After dinner, there was conversation and music until eleven o’clock, but no game of baccarat. Instead, Bertie went into a small drawing room with Gordon-Cumming’s accusers. After speaking to them, he sent for Gordon-Cumming. When Gordon-Cumming arrived, he appealed to Bertie, denying that anything of the sort had taken place, and reminding the prince of his years of loyal service.
“It is very shocking,” Bertie replied, “but what can you do against so many? There is only your word against theirs.”26
Gordon-Cumming retorted that he was going to confront his accusers the following day at Doncaster races. This was immediately dismissed as disastrous: it would bring the scandal out in the open. Gordon-Cumming came up with another suggestion. Perhaps he should appeal to his commanding officer, or to the Duke of Cambridge, commander-in-chief of the British army?27
When this proposal was rejected, Gordon-Cumming once again appealed on the basis of his former reputation. What a tragedy this would be, he said, for someone who, for twenty-five years, had attempted to lead the life of an officer and a gentleman.
Gordon-Cumming was dismissed while the document was drawn up. Half an hour later, they sent for him again. Bertie had left the room. Lord Coventry told Gordon-Cumming that the only way to avoid a scandal was for him to sign the document saying he would never play cards again. Gordon-Cumming immediately refused, on the grounds that to do so would be incriminating. But he was told that if he refused to sign, Edward Lycett Green and his friends would expose Gordon-Cumming as a cheat at Doncaster races in the morning. General Williams, speaking as a friend, told Gordon-Cumming that the best thing to do would be to sign the document. Gordon-Cumming was not a stupid man; he could see the benefit of hushing up the allegations. If they went public, the accusation would always haunt him. Innocent or guilty, he would be ruined. But as long as everyone kept quiet, the affair might be forgotten. Once again, the omertà of the Marlborough House set reigned supreme.
But Gordon-Cumming made one last attempt to avoid signing, arguing that to do so would immediately cause suspicion. Gordon-Cumming was noted for his card playing; if he signed this document, he would not even be able to play so much as a rubber of whist in the barracks. It was like being sent into the library with a revolver: Gordon-Cumming had no choice but to do the decent thing. He would also be obliged to leave Tranby Croft quietly, early in the morning, an action that would in itself excite comment.
Defeated, Gordon-Cumming signed, and the document was taken to the Prince of Wales for signature.
In consideration of the promise made by the gentlemen whose names are subscribed to preserve silence with reference to an accusation which has been made in regard to my conduct at baccarat on the nights of Monday and Tuesday the 8th and 9th of September 1890 at Tranby Croft, I will on my part solemnly undertake never to play cards again as long as I live.
Signed, W Gordon-Cumming.
Albert Edward P Coventry.
Owen Williams.
Arthur Wilson.
A C E Somerset.
Edward Somerset.
E Lycett Green.
A Stanley Wilson.
Berkeley Levett.
R D Sassoon28
After the prince and the nine other men had signed the document, Arthur Wilson, the host of Tranby Croft, vowed all present to secrecy.
“This will be no secret, sir,” replied Captain Somerset.
“Not when gentlemen have given their word not to divulge it?” asked Bertie.
“It’s impossible, sir. Nothing in the world known to ten people was ever kept secret.”29
The following morning Gordon-Cumming left early, walking to the railway station after leaving a note for Mrs. Wilson saying that he had urgent business in London. He also wrote to General Williams, strongly denying the charges and asking for any money he had won at baccarat to be donated to charity. Bertie also left Tranby Croft, relocating to the 10th Hussars’ Mess in York for the last day of the races. This was “a terrible blow to the Wilsons’ social aspirations. They realised His Royal Highness would never enter their house again.”30 But while Mrs. Wilson’s social climbing had suffered a setback, this was as nothing compared with the collateral damage caused by the disgrace. Arthur Wilson had been correct when he had cast doubt upon the Tranby Croft scandal ever remaining a secret.
Chapter Seventeen
THE TRANBY CROFT TRIAL
Bertie never forgives.
