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Queen Victoria's secret love affair
00:41:19
Did Queen Victoria have a romantic relationship – perhaps even involving a secret marriage and a child – with her servant John Brown? Fern Riddell investigates
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- [00:01]
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- [01:05]
Ellie Cawthorn
Welcome to the History Extra Podcast. Fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History magazine. Ever since the 1870s, rumors have swirled around the relationship between Queen Victoria and.
- [01:22]
Fearne Riddell
Her Highland servant Jeff John Brown. Were the pair in love?
- [01:27]
Ellie Cawthorn
Could they have got married? And might they even have had a secret child? In her new book, Victoria's Secret, historian Fearne Riddell investigates these claims and has made some dramatic new discoveries that she believes could cast the story in a new light. I spoke to Fearne to find out more. Fearne, you offer a new take on the relationship between Queen Queen Victoria and her Highland servant John Brown in your new book, Victoria's Secret. Before we get into your new findings on this matter, can you give us some context on the story for anyone who's not so familiar? So where do we find Victoria at this point in her life? And who was John Brown?
- [02:10]
Fearne Riddell
The story of John Brown and Queen Victoria is one that has floated around the corners of our culture for 160 years. And I think it's something that people think think they know about, but aren't really sure of the information. We meet Victoria when she's just lost Albert, who we believe has been the love of her life. And she's devastated and grieving, and this strapping, handsome Highland servant who she knew very well at Balmoral, steps into her life and becomes her constant companion for the next 20 years. Now, most people may have heard of John Brown or be aware of the situation, but the official line has always been that he was just a servant or at best a good friend. And what I have spent the last four years doing is trying to find out whether or not that was true. So There have always been three rumors around Victoria and John's relationship. Were they actually lovers? Did they get married and was there a child? And Victoria's Secret is my investigation, my pursuit of the truth that I could find of each of those things. And for me. I don't know how you feel, Ellie, but it completely changed everything I thought I knew about Victoria.
- [03:25]
Ellie Cawthorn
Well, I think we'll leave it there for a moment on some very enticing cliffhangers about marriages and secret children. But just tell us a bit more about how you came to this story in the start of your book. You say, I don't do royals, but why did you make an exception here? What drew you to this story?
- [03:42]
Fearne Riddell
I don't do royals and I wasn't particularly interested in writing about Victoria, but the history I've always written has been the history from below, the history of ordinary people. And I was fascinated by the fact that, as a Victorianist, we know that John was beside Victoria for 20 years of her life, her passionate midlife, as I see it, and we know so little about him. I started doing some research into what had been written about John and I found a fantastic book by an author called Tom Cullen, which was called Empress Brown, and it was written in 1969 and it printed facsimiles of a number of letters between Victoria and John. And I'd never seen these before. I couldn't believe that they existed. I couldn't believe that as a Victorianist, I didn't know about them. Why weren't we talking about them? And I realised very quickly it's because Tom Cullen's facsimiles are the only proof that we had. And other historians who came after him couldn't find where these letters were and believed potentially that they might have not been real. What Colin had done in his acknowledgments, which is part of the job of a historian, is to look not just at what people have said in the past past, but who they've gone to, had left a kind of couple of tantalising clues, as a number of other historians had done over the last hundred years, that John Brown's family had kept hold of a secret archive, that no one was allowed to see it and no one was allowed to be told anything about it or where it was or acknowledge what was in it, but that it existed. And that was too exciting for me not to kind of want to go and find out. And so that's what I did.
- [05:19]
Ellie Cawthorn
So when you got these hints of a secret archive, I mean, as a historian I can't imagine much more exciting than that. What did you do in order to try and hunt this material down?
