by Theo Aronson
If Reynolds Newspaper was wrong about some things, it was right about a great deal depending on the new Heir Presumptive, Prince George. Fortunately for the monarchy, his character was very different from that of his late brother. It was difficult to escape the notion that the greatest contribution Prince Eddy made to the throne was in dying.
Although the twenty-six-year-old Prince George was only a few degrees more intelligent, articulate and imaginative than his late brother, he was an altogether more suitable candidate. Those years in the Navy had encouraged his particular strengths: his diligence, his conscientiousness, his dependability. Of Prince Eddy’s apathy and waywardness, Prince George had no trace. And, in inheriting his brother’s position, Prince George also inherited his fiancée. After a decent interval, Prince George became engaged to Princess May; they were married eighteen months after Prince Eddy’s death. According to Dr Manby, who attended Prince Eddy during his last days, Prince George and Princess May began falling in love at the very time that Prince Eddy lay dying. ‘When attending the Duke of Clarence in his bedroom that fatal time,’ claimed Dr Manby’s daughter many years later, ‘he could see, out of the window, Princess May and Prince George pacing the gardens hand in hand.’30 The allegation is difficult to believe. Would two such reticent people, at that heart-rending time, have allowed themselves to be seen – not only by Dr Manby but by the entire company, including the Prince and Princess of Wales – in such a compromising position? Their shared concern for the dying Prince Eddy may well have drawn the couple together but the engagement of Princess May to Prince George seems to have been no more of a love match than her previous engagement had been. On the other hand, the two of them suited each other very well. They shared, among other things, an iron sense of duty. In later years, as King George V and Queen Mary, they developed into a dedicated and impressive royal couple.
Except by his immediate family, Prince Eddy was quickly forgotten. Any chance of his being remembered, or at least more fully understood, was foiled by the deliberate destruction of all important documentation concerning his life. In his will, Prince Eddy’s father, King Edward VII, directed that all his own private and personal correspondence, including letters to, from and concerning the members of his family, should be destroyed. Already the King’s sister, Princess Beatrice, had burned, or censored by transcription, large portions of Queen Victoria’s diary. This act of vandalism was augmented by Edward VII’s destruction of many of Queen Victoria’s private letters concerning her family. When Queen Alexandra died in 1925, her instructions that all her private papers should be likewise burned were only too faithfully carried out by her confidante and friend, Charlotte Knollys, sister of that great repository of royal secrets, Sir Francis, afterwards Lord Knollys. In this wholesale conflagration, all but the most innocuous papers concerning Prince Eddy were lost; his file, as blandly expressed by the Royal Archives, ‘has not survived’.
In most biographies of Queen Victoria and her family, Prince Eddy featured as an ill-defined figure. He was usually presented as a dissipated simpleton, as a slow-witted but otherwise conventional young rake. He was often described in terms of cliché: one writer claimed that he lived for ‘wine, women and song’, another that he had ‘an eye for a prettily turned ankle’, a third that he ‘could hear the rustle of a pair of silk knickers four rooms away’. Any possibility that he might have been homosexual was either not mentioned or dismissed out of hand. The concept, apparently, was too ghastly to contemplate. The fact that the Prince professed himself to be in love with Princess Hélène d’Orléans and Lady Sybil St Claire Erskine was naïvely regarded as proof that he could not possibly have had sex with men. The idea that, homosexual or not, he might have visited the male brothel in Cleveland Street, in the same way that the reputedly heterosexual Lord Euston visited it, was dismissed as nonsensical.
But as the years went by, and his contemporaries gradually died off, so did the balance tip the other way. Theories about Prince Eddy’s private life became progressively more outlandish. The thinly veiled claim, made by Dr T.E.A. Stowell in 1970, that he had been Jack the Ripper, unleashed a torrent of ill-informed speculation. Stories of his involvement in the Ripper murders, his secret marriage, his rampant homosexuality were suddenly presented as fact and widely believed. The most bizarre concerned his death. In spite of all written evidence to the contrary, it was claimed that he did not die of pneumonia. One theory was that he had been poisoned. In order that the succession pass to his more suitable brother and so shore up a collapsing dynasty, Prince Eddy had to be eliminated. Why else, it was argued, had his fingernails turned so suspiciously blue as he lay dying? Others claimed that he had been killed by increasingly heavy doses of morphine; that he had, in short, been put to permanent sleep. Several insist that he had syphilis and that he had died, totally insane, from syphilitic softening of the brain. For the last three years of his life, ever since the Ripper murders, he had been kept under strict medical control, in a permanently drugged state.
