by Roy Jenkins
Dilke
A Victorian Tragedy
Roy Jenkins
Contents
Introduction
I A Determined Preparation
II A Greater Britain
III Member for Chelsea
IV An English Republican
V The Birmingham Alliance
VI The Dust without the Palm
VII A Laborious Promotion
VIII A Radical amongst the Whigs
IX A Dying Government
X Mr. Gladstone’s Successor?
XI Mrs. Crawford Intervenes
XII An Inconclusive Verdict
XIII The Case for Dilke
XIV The Case for Mrs. Crawford—and the Verdict
XV The New Evidence
XVI What was the Truth?
XVII The Long Road Back
XVIII An Independent Expert
XIX A Quiet End
Appendix I List of Characters concerned with the Case
Appendix II List of addresses in the Case
References
Preface
My principal source of information has been the Dilke Papers in the British Museum. They were placed there by Miss Gertrude Tuckwell in 1938. She was the niece of the second Lady Dilke and the literary executrix of Sir Charles. She had used the papers to complete the standard biography of Dilke which had been begunby Stephen Gwynn, Irish Nationalist M.P., and which was published in 1917. This amply-proportioned two-volume work is still invaluable to any study of Dilke, even though it eschews the divorce case and makes most ruthless use of Dilke’s own writings, omitting, altering and even interpolating without any indication of what has been done.
Moreover, Miss Tuckwell clearly exercised her own censorship over the papers. Dilke himself was addicted to laceration (see p. 279 infra.), but it seems clear that much which he left intact was subsequently excised by Miss Tuckwell. In addition she stipulated in the terms of her bequest to the Museum that Dilke’s papers dealing with the case should not be available for inspection until 1950 had passed and the death of Mrs. Crawford had occurred. Later she made the terms still more strict. When both these qualifications had been fulfilled Mr. Harold Macmillan was to pronounce whether the papers could be seen. The Prime Minister (then Foreign Secretary) discharged this duty in the autumn of 1955 and freed the papers; in addition he gave to the Museum a box of papers which Miss Tuckwell had placed in his custody before her death. The hitherto reserved volume and the papers which were made available by Mr. Macmillan provide the bulk of the new information which I have used in the chapters on the case.
References are given in most cases to the volume and folio number of the document quoted. This practice has, however, been made more difficult by the decision of the Manuscript Department of the Museum to re-arrange the Dilke Papers between the time of my working on them and the publication of this book. As a result all references have had to be changed; and as some of the new volumes are still without folio numbers these folio numbers have in some cases been omitted. In chapters 13 and 14 the quotations to which no references are given are from the transcript of evidence taken at the second trial.
The list of those to whom I am indebted is long. Mr. Mark Bonham Garter, who suggested the subject to me; Mr. P. M. Williams, Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford; Mr. Harry Pitt, Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford; Mr. J. E. S. Simon, Q.C.; Mr. W. H. Hughes; Mr. Geoffrey Roberts; Mr. Anthony Barnes; Lady Waverley (the daughter of J. E. C. Bodley); Miss Violet Markham; Mr. Christopher Dilke; Mr. Eustace Roskill, Q.C.; the late Mr. Harry K. Hudson (who was Dilke’s private secretary from 1887 and who died only a few months ago); Mr. Francis Bywater; Lord Beaverbrook; Sir Frederick Whyte; and my successive secretaries, Mrs. P. C. Williams and Miss Julia Gill. To all these and to others whom I have not mentioned, I am very grateful.
London, June, 1958
ROY JENKINS
Preface to Revised Edition
Since this book was first published in 1958 the events and the characters with which it deals have formed the basis of a novel (The Tangled Web, by Betty Askwith, published in 1960), a television court drama (The Dilke Case, produced by Granada in 1960) and a highly successful stage play (The Right Honourable Gentleman, by Michael Dyne, first presented at Her Majesty’s theatre in 1964). The first and third of these offered new, imaginative solutions to the Dilke riddle. But they uncovered no new facts. So an element of mystery still persists. This new edition does not claim to dispel it. Like the first edition, it leaves the reader, in the last resort, having to choose between a balance of probabilities. But it does offer a little new information about Cardinal Manning’s attitude to the case, as well as a new surmise about the nature of Dilke’s relationship with Mrs. Crawford. These changes occur in chapter 16. Otherwise, apart from adjustments to the description in chapter 15 of Rosebery’s relationship to the case, the book is substantially the same.
