Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty

by Bailey, Catherine

  Thirty years after Billy’s birth, the bitterness and acrimony had not subsided. So powerful, so raw were these feelings, that at Wentworth, hours before the 6th Earl was buried, Lady Alice and her siblings could not bear the thought of their nephew being in the same room as their dead father’s body.

  A servant’s errand gives the mystery of the impostor affair a final twist.

  7

  On the eve of the 6th Earl’s funeral, a footman walked briskly through the Picture Gallery on the principal floor of Wentworth House. He was dressed in the Fitzwilliam livery. His hair was pomaded, he wore a stiff winged collar, a black tailcoat, knee breeches and buckled shoes. Rows of tiny silver buttons, embossed with a winged griffin and two coronets, ran up the sleeve of his jacket to just below the elbow. Instead of the usual white tie, he was wearing black tie and a black waistcoat, in mourning for the dead Earl.

  He had been summoned by a bell to Cliffords Lodgings, a suite of bedrooms along the West Front. The Picture Gallery was the quickest route. A long red and white room, stretching fifty yards, bisected by impressive stone columns, it was one of the few connecting passages between the Palladian and baroque façades of the house. The intricate carving on the magnificent ceiling was picked out in gilt; the wooden friezes above the great oak bookshelves were also painted gold; so were the picture frames around the many old masters lining the walls. There was a portrait of Shakespeare that had once belonged to Dryden, a cupid by Guido, a Raphael, and a painting of Mary Magdalene by Titian. Though splendid, the gallery was cosily furnished and used as a sitting room by the family. A range of smells wafted through it: the heady scent from vases of hothouse flowers grown in Wentworth’s greenhouses, the bitter smell of coal smoke from the grates that burnt along its length; the sweet tang of lime leaves, scattered discreetly along the skirting boards, the housekeeper’s remedy for ‘keeping mice away’.

  Treading softly, his feet making little sound on the parquet floor as he hurried through the gallery, the footman knew from the gossip in the servants’ hall, the flurry of hand-delivered notes and the tense, highly charged atmosphere in the house, that many of the assembled family members were not on speaking terms. Through rival camps of trusted servants, they were watching one another’s every move. The upset had been caused by a rumour. It was said that earlier that day Henry Fitzwilliam had taken his nephew, Billy, to the Duchess of Kent room to pay his last respects to the dead Earl.

  Turning right at the end of the Picture Gallery, the footman entered Cliffords Lodgings. Though modest in comparison to the state guest rooms, the bedrooms here commanded fine views over the oak trees in the Park, planted in the pattern of the troop formations at the Battle of Blenheim. His journey from the servant’s cubicle at the bottom of Pantry Stairs, behind the Pillared Hall, had taken almost four minutes.

  Quietly, precisely, he knocked on the door, the way he had been taught to. Henry Fitzwilliam, the Earl’s oldest surviving son and the man at the centre of the rumours, handed him a note, instructing him to deliver it to his sister, Lady Alice, who was staying in another room in the house.

  The note has survived. Everything else must be pieced together.

  Written hurriedly, with a quill pen, on the distinctive duck-egg-blue Wentworth House notepaper, it was the final signal to Lady Alice that Henry would have nothing to do with the conspiracy to kick Billy out.

  ‘Yes,’ it read. ‘Billy asked me to go with him to see dear Father. He said I would rather go with you than with anyone else. Father looked so calm, so peaceful – one could not wish anything else for him.

  ‘As to Billy I am very fond of him. I think he is of me. I want to be a good friend to him for his own and for his father’s sake.’

  This last sentence, gently expressed, was dramatic in its implications. Henry had switched sides. Without his collaboration, Lady Alice was thwarted in her move to expose Billy as an impostor. Henry was the sole executor of the 6th Earl’s will: if Lady Alice challenged Billy’s identity in court, she would have to bring her case against her elder brother. After Billy, Henry was the next in line to the Fitzwilliam title and fortune. His opposition made a nonsense of any potential legal challenge. Lady Alice could hardly commence proceedings against her brother when he was not only adamant that those proceedings were inappropriate, but would ironically be the one person who stood to benefit were her claim to succeed.

