Prince Albert's Sceptre

Since I started writing about Queen Victoria and Prince Albert there are two questions I am asked without fail. The first is, did Queen Victoria have an affair with her Highland Servant John Brown ?( my answer to that is in a later post ) and the second is about a.. ahem.. genital piercing called a ‘ Prince Albert’, could there a connection to the wedding tackle of the Prince Consort? My answer to that question has always been a firm No, that is an urban myth posited by the prurient ( while enjoying the alliteration). But thanks to the eagle eye of my Gay Best Friend, ( a connoisseur both of royalty and the male form) I have come to think again.

The GBF was watching a tv documentary about Prince Albert ( he is ,as I said , a connoisseur of royalty) in which I appeared as a talking head . But it wasn’t my words that aroused his interest, it was the photographs of the Royal family at Osborne running under my pontifications. In particular one photograph of the entire family - Victoria, Albert and their eight children ( the last Beatrice was born in 1857). Albert is standing on the left leaning against the parapet, and my GBF ‘s eagle eye was drawn to the ‘ humungous bulge’ ( his words) in Albert’s trousers. ‘ No wonder Victoria liked him so much!!!” I examined the photograph ( the one in this post ) in question and, as always, my GBF was correct. If you were looking for such a thing ( I am more of a face girl myself) you could hardly fail to notice that the Queen’s husband had a sceptre of his very own. No wonder that young queen wrote of her fiancé in her diary entry of November 19th 1839, “ my dearest Albert looked so beautiful in his full dress uniform…. tight white cashmere breeches, nothing under them , and high boots.” The italics are mine, but I think Victoria’s meaning is unmistakeable.

Victoria was not disappointed when she came to sample the merchandise, writing in her diary about her wedding night in a delirious post coiital swoon, “ I never, ever knew such happiness.” Even though both parties were virgins on their wedding night, it seems that inexperience was no drawback to the royal couple. They married on the 10th February 1840, and their first child Victoria was born exactly nine months and eleven days later. This was a source of great annoyance to Victoria who was hoping to have a lot more ‘ fun in bed’ as she called it, before becoming a mother. Given that sex in pregnancy was considered inadvisable at the time, she must have been constantly torn between lust and the inevitable consequences, six of them in the first eight years of her marriage. It’s a shame that Victoria had such an aversion to breastfeeding as that would have spaced her pregnancies , but I suspect that she couldn’t wait to get back into bed with Albert. I have argued here that their marriage was not in fact the idyll that her diaries suggest , but while Albert may have exerted control over Victoria in many ways, he certainly wasn’t forcing her to have sex with him. Quite the reverse, Victoria hated it if they were separated even for a night. It was Albert, not Victoria who decided that the risk to her mental health was too great for her to risk having another child after the birth of Princess Beatrice in 1857. Victoria’s reaction was ‘ What no more fun in bed, Doctor?” The remaining four years of their marriage were not easy. I have always wondered about the marble replica of Albert’s hand with its outstretched forefinger that Victoria always slept with after she became a widow at the age of forty two.

But what of the Prince Albert piercing? This is not a search term that anyone of a squeamish disposition ( I include myself in that category) should enter into their search engine. There are some things you just can’t unsee. But in an age before Y fronts, boxers, or briefs, how was a man of Albert’s stature to wear the tight fitting trousers of the day without revealing the extent of his endowment. Beau Brummel, the famous Regency dandy, apparently concealed the size of his manhood with a ring attached to his penis that could tether it inside his breeches. For Brummel elegance was all. Judging by the Caldesi photograph of the Royal family reproduced here, I doubt that Prince Albert had as yet employed this solution. Perhaps he was a bit squeamish about having a genital piercing and preferred to go au naturel. It is possible that as his hairline receded he may have chosen to let the world know that his virility was unimpaired. Indeed one could conjecture that his eagerness to embrace the new photographic technology might have been a way of signalling to the nation that he had some serious Crown Jewels of his own. Who can say? My GBF is convinced that after that photograph was put on public view, somebody must have taken him aside and had a quiet word about the Beau Brummel Stratagem. He also comments that once Prince Albert had had a Prince Albert, he would have been even more irresistible to his wife. I couldn’t possibly comment.

Biography is so often conjecture disguised as confident narrative, but in this case I think that the physical evidence is what you might call a hard fact ( please check my source at the Royal Collection if you think there might be some digital funny business). Even if Prince Albert didn’t in fact have a Prince Albert, it is now pretty clear ,,to me anyway, why such a piercing would have been named after him.

Apologies to anyone who has found this post unnecessarily salacious, but when it comes to Victoria and Albert, size does matter.

If you would like to see my play about Victoria and Albert’s marriage Victoria : A Queen Unbound you can book here https://www.watermill.org.uk/events/victoria. I is on till May 9th

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