Dilke (46 page)

The next section of further information related to the Sloane Street servants and arrangements. The menservants appeared not to be of the most exemplary character. Henry Shanks, who had been footman from 1882 to 1885, was first given notice to leave because he was discovered to have stolen 30s.; was then reinstated for a time; but was finally discharged without a reference for admitting acquaintances into 76, Sloane Street, and gambling with them throughout the night. William Goode, who was footman from 1882 to 1884, took during the latter part of his service to spending most of his time at the local public house. He was eventually discharged for drunkenness and stole a cheque on leaving. William Ireland, Bodley's clerk, was also dismissed for drunkenness in 1884.

All these three servants, therefore, had possible grievances against Dilke, and there is certainly no reason to assume that their evidence at the trial was prejudiced in his favour. Admittedly there was some bribery, but it was self-cancelling. Both Shanks and Ireland, who were almost destitute, were paid 25s. a week by Humbert, but they were known also to have received money from the other side. Ireland, who had not been called at the trial, signed a statement saying that he was always in his room from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m. and again in the afternoons, and that he never saw or heard Mrs. Crawford going up or down stairs. Shanks signed a statement (which was confirmed from other sources) saying that after Dilke entered the Cabinet three policemen used to watch the house each night.
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He was on duty in the front hall every second night (alternating with the other footman) from 8 to 10-30,
and he used habitually to stand at the door talking with the policemen. He did not believe it possible that Mrs. Crawford could have come into the house at night without being seen. He also testified to the fact—supported by other servants—that the only bed in Dilke's room was a very small camp-bed with room for no more than a single pillow. The policemen who watched the house were apparently under orders to report anyone who entered or left at night, and the instruction was interpreted sufficiently strictly for the men who failed to report the entry of Shanks's gambling companions to be dismissed from the force.

A further statement was also obtained from Ellen Drake, who had been under-housemaid from 1880 to 1883 and who, at the trial, had been generally considered a truthful witness. She testified that it was her regular duty to take fruit and milk to Dilke's bedroom at ten o'clock at night. It was also her habit to be up and about the house by 6.30 a.m. She never saw Mrs. Crawford in the house, either at night or in the morning. There were also letters from Mr. Hanbury Tracey, M.P., and Baron d'Estournelles de Constant, who had become French Minister at The Hague. They had both participated in the fencing parties, and they wrote of their conviction that Mrs. Crawford's stories of her morning visits to Sloane Street were quite impossible. D'Estournelles said that he was frequently at the house until 11-30, and Tracey wrote that he often returned from Prince's, where he dressed, to pick up something he had left behind at Sloane Street. All the guests came and went quite freely both before and after Dilke's departure for his office.

The last group of post-trial information was concerned not with the contradiction of Mrs. Crawford's story, but with providing an explanation for her invention of it. First there was evidence to suggest that her illness in the summer of 1884 had in fact been the beginnings of syphilis, and that, by the time of her confession, the knowledge that she was suffering from this disease provided her with an additional and urgent reason for wishing to sever her connection with her husband. This information was first given to Dilke by Mrs. Rogerson,
who was a good source in so far as she had been very close to Mrs. Crawford at the relevant period, and a bad source in so far as she was a highly unreliable witness. There was evidence that Mrs. Crawford had been treated at this period by Dr. Lee of Savile Row, Dr. Matthews Duncan, and Dr. Cumber-batch of Cadogan Place. To the last-named Mrs. Rogerson claimed that she herself had sent her.

Enquiries to these three doctors not unnaturally failed to elicit any information, but a further line was obtained when it was discovered in 1889 that Mrs. Crawford was still receiving treatment, at this time from Dr. Priestley, the father of her brother-in-law and one of the foremost specialists of the day on women's diseases. One of his prescriptions for her was traced as having been made up by an assistant (Caesar) employed by a chemist (Miles) in business at 165, Edgware Road, and was said to confirm the nature of her disease. The theory was that she had contracted it from Forster, who, in Dilke's phrase, was “thereafter eaten away by the disease until he died of it a few years later,” Forster having previously been infected by her sister, Mrs. Harrison. This would account for the revulsion from Mrs. Harrison which was known to have seized Forster, and also for a coolness which had sprung up between the two sisters; but it was all rather hypothetical.