Frank Spiering, author of Prince Jack: the True Story of Jack the Ripper, alleges that the Prince did not die at Sandringham at all. He claims that Dr Stowell was assured by the head gardener at Sandringham that Prince Eddy had not died during the long period that he had been working in the gardens of the house. More than one biographer asserts that the Prince had died, a virtual prisoner, in a sanatorium or lunatic asylum in the south of England.
Then there is the theory that he did not die in 1892 at all but lived on – as a recluse – for many decades. Exactly why, or how, a vast body of people ranging from Queen Victoria to the humblest servant successfully kept the matter quiet is never made clear. One account has him living on the Osborne estate, quite mad, until 1930. In The Ripper and the Royals that ineffable pair, Joseph Sickert and Melvyn Fairclough, present the wildest theory of all. It is that Prince Eddy’s death in 1892 was faked and that he was held captive for the following forty years.
By November 1891, they tell us, the Prince of Wales, after consultation with those Masonic conspirators who had been responsible for the Jack the Ripper murders, had decided that Prince Eddy must be removed from the line of succession. For one thing, his brother Prince George would make a more suitable King; for another, Prince Eddy’s accession to the throne would almost certainly uncover the truth about his secret marriage to the Roman Catholic, Annie Crook. So his death must be faked and he imprisoned. With this in mind, the Prince of Wales despatched his son to Balmoral late in November 1891. He was to remain there until such time as his fake death could be organized and his future place of imprisonment decided upon.
But this, apparently, did not satisfy the mastermind behind the whole Masonic conspiracy, Lord Randolph Churchill. The faking of Prince Eddy’s death would not solve the problem: the Prince must actually die. Lord Randolph thereupon sent two henchmen to Balmoral, ostensibly to deliver furniture but in reality to do away with Prince Eddy. Their gruesome task was made considerably easier by the fact that they happened to come across the Prince poised on a particularly precipitous rocky outcrop from which he was – quite alone – busily painting a Highland landscape. All they had to do was to push him over. Having done the deed, they hurried back to London. But the Prince had not been killed. Either he was discovered by a member of the staff or else he managed to make his own way back to the castle. If his body had not been broken, however, his spirit had. From that time on, the terrified Prince Eddy was ready to comply with any plans for his ‘disappearance’.
Sickert and Fairclough – in common with those writers who claim that the Prince’s last months were spent in a lunatic asylum – blithely ignore the fact that it was during this very period that Prince Eddy was at his most visible. Far from being hidden at Balmoral or confined to a sanatorium in the south of England, he was involved in all the public appearances that followed his engagement to Princess May of Teck on 3 December 1891. There was hardly a day between the announcement of his engagement and his final visit to Sandringham e
xactly a month later on which Prince Eddy was not attending some private or public function.
Undeterred by such considerations, Sickert and Fairclough – with information allegedly provided by the ubiquitous Inspector Abberline – move on to disclose Prince Eddy’s place of captivity. As busy Balmoral was clearly out of the question, the royal family had to look elsewhere. They struck a bargain with yet another of those high-ranking Freemasons, this time the 13th Earl of Strathmore. If the Earl would agree to hide Prince Eddy in his remote Scottish home, Glamis Castle, they would grant his family a unique honour: one of his female descendants would be allowed to marry a future King of England. To this the delighted Earl of Strathmore agreed. Prince Eddy was handed over. The royal family kept its promise. Some thirty years later the youngest daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore, Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, was married to the future King George VI. Fairclough gamely overcomes the awkwardness of the fact that, at the time of the marriage, the bridegroom was not regarded as the future King, by claiming that his elder brother, Edward, Prince of Wales, had no intention of ever ascending the throne. Edward VIII’s love affair with Mrs Wallis Warfield Simpson was merely the means by which he was able to implement his long-held determination to abdicate.