- [05:30]
Fearne Riddell
Well, the first thing I did, and I think we have to acknowledge how important digitization is to modern historical research. We hit the point now where it is absolutely a fundamental part of the work that I do. And places like Ancestry and findmypast and Scotland's People, these huge national international databases of digitised census records, marriages, births and deaths, are incredibly important for someone like me when you're deciding to investigate a family. So the first thing I did, seeing these hints of John's family and that they held they were guardians of an archive, was use Ancestry and findmypast to trace John's entire family tree. His brothers, their wives, their descendants, their uncles, their aunts, their cousins, cousins, all of it. And it was something that led me to the us, to Minnesota, to John's only surviving relatives that I can find, who are the descendants of his brother Hugh. And Hugh was very involved with Victoria. He became Highland Servant after John died. And they had kept safe for 160 years this secret archive. They didn't expect a historian from the UK to turn up in a Facebook dm, which is what I did, asking if I could talk to them about their ancestor. But what happened next was just incredible.
- [06:58]
Ellie Cawthorn
I'm going to leave it there for a moment and leave people hanging about the Secret Archive, just to return to kind of the story and the context a bit more before we delve into the discoveries, because I think really that gives some important context. So tell us a bit more about this relationship between Victoria and John Brown on a surface level. So how typical or atypical was it for a monarch at this time to have, you know, this long standing relationship with one particular servant? And what did John Brown do in the public view? What did John Brown do for Victoria?
- [07:31]
Fearne Riddell
So John Brown started his life as a gillie at Balmoral, which is where Victoria and Albert went when they decided they wanted a Scottish residence. And they did that because Albert felt it was the closest he could get to his homeland of Coburg was the Scottish Highlands, and John was already in service there. Albert thought very highly of him and he decided that he should be Victoria's special servant out of doors. Which meant that really, from the moment that Victoria and Albert were at Balmoral, John had care of Victoria and her children. Every time Albert was off hunting or shooting, it was John who was the Highlander, who was in charge of Victoria's party with her children. And so there was a very Kind of respectful, close, intimate relationship that started before Albert died, where John was Victoria's protector. He looked after her, he made sure her every wish was met. And she talks very highly of him in this period of someone that was always able to anticipate her needs, which for every royal, was the mark of a fantastic servant. But he was an outdoor servant. He wasn't someone who was beside her at every moment of her life. He was just there when she was at Balmoral. But even Victoria says at this time that she was irresistibly drawn to him. There was something about him that she just found incredibly exciting. And for much of that period, he is just a Balmoral servant. After Albert dies, John is the person that Victoria and her doctors and her family bring down from Balmoral to help her in her grief. You know, we're talking three years after Albert has passed away, Victoria is still in this deep suicidal depression and they feel that she needs to get out, she needs to be in fresh air. And the person who she will trust to be beside her, to lead her pony, to look after her in those moments is John. So he starts out as a very dependable, careful, reliable servant. But what happens over the next 20 years is so much more than that.
- [09:40]
Ellie Cawthorn
And there were rumours at the time, weren't there, about Victoria and Brown's relationship? Can you tell us a bit about how he was viewed?
- [09:48]
Fearne Riddell
So the reason why this story fascinated me so much is the rumours of, were they love us, was there a child, were they married? Start in the 1860s. They start pretty much within two years of John appearing down in London and at Osborne in Victoria's service as her Highland servant. So when you have rumours that start at the time, that's very exciting, because that means there has to be something. Why is there any smoke? What is the fire that starts it? And it's something that many people question because very, very quickly, with John's arrival, pretty much at Osborne at the end of 64, they are inseparable. She is absolutely devoted to him, he is absolutely devoted to her. Her daughters joke that he's Mama's lover. The rumours of Mrs. Brown start very quickly and it's because Victoria is a widow and John is a single man. She is a queen. He is the son of a crofter. So the fact that any form of intimacy could exist is deeply shocking to the court and then her government and then wider society. So the rumours start very quickly because in Victorian society, this isn't a friendship that should have existed whilst you had reliable servants. They knew their place they didn't deviate from it. And it becomes very clear very quickly to everyone around Victoria that her relationship with John is not that.
- [11:16]
Ellie Cawthorn
So there were always these hints that something may have been going on. But tell us, Ben, about what you've found that you think you know adds light to this picture.
