[The Duke of Clarence had] spread the falsest and most unnatural coloured pretence that man might imagine, that the King our most sovereign lord was a bastard, and not begotten to reign upon us.
Indictment against George, Duke of Clarence for slandering
his brother King Edward IV (1478).
Royal illegitimacy has been the stuff of ‘skeletons in the royal cupboard’ for generations, with people popping up all over the place to be ‘royal bastards’. In 1981 the Miami Herald noted the death of Irene Victoria Alexandra Louise Isabel Bush. Her claim to royal ancestry was her assertion that she had been born in Ireland at Carton, County Kildare on 28 February 1899, as Lady Irene Fitzgerald Coburg, the daughter of one Mabel Fitzgerald and HRH Prince Alfred of Edinburgh and Saxe-Coburg (1874–99), the son of Queen Victoria’s second son Prince Alfred (‘Affie’), 5th Duke of Edinburgh and Saxe Coburg, and his wife Marie Alexandrovna, Grand Duchess of Russia. Young Alfred was destined to the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and was given ‘a thorough German education’. During his service in the 1st Regiment of Prussia Guards he had led a dissipated life, which was a kind of solace for his troubled childhood and youth wherein he had endured ‘a frequently absent father’, an ‘unsympathetic mother’ and a martinet of a German tutor in Dr Wilhelm Rolfs. Around 1899 it appears that Alfred had married Mabel Fitzgerald, an Irish commoner, totally against the Royal Marriage Act of 1772. In 1899 Alfred, in a bout of severe depression, and suffering from venereal disease, shot himself at Meran in the Austrian Tyrol. However, he lasted a few days to die at Schloss Rosenau, Coburg on 10 February 1899. For decades Prince Alfred’s demise was glossed over, as was his liaison with Mabel Fitzgerald and his putative daughter. Then in 1924 Walburga, Lady Paget, wrote of Prince Alfred’s attempted suicide in her memoir In My Tower giving the lie that he had died of ‘phthisis’ (tuberculosis). His father’s biographers John Van der Kiste and Bee Jordaan noted in 1984, ‘The Royal Archives at Windsor … have intimated that the facts do not apply [sic]’.
Still assertions go on. In 2006 a Jersey accountant, Robert Brown, made the bizarre claim that he was the illegitimate nephew of Queen Elizabeth II, being the ‘love child’ of the late Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon. Brown averred that he was born in 1955 following an affair between Princess Margaret and the man she was once in love with, Group Captain Peter Townsend or, said Brown, from her well-publicised affair with the late Robin Douglas-Home. His claim received only publicity in the press.
Royal illegitimacy is a matter of state record since at least the eleventh century, with William the Conqueror – William the Bastard – the illegitimate son of Robert I of Normandy by Herleve, a girl from Falaise where Robert had a castle, being one of the most famous royal illegitimates in history. Yet what do royal records show about other royal bastards?
HENRY I (r. 1100–35):
Purported to have twenty-five illegitimate children by six known women and others unknown. Four children paternity uncertain.
He had six children by Sybilla Corbet of Alcester:
Robert, Earl of Gloucester, married Mabel Fitzhamon. Issue. d. 1147.
Reginald, Earl of Cornwall, married Beatrice Fitzrichard. Issue. d. 1175.
William, married Alice. Issue not known. d. c. 1187.
Sybilla, married Alexander I, King of Scots. No issue. d. 1122.
Gundrada. Background not known.
Rohese married Henry de la Pomerai. Issue. d. c. 1176.
He had three children by Ansfrida widow of Anskill, a knight:
Richard of Lincoln. Died on 25 November 1120 in the White Ship disaster.
Brother Fulk, a monk. (Name of several Counts of Anjou.)
Juliana, married Eustace de Pacy, Lord of Bréteuil. Issue. d. 1136, a nun.
By Nest, daughter of Rhys ap Tewdwr, King of Deheubarth, SW Wales, one son:
Henry Fitzhenry. Issue. d. 1157 in battle.
By Edith Sigulfson of Greystoke, one son:
Robert Fitzedith, Baron of Okehampton, married Maud d’Avranches. Issue. d. 1172.
By Isabel de Beaumont, daughter of the Earl of Leicester, two daughters:
Isabella who died unmarried c. 1120, and Matilda, Abbess of Montivilliers.
By Edith, one daughter:
Matilda, who died in the White Ship disaster. She married Rotrou II, Count of Perche. Issue.
STEPHEN (r. 1135–54):
At least five illegitimates, including Gervase, Abbot of Westminster.
Children by mothers unknown:
Gilbert. d. c. 1142.
William de Tracy. Issue. d. c. 1136.
Matilda, married Conan II, Duke of Brittany. Issue.
Constance, married Roscelin de Beaumont. Issue; a granddaughter, Ermengarde, married William I, The Lion, King of Scots and had four children, including King Alexander II.
Eustacia, married William Gouet III, Lord of Montmireil. Issue.
Alice, married Mathew de Montmorenci, Constable of France. Issue.
(There is a record that an unknown daughter was betrothed to William de Warenne; but never married.)
Records show four more children of uncertain paternity:
Joan, married Fergus of Galloway. Issue.
Emma, married Guy de Laval. Issue.
Sybilla, married Baldwin de Boullers.
(Records show an unknown daughter betrothed to Hugh Fitzgervais; never married.)
HENRY II (r. 1154–89):
He had twelve illegitimates by five or more mothers.
Geoffrey Plantagenet, Bishop-elect of Lincoln (1173), Royal Chancellor.
William Longsword.
RICHARD I (r. 1189–99):
Possibly two illegitimates.
JOHN (r. 1199–1216):
He had at least twelve illegitimates. These included:
Geoffrey.
Joan, married Llewelyn ap Ioworth, mother Clementina.
Oliver.
Richard.
Osbert.
EDWARD I (r. 1272–1307):
He had one disputed illegitimate.
EDWARD II (r. 1307–27):
He had one known illegitimate, Adam.
EDWARD III (r. 1327–77):
He had possibly three illegitimates by his mistress Alice Perrers (c. 1348–1400), maid of Queen Philippa’s Bedchamber. Jane and Joan are known names.
EDWARD IV (r. 1461–70):
He had two known illegitimates.
Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle by Elizabeth Lucy, and one daughter of whom little is known.
RICHARD III (r. 1483–85):
He had four known illegitimates of which two are prominent:
John of Gloucester, titular Captain of Calais. No issue.
Katherine Plantagenet, married in 1484 to the Earl of Huntingdon. No issue.
HENRY VII (r. 1485–1509):
He had one disputed illegitimate.
HENRY VIII (r. 1509–47):
He had two recorded illegitimates.
During the festivities of New Year 1514, Henry’s eye was caught by one of Queen Catherine of Aragon’s ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth ‘Bessie’ Blount, cousin of William Blount, 4th Baron Mountjoy. She became Henry’s ‘official’ mistress and bore him a son in June 1519, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset (so created in 1525), Earl of Nottingham, Lord High Admiral, Lt Gen North of the Trent, Warden of All the Marches up to Scotland. When it was clear that Catherine of Aragon was incapable of bearing King Henry a son it is thought that he had a mind to make Henry Fitzroy his legitimate heir and talked of making him King of Ireland. This came to naught. Bessie Blount was ‘packed off to the country’ in 1522 with one of Cardinal Wolsey’s protégé’s Gilbert Tallboys; Henry gave the young couple the Manor of Rokeby to live their lives henceforth in obscurity.
Although it was once proposed that Henry Fitzroy marry his half-sister Princess Mary Tudor (even though this was against canon law) he married Mary Howard, daughter of the Duke of Norfolk, sister of his childhood playmate Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Henry Fitzroy died in 1536; rumour had it that he was poisoned by King Henry’s second wife Anne Boleyn, but modern historians log his demise as being from tuberculosis; he was childless. Mary died in 1557.
