The Heir Apparent

by Jane Ridley

  Bertie’s concern that autumn was his son Eddy, now twenty-five. After leaving Cambridge, Eddy joined the fashionable cavalry regiment the 10th Hussars, but his military career was a farce. He was ignorant of the history of battles, and he detested drill and cavalry riding. (“One has to go jogging round and round the riding school in a very tight and uncomfortable garment called a stable jacket and very hot work it is I can assure you.”)72 His instructor at Aldershot found that Dalton had taught him “absolutely nothing!!” But, according to Lady Geraldine Somerset, the instructor was “equally astonished how much he has got on with him, and thinks, under the circumstances his papers are infinitely better than he dared to expect. He has his father’s dislike for a book and never looks into one, but learns all orally, and retains what he thus learns.”73

  The chain-smoking Eddy was aimless and lackadaisical and distressingly prone to put his foot in it. He was remarkably sweet-natured, however, and Alix’s favorite. Bertie, though, was infuriated, and teased him for his dandified clothes and the tall “masher” collars he wore to hide his abnormally long neck (“Eddy-Collar-and-Cuffs”). To stiffen his son and keep him out of trouble, he resolved to send Eddy on a six-month tour of India.74

  Bertie had a meeting with his equerry Lord Arthur Somerset, the superintendent of his stables, and instructed him to see that Eddy was properly equipped with saddlery for his Indian tour, arranging for him to meet the prince on 30 September 1889.75 At the last minute, Somerset wired to excuse himself from the meeting, as he was obliged to leave “on urgent private affairs” for Dieppe.76

  Lord Arthur Somerset was the third son of the Duke of Beaufort. Known as “Podge,” he was a major in the Royal Horse Guards (the Blues), a tall bachelor with luxuriant ginger facial hair. “He was inclined to fat; his small eyes were on the watch.”77 No one would have guessed that he was in the habit of visiting a homosexual brothel on Cleveland Street. Podge’s vice had come to the attention of the authorities in July 1889, when a postboy apprehended for theft had been found with the princely sum of eighteen shillings in his pocket. Questioned by police, the boy confessed that he and two others had received the money as payment for “indecent acts” with men at number 19, Cleveland Street, near Fitzroy Square. Under Section 11 of the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act, “gross indecency” between two men, whether public or private, was a criminal offense. Policemen kept watch on the house in Cleveland Street and spotted Lord Arthur, who was identified by the postboys and then interviewed by detectives. Podge waited uneasily during the summer, as the case against two men who had procured the boys came to court. He attempted to bribe a young male prostitute, a waiter from the Marlborough Club, but this led him straight into a police trap. By the end of September, the case against him was complete, but the government hesitated to issue a warrant. A homosexual scandal at Marlborough House was the last thing Lord Salisbury wanted.

  Lord Arthur Somerset’s movements and conversations are documented in the letters he wrote to his friend Reginald (Regy) Brett, later Lord Esher, a married man and closet homosexual. Brett preserved these letters and bound them into a volume he entitled “The Case of Lord Arthur Somerset.” This forms one of the chief sources for the tangled events that ensued.78

  In London on 5 October, Lord Arthur saw his commanding officer, Oliver Montagu. They agreed that the prince must be told, and Podge wrote a letter confessing his sins. Montagu undertook to go to Fredensborg, where Bertie was on holiday with Alix’s extended family, to see the prince, “so as he may hear the right story first.”79

  “I don’t believe it,” Bertie told Dighton Probyn, the eccentrically bearded comptroller and treasurer of his household. “I won’t believe it any more than if they had accused the Archbishop of Canterbury.”a80

  From Fredensborg, Bertie ordered Probyn in London to clear up Lord Arthur’s case. “Go and see Monro [the police commissioner], go to the Treasury, see Lord Salisbury if necessary.”81 On the evening of 18 October, Probyn saw Lord Salisbury for a few minutes on King’s Cross station before he caught the 7:30 train home to Hatfield. On the same night, Lord Arthur Somerset fled the country.

