by Theo Aronson
What Frank Spiering’s publishers describe as his ‘impeccable research’ included interviews with ‘staff members at Buckingham Palace and people at Scotland Yard’.8 But the chief and most important source was the copy of some notes, made by Sir William Gull, which the author discovered ‘bound in an ancient portfolio, in the New York Academy of Medicine’. These notes, Spiering subsequently claimed, ‘contained the confession of Victoria’s grandson, HRH Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale, whom the Royal Physician was treating for syphilis. They detail the Prince’s account of the sordid murders he committed in Whitechapel and his motivation for these murders.’9
This sensational ‘discovery’ was converted by Frank Spiering into an even more sensational book. Purporting to be a serious, non-fiction account, it reads, according to one American reviewer, like ‘concocted, Grade Z fiction’.10 Here, in brief, is the plot of Spiering’s book. Prince Eddy, wandering about Spitalfields one night, is so intoxicated by the butchering of horses in a horse slaughter-house that he grabs a knife and rushes out to murder and disembowel a prostitute. A subsequent visit to a Jewish abattoir results in a second murder. From the body he carries away a ‘bloody portion’ which he shows to his ‘lover’, Jim Stephen. To Stephen the Prince explains that the murders leave him feeling ‘tremblingly afraid, yet wonderfully free’. He had been infected, years before, with syphilis by a prostitute; therefore he feels no remorse at getting rid of them. Overcoming his initial shock, Jim Stephen feels obliged to make his contribution to his friend’s murderous exploits: he writes one of the famous Ripper letters, taunting the police.
After two more murders by Prince Eddy, Queen Victoria notices that her grandson is not looking well. Like any concerned grandmother, she packs him off to the doctor. This is the ubiquitous Sir William Gull who, realizing that his patient is suffering from syphilis, hypnotizes him. The horrified doctor discovers that the Prince, acting out his syphilitic obsessions, is responsible for the Whitechapel murders. Gull promptly communicates this astonishing news to Sir Charles Warren, Head of the Metropolitan Police.
But far from being equally astonished, Sir Charles Warren tells Gull that he has all along known about the Prince’s activities; and so does the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. The result is that Gull is drawn into this top-level conspiracy of silence.
The best course, decide Gull and Warren, is for Prince Eddy to be kept under strict surveillance, in the House of Rest Sanatorium in Balham. Here, in spite of treatments of iodide of potassium, electrical therapy and drugs, the Prince remains uncontrollable. On 8 November 1888, in a violent fit of rage, he escapes from the sanatorium. He heads for Jim Stephen’s house in De Vere Gardens, Kensington. Realizing that he would have sought sanctuary with his friend, Gull and Warren arrive in De Vere Gardens with a small party of hand-picked men to reapprehend him. But the Prince has slipped away. And, to his horror, Jim Stephen notices that one of the long knives is missing from the pantry.
That night the last victim, Mary Kelly, is murdered. The Prince’s particularly nightmarish eviscerating work over, he puts on ‘the woman’s dress and shawl which he’d brought with him in the black handbag’ and, moustaches notwithstanding, hurries to Sandringham in time to celebrate his father’s birthday. He explains away his garb to the doubtless puzzled guests by pretending that he had attended a costume party the night before. Not surprisingly, the Prince of Wales promptly alerts Sir William Gull and, the birthday luncheon over, Prince Eddy is escorted back to London and into the care of the doctor.
For the rest of his short life he is so successfully controlled by drugs and hypnotism that he is able to lead an apparently normal existence. But on 13 February 1891 he has a relapse and commits yet another murder. Finally deciding that enough is enough, ‘the powers who ruled England’ realize that the business must be brought to an end. First the Prince’s accomplice and lover, Jim Stephen, is committed to a lunatic asylum and then the Prince himself is gradually weakened. Instead of the customary doses of iodide of potassium, he is ‘probably given daily injections of morphine’. He is finally confined to a rest home in Ascot where ‘the doses were steadily increased until the sleep condition became permanent’.11
As no statement in Spiering’s book is actually attributed to any palace or police official, one must assume that all this information comes from Sir William Gull’s notes found in that ‘ancient portfolio in the New York Academy of Medicine’. Donald Rumbelow, in his masterly compilation of Ripper material, The Complete Jack the Ripper, describes his own efforts to locate these important notes. A letter to the New York Academy of Medicine produced nothing.
