by Theo Aronson
‘I did what I did then, and still, believe was the best for all concerned. If they don’t take care, they will make a hash of the whole thing yet, and then I suppose they will say I did it. At all events you and Newton can bear me witness that I have sat absolutely tight in the matter and have not told even my own father anything.’17
Reading this correspondence (some of which, significantly, was destroyed) there can be little doubt that Prince Eddy did visit the Cleveland Street brothel and that the Prince of Wales’s entourage was desperate to quash the rumours of his involvement, not because they were false but because they were true.
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Goaded by press accusations of unwillingness, and by police complaints of procrastination, the authorities felt compelled to make another move in the Cleveland Street affair. A summons was issued against Lord Arthur Somerset’s solicitor, Arthur Newton, and his two assistants, Frederick Taylorson and Adolphe de Gallo, on a charge of perverting the course of justice. In his efforts to protect Somerset and ‘other persons’, Newton was accused not only of trying to spirit away the ex-waiter Algernon Allies but also of scheming to get three of the telegraph boys out of the country. He had promised each of them £50 down, a new outfit, £1 a week for three years and a passage to Australia where they would be able to start a new life. But as Henry Labouchere put it in his paper Truth, ‘the proceedings [against Newton and his assistants] look very much to me like a noisy attempt to close the stable door after the steeds have been allowed to issue from the stable.’18
Newton was, to say the least, surprised by the summons. As he pointed out to Reginald Brett, with whom he was in constant touch, ‘all through the case till that moment the Government had acted with him in endeavouring to minimize the scandal’. At the first of the three Cleveland Street trials – that of Veck and Newlove – Newton had obligingly suggested ‘that it was unnecessary to mention names in connection with the case’: a suggestion with which the authorities had concurred only too readily. The government, said Newton, ‘had acted entirely in unison with him in an endeavour to keep the matter secret’.19 So why should they be summonsing him now?
Newton need not have worried. Throughout his trial he was to be handled with kid gloves. The government knew – as Somerset knew – that if cornered, Newton could let off a bombshell. Newton was, after all, the first person to have mentioned Prince Eddy’s name in connection with the Cleveland Street house: over six months before, at the start of the scandal, he had warned the Director of Public Prosecutions of the Prince’s involvement.
The initial hearings into Newton and his assistants over, there was a two-month-long delay while the apprehensive government debated whether or not to continue with the prosecution. During this time the government was remorselessly harried – both in the pages of Truth and in the House of Commons – by Labouchere. ‘I do not blame Mr Newton,’ argued Labouchere; ‘so far as I know he only aided Lord Salisbury in defeating justice, but it seems to me that if Mr Newton is prosecuted, Lord Salisbury and several other gentlemen ought also to be prosecuted and charged under the same indictment.’20
The trial, presided over by Mr Justice Cave, opened on 16 May 1890 in the Queen’s Bench Division in the Law Courts. It was conducted with a suspicious lack of vigour. The charge against Newton’s assistant De Gallo had already been dropped. As his other assistant, Taylorson, was claimed to have acted under Newton’s instructions, his plea of not guilty was accepted without comment. Sir Charles Russell, who had prosecuted Ernest Parke of the North London Press so successfully, now defended Newton with equal expertise. Having been tipped off to the effect that ‘a persuasive rather than a hostile attitude towards the authorities would result in the matter not being too deeply gone in to’, Russell was at his most emollient.21 It would not be right, he announced reassuringly, ‘even if pertinent to the case’, that he should mention the names of the people who had visited the Cleveland Street house. With this the prosecuting counsel – who happened to be no less a figure than Sir Richard Webster, the Attorney General – agreed heartily.
Russell’s chief line of defence was that his client was a young man of good character who had been carried away by an excess of zeal. By trying to get various young men out of the country, Newton had merely wanted to protect his clients from possible blackmail. He had certainly not done it to ensure that they would not be able to give evidence in court. With this argument, the prosecuting counsel was only too ready to concur. Of the six counts against him, Newton pleaded not guilty to five but guilty to the general charge of ‘perverting the course of justice’. Obligingly, the jury accepted these pleas. Everyone left the court under the impression that Newton would merely be bound over.
