by David Cohen
The girls felt at ease with their grandmother. Victoria offers the nice details that in private the Queen now took off her widow’s cap and that she sprayed herself with a delicate orange-blossom perfume. The Queen, her granddaughter noted, never perspired and her hands ‘used to be like hot bricks’. When she was grown up, Victoria tried to find this perfume which she knew came from Grasse in southern France but she never managed to procure it. Queen Victoria came over to Hesse when her granddaughters were confirmed at various times in the Lutheran faith.
Princess Alice’s death led to trouble. The Queen expected the bereaved husband to grieve properly, but instead Louis of Hesse became entangled with the disreputable Countess Chapsky, as Princess Victoria called her. In her recollections, Alice’s daughter, Princess Victoria, provides some details that show on this occasion the Queen and her son Bertie could behave in a united, and terrifying, fashion. Both thought the Countess quite unsuitable. They rounded on Louis and forced ‘my father to have his marriage annulled as the lady’s past and reputation made it impossible for my unmarried sisters to grow up with her’, Victoria wrote. Indeed, the Countess was given lavish compensation to go away. ‘The whole episode was a nine-day scandal in Europe and a painful one to my father and us,’ Victoria noted. It was, however, one of the first signs that the Queen and her son were mending their relationship, at least partially.
Bertie’s eldest son, however, continued to be trouble. After he left the HMS Bacchante, Eddy was sent to Cambridge. He showed no interest in his studies but Bertie was more tolerant than Albert had been and did not insist on his son passing examinations. Dalton ceased to be his tutor and James Kenneth Stephen was appointed in his place. It was a dubious choice for Stephen was as involved in the same secretive homosexual underworld as Dalton’s friend Carpenter. Stephen seems to have fallen in love with his Prince, which would only have confused Eddy’s sexuality further.
In August 1884, Eddy spent some time at the University of Heidelberg studying German with no success whatever. In 1885, he was commissioned as an officer in the 10th Hussars, which provoked a warning that suggests already there were rumours about Eddy’s sexuality. The Duke of Cambridge told Bertie it might be best if his eldest son did not stay too long in the regiment. ‘The Head Quarters of the Regiment will soon move to Hounslow,’ the Duke wrote, adding, ‘I do not think that this will be a desirable station for so young and inexperienced a man who would be surrounded by temptations of every sort.’
I have been unable to find out why Hounslow was synonymous with debauch, as far as the Duke was concerned. His advice was not followed and the Duke continued to have the lowest possible opinion of Eddy, who was, he wrote, ‘an inveterate and incurable dawdler’. Neither the army nor the university would fail the Prince of Wales’s son, however, and, in March 1887, Eddy was promoted to captain. At the age of twenty-three, he was allowed to open Hammersmith Bridge – this seems to have been one of his main achievements in life.
The historian Theo Aronson suggested that Eddy’s ‘unspecified “dissipations” were predominantly homosexual’. Aronson claimed the Prince had a typical homosexual childhood as psychoanalysts would see it and adored ‘his elegant and possessive mother’ Alexandra. He also cited Eddy’s ‘want of manliness’, his ‘shrinking from horseplay’ and his ‘sweet, gentle, quiet and charming’ nature, and topped this with the incisive analysis that there is ‘a certain amount of homosexuality in all men’.
The year 1887 also marked Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. Soon after the celebrations, a scandal and a tragedy hit the headlines and caused even greater controversy more than a century later.
Queen Victoria and the Ripper
In late 1888, five prostitutes were murdered in the East End of London. The brutality of these killings led to them being called ‘The Ripper Murders’. Although she was now in her late sixties, the Queen took considerable interest in them. A memo of 13 November 1888 records that she feared Scotland Yard’s new detective department might not be up to the task of finding the murderer: she wanted more policemen to patrol the streets of Whitechapel. The forensic Queen asked whether the cattle boats had been searched. Had the detectives investigated the number of single men living alone in single rooms for they seemed to be the obvious suspects? She even reminded the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police that the Ripper’s clothes ‘must be saturated with blood’ and asked why a proper search had not been made to see if such clothes had been abandoned in the East End. The Queen can hardly have guessed that, according to some historians, the Ripper might be someone she knew well.