ROY JENKINS
London, January, 1965
Introduction
Sir Charles Dilke died in 1911. Although he was then twenty-five years past the zenith of his career his name was still a great one. But in the years that have since gone by his fame has crumbled rapidly. There are few to-day to whom he is more than a rather shadowy Victorian politician who became involved in a half-forgotten scandal.
This decline has perhaps been inevitable, for his fame has had no base of solid attainment to which to anchor itself. He did not rise above the lower ranks of the Cabinet and there are no memorable measures which are popularly associated with his name. His career, broken as it was by the great scandal of the Crawford divorce case, was almost entirely an affair of promise and influence on others rather than of achievement. Had the case not occurred and shattered his life the story might have been very different. He was very near to high office and great power when the blow fell. If, as he himself insisted and as the evidence now available makes likely, he was the victim not of his own actions but of an elaborate conspiracy, his case was unique in recent British history. Few men of wealth and influence have found themselves hopelessly imprisoned in a net of entirely fabricated accusations. More, no doubt, have looked likely candidates for the premiership without in fact achieving that office. But no one, other than Dilke, has got within striking distance of 10 Downing Street and then been politically annihilated by a woman’s false accusations.
In these circumstances the unravelling of the case, which dominated Dilke’s own mind for more than a third of his life, inevitably becomes a major part of the interest of recounting his life and occupies a correspondingly large section of the book. But it would be a great mistake to see Dilke as a not very significant politican who achieved fame through his involvement in a divorce case. On the contrary, had the case never occurred, his name would to-day almost certainly be better known.
Moreover, the course of politics might have been markedly different. The discussion of political ‘might-have-beens’ is never the most useful historical pursuit, and the year 1886, when Dilke’s influence could have been most decisive, is so full of events which might easily have gone otherwise that too much significance cannot be attributed to any single difference. Nevertheless, there is obviously a strong possibility that, had Dilke retained his full influence over Chamberlain the Liberal split might have involved only a Whig, and not a radical, secession from Gladstone. It was not that Dilke was notably less imperialist, more favourable to the Irish or more dazzled by Gladstone than Chamberlain. But he had an instinctive and deep-seated loyalty to the left which the latter entirely lacked; and his character was less ruthless and more compromising.
Had Dilke’s influence prevailed many events might therefore have unfolded themselves differently. The twenty years of Tory hegemony which began in 1886 might have been avoided, the Irish question might
have been settled much earlier, and, with this out of the way, a more radical Liberal party might have turned, in the ‘nineties, to a massive programme of social reform. The effect on the emergence of the Labour party (which attracted much of Dilke’s sympathy in his later years) might clearly have been considerable. The Crawford divorce case must therefore be recorded not only as a personal disaster for Dilke, but also as a major political event.
Chapter One
A Determined Preparation
Charles Wentworth Dilke was born at 76, Sloane Street, on September 4th, 1843. He was the first child of the marriage of his father, also called Charles Wentworth Dilke, with Mary Chatfield, the daughter of an Indian Army captain. Mary Dilke, almost certainly unhappy in her marriage, was to bear one more child, Ashton Dilke, born in 1850, before she fell into a decline which led to her death in 1853. Her influence on her son Charles was not great. She left him with a low church devoutness, but he was to grow out of this by the age of twenty. More important, perhaps, was her firm desire to entrust his upbringing to her father-in-law rather than to her husband. “But moral discipline your grandfather will teach you,”1 she wrote to Charles a short time before her death.
