It’s nearly midnight by the time I log on to the Zoom call, but for my interviewee the working day has just ended. As I sit, blinking at my computer screen, a Minnesota kitchen pixelates into view.
I’m chatting to a woman called Angela – a bubbly, kind, ornately tattooed hospice worker who I’m hoping might be able to give an answer to one of the biggest mysteries in British history: what is the truth about Queen Victoria’s relationship with her most-trusted servant John Brown?
Those who have seen the 1997 movie Mrs Brown – starring Judi Dench as the Queen and Billy Connolly as John – will know that Victoria, widowed, scared and desperately sad, began to see the handsome Scots ghillie as her protector and appointed him ‘The Queen’s Highland Servant’.
For the next 20 years, no one was closer to the Queen. John ran her daily errands and put his life on the line to save her from would-be assassins. He spent hours alone with her every day and in her private house in the Highlands, he had the bedroom next to hers. But were Queen Victoria and John just friends or were they lovers and, more particularly, did they have a child together?
As an historian, I’ve spent years looking into this question and, as the great-great-great-niece of John Brown, one of the last surviving descendants of his brother Hugh and his wife Jessie, I think Angela may be the one person who might be able to answer it.
Queen Victoria’s close relationship with Scottish ghillie John Brown began in 1863
It was a rainy night in October 1863 that changed Victoria’s life for ever. Huddled in her carriage on a windswept road outside Balmoral, Queen Victoria was sunk in widow’s grief. It was two long years since she had lost her beloved husband, Prince Albert, and though she had spent the day riding the rough paths of Glen Clova with two of her daughters, not even the freshness of Scottish air could raise her spirits.
The journey back to Balmoral was proving treacherous: the carriage inched slowly forward, led by a man with a lamp.
With a sudden, violent shudder, it lurched to one side. Thrown to the ground face-first, the Queen managed to scramble out of the wreckage, only to find her daughters trapped, unable to free their clothing.
Although the horses ‘lay as if dead’, if they should bolt or attempt to stand, they would pull the wreck on top of the princesses and kill them. Princess Helena, 17, screamed in fear. The man with the lamp raced back, hauling her and Princess Alice, 21, from the wreck, cutting and tearing their voluminous skirts to shreds.
He freed the horses, found plaid blankets for the Queen and wrapped her in them, then hunted through the broken beams and wheels to find some claret to calm the princesses’ nerves.
Finally, he stood guard over their wounded, anxious party, until help from the castle arrived. This man’s name was John Brown.
John was not unknown to Victoria in 1863. For many years, he had led her pony whenever she was in residence at Balmoral. But it is not hard to imagine that on this night, Victoria – widowed, scared and desperately sad – began to see the handsome Highlander as something else.
Not merely her shadow, but also her protector. It was the start of a very different relationship.
Their friendship was sometimes tempestuous. John spoke to Victoria in a direct way no other servant would dare to, but was utterly devoted to her. She in turn, referred to the handsome Scottish Highlander as her ‘best friend’.
As she wrote in a letter to his brother Hugh, when John vehemently proclaimed he would serve her until his death: ‘I took and held his dear kind hand and I said I hoped he might long be spared to comfort me…
‘Afterwards I told him no one loved him more than I did… and he answered “nor you – than me… no one loves you more.”’
For more than a hundred years, the true nature of their relationship has remained hidden. After Victoria’s death in 1901, on the orders of her eldest son, Edward VII, the Palace set about erasing John from the record. Victoria’s journals were copied, edited, and the originals destroyed.
Those who have attempted to bring John and Victoria’s story to light have found themselves blocked, dismissed or ridiculed by powerful forces. As recently as 1987, when the family of James Reid, Victoria’s doctor, set out to publish his diaries for the first time – revealing what he had witnessed of Victoria’s intimate relationship with John – Princess Margaret personally attempted to halt publication.
Jeremy Brock, who wrote the screenplay for the movie Mrs Brown, told me he understood that there was an agreement with John’s family not to release any of his papers in the lifetime of the late Queen Mother. So John’s descendants were still very much on the royal radar, a century after Victoria’s death.