—PRINCESS ALEXANDRA
Despite all attempts to keep the Tranby Croft scandal secret, news of the affair spread like wildfire through the Marlborough House set. Lady Mina Beresford, eager to take revenge on Daisy for her affair with Charlie Beresford, claimed that Daisy Brooke was the source of the leak, and nicknamed Daisy “Babbling Brooke.”1 It was said that Bertie had bumped into Daisy and Brookie at York railway station, where the couple were on their way to Scotland for the Earl of Rosslyn’s funeral, and shared the extraordinary tale of Gordon-Cumming with them.2 Over twenty years later, Daisy took the opportunity to defend herself from these allegations in a letter to The Times:
“The subsequent funeral and deep mourning prevented me for a long time joining any social gatherings so that I was among the last to hear of what, at the time, set Society agog.”3
Mrs. Wilson and her daughter Ethel were another potential source of the leak, although Mrs. Wilson had been at pains to cover up the allegations when first told about Gordon-Cumming’s behavior by her son. It was perhaps inevitable that suspicion would rest upon the Wilsons, as Mrs. Wilson and Ethel had not signed the letter.
There were plenty of other people whom Gordon-Cumming had offended who were ready to let the cat out of the bag. Gordon-Cumming had made many enemies over the years, and the list of people who wanted to get their own back was extensive. Examples of Gordon-Cumming’s infamous rudeness included this anecdote: “A gentleman whom [Gordon-Cumming] had just met for the first time came up to him and said how delighted he was to have made his acquaintance but might he just mention that his name was Gilette with G soft as in gentleman? Gordon-Cumming replied ‘I thought it was hard, as in beggar.’ It is not even certain that he said beggar.”4 On another occasion, Gordon-Cumming had just come off guard duty at Buckingham Palace when he encountered a physician who had just attained his life’s ambition and been summoned to the royal bedside. “Did you see my brougham at the palace gates?” the doctor proudly asked Gordon-Cumming. “No, really?” Gordon-Cumming replied. “Is one of the servants ill?”5 Gordon-Cumming’s rudeness had extended to Leonie Jerome, Jennie Churchill’s little sister, even before her marriage. Spotting Leonie in Hyde Park, Gordon-Cumming had marched up to her and asked, “with a sneer, if Leonie was ‘Over here husband-hunting?’”6
Queen Victoria responded wearily to yet another scandal with her son at its center. “It is a sad thing Bertie is dragged into it.…”7 The queen was also anxious to make it clear that Bertie was not attempting in any way to shield “this horrid Mr Cumming. On the contrary he is most anxious that he should be punished. The incredible and shameful thing is that others dragged him into it and urged him to sign this paper which of course he never should have done. He is in a dreadful state about it for he has been dreadfully attacked about it.”8
Queen Victoria believed that the most appropriate course of action was for Gordon-Cumming to undergo a court-martial. Gordon-Cumming himself had offered to retire on half-pay for the duration of the trial, but the army regarded this as unacceptable, and Gordon-Cumming was immediately suspended pending an investigation. At this point, Gordon-Cumming offered to break off his engagement to the American heiress Florence Garner, but Florence refused, determined to stand by him.
By now, the newspapers were feasting eagerly on the impending scandal. Despite legal threats, the Echo claimed that:
The Baccarat Scandal is to be hushed up … a very comfortable arrangement for all parties immediately concerned, especially for the exulted personage who condescended to act as banker at the Tranby Cr
oft gambling table but it is certainly discreditable … the nation has a right to expect that a prince who pitches the key-note to society should recollect that his evil example is tenfold more mischievous than that of the common run of men … the spectacle of a prince presiding at a gambling table is far more demoralising than the circulars of betting touts.… The sense of justice is shocked when a couple of street urchins are sent to prison for playing pitch-and-toss whose offence in its essence is no wise distinguishable from that or peers and princes.…9
As soon as Gordon-Cumming discovered that the secret pact had been broken, he went straight to his solicitors, Messrs Wontner’s in St. Paul’s Chambers, and instructed them to demand a retraction from everyone who had signed the letter, along with an apology and £5,000 each, otherwise he would bring an action for slander against them all, including the Prince of Wales.
