Episode 2 Queen Victoria's Letters: A Monarch Unveiled

In 1897, Victoria's Diamond Jubilee celebrations

were the expression of supreme confidence.

She was Queen of Great Britain, she was Empress of India.

Her Empire, in fact, stretched all over the world.

What made the event so remarkable

wasn't just the fact that the streets of London

were thronged with thousands of people

singing God Save The Queen.

It was that the 78-year-old monarch

was prepared to be seen in public at all.

The Widow of Windsor, as she was known,

struggled with public appearances, because she was shy,

but also because she was still ostensibly in mourning.

For 36 years, she had been the embodiment of grief.

But appearances are deceptive.

Behind this well-known image of Victoria

lies another story to that of the heart-broken widow.

It was only part of the truth about Victoria,

whose marriage had been a source of constraint as well as deep love.

The loss of her beloved husband

and of her mother

was a terrible blow,

but it also initiated a process of liberation

for a woman who'd spent her entire life

under the shadow of domineering men.

Victoria had been a pawn in a political game

as a child and young Queen.

Her angel, Prince Albert, had used her pregnancies

as a way to gain power,

and punished her for resenting it.

But in her widowhood, Victoria - although bereft and deranged -

was free to embark on a way of life and on loves

that were to make her last four decades

her most productive and exciting.

And, luckily for us, she committed all her feelings to paper.

She wrote more than 50 million words.

Some were judged so shocking by her children

that when she died, they were destroyed.

I've spent the last five years reading Queen Victoria's journals

and unpublished letters

and I've come to feel something almost approaching awe for her.

Behind that stout old lady in black sitting at her writing table

was a passionate human being

and, contrary to what is so often said,

she was frequently and easily amused.

1861 was Queen Victoria's annus horribilis.

The deaths of her mother and her husband left her distraught.

She fled London.

It was presumed that her absence from the capital

meant she was doing nothing, left inept by grief.

In her journal, she bewailed the loss of her lover, her friend, her crutch.

"He did everything - everywhere!

"Nothing did I do without him, from the greatest to the smallest...

"my first word was, 'I must ask Albert.'"

In her delirium, she turned the man she'd often resented

and fought with into a demi-god.

What Victoria didn't realise at 42 years old,

was that marriage had infantilised her.

Marriage does infantilise people.

She had come to rely on Albert for absolutely everything.

She'd go and see him first thing in the morning

and say, "What dress she I put on?"

In politics and in personal life,

he had restrained her and controlled her.

And now his life was over, but her life wasn't over.

Little by little, she would flap her wings and become free.

And her first small steps to freedom

were taken here in Coburg

in modern day Germany -

her homeland and the birthplace of Albert and her mother.

She confessed her ongoing love-affair with Germany in her journal:

"If I were not who I am, my real home would be here."

Victoria was three-quarters German.

She idolised the land and the people.

The very air smelled like Albert,

and she breathed it in.

When she started coming back to Coburg,

her brother-in-law Ernst, Albert's brother,

expected her to stay with him in his grand baroque palace

in the middle of town, Schloss Ehrenberg.

But she preferred to be here, Schloss Rosenau,

a beautiful hunting lodge about five miles out of town,

where Albert was born.

It's a place full of his childhood memories

surrounded by quietness,

the hills and the forests.

Inconsolably bereaved she certainly was,

and you can see here a page from the visitors' book she wrote in 1862,

"Victoria Regina, the desolate widow of my beloved Albert".

A direct descendant of Prince Albert keeps the line alive today

in the nearby Schloss Callenberg.

Hubertus is the Hereditary Prince of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

-So, let's enter...

-the treasure house.

..one of the rooms here, please.

Oh, wonderful. Thank you very much.

You, sir, are the great-great- great-grandson of Prince Albert.

Yes, that is correct.

This is where we show the family relationships

between the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family and the British.

Oh, look, there's a marvellous Winterhalter!

Yes. Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

So, that's after he's arrived in Britain?

Yeah. It was in the early 1840s.

He's still got his hair before he went bald!

Oh, and look at this beautiful painting.

She didn't very dress well, but she had stupendous jewels.

-That's what the French noticed when she went to Paris.

-Yes.

After she was widowed, she became even more attached to Germany,

even more conscious of her German roots,

and Coburg was a particularly special place.

Well, Queen Victoria's roots are, indeed, very German

she was definitely fluent in the German language.

Even after the too early death of her husband Prince Albert,

she was still very much in love with Germany and especially Coburg.

She came back to open up a monument for Albert here

in 1865 in the market place.

That was also one of the very few public appearances, apparently,

-that she did after his death.

-Oh, yes.

Victoria had always loved melodrama,

since her days as a young queen.

Now, in her mourning, she made her loss blindingly clear to see.

Ever dressed in black,

she desired everyone to enter into her grief.

Dr Karina Urbach, an expert in Anglo-German relations,

sheds light on Victoria's behaviour after Albert's death.

She's such a bad psychologist, as Albert told her "don't overdo it

"when I'm gone," but she does exactly the opposite.

She puts him on a pedestal and drags her children

into the room once a year -

the room he died in - and keeps preaching all the time

how wonderful he was and it's absolutely ridiculous,

because the children hate it after a while

and resent everything about this idealised father.

