The Prince and the Assassin. Steve Harris
Clontarf on Sydney Harbour had instantly transformed Australia from unprecedented joy to unprecedented anger and moral panic, rocked to its foundations by the shame of the most serious assassination attempt on a member of the Royal family.
The shooting ignited the first experience of the fear of international political terror, of being at the front-line of a new global criminal conspiracy to overthrow colonial rule. It unleashed treason against security, justice against vengeance, self-interest against public interest, martyrdom against madness, religion against law, colonial masters against local administrators, truth against deceit.
This is the story of Alfred Albert and Henry O’Farrell, and how their worlds and lives collided in that moment of madness, and the story of the reverberating passions and forces which followed, some of which are still being felt.
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