‘None of the entries in our catalogue for works by or about Sir William Gull contain the material referred to by Mr Spiering,’ answered the Librarian. ‘In a library the size and age of ours, it is possible that a set of notes bound with a larger work or other works could have gone unnoticed by our cataloguers, but it is highly unlikely. Mr Spiering was never able to remember or reconstruct the catalogue entry he submitted for retrieval from our stacks and in which he allegedly found the notes by Gull. Thorough searches by staff also proved fruitless.’
Equally fruitless was Rumbelow’s direct appeal to Spiering. His letters, sent care of Spiering’s publishers, have remained unanswered.
In 1978, just before the publication of his book, Frank Spiering publicly challenged Queen Elizabeth II to make available the material on Prince Eddy in the Royal Archives at Windsor. He offered to halt the impending publication of Prince Jack if she held a press conference and revealed what she knew about her ‘great-uncle’s acts of murder and his own extraordinary death’. With infinite politeness, a Buckingham Palace spokesman told Mr Spiering that his allegations were ‘not sufficiently serious to warrant a special statement from the Queen’ but that the Royal Archives would be opened to him as they were to other researchers.12
Spiering’s answer – that he had no wish to see any files – led, in Donald Rumbelow’s drily expressed opinion, ‘to the inevitable conclusion that his challenge to the Queen had been made to publicize his book’.13
CHAPTER EIGHT
Ripping for the Prince
If Prince Eddy was not Jack the Ripper, then the Ripper was acting, argue several theorists, on his behalf. This is certainly the contention of Michael Harrison in his book Clarence published in 1972. Harrison claims that Dr Stowell, in his article in the Criminologist, was not pointing the finger at Prince Eddy at all, but at his one-time Cambridge tutor, J.K. Stephen. This was why Stowell called his suspect ‘S’. Finally realizing that his love for Prince Eddy was not reciprocated and that the relationship between them was cooling, Jim Stephen committed the murders as some sort of monstrous manifestation of his love.
Stephen had never fulfilled his early promise. Like many who shine too brightly in too many spheres at university, he shone in none once he left. Although he became a Fellow of his college and a barrister, he devoted much of his time to journalism. His prowess in debate, which had led his Cambridge friends to assume that he would enter Parliament, was frittered away in after-dinner conversation. In 1886 he suffered a severe blow on the head. Whether it was this, or inherited mental instability, which was the cause of his increasingly erratic behaviour, is uncertain. But from then on Jim Stephen veered recklessly from one interest to another.
He published a weekly journal, the Reflector, which folded after a few issues. He wrote a pamphlet in defence of the compulsory study of Greek at university. He brought out two slim volumes of poetry, in which both his snobbery and his hatred of women was only too apparent. In desperation his father, Mr Justice Stephen, had him appointed to a Clerkship of Assizes on the South Wales Circuit. This, too, he abandoned after a short spell, having anyway left most of the work to his deputy. Stephen then decided that he would become a painter. To his cousin, the young Virginia Stephen, afterwards Woolf, whom he sometimes used as a model, he once announced ‘as though it were an amusing incide
nt, that the doctors had told him that he would either die or go completely mad’.1
Michael Harrison’s reasons for identifying Jim Stephen as Jack the Ripper are extraordinarily convoluted. To follow them here would be tedious. In the absence of any hard facts, Harrison analyses every line of Stephen’s poetry, uncovers every double meaning, parades every literary allusion, hammers home every coincidence, gives significance to every number and date. He discovers a similarity of both style and handwriting between Stephen’s poetry and Jack the Ripper’s taunting letters to the police. Ignoring such evidence as does not suit his case, he overemphasizes such scraps as do.
In essence his theory is this. Jim Stephen was in love with Prince Eddy in a ‘dominant, demanding’ fashion. The gradual slackening of their relationship, once the Prince had left Cambridge and joined the Army, allied to the frequent sight of him in the company of other homosexuals in pubs and clubs, roused Stephen’s jealousy to ‘dangerous heights’.2 Already mentally unstable, Stephen’s balance was finally tipped by the thought of the Prince’s association with a woman – it might have been an actual association with a ‘harlot’ or simply the Prince’s loving relationship with his possessive mother, the Princess of Wales. (The Ripper’s removal of the uterus, claims Harrison, is a symbolic attack on women, not as whores, but as mothers.) Jim Stephen then committed his series of horrifying murders which Harrison deftly extends to ten to fit in with Stephen’s poem about ‘ten harlots of Jerusalem’. The murders were committed as an act of revenge by a discarded lover during a period of insanity: Stephen was offering up some sort of dramatic blood sacrifice.