Prince Eddy’s place of imprisonment secured, his death, at Sandringham on 14 January 1892, was duly faked. In fact, says Melvyn Fairclough, the Prince was not even at Sandringham that day: he was, as he had been since November, at Balmoral. Whether or not a real body was put into the coffin, the author does not say. A wing of Glamis Castle, already famous for one monster – a hairy, egg-shaped creature who apparently lived for over a century – now became the home of a much less frightening captive. For over forty years, until his death in 1933, Prince Eddy remained at Glamis. His days were spent painting landscapes. As proof of this theory, Joseph Sickert reproduces a photograph of a man, palette in one hand and paintbrush in the other, sitting beside an easel. His strongest reason for believing this to be a photograph of Prince Eddy is because the sitter happens to be sporting a lot of cuff; Prince Eddy, Fairclough reminds us triumphantly, was always known as ‘Collar and Cuffs’. The two men ignore the uncomfortable evidence that Prince Eddy, whose hair was seriously thinning by the time of his death, is here pictured, in his late forties, with a full head of lustrous silver hair.
How this massive deception of the faked death and forty-year-long imprisonment – involving the royal family, the royal households, the royal doctors, the Bowes-Lyon family and the staffs at Sandringham House, Balmoral Castle and Glamis Castle – could possibly have been kept secret, is not revealed. Fiction, in this case, is a great deal stranger than fact.
Yet when all these fanciful stories about the life and death of Prince Eddy have been discounted, one is still left with an enigma. He remains an odd, mysterious figure. That dandified prince with his buoyant moustache and hooded eyes exudes a strangely unfathomable aura. That he was lethargic, diffident and vacuous is well attested but about his more intimate life there is an intriguing air of mystery. Possibly bisexual, probably homosexual, almost certainly implicated in the Cleveland Street scandal, Prince Eddy remains a supreme conundrum of the late Victorian era.
EPILOGUE
The Warrior’s Tomb
Of all the monuments and statues, effigies and bas-reliefs to the dead kings, queens, princes and princesses that crowd St George’s Chapel at Windsor, none is more flamboyant than the tomb of Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale. The least known amongst them, Prince Eddy has been honoured with the most impressive memorial. As an example of the misrepresentation necessary to enhance and glorify the often puny royal image, it could hardly be bettered. The tomb is the work of the leading sculptor of the fin de siècle, Sir Alfred Gilbert. Conceived soon after the Prince’s death in 1892, it was not completed until 1926. Although Gilbert’s statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus is probably his best-known work, the Duke of Clarence’s tomb is undoubtedly his masterpiece.
Situated in the heart of the Albert Memorial Chapel, the Victorian annex to St George’s Chapel, the monument is an example of that most voluptuous of styles, L’Art Nouveau. Quite unintentionally, the sinuous lines and seductive fluidity exactly capture the spirit of the secret world in which the Prince is said to have moved: the world of the Yellow Book, the Green Carnation, the Gilded Lily, the Mauve Decade. It is a masterly tribute to the Age of Decadence.
There is, however, no hint of decadence in the actual effigy of the dead Prince. The recumbent marble figure, depicted in Hussar uniform and stretched out on a swirling cloak, is one of high Victorian medievalism. It is the effigy of a brave and blameless knight. Prince Eddy is presented as the royal family, with its instinct for self-preservation, would have wanted him to be presented. The prince born to be king lies like some sleeping warrior: noble, honourable and unsullied, the beau idéal of virtuous manhood.
NOTES
The files of the Director of Public Prosecutions at the Public Record Office, Chancery Lane, contain the official papers on the Cleveland Street Case, comprising police reports and statements, correspondence, legal opinions, transcripts of court proceedings, indictments, sworn informations and newspaper cuttings. These papers are filed in seven boxes, numbered DPP/95/1–7. The Home Office reports on the case are housed in the Public Record Office, Kew, in two boxes: HO 144/477/X24427 and X24427a. The correspondence of the 2nd Viscount Esher on the Cleveland Street affair is bound up in a volume labelled ‘The Case of Lord Arthur Somerset’ and is kept among the Esher Papers in the Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. These letters, with relevant dates, are referred to below under the heading CLAS.
PROLOGUE: THE MYSTERY PRINCE
1. Longford, Victoria R. I., p. 512.
2. The Times, 10 Nov. 1970.
3. Ibid., 4 Nov. 1970.
4. Ibid., 9 Nov. 1970.
5. Ibid., 14 Nov. 1970.
6. Queen’s Librarian to the author.
CHAPTER ONE: ‘THE LAD THAT’S LETTERED GPO’
1. Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary, p. 124.
