daughter Vicky asking for validation: “You have never said one word about my poor little Highland book, my only book. I had hoped that you and Fritz would have liked it. ”

The reason Vicky might have been avoiding the subject was that her mother’s shameless adoration of Brown was causing a scandal.

A scurrilous pamphlet entitled *John Brown’s Legs* appeared in New York, dedicated “to those extraordinary legs, poor bruised and scratched darlings. Here’s the Queen looking at a damaged knee. Good heavens, what a knee, we’re sticking out from the kilt of John Brown. ” The irony was that while the American was penning this pamphlet, the Queen herself was writing a third volume, *More Leaves from Our Life in the Highlands*, in effect a biography of John Brown.

The court and the politicians were absolutely horrified. Somebody had to be delegated to tell her that the book was entirely inappropriate. They chose the poor young Dean of Windsor, who went in and told the Queen that it really was not a very good idea to be writing these memoirs of her life with Brown; it would be misconstrued. She erupted in rage.

However, she took the young man’s advice, and the matter was never mentioned again. Whether the manuscript still survives somewhere in the Windsor archives, or whether Princess Beatrice, the Queen’s youngest daughter and self-appointed editor of her mother’s legacy, destroyed it, no one knows. Thanks to Beatrice, no trace remains of the Queen’s life with John Brown in her voluminous journals. We are left with silence, as her children were intent on deleting Brown and anything else deemed unsuitable from history.

It is poignant and sad that so avid a scribbler and recorder of her times as Queen Victoria should have had her words suppressed. And of course, the suppression had precisely the opposite effect upon us than was intended. Instead of making us forget about John Brown and Victoria, it makes us obsessed by the subject. What we do know is that in favoring Brown, Victoria showed herself to be a woman desperate for companionship, irrespective of the social cost.

She had come such a long way from her days as the submissive wife of Albert. With Brown she was free to do as she pleased. Of course people suspected him of sleeping with Victoria. There is a bit of a feminist issue here: if she had been a male monarch going to bed with the parlour maid, no one would have batted an eyelid.

It was the idea of a woman crossing the class barrier that really appalled them, especially as the rumours mounted to that of a secret marriage, even a love child, between the Queen and her Highland servant. A man who was probably one of the very few people in the world who ever knew the full truth about her relationship with Brown was her last doctor, Sir James Reid. His great-granddaughter, Michela Reid, keeps his diary, written in a minuscule hand that requires a magnifying glass to read. One entry from March describes the Queen and Brown going up and down the stairs together, Brown carrying her.

Dr. Reid was allowed to offer his arm, but he was not allowed to examine her, and certainly would not be allowed to carry her. They were all laughing about it and thought it was great fun. The next day’s entry reads: “The Queen walked a little in the room.

Brown lifts his kilt and says, ‘Is it there? ’ And she lifts her skirt, laughing, and says, ‘No, it’s here. ’” They were obviously very intimate. Is there a feeling in the Reid family that Dr.

Reid knew the true nature of the relationship? There is a feeling. The family used to tease Granny, calling her “his widow” about John Brown and the relationship, and she would always have to round up and say, “If you just laughed and dismissed it. ” Michela Reid’s own view: “I don’t think they were married.

I don’t think they even had an immoral affair. I think that they expressed their feelings so much in public. Had they been having an affair, they would have been more circumspect. ”

There is also the clinical detail.

Dr. Reid examined Victoria’s body after she died. She had a prolapsed uterus, which would have made any form of intercourse extremely painful, probably impossible. Reid does not think it was that sort of relationship, and certainly does not think she would have had a child.

“That’s preposterous,” she says. “Preposterous. ”

On the question of whether they were lovers, one biographer confesses himself a complete agnostic. It was plainly not a relationship like that between Victoria and Albert.

She was so open about loving Brown, about wanting him to hold her and carry her about in public and laugh with her. The likeliest thing, if forced to make up a mind, is that they had a tactile, loving relationship which involved lots of hugging, but that they were not lovers in the true sense of the word. —

Victoria was never one for convention. Despite giving her name to an era of propriety and prudishness, Victoria was anything but.

