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THE PRINCE

1

Alfred,

the would-be King

Alfred is really such a dear, gifted and handsome child that it makes one doubly anxious that he should have as few failings as mortal man can have.

— Queen Victoria

As a young boy, Alfred Ernest Albert had no real sense his life was different from every other boy in the British Empire.

His ‘mama’ was Queen Victoria, head of nation, Empire and Church. His ‘papa’ was Albert Francis Charles Augustus Emmanuel of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, her first cousin. After an arranged introduction, Victoria quickly abandoned her reluctance to entertain the ‘odious’ idea of marriage so early in her reign. The stoutish and diminutive Victoria, not even 5 feet tall, was instantly besotted by the handsome Bavarian, ‘excessively handsome…such a pretty mouth…a beautiful figure…quite a pleasure to look at Albert’.1

She sent for Albert four days later to tell him she would be ‘too happy’ if he consent to her wish that they marry. Ignoring the advice of her Prime Minister and mentor, Lord Melbourne, that ‘cousins are not a very good thing’, the 20-year-olds married four months later. Victoria bluntly forewarned Albert she was too busy as Sovereign to agree to his proposed two-week honeymoon, but she might have regretted this after their first night together. She wrote she had:

never never spent such an evening…his excessive love and affection gave me feelings of heavenly love and happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before. He clasped me in his arms, and we kissed each other again and again! His beauty, his sweetness and gentleness, – really how can I ever be thankful enough to have such a Husband! Oh! This was the happiest day of my life!…I feel a purer more unearthly feel than I ever did. Oh! was ever woman so blessed as I am!2

Such love and feeling was not reflected on the outcome of their sexual pleasure, despite having no shortage of opportunity. Victoria had her first seven children in 10 years but she and Albert were decidedly Queen and His Royal Highness first and foremost, Mama and Papa second. Affairs of Empire trumped anything emerging in the nursery, as Alfred would learn.

Parental warmth was not a compensation to life inside the ancient fortress walls of Windsor Castle, overlooking the Thames River. The resolute nature of the castle stone was reflected in a household run on strict teutonic lines, as decreed by Albert, with high expectations and ready punishment such as a whipping or solitary confinement for shortcomings.

There had been jubilation across the Empire when in November 1841 Victoria gave birth to the first male heir in 80 years. But Edward’s destiny quickly became one of parental doubt. Victoria was not enamoured with babies, who if ugly were ‘a very nasty object, and (even) the prettiest is frightful when undressed’ and she abhorred their ‘terrible frog-like action’3 and described them as ‘mere little plants.’4

And in Victoria’s mind her first-born son, was indeed ugly. ‘Too frightful’, she declared and for at least 18 months she took the view he was unworthy of even being called Edward, calling him ‘the boy’ while others came to know him as Bertie. More seriously than his looks, Victoria and Albert saw him as perhaps mentally retarded. They commissioned a phrenology assessment which described the boy’s brain as ‘feeble and abnormal’, underscoring parental judgments about ‘our poor strange boy’, ‘a stupid boy’,5 and ‘totally unfit for becoming a King’.6

Intellectually he suffered by comparison with their first-born daughter, Vicky, known as Pussy. She was their exemplar, precocious and intelligent, able to read and write before turning five, with governesses and instructors at Buckingham Palace imparting French, German, Latin, literature, and history, and Albert politics and philosophy. Seven-year-old Edward struggled to endure and absorb six hours of solid instruction every day, especially in German, the household language of Albert‘s Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Later reborn as Windsor at the behest of King George V after German Gotha bombers struck England in 1917, killing more than 800 and causing anti-German riots).

Alfred Ernest Albert created a better first impression than his ‘ugly’ brother on his birth at Windsor Castle on the morning of 6 August 1844. The Queen thought he most resembled her beloved and handsome Albert, and that could only mean good things, while Albert described him as ‘unusually big and strong.’7

The parental denunciation of Edward as a disappointing and possibly retarded heir was reinforced by his understandable diffidence to royal expectations and strictures, creating a cycle of negativity. Edward was convinced he would not sit on the throne—while ‘Mama is now the Queen…Vicky will have her Crown and you see Vicky will be Victoria the second’8—and so began a life-long pursuit of personal escapism and pleasure.

Victoria and Albert could see the seeds of debauchery more than duty, a particular anathema. Victoria and Albert were each familiar with family members who were not moral exemplars. They abhorred such behaviour, both personally and because they took it as their mission to inspire a higher morality for all Englishmen in the hope it would arrest any decline which risked a French-like revolution.