  Had Henry sided with Lady Alice and the other conspirators, everything might have been his: the Earldom, the coalfields, Went-worth, the fifty-room house in Grosvenor Square, the estate in Ireland, the portfolio of shares. But he turned his back on the chance to become one of the richest men in Britain.

  To begin with, Henry had been part of the plot.

  In the mid-1890s, when the impostor allegation was first made, he was nearly sixty years old; the lures of an Earldom and a huge fortune were tempting.

  His entire life had been lived as heir ‘de facto’. He was his father’s favourite son, the one the 6th Earl had wanted to succeed him. He was the person on whom the Earl had depended in a crisis, and on whom he leant in times of grief, most notably when his brother, John, was killed on the lawn in front of Wentworth after the horse he was riding tripped and crushed him.

  Henry had received a £200,000* bequest from his father – substantially more than his younger brothers, who were given £50,000 each. In appointing Henry the executor of his will, it seems the Earl had left it up to Henry to decide whether to contest Billy’s succession or not.

  It is possible that Henry came to doubt the validity of the evidence Lady Alice relied on to support her charge and was himself convinced by the documentation Billy had assembled to show that he was his father’s son. Conceivably, he decided to place his family’s interest above his own, electing to avoid the scandal that a high-profile legitimacy case would bring. Perhaps, if he had had a son of his own, his decision might have been different. Yet regardless of the reasoning that may have run through Henry’s mind, had he not been the man of principle that he was, if he had chosen to press the case against Billy, there is every chance he might have succeeded. In the days before DNA testing, the strange circumstances of Billy’s birth might have made it difficult for his lawyers to prove his legitimacy in a court of law. Crucially, the documents Billy kept in his safe reveal that in certain respects his solicitors believed his case to be weak. In 1900, they were short of proof that the Earl regarded Billy as his heir. The one letter they held had been written eleven years earlier. They had nothing more up to date.

  Twenty-five years after Milton’s death, Henry’s loyalty to his brother held strong. The message he sent to his siblings on the eve of the Earl’s funeral was clear: he wanted to be a ‘friend’ to Billy ‘for his own and for his father’s sake’.

  The relationship between the two brothers had been a primary one in both their lives. Henry was the one member of the Fitzwilliam family to have loved Milton unconditionally. From a young age he had been sensitive to his difficulties, and to his feelings. ‘I know he often thinks that we do not care for him,’ he wrote to his brothers and sisters, when he had urged them to club together to buy Milton a twenty-first birthday present. After Earl Fitzwilliam sent Milton into exile, Henry was the only one to see him off from Liverpool Docks. In later years, when Milton was living in self-imposed isolation in the wilds of North America, Henry continued to look after his brother. ‘Only those who have been in great trouble far away from friends and help can guess how grateful we are to dear good Henry,’ Laura wrote in 1874, after the family was quarantined by scarlet fever. ‘His case arrived a few days ago and as we unpacked it the tears ran down William’s face. He said “this is just like Henry”. He, William [Milton] is now wearing the things Henry sent out. The baby is in one of Reggie’s shirts which is just the thing to keep him warm after his scarlet fever. William gave an exclamation of delight when he saw the razors and Daisy said “Oh good old Uncle Henry to send razors to cut off Father’s prickly beard, I shan’t
mind now when father kisses me.” ’

  In a sanctimonious letter to Henry, his mother also thanked him for sending the things out to the young family. ‘So you see dearest Henry,’ she wrote, ‘your kind help was well bestowed and it has given great pleasure to our dear William and anything that lightens and cheers his sorrowful existence is indeed a cause for gratitude to our Heavenly Father who does not willingly afflict the children of men.’

  But perhaps the truest indication of Henry’s sensitivity to his brother’s feelings is to be found in his refusal to marry Mary Butler while Milton was still alive. Mary was the woman Milton had loved so passionately before his marriage to Laura. Henry and Mary married within five months of Milton’s death, when Henry was thirty-six, and Mary thirty.

