Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

by Leslie Carroll

  However, a young man’s heart is a resilient organ, and before long Eddy was head over heels in love with someone else. The young woman in question, Lady Sybil St. Clair-Erskine, was the beautiful and vivacious sister of the profligate 5th Earl of Rosslyn and the stepsister of Daisy Brooke, the Countess of Warwick. Daisy was the Prince of Wales’s current mistress; therefore, a marriage between Eddy and Lady Sybil would create a scandal of a most embarrassing magnitude. It would make Daisy one of the (albeit extended) family, thereby placing Alix, the Princess of Wales, in the awkward position of countenancing her husband’s paramour as an in-law.

  Adding spice to the mix was the fact that even as Eddy continued to explore every avenue by which he might marry Princesse Hélène d’Orléans, he was pouring out his heart to Lady Sybil. In June 1891, months before Hélène was compelled to formally reject him, the two-timing prince wrote to Sybil: I thought it was impossible a short time ago, to love more than one person at the same time. . . . I can explain it easier to you when next we meet, than by writing. I only hope that this charming creature [he addressed Sybil in the third person] which has so fascinated me is not merely playing with my feelings. . . . I can’t believe she would after all she has already said, and asked me to say . . . I am writing in an odd way and have no doubt you will think so but I do it for a particular reason. . . .

  A week later, he wrote to Sybil: I wonder if you really love me a little? I ought not to ask such a silly question I suppose but still I should be very pleased if you did just a little bit. . . . You may trust me not to show your letters to anyone. . . . You can’t be too careful what you do in these days, when hardly anybody is to be trusted.

  Eddy had learned something (sort of) from his little bribery-and-blackmail episode with the tarty Miss Richardson. What he’d gleaned from the experience, however, was not to avoid writing compromising love letters, but to eliminate all traces that he was the sender. The prince begged Sybil to excise his signature and the royal crest from the stationery.

  There is nothing new under the sun. Gold diggers are found in every generation and walk of life. Needless to say, Lady Sybil did not snip the crest and signature from Eddy’s billets-doux. She was also two-timing him with the son of the Duke of Westmorland.

  Eddy’s life seemed to be stalled in neutral. At the age of twenty-seven he remained unwed, and consequently without his own establishment, in adolescent stasis until he married. His army career was also going nowhere fast. To his father’s vast disappointment Eddy was still a major in the 10th Hussars when other men who had come up at the same time were lieutenant colonels. The heir presumptive was proving himself to be demonstrably unsuited for a military career—yet was he suited for anything?

  Field Marshal Garnet Joseph Wolseley, the highly decorated commander, observed that “HRH [His Royal Highness] has far more in him than he is often given credit for, but I should describe his brain and thinking powers as maturing slowly. Personally I think he is very much to be liked, thoughtful for others, and always anxious to do the right thing. He is, however, young for his age and requires to be brought out.”

  To “bring [Eddy] out,” the queen and his parents determined that he should travel, the better to broaden his exceptionally limited knowledge of the world. But where? They despaired of his getting into further sexual scrapes, and designing women could be found on every continent.

  Unable to agree on an appropriate itinerary for Eddy, the royal family determined to find him a bride. But of all the eligible prospects, the best choice was one who had been eliminated from consideration years earlier—the impoverished Princess May of Teck. Bertie would have to overcome his distaste for May’s morbidly obese mother, Princess Mary Adelaide of Cambridge. At least Mary Adelaide had a proper pedigree. Like Queen Victoria, she was a granddaughter of George III.

  Victoria approved of May. She was pretty, but not gorgeous ; and intelligent, but not clever (clever, witty people made Her Majesty feel inadequate). By the end of October 1891 Bertie had given his formal consent, and Eddy prepared to accept his marital destiny. The only person who had no idea what was going on was the prospective bride.

  There was just one more T to be crossed before the prince was fully ready to commit to May. On November 29, Eddy wrote to Lady Sybil St. Clair-Erskine asking whether there was any truth to the rumor that she had become engaged to Lord Burghersh, the Duke of Westmorland’s son. Stung by her affirmative reply, the prince responded, “Don’t be surprised if you hear before long that I am engaged also, for I expect it will come off soon.”

