Study in Black & Brown

QUEEN VICTORIA'S PRIVATE LIFE (224 pp.)--E.E.P. Tisdall--John Day ($4.50).

Evelyn Ernest Percy Tisdall has an improbable hobby for the head of a boarding school for young children: fireworks. He also goes in for fireworks in a literary way with court-scandal biographies, such as Alexandra, Edward VII's Unpredictable Queen, and Marie Fedorovna: Empress of Russia. His latest is about the Queen whose present reputation is about as far removed from gamy gossip as it is possible to get. But in her own lifetime the black-draped Widow of Windsor was openly rumored to be having a Lady Chatterley-like affair with a Scottish gamekeeper, and Scandalmonger Tisdall makes the most of it.

Biscuits & Spirits. "John Brown was thirty-five, with red-gold hair and beard and a precisely shaven upper lip, handsome in a big, scrubbed, leathery sort of Highland way. His eyes were remarkable, fierce and kindly, gentle and naming: but who among the aristocratic Household noticed the eyes of a kilted crofter, faintly odoriferous no doubt of sweat, who lived among the grooms?"

Queen Victoria, that's who. At Balmoral, she would have him and only him at her side indoors and out. They would go on long afternoon outings with the pony and trap--and a bottle of whisky in the boot. One of the Queen's Maids of Honor, meeting John Brown in the castle carrying a basket, once asked him whether the Queen was having her tea out that afternoon. "Weel, yus and nu," he muttered. "She dinna mooch like tay. We take out biscuits and sperruts."

There was no question about Brown's fondness for spirits. He usually reeked of them and was frequently drunk. Drunk or sober, he treated Victoria with brusque rudeness, and the Queen was apparently amused. She would laugh delightedly at his crudities and expect her horrified courtiers to do the same. One of her great delights were the Chillies' Balls, at which Victoria and Brown would prance and dance wildly together. "What a coarse animal that Brown is," said Lord Cairns, the Lord Chancellor, to the Queen's secretary, Henry Ponsonby. "I daresay the Chillies' Ball could not go on without him, but I did not conceive it possible that anyone could behave as roughly as he does to the Queen."

"Hoots Then, Wumman!" Were they lovers? Tinsley's Magazine for October 1868 reported that the English gentry jokingly referred to the Queen (then 49) as "Mrs. Brown." Punch ran a satirical Court Circular detailing the doings of Mr. John Brown; another magazine published a cartoon of John Brown lolling against a vacant throne; a scurrilous pamphlet, "Mrs. John Brown," was circulated, with the claim that they were morganatic man and wife.

Author Tisdall does his own scurrilous best to indicate that the aging Victoria was not always alone in the beds at Windsor and Balmoral over which hung photographs of her dear, dead Albert. He goes so far as to describe a mysterious photostat sent to him years ago, and now unaccountably lost, purporting to be the pieced-together fragments of a love letter in the Queen's handwriting, fished from Brown's scrap basket. The basis of the bond between them, he speculates, may have been that Brown was a spiritualist medium through whom Victoria thought she was in touch with Albert.

This backstairs stuff is as unconvincing as any tabloid keyhole column. But there can be no doubt that the willful Queen had a warmly loving relationship with the rough Scottish servant. The only recorded time in which the two were alone together, thinking that they were unobserved, makes a touching, human vignette. On a walk near Balmoral in 1875, a Mr. John Barry-Torr and his wife rounded a bend to see an empty pony cart and, a few yards away, Victoria and John Brown. Brown, pinning a plaid round the Queen's shoulders, apparently scratched her; she squealed and protested. "Brown offered no apology. He gave the Queen a kind of shake, clutched her more tightly and snapped: 'Hoots, then, wumman--can ye no hould yere heid up?' "

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.