This was the only part of this journal’s outrage that history confirmed. When the scandal finally bloomed into ritual debate at the House of Commons, it had already been controlled. By now Somerset had dissolved into the south of France, never to return. But here come all the Right Honourable Pecksniffs to yak it all over.
For the government, Attorney General Sir Richard Webster QC MP, also of the Athenaeum, spoke the only words of truth to come out of his mouth that night. ‘No good is done,’ he reminded the House, ‘by reporting cases of this description, and it is generally to the credit of reporters of the press, that they almost invariably refrain from reporting them.’77
Please bear this statement in mind.
In this instance, Webster was not alluding to Parke, but to the jailing of a pair of Cleveland Street victims, two boys hustled off in secrecy to serve relatively short terms of incarceration in exchange for keeping their traps shut.
Henry Labouchère, the aforementioned Member for Northampton, known to Queen Victoria as ‘that horrible lying Labouchère’, and to her son Edward, Prince of Wales, as ‘that viper Labouchère’, wasn’t so easily silenced. He’d come into that neo-Gothic marquee of duplicity burning with indignation at the jailing of Ernest Parke; and more than that, he had something to say about the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury.
My first charge is that Lord Salisbury and others entered into a criminal conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice. Instead of making every effort to punish offences, as far as I can see, every effort has been made to hush up the matter … Two boys have been sent to prison. Salisbury, and several other gentlemen ought also to be prosecuted. We have heard a good deal lately about criminal conspiracy. What is this case but a criminal conspiracy by the very guardians of public morality and law, with the Prime Minister at their head to defeat the ends of justice?78
You can’t really say it any clearer than that.
Labouchère’s use of the term ‘criminal conspiracy’ is interesting. It’s worth noting that not all conclusions of ‘conspiracy’ in respect of the events of 1888–89 are figments of modern imagination. This famous Victorian politician was arguing at the coalface of one such ‘conspiracy’, and it is his choice of word. Salisbury’s administration was in permanent ‘criminal conspiracy’, and as with the ‘nuclear industry’ of our day, telling the truth was not an option – it had to lie to survive.
Labouchère rehearsed his points, including the unusual protocol of a British Prime Minister tipping off a wanted criminal. ‘The importance of the point here,’ he said, ‘is why did Lord Salisbury interfere in the matter? Was it the responsibility of a Prime Minister and a Foreign Secretary to mix himself up in such matters? If he knew a warrant was going to be issued, surely the last thing a man in his official position should have done, was to communicate the fact to a friend of Lord Arthur Somerset?’ Then there was the associated peculiarity of the two boys, sentenced covertly and whisked away from the Old Bailey in secret.
Well, it was nothing of the sort, rejoined Webster: ‘The charge against Her Majesty’s Government is that it was agreed between the prosecuting and defending counsel with the knowledge of the Treasury Solicitor, that the accused should have light sentences as the price of silence, and that corrupt bargain was made with the knowledge of those in authority. I think the house will agree that, if true, more infamous conduct was never charged against persons in authority.’79
It was true. Half the Conservative House did agree, and the other half didn’t. Webster had, in fact, succinctly summarised the case he was put up to argue against (something he would do with less success in the ‘criminal conspiracy’ against the Irish Nationalist leader Charles Parnell*). With an appearance of ‘almost celestial virtue’ he repudiated the existence of this supposed ‘wicked and corrupt bargain’ between the courts and the Conservative government, at which a variety of Members rose, Ernest Parke’s boss T.P. O’Connor among them:
The Attorney General assumes an air of the most virtuous indignation because my Honourable Friend (Mr Labouchère) spoke for an arrangement between the prosecution and defence. The Attorney General is an experienced lawyer of many years practice, and he knows that arrangements of this kind are common … these arrangements between one side and the other are as common almost as criminal trials. In spite of all the Attorney General says, I maintain that there was such an arrangement here, and the object and meaning of it was to close the mouths of the persons in gaol, and in that way to save the criminals who their confessions might have exposed.80
The essence of the response from Sir Richard Webster was basically, ‘Not guilty, but I promise you we won’t do it again.’ It is axiomatic amongst lawyers that you do not propose a question to which you do not know the answer, and here Webster slipped. Referring to brothel-master Charles Hammond and his boy, who had come in for their share of invective, Sir Richard had this to say: ‘As to the circumstances under which Hammond did go to America, my own mouth is closed. I should be perfectly willing, and some day I shall be allowed, to state them. The Honourable and Learned Gentleman, the Member for South Hackney, knows them as well as I do.’81
The Honourable and Learned Gentleman in question was Sir Charles Russell, who immediately professed complete ignorance of the matter. ‘I know nothing about them,’ he said.
