They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  If anything happened to Edward, his son was what they got. His tutor, John Neale Dalton, had described ‘an abnormally dormant condition of mind’. At Cambridge University, to which the dope was sent, one of his instructors doubted whether he could ‘possibly derive much benefit from attending lectures’, as he ‘hardly knows the meaning of the word, to read’.62

  However, at all costs, the absurdity of reverence for this twerp had to be maintained. A sudden coronary for his father, Fat Ed, was very much on the cards. Gluttony was his pleasure, and his pleasure was out of control. When he sat down to eat it was a virtual suicide attempt. ‘He is a very dangerous guest,’ complained a Permanent Secretary. ‘He once got into Lord Cairns’ dining-room, and ate up the Judge’s luncheon.’63 Trained handlers in Marienbad and Baden Baden had failed to solve his gut. Plus, there was the fornicatory urge in the groin whose onslaught he could not negotiate – men got swindled of their wives in the bedrooms of their own country houses. But it was in Paris that Edward got into full adulterous stride. Fluent in several languages, he spoke German better than English (he had a thick German accent64), adored all things Parisian, and had a keen interest in French furniture.

  Known as the ‘siège d’amour’, this contraption was manufactured to suffer the enormous regal bulk while His Majesty guzzled vintage and shagged two at once. The future Edward VII was never a ‘Victorian’, he simply waited for history to catch him up. Like a sort of cement-mixer in a top hat, he risked apoplexy on a daily basis, and the whole fucking lot of them could have been up the Mall in black crêpe next Saturday.

  Prince Albert Victor wasn’t a person, but a ‘thing’ to be protected. Without a king you couldn’t have a queen, and without either you couldn’t have viscounts, dukes, duchesses, knights, barons, earls, lords, ladies, high sheriffs, and 10,000 other unctuous little dogsbodies walking backwards in buttons and bows. Master of the Horse, Master of the Rolls, Mistress of the Robes, Groom of the Stole, Grand Order of the Bloat and Most Noble Star of the Transvaal Murderer, all gone, all as shattered crystal without a king. A dozen centuries would go up in smoke, and history would be the property of people like Gladstone – ‘this most dangerous man’, wrote Victoria. ‘The mischief Mr Gladstone does is incalculable, instead of stemming the current and downward course of Radicalism, which he could do perfectly, he heads and encourages it.’65

  Nobody understood this better than the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury. The right to rule was his blood’s ingredient, its lineage fermenting backwards for half a thousand years. Salisbury disliked democracy, considering property ‘in danger’ from it, and all ‘social legislation was necessarily a change for the worse’.

  Victoria was very happy with Salisbury, and Salisbury would have done anything, anything, to protect the Crown. He would lie for it, cheat for it, empower the wicked to trample the innocent; he would incarcerate for it and, if necessary, put to death for it, exercising the full might of that pliable little strumpet he owned, called law.

  It is rumoured in London that Sir Charles Russell has given up his brief for Lord Euston in the libel action connected with the Cleveland Street scandal and accepted one from the Prince of Wales. He will watch the case on behalf of Albert Victor, whose name has been persistently dragged into the affair. It is evidently Lord Euston’s tactics to cripple Editor Parke by heaping up costs by means of legal motions and other expensive processes.66

  The above is a not inaccurate summary of developments (we will come to editor Parke and the ‘libel’ shortly). In escalating panic the government brought in its most enthusiastic Gunga Din. He was a society barrister and a personal friend of the Prince of Wales, the aforementioned Sir Charles Russell QC MP.

  Russell had defended Euston before, and lost, and Edward before, and won. He was a formidable courtroom operator whose arrogance and ambition had modified his grasp on reality. I don’t know if barristers have to swear an oath to uphold what is true, any more than do prime ministers, but Russell had little care for truth, other than when it could act as a servant to himself. There was nothing Russell wouldn’t do for Russell. His entire career was a dedication to heaving his corpulent Belfast frame up to and beyond the next rung. Consequently, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for the rabble fighting for their Crown, including appearing for the prosecution in the matter of a dangerous journalist.

