They are fascinating observations because Bertie was evidently re-creating the same overbearing-father/notup-to-snuff-son relationship that he’d had with his own father, Prince Albert, and which he vowed never to foist upon his own children.
In 1876, when Eddy was twelve years old and George was ten and a half, the royal family debated whether to send the princes to a proper school. Queen Victoria was adamantly against enrolling the boys in one of the finer public schools like Eton or Harrow, owing to an ongoing scandal surrounding the seduction of some younger pupils by their tutors or by older boys. Mutual “unnatural” intimacies had formed, and consequently, public school was thought to be a thoroughly unsuitable milieu for the princes. The inherent irony in where they ended up instead must have been lost on the family.
Reverend Dalton advised against the princes’ being separated from each other. George was already an arrogant brat, but Eddy’s influence grounded him; while “Prince Albert Victor [Eddy] requires the stimulus of Prince George’s company to induce him to work at all . . . the mutual influence of their characters on one another (totally different as they are in many ways) is very beneficial. Difficult as the education of Prince Albert Victor is now [because in Dalton’s mind Eddy had no “motive power”], it would be doubly or trebly so if Prince George were to leave him.”
The best way to keep the boys together was to sign them up for the Royal Navy. Dalton coached the princes so they could pass their entrance exams. In September 1877, they began their naval education as cadets aboard the HMS Britannia, the training ship for all officer candidates. Eddy was still only thirteen years old, with George not yet twelve. The Reverend Dalton accompanied them as a part-time tutor and ship’s chaplain.
The princes graduated in July 1879, leaving Britannia for a three-year tour of duty aboard the Bacchante, traveling around the world until 1882, visiting exotic locales and sampling the native customs. They met the Mikado and got tattooed in Tokyo; Eddy was inked with red and blue dragons on his arms.
The youths’ companions on the Bacchante had been handpicked to ensure that the princes would be surrounded by fine, upstanding boys. However, one of their mates was eventually deemed too feminine and was dismissed, according to George V’s biographer Harold Nicolson, because he “induced them to take liberties with him which they should not.”
At the end of their journeymanship aboard the Bacchante, the princes had to sit for another set of exams. Although Dalton was likely to blame for Eddy’s ennui, he remained unimpressed by his elder pupil, griping that “he sits listless and vacant . . . and wastes as much time in doing nothing as he ever wasted . . . this weakness of brain, this feebleness and lack of power to grasp almost anything put before him, is manifested . . . also in his hours of recreation and social intercourse. It is a fault of nature. . . .”
An 1880 photo of Eddy in his cadet uniform taken at the age of sixteen bears out Dalton’s “listless and vacant” portrayal of his pupil. Although the prince might have been just a typical sullen teen when it came to his studies or to the regimented schedule of royal duties, in the photograph, Eddy does leave a rather dim-witted impression; absolutely nothing appears to be going on behind his heavy-lidded Hanoverian eyes.
In October 1883 Eddy entered Trinity College, Cambridge, while George continued in the navy. But the heir presumptive’s university education was not quite the one shared by his fellow students. “He hardly knows the meaning of the words to read,” complained J. K. Stephen, one of Eddy’s tutors.
Lady Somerset, a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria’s aunt, the Duchess of Cambridge, was appalled at the prince’s ignorance. Although she found Eddy to be “charming, as nice a youth as could be, simple, unaffected, unspoiled, affectionate,” she wanted to know, “What on earth stupid Dalton has been about all these years! He has taught him nothing!”
Eddy’s university experience was fairly brief and none too illustrious. In July of 1885 he segued into the next phase of his life, a posting to his father’s regiment, the 10th Hussars. The prince proved just as lackluster an army officer. According to his instructors at Aldershot, Eddy had problems retaining information and an embarrassingly dismal knowledge of military history. His inertia did not go unnoticed, as the Duke of Cambridge declared, “He is an inveterate and incurable dawdler, never ready, never there!”
