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| The portraits of the Prince in day dress were made when he was somewhere between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. |
Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale (Albert Victor Christian Edward, 8 January 1864, Frogmore House, Windsor – 14 January 1892, Sandringham House, Norfolk), eldest son of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII), and Alexandra of Denmark, and the grandson Queen Victoria. From his birth, he was second in the line of succession to the British throne, and would have become king, had he not died before both his father and grandmother.
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| The photographs of the Prince as a child were taken in 1875, when he was eleven. |
Born two months prematurely - all of the Princess of Wales' children were born prematurely - he was always known in the family as "Eddy". He was always very close to the next born child, his brother George, and the two were educated together; Eddy was a very slow learner and inattentive student - something his family was very concerned about, and which may have been related to his early birth - and it was felt that the more lively George would be a stimulus. In 1877, when Eddy was thirteen, the boys began naval training. And two years later, they were sent as navel cadets on a three year world tour; by the time they returned home, the prince was eighteen years old.
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| With his brother, Prince George, later King George V (1865 - 1936). |
In 1883, the brothers were separated; George continued with his naval career, while Eddy went up to Trinity College, Cambridge. True to form, he was a poor student and was excused examinations, but he did become involved in undergraduate life. His tutor there, the poet James Stephen, was only four years his senior, and there are many who believe he developed a more than friendly attachment to the Prince.
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In 1889, London society was rocked by the news of a male brothel operating in Cleveland Street. There were rumors then and now that Eddy was somehow implicated in the scandal. There was never any evidence of the Prince's involvement, but it appears that some degree of cover-up was affected by those at the highest levels. That same year, Eddy was sent on a seven month tour of India. On his return he was created Duke of Clarence and Avondale and Earl of Athlone.
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| * Some rather rough retouching to the negative has been made on the Prince's neck and mustache. |
Several royal ladies were now beginning to be put forward as possible brides for the Prince. In 1889, his cousin Alix of Hesse, the future Empress Alexandra of Russia, was considered, but she did not return his interest and refused his engagement offer. A year later it was Princess Hélène of Orléans, daughter of the comte de Paris, pretender to the French throne who was living in exile in England. It was a love match, but the great stumbling block to their union was her Roman Catholic religion. There was much discussion - she offered to convert, he offered to renounce his place in the succession - but in the end, her father refused to agree to the marriage or let her convert; she later married the Duke of Aosta. That same year he was ill for a time with an illness only vaguely described in correspondence, and which some have speculated might have been a venereal disease.
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| * With his Equerry-in-Waiting from 1884 to 1888, Captain the Honorable Alwyn Henry Fulke Greville (1854-1929), second son of the 4th Earl of Warwick. |
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| * The same image as above, but on this cut-down copy of the original negative, the retoucher has attempted to erase Captain Greville by crudely transforming him into... a curtain? |
By the next year, another potential bride was under consideration. Princess May of Teck was the daughter of Queen Victoria's first cousin Princess Mary of Cambridge, Duchess of Teck, and the queen very much approved of this choice. The couple became engaged on 3 December 1891. But as planning for the wedding began, the Prince fell ill with the influenza which was then a world-wide pandemic. It developed into pneumonia and, surrounded by his parents, his brother George and two of his sisters, his fiancée and her parents, three doctors and three nurses, he died less than a week after his twenty-eighth birthday.
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His family was devastated by his death; his parents never really got over their loss and kept the room in which he died as a shrine. Prince George, who had always be so close to his brother, was stunned with grief and, though he wasn't really known that well outside of his family, the nation mourned the young man who might have been their king. At his funeral, Princess May's father handed the bereaved father a replica of the bridal bouquet that-would-have-been, which was placed on the coffin. And Eddy's former tutor at Cambridge, James Stephen, who had suffered a head injury in 1886, refused all nourishment from the day of the Prince's death and died twenty days later.
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Prince George was now, after his father, next in line to the throne, and soon enough the marriage questions began. Princess May had become very close to the Wales family through her former engagement and Eddy's death, and after some of the shock of his death had lessened, all agreed that she would still make an excellent future consort. In May of 1893 she accepted George's proposal, and they were married in July of that same year. They would go on to a very successful marriage, and would come to the throne in 1910 as the redoubtable George V and Queen Mary, the grandparents of the current British monarch.
Eddy was always kind, quiet, and unaffected. And though many considered in retrospect that, with his poor education and very passive nature, he may have made a very poor king, he was deeply loved by his family. And on the day of the coronation of her surviving son in 1911, the Dowager Queen Alexandra, who did not attend the ceremony but had remained at home at Sandringham, was heard to tearfully mutter to herself that, "Eddy should be king, not Georgie".
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Alongside the lingering rumors about his sexuality and "dissipation", for many years there was much speculation - never really taken seriously by reputable historians - that he had been the infamous murderer who had come to be known as Jack the Ripper, but this has now been finally and definitively disproven.
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The five images captioned with an asterisk - * - are from photographic negatives in the British Royal Collection. Of varying original quality and present condition, I copied them into Photoshop, reversed and made them into positives, then adjusted the contrast and lightness and color. Even with all that, they look little like the other beautiful, professionally printed vintage photographs posted here.
