The Spy Who Painted the Queen (19 page)

To make matters worse, Charles Russell & Co., De László's solicitors, had applied to see them, which they were entitled to do. Despite a thorough search of the MI5 registry and of the Home Office, the documents never materialised. As the Treasury Solicitor pointed out, ‘Messrs Charles Russell & Co may be expected to take full advantage of [this] on behalf of their client.'

Another problem concerned the French secret service reports, the most serious part of the case. The Treasury Solicitor pointed out:

As matters stand, all we can do is to say that we had information that a letter in Hungarian, of which we have a French translation, was seen and the French translation taken. We can give no indication of the person who saw the letter or took the translation; nobody here is able to say that he knows who it was and is prepared to vouch for his trustworthiness.

He urged more effort be made to persuade the French authorities to let them give the committee a little more precise information about their agent and how he got the information. Presumably the French were obdurate, not wishing to give any clue as to even the existence of an important informant. In the end no mention was made of the reports, or of the letter obtained by Thomson's informant, in the charges levelled against De László.

The third problem involved the statements Thomson had gathered from some of De László's sitters. Though they had made written statements, they suddenly seem to have become coy about standing up in court to justify them. One was dead, which was about as coy as you can get, but Mrs Wanda Muller and Henry Vincent Higgins were still alive and presumably could not be persuaded to appear in court. It had been nearly two years since they made their statements but no real explanation appears on the file as to why they refused.

By the time De László appeared before it, the Revocation Committee, after a slow start, had been busy. Between 1 January and 31 March 1919, it revoked the naturalisation certificates of twenty-one former Germans, four former Austro-Hungarians, one former Turk and one former Russian. One of these cases, that of Caroline Hanemann, is worth looking at before examining the De László hearing in more detail. Caroline was naturalised on 13 October 1914. She had been born on 23 September 1857 in Nordheim in what was then the Duchy of Sachsen Meiningen. She was lady's maid and companion to Mrs Graham Smith to whom she also acted as a nurse because her mistress was an invalid. Mrs Graham Smith also happened to be the sister of Mr Asquith's wife. Being of German origin, Caroline had naturally come under suspicion, and an article in the magazine
The Pianomaker
in December 1917 made the allegation that she had actually resided within 10 Downing Street for a period round about 27 September 1916. Allegations were made about the ‘Hidden Hand' that protected Germans and their friends, and about ‘the sinister undercurrent of German influence' and the ‘pampering of Huns'. The Downing Street story was probably true; Asquith frequently visited his sister-in-law in Easton Grey near Malmesbury and she sometimes visited him. MI5 had investigated the tale at the time and not discovered anything, though it did later receive a note claiming that Hanemann, at home in Wiltshire, had been found listening at keyholes, had opened and read her mistress's mail, and had openly expressed delight when news came through of German victories. All it could say about these allegations was that they were made by ‘a responsible person in a position to know about what she was talking'.

Caroline appeared before the three-man committee at Westminster Hall on 21 October 1918. She went before it with no legal representation and called no witnesses. She answered its questions clearly and courteously, explaining her various positions before she took the job with Mrs Graham Smith in 1890. Mr Graham Smith had died in 1908. Both Caroline's parents had died before the war and she had three sisters and three brothers in Germany, with two nephews at the front in the German army, one discharged wounded and one exempt from service because of his health. She had last heard from the family the previous July and her communications had all gone through Thomas Cook, a recognised intermediary. She had a sister who had also served as a maid, but she had returned to Germany in early 1915 when an attempt to obtain naturalisation had been rejected. Caroline had last visited Germany for ten days in 1912. When questioned about them, she explained what her male relatives did for work, all reasonable middle-class men with moderately responsible posts and all too old to have served in the war. The committee went through the various people who had supported her naturalisation application, all stalwarts of the local Wiltshire community, the teacher, the postmaster, the farm bailiff, Mr Lawson of the
Telegraph
who was a family friend, and Mrs Graham Smith herself. Mr Arbuthnot Lane, Mrs Graham Smith's doctor, wrote to support her because she had helped with Mrs Graham Smith's treatment.

Caroline explained her sympathies in the war lay with England and that it was a subject rarely spoken about in the house in front of her to save her feelings. All her money was in England and she was too old now to get any new work. She had done her bit in a small way for the war by making things for distressed folk and soldiers. When asked why she hadn't naturalised before the war she replied simply:

Because I never thought about it. I never thought of a war; I never thought about such a thing. And then, I have travelled about a good deal in other countries, and I had no feeling – I felt rather cosmopolitan, I suppose you would say. I never thought. Then, of course, my lady is such an invalid, and she is so lonely and so dependent on me that I never felt that I wished to go away, of course.

She was thanked for her attendance and told she would hear the result through the Home Office.

They certainly took their time considering the matter. It wasn't until 6 February 1919 that the home secretary revoked the naturalisation, and not until the 16th that Wiltshire Constabulary was instructed to serve a copy on Caroline Hanemann. She became an Alien Enemy at that point.

The hearing to decide De László's naturalisation was held on 23 June 1919. Though the Armistice had been signed on 11 November 1918, the Versailles Treaty was still unsigned and, technically, the country was still at war. The Honourable Mr Justice Salter, a former Tory MP who had been a judge of the King's Bench Division, High Court, since 1917, was chairman. With him were The Right Honourable The Viscount Hambleden, Eton-educated and former colonel of the Devon Yeomanry, and His Honour Judge Radcliffe. The attorney-general Sir Gordon Hewart, KC, MP, Sir Archibald Bodkin and G.A.H. Brandon appeared for the Home Office, instructed by the Treasury Solicitor. De László was represented by the Right Honourable Sir John Simon, KC, a former attorney general and Home Secretary, Mr Harold Murphy, and Mr J. Wylie, instructed by his solicitors Messrs Charles Russell & Co.

