by Theo Aronson
Although Dalton would have been delighted with the royal gift, his son – as he grew older – was not. In fact, he was acutely embarrassed at having a royal godfather. For the boy, who never used his first name of Edward, became celebrated as Hugh Dalton, that most dedicated of socialist Chancellors of the Exchequer, actively concerned with setting up the Welfare State after the Second World War. He grew up to loathe and distrust the royal family: an attitude they heartily reciprocated. Of all Labour politicians, the royal family disliked Hugh Dalton the most; they no doubt saw him, as did many Conservatives, as a ‘class traitor’. Particularly displeasing to King George VI – Prince Eddy’s nephew – was the insouciance with which Hugh Dalton sold off all his royal godfather’s gifts, including those christening cups from Copenhagen.
An interesting sidelight on the situation is that Hugh Dalton appears to have shared, not only the socialism of his father’s great friend Edward Carpenter, but also his ideals of brotherly love and friendship. ‘Both before and after his marriage’, writes Hugh Dalton’s biographer, Ben Pimlott, ‘his emotions were more stirred by men – increasingly by younger men – than by women.’12
For all Prince Eddy’s manly and military inadequacies, his brother officers seem to have been fond of him. It was true that he had ‘a certain shrinking from the robust horseplay which has been known to exist among subalterns’, but he was popular for other reasons.13 ‘He was greatly beloved’, it is claimed, ‘for his kindly disposition, his unassuming modesty, his earnest simplicity of character. For display, for ostentation, for flattery … he had no inclination.’14 Those swaggering and mustachioed cavalrymen, expecting to be faced by an arrogant and conceited princeling, warmed to what can only be termed his more feminine characteristics. ‘Kind’, ‘gentle’ and ‘dear’ are the adjectives most frequently used by his contemporaries to describe Prince Eddy. His was the sort of dozy, well-intentioned personality that tends to bring out the protective instincts in others. And he was helped, of course, by the fact that he would one day be King.
The Reverend William Rogers, who had known the Prince since boyhood, once visited him at camp. His obsequious account makes – in the light of Prince Eddy’s almost girlish diffidence and subsequent reputation for aberrant sexuality – amusing reading. The Prince had developed, the good cleric tells us, ‘into a fine, manly character not easily seduced from the right path. I was very much struck by his manly bearing. In the exuberance of my spirits I said, “Well, Prince Edward, they have made a man of you.” He was pleased with my remark, and asked me to send him my photograph … Some of his brother officers had said that they would like to make a man of the world of him. Into that world he refused to be initiated, but he was a man of the world in the best sense – a Christian gentleman.’15
In a carefully considered report to the Duke of Cambridge, Lord Wolseley – who was one day to succeed the Duke as Commander-in-Chief – gave his honest opinion of the young man’s abilities. ‘I think’, he wrote, ‘HRH has far more in him than he is often given credit for, but I should describe his brain and thinking powers, as maturing slowly … Some of our very best and ablest men have mentally matured with extreme slowness … Personally, I think he is very much to be liked, has most excellent manners, thoughtful for others, and always anxious to do the right thing. He is, however, young for his age and requires to be brought out. I studied him closely when staying in a country house with him, and this is the result of my study.’16
Perhaps Wolseley was right. There were certainly indications, after the Prince had been in the Army for a couple of years, that there had been some improvement. Major Miles, one of the Prince’s instructors at Aldershot, who had at first been ‘quite astounded at his utter ignorance’, subsequently professed himself ‘equally astounded how much he has got on with him and thinks, under the circumstances, his papers are infinitely better than he dared to expect. He has his father’s dislike for a book and never looks into one, but learns all orally, and retains what he thus learns.’17 Even the Duke of Cambridge had eventually to admit that although it was true that Prince Eddy ‘was not a devoted soldier … he has greatly improved in the last few months’.18
The Prince’s letters to his Cambridge friends might have been unimaginative but they were articulate, and his handwriting was fluid and confident. He always signed himself ‘Edward’, never ‘Albert Victor’. ‘I am, as you see, signing myself in the name you knew me when I was a boy, which I prefer with old friends …’ he once wrote.19 He was also beginning to look more self-assured. His previously tentative-looking moustache was now fuller and curled up at the ends; his somewhat vague stare struck some observers as cool and impenetrable. He had inherited, from both parents, a passion for clothes. With his slender figure and exceptionally slim waist, he had the perfection of, and about as much animation as, a tailor’s dummy. He was certainly a dandy. To minimize the length of his neck (‘a neck like a swan’, wrote one relation) he wore high starched collars. This led to the family nickname of ‘Collars-and-Cuffs’. ‘Don’t call him Uncle Eddy,’ the chaffing Prince of Wales would instruct visiting royal children, ‘call him Uncle-Eddy-Collars-and-Cuffs’.20 In an artfully posed photograph of himself in a kilt, with a fishing rod held stiffly in one hand, the Prince looks more like a fashion plate than someone about to get his boots muddy on some river bank.
