Free Royal Babylon by Karl Shaw Page A

laid out on his bed. She commissioned a portrait of her daughter Alice painted as a nun in the presence of a vision of the recently deceased Albert.
    Her closest adviser and mentor, Baron Stockmar, was convinced that Victoria had become mentally unhinged. He recalled that on the death of her own mother the Queen’s reaction had been similarly intense, albeit more briefly. The Queen was also ahypochondriac—a classic symptom of a manic-depressive personality. She would summon her personal physician up to half a dozen times a day with various imaginary complaints, usually concerning her digestive system. When her doctor was on his honeymoon he was surprised to receive a note from his Queen informing him “the bowels are acting fully.”
    Queen Victoria was known to have been highly sensitive about her grandfather George III. Both she and Prince Albert lived in perpetual dread that the hereditary illness would strike against their own children. When they had their eldest son’s bumps felt by a leading “expert” in phrenology, it appeared to confirm their worst fears. Sir George Combe examined the Prince’s cranium and gravely pronounced that their poor boy had inherited the shape of his brain from the “mad” King George III “and all that this implied.”
TWENTIETH-CENTURY WINDSORS
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    No one has yet suggested that Edward VII was insane, although considering the disastrous education he received it is a wonder that he wasn’t driven mad. Quite what modern psychoanalysis would have made of his compulsive-obsessive behavior, including his record of sleeping with over 1,500 women, or his shooting or his eating habits, not to mention his lifelong hobby of recording the weight of everyone who visited Sandringham, is another question.
    Edward VII and his wife, Alexandra, raised lackluster children whose general educational standard was well below average. The eldest, Prince Eddie, was by any standards a half-wit. The royal family were desperate to conceal the fact that the heir to thethrone was mentally infirm, but recognized that he couldn’t be hidden from the world forever and went to great lengths to prepare him for Cambridge. England’s finest tutors were hired and quickly concurred that a university education would be a complete waste of effort. Their report concluded damningly: “He hardly knows the meaning of the words ‘to read.’         ”
    After a predictably disastrous spell at Cambridge, Eddie was made a lieutenant in the Tenth Hussars, where his stupidity quickly became all too apparent. One day, while he was in dinner conversation seated next to his great-uncle the Duke of Cambridge, Commander-in-Chief of the British army, Prince Eddie casually revealed that the Crimean War was something of a mystery to him and that he had never actually heard of the battle of Alma. His brief military career was, like his academic training had been, in the words of his father, “simply a waste of time.”
    Queen Elizabeth II’s uncles all grew up to be either physically or psychologically challenged. The youngest, Prince John, showed signs of mental infirmity from an early age and was isolated from the rest of the royal family until his death at the age of fourteen. Prince Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, also had diminished mental faculties. He was neurotic, physically very frail and knock-kneed, had a squeaky voice and was prone to giggling fits or bursting into tears for no apparent reason. Known in family circles as “Poor Harry,” he was politely described as “slow.” In old age the Duke took refuge in his favorite pastime, watching children’s television. He once kept King Olav of Norway waiting for half an hour because he couldn’t be torn away from an episode of
Popeye
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    The Prince of Wales, later the Duke of Windsor, was in appearance like a slightly more