by John Hamer
It is a little known or reported fact that there are several masonic lodges in the royal palaces of Britain, the most significant one perhaps being the Royal Alpha Lodge in Kensington Palace. In 1885 Prince Eddy was initiated into the Royal Alpha Lodge at the behest of his father.
Prince Eddy
As well as his membership of the lodge, Eddy was also a regular ‘customer’ at a homosexual-paedophile brothel in Cleveland Street, London and indiscreetly instigated a series of explicit love-letters with a young boy employed at these most vile of premises. The well-known Satanist, Aleister Crowley had these letters in his possession for many years but eventually they were lost or more likely destroyed and have never since seen the light of day. This incident alone had the potential to become a huge national scandal if made public, but events took a turn for the worse when it was discovered that Eddy had also made a young Catholic ‘commoner’ of Irish descent by the name of Annie Elizabeth Crook, pregnant with his child. Eddy also, as it turned out, had foolishly married her in a clandestine church service and this in effect barred him from ever becoming king as British royals are not permitted to marry Catholics, let alone one who is deemed to be a commoner and bearing a child conceived out of wedlock.
In 1883, Eddy’s mother, Princess Alexandra, had asked the young painter Walter Sickert to introduce Eddy to the artistic and literary life of London. Sickert’s studio, where he spent most of his time, was at 15 Cleveland Street near to Tottenham Court Road in north London. He duly introduced the teenage Prince to many of the area’s ‘bohemian types’, including the theatrical friends he had made when, for four years, he had been a minor member of the Lyceum Theatre Company. Sickert also introduced Eddy to one of his models, a pretty Irish Catholic girl, the afore-mentioned Annie Crook who lived nearby at 6 Cleveland Street and who worked by day in a local confectioners or tobacconist’s shop. They fell for each other and, according to Sickert, went through two clandestine marriage ceremonies, one Anglican and one Catholic. Soon afterwards, due to Annie’s pregnancy, her employer needed someone to deputise for her during her confinement. Walter Sickert was asked if he knew anyone suitable and, after consulting friends, found a young girl by the name of Mary Jean (Marie Jeanette) Kelly, from the Providence Row Night Refuge for Women in Whitechapel. For some months, Mary worked alongside Annie Crook in the shop and the two became friends. In due course, on the 18th April 1885, Annie gave birth to Eddy’s daughter, Alice Margaret and when she returned home, her new friend Mary Kelly moved-in as the child’s nursemaid. Mary also worked as a prostitute in the evenings to supplement her meagre income.
Naturally, Eddy absolutely enraged the establishment with his ‘illicit’ marriage and this combined with the incident of the love-letters, threatened to tear apart the monarchy and spark a constitutional crisis of major proportions. So, as is always the case, the monarchy set in motion a huge cover-up operation as part of the damage limitation process. Annie was kidnapped from the small apartment in Cleveland Street in which she lived and in which Eddy spent time with her and at the same time Eddy was abducted into a carriage headed for Buckingham Palace where he was instructed, in no uncertain terms, to stay until further notice.
Fortunately, fearing the worst, Annie had already given the child, Alice to Walter Sickert for safekeeping shortly before she was forcefully taken to Guy’s Hospital in London. She remained there for five months and whilst she was there, Sir William Gull, the Queen’s personal physician performed a partial frontal lobotomy on her, in effect rendering her docile and compliant and thus easily controlled by these inhuman monsters. Subsequently certified insane by Gull, Annie lived for the rest of her life in institutions, spending her last days in the Lunacy Observation ward of St George’s Union Workhouse, Chelsea and dying there in obscurity in early 1920 at the age of 57.
This was not the first time that Sir William Gull had been implicated in a scandalous royal cover-up operation. Around twenty years prior to this, the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VII) the father of Prince Eddy, had been involved in a series of extra-marital affairs, one of which was with the young Lady Harriet Mordaunt. One day she foolishly confessed to her husband, Sir Charles Mordaunt, that she had been unfaithful with several men, one of whom was the Prince of Wales.
