of Schleswig Holstein
Christle was the first member of the Royal Family to attend to school instead of being educated by a tutor at home. He studied at Wellington College, which made Queen Victoria very happy since Prince Albert had helped to establish this institution many years before.. At Wellington, he played for the college First Eleven in 1883 and was captain of the cricket team in 1885. He also studied at Magdalene College, Oxford and at Sandhurst, where he was captain of the cricket team too. Christle's brother, Albert, was forced to go to Germany to inherit the dukedom of Schleswig Holstein Sonderburg Augustenburg, since his cousin, Duke Ernest Gunther, was unlike to produce an heir.
Christle became an army officer in the 60th King's Royal Riffles in 1888. He fought under Lord Horatio Kitchener in 1898 when the British troops defeated the Devrishes at Ondurman near Khartoum and recovered the Sudan. He participated also in the Ashanti Expedition to Ghana. In 1900, he served in the Boer War under Lord Frederick Roberts. In October while being in Pretoria, he came down with malaria and died on October 29 after receiving the Holy Communion in the presence of lord Roberts and Prince Francis of Teck. He was interred in the Pretoria cemetery on November 1st. 1900. During his funeral, a Boer woman commented: "They are burying their Prince in British soil; the English intend to remain in this land". His grave is marked with a granite cross and a cast iron railing. Two attempts were made by unknown persons to remove Prince Christle's body from its grave. It was never know the reason for the outrage but it is supposed that it was perpetrated by a Boer faction wishing to embarrass the British government.
During World War I, Prince Albert of Schleswig Holstein joined the German Army, but he refused to take part in active service against his mother's country. He also was an officer in the Kaiser's bodyguard.
When Albert was 31 years old, in 1900, he had a secret love affair with an unknown woman, whose name he never revealed. The only fact it is known about her is that she was of high birth. The result of that affair was a girl named Valerie Marie, who was born in Hungary on April 3, 1900, and raised by a couple of Jew origin named Schwalb. Prince Albert succeeded his cousin Ernest Gunther to the Augustenberg states in 1921 and in 1931, he wrote to his natural daughter admitting his paternity. He died on April 27 of that same year.
In 1935, Valerie Marie, who turned out to be Princess Helena's only grandchild, married an Austrian lawyer named Ernest Johann Wagner; she divorced him in 1938 and intended to marry Engelbert Karl, Duke of Arenberg, but as it was thought she was Jew because of her foster parents, the Nazi authorities forbid her to marry a German noble. Valerie Marie requested her aunts, Princesses Helena Victoria and Marie Louise, her late father's sisters, to testify she was Albert's daughter. Both Princesses sent letters confirming that Valerie Marie was their late brother's daughter, and as a daughter of a German prince, she was allowed to marry Arenberg. Valerie Marie died on August 14, 1953 in Mont Baron, France, without issue. She is thought to have committed suicide. Her aunt, Princess Marie Louise, attended her funeral at Enghien in Belgium in October 1953, two months after her death.
Eilers, Marlene: Queen Victoria's Descendants
Packard, Jerrold M.: Victoria's Daughters
Chomet, Seweryn: Helena, Princess reclaimed
