How English, Russian and Prussian imperial children rocked Europe with love scandals

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

Scandalous romances of sons and daughters of royal families with commoners seem to be the realities of the twenty-first century. Not like in the old days: everyone got married peacefully, and then they had favorites or favorites. But in reality, the history of the monarchy is full of high-profile (or carefully muted) premarital scandals, in the center of which were princes and princesses.

Queen Victoria's dissolute daughters

The legendary queen of Britain herself is known for her puritanical views and love for traditional family values, but her children seemed to be annoyed by these values by adolescence. Many princes have been seen for premarital affairs, but this is not so bad. At least two princesses have had affairs with completely inappropriate persons.

Queen Victoria's third daughter, Helena, was known for her active philanthropic work. Helen founded the Royal School of Handicrafts, was president of the Royal British Nurses Association, and has patronized many charities. But she still had enough strength and energy to have an affair with her late father's librarian, German Karl Ruhland.

Her little weather sister Louise was an ardent feminist. She painted very well, but the family considered the career of the artist she dreamed of unworthy of Louise's origin. She also danced wonderfully and was famous for her sharp mind. The atmosphere created by the mother in the family repulsed Louise so much that, although she greatly grieved for her father, she refused to hold official mourning along with the entire court.

While her mother was sorting out suitors, figuring out how best to "invest" her daughters, Louise fell in love with her brother Leopold's teacher, a priest named Robinson Duckworth. He was fourteen years older than Louise. Victoria herself, before the wedding, was in love with a man much older, but she did not understand her daughter's novel and, as soon as the connection became noticeable, she urgently dismissed the teacher.

After each revealed romance of the daughters, the queen married off as quickly as possible. Helen was married to her second cousin, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein. He was fifteen years older than the bride and was already seriously balding. The main condition for the wedding was Christian's move to Britain - the queen was not going to let her daughters go. Christian agreed and, oddly enough, Elena was happy with him. This did not stop her from getting addicted to opium.

Louise herself did not want to leave Britain and, when she was harshly faced with the question of a groom, chose John Campbell, the future Duke of Argyll. But her choice was scandalous almost as much as falling in love with a priest-teacher: the last time a marriage between a representative of the royal family and a subject, even a noble one, was recognized in the sixteenth century. However, the queen gave the go-ahead, separately noting that at least someone in the family would not marry a relative.

Alas, this marriage did not allow Louise to stay in her home country: Argyll was appointed to serve in Canada, and his wife had to go after him. In Canada, the princess shocked the local elite by making her techniques open to anyone with a suit. One of the customers complained that he had a chance to dance next to the grocer!

Grand dukes

The brother of two Russian emperors, Alexander I and Nicholas I, Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich became famous not only for his bad temper, but also for the specific forms of his love. Even before the wedding, he announced to the bride brought to Russia at six in the morning and made him play marches on the piano until breakfast, while he himself pounded on the drum. After the wedding, he mocked his wife both physically and mentally.

The prince also liked to feel like a ladies' man. He constantly screwed up, as he believed, women - although in reality many were simply afraid to refuse him. Not knowing the character of Konstantin Pavlovich, the wife of a Frenchman, Madame Araujo, once refused him. As revenge, the Grand Duke organized her gang rape of such cruelty that the unfortunate woman died a few hours after she was taken home and thrown there in the hall. The scandal was hushed up by the efforts of Alexander I.

The grandson of Nicholas I, Nikolai Konstantinovich, was madly in love with the American actress Fanny Lear. In order to shower his beloved with gifts, he robbed his own family, picking out three diamonds from the frame of the family icon and placing them in a pawnshop. When the investigation found out who was the impudent thief, Nicholas Roerich did not show a single drop of shame, guilt or remorse, which stunned everyone even more than the fact of theft itself.

Publicly, the Grand Duke was declared insane, but in fact the family did not doubt his sanity. The Grand Duke was erased from the history of the family, he no longer had the right of inheritance, his name was no longer mentioned in documents relating to the Imperial House. He was also stripped of all titles and awards and exiled without the right to return to the capital at any time in his life.

Kaiser's son-in-law

The younger sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II, Princess Victoria, being widowed, did not wish, according to custom, to keep mourning all her life. In 1927, she married a certain Alexander Zubkov, a rogue who pretended to be a fugitive Russian nobleman. Alexander was not bad at himself and thirty-four years younger than the princess, so it is not surprising that she chose to believe him and become Madame Zubkova.

But right after the wedding, the hubby showed an unkind disposition and, moreover, took possession of all Victoria's property. In the end, he was expelled from Germany in what he was, but he got a job in a restaurant in Luxembourg and lived happily ever after: out of curiosity, visitors actively went to look at the son-in-law of the last German Kaiser. To let the public know who is serving the table, there was a poster on the restaurant.

By the way, in his youth, as a prince, the Kaiser himself found himself in a very uncomfortable situation. His mistress Emily Klopp, much older than Prince William, undertook to blackmail the young man with photographs and notes that he inadvertently sent her. She wanted money, of course. The Prussian crown paid her twenty-five thousand marks, but this did not diminish Klopp's greed, and from time to time she still reminded of herself, shaking with old compromising evidence.

Read also: "Kings Can Do Anything": The Most Scandalous Unequal Marriages in European History.