Royal physicians lifted Queen Victoria’s tiny, still form into the coffin that was already crowded with sentimental treasures. Her five-foot frame settled among flowers and mementos as her family looked on. The new king, her son Edward VII, stood stiffly at the side, unaware that his mother’s left hand was clutching secrets that would have enraged him. The attending ladies finished their adjustments and filed out of the room.
Only Sir James Reed, her physician of fifteen years, remained. He reached into the queen’s closed left hand and placed a photograph and a lock of hair that belonged to a man her children had despised. Then he slid a simple gold ring onto her left ring finger—a ring that had belonged to that same man’s mother. He tucked these items securely into her palm and closed her fingers around them.
The casket was sealed, and he never told a soul until long after the king had done his best to erase every trace of John Brown from history. For more than a century, the story of what Queen Victoria carried into the grave remained hidden. It was only when author Tony Rennell was invited by the descendants of Sir James Reed to research their family archives that he uncovered the twelve pages of secret instructions Victoria had dictated to her secretary just before her death. The Royal College had censored the contents of these instructions for years, but Rennell was allowed to read them.
What he found showed that the woman famous for her prudish reputation was far more complicated than anyone had believed. Queen Victoria died at eighty-one, having reigned for sixty-three years, and she outlived her beloved husband Albert by four decades. She was Britain’s longest-reigning monarch at the time, but her private life was filled with sharp disagreements with her nine children. They resented her close relationships with certain servants and were furious at how she mourned their father.
She knew that her final wishes would not be honored if her family knew about them. So she confided in her physician and her chief lady-in-waiting, and she wrote everything down in meticulous detail. Some of her requests were merely odd. Others were more shocking.
Despite wearing black for forty years after Albert’s death, Victoria demanded that her entire funeral be dressed in white—the horses, the mourning attire, everything. She insisted on being buried in the white bridal veil she had worn at her wedding in 1840. That choice had deep personal meaning for her. She and Albert had both been inexperienced on their wedding night, and she associated white with purity and with the happiest relationship of her life.
In her final moments, she returned to that symbol, hoping to join Albert in heaven. She also ordered that a plaster cast of Albert’s hand be placed in her coffin. That cast was not merely a decorative keepsake. After her husband died at forty-two, Victoria had kept it by her bedside and slept with it every night for forty years, like a woman clutching a relic.
She had been devastated by his death. She fell into a deep depression and refused to appear in public for nearly three years. She wore only black for the rest of her life. She ordered her servants to lay out Albert’s clothes every morning, to bring hot water and his shaving brush to his room, and to change the water in his basin as if he were still alive.
For years, his valet brought in the suit he would have worn that day, and at night the servants returned to remove it, repeating the ritual endlessly. Victoria had been deeply in love with Albert. She described their wedding night in her journal with genuine enthusiasm, and she was known to have a passionate nature that contradicted the myth of the joyless, prudish queen. She commissioned a portrait of herself in a languid pose with flowing hair, intended only for Albert’s eyes.
She gifted him paintings of bare flesh, while his own taste ran closer to demure. Their union produced nine children in twenty-one years. But her attitude toward motherhood changed as the years passed. When her daughter Vicki expressed joy at the thought of becoming a mother, Victoria wrote to her bluntly, saying she thought of such moments as being like a cow or a dog, when our poor nature becomes so very animal and uneesthetic.
She also said of marriage, “The poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s slave. That always sticks in my throat. ”
Her frankness did not stop her from being devoted to Albert. When he died, she was consumed by grief.
And in her grief, she found comfort where her family did not approve. John Brown was a Scottish servant whom Albert had spoken of highly. After Albert’s death, Victoria sent for him, and he became her constant companion, her closest confidant, and the only person who could criticize her to her face. They became extremely close.
Her children hated him, and their resentment grew over the years. Historians have debated the nature of the relationship. Some have argued that it was romantic but never consummated. Others have claimed that a Scottish minister confessed on his deathbed that he had secretly married the couple.
No one knows for certain, but the queen’s children believed the worst. When John Brown died in 1883, Victoria grieved deeply, though she hid much of it from her children. She kept his photograph and a lock of his hair. She kept a ring that had belonged to his mother.
And when she made her final arrangements, she made sure those items would be buried with her without her family’s knowledge. Her son, King Edward VII, so despised Brown that after Victoria died, he had every monument and mention of the servant removed from royal properties. He destroyed as much of Brown’s legacy as he could. What he never knew was that his mother’s body had been placed in that coffin while secretly clutching Brown’s photograph, a lock of his hair, and his mother’s wedding ring on her finger.
Victoria had always planned her own funeral with obsessive care. She ordered that the mausoleum she had built at Windsor, where Albert’s remains rested beneath a life-sized marble sculpture of him in repose, would also receive her body. Her own matching statue had been designed to sit beside Albert’s, but when she finally died forty years later, everyone had forgotten where the statue had been stored. It was several months before workers found it boarded up in a wall at Windsor Castle.
The coffin itself was nearly full before her body was placed inside. It was crowded with flowers and sentimental items. Her daughter-in-law, Alexandra of Denmark, brought fresh hyacinths to the casket. Victoria herself had requested a sprig of heather, a Scottish symbol that called to mind her happy times at Balmoral Castle and her adventures with John Brown.
In the end, the heather in that coffin may have served a double purpose: honoring her love of Scotland and remembering the man she was never allowed to openly mourn. The secret instructions that dictated all of this were held by the Reed family for generations. Queen Victoria’s chief lady-in-waiting had hand-delivered the twelve pages to Sir James Reed, and the physician followed them to the letter. The documents remained in the possession of Reed’s descendants, stored among his personal papers.
The royal family did not approve. Princess Margaret reportedly confronted members of the Reed family in public, accusing them of holding something that belonged to the crown. She demanded it be returned. But the royal demands failed, and the instructions remain in the Reed archive to this day.
Victoria was only five feet tall, and her tiny body fit easily into the crowded casket. After her family left the room, only Reed knew the final secrets she carried with her. He closed her hand around items that would have destroyed her son’s peace of mind. He sealed the grave with her secrets intact.
The woman who was queen of the most powerful empire in the world was buried as she had lived—determined to hold on to the people she loved, no matter what anyone thought of her choices. She was buried with the man she married and the man she loved after him, and no one at Windsor suspected a thing until the truth was finally revealed decades later by a historian with access to a dying doctor’s private papers.
