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.