  Although this was the age of the telegraph and the fledgling electric light, it must be remembered that in certain areas we may still be supposed to be in the age of King Richard III. The mechanics were as crude and as transparently ugly: ‘Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous’ – as indeed had the top-hatted heirs of Shakespeare’s villainous hunchback.

  The Parke referred to was Ernest Parke, a bit of a firebrand reporter on the Star who would later evolve into its most famous editor. At the time of the scandal Parke was thirty-one, and the Star less than two years old. Loud and radical and no friend of the Establishment, he was a new kind of journalist, in the vanguard of a new breed of mass-circulation newspaper. Like its proprietor, first editor and legend of Fleet Street, the great T.P. O’Connor, the Star was always ready to offer a hand to the underdog and a boot up the arse to his oppressor.

  More often than not, it was Parke who put it in. His style was uncompromising and to the point. ‘The Metropolitan Police is rotten to the core’ was but one of his journalistic pronouncements (which doubtless endeared him to those he accused).67 Parke was passionate and enterprising, and worked at two newspapers to prove it. In parallel with his efforts at the Star, he was sole editor of a new evening newspaper called the North London Press. It stood apart from Fleet Street in more than just its title. Parke claimed to have the name of every pervert who had ever gone through the door at Cleveland Street, and, against the advice of men like O’Connor, declared that he would publish them.68 Such infatuation with what he perceived as justice may well have been admirable, but it was also dangerous, and Parke was rapidly moving out of his depth.

  In another London postal district, ominous voices were murmuring. The owners of not a few of them were in possession of regular armchairs at clubs like the Carlton and Athenaeum: ‘The social position of some of the parties will make a great sensation, this will give very wide publicity and consequently will spread very extensive matter of the most revolting and mischievous kind, the spread of which I’m satisfied will produce enormous evil.’69

  It’s hard to believe that this opinion was coming from the supreme officer of law in the land. It was the contribution of Lord Halsbury, the Lord Chancellor, giving his view on the contempt held for his own statutes by a certain class of upmarket bugger. In other words, ‘enormous evil’ did not reside in the illegality of sodomy, only in the dissemination of the news of it. As with gambling, a different law must apply. Halsbury was by now committed to the perversion of the course of justice, and was thus himself an accessory.

  The facts are in the hands of the Home Office and of Scotland-yard, but as some of the greatest hereditary names of the country are mixed up in the scandal, every effort is being made to secure the immunity of the criminals. Indeed, I am credibly informed that

  THE HOME OFFICE

  is throwing obstacles in the way of prompt action on the part of Scotland Yard, and trying to get the persons concerned out of the country before warrants are issued. Very possibly, our Government of the classes is of opinion that the revelations which would ensue, were the criminals put on their trial, would deal a blow to the reign of the classes, and to the social influence of the aristocracy. Let them, however, understand that they will not be allowed to protect their friends. It would be really too monstrous if crimes, which, when committed by poor ignorant men, lead to sentences of penal servitude, were to be done with impunity by those whom the Tory Government delights to honour.70

  When the maggots started spilling out of Cleveland Street there was a rush for the coastal ports. Prime Minister Lord Salisbury personally tipped off Lord Arthur ‘Podge’ Somerset (via Sir
Dighton Probyn, Treasurer to the Prince of Wales) that, with great regret, Her Majesty’s Government was no longer able to bury a warrant for his arrest, and that it would be issued immediately – that is, immediately he was on the boat.

  The gangplanks were bottlenecks of panicking homos. They cleaned out the lot. Charles Hammond, lessee of the brothel, was allowed to salvage his furniture before scuttling circuitously to Belgium with a youth. As soon as he was safely ensconced there, Permanent Secretary to the Home Office Sir Godfrey Lushington strolled out of the Athenaeum to procure a warrant for his arrest.

  The Yard headed off to the Continent, forcing their quarry out of non-extraditable France, only to discover in Brussels that the British government had no enthusiasm for such extraditions. The Home Secretary, Matthews, was informed by the Prime Minister that he didn’t ‘consider this a case in which any official application could be made’. The Liberal MP and publisher Henry Labouchère had an alternative point of view. ‘If it had not been intended to extradite Hammond,’ he asked, ‘what was their object in hustling this man from France to Belgium?’ A good question, and while no one was answering it, Hammond and his boy took off for America with further judicial pretence in hot pursuit.

