Long before her successful marriage to Prince Albert, Princess Victoria had a passionate affair with a dashing Scotsman. The 13th Lord Elphinstone was a trusted member of her uncle King William IV’s household and a nobleman – but despite his impressive pedigree, Elhinstone was neither German nor royal, prerequisites for the 15 year old princess’s ambitious mother, the Duchess of Kent. As the revelations of Victoria’s out of wedlock affair (and the rumoured child that the union produced) would have threatened her reign, attempts were made to bury the matter forever. Elphinstone was appointed Governor of Madras and effectively banished to India. The young princess never forgot her first love; she pined for five years before giving in to her mother and marrying Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg.  Successive generations of Royals kept Victoria’s secret, aware that the Queen;s correspondence with her cherished first-born ‘Vicky’ (the Princess Royal) revealed all and lay like a ticking time bomb in a German castle attic In 1945, Victoria’s great-grandson  King George IV sent Royal favourite (and MI5 operative) Anthony Blunt on  seven special missions to recover the letters. But Blunt was one of history’s successful double agents; before returning the letters to Buckingham Palace he microfilmed the most controversial missives and passed them on to the KGB. Perry  learnt of Blunt’s actions while interviewing two ex-KGB master spies in Moscow in the 1990s.His mission to uncover the story of Victoria’s first love saw him spending months combing through more than 300 heavily edited files in the British Library, piecing together the truth of Victoria’s secret for the first time.   Here is a surprising true story of passion, long-buried secrets and international espionage.  With balck and white and colour photographs.