But Eddy did at least evince an interest in something. The only quality he seemed to have inherited from his father was Bertie’s sense of impeccable tailoring. The young prince had become a fashionable young man with a spiffy mustache, a natty dresser in the popular “masher” style, sporting high starched collars and oversize cuffs. It was a look that suited Eddy, who had an unusually long neck and arms, prompting his father to nickname him “collar and cuffs.”
The mashers were the dandies of their day, dull-witted but debonair, dressing to impress women. And Eddy had one particular female in mind. He had developed a crush on one of his first cousins, thirteen-year-old Alexandra of Hesse. By this time Eddy had twice seen “Alicky,” as the family called her, at family weddings.
Nevertheless, the prince’s attraction to Alicky didn’t prevent him from indulging in the usual pursuits practiced by Victorian men of his class. Apart from Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales, the members of the royal family would not have been recognized by the average Briton; and while their movements were often observed by plainclothesmen from Scotland Yard, Eddy did manage to enjoy the social life of a typical toff. He mingled with other lordlings at music halls, and perhaps crossed paths with them at brothels. Royal brothers Eddy and George even shared a “ripper” of a girl (an ironic choice of words, though it was popular slang for someone who was lots of fun) at a location in St. John’s Wood. According to George’s diary Eddy was also keeping a girl in Southsea.
In 1888, Bertie had to extricate his elder son from an unnamed, but clearly sordid situation. Perhaps it was an indiscretion regarding one of these working-class young ladies, although that would have been par for the course when it came to the extracurricular activities of the nobility. For this reason, some of Eddy’s biographers have speculated that his transgression involved something significantly more scandalous. Precisely because the offense remained unspecified, these historians have taken the liberty of positing the theory that it had everything to do with “the love that dare not speak its name”—a homosexual encounter (or several). In any case, the matter, whatever it was, must have been surreptitiously cleared up, because there is no further mention of the event.
Instead, that autumn the headlines were filled with Jack the Ripper’s string of hideous murders. For many readers it was their first encounter with London’s destitute East End, a neighborhood so squalid that the police were finding it difficult to separate the Ripper’s victims from the numerous other unfortunate souls who turned up dead.
As the madman’s murder tally rose and no one had been apprehended, Queen Victoria expressed her disgust with the incompetence of Scotland Yard and the Metropolitan Police. She wanted results. Consequently, the coppers were eager to find a way to redeem their reputations.
Eddy undoubtedly read the papers, but Whitechapel was a world away from the Waleses’ London residence, Marlborough House. His focus was not on the Ripper, but on romance.
In September 1888, when Jack the Ripper was slitting the throats of his first victims, the diffident, moonstruck Eddy was confessing his crush on Alexandra of Hesse to their cousin, Prince Louis of Battenberg, revealing his hopes of courting and marrying Alicky, despite the efforts of meddling relatives.
On September 6, Eddy wrote to Louis: I thought you knew I was fond of Alicky. In fact I have been fond of her for years and have told no one with the exception of my parents, and that only a short time ago. . . . I fear that someone else must have told Alicky, which was I think a great mistake, and as you say relations can only spoil my chance by mixing themselves up in the affair. I guessed that myself last year, and therefore was very careful how I approached Alick
y and did not give her the slightest sign that I loved her, although inwardly I was longing to tell her so, but thought I had better wait my time.
. . . I can only get her to give me some hope and encouragement if not more, that some day I may be her fortunate suitor. . . . I can’t tell you what a happy creature I shall be if it only comes off right, for I do indeed know what a prize there is to be won.
Time had marched on. The new generation of royals remained mindful of their obligations to dynastic marital alliances, but now they wanted to wed for love as well. Once upon a time, it wouldn’t have mattered a jot to the parents if there was no mutual attraction between the potential newlyweds, or even if an attraction was merely one-sided. Children weren’t given the freedom to choose their spouses. Now, as the nineteenth century headed for the history books, the younger generation was putting a collective foot down and daring to refuse a prospective bride or groom as well as repudiating the notion of a loveless marriage.
In the absence of any romantic encouragement from Alicky, Eddy might have found another outlet for his manly urges. Or not. Nevertheless, his name was about to be coupled with one of the greatest scandals of the century.