The Wilson family, finding themselves hit with a writ for slander, went straight to George Lewis. Unfortunately, the dispute had gone too far before they called him in. The only course of action was to fight the case. George Lewis’s primary objective was to keep Bertie out of court. Both Lewis and Bertie himself knew that Bertie’s presence in court would provoke a hostile reaction from the public and the press. The stress of the impending trial began to tell upon Bertie; Captain Somerset, who ran into Bertie leaving the Marlborough Club, was shocked to see that half of the prince’s beard had turned gray.10
On May 13 it was announced that the case would be heard on June 1 before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Coleridge, at the Royal Courts of Justice. The Lord Chief Justice’s court was converted into a new courtroom with a raised bench, witness box, and chairs instead of the usual seats. According to The Times, admission was by ticket only, with thirty seats reserved for the press, and the remaining seats to go to members of the bar, witnesses, and special guests. Most significant of all, the Prince of Wales would be present.
The clerks were besieged by requests for tickets, as if for an important theater premiere. The Prince of Wales was to be the star attraction; as the showman P. T. Barnum had once told Bertie: “[I]t is you, sir, who will be the greatest show on earth.”11
On June 1, fashionably dressed people began to queue outside the iron gates of the Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand from nine-thirty in the morning, even though the proceedings were not due to begin until eleven. The clerks stalwartly refused all applications from anyone without a ticket, and by half past ten the courtroom was packed. According to the correspondent of the Telegraph: “A bright fine sun streamed through the skylight upon a gallery filled with ladies in the gayest of summer dresses and dainty bonnets, all looking as exactly interested as though they were going to witness a wedding instead of a trial. Many of them had provided themselves with opera glasses, others carried lorgnettes: they amused themselves by spying out the counsel as they arrived.”12 According to the reporter from the Pall Mall Gazette, who had squeezed in like a sardine in a can, “the court presented an appearance which, save for the dignity of its own fittings and its rows of learned-looking law books, might have been taken for a theatre at a fashionable matinée.”13 Sir Edward Clarke, attorney general and defense counsel for Gordon-Cumming, recalled later that “the court had a strange appearance,” because the judge, Lord Coleridge, had “appropriated half of the public gallery, and had given tickets to his friends.”14 Lady Coleridge, the judge’s attractive young wife, arrived wearing a blue fox fur around her shoulders and took her place on the bench alongside her husband, armed with a fan to tap the judge on the arm when he fell asleep. “Close to the footlights,”15 as Sir Edward Clarke later described it, sat the judge’s daughter-in-law, Mrs. Gilbert Coleridge, sketching the chief protagonists of the drama for posterity.
The jury all arrived promptly, a remarkable feat in those days, and every barrister in London not employed elsewhere crowded into the courtroom. This was an exceptional day in legal terms. Apart from Bertie’s brief appearance as a witness in the Mordaunt divorce case, no heir to the throne had appeared in court since Prince Hal, the future Henry V and hero of Agincourt, was committed for contempt of court by Judge Gascoigne in 1411.
All eyes were on Bertie, dressed in a somber black frock coat and seated in a red leather chair between the judge and the witness box, with Sir Francis Knollys behind him. One could be forgiven for assuming that it was Bertie himself who was on trial.
The instigator of the proceedings, Gordon-Cumming, sat beside his solicitor, St. John Wontner, as Gordon-Cumming’s counsel, Sir Edward Clarke, Attorney General, opened the case for the defense. Clarke focused on Gordon-Cumming’s previous good character, his military record, and his long-standing friendship with the Prince of Wales. Why, Clarke demanded, would a man accustomed to such advantages suddenly take to cheating at cards? He also made his views on baccarat clear to the jury by commenting that baccarat was “about the most unintelligent mode of losing your own money, or getting somebody else’s, I ever heard of.”16 Calling Gordon-Cumming as a witness, Clarke took him through the events at Tranby Croft, and concluded by asking Gordon-Cumming if he had cheated at cards on that night. Gordon-Cumming replied that he had not.
