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Some of the Greatest Men in History Had Dark and Scandalous Secrets

Khalid Elhassan January 31, 2022 36 min

16. The Seedy Misadventures of the Prince of Wales

Edward, right, with his mother Queen Victoria, and Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra of Russia, in 1896. National Portrait Gallery

Albert Edward (1841 – 1910), the eldest son of Queen Victoria and her consort Prince Albert, went on to succeed his mother on the throne and reign as King Edward VII from 1901 until his death. He was no great shakes as a ruler and was a mediocrity both as a man and as a monarch. As a libertine, freak, and all-around royal pervert, however, he shone. He stood in stark contrast to his notoriously straitlaced mother, who lent her name to an uptight and prudish age.

As he grew up, Albert, or “Bertie”, was a disappointment to his prim and proper parents. The first letdown arrived when Bertie was sixteen-years-old and had his first scandal with a prostitute. The queen was not amused, and the conversation must have been as awkward as awkward gets. Bertie did not mend his wayward ways, and after another scandal, his father went to chastise him. On the way back, he caught a severe bout of pneumonia, which did him in. For the next four decades, Queen Victoria blamed Bertie for the death of her beloved husband, and actively tried to prevent his succession to the throne.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.