The Queen, Her Lover and the Most Notorious Spy in History Read online

  ALSO BY ROLAND PERRY

  Fiction

  Programme for a Puppet

  Blood Is a Stranger

  Faces in the Rain

  Non-Fiction

  Horrie: The War Dog

  Bill the Bastard

  Last of the Cold War Spies

  The Fifth Man

  The Fight for Australia

  The Changi Brownlow

  The Australian Light Horse

  Monash: The Outsider Who Won a War

  The Programming of the President

  The Exile: Wilfred Burchett, Reporter of Conflict

  Mel Gibson: Actor, Director, Producer

  Lethal Hero

  Sailing to the Moon

  Elections Sur Ordinateur

  Bradman’s Invincibles

  The Ashes: A Celebration

  Miller’s Luck: The Life and Loves of Keith Miller, Australia’s Greatest All-Rounder

  Bradman’s Best

  Bradman’s Best Ashes Teams

  Don Bradman aka The Don

  Captain Australia: A History of the Celebrated Captains of Australian Test Cricket

  Bold Warnie

  Waugh’s Way

  Shane Warne: Master Spinner

  Documentary Films

  The Programming of the President

  The Raising of a Galleon’s Ghost

  Strike Swiftly

  Ted Kennedy and the Pollsters

  The Force

  Victoria’s Secret

  First published in 2014

  Copyright © Roland Perry 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

  Allen & Unwin

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  Australia

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  Cataloguing-in-Publication details are available from the National Library of Australia

  www.trove.nla.gov.au

  ISBN 978 1 76011 075 8

  eISBN 978 1 74343 885 5

  Internal design by Nada Backovic

  Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Australia

  Dr Leon Levin, Professor Ed Byrne, Professor James Sarros and Dr Anne Sarros For their support

  ‘Victoria was lame and unable to stand upright,’ yet ‘bent on marrying nobody but Lord Elphinstone.’

  ROBERT BROWNING

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  1 A Princess in Peril

  2 The Lover

  3 Unsuitable Suitors

  4 King William’s Frustration

  5 Transition to Monarchy

  6 Elphinstone in Exile; Victoria Victorious

  7 The Governor’s Distraction

  8 Melbourne Munificent

  9 Crowned but Loveless

  10 The Fading Elph

  11 Victoria Faces the ‘M’ Word

  12 Crisis of the Bedchamber

  13 Victoria’s Proposal; Elphinstone’s Compensation

  14 Vicky’s Birth; Elphinstone’s Fever

  15 Bertie’s Arrival; Lehzen’s Departure

  16 Lovers’ Reunion

  17 The Perfect Butler

  18 Time out at Osborne

  19 Bertie Beleaguered

  20 Caviar and Conversation

  21 On a High with the Highlanders

  22 Peel and Wellington: In Transition

  23 The Bleeding Disease

  24 Crimea Fear: Indian Challenge

  25 Old Feelings, New Challenges in Bombay

  26 Victoria Trumps Napoleon III

  27 In the Barrel of a Gun

  28 Elphinstone Steps Up

  29 The President’s Enforcer

  30 The British Prevail

  31 A ‘Friend’ in Trouble

  32 Last Writes

  33 Noble Intentions

  34 The End for Albert’s Torment

  35 The Queen Has Gone Missing

  36 The Queen Revives; Disraeli Dazzles

  37 Bountiful Bertie

  38 Brown the Bodyguard

  39 Victoria Up; Brown Down

  40 Gladstone Omnipotent

  41 Victoria’s New Passion

  42 Playboy Prince

  43 Symbolism over Invalidism

  44 Funeral for a Connoisseur

  45 Edward VII—Payback Time

  46 The Edwardian Era

  47 The Forgotten Letters

  48 The Problem with David

  49 Blunt’s Mission

  50 Postwar Winds of Change

  51 Blunt Acquisitions

  52 Straight Lies

  53 Climate of Treason

  Postscript: Exposé

  Notes

  Bibliography

  PREFACE

  In 1993 and 1996 when I was interviewing ex-KGB agents (on camera) in Russia, it was revealed that Anthony Blunt, a British double agent working for the former Soviet Union, had microfilmed a cache of royal correspondence and sent it all to KGB headquarters. At the time I was researching two books: The Fifth Man, about Victor Rothschild, a member of the infamous Cambridge spy ring that had included Blunt; and Last of the Cold War Spies, about Michael Whitney Straight, the American member of the ring. I assumed that the important royal letters concerned the Duke of Windsor and his correspondence with Hitler and the Nazis.Two of the ex-KGB master-spies—Yuri Ivanovitch Modin and Vladimir Barkovsky—emphasised that the royal letters were important. For one thing, the KGB could have used them to blackmail the royal family. For another, Blunt’s passing them on to his Moscow masters meant he had something over his palace masters and his MI5 superiors. It was subtle and unspoken. At no point did Blunt ever threaten anybody but all concerned in British Intelligence and at the palace tiptoed around him for 30 years, from when MI5 first became suspicious of him in 1949 until his knighthood was taken from him in 1979.

