The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (13 page)

The appearance of the lawyer for the Intervener put Mrs Druce into a great state of agitation.

‘He is not the plaintiff!’ she exclaimed. ‘It is my right to begin my own case, surely!’

‘I think,’ replied the judge dryly, ‘as far as I can gather, he means to relieve you of any trouble.’ (Laughter in court.)

‘Where is your pedigree, sir? I want to see it, to have it sworn before a commissioner for oaths, and verified now, this moment! You have no case at all!’ cried Mrs Druce furiously, at the Intervener’s representative. ‘You are wasting the time of the court! I think I have had enough of this gentleman!’

Complain as she might, however, it was to no avail. The gentlemen representing the Intervener remained in court, assiduously taking notes. And as Anna Maria as plaintiff had called no witnesses, it was Sir Robert Reid, KC – on behalf of the defendant, Alexander Young – who proceeded to open the case, and call the defendant’s witnesses.

There was much that was powerful in the evidence called by the defendant on that day, leaning towards proving that T. C. Druce did indeed die, and was buried, in December 1864. First in the witness box came William Arthur Tootell, Assistant Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths for the district of Edgware. His evidence was that, until 1875, it was not obligatory for a death certificate to be signed by a doctor. Before that date, he said, death certificates were frequently not attested by any medical man. Nobody, however, was called to give an adequate explanation as to why the ownership of the Druce vault in Highgate – originally registered in the name of Mrs Druce’s son, Sidney – had abruptly, and with no explanation, been subsequently transferred into the name of Herbert Druce, after the litigation started.

Next came the Druce’s family nurse Catherine Bayly, a middle-aged lady who had served the family all her life. She gave grim and graphic evidence as to the nature and circumstances of T. C. Druce’s death, supported by the testimony of his medical attendants, Doctors Shaw and Blasson, and his son, Herbert Druce. T. C. Druce, it was said, had died after a protracted illness, as a result of abscesses in the anal region, causing a gradual putrefaction of the lower body (the judge cut short the oral evidence at this point, and seemed much discomfited by the graphic detail of the medical evidence). Catherine Bayly had seen T. C. Druce’s body wrapped in chlorate of lime, then an enclosing shell, followed by an encasing of lead and, finally, a coffin of oak. The body had lain in state in the Druce family home at Mill Hill until the funeral, and Nurse Bayly had been ordered by the mistress of the house, Annie May, to lock the door to the room where the body lay to prevent anybody from entering.

The family accountant Alexander Young, executor of T. C. Druce’s will and defendant to the proceedings, subsequently gave evidence. He revealed that – and here there was another collective intake of breath – in addition to T. C. Druce’s will of March 1860, a codicil had been signed in November 1864, just a month before his death. By the terms of this codicil, T. C. Druce left a bequest of £1000 ‘to my son George Druce by my former marriage, now in Australia’. The money had been duly sent to the attorneys of this son in Australia, and a receipt had been received. The circumstances of the signing of the codicil were, to say the least, unusual: concluded a mere month before T. C. Druce’s alleged death, it had been witnessed by old Druce’s solicitor Henry Walker, now dead, and a lady named Miss Bruce, said to have been a governess in the Druce household at the time. None of the other children of T. C. Druce’s first marriage had been mentioned in the codicil, other than the son George – even though it was said that there was a daughter of the first marriage, Fanny, of whom old T. C. Druce had been exceptionally fond.

Mrs Druce’s cross-examination technique during the trial was eccentric. When the nurse Catherine Bayly testified to locking up the coffin of T. C. Druce on the instructions of Annie May, Anna Maria exclaimed:

‘Why did you lock up the room – to keep out the devil? What was in there – a corpse? A skeleton? What was in this wonderful Bluebeard’s chamber – an effigy, ha! ha! A wax figure, ha! ha! A face, or what?’

When the great-nephew of T. C. Druce’s solicitor, the late Henry Walker, who had witnessed the original will, gave evidence as to his great-uncle’s signature, Mrs Druce’s questions were no less bizarre:

‘Do you know that Mr Walker did not die? Do you know that he is living there at this very moment?’

‘I know perfectly well he is not,’ came the reply.

‘A second case of burying a skeleton or something – the same family,’ muttered Mrs Druce. ‘The same Highgate Ceme-tery, and the same people doing it.’ Then her face brightened. ‘If we open the Druce vault, we may open Mr Walker’s vault. Do you see any objection to opening Henry Walker’s vault?’

‘No, I see no objection,’ replied the great-nephew blandly, to a roar of laughter in court.

‘And if I bring some of the Duke of Portland’s servants to prove that that man stoked the fires at Welbeck, I suppose you have no objection then to showing us what is inside the vault, have you?’ Mrs Druce rambled on. She was, it appeared, raving.

‘Do not answer that question!’ the increasingly furious judge commanded the witness.

It was when Mrs Druce announced that she had a letter from T. C. Druce and waved a newspaper before the court, however, that Mr Justice Barnes decided he had had enough.

‘Is there any reason at all for your going into a lot of rubbish that has nothing to do with the case?’ he demanded. ‘Unless you keep more in order, I must stop you. Put that newspaper down, it has nothing to do with the case at all!’

‘Is that Druce’s writing?’ Mrs Druce squinted at the yellowing newspaper print.

‘It cannot be his writing, it is a newspaper!’ roared the judge.

But Mrs Druce was not to be deterred. ‘The original letter is to be had!’ she declared defiantly. (In fact, in all probability, Mrs Druce was here holding up the sample of T. C. Druce’s handwriting mentioned earlier, which was published in the
Daily Mail
.)