- [11:26]
Fearne Riddell
The hard thing about that question, Ellie, is I don't really know where to start because it's such a mountain of evidence, evidence that I never expected. It's probably easier to tell you what the book is connected to. So part of it is the evidence that we already know, the stories that have already been out there. For example, Bendell Grosvenor's incredible find of a letter in the early 2000s which said after John died, in Victoria's own handwriting, that this was the second time this terrible grief had happened to her. And then there are a series of diary entries from her politicians and people around her court that had been published since the 1950s onwards. And these all held sort of tantalizing rumours and stories and myths about John and Victoria. What I did was take all of that and then go and find a huge wealth of new research that put all of those stories and what had been dismissed as gossip in context to find what I feel is a very different take on Victoria. And part of that was in pursuit of the John Brown family archive.
- [12:32]
Ellie Cawthorn
Can you tell us a bit more about that archive and what you found there?
- [12:35]
Fearne Riddell
So we know that there was this rumor that the John Brown family, that his descendants had kept this secret archive, and a handful of historians had had access to it over the last hundred years, but they always promised never to reveal its location, never to reveal what was in it, never to say what they'd seen, just to sort of hint at it. So most historians had dismissed its existence, understandably, in that regard, because as historians, we need to be able to see what everyone's talking about so that we can all agree it's not fake, it's not, you know, it hasn't been invented, that it is real and those conclusions, that those intentions, interpretations that we have as historians are real. So I started on this journey to try and find if what Tom Cullen had printed in Empress Brown, those facsimiles of those letters, was real. And my first revelation was the discovery that, yes, they were, because they were sitting in an archive in Aberdeen and no one had realised. So the first real exciting moment for me was being able to uncover what, what I call the lost letters of Queen Victoria, which are incredibly moving. It's the letters that she writes to John's sisters in law after he dies, where she says that no one loves him more, where she declares that she and John had said to each other, no one loves you more than I do. And these incredibly moving, very intimate revelations were in these letters. So that was the first indication to me that the family archive was in fact real and held tangible evidence. And my next step was to try and find if I could contact the descendants to see if they held any more, which I did, and they did. But they didn't hold a complete archive because from the 1950s onwards, parts had been donated, parts had been sold at auction. And I then went on a journey to try and piece together as much as I could. And one of the most amazing moments in that for me was finding that a historian called Fenton Winas in the 1950s had met with the family and he had photographed everything they had. Every letter, every document, every artifact, every bit of jewelry, every bit of memorabilia, everything Victoria had given John, everything the family had managed to conserve. And it gave me this ink, incredible photographic record of what had been the John Brown family archive that pieced together then with auction catalogues of things from it that had been sold at later dates that are now in private hands, things that are in public museums. The evidence that there is of John and Victoria's relationship and her relationship with his family is absolutely overwhelming. And I certainly we can no longer claim that they were just friends.
- [15:24]
Ellie Cawthorn
Well, I guess anybody who wanted to claim otherwise, they might say, you know, the Victorians, they were really effusive. They spoke in, in these dramatic terms about love and grief and loss. Was Victoria just speaking in, you know, the tone and the tenor of the times, what would your comeback to that be?
- [15:41]
Fearne Riddell
I love it when people say that because it's part of. It is a wonderful moment of historians going, yes, we understand the Victorians were a very romantic people in the, the way that they write, but you also have to remember they were also very contextual people. So romantic, platonic love is expressed between same sex relationships. So a woman to another woman or a man to another man. And for hystex historians like myself, it has caused us a lot of headaches because a lot of the time when we feel people are ignoring, say, LGBTQA histories, other people will chime in and say, oh, no, but these are just romantic relationships. Platonic, totally platonic. You have to understand this is a series of letters and a language between a widowed woman and an unmarried man, between a queen and a servant, between the height of upper class and a Common crofter's boy. There is no way in any percent that you could downplay this as romantic, platonic language, because it would simply, simply be so shocking and so scandalous for them to say at the time. What's incredible about these letters is that Victoria refers to John as dear, dear John, beloved John, darling one. You know, this is not a language that she uses for anyone apart from Albert, her own children. It just does not exist. And so I understand the question. It's a fair one. But I also reject it. Absolutely. Because we have to use our common sense.
- [17:12]
Ellie Cawthorn
Yeah, fair enough. And we have this language coming from Victoria. Dear John, beloved John. Do we see it in reverse? Do we get a sense that John was also invested in this relationship in the same way? I mean, obviously for him, having an intimate relationship with the Queen would have other advantages as well as romantic.
