Jack the Ripper: The Prince Eddy Conspiracy
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Welcome to the Forbidden History Podcast. This program is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It contains mature adult themes. Listener discretion is advised. In 1888, the people of Victorian London were in a state of panic. A series of violent and brutal murders in the impoverished district of the capital, known as Whitechapel, had seen the emergence of one of the most notorious serial killers the world has ever seen, Jack the Ripper.

It's all the stuff of nightmares. There is a real panic amongst the East End especially. The pseudonym given to the unknown man who stalked the city at night struck fear into the hearts of even the most hardened Londoners. As the number of victims grew, so did the number of suspects. Over the years, countless claims have been made about the real identity of the Ripper, and hundreds of people have found themselves subject to the ongoing investigation.

including the once future king of Great Britain, Prince Albert Victor. There is smoke, but we don't know if there's fire. People can be removed and people can be made scapegoats, people can disappear. I don't think they would have thrown Prince Eddie to the wolves, that's for sure. Just how did the Victorian prince get caught up in one of the most infamous murder cases in criminal history?

Prince Albert Victor has become one of the most controversial figures in the history of the British monarchy. Amid rumors of schizophrenia and links to an underage male brothel, both his sexuality and mental health were the subject of speculation. But how did the grandson of Queen Victoria come to be named as a possible suspect in the Jack the Ripper case? What had he done to bring suspicion upon himself?

And why was there a link between the Whitechapel murders and the future King of Great Britain? Prince Albert Victor, known to his family as "Eddy", was born in 1862. He was the eldest son of the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII. At the time of his birth, he was second in line to the throne and the grandson of the reigning monarch, Queen Victoria.

As a child and a teenager, Eddie was described as good and kind and sweet, slightly docile. This pleased Queen Victoria, his grandmother, because she didn't like children. She certainly didn't like boisterous children. So Prince Eddie was a particular favorite of Queen Victoria. I think it's fair to say that Princess Alexandra, Prince Eddie's mother, mollycoddled the children.

And you see Prince Eddie in photographs always clinging to Princess Alexandra because the other side of his life was with tutors, with his tutor, Mr. Dalton. Dr. John Dalton was actually selected by Queen Victoria to be Eddie and George's tutor. And she considered him to be the right kind of moral character, if you like, to be responsible for the upbringing of these two boys.

Dalton proved to be a stern and unforgiving teacher. He often berated Eddy for his lack of academic ability, accusing him of being lazy and obtuse. Prince Eddy was allegedly slower than Prince George, so Prince George was really shielding him some ways from his tutor, Mr. Dalton.

who I think was very unfair and would say that Prince Eddie was backward or that he was abnormal or his brain was slow. To say this about a child of five, six, seven years old is more a reflection on the tutor than on the child. When his time as Dalton's pupil came to an end, Eddie went on to his university studies, where it was soon realized that the young prince was far from scholarly.

He did go to Cambridge University, as indeed monarchs have to go to effectively, and it was said of him that there was really no point in him attending any of the lectures at Cambridge because he probably didn't even understand the meaning of the words 'to read'. So I think you get a very clear picture of a perfectly likeable individual but really exceptionally dim. After Cambridge, Eddie was made a military officer, a role that seemed to suit him well.

His instructors soon realized that Eddie was learning from listening rather than reading and writing, and reported that he had no problems retaining information. Prince Eddie was in the 10th Hussars, which was Beau Brummell's regiment, and he certainly looked the part in the uniform.

You know, his father used to joke and tell the royal children to call him Prince Eddie Collars and Cuffs because he had this very long neck and used to wear these quite exaggerated collars and exaggerated cuffs. He was a dandy soldier and he was it with the twirly moustache. So he looked the part of a sort of dashing young prince. And the fact that he was obviously never filmed

and you rarely heard him speak because he didn't give speeches. He was a bit like a tailor's dummy in a way. He was perfect because he looked it. He looked like a very handsome young royal prince, but didn't have to do an awful lot apart from look magnificent in a uniform and magnificent on a horse. In 1888, Eddie relocated to London, which even in Victorian times was a bustling, vibrant and metropolitan city.

