Dilke

by Roy Jenkins

  “The Judge who tried the case had rightly decided that there was no legal evidence against Sir Charles Dilke: but was there not moral evidence of the strongest kind against him? He was charged by (Mrs. Crawford’s) confession not merely with adultery, but with having committed adultery with the child of one friend and the wife of another. He was charged with having committed with Mrs. Crawford ruthless adultery unredeemed by love or affection—he was charged with coarse brutal adultery more befitting a beast than a man, he was charged with having done with an English lady what any man of proper feeling would shrink from doing with a prostitute in a French brothel, and yet he was silent.”

  He could not shelter behind his counsel for the course which he had taken. Did the jury believe that they had not acted on instructions? Here Russell tried to interrupt, but the President silenced him with “I cannot allow you to interfere at all, Mr. Attorney-General,” and Matthews swept on. What made Dilke change his mind? It was not a respect for the truth as such but the fact that the Press campaign against him had become politically inconvenient.

  Mrs. Crawford’s story was contradicted only by the denials of Dilke. All the other evidence went to strengthen her allegations; and if her account were a fabrication, what possible motive could she have for inventing such a traduce-ment of her own character? As for the value of Dilke’s oath, was this not shown up by the evidence of the Hilliers, upon which Matthews said that he relied strongly? Did not Mrs. Crawford’s ability to sketch the apartment in Warren Street powerfully bear out her account of what had occurred there? Nor was Matthews prepared to attach weight to the evidence against the possibility of adulterous meetings at 76, Sloane Street.

  “As to the evidence adduced for Sir Charles Dilke with regard to the fencing in the mornings, it was of no importance. Sir Julian Pauncefote had been brought forward as to that point. Like other witnesses brought forward by the Queen’s Proctor, Sir Julian was a merely ornamental one. Who had disputed that there had been fencing in the mornings? Nobody. . . . Mr. Bodley, the private secretary, had been produced, and from his evidence it would appear that the occupation of a private secretary to a Cabinet Minister was of a most extraordinary character. Mr. Bodley, who, though he always sat with the door of his room open would not have it taken off, was constantly shouting to Mr. Ireland in an adjoining room, and Mr. Ireland was constantly shouting to him; and as to the Minister himself, though messengers were constantly arriving at his house with telegrams and written despatches, and every minute of his time throughout the morning was occupied with official business, except that which he spent in fencing and at breakfast, he found time to remove cancelled appointments from his diaries by cutting little round holes in those diaries instead of erasing the entries by the stroke of a pencil.”

  Matthews turned to Fanny. She was “so precious a vessel that she was not allowed to come into contact with anyone from the Queen’s Proctor until her statement had been distilled in the retort of Mr. Humbert.” But then she was lost. Her absence fixed guilt on Sir Charles Dilke. Mrs. Crawford had confessed adultery with Captain Forster, “but the dates showed that she had not done so till she had committed herself with Sir Charles Dilke.” The suggestion that she had invented the story against Dilke because she wished to marry Forster was most implausible. She would hardly have helped her desire by falsely accusing herself of adultery with another man. And if she was party to a conspiracy against Dilke why had she not given her husband more help in his suit against him? Matthews moved to his conclusion.

  “The burden of proof was on the Queen’s Proctor, who, in order to be successful must show conclusively that Mrs. Crawford had not committed adultery with Sir Charles Dilke. The jury could only give a verdict against his client if they believed that Mrs. Crawford was a perjured witness and that a conspiracy existed to blast the life of a pure and innocent man. . . . He asked earnestly for a verdict which would deliver his client from the terrible burden which he had had to bear and free him from a marriage on which Mrs. Crawford had, unhappily, brought discredit and disgrace.”

  Sir Walter Phillimore’s closing address was a much tamer affair. It had none of Henry Matthews’s gusto. “There was no need,” he began by saying, “for the advocate for the Queen’s Proctor to use impassioned speech.” Nevertheless he deployed some effective arguments in a quiet way. Could the jury believe that a guilty wife accusing herself of innumerable acts of adultery in three or four different places would be unable to produce more corroboration than had been heard during the case? Such evidence as had been produced against Dilke—that of the Hilliers and Mary Ann Gray—did not appear to refer to Mrs. Crawford. So far as her two specific dates for Warren Street were concerned, were not Dilke’s alibis for the two days almost completely convincing, and might not that for the first occasion have been still more so had Mrs. Crawford not had the opportunity, after hearing Dilke’s evidence, to change the time of the alleged meeting from the afternoon to the morning? As for the second occasion—May 6th—Phillimore had Mr. Earle (who was willing to testify to the time of Dilke’s arrival at Bryanston Square) as well as Lady Dilke in court, but as she was not cross-examined there appeared to be no need to call him.

  There was the difficulty about Mrs. Crawford’s knowledge of the interior arrangements of both 76, Sloane Street, and 65, Warren Street. But might she not have picked up the former through her family connection and the interchange of servants between Sir Charles Dilke’s household and that of her sister? As to Warren Street, who knew whether her plan was correct? Forster had admitted taking her to a house of ill-fame. Perhaps she had drawn the room there. For motive there was her desire to shield Forster. She had not admitted her adultery with him until it had been overwhelmingly proved against her, and at the time of her confession she was almost certainly unaware of the renewal of his engagement. What the jury had to consider was not whether Mrs. Crawford had been guilty of adultery—that was not in question, and whatever their verdict Crawford could without doubt obtain his divorce—but “whether she had been guilty of a double adultery, or whether, having fallen a victim to a man with whom she was enamoured, she had falsely accused Sir Charles Dilke.” Phillimore concluded, a little unenthusiastically, by saying that “he was glad that his task had come to an end and (that) he now left the case in the hands of the jury and of his Lordship.”