  Eddy proposed to May on December 3, 1891. Twenty-four years old, she had been certain she’d die a spinster. At the prospect of becoming a married woman, and a future queen of England, she became so excited that she literally twirled about the room, displaying what she knew were her best features—her ankles and calves.

  It seemed like a solid match. Eddy was sweet and kind, even vulnerable. May was pragmatic and steady. They both enjoyed many of the same interests, including genealogy and the theater. And each was anxious to be loved. They didn’t, however, love each other, although they may have felt mutual affection and esteem.

  Britain’s royal family has never believed in long engagements. The wedding date was set for February 27, 1892, and the young couple began to shop for furnishings for the apartment they would occupy in St. James’s Palace. Eddy wrote to his aunt Louise and her husband, the Marquess of Lorne (who was known to dash out for nocturnal homosexual trysts in Hyde Park): I wonder if you were surprised when you saw that I was engaged? . . . for I must say I made up my mind rather suddenly . . . and it is really time that I thought of getting married, if ever I am to be. . . . I think I have done well in my choice, for I feel certain that May will make an excellent wife, and you may be certain that I shall do my best to make her a good husband.

  On January 4 the Waleses and the Tecks traveled from London to Sandringham, where they planned to spend the next several weeks. Everyone, including Eddy, seemed to have a cold, but his symptoms worsened after he insisted on going hunting for his twenty-eighth birthday, January 8. Dr. Laking, physician-in-ordinary to the Prince of Wales, diagnosed Eddy’s illness as influenza and incipient pneumonia. The influenza epidemic had everyone nervous, and the disease was about to claim yet another victim. Over the next few days Eddy’s fever spiked to 103 degrees and, after a brief rally, soared to 107. His family and the doctors could only ease his discomfort. Alix didn’t leave her son’s side. Outside, below the prince’s window, Eddy’s younger brother Prince George strolled along the frozen ground hand in hand with May. Was something going on between them? Or were they comforting each other as the person they had in common slipped away? The gesture was remarkable enough at the time for Laking to remember it years later.

  Eddy’s final words, repeated several consecutive times in the throes of delirium, were, “Who is it?” He died on the morning of January 14, 1892, just six days after his twenty-eighth birthday.

  Although Eddy had been completely indifferent to the army, his robust father insisted that he be accorded a full military funeral at which no women (including Eddy’s mother, May, or his aunts) were permitted to be present. Eddy would have hated it. The women sneaked in anyway, much to Bertie’s consternation. Eddy was interred at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Park, in an Art Nouveau tomb far more glorious than the prince’s life had ever been. His parents kept his room at Sandringham as if it were a shrine, with a Union Jack draped over the bed, and Eddy’s shooting hat on the hook where he had last placed it; even his toothpaste and soap dish were displayed as relics.

  The Prince of Wales was immeasurably distraught, writing to his mother, “Gladly would I have given my life for his, as I put no value on mine . . . it is hard that poor little May should virtually become a widow before she is a wife.”

  Prince George was now the heir presumptive. And after a suitable period of mourning, he wed Princess May of Teck on July 6, 1893. It was not a love match, despite the incident
of hand-holding at Sandringham. Their children would eventually characterize their gruff father as verbally abusive to their mother.

  Princesse Hélène d’Orléans, the one that got away, married the Duke of Aosta in 1895. Lady Sybil St. Clair-Erskine wed the Duke of Westmorland’s son, who eventually inherited his father’s title. She died in 1910.

  In the summer of 1911, solicitor Arthur Newton, who had represented Lord Arthur Somerset and the other participants involved in the Cleveland Street brothel scandal, had his law license suspended for fraud. Two years later he was accused of conspiring to swindle a wealthy Hungarian, was disbarred, and sentenced to three years in prison.

  Bertie finally ascended the throne on the death of his mother, Queen Victoria, in 1901. His nine-year reign, the Edwardian era, was known for its gilded splendor, an age of fast cars, fast horses, and fast women. Eddy’s younger brother George succeeded their father in 1910, reigning as George V until his demise in 1936.