Victoria and Albert endeavoured to keep Edward on a righteous path as best they could, while also working to keep Alfred as isolated as possible from Edward’s influence, and ensure the spare and preferred heir was well placed should Edward never make the throne, or perhaps in the future could not produce his own male heir. While Albert promised Alfred, or Affie as he was known, would be taught ‘to love the dear small country to which he belongs’,9 the Queen had to stave off efforts to make him a King in Germany when he was just five-years-old. He had to be raised as a possible King of England.

But the boys were not rivals. They initially shared a bedroom—‘I think that Affie likes being with me, and I like having him too, because it as a much better match for me than older persons’,10 Edward said, and each endured the same arduous education six days a week, chafed under the royal regime, and yearned for more fun. Occasionally boys were brought in from Eton College for them to play with, but Alfred and Edward shared a special bond as they each paid the dues of destiny, and tried to look out for each other to avoid punishment. Albert occasionally meted out a whipping and when 11-year-old Alfred was caught smoking he was separated from Edward and ordered to endure three days solitary confinement at Royal Lodge, south of the castle in Windsor Park. He did occasionally play with the boys but Victoria, herself brought up in an exclusively adult environment, was not a frequent visitor to the nursery, and the young princes were known to careen down palace corridors screaming out ‘The Queen! The Queen!’ if they sensed her approach.

Albert chastised Victoria over the lack of joy she gained from her children. ‘The trouble lies in the mistaken notion the function of a mother is to be always correcting, scolding and ordering them about’, he wrote. Edward later said that for he and Alfred ‘there was no boyhood’. They both evidenced irritability. Edward complained ‘other children are not always good…why should I always be good?…nobody is always good’11 and when Alfred did not want to do something he petulantly declared, ‘boys never!’12

Their upbringing was regimented and repressive. Alfred’s formal education began alongside Edward with Henry Birch, a young Eton graduate who focused on English, geography and mathematics, while others came in to teach religion, writing, French, German, drawing and music. But after Edward’s negative phrenology assessment Albert lost faith in Birch and replaced him with Frederick Gibbs, a dour barrister and fellow of Trinity College. He was told by Albert‘s long-time friend and advisor from Coburg, Baron Christian Frederick Stockmar: ‘If you cannot make anything of the eldest, you must try with the younger one.’13

Beyond the heavy education agenda, for eight-year-old Alfred there was aristocratic instruction on ‘manners of conduct towards others in appearance, deportment and dress’ and ‘acquitting oneself credibly in conversation, on whatever maybe the occupation of Society’, and riding, military drill and gymnastics. His day was royally filled from 8am to 7pm six days a week.

Alfred’s escape was to spend as much time as he could playing with toy ships in imaginary naval voyages and battles. His imagination matured into a desire to be free to steer his own life course, not one strictly directed by his parents. He could sense his brother struggling with the parental judgment of being unworthy of a mandated role he did not savour but had to spend his life in waiting. They could be forgiven for a shared feeling they were on an unwinnable quest. The Queen bluntly told her children: ‘None of you can ever be proud enough of being the child of such a Father who has not his equal in this world—so great, so good, so faultless.’14

Alfred pleaded with his father. ‘Please papa’, let me join the Navy, he repeatedly asked. Albert was disappointed he had failed to persuade his son to follow his own interests to become an engineer, but warmed to the boy’s persistent pleas to join the Blue Jackets. He was also concerned that Alfred’s teenage years would come under the corrupting influence of his brother.

Albert allowed him to be coached in mathematics and geometry by a retired Naval chaplain, William Jolley, and seamanship on a training ship at Portsmouth, under Captain Robert Harris.

Albert came to think it a good idea for his son to gain life experience and competencies away from the influence of his ‘idle’ brother, and he rationalised it as something parents could not prevent.

As regards his wish to enter the Navy, this is a passion which we, as his parents, believe not to have a right to subdue…it is certainly not right to break the spontaneous wish of a young spirit…we gave him an engineering officer as instructor, hoping to interest him in this branch, but his love for the Blue Jackets always turned up again, and always with greater force…with the remarkable perseverance which this child possesses, it is not to be expected that he will give up the idea easily.15

Queen Victoria was not amused. She felt Affie was ‘a good, dear promising child’, and daughter Victoria had just left to marry Prince Frederick William of Prussia (to whom she had become engaged three years before when she was only 14 and he was 24). It was ‘too wretched…horrible!’ for her two favourite children to leave ‘tame, dull, formal England’ and what even she called ‘the prison life of Windsor.’16

She felt ‘papa is most cruel’ but Albert was convinced the distance and discipline afforded by the Navy, and some modest exposure to Royal life in European ports, would stand Alfred in good stead, whether he would only ever inherit his German Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, or circumstances meant he had to take the English throne. Alfred would ‘become more generally competent’ and be more ready to be a King than by staying at home under his brother’s influence, or moving to Bavaria and becoming more ‘German’ which would make any English prospects more problematic.