  To the last, Henry stood by his brother; it was he who rallied the family to Milton’s bedside when he died.

  On Sunday 14 January 1877 a telegram arrived at Wentworth. It was from Laura: Milton was in Rouen, desperately ill. Henry left for France immediately. From Victoria station in London, as he waited to catch the train to Dover, he wrote to warn his sister Fanny, who was living in Ireland and who had also been close to Milton.

  I fear that dear William is very seriously ill and that any improvement must be very slow while a turn for the worse which might come on any time would make his condition very dangerous. Darling Fan I can’t disguise from myself and must not hide from you that the time may not be long; I can not pray to have such a life of sickness and misery prolonged when if God takes him he will be so happy. As he has had sorrow here so may he have happiness in heaven.

  Three days later, Milton died. He was thirty-seven years old. What he died of, and why he was in northern France, we do not know. As with so much of his life, there is no official record.

  Milton was buried at Wentworth in a quiet, private ceremony. ‘There was little to indicate the exalted position of him to whose memory the last tribute was being paid,’ reported the local newspaper. ‘The funeral route was the shortest and most private which could be chosen, more than half of it being through the gardens at the back of Wentworth House, and the work of the bearers was consequently much lighter than it would have been had the road through the Park and the village been selected.’

  Milton’s funeral was in stark contrast to the lavish send-off usually accorded to an eldest son. As Michael Bond, Milton’s great-grandson, remarked, ‘They tried to sneak him out the back way.’

  It was Henry who chose the words inscribed on Milton’s tomb.

  Fear not for I have redeemed thee,

  I have called thee by thy name,

  Thou art mine

  (Isaiah 43)

  In siding against Alice and his other brothers and sisters, Henry headed off a scandalous court case that would have damaged the Fitzwilliams’ reputation. Yet days after the old Earl was buried, he was caught up in the fallout from the family dispute that he had done his best to ensure would remain private. Incredibly, for a man who had just inherited the early-twentieth-century equivalent of more than £3 billion pounds, so great was Billy’s hatred of his Aunt Alice that he would spend the next two years disputing the ownership of a handful of worthless trinkets and a few ordinary tables and chairs.

  On 15 March 1902, less than three weeks after his grandfather’s funeral, word reached Billy that his aunt had been ‘thieving’.

  Alice had hedged her bets. She knew that if she failed in her bid to oust her nephew, when Billy succeeded to her father’s title and fortune, she would be turned out of Wentworth House. Furtively, in collusion with a number of her sisters and behind the rest of the family’s back, she had been preparing for that day for years. From early in 1896, Alice had systematically removed large quantities of furniture and other household goods from Wentworth and from Coollattin, the Fitzwilliams’ Estate in Ireland. The last wagonload of booty had been smuggled out under Billy’s nose: it had left Wentworth a few days after the old Earl died.

  Billy was incensed when he was tipped off about the thefts. Not knowing what had been stolen, or where the ‘spoil’, as he called it, had been hidden, he instructed his solicitor, Mr Barker, to confront his Aunt Alice. Reporting back to Billy, Barker wrote:

  I asked her to furnish me with a statement, showing all the articles which have been removed from Wentworth and Coollattin since the 5th April 1896 with the date of removal and showing the various articles which are claimed by her and her sisters specifying in each case upon what circumstances such claim is founded. I spoke about the things which had been removed from Wentworth since the late Earl’s death and told her they should be returned and she has promised to ascertain what they were and where they are.

  Alice refused to return the things. Nor would she reveal what had been removed. As Billy’s solicitor discovered, she had hidden her ‘spoil’ well. Scattered around London, it had been stored at numerous furniture warehouses, or deposited at ‘places of safekeeping’, as Alice termed them. These included the London and Westminster Bank, the department store Barkers of Kensington, Mr Muntz’s antique shop in Bond Street, and her sister Mary’s house in South Street.

  Under pressure from Billy and his solicitors, Alice finally produced an inventory. It ran to twenty-three pages – a list of more than 1,000 items. In spite of their number, their total value amounted to no more than a few hundred pounds. An extract from the inventory shows that most of the articles taken from Wentworth were pieces of day-to-day household furniture:

  Pink bedroom: Easel, dressing stool, bath and footstools, looking glass, cupboard, bed and bedding, small square zither table.