Clarke also outlined Gordon-Cumming’s coup de trois system of placing bets, which, he explained, could have been mistaken by the inexperienced players as cheating, rather than a correct method of gambling. After his opening speech, Clarke then questioned Gordon-Cumming, and his approach was to show that Gordon-Cumming “was a man of honour who had been sacrificed to save the courtiers.”17
After the court had adjourned for lunch, it was time for Gordon-Cumming to be examined by Sir Charles Russell. Sir Charles was a natural choice to represent the Prince of Wales against Gordon-Cumming’s libel suit. Flamboyant and stylish, Sir Charles was a member of the Jockey Club, owned a racehorse called Miss Shylock, and never traveled without a pack of cards. He was also a formidable advocate who could tie any witness up in knots.18
Russell provided a model of the table used for the game of baccarat and a photograph of the room, and questioned Gordon-Cumming about the bets where cheating had been suspected. Russell also asked him about why he had signed the document agreeing not to play cards: Gordon-Cumming stated that he had “lost my head … on that occasion. If I had not lost my head I would not have signed that document.”19 Gordon-Cumming’s cross-examination ran into the second day, after which he was then reexamined by Clarke; his time in the witness box lasted until 1 P.M. The Illustrated London News concluded that Gordon-Cumming made an admirable witness. “Leaning easily on the rail, his grey-gloved left hand resting easily on the bare right, perfectly dressed, his tones equable, firm, neither over-hurried nor over-deliberate, cool, but not too cool,”20 while the Pall Mall Gazette decided that “Sir William faced the fire of the most deadly cross-examiner in England much as he would have faced his foe on the battle-field … knowing that its issue was social life or death.”21
Bertie followed Gordon-Cumming into the witness box and, according to the Daily Chronicle, he appeared to be nervous. “The Prince stood with one hand easily resting on the rail, his head a little down, his attitude free and not undignified. His voice was a little hoarse and rough, and somehow had a queer unfamiliar note in it; but the replies were given with great readiness, and even rapidly.”22 The reporter for The New York Times observed that “the heir apparent was decidedly fidgety, that he kept changing his position, and that he did not seem able to keep his hands still,”23 and the Daily News agreed and stated that Bertie made an unfavorable impression.
Examined by Clarke, Bertie stated that he had not seen any cheating, and was ignorant of the accusations until he was told by Lord Coventry and General Williams; although Gordon-Cumming had been a good friend for years, Bertie believed he was guilty of cheating.
After twenty minutes of questions from Clarke and Russell, Bertie was told that he was free to leave the witness box. As Bertie was turning away, a “sharp clear voice with a cockney accent” rang out. “Excuse me,
your Royal Highness, I have a question or two to ask you!”24 This question, not strictly admissible, came from a member of the jury. Bertie wheeled around with a smile, and stood to attention as the juryman asked him two questions: Had Bertie seen nothing of the alleged malpractices of the plaintiff? And what had Your Royal Highness thought at the time of the charges made against Gordon-Cumming?
To the first question Bertie replied that he had not seen anything suspicious, although he explained that “it is not usual for a banker to see anything in dealing cards.”25 To the second, Bertie responded that “the charges appeared to be so unanimous that it was the proper course—no other course was open to me—than to believe them.”26
The queen was horrified by the trial, and Bertie’s involvement in the case:
This horrible trial drags along and it is a fearful humiliation to see the future king of this country dragged, and for the second time, through the dirt just like anyone else in a Court of Justice. I feel it is a terrible humiliation, so do all the people. It is very painful and must do him and his prestige great harm. Oh! If only it is a lesson for the future! It makes me very sad.27
The following day: “I hope and think there is no doubt that the verdict will be given against Sir William G Cumming as the evidence is perfectly clear, but even if it is not he will be turned out of the army and society … his lawyer, the Solicitor-General most unjustifiably attacked Bertie most unjustly and unfairly. The whole thing must do Bertie harm and I only pray it may be a warning.”28
The last witness for the prosecution was General Williams. Questioned by Sir Edward Clarke, the general admitted that he had not seen Gordon-Cumming in any way that suggested cheating.
The case for the defense began on the third day of the trial, with Stanley Wilson, the son of the house, in the witness box. Stanley said that he had seen Gordon-Cumming illicitly add counters to his stake twice on the first night and at least twice on the second night, although he could not remember the full details. Stanley was followed into the witness box by Sub-Lieutenant Berkeley Levett, who confirmed that on the first evening he had seen Gordon-Cumming add counters after the hand had finished but before the stake had been paid. He was unsure of other details of the evening’s play, and had not witnessed anything on the second night.
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