But of course, people like Prince Albert Victor live in the brightest part of the city. They live in the glittering West End. They live in palaces and grand houses in Belgravia and Mayfair. So their city is a very, very glamorous part of it. But much of Victorian London is desperately squalid. It was a city of two halves.

The well-heeled, glamorous areas of Mayfair and the West End were completely different and a far cry from the impoverished areas of the capital. I think we all have a very strong image of Victorian London, don't we? It's a grimy, very dark place, you know, lit by lamps. There's always a fog. And this fog is actually caused by industrial activity rather than just bad weather. It's a highly polluted, dirty city.

Some of the most notorious slums were situated in the hub of London's East End, Whitechapel. It was an area beset by crime, severe poverty, overcrowding and alcoholism. Definitely not somewhere to be seen if you were a member of the Royal Family.

There'll be people living in absolute abject poverty in the slums of Whitechapel, eking out really pitiful existences in the grime and the dirt in these kind of rat festoon slums. You had this very dark underbelly of society. Depravity probably wouldn't be too strong a word socially and morally. You had these almost two worlds within one city. But despite the dangers that came with the seedier parts of London,

men from all classes often visited under the cover of darkness in the hope of enjoying the many illicit forms of entertainment that were on offer. It was frowned upon in high society to be seen to be misbehaving, so you would have to do it behind closed doors. Victorian society, many might argue, was a highly hypocritical concept. Everybody knew how they should speak, dress and behave, so it was a very, very codified society.

And the Queen led that sort of moral crusade to make Britain appear to be religious, appear to be moral. That doesn't mean that it necessarily was. In spite of the strict protocols of Victorian society, London was a place that catered to all vices. The more repressed a society is, the more vice flourishes behind the closed curtains.

So in the Victorian era, there was nothing happening then that doesn't happen today. The 19th century, from the beginning of the reign of Victoria to the very end of the reign of Victoria, was a smorgasbord of sexuality, sensuality and indulgence. People from upper-class backgrounds could actually go a few miles away in a coach and find basically what they were looking for on tap.

The main thing was money. If you had money, you could buy anything you wanted. And the poor were there to service the rich. Prostitution was both common and widespread in the poorer parts of London. Men from all walks of life ventured into these areas of the city in search of a good time, including, it was rumored, members of the royal family.

There were all kinds of brothels in London. There were sort of houses of assignation where prostitutes could take a client and pay perhaps a shilling for an hour to rent a room. There might be a bucket of filthy water and a flea-ridden mattress. Alternatively, there were houses of luxury.

where great ladies in their own right, women like Cora Pearl, lived and worked and were sort of courted by the aristocracy. Members of the aristocracy, and even royalty, were known to frequent various illicit establishments throughout London. But although this was common knowledge, it was never reported. All of that was about to change. Whatever you wanted to do, you could do if you had the means to do it.

But if you were involved in a scandal, then that was it. If you were a person, a man of position, then your life was destroyed. But for Prince Eddie, a scandal is exactly what happened. In 1889, he became involved in one of the biggest news stories of the age. It was just the beginning of the ruin of his reputation.

and the starting place for rumors that he may have been the man behind the Jack the Ripper murders. A 15-year-old telegraph messenger was found to have 18 shillings on him. Now, the telegraph messengers were not supposed to carry money. Police Constable Luke Hanks was assigned to investigate the case. He quizzed the telegraph boy about where the money had come from, and he received a surprising answer.

P.C. Hanks said to this boy, "Where did you get the money? Did you steal it?" And he said, "No, no, no, no, I didn't steal it. It's my money. I've saved it up." Anyway, P.C. Hanks kept going and finally he said, "Okay, I'm going to tell you the truth. I got the money by going to bed with gentlemen at Mr. Hammond's house at 19 Cleveland Street."

Brothels were hardly unusual in Victorian London, and the police largely turned a blind eye to them. Male brothels, however, were a different matter. Homosexuality in Victorian times was something that wasn't even spoken about.

It was punishable by imprisonment and hard labour. And that made Britain the most dangerous place in Europe to be a homosexual. Not only could you be caught if you were indecent in public, you could be caught in private as well.

The Cleveland Street scandal of 1889 was the type of scandal that simply really wouldn't take place today because we accept homosexuality. The fact that the police had discovered a male brothel catering to an exclusively gay market and they found that many of the clientele of this brothel in central London were incredibly important aristocratic figures. The client list he offered up read like a who's who of Victorian society.