It achieves the absolute opposite.

She went back again and again and again to Coburg.

Yes. I think she would have loved to just live in a little cottage

in Germany with Albert. That was her ideal.

-And it was home. It was the heimat, wasn't it?

-Yes. She feels relaxed,

because when she talks German she can be a different person.

In her English identity, she has to be the Queen,

but in Germany, she is just a "kleine Frau", as Albert calls her.

Grief-stricken Victoria may have been, but inept she certainly wasn't.

She was about to demonstrate her political astuteness in Germany,

then not a unified country as we know it is today.

Germany was merely a notion.

The question was - would the various small German duchies and city states

come together in a peaceful federation?

Or would they allow themselves to be bullied

by the northern kingdom of Prussia

into becoming a modern militaristic nation?

That was the central political drama of Victoria's times,

and in that drama, she stood plum centre stage.

In the summer of 1863,

the Queen came here to Schloss Ehrenberg.

While she was here, she thrust herself between the twin camps

of Prussia and Austria before any of her diplomats.

It was her first major activity since she was widowed.

"Felt so nervous, all being in state and I alone...

"I have no longer my beloved Albert to guide, cheer, advise and pilot me

"through the great difficulty."

Here in the Hall of Giants,

where Victoria's parents were married,

we meet Victoria the diplomat,

meeting with no less a person than the Emperor of Austria,

and together they drank a toast to the unity of Germany.

So early in her widowhood

we find Victoria alone,

but nonetheless an independent woman,

negotiating not particularly on behalf of England,

but on behalf of a peaceful Europe.

Victoria had found the inner strength to exert her power

and carry out Albert's political work on her own.

In this instance, she's a sort of arbiter.

She wants to bring together these two German leaders,

Emperor of Austria and William of Prussia,

and she thinks that there should be some rapprochement,

some understanding between the two.

She still hopes for a peaceful solution of the German question.

During that period, if you'd asked many English newspaper editors,

"What's the Queen doing?" they'd have said she's gone to sleep,

-she's gone into hiding, she's not doing anything.

-Yeah.

But, as a matter of fact,

she was deeply politically engaged in Germany.

Yes. I think that's when one underestimates her,

because she is hiding in black and one doesn't understand

that she had her back channels

and she was very much into this back channel work

and she saw herself, because of Albert,

as a diplomat in many ways.

It's interesting at this time that we see the British Queen becoming,

partly through her own marriage and the marriages of her children,

so intimately involved in European politics.

At this time, the British politicians complained that their monarch

was too weepy, too reclusive, not doing her work,

not interested in the main political questions.

But Victoria was looking at the future of Europe itself.

That seems to me far less parochial,

far less narrow than the things that many of her cabinet ministers wanted.

And her role in all this was pivotal.

The future of Germany was quite literally being fought out

between members of her own family.

With her eldest daughter Vicky

married to the Crown Prince of Prussia,

and Bertie married to the Princess of Denmark,

Victoria was caught in the middle of the war

between these neighbouring states.

"Oh, if Bertie's wife was only a good German and not a Dane!

"Not as regards the influence of the politics

"but as regards the peace and harmony of the family!

"It is terrible to have the poor boy on the wrong side."

The personal was the political for Victoria.

Intensely German, she nonetheless felt as all mothers would,

grief that her family stood on opposing sides

of the political divide.

While Victoria showed her fortitude on the world stage -

involving herself in European wars of global significance -

she was also finding freedom at home in her personal life.

As a young woman, she had always sought father figures,

from the flirtatious Lord Melbourne

to her "angel" Albert.

Now she had another man by her side.

"I feel I have here and always in the house

"a good devoted soul,

"whose only object and interest is my service,

"and God knows how much I want so to be taken care of."

These are the words the 45-year-old Victoria

wrote about Albert's Highland servant, a Mr John Brown,

who was brought down from Balmoral to attend Victoria at Osborne in 1864.

PIPE BAND PLAYS

I honestly think that if it hadn't been for the Highlands of Scotland

and the friendship of John Brown in those 10 years

after Prince Albert died,

that Queen Victoria would have gone stark staring mad.

She'd always loved it here in Scotland,

since her early visits with Albert,

and the unaffected character of the Highlanders

made such a refreshing change after the stuffiness

of Windsor and Buckingham Palace.

And so it was that the bearded and kilted John Brown,

seven years her junior, became Victoria's next male dependency,

as closest companion and best friend.

BELL RINGS

Raymond Lamont Brown is the Highland servant's official biographer.

She spent far more time with John Brown than with any other person,

-certainly more than any member of her family.

-Yes, that's true.

He would attend her whenever she needed him.

He understood her very well.

I think something that her family and her ministers didn't understand

was that although she was surrounded by people all the time,

she was very lonely

and John Brown said to her, quite openly,

"I think you're just a lonely wee bairn

"that needs to be brought out of herself."

And that's exactly what he did.

He, sort of, pulled her out of her depression.

He became a walking encyclopaedia of Queen Victoria's likes and dislikes,

her neuroses and so on.

He devoted his life to her.

He never went on holiday and he was always there for her.

In some ways, it was an even greater commitment than Albert

made in his marriage vows, because it was one of absolute service.

Yes. Albert, of course, had his own agenda of the things that he did,

but for John Brown, from dawn to dusk, his agenda was Queen Victoria.