A second scandal broke eight months later. It involved descendants of some aristocrats who had at times been lovers of the royals for over five centuries. The potential consequences were much more serious than they were six years later, when Oscar Wilde sued for libel after being accused of being a sodomite.
In July 1889, Police Constable Luke Hanks investigated a theft from the London Central Telegraph Office. He questioned a fifteen-year-old telegraph boy, Charles Swinscow, and found he had the considerable sum of fourteen shillings on him. Swinscow confessed he earned the money working as a male prostitute for Charles Hammond. Another Post Office clerk had introduced them. This clerk has a name which one suspects was made up to make a point – Henry Newlove. The love that dare not speak its name was, of course, as old as the Greeks but the Victorians sometimes pretended it was new.
Within hours, Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline descended on 19 Cleveland Street with a warrant to arrest Hammond (Cleveland Street runs down into Soho and today has a slightly dilapidated feel). Abberline found the house was locked but he tracked Newlove to his mother’s home, a mile north in Camden. Hammond was not there. Abberline suspected that Newlove had got word to Hammond and the owner of the brothel disappeared.
Newlove gave Abberline the names of a number of clients who used the brothel; the most glittering being Lord Arthur Somerset and Henry FitzRoy, the Earl of Euston – a descendant of one of Charles II’s bastards. The enthusiastically heterosexual Bertie found it hard to believe and suggested one might as well dream that the Archbishop of Canterbury fancied young men. He did not choose his example well. Edward Benson, the then Archbishop, had been a favourite of the bursar of his college at Cambridge who, according to one of Benson’s sons, was in love with his father. Furthermore, after the Archbishop’s death, his widow set up home with Lucy Tait, who happened to be the daughter of the previous Archbishop. Oscar’s ‘love that dare not speak its name’ seems to have been singing hymns. All the Benson children, boys and girls, appear to have been homosexual.
Unaware of this background, Bertie told his Comptroller to investigate the allegations. Within a day, meetings were set up with Somerset and his lawyer, as well as with the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. They were all left in no doubt that Bertie was ‘in a great state’, though he did not ‘believe a word of it’ as far as his son was concerned.
Somerset had considerable contact with Eddy as he ran his stables. Abberline was an intrepid detective, but one did not arrest a friend of the Queen’s grandson lightly. He interviewed Somerset, but did not detain him. Abberline was not content to leave it like that, however, and, a few days later, intercepted letters which led him to question Algernon Allies. Allies admitted Somerset had paid him for sex and also that he had worked as a rent boy on Cleveland Street for Hammond. On 22 August, Abberline interviewed Somerset a second time but again he did not, or was not allowed, to hold him.
As soon as Abberline had released him, Somerset left for Germany, where Eddy was taking his summer holiday. The Prince received Somerset and sent him on to Hanover to look at some horses he might buy for his stables. Meanwhile, the press got wind of Abberline’s investigation and started to refer to ‘noble lords’ implicated in some sordid affair. Abberline charged the only suspects he could – Newlove and another rent boy called Veck. Both pleaded guilty to indecency on 18 September but received surprisingly light sentences
. It has been suggested they were treated leniently to make sure they did not talk. Hammond, who had run the brothel, was still at large. Then came the news that he had been seen in America. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, ordered there should be no attempt to extradite Hammond back to England and the case against him was quietly dropped, which of course suited the royal family.
Somerset felt safe enough to return to Britain to attend horse sales at Newmarket but left for Dieppe on 26 September, eight days after Newlove and Veck had been sentenced. It seems likely he had been told that he was in danger of being arrested, but not in that much danger as he came back to England four days later. His grandmother, the Dowager Duchess of Beaufort (who could trace her ancestry back to Henry VII’s intellectual mother, Margaret Beaufort), had died and he wanted to attend her funeral.
