Every few years, some (usually) deluded soul tries to persuade the newspapers or the courts that he’s a direct descendant of some dead member of the Royal Family or other — invariably from the wrong side of the blanket.
Little wonder, then, that no one paid much attention when Nick Locock took to the law in 2004. Once and for all, he said, he wanted to prove that he was the great-grandson of Princess Louise, the most beautiful — and least conventional — of Queen Victoria’s five daughters.
His claim seemed unlikely, to say the least. If the as yet unmarried princess had indeed given birth secretly to his grandfather, Henry, he was asking us to believe that Queen Victoria — the moral guardian of her era — had colluded to wipe the record clean.
Ravishing: Princess Louise was the fourth daughter and sixth child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert
But Locock, a retired racing commentator from Hampshire, was so convinced that he wanted the court’s permission to retrieve a sample of Henry’s DNA.
This would have involved drilling a hole in his grandfather’s coffin at the Locock family vault in Sevenoaks, Kent, and removing a sample of bone.
After that, Nick maintained, Henry’s DNA could conceivably be compared with an existing DNA sample from one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters. The courts, however, turned down his application, citing ‘the sanctity of Christian burial’.
This left Locock both disappointed and bemused. ‘I wouldn’t mind so much if the very same church hadn’t recently moved about 200 bodies to make way for a coffee shop,’ he said.
And there it all rested, until author Lucinda Hawksley began working on a biography of the lovely Louise — a woman so far ahead of her time that she became a respected sculptor and campaigner for women’s rights.
Family ties: Nick Locock (left) wanted to prove he was the great-grandson of Princess Louise in 2004 (pictured right with Queen Victoria riding on horseback)
Like all researchers into the Royal Family, Hawksley applied to visit the royal archives at Windsor. To her surprise, she was told that Princess Louise’s files were ‘closed’ to the public.
Next, she tried several times to get access to the archives of Louise’s husband’s family — the Argylls — at Inveraray, Scotland, but again she was firmly rebuffed.
Stranger still, she ran against the same brick wall when she asked to see papers connected to people Louise had known — from fellow artists to servants and friends.
And Hawksley wasn’t the only one who wondered what was going on. The archivists she approached at the National Gallery, the Royal Academy and the Victoria & Albert Museum, as well as at various overseas collections in Malta, Bermuda and Canada, were frankly bemused to discover that all the papers she’d requested had been ‘removed’ to Windsor.
By then, Hawksley was all the more determined to get to the bottom of this most tantalising of royal mysteries.
Why, she wanted to know, had the detailed records of the most popular of Victoria’s daughters been locked away in the archives? What was it about her that was deemed too scandalous or dangerous to be revealed?
Fortunately, enough clues remained to untangle Louise’s remarkable story. Victoria made no secret of the fact that she was disappointed in her children. As babies, they bored and even revolted her; as children, they were dressed up like dolls to be formally presented to her a few times a day.
By the time her sixth child and fourth daughter, Louise, came along, the Queen had all but lost interest. For the most part, the tall, flaxen-haired child was either belittled or ignored — a misfortune that evidently marked her deeply.
She reacted by often misbehaving, which led the Queen to dismiss her frequently in her letters and diaries as ‘backward’, ‘difficult’, ‘awkward’, ‘naughty’ or ‘rebellious’.
The legacy of this treatment was that Louise throughout her life had a desperate longing to be noticed.
Princess Louise's (right) purported son Henry Locock (left). Nick Locock maintained his DNA could be compared with a sample from one Queen Victoria's granddaughters to prove he was related
And, at 18, when she flowered into the type of curvaceous, regular-featured, blue-eyed beauty most admired by Victorian men, she was indeed noticed. But was she also seduced?
Lieutenant Walter George Stirling, of the Horse Artillery, had been hired in March 1866 as the latest tutor for her delicate younger brother, Leopold, who was a haemophiliac.
An important addition to the Royal Household, Stirling also joined various family outings, parties and dinners. Leopold blossomed under his care, and there was certainly no sign that Victoria was anything but pleased with the handsome young officer.
