A film premiered last night shows the many plots to kill the young Queen Victoria. But her biographer reveals the real story behind this remarkable couple is even more sensational...
The day is bright and sunny, and the youthful Queen Victoria, with the handsome young Prince Albert at her side, is trotting through a London park in an open carriage, when - BANG! A gun is fired.
Prince Albert slumps over his wife, with blood pouring from him. Victoria and the British Crown have been saved through his noble action, though he is wounded.
This is a scene from the film The Young Victoria, which will be released this week, with Emily Blunt as the Queen and Rupert Friend as the Prince Consort. It is not an invented scene, but it is grossly exaggerated.
What actually happened was that Prince Albert saw a 'theatrical little man' wielding a pistol in the crowd as he and the Queen drove down Constitution Hill in London in her open droshky (low-wheeled carriage). To protect her, he bravely flung himself over his wife, turning his back to the gunman. In fact, the man pointing his gun was quickly overwhelmed by the crowds. There was no bloodshed and no one was hit by a bullet.
On another occasion, when Prince Albert and the Queen were out driving, the Prince saw a different man pointing a gun at them, but it misfired. He told Sir Robert Peel (the Prime Minister) that evening, that he had seen 'a man of the age from 26 to 30, with a shabby hat and of dirty appearance, stretch out his hand and snap a small pistol at the carriage window' from a distance of three or four feet.
With what might seem insane bravery (it would not be allowed by security forces today), the Queen resolved to ride out again the following day to see if her would-be assassin might return. He did.
The man was the son of a stage carpenter from Covent Garden, and his name was John Francis. And he did indeed pull the trigger, but it misfired once again. There was now enough evidence to arrest him. When it was suggested that he was mad, the Queen said: 'He was not in the least mad, but very cunning.' He was condemned to death, a sentence which was commuted to penal servitude.
Two days later, the Queen was again shot at on her way to the Chapel Royal, this time by a hunchbacked dwarf named John Bean. In the event, he never posed any danger - his pistol was loaded with tobacco and paper.
These were only some of the attempts made upon the life of the young Queen Victoria. The last such attack was in 1850, when she was visiting her uncle Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge. As her carriage squeezed through the gateway of his house in Piccadilly, her assailant, an officer in the 10th Hussars, Robert Pate, hit her with his walking stick.
He, too, was immediately set upon by the crowds, but this time she had been badly bruised and she bore a scar on her neck for ten years. It was suggested that she cancel a proposed visit to the opera that evening. She retorted: 'If I do not go, it will be thought I am seriously hurt.'
'But you are hurt, ma'am.' 'Very well, then, every one shall see how little I mind it.'
It is an extraordinary fact, as the great Victorian statesman Lord Shaftesbury noted in his journal, that 'the profligate George IV [Victoria's uncle] passed through a life of selfishness and sin without a single proved attempt to take it. This mild and virtuous young woman has, four times already, been exposed to imminent peril'.
And although the screenplay of the new film (written by Julian Fellowes) invents the fact that Prince Albert was wounded, the incident in the droshky gives him the opportunity to explain to Victoria why he risked his life for hers.
Of course it was a demonstration of his love - and that thrilled her above anything. But more than that, Albert told his young Queen that, while he was replaceable, she was not.
For the truth is that, if anyone had succeeded in killing Queen Victoria before she gave birth, it is highly questionable whether the British monarchy would have survived at all.
Not one of her grandfather George III's fat, dissolute sons had managed to produce a robust heir. Her uncle George IV's daughter, Princess Charlotte, died aged 21 in 1817.
King William IV, George IV's younger brother who inherited the throne, had ten children by the actress Mrs Jordan.
Unfortunately, although they were a strapping, vigorous brood, who went on themselves to breed many an interesting descendant (such as John Julius Norwich the historian and even David Cameron who is the great-great-great-great-great-grandson of Mrs Jordan), none was legitimate.
