The King in Love: Edward VII's Mistresses (28 page)

How much, one wonders, did the Prince of Wales long for three beautiful and sophisticated daughters of whom a father could be proud?

Prince George, the second Wales boy, who turned twenty-five in 1890, was revealing himself to be more mature, not only than his three younger sisters, but than his elder brother, the twenty-six-year-old Prince Eddy. Much of this was due to the many years he had spent in the navy. Alone among Princess Alexandra's children, Prince George had inherited something of her good looks. Blue-eyed, sun-tanned,
with a neatly trimmed nautical beard and moustache, he had none of the pallid, inbred appearance of his brother and sisters. And although he may have been an unimaginative and unintellectual young man, Prince George had – for his position – the more valuable characteristics of self-discipline and conscientiousness.

Yet no less than his brother and sisters was he still very much enmeshed in his mother's web. To read the letters between mother and son is scarcely to believe that she was the middle-aged future Queen of England and he a fully adult naval officer. How he wished, he had written to her two or three years before, that he were going to Sandringham for the holidays. It almost made him cry to think of it. 'I wonder who will have that sweet little room of mine, you must go and see it sometimes and imagine that your little Georgie dear is living in it.'
²²

Wrenched apart by so many things during the early 1890s – the Tranby Croft scandal, the Beresford affair, the Lady Brooke romance – the Prince and Princess of Wales were brought together by the problem of their eldest son, Prince Eddy; or, to give him his correct title, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale.

Having turned twenty-seven in 1891, Prince Eddy remained the negative, lethargic, apathetic creature he had always been. Even allowing for the fact that all the Wales children were immature, Prince Eddy was, in his mother's telling word, exceptionally 'dawdly'. Nothing – his years in the navy, his time at Cambridge, a career in the 10th Hussars or a tour of India – had been able to shape his amorphous personality. Although not the imbecile he is sometimes made out to be, Prince Eddy was certainly backward. With his elaborate uniforms, waxed moustaches and sleepy-eyed stare, he had about as much animation as a tailor's dummy. The only activities for which he showed any trace of enthusiasm were shooting, fishing, playing cards and making love.

A personable, well-mannered enough young man, without arrogance or conceit and with an air that some women found seductive, Prince Eddy was utterly lacking in the qualities of a future king. Anyone further removed from the late Prince Consort's ideal of an intelligent, enlightened, influential and unsullied monarch would have been difficult to imagine. Indeed, even more than his father, the Prince of Wales, Prince Eddy seemed like a throwback to those dissolute Hanoverian princes whose bad blood the Prince Consort had been at such pains to get rid of.

Prince Eddy's bizarre personality and dissipated habits have given rise to two persistent rumours: that he was involved in the Cleveland Street homosexual scandal and that he was Jack the Ripper.

The story of the Jack the Ripper murders, in which five, and possibly eight, prostitutes were murdered and hideously mutilated in London's Whitechapel district during the late 1880s, is too well known to bear repeating here. In spite of several well-argued theories, the identity of the famous mass murderer has never been conclusively established. But in November 1970, an article in
The Criminologist
, by a Dr Thomas Stowell, implied that Prince Eddy had been responsible for the horrific killings. Having studied the papers of Queen Victoria's personal physician, Sir William Gull, Stowell hinted that the murders had been committed by Prince Eddy during a fit of insanity brought on by his alleged syphilis. The syphilis had been contracted by the Prince in the course of one of his voyages on HMS Bacchante.

The claim – that the Prince was syphilitic – may or may not be true. What seems more certain is that he at one stage suffered from a gonorrhoeal infection: a prescription found among the papers of one of his doctors apparently confirms this. If nothing else, this indicates that Prince Eddy led as active a sex life as any other fashionable young man.

Dr Stowell's theory, despite its deliberate vagueness, was eagerly taken up by the world's press. The Jack the Ripper story had always been an intriguing one; how much more intriguing was the possibility that the sadistic mass murderer might have been the prince destined one day to sit on the British throne.

