by Roy Jenkins
“I became aware that the Queen’s Proctor had put on detectives to try to prove the truth of a portion of the statements which had been made by Mrs. Crawford to her husband and I wrote to James to ask him how the Queen’s Proctor could intervene except in the other sense. James replied: ‘Stephenson (the Queen’s Proctor) is a brute and cannot be acting in accordance with any principle. It cannot be right for the Queen’s Proctor to intervene in order to prove that a woman is entitled to a divorce.’”11
Dilke was also influenced by the fact that Manning, as well as his own legal advisers and Hartington, was against any action. The Cardinal was in close contact with Dilke at this time. On February 17th he had written rather archly:
My dear Sir Charles Dilke,
Mr. Bodley has just been with me and you know with what we have been occupied. I have not forgotten any part of our conversation last summer and it has been constantly in my mind these last days. My first impulse would be to come to you, but I did not know what would be in accordance with your wish. You know how truly,
I am always faithfully yours,
Henry E. C. Archbp.12
A week or so later Lady Dilke had asked Manning to intervene with Stead, who claimed to be an intimate friend of the Cardinal’s and who had certainly received his support at the time of the Maiden Tribute case. Manning responded at least to the extent of asking Stead to go and see him. It is possible that this interview may have had something to do with the shift of the Pall Mali’s attack to Chamberlain, although Stead was much later to claim that throughout he had Manning’s support for his strictures on Dilke. After the interview Manning wrote to Lady Dilke advising that Dilke should for the time being keep as quiet as possible and that he should neither leave the country nor, unless his constituents should demand it, attend the House of Commons. In the same letter (dated March 2nd) he also discountenanced any action by Dilke to reopen the case. “All active attempts, such as Mr. Stead seems to propose,” he wrote, “would only more widely spread and keep alive the excitement . . . which will lose its intensity if met by silence. . . . In trials so great all human efforts fall short.”13
Dilke took neither of these pieces of advice. The first he rejected with remarkable alacrity, and on March 3rd he made his first appearance in the new Parliament, being welcomed with particular cordiality by Joseph Cowen, the member for Newcastle, but less warmly by many others.[10] He kept silent in the House, however. Against the second piece of advice Dilke acted three weeks later. Towards the end of March he offered to place all the information in his possession at the disposal of the Queen’s Proctor. In mid-April, having received no response, he wrote formally and publicly to that official stating that the charges made against him were not only unsupported but untrue, and that he was prepared to deny them on oath. In consequence of this letter he was able to inform a meeting of 2,000 of his constituents held at Preece’s Riding School in Knightsbridge at the beginning of May that he had succeeded in inducing the Queen’s Proctor to intervene in what he described as “the natural and proper way,” that is to attempt to show that the divorce had been given upon the basis of an adultery which had never taken place. Dilke noted: “My part in procuring this intervention had been the chief one, but it had been contrary to the advice of my friends.”14
During this spring Dilke’s spirits revived again. He received a number of unexpected expressions of goodwill. One was the offer of the freedom of the borough of New Romney, which he accepted with alacrity. Another was a letter from Lord Randolph Churchill, which is perhaps worth quoting in view of the statement of Stead which was cited earlier. Churchill wrote from Connaught Place on April 8th:
My dear Dilke,
Please be certain that if you think that at anytime any opinion of mine could be of any value to you I should be only too glad to be of service. I have felt great sympathy for you in the recent troubles and worries that you have had to encounter, but I did not like to speak about them to you for fear of being thought intrusive. I hope you will not take the smallest notice of the newspaper persecution which is going on. “The majesty of the law” is a very tawdry and poor sort of affair if the deliberate investigation of accusations by a Court of Justice and a clear judgment on such accusations cannot afford complete and adequate protection to the person against whom such accusations have been made.
