They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  Anyone of a moderately enquiring mind might wonder how it was that this unnamed Police Inspector could know that.

  Schweisso goes on to describe a matrix of chicanery holding this coroner’s court together, concluding his letter with: ‘I give you this statement voluntarily, to show you, as far as I’m concerned, that it was a regular got up case of the police.’10

  A got-up case it was. It was a culmination of scheming instigated by Michael Maybrick; and with no shortage of informants inside the Maybrick marital home, he was well aware of the domestic ferment he was poised to walk into. The ‘Whore’ had inadvertently delivered herself into his hands at Flatman’s Hotel, and he was almost ready to act. He would of course enjoy all the usual support from coroners, coppers and courts.

  Anyone looking to cook up a motive for murder was spoiled for choice. Florence continued to supply all the ammunition needed. The day after her return from London, James took her to Aintree for the Grand National, the highlight of the racing year. At some point Florence was escorted arm-in-arm up the course by Alfred Brierley, and when they finally got home her husband freaked. ‘I was expecting a tragedy in the family,’ wrote one of the Maybricks’ oldest friends, ‘but I was looking at it from the other party. James had gotten wise to the Flatman’s Hotel affair, and I was expecting him to plug Brierley at any time.’11 Instead he took it out on his wife, smacking her in the face and telling her to get out. A servant girl called Brierley (no relation) was sent to fetch a cab. The fracas then moved into the hall, where Maybrick ‘raved and stamped like a madman’. Another servant, Mary Cadwallader, was an eyewitness. ‘She had on a fur cape. He told her to take it off as she was not going to go away with that on. He had bought it for her to go up to London in’ (to see ‘her aunt’, the lying bitch).

  Cadwallader attempted to intervene. ‘Oh, master,’ she begged, ‘please don’t go on like this, the neighbours will hear you.’ He didn’t give a fuck what the neighbours heard, and didn’t want to hear her: ‘Leave me alone, you don’t know anything about it.’ But Cadwallader was undeterred. ‘Don’t send the mistress away tonight. Where can she go? Let her stay until morning.’ By now Maybrick was bellowing, ‘By heavens, Florie, if you cross this doorstep, you shall never enter it again.’ He became so exhausted, said Cadwallader, ‘he fell across an oak settle and went quite stiff. I did not know if he was drunk or in a fit. I sent the cab away and we got Mrs Maybrick upstairs and Mr Maybrick spent all night in the dining room.’12

  By morning the blow to Florie’s face had matured into a black eye. She took it around the corner to show to a neighbourhood friend by the name of Matilda Briggs, seeking her advice about a separation. It was decided that she should see a solicitor, but first Mrs Briggs took her to see Florence’s physician, Dr Hopper, who apparently had her trust. She told him that James had beaten her, that she couldn’t bear him to touch her, that they slept in separate beds. Notwithstanding this, Hopper thought an attempt at reconciliation was the best option, and later that day he went to Battlecrease to have a go at it. Tragically, he succeeded. The couple agreed to try to forgive and forget, and James sealed the deal by consenting to pay Florie’s debts. But the marriage was broken; she was an adulteress with little love for James, and ten weeks later he was dead.

  Following her husband’s murder, the machinery of state preservation, last visited upon a Bradford milkman, was now visited upon Florence Maybrick. The motive was precisely the same as with William Barrit: to blame anyone, destroy anyone, hang anyone, who might threaten Her Majesty’s ruling elite. Jack was at the heart of it, and from the beginning Michael Maybrick knew he was on a win–win. He moved on his own family with the pleasure of Satan, accusing his brother of one horror, his brother’s wife of another, and taking care of the documentation for both. There would be forged letters, phoney medical prescriptions, and a forged will. No one can lie like a psychopath, and nothing keeps its mouth shut like Masonry. The ‘Mystic Tie’ was its raison d’être, and having debased everything the Fraternity claimed to stand for, Michael now made it his servant.

  Let me just stop and interview myself here. Are you saying that Michael Maybrick set James Maybrick up as Jack the Ripper, murdering him with the state’s acquiescence, and blaming Florence Maybrick for the deed?

  How about 100 per cent?