This was too ridiculous a falsehood for even Sir Richard Webster to swallow, and although Russell was on the same bent agenda, he replied, ‘The Honourable and Learned Gentleman’s memory misleads him,’ which is another way of saying, ‘You are lying like the label on a bottle of snake-oil.’
Indeed he was. Russell had appeared for a man called Newton (this on behalf of the Prince of Wales). On the application to move the case to the Queen’s Bench, Newton’s affidavit stated ‘that he had been a party to getting Hammond to go away on account of the blackmail he was levying on people in England’.
Who might these ‘people in England’ be? And rather than the police sending Partridge (and the mysterious Tyrell) to America with wads of cash, why wasn’t Hammond extradited from Belgium and prosecuted for the very serious crime of blackmail? It was a question for which the Establishment didn’t require an answer; and anyway, it was all over bar the shouting, the business of the House complete except for the ritual expulsion of Labouchère.
He was finally ordered out of the pantomime by means of a parliamentary device enforced from time to time against Members who persisted in telling the truth.
LABOUCHÈRE: I am obliged to speak frankly and truly in this matter. I assert, if I am obliged to do it, that I do not believe Lord Salisbury.
THE SPEAKER: I must call on the Honourable Member to withdraw the expression.
LABOUCHÈRE: I decline, sir, to withdraw.
And as a matter of fact he repeated it. The First Lord of the Treasury, the successful newsagent W.H. Smith, got to his feet.
‘It is my duty to move that Mr Henry Labouchère be suspended from the service of this House.’
MPs call themselves ‘Honourable’ because nobody else would. The House divided. There was a vote. Ayes 177, Nos ninety-six. The Ayes had it, and out Labouchère went.82
The End.
The Scandal of Cleveland Street affords an opportunity to take a look at the Victorian ruling class on the run. With survival in mind, extremes of criminal behaviour were no problem. It was ruthless as Herod. After a breather of two or three weeks, on 3 March 1890 Salisbury got up in the Lords and fibbed like a slut, and that was just about that. As his recent biographer Andrew Roberts tells us, ‘He shrugged it off.’
The thrust of Salisbury’s speech was immediately to raise the matter over which his conduct ‘had been called into question’: ‘My Lords, it is said that I met with Sir Dighton Probyn, with the view of enabling a person who was exposed to a serious charge to escape from justice.’ He then went on to describe how he had done precisely that, while insisting that he hadn’t. He’d just come back from France, he said, where at Dover, he found a telegr
am from Probyn, asking if he could meet Salisbury in London.
I had no notion what it was about … I replied that I should be passing through town, and that he would find me at the Great Northern Railway Station in time for the 7 o’clock train … Sir Dighton Probyn came to see me there. He then informed me what he wanted to do was to ask whether there was any ground for certain charges which had been made in the newspapers against sundry persons whom he named. My reply was, that so far as I knew, there was no ground whatever for them … I think I added – but of that I am not quite certain – that rumours had reached me that further evidence had been obtained, but I did not know what its character was. My Lords, I am not ashamed to say that is all I recollect of a casual interview for which I was in no degree prepared, to which I did not attach the slightest importance … and I may add that I can aver in the most confident manner that the suggestion which has been made that a man of Sir Dighton Probyn’s character and career could have appointed an interview with me for the purpose of worming out matter which he might use for the purpose of defeating the ends of justice is the wildest and most malignant imagination that has ever been conceived.83
Note how this most expert liar transfers the accusation onto Sir Dighton Probyn. Is this not the most astonishing casuistry? Salisbury had deflected criticism of his own propriety into a question of the honour of Sir Dighton Probyn.
