said anything about acquiring carnal knowledge and instruction.
Notwithstanding Governor Bruce’s supervision, two Grenadier Guards ventured to the outskirts of the 12,000-strong military camp, where some 50 or 60 women, known as ‘wrens’, lived in nest-like abodes of mashed bog earth and gorse branches as victims of the Great Famine, engaging in prostitution or pursuing matrimony.
The red-tunic Grenadiers recruited and briefed Nellie Clifden, a vivacious and promiscuous 17-year-old known for sharing her affections around London’s hot spots of the day such as Cremorne Gardens and Mott’s Dancing Rooms. In a bedroom in the officer’s quarters she faced a young soldier, 20-years-old, tall, bearded and a little unsteady on his feet. Nellie unbuttoned his uniform, which featured the Royal cypher and Grenadier motto, Honi soit qui mal y pense (Evil be to him who evil thinks) embossed on each button.
Edward didn’t think Nellie was in any way evil. He happily and proudly wrote in his engagement diary of 6 September ‘Curragh, NC, 1st time’. Three nights later he summoned Nellie back for a follow-up appointment, ‘Curragh, NC, 2nd time’ and again the next night ‘Curragh, NC, 3rd time’.22
Word of the triple treat spread from the soldiers, delighted with their stewardship of the future King, to the gentlemen’s clubs of Ireland and then England, and gossips like Lord Torrington. Edward and Alfred were likely to have shared and relished the intimate details of the first ‘Princess of Wales’, although Alfred later thought one of their friends was out of line in naming a racing mare ‘Miss Clifden’.
But it was no relish for their Royal parents. Prince Albert was seriously ill, but when his most trusted friend, Baron Stockmar, heard the gossip he felt compelled to tell him his son had been initiated in what he called ‘the sacred mysteries of creation’.23 Albert was mortified. He had an intense revulsion of all things sexually improper. His libidinous father Duke of Saxe-Coburg had an embarrassing affair with a courtesan, his mother Luise was flirtatious, prompting rumours of Albert’s legitimacy, and his brother had a scandalous affair with a servant girl in Dresden. When Albert was only a boy of seven, his father divorced his mother on a charge of adultery, banishing her to Switzerland with a pension and a ban on ever seeing her children again. Victoria, whose own father had only married her mother after dismissing Thérèse-Bernadine Mongenet, known as Madame de Saint-Laurent, his faithful mistress of 28 years, also feared one or both the Princes would turn out like the ‘mad’ George III or the ‘wicked’ Carlton House set of George IV and his fascination with erotica, or William IV with 10 illegitimate children.
Royals were known to exercise what they saw as an aristocratic prerogative for pleasure, but Victoria and Albert kept their sexual pleasures and shared love of nude paintings to themselves. Alfred and Edward were on their moral frontline, and now their heir to the throne might have undone all their good work and put his own future at risk: what if the girl had given him a disease, or became pregnant and filed a paternity suit, or ruined their chances of securing him the matrimonial advantages of a wealthy European aristocratic family?
Albert wrote to Edward that his behaviour caused ‘the deepest pain I have yet felt in this life’.24 He knew he was ‘thoughtless and weak…but I could not think you depraved!’ The sacred mysteries of creation, he said, ‘ought to remain shrouded in holy awe until touched by pure and undefiled hands’, and as a young man responding to ‘sexual passions’ he could not understand ‘why did you not open yourself to your father’, who would have reminded him of the ‘special mode in which these desires are to be gratified…by…the holy ties of Matrimony’.25
‘If you were to try and deny it’, Albert added despairingly, ‘she can drag you into a Court of Law to force you to own it and there with you (the Prince of Wales) 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 cross-examined 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 heart.’26
‘You must not, you dare not be lost’, he said.27 The pressure was on to secure a suitable marriage before the Prince was ‘lost’. He was despatched to Germany, officially to observe Prussian manoeuvres, but in reality to meet the woman who his parents, with the help of daughter Vicky, secretly determined should be his future wife.
Their desire was another dynastic link with Germany and more ‘strong blood’ as the Queen called it, but they had to be sensitive to what England would accept. After reviewing seven young princesses it was arranged for Edward to meet 16-year-old Princess Alexandra of Denmark.
Albert was impressed enough to say frankly that ‘from that photograph I would marry her at once.’28 And he and Victoria also could not help but notice Alfred’s keen interest in ‘Alix’. On the strength of photos alone, Alfred made no secret of his wish to marry her himself if Edward remained hesitant. If Edward became ‘obstinate’, Victoria said, ‘I will withdraw myself altogether and wash my hands of him, for I cannot educate him, and the country must make him feel what they think…Affie would be ready to take her at once, and really if B. refused I would recommend Affie’s engaging to marry her in three years.’29
While Alfred wondered who might win Alix he returned to single life on the sea, occasionally visiting his sister Victoria who was told by the Queen that his behaviour was ‘much improved but he must be looked after and is never allowed to go about alone’.30
Prince Albert, meanwhile, wasn’t done with Edward’s Curragh affair. Despite feeling ill with crippling insomnia and neuralgia—‘Bin recht elend (I feel miserable)’ he complained in his diary—he met his son in a tense encounter in pouring rain at Cambridge University. Albert forgave his son but warned that forgiveness could not restore the state of innocence and purity which he had lost forever.
Three weeks later Albert was on his death bed. His demise in December 1861 was put down to typhoid fever, although later it was thought more likely to be stomach cancer. But for the grief-stricken Queen Victoria, there was no doubt: her beloved husband had died at the age of 42 from the shock of his son’s degrading nights with an Irish harlot. ‘What killed him was that dreadful business at the Curragh…Oh! that boy…I never can or shall look at him without a shudder’, she wrote of Edward.31 And she meant it, making her contempt known for the next 40 years.
Alfred, at sea off Mexico, was the last child to hear the relayed news of his father’s death. Heart-broken at being the only child not at the funeral, it became his custom for the rest of his life to spend the anniversary of his papa’s death alone in private remembrance.
His brother, blamed and shunned by the Queen, was now even more determined to pursue matters of pleasure, and enjoined Alfred in that pursuit between his Naval excursions. Even while waiting to be engaged and finally married to Princess Alix in 1863, Edward embraced the freedom and privacy of his Marlborough House in The Mall. The princely pair were the stars in the ‘fast set’ of Marlborough, enjoying numerous house parties, dinners, balls, races and theatre. And the company of women, be they wives of their friends or ladies of the theatre in London and Paris, in the company of rich and fast friends like Charles Wynn-Carrington—who later had his own affair with Nellie Clifden and went on to become a future Governor of New South Wales. And in sojourns across the Channel they conquered Paris one bottle, one boulevard, one brothel at a time.
The Queen detested such hedonistic behaviour, fretting over a French-style revolution if the upper classes did not cease to be ‘frivolous, pleasure seeking and immoral’32 but it did not slow the princes down. Victoria feared that under Edward’s influence Alfred would continue to ‘fall into sin from weakness’33 and was relieved he was at sea more than at Marlborough.
But Alfred was enjoying the life of a sailor prince. He joked to his aunt Princess Alexandrine