As he was being taken to the police station, he said, "I think it's very unfair that I'm arrested and all the gentlemen and famous people who come to Cleveland Street are going to get off scot-free." The Telegraph boy gave up the names of several men who visited the brothel. And he said that two aristocrats were involved in the Cleveland Street scandal. One was Lord Euston and one was Lord Arthur Somerset. Lord Arthur Somerset was a peer of the realm.

Someone who was entitled to sit in the House of Lords. He was also an equerry-in-waiting to Albert's father, the Prince of Wales. A watch was kept on Cleveland Street, and Lord Arthur Somerset was seen to call there. The police seized their opportunity to catch Lord Somerset red-handed and swooped in on the house to make the arrest. Now, Lord Arthur Somerset was a name to be conjured with.

For a member of the Prince of Wales's court to be a regular patron of a male brothel was a big scandal. Lord Somerset had sought the help of Arthur Newton, a talented but ruthless and unprincipled solicitor. A solicitor called Arthur Newton jumped up and said, "I'm actually representing these men."

He knew full well that there was actually nothing to be gained by standing up in court and trying to argue that Somerset wasn't there. What he then decided to do, very shrewdly, was try to prevent Somerset ever coming to court in the first place because he knew it was a loser. Newton, along with Lord Somerset, decided to reveal the name of another man who they believed was a patron of Number 19 Cleveland Street.

But rather than disclose the full name, they only supplied the prosecution with three initials. .A. .V. Now in the documents, which still exist, this letter is still there. And there's a little bit of paper taped over it. It was too dynamic, too explosive a name, even to leave uncovered.

The very threat of this was enough to convince the DPP to drop the case, even though they knew Lord Arthur Somerset was 100% guilty as charged. PAV stood, of course, for Prince Albert Victor, the oldest son of the Prince of Wales and heir presumptive to the Imperial throne of Great Britain. Was Lord Somerset telling the truth?

Could Prince Eddie have been a visitor at number 19 Cleveland Street? Whether it was true or not, enough damage to his reputation had been done for him to be considered a suspect in another crime that had left the public riveted.

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and Catherine Eddowes. They became known as the Canonical Five. All were from the Whitechapel area. Their murders so brutal and horrific that panic spread throughout the capital. But what possible connection could there be between these five harrowing murders and the heir to the throne of Great Britain? The time of the Ripper murders, many of the newspapers were printing all sorts of stories that actually engendered panic in a lot of members of the population.

But if you were living in that area, you were genuinely worried. And especially if you were a sex worker, you would imagine that actually your next client could be a man who's going to disembowel you. There is a real panic amongst the East End especially. All of the victims had been subjected to barbarous and sickening attacks by a clearly unhinged individual. The gory details alone were terrifying.

But what really scared people was the knowledge that the police had no idea who the culprit was. Over the years, many claims have been made and theories put forward about the real identity of Jack the Ripper. But probably the most sensational of them all came nearly 80 years after the events when an article appeared in a little-known publication suggesting that the true identity of the Ripper had been covered up. The reason?

He was a high-ranking member of the royal family. The first time that Prince Albert Victor is specifically identified as a suspect for the Ripper killings is in 1970, when a hitherto obscure doctor called Thomas Stoll publishes this article in a magazine in which he identifies implicitly that the murderer was Prince Albert Victor.

Stowell's claim that Prince Eddie was the Ripper was based on the theory that Eddie had been suffering from some form of venereal disease contracted on a tour of the East Indies.

He basically hinted in the story that this character that he doesn't name had been in the West Indies, yes, Eddie had been in the West Indies. He then alleges that this individual caught syphilis and as a result of that his brain degenerated into insanity and this was the root cause of these murders. There was no cure for syphilis in the Victorian age and when left untreated it often spread to the brain and nervous system.

causing the sufferer to experience confusion, mood changes, mental instability and even psychosis. This of course is an outlandish theory on first inspection but it seems that Stoll has absolutely impeccable evidence. What is this? Well, according to Stoll, he's got the diaries of a doctor, physician called Sir William Gull. Dr William Gull was one of Queen Victoria's physicians.