  Later, in the House of Commons debate on 28 February 1890, Salisbury was accused of entering into a criminal conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. The case against him turned on the fact that Arthur Somerset escaped to France on the same night as the King’s Cross meeting.82 Salisbury denied the charge, but doubts have always lingered. Might Probyn have hurried around to the Marlborough Club, where Somerset was staying, and tipped him off?83 Salisbury’s biographer considers that the prime minister felt justified in warning Somerset, out of a sense of class loyalty to his father the Duke of Beaufort.84

  Bertie wrote to the PM to say how glad he was to learn that “no warrant is likely to be issued against the ‘unfortunate Lunatic’ (I can call him nothing else) as, for the sake of the Family and Society, the less one hears of such a filthy scandal the better.”85 On 12 November, however, the warrant was issued at last, charging Lord Arthur Somerset with “gross indecency” with other male persons contrary to the Criminal Law Amendment Act. By then, he was living in a villa in Monaco. He never returned to face charges.

  Lord Arthur Somerset always maintained that his refusal to stand trial was more than a mere matter of saving his own skin. His real reason he explained in the letters he wrote from abroad to Brett. These documents reveal a sensational story: that Arthur Somerset was a scapegoat who went into exile in order to shield the name of Prince Eddy, who had also visited the Cleveland Street brothel.

  Soon the rumors about Eddy’s involvement in the scandal were circulating in London, and an article in The New York Times (10 November 1889) actually mentioned him by name. This caused a “great pother” in the Prince of Wales’s household, and when Bertie returned to London in mid-November, Marlborough House swung into action to suppress the gossip. Oliver Montagu implored Lord Arthur Somerset to return and stand trial in order to clear Prince Eddy’s name.86 Somerset refused. Nor did he make any attempt to protest the prince’s innocence. He explained his predicament in a letter to Brett:

  I cannot see what good I could do P[rin]ce E[ddy] if I went into court. I might do harm because if I was asked if I had ever heard anything against him—whom from?—was 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. I have never … ever told any one with whom P[rin]ce E[ddy] was supposed to have gone there. I did not think it fair as I could not prove it & it must have been his ruin. I can quite understand the P[rince] of W[ales] being much annoyed at his son’s name being coupled with this thing but … it had no more to do with me than the fact that we (that is P[rin]ce and I) must both perform bodily functions which we cannot do for each other.… If I went into Court and told all I know no one who called himself a man would ever speak to me again. Hence my infernal position.87

  Bertie was furious with Arthur Somerset. He wrote to Carrington on 2 January 1890: “I hardly like to allude any more to the subject of AS as it is really a too painful one to write about—and his subsequent conduct makes me wish that he had never existed.”88

  It’s possible, as one account suggests, that the rumors about Eddy visiting the Cleveland Street brothel caused such consternation to Marlborough House “not because they were false but because they were true.”89 An alternative scenario suggests that the rumors about Eddy and Cleveland Street were slanders that were deliberately spread and embroidered by Lord Arthur Somerset. In his letter to Brett, quoted above, Somerset concedes that he cannot prove the rumors about Eddy visiting Cleveland Street. After his ignominious flight, he needed to vindicate himself and show he was a man of honor. What better way than to claim that he had
voluntarily gone into exile in a chivalrous bid to throw his cloak over the young prince?90 Whether or not Prince Eddy did, in fact, frequent Cleveland Street—or whether he was gay or, more likely, bisexual—is perhaps not the issue. The real point is that Eddy had become the story, and that made him a liability.

  Lord Arthur Somerset was exceptionally well placed to damage Eddy because of his family connections. His sister, Blanche, with whom he kept in close contact throughout the drama, was married to the Marquess of Waterford, older brother of Lord Charles Beresford. In his attempt to damp down the scandal, Oliver Montagu wrote to Blanche Waterford complaining that some female members of her family had been “insinuating things about Prince Eddy.”91 The woman he had in mind was her sister-in-law: Mina Beresford. Mina had given Daisy Brooke’s incriminating letter to Lord Waterford for safekeeping. She must have known about the Lord Arthur Somerset/Eddy story, and she had every motive to spread damaging rumors. The Cleveland Street scandal was intimately linked to the Beresford affair. Both were fueled by the fury of Mina Beresford.

