The monarchs we never had
Prince Albert Victor (1864-1892)
Who was he?
Albert Victor Christian Edward, the first son of the prince and princess of Wales, was born on 8 January 1864. Two months premature and weighing less than four pounds, the second in line to the throne was nonetheless strong and healthy. Although he would always be known as Eddy, he was christened Albert by decree of his grandmother Queen Victoria, after her husband who had died three years before. Eddy was soon followed by brother George and several sisters.
The Wales’s lived at Marlborough House in the Mall. Far from Victoria’s withering gaze, the prince of Wales had begun to attract a bohemian coterie to his London court. Eddy was just six when he had his first brush with scandal. In 1870, his father was forced to give evidence in the divorce of one of his many mistresses. At a time when divorce was the rare luxury of the upper classes, being summoned to court was enough to confirm to the public that the prince was a philanderer.
Queen Victoria decided that princes Eddy and George needed a more sober influence, and appointed as their tutor the Reverend John Neale Dalton. Very ambitious but no teacher, Dalton tamed the wild princes, devising a rigorous schedule of what he considered essential for their royal education – and bored them stiff. But the boys stubbornly refused to acquire even the most basic education.
Possibly to cover up his failings as a teacher, Dalton complained: Eddy, he said, was apathetic with an ‘abnormally dormant condition of mind’. As the prince’s first libeller, Dalton effectively sowed the seeds of doubt in terms of Eddy’s academic abilities and personality. Other people have taken this criticism and built a great deal more on these very modest foundations. Even today it is not uncommon to read articles stating that the prince had a learning disability.
In 1877, with the Reverend Dalton in tow as ship’s chaplain, 13-year-old Eddy and 12-year-old George sailed on the training ship HMS Britannia as sea cadets. They would spend the next five years at sea, far away from the scandals at home, but despite this, their lives remained as constrained as ever.
There were highlights, however. In the summer of 1879, Eddy met Lillie Langtry, his father’s latest mistress, at Cowes. Then, in 1881, the princes dropped anchor in Australia where, long-ignored press accounts show, their tour was a genuine success – and it was Prince Eddy and not his shy younger brother who really stole the show. On the way back to England, they stopped in Japan and got matching tattoos.
Finally reaching home in 1883, the boys were parted. George remained in the navy, while Eddy went to Cambridge, becoming the first prince to attend university. The initial impression of his tutor J K Stephens wasn’t good: ‘I do not think he can possibly much benefit from attending lectures at Cambridge … He hardly knows the meaning of the words to read.’
Eddy may not have been a scholar – like many of his social class, he was excused exams – but he got thoroughly involved in undergraduate life, meeting artists, writers and a range of other people. He was a member of the Pitt Club, where he exchanged political views with other students. The most divisive issue of the 1880s was Home Rule for Ireland. Prince Eddy had his own firm opinions on this extremely sensitive matter. When a Cambridge friend sent him some verses strongly in favour of Home Rule. Eddy replied: ‘I thought the poems you sent me very good, and they certainly do you credit as they are only too true.’
Cambridge at that time was the centre of the new aesthetic movement, the cult of ‘Greek love’ and pleasure for pleasure’s sake. And it was there that Prince Eddy began to acquire a reputation for sexual ambiguity: his all-male circle of friends included some who by today’s standards would describe themselves as gay.
In January 1885, Eddy turned 21. After all the dull years spent at sea, he was now on the cusp of public life. Later that year, he said goodbye to his carefree university days and came to London to join the highly fashionable 10th Hussars, his father’s regiment. Just like the prince of Wales, Eddy clearly had a fondness for uniform. The army, however, had an image problem – a long tradition of wine, women and song. As an officer, Eddy encountered drinking, gambling, high-class courtesans and haunts of vice and depravity.
Out of uniform, Eddy became a ‘masher’, wearing the trademark high collar of the fashionable young man about town and acquiring the nickname ‘Collars and Cuffs’. He even had a girl in St John’s Wood whom he shared with his brother George.
By late summer 1888, Prince Eddy, now a captain, had begun performing public engagements, including opening the splendid new Hammersmith Bridge. And as a letter of 6 September 1889 to his cousin Prince Louis of Battenberg reveals, Eddy had fallen in love with the 16-year-old German princess Alix of Hesse: ‘I thought you knew I was fond of Alicky. I did not give her the slightest sign that I loved her, although inwardly I was longing to tell her so, but thought I had better wait my time.’
But while Prince Eddy pined after Princess Alix, elsewhere in London a scandal was about to erupt that would forever stain his reputation. Telegram boys weren’t allowed to carry cash, so when young Charlie Swinscow was found with 18 shillings, the police suspected theft. Charlie finally admitted that he’d been paid for sex with a gentleman at a house in Fitzrovia. It soon emerged that 19 Cleveland Street was a centre of male prostitution.
The police investigation revealed that among the regulars at No. 19 was Lord Arthur Somerset, equerry to the prince of Wales. However, whereas any homosexual act was a serious offence, punishing the high-born customers of Cleveland St could upset social order. Lord Somerset’s wily solicitor Arthur Newton knew this and sought to play on the establishment’s fears.
He made it clear that, should his client be charged, someone even higher than a lord would suffer. A civil servant wrote in a memo dated 16 September 1889: ‘I am told that Newton has boasted that, if we go on, a very distinguished person will be involved … PAV.’ The name was never broadcast openly, but the initials stood for ‘Prince Albert Victor’. But it all appears now to have been a lie, fabricated by Newton to take the pressure off his client.
And it worked. The minor players in the scandal, charged with ‘procuring to commit acts of gross indecency and conspiracy to commit buggery’, got off with light sentences. And there was no warrant for Somerset’s arrest.