Sir Charles was absolutely incensed and he let it be known that he intended to sue for divorce, citing the Prince as a co-respondent. The Prince of Wales was rightly nervous about giving evidence in court as it would bring shame upon the entire royal family and cause an unacceptable scandal. So, at this point, Queen Victoria herself interceded on the Prince’s behalf to protect the reputation of the family and instructed Sir William Gull to intervene.
Gull immediately, in consort with several other doctors conspired to have the young woman declared insane and locked away in a lunatic asylum, where she spent the last remaining 37 years of her life in abject misery, dying in 1906. Ultimately the case was dismissed, saving the Prince and the royals from acute embarrassment and no divorce was granted, not because adultery was unproven but simply because poor Harriet was declared insane.
However, to return to the main story, the matter might have ended there, but for Mary Kelly’s greed. Back in Whitechapel, Mary had befriended three other local prostitutes to whom she boasted of her ‘royal connections’ and in the spring of 1888 the quartet, led by Mary, hatched a plan to demand money from Walter Sickert, threatening to otherwise make the story public. Being a simple girl, she had not fully comprehended the fact that was she in effect also holding-to-ransom a group of psychopathic murderers who would literally stop at nothing and had the means to kill with impunity whilst enjoying the ‘protection’ of people in high places.
Sickert immediately passed word to Eddy who informed his father and the Prince of Wales discussed the threat in the greatest secrecy with trusted fellow masons in the Royal Alpha Lodge. Subsequently, a special meeting was arranged at the Lodge by the royal masons known as the ‘Princes of the Blood Royal’ whereby they agreed to form a ‘hunting party’ to literally hunt-down and kill the hapless girls as punishment for their sheer audacity and significantly, as a masonic blood-sacrifice ritual.
The ‘hunting party’ was drawn exclusively from the Royal Alpha Masonic Lodge and included Sir William Gull, Eddy’s former Cambridge University tutor J. K. (James Kenneth) Stephen and Sir Charles Warren, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police (who took no active part in the killings but who helped facilitate the plot and expedite the cover-up). To drive them about their sordid business they recruited a coachman who had previously betrayed Prince Eddy’s indiscretions to the royals, one John Netley.
Warren provided what information he could, on the girls’ whereabouts using his privileged position in the police force and Sir William Gull prepared grapes injected with opium, which would be offered to the victims to subdue them so that the dastardly deed could take place with a minimum of fuss. It was arranged that John Netley, the coach driver and a particularly nasty character, was to be the ‘getaway driver’ and the ‘lookout’ would be J.K. Stephen, a cousin of Virginia Woolf and another freemason with royal links, whilst the murders were planned to occur within Gull’s carriage – away from prying eyes.
It should be noted that Abberline’s diaries confirmed that the modus operandus was not that of one person only and that the murders were planned and performed according to masonic ritual, similar to a fox-hunt. These are facts which were never allowed to come to light.
So, who was the ringleader of this murderous gang? None other than the prominent freemason, Secretary of State for India, the Leader of the House of Commons and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill, father of the future prime minister, Winston Churchill. Churchill was not only the ‘brains’ behind the entire operation, but he was also personally responsible for the cutting of masonic emblems and symbols into the bodies of the victims, whilst the skilled surgeon’s hands of William Gull performed the organ removals.
The kil
lings and mutilations were not observed by the police simply because four of them were not carried out in the streets where the bodies were found but in a moving coach, whilst the last was perpetrated in situ, in the victim Mary Kelly’s own room. The police must have been aware that the bodies had been moved to their resting places due to the lack of blood as the whole pavement area would surely have been awash with blood had the rituals been performed there. Obviously though, this fact was never publicly disclosed by the police.