According to Harrison, the Ripper’s identity, well known to the authorities, was suppressed, not only because Stephen was the son of ‘one of Britain’s most famous judges’ but because of his suspect friendship with the Heir Presumptive to the British throne. ‘One could imagine’, argues Harrison, ‘what might have happened to the Crown and the Judiciary had a Stephen been shown to be the Ripper.’3
This is all too baroque by half. Indeed, from the very outset one of Harrison’s chief clues is rendered worthless. He claims that Stowell had chosen the initial ‘S’ as a code letter for Prince Eddy for a very good reason: ‘S’ was the first letter of Stephen’s name. By doing this, Stowell was dropping a hint that the Ripper was actually Stephen and not Prince Eddy. But had Harrison bothered to ask the editor of the Criminologist about it, he would have been told that Stowell had originally wanted to use the more conventional ‘X’. Only on being told by the editor that ‘X’ was too trite did Stowell agree to change the initial to the first letter of his own name – ‘S’.
The one verifiable fact to emerge from the welter of Michael Harrison’s arguments is the refusal of Jim Stephen to take any nourishment after hearing of Prince Eddy’s death; and of his own death, in a lunatic asylum, twenty days later. The relationship between the two men is certainly intriguing. Perhaps, as Stephen became progressively less successful and more unbalanced, he began to look back on their time together as a sort of idyll.
Even more tortuous are the paths by which Joseph Sickert sets out to solve the Ripper mystery. His theory, as told by Melvyn Fairclough in The Ripper and the Royals, is that the murders were committed, not by one man but by a group of high-ranking Freemasons determined to keep secret the marriage of Prince Eddy to Annie Crook.
While working in that confectioner’s and tobacconist’s shop in Cleveland Street, runs Sickert’s version, Annie Crook had been joined by a girl named Mary Kelly. When Annie gave birth to her daughter by Prince Eddy, Annie’s friend Walter Sickert arranged for Mary Kelly to move in with her as companion and nurse. The arrangement did not last long. Mary Kelly soon took to prostitution and gin-tippling in the East End. In 1888 she, together with three other prostitutes, decided to take advantage of Mary Kelly’s one valuable asset: her knowledge of Prince Eddy’s secret marriage. The four of them set out to blackmail Walter Sickert. Unless they were paid for their silence, they threatened, they would make public everything they knew about Prince Eddy, Annie Crook and their daughter.
Walter Sickert immediately alerted Prince Eddy. He consulted his younger brother, Prince George, who happened to be home on leave from the Navy. Prince George told their father, the Prince of Wales who, in turn, told not only ‘some of his friends’ but also the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. Between the lot of them, they decided that the blackmailers must be silenced. If the marriage were to be revealed the throne ‘might be swept away forever’ and with it, ‘the Freemasonic Royal Alpha Lodge No. 16’. The ‘real power behind the throne in the 1880s’, explains Joseph Sickert, ‘was Freemasonry’.4 The Prince of Wales was Grand Master of England, Prince Eddy had been initiated into the movement in 1885 and ‘many peers of the realm, especially those close to the throne’ were Freemasons.5
The most effective way of silencing these blackmailing prostitutes was to murder them. So a great Masonic conspiracy, including Sir Charles Warren, head of the Metropolitan Police, and Sir Robert Anderson, head of the Metropolitan CID, set about accomplishing this task. The actual killing was done by Sir William Gull. On each occasion he would be driven to the East End by a coachman named John Netley. The victim would be lured into the curtained coach where they would be fed by Gull with grapes ‘liberally treated with laudanum’. Once they were unconscious, Gull could begin his task of throat-slitting and disembowelling. The coach was lined with ‘American cloth’ which prevented the blood from soaking into the floor and could afterwards be washed down by the obliging Netley. The bodies would then be deposited by Netley ‘in a manner prescribed by his Masonic masters’.6 Indeed the places, dates, method of murder and arrangement of the intestines were all rich in Masonic symbolism.
