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12M

p6

Victoria’s Secret

By

Ian O’Shea

 

Synopsis

Title:                         VICTORIA’S SECRET

Volume:                    First of four

Genre:                       Unromantic historical reality

Dedication:               Queen Elizabeth 11 who, since 1952 has provided Britain’s first legitimate monarch in over fifty years.

                                  The benefits from the restoration of the true royal bloodline to the Throne of her Majesty’s forefathers                                              

                                   are self-evident to an unbiased loyal mind.

 

God save the Queen

 

Prince Consort Albert was not the father of Queen Victoria’s eldest son, the future King Edward. Several generations of unwitting impostors reigned over Britain; before a twist of fate restored legitimacy. Because Victoria was able to conceal that her eldest grandchild, the future Kaiser Bill of Germany, was also the true heir to the British Throne.

Albert wanted an Anglo-German royal dynasty. Trying to reveal Victoria’s Secret, Albert telegraphed the French Emperor, after his victory at Solferino. Albert threatened the French would face Britain and Germany united under a single monarch. Overwhelmed by surprise Napoleon 111 sued for peace at Villafranca, throwing away fruits of his victories in

Italy.

Victoria’s Secret had struck its first blow in Europe’s power struggle. Albert’s intrigues were stopped, with his execution by poisoning.

Sequels to this researched, and documented, history will explain

 * How Victoria’s Secret played a key part in the wars to unify Germany.

 *Why Victoria’s Secret drove Kaiser Bill to the madness of the Great War.

 *The depth of the miseries plumbed by the British nation while bereft of a legitimate monarch. The nation suffered, almost beyond endurance, through two World Wars and the Great Depression. How our national fortune changed, with the chance restoration of the first legitimate monarch to reign over us, since the usurpation of 1901, with the accession of our Queen Elizabeth.

God save the Queen

 

Victoria’s Secret

 

Once upon a time a handsome Prince travelled to a neighbouring realm, where he sought the hand in marriage of a beautiful Princess. The Prince was Frederick of Hohenzollern, who as Crown Prince of Prussia, was heir to the most powerful Kingdom in Germany. He was a striking young man, being tall of stature and elegant of manner. Crown Prince Frederick swept his diminutive fifteen-year-old fiancée quite off her feet. She was the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria of England and, sharing her mother’s name, is best known to history as Princess Vicky.

Presented with the supreme test of any maiden’s early existence, which will forever be the acquisition of a suitable husband, the sweet little Princess netted her prey in a single swipe. When her parents formally introduced their daughter to the visiting Prince, the fifteen-year-old girl handled the hesitant conversation around the dining table with surefooted ease. Before the hapless guest left that table, a pair of huge grey blue eyes were making it abundantly clear that they saw nothing but the ensnared visitor who was quickly being addressed, in flawless German, as,

“     My dearest friend- Fritz.”

The whirlwind conquest was over and done in a couple of hours; at dinner at the British Queen’s favourite retreat, Balmoral Castle in the magnificent Highlands of Scotland. --

The original impulse for Princess Vicky to marry Prince Frederick came from her father, Prince Albert who arrived in England, as a penniless Princeling from the tiny German Dukedom of Coburg. Albert grabbed at the opportunity to wed his daughter off to the future King of his homeland’s powerful northern neighbour, the mighty warrior realm of Prussia. Albert rightly guessed that Prussia was well on the way to the domination of Germany; and wanted his own lineage hitched firmly to the Hohenzollern family, which for centuries had ruled the nation that Albert calculated most likely to emerge as the master of continental Europe.

Queen Victoria told her husband, pointedly, and more prophetically than she knew, or would have cared for, that her beloved daughter, Vicky, could be sacrificed in the Prussian lions’ den; for reasons of state. A minor spat, provoked by a Prussian suggestion that the ceremony take place in Berlin, was quashed by the celebrated outburst from Queen Victoria herself, that,

“ It is not every day that one marries the daughter of England’s Queen.”