But it was in uniform that he looked most impressive. The dress uniform of the 10th Hussars – as was to be expected from a regiment which had once numbered Beau Brummell in its ranks – was especially elegant. Rendered even more elegant by subtle changes on the part of the Prince’s tailor – a longer tunic with rounded corners, a tighter waist, a higher collar – it gave him a decidedly dashing air. His top-boots were highly polished, his breeches skin-tight, his tunic glittered with gold braid, frogging and tassels, his busby sported an extra-long white plume.
This bandbox appearance, allied to his languid manner and hooded gaze, afforded Prince Eddy a mysterious, curiously seductive aura. As he smoked almost continuously, both Turkish cigarettes and cigars, he was usually seen through a haze of slowly drifting smoke. It comes as no surprise to learn that he was by now being drawn, ever more deeply, into the shimmering underworld of late Victorian London.
It is concerning this period of Prince Eddy’s life that various bizarre legends have grown up. Most of them are connected to the famous Jack the Ripper murders in which five, and possibly eight, prostitutes were murdered and hideously mutilated in London’s Whitechapel district in the autumn of 1888. Closely related to these murders is one of the strangest of the Prince Eddy legends: the story of his ‘secret marriage’.
The story first came to light in 1973. In the course of making a series of television programmes on Jack the Ripper, the BBC researchers were put in touch with a man by the name of Joseph Sickert. Sickert, the natural son of the celebrated Victorian painter, Walter Sickert, claimed that he was Prince Eddy’s grandson. The Ripper murders, said Joseph Sickert, had all been part of an elaborate attempt to cover up Prince Eddy’s unsuitable marriage.
These startling revelations aroused the interest of the journalist Stephen Knight who, in collaboration with Sickert, produced a book entitled Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution. In it, Knight repeats, in a highly coloured version, Sickert’s theory that Prince Eddy was his grandfather and that the Prince’s clandestine marriage had led to the Ripper murders.
In 1978, two years after the publication of Knight’s book, Joseph Sickert repudiated it. The Ripper connection had been a hoax, he said. The only truth in the book concerned his illustrious ancestry. Yet in 1991, after Knight’s death, Joseph Sickert – in collaboration this time with Melvyn Fairclough – not only repeated, but also considerably expanded upon, the story. Because, he explained in the foreword to a new book The Ripper and the Royals, he had realized that Knight was misrepresenting his material, the two of them had quarrelled and Sickert had decided not to give Knight the full story. He was now making good that omission
. In The Ripper and the Royals, the whole extraordinary tale, as recounted to Joseph Sickert by his father Walter Sickert, was being presented for the first time.
And an extraordinary tale, as retold by Joseph Sickert through Melvyn Fairclough, it is.
They start their story by claiming that towards the end of 1883 Princess Alexandra asked the twenty-three-year-old artist, Walter Sickert, to introduce Prince Eddy ‘to the artistic and literary society’ of London. Walter Sickert’s father and grandfather had apparently been ‘employed in the Royal Palaces of Denmark’. At that time Walter Sickert had a studio in Cleveland Street, in the Bohemian quarter centring on Fitzroy Square and it was here, we are assured, that Prince Eddy frequently visited him. To pass undetected, the Prince would pretend to be the artist’s brother, ‘Albert Sickert’.