*

The second day of the hearing went as badly for Mrs Druce as the first. As she had not called any witnesses, she was examined by the judge and cross-examined by Sir Robert Reid, KC, raving, for the most part, about the undead Henry Walker and the necessity to dig up multiple graves at Highgate.

By the end of the proceedings, Mr Justice Barnes had no hesitation as to how he was to direct the jury in his summing up.

‘Members of the jury,’ he said, with even more than his customary terseness, ‘I do not suppose there is the slightest difficulty in your returning your verdict, and making an end of a matter that ought never to have been brought into court.’

Accordingly, the official verdict of the jury was that the will dated 28 March 1860, and codicil dated 14 November 1864, of T. C. Druce were duly signed and valid, and that T. C. Druce did, in fact, die in December 1864.

And there, perhaps, the case might have ended. Powerful evidence had been produced that T. C. Druce had died and was buried in December 1864. The issue of whether he had led a double life as the 5th Duke of Portland, on the other hand, had not been tried, being strictly irrelevant to the proceedings to set aside probate on the will. Those proceedings had been narrowly confined to the issue of whether T. C. Druce did, or did not, die in 1864. Moreover, while the evidence called by the defendant as to the circumstances of the death of T. C. Druce was indeed powerful, there were awkward questions that had not been satisfactorily answered, mainly because Mrs Druce had lacked a legal representative properly to argue her case.

For instance, who precisely was the governess Miss Bruce, shadowy witness to the deathbed codicil? Why had the nursemaid Catherine Bayly been given keys to the room in which the coffin of T. C. Druce lay, with strict instructions to allow nobody to enter? Why had the ownership of the vault in Highgate been transferred by the London Cemetery Company from Anna Maria’s son Sidney to Herbert Druce, abruptly and with no explanation? These were all questions relevant to the circumstances of the will, codicil and alleged
death of T. C. Druce, as well as to the issue of the validity of the probate granted on the will.

No doubt, such questions would have been put to the court, had Mrs Druce been in a position to do so herself, or through her counsel. Alas, the poor lady was now bereft not merely of counsel, but of her wits. After a few spats with the courts over minor issues in the next few years, the woman whose extraordinary request to the Ecclesiastical Court had set the entire Druce–Portland case in motion, disappeared completely from view. The official story was that she had been committed to a lunatic asylum. However, it was rumoured that she had been bought off by somebody – the duke or Herbert Druce – and was living in opulence at a secret address. Whatever the truth of the matter, old Mrs Druce was not to be heard of again (at least, not officially). The Druce vault at Highgate retained its secret, and for those determined to oppose its opening, a new – and rather more menacing – challenger to the Portland millions had now thrown his hat into the ring.

Shams and delusions are esteemed for soundest myths, while reality is fabulous.

H
ENRY
D
AVID
T
HOREAU
, Walden

G. H. Druce watches the proceedings in Clerkenwell Police Court
(the
Penny Illustrated Paper
, 30 November 1907)

There is no limit, in England, to what a bad husband may do – as long as he sticks to his wife.

W
ILKIE
C
OLLINS

Man and Wife

Eighteen-sixteen, in the western hemisphere, was the year without a summer. Never, in human memory, had winter stretched its chilly grasp so far into the year. In both Europe and America the August sun glowed like a dull red spark in a flinty sky, and summer winds blew with icy keenness. In New Hampshire, an amateur meteorologist reported foot-long icicles at midday, and summer ice covered the surface of lakes and rivers as far south as Pennsylvania. Newly shorn sheep perished in the cold, and birds fell dead from the sky. In Ireland, the summer rain pelted down non-stop for eight weeks, destroying the potato harvest and creating widespread famine. Throughout Britain also, crops failed, riots broke out and village uprisings caused members of the prosperous middle classes to tremble in their beds.

The true causes of the catastrophic global summer temperature abnormalities of 1816 were not fully understood at the time. They are now, however, believed to have been the result of low solar activity combined with a number of
volcanic events, culminating in the massive eruption in April 1815 of Mount Tambora in the Dutch East Indies. Average global summer temperatures decreased dramatically as a result, causing the crop failures and severe food shortages described above. However, the catastrophe did have some positive, although accidental, cultural effects. The ‘incessant rainfall’ of the ‘wet, uncongenial summer’ of 1816 prompted Mary Shelley and her friends to stay indoors and invent ghost stories during their July holiday in Switzerland, resulting in the birth of the classic gothic novel
Frankenstein
. And the unusually spectacular sunsets of the period, caused by high levels of volcanic ash in the atmosphere, are said to have inspired the artist J. M. W. Turner.

Deep in the heartland of the usually rich and fertile fields of eastern England, the weather in the provincial town of Bury St Edmunds did not escape the year’s meteorological malaise. Bury was famed as a magnet for the gentry, and boasted more titled families than almost any other settlement in England. However, even this prosperous and bustling market town, with its ivy-clad Georgian façades, witnessed unwelcome unrest during the course of the year. On 8 May, a large, menacing crowd assembled on the ancient market square. A week later, local farmer Robert Gooday’s barns on Southgate Street were destroyed by the mob. And at about the same time, a great number of people assembled in the Butter Market at eight o’clock in the evening to demand that the town hosier, Mr Wales of Abbeygate Street, give up his spinning machines. Things being ‘very tumultuous’, the magistrates ordered the suppression of the riots, after which the situation quietened down, at least in Bury. But agrarian riots continued elsewhere
in Suffolk throughout the year, notably in the nearby village of Brandon, where over a thousand armed men attacked a butcher’s shop, demanding ‘bread or blood’.