It was not that Wentworth Dilke, as the father was known, was a dissolute man. In his early life he was admittedly idle, and did no work until his marriage at the age of thirty. This habit he apparently acquired in Florence, where, after leaving Westminster School, he had been sent to live with the British Consul, Baron Kirkup. It persisted throughout his time at Cambridge and his first years as a young man in London. During this period, in the words of his son, “he was principally known to his friends for never missing a night at the Opera.” After his marriage, however, he manifested a wide range of practical energies. Through his connection with the Royal Horticultural Society he founded two specialised but profitable periodicals—the Gardeners’ Chronicle[1] and the Agricultural Gazette—and added to his already comfortable means. He was an active member of the Society of Arts, and the experience which he gained through the organisation by the Society of a national exhibition of “art manufactures” led him to be one of the first to put forward the idea of the Great Exhibition of 1851. With three other members of the Society, Wentworth Dilke waited upon Prince Albert in 1849. At this meeting it was decided to proceed with the plans for the Exhibition. Six months later Wentworth Dilke was appointed one of an executive committee of four, and took a large share of the administrative responsibility for the whole enterprise.
When the Exhibition showed itself a great success, Wentworth Dilke was accorded his full share of the credit. He became—and remained—a close associate of the Prince Consort and a man who had the full approval of the Queen. He was offered, but declined, a knighthood. He achieved some international repute, and was showered with presents and minor decorations by foreign sovereigns. He established himself as a great man in the field of exhibitions; and as exhibitions were very much the fashion of the age this gave him an occasional occupation of importance for the rest of his life. He was British Commissioner at the New York Industrial Exhibition of 1853, at the Paris Exhibition of 1855, and at a number of smaller displays. He was one of the five royal commissioners for the London Exhibition of 1862, and when he died of influenza at St. Petersburg in 1868 the occasion of his visit was to represent England at a Horticultural Exhibition. In the meantime he had been made a baronet in 1862—by the personal act of the Queen—and had sat in the House of Commons for three years as the Liberal member for Wallingford.
The aspect which he presented to the world was that of a highly successful man. He had a wide range of acquaintance—English and foreign, political, scientific and literary—and a comfortable fortune. He had established his family at 76, Sloane Street, on the border of Belgravia and Chelsea, a lease of which he had taken immediately after his marriage, and he rented Alice Holt, a small country property near Farnham.
His achievement was marred only by his unimportance within his own family. He was in no way indifferent to family ties. He encouraged the filling up of his house in London with his wife’s relations. Her grandmother, her mother and her unmarried cousin all came to live there in 1840 (the last two surviving and remaining in Sloane Street until the ’eighties). Thirteen years later his own father gave up his house in Lower Grosvenor Place, made over his property to his son, and joined the Sloane Street establishment for the rest of his life. Wentworth Dilke could surround himself with dependent relations, but he could not make himself pivotal to the household which was thus created, and he could not win the respect of his elder son.
Of this latter fact there can be no doubt. Much later in his life Charles Dilke could look back and feel that his father had perhaps been harshly treated by himself and by others. “He was a man of great heart and of considerable brainpower,” he was to write in 1890, “but brain-power wasted and heart misunderstood.”2 But at the time, in the ’fifties and the early ‘sixties, he was consistently disparaging of his father. He could feel no real respect even for Wentworth Dilke’s work for the Great Exhibition. “Father was concerned with matters in themselves interesting,” he wrote, “but his part in them was one of detail, and his share in the planning and direction of the ‘51,’ for instance, large as it was, is not a share an account of which would be of more interest than would a reprint of the minutes of the executive committee.”3 “. . . he was entirely without literary power,” was another of Charles Dilke’s severe judgments. At another time he noted with mild contempt that his father was jealously resentful of his own growing influence over his younger brother. And he wrote letters of patronising advice during the Wallingford campaign such as a father can rarely have received from a twenty-one-year-old son: “You must set to work. . . . You must get up the last debates. . . . You must make up your mind what to do as to Church Rates, and not budge an inch!”4 So the instructions flowed from the pen of Charles Dilke. And he summed up his disparagement of his father, and his preference for his grandfather, in a comparison that was as cool as it was sweeping. “. . . my father was in every way a man of less real distinction than his father,” he wrote, “although much better known by the public on account of the retiring nature of my grandfather.”5
This grandfather, Mr. Dilke as he can best be called for purposes of differentiation from his son and grandson, was unquestionably the dominating influence on Charles Dilke’s boyhood. He had been born in 1789, the son of yet another Charles Wentworth Dilke, who was a clerk in the Admiralty, but who came of a cadet branch of a landed family of some note, the Dilkes of Maxstoke Castle in Warwickshire. Mr. Dilke was also appointed to an Admiralty clerkship, but he did not retain it for his whole working life. His interests were literary and his talents were not negligible. From 1815 onwards he was contributing frequently to the Quarterly and other reviews. He was a close friend of Keats, and he had intimate associations, extending over a long period, with Charles Lamb and Thomas Hood.