Alongside Brown's devotion to the Queen

came an abruptness and complete disregard for court etiquette,

something which Brown could see that Victoria,

contrary to her steely appearance, rather enjoyed.

Whilst these qualities of Brown's enraged the household,

they were precisely the things

that made him the ideal companion for Victoria.

Great man that Albert had been,

he'd always been sickly and fussy.

He didn't share his wife's love of guzzling and drinking.

Whereas Brown loved his whisky - he was often tipsy.

He liked pouring whisky into the Queen's milk

and saying, "Don't stay thirsty".

Victoria wouldn't credit what I'm about to say,

but Brown released her from Albert.

He released her inner capacity for hedonism and fun,

and she revelled in it.

Cheerio!

Victoria found freedom in her friendship

with this most unlikely of characters,

out riding and laughing in the grounds at Osborne with Brown.

Where she had been suppressed in her childhood

by the cruel workings of Sir John Conroy,

and had struggled with an overbearing and scheming husband,

she loved Brown's openness and dedication to her and her alone.

"It is a real comfort, for Brown is devoted to me.

"So simple, so intelligent, so unlike an ordinary servant."

No-one could talk to Victoria as John Brown did.

He held her in check.

There was once an occasion when a footman came into the room

carrying a tray and the poor boy dropped it.

The Queen erupted with rage, said he should be dismissed to the kitchens.

But John Brown intervened immediately.

"Woman, what are ye doin' to that poor laddie?

"Have ye never dropped anything yersel'?"

The footman was reinstated.

The straight-talking Scotsman had put the Queen of England

in her place...

and she enjoyed it.

But it wasn't just Brown's frankness she relished.

He also filled a deep emotional need in Victoria.

On the fourth anniversary of Albert's death,

she completely defied convention

by bringing Brown to pay his respects at Albert's mausoleum.

Her writings that day show just how significant

Brown's response was for Victoria.

"When he came to my room later,

"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...but what can I do though for ye?

"'I could die for ye.'"

I don't think anybody could ever have replaced Prince Albert,

but she needed some kind of male crutch,

and John Brown supplied that.

What came next showed the contradictory nature

of Victoria's character.

The woman who shied away from the public

decided to share her thoughts with everyone.

We tend to think that Diana, Princess of Wales

invented the concept of "feel my pain",

but Queen Victoria got there before her

with her decision to publish extracts from her private diaries.

Leaves From The Journal Of Our Life In The Highlands.

It came out in 1868 and was an instant best seller.

No monarch had ever published a book before.

This one was wholly at odds with Victoria the weeping widow.

VOICE OVER TANNOY AND FAINT APPLAUSE

Come on! Heels! Heels!

The journals chronicle her life of outdoor frivolity.

She felt truly elated out in the open Highland landscape...

at local dances...

and at the annual Highland Games.

"The games began about three o'clock," she writes.

"1. Throwing the Hammer.

"2. Tossing the Caber.

"3. Putting the Stone.

"A pretty wild sight,

"but the men looked very cold,

"with nothing but their shirts and kilts on -

"they ran beautifully."

The journals are pretty mild stuff.

The remarkable thing about them is that they were published at all.

They're nice books - bound in green, embossed in gold -

and pretty soon they'd sold over 100,000 copies.

There is one person, however,

that might be named as the hero of the book,

and that, of course, is John Brown.

Her children hardly got a look in and weren't best pleased.

But it seemed that Victoria was unaware.

Instead, she wrote to her eldest, Vicky,

asking for validation of the book.

"You have...never said one word about my poor little Highland book,

"my only book.

"I had hoped that you and Fritz would have liked it."

The reason Vicky might have been avoiding the subject

was that her mother's shameless adoration of Brown

was causing a scandal.

A scurrilous pamphlet

entitled John Brown's Legs

appeared in New York.

It was dedicated to "those extraordinary Legs -

"poor bruised and scratched darlings."

Here's the Queen looking at a damaged knee.

"Good heavens, what a knee!" sticking out from the kilt of John Brown.

What's so hilarious about this is that while the American

was penning this pamphlet,

the Queen herself was writing a third volume

of Leaves From Our Life In The Highlands,

in effect a biography of John Brown.

The Court and the politicians were absolutely horrified

and somebody had to be delegated to tell her

that the book was entirely inappropriate.

They chose the poor young Dean of Windsor,

who went in and told the Queen that it really wasn't a good idea

to be writing these memoirs of her life with Brown.

It would be misconstrued.

She erupted with rage.

However, she took the young man's advice,

and the matter was never mentioned again.

I wonder if it still survives somewhere in Windsor

in those archives

or whether Princess Beatrice - the wrecker - destroyed it.

Thanks to Victoria's youngest daughter, Beatrice,

no trace remains of the Queen's life with John Brown

in her voluminous journals.

We are left with silence

as her children were intent on deleting Brown

and anything else deemed "unsuitable" from history.

It is poignantly sad

that so avid a scribbler and recorder of her times

as Queen Victoria

should have had her words suppressed,

and, of course, the suppression has the precisely opposite effect

upon us that it was intended to do.

Instead of making us forget about John Brown and Victoria,

it makes us obsessed by the subject.

