Ernest Boulton (1848-1904) was een Engelse music-hall
performer die
zich kleedde en leefde als vrouw in het Victoriaans
Engeland. Ernest Boulton was
geliefd bij het
publiek, niet op zijn minst vanwege
zijn spectaculaire jurken. Hij was ook volledig eerlijk over zijn
geaardheid en trad in de openbaarheid als de levenspartner van een
prominente mannelijke politicus. In 1869 werd hij gearresteerd en
aangeklaagd voor samenzwering met als doel sodomie te bedrijven. Na een
sensatieproces en de tragische zelfmoord van zijn geliefde werd Boulton
vrijgesproken.
Thomas Ernest Boulton
and Frederick
William Park were two Victorian
cross-dressers and suspected homosexuals who appeared as defendants in
a celebrated trial in London in 1871, charged "with conspiring and
inciting persons to commit an unnatural offence". After the prosecution
failed to establish that they had anal sex, which was then a crime, or
that wearing women's clothing was in any sense a crime, both men were
acquitted.
Ernest Boulton
was born on 18
December 1847 in Tottenham,
Middlesex, England, the son of stockbroker Thomas Alfred Boulton and
his wife, née Mary Ann Sarah Levick. He died of a brain tumour on 30
September 1904 at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery,
Queen Square, London. From childhood he liked wearing female clothing,
and was encouraged in his impersonations of maids and other women by
his mother; he used the nickname "Stella". Frederick William Park
(1846–1881)
was born on 21 November 1846 and
christened on 5 January 1847 in Wimbledon, Surrey, the son of barrister
Alexander Atherton Park, Master of the Court of Common Pleas (a
superior court) and his wife, née Mary Frances Brown. His headstone in
Mount Hope Cemetery, Rochester NY, USA, cites a death date of 29 March
1881. Boulton started work as
a clerk at
his uncle's stockbroking firm and
then briefly at a bank, before leaving in 1866 or 1867.Park was
initially an articled clerk (law student) with a London solicitor.
As they became friends,
Boulton and
Park formed a theatrical double
act, touring as Stella Clinton (or Mrs Graham) and Fanny Winifred Park,
and receiving favourable press reviews for their performances.[2] For
around two years they also frequented the West End of London in both
women's and men's dress, attending theatres and social events. They
were ejected from both the Alhambra Theatre and the Burlington Arcade
on several occasions. On one occasion they were bound over to keep the
peace after being mistaken for women dressed as men. A third person involved
in the affair
was Lord Arthur Clinton, who had
lived with "Stella" as husband and had exchanged love letters with
Stella. On the evening of 28
April 1870
Boulton, Park and another man were seen
leaving a house in Wakefield Street, near Regent Square, by a police
detective, who followed them as they took a cab to the Strand Theatre.
There the detective saw them meet two others, described as "gentlemen",
before the party entered a private box inside the theatre. A police
superintendent and a police sergeant joined the detective during the
performance, and Boulton, Park and one of the others, Hugh Alexander
Mundell, were arrested as they attempted to leave the theatre. The
others escaped.[6] The three arrested men were subjected to intimate
examination by a police doctor in order to establish whether they had
had anal sex. When brought before the
magistrate,
Frederick Flowers, at Bow Street
Magistrates' Court the next day, Boulton and Park were still wearing
women's clothing, which was described in some detail in newspaper
reports. Mundell claimed that he had believed that Boulton and Park
were women, even though he had previously met them while they were
dressed in men's clothes. He was given bail, but Boulton and Park were
not. The case attracted considerable attention and a large crowd had
collected in Bow Street to see the two leave in a police van.[6]
Subsequent magistrates' court hearings also attracted unusually large
numbers of spectators to witness the proceedings. The indictment was
against Lord
Arthur Clinton, Ernest Boulton,
Frederic Park, Louis Hurt, John Fiske, Martin Cumming, William
Sommerville and C. H. Thompson. The last three absconded before the
trial.[9][10] John Fiske was an American citizen and the United States
consul at Leith, Edinburgh. Lord Arthur died on 18 June, the day
after receiving his subpoena for the trial, ostensibly of scarlet fever
but more probably a suicide.[5] However there was speculation at the
time that, helped by powerful friends, he faked his death and fled
abroad, to lived on in exile. The author Neil McKenna cites
circumstantial evidence that supports this theory. The trial began on 9 May
1871 at the
Court of Queen's Bench, before a
special jury. It was presided over by Sir Alexander Cockburn, the
Lord Chief Justice. At the hearing Boulton and Park's lifestyle
attracted great public interest, especially when a trunkful of their
dresses was brought in as evidence. However, the unreliability of the
witnesses and their physical examination by the police without higher
authority swayed opinion in their favour. The prosecution was unable to
prove either that they had committed any homosexual offence or that the
wearing of women's clothing by men was an offence in English law.
Cockburn's summing up was critical of the prosecution's case and the
behaviour of the police. After deliberating for fifty-three minutes
the jury found them not guilty.
In 1882 there was a
subsequent
bizarre development when a Mary Jane
Furneaux was convicted of impersonating Lord Arthur Clinton in a
cross-dressing fraud case. Furneaux convinced her victims that she was
Lord Arthur Clinton disguised as a woman, and that his reported death
was a cover. Ironically, while Clinton had no creditworthness at
the time of his death, Furneaux succeeded in obtaining 15,000 pounds.
Such was the interest in the case that it prompted the selling of cheap
biographies of Furneaux. Boulton and Park appear
as characters
in The Sins of the Cities of the
Plain (1881), a pioneering work of homosexual pornographic literature.
In this story the cross-dressing narrator recounts how he meets Boulton
and Park dressed up as women at Haxell's Hotel in the Strand, with Lord
Arthur trailing along behind. Later on the narrator spends the night at
Boulton and Park's rooms in Eaton Square, and the next day has
breakfast with them "all dressed as ladies".
Boulton and Park appear
in the play
Lord Arthur's Bed (2008) by the
English playwright Martin Lewton. A stage play by Taggart
writer Glenn
Chandler, based on the story of
Fanny and Stella and entitled Fanny and Stella: The Shocking True
Story, was to be performed at the Above the Stag venue on London in
May–June 2015.
Het toneelstuk Stella van Neil Bartlett is gebaseerd op
het opvallende leven en de
eenzame dood van Ernest Boulton. Het stuk werd in 2016 Nederland
opgevoerd tijdens het Holland festival.