A sudden intolerably bright fireball lights up a remote and deserted Indian plateau. Searing heat melts rock into incandescent pools of glowing liquid. The earth heaves. A monstrous thunderclap of sound reverberates over the land. An ominous mushroom-shaped cloud boils skywards. For years afterwards, strange plants and even stranger human mutants are discovered in the area, warped spawn of a mysterious and deadly force. Just another atomic test? Not exactly. Because it was Professor Huxtable's brainchild. And the professor is one of the most devoted and loyal servants of Queen Victoria...
The intensely revealing and entertaining account of a great royal secret and hidden love story - an unbuttoned history of Queen Victoria's loves and intrigues.
The intensely revealing and entertaining account of a great royal secret and hidden love story - an unbuttoned history of Queen Victoria's loves and intrigues. Long before her successful marriage to Prince Albert, Princess Victoria had an affair with the dashing Scottish 13th Lord Elphinstone. After the liaison was exposed, Elphinstone was banished to India, appointed Governor of Madras, which allowed Victoria's mother to engineer a royal union for her with Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg. After five years pining for Elphinstone, Victoria finally gave in and married Albert. Despite a successful marriage, Victoria never forgot Elphinstone and after a decade in India he returned to her side as Lord-in-Waiting at Court. He only left her to take up the critical role of Governor of Bombay during the Indian Uprising of 1857. Elphinstone died soon after in June 1860 from a fever. Many attempts were made to bury the memory of Lord Elphinstone, his long-running relationship with the monarch and his grand service for the Empire, but Victoria recorded it in letters to her confidant, her first- born, the Princess Royal: 'Vicky'. The revealing correspondence, like a ticking time-bomb, sat in a German castle attic until 1945 when King George VI, Victoria's great-grandson, sent a courtier, MI5 operative Anthony Blunt, on seven special missions to gather the letters.
Queen Victoria's death, in January 1901, was an immense shock that unsettled Britain and the Empire to a degree that now seems inconceivable. She had been Queen for 63 years; people wept in the streets, and a million onlookers lined the route of her funeral procession in London. What would the country do without her?
Alexander III called Victoria ‘a pampered, sentimental, selfish old woman,’ while to her he was a sovereign whom she could not regard as a gentleman. But the Queen's son and two of her granddaughters married Romanovs.
First published in 1981, this is Ronald Clark's engagingly readable account of Queen Victoria's relationship with "Our dear Balmoral" and the life that went on there. The biography of Balmoral begins with the first visit to Scotland of the young Queen Victoria and her husband Prince Albert in 1842. Five years later, while bad weather envelops the Royal party in western Scotland, the son of the Queen's physician, convalescing in Old Balmoral, reports blazing sunshine from Upper Deeside. The death of his host shortly afterwards opens the way for the Royal acquisition of the Balmoral estate and the building of the new Castle in 1853-55. In the period up to Albert's death in 1861 Balmoral becomes the setting for many of the Royal couple's happiest moments as they revel in the beauties of the scenery, relish the picturesque pageantry of Highland life, enjoy their incognito expeditions into the surrounding country, and - in Albert's case - discover a passionate enthusiasm for deer-stalking. After the Prince Consort's death Balmoral becomes a mausoleum of memories, but also a source of strength enabling the Queen to survive her devastating loss. About the time of the Golden Jubilee of 1887 there is an Indian summer, with members of the Queen's extensive family rallying round and dances and entertainments displacing some of the black-crepe gloom. In 1896 there is the colorful visit of the Tsar, with his wife and daughter. The closing section links Victorian Balmoral with the life of the Castle today.
