Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld

by Theo Aronson

  Nor, apparently, was Saul the only one known to have had sex with Lord Euston. The Earl was a familiar figure in the homosexual underworld. A notorious blackmailer, Robert Clibborn, who was later to blackmail Oscar Wilde, once also milked Lord Euston. Wilde, who was always fascinated by the activities of young criminals, claimed that Clibborn deserved to be awarded the Victoria Cross for the avaricious tenacity with which he blackmailed Lord Euston.

  And finally – and most significantly – why was Saul not prosecuted for perjury? If he had lied about Lord Euston’s visits to Cleveland Street, if he had indeed ‘imputed to Lord Euston heinous crimes revolting to one’s notions of all that was decent in human nature’, why was he not arrested?11 Surely, argued Henry Labouchere in an editorial in his newspaper Truth, to allow ‘a wretch like Saul … to swear away the honour and good name of a person with impunity, without any action on the part of the Public Prosecutor, is an insult to law and justice’.12

  It certainly was. And Labouchere was not the only one to think so. On the very day after the appearance of this editorial, the Director of Public Prosecutions wrote to the Attorney General with a request to prosecute Saul. It was refused. The Attorney General’s answer was unequivocal. ‘No proceedings should at present be instigated against Saul,’ he wrote.

  Why, one wonders, were the authorities so anxious to keep Saul quiet? As a mere witness in the Parke trial he had been indiscreet enough; were the authorities afraid of what he might say or, worse still, of whose names he might mention, if he were actually required to defend himself?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ‘I never mentioned the boy’s name’

  By the end of 1889 the rumours of the involvement of Prince Eddy in the Cleveland Street affair were reaching their height. It was widely believed that he was about to be brought home from India, either to face trial or to give evidence. The New York Times went even further. It was ‘obvious to everybody’, claimed its London correspondent, ‘that there has come to be within the last few days a general conviction that this long-necked, narrow-headed young dullard was mixed up in the scandal, and out of this had sprung a half-whimsical, half-serious notion which one hears propounded now about clubland, that matters will be arranged that he will never return from India.

  ‘The most popular idea is that he will be killed in a tiger hunt, but runaway horses or a fractious elephant might serve as well. What this really mirrors is a public awakening to the fact that this stupid, perverse boy has become a man and has only two highly precious lives between him and the English throne and is an utter blackguard and ruffian.’

  Warming to its task, the New York Times went on to claim that the revelation that Prince Eddy was ‘something besides a harmless simpleton has created a very painful feeling everywhere. Although he looks so strikingly like his mother, it turns out that he gets only his face from the Danish race, and that morally and mentally he combines the worst attributes of those sons of George III, at whose mention history still holds her nose. It is not too early to predict that such a fellow will never be allowed to ascend the British throne; that is as clear as anything can be.’1

  So widely believed were the rumours about the Prince’s enforced return from India to stand trial that an official announcement had to be issued to the press, to the effect that there was no intention of curtailing the Prince’s Indian tour.

  A further press statement was necessary to deny that the Prince’s equerry, Captain George Holford, had been dismissed from his service and was returning home from India. For by now it was being rumoured that Holford had also been implicated in the Cleveland Street affair. ‘Let me know whether any warrants are issued and whether others have to go,’ wrote the anxious Lord Arthur Somerset to a friend. ‘I suppose the story of George Holford was all nonsense, wasn’t it?’2

  On 22 December 1889 a letter, signed by ‘A Member of Parliament’ was published in the New York Herald. Although it might well have been written by a member of Parliament, it was undoubtedly done so at the instigation of those two dedicated royal servants: the Prince of Wales’s secretary, Sir Francis Knollys, and his Comptroller, Sir Dighton Probyn. The letter was headlined ‘The Policy of Hushing Up’.

  ‘The authorized announcement which has appeared in the papers concerning Prince Albert Victor will not be misrepresented by anyone who is familiar with the kind of talk which has been afloat for several weeks past. Over and over again it has been whispered about that “Prince Eddy” would shortly be recalled from India under circumstances peculiarly painful to himself and his family. It was impossible either to trace these reports to their source or to check them. It may, however, put some slight restraint upon the gossip-mongers to be informed in a semi-official manner that the arrangements in connection with the young Prince’s visit to India will not be altered in any way, and that he will return at the time originally fixed, and not before.