Years of researching – and talking to the Brown family – have led me to conclude that Victoria and John did have an intimate relationship. Not only that, but rumours that they secretly married and had a child that was spirited away to be brought up outside the Royal Family may indeed have some foundation. Gossip about the pair began in the summer of 1865, after Victoria requested John be transferred to the Royal Household at Windsor.
‘Strange and disagreeable stories are going about London…’ wrote Lord Stanley, who served twice as her foreign secretary, in his private diary. ‘The Queen has taken a fancy to a certain Scotch servant, by name Brown: will have no one else to wait upon her, makes him drive her out alone in a pony carriage, walk after, or rather with her, gives orders through him to equerries, allows him access to her such as no one else has…
‘There is nothing in this, most likely, except a fancy for a good-looking and intelligent dependant: but the thing has become a joke through Windsor, where H.M is talked of as “Mrs Brown” – and if it lasts the joke will grow into a scandal.’ References to the Queen as ‘Mrs Brown’ clearly insinuated that she and John were in a sexual relationship. Victoria’s middle daughters, Helena and Louise, openly spoke of him as ‘Mamma’s lover’. Lord Stanley assumed it was a joke – but could the princesses simply be acknowledging what everyone else wanted to deny?
John had a decade of royal service behind him by the time of the carriage crash, having worked his way up from stable boy to ghillie, guiding the royal visitors on picnics and fishing trips. He was the quintessential outdoorsman, with a keen eye and knowledge of the seasons, the animals and the weather. He spoke with a heavy Aberdeenshire accent and always wore a tartan kilt.
When Prince Albert died suddenly of typhoid fever in 1861 – aged only 42 – Victoria was bereft. Their marriage had produced nine children and she was tormented by the loss of Albert’s body and his touch. ‘My life is without joy, and nothing, nothing can ever bring back one shred of my lost happiness!’ she wrote to a friend. ‘Oh God, why must it be so? This yearning is such torture! I could go mad from the desire and longing.’
It was twelve days after Victoria wrote that letter that her carriage overturned.
On the fourth anniversary of Albert’s death, in 1865, Victoria took John with her to a service at the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore. ‘I must tell you how touchingly my poor faithful Brown spoke to me yesterday,’ she wrote to Vicky, her eldest daughter, who had married the Crown Prince of Prussia and was living in Berlin.
Brown wore a signet ring on his left little finger, as seen in a painting of him at Frogmore in 1883. The Victorian obsession with romantic symbolism cannot be underestimated. To wear such a ring on your left hand was to wear it closest to your heart
‘He was so much affected; 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 ye at Frogmore this morning, I felt for ye, to see ye coming there with your daughters and your husband lying there – marriage on one side and death on the other; no, I didn’t like to see it… There is no more pleasure for you, poor Queen, and I feel for ye but what can I do though for ye? I could die for ye.”’
Scandalous stories about the couple began to swirl around the world. In September 1866, the Swiss paper Gazette de Lausanne published a shocking exposé claiming Victoria, then aged 46, and John had privately married and that she was pregnant.
The government was horrified: the reputation of the Queen was the reputation of the empire. A British diplomat in Switzerland complained, which was the most foolish response imaginable: it gave the British Press an excuse to cover the story and it was soon running in newspapers as far afield as Australia.
But Victoria carried on regardless. She promoted him and raised his salary to £150 per annum (when the most well-paid male servants in London would have been earning £40-£100). Only the Queen could give him orders. Victoria had refused all official duties since Albert’s death, leaving some to question what the point of a monarch was if she were able to abandon her role. The Times called for an end to her seclusion, even suggesting Bertie, her eldest son should ascend to the throne if she would not return.
To try to stem the tide of political anger, Victoria was persuaded to attend the State Opening of Parliament in 1866, but did so without the splendour of her ceremonial robes. Instead, she wore her widow’s weeds. She refused to read the Queen’s Speech, forcing the Lord Chancellor to do so on her behalf.