  Sitting-room: 3 round tables, small square table, 3 common easels, carved wood bracket shelves, blue backed music stand, small easy chair, 3 small occasional chairs, rough drawing table, small round table with a centre leg, small book cupboard and a rush bottom stool; 2 silver gilt tea spoons in case, silver gilt inkstand, small brass standard lamp, a pair of velvet frames.

  Billy carefully went through every page of the inventory, determined to challenge anything he could. Placing a tick beside the items he believed to be his, he insisted they should be returned. Claim followed counter-claim, as aunt and nephew fought each other for particular items. Alice was adamant that she had only removed things that had belonged to her, claiming that she had bought them, or that they had been given to her by her parents or by other members of the family. She had stored a sizeable number of items at 4 Grosvenor Square, the Fitzwilliams’ palatial London residence. Under the terms of the old Earl’s will, Alice and her sisters were bequeathed the right to live there for twelve months after his death. Billy did not have access to the house. Fearing that in the course of their remaining tenure his aunts would steal yet more of his inheritance, he asked his trustees to instruct Messrs Robinson, a firm of probate valuers, to take an inventory. Not only did they list the heirlooms – the usual practice when settling a large estate after a death – they itemized the entire contents of the house. Their inventory shows that even in the servants’ rooms they were meticulous to the last:

  4th and 5th housemaid bedroom: coal scuttle and scoop, shovel, kettle, linen basket, poker, wire fireguard, paper basket, two brass beds, a hammer and a broom.

  The argument between Billy and his aunt tore through the family, causing further bitterness and anger. Henry, as the executor of the old Earl’s will, was compelled to act as mediator: his integrity, his sense of fair play and his exasperation at the behaviour of his brothers and sisters – and theirs at his – emerge in his reply to a letter from his younger brother, Charles, who had asked him to go to London to mollify Alice.

  Dear Charley

  I am very sorry Alice is seedy. I don’t agree with you about my going up to London.

  I want everything to be on a business footing, so far as my business is concerned. I am not inclined to go and talk soft meaningless nothings with people who think nothing of doing their best behind my back to blacken me in any way they can. What is necessary is that everyt
hing taken from Wentworth after Father’s death, without my knowledge, shall be returned, and that satisfactory evidence shall be shown as to the ownership of all the items in that enormous list of things claimed. No one wants Alice or anyone else not to have what belongs to them, but surely, in a case of this kind, common sense will say that the claims must be satisfactorily substantiated.

  I write in plain terms to you; if I write a business letter to my sisters I am supposed to be a devil and a wretch.

  After a year of wrangling, an impasse had been reached: at the expense of huge legal bills, many times more than the articles under dispute were worth, Billy instructed Mr Barker to obtain further details from Lady Alice as to precisely why she claimed certain items were hers. In a letter, the deadpan tone of which was as absurd – given Billy’s vast wealth – as the solicitor’s instructions, he duly reported back to the Earl’s secretary:

  The inkstand and his reading glasses are said to have been given to Lady Alice by Mr Thomas Fitzwilliam. The brass standard lamp is said to have been given to Lady Alice by her sisters and others. The two silver open work Sardinieres (small oval), one silver basket, and the silver mounted claret jug are all stated to have been purchased by Lady Alice. As regards the six china handled knives, the handles are said to have been given to Lady Alice by the late Lady FW and she had the blades put in. The silver sugar basin (blue lining) and sugar sifter – this it is said was a Christmas present to Lady Alice from the late Lord Fitzwilliam given in the presence of Mr Charles Fitzwilliam and it is said that it is a copy of an original at Wentworth which Lord Fitzwilliam wished to give to Lady Alice, but which she refused. Silver cruet said to have been bought by Lady Alice.

  After a year of passing endless marked-up lists to and fro, Billy’s solicitor’s patience had been tested to the limit. Barker closed his letter with the suggestion that the matter should be brought to a close: