Quick note from Valorie — I meant to publish this review back in April, in time for the US release of Dr. Fern Riddell’s newest historical investigation, but somehow never ended up scheduling it. I found it in my drafts folder today as I was looking for something else. So my apologies for that—I’ve cleaned up some language from pre-order to order to reflect that the book is out, but if you see any language that’s the wrong way around, I hope it won’t be confusing. Thanks and enjoy!
In this explosive new biography of Queen Victoria, Fern Riddell has solved a historical mystery that the Windsor royal family has quietly tried to erase for over 150 years: What was the exact nature of Victoria’s relationship with her servant, John Brown? Sold in the UK as Victoria’s Secret and in the US as Victoria in Love (changed, I assume, to avoid associations with the famous lingerie brand), this is essential reading for anyone curious about the queen who gave her name to an iconic era of British history.
The official story has always been that John Brown was a friend of the queen’s. A very good friend, perhaps, but never more. The evidence that exists, gathered from numerous sources that official royal archivists cannot cull or destroy (as, Riddell shows, they have done with numerous other sources), tells a different story. They may indeed have been close friends, but countless private diary entries, foreign gossip columns, and private letters show us that the friendship warmed into love, mutual respect, and influence. Deathbed confessions suggest that love was no mere affair but legitimized as a morganatic marriage.
This, of course, challenges the official story of Victoria as a woman who mourned her husband Albert for forty years, from his death in 1861 to her own in 1901. It’s a romantically tragic portrayal, but it ignores the realities of a queen in her forties, a woman who was known to be temperamental, lusty, and sensual. Widowhood did not simply erase her appetite—if she had been a man, everyone would have assumed the monarch took a lover at some point. While the claims Riddell is making are, of course, the selling point of the book, I think its strongest feature is the way Riddell encourages us to consider who gets to make royal history, and shows us how to challenge it intelligently. It’s one thing, after all, to make up wild accusations and conspiracy theories. It’s quite another to sharply show with evidence and consideration how a cover-up may have been engineered. In her signature warm and knowledgeable voice, Riddell does this all. The way she writes is as irresistible as the content she’s writing about.
Crucially, this book is not just a recitation of facts that support Riddell’s argument. It’s a story—a love story, really. A middle-life love story, and an important biographical examination of Queen Victoria. “I wanted to…give Victoria back her womanhood,” Riddell writes in the afterword, and I’m glad this was something she set out to do. Women, especially women of the past, women in royal or political roles, are so often symbols, ciphers for governmental authority or societal meaning or religious values. Queen Victoria especially is often relegated to this, her complex humanity compressed down into bite-sized pieces palatable to a public that’s been dead for over 100 years. But in addition to her mourning blacks and “we are not amused,” she was a flesh and blood human, one who enjoyed having sex with her husband and fell in love with a handsome man after her husband’s untimely death.
She was a woman. And she deserves to be remembered as that too.
There are two explosive claims in Victoria’s Secret/Victoria in Love. Let’s consider the evidence that exists for them.
The first is that Queen Victoria and John Brown were lovers and that they married at some point, making it Victoria’s second marriage. This is, I believe, well-supported by the evidence Riddell presents. There is circumstantial evidence, like Scottish cultural norms around marriage and the habit of Victoria’s own family members marrying people below their station, but there is also much more serious evidence, like the deathbed confession by the minister who married them. The great lengths the royal family and the royal archives have gone to erase evidence also makes me raise my eyebrows—why go to the trouble if there’s nothing to hide? I’m convinced both that it happened and that it was hidden from the public for numerous reasons.
The second explosive claim of the book is that the couple had an illegitimate child. This one I find a harder pill to swallow. And to be clear, this is not exactly a claim Riddell is making, but a claim that the living descendants of John Brown are making. Riddell published it, and the timing does kind of shake out. I think it is possible, especially since Victoria had largely withdrawn from public life at this point, making hiding a pregnancy and the subsequent physical recovery much more possible than it would be to do the same today. (Remember how a shockingly large segment of the internet became convinced Prince William had murdered Princess Kate because she disappeared from public life for 2 months? Can you imagine her successfully hiding a secret full-term pregnancy and the resulting child today?)
So sure, between voluminous skirts and sanctity of her body and her retreat from public life and the absence of a round-the-clock paparazzi with zoom lenses, sure. Maybe. I just also think that a pregnancy in her mid-to-late 40s, while not impossible, would be risky, health-wise, especially in the 1860s. The number of people who would have to be part of that cover-up is not small, certainly higher than the number of people required to cover up a secret marriage, and we can see how that turned out. I mean, there were rumors that the two had married (and, to be clear, that they’d had an illegitimate child) during the 1860s. The rumors of their marriage plagued Victoria’s reign for years, and rightly so. So while I think it’s possible, I find it improbable. Of course, until someone orders a DNA test, we’ll never know for sure.
Ultimately, this book is a fantastic addition to the canon of Queen Victoria biographies. It is necessary reading for anyone intrigued by the queen’s life after the death of Prince Albert.
I wanted to…give Victoria back her womanhood, that sense of self that was so often taken from her by courtiers, politicians, the Crown, her family and even her public. With John, she found a freedom and a security that had not existed at any other point in her life. She was passionately, erotically, obsessed with him; he, in turn, devoted himself to her every need.
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