- [17:32]
Fearne Riddell
That's a really fascinating question because it immediately allows us to understand that we have very little left from John because John's entire archive was destroyed by Victoria's court after his death. And so we only really have his voice in what Victoria says. And the things that stand out for me is when she records that he says he would die for her, which I find highly romantic and very, in a very Bridgerton or even an Outlander kind of sense of the word. This declaration that they both said, no one loves you more than I do to each other. That comes from Victoria. Victoria saying, this is what John has said to her. And they're, they're really beautiful, moving moments. But I think many people in the period hoped that they could portray John as almost a Rasputin like figure. And we have absolutely no evidence of that from Victoria and those who knew him best. He was valued for the fact that he did not want anything from her. He did not reach for a peerage or any of those insane things that people expect someone to want if they were only in it for the money. And Victoria says it repeatedly, he doesn't want anything more from me. And I think that's a really powerful thing to see, that this is two people who unexpectedly found each other across a class dividend, totally unexpectedly, and then for 20 years guarded one another and their relationship. Absolutely. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Do you ever think about switching insurance companies just to see if you could save some cash? Well, Progressive makes it easy. Just drop in some details about yourself and see if you're eligible to save money. When you bundle your home and auto policies, the process only takes minutes and it could mean hundreds more in your pocket. Visit progressive.com after this episode to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states.
- [19:47]
Ellie Cawthorn
I wonder if we could move on now to the question of marriage, because obviously that would be an escalation of this relationship. What have you found that leads you to think that there may have been a marriage between them?
- [19:58]
Fearne Riddell
One of the things I find so fascinating is how when pieces of evidence have come forward about John and Victoria over the last 50 years, they've been downplayed and dismissed in very weird terms in ways that don't make sense to me as a historian. So some years ago, the discovery that Victoria's Scottish chaplain had made a deathbed confession where he confessed that he had married John and Victoria was seen as something that sort of should be swept under the carpet and was very quickly passed over in a way that didn't make any sense to me at all. And I went back to look at this deathbed confession and to explore marriage in this period in 1872, which is around the period when we think they may have got married. I think they may have got married. And I realized something that I don't think a lot of historians who have looked at this period of Victoria's life have considered. We've always looked at, did Victoria and John get married from an English perspective? You know, where they would have to have done it in a church, there would have to have been marriage bans. How would you keep it secret? And all of this. And we've ignored completely that in Scotland and in Scottish law, there was a very different form of marriage available to them and something that was very common in John's community in Aberdeenshire at this time. And that's an irregular marriage. And an irregular marriage is recognised in Scottish law. You are just as married as you are across the border in England, if you'd done it with a vicar. But it is simply an exchange of vows in front of someone that you respect. It could be a clergyman, it could simply be someone who's notable from your parish. Sometimes there's an exchange of rings, sometimes you write it down. But it is a form of marriage that is simply if you and your partner decide that you are married, you are married in the eyes of God and in Scottish law. And I found that history of irregular marriage absolutely fascinating because we do have these tantalizing bits of information. Historians over the years have said, you know, that they've come across documents that said Victoria and John were married, but they can't reveal where they are or they've been destroyed or all of these things. But again, very reputable historians who were well respected in their fields at the time, but just couldn't produce the document that they wanted to for reasons unknown, or for pressure that they had to fold to. So that tied in with this known deathbed confession of Victoria's Scottish chaplain was fascinating to me, along with the history of irregular marriage. And I found it very strange that we have dismissed someone who was one of the most powerful and influential Scottish chaplains and in his church at the time, where a deathbed confession is something that you have to do, you have to absolve your soul before you move on to the next life, that this sacred act would be dismissed by historians who just don't want to deal with it. And so I found firstly that very intriguing. So I went on kind of an adventure to see if I could find any more evidence, knowing what I then did about irregular marriages, what could I find? And I feel that in a. In the 1870s, after John and Victoria have been very intimate for some time, their relationship has deepened hugely. They've declared their love to one another. And then we have this awful moment where Victoria survives an assassination attempt and she's deeply estranged from her children at this time, many of them, it's very unhappy family circumstances. John is the only person who saves her in this assassination attempt and he physically tackles the assassin to the ground. In the moments after this, there is a sudden change in how he appears. We get the deathbed confession from Norman MacLeod. Then Victoria starts ordering her sons to shake John's hand whenever they're in his presence. And on his little finger, on his left hand from 1873 onwards, appears a gold signet ring. And the reason for me, why that matters is because morganatic marriages, which are the secret marriages royals have to commoners that are never public and are never known, are also known as left handed marriages. And in every portrait, every photograph, you see this signet ring on incredible display. Now, I know that sounds a little woolly, and I know it sounds as if I'm going into a Da Vinci Code moment, but as I was sitting in the archive with Fenton Winas's research, I turned a page and I saw something that knocked me for six. And it was that Victoria had had John's hand cast and carved in the week after his death, which we know she also did for Albert. And it was an incredibly emotional moment to see this. One of the things that had happened is she'd made sure his signet ring was on his Little finger. And the final thing of that is a piece of information we already knew, and that's that Victoria went to her grave wearing John's mother's wedding ring.