2. d’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest, p. 29.
3. Nicholson, Garland, p. 27.
4. Beardsley, Letters, p. 58.
5. HO 144/477/X24427.
6. Vanity Fair, 19 Nov. 1887.
7. Davenport-Hines, Sex, p. 79.
8. Hibbert, Edward VII, p. 73.
9. Croft-Cooke, Feasting, p. 51.
10. Hyde, Other Love, p. 129.
11. Bell, Davidson, pp. 114–15.
12. Hyde, Cleveland Street, p. 15.
13. O’Brien, Memories, p. 6.
14. Hyde, Cleveland Street, p. 17.
CHAPTER TWO: ‘APPLES OF SODOM’
1. Croft-Cooke, Feasting, p. 236.
2. Magnus, Kitchener, p. 235.
3. Weeks, Coming Out, p. 41.
4. Symonds, Letters, p. 808.
5. Croft-Cooke, Feasting, p. 135.
6. Weeks, Coming Out, pp. 40–1.
7. Croft-Cooke, Feasting, p. 157.
8. Ibid., p. 125.
9. Ibid., p. 173.
10. Hyde, Oscar Wilde, p. 217.
11. Davenport-Hines, Sex, p. 47.
12. Hyde, Other Love, pp. 205–6.
13. Saul, Sins, Vol. I, pp. 92–6.
14. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 40.
15. Mayne, Intersexes, p. 220.
16. David Trent to the author.
17. Saul, Sins, Vol. I, p. 87.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., p. 89.
20. Leeves, Diary, p. 101.
21. Ibid., p. 108.
22. Ibid., p. 103.
23. Ibid., p. 109.
24. Hyde, Other Love, p. 94.
25. Ellmann, Oscar Wilde, p. 258.
26. Mayne, Intersexes, p. 427.
27. Saul, Sins, Vol. II, pp. 53–5.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., p. 56.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., Vol. I, pp. 8–19.
32. Ibid., p. 38.<
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33. Ibid., Vol. II, p. 34.
34. Ibid., p. 37.
35. Ibid., Vol. I, p. 96.
36. DPP 1/95/1.
CHAPTER THREE: MOTHERDEAR’S BOY
1. Victoria, Dearest Mamma, p. 236.
2. Ibid., p. 30.
3. Ibid., p. 43.
4. Battiscombe, Alexandra, p. 70.
5. Victoria, Dearest Mamma, p. 236.
6. Ibid., p. 212.
7. Ibid., p. 226.
8. Ibid., p. 278.
9. Ibid., p. 285.
10. Ibid., p. 287.
11. Battiscombe, Alexandra, p. 62.
12. Victoria, Dearest Mamma, p. 289.
13. Ibid., p. 306.
14. Greville, Leaves, Vol. 4, p. 186.
15. Ibid., p. 187.
16. Victoria, Dearest Mamma, p. 288.
17. Victoria, Your Dear Letter, p. 17.
18. Nicolson, George V, p. 4.
19. Battiscombe, Alexandra, p. 85.
20. Ibid., p. 121.
21. Cohen, de Rothschild, p. 140.
22. Ibid., p. 139.
23. Battiscombe, Alexandra, p. 123.
24. Pope-Hennessy, Queen Mary, p. 56.
25. Battiscombe, Alexandra, p. 122.
26. Vincent, Duke of Clarence, p. 25.
27. Arthur, George V, p. 31.
28. Battiscombe, Alexandra, p. 122.
29. Bullock, Prince Edward, p. 47.
30. Cust, Edward VII, p. 33.
CHAPTER FOUR: ‘A CAREFULLY BROUGHT-UP BOY’
1. Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, p. 77.
2. Carpenter, Days and Dreams, p. 77.
3. Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, p. 71.
4. d’Arch Smith, Love in Earnest, p. 192.
5. Gore, George V, pp. 58–9.
6. Vincent, Duke of Clarence, p. 55.
7. Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, p. 70.
8. Ibid., p. 71.
9. Nicolson, George V, p. 39.
10. Ibid., pp. 41–2.