In 1830 he resigned from the Admiralty and turned all his energies to letters. In the words of his grandson, “he brought the but-just-born yet nevertheless dying Athenaeum . . . and restored its fortunes and his own.” For the first sixteen years of his proprietorship he acted in effect as editor and chief contributor, in addition to being principal shareholder. During this period he gave the paper a unique reputation for the detachment and impartiality of its literary criticism. Most comparable journals were in the hands of one publisher or another, and reflected this attachment in their literary columns. But the Athenaeum remained austerely independent; and Mr. Dilke fortified its reputation for incorruptibility by the extreme—and perhaps slightly priggish—course of withdrawing entirely from general society. This was “to avoid making literary acquaintances which might either prove annoying to him, or be supposed to compromise the independence of his journal.”6
After 1846 Mr. Dilke’s supervision of the Athenaeum became less detailed and his social life less restricted. He continued his publishing activities, however. For three ye
ars, working in close association with Charles Dickens, he acted as manager of the radical and recently established, Daily Mews. Despite his favourite description of himself as an “antiquary,” his political views were fully in accord with those of the paper, but this was not enough to make his work here as successful as it had been with the Athenaeum. It was left to a later manager to establish the Daily News on a secure financial basis. With weekly papers, however, Mr. Dilke continued to show a surer touch. In 1849 he helped to found Notes and Queries, and thereafter contributed frequently to this successful literary journal which later passed into the full ownership of his grandson.
After he left the Daily News Mr. Dilke’s interests were increasingly engrossed by the upbringing of this grandson, Charles Dilke. The death in 1850 of his own wife, a Yorkshire farmer’s daughter whom he had married forty years before when he was only eighteen and she even younger, that of his daughter-in-law in 1853, and his abandonment of his own house in the same latter year, all helped to concentrate his attention in this direction. This concentration was further assisted by the fact that Charles Dilke never went to school. He was not judged to be strong enough. “My health at that time (1856),” he was to write later, “was not supposed to be sufficiently strong to enable me even to attend a day-school, and still less to go to a public school, but there was nothing the matter with me except a nervous turn of mind, over-excitable and over-strained by the slightest circumstance. This lasted until I was eighteen, when it suddenly disappeared, and left me strong and well.”7
Charles Dilke did not entirely escape formal education, however. At the age of ten, immediately after his mother’s death, he began lessons in classics and mathematics with a Chelsea curate. Three years later he became half-attached to a Kensington day-school, doing the work which was set without regularly attending the school. In addition his grandfather sought to fill some of the gaps which were left by this tuition. But all this did not add up to the pattern of instruction which he would have received, still less to the way of life he would have experienced, had he been sent to school in the normal way. In the first place his ill-health led not merely to his being kept away from school, but to the discouragement of intellectual application. “I was a nervous, and, therefore, in some things a backward child,” he wrote, “because my nervousness led to my being forbidden for some years to read and work, as I was given to read and work too much, and during this long period of forced leisure I was set to music and drawing, with the result that I took none of the ordinary boy’s interest in politics. . . .”8 The music lessons, which continued for fourteen years, constituted no useful training. He abandoned them on going to Cambridge, where, because of their proximity to the Fellows’ Combination Room, he was allowed to keep no piano in his rooms, and retained barely the normal, untutored man’s capacity for musical appreciation. Drawing he abandoned almost equally quickly, but in this case there was no revulsion of feeling. Throughout his life he retained and developed a carefully cultivated taste for pictures.