What we do know is that in favouring Brown,

Victoria showed herself to be a woman desperate for companionship,

irrespective of the social cost.

She had come such a long way from her days

as the submissive wife of Albert.

With Brown, she was free to do as she pleased.

Of course people suspected him of sleeping with Victoria.

There's a bit of a feminist issue here.

If she'd been a male monarch going to bed with a parlour maid,

no-one would have batted an eyelid.

It's the idea of a woman crossing the class barrier

that really appalled them.

Especially as the rumours mounted to that of a secret marriage,

even a love child between the Queen and her Highland servant.

BELL RINGS

A man who was probably one of the very few people in the world

who ever knew the full truth about her relationship with Brown

was her last doctor, Sir James Reid.

-Oh, goodness.

-The whole collection.

Michaela, Lady Reid, is married to his grandson.

He kept a diary while he worked with her.

-Yes, and there are 40 little tiny diaries here.

-Goodness me.

See, his writing was minuscule.

Oh, isn't it wonderful!

If you read a lot, you really require a magnifying glass.

-And here are some more diaries.

-Yes. This is one from March.

-This is the Queen and Brown, I think.

-Yes, she has a fall.

They were going up and down the stairs, Brown and the Queen.

Brown, of course, carried her.

Reid wasn't allowed so much as to touch her.

Well, he was allowed to offer his arm.

-But, I mean, he wasn't allowed to examine her medically?

-No, no.

And certainly wouldn't be allowed to carry her up and down the stairs.

-Whereas Brown was allowed to enfold her in his arms.

-Yes, yes.

And they were laughing about it all and thought it was great fun.

And then the next day,

it says, "the Queen walked a little in the room."

Brown lifts his kilt and says, "Is it there?"

and she lifts her skirt, laughing, and says, "No, it's here."

She was moving his big manly hand from the thigh to her bottom.

Bottom. Yes. But I think she's pointing,

lifting her long skirt and pointing to his knee.

The idea of a woman lifting her skirt in those days was raffish.

Yes. It was very forward. They were obviously very intimate.

Is there a feeling that in the Reid family,

that Dr Reid knew the nature of the relationship?

Yes, there is a feeling.

And we used to tease Granny - as we called her - his widow,

about John Brown and the relationship

and she would always clam up.

She just laughed and dismissed it.

-What do you think?

-I don't think they were married.

I don't think they even had an immoral affair.

I think that...

..they expressed their feelings so much in public.

Had they been having an affair,

they would have been more circumspect about it.

There's also the kind of physical detail that we now know

because of Dr Reid examining her body after she died, isn't there?

Yes. She had a prolapsed uterus,

which would have made any form of intercourse

extremely painful, probably impossible.

So, I don't think it was that sort of relationship

and I certainly don't think that she would have had a child,

because she was too...

Oh, no. That's preposterous.

-Preposterous, which has been said.

-Oh, yes. It has.

When anybody knows that I'm writing about Queen Victoria,

they've always been asking me the same question,

"What was the relationship between John Brown and the Queen?"

"Were they lovers?"

I'm afraid to say that, on that question, I'm a complete agnostic.

It's plainly not a relationship like that between her and Albert.

She was so open about loving Brown, about wanting Brown to hold her

and carry her about in public and laugh with her,

that I'm sure there was no kind of secret covet relationship going on.

I think the likeliest thing, if you forced me to make up my mind,

is that they had a tactile, loving relationship

that involved lots of hugging,

but that they weren't lovers in the true sense of the word.

Victoria was never one for convention.

Despite giving her name to an era of propriety and prudishness,

Victoria was anything but.

Where she loved the openness of Brown,

she couldn't stand those who were reserved around her.

So, when it came to her buttoned-up Liberal Prime Minister,

W.E. Gladstone, she had no tolerance at all.

"Mr Gladstone is a very dangerous man...

"And so very arrogant, tyrannical and obstinate,

"with no knowledge of the world or human nature."

Victoria was not one to mince her words.

She used every weapon in her armoury,

her psychological illnesses, her physical illnesses

to combat what she believed

were assaults by the Liberals on the monarchy itself.

Her undisguised loathing of this humourless intellectual statesman

showed how very self-assertive Queen Victoria could be.

Gladstone was awkward with the Queen

and like his hero, Prime Minister Robert Peel,

he didn't have the best way with women.

30 years after her run-in with Peel,

Victoria showed herself to be just as belligerent with Gladstone

as she had been in her youth.

One such occasion occurred in the summer of 1869,

when the Lord Mayor of London and Gladstone

asked her to open the new Blackfriars Bridge.

The Queen was determined to wriggle out of it

and the drama went on and on through the summer and autumn,

with Gladstone bearing the brunt

of most of the Queen's emotional outbursts.

"She thought she had clearly expressed

"that it was impossible for her to open Blackfriars Bridge,

"but, as Mr Gladstone seems still in doubt,

"she will repeat her sincere regret

"that it is quite out of the question for her

"to do anything of the kind in the heat of the summer."

The republicans, the press,

but also the keen monarchists

were all asking themselves the same question,

If the country functioned perfectly well

with the head of state spending most of her year

either up in Balmoral or down on the Isle of Wight,

why did we need a monarch at all?

And it was to silence that question

that the Prime Minister, Mr Gladstone,

was determined to parade the little woman on this bridge.

