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Unexpected and Surprising Facts About England’s Iconic Queens

Khalid Elhassan February 13, 2022 38 min

10. Queen Victoria’s Creepiest Admirer

Michael Fagan’s intrusion into Queen Elizabeth II’s bedroom, and Thomas Flower’s stalking of Queen Victoria a century and a half earlier were undeniably creepy. However, they paled in comparison to the creepiness of Edward Jones, a disturbed teenager. Dubbed “Boy Jones” by the palace staff, he had an unhealthy fixation on Victoria. Around 5 AM on December 14^th, 1838, a palace servant saw a gargoyle of a face in a window. It appeared to be smudged with soot and belonged to an ugly youth who impishly grinned at him.

Investigation revealed that a palace room had been ransacked, so the alarm was sounded, and the hunt for the intruder was on. A constable spotted a teenager outside the palace, gave chase, tackled, seized, and hauled him in. A closer look revealed that he had caught an unfortunately featured young man, whose face and clothes were covered in grease and soot. He had on two pairs of pants, and when the outer one was removed, several pairs of ladies’ drawers fell out – Queen Victoria’s panties.

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.