The assassins set about discovering the blackmailers’ whereabouts with ‘insider’ help from Warren and then systematically plotted their executions. The ritualistic, murderous spree began on the 31st August 1888 with Mary Ann Nicholls as their first victim and continued with the killing of Annie Chapman on the 8th September. In turn each woman was lured inside the coach, then killed and mutilated in the ritualistic way that the three ‘Juwes’, Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum, the murderers of Hiram Abiff, were executed in the old Masonic legend. Their throats were ‘cut across’, their bodies’ torn open, their internal organs deftly removed and arranged around the corpses in their final resting places and their entrails ‘thrown over’ the left shoulder.
On the 30th September there were two further killings but on that night things did not go smoothly. As the murderers were dumping that night’s first victim, Lizzie Stride, in Berner Street, they were interrupted and had to abandon her corpse before its ritual mutilation had been completed. More alarming still, the night’s second victim, Catherine Eddowes, was, according to Sickert, almost immediately discovered to have been killed in error. It was learnt that poor Catherine had for some time lived with a man called John Kelly, had often used his surname and so had been wrongly identified by the gang’s underworld informants as the blackmailer-in-chief, Mary Kelly.
That mistake nearly led to the group’s undoing. In the mistaken belief that this was to be the climactic, final episode of their campaign, the group had already arranged Catherine’s corpse, more completely mutilated than any of her predecessors, in Mitre Square (significantly masonic) opposite the masonic Temple and close to the Whitechapel Road. They had chalked on a nearby wall a masonic slogan to act as a postscript to the whole sordid affair. Abberline copied it down into his notebook and it said:
The Juwes are
the men that
will not
be blamed
for nothing.
Arriving on the scene suspiciously quickly, Sir Charles Warren, to the acute surprise of his underlings, ordered that the chalked epitaph, presumed by observers to be in the killer’s hand, noted by Abberline to be that of an ‘educated’ man, should be immediately washed down and erased. The reason he gave was that he did not want anti-Jewish sentiment to be inflamed, but Sickert suggested the real reason was that too many insiders would recognise that the message referred not to the ‘Jews’ but to the ‘Juwes’ of Masonic legend, and would therefore identify the killers as freemasons.
After this setback there was a pause of more than a month, the longest interval between the killings, whilst the group redoubled their efforts to find the real Mary Kelly who was by this time lying low in fear of her life. Meanwhile, rumours of the killer’s associations with freemasonry and with the royal family continued to grow. It was not until the 9th November that Mary Kelly was finally tracked down. To use the coach again was deemed to be too dangerous now, so she was dispatched in her own Dorset Street lodgings, more bloodily mutilated than any of her fellow-conspirators, her throat slashed, her body brutally cut apart and her intestines arranged ritually about the room.
There is in existence a police drawing of the last person to be seen with Mary whilst she was still alive and this bears an uncanny resemblance to no less a person than Lord Randolph Spencer-Churchill himself. Of course, this particular ‘lead’ was never followed-up by the masonic-controlled and run Metropolitan Police. J.K. Stephen, again according to Abberline’s diaries, actually went to the police, made a full confession and surrendered himself in a fit of guilt but of course no arrests were made and Stephen was also released without charge whilst Abberline resigned his position with the force and retired forthwith as a direct result of his disgust at the inaction and cover-up on the part of the police. Indeed there are still files in existence in Scotland Yard that have been sealed forever to prevent the truth from ever being revealed. Stephen himself suffered a complete mental and physical breakdown shortly after the attacks and died a sad, lonely death in a lunatic asylum in Northampton, three years later at the age of only 33.
In the late 1970s, a researcher and author, Stephen Knight, managed to obtain limited access to the ‘Ripper’ files but discovered that there were many gaps in the records. Despite this, he still managed to unearth new leads and information based upon which he wrote a book ‘Jack the Ripper – the final solution’. Unfortunately before publication, many of the more incriminating parts were ‘stolen’ and in those days, before personal computers were commonplace, he had no back-ups or copies as protection. After the book was eventually published, minus the more incriminating information, he published another book. ‘The Brotherhood’ which exposed the gross corruption and illegality prevalent in the freemasonic movement and shortly afterwards he was dead – allegedly poisoned, but of course no arrests were ever made. No change there then.