Before long, continues their account, Prince Eddy had met and fallen in love with one of Sickert’s occasional models: a young woman by the name of Annie Elizabeth Crook, who was employed in a local tobacconist’s and confectioner’s shop. They had allegedly been introduced to each other by Prince Eddy’s tutor, Jim Stephen; Stephen and Annie were second cousins. Jim Stephen, writes Fairclough, was in love with Prince Eddy and in order to protect the young Prince from the ‘homosexual milieu’ into which he had been drawn, Stephen introduced him to Annie Crook in an effort to ‘divert’ him. Stephen ‘could handle the thought of Eddy with a woman, but became jealous if he was with other men and hoped that a relationship with Annie would serve to exclude them’.21 The young couple became lovers and on 18 April 1885, Annie Crook gave birth to a daughter at the Marylebone workhouse. The girl was named Alice Margaret Crook.
It was after the birth of their daughter Alice, claims Joseph Sickert, that Prince Eddy and Annie Crook were married. As the bride was Roman Catholic, there were two ceremonies: an Anglican marriage at St Saviour’s Parish Hall and a Catholic marriage at St Saviour’s Chapel. With the Act of Settlement of 1701 excluding anyone married to a Roman Catholic from inheriting the crown, and as the Royal Marriage Act of 1772 forbade any member of the royal family marrying without the monarch’s consent, Prince Eddy’s marriage had to be kept secret. Another reason for secrecy, runs Joseph Sickert’s theory, is that had it been revealed, a combination of republicanism, class hatred and anti-Catholicism would have led to revolution and the fall of the monarchy.
But, inevitably, the news reached the ears of ‘those in power’. Chief amongst these powerful men was the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. Fearing a national upheaval, he immediately ordered not only a cover-up but also a forcible separation of the young couple. One day, under cover of a purposely organized commotion in Cleveland Street, two closed carriages slipped into the area. One stopped outside Sickert’s studio; the other outside No. 6, where Annie Crook lived in a basement room. Two men in ‘brown suits’ entered the studio to re-emerge with the struggling Prince Eddy between them. They bundled him into the carriage. In the meantime, a man and a woman were forcing Annie into the second coach. They were driven off in opposite directions, never to see each other again. The Prince was henceforth ‘confined to Court and supervised’.
Annie, claims Fairclough, was more harshly treated. She was taken to Guy’s Hospital where she was detained for several months and certified insane. This was ordered by Sir William Gull, Queen Victoria’s Physician-in-Ordinary and physician also to the Prince of Wales’s family. Gull, an expert on paraplegia and diseases of the nervous system, performed ‘some kind of operation’ on Annie which led not only to ‘partial paralysis and later epilepsy’ but to an impairment of her memory. Thus mentally and physically crippled, she could safely be set free.
For the rest of her life, Prince Eddy’s ‘wife’ Annie Crook drifted in and out of infirmaries and workhouses. She died, aged fifty-eight, in 1920, in the Lunacy Observation Ward of St George’s Union Workhouse.
The Ripper murders, claims Joseph Sickert, were instigated by ‘a group of influential men’ in order to protect Prince Eddy from being blackmailed by a handful of Annie’s associates who knew about the clandestine marriage. But that was another story.22
So much for Prince Eddy’s ‘wife’, Annie Crook. Joseph Sickert and Melvyn Fairclough now move on to outline the career of Prince Eddy’s ‘daughter’, Alice, who bore her mother’s surname of Crook. Alice is depicted as having lived an equally wretched and impoverished life. Twice, as a girl, she was almost killed in carriage ‘accidents’ organized by that coterie of ‘influential men’. In 1905, at the age of twenty, Alice had a brief liaison with her mother’s artist friend, Walter Sickert, and bore him a son. This son (who was, if Joseph Sickert is to be believed, Prince Eddy’s ‘grandson’) was named Charles. One day, while Alice was in Holloway prison for some minor offence, she was told that her son Charles was to be taken from her; she had proved herself incapable of caring for him.
