Six scandals that rocked the royals

At a time when the royal family is under significant strain, historians shine a spotlight on some of the biggest crises to have enveloped the British monarchy over the past three centuries.

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The prince, the brothel and a culture war

KATIE HINDMARCH-WATSON describes a sex scandal that consumed Queen Victoria's grandson.

On 7 July 1889, a policeman arrested a sometime telegraph boy, Henry Newlove, at his mother's house in Camden Town.

Newlove had been recruiting younger telegraph boys at London's Central Telegraph Office to provide sexual services for affluent male clients at a brothel on Cleveland Street. Defiant, Newlove said that he thought it "very hard that I should get into trouble while men in high position are allowed to walk around free... Why, Lord Arthur Somerset goes regularly to the house at Cleveland Street; so does the Earl of Euston and Colonel Jervois." Within months, Newlove was in prison and Somerset was in exile. Yet Henry Fitzroy, Earl of Euston, triumphed in a libel suit that exonerated him from any "gross indecency", and Colonel Jervois received no further mention in police records or the press. However, another man in high position became the focus of speculation.

We still don't really know why Prince Albert Victor - or 'Eddy', grandson of Queen Victoria and oldest son of the Prince of Wales - became linked to the story.

Arthur Somerset had been his father's equerry, but there is no evidence that the two men associated with one another, and no proof has emerged one way or another about Eddy's propensity for sex with teenage telegraph boys.

The Cleveland Street Scandal evolved from Newlove's revelations into a morality tale about rich men's predatory vices, unequal treatment before the law, and the public's right to private revelations. Prince Eddy was a potent symbol in a class culture war that pitted aristocratic privilege against aspiring youths in a modernising city.