The Queen acknowledged the ‘sad contrast’17 between the heir and spare heir, and reluctantly agreed. It was necessary because ‘he is really such a dear, gifted and handsome child that it makes one doubly anxious that he should have as few failings as mortal man can have.’18

Her hope for Alfred was in proportion to the trepidation she felt about Edward succeeding her. When he turned 17 Victoria wrote:

I tremble at the thought of only three years and a half before…he will be of age and we can’t hold him except by moral power! I try to shut my eyes at that terrible moment!…oh! dear, what would happen if I were to die next winter. It is too awful a contemplation.19

A year later she and Albert sent him a stern 18th birthday message full of exhortations about moral duties and how only through punctual and cheerful performance of those duties ‘the true Christian and the true Gentleman is recognised’.20 Edward burst into tears.

While Edward would be denied any escape into military service, Alfred’s wish was granted just two weeks after his 14th birthday. After passing entrance exams at the Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth he could enter Her Majesty’s service in August 1858 as a naval cadet on HMS Euralyus.

Alfred was excited, but leaving all that was familiar was still a big step and he sobbed when farewelling his parents.

Two years later, in a novel but strategic move, Victoria sent both the teenage princes abroad as part of their Royal training and separation. Alfred was sent to South Africa, where he laid the foundation stone of the breakwater at Table Bay, opened a library and enjoyed a hunting party which shot between 600 and 1000 animals. Edward went to Ireland, Canada and the United States—a land still seen as one full of revolutionary republicans and democrats—where he was seen to have acquitted himself well, although it was felt he looked with too much pleasure on the ‘vast array of beauties lined up for him’ at a dance in Cincinnati, and the New York Herald reported he ‘whispered sweet nothings’ to his dance partners.21

The following year saw a more negative episode, a life-changing affair which would come to shape the whole family forever.

Edward, who had been attending Cambridge University, was despatched to a 10-week military training camp at Curragh, 30 miles from Dublin in County Kildare, accompanied by his governor, Robert Bruce, whose task was to fulfil Albert’s wish that his son become ‘a good man and a thorough gentleman’.

The Queen wasn’t confident. Her instincts told her Edward was more his mother’s son when it came to sexual appetite, and not his father’s son when it came to strict propriety. She told her uncle, Prince Leopold Franz Julius of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha: ‘Alas! Sons are like their mothers—at least the eldest are supposed to be…and so I think Bertie has avoided all likeness to his beloved father.’ That was to become all too clear at Curragh. Edward had dutifully promised to ‘do my best now to make the best use of the short time I now have before me for acquiring knowledge and instruction’. But he hadn’t said anything about acquiring carnal knowledge and instruction.

Notwithstanding Governor Bruce’s supervision, two Grenadier Guards ventured to the outskirts of the 12,000-strong military camp, where some 50 or 60 women, known as ‘wrens’, lived in nest-like abodes of mashed bog earth and gorse branches as victims of the Great Famine, engaging in prostitution or pursuing matrimony.

The red-tunic Grenadiers recruited and briefed Nellie Clifden, a vivacious and promiscuous 17-year-old known for sharing her affections around London’s hot spots of the day such as Cremorne Gardens and Mott’s Dancing Rooms. In a bedroom in the officer’s quarters she faced a young soldier, 20-years-old, tall, bearded and a little unsteady on his feet. Nellie unbuttoned his uniform, which featured the Royal cypher and Grenadier motto, Honi soit qui mal y pense (Evil be to him who evil thinks) embossed on each button.

Edward didn’t think Nellie was in any way evil. He happily and proudly wrote in his engagement diary of 6 September ‘Curragh, NC, 1st time’. Three nights later he summoned Nellie back for a follow-up appointment, ‘Curragh, NC, 2nd time’ and again the next night ‘Curragh, NC, 3rd time’.22

Word of the triple treat spread from the soldiers, delighted with their stewardship of the future King, to the gentlemen’s clubs of Ireland and then England, and gossips like Lord Torrington. Edward and Alfred were likely to have shared and relished the intimate details of the first ‘Princess of Wales’, although Alfred later thought one of their friends was out of line in naming a racing mare ‘Miss Clifden’.

But it was no relish for their Royal parents. Prince Albert was seriously ill, but when his most trusted friend, Baron Stockmar, heard the gossip he felt compelled to tell him his son had been initiated in what he called ‘the sacred mysteries of creation’.23 Albert was mortified. He had an intense revulsion of all things sexually improper. His libidinous father Duke of Saxe-Coburg had an embarrassing affair with a courtesan, his mother Luise was flirtatious, prompting rumours of Albert’s legitimacy, and his brother had a scandalous affair with a servant girl in Dresden. When Albert was only a boy of seven, his father divorced his mother on a charge of adultery, banishing her to Switzerland with a pension and a ban on ever seeing her children again. Victoria, whose own father had only married her mother after dismissing Thérèse-Bernadine Mongenet, known as Madame de Saint-Laurent, his faithful mistress of 28 years, also feared one or both the Princes would turn out like the ‘mad’ George III or the ‘wicked’ Carlton House set of George IV and his fascination with erotica, or William IV with 10 illegitimate children.