  Perhaps those who still remembered Eddy’s lackluster and somewhat dim persona believed that with his death the British Empire had dodged a metaphorical bullet, allowing his somewhat brighter brother to eventually ascend the throne. But no one could have predicted that more than three-quarters of a century after Eddy’s demise, he would be posthumously cast as the ultimate sort of royal pain: a brutish murderer.

  Between September and November 1888, five prostitutes were gruesomely slain, eviscerated, and mutilated in London’s seedy East End neighborhood of Whitechapel. The press dubbed the killer “Jack the Ripper.” Although the body of one suspect was found in the Thames, weighed down by four stones, the Ripper was never apprehended or conclusively identified. During the succeeding decades, the names of more than a hundred suspects have been floated.

  And then, in the 1970s, two different authors published startling revelations, naming Eddy—the heir presumptive to Britain’s throne—as the notorious Ripper. Not only did they assert that the prince was a violent serial killer, but they revived the specter of the Cleveland Street brothel scandal, also pegging Eddy as a closet queen, an allegation that further tarnished the image of the royal family, who were now confronted with some nasty allegations regarding one of their ancestors.

  In 1970 the eighty-five-year-old T. E. A. Stowell published an article in the Criminologist, stating unequivocally that Eddy was Jack the Ripper, a contention he had first asserted a decade earlier. Stowell maintained that the prince was insane at the time of each attack, in the grip of the symptoms of syphilis. Buckingham Palace dismissed Stowell’s claims as a “mischievous calumny . . . too ridiculous for comment.” Their avowal was not spin-doctoring. Every movement of the royal family was minutely chronicled and Eddy was nowhere near East London each time the Ripper struck. He was attending public functions in the performance of his royal obligations, with plenty of witnesses to corroborate his whereabouts.

  In the face of such nasty little things as facts, Stowell began to backtrack. But he died on November 8, 1970, before he could expound further on the elements of the story that he insisted were genuine. Stowell’s son immediately burned his manuscripts, stating, “I read just enough to make certain that there was nothing of importance. My family decided that this was the right thing to do. I am not prepared to discuss our grounds for doing so.”

  It didn’t matter whether T. E. A. Stowell had crafted a ripping yarn out of thin air. By the time he died, approximately three thousand publications had disseminated his allegations. The posthumous damage to Prince Albert Victor’s reputation was done. In the minds of late-twentieth-century historians and their readers, “Eddy” was a syphilitic serial killer.

  But Stowell wasn’t the only self-aggrandizing nutcase to hitch his wagon to the dead and defenseless Eddy’s star in the hopes of either a big payday or at least international notoriety. Another story emerged, bolstering the belief of the current generation of scholars and royal watchers that Eddy was a royal pain of the most sinister kind.

  In 1973 a man calling himself Joseph Sickert approached a producer for the BBC claiming to be Eddy’s grandson. Sickert asserted that his mother was the prince’s illegitimate daughter, born to a part-time artist’s model and Cleveland Street shopgirl, Annie Crook. According to Sickert, Annie, who just happened to be working-class, illiterate, and Catholic, had met the prince after the minor Victorian painter Walter Sickert was asked by Eddy’s mother, the Princess of Wales, to take the lad around and show him the seamier side of London. Joseph Sickert’s story gained traction, despite the fact that during the time he claimed that Eddy was trysting with Annie Crook, the prince was busy with his studies at Cambridge or was visiting Heidelberg.

  Sickert asserted that after Annie bore Eddy a love child (a baby that was allegedly raised in a workhouse), she was purportedly taken to a hospital and declared insane. There, an operation was performed on her brain to genuinely render her a mental incompetent. According to Sickert, Annie died in an asylum in 1920.

  To spice up this drama even more, Sickert introduced a Masonic conspiracy headed by the Prince of Wales to murder all of Annie’s friends who knew anything about the secret baby and the couple’s subsequent clandestine marriage.

