SENIOR royal courtiers tried to cover up allegations that the great uncle of the Queen fathered an illegitimate son, newly released documents show.

They reveal that police conducted an extensive investigation into an affair between Margery Haddon, a married woman, and the Duke of Clarence, eldest son of the future Edward VII.

The liaison was said to have occurred during a royal tour of India in the 1880s, but when Haddon turned up in London to claim she had conceived the duke’s child, senior officials quietly arranged her passage back to India, where she had been born and raised.

Clothes were provided for her through a secret account and a “go-between” for the duke provided maintenance payments for the boy, Clarence Haddon. Embarrassing letters in the woman’s possession were believed to have been purchased by lawyers acting for the duke.

The allegations remained out of the public eye for years until Clarence Haddon turned up in London in the 1920s to stake publicly his claim to be an illegitimate member of the royal family. His claims were dismissed and, because he lacked documentary proof, he was seen as a crank.

However, his and his mother’s full story has come to light in documents made public by the National Archives in Kew, southwest London, after more than 70 years.

They show Margery Haddon’s claims were taken seriously enough for the Metropolitan police commissioner, head of Special Branch and one of most senior of the monarch’s officials — the keeper of the privy purse — to investigate.

The files, comprising hundreds of pages of police reports, royal correspondence and photographs, start with Margery Haddon’s claim that her affair with the Duke of Clarence began at a ball in India in 1889.

The daughter of a civil servant, she was a vivacious woman brought up in Calcutta, then the seat of colonial power in India. By the time she met the duke, she was married to a civil engineer, Henry Haddon.

The Duke of Clarence, nicknamed “Eddy”, was known as a womaniser and heavy drinker. Robert Lacey, the royal biographer, said: “He had a reputation as a somewhat debauched character and it’s interesting if there is evidence of a royal cover-up. There was always great anxiety among the royal family about protecting his reputation.”

After the ball, one of a number during the tour of India by the duke and his younger brother, the future King George V, Haddon claimed she and the duke became lovers. The following year she is said to have given birth to her son, Clarence Guy Gordon Haddon.

Two years later, in 1892, the Duke of Clarence died at the age of 28 during a flu epidemic, leaving the way clear for his younger brother to become king. By now, Margery Haddon had come to Britain but her life was starting to fall apart. She was divorcing her husband and had begun to drink heavily.

By 1914, after a number of failed marriages, she had descended into alcoholism and seemed almost deranged. That year she was arrested outside the gates of Buckingham Palace after shouting she was the mother of the Duke of Clarence’s illegitimate son.

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