Where she loved the openness of Brown, she could not stand those who were reserved around her. When it came to her buttoned-up Liberal Prime Minister, William Gladstone, she had no tolerance at all. “Mr. Gladstone is a very dangerous man,” she wrote, “and so very arrogant, tyrannical, and obstinate, with no knowledge of the world or human nature.

”

Victoria was not one to mince her words. She used every weapon in her armoury, her psychological illnesses and physical illnesses, to combat what she believed were assaults by the Liberals on the monarchy itself. Her undisguised loathing of this humorless, intellectual statesman showed how very self-asserted Queen Victoria could be. Gladstone was awkward with the Queen, and like his hero Prime Minister Robert Peel, he did not have the best way with women.

Thirty years after her run-in with Peel, Victoria showed herself to be just as belligerent with Gladstone as she had been in her youth. One such case occurred in the summer of 1869, when the Lord Mayor of London and Gladstone asked her to open the new Blackfriars Bridge. The Queen was determined to wriggle out of it, and the drama went on and on through the summer and autumn, Gladstone bearing the brunt of most of her emotional outbursts. She thought she had clearly expressed that it was impossible for her to open Blackfriars Bridge.

But as Mr. Gladstone seemed still in doubt, she would repeat her sincere regret that it was quite out of the question for her to do anything of the kind in the heat of the summer. The republicans, the press, but also the keen monarchists, were all asking themselves the same question: if the country functioned perfectly well with a head of state spending most of her year either up in Balmoral or down on the Isle of Wight, why did we need a monarchy at all? It was to silence that question that the Prime Minister was determined to parade the little woman on this bridge.

She was equally determined not to be bullied, and not to be put under pressure. As July wore on, she dug in her heels. “The Queen is much surprised at being again teased and tormented about this bridge,” she wrote, “having three weeks ago nearly been asked by Mr. Gladstone, and she refused to open it, saying the fatigue of the whole thing being much too great.

” There was no mincing in the heat, and everyone suffered her mood swings. When it came to the event, Victoria decided she could open the bridge. But what a palaver she had caused in doing so. Frequently caught in the crossfire between Gladstone and his Queen was her private secretary, Colonel Henry Ponsonby.

His great-granddaughter Laura Ponsonby is the keeper of many letters penned by Victoria’s idiosyncratic hand. “The Queen’s handwriting is incredibly difficult to read,” she says. “I think I’m getting worse, coming out of the twins’ writing desk every 10 minutes. ” Her feeling is that Gladstone found Queen Victoria almost impossible to deal with, whereas Henry Ponsonby was far better at dealing with her; he knew what he was doing.

He did all he could to try to make the Queen more reasonable. But she was very, very critical about him. Henry Ponsonby knew that it was no good contradicting her. There was a famous story: when he said, “Two and two make four,” Queen Victoria said, “No, they make five.

” He said, “No, I think they make four. ” She said, “No, you’re wrong. ” Then he said, “I’ll leave it. I’ll let it drop,” and then they went back to it, and it was okay.

He knew that if he said no, Queen Victoria would immediately dig her heels right in. She could be absolutely impossible, of course, but he managed to cope with it. And he had a great sense of humour. That was the saving thing.

He got them all laughing at the dinner table; he looked around at Queen Victoria and she was absolutely giggly. She was known for her full roar of laughter. You start laughing, and then tears come to your eyes, you shake, and all this sort of laughter comes up. She had a lot of that.

It was the weird mix of Victoria’s humour and hysteria that the politicians could not come to terms with, so much so they feared for her sanity. And you can see why the establishment were worried when you look at the terse notes between the Queen and Mr. Gladstone. When Gladstone went to stay at Balmoral, he was awkward and would not speak to the Queen.