There was also a view that, if Mrs. Crawford had invented the story, she must have been aided by allies other (and probably more powerful) than Forster. Bodley wrote to Dilke, on September 27th, 1887, commenting on a paragraph, friendly to Dilke, which had appeared in a journal entitled
Land and Water
, and which suggested conspiracy against him. Bodley's letter (a vital part of which is most unfortunately missing
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) starts several new hares.

“There can be no doubt to whom the paragraph points,” he wrote, “but I know nothing whatever to
justify the suspicion. The combination of ‘individual jealousy,' ‘feminine hatred,' ‘racial prejudice,' and ‘great wealth' can only mean Rosebery and his wife.
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. . . I have never heard a word as to Rosebery's hostility to you except of course the very frequent and obvious observations that your being out of the way was worth a good deal to him. . . . My impression would be that the writer has two different rumours mixed up in his head. As you took the line you did about the Princes Gardens incident
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I have never opened my mouth in this country regarding it. But there has always been the idea in the air that your hidden foe was of your own party—that is to say that you were betrayed by Chamberlain. Then the second rumour was that of Miss Rothschild's attachment to you. Of course I heard much about this in the autumn of '85 when half the women you knew in London wrote to me to ask if your marriage could not be stopped, and as they were all previously fettered themselves they invariably suggested that if marriage was necessary you should avail yourself of Miss R.'s disposition. But as you know I never had any intimacy with the Jew gang. I never heard they had shown any great hostility to you excepting of course the national line the tribe would take of kicking a man when he is down. As to the Princes Gardens incident I have always felt that. . . (here the break occurs) . . . said about you, and I find a most marked advance of feeling in your favour. Everybody of course connected with the F(oreign) O(ffice) wants you back, but amongst the rest there is a distinct change. If only something tangible could happen people would welcome it. . . . There is one individual who did not frequent that section of society in bygone days who does not share the sentiments I have described, indeed, I was told, he gets ‘very mad' as the Americans say, when it is suggested that your return to public life is not an improbability. There is no need to give a name, but this fact
assures me in my belief that if Mrs. Crawford's proceedings for the twenty-four hours preceding the confession could be ascertained, nothing more would be necessary than to publish them. However, the fact of the possibility of your speedy return exciting anger is a good sign, as if there were no chance of it you would still be the object of the devoted sympathy which did more than anything else to ruin you in '85.

“Yours ever,
J. E. C B.”
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This fascinating letter although long is none the less cryptic. The references to Rosebery and to Chamberlain (it is to him again, of course, that the last section refers) are, however, clear enough. Rosebery, in whose guilt Bodley did not believe, can be dealt with first. The basis of the rumour was that some money had passed between the Roseberys and Mrs. Crawford. The position as Dilke understood it was most fully stated in a note which he wrote in April, 1894:

“John J. Louden of Killudunyan House, Westport (one of Parnell's solicitors), wrote naming Mrs. Bridgmount, an Irish woman, as the author of the story of how Lord Rosebery found the bribe for Mrs. Crawford to lie about me. Mrs. Bridgmount lived with Rosebery both before and after his wife's time. I have never believed the story. Lady Rosebery found some money for Mrs. Crawford as we know, but that was a different matter.”
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Dilke had felt a gust of suspicion against the Roseberys much earlier, however. On December 12th, 1885 he wrote to Rosebery in the following terms:

“
Secret

My dear Rosebery,

Some time ago friends of mine who are also friends of Mr. Crawford and of yourself expressed surprise that he was staying with you. I replied that it was not unnatural, there being nothing I know of against him. To-day I
have however a statement so incredible that I hesitate to repeat it to you even in a secret letter. It is that Mr. Crawford states that Lady Rosebery has promised him
help
in his case. Now, no doubt he believes the wicked and monstrous lies that have been told him, but no one else who has any acquaintance with the matter believed them, and I make no doubt but that the nature and authorship of the plot against me will be fully exposed. Still, it is not pleasant to have a colleague's name used in this way, and I think it best to write to you rather than to write to relations of Lady Rosebery's or to colleagues of ours or common friends.