- [25:13]
Ellie Cawthorn
It's such a tantalizing idea. You've already mentioned in this conversation that. That it would have been unthinkable to people at the time that a queen could have this relationship with a commoner. So I guess my question here is why would Victoria risk it? Is it in keeping with her character at this time that she would take such a dramatic risk?
- [25:37]
Fearne Riddell
I think that's such a good question. Because Victoria, that I found through writing Victoria's Secret, is not the prudish widow that we think of once Albert dies. She's incredibly passionate. She's incredibly tempestuous. She won't take no for an answer. She refuses to listen to everyone. And she ignores every government and family request to cast John off, to get rid of him, to downplay his role or his place in her life. Every single time there's an issue, she refuses, in very dramatic and forthright and emotional language, she will not be parted from him. So I think we have to understand that the reasons why I feel so strongly about the marriage and the relationship are because of Victoria's own words. And she doesn't use them about everyone else. These are specific to John. This defense, this determination. Why would she take such a risk? Someone who is as traditional as Victoria, as devoted to monarchy, as devoted to being the best queen that she could. Again, we have to use our common sense. There is not a difficult explanation here. She was in love. And the thing that I found so fascinating as I was researching and writing this is for two years I spent exactly as you are, Ellie. But why did she do this? I don't understand. It doesn't make any sense. What's going on? And then the moment I turned a corner in how much research I had and the irregular marriages and what other historians had found and I could put it all together, the moment I went, oh, well, it all makes sense. If they were married, everything falls into place and it doesn't become difficult or awkward or weird or how do we explain it? If they were married, which I believe they were, all of Victoria's behaviour makes complete sense. It just does. It's why she forces her sons to shake his hand and throws afy out when he refuses to shake John's hand and he's just married the daughter of the Tsar. You know, these are political issues that John is at the centre of, where Victoria wants him respected and treated As a de facto rule consort above everything else.
- [27:48]
Ellie Cawthorn
She was a traditional person but she was a very passionate and a very willful person as well, wasn't she? But I mean, let's talk about the most explosive idea here, the idea that there could have been a child between Victoria and Brown. Lay out your thoughts on this matter and how you came to them.