Royals were known to exercise what they saw as an aristocratic prerogative for pleasure, but Victoria and Albert kept their sexual pleasures and shared love of nude paintings to themselves. Alfred and Edward were on their moral frontline, and now their heir to the throne might have undone all their good work and put his own future at risk: what if the girl had given him a disease, or became pregnant and filed a paternity suit, or ruined their chances of securing him the matrimonial advantages of a wealthy European aristocratic family?

Albert wrote to Edward that his behaviour caused ‘the deepest pain I have yet felt in this life’.24 He knew he was ‘thoughtless and weak…but I could not think you depraved!’ The sacred mysteries of creation, he said, ‘ought to remain shrouded in holy awe until touched by pure and undefiled hands’, and as a young man responding to ‘sexual passions’ he could not understand ‘why did you not open yourself to your father’, who would have reminded him of the ‘special mode in which these desires are to be gratified…by…the holy ties of Matrimony’.25

‘If you were to try and deny it’, Albert added despairingly, ‘she can drag you into a Court of Law to force you to own it and there with you (the Prince of Wales) in the witness box, she will be able to give before a greedy Multitude disgusting details of your profligacy for the sake of convincing the Jury; yourself cross-examined by a railing indecent attorney and hooted and yelled at by a Lawless Mob!! Oh, horrible prospect, which this person has in her power, any day to realise! And to break your poor parents heart.’26

‘You must not, you dare not be lost’, he said.27 The pressure was on to secure a suitable marriage before the Prince was ‘lost’. He was despatched to Germany, officially to observe Prussian manoeuvres, but in reality to meet the woman who his parents, with the help of daughter Vicky, secretly determined should be his future wife.

Their desire was another dynastic link with Germany and more ‘strong blood’ as the Queen called it, but they had to be sensitive to what England would accept. After reviewing seven young princesses it was arranged for Edward to meet 16-year-old Princess Alexandra of Denmark.

Albert was impressed enough to say frankly that ‘from that photograph I would marry her at once.’28 And he and Victoria also could not help but notice Alfred’s keen interest in ‘Alix’. On the strength of photos alone, Alfred made no secret of his wish to marry her himself if Edward remained hesitant. If Edward became ‘obstinate’, Victoria said, ‘I will withdraw myself altogether and wash my hands of him, for I cannot educate him, and the country must make him feel what they think…Affie would be ready to take her at once, and really if B. refused I would recommend Affie’s engaging to marry her in three years.’29

While Alfred wondered who might win Alix he returned to single life on the sea, occasionally visiting his sister Victoria who was told by the Queen that his behaviour was ‘much improved but he must be looked after and is never allowed to go about alone’.30

Prince Albert, meanwhile, wasn’t done with Edward’s Curragh affair. Despite feeling ill with crippling insomnia and neuralgia—‘Bin recht elend (I feel miserable)’ he complained in his diary—he met his son in a tense encounter in pouring rain at Cambridge University. Albert forgave his son but warned that forgiveness could not restore the state of innocence and purity which he had lost forever.

Three weeks later Albert was on his death bed. His demise in December 1861 was put down to typhoid fever, although later it was thought more likely to be stomach cancer. But for the grief-stricken Queen Victoria, there was no doubt: her beloved husband had died at the age of 42 from the shock of his son’s degrading nights with an Irish harlot. ‘What killed him was that dreadful business at the Curragh…Oh! that boy…I never can or shall look at him without a shudder’, she wrote of Edward.31 And she meant it, making her contempt known for the next 40 years.

Alfred, at sea off Mexico, was the last child to hear the relayed news of his father’s death. Heart-broken at being the only child not at the funeral, it became his custom for the rest of his life to spend the anniversary of his papa’s death alone in private remembrance.

His brother, blamed and shunned by the Queen, was now even more determined to pursue matters of pleasure, and enjoined Alfred in that pursuit between his Naval excursions. Even while waiting to be engaged and finally married to Princess Alix in 1863, Edward embraced the freedom and privacy of his Marlborough House in The Mall. The princely pair were the stars in the ‘fast set’ of Marlborough, enjoying numerous house parties, dinners, balls, races and theatre. And the company of women, be they wives of their friends or ladies of the theatre in London and Paris, in the company of rich and fast friends like Charles Wynn-Carrington—who later had his own affair with Nellie Clifden and went on to become a future Governor of New South Wales. And in sojourns across the Channel they conquered Paris one bottle, one boulevard, one brothel at a time.