  ‘The issue of this notice was, no doubt, the subject of careful consideration beforehand, and it was wise. There are some people who will believe anything, and there is never any telling how far slander may spread. I have heard, though I have not actually seen the paper, that a New York journal recently published an article on certain abominable scandals, with a portrait of Prince Albert Victor in the midst of it. If this is so, a more atrocious or a more dastardly outrage was never perpetrated in the Press.

  ‘Speaking with some knowledge of the charges in question, and of the persons who are really compromised by them, I assert that there is not, and never was, the slightest excuse for mentioning the name of Prince Albert Victor in association with them. A feeling of delicacy can alone have prevented this statement appearing in a form to command universal credence, but now that there are libellers who do not hesitate to assail the young Prince – at a safe distance – it is a mistake for the English Press to maintain absolute silence on the subject. It is much to be wished that the editor or proprietor of the New York paper to which I refer could be reached by the law which he has violated …’3

  The unnamed correspondent was protesting too much. A considerably better-informed assessment of Prince Eddy’s complicity was to be found in the letters which Lord Arthur Somerset was writing to his great friend, the Honourable Reginald Brett.

  Throughout the Cleveland Street scandal, Lord Arthur Somerset had kept in touch with Reginald Brett. At that time, the thirty-seven-year-old Brett, the future 2nd Viscount Esher, was on the threshold of his highly successful career. A cultured, astute and intelligent man, he was already a figure of some importance but his power would reach its apogee during the reign of King Edward VII. In political, diplomatic, military and social matters, Lord Esher was one of the most influential members of the Edwardian court.

  But there was another facet to Reginald Brett’s character. Although married and the father of four children, he was an active homosexual. The years before his marriage had been marked by a series of passionate or what he called ‘rapturous’ love affairs with various young men; it was a way of life which his marriage in no way interrupted. In fact Brett not only continued to fall in and out of love with beautiful youths but was also to conceive an unhealthy passion for one of his own sons. He could never remember a single day, he once admitted to a friend, when he was not deeply in love with some young man or other. Five years after the Cleveland Street scandal, he published, anonymously, a white-covered book of verse called Foam, in which he glorified ‘golden lads’.

  So it was not altogether surprising that he and Lord Arthur Somerset should have shared confidences. As well as having sexual tastes in common, the two men moved in the same royal, social and racing circles. When the Cleveland Street affair was first uncovered, it was in Brett that Somerset confided. Always methodical, Brett pasted all the Cleveland Street correspondence – from Somerset and others – into a bound volume which he entitled The Case of Lord Arthur Somerset. This volume, which is to be found among Lord Esher’s private papers at Churchill College, Cambridge, throws considerable light on P
rince Eddy’s complicity in the affair.

  Somerset’s first letters to Brett after his flight to France are concerned with his hopes of making a new life for himself on the Continent. After spending a few days with his brother Lord Henry Somerset in Monaco, Lord Arthur took the Orient Express to Constantinople. Surely Sultan Abdul Hamid II, appropriately known as ‘Abdul the Damned’, would have no objections to Somerset’s sexual preferences. He did not, and Somerset applied for a position in the imperial stables. But he was reckoning without the long arm of the British law. A series of long-standing treaties between the Ottoman Empire and the United Kingdom gave Britain jurisdiction over British subjects living in Turkey. Warned that he could be arrested, Somerset hastily reboarded the Orient Express.

  This time he took it as far as Budapest. Perhaps in Hungary, so famous for its horses, he would land a job. But he did not and because people were ‘beginning to ask inconvenient questions’, Somerset moved on to Vienna.4 Here, as he explained to Brett, things were worse. Under the common misapprehension that all homosexuals are paedophiles, the Austrian police arranged for him to be trailed by various urchins, singly or in packs, whenever he set foot outside his hotel. When he failed to show the expected interest in their ragamuffin charms (the police, in a choice example of muddled bureaucratic thinking, even dressed one of the boys as a girl) the lads took to shouting insults at him. Fortunately, Somerset understood no German.