He had also treated Eddie's father, the Prince of Wales. Stowell suggested that Gull also treated Eddie for a severe psychological condition. Gull has treated, supposedly, Prince Albert Victor for having syphilis and has a very, very clear idea that Prince Albert Victor also has an illness that causes him to go around killing and disemboweling women.

Gull supposedly records this stuff in his own diary, and it's this diary that Stowell claims to have which directly implicates Prince Albert Victor. Is there any merit to Thomas Stowell's theory? Is it possible that Prince Eddie was suffering from an illness that unhinged him enough to commit a series of bloody and brutal murders? And what hard evidence did Stowell put forward in support of his astonishing claims?

Now to make matters a little bit more murky, almost as soon as he's published this article in The Criminologist magazine, Stoll then goes ahead and dies.

After he's died, no one can find any of these papers that he supposedly has from Sir William Gull. So what are we left with? We're left with an article in an obscure magazine in 1970 written by a retired doctor who's now dead with papers that don't seem to exist. This is kind of the weight of evidence we have against Prince Albert Victor. Yet it's enough to keep his name as a suspect.

Another author comes along later and says that he's got hold of some William Gull's papers from the New York Library of Medicine. Again, when that's checked out, the New York Library of Medicine goes, "No, those papers simply aren't here." A lot of people are very keen to prove that Prince Albert Victor to be the Ripper because what could be greater and more fun than having such an august figure as Jack the Ripper?

I think several biographies of Prince Eddie have all stated that the Royal Archive at Windsor says that his file has been somehow misplaced or lost or has not survived. If that's true, then it's a great shame because the truth can never be told without the private papers. This leaves an open goal for people to say what they want about him.

but recently discovered correspondence written by Prince Eddie to one of his physicians, Dr. Roach, has led to speculation that Eddie was indeed suffering from some form of sexually transmitted disease. In the letters, Eddie writes to his doctor, updating him about his current state of health. He writes that he is suffering from "gleet", a Victorian term for one of the symptoms of gonorrhea. But the gossip about Eddie did not stop there.

Another story was soon circulating that he had become involved in a dangerous relationship that threatened the future of the British monarchy. There is a highly suspect rumor-stroke story that Princess Alexandra sent Eddie off to the artist Walter Sickert to brush up his artistic skills. Walter Sickert was an avant-garde English painter.

The rumors had it that while taking lessons at Sickert's studio, Eddie had become involved with one of his models, which resulted in her giving birth to a child. While in Sickert's studio, he met a young woman. They had an affair, she had a child. It's all the stuff of nightmares/fairy tales, really.

It was suggested that the five Ripper victims had found out about Eddie's child and attempted to blackmail him, and that their deaths were the result of a murderous cover-up sanctioned by the royal court. There have been a number of stories that Eddie fathered illegitimate children. There have been a number of claims made over the years

These things are very hard to substantiate because it's only obviously in the modern era that one can establish beyond all reasonable doubt paternity through DNA testing and so forth. Could it have been possible that Eddie had fathered a child with one of Sickert's models, panicking the establishment into covering up the scandal by murder?

Issues have been raised about illegitimate children, but that doesn't mean that he is in any way unique. You know, there are 10, 12, 15, 20, 100 people in similar positions to him where such accusations or assertions have been made. But at the end of the day, it's got to be said that there was, by definition, cannot be any absolute proof, circumstantial or otherwise, that this was the case.

The story about Prince Eddie fathering an illegitimate child, that's where the roots of the Jack the Ripper rumors started. The Sickert's son, I believe, who first started spreading that around. The girl's nursemaid, I think, was Mary Kelly, who was one of Jack the Ripper's victims. And one of the five Jack the Ripper's victims were blackmailing Sickert. It all becomes like a sort of Victorian melodrama.

There are many theories put forward as to why Eddie may have been the Ripper. Countless tales involving government cover-ups and state sanctioned murders, but they all seem to omit one vital detail. On the date that the first Ripper victim, Mary Ann Nichols, was murdered, Eddie was at Danby Lodge in Yorkshire. When Annie Chapman was murdered, the Prince was staying at the Cavalry Barracks in York.