The Queen detested such hedonistic behaviour, fretting over a French-style revolution if the upper classes did not cease to be ‘frivolous, pleasure seeking and immoral’32 but it did not slow the princes down. Victoria feared that under Edward’s influence Alfred would continue to ‘fall into sin from weakness’33 and was relieved he was at sea more than at Marlborough.

But Alfred was enjoying the life of a sailor prince. He joked to his aunt Princess Alexandrine in Saxe-Coburg ‘I have now got the two letters RN fixed to the end of my name…as the old maids say that it is alright because I have come back to the Royal Nursery’34 but he firmly told others that RN definitely did not stand for Royal Nursery.

He endured some early criticism, unusual for the times. After he had progressed to midshipman on the St George, he was christened ‘Midshipman Easy’ by Punch magazine, referencing the spoiled son of foolish parents in an 1836 novel. Others ran headlines ‘The Boy Sailor’ and ‘Alfred the Great Roughing it’. Victoria was particularly upset by the Times, with what she felt was an ‘imprudent’ reference to the cost of Alfred, as ‘Mr Midshipman Easy’, and ‘the Princely Hero of a Court’, with all the ‘royal receptions, and royal salutes, and royal fiddle-faddles of every description’ when he reached Fleet ports around the Mediterranean. ‘We want him to learn his profession, not in a vapid half-and-half, Royal Highness kind of way,’ the Times said. ‘He was sent out to be trained to salt water, and it is upon rose water that his first lesson in navigation is taking place.’35

Queen Victoria requested there not be public receptions when Alfred’s ship visited Malta, Gibraltar, Morocco, Tunis, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Palestine and Corfu. But there was never a shortage of military men and officials, and their wives and society ladies, keen to demonstrate royal and loyal affection.

An article in Household Word, edited by Charles Dickens, said Alfred was as popular with his messmates ‘as any other sensible, good humoured and high spirited English boy might be’, but lampooned the way local officials and military bowed ‘almost to prostration to a little boy in a cadets uniform’. This was a sycophancy that Alfred ought to be removed from, and if an illustration in the London Illustrated News had portrayed them ‘creeping on their bellies to lick the dust off the Prince’s shoes the effect of abjectness could hardly have been stronger’.36

Alfred’s fellow ‘middies’ seemingly agreed, and adopted their own little ceremony: whenever a Royal salute was fired they would bump him, or put him over a table in the gunroom and ceremoniously deliver a mock beating with a dirk scabbard to ensure he did not ‘give himself airs’.37

Notwithstanding Albert’s earlier efforts to ensure that while it was Her Majesty’s Navy, Her Majesty’s sailor son ought to be afforded no special favours, within five years Alfred was promoted to Lieutenant on the Raccoon, although that was delayed at one point ‘on account of him having allowed some slight indiscipline among the crew of his boat’38 Another ‘slight indiscipline’ included efforts to source some additional income by selling some of the Queen’s correspondence.

But that was the least of it. As the Queen was to learn, what happened in ports like Malta did not always stay in Malta.

During Fleet visits to La Valetta, locals declared ‘viva Alfredo’ and in the ensuing receptions, operas and balls, Alfred enjoyed the warm embrace of various contessas wanting to dance with a Prince who perhaps stood a heartbeat away from the throne. Life for the British establishment in Malta was high spirited: ‘…if you don’t want to be made love to you should not be so pretty’ was a sentiment recalled by a prominent society lady.39

Alfred danced until the early hours ‘exhibiting high pleasure and delight’, as the Malta Observer reported. And did more than dance. Gossip reached London in 1862 that a ‘dashing young naval officer had got into a scrape with a lady. The Queen was onto it.’40 Alfred, in the grand Hanoverian family tradition, had an affair in Malta with ‘a lady of rank’, the start of a life-long affection for the pleasures to be had while in port in Malta. (Alfred would later name his third child, born in Malta, Victoria Melita, in honour of the island, the name thought to come from Greek word for ‘honey’).

The Queen, who had not forgotten or forgiven Edward’s behaviour in Ireland, and always worried about him taking Alfred down the low moral road, lamented Alfred’s ‘thoughtless and dishonourable behaviour’ without ‘a particle of excuse’. She told Princess Victoria, ‘The conduct of Affie has dealt a heavy blow to my weak and shattered frame and I feel quite bowed down with it’. Vicky empathised, wondering ‘how could Affie be such a goose, to play such a silly trick and stand in his own light…I feel so pained to think that he could be so thoughtless as to add to your grief by misbehaviour. It is so disheartening, as he had been going on so well in every respect and is such a darling’41 although she too was annoyed Alfred could indulge ‘amusing ladies plenty of his time’.42

