Victoria Preview_Layout 1

VICTORIA’S
DARK
SECRETS
ED SAMS
Yellow Tulip Press
www.curiouschapbooks.com
Copyright 1992 ‐ 2014 by Ed Sams
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without written permission from the publisher, except
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other without written permission from the publisher.
Published by Yellow Tulip Press
P.O. Box 211
Ben Lomond, CA 95005
USA
Second Edition
Printed in the United States of America
FOR ALICE JONES SAMS
1922 - 1993
CONTENTS
THE DARK SIDE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
THE BAD BLOOD OF THE HANOVERS . . . . . . . .7
THE COBURG CURSE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11
THE BLEEDING SICKNESS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .15
RASPUTIN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
ANASTASIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .27
PRINCE EDDY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .31
JACK THE RIPPER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .33
VAMPIRES! . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .41
CURSES PLACED AND LIFTED . . . . . . . . . . . . .49
THE BLOOD OF KINGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .55
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .57
V
CHAPTER 1
THE DARK SIDE
ictoria, Queen of England and the British Isles, Empress of India and
royal grandmama to the crowned heads of Europe, presided over an
unsurpassed age of progress and plenty in England. This age, span‐
ning from 1837 to 1901 and encompassing most of the nineteenth century, is
known by her name. Victorianism over the years has come to imply rigid so‐
cial conduct, strict sexual morality, strong family
values and simple religious faith. However, if
these values were taken in sum as requirements,
no one‐‐least of all Victoria herself‐‐could be con‐
sidered Victorian.
Partial to whiskey in her tea rather than milk or
cream, Queen Victoria was a self‐proclaimed lib‐
eral who spent her life destroying racial barriers,
whether by ennobling the Jewish Benjamin Dis‐
raeli to become Lord Beaconsfield or by creating
special titles for her Munshi and other members
of her Hindu staff.
The last of the House of Hanover, she was also a
sensualist, whether about food or the good looks
of the opposite sex. In her fifties she had her name
scandalously connected with John Brown, the
Queen’s Highland Servant.
Victoria at her
coronation
Though mother to nine children, the Queen disliked childbirth and disap‐
proved of marriages. Instead of birthdays, she preferred to remember the an‐
niversaries of people’s deaths. And rather than take part in society, she enjoyed
visiting friends in mausoleums after they were interred. Although Queen Vic‐
toria was unquestionably a woman of clear religious convictions, she also pos‐
sessed a dark side, given over to mysticism and its contemplation of the
unseen world. Much of this fascination with spiritualism surfaced after the
sudden death of her beloved husband, Prince Albert. However, evidence of
the uncanny can be found throughout her life, even before her actual birth.
When Victoria’s father, the Duke of Kent, was stationed at Malta, he heard a
Gypsy prophesy that a daughter of his would someday be a great queen.
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Victoria’s Dark Secrets
Ed Sams
Hearing the call of destiny, he rushed his pregnant wife across the Eng‐
lish Channel during a winter storm in order that England’s next great
queen might be born on English soil. Eight months after his daughter’s
birth, the Duke of Kent was dead. He died from complications of a head
cold, although Princess de Lieven, wife of the Russian Ambassador, in a
letter to Metternich, hinted that the Duchess of
Kent murdered him: “She kills all her hus‐
bands, though (Weintraub, 50).”
The Duke of Kent
Victoria’s mother had been the widow of the
Prince of Leningen in Germany before she be‐
came the widow of the Duke of Kent. Most im‐
portantly, she was the daughter of the Duke of
Saxe‐Coburg Gotha and the younger sister of
Leopold, King of the Belgians. Between them,
the sister and brother conspired to keep the
Princess Victoria in the family by arranging a
marriage between her and one of her Saxe‐
Coburg cousins. In 1840, as Queen of England,
Victoria chose Albert of Saxe‐Coburg Gotha to
be her Prince Consort.
The marriage was an enormous success, both
personally and politically. Victoria and Al‐
bert had nine children‐‐Vicky, the Princess
Royal; Bertie, The Prince of Wales; Princess
Alice; Prince Alfred, the Duke of Edinburgh;
Princess Louise; Princess Helena or Lenchen;
Prince Arthur, the Duke of Connaught;
Prince Leopold, the Duke of Albany; and
Princess Beatrice, or Baby.
Prince Albert proved to be the model Victo‐
rian family man as well as the model consti‐
tutional monarch, in whose guidance the
Queen placed full reliance, whether in mat‐
ters of state or the choice of a new hat.
The Duchess of Kent
Therefore, Albert’s early death in 1861 came as a sudden shock from
which Queen Victoria never quite recovered. Plunged into deepest
mourning, the Queen became a virtual recluse in her castle strongholds,
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Victoria’s Dark Secrets
Windsor and Balmoral, as well as at Osborne,
her island retreat on Wight. There she began to
dabble in the occult. Her daughter, Princess
Louise, was said to be interested in spiritual‐
ism, and no doubt provided her mother the
sympathetic vibrations necessary for psychic
contact to take place. Princess Louise is distin‐
guished from all of Victoria’s other children as
the only one to marry a commoner. Although
Queen Victoria insisted upon royal marriages
as a rule, she allowed Louise to marry Lord
Lorne, perhaps because he was heir to the
Duke of Argyll. The Argylls were Highlanders
and reputed to possess second sight. Lorne
Prince Albert
himself was given to clairvoyant visions and
had a sister who was a spiritualist “and looked it,” according to Disraeli
(Longford, 338). In time, the Queen’s necromantic interests became so
great that she appointed her own royal psychic, the gifted Robert Lees.