During the double killing of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes, Eddie was recorded by Queen Victoria in her diary as being in Abergeldy in Scotland. And when the final Ripper victim, Mary Jane Kelly, lost her life, Eddie was more than a hundred miles away at the Royal Sandringham Estate in Norfolk. If the stories of his involvement in the murders were true, then how could Prince Eddie have been in two places at once?

You didn't really see him at great royal events, so he wasn't visible to the public. There was a Prince Eddie, but you didn't see much of him. Other than rumors and fanciful stories, there seems to be no hard proof that Prince Eddie was in any way connected with the Ripper killings. But what about the Cleveland Street scandal? Eddie was clearly identified as a potential suspect, but somehow he managed to keep his name out of the press.

There's pretty conclusive evidence that there was an establishment cover-up. Something was going on and nobody quite knew what it was. Suddenly, two of the most eminent courtiers of the Queen and the Prince of Wales turned up. And they started sticking their six penneth in, saying what's going on.

Lord Arthur Somerset fled to France and escaped prosecution. Some said that the prime minister, Lord Salisbury, had aided his escape.

It seems entirely credible that he was saved to save the face of the aristocracy. But Lord Arthur Somerset wrote to his sister and several times said that he ran away to France because he was protecting PAV. So that place, Prince Albert Victor, at number 19 Cleveland Street, which was a mail brothel. But the British press could never name

Prince Eddie, and nor could various MPs in the House of Commons who tried to bring up the fact that there was a cover-up and that Lord Arthur Somerset had been sent away to protect somebody much more important. Though the British press couldn't name Prince Albert Victor for fear of libel, the American press could. And the New York Times did name Prince Albert Victor. They did name Prince Eddie in relation to Cleveland Street.

They were quite rude about him, saying he was rather thick-headed and debauched. Could the rumors of a royal cover-up in the Ripper case have stemmed from Eddie's involvement in the Cleveland Street scandal? We don't have absolute proof that Prince Eddie visited 19 Cleveland Street. What we have is circumstantial evidence, some nods and winks, and some very strong question marks.

I think the first piece of circumstantial evidence is the kerpuffle in political circles, in government circles, in Whitehall, around the Cleveland Street scandal, which is otherwise inexplicable for a fairly straightforward prosecution. The second piece of evidence is that one of the Telegraph boys talked about having sex with a tall,

gentleman with olive skin. That could have been a description of Prince Eddie when you look at photographs of him. He was tall and he did look foreign and he did have an olive complexion. Then there's the threat by Arthur Newton, the defense solicitor for Lord Arthur Somerset. Why would Arthur Newton risk making that threat if it was an empty threat?

If you went around saying that the heir presumptive to the imperial throne was visiting a male brothel, you could expect some degree of retribution or some degree of trouble. It's very much a case of there is smoke, but we don't know if there's fire. But I think the very existence of smoke presupposes that there was something going on there.

I would have to say that the royal family probably were above the law in 1888, 1890. You can see the cover up with Lord Arthur Somerset that people can be removed and people can be made scapegoats, people can disappear. And the fact that all of these girls were murdered just to cover up the fact that the heir presumptive to the throne had had an illegitimate child, it doesn't ring true at all.

I don't think they would have thrown Prince Eddie to the wolves, that's for sure. In October that same year, Eddie was sent on a royal tour of India. The foreign press, who had accused the prince of being involved in the scandal, suggested that he had been forced to go to allow the dust to settle. In 1891, Prince Eddie was sent abroad on a tour of India.

I think any royal tour, the British royal family, is very carefully planned and announced

far, far in advance, whereas the tour that Prince Eddie was sent to in India was not announced far, far in advance. It was almost a snap decision. And there were arguments between Queen Victoria and the Prince of Wales and the Prime Minister about whether it was sensible to send him to India. His father wanted to send him on a tour of the courts of Europe.

But that was deemed very ill-advised considering the character of Prince Eddie and the fact that it had come to Queen Victoria's attention that Eddie was leading a somewhat dissipated life. In a letter from Sir Dighton Probin to the Prime Minister, he said, "The Prince of Wales is sending Prince Eddie on this tour as a punishment." He also mentioned the word "scandal."

Clearly there had been a scandal. Clearly there was punishment. Was the scandal Prince Eddie's visits to Cleveland Street? Was the punishment a punishment for Prince Eddie's visits to Cleveland Street? There's a crucial piece of evidence that completely blows out the water, the case that Prince Albert Victor was Jack La Ripper.