Yours sincerely,
Charles W. Dilke.”

Rosebery, replying on the following day, wrote: “I should have thought that even in this age of lies no human being could have invented so silly a lie as that you mention. But if you wish me to contradict it, I will only say that there is not a vestige of truth or even possibility about it.” He added that when he “first heard” with the rest of the public “about this case” he was placed in an embarrassing position, and had decided to keep clear of it and treat Crawford and Dilke, who were both his friends, as though nothing had happened.

This letter (as Mr. Rhodes James makes clear in his recent biography of Rosebery) contains a misstatement about the way in which Rosebery first heard of the case, but it appeared completely to satisfy Dilke. He answered at once:

“My dear Rosebery,

Your letter is all I could expect or wish. He (Crawford) thinks he has received the greatest of injuries at my hands. I have received none at his because I have never for an instant doubted his belief in what he was told.

Yours sincerely,
Chas. W. D.”

Many years later Dilke wrote to Sir Wemyss Reid saying that his suspicions never revived. Rosebery behaved less
generously. He severed all contact with Dilke after the second trial, and as late as 1909 he took the trouble to write the following note:

“I think it necessary to leave on record for the information of my children, in case Sir Charles Dilke should leave any records of his life speaking ill of me, that I was compelled to cut him dead, for having declared that my wife (then dead) had inspired Mrs. Crawford to make a false accusation against him in order to get him out of the way of my career.

AR.”

Could one or both of the Roseberys have been party to a conspiracy?

Apart from the alleged payment of money by Lady Rosebery to Mrs. Crawford there are two factors which gave a certain superficial plausibility to the story. The first was that Dilke was undoubtedly a direct rival to the extremely ambitious Rosebery. This was explicitly (and generously) recognised by Rosebery on February 3rd, 1886, the day on which he became Foreign Secretary. “You will know already,” Rosebery wrote to Dilke, “that I have been appointed to the Foreign Office. . . . Had you not felt compelled to stand aside this office would have been yours by universal consent.”
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The second factor was Lady Rosebery's known capacity for trying to advance her husband's career by rather unfortunate methods. But there is a great difference between making scenes to Mr. Gladstone and bribing Mrs. Crawford to concoct a conspiracy. It is true that she was sometimes hysterically anxious for her husband's success and that Dilke stood directly in his way. But these truths do not even begin to prove that she attempted to remove the obstacle. The theory of a plot instigated by the Roseberys might be dramatically satisfying, but there is no hard evidence in its support.

A Chamberlain-instigated conspiracy would be still more dramatic, and this theory has at least a certain volume of circumstantial evidence in its support; but the question of motive would be more complicated in the case of Chamberlain
than in that of Rosebery. Bodley, as his letter indicated, clearly believed in Chamberlain's guilt. But his mind had long been predisposed in this direction. Even before he had any evidence to go on he wrote to Dilke in terms which were bitingly critical of Chamberlain. The latter's behaviour in allowing Matthews to be elected for East Birmingham—“by his deliberate action he returned to Parliament in as strict a sense as the Duke of Bedford used to return the member for Tavistick the man who a week previously had vilified you . . . in the court”—aroused Bodley's special anger.

“More than this,” he continued, “what you suffered on account of that association (with Chamberlain) in the autumn of '85 will be never known. Chamberlain had not then adopted the fashionable principles of the Primrose League on Irish affairs. His anecdotes about Foulon and similar sentiments had struck terror into the hearts of the ‘classes' who now are for the moment his allies. Lady Salisbury's brutality on hearing of your disaster represented a very extended feeling; she said ‘we liked Sir Charles Dilke, but we are delighted because it will smash Chamberlain.' At the time of the Birmingham election a man of the world whose opinion you respect said to me, ‘It would certainly have been a strong order for Chamberlain to have chucked over the Ministry in the matter of Matthews, but not so strong as Dilke's insisting in 1880 upon the ex-Mayor of Birmingham going straight into the Cabinet.' There have it is true been single-minded patriots who have sacrificed friendship to the state ever since the days of Brutus and Cassius, but there have always been a few cynics inclined to criticise their lofty motives.”
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