Victoria felt the misbehaviour even more than Edward’s Curragh escape—‘the bitter anguish that followed Affie’s conduct is far worse than Berties’—and she was reluctant to even see him. ‘I had wished not to see him and thought for himself it would have been better. But for the world it was necessary so I saw him. It was very trying.’43

In what would have been an excruciating maternal confrontation for any son, let alone with the Queen, Alfred exhibited sufficient anxiety and subdued tone to at least ‘show me he feels enough’. But Victoria lamented having to handle such matters without the help of Albert or a male of sufficient age and experience she asked General Jonathan Peel who could ‘help her with her sons’ and ‘keep them in the path of duty’44 and away from their ‘wickedness’ with women, which sometimes forced payments to keep irate husbands quiet, or the risk- of prostitutes, who Albert had warned ‘will consider you good sport’.45

To Victoria, even the illness of Alfred’s younger brother Prince Leopold, a haemophiliac, was, she told Vicky, ‘ less trying than the sinfulness of one’s sons—like your two elder brothers…one feels that death in purity is so far preferable to life in sin and degradation.’46

And she was also dealing with government ministers over another plan for Alfred to become a king. When King Otto abdicated the Greek throne in 1862 Athens chose Alfred as his successor, a Greek plebiscite backed the move with ‘the Alfred fever…raging all over the country’ and The Times declared the appointment ‘certain’ because ‘the Greeks have no other candidate’.

The Queen was aghast. Alfred was much too needed in England as the spare heir, she protested. Edward might not have children or might die, and typhoid could quickly decimate a court. So ‘we could not spare one heir’. Besides which Alfred was too young, had other ‘duties’ in line at Coburg, and his children couldn’t possibly be brought up as Greeks.47

Victoria enjoined the British Government to vehemently oppose the move and her Greek tragedy was averted. Alfred was instead formally designated Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the small kingdom of his father’s family. The ruling Ernest II had salaciously lived up to the title of ‘father of his people’ but was officially childless, and while the title would normally fall to his brother Albert’s eldest son, Edward was Queen Victoria’s heir apparent so he renounced in favour of his brother.

Despite the reinforced Germanic link, Alfred continued to cause Victoria anguish. She saw men in the image of her husband, or after his death as a ‘John Brown’, evidencing what she saw as Albert and her close servant’s sense of nobility, selflessness, dignity, devotion and humility. Or a ‘John Bull’, living life hard, displaying raciness, arrogance and a devotion to the pleasures of table, turf, and bed.

To her disgust, Alfred was, like his brother, more John Bull. She complained to her daughter ‘he gives me cause for sorrow and anxiety (I mean morally)’. She was particularly determined to prevent him from ‘getting into mischief’ with Alix, his future sister-in-law and Princess of Wales, who Alfred had been ready to take her ‘at once’. While she was now engaged to Edward, Victoria confided to Vicky:

we do all we can do keep him from Marlborough House as he is far too much épris of Alix to be allowed too much there without possibly ruining the happiness of all three and Affie has not have the strength of mind or rather of principle and character to resist the temptation, and it is like playing with fire.48

He caused his mother a different anguish when he fell seriously ill in Malta, and her heart sank ‘as I realized my darling Boy had the same fever as his Father!…But God’s will be done! I can only hope and trust.’ Receiving telegram updates every two hours, she could not ‘contemplate the possibility of his also being taken from me’, but some newspapers reported ‘unpleasant rumours’ Alfred had passed away.49

He did recover, but suggestions his health might force him to leave the Navy were not well received. Lord George Clarendon, former Secretary of State or Foreign Affairs, warned he was ‘a baddish fellow and will give great trouble at home’ if he left the Navy.50

He stayed in the Navy, and as a ‘baddish fellow’ bounced back into his life around the Mediterranean, Marlborough and Paris. There was an abundance of wine, cigars and women. Some of the women were actresses and singers chosen for the stages of London and Paris as much for their physical attributes as any artistic talent, attributes to be enjoyed on and off the stage.

Victoria was determined to ‘save’ Alfred, and had long been plotting a marital solution. She did not imagine the task to be too difficult because ‘there is a greater choice and his wife need not unite so many qualities as Bertie’s must, for many reasons public and private’51 but she wanted Alfred to ‘fix his affections’52 securely, even if he could not marry until he came of age. She plotted with other Queens in Europe to introduce Alfred to a parade of princesses. Her preference was one ‘thoroughly and truly German, which is a necessity’ and the parade of prospects included Princesses Catherine of Wurttemberg, Catherine of Oldenburg, Elizabeth of Weid, Marie of Saxe-Altenburg, and Frederica of Hanover, daughter of Victoria’s first cousin, George V, the blind and last king of Hanover.