Louise, meanwhile, was spending a great deal of time with both her brother and his tutor. So it came as a shock when Stirling was abruptly dismissed from his post just four months later.
The official explanation was that the Queen had decided Leopold needed a tutor more used to dealing with ‘persons of delicate health’.
But this makes little sense, as the boy was promptly placed in the care of a notoriously brutal servant, who regularly abused the prince — extremely dangerous for a child at risk of bleeding to death.
Siblings: Prince Leopold with his sister Princess Louise
So why did Victoria sack Stirling? What we do know is that, shocked at her precipitate action, two of the Queen’s senior advisers — who knew that Stirling was a man of great qualities — suggested she give him an alternative job training another of her sons, Prince Arthur, for the Army. But although Stirling would have been ideal for the job, she refused.
It wasn’t long before the entire Royal Household was in a ferment of gossip about his abrupt departure. But the persistent rumour that he’d actually made Louise pregnant emerged only a year or two later.
Surely, you’d think, someone would have noticed the Princess’s expanding girth? Possibly, but the fashions of the time conspired to make baby bumps all but invisible.
Louise would also have had recourse to one of the special boned corsets for expectant mothers, which were tightly laced to create as small a waist as possible. Muffs and shawls also helped hide a tell-tale bump, as did the fashion for frills, pleats, padding and decoration.
Normally, Louise avoided all of these and, intriguingly, there are many references in 1866 to the fact that her dresses were suddenly highly decorated with ribbons, bows and pleats.
How could the Princess have hidden her pregnancy from her dresser?
Simple: as Victoria herself noted in her diary for autumn 1866, Louise, at this date, did not require servants to help her dress.
She certainly wasn’t her usual self in 1866. That July, Louise wrote to a girlfriend that she was feeling ‘low and sad’. The letter went on: ‘[I] sit in my room and cry. I cannot write and tell you why, there are so many things ought not to be as they are . . . I am expected to agree with them and yet I cannot when I know a thing to be wrong.’
It’s also notable that Louise made few public appearances in the winter of 1866 — and that, when she did, she rarely left her carriage.
Grave: The Locock family vault in the grounds of St. Nicholas's Church in Sevenoaks, Kent
If she was indeed pregnant, her baby would have been born towards the end of that year or the start of the next. All that the available records tell us is that she was apparently back to her slim self by February, when she attended the Opening of Parliament in a dress of white satin.
That same month, her brother, Bertie — the future king — and his wife, Alix, provoked Victoria’s wrath by deciding not to name their newborn daughter after the Queen. Instead, they called her Louise. Was naming the young Princess’s niece after her their way of alleviating Louise’s pain at having to give up her own baby? Certainly, she was reported to be delighted at the tribute.
A few months later, her brother, Prince Arthur, included a cryptic line in a letter to her suggesting he’d mentioned a taboo subject. ‘As to the great secret,’ he wrote, ‘I did not know that I could not mention it to you: of course, I would not speak of it to anybody else.’
Meanwhile, Queen Victoria was fretting. Although Walter Stirling had been sent back to the Royal Horse Artillery — and was later posted overseas — she feared he might be indiscreet.
To her friend Lady Biddulph, the Queen wrote: ‘I dread [Stirling’s] indiscretion & thought to wound’ — an odd thing to write about an upright Army officer who’d come to the Royal Household highly recommended.
Yet despite her obvious animosity towards the young lieutenant, she gave him a pay-off: the official title of Royal Groom — without any duties — and a respectable annuity. Given that Stirling had been Leopold’s tutor for only four months, this seemed an outlandishly generous gesture. In return, however, Victoria was rewarded with his silence.
Buried: Plans were being made by Nick Locock to exhume Henry's body and investigate possible royal connections
So if Louise did have an illegitimate child, what could have become of it?
Naturally, there would have been no question of a Princess of the blood keeping such a baby. And this is where the Locock family comes into the picture.
Sir Charles Locock was Queen Victoria’s accoucheur — or gynaecologist — who’d attended the births of all her children. No one could have been a more natural person for the Queen to turn to if Louise had become pregnant.