- [28:06]
Fearne Riddell
Well, I found the child incredibly tantalising and there's always been rumours that Victoria and John had a child and stories from the 1970s of documents and letters that indicated that there was family histories that had been published claiming that they might have been. And all of it felt a bit woolly and nothing was very concrete. But as a historian you have to investigate everything. And I was trying to hitting a lot of dead ends. You know, I couldn't get into coots where apparently there was letters of evidence that there was a child. I couldn't find any evidence of surviving descendants of people who'd claimed that they might have been this child and all of this. And I was hitting dead end after dead end and going, okay, well I think I've proved they fell in love. I believe they got married. Maybe the child is just one of those things. It's just a bit of gossip, it's just a bit of rumour and I will just explain that in the book that I tried but there isn't anything to support it. And I was having a conversation with John, surviving descendants, direct descendants, and they were, we were talking through some of the artefacts that they still had and they were showing me and I was explaining that there was this rumour that there was a secret child but I couldn't find any evidence of it and I didn't think it was really important and I was just going to write it off in the book and say, you know, this is the story of a love affair and a marriage and Angela, who is one of John's sole surviving descendants, listened very carefully and then she cocked an eyebrow and she went, oh, that's fascinating. And it was 2am in the morning here because they're in Minnesota so there's a six hour time difference and I was sort of half asleep and I was like why, why, why, why is it fascinating not thinking? And she paused and she went, well that's what we were always told. And I was like, what? She's like, well, we were always told that there was a baby given to the family, there was a big long boat ride and that's who we're descended from, is the child of John Brown and Queen Victoria we were always told there was a love affair. We were always told they were deeply connected and all of this. And I fell off the sofa, both literally and metaphorically. And I couldn't believe it. Because as a historian, when you're weighing up evidence, family testimony and family history is really important, but you always have to investigate it. Is there any evidence that it could be true for what is being said? Because obviously, as we know, as generations pass, family memory, what is truth becomes myth. What evidence of truth could there be in this? And what I found was really tantalizing. Hugh, John's brother, as I mentioned, who Angela is descended from, he and his wife Jessie, had gone to New Zealand. So that was my. Their big boat ride sorted. There it was. They had one child, Mary Ann, they had no others, which is really surprising at this time, because when you look at all of John's family and all of his siblings and all of his extended family, you know, we're talking five to nine kids every single time. And Hugh and Jesse just have the one now. That can happen. But it's interesting. This is not the period. This is a very different fertility time to what we see today, where we have, you know, 2.4 children on average. You were looking at five to nine. So that was interesting. That sparked my curiosity because I could see a correlation. Then I found that Victoria's son, afi, had gone to New Zealand on his royal tour in 69 and seen Hugh and spoken to Hugh. Why on earth would Victoria's son, this important prince, be seeking out John's brother on the other side of the world? It was just bizarre. It was a bizarre connection. Again, one of those things where you're sort of scratching your head going, okay, this is interesting. This is interesting. And then I found a beautiful letter that Victoria had written to John in which she calls him darling one, and she is begging him. This is one of the things that I uncovered in the John Brown family archive that is now, part of which is now in Aberdeen, that she was begging him to get Hugh and his family to come home. She offered to pay everything. She offered to pay every expense, everything, to bring them back, back to the uk. That, again, was very intriguing, because why? Why did it matter? And then Victoria had built John this beautiful mansion at Balnacioli, which she said in letters that have never been seen before that I've uncovered that are in the book. This house and this land is to go to John and his brothers for generations forever. So she's carving out part of the Balmoral estate. John has A number of brothers, many of whom Victoria is closely connected to, all of whom are in service. Who gets to live in the big house? It's Hugh and Jessie and Mary Ann. No one else with the five children or the nine children. Just this tiny little family. And when John dies, it's Hugh and Jessie and Mary Ann that Victoria scoops up from Balmoral and takes down to Windsor to be with her always. And while both of John's other nieces, both are named after Victoria, both Victoria Brown are in the press, are mentioned. Victoria gives them wedding dresses, she gives them gifts at their marriage. Mary Ann, who we know Victoria kept beside her, is never mentioned anywhere. And that, as a historian, you're starting to go, okay, this is really interesting. Now, obviously, without DNA, and there is no accessible Royal Victorian DNA for us to test against, we can't answer this question for Angela, and she's very sanguine about it. You know, it's something they've always been told. They don't know if it's true, but they obviously have an incredible connection to Victoria and her family. I find it fascinating. And there has to be a moment where, as historians, we allow history to breathe. So right now we're in a breath. I don't know the answer to it yet, but I certainly have found a lot of interesting evidence around it that no one has ever seen before.
- [33:59]
Ellie Cawthorn
Can you foresee any future where some kind of DNA testing could be done?
