Background
Clinton was the son of Henry Pelham-Clinton, 5th Duke of Newcastle and Lady Susan Harriet Catherine Hamilton.
Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom
Clinton was the son of Henry Pelham-Clinton, 5th Duke of Newcastle and Lady Susan Harriet Catherine Hamilton.
Clinton was educated at Woodcote School, Reading and then Eton College. He entered the Royal Navy in 1854 at the age of 14 and served during the Crimean War in the Baltic Campaign of 1854.
He then served in the Naval Brigade during the Indian Mutiny and was present at the Capture of Lucknow. He was promoted to Lieutenant in 1861. In 1863, he was appointed to serve on HMS Revenge.
Charges of "desertion and breaking his parole" were upheld by the court and Lord Albert Pelham-Clinton was sentenced to be dismissed from the navy, although The Times reported that the case referred to Lord Arthur in error.
He was declared bankrupt on 12 November 1868, with debts and liabilities reported to total £70,000. His successor was the philanthropist, Edward Denison.
At this time, Clinton was still, nominally, a naval officer, but he was placed on the retired Navy List on 1 April 1870. Boulton and Frederick William Park often appeared in public in female dress and, on 28 April 1870, they were arrested and later charged "with conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offence" with Clinton and others
Clinton officially died on 18 June, the day after receiving his subpoena for the trial, ostensibly of scarlet fever but more probably a suicide.
But at the time there was considerable speculation that he had used his powerful connections – he was the godson of Prime Minister William Gladstone – to flee abroad. In his book Fanny and Stella biographer Neil McKenna cites circumstantial evidence suggesting that Lord Arthur did indeed live on in exile. Boulton and Park were acquitted.
Twelve years later, in 1882, a woman called Mary Jane Fearneaux was found to have been impersonating Clinton.
She spent some years living as a man in Birmingham, claiming she was Lord Arthur and that the death was a fiction contrived by family and friends to avoid disgrace. While impersonating Clinton, she sometimes dressed as a woman, claiming this was a disguise to avoid attention after the notoriety of the Boulton and Park case.
On 8 February 1882, she and a man called James Gething were charged with obtaining £2,000 from one man and £3,000 from another under false pretences. In the subsequent trial, Gething was acquitted and Fearneaux changed her plea to guilty.
She was sentenced to seven years in prison.
19th United Kingdom Parliament]
A member of parliament (Member of Parliament) for three years, he was notorious for involvement in the homosexual scandal and trial of Boulton and Park. (around £563 million in 2016 when adjusted for inflation) and stood down as a member of parliament at the subsequent, 1868 general election, which took place between 17 November and 7 December.