The Victorian Era was a time of dramatic change. Industrialization was changing everything from
transportation to work to our very home life. The first ever railroad from London to Birmingham was
built, the telephone was invented, and all kinds of other machines were changing our way of life,
especially in the fields of cooking and medicine. But Victorian England was still anything but
clean. Most of the country would fail horribly with anything resembling a modern-day health code
inspection. The streets were dirty, and in many ways, the leaders were even filthier. Welcome
back to Nutty History. Today, we’re exploring some filthy secrets of Victorian Era leaders.
When we look back at the Victorian Era and the aristocrats that made up the ruling class,
we often think of prim and proper people, well-dressed, polite, and scornful of anything
overtly improper. In short, they were prudes. But there was a seedier, more adulterous, wild side to
these aristocrats, who played the part of refined, controlled gentlemen and women in public, but in
private led much more debauched lives. A secret society called “The Souls” was formed in 1885 in
order to help the elite and artistically-inclined explore this side of themselves. The Souls hated
the restrictive formalities of Victorian culture and etiquette, the restrictions
the culture placed on the passions, and the separation between men and women. All pretty
progressive ideas, really. One of the society’s members, writer Wilfred Blunt, wrote that:
“It was a group of men and women bent on pleasure, but pleasure of a superior kind, eschewing the
vulgarities of racing and card-playing indulged in by the majority of the rich and noble,
and looking for their excitement in romance and sentiment.” There were quite a few high-ranking
British politicians who were members of The Souls, including Arthur Balfour, who served as Prime
Minister from 1902 to 1905, George Wyndham, the Chief Secretary of Ireland, and George Curzon, the
Viceroy of India. Getting around was commonplace among The Souls, and women often bore children out
of wedlock– a big no-no in Victorian society at the time. There were still rules within The Souls,
however. A married woman bearing the child of her lover could be easily covered up,
but if she was single, it was a problem. Scandal erupted in the early 1890s after it was revealed
that two unmarried members of The Souls, Harry Cust, a British MP, and Nina Welby-Gregory,
a writer and daughter of a prominent politician, Sir William Welby-Gregory, were set to have
a child. Harry was in love with another woman, but was pressured by Arthur Balfour,
the future prime minister, to marry Nina. Word got out about the ordeal, and a public morality
campaign was mounted against Harry to oust him from parliament. It was ultimately unsuccessful.
Cust went on to continue his womanizing ways, and was reportedly the grandfather of Margaret
Thatcher through a secret relationship with a servant, though this fact is still up for dispute.
One of the biggest scandals of the Victorian Era, if it’s true, revolves around Queen Victoria
herself, and whether or not the Queen for which the era was named was actually a legitimate queen
in the first place. Victoria became heir and eventually queen through the bloodline
of her father, Prince Edward, the Duke of Kent. However, some, including historian A.N. Wilson,
in his book, “The Victorians,” has cast doubt on who the queen’s father actually was. One of the
main pieces of evidence that Queen Victoria may have been illegitimate has to do with a genetic
disease called hemophilia. Hemophilia, a disease that impairs the body’s ability to clot blood,
can be passed down to offspring by either the father or the mother. It wasn’t present
in any of Victoria’s ancestors, yet it was found in many of her own descendants,
leading Wilson and others to speculate that Victoria’s mother, a German princess who
became the Duchess of Kent through her marriage to Prince Edward, had an affair. One of the
leading candidates for who the real baby daddy could have been is a guy named John Conroy.
Conroy was a British Army officer who rose up the ranks and eventually became comptroller
to Victoria’s mother, comptroller being a fancy word for a guy in charge of financial decisions.
His presence eventually became unwelcome, and when Victoria came of age and became Queen,
she quickly had him expelled from the royal court. Did the new Queen simply not like the man? Or was
it something more…personal? It's a controversial claim. Critics argue that hemophilia can also
arise spontaneously in children of older fathers, and Queen Victoria’s assumed father, Prince
Edward, was 51 when she was born. A.N. Wilson, the historian who made the most public claim about the
alleged affair, himself walked his theory back later, saying he did see physical resemblances
between Queen Victoria and her grandfather on Prince Edward’s side, King George III.