CHARLES II (r. 1650–85):
He had sixteen illegitimates by eight mistresses.
By Lucy Walter of Haverfordwest (c. 1630–58):
James, Duke of Monmouth, married Anne Scott of Buccleuch (1651–1732). Issue. d. 1685.
By Elizabeth Killigrew, later Lady Shannon:
Charlotte Fitzroy, married William, Earl of Yarmouth. Issue. d. 1684.
By Barbara Villiers (1641–1709), later Duchess of Cleveland:
Anne Fitzroy, married Henry Lennard, Earl of Sussex. No issue. d. 1722.
Charles Fitzroy, Duke of Southampton and Cleveland, married (2) Anne Poultney (1663–1745). Issue. d. 1730.
Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Grafton, married Isabella Bennett (d. 1723). Issue. d. 1690.
George Fitzroy, Duke of Northumberland, twice married. No issue. d. 1716.
Barbara Benedicte, Prioress. Some historians suggest that she was the daughter of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough.
By Nell Gwynne (1650–87):
Charles Beauclerk, Duke of St Albans, married Diane de Vere (d. 1742). Issue. d. 1726.
James Beauclerk. d. 1680.
By Louise de Kéroüaille (1649–1734), Duchess of Portsmouth:
Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond and Duke of Aubigny, married Anne Brudenell. Issue. d. 1723.
Mary ‘Moll’ Davies.
Mary Tudor. d. 1726. Mary was married three times, but by her second and third husbands, Henry Graham of Levens and James Rooke, respectively, she had no children. By her first husband, Edward, Earl of Derwentwater (d.1705), she had children who became significant in Jacobite history. James (1689–1716) was executed for his part in the Jacobite rebellion of 1715; Charles (1693–1746) became private secretary to Prince Charles Edward Stuart and was executed for his part in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745.
The current dukes of Buccleuch and Queensberry, Grafton, St Albans, Richmond and Gordon are all direct descendants of Charles II’s illegitimate children. Other connections can be made through the convolutions of family tree branches. For instance, Ralph George Algenon Percy, 12th Duke of Northumberland (b. 1956), although nothing to do with the title created for Barbara Villiers’s second son, is related to Charles II and Louise de Kéroüalle, and to Charles II and Lucy Walter as his mother was a daughter of the 8th Duke of Buccleuch and his grandmother a daughter of the 7th Duke of Richmond.
JAMES II/VII (r .1685–88):
He had seven illegitimates by two mothers.
One significant offspring of four was by Arabella Churchill (1648–1730), maid in waiting to Queen Anne Hyde, sister of John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough:
James Fitzjames, Duke of Berwick, Marshal of France. d. 1734.
GEORGE I (r. 1714–27):
He had three illegitimates by his German maîtress en titre the ‘tall and lean of stature’ Ehrengard Melusina von der Schulenberg (1667–1747), Duchess of Kendal, nicknamed ‘The Maypole’. (There were persistent rumours that George had married her ‘with his left hand’ according to the Continental custom of kings marrying commoners.)
GEORGE II (r. 1727–60):
He had one recorded illegitimate.
GEORGE IV (r. 1820–30):
He had some six possible illegitimates, including Lord Albert, by his mistress Elizabeth, Marchioness of Conyngham, and of which three are considered ‘most certain’.
By Grace Eliot:
Georgina Augusta Frederica Seymour, b. 30 March 1782, married Lord Charles Bentinck, 1808.
By Elizabeth Fox (Mrs Crole):
George, b. 23 August 1799, followed a privileged military career.
By Lucy Howard:
George Howard (c. 1818–20).
WILLIAM IV (r. 1830–37):
He had ten illegitimates with his mistress, comedy actress Dorothy Jordan (Bland), (1761–1816):
George Augustus Frederick Fitzclarence, 1st Earl of Munster, b. 29 January 1794. Married Mary Wyndham Fox, daughter of the Earl of Egremont. Committed suicide, 20 March 1842.
Sophia Fitzclarence, b. 4 March 1795. Married Philip, 1st Baron De L’Isle and Dudley. d. 10 April 1837 in childbirth.
Henry Edward Fitzclarence, b. 8 March 1797. d. 3 September 1817.
Mary Fitzclarence, b. 19 December 1798. Married Charles Fox, illegitimate son of Henry, Baron Holland and Elizabeth Vassall. d. 13 July 1864.
Frederick Fitzclarence, b. 9 December 1799. Married Lady Augusta Boyle, daughter of George, Earl of Glasgow. d. 30 October 1854.
Elizabeth Fitzclarence, b. 17 January 1801. Married William Hay, Earl of Erroll, 16 January 1856. Their daughter Lady Agnes was mother-in-law to Louise, Princess Royal, eldest daughter of Edward VII.
Adolphus Fitzclarence, b. 17 February 1802. d. 17 May 1856, unmarried.
Augusta Fitzclarence, b. 17 November 1803. Married (1) John Kennedy-Erskine of Dun, second son of the 1st Marquis of Alisa (d. 1831); (2) Lord Frederick Gordon, son of the 9th Marquis of Huntly. (d. 1878). Issue by first marriage. d. 8 December 1865.
Revd Augustus Fitzclarence, b. 1 March 1805. Married Sarah Elizabeth Gordon, eldest daughter of Lord Henry Gordon, fourth son of the Marquis of Huntly. Rector of Mapledurham, Oxfordshire. d. 14 June 1854.
Amelia Fitzclarence, b. 21 March 1807. Married Lucius Bentinck Cary, 10th Viscount Falkland. d. 2 July 1858.
So by extant records Henry I, with twenty-five purported illegitimates, tops the list of siring royal bastards. But what of the monarchs of Scotland ?
WILLIAM I, THE LION (r. 1165–1214):
He had nine purported illegitimates.
ALEXANDER II (r. 1214–49):
He had one illegitimate daughter.
ROBERT II (r. 1371–98):
He had at least eight illegitimates.
ROBERT III (r. 1390–1406):
He had one illegitimate child.
JAMES II (r. 1437–60):
He had one illegitimate child.
JAMES IV (r. 1488–1513):
He had at least seven illegitimates. His most prominent were:
By Mariot Boyd, daughter of Archibald Boyd, Laird of Bonshaw:
Alexander Stewart, b. 1493. Archdeacon of St Andrews aged 9; Archbishop of St Andrews aged 11; Chancellor of the University of St Andrews, founder of St Leonard’s College, 1512. Died with his father at the Battle of Flodden, 9 September 1513.
Catherine, b. 1494.
By Janet Kennedy, daughter of John, Lord Kennedy:
James Stewart, Earl of Moray, created 1501.
By Isabel Stuart, daughter of James, Earl of Buchan, a child, details unknown.
JAMES V (r. 1513–42):
He had at least nine illegitimates, of which the most prominent in history was by Margaret Erskine, wife of Robert Douglas of Lochleven:
James Stewart, Earl of Moray. b.1531. Commendator of St Andrews Priory aged 7. He became the chief minister of his half-sister Mary, Queen of Scots, thereafter Regent of Scotland on her abdication. He was murdered by James Hamilton of Bothwellhaugh at Linlithgow on 23 January 1570.
King Henry VI was a very ignorant and almost simple man and, unless I have been deceived, immediately after the battle the Duke of Gloucester, Edward’s brother, who later became King Richard killed this good man with his own hand or at least had him killed in his presence in some obscure place.
Philippe de Commynes, Memoirs (c. 1498).
Like Henry VI who ended his life at the Tower of London, many of royal birth have spent years in prison, quite often because they were in the way of others who wished to succeed to the throne. One such was Edward Plantagenet, nephew of Edward IV and Richard III. He was imprisoned both by Richard III and Henry VII. In prison since childhood, Edward was executed on a ‘trumped-up charge’ of treason in November 1499; he had been in prison for fifteen and a half years. In Scotland David, Duke of Rothesay (b.1378), heir apparent to Robert III, was imprisoned at Falkland Castle in 1402 on the urgings of his uncle the Duke of Albany and his father-in-law the Earl of Douglas, to die in obscure circumstances a few months later.