Believe me to be,
Yours sincerely,
Randolph S. Churchill15
The investigations of the special solicitor—Ernest Humbert—-whom Dilke was employing for the case also appeared to be going well. He had found Fanny Stock, the witness to whom Chamberlain attached so much importance at the time of the February trial, and obtained a fairly satisfactory statement from her; and he was in a position to prove, as had not been the case in February, the adultery of Mrs. Crawford with Captain Forster. This was likely to be of great importance because at the second trial it would not be possible for Mrs. Crawford, any more than Dilke himself, to escape the witness-box. The prospect of her being subjected to rigorous cross-examination by Sir Charles Russell would in any event have been an encouraging one for Dilke and his supporters. With this new evidence at his disposal, which directly contradicted what she had told her husband, there was every hope that Russell would be able to completely destroy her as a witness of the truth. An elaborate and powerful list of suggestions for Russell’s cross-examination, incorporating this and many other points, was drawn up. Inspired by this outlook, Dilke took part in a debate in the House of Commons and went so far as to write to Chamberlain: “Things are changing so fast that I do not believe that at this moment Crawford himself believes me guilty. It will still be a hard and a long fight, but I am not now hopeless of coming out right. . . .”16
It was another false dawn. Dilke had assumed—a natural enough layman’s assumption—that if the case were re-opened he would still be a party and his counsel would still enjoy the full rights of cross-examination. More surprisingly James and Russell appeared to share this view. It was quite false. Dilke had been finally dismissed from the case by Mr. Justice Butt in February. In a future hearing he could appear only as a witness, as indeed could Mrs. Crawford, and the only counsel who would have the right of cross-examination would be those representing Crawford as the successful plaintiff in the first case on the one hand, and those representing the Queen’s Proctor, who was attempting to upset the verdict, on the other. The realisation that this was the position came as an immense blow to Dilke. “If I had known that I should not be allowed to be represented (at) the intervention,” he wrote later, “I could not have faced it—the hardships of the course taken proved too great. But no one, of all these great lawyers, foresaw this.”17
In an attempt to retrieve the position Dilke lodged an application to be reinstated as a party to the suit. It was heard, together with a similar but more surprising application from Mrs. Crawford and a motion relating to the jury, before Sir James Hannen, the President of the Probate, Divorce and Admiralty Division of the High Court, sitting in chambers, on June 11th. The applications of both Dilke and Mrs. Crawford were dismissed. The motion relating to the jury came from Crawford. He wished to have none on the ground that the public speeches about the case which Dilke had made might create bias in his favour. This was countered by counsel for the Queen’s Proctor asking for a special jury,[11] in view of the complicated issues involved. To this latter request the judge readily agreed.18 Dilke then took his application to be reinstated in the case to the Court of Appeal. It was again rejected, on June 30th.
The prospects for the trial were then about as unfavourable for Dilke as can easily be imagined. His future was to turn on whether or not the Queen’s Proctor could prove a negative. The task of this official was to demonstrate to the court that there had been no adultery between Mrs. Crawford and Dilke—a type of proposition which, by its very nature and whoever the principals and whatever the circumstances, could never be a very easy one to prove. He was not to be assisted in this task by D
ilke’s own well-briefed legal advisers; and the issue was to be decided by a City of London special jury—a body of men who would no doubt wish to be fair but who were likely to have strong political prejudices against Dilke.
The decision that Dilke’s own counsel could not appear in the case was made particularly damaging by two special factors. First, Crawford had engaged Henry Matthews, Q.C.,[12] who had not appeared at the February trial, one of the most powerful and aggressive cross-examiners at the Bar. He was a Roman Catholic and a Tory, and neither his religion nor his politics inclined him to treat Dilke with much consideration. In a case which would inevitably turn, more than on anything else, upon the relative performance under cross-examination of the two principal witnesses, it was essential that he should be matched by an advocate of equal toughness and skill. This Sir Charles Russell would undoubtedly have been. Equally undoubtedly it was what the leading counsel briefed by the Queen’s Proctor was not. Sir Walter Phillimore was a lawyer of considerable repute who enjoyed a large practice, particularly in the ecclesiastical courts and in matters touching international law. He was later to be a judge of distinction. But as an advocate and cross-examiner he was not in the same class as Matthews or Russell. Furthermore, he was quite unused to the rough and tumble of a major divorce court case. Even had he possessed exactly the right qualities for his task, however, he could hardly have discharged it well in the circumstances in which he was constrained to act.