Henry John Temple, AKA Lord Palmerston, was one of Britain’s most influential politicians,
and perhaps Britain’s most prolific lady’s man. He served two stints as Prime Minister,
the first from 1855-1858 and the second less than a year later,
from 1859-1865. He was known for his decisive and shrewd foreign policy decisions, and maybe the
most influential of which was his insistence on taking Sevastopol during the Crimean War,
a move that cut off the Russians from the Black Sea and its valuable trade routes for the next
150 years, and a move that is very much related to the current events in the region today. Lord
Palmerston was also pretty decisive in the bedroom. He definitely got around, and married
pretty late in his 50s, to a woman named Emily Lamb, a widow to a guy named, deep breath, Peter
Leopold Louis Francis Nassau Clavering-Cowper, who kicked the bucket in 1837. Although Emily was a
widow when she remarried, she and Palmerston had allegedly been seeing each other for some time,
and a few of the children she had with…let’s just call him Cowper…were said to have come
from Palmerston. As prime minister, Palmerston helped pass the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857,
which made divorce legal for the first time, a fitting cause for a man who,
while he himself didn’t end up getting a divorce, he did have a string of affairs afterwards,
gaining a reputation that led to the London Times newspaper to dub him “Lord Cupid”.
Some might say that the name Prince Albert has a nice ring to it. Literally. The husband of Queen
Victoria was rumored to have a piercing where the sun didn't shine, on his “member” of parliament.
The point of the piercing was apparently to hide his “ member”, to avoid the unsightly bulge that
was considered unfashionable in the Victorian Era. Others have speculated that it was to correct a
condition called Peyronie’s Disease, which causes pain when a man gets excited…you get the picture ,
and the piercing could’ve been an attempt to correct it. Prince Albert’s ring remains in the
realm of rumor, though. But it hasn’t stopped the style from taking on his name. Go into a tattoo
and piercing shop and ask for a Prince Albert, and you’ll either be told to leave or told to
prepare yourself. Good luck with it! Despite their public personas of piety and courtly self-control,
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert – who were first cousins, by the way – had a decidedly more
intimate relationship behind closed doors. One of those doors was the door to their bedroom at their
summer home on the Isle of Wight, where the royal couple reportedly had a mechanical lock placed
on the door which allowed them to lock it from the bed so they could, well you know…. Her love
for her cousin was very apparent in how she wrote about him in her diary. One entry reads: “I NEVER,
NEVER spent such an evening!!! MY DEAREST DEAREST DEAR Albert…his excessive love and affection gave
me feelings of heavenly love and happiness I never could have hoped to have felt before!”
While the queen’s relationship with her husband was, by all accounts, one of mutual love and
respect, the same can’t be said of Victoria’s relationship with her nine children. She’s been
described by some historians as an awful mother who was super controlling and viewed her kids less
as individuals and more as extensions of herself. The Queen reportedly didn’t allow her youngest
daughter, Beatrice, to marry, instead wishing that Beatrice live with her into old age as her
companion. It didn’t work out the way Victoria wanted, though. Beatrice secretly got engaged,
and when the queen found out, she didn’t speak to her daughter for six months, and only mended
the relationship after Beatrice promised to continue living with her after the marriage.
Another of Queen Victoria’s children would eventually become her successor,
King Edward VII. However, the queen’s relationship to “Bertie”, as he was nicknamed,
was a pretty toxic one. She blamed the death of her beloved husband on Bertie,
who as a child and young adult, and in fact most of his adult life, rebelled against the strictness
with which he was raised. Victoria called her son “backward” and “lazy”, saying rude remarks like,
“I never can or shall look on him without a shudder”. The Queen’s contempt for her son led her
to exclude him from any involvement in government during her 60-year reign. So, with not much to do,
mommy issues, and a lot of money to play with, Bertie turned to a life of pleasure. He became
a socialite playboy of sorts in France. He helped make Cannes the upper-crust resort town that it
is today. He was the first guest invited to the top of the Eiffel tower. He frequented cabaret
shows in Paris where Moulin Rouge was born. And he had many, many relationships. Historians have
linked him to at least 55 women. While the young prince was able to keep a lot of them secret,
one managed to make headlines. Sir Charles Mordaunt, a prominent British MP, accused
Bertie in a divorce filing after he found him with his wife, Lady Mordaunt. Divorce, remember, had
just recently become legal thanks to Lord Cupid. Bertie was able to brush the scandal off pretty
easily – his charisma was enough to help the public forget about his less-than-traditional love
life. Lady Mordaunt ended up being the one who was hurt the most by the whole ordeal. In the divorce
proceedings, her lawyers justified her adultery as an act of “hysteria”; that all-encompassing word
used so broadly – and incorrectly – to describe women’s behavior at the time. Lady Mordaunt spent
the rest of her life in seclusion, and her family eventually moved her to an insane asylum, where
she stayed until her passing. What other filthy secrets of Victorian Era leaders do you know of?
Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget to like and subscribe for more Nutty History!