Many people blamed John for Victoria’s neglect of her duty. At the opening of Blackfriars Bridge in 1869, angry crowds surged towards Victoria’s carriage shouting toward the tartan-clad figure: ‘There’s John Brown! Pull him out! Turn him out!’
But public opinion changed in 1872 when a young Irish rebel, Arthur O’Connor, made an attempt on the Queen’s life as she prepared to leave Buckingham Palace. He ran to her carriage window and pointed an ancient pistol at Victoria’s shocked face, saying: ‘Take that from a Fenian!’ John, moving like lightning, hauled him violently from the door and pinned him down. The pistol clattered to the ground.
As the news of the attempted assassination exploded across the capital, John was no longer booed or hissed. He was issued with a revolver and from then on slept with it under his pillow. His declaration that ‘I could die for ye’ was now a reality.
As Victoria awarded him a medal, she wrote: ‘You will see in this the great anxiety to show more and more what you are to me and as time goes on – this will be more and more seen and known. Everyone hears me say you are my friend and most confidential attendant.’
Had they married in secret? A legal English marriage – even a private one – would have required a church, a minister and the reading of banns. But since the medieval period, Scotland had accepted an ‘exchange of consent’ as marriage. In Scottish law, if Victoria wanted to marry John, privately, there was nothing standing in her way.
There is strong evidence that an irregular marriage between John and Victoria did take place. As Victoria’s much-loved royal chaplain, the Reverend Norman Macleod, lay dying in 1872, he made an astonishing deathbed confession to his sister, telling her he had married John and Victoria.
Whatever the nature of their relationship before 1872, it is clear that year marked a turning point. Victoria had suffered a long illness and John had cared for her, then he had saved her from O’Connor’s assassination attempt.
John began to wear a plain gold signet ring on the little finger of his left hand. It’s not there at any point before early 1872, but it’s prominently on display in the photographs and paintings of him from 1873 onwards.
Albert had worn a gold signet ring on the little finger of his right hand, which was the usual position. Yet John’s, for some reason, sat on his left. Here is where the Victorian obsession with romantic symbolism cannot be underestimated. To wear such a ring on your left hand was to wear it closest to your heart.
For John and Victoria, though, there may have been a deeper symbolism. Morganatic marriage – the private marriage of a royal to an ordinary person, which bestowed no rank or recognition, undertaken solely as an expression of love – was also known as a left-handed marriage.
If John was only ever a servant, even a close one, why would Victoria care so much for his family, visiting his parents and his brothers? When John’s father died, Victoria attended his funeral. This was extraordinary: ‘The thing itself is a trifle, but it is noticed that of all the relations and friends whom she lost, she has never attended the funeral of any, and it is not thought decent that the sole exception made should have been in favour of a Highland farmer,’ Lord Stanley wrote in his diary.
Shortly afterwards, she gave John’s widowed mother a cottage on the Balmoral estate. She offered to pay for a return trip for his brother Hugh, who had emigrated to New Zealand: ‘I know how your mother would like it and it can easily be done. I have thought about it ever since I saw her cry when she spoke of all her children she had seen and knew within reach and she mentioned Hugh. I hope, darling one, you will do this. Ever your own devoted friend.’
In this deeply intimate letter, the only one between them currently known to survive, John was no longer ‘Brown’ but ‘darling one’.
One of the more obvious signs that he had begun to take the place of a de facto royal consort is that Victoria now expected her sons Bertie, Affie, Arthur and Leopold to shake John’s hand when they visited, as if he were an equal.
Victoria drew up a memorandum specifying if she fell ill, John was to care for her. She wanted to make sure if she was at death’s door, John could not be barred from her side.
As Christmas 1876 approached, so did John’s 50th birthday. He was now eight years older than Albert when he died, and had watched and cared for Victoria for most of his life. For Christmas, she gave him a silver teapot, elaborately monogrammed with his initials.
To celebrate the New Year, she gave him a card illustrated with a parlour maid holding an envelope in her hands and the words: ‘My lips may give a message better of Christmas love than e’en my letter.’ How much evidence is required to prove that Victoria and John were more than friends? The house, the family, the cards, the letters, the gifts, the terms of endearment, the mutual declaration of love…
As the years went by, Victoria and John’s relationship was clear for all to see. Every other man was banned from smoking in her presence. John was not only allowed to do so, but she gave him a beautiful little pipe in a silver monogrammed case. The rules she had set with Albert she happily broke for John.