  This was Sickert’s explanation for the grisly deaths of the five East End prostitutes. If these were Annie’s purported confidantes, she didn’t travel in very good company.

  As time passed and Sickert acquired coauthors for his published versions of these sordid events, the story grew more fanciful with the retelling. In The Ripper and the Royals, written with Melvyn Fairclough, Sickert alleged that Eddy did not die in 1892 (as the world heretofore believed), but had been locked away in Glamis Castle in Scotland (where he was said to have perished in 1933), to prevent him from ever ascending the throne—his punishment for wedding a Catholic.

  However, none of Sickert’s story is true. It was all an elaborate hoax. Sickert wasn’t even the charlatan’s surname. He was born Joseph Gorman in 1925. Yet, even after Gorman admitted that he had invented each of his contentions, for some reason (perhaps he was desperate to convince people that he wasn’t a complete pathological liar) he continued to stubbornly maintain that he was Eddy’s descendant.

  In any event, Stowell and Sickert’s damaging and completely fictitious stories cast a wide shadow over Eddy’s reputation, irreparably tarring him as a syphilitic serial killer.

  Add another, genuine historian to the stew and make that a homosexual syphilitic serial killer. Even the well-respected and prolific royal biographer Theo Aronson concluded in the 1980s that because there was such a conspiracy to keep Eddy’s name out of the courts (and the press) after the July 1889 raid of a male brothel in London’s Cleveland Street, the twenty-five-year-old prince must have been a client. In the absence of any unequivocal verification that Eddy never visited 19 Cleveland Street, Aronson posited that this dearth of evidence is proof itself that the prince frequented this notorious homosexual haunt.

  With such dodgy claims still reposing in library stacks, Eddy’s name remains marked with a metaphorical asterisk in the English monarchy’s hall of fame—or shame, as the case may be. It is precisely his enduring infamy that classifies the hapless Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, as a royal pain.

  PRINCESS MARGARET

  Countess of Snowdon

  1930-2002

  ONE EVENING DURING THE 1940S, THE QUEEN OF ENGLAND scolded her younger daughter as the teen was preparing to leave for a costume party, dressed as an angel. “You don’t look very angelic, Margaret,” her mother, Elizabeth, said disapprovingly. Without missing a beat the princess replied, “That’s all right. I’ll be a Holy Terror.”

  Most families have their share of sibling rivalries, and the royal houses of England are no exception. For centuries, younger brothers and sisters have envied the heirs, and when they made a bid for attention, some of them did so in a big way. Prince John crept onto his older brother Richard I’s throne while the Lionheart was in the Holy Land slashing at Saracens. Geo
rge, Duke of Clarence, participated in four revolts against Edward IV, reasoning that if his big brother had usurped the crown by force, the same method might work for him as well.

  But younger sisters don’t operate in the same way. And in a constitutional monarchy where the sovereign’s role is largely ceremonial and she can’t nab the crown, there’s only one sphere left in which she can compete with her older sibling: by grabbing the spotlight. After all, as the saying goes, “All publicity is good publicity.”

  Except when it’s not.

  Nicknamed the “palace brat,” Princess Margaret became a royal pain by acting up and acting out. Her sexy good looks and vibrant personality eclipsed those of her staid older sister, who acceded to the throne in 1952 as Elizabeth II. Margaret’s expensive, jet-setting lifestyle at the expense of the British taxpayers and her clear preference for posh nightclubs over charity balls earned her the enmity of both Parliament and the press. And the subject of her youthful grand passion, which readers of a certain generation may remember as if it were yesterday, generated such a scandal for the monarchy that the biggest players from both Church and state were harnessed in an endeavor to resolve it. If The Sound of Music had been written about an English princess instead of an Austrian nun, the House of Windsor would have chorused, “How do you solve a problem like Margaret?”

  Ever since she could pronounce it, Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret Rose hated her name. For one thing, she had only two first names, while her older sister Elizabeth Alexandra Mary had three. It only increased Margaret’s dislike of her name when young Elizabeth, whom the family called Lilibet, insisted on referring to her baby sister as “Bud.”