And she was equally determined

not to be bullied and not to be put under pressure.

As July wore on, the Queen dug in her heels.

"The Queen is much surprised at being again teased and tormented

"about this bridge, having three weeks ago, nearly,

"been asked by Mr Gladstone."

And she refused to open it, saying,

"The fatigue of the whole thing being much too great

"with a day commencing in the heat."

Ever one for mood swings, when it came to the event,

Victoria decided she COULD open the bridge.

But what a palaver she had caused in doing so.

Frequently caught in the crossfire between Gladstone and his Queen

was her private secretary, Colonel Henry Ponsonby.

His great-granddaughter Laura Ponsonby

is the keeper of many a letter penned by Victoria's idiosyncratic hand.

The Queen's handwriting was almost illegible.

Incredibly difficult to read.

I think I'm getting worse at it.

-They're rather wonderful, these deep black borders.

-Aren't they?

These little letters were coming out of the Queen's writing desk

-every 10 minutes.

-That's right.

My feeling is that Gladstone found Queen Victoria

almost impossible to deal with,

whereas Henry Ponsonby was far better at dealing with her.

Henry Ponsonby knew what he was doing, in a way.

He did all he could to try and make the Queen

more reasonable with Gladstone, but she was very critical about him.

Henry Ponsonby knew that it was no good contradicting her.

There's a famous story about him, where he says,

"When I say two and two make four,

"Queen Victoria says, 'No, they make five.'"

And then he says again, "No, I think they do make four,"

and she says, "No, I think you're wrong."

Then he said, "I leave it. I let it drop.

"And then we go back to it and then it's OK."

He knew if he said no,

Queen Victoria would immediately dig her heels right in.

Henry Ponsonby admired her.

She could be absolutely impossible, of course,

but he managed to, sort of, cope with it

and, of course, he had a great sense of humour.

I think that was the saving thing -

-he could see how very funny she was.

-That's right.

He got them laughing at the dinner table.

He said he looks round at Queen Victoria,

and she's absolutely giggling away,

which is known as fou rire - mad laugh -

and that you start laughing and then tears come to your eyes,

you shake, and all this laughter comes up.

-She had a lot of fou rire, didn't she?

-Yes, she had a lot of fou rire.

-She was always having the giggles.

-Yes.

-Gladstone wasn't particularly humorous.

-No, I think not.

It was the weird mix of Victoria's humour and hysteria

that the politicians couldn't come to terms with.

So much so, they feared for her sanity.

You can see why the Establishment were worried

when you look at the correspondence between the Queen and Mr Gladstone.

When Gladstone went to stay at Balmoral,

he was awkward and couldn't speak to the Queen.

She often refused to speak to him,

so they would correspond whilst they were both living in the same house,

sometimes as often as six times a day.

The letters are particularly comic, I think.

Gladstone, his letters beautifully written,

a little pompous, absolutely rational.

And she scrawls frenziedly back.

It's as if somebody is screaming through paper.

Here's one which was written in the afternoon.

Just an outburst, really.

"It is not to Tahiti but to Honolulu

"that the complaints relative to Prince Alfred refer."

What that was about, who knows?

History doesn't relate.

But you do see what Mr Gladstone was up against.

Victoria capriciously showed her Prime Minister

time and time again,

that she was Queen and he couldn't bully her

into doing something she didn't want to do.

Victoria maintained her hostility to Gladstone to his dying day.

The grand old man clung to office

long after he became physically incapable.

On and off, he was Prime Minister for 26 years.

I think the most disgraceful thing about Queen Victoria

is the way she behaved to Gladstone at the time of his resignation.

He'd devoted his entire life to the service of his country,

and she offered him not one word of thanks.

"She trusts he will be able to enjoy peace and quiet

"with his excellent and devoted wife in health and happiness,

"and that his eyesight may improve.

"The Queen would gladly have conferred a peerage on Mr Gladstone

"but she knows he would not accept."

Gladstone's decline and death had little effect on the Queen.

Years ago, she had unashamedly fallen for his political opponent,

Benjamin Disraeli, whose one-nation Toryism

was her kind of politics.

Besides, he knew how to make her laugh.

At Disraeli's private home in the heart of Buckinghamshire,

curator Robert Bandy is the proud keeper of the numerous gifts

Victoria lavished on Disraeli.

This is the dining room.

We have an awful lot of portraits in the house

that are gifts from the Queen.

All have a crown on the top

to tell us exactly who they came from.

In case you could be in any doubt.

In case you could be in any doubt, exactly.

An unconventional visit to Hughenden in 1877

showed Disraeli's political skill and charm.

When Disraeli collected the Queen from Wycombe station,

he took two carriages with him - one with slightly faster horses,

so he could welcome the Queen for the first time on the platform.

Obviously, great statesman, showman, lots of bowing and dipping.

-Very theatrical.

-Very theatrical.

The people of Wycombe loved it.

He popped into the first carriage with the quicker horses,

got back to Hughenden before the Queen

so he could welcome her in exactly the same way,

but for a second time, whilst she got to the front door of the manor.

That's delicious.

And he was also mindful that she was a slightly short lady

and had the bottom two inches of her dining chair sawn off

so that her feet were flat on the floor when she sat.

