Plus, there were those it slept with or who otherwise amused it, people toys, like Lillie Langtry or Oscar Wilde.
Edward, Prince of Wales was a philistine who didn’t give much for their product, but loved the company of artists. Two of the most celebrated of the age were close personal friends: the little composer with his peculiarly British talent Sir Arthur Sullivan, and a true giant of his epoch, the painter Sir Frederick Leighton.
Both of these complimentary-ticket holders of the upper class (like Oscar Wilde) were Freemasons, as were a staggering number of the class they entertained.
Unlike Freemasonry today, the Craft had its own class hierarchy, centralising like everything else in London, and above all at its gentlemen’s clubs. Forget the histrionics over Parliament – that was just a floor show for the proles. In the clubs they were all players in the same game, and it was at White’s, Pratt’s, the Athenaeum and their like that political business was actually done.
Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, was a member of the Athenaeum, as were Home Secretary Henry Matthews, Judge James Fitzjames Stephen, Arthur Sullivan and Frederick Leighton. And so, for the record, were two other gentlemen we shall be hearing a great deal more of, Sir Charles Russell QC MP and London’s Boss Cop, Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren.
Just before it hit the fan at Cleveland Street, Prince Albert Victor had a night out. It was one of many such soirées organised to celebrate the sovereign’s birthday: ‘Prince Albert Victor dined with the First Lord of the Treasury, among other guests being Bros [“Bro” means Brother in the Freemasonic vernacular] the Marquis of Hertford, the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, the Earl of Carnarvon, the Earl of Zetland, the Earl of Londesborough, Lord Randolph Churchill, M.P., Sir Hicks Beach, Bart, Lord Harlech, Sir John Mowbray, Bart, and Sir W. Hart-Dyke, Bart, M.P.’ Other distinguished Masons feasting in honour of their monarch that week were Bros ‘Lord George Hamilton, M.P., as First Lord of the Admiralty, the Duke of Portland, as Master of the Horse, the Earl of Mount Edgecombe, as Lord Steward, and the Earl of Lathom, as Lord Chamberlain.’48
I do not mention these names without purpose, nor seek to make an idle point. Many of the Freemasons here mentioned will acquire a specificity as the narrative proceeds.
At another banquet at Arlington Street, Lord Salisbury entertained the Prince of Wales and his ever circulating phalanx of toadies and mattress-muck: the toast, a décolletage of diamonds in the waxy light, was the same all over London: ‘To Her Majesty the Queen.’
It was at about this time Verdi became popular with London’s window-cleaners, whistling while they polished to the air of ‘La Donna è mobile’ lyrics courtesy of the fellows of their class.
Arseholes are cheap today
Cheaper than yesterday
Little boys are half a crown
Standing up or lying down
Bigger boys are three and six
They are meant for bigger pricks …
Henry James Fitzroy, Earl of Euston, was a six-foot-four-inch aristocrat, who in his top hat must have cleared seven feet. His close friendship with Edward and Albert Victor says something about all three. Euston was a classic pile of shit, squandering family money in pursuit of endless good times. Decadence appeared to be his life’s ambition, and was one of the few activities at which it could be said he excelled.
‘Of distinctly Bohemian tastes,’ wrote an early biographer, ‘he soon got into a “set” that was anything but a desirable one. A host of parasites looked upon him as their prey, to be exploited and sucked dry. Nor did the women ignore him. His women friends, however, were not of the description who would have been welcomed in Belgravian drawing rooms. Not that they, for their part, had any desire to be in them. They were much more at home in the green rooms of the lesser theatres and the Haymarket night houses.’49
It was at one of these dives that Euston fell for the wide eyes and rosewater of Kate Smith, a well-known West End slut. He had married and abandoned her by the age of twenty-four. His career in debauchery then flourished. There were plenty of other pretty faces in lipstick, although not all of them belonged to girls. It took a while for Euston to work out what kind of sex he liked, and he ended up liking all of it. By the late 1880s this enormous ex-Guards officer was a not uncommon sight in the nancy shadows of Piccadilly.
On a late afternoon of May or June 1889, a youth emerged out of them proffering the Earl a card: ‘“Poses Plastique”, Hammond, 19 Cleveland Street. W.’
According to Euston, when called to explain himself at a subsequent magistrates’ court, his interpretation of the term ‘Poses Plastique’ meant no more than a glass of champagne and the pleasant scrutiny of a little girl’s genitals. He went along to Cleveland Street and was, he claimed, surprised to find no girls.
He would be more easily believed, at least by this writer, had he said he was surprised to find so many of his aristocratic friends. There was, for example, Lord Arthur Somerset (‘Podge’), a fellow intimate of the Prince of Wales. That very year, the Prince had travelled with Podge to Paris in a railway compartment shared by their musical pal Sir Arthur Sullivan.50 Was Podge – a notorious homosexual – another innocent victim bamboozled by some scoundrel in Piccadilly? And then there was dear Lord Beaumont, and Lord Ronald Gower, and dozens of other guileless aristocrats, all of whom had traipsed to Cleveland Street only to discover (with corporate shock) that it was a homosexual brothel.
The secret machine was shoved into gear. When Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli said, ‘Royalty cannot survive without Freemasonry, and Freemasonry cannot survive without Royalty,’ he spoke nothing less than the truth. It is what Masonry called ‘the Mystic Tie’.
Not a year before, the Earl of Euston had been installed as Provincial Grand Master of Northants and Huntingdonshire, and the following day he and the Duke of Clarence were star guests at the laying of a foundation stone at the New Northampton Infirmary. Having promised in his inaugural speech to do all he could ‘to advance the interests of Freemasonry’, Euston positively sweated unction in his address of thanks to the Duke:
We recognise with pride the honour done to our ancient and honourable fraternity by so many members of your Royal House, who have entered its Lodges, and done excellent work of brethren of the mystic-tie, and we trust that that connection, so intimate and so valued in the past, may have a long continuance in the future. More especially we beg your Royal Highness to convey to his Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales, our most Worshipful Grand Master, the assurance of our dutiful submission and obedience.51
Euston practised his Masonic submission under a multiplicity of disciplines. He was a member of Studholm Lodge, St Peter’s Lodge, Lodge of Fidelity, De La Pre Lodge, Bramston Beach Lodge, Royal Alpha Lodge, Stour Valley Lodge, Grafton Lodge, Fitzwilliam Lodge, Military Lodge, Pegasus Lodge, Foxhunter’s Lodge, North and Hunts Master’s Lodge, Studholm Chapter, London, and Grafton Chapter, London.52
There is, however, one Chapter that you will not find in his obituaries, nor in his official CV at Freemasons’ Hall. It is an order of the Knights Templar – a Christian adjunct of Freemasonry that claims its genesis from the time of the Crusades – called ‘the Preceptory of Saint George, the Encampment of the Cross of Christ’. Amongst its august membership was another ‘Christian’ degenerate and friend of Euston, and he is the subject of this book.53
Meanwhile, on the morning of 5 July 1889, Chief Inspector Frederick Abberline went to Great Marlborough Street police court seeking a warrant for the arrest of Charles Hammond, the owner of the establishment in Cleveland Street, and others involved in the ‘Poses Plastique’. The instrument was