- [34:05]
Fearne Riddell
Absolutely. Absolutely. We know it's not possible at the moment in the way that DNA works, you can't do it matrilineally because Mary Ann had a son called Hugh who is Angela's grandfather. And unfortunately, when you have a boy, they ruin everything. When you have it in a family line, you can't. The DNA is not passed on. So we need DNA science to shift. We need things to change. But I remain very hopeful in the future that while I believe Victoria and John and I've proved this beautiful love affair, and I certainly believe they got married, if we get an answer on a child, whether it's true or false, it doesn't change any of that. It doesn't alter the relationship that they had. It just gives us more clarity on its boundaries.
- [34:53]
Ellie Cawthorn
You've spoken throughout this conversation about having to, you know, uncover these hidden glimpses of material, people alluding to stuff that then has been lost or it's been hidden or it's not available. I wonder if you could tell us a bit about the process of this story being lost, or you might argue, hidden since the 1870s.
- [35:15]
Fearne Riddell
So what started really at John's death in that, as I said, Victoria had built this beautiful house, Balnacioli, for him. And one of the things that surprised me massively was when I was going through John's estate inventory because there was no will that was found. Again, somewhat suspicious, there was no mention of Balnacioli, even though I had letters that had never been seen that proved that Victoria wanted to legally make sure he had the house and the land. And it's certainly talked about as legally being his in documentation after this. Yet there's no mention of Balnacioli. That was weird to me, because why is it missing? It's part of his estate. It needed to be on there. Then I uncovered that Victoria wanted to write a book about John's life. We know that she published Leaves from the Highlands. We know that she published More Leaves from the Highlands. In the aftermath of that, she then decided she wanted to write a book about John and about their relationship, using his diary entries, using hers, exposing their story. She gets very cross because there's a review of in the Athenaeum of More Leaves that says very clearly that John is just a dependable servant. And she writes to her private secretary, Henry Ponsonby, that the Queen wants to show he was so much more than this, you know, so she was. She was determined that the truth of what he meant to her was. Would come out in some way. Unfortunately, with John's death, Victoria's protector in court is gone. And she's met with a huge amount of resistance from her government and her ministers and her court. From Henry Ponsonby, from Randall Davidson, who's Dean of Westminster, who go on a campaign to make sure Victoria never publishes anything, that she feels embarrassed and humiliated to never acknowledge her feelings for John. And they write in letters and in documents and in memoranda. You know, the terms that she uses for him are, it's incredibly dangerous, must never be known, all of this. So it starts with John's death, then Bertie and Beatrice, Victoria's children, go on a grand campaign of eradication. Bertie removes and burns as much as he can. Beatrice edits all of Victoria's journals, eradicating much of John and his family from them. But what I have found comes from personal family testimony, private collections, public archives across the country and across the world. And it's amazing to be able to show Victoria and John in that light.
- [37:41]
Ellie Cawthorn
And finally, Fearne, in a feature that you've written for BBC History Magazine, you talk about this journey and you say, if I were wrong, it could have been the wild conspiracy that might well end my career.
- [37:52]
Fearne Riddell
Well, hopefully not.
- [37:53]
Ellie Cawthorn
But what do you anticipate being the response to your findings when you publish them?
- [37:58]
Fearne Riddell
I really hope that what this does is alter people's understanding of Victoria's midlife. We think of her as this prudish widow who just grieved forever. And actually, she was incredibly passionate. She had a companion, a man beside her for 20 years who was the centre of her world and for whom she was the centre. She says I am his only object, underlined. And I think that for me is an incredibly powerful thing. What I wanted to do with this book was not only give John and his family their place in history, which they deserve and has been taken from them, but I wanted to give Victoria her womanhood back. And I hope that's what it does.
- [38:41]
Ellie Cawthorn
That was Fearne Riddell speaking to me.
- [38:43]
Fearne Riddell
Ellie Cawthorn.
- [38:44]
Ellie Cawthorn
You can find plenty more details on Fearne's discoveries in her book Victoria's Secret, the Private Passion of a Queen. And you can find a feature Fern wrote on this subject alongside plenty more on Queen Victoria on our website historyextra.com thanks for listening.
- [39:02]
Fearne Riddell
This podcast was produced by Lewis Dobbs.