  As for Eddy, he seemed happily unaware. On 7 October, as the Cleveland scandal was about to break in London, he wrote a letter from Fredensborg to his cousin Louis Battenberg, confessing that he loved his first cousin Alexandra (Alicky) of Hesse, and asking Louis, who was married to her sister Victoria, to find out “if there is any real reason why Alicky does not care for me, and if I have ever offended her in any way.” In a fluently written letter, which shows little sign that Eddy was the fool he is often supposed to be, the prince poured out a story of unrequited love. “I can’t really believe that Alicky knows how much I really love, or she would not I think have treated me quite so cruelly. For I can’t help considering it so, as she apparently gives me no chance at all, and little or no hope; although I shall continue loving her, and in the hope that some day she may think better of what she has said, and give me the chance of being one of the happiest beings in the world.”92

  Eddy was created Duke of Clarence and Avondale—“the poor boy seems to be destined to have two names, why can’t you darling Motherdear try to get it altered and let him only be called Duke of Clarence,” wailed Georgie to Alix.93 Days later Eddy was rejected by Alicky. Her letter came as no surprise, as she had never pretended to like him, and she had set her mind on marrying his cousin Nicky, the czarevitch. Marriage between the weak-willed prince and his neurotic, controlling cousin would probably have been a disaster, but rejection by Alicky made finding a wife for Eddy a matter of urgency. “I am well aware how anxious the government are that Eddy should marry,” Bertie told the Queen.b94

  The choice was limited. Vicky’s daughter Margaret (Mossy) was ruled out by Alix because of being Prussian.95 The only eligible German princesses—a Mecklenburg and two Anhalts—were, according to Queen Victoria, “all three ugly, unhealthy and idiotic:—and if that be not enough, they are also penniless and narrow minded!”96

  Meanwhile, Eddy made his own choice. He had fallen for Princess Hélène d’Orléans, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the Comte de Paris, the pretender to the throne of France. She was, however, a devout Roman Catholic. Such a marriage, said Queen Victoria, was “utterly impossible.”97

  Eddy’s romance with Hélène had begun in the summer of 1889, at Sheen, Richmond, where the Fifes lived close to the Comte de Paris at Sheen House. While his sister Louise spent the summer recovering from a miscarriage, Eddy “got to like or rather love” Hélène.98

  In July, he succumbed to a mysterious illness, possibly gout, and recuperated with the Fifes at Mar Lodge, where Hélène was staying, too. On 29 August, Eddy drove over to Balmoral and paid a surprise visit to Queen Victoria.99 Holding Hélène by the hand, he told the Queen that she had loved him for years, and was prepared to make the sacrifice of changing her religion for his sake. Victoria, who was sentimental, was won over. She wrote in a memo to Lord Salisbury: “I have never seen him so eager, so earnest and she was touchingly pathetic in her equally earnest appeal. It was difficult not to say yes at once.”100

  In fact, as Arthur Balfour, the minister in attendance at Balmoral, perceived, the idea of sending the young couple to the Queen was Alix’s. The letter Alix wrote to the Queen the following day impressed even the cynical Balfour. “What astounding but delightful news are [sic] these. Dear Eddy has told me all that took place yesterday how he & dear Hélène went straight to you.… Nothing on earth could give me greater pleasure than to see these two dear children united.… I hardly dare allow myself to dwell on so blessed a prospect—Now however that you have so kindly promised your all powerful help let me thank you from the bottom of my heart.”101 Balfour commented, “My opinion of the Princess of Wales’s diplomacy is raised to the highest point.”102 Hélène was intelligent—seemingly rather more so than Eddy—and stylish. And, more important than anything else so far as Alix was concerned, she was not German.