She often refused to speak to him. They would correspond, even while both living in the same house, sometimes as often as six times a day. The letters are particularly comical: Gladstone’s beautifully written, a little pompous, absolutely rational, and she scribbles furiously back, as if somebody is screaming through paper. Here is one written in the afternoon, just an outburst: “It is not to Tahiti but to Honolulu, the complaints relative to Prince Alfred.

” What that was about, who knows; history does not relate. But you do see what Mr. Gladstone was up against. Victoria capriciously showed her Prime Minister time and time again that she was Queen, and he could not bully her into doing something she did not want to do.

She maintained her hostilities towards Gladstone to his dying day. The grand old man clung to office long after he became physically incapable. On and off he was Prime Minister for twenty-six years. At the time of his resignation, Victoria offered him not one word of thanks.

Her note read: “She trusts he’ll be able to enjoy peace and quiet with his excellent and devoted wife, in health and happiness, and that his eyesight may improve. The Queen would gladly have conferred a peerage on Mr. Gladstone, but she knows he would not accept. ” Gladstone’s decline and death had little effect on the Queen.

Years ago, she had unashamedly fallen for his political opponent, Benjamin Disraeli, whose One Nation Toryism was her kind of politics. Besides, he knew how to make her laugh. At Disraeli’s private home in Hughenden, curator Robert Bandy is the proud keeper of the numerous gifts Victoria lavished on Disraeli. There are diamonds, and an awful lot of portraits in the house from the Queen, all of them with a crown on top, in case he could be in any doubt.

An unconventional visit to Hughenden in 1877 showed Disraeli’s political skill and charm. When Disraeli collected the Queen from Wickham station, he took two carriages with him: one with fast horses, so he could welcome the Queen for the first time on the platform. After all the bowing and dipping, he popped her into the first carriage with the quick horses, got back to Hughenden before the Queen, and welcomed her in exactly the same way for a second time when she got to the front door of the manor. It was delicious.

Disraeli noticed that the Queen was a slightly short lady, and her feet did not touch the floor; they dangled in the air. He did not think that was particularly becoming for a monarch. This is another present from her: two selected speeches of Albert. Very remarkable, considering that at first Victoria disliked Disraeli entirely, when he was just a member of the House.

But he became useful to her because, whereas she complained that Gladstone referred to her as though she were a public meeting, Disraeli gave her the opposite of the spectrum. He gave her the tittle-tattle and gossip, wrote her fearful notes from parliament. After all, she had a very marked sense of humour, and she liked the fact that he made parliament and the ministers so amusing. She laughed over his letters.

Who else is on the chimney-piece? John Brown, given by the Queen to Disraeli. Disraeli, the most unlikely Victorian prime minister, and Brown, completely outside the normal social sphere for the Queen, were both drawn in closest to her. Both Brown and Disraeli gave Victoria the loyalty she always longed for, and she lapped up Disraeli’s endless attention and flattery.

“He is so full of poetry, romance, and chivalry,” she wrote. “When he knelt down to kiss my hand, which he took in both of his, he said, ‘In loving loyalty and faith. ’”

Disraeli not only amused and flirted with Victoria; he understood her emotional struggles in life. Professor Jane Ridley, who has written biographies of both Disraeli and Queen Victoria, puts it clearly: Disraeli did not treat her as a stupid woman.

He treated her as a sort of exotic and wonderful Queen. He also treated her as an equal. He made her feel, by writing her these wonderful confidential letters, that he was telling her everything, that he was her minister, and that together they were ruling the country. He made her feel good.

Before, she had had that awful generation of those dreadful old men she called them, who talked down to her and did not flatter her in this way. But Disraeli got on his knees flattering her right from day one, and she loved it. People smiled at Victoria’s crush on Disraeli, and at his shameless camp manipulation of it. He dubbed her “the Fairy” or “the Fairy Queen.

” He was genuinely fond of her, but he was prepared to exploit the friendship for political ends. Britain was moving to a position where eventually every male adult would have the vote, and many politicians feared this would mean an inevitable lurch to the left. Disraeli had his finger on the pulse; he knew there were thousands upon thousands of lower-middle-class and working-class men who were natural Tories. Victoria became the perfect figurehead for Disraeli’s one-nation conservatism.

