The Prince and the Assassin. Steve Harris
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