If she'd sat on a normal chair,

her feet would have been dangling in the air.

And he didn't think that was particularly becoming

-of the monarch.

-That's very funny.

This is another present from her.

It's the collected speeches of Albert.

This is very remarkable

because at first she was a little bit...

She disliked him entirely

when he was just a member of the House,

but he grew useful to her,

because where she complained that Gladstone

treated her like a public meeting,

Disraeli gave her the opposite end of the spectrum,

he gave her the tittle tattle and the gossip

and he would write three or four notes a day to her from Parliament.

And, of course, she had a very marked sense of humour

and she liked that he made accounts

of parliament and cabinets so amusing.

She laughed over his letters.

Now, who have we here on the chimney piece?

We've got John Brown given by the Queen to Disraeli.

Two relative outsiders -

Disraeli, the most unlikely Victorian Prime Minister,

and Brown, completely out of the normal social sphere for the Queen -

that are drawn in closest to her.

Very much so.

Both Brown and Disraeli gave Victoria the loyalty she always longed for

and she lapped up Dizzy's endless attention and flattery.

"He is so full of poetry,

"romance and chivalry.

"When he knelt down to kiss my hand,

"which he took in both of his,

"he said, 'In loving loyalty and faith.'"

Disraeli not only amused and flirted with Victoria,

he understood her emotional struggles in life.

Professor Jane Ridley has written biographies

on both Disraeli and Queen Victoria.

Disraeli didn't treat her as a stupid woman.

Disraeli treated her

as a sort of exotic and wonderful Queen.

He also treated her as an equal.

He made her feel, by writing her these wonderful

confidential letters,

that he was telling her everything

and that he was her minister

and together they were ruling the country.

So, he made her feel good.

Before, she'd had this awful generation

of those "dreadful old men", as she called them,

who talked down to her

and didn't flatter her in this way,

but Disraeli is on his knees flattering her from day one

and she loves it.

Who wouldn't?

People smiled at Victoria's crush on Disraeli,

and at his shameless camp manipulation of it.

He dubbed her the faery or the faery queen.

He was genuinely fond of her,

but he was prepared to exploit the friendship for political ends.

Britain was moving to a position

where, eventually, every male adult would have the vote.

Many politicians feared this would mean an inevitable

lurch to the left.

Disraeli had his finger on the pulse.

He knew there were thousands and thousands of lower middle class

and working class men who were natural Tories.

Victoria became the perfect figurehead

for Disraeli's one-nation Conservatism.

His plans involved Victoria as a symbol of British power,

not just at home but stretching far across the world to the Empire.

Showing both political astuteness and glorious creativity,

Disraeli announced Victoria was the Empress of India

on January the 1st, 1877.

She was delighted with her new title.

"My thoughts much taken up with the great event at Delhi today

"and in India generally,

"where I am being proclaimed Empress of India...

"I have for the first time today signed myself as V.R. & I."

Empress of India.

It's a title you might think more appropriate for a railway engine

or possibly even a pig,

but it made Britain an imperial power.

India, in all its exotic expanse,

now came under the royal dominion of the Faery.

Of course sophisticated people flinched at the title,

but Victoria and Disraeli knew that the vast proportion

of the British people thought the Empire made Britain rich.

And, for the next 80 years, the Empire was the pride

of Britain's conservatives and the envy of many beyond its borders.

As she'd instinctively used her diplomatic skills in Germany

in the years following Albert's death, Victoria leaped at the chance

to stand at the helm of Disraeli's political ideals

to galvanise Britain's classes under a powerful monarch.

There's a glorious romance about being Victoria RI

rather than being simply Victoria Regina.

It was a real publicity coup in India.

Victoria is extraordinarily popular.

They see her as almost as a goddess figure,

even though she never went there in her life.

She has this extraordinary common sense

about predicting what is going to happen and about politics.

And, about the Empress of India thing, she was absolutely right.

-It was a really astute political move.

-Yes.

But the pair's political romance couldn't last for ever.

Disraeli fought on in politics to his dying day.

Victoria showered attention on him right to the end,

bestowing on him a peerage as Lord Beaconsfield.

At his death, she was distraught.

"I cannot write in the third person at this terrible moment

"when I can scarcely see for my fast falling tears."

Victoria made the most extraordinary confession

to her friend Lady Waterpark.

"I know you will feel for me

"in my great and irreplaceable loss.

"I have lost so many,

"but none whose loss will be more heavily felt

"than this of dear Lord Beaconsfield."

They are remarkable words,

when you consider how recently she'd lost her beloved daughter Alice

and how intensely she had mourned the Prince Consort.

They show how close Victoria had become,

both in politics and in her heart, to Dizzy.

Gladstone was the dictatorial Prime Minister.

Disraeli was the true and trusted friend.

As if the death of Disraeli wasn't enough for Victoria to cope with,

just two years later came the death of the man

who may have been the love of her life, John Brown.

The Queen was devastated.

The fatherless widow was alone again.

The extent of Victoria's grief on paper is only known in part.

These words escaped the ruthless Windsor censorship.

"I am terribly upset by this loss,

"which removed one who was so devoted and attached to my service,

"who did so much for my personal comfort.

"It is the loss not only of a servant,

"but of a real friend."