It is here that Joseph Sickert’s story becomes more intriguing still. By now Prince Eddy was dead and his brother, Prince George, the future King George V, was Heir Apparent. The birth of Alice’s son Charles had happened to coincide with that of a fifth son to Prince George and his wife Princess May, the future Queen Mary. Their son was christened John. Prince John – so runs Sickert’s version – died in his first year and, instead of announcing this fact to the world, ‘the royal family and their advisers’ decided to snatch Prince Eddy’s ‘grandson’ – Alice’s illegitimate son Charles by Walter Sickert – and substitute him for the dead Prince John. The royal family had been worried ‘that Charles might one day prove an embarrassment to the monarchy since, as Eddy’s grandson, he was in line to the throne’. Having him ‘within the confines of the palace walls, they could … forestall any complications his existence might create’.
The substitute Prince John – ignored by his putative mother, Princess May, and doted on by his great-grandmother Queen Alexandra (‘who knew that John’s real mother was Alice’) – was discovered to be epileptic. He died in 1919, aged thirteen.23
Prince Eddy’s ‘daughter’ Alice, at the age of forty, had another brief affair with the sixty-four-year-old Walter Sickert, and bore him a second son. Alice died, aged sixty-five, in 1950. It is to her second son, Joseph Sickert, that we owe the above story of Prince Eddy’s ‘secret marriage’.
Joseph Sickert’s story is, to put it kindly, improbable. Its sensationalism aside, at no stage does it take into consideration the character and circumstances of Prince Eddy himself. That Princess Alexandra would have wanted her son – at that stage newly arrived at Trinity College, Cambridge – to be introduced into London’s artistic and Bohemian circles is highly unlikely. One of her chief concerns was to guard him against just such society; to keep him as unworldly and unsullied for as long as possible. Nor would she ever have chosen an unknown, twenty-three-year-old painter to effect such introduction. There was no shortage of well-established and respectable court painters and sculptors to awaken whatever interest the Prince might have had in cultural matters. Two of Queen Victoria’s children, Prince Leopold, Duke of Albany and Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll, moved in what, by royal standards, were considered to be artistic circles. In any case, Prince Eddy never showed the slightest interest in art or literature.
1. A sexual conundrum: Prince Albert Victor (Eddy), Duke of Clarence and Avondale
2. Three of the telegraph boys involved in the homosexual brothel case
3. The Cleveland Street brothel, picturing clients, telegraph boys, a waiting cabby and an oblivious policeman
4. Charles Hammond, the brothel-keeper who was allowed to escape justice
5. Lord Arthur Somerset, whose visits to the brothel sparked off the Cleveland Street Scandal
6. A male prostitute, in drag, soliciting in Piccadilly
7. The Prince and Princess of Wales holding Prince Eddy and Prince George, with the boys dressed, as was customary, as girls
8. Prince Eddy and Prince George, in miners’ outfits, during the visit of HMS Bacchante to Australia
9. The philandering, pleasure-seeking, undeniably heterosexual Prince of Wales
10. ‘Motherdear’: the beautiful, elegant and possessive Alexandra, Princess of Wales
11. The Wales family in the early 1880s. The Prince and Princess of Wales flanked by Prince George and Princess Victoria; Prince Eddy flanked by Princess Maud and Princess Louise
12. The malleable Prince Eddy, during his first year at Cambridge
13. Jim Stephen, the Prince’s unstable, misogynous Cambridge mentor
14. Looking like a tailor’s dummy, Prince Eddy poses elegantly on a river bank, at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders
15. The Prince astride a buffalo, shot during his tour of India at the height of the Cleveland Street Scandal
16. A policeman taking statements from a telegraph boy
17. An artist’s impression of a pimp handing Lord Euston a card advertising ‘poses plastiques’ at the Cleveland Street brothel
18. Five of the boys involved in the brothel case
19. Resplendent in Hussar uniform and flanked by members of his staff, the newly created Duke of Clarence and Avondale
20. The lovelorn and ambitious Princess Hélène d’Orléans, who was determined to marry Prince Eddy