Undoubtedly the most romantic prisoner was Mary, Queen of Scots, who spent nineteen years, seven months and ten days as a prisoner of Queen Elizabeth I, until her execution at Fotheringay on 8 February 1587. Again, two royal prisoners whose story is steeped in mystery and pity are the 12-year-old Edward V and his 9-year-old brother Richard, Duke of York, the famous ‘Princes in the Tower’ who ‘disappeared’ some time after 1483. Charles I also suffered trial and imprisonment. He surrendered to the Scots about a year after the Battle of Naseby on 14 July 1645, to be imprisoned at Newcastle and Hampton Court (from which he escaped) and Carisbrooke Castle. In January 1649 he was brought to trial for treason at a court he did not recognise as legal; he was found guilty of the charge that he had fought against his subjects and was executed at Whitehall Palace, 30 January 1649.
Queen Consorts fared little better. For thirty-nine years Eleanor of Brittany, niece of kings Richard I and John, was imprisoned because of her superior claims to rule England over King John. She died at Bristol Castle, 10 August 1241. Isabella of France, daughter of Philippe IV of France, queen of Edward II, was imprisoned for just over twenty-eight years. With her lover Roger Mortimer, she plotted the overthrowal and death of Edward II. Her imprisonment at Castle Rising, Norfolk, lasted from April 1330 until her death on 22 August 1358. Other kings died in incarceration. Edward II was murdered at Berkley Castle, Gloucestershire, on 21 September 1327; and Richard II was starved to death at Pontefract Castle to die around 14 February 1400.
Three Scottish kings stand out as royal prisoners. Duncan II (d.1094), son of Malcolm III and his first wife, Ingibjord, were taken as hostages by William I, the Conqueror, during one of his father’s five fruitless raids into Norman suzerainty in England. Historians believe that Malcolm favoured as his heirs his children by his second wife Margaret, granddaughter of Edmund II of England, with possible disinheritance. Duncan spent fifteen years in Norman captivity. Duncan was killed in battle in 1094 after his invasion of Scotland to win his throne from Donald III who had usurped it on Malcolm’s death in 1093.
David II (r.1329–32; 1332–33; 1336–71), son of Robert I, the Bruce, and Elizabeth de Burgh, was taken prisoner after he had invaded England at the Battle of Neville’s Cross, near Durham, on 17 October 1346. He was released under the terms of the Treaty of Berwick of October 1357 for a ransom of 100,000 marks, of which the balance was never paid. David was thus in what has been described as ‘agreeable captivity’ in London and Hampshire for just under eleven years.
James I (r.1406–37), son of Robert III and Annabella Drummond, tops the list of royal prisoners who were held in custody while still reigning. At the age of 11 James was captured at sea while on his way to safety in France from lawless Scotland. He was handed over by pirates to Henry IV to be confined first at the Tower of London and then Nottingham Castle. He was allowed to vacillate at the English court, and eventually married in 1424 Lady Joan Beaufort, great-granddaughter of Edward III; this was the year of his coronation in Scotland, his release coming after the death of Henry IV in 1422. James was assassinated at Perth, 21 February 1437. In all, James had been in confinement for almost eighteen years.
A number of British royals appeared in law courts for various reasons, from Cardinal Wolsey’s opening of the ‘Secret Trial of the King’s Marriage’ on 17 May 1527, concerning Henry’s divorce of Queen Catherine of Aragon, to the proceedings against Queen Caroline, wife of George IV during August–November 1820, when she appeared in the House of Lords on charges of immorality. Only one subsequent British monarch appeared in a civil court.
As Prince of Wales, Edward VII appeared in court as a witness, twice. In 1890 he was called to the civil court in what is known to historians as the ‘Royal Baccarat Scandal’ but twenty years earlier he appeared in more serious circumstances, for since the reign of Henry IV no Prince of Wales had ever stood before a Court of Justice.
Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, was drawn into the ‘Mordaunt Case’ because of his vigorous and hectic social life. Lady Harriet Mordaunt (d.1906), one of the daughters of Sir Thomas Moncrieffe, was an attractive 21 year old who appeared regularly at Edward’s parties from Abergeldie near Balmoral to Marlborough House, London. Her husband, Sir Charles Mordaunt (1836–97), was Tory MP for South Warwickshire and was many years her senior. To all in society Harriet appeared ‘excitable and highly strung’. Following the birth of her first child, Violet (later Marchioness of Bath), in 1869, the premature infant was diagnosed with what Harriet interpreted as threatened blindness. This she told people was caused by a ‘fearful disease’ (i.e. venereal contagion). As time passed Harriet exhibited postpartum depression leading to increased eccentricity of behaviour. She told her husband that the child was not his and that she had committed adultery ‘often and in open day’ with Lowry Egerton, Lord Cole, Sir Frederick Johnstone and the Prince of Wales among others. She identified Lord Cole as the father of Violet. Instead of dismissing the confession as nonsense, Mordaunt chose to believe his wife. The child was soon cured of a mild eye infection and there were no traces of venereal infection in either Harriet or her infant.
Incensed by her confession Mordaunt forced open her private desk and removed a diary and correspondence Harriet had had with the Prince of Wales and others. Although Edward had sent her a valentine card as well, the eleven extant letters from him were innocuous social gossip, but Mordaunt filed for divorce. Edward strongly voiced his innocence, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Hatherley, pronounced the letters to Harriet as ‘unexceptional in every way’, and the Lord Chief Justice, Sir Alexander Cockburn, advised Edward of what would happen in court. Yes, Edward had written to Harriet; yes, he had visited her on several occasions; but, no, he had not had sexual intimacy with her. Alexandra, Princess of Wales, believed her husband and publicly supported him. When the facts were communicated to an aghast Queen Victoria she telegraphed her support for her son, adding that he should be more circumspect in future when dealing with young married women. The anti-royal press, like the Reynolds’s Newspaper, had a field day stirring up wide public interest in the trial, which was heard before Lord Penzance in the Court for Divorce and Matrimonial Causes in Westminster Hall, and before a special jury on 23 February 1870 (postponed from the 16th).
Edward was not cited as a co-respondent, a counter-petition having been filed by Sir Thomas Moncrieffe on his daughter’s behalf to the effect that Harriet was clinically insane; at that time she was already in an asylum. Edward was only subpoenaed by Harriet’s counsel Dr Francis Deane as a witness. The prince, who had shown great nervousness at the thought of appearing in court, was confident in the witness box. It appears that Sir Charles Mordaunt had suspected his wife of illicit liaisons for some time but had kept quiet. Yet, on returning home to Walton Hall (his country house in Warwickshire) he found Harriet showing off her driving skills to the Prince of Wales. When Edward had gone Sir Charles had the ponies he had given to her shot before her eyes. The testimony further heard by the jury shed public light on Edward’s social habits of visiting attractive married women when their husbands were out. They heard from Mordaunt’s butler and a ladies’ maid how the prince had visited Harriet in 1867 and 1868 several times. The butler said: ‘Lady Mordaunt gave me directions that when the Prince called no one was to be admitted.’ Occasionally Edward would arrive in a hansom cab. Then came the blunt question from Mordaunt’s counsel, Mr Serjeant Thomas Ballantyne: ‘Has there ever been any improper familiarity or criminal act between yourself and Lady Mordaunt?’
