In July 1889, London’s Metropolitan Police raided a male brothel on Cleveland Street, setting off a scandal that would threaten the highest reaches of Victorian society. After hours of interrogation, the young men arrested at the establishment testified that dozens of prominent aristocrats had been regular clients, and before long the investigation reached the doorstep of the British royal family itself. Rumors began to circulate that Prince Albert Victor, grandson of Queen Victoria and second in line to the British throne, was among the brothel’s patrons. Although the prince’s name was largely kept out of the domestic British press, the American newspaper The New York Times described Albert Victor as a “stupid, perverse boy” and argued that he should never be allowed to ascend the throne.
The government was soon accused of orchestrating a systematic cover-up to protect the most powerful men implicated in the affair. Homosexual acts between men had been fully criminalized in Britain since 1885, but the legal penalty had softened considerably over the preceding decades. Sodomy had been a capital offense until 1861, when the maximum punishment was reduced to life imprisonment. By 1889, the likely sentence for such a conviction was two years in prison with hard labor — though the social ruin that followed exposure was considered devastating in its own right.
Fifty years earlier, the stakes had been far higher. James Pratt and John Smith were hanged in 1835 after being caught having sex in a lodging house in central London. The young court reporter Charles Dickens, who visited Newgate Prison before their execution, wrote that the two men knew “their doom was sealed” and that “for them there was no hope in this world. ”
The Cleveland Street affair began with a much smaller crime.
In July 1889, Police Constable Luke Hanks was investigating a robbery at the London Central Telegraph Office when he discovered a 15-year-old telegram delivery boy in possession of 14 shillings — an amount that would have taken the boy weeks to earn. Messenger boys were not permitted to carry their own money while on duty, so the sum immediately raised suspicion. The boy, Charles Thomas Swinscow, was taken to the police station for questioning. He admitted that he had earned the money working as a prostitute at 19 Cleveland Street, and named a man called Charles Hammond as the operator of the brothel.
He also gave the names of two other telegraph boys, 17-year-olds George Alma Wright and Charles Ernest Thickbroom, who had also been procured by an 18-year-old named Henry Newlove. Both boys corroborated Swinscow’s testimony, and the case was assigned to Detective Inspector Frederick Abberline, who raided the brothel on July 6 with arrest warrants for Hammond and Newlove. Newlove was apprehended, but Hammond had conveniently fled. Authorities were later accused of having deliberately delayed action to allow implicated men to escape the country.
The Evening Star reported that the magistrates who conducted the investigation had sent a report to the government asking what course the authorities ought to follow. The paper claimed the government did not wish to spread the scandal, and that proceedings were abandoned on the understanding that the offenders would exile themselves. During questioning, Newlove — who had been in charge of procuring prostitutes for the brothel — named Lord Arthur Somerset, head of the Prince of Wales’s stables, the Earl of Euston, Henry FitzRoy, and a colonel in the British army as clients. More than 30 arrest warrants were issued in total.
Despite the attempts at suppression, the international press fueled public speculation that Prince Albert Victor was one of the brothel’s patrons. Albert Victor, born January 8, 1864, was the first child of the future King Edward VII and his wife Alexandra of Denmark. He was educated alongside his younger brother George, the future King George V, and the royal brothers spent three years as naval cadets traveling through the Caribbean, South Africa, Australia, South America, and East Asia. One of Albert Victor’s childhood friends later recalled that the prince’s brother officers had said they wanted to make “a man of the world” of him, but “into that world he refused to be initiated.
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When Albert was 25, Queen Victoria suggested he marry one of her favorite granddaughters, Princess Alix of Hesse. Alix refused his proposal at Balmoral Castle in 1889, writing to the prince later that although it grieved her to pain him, they could not marry. Five years later, Alix agreed to marry another of Albert’s cousins, Nicholas, the future Tsar of Russia. The couple was married for 24 years before they were shot and killed along with their five children on July 17, 1918.
After two more unsuccessful matches, it was agreed that Albert Victor would marry Princess Mary of Teck. That marriage never took place. Although the authorities had discovered the Cleveland Street brothel in the summer of 1889, news of the scandal did not reach the press until winter that year. New Zealand’s Lyttelton Times was one of the first to report on it, stating that the list of offenders featured the sons of dukes, peers, financiers, many honorable persons, and several officers of the Imperial Army, all of whom had suddenly resigned their commissions and fled.
Albert Victor’s involvement was soon alluded to as well. The prince appeared to have suddenly left the country on a trip to India, and some newspapers claimed he would stay abroad until the scandal blew over. The Wellsville Daily Reporter in New York wrote that Prince Albert Victor’s sudden trip to India “is said to not be unconnected with discoveries made by police. ”
Even the Prince and Princess of Wales became targets of public hostility.
The Illustrated Police News described how the scandal was continuing to cause “infinite trouble and vexation,” with Marlborough House “daily assailed with anonymous letters of a most outrageous character. ”
In the end, 60 suspects were identified in the Cleveland Street affair, and 22 of them successfully fled the country. Henry Newlove pleaded guilty to indecency and was sentenced to four years and nine months of hard labor. The teenage prostitutes were also convicted, though their sentences were relatively lenient.
Albert Victor’s involvement in the Cleveland Street brothel has never been substantiated. He died from pneumonia in January 1892 at just 28 years old, less than three years after the scandal was first discovered. After his death, the future King Edward VII said he would have gladly given his own life to save his beloved son.
But even in death, the Cleveland Street scandal continued to stalk Albert Victor’s memory for decades.