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Values were changing, no doubt under the pressure of material circumstances. Old taboos were lifting, and among them the Briton's old maidenly blushes at the thought of a plain-clothes police. Whether this would spread to embrace
political
police was yet to be seen. Plain-clothes detection and disguises were only a step away from espionage, but it was still a very long step… The spy story as a genre had not yet been born.

In naval and military circles, the old preoccupation with honourable conduct – not sneaking or spying – was beginning to lose ground, faced with the need to prevent the Boers from obtaining guns from Europe and to keep up with German technical progress. Now that the Europeans had carved out their Empires and there was no easily conquerable land left in Africa or elsewhere, the threat faced by British governments was more likely to come from other states than from isolated terrorists. But the Army and Navy would not turn to ScotlandYard for expertise, for they had cobbled together their own intelligence services over the years.

So Special Branch had been too efficient for its own good. Like any department of Government, it could only increase in importance by developing a larger workload. At least one Special Branch policeman therefore turned his attention to a phenomenon he considered equally capable of destroying the social fabric. The Naughty Nineties had seen coverage in the newspapers of the Oscar Wilde trial, and Inspector John Sweeney was among those horrified by its revelations. Littlechild, now a private detective, had had a walk-on part as discoverer of a nest of rent-boys in Alfred Taylor's flat at 13 Little College Street. Three years later in 1898, when Sweeney turned his beady eye upon it, the ‘Legitimation League' hardly represented what Bernard Porter calls ‘sexual anarchy'.
²⁶
It was founded on nothing more than a well-meaning desire to remove the taint of bastardy from illegitimate children. But Inspector Sweeney single-mindedly pursued these people in the belief that they posed a threat to the foundations of society. He persuaded the League's secretary, who made a living from the sale of progressive literature, to sell him Havelock Ellis's
Psychology of Sex,
a book intended as a serious scientific study of homosexuality. No sooner was it handed over than he arrested the fellow on an obscenity charge. Sweeney persuaded his terrified prey that if he pleaded guilty, he would get off with a fine and no publicity; but he must shut down the League and its publication,
The Adult.
²⁷

Quite what Melville, who presumably sanctioned this pursuit of the Legitimation League, was thinking is unclear. It has been suggested that the prosecution would have appealed rather to Anderson, ‘who was just the kind of person to perceive a threat to the national fibre in the encouragement of free love'.
²⁸
This was the one occasion on record when the Special Branch seems to have acted in a frankly paranoid way toward liberal progressives who did not claim to be anarchists, and it calls the personality of Melville into question. Was he obsessively strait-laced? Surely he could not have done his job if he was. Nothing he wrote implies any kind of moral disapproval: despair at the foolishness of mankind perhaps, strong dislike of violent anarchy certainly, but perhaps something more akin to Conrad's dismissal of the average anarchist as hopelessly lazy and cowardly rather than ‘evil'. There is no apparent obsession with other people's sex lives. His easy familiarity with people in all walks of life implies a certain tolerance, his writings indicate a sense of humour, and his Will shows that he was kind and considerate. The Legitimation League affair was in Sweeney's own opinion one of his finest achievements,
²⁹
but Melville did not take any credit for it.

He and Amelia had, as it happened, had a little girl together in 1896. She was a child of their middle years; Amelia was forty-four when she gave birth. Unbelievably, he lost this third little daughter to meningitis. Amelia Norah Melville died, aged three, in the Throat Hospital in Golden Square, Soho, in August of 1899.