Through love and loss time and time again,

Victoria had the remarkable fortitude

to carry on in the midst of grief.

Far from her widowhood constraining her,

she had the strength to reinvent herself

and was visibly a new woman aged 68,

celebrating her golden jubilee.

"The crowds from the Palace gates up to the Abbey were enormous.

"This never-to-be-forgotten day

"will always leave the most gratifying

"and heart stirring memories behind."

The celebrations didn't end in London.

They extended far across the reaches of the Empire.

In India.

Am I in India?

No. I'm on the Isle of Wight.

I'm in the Durbar room.

Victoria added this fantastic wing

to Prince Albert's Italianate Villa.

And what a symbol of her liberation

from the Albertian past.

Her dominion,

her imaginative grasp of her empire and of the world itself

had expanded so much in her life.

It's utterly fantastic!

Victoria had never been to India,

but she always had a great affection for its peoples.

She'd far rather hear exotic stories of India

than talk to her boring Oxford-educated politicians.

And so it was decided in her Jubilee Year

that a taste of India would be sent to her in England

in the form of two Indian servants from Agra.

One of those servants would turn out to be her last great attachment.

The man in question was 24-year-old Abdul Karim.

Hired as little more than a footman,

he was to become the new subject of Victoria's male affections.

"Abdul Karim...

"Much lighter, tall

"and with a fine, serious countenance."

Victoria loved the company of Abdul Karim.

And now, down the corridors of Osborne House,

there wafted the delicious aromas of the spices

he brought with him from Agra.

Cinnamon...

cloves...

turmeric...

cumin...

nutmeg...drowning out the pong of over-boiled cabbage and mutton.

And there he is.

Abdul Karim brought with him

India in all its colour and splendour,

which Victoria welcomed whole-heartedly into her court.

Shrabani Basu is the author of the best selling book

on Abdul Karim and Queen Victoria.

Unlike Brown, he was a married man.

He was a married man and his wife came to the court, as well.

Mrs Karim, as she was called.

She was veiled and it was a good Indian family.

He not only got his mother, but his mother-in-law, as well.

So, there were several of these burqa-clad Muslim ladies

-around the throne, as it were.

-Yes. The Queen was so excited.

She said they were the first purdah ladies in court.

If Victoria liked a servant, she didn't hold back.

Abdul was soon promoted to the position of the Munshi,

The Queen's Indian teacher.

She wanted to learn about the ordinary people of India

and this was really important to her.

She wanted to learn the language

and he gives her the everyday phrases and she shows off.

She loves showing off. She has these Indian princes come

and what better than casually use a Hindustani phrase.

What were the useful everyday phrases that he taught her?

Well, there were standard things, like "the tea is too hot"

or "the egg is not boiled enough."

But there were also intriguing phrases,

like "I will miss the Munshi very much" and "hold me tight."

Where did that come from?

That's very charming, isn't it? Do you think she did hold him tight?

I suppose so.

It was a relationship on so many levels.

It was mother-son, grandmother-son, it was closest friend.

And, at the same time, Queen Victoria liked

a strong man next to her.

If you see the pattern from John Brown - he was six feet tall,

a strong man, somebody who cared for her - and the same,

Abdul Karim six feet two,

standing next to her, looking after her.

Definitely, the physical, sensual element was very much part of it.

I think that's very revealing.

None of Victoria's English courtiers liked the Munshi.

They thought he was John Brown in a turban.

But Victoria seemed not to notice,

or perhaps chose to ignore their snobbish and racist feelings towards him.

Writing to Vicky, Victoria's words were all praise.

"He is so good and gentle and understanding,

"all I want and is a real comfort to me.

"Such a good influence with the others."

Anything Abdul Karim wanted, he would get.

If he wants a nice room,

he gets a nice room he gets John Brown's old room

and that is noticed.

She gives him his own carriage to ride around,

so goes around Balmoral, he goes to India on holiday.

Can you tell us about what the attitude of the courtiers

was towards Abdul?

As soon as he started getting all the favours,

the resentment started, as well.

And the Queen accuses them all the time of racism

and she insists that they behave courteously to him,

which they don't.

I mean, the Munshi invites it, because he is a bit arrogant

and a bit full of himself.

He does strut around, he does lord it over the other Indian servants,

but that's the position he's been given.

Although unrest at court was mounting,

Victoria didn't seem to care.

She was simply not going to give up her fondness for her new best friend.

And a shameless display of favouritism in June 1890

further incensed her household.

The Queen lost a brooch whilst she was clambering into her carriage.

One of the footman said that he'd seen Abdul Karim's brother-in-law,

Hourmet Ali, hovering about at the time.

Somebody told Mrs Tuck, the Queen's dresser,

that Ali had pinched the brooch and sold it to the jeweller's in Windsor.

Then they got a note from the jeweller to prove it.

The Queen was furious.

Not with the thief, but with Mrs Tuck.

She claimed that in India it was perfectly normal to pick things up

which didn't belong to you, and it wasn't considered dishonesty at all.

And then she rounded on Mrs Tuck,

"This is what you English call justice."

"You English", coming from the Queen,

who'd escaped to Germany when times had got tough

and, although she'd spent the previous 50 years on the throne,

evidently never really felt at home in Britain itself.