Everyone, that is, except the judge. Mr Justice Cave had presided over all this legal egg-dancing in mounting exasperation. When he came to pass sentence, on 20 May, he made his feelings clear. He did not for a moment believe that a mere desire to save his clients from blackmail had been the reason for Newton’s attempt to get the boys out of the country. He therefore sentenced him to six weeks’ imprisonment.
It was, all things considered, a mild enough sentence. The authorities, relieved that Newton had not carried out his earlier threat of mentioning Prince Eddy’s name in court, rewarded him by ensuring that he was not struck off the rolls. Newton did not even suffer, as any solicitor in similar circumstances would have suffered, a period of suspension from practice.
Arthur Newton’s subsequent career was highly colourful. For twenty years after his short spell in prison, he enjoyed a successful practice, which included acting for Alfred Taylor, Oscar Wilde’s co-defendant, in the Wilde trials of 1895. His career reached its apogee in 1911, with his defence of the notorious wife-poisoner, Dr Crippen. But the Crippen case proved to be his undoing. He was suspended by the Law Society for twelve months for what they considered to be unethical behaviour: the selling of Crippen’s ‘confession’ to a magazine. A year later Newton was charged with obtaining a large sum of money by fraud and false pretences. He was found guilty and sentenced to three years’ imprisonment. This time he was struck off the rolls.
The Cleveland Street scandal had its climax in a turbulent debate in the House of Commons on 28 February 1890. In an hour-and-a-quarter-long speech Henry Labouchere accused Lord Salisbury’s Conservative government of a ‘criminal conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice’. Relentlessly, he went through all the suspect aspects of the case: the unimpeded flight of Hammond and the failure to extradite him; the sluggishness in moving against Lord Arthur Somerset; the lack of any examination of the telegraph boys by a magistrate; the rushed trial of Veck and Newlove; the failure to arrest Somerset on his return to England to attend his grandmother’s funeral; the railway-station meeting between Lord Salisbury and Sir Dighton Probyn which resulted in the timely flight of Somerset; the reluctance on the part of the authorities to act on police information; and, above all, the curious lack of vigour with which the entire affair had been conducted.
At one point only did Labouchere refer to Prince Eddy – or rather, to ‘a gentleman of very high position’ – and this was to deny that the Prince was in any way connected with the scandal. But then Labouchere, for all the radicalism of his politics and his readiness to attack such things as royal finances, was not entirely immune to the mystique of monarchy; nor could he possibly have known the truth about Prince Eddy’s complicity.
Labouchere was answered in an even longer speech by the Attorney General, Sir Richard Webster. Without actually lying, the Attorney General was able to refute his opponent’s accusations by skilful and wordy obfuscation. In short, he made what Labouchere afterwards described as ‘the best of a bad case’. The Attorney General’s speech was followed by ten minutes of uproar, at the end of which Labouchere was expelled for a week for refusing to withdraw an insulting remark about Lord Salisbury. For two hours more the debate raged on but, in the absence of Labouchere, the battle was as good as lost. What had been, in effect, Labouchere�
��s demand for an enquiry into the handling of the Cleveland Street affair, was beaten by 206 votes to 66.
The matter was concluded a few days later when Lord Salisbury made a personal statement in the House of Lords. He ended his dismissal of Labouchere’s accusations with the airy claim that ‘the subject is not one that lends itself to extensive treatment, or that commends itself for lengthened debate.’22
Had there been a criminal conspiracy to hush up the Cleveland Street scandal? There certainly seems to have been.