  Michael had been whispering into receptive ears. No one can know exactly what came out of his mouth in respect of James, but the substance of it isn’t difficult to construe. Certainly it is known what toxic murmurs he put about regarding Florence, and extrapolating from the one presents a useful idea of the other.

  We will come to these accusations, and to Michael’s ‘regret’ at having to make them, in due course. But make them he did, and was he not a man of unimpeachable honour? In the spring of 1889 the authorities had reason enough to believe that the nightmare who had been terrorising Whitechapel was in his grave. It was a welcome development, but there was a caveat. It was believed that Florence Maybrick had discovered the truth of a terrible secret. Most dangerously, she was now the guardian of a scandal that a legion of lickspittles, including the Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, had criminalised themselves to secure.

  Masonic anxieties that Jack had generated in life were now transferred to the havoc he might wreak in death. At all costs, Bro James Maybrick had to be disassociated from Freemasonry, and his wife permanently shut up. As a pillar of the Fraternity, a pillar of society, Michael Maybrick was only too ready to help. It goes without saying that in reality Florence knew nothing, because there was nothing to know. It was a lie within a lie. But that was all it took for the System to kick in – witness the cops at Flatman’s Hotel – ultimately crushing her inside the well-rehearsed mechanism of an Establishment cover-up.

  James Maybrick died in the arms of his best friend, George Davidson, on the evening of 11 May 1889. Thereafter, Florence was entrapped in the System, isolated and silenced. Virtually everyone had deserted her, but why had they deserted James? The only thing he’d done wrong was to get himself murdered, yet those who had been his intimates, particularly in Freemasonry, abandoned him. The nineteenth-century conventions of Masonic interment were quite specific, and there must have been those who wondered why tradition was flouted so brutally in respect of James. How was it that this hapless victim of homicide, a city worthy who counted so many of Liverpool’s most prominent Masons amongst his business associates and friends, should go to his maker without a Masonic contingent present, much less a Masonic wreath?13

  ‘There is no privilege appertaining to the Fraternity,’ claimed a prominent Masonic periodical in 1882, ‘of which Masons in general are so tenacious as the right of Masonic burial. So earnestly is this regarded that many, long before the approach of the dread messenger, request some brother, in case he should be the survivor, to see that this last token of respect to his memory be paid; and, in many instances, they select the Brother who is desired to officiate upon the solemn occasion.’

  In this case, Bro Michael Maybrick.

  ‘In view, therefore, of the value set upon this privilege by the great majority of Masons in deference to the feelings of the relatives and friends of the deceased, and with proper regard for the reputation of our craft before the public, no accessory which will lend dignity and solemnity to the ceremony should be neglected.’14

  Sharing both blood and Masonic brotherhood with James, Bro Michael put himself in charge of the funeral. Surely of all people he should have assured Masonic solemnities for his wretched sibling. Instead he was secretly laughing at the graveside.

  The vicar who buried James at Anfield Cemetery, the Reverend C.R. Hyde, had been his friend for twenty years, and was himself a prominent Mason. For a description of the funeral James should have had, we might do worse than turn to the Liverpool Daily Post of 12 February 1897, when Bro Hyde himself was interred.

  From the gates of the cemetery the cortege passed through a double line of Freemasons who flanked the road. The
deceased gentleman was Chaplain of the Kirkdale Lodge (1756) and a considerable number from this Lodge were present, while Brethren from other Lodges were in attendance. The chief portion of the assembly at the graveside consisted of Freemasons.

  Michael Maybrick denied his brother these solemnities. Apart from near family and a few friends, what James got was predominantly a contingency of the staff from Battlecrease. Among them was a twenty-eight-year-old nursemaid to Florie’s kids by the name of Alice Yapp. She made no particular secret of her dislike for her employer. They were about the same age, probably as pretty as each other, but Yapp was a servant with nothing, and Florence her mistress with it all. I think it’s indicative of the resentment Yapp felt that she would turn up at the ‘trial’ carrying one of Florie’s Parisian silk parasols.