Except, that same night, Probyn had tipped ‘Podge’ Somerset off, and he had quit London with the alacrity of a rat up a drainpipe. The next day, Probyn had written to the Prime Minister, ‘I fear what you told me last night was all too true,’ a mystery of circumstance confirmed by a letter to Probyn from the Prince of Wales: ‘Your interview with Somerset must have been a very painful one.’
In reality, Sir Dighton Probyn and the Prince’s Private Secretary, Sir Francis Knollys, had been rushing around like a pair of hysterical waiters for months, battling for the homosexual corner in the wildest and most malignant way to defeat the ends of justice.
Salisbury’s fiefdom was intoxicated with corruption, poisoned with its own iniquity. A year before, the Liberal leader Gladstone had put his knuckles on his hips and surveyed the Conservative benches opposite. His contention was ‘that no government during the past half century had shown so unblushing and unscrupulous a contempt for the law as had that of Lord Salisbury’.
He was alluding here to another great and concurrent scandal, the conspiracy to defame and destroy Charles Parnell. The Parnell scandal featured government perjury, forgery, slander, bent courts and imprisonment of the innocent, establishing new benchmarks of political deceit by what Gladstone called ‘the foulest and wickedest means’.
The Cleveland Street and Jack the Ripper scandals were from the same stable, and were managed with no less élan, requiring little more from the ruling elite than instinct. If the Crown was under threat – be it from a nancy prince or a Monster with a Blade – it was a threat to them all. And they all knew – every baron, every earl, every duke – that, provided the monarch remained supreme, then so did its most ardent beneficiaries, this to include Queen’s Councillors, Most Honourable Judges, senior policemen and arse-licking MPs. They were the Royal Courts of Justice, not the people’s courts, and I do not exaggerate when I say they were almost exclusively staffed by Freemasons.
In respect of Cleveland Street, the victims, low-class working boys, went to prison, and the perpetrators, guilty as it got, walked free. Bro Euston, Bro Clarence and his dad, Bro the King-to-be, were all Freemasons, and that was not without significance. To join the Masons in the nineteenth century wasn’t like signing up at the golf club, because Victorian golf clubs didn’t exercise the power of the state. Golf clubs couldn’t hang people, or incarcerate them for life. In the matter of Clarence, we are talking about the ability of Freemasonry to seriously interfere with the administration of the law. The most senior Law Lord in England, the Lord Chancellor Lord Halsbury, was a Freemason. The man who framed charges on behalf of the government, the Solicitor General Sir Edward Clarke QC MP, was also a Freemason. In his memoir, Bro Clarke tells us: ‘I kept up my Masonic work until I became a Member for Plymouth. Then I practically abandoned it for twenty years.’84
And why was that?
‘Because I wished to avoid the slightest possibility of it being connected with politics.’
In which case, he must have had less sentient aptitude than the three famous monkeys. By the late nineteenth century Freemasonry and politics were inextricable, the Houses of Parliament resembling an enormous and permanent Freemasonic lodge. To vote Conservative in the late 1880s was to vote for the Conservative (Freemasonic) and Unionist Party. Without effort, I was able to identify 338 Freemasons in the Parliament of 1889. You could safely add another fifty.
