Madden’s picnic in a glen is a short episode designed to show how Queen Victoria’s dependence on her gillie John Brown’s guardianship. *He ensures the Queen’s privacy by chasing snooping journalists. 
After Albert’s death, Victoria’s choice of wearing black became a personal and symbolic gesture so ingrained that it was usual to recall her as a petite full-bodied dowdy woman in black. It is this woman that John Madden portrays in Mrs. Brown, a title referring to the presumption that sometime after Prince Albert’s death, Victoria secretly married John Brown, a servant who had become her companion. They were a constant couple until Brown’s death in1883.
What they ate at the picnic was utterly unimportant.
The cast: Judi Dench as Queen Victoria; Billy Connolly as John Brown; Geoffrey Palmer as Henry Ponsonby.
Featured Image: Queen Victoria’s picnic parade.
See John Madden. Mrs. Brown (1997). Screenplay by Jeremy Brook; See Delia Miller’s Queen Victoria’s Scottish Highlands. London: Philip Wilson Pub. 1985; Jeremy Brown. Mrs. Brown, a Screenplay. London: Methuen, 1997
*Victoria’s servant or gillie in Scotland at Balmoral, then “personal servant “who she writes, “always attends me when I go out—walking, riding and all our traveling expeditions.” “Invaluable, shrewd, and trustworthy man.” See John Kerr. Queen Victoria’s Scottish Dairies (1992).