Yet any peace Victoria felt was shattered again in 1882 when a destitute lunatic, Roderick Maclean, drew his pistol and fired two shots at her carriage. John leapt over the back of the carriage to her rescue. ‘It is worth being shot at to see how one is loved,’ Victoria wrote to her daughter Vicky.
A locket with Queen Victoria’s portrait and her hair, alongside a portrait of Prince Albert, are said to have been gifted to John Brown
A year later, the precious intimacy and companionship that had been built over the course of decades and withstood all opposition was ripped away from her. When two suspect characters were spotted in the environs of Windsor Castle, John went in pursuit. It was a bitterly cold winter and he caught a chill. A few days later, at just 56 years old, he died. Victoria was once again overwhelmed by grief.
Just as she had with Albert, Victoria ordered John’s hand to be cast and then carved in stone, with his gold signet ring on his finger. To carve a hand, to be able to touch and hold it for the rest of your life when the one you love has left it, seems beautiful and heart-rending.
Victoria had also memorialised Albert with a locket holding locks of both their hair – which she later gifted to John. She did the same for her beloved servant upon his death, creating a locket emblazoned with his photograph, hair and the words ‘Dear John’ for his family.
Servants were given gold mourning pins – some with John’s head in profile and his initials, others with his photograph – to be worn in his memory. Then, to mark her most intimate feelings, Victoria began to wear his mother’s wedding ring – which John had given to her – openly on her own hand.
When Victoria died, 18 years later, in 1901 she was buried still wearing that ring. She also requested that a lock of John’s hair, one of his pocket handkerchiefs and a photograph of him – along with items belonging to Prince Albert – be buried with her.
Trying to trace what really happened between the Queen and her Highland Servant has been a frustrating journey. Much evidence has been deliberately destroyed. For months I chased a rumour that a man called George Hanton might have been Victoria and John’s illegitimate son, but it seemed too distant a possibility.
Then, unusual aspects of a will connected to Mary Ann, the only child of John’s brother Hugh – who moved with his wife Jessie to New Zealand – caught my attention. In short, if various members of Mary Ann’s family died, an official at Balmoral was to be given guardianship of her children.
Why would that be? John Brown – no more than a servant in royal eyes – was long dead. Why would any member of his family be protected by Balmoral?
Could it be that Mary Ann, whose birth was registered soon after Hugh and Jessie’s arrival in New Zealand in 1865, was actually Victoria and John’s child, sent to the furthest reach of the empire in secret? After much detective work, I had tracked down Angela, one of Hugh and Jessie’s last surviving relatives, in the USA. On our late-night Zoom call, she revealed to me the bombshell story that had been passed down her family.
‘We were always told that we were the illegitimate line… that there was a big boat trip… and a baby given to the family.’
Here was a direct line: John’s brother’s only child, Mary Ann, who may have been sent out to join him and his wife in New Zealand, named as Victoria and John’s daughter by her only surviving descendants. If true, it would make Angela the great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
It may seem outlandish, but I can’t discount the possibility – however remarkable – that Victoria had the capacity and ability to disguise a pregnancy in the mid-1860s, give birth, and then keep the baby a secret. Without DNA evidence, of course, we’ll never know – and given the secrecy that surrounds this story, that is unlikely to be forthcoming from the Royal Family.
But with Victoria, signs and clues, like the two four-leafed clovers she collected and gave to John, which he kept in his scrapbook, tell you all you need to know. In the Victorian language of flowers, which the Queen and her servant would have both understood, the meaning of a four-leafed clover is clear: Be Mine.
- Adapted from Victoria’s Secret by Fern Riddell (Ebury Press, £22), to be published July 31. © Fern Riddell 2025. To order a copy for £19.80 (offer valid to 09/08/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.
- Queen Victoria: Secret Marriage, Secret Child? is on Channel 4 on July 31.