  But no one was actually interested in arresting Hammond – he was the last thing the Establishment needed in court. Instead it was Inspector Abberline who was put up to take the flak. ‘Coming to the facts of the case,’ reported The Times, ‘the police had received all the information it was possible to obtain in this matter. Inspector Abberline had on that date [July 1889] all the information in his hands. But for some reason he did not act. Counsel considered that the whole cause of the mischief that had arisen through the spread of these disgraceful scandals, was the conduct of Inspector Abberline in allowing the man Hammond to leave the country. A more remarkable introduction to a prosecution in which it was suggested that the course of justice had been perverted never could be imagined.’71

  Such sentiments were of course dwarfed by the concurrent scandal of the Ripper. Abberline was perverting the course of justice in precisely the same way ‘justice’ was made laughable in respect of Jack. Both the Fiend and the Arse-Seller were immune from Victorian law. What the authorities wanted from Hammond – and the only thing they wanted – was a clutch of letters he kept about his person, acquired no doubt through his connections with the Post Office trade. Having lost his income as a brothel keeper, the fear was that he’d create a new one through blackmail. These letters contained the goods on Somerset, Euston, P.A.V. et al., and were worth a good deal of money. They were also of inestimable value to anyone trying to prove the case.

  A detective called Partridge was dispatched from London with instructions to ‘secure the letters at any price and at all hazards’. He at last caught up with Hammond in California, and got hold of the letters in the name of justice, at a price unknown. On his way back to England he ran into a man in San Francisco who introduced himself as ‘Tyrell’, and stated that he had been ‘sent out from London to aid Partridge’.

  With the letters now in his possession, what aid Partridge might have needed is unclear. But after presenting ‘credentials and testimonials’, Tyrell gained Partridge’s confidence and the keys to the ‘zealously guarded’ box containing the letters, which mysteriously ‘disappeared one night’, along with Tyrell.

  Like so many bits and pieces of unwanted history, Mr Tyrell and his stolen letters were never heard of again. His evaporation meant, of course, that those for or against the accused at Cleveland Street had either lost or secured irreplaceable evidence, depending on whose side you were on.

  It was at about this time that someone walked into the Star offices and presented Ernest Parke with the journalistic equivalent of a Mickey Finn. The informant told him that, like ‘Podge’ Somerset, the Earl of Euston had made a run for it. This was sensational news, exclusive to the Star. But when editor T.P. O’Connor heard it, and more importantly, who had offered it, he declined to have anything to do with the story. Parke, however, fell for it, and published it in his own newspaper, informing his readers that Euston had fled for South America, and was heading for Peru.72

  For Salisbury’s government this was manna from heaven – no seraphim could have dealt better news. By any standards, something remarkable had happened. Suddenly, it wasn’t a question of Euston raping boys, but the unspeakable outrage of a newspaper accusing him of going to Peru! A storm of indignation raised itself inside the political Establishment. Lethal nonentities reached for their wigs. How dare any man accuse another of going to Peru? He hadn’t even been to Ramsgate!

  In reality, the only place Euston had been was to Boulogne, to visit fellow arse-artist Somerset, and coordinate their story.

  Literally overnight, Parke was a pariah, a dangerous little North London Zola, menacing the freedoms of an unfettered press and clean sheets in general. Peru? The ignominy of it! The man must be crushed with the full wholesome mechanism of pure Victorian law.