Friend and Blunt in another scene from The Young Victoria
Another scene from The Young Victoria. Was there more to the Queen than meets the eye?
It meant everything really hung on the dumpling-daughter of the Duke and Duchess of Kent - the princess who would become Queen Victoria.
Her father died when she was in her infancy and it is almost impossible to conceive of the paranoia in court circles when she was young that she - and therefore the monarchy - might not survive.
Her childhood was a nightmare - her mother kept Victoria under more or less constant supervision. Even aged 18 she was still not allowed to go up and down stairs without someone holding her hand, and all her food was tasted for poison before she ate it. For a strong-minded girl and young woman, the constraints were all but intolerable.
Victoria was kept prisoner by her mother in Kensington Palace. They shared a bedroom until the day she became Queen. She was supervised at every turn either by the Duchess of Kent or by her Governess, the Baroness Lehzen.
She was never allowed out to play on her own. In fact, for Victoria, even to have visitors was all but unknown. Like a princess in a German fairy story, she was kept immured in case someone tried to kill her - there was, after all, an air of revolution in Europe and the immense poverty after the Napoleonic Wars made her an even more likely target. In reality, the charming Emily Blunt is not only too pretty to convey what the young Victoria was like; she is too mild-tempered. The actual Victoria was all but bursting with understandable frustration at the hour-by-hour supervision she was forced to endure.
Moreover, the future Queen was dominated by the evil genius of Sir John Conroy, Comptroller of the Duchess's household. Members of William IV's court joked about the 'Conroyal Family' at Kensington Palace, and in later life Queen Victoria told the Duke of Wellington that one reason she hated Sir John was that she had witnessed 'some familiarities' between the Irish soldier and her mother.
Victoria was an intelligent - if maddening - woman. Surely she guessed, or feared, that she was Conroy's daughter? The old Duke of Kent, her supposed father, was well 'past it' by the time Victoria was conceived. Moreover, there is the family's curious medical history which we now know, and which surely requires some explanation.
Her grandfather, George III, notoriously suffered from the condition known as porphyria, whose symptoms included madness, flatulence, itchy skin and discoloured urine. When the present Queen's sister, Princess Margaret, saw the film of Alan Bennett's play The Madness Of King George, she asked: 'Isn't it hereditary?'
A photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert taken in May 1854
A photograph of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert taken in May 1854
Well, the answer is, yes it is, yet not one of Queen Victoria's descendants has ever been recorded as having it.
There is another curious medical fact. We know Queen Victoria passed on haemophilia to her descendants. Seventeen generations of the family on Queen Victoria's mother's side have been investigated by scientists at the Royal Society of Medicine. Not one has haemophilia.
Nor was there any haemophilia in the Royal Family before Victoria, so the finger really does point to Queen Victoria's father having been someone other than the Duke of Kent. It must have been the awful Sir John Conroy with that haemophiliac gene.
The new film rightly shows his attempts to get Victoria to sign a deed making him the Regent, and her doughty resistance. Did he actually, as in the film, use physical violence on her?
The scenes seemed horribly plausible to me, yet her courage in resisting him again reinforced my sense of the extraordinary providence which led us to possessing the matchless blessing of Victoria and Albert and the extraordinary legacy they left us.
Strangely enough, there are interesting medical details on the side of Prince Albert, the German cousin Queen Victoria married, which suggest that he, too, may have been illegitimate. His mother had been dismissed from the court of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha for having an affair with the Jewish chamberlain, the Baron von Mayern, a cultivated, musical, intelligent man.
Both Albert's stupid, lecherous, drunken and supposed father, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg, and his brother Ernst had hereditary syphilis, but there is no trace of this in the life of Albert who, like the Baron von Mayern, was intelligent, musical and cultivated. Unlike his own Saxe-Coburg relations, he was also a pillar of family rectitude and marital loyalty.
But it is not just this extraordinary genetic inheritance of the young Victoria and her prince by which we can see what a slender thread the destiny of our British monarchy hangs.