Freemasonry likes to kid itself, or perhaps others, that it is apolitical, a bit like Henry Ford’s dictum concerning the colour of his cars: ‘Any politics, providing it’s Conservative.’ From its invention in the early eighteenth century, Freemasonry has been a deeply reactionary proposition, clandestinely linking the authorities of state. It isn’t necessary to read between the lines to understand this – just read the lines themselves: ‘Freemasons have always shown an unshaken devotion to the Crown’; ‘Loyalty to the King is an essential principle of Freemasonry.’85 Thus, when Labouchère told his certain truth, there might well have been a fraternal tendency to squash it and kick the Honourable Member out. To lie on behalf of the royals had become a noble requisite, a means by which one demonstrated one’s ‘loyalty’, not to the British people, but to the ruling system; and that included Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence.
‘In order to serve in the Commons and Cabinet, I had to tell eighteen lies under oath,’ wrote ex-Labour Cabinet Minister Tony Benn in 2003.86 He says he found this ‘deeply offensive’. ‘Above all,’ he continued, ‘the existence of an hereditary monarchy helps to prop up all the privilege and patronage that corrupts our society; that is why the Crown is seen as being of such importance to those that run the country – or enjoy the privileges it affords.’
One of the founders of Mr Benn’s party had a not dissimilar point of view, although his was posted over a century before. ‘In these modern days,’ wrote Keir Hardie, ‘there is nothing for a King to do except to aid in the work of hoodwinking the common people. The role assigned to him is that of leading mime in the pantomime in which the great unthinking multitude is kept amused while it is being imposed upon. A King is an anachronism, and is only kept in being as a valuable asset of the ruling class.’87 Like Mr Benn, Mr Hardie had difficulties with his sovereign oath.
Now let’s add another one. It’s the Masonic oath:
I do solemnly promise, vow, and swear, that I will always and at all times love the Brotherhood heartily and therefore will charitably hide and conceal and cover all the sins, frailties and errors of every Brother to the utmost of my power.88
It doesn’t come clearer than that, and at least half of Queen Victoria’s Parliament had sworn to this. One can either believe that these promises were useful to the state, or one can believe that they were not. For those inclined to the latter opinion, the question must surely be, what then was the purpose of them? Why take such an oath if the corporate intention was to dishonour it?
Was Bro the Duke of Clarence not in trouble? Was Bro the Earl of Euston not in the same boat? Had not these parliamentary Brethren taken their Freemasonic oath? Did they not ‘hide and conceal and cover, all the sins, frailties and errors of every Brother’ to the utmost of their power? And if not, why not? If they did not, their treachery is doubly compounded.
Courtiers Bro Sir Francis Knollys and Bro Sir Dighton Probyn had taken this oath, as had a ruling executive with supremely vested interests in making it stick.
When His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales first heard of Euston’s complicity in the Cleveland Street scandal, he wrote, ‘It is really too shocking! A married man whose hospitality I have frequently accepted!’ So sh
ocked was he that he invited him to dinner. On 13 March 1890, Euston was a guest of His Highness at a banquet celebrating one hundred years of the Prince of Wales Freemasonic lodge.89 Some interesting names were present, including many we shall be hearing more of. They included the Chamberlain to the Queen the Earl of Lathom, and Colonel Thomas Henry Shadwell Clerke, Secretary to the English Freemasons and Masonic Secretary to Edward himself. Like Euston, Shadwell Clerke was a personal friend of my candidate, both enjoying membership of the Knights Templar ‘Encampment of the Cross of Christ’.
Bro the Prince of Wales and Bro Lathom were to be found once again at another Masonic celebration at the very heart of the English law, in Lincoln’s Inn. The evening was devoted to the consecration of a new lodge, the Chancery Bar, its membership restricted to the legal profession. The other guests included the Lord Chancellor, Bro Lord Halsbury, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, Bro Lord George Hamilton, plus a galaxy of wigs: Bro Judge Sir H. Lloyd, Bro Sir Forrest Foulton, Bro Sir Frank Lockwood QC MP, Bro Mr Staveny Hill QC MP, Bro Mr Jones QC MP, Bro E.H. Pember QC, Bro D.R. Littler QC, Bro F.A. Philbrick QC, and Bro Colonel Le Grande Starkie.
They All Love Jack Page 7