‘There has not,’ replied the prince, to much applause from spectators in the public gallery (admonished by Lord Penzance). There was no cross-examination and Edward’s ‘ordeal’ only lasted seven minutes. Sir Charles Mordaunt’s petition for divorce was dismissed on the grounds that Harriet Mordaunt was clearly insane and ‘could not be a party to the suit’. Much litigation followed the case, yet on 11 March 1875, Mordaunt was granted his divorce. Before setting off to dine with Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone, that night the Prince of Wales wrote this to Queen Victoria:
I trust by what I have said today that the public at large will be satisfied that the gross imputations which have been so wantonly cast upon me are now cleared up.
The Prince of Wales had not been on trial, but the public found him guilty. Reynolds’s Newspaper voiced the widespread public disapproval of the Prince of Wales’s conduct and hoped that Queen Victoria’s health would be robust to defer the Prince of Wales’s accession to the throne; within days of the trial he was publicly booed at the theatre and at Epsom races. Queen Victoria said she believed that the Prince of Wales’s conduct in public did ‘damage him in the eyes of the middle and lower classes’ and that he should spend less time in the company of the ‘frivolous, selfish and pleasure-seeking rich’. The Prince of Wales ignored her.
… a very delicate subject [arises] – the cruelty of a fabricated and most scandalous and base report concerning P.S. [Princess Sophia].
Letter of March 1801 from Princess Elizabeth to Dr Thomas Willis.
Princess Sophia was born at Queen’s House, Kensington, on 3 November 1777, the fifth daughter and eleventh child (of fifteen) of George III and Queen Charlotte. Beloved of her siblings, Sophia never married; she died in 1848 blind like her father and, according to the backbiting of the time, she had an illegitimate baby. By the ‘cackle of gossip’ and the ‘savagery of politics’, the affair was reinvented as an incestuous illegitimacy with her brother Prince Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, later King of Hanover.
Never of robust health Sophia was kept mainly at Windsor along with her sisters, in a close confinement by the orders and presence of Queen Charlotte. Sophia was seriously ill at Weymouth during January–October 1800, to be attended by Physician to the Royal Household (later Sir) Francis Milman. According to his records the princess was suffering from ‘spasms’, but somehow gossip was developed that the ‘spasms’ were actually a cover-up for pregnancy. By the end of 1800 it is clear that Sophia knew what was being said about her. She wrote this to Elizabeth, Countess Harcourt: ‘It is grievous to think what a little trifle will slur a young woman’s character for ever.’ Could she really have considered pregnancy ‘a little trifle’, later historians wondered?
Who initiated the pregnancy story? Historians believe that it was ‘fostered’ and ‘embellished … with its malignant horror’ by Princess Caroline of Brunswick (1768–1821), wife of Sophia’s brother George, Prince of Wales. Caroline was a poisonous member of the Royal Family, who constantly sought revenge for the ‘humiliation of her marriage’ (George parted from Caroline for ever after the birth of their daughter in 1796). Caroline’s gossiping concerned many of the Royal Family, from George III who she said had ‘freedoms with her of the grossest nature’ to anecdotes about changeling infants and incestuous relationships. All were laughed off by family and courtiers alike. But why did the gossip about Princess Sophia remain for generations?
Writing in 1977 in Society Scandals the historian Sir Roger Thomas Baldwin Fulford (1902–83), set out a theory of how Princess Sophia was so accused. He identifies the lawyer-turned-politician Sylvester Douglas, Lord Glenbervie (1743–1823) as a diarist who married the elder daughter of Prime Minister Lord North. She was lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Wales and, through her, titbits of gossip about Princess Sophia appeared in his diary. Glenbervie wrote on 25 March 1801:
I heard yesterday a recapitulation of many of the circumstances of the Princess Sophia’s extraordinary illness last autumn at Weymouth … They are too delicate a nature for me to commit them … even to this safe repository. But they are such as leave scarce a doubt in my mind.
He later noted that the ‘extraordinary illness’ was a pregnancy and that the child’s father was General Thomas Garth (1774–1829), equerry to George III. Glenbervie went on to say that ‘the Weymouth foundling’ was christened Thomas and was lodged at the house in Weymouth of Col Herbert Taylor, George III’s private secretary. Garth was a long-trusted friend of the Royal Family and a prominent courtier. Fulford dismisses Glenbervie’s accusations with: ‘would they [the princess’s siblings] have allowed one who had behaved in this way to their favourite sister to remain in the Court circle?’ Fulford further quotes the diarist Charles Greville who said of Garth: ‘he is a hideous old Devil, old enough to be [Sophia’s] father, and with a great claret mark on his face.’
Thus Fulford dismisses Garth as being an improbable lover and says that the ‘scandalmongers’ were made to ‘dig deeper’. So he identifies Glenbervie as saying: ‘the Duke of Kent [Prince Edward] tells the Princess [of Wales] that the father is not Garth but the Duke of Cumberland. How horrid!’ A womanising blackguard, Cumberland was a popular target for invective and the incest story would have had willing listeners who believed, as Christopher Hibbert put it, that ‘[Cumberland’s] watchful affection for [Sophia] was certainly felt to be unnatural’. Fulford dismisses the stories of Princess Sophia’s pregnancy and quotes Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, Marquis of Landsdowne on Princess Sophia’s death: ‘Her Royal Highness has passed a long life of virtue, charity and excellence in every position, public and private, in which she was placed.’ Other historians have had a different opinion.
In 1882 Percy Fitzgerald noted that ‘there was a secret morganatic marriage between General Garth and Sophia’, and others, like Anthony Bird, attested that she gave birth to the offspring Thomas Garth Jr who was ‘a thoroughly unpleasant and unprincipled young man’. Fitzgerald went on: ‘there seems to have been no doubt in the [Royal] Family about his parentage.’ During one illness, which was deemed terminal, General Garth entrusted to his son ‘very incriminating papers’ about the illegitimacy. Garth Jr promptly attempted to blackmail the Royal Family.
In her reassessment of the six daughters of George III in 2004, Flora Fraser added that a child (purporting to be Sophia’s) was baptised at Weymouth on 11 August 1800. Born on 5 August the child, ‘Thomas Ward, stranger’ (or foundling) was ‘adopted by Samuel and Charlotte Sharland’. Was this child’s entry a royal cover-up? We shall probably never know, but the charge of incest against Cumberland is summed up by his biographer Anthony Bird:
The canard that Cumberland added incest to his crimes became accepted as an article of faith and is believed to this day [1966] – for the vilification of his character continues.
If you were to try and deny it [that Edward had fathered an illegitimate child], she [Nellie Clifton] can drag you into a court of law to force you to own it & there with you 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 crossexamined 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’ hearts!
Albert Consort, to Edward, Prince of Wales on discovering that Edward had had sexual relations with Nellie Cliften while on military service at The Curragh, Ireland.
When King Edward VII breathed his last at 11.45 p.m. on 6 May 1910 at Buckingham Palace, surrounded by Queen Alexandra, George and Mary, the Prince and Princess of Wales, Louise, the Princess Royal, Duchess of Fife, daughter of Princess Victoria and sister Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, the international press rushed into print with eulogies on Edward as the ‘Uncle of Europe’ and his devoted family. None mentioned his ‘secret family’ of supposed children, products of decades of philandering in and out of the boudoirs of some of society’s beauties.
Leonie Blanche Jerome (1859–1943), wife of Col (later Sir) John Leslie (1857–1944) and sister of Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill, had in her possession at Castle Leslie, Co. Monaghan, Ireland a photo album, one of its pages containing an intriguing picture. It showed the image of one Baroness de Meyer and, said writer Anita Leslie, ‘lightly pencilled under the name [was the caption] “daughter of Edward VII”’.