  From Vienna he went to Paris. In the more tolerant atmosphere of France, Somerset was able to settle down, undisturbed, in a pension in Passy. He was visited here by his sister Blanche, Lady Waterford, who assured Brett that her brother was ‘better here than anywhere, and is as nearly happy as one could hope. This is such a snug rabbit hole …’5

  All through the Cleveland Street scandal, Lady Waterford was very supportive. Some of this may have been due to the fact that she did not actually believe her brother to be guilty. According to one of her friends, Lady Waterford – who had first visited her brother while he was staying in Monaco – had been told by Somerset that ‘he was perfectly innocent but that he had been driven into the wilderness in order to screen others who were amongst the highest in the land.’6

  In no time, this theory had taken root. Although not many shared Lady Waterford’s touching belief in her brother’s innocence, they were quite ready to believe that Somerset’s decision to flee and so avoid a trial had been taken for the noblest of motives: to protect Prince Eddy’s name. Lord Arthur Somerset, by keeping silent about the true cause of his exile, was sacrificing himself for the sake of the throne.

  True or not, the fact that this theory was being widely discussed was causing considerable anguish in the Prince of Wales’s household; they were, as Somerset put it to Brett, ‘in a great pother about it at Sandringham’. The Prince of Wales was known to be ‘much annoyed at his son’s name being coupled with this thing’.7 Sir Francis Knollys and Sir Dighton Probyn, who seem to have known rather more about it than their royal master, were trying desperately to quash the rumours. In their efforts they were joined by a third royal supporter: this was the Honourable Oliver Montagu.

  Montagu, as well as being Somerset’s former commanding officer, was an Extra Equerry to the Prince and Princess of Wales. A handsome man, imbued with a strong sense of chivalry, Oliver Montagu had been in love with the Princess of Wales ever since they first met. For year after year the unmarried Montagu devoted himself to the beautiful Princess Alexandra. That their affair remained platonic, there is no question. The Princess of Wales was quite content with his ardent but blameless courtship, while Oliver Montagu asked for nothing more than to be allowed to adore and protect his ‘Beloved Lady’.

  That protection was seldom more needed than now – when the Princess’s favourite child stood in danger of public exposure as a frequenter of a male brothel. Montagu was tireless in his efforts to spare her this shame. Already, together with Knollys and Probyn, he had helped Somerset to slip away to safety (‘Oliver Montagu was very kind the day I left and helped me to get away quietly,’ reported Somerset to Brett)8 but he was horrified to find that Somerset’s escape was being widely seen for what it in fact was: a means of preventing Prince Eddy’s name being dragged through the courts.

  Lady Waterford, alarmed to hear that she was being blamed for spreading the rumours about Prince Eddy, wrote to Oliver Montagu to deny that she had done any such thing. His reply was reassuring. ‘Believe me,’ he wrote, ‘no one that I have heard of, and most certainly neither of the parents you allude to [the Prince and Princess of Wales] have ever for one moment suggested … your having insinuated things about Prince Eddy, though I fear there is no doubt that some female members of your family have done so …’9 Oliver Montagu was referring to Isabella, Lady Henry Somerset, and her mother, Lady Somers. As Lord Henry had left his wife in order to go and live with another man, both Lady Henry and her mother were, not unnaturally, obsessed with the evils of homosexuality.

  Lady Waterford was likewise anxious to dispel any notion that it was her brother, Lord Arthur, who had taken Prince Eddy to 19 Cleveland Street. ‘Please correct any impression that Arthur and the boy ever went out together,’ she begged Reginald Brett. ‘Arthur knows nothing of his movements and was horrified to think he might be supposed to take the Father’s [the Prince of Wales’s] money and lead the son into mischief of any kind.’ She was sure, she added, that Prince Eddy was ‘as straight as a line’.10 As Lady Waterford believed her brother to be innocent, one need not put too much faith in her claim that Prince Eddy was as straight as a line. In any case, she was in no position to know: Somerset would certainly not have told her the full truth.