In October David Nicoll's play about the Walsall affair, its villain
le vile Melville,
was performed at the Athenaeum Rooms in the Tottenham Court Road to raise money for Deakin and the others who had just been released.
³⁰
Special Branch was hardly bothered. English anarchists represented about three per cent of those they knew about.
³¹
What was more worrying was the continuing shift among violent anarchists on the continent from bombing campaigns to political assassination, and the diplomatic awkwardness that resulted from attempts to get the formal cooperation of Special Branch. This came to a head after 1900, the year in which the Prince and Princess of Wales were shot at by a teenage boy in Brussels and King Humbert of Italy really was assassinated, by a Mafioso from New York; perhaps Anderson's story had not been so ‘far-fetched' after all.
³²

Count Hartsfeldt, the German Ambassador, approached the Foreign Office in the summer of 1900 with a request that Prussian police commissioner Ossip should bring six of his constables to London ‘for the purpose of improving their knowledge of police duty in attendance on the Royal Family and in the Criminal Branch'.
³³
The Commissioner, on the basis of advice filtering up from Melville who had now been created Superintendent, would not countenance the idea; and it fell to Sir Thomas Sanderson at the Foreign Office to compose a suitably diplomatic response based on what Sir Edward Bradford had told him.

As regards attendance on the Royal Family he says that efficiency does not depend on any rules of practice, but on the possession of a large amount of common sense, judgement and presence of mind, and the power of dealing with difficulties and emergencies irrespective of rules and without reference to a superior officer.

With regard to the general work of the Criminal Branch, the laws which govern the work of the Metropolitan police are so different from those in Germany that Sir E. Bradford believes that any attempt to derive instruction from our practice would rather confuse than assist your police officers.
³⁴

In case that was not enough to see off the Prussians, the letter concluded with the Government's view that collaboration with foreign police would prove unpopular with the public.

The Italians enquired next. This was all very complimentary; Special Branch were obviously doing a better job than any other royal protection squad, but as Anderson had pointed out to the Germans, this was not merely a matter of training but of police culture and public expectation. In January of 1901 Signor Sessi, the Commissioner of Police for Rome, approached the Italian Consul General in London asking for information about how the English did things – there having been a ‘great misfortune' in July 1900 (the assassination of the King at Monza), in response to which the Italian police had set up a criminal investigation department within the Royal household. Sessi wanted the answers to ten questions, among them ‘are any of the officers ever sent abroad among the anarchists for the purpose of obtaining information?' and ‘are there any agents on cycles?' and ‘what measures are taken to ensure the safety of foreign princes, guests of the state?'

Anderson resigned a few months later, apparently after many difficulties with Sir Edward Bradford. As similar queries landed on the desk of Sir Edward Henry, his successor, the groans from that office must have been audible right down the corridor.

If one of the Kaiser's own police officers is to be believed, Melville appears to have been perfectly happy to work with the German police so long as they collaborated without professional formalities. In January 1901 Queen Victoria lay on her deathbed, and Gustav Steinhauer, as the royal bodyguard, was sent to England with Kaiser Wilhelm II who wished to pay his last respects.
³⁵
Melville had heard that assassination attempts were planned for the funeral. Both the Kaiser and King Leopold of the Belgians were allegedly in danger. He discussed the matter with Steinhauer within hours of the German party's arrival.

This Melville was a silent, reserved man, never given to talking wildly.

‘I have spoken to the Prince of Wales', he informed me, ‘and he has requested that neither the Kaiser nor any of the members of his suite shall be told what is in the air. The Prince thinks it more than likely, if the Kaiser has any reason at all to fear assassination, that he will not attend the funeral. That would be disastrous from a political point of view.'

The Queen died and as the funeral approached Steinhauer consulted Melville again.

‘Tonight', said Melville slowly, ‘I hope to arrest three of the most dangerous nihilists in Europe. It may be that I shall want your assistance. In the meantime, not a word to any one.'

By now they were both at Osborne, and that afternoon Melville took Steinhauer with him to London by train. On their way to Waterloo –

‘Steinhauer', he began, ‘I hope you have made your will.'

‘So', I said, ‘it is as bad as that!'

It was. It was worse.

At Scotland Yard, Melville issued Steinhauer with a revolver, ammunition and a black silk scarf with which he must, later that night, cover his face, bandit-style, and his white shirt-front. He then took him to Simpson's Grand Cigar Divan in the Strand, where one could dine in discreet opulence off such rib-sticking British fare as steak-and-kidney pudding or roast beef followed by syrup roly-poly. After dinner and ‘one or two bottles of wine' they sat over their coffee and cigars until 11.00 p.m. when Melville judged the time right to leave.