If Sir William Gull was the actual murderer, the instigator of the murders was Lord Randolph Churchill, brother of the 8th Duke of Marlborough and father of the future Sir Winston Churchill. He was, says Sickert, ‘the highest Freemason in England: Magister Magistrorum or Master of Masters’.7Determined to prevent the wholesale sweeping away of ‘the monarchy, the aristocracy, the landed gentry and the government’ which would doubtless follow the revelation of Prince Eddy’s marriage, Lord Randolph was tireless in the organizing of his fellow Masons in these murderous expeditions.8 For Gull and Netley were not the only ones directly involved. On the occasion of the last murder – of Mary Kelly – Lord Randolph was himself present in the room in which she was so hideously mutilated. ‘Like a shooting party making a foray into the country …’ explains Sickert, ‘other gang members went along to oversee the job in hand, or to act as look-outs, or simply for the ride.’9 Sometimes as many as twelve would set out.
One leading gang member was, apparently, the inevitable Jim Stephen. ‘It was due to his love for Eddy and his loyalty to his Royal Alpha brothers that he became involved in the conspiracy in the first place’, but when the ‘feverish’ Lord Randolph decreed that Annie Crook and her daughter Alice must also be killed, Stephen rebelled.10 His love for Eddy overcame his Masonic loyalty. He reported the plan to Inspector Frederick Abberline, who was in overall charge of the investigation. He also, apparently, told Abberline the full story of the Masonic conspiracy. But as Abberline’s superiors, Sir Charles Warren and Sir Robert Anderson, were part of the conspiracy, there was nothing that Abberline could do about the murders. In fact, he was subsequently ‘advised’ not to pursue his investigations.11
Stephen also told Prince Eddy about the proposed murder of his wife and child. The Prince’s reaction to this was to suggest that his grandmother, Queen Victoria, be murdered instead. Having been brought up by his mother, the Danish Princess Alexandra, to hate everything German, and regarding Queen Victoria as the personification of all things German, Prince Eddy’s ‘tortured mind formulated the madcap scheme of having his grandmother murdered’. But at this, apparently, even Lord Randolph Churchill balked. ‘Who?’ he exclaimed. ‘The great whore herself?’12
And so Joseph Sickert’s fancifull
y fashioned edifice soars skywards. Speculation is piled upon speculation, conjecture heaped upon conjecture. The reasoning becomes progressively more involved; the motives less comprehensible. Towards the end of the book he tells us that the last woman murdered was not – as is generally believed – Mary Kelly at all: by then, or soon after, she was safely in Canada, having had her passage paid in exchange for Prince Eddy’s marriage certificate. (Had this been done at the start, one cannot help thinking, a great deal of trouble, and blood, would have been saved.)
To back up his claims, Joseph Sickert quotes the diaries of Inspector Abberline. Three such diaries had apparently been bequeathed to Walter Sickert but are now in Joseph Sickert’s possession. He was prepared, Joseph Sickert announces on one page, to present these important diaries to the Metropolitan and the City of London police. But on the next page he claims that the Special Branch had ‘forcibly’ entered his home in search of Abberline’s diaries. Luckily, they were not in his possession at the time and he fobbed off the intruders with a few unimportant papers. On another occasion a number of Crown Prosecution Service officials, who had somehow managed to read the still unpublished manuscript of The Ripper and the Royals, came to warn him that the book had ‘political implications and could embarrass the Royal Family’. Two days after this, three men purporting to be from the Special Branch came to check if the manuscript was ‘treasonable’.13
The whole story is incredible. Indeed, it is difficult to believe that Joseph Sickert is being serious. Even if the story of Prince Eddy’s secret marriage were true, can one really believe that dozens of Freemasons, including the Prince of Wales, the heads of the Metropolitan Police and of the Metropolitan CID would countenance a series of horrific murders? Or that the truth would never, until now, have leaked out? Or that five derelict and drunken prostitutes would have been believed? That only by murdering them could they have been silenced? Or that they, in turn, would not have told their friends about it? How could the seventy-year-old Sir William Gull, who had suffered a stroke the year before, have carried out the murders? For although he had recovered from his stroke, its effects had obliged him to give up his medical practice. He died just over a year after the Ripper murders. And why was Walter Sickert, who knew more about the alleged marriage than anyone, not murdered?