  Parke had been set up, sold a pup, conned by a breed we shall be hearing more from. I was certain that this bum steer could be sourced back to Scotland Yard, but it wasn’t until the 28 January 1890 edition of a conservative magazine called the Hawk turned up that I could confirm it:

  It may be remembered that Parke said he had certain evidence to prove that he acted in good faith (as I believe he did), which, however, he could not bring forth without sacrificing confidences. I have no confidences placed in me, and so I am sacrificing nothing. It is alleged that the way the information reached the Star was by an officer employed at Scotland Yard. It is also said that having promised to supply Parke with proof when the time arrived, when called on by Parke to fulfil his promise, the officer said he was instructed by his superiors to give no more information.73

  Scotland Yard made no comment. Euston sued Parke for criminal libel, and the guilty were back in business. It’s hard to believe that this actually happened. Even the sanctimonious voice of conservative Fleet Street could hardly believe it. ‘We have no sort of sympathy with the prosecutor, Lord Euston,’ wrote the Standard, virtually inviting prosecution itself, ‘who admitted quite enough about his own tastes and pursuits to show that he has very little claim to the respect of persons of decent life.’

  (Not a lot of irony there, then? Euston was a bosom pal of the future King, actually becoming Edward VII’s aide de camp in 1901. But then, the Standard wasn’t in line for the throne, so nobody bothered with twaddle like that.)

  The judge initially selected to hear the case was kicked off, and replaced by another of more ferocious disposition. Out of the Athenaeum shuffled yet another intimate friend of the Prince of Wales, the Honourable Mr Justice Hawkins, later Baron Brampton, a vengeful seventy-two-year-old Catholic with a profound affection for coin.

  Hawkins was notorious for his greed. ‘On the make’ was what they said of him, this disagreeable feature of character ameliorated only by his fondness for the oiled rope. He was known as ‘Hanging Hawkins’, although he was said to have a quite energetic fear of death himself.74

  On this mercifully non-hanging occasion, Hawkins was to represent the apogee of institutionalised corruption for and on behalf of the Victorian ruling elite. Never mind what Albert Victor and his homosexual associates had been up to, this was the judge who had recently put a schoolboy into prison for five years for doing the same thing. ‘I was horrified by the apparent brutality of the sentence,’ wrote an official who had been present at the Old Bailey, ‘and the thought that if the youth had belonged to a different class in society his offence would have been treated quite differently and never have been made public at all.’75

  And that’s what this venal pantomime was all about. As far as Hawkins was concerned, it was making upper-class buggery public that was the very grave offence. Parke stood before this ancient bigot to hear what Disraeli had described as ‘Truth in Action’ – in other words the process of British law.

  Ernest Parke, you have been con
victed of an offence which deserves the most condign punishment. I must say that I think a more atrocious libel than that of which you have been guilty has never been published by any man in circumstances than those in which you have published this libel … You had nothing before you but the idlest rumours, suggesting to you that amongst other persons Lord Euston had been guilty of this abominable crime … This was a wicked libel, published without any justification whatever … I feel it my duty to pass upon you a sentence which I hope, besides being a punishment to you, will be a warning to others.76

  Those last six words being the salient point. Twelve months for telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

  The elation of the government was as spiteful as it was predictable. A reactionary weekly, the Saturday Review, positively levitated with glee: ‘The man Parke’s clients lust, first, for personal news, secondly, for dirty personal news, thirdly, for dirty personal news, if possible about persons with titles. He gives it to them; and the law has given him twelve months imprisonment. This is excellent. This man Parke is one of a gang.’ But not all were so partisan, and not a few knew exactly what this was about. ‘As we expected,’ wrote the editor of Reynold’s News,

  the result of the trial of the young journalist Parke, has raised a storm of indignation not only at home, but abroad. The whole affair is considered part and parcel of the plan intended to whitewash the police and government from all participation in the frightful miscarriage of justice that has taken place … In his virulent address to the jury, and when passing what we can but consider a most vindictive sentence on the accused, Judge Hawkins emphatically declared that the libel was one of the grossest ever published without a single extenuating circumstance, and Mr Parke was made an example to others who dare tamper with the name of our virtuous and noble aristocracy. What, then, is the conclusion come to? Why, that the authorities were more anxious to conceal the names of those who patronised the horrible den of vice, than punish the principal patrons of the hideous place. Why were the wretched telegraph boys taken to the Old Bailey, whilst Lord Arthur Somerset, being duly warned of what had occurred, made his escape? All this requires, but we suspect will not obtain, satisfactory explanation.