Outside, in the brilliantly-lit Strand crowded with people, we got into a hansom cab. Melville gave the driver an address somewhere in the neighbourhood of London Bridge. With my nerves tingling with excitement, we drove up Fleet Street, through the deserted thoroughfares of the City, and thence over London Bridge to some squalid street close by the station. Telling me he would not be more than a minute or two, Melville, surprisingly active for a middle-aged man,
³⁶
jumped out of the cab, and without knocking went inside a house that was in pitch darkness.

When Melville emerged from the house (in Vine Lane, off Tooley Street leading down to the river) he was followed by a woman in a dark mackintosh who got into another cab, which theirs followed. They were conveyed over the bridge towards the East End. In an alleyway somewhere in Whitechapel the first cab stopped, followed by the second.

‘Now', whispered Melville, ‘mind you obey instructions and keep your pistol handy. We are getting near the spot.'

They followed the woman on foot as she made her way through a neighbourhood that ‘fairly reeked with smells foreign to London'. When she entered another darkened house, Melville and Steinhauer lurked unnoticed in the black and silent street. She emerged and took Melville into the house. Then she came back and Steinhauer followed her. He felt her be-ringed fingers through her glove as she took his hand. Inside the house was ‘blacker than ink… one of those terrifying darknesses you can almost feel'. He and Melville stood motionless and waited.

Then, so rapidly that we were taken unawares, there was tragedy on the floor above. We saw a flash of light from an open door, heard the crash of a pistol shot and an agonizing cry of pain in a woman's voice. In almost the same moment there came a hail of bullets from above.

Bang! Bang! Bang! One, as we discovered subsequently, went through Melville's hat, another struck me on the arm. But it did no great damage beyond a temporary numbness; it must have ricocheted from the wall and spent its force – luckily for me.

Our own pistols were out almost as soon. Like madmen we blazed away into the light above and were rewarded by a cry and a fall which proved someone had been hit.

Upstairs, the woman and a man lay dying. Two men had leapt from the window into the street; they dashed off in a cab and succeeded in giving Melville and Steinhauer, who pursued them in another cab, the slip. Back to the house went the two policemen, only to find the upstairs room empty.

The girl had disappeared, and so had the man who had been lying wounded on the floor beside her. The handcuffs Melville had put on him… had been broken off and lay on the floor. We lit the gas and saw a scene of terrible disorder. The room itself looked as though it belonged to a woman of the streets. There was a bed in it, a table, two or three chairs, a couple of mirrors and a small oven. On the walls were photographs of actresses. Over the bed were a number of pictures in the nude and a large paper fan which Melville took away with him. There was blood all over the floor.

It seemed that the runaways had returned for their friends. Why Melville wanted the fan is unclear. The idea that a crime scene should remain undisturbed for forensic examination
in situ
had not yet emerged. However forensic science was on the horizon and fingerprinting was probably in his mind. A Home Office committee had recently reported upon methods of ‘Identification of criminals by measurement and fingerprints'. The new Assistant Commissioner in charge of CID, Sir Edward Henry, had a passion for the subject and was publishing a book,
The Classification and Use of Fingerprints.
The subject was not entirely new, but Henry's appointment in the spring of 1901 represented commitment to a fingerprinting system and rejection of the old unscientific Bertillon system, which had proved useless since it relied largely on cranial measurements, definition of the ‘stunted' criminal physique, chaps whose eyes were too close together, and so on.

Three Russian nihilists had got away, but the body of the woman informer was dragged from the Thames some weeks later.
³⁷
Melville told Steinhauer she was an Italian, who had volunteered information about a Russian plot to kill the Kaiser and King Leopold after being rejected by one of the men. When her lover's two companions arrived from the continent one dark night, she travelled to Melville's private address to alert him. She was able to show him their plan to escape from the funeral procession: this had been torn up and thrown into the fire, but she retrieved enough of the charred map to satisfy Melville that she told the truth. The anarchists were not found in London, although long after the funeral