Coverage of the various historical cultures, rulers, and states of Europe
In 1680, Saxe-Gotha (in its second guise) was divided for the seven sons of the late Duke Ernst 'the Pious', with the territory being used to form Saxe-Coburg (in its third iteration) amongst the others.
History Behind the Story - Was Prince Albert Illegitimate?
Shocking revelations on this week’s episode of ITV’s Victoria seemed to suggest that Prince Albert might not have been his father’s son.
Who was Albert’s mother? Could he have really been illegitimate? Read some of the evidence and decide for yourself.
Prince Albert’s mother, Princess Louise, was only sixteen when she married the 33-year-old Duke Ernest of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld in 1817. Louise was a great catch, not only was she young, vivacious, clever and beautiful, she was also the only child and heir of the wealthy Duke of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg. Her husband, on the other hand, was a notorious womaniser and already had at least two illegitimate children. One of Ernest’s mistresses, Pauline Panam, (who was only fifteen when their affair began) later became a famous Parisian actress and publicly humiliated the the Duke and his family by publishing a kiss-and-tell memoir in 1824. Pauline and Ernest’s illegitimate son, also called Ernest, referred to himself as a Prince of Coburg until the day he died.
Miniature of Duchess Louise, date unknown. (via flikr)
Louise quickly gave birth to two sons (Ernest in 1818 and Albert a year later) but Duke Ernest continued to be unfaithful. Louise, who was still just a teenager, was popular at court and had many admirers. In June 1820, one of her ladies-in-waiting accused Louise of having an affair herself, with one of the Duke’s friends, Count Alexander Solms. The rumours found their way back to her husband, who (in a case of textbook hypocrisy) was furious. Solms was banished from court and Duke Ernest launched a bogus investigation that went on for years. “You will laugh when you hear it,” wrote Louise to her childhood friend Augusta von Studnitz, ‘but it has made me cry’:
If he [Ernest] had been sensible he would have laughed [...] but he took it seriously, and was angry with me. We talked about it and it all ended in tears... Now he watches me, which he has never done before... and he misconstrues everything.
By 1824 Ernest and Louise were separated and Louise exiled from Coburg. ‘You have dreadfully deceived me’ wrote Ernest to his estranged wife, 'I can affirm before God that you have had my heartfelt love [...] We shall hardly see each other again. May you not become so unhappy as you have made me.’ Two years later Ernest divorced her, naming the young army officer Lieutenant Alexander von Hanstein as her lover in the official divorce proceedings. Louise never officially confirmed nor denied the accusations, but she married von Hanstein almost immediately after the divorce was granted. Ernest married again too, this time to his own niece Duchess Marie of Württemberg.
The legitimacy of the children, Albert and Ernest, was never brought up in the divorce case. Louise’s affair was reported not to have begun until 1822 or 23, when Albert was already three years old. Duke Ernest, as the acknowledged father of both boys, was automatically awarded custody. Louise wrote:
Leaving my children was the hardest, most painful thing of all. They have whooping cough and said, “Mamma cries because she has got to go, now, when we are ill.” The poor lambs. God bless them.
She never saw her children again. Louise died in Paris in 1831, probably of uterine cancer, at age only thirty.
Louise, Duchess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, with her sons, Albert (right) and Ernest, painted by Ludwig Döll, c.1823-4.
If Duke Ernest had seemingly never questioned Albert’s paternity, then where did the rumours come from?
One explanation lies in the fact that Victoria and Albert introduced haemophilia, an inherited genetic disorder, into the royal families of Europe. There had been no recorded haemophiliacs in the British royal family before their son, Leopold, was born in 1853, and two of their daughters, Alice and Beatrice, were carriers of the gene. As a result there was speculation that the royal bloodline must somehow have been “tainted,” and both Albert and Victoria have been rumoured to be illegitimate. (We know now that in about a third cases haemophilia is caused by a spontaneous genetic mutation, and it seems likely that Victoria was unknowingly born a carrier).
Another source of the rumours was that Prince Albert seemed not to resemble either his father or brother in either looks or personality. While Ernest was dark-haired like his father, Albert was ‘lovely as an angel with his fair curls’. The boys’ tutor wrote that while Louise was still alive she had:
made no attempt to conceal that Prince Albert was her favourite child. He was handsome and bore a strong resemblance to herself [...]
Both Ernests - father and son - were notorious womanisers, while Albert was shy and generally disliked the company of women. In the early years of his marriage he had caused grave offence by failing to pay enough attention to the senior ladies at court. He was disgusted and horrified by his elder sons’ sexual escapades, writing to the Prince of Wales in 1861 that his behavior had ‘caused me the greatest pain I have yet felt in this life.’