  With the Queen in support, it remained only to overcome the resistance of Hélène’s parents and of Lord Salisbury. Marriage to a Roman Catholic would have excluded Eddy from the succession under the Act of Settlement. Now that Hélène proposed to convert to Anglicanism, Eddy naïvely believed that this would satisfy Salisbury. He was wrong: Salisbury was dismayed. His reasons were chiefly diplomatic. Marriage to a French princess would annoy the Germans, jeopardizing his policy of cultivating the central powers in order to balance the threats posed to the British Empire by France and Russia. Nor would the marriage please the French Republic, as Hélène’s father, the claimant to the French throne, was pledged to its destruction. As he had done over the Vienna incident, Salisbury cloaked his foreign policy objections in a lecture on the constitutional position of the monarchy, writing a memorandum in which he listed seventeen reasons why the marriage could not take place.103

  Hélène’s family were unhelpful, too. Her mother, a keen shot who preferred deer stalking to chaperoning her daughter, supported the match. But the Comte de Paris was a sick man, disillusioned by the failure of his bid for a monarchist restoration in France, and he was in no mood to allow his daughter to convert to Protestantism. Hélène appealed to Pope Leo XIII, but he predictably supported the count. “This,” said Bertie, “brings everything to a dead lock” and “makes poor Eddy quite wretched, as he is very devoted to H.”104

  By the autumn, it was plain that the Orleanist marriage was not to be. Ponsonby and Knollys heaved sighs of relief. Tampering with the Act of Settlement, worried Ponsonby, would raise debate in Parliament “as to whether there should be any succession at all,” and might encourage “actual opposition to Prince Eddy coming to the throne.”105 Deep-seated anxiety as to the future of the monarchy meant that ultimately personal feelings must be sacrificed to preserving the institution—in the end the reason why Götterdämmerung was averted in England.

  Hélène was devastated. Before her marriage to the Duc d’Aosta four years later, she told Margot Asquithc that she had resisted the match, considering it a desecration of Prince Eddy’s memory. When Margot replied that she had always wondered at her devotion to someone “so much stupider” than her, Hélène’s “eyes filled with tears as she explained to me the sweetness of his character.”106

  Hélène might well have been unhappy with Eddy. At the same time that he declared himself to be “in love” with her, he was flirting with Lady Sybil St. Clair Erskine, Daisy Brooke’s half sister, penning her playful letters. “I thought it was impossible a short time ago to —— more than one person at the same time,” he told her.107 Meanwhile, he appealed to the solicitor George Lewis to help him pay off two ladies who were demanding money for the return of his letters. “I am very pleased you are able to settle with Miss Richardson,” he told Lewis, “although £200 is rather expensive for letters.”108 It was only too reminiscent of his father’s youth. So, too, was the fact that the illness from which Eddy was suffering turns out not to have been gout after all, but gonorrhea, as a prescription made out by the young doctor Alfred Fripp reveals.d109

&n
bsp; * * *

  * In 1883, the Maynard estates comprised 13,844 acres in Essex and Leicestershire, yielding an income of £20,000. Daisy was rich, but she was not one of the super-rich.

  † These quotes are taken from the account of the interview that Daisy gave many years later to journalist Frank Harris, who published it in 1916.

  ‡ Consuelo’s husband, Lord Mandeville, was declared bankrupt for £100,000 in 1889, which can’t have helped. (Vincent, Later Derby Diaries, p. 855 [16 March 1889]; Vane, Affair of State, p. 186.)

  § Gladstone considered that the Queen ought to help him out. “Her Civil List had been fixed with a view to her keeping up full state; she now lived a life of comparative retirement: duties and expenses consequently devolved on him which would naturally fall on the Sovereign; and yet the Queen allowed him nothing.” (Diary of Edward Hamilton 1885–1906, p. 98 [20 June 1889].)