The Baroness was the daughter of Blanche, Duchesse de Caracciolo, who seems to have separated from her husband on her wedding day to return for a while to her philandering lover, Prince Josef Poniatowski, a current equerry to Emperor Napoleon III. During the late 1860s, Edward, Prince of Wales, met her and when she fell pregnant around 1868 arranged for her to live with his supposed baby daughter, Alberta Olga Caracciolo, at a cliff-top villa at Dieppe, where he visited her when passing in a borrowed yacht. The house became the Villa Olga and was dubbed La Villa Mystère by locals, and Edward’s visits were well known among the resident English elite. Lee Jortin, the local English consul, monitored Edward’s visits. Blanche later recalled: ‘When the august parent of [Alberta] Olga came incognito we were supposed not to know, although plain-clothes policemen paraded our quarter in relays day and night.’ Edward stood godfather to baby Alberta Olga. In later life the pretty girl would be drawn and painted by Sickert, Whistler, Boldini, Helleu and Jacques-Emile Blanche in 1887. In due course Alberta Olga married the society photographer Adolphe de Meyer and Edward prevailed upon Albert, the Wettin King of Saxony to confer a Saxon barony on de Meyer so that Alberta Olga could attend his coronation in 1902 as a baroness. The de Meyers were regular guests of members of the louche (the Prince of Wales’s) circle, for instance enjoying the after Ascot week with the Ernest Becketts, he who fathered Edward’s mistress the Hon. Mrs George Keppel’s daughter Violet.
In September 1871 the Prince of Wales received a letter while at Abergeldie containing these words: ‘Without any funds to meet the necessary expenses and to buy the discretion of servants, it is impossible to keep this sad secret.’ The letter had come from a Mrs Harriet Whatman, a friend of his mistress since 1867 Lady Susan Pelham-Clinton, and announced the impending birth of his child. Lady Susan Charlotte Catherine was the daughter of Henry Pelham-Clinton, 5th Duke of Newcastle, a mentor to the Prince of Wales and a great friend of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert; Lady Susan had been a bridesmaid to the Princess Royal in 1858. On 23 April 1860 she married against parental wishes the clinically insane Lt Col Adolphus Vane-Tempest (b. 1825), third son of Charles Stewart, 3rd Marquis of Londonderry. He died in 1864 having had some kind of ‘struggle’ with his keepers.
Edward was annoyed that Lady Susan had not informed him concerning the pregnancy. She said that she had done so to protect one she ‘loved and honoured’, and she had contemplated an abortion. Only when her financial situation worsened did she contact Edward, who she had not seen for some time. Through Edward’s private secretary Francis Knollys, Lady Susan was given instructions to see Edward’s ‘confidential practitioner’ Dr (later Sir) Oscar Clayton. But history does not show whether or not an abortion took place; certainly the fate of the child is not known. Lady Susan was still too ill in 1872 to attend the service of thanksgiving for the recovery of Edward from typhoid, although he sent her tickets. Lady Susan died on 6 September 1875, still in her thirties. Years later it was discovered that Edward had kept all of her love letters, enabling historians to add detail to the story of one of Edward’s best attested illegitimate children.
Servants’ gossip was always a good source of material for stories about the Prince of Wales being ‘susceptible to feminine charms’. When the little daughter of an employee on the Eaton Hall estate in Cheshire of Hugh Grosvenor, 1st Duke of Westminster reported to her father that she had seen Edward ‘lying on top of Mrs Cornwallis-West in the woods’, she was hit with ‘a violent blow and told she’d be killed if she repeated the story’. Mary ‘Patsy’ Cornwallis-West was born Mary Fitzpatrick in 1858 and when she was 17 she married Col William Cornwallis-West of the 1st Volunteer Battalion, Royal Welsh Guards and of Ruthin Castle, Wales. Patsy was the kind of woman the Prince of Wales liked; she was flirty, sexy and fun – her favourite party trick was to slide down the stairs on a tea-tray. In 1874 Patsy gave birth to George to whom Edward became godfather. In his autobiography Edwardian Hey-Days George wrote:
The Prince of Wales often came [to the Cornwallis-West London home at No. 49 Eaton Square] and was invariably kind to me and always asked to see me. Never a Christmas passed without his sending me some little gift in the shape of a card or a toy.
In 1900 George married Jennie, Lady Randolph Churchill (against Edward’s advice); they divorced in 1913. In all Patsy had three children to include Daisy and Constance. The Prince of Wales monitored George’s career in the army, carefully using his influence when necessary.
It was widely believed that Edward was George’s father. Writing in 2003, biographer Tim Coates said that Edward ‘was a lover of many women and father of many children, including possibly all of Patsy’s’. Patsy’s two daughters also rose high in society. Daisy (d. 1943) married Prince Hans of Pless, and Constance (known as Shelagh, d. 1970) married Bendor, 2nd Duke of Westminster, and George married for a second time the actress Stella Patrick Campbell (d. 1940). Patsy Cornwallis-West died on 21 July 1920 at Arnewood, Near Newlands, in the New Forest.
The Prince of Wales was further rumoured to have fathered a child with the Princesse Jeanne-Marguerite Seillière de Sagan, wife of the Duc de Talleyrand-Périgord, whom he had first met during his visit to Louis Napoleon at Fontainebleau in 1862. Whenever he was in France Edward made efforts to meet her and visited her mostly at her home at the Château de Mello, south of Paris. There, a well-attested incident took place. Her eldest son, on being curious why his mother lunched alone in her boudoir with Edward, crept into the room to find the Prince of Wales’s clothes spread over a chair. Gathering them up he threw them all out of the window to flutter down into a fountain in the gardens below. When Edward emerged from the princess’s bedroom his sodden clothes were being fished out of the fountain. He had to return to Paris in borrowed clothes which did not fit him. It is said by French historians that the princess’s second son, Prince Hélie de Sagan, was Edward’s child. Aristocratic gossips further inferred that Chief Constable of Edinburgh Roderick Ross was also a child of Edward, as was Sir Stewart Graham Menzies, ‘C’ of the British Intelligence Service MI6.
In more recent times the art collector Edward James (1907–84) said that his mother, Evelyn ‘Evie’ Elizabeth James (1869–1930), was the illegitimate daughter of the Prince of Wales. She was officially the eldest daughter of Sir Charles Forbes, fourth baronet of Castle Newe, not far from Balmoral; her mother being Helen Moncrieff. Evie, noted James’s biographer John Lowe, was ‘the result of an indiscreet romp in the Highland heather between the young Prince of Wales and Helen …’ It is said that the union was well known in aristocratic circles and Evie was a regular visitor to Balmoral as a child. Evie married William Dodge James who bought in 1891 West Dean Park, West Sussex, which became a place of royal visits. At West Dean Park a collection of royal letters was found on Evie’s death which Edward James cited as proof of his mother’s parentage.
Edward VII had six legitimate children with his wife Alexandra of Denmark and, considering Edward’s life of serial adultery, perhaps several more from the wrong side of the blanket. Today there are still many in aristocratic families who believe that in their family trees are members of Edward’s ‘secret family’.
I never thought Hitler was such a bad chap.
Prince Edward, Duke of Windsor, during an interview in 1970. (Richard Woods, Sunday Times, 16 January 2005).
In a radio address from Windsor Castle on the evening of 11 December 1936, Edward VIII endeavoured to explain to the British Nation and Commonwealth why he had shocked them by abdicating his role as monarch. He said: ‘I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love …’ That woman was Mrs Wallis Warfield Simpson (1896–1986), the twice-divorced native of Baltimore, Maryland, and he was Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David (1894–1972), eldest son of George V and Queen Mary, and great-grandson of Queen Victoria. Edward and Wallis were married in the salon at the Château de Candé in the Loire Valley, France, on 3 June 1937 and lived the rest of their lives in exile as the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Later that year the Duke and Duchess embarked on a visit that enraged sections of public opinion in Britain, caused the new King George VI to call it ‘a bombshell and a bad one’, and historians to ask: ‘What was behind the Duke of Windsor’s purported flirtation with Adolf Hitler?’