Victoria and Vicky exchanged notes dissecting the looks, character, health and ages of candidates from Wurttemberg, Oldenburg and Saxe-Altenburg, seeking to guide Alfred to their preference of a Germanic princess who was not ‘ugly’, ‘sympathetique’ to his personality, and from a family without too many health issues due to in-breeding. They frowned on princesses who were ‘sickly looking’, or had bad teeth, large hands and feet, and unhealthy family members. Alfred assured his mother that Princess Marie of Altenburg evidenced ‘only one tooth (which) is not good, and she has not got large feet and hands’, and she had made ‘a very favourable impression’ on him. He described her as being ‘very pretty, very tall, slight, with beautiful large thoughtful grey eyes, fine marked features and very dark hair!’

Victoria was pleased Alfred was interested in someone thoroughly German, and so preferable to others who were ‘really objectionable on the score of health and blood’ telling him firmly ‘it cannot be’ for him to marry anyone with ‘generations of blindness and double relationships But she was concerned Alfred would not be hastened toward any marital conclusion with a Princess who was 19 ‘and cannot be left in uncertainty to be snatched away by others…if he doesn’t in the end…like Princess Marie of A…he must look for somebody else,’ she told Vicky.

But Alfred was not taking his mother’s wishes on board, continuing to assess other princesses. The King of Prussia conferred an Order of the Black Eagle on him, which the Times called ‘a very questionable honour’. This was ‘monstrous’ criticism, the Queen said, ‘it is the pure vulgarity of the Press. I took it…as a valuable token of the King’s wish to be on good terms with England. Oh! What I suffer, no one knows.’ Vicky advised Alfred that ‘now he knew the princesses he must seriously reflect in his own mind and balance all the advantages and disadvantages before he settled anything and at any rate should look for an opportunity to make better acquaintance with the one that pleases him most before he fixes his choice’.53

But Alfred was not rushing to settle on one female in his life. He remained determinedly without a ‘fix on his affections’, enjoying the freedom that came with being a sailor prince in the Mediterranean, and there would also be talk of his love for a ‘commoner’ and affections for various duchesses and ladies in London.

Victoria said he was vague and wilful, and now distrusted him completely. There was no doubt in her mind what was needed. In the absence of marriage, some ‘responsibility and the separation from his London flatterers will do him good’,54 and also keep him from causing ‘mischief’ with Princess Alix.

So in early 1866 she devised a plan for him to assume a more royal and respectable profile. She had him invested as Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Ulster and Kent, appointed master of Trinity House, awarded the freedom of the City of London and granted Parliamentary approval of a £15,000 Royal coming-of-age stipend—a significant rise on his £1 a day naval lieutenant remuneration. But more significantly, she sought a fast-track for Alfred to the command of a ship. And a ship on which he could undertake a long voyage.

With the help of a special order allowing him to be promoted to Captain without first being a Commander, Alfred was given command of the Galatea, one of the fastest and best equipped ships of its day, at the age of 21. Named after the goddess nymph of calm seas, the 26-gun steam-powered, 280-foot long frigate had served in the Channel squadron and North America, with a top speed of 13 knots.

Mindful of previous criticism of her son doing it easy in the Navy, the Queen wrote to the Prime Minister, Lord Derby, to ensure Alfred was ‘in command of his ship, the Galatea, as a captain in her Navy and not as a Prince’, and urged that ‘the Admiralty must make no difference’ to his treatment, and he should ‘conform to what every other captain on duty must do’55

After Alfred talked to Edward about the appeal of a voyage that would take him away from the scrutiny of London and Victoria’s marital machinations, the heir encouraged the Queen, saying the brothers had often spoken of a voyage, and cleverly tapping her concerns about ‘fast’ behaviour said both the Fleet Admiral and the Naval chaplain instructing Alfred both felt it would be ‘a good thing’.56

The Queen had what she wanted. And the voyage she had in mind was as far as the Empire extended, all the way to Australia. She presented it as completely Alfred’s idea. ‘He of his own accord proposed a voyage to Australia and I encouraged him very much in this plan, as it is a Colony of such importance, one in which beloved Papa took such interest and to which none of our Princes have yet been.’57

But Alfred evidenced some ‘reluctance and suspicion’ about just how long a voyage she had in mind. Some newspapers suggested it could be as long as two years, but Alfred did not want to miss the next society season, which ran from Christmas to about June. As he later told friends, picking up on life and old friends in London after any voyage was difficult, ‘to say nothing of the fairer sex whom one may have left disconsolate.’58

By mid-May word began to spread that Alfred had left his Clarence House in the Mall, accompanied by friend Elliott Yorke as equerry, and would board the Galatea in Gibraltar and then depart from Marseille for a tour of the most distant and remote colonies.

But before Alfred began his official assignment, he wanted to pursue some unofficial assignations in Paris with his brother. As soon as he arrived in Marseille he handed over command of Galatea and took a train to the French capital. Like his brother, he had come to love the city, and all its delights. Alfred wasn’t quite as outgoing as Edward but he was still a young man with royal privileges but without the same scrutiny as his brother, and still without ‘fixed affections’.