  One element of the correspondence that the KGB master-spies hinted about was Queen Victoria’s disclosures to her daughter concerning a love affair she had had before she met Prince Albert. Research established this was the thirteenth Lord Elphinstone. I spent many months poring over the 309 massive files in his archive in the Asian section at the British Library in London. (Library staff estimated that a full review of this archive would take six years.) The files appeared to have been intermittently ‘vetted’ or ‘edited’, the last ‘review’ being in 1982. The problem with this filleting of letters is that events and other information overtake the files. New and related data over time gives more meaning to the original retained information. Coupled with speedy internet searches, crosschecking, and access to other related files (for instance, in India where Elphinstone spent so much time), there is no hiding from, or prevention of, fresh perspectives and often insights and revelations. Short of destroying all the files, vetting can never avoid increased perception.

  While working on this story I came across an Englishman claiming that he was a direct descendent of Queen Victoria and that she had had a bastard child while in seclusion at Ramsgate between September 1835 and February 1836. If tr
ue, the father of this mystery child—allegedly born in late October 1835—had to have been Elphinstone. I was sidetracked by this undertaking for over a year of exhaustive research. But there was no direct evidence of this illegitimate royal birth. I had DNA checks done on the Englishman making the claim but the results showed no direct link to the royals or Elphinstone. After checking of files—births, deaths and marriages, wills in England and Scotland, and a myriad other documents over six generations—there was nothing definitive linking this claimant to either Victoria or Elphinstone. Not even the Mormons, who bought up church parish registers in the UK and elsewhere going back to that time, could assist. (The Mormons’ motive for acquiring these records was to baptise everyone on the registers into their church to boost their claim to having huge numbers.)

  There was a great deal of circumstantial evidence that a child, who had been adopted into an impoverished London servant family in 1836, did have enormous wealth, mainly property, settled upon him in most unusual circumstances in a long-running cover-up.This person died in 1919, aged 83. His son died in 1968. Post-1968 that property, worth about £3 billion, was fraudulently distributed after relatively small payments (worth just £3 million) were made to descendents of that original adopted child.These payments were enough to buy off or prevent anyone in the family investigating the fraud, except for the one individual: the Englishman to whom I was introduced.

  I may return to this story. A little distance and time will make it an enticing project.

  I am most grateful to Yuri Modin, and (the late) Vladimir Barkovsky, both of whom were formerly Moscow controls running the British spies recruited mainly at Cambridge University, England, in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. I visited them in Moscow several times and they were unfailing in their courtesy and assistance. They both indicated at the beginning of our conversations that they would not provide information that was not already known by Western intelligence. I was happy with this; it put me ahead of anyone else in the Western media, and the data collected allowed me to probe deeper. Several journalists, including Philip Knightley and the late John Costello, were helpful with information.

  Thanks also to those who offered comments and insights, including Dr Leon Levin, Dr Anne Sarros and Diana Georgeff. Jack Grossman, the documentary filmmaker who accompanied me to Russia, died in May 2013 but not before he read and offered advice on this book. His encouragement was always a mainstay and great support for me in my books on espionage agents and also this current book.

  My thanks also to publisher Sue Hines at Allen & Unwin for her support on six books.

  A word on the ‘style’ of the book. I call it ‘non-fiction with occasional dramatisations and reconstructions’. This is similar but not the same as a television or film script-writer writing on a non-fiction subject and re-creating some scenes based on correspondence of the participants, interviews and other sources. Such stories and re-enactments are daily staple diet for television and film.The book writer can vary this film-script writing approach to make an otherwise complex narrative more accessible, digestible and comprehensible for the reader while keeping the subject’s integrity intact. The key is to do at least as much research as one would for an academic or non-fiction project. This approach leads to the writer facilitating comprehension of a subject rather than simply regurgitating dry facts. I believe in the axiom that there are no dull topics, only dull writers.

  Professor Roland Perry OAM, BEc., F. Monash

  Writer-in-Residence, Monash University.

  May 2014

  1

  A PRINCESS IN PERIL

  Sixteen-year-old Princess Victoria was in a terrible state. Her mystery illness had lingered for several months by mid-October 1835 and her physician, Dr James Clark, had been unable to give a convincing opinion in his consultations with her at the family’s hideaway resort at Ramsgate on England’s east coast.The 51-year-old Scot, who had qualified at the respected Aberdeen University, was not the finest diagnostician. He had spent most of his working career as a naval surgeon and rarely attended to women. He had joined the household of the widowed Duchess of Kent—Victoria’s 49-year-old mother—in April 1835 at the direction of the duchess’s brother Leopold, King of the Belgians. The young princess’s illness had been this earnest doctor’s first real challenge since attending to the Kents. He mulled over a variety of ailments. Clark had examined her in late August in her bedchamber with her lady-in-waiting Baroness Lehzen present. He asked the princess to remove her clothes. She lay grim-faced on her back, naked but for underwear.