When Prince Eddy found out that his wife had been lobotomised he had a nervous breakdown as a result and when he learned the truth about the ‘Ripper’ murders, he withdrew within himself and was never the same again thereafter.
Sickert fled the country immediately, upon hearing the news of Annie Crook’s abduction and took up residence in Dieppe, France in an attempt to protect the child, Alice. When Alice grew up, she and Walter became lovers and in turn had a child themselves who went by the name of Joseph Sickert – the very same man who held Inspector Abberline’s diaries after inheriting them from his father.
In the meantime, Prince Eddy, his mental health by now completely shattered, was given into the care of the Earl of Strathmore who owned Glamis Castle in Scotland, until such a time as it had been decided by ‘the firm’ what was to be done with him. The royal family then blatantly lied to the world and announced that Eddy had sadly passed away at the age of only 28, on the 14th January 1892 due to influenza, but of course Eddy was still alive and being held in Balmoral Castle having not yet made the final move to Glamis.
Balmoral is approximately 1000 feet (300 metres) above sea-level and as such is partly surrounded by steep cliffs. This was the intended site for the planned murder of Eddy to be undertaken by Randolph Churchill and John Netley the coachman. The prince was pushed from the cliff-top but somehow managed to survive his fall and after the passage of two days had endeavoured to crawl all the way back to Balmoral where he was found at the door by his incredulous hosts. It was decided after this that the best option would be to just incarcerate him at Glamis for the rest of his life and the Earl of Strathmore agreed to undertake this task on behalf of the royals in return for one simple favour. The favour he stipulated was that one of his daughters be allowed to marry a future king of England.
Prince Eddy died in 1933, forty one years after his ‘official’ death date and during this time, his mother visited him only once, but took a photograph of him which she apparently sent to her cousin. This photograph is still in existence and shows a much older Eddy thoughtfully painting a picture which would sadly never be seen by anyone outside the walls of Glamis Castle.
The pact between Strathmore and the royal family was eventually fulfilled in 1923 when Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (his daughter, b. 1900) married the future King George VI of England after originally being promised to his brother, the heir to the throne and eventually the former King Edward VIII (he of abdication fame). In 1936 George ascended the throne upon his elder brother’s abdication and Elizabeth became his queen consort. Elizabeth of course was more commonly known as the Queen Mother and the mother of the current incumbent of the family fir
m, Queen Elizabeth the second. She went to her grave in 2002 without ever revealing the secret and thus the world was never aware of this unholy pact.
In a further twist, as revealed in the Duke of Windsor’s (the former King Edward VIII’s) last known interview, shortly before he died, he revealed to Michael Thornton, the author of ‘Royal Feud – The Queen Mother and the Duchess of Windsor’ that the Queen Mother had been in love with him and not his brother Bertie (who eventually became King George VI). In fact it was the Queen Mother’s treachery that was the reason why the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were banished from England and forced to live out the rest of their lives in France. Here is a transcript from the final interview of the Duke of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII of England) with the author Michael Thornton:
“‘So you're planning to write a book about the Queen Mother,' said the Duke, exchanging a conspiratorial smile with his wife.
'Well, we shall have to be extremely careful what we say on that subject, won't we darling?'
'Why is that, Sir?' I inquired innocently, although I was well aware of the reason.
The Duke, only months away from being diagnosed with inoperable throat cancer, was interrupted by a convulsive spasm of coughing.
He cleared his throat and added: 'I hope your book will tell the truth, instead of all that gush they dish out about her. Behind that great abundance of charm is a shrewd, scheming and extremely ruthless woman.'