A few days after the parliamentary debate, W.H. Smith, Leader of the House of Commons and founder of the famous chain of bookstalls, asked Hamilton Cuffe, Assistant Director of Public Prosecutions, to find out how Labouchere had been able to get hold of so much confidential information for his speech in the House. There had obviously been leaks from police and government circles. Cuffe looked into the matter with great thoroughness. What he discovered would have made Labouchere’s case even stronger. Cuffe came to realize that all the procrastination – Labouchere’s ‘criminal conspiracy’ – could be narrowed down to four people, all of them at the very top of the administrative tree. They were the Home Secretary, Henry Matthews; the Attorney General, Sir Richard Webster; the Lord Chancellor, Lord Halsbury; and the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. None of these men had acted unlawfully, but an understanding that Lord Salisbury did not want charges pressed against Lord Arthur Somerset affected all their actions.
Why should Lord Salisbury have been so set on shielding Somerset? They were not particularly friendly; nor was there any sort of family connection. A practical politician and a hardened man of the world, the Prime Minister would scarcely have risked his reputation for the sake of Somerset, fellow aristocrat though he may have been. The history of the nineteenth century was not short of publicly disgraced aristocrats; one more would have made no difference. In any case, Somerset was disgraced. He might not actually have appeared in court but there were few who did not know that a warrant had been issued for his arrest, and on what charge. He was never able to return to England. For the following thirty-seven years Somerset lived – with a companion named James Andrew Neale – in a villa in Hyères in the South of France. When he died, on 26 May 1926, not even his remains were brought back for burial in the family vault at Badminton.
No, Lord Salisbury must have been acting for reasons of state. The very personification of the ruling class, he regarded his prime duty to be the upholding of its institutions and, above all, its crowning glory – the monarchy. In the course of Queen Victoria’s long reign, the throne had developed into a powerful symbol: influential, mystical, sacrosanct. It was up to Lord Salisbury to see that this image was not tarnished. Often, during his premiership, he had felt obliged to give his attention to some relatively minor royal question which, if mishandled, might affect the dignity of the crown.
Six years on, Lord Salisbury was to be involved in a similar piece of duplicity during the official enquiry into the Jameson Raid – that unprovoked invasion of the independent Transvaal by a band of British freebooters. The nickname given to Salisbury’s blinkered investigation could well have been given to the Cleveland Street inquest: ‘the Lying in State at Westminster’. It was a similar exercise in safeguarding the prestige of the British throne.
Prince Albert Victor, for all his weaknesses, was Heir Presumptive. The Queen was getting old; she had already celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of her accession. The Prince of Wales, who ate, smoked and fornicated too much, was not expected to live into old age. So it was not unlikely that within a decade or so, Prince Eddy would ascend the throne. For a crowned and anointed King-Emperor to be suspected of breaking the law by patronizing a notorious male brothel would be too appalling to contemplate. Whether Lord Salisbury believed that the Prince had visited 19 Cleveland Street was neither here nor there; the Prime Minister’s main concern was that the rumour should be quashed; that Somerset, and others, should be prevented from mentioning the Prince’s name in open court.
Beyond the patrician figure of Lord Salisbury stood a still more important one: the Prince of Wales. By now he, as well as his circle of advisers – Knollys, Probyn and Montagu – knew even more about the matter than did Salisbury. Scandals, sexual or otherwise, were something which the Prince of Wales had been containing all his adult life. An accomplished diplomat, driven by the supreme monarchical need for self-preservation, the Prince of Wales had handled the matter very adroitly. It was no mean achievement for him and his coterie of polished courtiers to have hushed things up so successfully; to have convinced even a man like Labouchere that there was no substance whatsoever in the rumours about Prince Eddy.