  Glancing over his spectacles at the princess, Clark mumbled in his broad brogue that her ‘tummy’ seemed a bit bloated. He ran his fingers over her stomach and pressed here and there causing Victoria to wince. Clark asked her about her complaint that she was having a problem going to the lavatory.

  ‘That’s the trouble,’Victoria said in a frustrated tone, ‘I can’t go at all, doctor!’

  Clark motioned for Lehzen to help Victoria dress.

  ‘I believe you have constipation, pure and simple, my lady.’

  ‘But you thought it was a bilious fever a month ago,’ Lehzen proffered.

  ‘You even thought I might have typhoid!’Victoria said.

  ‘God knows you may have it still,my lady,’Clark said,his authoritative manner intact,‘but you are having trouble with constipation.’ Before the others could protest, he added: ‘You must have a daily dose of physic before breakfast. I will personally make up some for you today.’

  ‘Physic?’Victoria frowned.

  ‘It’s a laxative,’ the doctor said.‘You should be right in a week or so.’

  Clark departed. Victoria said to Lehzen: ‘I shall never let a doctor examine my body again!’

  When Victoria collapsed soon afterwards, Clark was in London. Lehzen begged the duchess and the comptroller of the Kent household, 49-year-old John Conroy, to bring Clark back to Ramsgate urgently.

  ‘No, that would be ridiculous!’ the Duchess of Kent had scoffed. ‘Such a summons would cause an unnecessary noise in London.’ She was thinking of her brother-in-law King William IV, himself ailing. He had often voiced his disapproval of the way Victoria was being treated by her mother and tall, handsome and stern Conroy. The latter had emerged as the main culprit in the eyes of King William and those close to unfolding events.

  Conroy, formerly an Irish officer in the British Army, was a philanderer and seducer who seemed to have a peculiar grip on the Duchess of Kent. He acted as if he were a strict father to Victoria. Over time, especially by late 1835, people whispered about his ‘proximity’ to both women. Rumours circulated: was he Victoria’s father? The duchess’s husband, the Duke of Kent, was believed to have been impotent late in his life.Was it possible that in 1819 the fiercely ambitious Conroy and the poor and avaricious duchess had coupled secretly to produce a child who would be claimed as the duke’s? The child would be in line for the throne—and there would also be an increased annuity from the Privy Purse for them. If true, it would mean that Victoria was a bastard, ineligible to become queen. The speculation was understandable yet, without the science to decide paternity, it was little more than court tittle-tattle. More likely, the stout, doubt-riddled and indecisive duchess simply needed a strong man like Conroy to run her royal household, and he used his innate political skills to manipulate her.

  King William had been irritated all through 1835 by the way Conroy and the duchess had paraded the princess up and down the country. They stayed with aristocrats, and opened everything from hospitals and parks to porcelain works and flower shows. Conroy insisted that a royal salute be fired whenever they passed by, an honour normally reserved for the monarch; King William had considered this the height of presumption. He was the reigning monarch. Why should the heir apparent be sent on tour as if the Kent household was already in Buckingham Palace? King William outlawed all salutes other than for him or Queen Adelaide. William was aware too that the ‘unscrupulous and vain’ Conroy was urging that he b
e appointed Victoria’s private secretary and the duchess be made ‘regent’ if the king should die before Victoria turned eighteen, the prescribed age for crowning a monarch.

  As Victoria grew more ill, the last thing the duchess wanted was a prying monarch, with his court and, indeed, the press demanding to know if Victoria—the next in line for the throne of England—was seriously ill. The duchess had contacted Clark about Victoria’s collapse, but he remained unconcerned.The duchess became worried. She consulted Conroy, suggesting a local doctor should be called. Conroy was against it.

  ‘It will be politically dangerous,’ he warned. He too was worried about leaks. If the outside world learned or heard rumours that the princess was ill enough for a local Ramsgate physician to be called, then the king would soon be informed. But Victoria had deteriorated. In desperation, Moses Montefiore, the owner of the Townley House, the estate at which the Kents were ensconced, was contacted. He recommended a doctor friend, who came in the middle of the night. Victoria had become delirious. Rather than examine her, the intimidated local medico suggested rest and departed hastily. Even Conroy by this time was beginning to fret. He could see his hoped-for career evaporating. If Victoria died, he would be left with his wife, their two daughters and an impoverished duchess, who could not afford to keep him running her household. His machiavellian dreams of running a royal court were slipping away with every shorter breath the princess took.

  Lehzen had witnessed Victoria’s mood swings, hunger and growing plumpness over the past three months and dared to consider the possibility that she was heavier not just from overeating. She was aware of her charge’s dalliances with one particular member of the Royal Horse Guards while out riding in London’s parks. It was most unlikely but possible that she was pregnant to him. Lehzen had turned a blind eye to those assignations. Clark finally bustled back to Ramsgate and Lehzen begged him to examine her again.