Letter shows Queen Victoria's affections

[quaoar]

This John Brown guy must have been an intern.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apeurope_story.asp?category=1103&slug=Britain%20Queen%20Victoria

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

LONDON -- A newly discovered letter written by Queen Victoria, published Wednesday, raised more speculation about an age-old question: Did she have a love affair with her Scottish servant, John Brown?

The letter, written after Brown's death in 1883, talks of "her present unbounded grief for the loss of the best, most devoted of servants and truest and dearest friends."

The letter, written to Viscount Cranbrook on March 30, 1883, was discovered in an archive at the Suffolk Record Office by East Anglia University postgraduate student Bendor Grosvenor.

Queen Victoria, who usually wrote about herself in the third person, said: "Perhaps never in history was there so strong and true an attachment, so warm and loving a friendship between the sovereign and servant as existed between her and her dear faithful Brown. Strength of character, as well as power of frame - the most fearful uprightness, kindness ... combined with a tender warm heart ... made him one of the most remarkable men who could be known."

[mr_hat]

1. 'COR! 'E'd 'ad to 'ave strength of frame, wouldn't 'e?

[MADem]

2. Hmmmm

Is that a royal way of saying he was hung like a horse?

Johnny, she hardly knew ye!!!

[Liberal Veteran]

3. I think she meant he smelled bad....

:)

[MrMonk]

4. Wasn't there a movie about the Queen and Mr. Brown?

[mohinoaklawnillinois]

5. Yeah, it's title was Mrs. Brown and

Judi Dench played Queen Victoria and Billy Connolly played Brown.

It was a pretty interesting movie and Billy Connolly was absolutely terrific in the role.

[pacifictiger]

6. yes, I really enjoyed it.

Billy Connolly, the scottish comedian, played Brown. I saw it on TV a couple of years ago - not sure if it was a made for TV movie or not, but worth seeing. The movie portrayed Brown as having been a most trusted servant of Victoria's husband, and, after he died, instrumental in helping her through her grief and emergence from seclusion.

[elehhhhna]

8. GREAT MOVIE! Loved it!

[mcscajun]

7. And the most telling part of the letter...

from another part of the article...

The letter also says: "And the queen feels that life for the second time is become most trying and sad to bear deprived of all she so needs."
(snippage)

the article continues...

No one disputes the fact that Brown, a handsome man five years younger than the queen, became the most important person in her life after her husband died and remained her confidante for nearly 20 years.

After Brown died, Victoria erected a statue of him at Balmoral.

It seems pretty clear that she found love for the second time in her life...and was nearly as devastated by Brown's passing as when she was widowed by the death of Prince Albert.

[Nothing Without Hope]

9. I'm betting they never made love

She was always more interested in the hearts and flowers and emoting than physical passion, though she did like virile-looking men. When she talked to her girls about their "marriage duties," there was the "lie there and think of England" sort of thinking that suggests Albert was a really, really lousy lover and that she never learned that passion can trump modesty.

I can't see Brown as being allowed to actually have sex with her, but I have no doubt she enjoyed lusting after him and would have REALLY LOVED feeling that he lusted after her. The "something" that she had missed so sorely since her beloved Albert had died was not sex, but her idealized version of soul-matehood & companionship with an attractive man.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

10. I'll bet you're right

People were generally more florid in their descriptions of their affection for friends in the Victorian Era.

Much of present day society is so uptight about being accused of extramarital philandering or of being gay that the emotional intimacy which accompanies friendship is often squelched.

[Nothing Without Hope]

12. So it's a reversal...interesting insight.

Both ways are incomplete and put artificial barriers in the way of true intimacy. Hope it isn't another century until we can get it right.

[ananda]

11. a real hunk

John Brown was very hunky and handsome and looked great in a kilt. QV was a dumpy lump of a woman. It had to be platonic. He died 18 years before she did and that was a good twenty or more years after Albert. No wonder she lived for her kids and all those ruling passions, making ruling class marriages with all her kids so that almost all of Europe somewhere was ruled by her kids and cousins. Kaiser Wilhelm was her grandson; Alexandra, Czarina of Russia was her granddaughter and Nicholas was a nephew or cousin. World War I was basically a war between cousins and spelled the end of monarchy as a viable ruling system. The mentality is still there but the incestuous marriages have been replaced by the power of a family willing to prostitute and shill for corporations and the moneyed elite. But even now as then, raising children to rule is so fukking brutal that it mostly turns them into idiots or monsters... we should know. We have both in GWB.

Sue

[whirlygigspin]

13. Bang on!

Sue knows what time it is!

weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

[VegasWolf]

14. That's not the same servant Prince Charles was fooling around with. n/t

[SKKY]

15. Yea, they were probably bumping uglies....

[SemperEadem]

16. I recently read a couple of the published diaries of Victoria R&I

after reading her writings, it seemed to me that she decended into a form of madness after Albert's death for about 10 years, til 1871-ish... then her writings seem to indicate that she was finally moving out of that phase, but she never wore anything but the deepest, severest black.

She idolized him... if you've ever seen their photographic portraits together, she gazes up at him in such abandoned adoration. He was almost like her God on earth. After his death, the photos of her had her gazing up at a marble bust of him on a pillar, with her daughters in black, too.

She seemed to dislike the rigours of statehood and Albert helped to shoulder a lot of her responsibilities and meeting with the various members of Parliament. She seemed to deeply resent widowhood and the turn her life took. One thing is for certain, she loved Albert--worshipped him-- and even though she turned to Brown for comfort and grieved him well when he died, she never looked upon him as a replacement for Albert---she was too conscious of everyone's rank to allow that to happen.

She once went so far as to tell her daughters (Vicki and Alice) that they would never, ever have as good and gentle a husband as she had in their father--that no man would ever measure up to Albert. Whether that meant him out of bed as opposed to in bed, I can't say...

The letters which Princess Beatrice, their youngest, who was the editor of her mother's letters after the queen's death, allowed to be published certainly speak of the queen being torn about her daughters' upcoming marriages and the horrors to which one delivers their 'innocent daughter' on her wedding night--along the lines of 'nothing can prepare the virgin for what is to come'. She spoke quite bitterly on wifely duties in the bed, even admonishing both Vicki and Alice to not make any mention to either Louise or Helena if they should ask them before the wedding night.

When I think of a merry, happy, free young girl -- and look at the ailing, aching state a young wife generally is doomed to -- which you can't deny is the penalty of marriage.

I feel sure that no girl would go to the altar if she knew all.

Being pregnant is an occupational hazard of being a wife.

What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine dear, but I own I cannot enter into that: I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments: when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic"

I think people really marry far too much; it is such a lottery after all, and for a poor woman a very doubtful happiness."


Truly a mauvais sujet to her. Thinking of Britania must have been what she did because she did have 9 children after all.