This was the second special factor. The Queen’s Proctor, Sir Augustus Stephenson, showed throughout the most marked antipathy towards Dilke. This may partly have been due to his desire to guard himself against any charge of favouritism. The public suggestion that he might be asked to intervene, followed by the announcement that he was doing so, created in some people’s minds the impression that he had re-opened the case, not because a miscarriage of justice might have occurred, but because of Dilke’s political prominence. But Stephenson’s behaviour surely went much farther than could have been justified by any fear of this sort. As early as March he provoked such a bland and genial Whig as Henry James to quarrel with him at a public dinner. In April he replied to Dilke’s letters in a tone of strident discourtesy, and then, having brusquely refused to carry on any further direct correspondence, adopted the same tone, combined with extreme dilatoriness, in his replies to Dilke’s solicitor. Throughout the weeks when the case was being prepared, information obtained from the Dilke side was quickly passed on by Stephenson to the Crawford side. Much of that coming from the Crawford side, however, was not communicated to Humbert, and none was communicated with alacrity. It was July 10th, for instance (with the case due to open on July 16th), before Humbert received a copy of Mrs. Crawford’s proof; and it was July 14th before any meeting took place between Stephenson and Dilke. Even then Phillimore was not present. He would no doubt have regarded his presence as a professional impropriety. Neither he nor the Queen’s Proctor conceived of their roles as being to represent Dilke, and it would indeed have been impossible for them to have done so, in view of the paucity of the contact which they allowed themselves with him.
In these circumstances it was not surprising that Dilke’s buoyancy of the spring had evaporated by the beginning of July. The outlook for the case had become exceedingly gloomy. But before it began he was to receive yet another heavy blow. The period between the two trials had been politically one of the most decisive in recent British history. It had seen the preparation of the first Home Rule Bill, the resignation of Chamberlain from the Government, the introduction of the Bill to the House of Commons, a period of fevered negotiations in an attempt to patch up a last-minute agreement, the Prime Minister’s sudden rejection of any compromise, and, in consequence, the defeat of the Bill on second reading. There followed the dissolution of the six-months-old Parliament, a general election in which Chamberlain made common cause with Hartington, and the reduction of the Gladstonian Liberal party to a rump of 191 members. Dilke viewed these events almost as an outsider. When the time came he took his decision in favour of the bill and against Chamberlain, but throughout he saw the unfolding of the picture much more in terms of its impact upon his relationship with Chamberlain than upon the general political scene. His part can be described almost completely from their correspondence and from Dilke’s notes on their meetings.
On March 4th Dilke wrote:
“I went to Chamberlain’s house, he being too cross to come to the House of Commons, and held with him an important conversation as to his future. I tried to point out to him that if he went out, as he was thinking of doing, he would wreck the party, who would put up with the Whigs going out against Mr. Gladstone on Home Rule, but who would be rent in twain by a Radical secession. He would do this, I told him, without much popular sympathy, and it was a terrible position to face. He told me that he had said so much in the autumn that he felt he must do it. I said, ‘Certainly. But do not go out and fight. Go out and lie low. If honesty forces you out, well and good, but it does not force you to fight.” He seemed to agree, at all events at the moment.”19
At the end of March Dilke had to attend a meeting of the Chelsea Liberal Association on the Irish question. He tried to steer a middle course by drafting a resolution “that while this meeting is firmly resolved on the maintenance of the union between Great Britain and Ireland, it is of the opinion that the wishes of the Irish people, as expressed at the last election, should receive satisfaction.” Chamberlain, to whom the resolution was sent for approval, wrote back surlily that the two things were inconsistent. On the day after the Chelsea meeting his own and Trevelyan’s resignation from the Government were announced, and one bridge was down.
