The Prince and the Assassin. Steve Harris
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