Stella and Fanny’s public appearances drew the unwanted attention of the home secretary, who had been pushing the attorney-general to press charges against the men. Both Boulton and Park had already been in trouble with the law: Ernest Boulton had been arrested two times for dressing in women’s clothing, and Frederick Park had been accused of being a prostitute. The police had men under surveillance for one year: officers staked out their apartment and tracked their movements.
One night, on April 28, 1870, Boulton and Park, dressed as Fanny and Stella, joined a party of men at the Strand Theatre; according to witnesses, they shamelessly flirted with their party all night. Built in 1832, the Strand Theatre was a highly popular location for Victorian burlesque shows that was equally notorious as a scouting location for prostitutes. When Park and Boulton left the Strand Theatre with one of their party, Hugh Alexander Mundell, the three men were arrested and brought to the Bow Street Magistrate’s court.
When the officers questioned Mundell, he was convinced that Park and Boulton were women; when they admitted that they were men, he thought they were joking. The police allowed Mundell to make bail, but Boulton and Park remained in custody. The charge of ‘public mischief’ – very common for cross-dressers – was only a misdemeanor, so Park and Boulton fully expected the officers to give them a fine before releasing them. Instead, they were humiliated, subject to a physical examination that checked them for evidence of sodomy, in full view of other officers, who jeered and tormented them.
The British courts officially charged Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park “with conspiring and inciting persons to commit an unnatural offense”: the term ‘unnatural offense’ being the legal term for sodomy. Park and Boulton remained in jail for months before they were released to await their trial. The court also indicted other members of their party the night of their arrest as well as Boulton’s lover, Lord Arthur Clinton. The son of a duke and a member of Parliament, Clinton died the day after he received his indictment: although his official cause of death was scarlet fever, there is speculation that his wealth and power allowed him to fake his death to live the rest of his life in exile.
The case was a spectacle of Victorian England: coverage of the trial littered the London newspapers, and thousands of onlookers gathered at every court appearance. The defendants appeared in court on May 9, 1871, where a jury of the Court of the Queen’s Bench presided over the case: Lord Chief Justice Sir Alexander Cockburn was the judge in the case, and the attorney-general was the prosecutor. The prosecution attacked Ernest Boulton and Frederick Park’s lifestyle instead of presenting actual evidence, such as parading a trunk of the men’s dresses before the jury. As the trial progressed, testimony revealed that the other defendants barely knew each other.