  Lord Arthur Somerset was equally anxious to deny that he had introduced Prince Eddy to the Cleveland Street house. It had no more to do with him, he told Brett, ‘than the fact that we (Prince Eddy and I) must both perform bodily functions which we cannot do for each other. In the same way we were both accused of going to this place but not together, and different people were supposed to have gone there to meet us.’ Somerset went on to deny that it was he who had started the rumour that Lord Euston had taken the Prince to Cleveland Street. ‘I have never even mentioned Euston’s name,’ he protested, ‘nor have I ever told any one with whom Prince Eddy was supposed to have gone there.’11

  In his determination to get Somerset to deny publicly the widely believed theory that he was sacrificing himself for Prince Eddy’s sake, Oliver Montagu considered visiting him on the Continent. At this Somerset took fright. ‘Don’t let Oliver or anyone come out to me,’ he urged Brett. ‘If he starts, let me know and I will move …’12 Quite clearly, Somerset did not want to be placed in the position of having to admit to Montagu all he knew about Prince Eddy.

  An announcement that his solicitor, Arthur Newton, was about to be charged for ‘conspiracy to defeat the course of justice’ alarmed Somerset still further. ‘There was never anything like the virulence of this prosecution,’ he wrote. ‘I can see that they will end by dragging that name before the public that we all want to avoid.’ If Newton were cornered, he continued, ‘He will very likely give them a nasty one … they will end by having out in open court exactly what they are all trying to keep quiet.’13

  Newton, in fact, was doing his bit towards keeping Prince Eddy’s name out of court. No more than any of the others involved in the affair did Newton want to be accused of disloyalty towards the throne. In a guarded letter to Brett, he claimed that he had hit upon ‘a comparatively simple way’ of demonstrating ‘the innocence of the person about whom we were speaking yesterday. I mean the person in India.’14 If Brett would call on him the following day, he would outline his scheme. Whether or not Newton’s little intrigue was ever carried out is uncertain.

  In the meantime Sir Dighton Probyn was writing to Somerset’s mother, the Duchess of Beaufort, in an effort to get her to influence her son. ‘Nobody accused your son of having mentioned PAV’s name, but his excuse to everybody for having to leave Eng
land is that he has been forced to do so to screen another and that his lips are closed. The only conclusion therefore people can draw from this is that he is sacrificing himself to save the young Prince. Who else is there for whom he could make such a sacrifice?’15

  Instead of visiting Somerset, Oliver Montagu wrote him a strong, or what Somerset called an ‘infernal’ letter. It was up to Lord Arthur, he urged, to speak up and clear Prince Eddy’s name. Was he ‘aware of the irreparable harm he was doing by still persisting in his silence as to the real cause of his leaving the country and insinuating that it was for the sakes of others that he had done so …?’16

  But that, explained Somerset to Brett, was the ‘real cause’ of his silence. In a discreetly worded but very revealing letter Lord Arthur made his position clear (the italics are the present author’s):

  ‘I cannot see what good I could do Prince Eddy if I went into Court. I might do him harm because if I was asked if I had ever heard anything against him – whom from? – has any person mentioned with whom he went there etc? – the questions would be very awkward. I have never mentioned the boy’s name except to Probyn, Montagu and Knollys when they were acting for me and I thought they ought to know. Had they been wise, hearing what I knew and therefore what others knew, they ought to have hushed the matter up, instead of stirring it up as they did, with all the authorities …

  ‘What Oliver does not seem to see is that, if I could tell him my reasons for not going into Court, I could not go in. Nothing will ever make me divulge anything I know even if I were arrested. But of course if certain people laid themselves out to have me arrested and succeeded, I might possibly lose my temper and annoy them.

  ‘Of course, it has very often, or may I say constantly occurred to me, that it rests with me to clear up this business, but what can I do? A great many people would never speak to me again as it is, but if I went into Court and told all I knew no one who called himself a man would ever speak to me again. Hence my infernal position …