His plans involved Victoria as a symbol of British power, not just at home but stretching far across the world to the Empire. Showing both political astuteness and glorious creativity, Disraeli announced Victoria was the Empress of India on January 1, 1877. She was delighted with the new title. “My thoughts much taken up with the great event of Delhi today, and in India generally, where I am being proclaimed Empress of India,” she wrote.

“I have for the first time today signed myself as V. R. and I. , Empress of India.

”

It is a title you might think more appropriate for a railway engine, or possibly a page. But it made Britain an imperial power. India, in all its exotic expense, now tame under the royal dominion of the Fairy. Of course, sophisticated people flinched at the title.

But Victoria and Disraeli knew that the vast proportion of the British people thought the Empire made Britain rich. For the next eighty years, the Empire was the pride of Britain’s Conservatives, and the envy of many beyond its borders. As she had instinctively used her diplomatic skills in Germany in the years following Albert’s death, Victoria leapt at the chance to stand at the helm of Disraeli’s political ideals, to galvanize Britain’s classes under a powerful monarch. There is a glorious romance about being “Victoria R.

I. ” rather than simply “Victoria Regina. ” It was a real publicity coup. In India, Victoria was extraordinary popular; they saw her as almost a goddess figure, even though she never went there in her life.

She had an extraordinary common sense about predicting what was going to happen, about politics, and about the Empress of India thing. She was absolutely right; it was a really astute political move. But the pair’s political romance could not last forever. Disraeli fought on in politics to his dying day.

Victoria showered attention on him right to the end, bestowing on him a peerage as Lord Beaconsfield. At his death, she was distraught. “I cannot write in the third person at this terrible moment,” she wrote, “when I can scarcely see for my fast falling tears. ” She made the most extraordinary confession to her friend Lady Waterpark: “I know you will feel for me in my great and irreplaceable loss.

I have lost so many, but none whose loss will be more heavily felt than this of dear Lord Beaconsfield. ” They are remarkable words when you consider how recently she had lost her beloved daughter Alice, and how intensely she had mourned the Prince Consort. They show how close Victoria had become, both in politics and in her heart, to Disraeli. If Gladstone was the dictatorial Prime Minister, Disraeli was the true and trusted friend.

As if the death of Disraeli was not enough, just two years later came the death of the man who may have been the love of her life, John Brown. The Queen was devastated. The childless widow was alone again. The extent of Victoria’s grief on paper is only known in part; these words escaped the ruthless winds of censorship: “I am terribly upset by this loss, which removed one who was so devoted and attached to my service, who did so much for my personal comfort.

It is the loss not only of a servant, but of a real friend. ”

—

Through love and loss, time and time again, Victoria had the remarkable fortitude to carry on in the midst of grief. Far from her widowhood constraining her, she had the strength to reinvent herself. In 1887, aged sixty-eight, celebrating her golden jubilee, she was visibly a new woman.

“The crowds from the palace gates up to the Abbey were enormous,” she wrote. “This never-to-be-forgotten day will always leave the most gratifying and heart-stirring memories behind. ”

The celebrations did not end in London; they extended far across the reaches of the Empire. In the durbar room at Osborne on the Isle of Wight, Victoria added this fantastic wing to Prince Albert’s Italianate villa, a symbol of her liberation from the Albertine past.

Her dominion, her imaginative grasp of her Empire and of the world itself, had expanded so much in her life. It is utterly fantastic. Victoria had never been to India, but she always had a great affection for its peoples. She would far rather hear exotic stories of India than talk to her boring Oxford-educated politicians.

And so it was decided in her Jubilee year that a taste of India would be sent to her in England, in the form of two Indian servants from Agra. One of those servants would turn out to be her last great attachment. The man in question was twenty-four-year-old Abdul Karim, hired as little more than a footman. He was to become the new subject of Victoria’s male affections.

