Claims that Queen Victoria had a secret child are pure clickbait

Telegraph

2 days ago

Rarely has the humble question mark done so much heavy lifting in a programme title. Because for all its proclamations of 'overwhelming evidence' that Queen Victoria had made an honest man of faithful ghillie John Brown, the jury remained very much out on Channel 4's Queen Victoria: Secret Marriage, Secret Child?.
The evidence that Queen Victoria had indeed married her loyal servant-cum-companion and had a child with him? She didn't go out much for a couple of years after Prince Albert's premature demise and could have hidden a lot under her signature voluminous skirts. And – besides a note describing a dodgy deathbed confession from a Scottish vicar who claimed he officiated the ceremony – that was about it.
Taking the gossipy scribblings of a Swiss tabloid, musing that Victoria was hiding a pregnancy secret, as some kind of starting point, historian Fern Riddell embarked on a flight of fancy that had her staring at a picture of John Brown and cooing on about how sexy he was. 'Looking at this you can see why Victoria was so incredibly drawn to him,' sighed the academic who was clearly in the grip of a fangirl crush.
Putting two and two together and coming up with something like 69, Riddell interpreted the letters and postcards between the monarch and her servant with all the gushing lust of a feverish romance novelist. Landing on any turn of phrase or declaration of devotion that supported her theory – well, she has got a book to flog – Riddell strove to present pure conjecture as indisputable fact. I wasn't buying it.
Which could not be said for sometime judge and media legal everyman Robert Rinder, who had been presumably enlisted to cast an objective eye on proceedings. But he too got swept up in Riddell's elaborate fantasy. 'It blows history up,' was just one of the many bizarre overstatements that littered a story spun from the flimsiest of threads.
It all felt rather prurient. The hook for it all, which could have been delved into further, was Riddell's discovery of a John Brown family archive. How she got her hands on this mysterious archive remained obscure, but it had led her to tattooed Angela from Minnesota who believed she was descended from history's most celebrated ghillie. The likeness was not striking.
This is where we really could have done with the forensic approach of Who Do You Think You Are?, tracking the lineage of 'Mary Ann', the supposed child of Victoria and Brown, down through the generations. Mary Ann had, we were told, been passed off as the offspring of John Brown's brother and his wife and whisked to New Zealand for safe-keeping. But the evidence supporting this theory amounted to little more than hearsay. Tracking down the missing links in the chain to Angela would have given the story some much-needed ballast.
Riddell has, I understand, earned a degree of credibility as a social historian, but here she played the part of a starry-eyed fantasist, reading so much between the lines into the correspondence between Queen Victoria and John Brown that credulity flew out of the Balmoral window long before the closing credits. This isn't history, it's clickbait.