After the funeral, Somerset fled back to France. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, was later accused of warning him that a warrant for his arrest was imminent. Salisbury denied this. Eddy, however, wrote to him a few days later and used a curious set of expressions. He thanked Salisbury and expressed ‘satisfaction’ that Somerset had been allowed to leave the country. Eddy asked that, if Somerset should ‘ever dare to show his face in England again’, the authorities would not bother him.
As in the abdication scandal nearly fifty years later, the foreign press wrote far more about the story than the British press. The New York Times reported that Eddy had left Britain ‘to escape the smoke of the Cleveland Street Scandal in which he was mixed up. He is something of a wreck.’ The paper added that he was not half the man that his brother George was. Eddy’s father had his vices, the paper said, but he made up for these with some real virtues, while no one had been able to detect one good quality in Eddy. His dissipations were endangering the monarchy, the paper concluded.
Ernest Parke, editor of The North London Press, then managed to persuade some of Hammond’s rent boys to talk. Parke wondered why the male prostitutes had been given such light sentences instead of the usual penalty for ‘gross indecency’, which was at least two years. He also commented on how easily Hammond had managed to escape to America. The rent boys, Parke discovered, had given Scotland Yard the names of some of their aristocratic clients, but no one had been charged. On 16 November, Parke named Henry FitzRoy, Earl of Euston, as having been caught up in ‘an indescribably loathsome scandal in Cleveland Street’ and added that he too had eluded the law by sailing to Peru.
Parke kept the matter in the public eye and, on 16 December 1889, Newlove and Arthur Newton, Somerset’s solicitor, were charged with obstruction of justice. The crown claimed he offered Hammond and the boys money to go abroad so they could not give evidence; a deal was obviously done. Newton pleaded guilty to just one of the six charges against him. He admitted that he had helped Hammond flee but he had committed no crime as there was no arrest warrant out for the man – he had merely tried to protect his client from blackmail. The Attorney General presented no evidence on the other five charges. Newton was sentenced to six weeks in prison, a very light sentence but one which his fellow lawyers considered something of an outrage. In response, 250 London law firms sent a petition to the Home Secretary protesting.
During Newton’s trial, the radical MP Henry Labouchère tabled a motion in Parliament that alleged a cover-up to protect the royal family. Labouchère was fiercely hostile to homosexuality and no flatterer of the royals. He was convinced the conspiracy to cover up the scandal went to the top of the government and accused Salisbury of conspiring to pervert the course of justice in hampering the investigation and allowing Somerset and Hammond to escape. During an angry debate, Labouchère declared: ‘I do not believe Lord Salisbury.’ Members of Parliament can accuse each other of almost anything in the House but not of lying. Labouchère refused to withdraw his remark and was temporarily expelled from the House. His motion was defeated by 206 to 66 – a large majority against, but there were clearly sixty-five MPs who agreed with him.
Even the usually tolerant Bertie was worried by the impact his son’s behaviour could have on the monarchy. In letters to his friend Lord Esher, 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 it ... we were both accused of going to this place but not together ... they will end by having out in open court exactly what they are all trying to keep quiet.
Somerset promised he had never mentioned Eddy’s name to anyone other than three trustworthy associates. He added, ‘Had they been wise, hearing what I knew and therefore what others knew, they ought to have hushed the matter up.’ Somerset’s sister, Lady Waterford, in a very modern phrase, said of Eddy: ‘I am sure the boy is as straight as a line. Arthur does not the least know how or where the boy spends his time, he believes the boy to be perfectly innocent.’
It turned out that Parke had made one claim too many: the Earl of Euston had never set foot in far-off Peru. So Parke was tried for libel and sentenced to a year in prison. The rumours have persisted, however. Sixty years later, George V’s official biographer, Harold Nicolson, was told by Lord Goddard (a twelve-year-old schoolboy at the time of the scandal) that Eddy ‘had been involved in a male brothel scene, and that a solicitor had to commit perjury to clear him. The solicitor was struck off the rolls for his offence, but was thereafter reinstated.’
