Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale - Cleveland Street Scandal

Cleveland Street Scandal

For more details on this topic, see Cleveland Street scandal.

In July 1889, the Metropolitan Police uncovered a male brothel in London's Cleveland Street. Under police interrogation, the male prostitutes and pimps revealed the names of their clients, who included Lord Arthur Somerset, an Extra Equerry to the Prince of Wales. At the time, all homosexual acts between men were illegal, and the clients faced social ostracism, prosecution, and at worst, two years' imprisonment with hard labour. The resultant Cleveland Street scandal implicated other high-ranking figures in British society. Rumours swept upper-class London of the involvement of a member of the royal family: Prince Albert Victor. The prostitutes had not named Albert Victor and it is suggested that Somerset's solicitor, Arthur Newton, fabricated and spread the rumours to take the heat off his client. Letters exchanged between the Treasury Solicitor, Sir Augustus Stephenson, and his assistant, The Hon. Hamilton Cuffe, make coded reference to Newton's threats to implicate Albert Victor. The Prince of Wales intervened in the investigation; none of the clients were ever prosecuted and nothing against Albert Victor was proven. Although there is no conclusive evidence for or against his involvement, or whether or not he ever visited a homosexual club or brothel, the rumours and cover-up led some biographers to suppose that he did visit Cleveland Street, and that he was "possibly bisexual, probably homosexual". This is contested by other biographers, one of which refers to him as "ardently heterosexual" and his involvement in the rumours as "somewhat unfair". The historian H. Montgomery Hyde wrote, "There is no evidence that he was homosexual, or even bisexual."

Somerset's sister, Lady Waterford, denied that her brother knew anything about Albert Victor, "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", she wrote. In surviving private letters from Somerset to his friend Lord Esher, Somerset denies knowing anything about Albert Victor, but confirms that he has heard the rumours and hopes that they will help quash any prosecution. He 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. I wonder if it is really a fact or only an invention." He continued, "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, with all the authorities."

The rumours have persisted; 60 years later the official biographer of King George V, Harold Nicolson, was told by Lord Goddard, who was a 12-year old schoolboy at the time of the scandal, that Albert Victor "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." None of the lawyers in the case was convicted of perjury or struck off during the scandal but Somerset's solicitor, Arthur Newton, was convicted of obstruction of justice for helping his clients escape abroad and was sentenced to six weeks in prison. Over 20 years later in 1910, Newton was struck off for 12 months for professional misconduct after falsifying letters from another of his clients—the notorious murderer Dr. Hawley Crippen. In 1913, he was struck off indefinitely and sentenced to three years' imprisonment for obtaining money by false pretences.