The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (14 page)

In the autumn – by which time the situation had settled down somewhat and the weather improved – an uneasy quiet reigned over the town. Farmers got on with gathering the harvest as best they could, and Bury’s famous St Matthew’s Fair went ahead in late September, although in more subdued fashion than usual. It was hardly an auspicious year in which to be married, however: a fact that could not have failed to strike the mind of the Reverend William Stocking, rector at the village of Tuddenham and reader at St James’ Church in Bury, as he surveyed the small group of young people assembled before him in the picturesque churchyard one chilly October morning. Reverend Stocking was a seasoned veteran of hastily arranged matches. However, even he could not help but be moved by the little group that clustered round him in the blustering wind. They were so very young. Even the most credulous bystander would hardly believe that the bridegroom was the twenty-one years of age required for a marriage licence to be granted, still less the bride. The Reverend Stocking wondered if they were of age – especially the bride-elect, who was one of the most beautiful young women he had ever seen.

Despite his doubts, he thought it best to let things well alone. A devout follower of the Church of England, Stocking nevertheless bore the imprint of the Nonconformism for which Bury was famous. A number of Bury families had been founders of the pioneering New World colony of Massachusetts Bay, and the town’s ancient grammar school – attended
by the reverend’s own son – had provided some of the leading Puritan thinkers of the English University of Cambridge. A man’s conscience, in Stocking’s view, must ultimately be a matter between himself and God.

So it was that on Saturday, 19 October 1816, Thomas Charles Druce, linen draper, married Elizabeth Crickmer, spinster, at St James’ Church, Bury St Edmunds. There was no crowd of well-wishers in attendance. The ceremony was witnessed only by the bride’s youthful brother and sister, William and Mary Crickmer, and an older couple, family friends Samuel and Sarah Hurst. The kindly rector must have wondered what could have prompted such secrecy.

The truth of the matter, had he known it, would have doubtless turned Stocking’s hair an even lighter shade of grey than it was already. Elizabeth Crickmer was not only beautiful, but rich. She came from a prosperous family of the nearby town of Bungay, and it was rumoured that she had a fortune of no less than £7000. Elizabeth had met the young Thomas Charles Druce when she was a pupil at an exclusive girls’ boarding school in Bury. Full of charm and apparently of good breeding, the dashing young man claimed to be a linen draper from Bury (although no draper of that name was ever recorded in the town, nor was any draper’s shop registered in his name). A whirlwind romance followed, culminating in the couple’s elopement – a fact confirmed many years later by Elizabeth’s grandson, Charles Hollamby Druce: ‘The old man [Druce] took her [Elizabeth] away from school,’ he stated. ‘She ran away from school to get married.’

The school attended by Elizabeth at Bury has not been identified with certainty. The most likely establishment
seems to have been an exclusive girls’ boarding school at the edge of town on Southgate Street, run by a Miss Cooke. It is believed to have been the inspiration for the school in Charles Dickens’
The Pickwick Papers
, which was also in Bury St Edmunds, thinly disguised in the novel as ‘Westgate School’. Miss Cooke’s school – with its red-brick walls and crumbling, mellow walled garden – is almost exactly replicated in the school described in Dickens’ novel. There is also an uncanny parallel in the elopement story: for Mr Pickwick’s mission in scaling the old school wall is to rescue a rich and beautiful heiress, a boarder at the school, from the clutches of the villainous Alfred Jingle, masquerading as the aristocratic Fitz-Marshall. When Dickens visited Bury in the 1830s, the Druce case was in the distant future. However, the rumours of a long-ago elopement from Miss Cooke’s school might well have still been in circulation.

How did the mysterious, non-practising linen draper and the rich, beautiful heiress fare in their wedded life? On the surface, all seemed to be well at first. The couple lived in an impressive house on Great Market, one of the principal streets of Bury, rented out for the then considerable sum of £18 a year. They enjoyed every luxury that their privileged station in life could afford, including that of having their full-size portraits painted by the resident town portraitist. Four children were born to the couple in rapid – some suspected rather
too
rapid – succession: Henry Thomas in 1817, Charles Crickmer in 1818, George in 1819 and an only daughter, Frances Elizabeth (‘Fanny’), in 1821. The name of T. C. Druce was noticeably absent, however, from the roll-call of public functionaries of the town. Indeed, Thomas Druce seems to have exhibited in
his early years the same secrecy that would be characteristic of his later life in Baker Street. Contrary to the normal practice of wealthy townsfolk, the only public office he appears to have held in the borough of Bury was that of an overseer of the poor.