Abdul Karim was much lighter, tall, and with a fine serious countenance. Victoria loved his company. Down the corridors of Osborne House wafted the delicious aromas of the spices he had brought with him from Agra: cinnamon, cloves, turmeric, cumin, nutmeg, browning up the pong of over-boiled cabbage and mutton. Abdul Karim brought with him India in all its colour and splendour, which Victoria welcomed wholeheartedly into her court.

Shrabani Basu, author of the best-selling book on Abdul Karim and Queen Victoria, describes the scene: he was a married man, and his wife came to the court as well, Mrs. Karim as she was called. She was veiled, and it was a good Indian family. He not only got his mother, he got his mother-in-law as well.

There were several of his burqa-clad Muslim ladies around the throne, as it were. The Queen was so excited, because she said it was the first time there had been ladies of that kind in court. If Victoria liked a servant, she did not hold back. Abdul was soon promoted to the position of the Munshi, the Queen’s Indian teacher.

She wanted to learn about the ordinary people of India, and this was really important to her. She wanted to learn the language, and he gave her the everyday phrases. She loved showing off. When Indian princes came, what better than casually to use a Hindustani phrase?

The useful everyday phrases he taught her were standard things like “Oh, you know, the tea is too hot” or “the egg is not boiled enough. ” But they were also intriguing phrases like “I will miss them when they very much” and “Hold me tight. ” Where did that come from, one wonders. Did she hold him tight?

It was a relationship on so many levels: mother and son, grandmother and grandson, closest friend. Queen Victoria liked a strong man next to her. If you see the pattern from John Brown, he was six feet tall, a strong man, somebody who cared for her. Abdul Karim was six feet too, standing next to her, looking after her.

Definitely the physical, the sensual element was very much part of it. That is very revealing. None of Victoria’s English courtiers liked the Munshi. They thought he was John Brown in a turban.

But Victoria seemed not to notice, or perhaps chose to ignore their snobbish and racist feelings towards him. Writing to Vicky, Victoria’s words were all praise: “He is so good and gentle and understanding, all I want, and is a real comfort to me, such a good influence with the others. ”

Anything Abdul Karim wanted, he would get. If he wanted a nice room, he was given the room.

He was given John Brown’s old room, and that was noticed. She gave him his own carriage to ride around in. He went around Balmoral, he went to India on holiday. As soon as he started getting all the favours, the resentment started as well.

The Queen accused them all the time of racism, and insisted they behave courteously to him, which they did not. And the one she invited was a bit arrogant and a bit full of himself; he did strut around, he did rule over and lord over the other Indian servants. But that was the position he had been given. Although unrest at court was mounting, Victoria did not seem to care.

She was simply not going to give up her fondness for her new best friend. The brooch incident in June 1889 further incensed her household. The Queen was furious, but not with the thief. She was furious with Mrs.

Tuck. In India, she claimed, it was perfectly normal to pick things up that did not belong to you, and it was not considered dishonesty at all. Then she rounded on her dresser: “This is what your English call justice. You English.

”

Coming from the Queen who had escaped to Germany when times had grown tough, and who, although she had spent the previous fifty years on the throne, evidently never really felt at home in Britain itself, the outburst was telling. As with other members of the court, Dr. Reid was not keen on how much time the Queen devoted to the Munshi, especially as he was so often unwell. Reid had to look after the Munshi and was sometimes kept up to midnight, at his wits’ end.

The Queen went several times to see him in his room and stroked his hand, taking Hindustani lessons, stroking his neck, smoothing his pillows. One does not want to be too explicit, but what was the matter with the poor Munshi? Well, first of all he had had scabies, but that was a bit better. But this was a big boil on his neck.

Dr. Reid disliked the Munshi hugely. He thought he was a bad egg, horrible to his fellow Indians, full of a sense of superiority over all the others. Could he see what she saw in the Munshi?

Clearly not. For Victoria, he was exotic, and he was a symbol of India. Victoria, oblivious to the resentment, turned a blind eye to the unhappy members of her court. But things came to a head when she insisted the Munshi join her on her annual trip to the sunny Riviera.

