Sex and Those Eminent Victorians

The 20th century has long been fascinated by what it considers one of the odder aberrations of the 19th: Victorian morality. British Historian J.H. Plumb has aptly described "the Victorian's schizophrenic attitude--the conspiracy of silence, the excessive modesty that made the sight of a female ankle wildly erotic, contrasted with the baby prostitutes in the Strand." American Scholar Steven Marcus, in his study The Other Victorians, wrote of "a world part fantasy, part nightmare, part hallucination and part madhouse." Last week London was atwitter over not one but two sex scandals that came to light when some documents dating from the days when that curious world still flourished were finally unsealed. Both episodes involve a number of eminent Victorians; neither has suffered from aging.

One story comes from the private diaries of William Ewart Gladstone, Queen Victoria's least favorite Prime Minister, who, in his avowed efforts to save prostitutes from sin, apparently indulged in unspecified sexual pleasures and then scourged himself in punishment. The other, released by the Public Records office, discloses an unsuccessful cover-up by the British Cabinet and Buckingham Palace, which tried to suppress the facts about the homosexual activities of Lord Arthur Somerset, equerry to the then Prince of Wales who in 1901 became King Edward VII.

Publicly, Gladstone was not the least ashamed of what he called his "rescue work" with tarts. In 1853, he permitted a would-be blackmailer to make this work public rather than pay hush money. Gladstone's political career--he was then Chancellor of the Exchequer and righteous apostle of the balanced budget --was unharmed because Victorian society preferred to regard his evening excursions as an eccentric pet charity.

Historians dealt with this aspect of his life delicately because they sensed that the real story lay bound in leather and sealed in wax in the 41 volumes of Gladstone's diary, which his sons deposited with the Archbishop of Canterbury. The volumes, covering his life from 1840 to 1854, are now being published by Oxford University Press. They show that Gladstone was so guilt-stricken over what he regarded as shameful sexual thoughts that he frequently went home after his "rescue" meetings with prostitutes and whipped himself. Then he carefully noted the episodes of flagellation in his diary with a discreet little illustration of a stick with a thong, much like a Michelin Guide to masochism.

The first of these episodes appears in 1851 --Gladstone was then 41--after a visit to a woman named Elizabeth Collins. "Received (unexpectedly) and remained 2 hours: a strange and humbling scene," says the diary cryptically.

What precisely went on in that scene probably will never be known, although before he died, Gladstone assured his son, equally cryptically, that he had never "been guilty of the act which is known as that of infidelity to the marriage bed."

The diary makes clear that Gladstone suffered extreme sexual frustration. He writes of "dangerous curiosity and filthiness of spirit... the extraordinary tenacity of the evil in me." Before taking to the streets, Gladstone tried sublimation through reading pornography (in Latin and French), but he admitted to his diary that he deliberately preferred to "court evil." Why? As he wrote in the diary: "Has it been sufficiently considered how far pain may become a ground of enjoyment?"

Less strange to modern eyes is the inside story that emerges from the spidery script that records the attempts to play down the notorious "Cleveland Street case." On July 4, 1889, a young telegraph messenger named Swinscow told police that he and other boys earned extra money at a well-known male brothel at 19 Cleveland Street, in London's Tottenham Court Road district.

Police staked out the brothel and gathered evidence against various social nabobs for prosecution under a law that prohibited acts of "gross indecency" between male homosexuals (women were exempt under the law because Victoria found it inconceivable that they could commit similar acts). But only two people were ever prosecuted in the case: George Veck, an unlucky and obscure 40-year-old Anglican clergyman, and another young messenger named Henry Newlove. They were hustled into Old Bailey, pleaded guilty to violating the homosexual statute and got light sentences. The press was cowed into near silence; one editor was sentenced to twelve months for libel for naming a high-born participant who was never brought to trial. But gossip spread. The Pall Mall Gazette complained of unnamed lords who "swagger at large and are even welcomed as valuable allies of the administration of the day."

Black Sheep. The biggest fish eventually caught in the police net was Lord Arthur ("Podge") Somerset, 38, son of the Duke of Beaufort, major in the elite Royal Horse Guards and manager of the Prince of Wales' racing stables. The director of public prosecutions wanted to try Somerset, but Home Secretary Henry Matthews warned against any "fishing enquiries about other charges and other persons." The Lord Chancellor wrote a secret opinion opposing prosecution, and Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, backed him up.

They were also clearly concerned about stories that implicated an even more eminent Victorian: Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, 25, the black sheep grandson of Queen Victoria and son of the Prince of Wales. A known bisexual libertine, young Prince Eddy has also been named by some authorities as the real Jack the Ripper, but the police apparently had no more solid evidence against him in this case than in the Ripper murders. Pressure also came from the Prince of Wales, who sent titled emissaries to the police with the message that he was "very anxious" and wanted Somerset cleared quickly.

The government wilted under the public outcry, and the press reported that "at last the conspiracy to hush up this scandal is breaking down." On Nov. 12, 1889, a warrant was issued for Lord Arthur's arrest, but by then he had left the country. Some experts say that he ended offering his services to the Sultan in Constantinople, where the laws were more lenient, but the present Duke of Beaufort's family has denied researchers access to the family records on their notorious forebear. As for No. 19 Cleveland Street, it was torn down in the 1920s to make way for an eminently respectable institution, which by sheer geographical happenstance is called the Middlesex Hospital.

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