Beneath the surface, however, the life of this superficially privileged couple was not quite all it seemed. For Elizabeth found out her husband’s fatal weakness very quickly after their wedding. Thomas Charles Druce was, quite simply, an inveterate womanizer. His infidelities, which continued throughout his two marriages, were to become legendary. One published newspaper account in 1898 – corroborated by the 6th Duke of Portland’s private detectives – claimed that he had got a young woman ‘in the family way’, and that the girl in question was subsequently admitted to a nunnery that took in fallen women. A former polisher at Druce & Co., a Mr Charles Benjafield, stated to Freshfields that his brother-in-law Mr Payne, also employed at the Baker Street Bazaar, was in fact an illegitimate son of T. C. Druce by a woman called Ann Payne. Payne, Benjafield said, had a sister older than him, also said to be a child of T. C. Druce. It seemed that no woman was safe from T. C. Druce’s advances, no relationship or tie of the blood too sacrosanct for him not to try his luck. Elizabeth discovered this all too soon to her cost, when her husband – very early in their marriage – is said to have broken a taboo as powerful as it was ancient. It was this act that probably doomed their marriage almost from the start, although its true nature and extent were not revealed until much later. There was nothing, however, that Elizabeth could do about it at the time. She was trapped.

At some point in the early 1820s, when the couple were still living in Bury, Thomas Charles Druce vanished without trace. What unknown troubles or temptations prompted his sudden disappearance are not known. What is known, however, is that the town records are wiped clean of all mention of him. Instead, we find Elizabeth struggling on with her little family on her own. Since she could no longer afford to live in the fine house in Great Market, from the summer of 1822 she rented a cottage in a much shabbier quarter of the city, Lower Baxter Street. This was barely large enough to accommodate all four of her children, the eldest of whom were sent out to earn what they could, to keep the family from the streets. Elizabeth’s son George was later to recall that from the time he could run about, he had to hold horses’ heads in the market place and gather turnip tops and odd sweepings of vegetables for the family dinner. Fanny, the only daughter, was sent to Yarmouth to live with her cousins, the Burtons, for Mary Crickmer (Elizabeth’s sister who had witnessed her marriage in 1816) was now married to a prosperous Yarmouth lawyer, Samuel Burton.

It seems that Elizabeth was so poor that, on several occasions in the 1820s, she was forced to apply to the Poor Law Officers of Bury to be excused from paying rates. The applications were generally granted, her unfortunate story being well known in the town. Local worthies did their best to help her by turning a blind eye to repeated financial defaults. The kindly Charles Blomfield, a churchwarden, alderman and Justice of the Peace, regularly excused Elizabeth from the poor rate rental for her home of 6 shillings. Likewise, the Reverend William Stocking – who doubtless remembered his
misgivings on her wedding day – kept a kindly watch over her. In all this time, there was no sign of the husband who had taken Elizabeth’s dowry and deserted her, and even if there were, there was little that Elizabeth could do to improve her position. In those days, a woman’s property automatically devolved on her husband when she married. As a result, it was a common occurrence for abandoned wives like Elizabeth to be left destitute. It was not until 1882, with the passing of the Married Women’s Property Act, that wives were granted the right to own property independently of their husbands. That was sixty years too late for Elizabeth Crickmer.

It was during this time that Elizabeth seems to have sought solace in the arms of a local gamekeeper. The details of the liaison, including the identity of the man concerned, have been lost, but what is certain is that Elizabeth gave birth to a fifth child after she was estranged from T. C. Druce: William, born in October 1827. It was George Druce’s son, George Hollamby Druce, who first claimed that William Druce was illegitimate. However, it also seems to have been taken for granted by contemporary lawyers that William was not T. C. Druce’s son: a Freshfields note, for example, states that ‘William is illegitimate’.

