Prince Albert Victor: The Lost King

The tradition of disappointed heirs to the throne is one of the British Crown's most durable ones. Edward VII was already an old man before he succeeded Queen Victoria; as great as he eventually became, at first George VI's appeal was a pale shadow of Edward VIII's popularity; Elizabeth II's youth was sacrificed to duty; and even the current Prince of Wales has waited and waited*...

In his own generation, Prince Albert Victor - son of the future Edward VII and Queen Alexandra - was intended to be King, only to die young and thrust an unprepared George V onto the throne. Fortunately, the British Crown has another tradition, that of those who ascend it to not merely rise to the occasion but exceed all expectations...

Yet another of the Royal Family's redoubtable traditions is that each of its generations has a member whose memory is plagued by scandal, and in this case Prince Albert Victor more than fills the bill. Already considered a suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders when they began to occur in August 1888, from the moment the Cleveland Street Scandal broke in July 1889, his name was forever linked to the last royal taboo, namely that of homosexuality - the mere existence of which is seen as the principal threat to an organization founded on heredity.

Although widely travelled as a naval cadet at a time when most people lived and died within five miles of where they were born, the Prince known to his family as Eddy was far from worldly, with even his kindest biographers referring to him as 'thick'. Born on this day in 1864 at Frogmore House (located in the Home Park near Windsor Castle) early on the Prince's tutor John Neale Dalton referred to his pupil's brain as 'abnormally dormant', whereupon it was suggested that a military career was likely the best option. It wasn't. No matter what the field of study, Eddy was ill-suited to learning, and from a young age expressed grave misgivings about fulfilling the role he was expected to undertake.

By 1891 his grandmother the Queen had brokered a marriage between Eddy and an impoverished German Princess, Mary of Teck; before they could be wed, though, Eddy perished in an influenza pandemic in January 1892...

During the customary mourning period the ill-fated fiancee became friendly with her former paramour's brother, the Duke of York, and rather than letting an eminently suitable Protestant bride go to waste, the pair initially united in an official show of grief were soon also united in matrimony in the Chapel Royal at St. James's Palace**.

Eddy's legacy, then, wasn't a disappointing reign which may have ended in the abolition of the monarchy but the only honourable setting aside of an unsuitable heir in favour of one whose solid foundation has kept the House of Windsor in power even as their cousins across Europe have fallen from grace.

*And is bloody well gonna keep on waiting, if I have anything to say about it...
**So successful was their marriage that George V became one of the first English monarchs to never take a mistress.
*

share on: facebook