  Raise your eyes across the grave and you’re looking at another nasty piece of work, the counterfeit friend Matilda Briggs. Mrs Briggs was an intimate of the deceased, and like Yapp had personal reasons for despising Florence. She loathed her because she had been ‘madly in love with James’,15 had made a desperate effort to marry him, and might well have pulled it off had not the adulterous little slut from Alabama turned up.

  According to Florence Aunspaugh, both Briggs and Yapp ‘hated Florence Maybrick’, although Briggs camouflaged her bitterness behind a mask of saccharine benevolence.16 Though of course ignorant of Michael’s Whitechapel horror story, these two women were easy prey for a psychopath, predisposed in their animosity and only too eager to be walk-ons in his nightmare.

  In a post-‘trial’ interview he denied any relationship with either, most particularly the accusation that Alice Yapp was acting as his ‘spy’ in the Maybrick household. ‘There is not a shadow of truth in such a report,’ he countered with commanding rectitude. ‘Why should I want to have a spy upon Mrs Maybrick, I should like to know?’17

  The question is answered with another. Why was Florence Maybrick not at her husband’s funeral? Why was she semi-comatose in a stinking bed, abandoned in her own excrement, locked in a bedroom at Battlecrease House with no one in attendance?

  Without Yapp and Briggs in the equation, it would have been infinitely more difficult for Michael to have got away with it. Without their willing acquiescence he might not have got away with it at all. Yapp was a harridan. In the context of such wickedness, to call her a mere ‘spy’ was a compliment.

  Following her child’s incarceration, Florence’s mother, Caroline von Roques, wrote in her despair to the one individual whose Masonic clout she misguidedly imagined could help her:

  TO HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS, THE PRINCE OF WALES

  As the daughter and as the widow of a Freemason, and as an accepted member of the American Order for Women, the Eastern Lodge, I approach your Royal Highness with the entreaty that the [?] of my need, for the protective and fraternal respect of all Free and Accepted Masons and kindness of the Members of the Order. I now approach your Royal Highness under equally terrible conditions. The unjust and cruel punishment for an unproven offence has been the sentence to my young, delicate, well-born and innocent daughter, Mrs Maybrick. She has endured for 3 years a living death amongst the lowest class, taken from her family, her mother, her children, her station, deprived of all worldly interests, shamed and ruined, through the mere suspicion of her legal Brother in Law and treacherous friends – gossip of servants [?] [?] against her – a stranger, alone, friendless, brotherless, a mere girl, a widow, the daughter and the granddaughter, and the widow of a Mason.

  All emphasis is hers. Baroness von Roques knew something that her son-in-law’s Masonic contemporaries had mysteriously forgotten: that James was a Mason, and Florence ‘the widow of a Mason’. What she didn’t know was that Michael had fingered James as the Ripper, and that this functioned as an insurance policy for him to get away with anything he liked. The Victorian state had cast its mantle around the terrible secret, and as guardian of it Michael truly was ‘On Her Majesty’s Service’. He could snigger at their stupidity and relish the fun, indulging in the inevitable vaudeville of Her Majesty’s ‘justice’. A circus of bent coppers and zombie coroners was in his wake, and as with the milkman Barrit, the journalist Ernest Parke and the politician Charles Stewart Parnell, it was justice made into a mockery.

  The imprisonment of Florence Maybrick represented a triumph of the rot. Totally framed and utterly innocent, she suffered ‘an unjust and cruel punishment for an unproven offence’, predicated on nothing but the fabricated ‘suspicion of her legal Brother in Law’, a serial killer called Michael Maybrick.

  The desperation in von Roques’ text tells us almost all we need to know about ‘the Maybrick Mystery’. ‘I appeal to your Royal Highness,’ she continues,

  and plead as the Head and Chief of English Masons, mercy and justice and freedom where ever dispensed may be taken into serious consideration. Some months since the documents proving my rights to such considerations were shown to his Lordship the Earl of Lathom by a member of the Skelmersdale Lodge (1380). I had achieved through his influence to approach Her Majesty the Queen at a time when [my time?] when my awful sorrow as a mother and a grandmother. His Majesty’s just heart has heretofore shown to the cause of mothers [brothers?] and children.18