To set the stage, in 1885 an amendment was passed to the Criminal Law Act, enacting penalties of up to two years’ imprisonment, with or without hard labor, if a man was convicted of “gross indecency”—attempting to commit, committing, or procuring sex acts from other men. It was known as the Labouchère Amendment (for Henry Labouchère, the MP who introduced it into Parliament), but was nicknamed the “Blackmailer’s Charter.” The amendment wended its way through Parliament with little scrutiny because homosexuality was considered an indecent topic for discussion by such an august body as the House of Commons.
Four years later, in July of 1889, a male brothel located at 19 Cleveland Street and run by Charles Hammond was raided by the Metropolitan Police. The brothel was empty at the time, Hammond and his young male companion having managed to flee to the Continent.
The incident mushroomed into a national scandal after it was revealed that telegraph boys in the employ of the General Post Office had been receiving money for performing certain sexual favors for gentlemen at the Cleveland Street brothel. Several of the youths had been recruited by George Veck, one of Hammond’s pals, who routinely posed as a parson in order to gain the boys’ trust. Veck had been sacked from his employment at the post office for “improper conduct” with telegraph boys and in 1889 was living with his boyfriend, a youth of seventeen.
Inspector Abberline of Scotland Yard was pulled off the Ripper case and assigned to handle the Cleveland Street Affair. He took his assignment very seriously, determined to quash criticism of the Yard’s unsatisfactory detective work on the Whitechapel serial murders. But because many of the adolescent rent boys were telegraph couriers, the post office was equally determined to keep the matter as quiet as possible.
The frightened teens began to name names; their targets included a bevy of rich and titled gentlemen and decorated military officers. According to a fifteen-year-old telegraph-cum-rent boy with the improbably ironic name of Henry Newlove, one of the biggest fish in the Cleveland Street pond was Lord Arthur Somerset (nicknamed “Podge”), extra equerry to the Prince of Wales and master of the stables. A dapper thirty-eight-year-old living well above his means, the tall, blond Somerset (known to the rent boys as “Mr. Brown”) was a younger son of the Duke of Beaufort. Terrified that he would be ruined if his boss were to get wind of his predilections, Somerset hired Arthur Newton, a thoroughly unscrupulous young solicitor who was making a name for himself defending some of London’s seamier residents. Newton was already representing the proprietor of 19 Cleveland Street, Charles Hammond, and the faux vicar George Veck, as well as the young boys who were implicated in the scandal.
Maintaining a discreet silence about the whole affair, Somerset took a leave of absence from his job and hightailed it to the Continent. However, some members of the government were keen on covering up Somerset’s involvement, insisting to Scotland Yard that there was insufficient evidence (merely the word of teenage telegraph boys who sold their services) to extradite a duke’s son.
However, Hamilton Cuffe, the deputy to the treasury solicitor, was interested in justice being served. In Cuffe’s view, if there was enough evidence to prosecute the boys, Hammond, and Veck, then surely Somerset was just as culpable and should be made to appear before the bar.
Somerset was desperate to keep his name out of the press and his body out of the courts. And his solicitor, Arthur Newton, was equally determined to help him. It was most likely Newton who floated the rumor that there was a powerful reason for Somerset’s silence on the whole affair: He was protecting the name of a very important personage in the kingdom whose name and association with the Cleveland Street brothel—were the information to be revealed—would send shock waves through England and change the face of the monarchy forever.
On September 16, 1889, Hamilton Cuffe wrote to Sir Augustus Stephenson, the treasury solicitor, “I’m told that Newton has boasted that if we go on, a very distinguished person (PAV) will be involved. I don’t mean to say that [I] for one instant credit it—but in such a case as this one never knows what may be said, concocted or true.”