Fascinating though the theory might be, it is patently absurd. In the first place, Prince Eddy had alibis for several of the nights on which the murders took place: for one he was in Scotland, for another at Sandringham, for a third on a tour of the Midlands. And, secondly, the Ripper must have been, above all else, an astute, quick-witted, fast-moving man; by no stretch of the imagination could poor, 'dawdly' Prince Eddy be described in those terms. He was simply not intelligent enough. And would such a kindly, good-natured, impractical oaf have been the type to slit a woman's throat, expertly eviscerate her body and carry off her uterus? Hardly.

About Eddy's possible involvement in the Cleveland Street scandal one is on firmer ground. Of the many male brothels, homosexual clubs and pubs that flourished in late Victorian London, one of the busiest places was the brothel in Cleveland Street, not far from Tottenham Court Road. The arrest, in July 1889, of several telegraph
messenger boys, who seemed to have suspiciously large sums of money to spend, led the police not only to 19 Cleveland Street where the boys earned their money, but into a larger hornets' nest than they could ever have imagined. For among the many 'toffs' that frequented the brothel was Lord Arthur Somerset, third son of the eighth Duke of Beaufort, who was not only a distinguished soldier and an enthusiastic sportsman but an equerry to the Prince of Wales.

That Lord Arthur Somerset had not actually committed sodomy, but had only indulged in what was charmingly described as 'gentle dalliance with the boys',
²³
was neither here nor there. He had broken the law. The Prince of Wales, on hearing the accusation, refused to credit it. 'I won't believe it any more than I would if they had accused the Archbishop of Canterbury,'
²⁴
he exclaimed. If it were true, then Lord Arthur Somerset must be 'an unfortunate Lunatic'.
²⁵

But there was worse to come. No sooner had Lord Arthur Somerset fled the country to avoid prosecution than the press began to hint at what was already common talk in the London clubs: that Prince Eddy had also visited 19 Cleveland Street. Lord Arthur's solicitor had apparently warned that if his client were to come to trial, 'a very distinguished person will be involved (PAV)'
²⁶
– the initials PAV standing, of course, for Prince Albert Victor. And Lord Arthur's sister, Lady Waterford, was very anxious to quash any notion that it might have been her brother who had taken Prince Eddy to the Cleveland Street house. 'Please correct any impression that Arthur and
the boy
ever went out together,' she instructed one of her brother's friends. '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 . . .'
²⁷

But Lord Arthur seems to have known rather more about Eddy than he was prepared to admit to his sister. Not long after he had fled to the Continent, Lord Arthur was accused, by Princess Alexandra's admirer, Oliver Montagu, of pretending that he had left the country only in order to avoid implicating others in the scandal. His silence on the real reason for his flight – that is, his own guilt – merely strengthened the rumours that he was keeping quiet for the sake of others, chief amongst them Prince Eddy.

But that, answered Lord Arthur,
was
one of the main reasons for his silence. 'I cannot see what good I could do Prince Eddy if I went into Court,' he explained. 'I might do him harm because if I was asked if I had ever heard anything against him – from whom? – has 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 . . . Nothing will ever make me divulge anything I know even if I were arrested.'
²⁸

None of this, of course, is irrefutable proof that Prince Eddy visited 19 Cleveland Street. Those who agree with Lady Waterford that he was 'as straight as a line' point to the fact that his name, in the years ahead, was to be coupled with those of several women and that he would eventually become engaged to be married. But being 'straight as a line' does not preclude a man from having sex with the odd telegraph boy, any more than getting married proves him to be incontestably heterosexual.

Prince Eddy may well have been one of those over-sexed, easy-going and pliable young men who are ready to try anything once – or, if they enjoy it, twice or three times – without letting it become a way of life. Or he might, as has been suggested, have been taken to Cleveland Street on the understanding that he was to see some of those
poses plastiques
which were 'the Victorian equivalent of striptease'.
²⁹
The owner of the establishment certainly advertised
poses plastiques;
these might well have been performed by girls or by boys dressed as girls. Eddy is said to have been accompanied by Lord Euston who later professed himself incensed at being offered naked boys instead of stripping girls.

