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 by reviewers who may quote brief passages in a review. Nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or 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

CHAPTER 1 THE DARK SIDE

ictoria, Queen of England and the British Isles, Empress of India and Vroyal 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 Victoria at her sensualist, whether about food or the good looks coronation of the opposite sex. In her fifties she had her name scandalously connected with John Brown, the Queen’s Highland Servant.

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.

1 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).”

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 The Duke of Kent 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‐ The Duchess of Kent ters of state or the choice of a new hat.

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,

2 Ed Sams 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

3 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, John Brown 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).

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:

4 Ed Sams 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. The Prince and Princess of Wales at their wedding

5 Victoria and Albert For the Whole Story,

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