Prince Alfred

A carte-de-visite portrait of Prince Alfred (1844-1900) Duke of Edinburgh, second son of Queen Victoria. The portrait shows him seated in front of a studio backdrop depicting the deck of a ship.

Prince Alfred (‘Affie’), Duke of Edinburgh, was born in 1844 at Buckingham Palace, the 4th child of Queen Victoria, and the only one not born at Windsor. The Queen wrote when he was only a year old that Alfred was the possessor of a ‘very good manly temper’ which he reportedly retained for the rest of his life. In 1867-68 he made an extended tour of Australia where he was the victim of an unsuccessful assassination attempt by a Fenian, an Irishman named Henry James O’Farrell, at Clondarf in New South Wales on 12 March 1868. O’Farrell was hanged the following month. In 1874 Prince Alfred married Maria Alexandrovna, Grand Duchess of Russia. In 1893 he succeeded his uncle Ernest II as reigning Duke of Saxe-Coburg & Gotha. Prince Alfred died 30 July 1900 at Schloss Rosenau, near Coburg.

Prince Alfred was the first serious stamp collector in the royal family and was Honorary President of what is now the Royal Philatelic Society from 1890 until his death. Before he died, he sold his collection to his elder brother the Prince of Wales.

Photographed by the London Stereoscopic and Photographic Company.