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John Brown: Queen Victoria's Highland Servant, by Raymond Lamont-Brown; pp. xviii + 198. Stroud: Sutton, 2000, 19.99, $29.95.
Few servants in history have been the focus of more biographies than Victoria's insufferable gillie John Brown. A stable-boy of fifteen on the Balmoral estate in Deeside in 1842 before it was acquired by Victoria and Albert, he is first mentioned in the Queen's journal in 1849. In 1858 he became Albert's personal Scottish servant, and remained in attendance after the Prince's death in 1861. Since Victoria's physicians wanted to get her riding again, to extricate her from self-imposed purdah, Brown was sent south in 1864 to be her groom. Until his death at Windsor Castle in 1883, he would be her closest and most influential attendant, accumulating power and perquisites despite egregious personal flaws she would have tolerated in no one else. He drank heavily and smoked a foul pipe; he used crudities in her presence and even to her; he was arrogant and indiscreet and insubordinate to her highest courtiers and even to her royal children, especially the Prince of Wales-the future Edward VII.
What she publicly valued in Brown was his simple and utter loyalty. What she seems to have privately valued was that he was a physical connection to her late husband, having been his gillie, and that he was a virile-even kilted-presence she could safely have about her. He was outrageously gruff and smelled worse than bad, but he was always there to ease her onto her horse or into her carriage, and do her errands. She was...