As with other members of the court,

Dr Reid wasn't keen on how much time the Queen devoted to the Munshi,

especially as he was so often unwell.

He had to look after the Munshi,

and he was sometimes kept up to midnight, you know,

and he was at his wits' end.

"The Queen went several times to see him in his room

"and stroked his hand,

"taking Hindustani lessons,

"stroking his neck and smoothing his pillows."

One doesn't want to be too indelicate,

but what was the matter with the poor Munshi?

Oh. Well, first of all he'd had scabies, but that was a bit better.

But, this was a big boil on his neck.

How did Reid and the Munshi get along?

Oh... Reid disliked the Munshi hugely and thought he was a bad egg.

He was horrible to his fellow Indians

and felt his sense of superiority over all the others.

Can you see what she saw in the Munshi,

because clearly Reid couldn't, could he?

No. He was exotic and he was a symbol of India.

Victoria, oblivious to convention,

turned a blind eye to the unhappy members of her court.

But things came to a head when she insisted the Munshi join her

on her annual trip to the sunny Riviera.

Victoria had always loved coming to France, as a place of escape,

travelling around in the years after Albert's death

under the name of the Countess of Balmoral.

France represented freedom for Victoria.

And in 1897, a royal trip to Cimiez was planned,

staying at the swanky new Excelsior hotel

with superb views of the Mediterranean.

"Drove through the town...along the fine Promenade des Anglais,

"close to the sea, which looked so lovely

"and a wonderful deep blue colour."

But the holiday plans were going awry.

An almighty row was about to break out in the household,

precipitated by Dr Reid, who most improperly told the others

that the poor Munshi had yet again gone down with a dose of the clap -

gonorrhoea.

They seized on this as the perfect excuse to say

if the Munshi went to Nice, they weren't coming.

They were going to be on strike.

This precipitated the mother of all tantrums.

Mrs Phipps is chosen to go tell the Queen that if the Munshi goes,

we are not going to go.

We are going to collectively resign.

This is revolt.

The Queen hears this and she gets into a screaming rage.

She gets up, she throws everything down from the table,

so all these letters, pots, ink pens crashing down.

Mrs Phipps leaves the room in tears

and she goes back and tells them what has happened.

So, at the end of the day, they don't resign

and the Munshi travels, as he always does, with the Queen.

So, it's victory for the Munshi.

And it was victory for the Queen, too.

But when Victoria paraded with the Munshi

on Nice's famous Promenade des Anglais,

one of the local newspapers described the Munshi as a mere "servant".

The Queen was infuriated

and insisted that the newspaper print a retraction,

stating that the Munshi was a learned man.

Far from being her servant, he was her Indian secretary,

her preceptor in the Hindustani tongue.

And, moreover, one of the most important

"personages aupres de la Reine".

The Queen was always insistent that the Munshi be respected.

"Remember, he is my Indian Secretary

"and considered as a gentleman in my suite."

In Victoria's eyes,

a gentleman wasn't a wealthy landowner,

it was someone who had admirable qualities,

no matter their class or race.

I find it one of Victoria's most lovable qualities -

her complete lack of snobbishness and disregard for social constraint.

This was the woman who had been supposedly crippled

by the death of her husband at the age of 42,

but had become so much more than the widow in black.

Victoria spent the last 40 years of her life after Albert

finding freedom in the most unlikely of relationships.

And despite living life shying away from the public,

she emerged as an icon of the era,

a picture of British power.

Just four years before her death,

the streets of London were lined with her public

celebrating her Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

"No-one ever, I believe, has met with such an ovation

"as was given to me, passing through those six miles of streets...

"the cheering was quite deafening

"and every face seemed to be filled with joy."

Victoria died in January 1901

after a remarkable 63 years on the throne.

And more than a century after her death,

her words still command our attention.

Victoria had written instructions,

which she gave to her dresser, Mrs Tuck, and to the doctor, Dr Reid,

and they told what she wanted to be put in her coffin with her

when she died.

She was to have the Prince Consort's dressing gown,

she was to have various photographs

of her favourite grandchildren and servants

and she was to have locks of their hair.

Perhaps most significant,

she was to be holding a framed photograph

of John Brown

and on her finger was the ring which he'd given her -

his mother's wedding ring.

As one walks past that mausoleum at Frogmore,

which is nearly always closed,

it's a strange thought to think of her lying there

surrounded by all her mementoes.

The image is emblematic of a Queen who liked drama in life

and now in death.

But, sadly, the image isn't one her children could tolerate.

All traces of the Queen's unconventional attachments

were erased.

The Munshi was deported.

Her children tried to edit their mother's life,

destroying the statues of John Brown,

censoring her journals,

burning her letters.

But many of her words survive.

And they provide a fascinating insight

into this extraordinary human being.

Victoria had overcome her pressurised childhood

in a controlling political system

and had fought through the power struggles of her marriage

to a man who had restrained her.

In the midst of grief, she emerged as a woman

free to move in the world of politics

and make deep friendships without constraint.

And, in all this, she revealed herself a woman

who was anything but Victorian.

Far from being prim and proper,

she loved life in all its richness,

she was blind to class and colour

and, contrary to what we think, had a great sense of humour.

When you look at this statue, she seems so stiff,

so formal, the Queen Empress,

but hear her words,

and Victoria lives.