While members of the Royal Family typically strive to be viewed as figures of high moral standing, it would be an understatement to say that there aren’t some rather questionable skeletons in the royal closet. For example, a prince was once rumoured to be Jack the Ripper.
Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale was born on January 8, 1864 and was the eldest child of the future King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra. The heir to the throne died in 1892, meaning his younger brother went on to become King George V after their father died in 1910.
The great-uncle to the late Queen was a controversial figure. Once a key suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders, Prince Albert Victor, or ‘Eddy’ as he was known by his family, was also thought to be involved in the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889.
The rumours swirled that he was the Whitechapel killer and there were two theories to support it. The first theory was that the prince had contracted syphilis from a prostitute in the West Indies which made him go on a murderous, vengeful rampage as the disease spread to his brain, turning him mad.
The second theory follows the idea that Albert fell in love, had a child with and secretly married a Catholic girl in Whitechapel. The story goes that this was an undesirable match and the killings in the East End were the work of agents of the Royal Family who murdered anyone who had knowledge of the prince’s secret marriage or child.
Despite these scenarios, it has been widely discredited that he was the Whitechapel serial killer as the prince was 500 miles from London with his grandmother, Queen Victoria, in Balmoral on the night of the double murder on September 30, 1888.
The Jack the Ripper investigation wasn’t the only time suspicions were raised about the then second-in-line to the throne as there were more rumours which plagued the prince’s life.
His apparent involvement in the Cleveland Street Scandal of 1889 caused huge concern as sexual acts between men were illegal in Britain at the time. When a male, homosexual brothel was discovered by police in Euston, it was eventually reported by foreign press that Prince Albert Victor had visited.
Other prominent patrons of the brothel reportedly included Lord Arthur Somerset and Henry FitzRoy, Earl of Euston. The scandal launched huge criticism of the government as they were accused of covering up the controversy to protect high-ranking members of the aristocracy.
In 1891, the prince proposed to Princess Victoria Mary of Teck (the future Queen Mary). Their wedding was set for February 27, 1892. Between 1889 and 1892 an influenza pandemic struck the country and the prince fell ill, eventually developing pneumonia.
Less than a week after his 28th birthday, Prince Albert Victor died at Sandringham House in Norfolk, surrounded by his family and fiancée. The death of the second in line to the throne launched his younger brother, the future George V, into his place.
Prince Albert Victor’s death sparked a national outpouring of grief and mourning, shops boarded up their windows and the family wrote letters of their sadness at his passing. The sadness and shock may have been the case, but work published from the 1960s onwards show that biographers and historians do not tend to look back upon his life particularly favourably.
In 1964, historian Sir Philip Magnus said the prince’s death was a “Merciful act of providence”, and supported the idea that his death had removed an unsuitable heir to the throne and replaced him with the reliable and sensible George V.