Bertie realised he must do something about his son. One possibility was to send Eddy away, either to the colonies or to tour Europe. He wrote to Sir Francis Knollys, later the Prime Minister’s private secretary, that he did not ‘dare tell the Queen his real reason for sending Prince Eddy away which is intended as a punishment and as a means for keeping out of harm’s way’. It seemed unlikely to him that either of these objects ‘would be attained by simply travelling about Europe’.
In October 1889, Eddy did go to India but there was no place on earth where he could not get into trouble with either sex. At sea, he met Mrs Margery Haddon, the wife of a civil engineer. She later claimed Eddy was the father of her son, Clarence Haddon. Eddy’s lawyers admitted that there had been ‘some relations’ between him and Mrs Haddon, but denied he had fathered her child.
Queen Victoria, we shall see, suspected more than Bertie imagined and decided the only answer was to marry Eddy off as soon as possible to a strong woman who would keep him in check. The first potential bride, Princess Alix of Hesse, did not like Eddy and made the poor choice of marrying Tsar Nicholas II instead. She was shot with her husband and children after the Russian Revolution, in 1918.
The second potential bride, Princess Hélène of Orléans, the daughter of Prince Philippe, Count of Paris, adored Eddy, but she was a Roman Catholic. Queen Victoria, who was staunchly Protestant, opposed the match but, when the couple confided their love to her, she relented. Hélène offered to convert, and Eddy offered to give up his right to the throne. Hélène’s father had probably learned enough about Eddy not to want him as a son-in-law, though. His daughter was so keen on Eddy that she travelled to Rome to persuade Pope Leo XIII to permit the marriage, but he would not go against her father’s wishes.
Eddy now developed an illness that is only referred to as ‘fever’ or ‘gout’. Many biographers argue he was suffering from ‘a mild form of venereal disease’. During the course of the illness, he was seen by a young doctor, Alfred Fripp, whose godfather was Canon Dalton. Eddy and Fripp spent much time together and travelled to Scotland and also in England. Thea Aronson claims the two men were lovers.
We know little of the private discussions that took place on the subject of Eddy’s marriage. The Royal Archives have conveniently lost their files relating to the subject as a number of historians have found, rather to their surprise. But suddenly, after failing with Hélène, in December 1891, Eddy – to her ‘great surprise’ – proposed to Mary of Teck.
Mary was the daughter of Princess Mary, one of the granddaughters of George III; she married late and was so fat Queen Vic
toria despaired of her. Still, her daughter was a minor English Princess. Mary’s father was Francis of Teck and of less distinguished stock. He was a minor Viennese aristocrat, who never managed to live within his modest means and did not impress his English relations, although he had served with some distinction at the Battle of Solferino in 1859. Even after he had married into the royal family, the only post he was ever given was Honorary Colonel of the City of London Police Volunteers. Perhaps the most interesting thing about Teck was that it was rumoured one of his relatives had committed incest with a sister and then proceeded to murder his valet when the man found out.
In fact, the Tecks were professional poor relations. The Queen helped by giving them a grace-and-favour lodging in Richmond, but only provided a small allowance. To save money, they travelled throughout Europe, visiting relations who would put them up. On one of these trips, Mary stayed for months in Florence and enjoyed visiting the art galleries, churches and museums. At the age of twenty-four, she was cultured and well educated, but must have despaired of ever finding a husband, let alone one who would one day be King. She did not dream of refusing Eddy, whatever his reputation might be.
The wedding was due to take place on 27 February 1892, but Eddy caught influenza in the pandemic that had raged through Europe from 1889. For Queen Victoria, the fact that he suddenly became critically ill brought back traumatic memories of the death of her own beloved Albert. Eddy’s parents, his brother and other members of his family were at his bedside as he lapsed into a coma. Bertie, who had been blamed for his father’s death, was distraught as he watched his son die. He wrote to his mother: ‘Gladly would I have given my life for his.’ Mary of Teck told the Queen that Eddy’s mother Alexandra had a ‘despairing look on her face [which] was the most heart-rending thing I have ever seen’.