According to Historian Michael Harrison, “Robert James Lees, scholar, philan‐
thropist and friend of Gladstone and Disraeli, arranged the seances at which
the Queen endeavored‐‐perhaps succeeded?‐‐to communicate with the spirit
of her dead husband (Harrison, 154).” Supposedly Prince Albert was con‐
tacted and, in return, the dead Prince once more advised his queen, this time
to send for the ghillie John Brown of Balmoral to act as resident medium and
metaphysical go‐between (Longford, 334).
Therefore, the suggestions of Queen Victoria’s illicit affair with John Brown
were erroneous, and any appearance of impropriety would have an innocent‐‐if
bizarre‐‐explanation. Brown was trance channeling the spectral presence of
Prince Albert, and Queen Victoria was keeping Brown by her side in order to be
near her departed husband. The sculptor Sir Joseph Boehm, who had been roy‐
ally commanded to make a bust of Brown at Balmoral, heard there that the
Queen had “got it into her head that somehow the Prince’s spirit had passed
into Brown and four years after her widowhood, being very unhappy, allowed
him all privileges (Weintraub, 335‐386).” This, however, is hearsay. The only
firsthand evidence of such an unearthly triangle would be John Brown’s diaries,
but unfortunately Queen Victoria’s son Bertie burned those when he came to
power as Edward VII. Despite her own skepticism, Elizabeth Lady Longford
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Victoria’s Dark Secrets
Ed Sams
acknowledged rumors of such royal seances in her landmark biography
Queen Victoria: Born to Succeed. She writes, “It was said and still is repeated
that he had burned the records of Brown’s spiritualist seances with Queen
Victoria . . . . According to Psychic News, Lionel Logue, the distinguished
speech therapist who cured the stammer of King George VI, told Hannen
Swaffer, the well‐known journalist and spiritualist, that he had read John
Brown’s diary at Windsor Castle (455‐456).”
Whether Queen Victoria reached Albert or
not, she carried out her daily life as if he
were still there. All evidence of the
Prince’s death was suppressed in an elab‐
orate charade to give every appearance
that Albert had not died, but merely left
the room. According to Michael Harrison,
“Osborne House . . . had turned into a
sort of ghost‐trap for the spirit of the de‐
parted (3).” Not only were the Prince
Consort’s clothes laid out each evening,
but hot water and a clean towel were pro‐
vided as well (Longford, 310‐311).
Throughout the long period of mourning,
her seclusion and obsession with the dead
baffled the Queen’s ministers and subjects with the dead. On Valen‐
tine’s Day 1863, Victoria wrote to her daughter Vicky, the Crown
Princess of Prussia, “I go daily to the beloved Mausoleum, and long to
be there!” Vicky sent coded messages back to England inquiring as to
her mother’s sanity (Hibbert, 171).
John Brown
Someone who seemed to understand Victoria’s dark side was her
daughter‐in‐law Alexandra, the Princess of Wales. Like Lord Lorne,
Alexandra was also a surprising choice to be consort to the next king of
England, for Alexandra was the daughter of a minor princeling in the
Danish royal house, and Denmark was at odds with Queen Victoria’s
beloved Germany. Nevertheless, there was something fey about Alexan‐
dra which won the Queen over. Despite their differences, both under‐
stood each other very well. Michael Harrison writes:
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Victoria’s Dark Secrets
Alexandra‐‐’Alix’‐‐came from a land where ghosts were,
and and are still, taken au grand serieux; where the ancient
communion with the family dead maintained the old cus‐
toms‐‐the meals laid out for the wandering spirits, the curi‐
ous ceremonies at tumulus and carved stone and bog tomb
to pacify the rebellious shades of the long ago dead. As a
daughter of the royal house of Denmark, she knew the old
tales, knew of the old superstitions; acknowledged, if you
will, that the dead are never quite dead, and that prudent
people never begrudge the small, traditionally proven acts
by which the dead may be kept, if not exactly friendly, then
at least powerless to wreak harm (4).
The dead are never quite dead. Certainly Prince Albert was not allowed
to pass away completely. The madness that Princess Vicky feared in her
mother was the hereditary madness of Victoria’s grandfather, King
George III. A violent, vicious madness raged throughout the House of
Hanover, blamed on bad blood. Likewise, a strain of neurotic melan‐
choly ran through the members of Prince
Albert’s family, the Saxe‐Coburg Gotha,
which was blamed on a curse.
With the “bad blood” of one and the
blood curse of the other, Victoria and Al‐
bert were the genetic repositories of their
respective royal houses. Through them,
the pride and folly of previous genera‐
tions were played out; in them, the dead
were not entirely dead. For together, Vic‐
toria and Albert created the scourge of
hemophilia, “the royal disease,” which
toppled many a throne in Europe in the
early years of the twentieth century.
5
The Prince and Princess of
Wales at their wedding
Victoria and Albert
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