Born in 1864 as the second person in line to become the heir of the British throne, Prince Albert Victor, the grandson of Queen Victoria, actually never lived to that day. Eddy, as many preferred calling him, died at 28 much before his grandmother and father.
Ever since his death, many have made unsubstantiated claims that the prince was in fact Jack the Ripper, a mysterious serial killer who took the lives of at least five London women in 1888.
The parents to Albert Victor, the first born, were Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, and Alexandra, Princess of Wales, who was from Denmark.
He got his education both from private tutors and at Trinity College, Cambridge after which he became part of the British army at a tender age.
Even before associating his name with Jack the Ripper, the princes was already linked with a Cleveland Street male brothel. The scandal became public in 1889 and speculation was that the Prince secretly visited the brothel. The local newspapers desisted from associating his name with the scandal but foreign publications are said to have reported it.
Prince Albert Victor Never wed
The prince died a bachelor. He made a marriage proposal to Princess Alix of Hesse, his first cousin and got rejected. She would later on get married to Nicholas II, Russia’s last czar.
After the rejection of his proposal, he romantically got involved with Princess Helene, a Roman Catholic whose father was an exiled French count.
The country’s rules at that time blocked British royals from marrying Catholics and so his pleas to Queen Victoria and the Pope went unheard. He at one time wanted to give up his right to the throne so as to get married but the couple eventually ended their relationship.
His marriage journey finally began to seem to have come to a good ending when he got engaged to Princess Mary of Teck but before the wedding could take place, he fell ill and died in 1892, January.
The Queen’s Death
Queen Victoria’s death happened in 1901 and Prince Albert Victor’s father, who was crowned Edward VII, ascended the throne. The monarch died in 1910 and Prince Albert’s younger brother, George became king. In 1893 he married Mary of Teck.
The 20th century saw many speculate that Prince Albert Victor was Jack the Ripper and got into the condition due to a mental illness resulting from syphilis. This is a debunked theory but the Prince remains among the top suspects of the unsolved killings.
