Finishing his latest book, The Queen, Her Lover and the Most Notorious Spy in History, Australian author Roland Perry felt certain of one thing: "There will be a lot of matrons in Toorak and Vaucluse who will be harrumphing into their martinis over this."
Perry's 28th book, which he describes as dramatised non-fiction, recounts the story of the then 15-year-old Princess Victoria and her secret love affair with a Scottish earl, 12 years her senior.
If found out, the out-of-wedlock affair between Victoria and Lord Elphinstone (and the rumoured child the two produced) would have threatened the reign of Victoria and the house of Windsor. The establishment's fear of the relationship being revealed was enough to see Elphinstone effectively exiled to India, to become the governor of Madras.
Successive generations of Royals carried Victoria's secret, which had been logged meticulously in Queen Victoria's correspondence with her first-born "Vicky," who around age 17 had an arranged marriage to a Prussian prince and became her mother's grestest confidante.
To Perry there is one clear reason the story has never truly been told.
"I find historians ignore information that doesn't suit them or their agenda. In this case it did not suit the establishment for this information to be exposed in the way I have, a long time on," he says.
The Melbourne-based author, who has also worked as a journalist and a documentary filmmaker, came across the story as a result of his "odd expertise".
"I'm the only author in the world who's bothered, who's silly enough to do two massive biographies on members of the Cambridge Five ring of spies. That's where the expertise came in."
It was in 1993 and 1996, while interviewing ex-KGB agents in Russia for his two books The Fifth Man and Last of the Cold War Spies that Perry learned of a cache of royal correspondence that had been microfilmed by British double agent Anthony Blunt.
An espionage agent working for MI5 and secretly controlled by the KGB, Blunt was sent by George VI to retrieve the Victoria-Vicky letters, along with "any letters and memoranda of conversations between Edward VIII and Hitler and top Nazis".
"That information was deadly," says Perry. "If it had come out that Queen Victoria had had a red-hot affair and wasn't this pristine po-faced figure, on top of Edward VIII dealing with the Nazis, post-war, that would have been the end of the house of Windsor."
The book emphasises that there was no doubt about Queen Victoria's sexual nature. "Even the grovelling biographers have admitted she was, shall we say, highly sexed," says Perry, who believes this chapter of Queen Victoria's life changes her image completely.
Amid her romantic relations and her steep learning curve in diplomacy, the Queen Victoria Perry paints is an amorous individual, who was willful and strong in breaking from her mother's control at 15.
After the initial tip-off Perry received in his dealings with ex-KGB agents he spent months in the Lord Elphinstone archive in the British Library in London, trawling through the 309 files on offer.
The story is there if you want it, says Perry, referring to the archive's collection of letters, newspapers and files confirming Queen Victoria and Lord Elphinstone's relationship.
"If given direction a 12-year-old could get the information required. The newspapers were absolutely replete with it. I even found something in the Hobart Examiner from 1838."
Perry's best known works are his biography Don Bradman and Monash: The Outsider Who Won The War, for which he won the Fellowship of Australian Writers' Melbourne University Publishing Award in 2004. He was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia in 2011.
He says his book on General Sir John Monash is the most important he has done because he believes Monash to be "the greatest achieving Australian of all time". But he puts his broad interest in history down to chance.
"I stumble, I'm a stumbler. I'm certainly street-smart compared to most academics, because I'm not an academic in essence."
As dramatised non-fiction, Perry's latest book colours the historical narrative with reenactment, but the author stresses it is all based on fact.
"I'm very careful to stick within the integrity of events as I know them. It's all in her diaries, what he said, she said. All I did was reconstruct," he says, adding that he had good contacts within the palace system.
"It's not just pulled out of my head, but yes, it is a very curious business."
The Queen, Her Lover and the Most Notorious Spy in History
Roland Perry
Allen & Unwin, $32.99
