Prince Eddy's Connection

Similarly, Theo Aronson's roundabout portrait of the heir presumptive to the English throne, Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld, achieves an authority that few previous accounts of the Cleveland Street Scandal and its aftermath attain. Again, it is not so much the evidence itself that has changed - the royal family, probably under the direction of Prince Eddy's father, Edward VII, destroyed all papers related to the affair shortly after Prince Albert Victor (Eddy) died in 1892. The depth with which existing evidence is examined and analyzed as well as Aronson's comprehensive look at not only Eddy's relationship to the Cleveland Street Scandal but also unrelated sensations like Jack the Ripper murders, to which he has in the past been linked, bolster reader confidence. Aronson, incidentally, sums up the plethora of Ripper scholarship deftly and succinctly but relies for his own primary evidence on the files of the director of public prosecutions at the Public Records Office - a nightmare of bureaucratic disorganization if ever one existed - and conducts a thorough examination of periodical and newspaper accounts of the period - no mean task.

Source: "They Sure Got to Prove It on Me": Millennial Thoughts on Gay Archives, Gay Biography, and Gay Library History, by James V. Carmichael, Jr.

Police documents from the Public Record Office (released in 1975) and the letters of the self-exiled Lord Arthur Somerset unequivocally link the later Duke of Clarence and his friend Stephen to the "Cleveland Street Scandal". Although the British press avoided this, the American press was occasionally more forthright: Cable reports from England announce that Prince Albert Victor [sic], eldest son of the Prince of Wales and heir presumptive to the throne, has returned from India, where he had gone to escape the smoke of the Cleveland Street scandal, in which he was "mixed up". ("Prince Victor", Daily Northwestern, Oshkosh, Wisconsin, 26 May 1890). Chief Inspector Frederick George Abberline (1843-1929), the most prominent investigator in the "Jack the Ripper" case, was also one of those handling the "Cleveland Street" investigation - see Morris B. Kaplan, Sodom on the Thames: Sex, Love, and Scandal in Wilde Times (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 167-70

Source: "Paedobaptistry": Wilde as Priapic Educationalist, "Liable to Misconstruction": Pater's Evaluation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, Chapter Five

The beastly revelries of a lot of English noblemen in a house at Cavendish Square, in the West End of London, will be investigated by parliament. The fact that Prince Albert Victor, eldest son of the Prince of Wales, and therefore heir to the British throne, is connected with the scandal, makes the possible political effect pretentious, and the British throne may capsize in consequence. The noble brutes debauched about seventy young girls in the West End den, who were dressed as boys to elude notice. Hammond, who was general manager of the debauchery, has fled to the United States.

Source: The Capital Evening Journal, Friday December 20, 1889, Page 2