The transcript of the five-day hearing runs to hundreds of pages, but, it has to be said, would run to an awful lot fewer without the verbiage spouted by both sides – in particular De László's defence barrister Sir John Simon. He seemed incapable of making any point without referring to the honesty of the police and the good will showed by the authorities in releasing all the paperwork, and in stressing that his client might technically be guilty, but … He repeatedly raised points but stressed he wasn't complaining on behalf of his client. A decade later, Oswald Mosley nicknamed him ‘Soapy Simon', and it's quite plain here why.

De László himself appeared as a witness mainly to clarify some points on a written defence statement he had laid before the court. He was questioned surprisingly lightly despite his quoted desire that everything should be done in public ‘in order that his real actions should be known, and that the gravity of the case should be put at its true weight'.

The case was widely reported in the press and the entire transcript is available in the files at Kew so the extracts quoted are purely the author's own.

The attorney general began by reminding the hearing of the terms of the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act 1918, including the section which declared that if anyone to whom a naturalisation certificate had been granted ‘has during the War in which His Majesty is engaged unlawfully traded with or communicated with the enemy or with the subject of an enemy state', the secretary of state should seek to revoke the certificate. The fundamental question was whether De László had done any or all of these things and then whether continuance of his certificate was conducive to the public good. He then gave basic details of the three charges – that De László had assisted the escapee Horn with money and had not informed the police for twenty-four hours, that he had, on numerous occasions, communicated through the Dutch diplomatic bag, and also that he had attempted to persuade Mr Winthrop Bowen to send letters to Hungary for him from New York.

He then set out the basic facts of De László's life including some details of his internment in 1917. He detailed some of the prominent persons he had painted including King George V, King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, the Kaiser, President Roosevelt and the Emperor Franz Joseph. It was explained he had married Miss Guinness in 1900 and that, after living in Brittany, Budapest and Vienna, they had settled in London in 1907. He had, the attorney general conceded, ‘a genius for portrait painting'.

Turning to the naturalisation itself, the attorney general said that in his defence statement De László offered four grounds for wishing to be naturalised: one was his marriage, one was his work, the third the similarity between the British and Hungarian constitutions and the fourth the traditional hospitality of Britain towards artists. He seemed to admit that there was evidence De László had had the intention of naturalising long before the start of the war, though he did point out that Britain had declared war on Austria-Hungary on 12 August 1914 and the application wasn't sent to the Home Office until three days later. The oath of allegiance wasn't sworn until 2 September.

The attorney general then read extracts of letters showing that the naturalisation had caused problems in Hungary, including the one that had been published in a Hungarian newspaper, and subsequently republished in the British newspaper
The Star
,
which De László had written to his family saying, ‘It has cost me a severe mental conflict, but on account of my five sons I had to do it.' The Hungarian newspaper commented he should be stripped of his Hungarian title and removed from the Hungarian Senate of Fine Art.

The attorney general and Sir John Simon traded quotes from the letters regarding the gifts of money sent to his family at some length before turning to the question of the correspondence being sent otherwise than through the post. Simon pointed out that De László had told the authorities about this, but the attorney general added darkly, ‘there were other sources of information also' and De László had used ‘a secret and unusual manner, namely through the Dutch Embassy Bag'. Madame van Riemsdyk's part was explained, as was her relationship with the Dutch foreign minister, as well as how Mrs De László had tried to get letters through Italy and how, following a letter from her to Madame van Riemsdyk bemoaning their difficulties, De László himself had written asking her to forward letters. Sir John Simon pointed out that these letters were sent through the normal post and the attorney general said he was merely showing how the use of the bag had eventually come about. He then produced a letter dated 13 October 1914 which contained a sentence, ‘I send them open as they have to pass the censor here', which proved De László was aware of the censorship from early in the war. He then read a letter from Mr Winthrop Bowen in New York from January 1915 in which he said:

By all means send me any letters you wish me to forward to the continent of Europe. Be sure and seal all letters and put them in a larger envelope … I will post them myself and not trust a servant to do it … just send me any letters you wish remailed.

Though there was later evidence that De László hadn't used this route, he said, it remained pertinent that he had considered it. Mail to the USA was not censored at that time.

The attorney general then turned back to Madame van Riemsdyk, explaining the usual method was to write to her enclosing a letter or postcard for forwarding and for her to then forward the replies and for De László to reimburse her. He read out a couple of her messages and Sir John Simon pointed out that one referred to the use of the diplomatic bag and both had been sent by postcard. The attorney general then read out a letter of 2 September 1915 in which van Riemsdyk explained that the size of the envelope was because she had received so much correspondence for him and the number of mail boats had been so reduced that she simply couldn't transmit them individually. Her brother had also put her under pressure to reduce the amount being sent in the bag so, she asked, could he request his people not to send so many letters? She added the line, referring to the letters to him, ‘it would be no good my sending on the letters by post'. No one seemed able to explain
why
it wasn't possible to send them in the normal mail and, unfortunately, there was then an interruption in the flow of evidence when, with the permission of the president, the defence called Austen Chamberlain, chancellor of the exchequer, to give evidence of De László's character.

Chamberlain was giving evidence under subpoena (the only way a minister of the Crown could attend, though if he had been a private citizen he would have given evidence voluntarily), and it was asked whether he could give his evidence on the first day because of his extremely busy schedule. He explained, under questioning, that he had known De László for a number of years, that he had painted his portrait in 1913 and that they had had a number of friendly and open conversations. He was sure that the subject of naturalisation had come up during the sittings.