Widowed queen's devotion to manservant and grief at his death revealed by letter in which she tells of 'so warm and loving a friendship'. Ben Fenton reports

　　The extent of Queen Victoria's love for John Brown, her Highland manservant, is revealed in a letter published today in which she likens her feelings at his death to becoming a widow for the second time.

　　Victoria's relationship with the unconventional Scot was the subject of profound gossip in the Royal Family and court circles from the time that he began to console her after the death of her husband, Prince Albert, in 1861.

　　Her daughters referred to Mr Brown as "Mama's lover" and he was also known in the royal household as her "stallion", while her popular nickname became Mrs Brown after a rumour that she had secretly married the man who had been her husband's favourite ghillie.

　　Until now nothing substantiated the rumours. The Queen's own journal described her reaction to Brown's death in March 1883 merely as being "terribly upset by this loss".

　　But in the recently discovered letter, written to Viscount (later Earl of) Cranbrook, a close friend and former Secretary of State for India, she wrote of "her present unbounded grief for the loss of the best, most devoted of servants and truest and dearest of friends". Victoria, who usually wrote about herself in the third person, went on: "Perhaps never in history was there so strong and true an attachment, so warm and loving a friendship between the sovereign and servant as existed between her and her dear faithful Brown."

　　It is thought the phrase "between the sovereign and servant" was added as an afterthought.

　　The letter goes on to praise Brown in a most personal way: "Strength of character, as well as power of frame - the most fearful uprightness, kindness…combined with a tender warm heart…made him one of the most remarkable men who could be known." It adds: "And the Queen feels that life for the second time is become most trying and sad to bear deprived of all she so needs...

　　"The shock too was so sudden that the Queen is quite stunned."

　　The letter, written two days after Brown died from an attack of the skin disease erysipelas, is published in the latest edition of History Today magazine.

　　It was discovered in the Suffolk Record Office by Bendor Grosvenor, a PhD student at the University of East Anglia, while writing a thesis on Disraeli's government. It had been lent to the archive by the current Earl of Cranbrook. "In terms of evidence of a sexual relationship between them from her own pen, I think this is as close as we are going to get," Mr Grosvenor said.

　　"It's not a billet doux which says 'Darling, you were marvellous last night', but it is a letter to a very close friend of hers in which she compares the death of someone to the death of her husband.

　　"I suspect that there was a sexual side to their relationship.

　　"We know that she had oodles of children with Albert and, according to her own account, lots of sex, and she was a young widow (at 42)."