There were also the assassins. It would only have taken one accurate assassin to bring the line more or less to an end. I say more or less, since the crown would have passed to Ernest Augustus Duke of Cumberland, later King of Hanover, and it is hard to imagine that the English monarchy would have survived.
Emily Blunt arriving for the world premiere of the film in London
Emily Blunt arriving for the world premiere of the film in London
Indeed, I believe that there are good genetic reasons for the survival of the British Royal Family - namely their good mixture of Irish and Jewish stock. Queen Victoria inherited the physical strength and political deviousness of her real father, the Irish Sir John Conroy, and Prince Albert inherited the cleverness of the Baron von Mayern. But even if you do not accept this rather basic genetic explanation of how the royal bloodline proved so resiliently adaptable - something phenomenal happened when the young Victoria chose as her husband one of the best things that ever happened to Britain: Prince Albert.
That the monarchy survived the assassins can be attributed to God, or luck.
That it survived the changing political climate of the 19th century when so many others went down must be down to Queen Victoria, and her remarkable relationship with Albert - the man who taught her so much.
In the opening years of her reign, when she was an unmarried teenager, she made some silly mistakes, thinking for example that she could insult the Tory Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, by refusing his suggestions that a few members of his political persuasion should be represented at court.
She was booed in public and someone cruelly called out 'Mrs Melbourne' when she went to the opera with 'Lord M', the Whig Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, whom she adored in a besotted teenaged-crush.
Melbourne, however, was a man of the old Regency days, whose aristocratic hauteur made him a charming dinner companion but a rotten adviser about the condition of England in the late 1830s.
Victoria was going to rule over a country which was the first great industrial power in the world. She needed to know about mill towns and coal mines and railways. She needed to be sympathetic to the aspirations of the middle classes.
Albert, when he had married her, had great difficulty persuading his headstrong young Queen to adapt to the times, however obsessed she was with him sexually. But eventually he was able to persuade her to mould the constitutional monarchy to the changing politics of Britain.
Robert Peel was the inventor of One Nation Toryism. His concern for the middle class, his desire to expand the franchise, and his worries about the conditions of the working classes were shared by Albert.
In the 20th century, when Europe was dominated by crazed dictatorships of Right and Left, the British monarchy stood for all its people. In times of war and in times of national crisis, the monarchy was a source of national unity, rather than being the source of bitter division as it was in Russia.
That was very largely the political achievement of Prince Albert, who was also a true Renaissance man, a good composer, a keen sportsman and a patron of the arts.
Who would have thought that such a man could have emerged from the tiny, tinpot Duchy of Coburg?
From Victoria and Albert and their nine children descended the royal families of Prussia (later Germany), Russia, Spain, Denmark, Greece and Sweden. In so far as monarchy survives at all in Europe, it survives among those of their descendants who learned the lessons of Prince Albert's constitutional liberalism.
The eldest child of Victoria and Albert, Crown Princess Vicky, became the mother of German Emperor Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose militarist policies and determination to build up the German navy led to the outbreak of World War I. Victoria's letters to her daughter, when Vicky went to Germany and got married, reveal the extent of Prince Albert's vision of a modern federalist Germany, based on democracy.
It is one of the great political tragedies of history that Prince Albert died aged 42 and was unable to influence events in Germany and to control his mad grandson Kaiser Bill.
I believe that if Prince Albert had lived as long as his wife, until the 20th century, there would have been no World War I, and the tragedies of the 20th century - its genocides, its Bolshevik and fascist tyrannies - would never have happened.
The film, The Young Victoria, is a reminder of how incredibly lucky we all were that he lived at all, and of what an irreparable loss was caused by his death.
Victoria was mocked for her everlasting mourning for her husband, but even today, most people have failed to see quite what a genius he was.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1158993/Were-Queen-Victoria-Prince-Albert-illegitimate.html#ixzz3fIfNTjwj
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