But simply being different from his father does not necessarily make Prince Albert illegitimate. The most likely explanation (in my view) is that rumours about his paternity were stirred up by the xenophobic English press when Albert first emerged as a potential suitor for Victoria. Albert was the second son of a minor German Duke, while Victoria was Queen of England, the richest and most powerful woman in the world. The press lampooned Prince Albert as a gold-digger and they printed lewd jokes suggesting that all he had to offer Victoria was a sausage.
“Shutting up the Sausage Shop” - Prince Albert and his father are shown closing down the family sausage business because Albert has acquired England’s ‘splendid fortune’ by marrying Victoria. The whole Saxe-Coburg family will ‘skin the English for the rest of our days.’ Cartoon published 18th January 1840 in Cleave’s Penny Gazette. (British Library)
The press poked into Albert’s family background looking for dirt. They discovered that his stepmother was a Catholic and accused him of being one too. After Victoria and Albert became engaged she was forced to write to him asking for him to send ‘as soon as possible’:
a short History of the House of Saxe-Coburg, who our direct ancestors were, and what part they took in the Protestant, or rather Lutheran, religion [...] for a few stupid people here try to say you are a Catholic
What’s more, thanks to Pauline Panam, all of Europe knew about Albert’s father’s affairs and his parents’ divorce. It didn’t help that while in London for his brother’s wedding, Ernest had become seriously ill with syphilis and their father had very publicly tried to seduce half the ladies a court. In this climate, it is not surprising that people began to gossip (there was talk that Lord Melbourne had only okay-ed the match after he learned that Albert was not Duke Ernest’s biological son), and equally unsurprising that a humiliated Albert became sensitive about moral standards of behaviour.
Although the records of Ernest and Louise’s divorce suggest only one lover - Alexander von Hanstein - by the 1920s another possible father was being suggested. A 1915 biography of Pauline Panam entitled “A German Prince and his Victim” suggested that Louise may have had an affair with:
A certain Baron von Meyern, Chamberlain at the Court, a charming, handsome, and cultivated man, of Jewish extraction, much to her senior
This rumour was subsequently repeated in an antisemitic pamphlet published in Berlin in 1921, which argued Prince Albert was ‘without contradiction [...] half Jew’ and that ‘since his time Jewish blood has been circulating in the blood of the English Royal Family.’ Lytton Strachey, who wrote one of the first biographies of Queen Victoria (also published in 1921), drew upon both of these sources and reignited the gossip about Prince Albert’s paternity. Strachey wrote:
The ducal court was not noted for the strictness of its morals; the Duke was a man of gallantry, and it was rumoured that the Duchess followed her husband’s example. There were scandals: one of the Court Chamberlains, a charming and cultivated man of Jewish extraction, was talked of; at last there was a separation, followed by a divorce.
Queen Victoria (seated) with Prince Albert (second from left) and King Leopold (right) in 1859. (Royal Collection)
Leopold, who was Duke Ernest’s younger brother, was not seriously suggested as potential lover until much later. When historians began examining Louise’s correspondence they discovered that she had been extraordinarily close to Leopold. In a letter to her friend Augusta, Louise had admitted she had a crush on him, writing naively:
Tell me quite frankly, which do you think the most handsome, him [Leopold] or Ernest? I shan’t tell anybody, and as I love them both - only in different ways - I shall not mind a bit what you say.
When Prince Albert was two, she wrote lovingly that:
Albert adores his uncle Leopold, he doesn’t leave him for a moment, looks at him tenderly, embraces him at every opportunity, and does not feel content except when they are together.
After she was exiled from the Coburg court Louise had asked to remembered to Leopold: ‘I should not like him to forget me completely,’ she wrote.
Writing in the 1970s, historian David Duff conceded that it was ‘possible’ for ‘a man of Leopold’s character’ to have fathered a child with his brother’s wife. Leopold was in Coburg at Christmastime 1818, nine months before Albert’s birth the following August. He had just lost his own wife, Princess Charlotte, who had died in 1817 giving birth to their stillborn son. Perhaps Leopold and Louise did turn to each other for comfort. Or maybe the calculating and ambitious Leopold had grand plans to father another child who might one day share the English throne. After all, Leopold did always take a strong interest in his nephew, and was one of the chief architects behind his marriage with Victoria.
This is pure speculation of course, based entirely on circumstantial evidence. Most historians agree that it is unlikely that Prince Albert was illegitimate, and even less likely that Leopold was his biological father. But we can never know for sure. As David Duff writes:
It is difficult, if not impossible to prove that a young man and woman slept together a century and half ago. If they had so chosen it is probable that it could have remained their secret, and theirs alone [...] It is hardly likely that a neat confession would have been filed away for the benefit of some researcher much later in time.
So, what do you think? Was Prince Albert really illegitimate?