That there had been a conspiracy instigated at the highest levels, there can be very little doubt. Sixty years later, when the writer and politician Harold Nicolson was working on his official life of Prince Eddy’s brother, King George V, he was told by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Goddard, that Prince Eddy ‘had been involved in a male brothel scene, and that a solicitor had to commit perjury to clear him’.23 And while researching in the Royal Archives, Nicolson made a note in his private diary to the effect that there seems to have been a skilful cover-up of the scandal ‘to save the name of the Royal Family’.24 To this day, the present Lord Salisbury is ‘not willing to agree’ to an examination of the relevant papers.25
PART FIVE
Duke of Clarence
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘The greatest position there is’
Not until May 1890, when the last of the three Cleveland Street trials was almost over, did Prince Eddy arrive home from his Indian tour. He had broken his voyage to spend a few days in Egypt, as the guest of the Khedive Tawfik. From there he had sailed on to Athens to visit his Greek relations: George I, King of the Hellenes, was the Princess of Wales’s brother. Crown Princess Sophie of Greece, whose wedding Prince Eddy had attended on his way out to India the previous October, wrote to her mother, the German Empress Frederick, to report that ‘Eddy leaves tomorrow morning; poor boy he still looks dreadfully yellow and thin! He is such a dear and so good and kind.’1
To give some sort of shape to dear, good, kind Prince Eddy’s amorphous personality, the royal family decided to take certain steps. The first of these was the bestowing of a new title. On 24 May 1890, the day Queen Victoria turned seventy-one, he was created Duke of Clarence and Avondale and Earl of Athlone. It had been with some reluctance that Queen Victoria had agreed to this bestowal of a dukedom on her grandson. ‘I am very sorry Eddy should be lowered to a Duke like any one of the nobility, which a Prince never can be,’ she complained to her eldest daughter, the Empress Frederick. ‘Nothing is so fine and grand as a Royal Prince …’2
Prince Eddy’s brother, Prince George, had other, more significant, objections to the title. So many ‘stupid jokes and puns’ had apparently been made about ‘Albert’ and ‘Victor’; he could now visualize similar double entendres about the activities of ‘Clarence’ and ‘Avondale’. ‘Why can’t you darling Motherdear’, appealed Prince George to Princess Alexandra, ‘try and get it altered and let him be called the Duke of Clarence, which is an old English title.’3
Prince George’s objections were met. From this time on Prince Eddy was usually referred to as the Duke of Clarence. But even this led to criticism. The mischievous Henry Labouchere immediately launched into an attack on the title. ‘The only Duke of Clarence who is known to history is the numbskull who was deservedly drowned in a butt of malmsey,’ he wrote in Truth, ‘and, during the present century the title was associated with the aberrations and extravagances for which William IV was unenviably notorious.’4 What Labouchere was implying, of course, was that Prince Eddy was a numbskull, notorious for his aberrations and extravagances.
Numbskull or not, Prince Eddy was formally introduced, in June that year, into the House of Lords by his father, the Prince of Wales, and his uncle, the Duke of Edinburgh. The colourful ceremony was watched, from the royal gallery, by his adoring mother and
sisters. The Prince, who was already a Mason, was also installed, at Reading, as Provincial Grand Master of the Berkshire Freemasons. He was promoted, in quick succession, to honorary colonelships of the 3rd King’s Royal Rifle Corps, the 1st Volunteer Battalion of the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, the 4th Bombay Infantry and the 4th Bombay Cavalry. If nothing else, this allowed him to sport even more splendidly tailored uniforms.
As, at the age of twenty-six, a royal duke could hardly still be living under his parents’ roof, a suite of rooms was prepared for his use in St James’s Palace. It was designed to serve as the home in which the Prince could be launched on the next stage of his career; for by now the family had decided that marriage was the only solution to the problem of Prince Eddy. Both to give his life some sense of purpose and, more important, to lay the ghost of the Cleveland Street scandal, Prince Eddy must find a wife or, more accurately, must have a wife found for him.
Marlborough House expected no resistance from the Prince on the subject. ‘If he is properly managed,’ wrote Sir Francis Knollys with brutal frankness, ‘I do not anticipate any real opposition on Prince Eddy’s part.’5 Indeed, it would never have occurred to the pliable Prince to go against his family’s wishes. He was also conscious enough of his royal birth and obligations, of the dynastic imperatives, to realize that he would have to marry sooner or later. That there might be any choice in the matter would never have occurred to him. Whatever his sexual preferences, Prince Eddy was to prove quite capable of contemplating marriage and, indeed, of professing himself to be in love with a woman. In fact, once the subject had been raised, the young man astonished his family by the volatility with which he seemed to be tumbling in and out of love.