For some years, Elizabeth continued to battle on. But in 1829, disaster struck when the benevolent Reverend Stocking, her staunch ally, died. The unwelcome event was at once reflected in Elizabeth’s change of circumstances. Immediately, she moved to a cottage in a poorer area of the town, Eastgate Street. Then, after only a few months, she moved again, to an even cheaper cottage in the same street. In neither of these places was she able to pay the rent. Finally, it seems that
she wisely decided to throw herself on the mercy of her relations. In or about 1830 she left Bury for London, where her brother Charles – a prosperous wine merchant – had a home in Kennington.

*

Quite what thoughts ran through Thomas Druce’s head when, some time in 1835, his wife at last caught up with him at the Baker Street Bazaar, are difficult to imagine. For years, he had carefully avoided being traced, even as he grew rich on the profits of the business he had founded with the fortune he had acquired from her. He had changed address with baffling frequency, keeping the mystery of his past life secret. Yet somehow, Elizabeth managed to track him down. Finally, Thomas Druce was compelled to recognize the family that he had abandoned. Reluctantly, he agreed to support Elizabeth on the modest allowance of 12 shillings a week. He then turned his attention to the children. Henry Thomas, the eldest son, had already gone to sea, where his ship, the
Nimble
, was subsequently lost in a wreck off Petershead. Charles Crickmer, the second son, was set up by his father in a modest business as a tailor. George, the third son, then at sea with the Revenue cruiser the
Prince of Wales
, was recalled ashore by his father, and sent to school after being shown round the Baker Street Bazaar. William, the youngest, then only eight – a Druce for form’s sake only – stayed on with his mother, and was eventually apprenticed to a master mariner in Yarmouth.

Most of all, however, Thomas Druce wished to keep the only child of Elizabeth’s for whom he felt genuine affection – his beloved daughter Fanny – to himself. Unlike the other
children, who were given minimal assistance, Fanny was sent to an expensive boarding school to receive a lady’s education – first to Rosewood Ladies’ School run by a Mrs Gibbons in Kew Foot Lane, Richmond, and subsequently to a private governess, Mrs Whitwell, at the Claverley Park estate in Tunbridge Wells. ‘I hope and trust’, T. C. Druce wrote to Fanny anxiously when she was at school, ‘that you will exert yourself to advance in your reading, writing and cyphering in particular. Indeed, I cannot express to you the great anxiety I feel for your improvement, therefore let that, combined with the great advantage and pleasure of a cultivated mind, induce you to the most energetic perseverance in your studies.’

Once her education was completed in 1842, Fanny was sent to live in seclusion in London, with a lady by the name of Eliza Tremaine, whom her father claimed was the widow of an army officer. While there is evidence that T. C. Druce assigned the lease of a house at 71 Edgware Road to Mrs Tremaine in 1850, there is no trace in contemporary army records of an officer with that surname. It is probable that ‘Mrs Tremaine’ came from less genteel origins than T. C. Druce claimed, and that she was a mistress kept by him. She seems, in fact, to have been one of several women apparently ‘maintained’ by T.C. Druce, and introduced to his children as ‘aunts’. T. C. Druce’s son, George, was later to recall that Annie May – before she married his father – was introduced to him in this way. Once again, Thomas Druce seemed to show a devotion to Fanny matched only by his carelessness to the other Crickmer-Druce children. He was a frequent visitor to the house in which she lived with Mrs Tremaine, signing his many letters to her as ‘your affectionate father’.

T. C. Druce’s possessive and tyrannical love for his daughter seems to have excluded all others, including her own mother. Fanny had barely arrived at boarding school in 1836 when her father told her that Elizabeth had died in Bury St Edmunds. However, nothing could have been further from the truth; in fact, Elizabeth lived on quietly in Yarmouth and then London for the next fifteen years, collecting her weekly allowance from her husband at her brother’s house in Kennington. But Fanny meekly accepted her father’s word, at least in public; indeed, throughout her life, she stayed loyal to the ‘official’ version of her mother’s death in Bury in 1836. However, informed by her brother Charles that her mother was still living, Fanny continued to see Elizabeth in secret. She would visit her at Charles’ house, bringing for her mother’s use her own cast-off clothes – for Elizabeth, on an income of 12 shillings a week, could hardly afford to dress like a lady. She was, however, an expert needlewoman, making best-quality white shirts for a firm in Southwark; and she tried to maintain whatever contact she could with her children, saving copies of old newspapers for her son George, her ‘sailor boy’, which she used to give him when he returned from a voyage, to read when he went back to sea.