Stephenson replied to Cuffe the following day, characterizing Newton as “a dangerous man, and he may—or his clients may—make utterly false accusations against others—with respect to whom so far as our information goes—or the descriptions given by the boys—there is no shadow of grounds for imputation. Still such imputation may be made.” Stephenson thought Newton was bluffing. No one else at any time had mentioned Eddy’s name, whether in earnest or as a way to deflect attention from his own participation in the scandal. Not one police officer stationed near the brothel to observe the comings and goings of its clients saw Eddy. Even during the prince’s years as a naval cadet, and his stint at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he hobnobbed with a clique of young men, some of whom were rumored to be homosexual, there was never so much as a hint or a whisper that Eddy might be gay.
While the civil servants were fairly certain that Newton was lying, the politicians and cabinet ministers weren’t about to take any chances by calling the lawyer’s bluff. They were willing enough to credit Newton’s allegations, which was all the more reason to keep Eddy’s name out of the scandal and to come up with any number of reasons to avoid issuing a warrant for Somerset’s arrest. If Somerset’s sexuality was outed in a court of law, he would have nothing left to lose, and would surely implicate the prince as another of the Cleveland Street clients.
Somerset was traveling in Constantinople when his sister Blanche, Marchioness of Waterford, took it upon herself to defend the reputation of both men.
Please correct any impression that Arthur [Somerset] and the boy ever went out together. . . . Arthur knows nothing of his movements and was horrified to think he might be supposed to take the Father’s money and lead the son into mischief of ANY kind. I am sure the boy is as straight as a line.
Dighton Probyn, private secretary to the Princess of Wales, wrote to Somerset’s mother, the Duchess of Beaufort, advising her that “Nobody accused your son of having mentioned PAV’s name, but his excuse to everybody for having to leave England is that he has been forced to do so to screen another and that his lips are closed. The only conclusion therefore people can draw from this is that he is sacrificing himself to save the young Prince. Who else is there for whom he could make such a sacrifice?”
Oliver Montagu, an extra equerry to the Prince and Princess of Wales, wrote to Somerset rhetorically inquiring whether his lordship was “aware of the irreparable harm he was doing by still persisting in his silence as to the real cause of his leaving the country and insinuating that it was for the sakes of others that he had done so. . . .”
Somerset addressed both queries in a reply to the (also homosexual) Reginald Brett, Lord Esher, insisting in a very couched manner that the “real cause” was
because he was protecting the prince.
Theo Aronson, one of Eddy’s biographers, is far more willing than other historians to conclude that the prince was concealing a homosexual lifestyle. Aronson maintains that the reason the Prince of Wales was so eager to silence the rumors and innuendo surrounding Eddy’s connection to the Cleveland Street brothel was not because it was an outrageous lie, but because it was true. Many of the private papers of Queen Victoria and of the Prince and Princess of Wales (later Edward VII and Queen Alexandra) were burned after their deaths, destroyed on their instructions. And according to Aronson, the Royal Archives has insisted that Prince Eddy’s file “has not survived.”
Nevertheless, these allegations of homosexual conduct with young boys that mortified the royal family by dragging the prince’s reputation through the mud remain far-fetched. Lord Somerset and Eddy barely knew each other. The Prince of Wales’s extra equerry would have had little reason to come into contact with His Royal Highness’s son.
Yet the tacit assertions about Eddy’s predilection for teenage rent boys sent the crown into a tizzy because it didn’t take long for Somerset to begin to believe his solicitor’s lie. Sir Arthur’s new line of reasoning went something like this: Although he had never crossed paths with Eddy at the brothel, nor had ever accompanied him there, that in itself was no proof that Eddy was not a client!
On December 10, 1889, Somerset wrote: I can quite understand the Prince of Wales being much annoyed at his son’s name being coupled with the thing but that was the case before I left—in fact in June or July. . . . It had no more to do with me than the fact that we (that is Prince and I) must both perform bodily functions which we cannot do for each other. In the same way we were both accused of going to this place but not together; and different people were supposed to have gone there to meet us. . . . Nothing will ever make me divulge anything I know even if I were arrested. . . . It has very often, I may say constantly occurred to me that it rests with me to clear up this business, but what can I do? A great many people would never speak to me again as it is; but if I went into Court, and told all I knew, no one who called himself a man would ever speak to me again.
Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds Page 28