What Alfred did that Parisian summer would be fondly remembered, but also mark the start of a year that could never be forgotten.

Selected References

Longford, Elizabeth, Queen Victoria R.I., (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), p.67.; Morning Post,(8 January 1859, BLN); Plaidy, Jean, Widow of Windsor, (London: Random House, 2008), p.268; The Times, (8 December 1862, 17 February 1863, 6 May 1864, BLN).

endnotes

1 Viscount Esher (ed.) The Girlhood of Queen Victoria: A Selection of Her Majesty’s Diaries 1832–1840, (London: John Murray, 1912), pp. 215, 246, 263.

2 Christopher Hibbert, Queen Victoria: A Personal History, (London: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 123.

3 John Van der Kiste & Bee Jordaan, Dearest Affie: Alfred Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria‘s Second Son, Stroud (London,: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1984), pp. 16, 45.

4 Jane Ridley, Bertie, A Life of Edward VII, (London: Vintage, 2013), p. 15.

5 Helen Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession: Victoria, Albert and the Death That Changed the British Monarchy, (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2011), p. 29.

6 Ridley, Bertie, pp. 16, 26, 79.

7 Roger Fulford (ed.), Dearest Child: Letters Between Queen Victoria and the Princess Royal, 1858–1861, (London: Evans Brothers, 1964), p. 267.

8 Ridley, Bertie, p. 19.

9 Kiste & Jordaan, Dearest Affie, p. 45.

10 Ridley, Bertie, p. 23.

11 ibid., pp. 26, 29, 34.

12 Kiste & Jordaan, Dearest Affie, p. 17.

13 Ridley, Bertie, p. 27.

14 Greg King, Twilight of Splendour: The Court of Queen Victoria During Her Diamond Jubilee, (Hoboken, US: John Wiley and Sons, 2007), p. 134.

15 ibid., p. 28.

16 Fulford, Dearest Child, pp. 110, 131, 134.

17 Kiste & Jordaan, Dearest Affie, pp. 29, 34.

18 Fulford, Dearest Child, p. 110.

19 Hibbert, Queen Victoria, p. 268.

20 Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession, p. 30.

21 Ridley, Bertie, p. 48.

22 ibid., pp. 42, 54.

23 Ridley, Bertie, p. 58.

24 Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession, p. 51.

25 Ridley, Bertie, p. 58.

26 Turtle Bunbury, www.turtlebunbury.com/history

27 Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession, p. 51.

28 Kiste & Jordaan, Dearest Affie, p. 42.

29 Roger Fulford (ed.), Dearest Mama: Letters Between Queen Victoria and the Crown Princess of Prussia, 1861–1864, (London: Evans Brothers, 1968), p. 53.

30 Fulford, Dearest Child, p. 295.

31 Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession, pp. 50, 66.

32 Longford, Queen Victoria, p. 66.

33 Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession, p. 167.

34 Kiste & Jordaan, Dearest Affie, p. 31.

35 The Times, (30 December 1858, BLN).

36 Political Examiner, (15 January 1859, BLN).

37 www.euryalus.org.uk

38 Cork Examiner, (12 December 1862, BLN).

39 Lady Winifred Fearnaught, Chronicles of Service Life in Malta, (London: Edwin Arnold, 1908), p. 104.

40 Longford, Queen Victoria, p. 55.

41 Fulford, Dearest Mama, pp. 104, 107, 122.

42 Kiste & Jordaan, Dearest Affie, p. 85.

43 Fulford, Dearest Mama, pp. 108, 121.

44 Rappaport, Magnificent Obsession, p. 163.

45 Ridley, Bertie, p. 58.

46 Wilson, Victoria: A Life, (London: Atlantic Books, 2014.), p. 272.

47 George Earle Buckle (ed.) Letters of QV 1862–69, (London: Murray, 1907), p. 48.

48 Fulford, Dearest Mama, cited from pp. 51, 211.

49 QV Journal, (18 February 1863, NLA).

50 Kiste & Jordaan, Dearest Affie, p. 48.

51 Fulford, Dearest Child, p. 334.

52 Fulford, Dearest Mama, p. 211.

53 ibid., pp. 261, 262, 265, 267, 325, 328, 331.

54 Kiste & Jordaan, Dearest Affie, p. 55.

55 George Buckle, Letters of Queen Victoria, (London: John Murray, 1926), p. 432.

56 Juliet Rieden, The Royals in Australia, (Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 2015), p. 30.

57 Ridley, Bertie, p. 98.

58 Curtis Candler, Notes About Melbourne and Diaries, (Melbourne, 1848), p. 340.