Dilke then set himself two objects. The first was to prevent Chamberlain, whatever he thought about Home Rule, from moving too close to the Whigs.
“I think you must let it be known that you are not satisfied with the Whig line,” Dilke wrote on April 7th. “I hate the prospect of your being driven into coercion as a follower of a Goschen-Hartington-James-Brand-Albert Grey clique. . . . I believe from what I see of my caucus, and from the two large public meetings we have had for discussion, that the great mass of the party will go for Repeal, though fiercely against the land.[13] Enough will go the other way to risk all the seats, but the party will go for Repeal, and sooner or later now Repeal will come, whether or not we have a dreary period of coercion first. I should decidedly let it be known that you won’t stand airs from Goschen.”20
Dilke’s second object, against his own preference on the merits, was to get Gladstone to abandon the plan for the exclusion of Irish members from Westminster, His hope, which appeared not ill-founded, was that this might persuade Chamberlain to vote for the second reading of the bill. There was not much in the circumstances that Dilke could himself do with Gladstone, but he encouraged Chamberlain to ask for the concession, and gave him some extremely good (but unheeded) advice about the desirability of negotiating direct with a well-disposed member of the Cabinet, such as Herschell, the Lord Chancellor, instead of carrying on tortuous and pointless correspondence with Labouchere and O’Shea.
Chamberlain was trying to exert his own pressure upon Dilke at this stage. He wanted him to join in voting against the second reading, and he sought to achieve this by impressing upon Dilke how strong the opposition was likely to be. “The Bill is doomed,” he wrote on April 30th. “I have a list of III Liberals pledged against the second reading. Of these I know that 59 have publicly announced their intentions to their constituents. I believe that almost all the rest are certain; but making every allowance for desertions, the Home Rule Bill cannot pass without the changes I have asked for.”21 He concluded by asking Dilke to go down to Birmingham and discuss the matter. This invitation Dilke declined. He was much occupied with preparations for the case, and, perhaps, was unwilling in his insecure circumstances to expose himself to the force of Chamberlain’s determination. Instead, there took place in the first week of May their last major exchange of political
letters.
Dilke wrote from Pyrford on May 1st. He explained why, although he still believed that Gladstone would agree to keep the Irish members at Westminster and although he (Dilke) would certainly accept the concession if it were made, he could not possibly demand it as a condition of voting for the second reading, because his real position was that he would much sooner be rid of the Irish. But he would remain uncommitted for as long as possible, if that was of any help. He concluded:
“The reason, as you know, why I am so anxious for you (which matters more than I matter at present or shall for a long time) to find yourself able if possible to take the offers made you, and vote for the second reading, is that the dissolution will wreck the party, but yet leave a party—democratic, because all the moderates will go over to the Tories; poor, because all the subscribers will go over to the Tories; more Radical than the party has ever been; and yet, as things now stand, with you outside of it.”22
Chamberlain replied two days later in a harder and cooler tone:
“My pleasure in politics has gone, and I hold very loosely to public life just now. The friends with whom I have worked so long are many of them separated from me. The party is going blindly to its ruin, and everywhere there seems a want of courage and decision and principle which almost causes one to despair. I have hesitated to write to you again, but perhaps it is better that I should say what is in my mind. During all our years of intimacy I have never had a suspicion, until the last few weeks, that we differed on the Irish Question. . . . You must do what your conscience tells you to be right, and having decided, I should declare the situation publicly at once.
“It will do you harm on the whole, but that cannot be helped, if you have made up your mind that it is right. But you must be prepared for unkind things said by those who know how closely we have been united hitherto. The present crisis is, of course, life and death to me. I shall win if I can, and if I cannot I will cultivate my garden. I do not care for the leadership of a party which should prove itself so fickle and so careless of National interests as to sacrifice the unity of the Empire to the precipitate impatience of an old man[14]—careless of the future in which he can have no part—and to an uninstructed instinct which will not take the trouble to exercise judgment and criticism.”23