Prince Eddy left England in October, bound for a grand tour of India. Some biographers have claimed that he was bundled out of the country to escape the scandal. But historian Philip Ziegler states: ‘They might have wanted to get Prince Eddy out of the country, but it wouldn’t have been anything to do with a sexual scandal. It would just have been because it might possibly do him some good.’
When Eddy finally returned from India, he discovered the true reason for Alicky’s indifference. She had visited Russia and danced with the young Tsarevitch Nicholas, a distant cousin of Eddy’s. When she agreed to marry Nicholas, she sealed both their fates.
The news prompted the prince of Wales to begin drawing up a list of possible brides for his son – as long as he remained single, Eddy would be vulnerable to scandal. And Eddy managed to become besotted with the most unsuitable princess he could possibly find – Hélène, the daughter of the comte de Paris, duc d’Orléans. She was French, Catholic and descendant of one of the pretenders to the French throne. At one point, Prince Eddy even threatened to renounce his claim to the throne for her, but her father still said no.
Soon Eddy was enamoured of another unsuitable girl: the very beautiful, but very common Sybil Erskine. The prince of Wales had had scandal enough that year without his son’s difficulties, and he decided that, unless Eddy could be married, he should be banished to the colonies. However, his mother Princess Alexandra couldn’t bear the thought of losing Eddy again and determined that this time a bride would be found for him. She came up with May of Teck, a thoroughly sensible, decent girl.
Eddy, who by now had been created duke of Clarence and Avondale, obediently agreed to her choice and, in December 1891 at a house party, duly popped the question. But the somewhat resigned tone of a letter to his cousin Louis the following January reveals that, for Eddy, this wasn’t quite true love:
I wonder if you were surprised when you saw I was engaged? I dare say you were, for I must say I made my mind up rather suddenly, which I think, however, was the best thing after all, and it is really time I thought of getting married, if I am ever to be. Anyway, it is now settled at last.
The couple enjoyed two weeks in London shopping and going to the theatre. It was almost Christmas and the crowds greeted them warmly, cheering wherever they went. Things were finally looking up for Eddy.
At about the same time, he was being considered for an important political role: viceroy of Ireland. It was basically a symbolic position but, in troubled times, an important one. The nationalists were still pressing for Home Rule and their violent campaign of disobedience had led to an equally robust response from the British government. Recently discovered correspondence reveals that the Dublin commander thought Prince Eddy was the man to calm the situation, and the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, agreed. This new information means that the aspersions cast on the prince’s character and intelligence must be false.
How did he die?
Prince Eddy spent Christmas at Sandringham. Princess May arrived in the new year, to continue making arrangements for their wedding. But on his 28th birthday, Eddy fell ill, a victim of the deadly flu epidemic that had been raging in Britain for a year.
As the prince weakened, anxious crowds gathered to read the bulletins posted at Marlborough House. The prince’s temperature rose higher and he became delirious. His death on 14 January 1892 was announced by black-bordered newspapers and tolling bells all over London.
For the rest of her life, Princess Alexandra made daily visits to the room where Eddy died, leaving fresh flowers on his bed. But most other people soon forgot about the prince, and 18 months later, May of Teck married Prince George. As George V, he became king in Eddy’s place in 1911, reigning for 25 years with the renamed Queen Mary by his side.
What were the consequences?
With the evidence of his early sympathy towards Home Rule, it is possible that, if Prince Eddy had become viceroy of Ireland, he might have found himself building bridges with the Irish – a position similar to the one his father later enjoyed as king by promoting the Entente Cordiale with France.
It is generally believed that, compared to his brother, Eddy would have been more responsive to events and more interested in the arts. He might also have felt able to take risks. In 1917, George V refused to let his cousin Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his family take refuge in Britain. It is possible that Eddy would have let them in, not caring about what people thought or having any worries about republicanism.
But perhaps the major consequence of Prince Eddy’s early death is the way in which, as the reign of George V progressed, his reputation became corrupted. It started with the first biographies of George and Mary. Almost all of these aimed to increase the popularity of the king emperor and his consort, partly by ignoring the fact that George had replaced an heir who was probably his superior in many ways.
Then the scandalous material began to creep in, with many writers alluding to Eddy’s possible involvement in the Cleveland Street scandal. However, research by the biographer Andrew Cook has shown that there was no connection between Eddy and that infamous house of pleasure.
Then, in November 1970, amateur criminologist Dr Thomas Stowell made the sensational claim that Queen Victoria’s grandson was Jack the Ripper. He based his claim solely on two facts: the prince sometimes wore a deerstalker hat as the serial killer was reputed to do; and he had stalked deer and knew how to dress their carcases.
Stowell’s theory had a huge hole in it: as Court Circulars of 1888 show, Prince Eddy wasn’t in London at the time of any of the murders.
However, by now, the name of the once obscure prince was familiar to every crackpot and crank in the land. A few years later, a book and a BBC documentary made more sensational claims: Eddy wasn’t the killer but was the cause of the killings. He’d fallen for the Catholic Annie Crook, whom he had met in Cleveland Street, and they had married and had a child. The Ripper murders were not, according to this theory, the serial rampage of a madman, but a heavily disguised attempt to hide the truth about Eddy’s guilty secret. The killer was, in fact, the royal physician Sir William Gull.
Several films followed. The glossy, big-budget From Hell (2001) starring Johnny Depp is just the latest to put the prince’s illicit liaison with a Catholic girl at the salacious centre of a state conspiracy.
The House of Windsor as it exists today was very much George V’s creation. Perhaps as a reaction against all the upset that his father had caused by his racy behaviour, George was intent on having the royals become the very epitome of the wholesome British family, with no whiff of scandal about them but with very little humanity too. If Eddy had been king, it seems likely that he would have responded much more naturally to the British public.