It's the dates. Every time when the Ripper struck in 1888, Prince Albert Victor was nowhere near Whitechapel. He was in Yorkshire, Sandringham and Scotland. These are a long way from Whitechapel, and you can't murder someone in Whitechapel and be in Scotland on the same night. It's impossible. We may never know for sure if Eddie was involved in the Cleveland Street scandal, but the rumors alone were enough to fuel the myths linking him with the Whitechapel killings.

So why were so many people determined to see Prince Eddie revealed as Jack the Ripper? Clearly, something was going on and I think there was a conspiracy to cover it up. I mean, it's very odd that if you look at the documents, I mean, there are probably two or three thousand pages of documents around the Cleveland Street scandal. Clearly, they're not complete.

If you look at letter books, they don't run in sequence. Pages are missing. Crucial documents are missing. So we only have a partial picture. We do have the document that says "P.A.V. Prince Albert Victor." Clearly, something was going on. People find it very, very difficult, I think, to think of Jack the Ripper as just an ordinary, everyday, downtrodden East Ender.

It's much more attractive in people's minds to think that Jack the Ripper is an upper class individual, somebody who's being shielded. He wasn't seen enough. He's almost like you see him in the tail of your eye but you can never quite catch his personality or his character. From a very young age Prince Eddie was quite passive.

He actually didn't do an awful lot. You know, he was sort of thrown into Naval College and he was sent around the world on HMS Picante. You know, he was shoved into the 10th Hussars. Didn't exceed at anything at all. So I suppose he's a blank page and people are allowed to write their fantasies onto that blank page. And that might be Cleveland Street, it might be Jack the Ripper.

The fact that he was a royal prince, the man who would be king or could have been king, is a great enigma and that makes him more attractive. I would say that as far as Prince Eddie's reputation is concerned, looks count. You look at those photographs of him, Cleveland Street, 1888, and the Ripper, 1888, and you see a stereotypical Victorian melodramatic villain.

You see somebody with a very sensuous mouth, with the hooded eyes. He looks slightly as though he's on laudanum half the time. He also looks magnificent in his clothes. He pays an awful lot of attention to the way that he looks. It's plausible that he might have been, you know, cavorting with rent boys in Cleveland Street. I think it's less plausible that he was Jack the Ripper because it's been conclusively proved that Prince Eddie was in Balmoral for at least two of the killings.

I think Prince Albert Victor's had a really bum rap, to be frank. I think that he was not the brightest of individuals, that's not his fault. And it's not his fault that he was accused of being one of the worst serial killers who's ever stalked the streets of London. But Eddie's luck went from bad to worse. By 1892, less than a week before his 28th birthday, he developed pneumonia and died in his bed at the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk.

Prince Eddie was celebrating his 28th birthday at Sandringham with the family when he was out shooting and caught a chill, which turned into a flu, which eventually became pneumonia. Unfortunately then, pneumonia could kill, and it did kill poor Prince Eddie, who died in Mother Deer, Princess Alexandra's arms.

In public, you see photographs of Prince Eddie's cortege being led up the hill to Windsor and he was eventually buried in St. George's Chapel in Windsor. Rumor and scandal gave way to shock over the prince's death. His brother George took his place in the line of succession and was eventually crowned king. After that, little more was ever heard of Eddie. It remains one of the most remarkable of all royal stories.

Prince Albert Victor is a man almost lost to history. He would have almost been a forgotten footnote if it weren't for the extraordinary rumors that swirled around him during his short life, the speculation about his fragile mental health, his supposed association with male brothels, and the gossip suggesting he had fathered a child out of wedlock. All of which would have probably guaranteed Eddie a place in the hall of colorful royal characters.

But it's how he became a serious suspect in the most notorious serial killings in British history that he'll be chiefly remembered. Even though it's not hard to prove his innocence of the hideous crimes of Jack the Ripper, the fact remains that a prince of the realm somehow got himself linked to five horrific, vicious murders. Well over a century on, the Ripper story continues to intrigue people the world over. The shadow cast over it by Prince Albert Victor

is just another part of its intriguing fascination.