The Dukes by Brian Masters

Author:Brian Masters [Masters, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non Fiction
Publisher: Pimlico
Published: 2001-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

i

"Hast thou no care that, ebbing all too fast,

My youth is scorched and scarred with burning tears? Hath thy hard heart no memories of the past, No longings for the love of happier years ?

"Come back ! Come back! I beg thee from this boon - Oh, turn thine ear and hearken to my cry — Come back! come back ! and come, dear love, full soon, For if thou come not soon I needs must die."35

Harry did not, could not, come back. The cruel hypocrisy of the time had despatched him as far away as possible from polite gaze, to New Zealand, where he died in 1902. Lord Henry, now exiled for nearly twenty-five years, thought England might be ready to receive him again, and chose to come for Edward VII's coronation. He did not reckon with his mother-in-law's vindictiveness. She set private detec­tives upon him, who watched his every move, and she informed Scotland Yard that the monster was again at large.36 Presumably, his own family at Badminton was not ready to forgive him either, for he appears to have stayed in London only a few days, to return once more to Florence, a saddened man.

Lord Henry's younger brother was Lord Arthur Somerset, born in 1851, a former Guards officer, and Assistant Equerry to the Prince of Wales (Edward VII). In 1889 there erupted the scandal already mentioned in a previous chapter, concerning a male brothel in Cleve­land Street, frequented on the one hand by adolescent telegraph boys, who were paid for their services, and on the other by members of the aristocracy, who did the paying. The case would not have reached the proportions it did were it not for the assiduous probing of the North London Press, an organ since retreated into obscurity. The newspaper named some clients of the establishment, among them Lord Euston (son of the Duke of Grafton), who successfully sued; by implication the Duke of Clarence, eldest son of the Prince of Wales, and heir to the throne (he died in time, and was succeeded as heir by his brother, George V); and Lord Arthur Somerset, who was known in Cleveland Street as "Mr Brown".

A police constable called Sladden observed "Mr Brown" call at 19 Cleveland Street on 9th July and on 13th July 1889. Two weeks later, on 25th July, P.C. Sladden went with two of the boys, Swins- cow (aged fifteen) and, incredibly, Thickbroom (aged seventeen) to Piccadilly, where they identified "Mr Brown" in the street as the man they had both been to bed with at Cleveland Street. P.C. Sladden then followed the suspect to Knightsbridge barracks, where he was identified as Lord Arthur Somerset."7

The same day, the papers were sent to the Director of Public Prosecutions, in whose opinion the evidence was sufficient to pros­ecute Lord Arthur for gross indecency. Another boy called Newlove had testified to the police that Lord Arthur "had to do with me on several occasions there"38 and a fourth, a "good-looking curly- headed youth" of fifteen called Algernon Alleys, had been kept by Somerset for the past two years.

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