—

Victoria had always loved coming to France as a place of escape, traveling around in the years after Albert’s death under the name of the Countess of Balmoral. France represented freedom for Victoria. In 1897, a royal trip to Nice was planned, staying at the swanky new Excelsior Hotel with superb views of the Mediterranean. She drove through the town along the fine Promenade des Anglais, close to the sea, “which looked so lovely in a wonderful deep blue colour.

”

The holiday plans were going awry, and an almighty row was about to break out in the household, precipitated by Dr. Reid, who most improperly told the others that the poor Munshi had yet again gone down with a dose of gonorrhea. The household seized on this as the perfect excuse to say: if the Munshi went to Nice, they were not coming. They were going to be on strike.

This precipitated the mother of all tensions. Mrs. Phipps was chosen to go tell the Queen that if the Munshi went, they were not going to go; they were going to collectively resign. The Queen heard this and got into a screaming rage.

She got up and threw everything down from the tables: all the letters, portfolios, ink, pens crashing down. Mrs. Phipps left the room in tears and went back and told them what had happened. At the end of the day, they did not resign.

And the Munshi travelled, as he always did, with the Queen. It was a victory for the Munshi, and a victory for the Queen too. But when Victoria paraded with the Munshi on Nice’s famous promenade, one of the local newspapers described the Munshi as a mere servant. The Queen was infuriated and insisted that the newspaper print a retraction, stating that the Munshi was a learned man, far from being her servant, and that he was her Indian secretary, a preceptor in the Hindustani tongue, and moreover one of the most important personages at court.

Victoria always insisted he be respected. “Remember,” she said, “he is my Indian secretary, and considered as a gentleman in my suite. ”

In Victoria’s eyes, a gentleman was not a wealthy landowner. It was someone who had admirable qualities, no matter their class or race.

One biographer finds this one of Victoria’s most lovable qualities: her complete lack of snobbishness, and her disregard for social constraint. —

This was the woman who had been supposedly crippled by the death of her husband at the age of forty-two. But she became so much more than the widow in black. Victoria spent the last forty years of her life after Albert finding freedom in the most unlikely of relationships.

And despite living her life shying away from the public, she emerged as an icon of the era, a picture of British power. Just four years before her death, the streets of London were lined with her public celebrating her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. “No one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation as was given to me passing through those six miles of streets,” she wrote. “The cheering was quite deafening, and every face seemed to be filled with joy.

”

Victoria died in January 1901, after a remarkable sixty-three years on the throne. More than a century after her death, her words still command our attention. Victoria had written instructions, which she gave to her dresser Mrs. Tuck and to Dr.

Reid, telling them what she wanted to be put in her coffin with her when she died. She was to have the Prince Consort’s dressing gown. She was to have various photographs of favourite grandchildren or servants, and locks of their hair. Perhaps most significant, she was to be holding a framed photograph of John Brown.

And on her finger was the ring which he had given her, his mother’s wedding ring. As one walks past the mausoleum at Frogmore, which is nearly always closed, it is a strange thought to think of her lying there, surrounded by all her mementos. The image is emblematic of a queen who loved drama in life, and now in death. But sadly, the image is not one her children could tolerate.

All traces of the Queen’s unconventional attachments were erased. The month she was buried, her children tried to edit their mother’s life: destroying statues of John Brown, censoring her journals, burning her letters. But many of her words survived, and they provide a fascinating insight into this extraordinary human being. Victoria had overcome her pressurized childhood in a controlling political system, and had fought through the power struggles of her marriage to a man who had restrained her.

In the midst of grief, she emerged as a woman free to move in the world of politics and make deep friendships without constraint. In all this, she revealed herself a woman who was anything but Victorian. Far from being prim and proper, she loved life in all its richness. She was blind to class and colour and country, and had a great sense of humour.

When you look at the statue of her, she seems so stiff, so formal, the Queen Empress. But hear her words, and Victoria lives.