His presence, as a senior member of the Royal Household, would have caused no comment; and if he did indeed deliver the Princess’s baby, absolute discretion would have been assured.
Various events in 1867 support a belief that he took a hand in the affair. In the spring, Frederick, one of Sir Charles’s grown-up sons, suddenly moved into a flat near St James’s Palace, which may have been a grace-and-favour apartment. Then Sir Charles’s wife died unexpectedly.
Victorian convention demanded at least a year of mourning — yet Frederick married his fiancee Mary Blackshaw just six weeks after the death of his mother. Four months later, in December, the couple adopted a baby boy.
At around the same time, Sir Charles received a visit from a Lady Stirling — the mother of Lieutenant Walter Stirling, the likely father if Louise had given birth. Not only that, in the very month the child — named Henry — was adopted, his new father Frederick Locock began to receive a large and unexplained allowance.
Indeed, when Frederick died in 1911, he left more than £100,000 — a fortune in those days. Yet he’d never earned anything approaching that amount in his lifetime.
So if Louise did give up a son, did she ever see him again?
According to the Lococks, she visited Henry all through his childhood.
As Lucinda Hawksley discovered, the Princess was known to adore spending time at her country home of Dornden in Kent. Was it coincidence that the house next door was owned by Sir Charles Locock — and that little Henry and his adoptive parents were regular visitors?
As he grew up, Nick Locock — the man who later brought the court case — found that he wasn’t the only Locock child to have been told that his grandfather Henry’s natural mother was Princess Louise.
‘Subsequently,’ he told Hawksley, ‘I realised that not only my brother and sister, but each of my 11 cousins had been told the same story by their parents.’
Family: Princess Louise and her younger brother Leopold pictured in 1886
Clearly, Henry had told each of his own children that his mother was Princess Louise.
If he’d been a fantasist, you’d expect his adoptive father Frederick to have denied Henry’s claims — but he never did, simply maintaining a discreet silence.
What’s more, the Locock family still have in their possession a number of artefacts from the Royal Family. One of these is a bronze sculpture of a baby given to Sir Charles by Victoria, which may well have been made by the Princess.
There’s also a photograph of Henry as a baby in a special frame, hand-decorated in a style, according to Hawksley, that suggests Louise, an accomplished artist, may have painted it herself.
After Henry grew up, he married and had six children. Sadly, he died young in 1907 after falling out of a train in Canada.
The story was that he’d gone to Canada to buy land. But, by a strange coincidence, Walter Stirling — his possible natural father — had emigrated to Canada: was Henry on a mission to find him?
Six months after Henry’s death, a trust fund of nearly £60,000 was mysteriously set up for his six children — money the Locock family have always assumed came from the Princess.
As for Louise, she’d been bullied by her mother into marrying the son of the 8th Duke of Argyll — who turned out to be homosexual. The couple had no children.
Although Hawksley wasn’t granted access to the Argyll archives, she’s been told by a researcher who has seen them that they contain a letter from Queen Victoria to the duke. Written before the wedding, it states that Louise is ‘barren’.
How could the Queen possibly have known that?
The likeliest explanation is that complications had occurred during Henry’s birth which made it impossible for the Princess to have another successful pregnancy.
For many years, both before and after her unfortunate marriage, Louise enjoyed a sexual relationship with one of the top sculptors of the day, Joseph Edgar Boehm. As Hawksley’s biography reveals, Boehm almost certainly died in the Princess’s arms while they were making love — another affair that was quickly hushed up.
An accomplished flirt, Louise also narrowly avoided being involved in another scandal when she became too close for comfort to the good-looking husband of her younger sister, Beatrice.
In short, there can be no doubt at all that the Princess’s long life — she died aged 91 — has been deliberately sanitised and edited for public consumption.
Yet with so many papers relating to Louise still under lock and key, there’s still no conclusive proof that she gave birth to an illegitimate child. True, plenty of circumstantial evidence suggests that she did — but, as Hawksley recommends, you must make up your own mind.
Source-Dailymail