  It was like dropping a line to Adolf on behalf of Anne Frank. The well-being of this lot was precisely why Florence had been sentenced to life imprisonment. I naturally make no accusation against Fat Ed. He was as ignorant of Florence Maybrick as he was spared the bother of reading her mother’s letter. It went to his private secretary, Bro Sir Francis Knollys, who forwarded it to the Masonic Secretary to the Prince and intimate pal of the Ripper, Bro Colonel Thomas Shadwell Clerke. Clerke dismissed it as a ‘legal matter’, and nothing further was ever heard of it.19

  Nothing more was heard from the Earl of Lathom either. His lodge, the Skelmersdale, was but one of many at which this fabulously wealthy aristocrat sat as Grand Master. His baronial heap at Ormskirk in Lancashire played frequent host to the masters of the state, Viscount Lord Salisbury among them.

  This corpulent reprobate, England’s Prime Minister, was well aware of ‘the Maybrick Mystery’, and it was he who recommended that Her Majesty should show no mercy in respect of the public agitation to free Mrs Maybrick. Salisbury was the boss cunt of his class, dominating the executive, and a ‘dangerous leader to be placed in command of a body so easily influenced for evil’. Such was the opinion of his parliamentary contemporary Lord Rosebery: ‘I hope the Noble Marquis will excuse me when I say that he is a little impetuous in the use of the weapon committed to his charge. If he is not hacking about and dealing death and destruction with it, he is always threatening with it.’20

  But let us return to Salisbury’s Liverpool host, the Earl of Lathom. Chamberlain to the Queen, Master of her Swans, he was Provincial Grand Master of Lancashire. Among his other lodges was the Liverpool Lodge of Harmony (32), in which James Maybrick was a fellow Companion, and the exclusive London chapter St George’s (42), where he enjoyed the company of Bros Colonel Shadwell Clerke and the serial killer Michael Maybrick.

  Caroline von Roques didn’t have a hope in hell, and neither did Florence. They were up against a government within a government, a judiciary within a judiciary, and a police force within a police force. Jack the Ripper was as much a part of the ‘Mystic Tie’ as its Grand Master, Bro the Prince of Wales himself.

  Because the British state was rotten to the core, Bro Jack got away with it. Nothing could be allowed to threaten Masonry, because the whole venal dinosaur of the Victorian ruling elite couldn’t function without it. If you wanted your bit of ribbon, you pressed your fingertips together and bowed out backwards like you were sucking on a gallstone.

  In December 2013 the journalist Nick Cohen wrote a characteristically incisive piece in the Observer. What he writes of the English governing class and its Civil Service is as accurate now as it was 130 years ago: ‘The best way to imagine the British Establishment, is to picture a committee that never
meets. There is no chain of command, which might leave incriminating paper trails; no controlling intelligence. Its members do not need to wait for instructions from on high, they know what to do without being told.’

  Three great corruptions were simultaneously in progress in 1889. They were the conspiracy to frame Charles Parnell, the conspiracy to bury the Cleveland Street scandal, and the conspiracy to hide Jack the Ripper. To this substantial list we can add another: the conspiracy to frame Florence Elizabeth Maybrick.

  18

  ‘The Maybrick Mystery’

  Some men wish evil and accomplish it,

  But most men, when they work in that machine,

  Just let it happen somewhere in the wheels.

  The fault is no decisive, villainous knife

  But the dull saw that is the routine mind.

  Stephen Vincent Benét, 1928

  On 7 August 1889 a withered misogynist with animal hair on his head told Florence Maybrick that the state was going to take her from this place and break her neck. The place was a courtroom buried in St George’s Hall in Liverpool, where for the previous eight days she had listened to a confection of invention and treacheries that were now to take away her life.

  The man with the morbid tidings, Judge Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, was a sixty-year-old Queen’s Bencher who was himself to die four years later in a lunatic asylum. Symptoms of his ‘fatal affliction’ developed after a fuse-out at the Derby Assizes in April 1885. The stroke – if that’s what it was – had blown away the intellect but left a lot of the nasty stuff. Already suffering from the uglier accesses of hag-worship, he was a virulent monarchist whose conservatism was off the scale. ‘It is highly desirable that criminals should be hated,’ he wrote, ‘that the punishment inflicted upon them should be so contrived to give an expression to that hatred.’1