Despite such legislation as the promulgation of the racist Nuremberg laws of 1935 and the clear evidence that National Socialist Germany was rearming in violation of the Versailles Agreement of 1919, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor met the Führer of the Third German Reich, Adolf Hitler on 22 October 1937, at his mountaintop villa, the Berghof, above Berchtesgaden. While in Germany they met deputy leader and Reich Minister Rudolf Hess and the flamboyant Reichsmarschall Herman Göring.
Why were the Windsors there at all? The visit had been arranged by Charles Eugene Bedaux – who had lent them his house for their wedding – a French businessman who had major deals with German companies. Of dubious security background – he was suspected of spying for Germany in the First World War – Bedaux was trying to ingratiate himself with Hitler, who could open German markets to him, by arranging a meeting with a man Hitler had always wanted to meet. The Duke of Windsor’s publicly announced reason for going to Germany was to study ‘housing and working conditions’, a subject that had always interested him as Prince of Wales and king, emphasised by his visit to South Wales in 1936. Edward’s total disregard for British governmental and public opinion against the visit is likely to have come about because he was prevented from having a morganatic marriage, and because of the way his family treated his new wife and denied her royal status.
Several books have been written on the Duke of Windsor’s supposed ‘treachery’ against king and country through his Nazi sympathies and the ‘constant contact’ the duchess had ‘during Britain’s dark hours’ with Hitler’s Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop (with the suggestion that the duchess had an affair with him). Moreover, Edward’s reluctance to leave Paris in 1940 was interpreted in some quarters as Edward having knowledge of a German invasion of France and wherein he could have a base to negotiate peace between Hitler and Britain. While Edward was in Paris he presented a security risk; however, he then went to fascist Spain where his blatant passing of information to Hitler’s diplomats in Madrid after the war had begun adding to negative public opinion. It was widely believed that Hitler thought that when (not if ) he conquered the United Kingdom he could put a compliant Duke of Windsor back on the throne as a puppet king. The German blood of the British Royal Family had been greatly researched by the National Socialists. To get the Windsors out of the way, and to stop them doing any diplomatic harm, on 9 July 1940 the wartime government of Prime Minister Winston Churchill appointed a reluctant Duke of Windsor as Governor of the Bahamas.
Despite the books denouncing the Duke of Windsor as ‘a dangerous enemy of Great Britain’, Francis Edward, 8th Baron Thurlow, Governor and C-in-C of the Bahamas 1968–72, speaking in 1999, summed up what many people thought about the Duke of Windsor and Germany:
[Windsor] was basically taken for a ride. I don’t accept at all that there was anything more than poor judgement [concerning his visit to Germany]: he was suckered into this situation, and he had nobody to advise him – no official staff at all.
And [Windsor] enjoyed being made a fuss of: it’s very difficult, if you’ve been made a fuss of all your life and then suddenly find that nobody is interested in you, so it’s rather nice to be made a fuss of [as Windsor was by Hitler and his followers].
In the event of Hitler being successful in his conquering of the United Kingdom it is a matter of speculation whether or not the Duke of Windsor would have agreed to cooperate in the governance of his occupied birthplace, let alone agree to be its puppet king. Some four decades after his death the jury is still out.
The appearance of Prince Henry of Wales (‘Harry’) dressed as a Nazi soldier at a fancy-dress party in 2004 raked up memories and suspicions in the press concerning the House of Windsor’s links to Hitler and their German background.
One of the most interesting of these links was HRH Prince Leopold Charles Edward, 2nd Duke of Albany, Earl of Clarence and Baron Arklow, born at Claremont House, Surrey, on 19 July 1884. His parents were Prince Leopold, fourth son of Queen Victoria and Princess Helen of Waldeck-Pyrmont. Considered to be ‘Queen Victoria’s favourite grandson’, he was educated at Eton. Yet his devoted grandmother dealt him a card that would seal his fate for ever. She decreed that he should succeed to the duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, from which German principality his grandfather Prince Albert had come.
So, aged 16, Charles Edward (now Karl Eduard) became duke of thousands of hectares of land in Bavaria and thirteen castles. Charles Edward was enrolled in the German Army (at the insistence of his overlord and cousin Kaiser Wilhelm II); the Kaiser then married him off to his own niece Victoria. When war was declared in 1914 Charles Edward had the nightmare situation of fighting for the Kaiser against the country of his birth.
By the end of the war in 1918 Charles Edward was declared a ‘traitor’ by his family in Britain and was stripped of his British titles. In his fear that Germany, now a republic after the deposition of the Kaiser, would fall to the communists, Charles Edward allied himself with Hitler and his National Socialists. Over the years he tried to develop good relations with Britain in the Anglo-German Fellowship, hoping that his cousin Edward VIII would develop his pro-German inclinations. All this came to an end on Edward VIII’s abdication, and when George VI came to the throne relationships with Britain became icy for Charles Edward.
Under Adolf Hitler, Charles Edward accepted certain official positions. He was president of the German Red Cross, thus he presided over the programme of enforced euthanasia of around 100,000 disabled men, women and children all deemed by the Nazis to be a drain on resources. Still today the extent of Charles Edward’s involvement is not clear. He turned up at George V’s funeral in 1936 in military uniform, steel helmet and swastika armband. Again, war broke out in 1939 and once more Charles Edward opposed the land of his birth. His three sons fought for Germany and one, Prince Hubertus, was killed on the Eastern Front. At the end of the war Charles Edward was captured by the Americans and interned. Brought to trial for war crimes, he pleaded ‘Not Guilty’, and while dubiety was expressed he was ‘exonerated of complicity in actual war crimes’, but his estates were confiscated and he was fined heavily, forcing him into poverty.
Charles Edward died at Coburg on 6 March 1954. Ironically, his sister Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone, became one of the best loved of British royal ladies. She was deeply distressed at her brother’s death but outlived him by some thirty years; she died in 1981 aged 98.
Other members of the Windsor’s German family tree went along with Hitler, others held back. Queen Victoria’s great-grandson Wilhelm of Prussia (b.1882), son of Queen Victoria’s grandson Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, served in the 1st Infantry Regiment at Koningsberg; he played a role in the invasion of Poland but died from internal injuries in 1940 during an attack on the French positions at Valenciennes. His funeral at Potsdam drew a crowd in excess of 50,000 which displeased Hitler. The Crown Prince’s brother, Prince August Wilhelm (1887–1949), became a keen member of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers party). At first Hitler was happy to accept the help and exploit the positions of German royalty, but by 1943 he turned against them and stripped all members of the Hohenzollern and Habsburg families of their titles and commissions. August Wilhelm was expelled from the Nazi party and arrested. Another who was thrown out was Queen Victoria’s great-grandson Prince Wilhelm-Karl von Preussen (1922–2007), but a further four of Queen Victoria’s great-grandsons were more committed Nazi supporters: the princes Van Hessen.
Prince Christoph (1901–43), his twin brother Richard (1901–69), Philipp (1896–1980) and his twin Wolfgang (1896–1989) had as their grandmother Princess Victoria (1840–1901), eldest daughter of Queen Victoria; she married Emperor Frederick II (1831–88) of Germany, King of Prussia. The princes’ mother was Princess Margaret (‘Mossy’, 1872–1954), the youngest child of the Empress Frederick, who married Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse in January 1893. Prince Christoph married Princess Sophia (1914–2000) of Greece and Denmark on 15 December 1930. Her train was carried by her 9-year-old brother Philip (later Duke of Edinburgh). Christoph joined the Nazi party in 1931 and the Schutzstaffel (SS) in 1932; he was attached to Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler’s personal staff and became head of Reichsmarschall Herman Göring’s security service the Forshungstamt. Prince Richard joined the Nazi party in 1932 and the Sturmbateilung (SA) the same year. Prince Philipp joined the Nazi party in 1930 and the SA in 1932. Prince Wolfgang, also a party member, became Oberpresedent (governor) of Hessen-Nassau.