'I have never even mentioned Euston's name,' wrote Lord Arthur, 'nor have I ever told
anyone
with whom Prince Eddy was supposed to have gone there. I did not think it fair as I could not prove it, and it must have been his ruin.'
³⁰

Whether any of this gossip reached the ears of the Prince and Princess of Wales is unknown. But there is no doubt that it was at that time that the parents decided that some sort of action was necessary to halt their son's all-too-possible drift into depravity. The only possible solution for Prince Eddy's many problems was, they agreed, the conventional one: marriage. So between the years 1889 and 1891 the names of several candidates for the post of a future Queen of England were bandied about (with Eddy falling in love with the only really unsuitable one, Princess Hélène of Orleans, the daughter of the Roman Catholic Pretender to the French throne) but in the end it was decided that he must marry Princess May of Teck. Although Princess
May's pedigree was not, by royal standards, impeccable (like the Battenbergs, there was a morganatic marriage in the background) she was, as the approving Queen Victoria put it,
'very
sensible and well-informed, a
solid girl
which we want . . .'
³¹

Prince Eddy, who could usually be relied upon to do as he was told, not only agreed to the match but obliged everyone by falling in love with Princess May. The couple became engaged, at one of those inevitable house parties, on 3 December 1891. Both the Prince and Princess of Wales were delighted; 'this time I do hope that dear Eddy has found the
right bride,'
³²
wrote a relieved Alexandra to the Queen.

This mood of general gratification did not last long. Just over a month later, when Princess May and her parents were at Sandringham to celebrate Prince Eddy's twenty-eighth birthday, he fell ill. It was influenza. This quickly developed into pneumonia and for six days, in his tiny bedroom, the Prince lay dangerously ill. By the dawn of 14 January 1892, it was realised that he was dying. Soon after half-past nine that morning, surrounded by the shocked and exhausted members of his family, he died.

The Prince and Princess of Wales were desolate. The faithful Oliver Montagu, on hurrying to Sandringham, found them shattered by their loss. 'The Prince broke down terribly at our first meeting; as did also the poor Princess, but they all got calmer after and took me to see the boy three different times before I left again,'
³³
reported Montagu.

For a while, their shared sorrow brought husband and wife very close together. On a booklet containing the sermon preached at Sandringham Church on the Sunday after Prince Eddy's funeral, the Prince of Wales wrote an inscription. 'To my dearest Wife, in rememberance of our beloved Eddy, who was taken from us. "He is not dead but sleepeth." From her devoted but heart-broken husband, Bertie.'
³⁴

Given her opinion of Daisy Brooke, Princess Alexandra would no doubt have been astonished to hear the assertion, made in 1891, 'that since the Prince had taken up with Lady Brooke, he had led a much better life . . . and that her influence had been distinctly and visibly for the better, and had terminated all the late hours and generally fast living that had prevailed before.'
³⁵

These were not the views of Daisy Brooke herself, but of two people in the Prince's circle. One was his private secretary, Sir Francis Knollys; the other was Lady Henry Somerset, sister-in-law of the now
disgraced Lord Arthur Somerset and President of the British Women's Temperance Association. Their views had been given to W.T. Stead, the editor of
Review of Reviews
, in the course of his research for a character sketch of the Prince of Wales.

There was a great deal of truth in what Stead had been told. Daisy Brooke might have been all that Princess Alexandra thought she was – showy, flighty, amoral – but she disapproved strongly of heavy gambling and excessive drinking. In this, she was undoubtedly a good influence on the Prince of Wales. And, after Daisy's meeting with W.T. Stead in the spring of 1892 – the year after he had published his piece on the Prince – she became fired with an ambition to become an even better influence on her royal lover.