So London it was to be.

Vicky’s engagement dragged on for over two years, and proved to be a period of profound happiness. The most exhilarating moments that Vicky was to experience throughout her long life came about during the time when she was closeted away with her father, who had undertaken to tutor his daughter in the royal art of governance, and to prepare Vicky to take up her duties as the Queen of Prussia.

Prince Albert began the fateful course of instruction by drawing his daughter’s attention to the big issue at the heart of European politics at the time; the clash between royal autocracy and representative government. For several delirious weeks, they outlined a kind of goodwill campaign on how Princess Vicky would nudge her new husband to a more perfect understanding of the righteousness of the democratic ideal. The tone of selfless rectitude infused Princess Vicky’s daily instruction for over a month, before her father let fall the truth behind their daydreams

Prince Albert opened his heart with a simple revelation; all the more startling for the smooth matter-of-fact tone of voice in which it was delivered. Prince Albert informed his daughter that not only was she heading off to become the Queen of Prussia; she was also first in line to inherit her mother’s throne in Britain. The Princess stared into her father’s tranquil face, speechless. Had she heard this information from any other lips, Vicky would have proclaimed the speaker mad. Prince Albert pressed on. He asked whether Vicky had ever wondered about the true nature of her parents’ marriage. The girl flushed deep, and nodded. A faint catch of emotion infused Prince Albert’s voice as he continued, by asking his daughter whether she had guessed that he was not an entirely suitable husband for her mother; the Queen.

Until the Prince posed his direct question Vicky received her father’s unheralded announcement, in silence with evident astonishment. Without taking her eyes from her father’s benign stare, the Princess whispered,

“ I know that you are a homosexual. I have seen you --- doing it--with the menservants.” The Prince did not flinch. He smiled paternally at his daughter, and observed smoothly that she must therefore be prepared to understand that she was the legitimate issue from her mother’s marriage to him. However, not all of her brothers and sisters were so blessed. His daughter’s composure threatened to disintegrate. A pronounced tick flicked at the corner of her full mouth, and her eyes glistened with tears; which never fell.

In a quavering voice, Princess Vicky murmured, “ So I am, the legitimate heiress to Mama’s Crown.”

Albert’s upper lips curled back, showing a flash of his fine teeth, as he answered abruptly; and emphatically.

“Yes.”

Vicky did not take her unblinking eyes away from her father’s for a fleeting instant. At length she asked, “So, who is the father of my brother Bertie; the Prince of Wales?”

Albert made a short sound; somewhere between a grunt and a guffaw, and snapped, “Lord Harry Temple, the third Viscount Palmerston.”

The Princess stared at her father, wide eyed, and open-mouthed. At length the girl murmured, “What! Old Lord Cupid? With Mama?”

Prince Albert and his daughter quickly came to agreement on the strategy most likely to bring about the result they desired. They would keep quiet about their ace in the hole, which they christened Victoria’s Secret, until a healthy child was born to Vicky and Fritz. Only then would the proud Crown Prince of Prussia, learn of the full patrimony of his offspring.

Victoria’s Prince Consort was good at his job. The image of Albert the Good resides yet, as a universally admired icon, in British folklore. The memory of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s Consort, as an historical figure would have been wholly different, had all of Albert’s feverish hopes for his first grandson come to fruition.

The boy was born, in January 1859, after a long and difficult labour; a breech birth, which both mother and child were extremely fortunate to survive. The extended delay in clearing the infant from his mother’s body left little Prince Willy of Hohenzollern with a withered and useless left arm. Prince Albert could not have felt less concerned if his first grandchild were born with no limbs. All the little boy’s ecstatic grandfather on the distaff side cared to know was that whatever flopped out of his eldest daughter’s womb was graced by a head; on which to set the two crowns of his increasingly frenzied dreams.

That head made heavy weather of its initial emergence into the world, but it survived the ordeal. Albert could not conceal his joy, which led him to make the mistake that killed him.