Queen Elizabeth II’s marriage to Lt Philip Mountbatten (formerly Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksberg), son of the bisexual Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Hesse-Darmstadt, was almost scuppered by Philip’s links with Hitler’s henchmen. Leading the opposition to Philip, whose suit with the infatuated Princess Elizabeth was being doggedly pursued by Philip’s uncle Lord Mountbatten, was his future mother-in-law Queen Elizabeth (better known today as the Queen Mother). One of her brothers had been killed during the First World War and she had a dislike of Germans, despite the fact that her own mother-in-law Queen Mary was wholly German. Nevertheless, she was opposed to her daughter marrying a man whose four sisters had married Germans and whose brothers-in-law fought for Hitler. Princess Elizabeth’s deep infatuation for Philip Mountbatten meant that her parents, with serious misgivings, consented to the marriage. Philip’s sisters and their husbands were not invited to the marriage ceremony.
At the diamond wedding anniversary celebrations of Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, in November 2007, in the congregation at the Westminster Abbey service were a small group of Prince Philip’s German relations; they were the prince’s nieces and nephews, the children of his sisters.
Another link with the Nazi’s came when Prince Michael of Kent married Marie-Christine, daughter of Baron Gunther von Reibnitz. The baron had honorary membership of Himmler’s SS, but in the postwar de-Nazification most honorary-SS members were dubbed only Mitlaufer (fellow-travellers) and any public fuss concerning the marriage soon died down.
It was during the Nazi threat to Britain that Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, became a sharp shooter. Apart from medieval monarchs who were brought up to bear arms, few modern British sovereigns have been marksmen off the hunting field. George V, Edward VIII and George VI all had naval training and were familiar with firearms. During the Second World War George VI learned how to use a hand gun and a sten gun. It is said that wherever he went during the war years the sten gun went too. From the early days of the war the Queen Mother was taught how to use a pistol, causing her to remark, ‘Now I shall not go down like all the others’.
‘Ever your devoted cousin and friend.’
‘God bless you good old Nicky.’
‘You can always depend on me your greatest friend.’
Sentiments in letters from George V to his cousin
Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.
Secrecy in the Royal Family has been honed to a fine art. Yet often this concealing of the truth has led to misunderstandings and false rumours. One such ‘cover-up’ cited by historians is the supposed betrayal by George V of his cousins the Romanovs.
Shot at the Ipatiev House – the ‘House of Special Purpose’ – at Ekaterinburg, Siberia, on 17 July 1918, their bodies dumped in a mineshaft but later moved and buried; so died Tsar Nicholas II, his wife Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, and their five children. Their murders by communists have been well documented; and their exhumation in 1991 and reburial on 17 July 1998 in St Catherine’s Chapel of St Peter and St Paul, St Petersburg, received international media coverage. But the role of the British Royal Family in offering help to their Russian cousins remains hazy.
In the weeks that followed Nicholas II’s abdication of the Russian throne, for himself and his heir the Tsarevich Alexei, the future of the Imperial Russian Royal Family became a political and diplomatic conundrum. On 19 March 1917 the British ambassador in Petrograd (modern St Petersburg) was instructed to inform the Russian Foreign Minister, Paul Miliukov, that ‘any violence done to the Emperor and his family would have a most deplorable effect and would deeply shock public opinion in [the United Kingdom]’. Miliukov enquired if the British government would grant the Imperial Russian Royal Family asylum in Britain. The matter was discussed by Prime Minister David Lloyd-George, Chancellor of the Exchequer Andrew Bonar Law, George V’s private secretary Lord Stamfordham and Foreign Office Minister Lord Hardinge. On 22 March signals were sent to the British ambassador to inform the Russian provisional government that the British would grant the Romanovs sanctuary for the duration of the war. These last few words were to be a clue as to the ultimate fate of the Romanovs.
Tsar Nicholas and his family took the offer at its face value; official discussions were made for the Romanovs to go to England. The family started to pack, expecting the call to embark at Petrograd quickly. Things were delayed as the royal children caught the measles. Back in Britain George V was having second thoughts. He was willing to arrange for his imperial cousins to seek sanctuary in say Switzerland or Denmark, but was increasingly ‘doubtful’ about them coming to England. George feared that temporary sanctuary would lead to permanent asylum. Once news had got out about the possible sanctuary offer, George received ‘many abusive letters’ from socialists and communist sympathisers and feared his kingdom might be plunged into bloody revolution. Sir George Buchanan, the British ambassador at Petrograd also ‘pointed out that the presence of the Imperial Family in England would assuredly be exploited to our detriment by extremists as well as by the German agents in Russia’.
An alternative sanctuary in France was proposed and agreed by the British government, but not acted upon. The tide of events had quickened in Russia. On 22 March 1917, the Romanovs were moved to Tsarskoe Selo, near Petrograd, then to Tobolsk, Siberia, and then even further away to Ekaterinburg in the Ural Moutains.
In 2006 a diary was discovered that shed new light on a plot by the British Secret Services (then under ‘C’ – Sir Mansfield Cumming) to rescue the Romanovs. The diary belonged to Captain Stephen Alley (d.1969, aged 93), second in command at the British International Mission at Petrograd; in those days Alley was employed by MI1, later MI6. The diary shows that Alley positioned a team of six fluent Russian-speaking agents ready to go to Ekaterinburg to rescue the Romanovs, codenamed ‘The Valuables’. The plan was formulated to spring the Romanovs and take them by train to Murmansk and then on by Royal Navy vessel. The logistics were worked out but were never activated. Why? Historians believe, based on papers in the Russian State Archives, that Alley’s telegrams detailing the rescue operation were intercepted by the communists (i.e. Bolsheviks) resulting in the house at Ekaterinburg becoming an impregnable fortress. Such a mission then would be military suicide. The Romanovs were left to their fate.
The British government had offered too little too late, and George V has never been exonerated for his part in procrastinating about what to do with his cousins. When Lloyd-George was writing his war memoirs in 1934, pressure was put on him to delete ‘the chapter on the future residence of the deposed Tsar’. Lloyd-George complied. Did George V finally veto his cousins’ rescue? The Royal Family still keep the answer secret. As Kenneth Rose wrote in his 1983 biography of George V: ‘… it is significant that the Royal Archives at Windsor contain hardly any documents dealing with the imprisonment of the Imperial Family between April 1917 and May 1918 …’ So is it any wonder that researchers believe that another ‘royal cover-up’ was enacted to save George V’s honour?
When it comes to the murdered Romanovs there has been some cooperation between the Royal Family and the scientists in trying to identify the rediscovered remains. When these remains were unearthed Prince Philip supplied DNA to help identify the skeletons. The Tsarina’s niece Princess Alice of Greece was Prince Philip’s mother. Even so, two skeletons were missing: those of the Tsarevich Alexei and his sister Maria. In 2007 more supposed Romanov remains were discovered near the original burial site. Prince Philip’s DNA has been cited again to prove that all the murdered Romanovs have now been identified.
Two postscripts to this story are of interest. One event is cited by some to underline what they consider to be King George V’s ‘hypocracy’ in the matter of his cousins’ murder. Writing in her memoirs My Dear Marquis, Agnes, Baroness de Stoeckl, the former Miss Agnes Barron, wife of Sasha, a member of the Imperial Russian Diplomatic Corps wrote how Grand Duchess George of Russia (sister-in-law of Nicholas II) wished to hold a service in memory of her relatives at the Russian chapel in London’s Welbeck Street. She wrote:
King George and Queen Mary wished to attend.
The little chapel was full when we arrived, all rose and bowed as the Grand Duchess George of Russia entered with her daughters and took her place on the right side of the Iconastasis [a screen shutting off the sanctuary on which icons were placed]. Seats placed next to her were reserved for their Majesties. We stood immediately behind her. She had asked for this.
We were all in the deepest mourning, wearing the regulation Russian headdress, a Marie Stuart cap, the peak edged with white, a long crepe veil covering us from head to foot.
Their Majesties entered, escorted by Sasha.
The priests in their black and silver vestments appeared, they bowed low to the King and Queen then to the Grand Duchess …
The beauty of the liturgy was too much for the loyal Russians who had come to pay their last homage to their beloved Emperor and all that he represented. They broke into sobs … Their Majesties were much moved and at the end, when the choir sang a prayer to the Virgin in farewell to the soul which had fled, tears were running down the Queen’s face.
There were those in the congregation who thought the tears were ‘crocodile tears’.
The British ambassador at St Petersburg, Sir George Buchanan, was criticised at the time for ‘bungling’ the safe passage of the Russian Imperial Family to Britain. Others thought that he was ‘far too gullible’ and had been ‘hoodwinked’ by the leaders of the Russian Revolution into believing that the Imperial Family would be safe.
Buchanan was humiliated and returned to England in 1918. He was warned by the Foreign Office to make no comment on the fate of the Russian Imperial Family or George V’s role in it. If he did he would be charged with infringing the Official Secrets Act and would lose his pension. Although he went on to be ambassador to Rome from 1919–21, Buchanan was denied an expected peerage. He died in 1924 much embittered by his treatment over the fate of the Imperial Family; his relatives believed that he too had been muzzled to protect George V.
HRH Prince John, who has since infancy suffered from epileptic fits, which have lately become more frequent and severe, passed away in his sleep following an attack this afternoon at Sandringham.
Court circular bulletin from surgeon apothecary Sir Alan Reeve Manby (1848–1925), 18 January 1919, Sandringham House.
Enter the lychgate of St Mary Magdalene church, Sandringham, Norfolk, walk forward and you will find him. His grave lies next to that of his baby uncle, another Prince John, the stillborn son of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, of 16 June 1890. Who was this Prince John so interred in a grave that is remarkably un-royal and who biographers have called ‘The Little Prince the Nation Forgot?’
Prince John Charles Francis was born at 3.05 a.m. at York Cottage, Sandringham, on 12 July 1905, the sixth and last child of Prince George and Princess Mary of Teck, the future George V and Queen Mary. All of the royal couple’s children exhibited characteristic oddities. Prince Edward (the future Edward VIII) suffered from deafness inherited from his grandmother Queen Alexandra and was also a severe depressive, with the ‘Hanoverian melancholic gene’ inherited from his grandmother Queen Victoria. Prince Albert (later King George VI) had a distressing stutter and congenitally malformed knees. He would fly into uncontrollable rages. Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, had unfathomable fits of tears, interlarded with episodes of nervous giggling and was declared ‘mentally backward’. Prince George, Duke of Kent, howled whenever he saw his mother, was of a ‘frenetic character’ and in adulthood was absorbed into a milieu of homosexuality and drugs. Princess Mary, later the Princess Royal, suffered from a crippling shyness, but had to be removed from her brothers’ schoolroom for being a ‘disruptive influence’. Alas, Prince John showed early signs of learning difficulties. At the age of 4 he began to suffer from fits, which the royal doctors diagnosed as epilepsy originating after conception (genetic epilepsy). His fits could render him violent and unpredictable, and when the royal children were out on the hills above Balmoral, for instance, Loeila Ponsonby noted, Prince John had to be roped to his nanny as a precaution against self-harm.
In an age when ‘mental afflictions’ were obscured from public view, it was noted that the Royal Family, said Garry Jenkins, ‘wanted nothing more than to bury the memory of Prince John as an embarrassing footnote in their history’. Prince Edward, Prince of Wales, considered his afflicted brother a ‘regrettable nuisance’ and scarcely mentions him in his ghosted autobiography A King’s Story (1951). Reginald Baliol Brett, 2nd Viscount Esher, political and royal go-between, noted Prince John’s increasing unpredictability in his diary entry for 21 August 1910. On one occasion at lunch with the king and queen at Balmoral, wrote Esher, Prince John continually ran round the dining table ‘all the while they ate’. Regularly he would slip from his nanny’s notice to appear unannounced at his parents’ official gatherings and make a ‘scene’. As his behaviour became more eccentric, the king and queen realised that he was not controllable as ‘normal’ children; they were particularly concerned that John would have a fit in public. So, said the court gossips, John was packed off to Sandringham estate in the care of royal nanny Mrs Lalla Bill.
It is a popular royal description that George V and Queen Mary were unfeeling parents. Certainly the Duke of Windsor (the former Edward VIII) wrote to the Earl of Dudley after Queen Mary’s death: ‘I’m afraid the fluids in her veins have always been as icy cold as they are now in death.’ Again, while jumping to the queen’s defence, her lady-in-waiting of over fifty years, Mabell, Countess of Airlie, openly agreed that the queen ‘had no interest in her children as babies’. Both George and Mary had a keen sense of public duty and in protecting the monarchy and this caused them to be secretive about John. He was moved to Wood Farm in 1916, on the edge of the Sandringham estate, near Wolferton. There, as far as the public were concerned, he became the forgotten member of the Royal Family. Perhaps the last family album photograph of him to appear in the public milieu was the one taken by Prince Edward at Balmoral in 1912, wherein Prince John is pictured riding in a metal royal car and sporting a white sailor suit. Despite the royal gossip about Queen Mary’s coldness towards her children there is evidence that Queen Mary spent a lot of time with John at Sandringham, and his grandmother Queen Alexandra showed him much compassion. Despite her crippling deafness and rheumatism, she would send her car to Wood Farm to bring the ‘dear and precious little boy’ to her at Sandringham for afternoon tea, music and games.
Early on the morning of 18 January 1919, Dr Sir Alan Manby was called to John’s bedside. Through the preceding night his condition had worsened after an epileptic fit. That afternoon Dr Manby recorded that John had succumbed to ‘a severe seizure’. In her Sandringham diary Queen Mary wrote this:
At 5.30 Lalla Bill telephoned to me from Wood Farm, Wolferton, that our poor darling little Johnnie had passed away suddenly after one of his attacks. The news gave me a great shock, tho’ for the poor little boy’s restless soul, death came as a great release. I broke the news to George & we motored down to Wood Farm. Found poor Lalla very resigned but heartbroken. Little Johnnie looked very peaceful lying there.
The queen penned another memory to her friend Miss Emily Alcock on 2 February 1919:
For him it is a great release as his malady was becoming worse as he grew older, & he has thus been spared much suffering. I cannot say how grateful we feel to God for having taken him in such a peaceful way, he just slept quietly into his heavenly home, no pain, no struggle, just peace for the poor little troubled spirit which had been a great anxiety to us for many years, ever since he was four years old … The first break in the family circle is hard to bear but people have been so kind & sympathetic & this has helped us much.
It is true to say that in an age of non-technological media, when newspapers were more reverential towards the Royal Family than today, by 1919 half of Britain had forgotten Prince John existed, while the other half had never heard of him. It is likely that Prince John had had the best care as prescribed by the medical and social criteria of the day. It is the modern interpretation of these criteria that makes John’s ‘exile’ to Sandringham seem a chapter of royal embarrassment.
A little anecdote on Prince John comes from the memoirs of Baroness de Stoeckl:
One day [Princess Victoria, the second daughter of Edward VII] was in the nursery playing with her nephews and niece, the children of King George V. Prince John, the youngest, was only a baby, he had been given a piece of biscuit which he had sucked thoroughly, then scraped on the floor, finally he gave it to the dog to lick. At this moment, King Edward came in and stood looking down at the child. The latter held up the biscuit and said, ‘Grandpa eat!’ Before Princess Victoria could intervene, the biscuit had been swallowed by the affectionate grandfather. The princess, having seen the adventures of that biscuit, promptly left the room and was sick.