  The President then summed up. He began by defining the issue, first in its legal and then in its practical form.

  “The Queen’s Proctor,” he said, “is entitled to be successful in his intervention on one condition only, and that is if the decree has been obtained by reason of ‘material facts not having been brought to the knowledge of the court.’” He continued: “Mrs. Crawford has come into court and asserted upon oath that her confession to her husband was a true confession. Sir Charles Dilke has sworn to the contrary, and substantially you have to determine which of these two persons, who have been brought face to face before you, is telling the truth, and which is telling what is false.”

  Next he turned to the question of Dilke’s behaviour at the first trial and led himself to a conclusion highly unfavourable to Sir Charles.

  “Well, you must put yourselves in his place, if I may venture to suggest such an idea to you,” he said to the jury. “If you were to hear such a statement made involving your honour, as it would do morally, whatever might be the legal view of the facts—would you accept the advice of your counsel to say nothing? Would you allow the court to be deceived and a tissue of falsehoods to be put forward as the truth and to be accepted as such by a court of justice?”

  Sir James Hannen then considered Dilke’s alibis for February 23rd and May 6th, 1882. He agreed that it would have been impossible for the latter to have gone to Warren Street during the afternoon of February 23rd. If Mrs. Crawford’s allegation had been that originally stated by her husband, Dilke would have had an adequate answer. But there was nothing implausible in the suggestion that Crawford, in the stress of the moment, might have misund
erstood her statement. As to the morning, if the time at which Dilke had arrived at the Foreign Office could have been fixed “at so early an hour as to render the drive to Warren Street and back impossible, such evidence would have been invaluable.” In its absence his advice to the jury could merely be that they should decide between the relative truthfulness of Dilke and Mrs. Crawford. As to the alibi for May 6th, that depended upon “whether or not you can rely upon the accuracy of Lady Dilke.” The President appeared to be unwilling to do so.

  “It has been stated that Mr. Earle was here, but that it was not necessary to call him because Lady Dilke was not cross-examined. Now the meaning of that is this. In the view of lawyers when a fact ceases to be made the subject of cross-examination in the sense that you see it is no longer in dispute, it is not necessary to go on calling witnesses to prove that which you see from the action on the other side is not disputed. I must say I do not think that anyone would suppose that Mr. Matthews intended it to be taken that Lady Dilke was giving the hour of Sir C. Dilke’s arrival correctly. I can easily imagine that he would be anxious not to keep that lady in the box longer than was necessary;[3] and therefore I can only say that it appears to have been a very great mistake not to have called Mr. and Mrs. Earle to prove what time Sir C. Dilke came to the house in corroboration of the evidence of his wife.”

  The President then considered the state of the evidence about the Warren Street house. He was prepared to accept Dilke’s account of the pension paid to Anna Dessouslavy as being reasonable. But he clearly found the evidence of the Hilliers highly damaging to the veracity both of Dilke and of Mrs. Dessouslavy. He was also most unfavourably impressed by Phillimore’s “theatrical” action in producing Giuliano and then not putting him into the box. The implication was that even if Dilke had not used Mrs. Dessouslavy’s rooms as a place of assignation, Giuliano had. Furthermore, if Mrs. Crawford had not gone to the house under the circumstances described, how could she have known of its existence? Nor did the President think there was anything inherently implausible about Mrs. Crawford’s account of her visits to 76, Sloane Street. It was not necessary to assume anything more than the perjury of Sarah. Mrs. Crawford did not claim to have been there sufficiently often that it was inevitable that she must have been seen by anyone else, other than the footmen on the occasions they had mentioned; and what, in any event, was the reason for her admitted visits at Sir Charles Dilke’s breakfast time?

  The President did not make a great deal of the nonappearance of Fanny, but he clearly thought that the detail relating to her added to the credibility of Mrs. Crawford’s story: “That is a most revolting subject, gentlemen, and one which one would be glad to believe untrue; but the question for you in regard to that is do you think Mrs. Crawford invented the story?” “Which is the more probable,” he asked later, “that a man should do such things or that a woman should invent them of him?” And it was clear what his own answer would be. He turned to Mrs. Rogerson: “I think it is vain to endeavour to put any intelligible construction on the conduct of an hysterical woman who seems to have acted with such grave indiscretion.” But he thought the evidence pointed strongly to her having written the “Métropole” letter; and he was very sceptical of the theory that Mrs. Crawford had written the last anonymous letter herself or that it was part of a conspiracy to which she was privy.

  He passed to the final words of his charge to the jury.

  “You must bear in mind, as I have already pointed out to you, that on the former occasion it was for Mr. Crawford to prove that his wife had committed adultery with Sir Charles Dilke. On this occasion it is for the Queen’s Proctor to prove that Mrs. Crawford did not commit adultery with Sir Charles Dilke. The onus is on the Queen’s Proctor.”

  He added a further point. It had been suggested that the verdict would not greatly matter to Mr. Crawford as he would still be in a position to sustain an action against Captain Forster.

  “That certainly ought not to influence your judgment in the least. But if it were entitled to a feather’s weight in your judgment you will not forget this, that the difference would be that Mr. Crawford would be put to the enormous expense of these proceedings before he could begin again to take further proceedings against his wife and Captain Forster.” “I believe I have now said all I need to say,” Hannen concluded . . .” and I now commit the case to your charge.”

  After this summing-up there could be little doubt about the verdict, and little reason for the jury to take long in reaching it. They retired at 2.55 on the afternoon of Friday, July 23rd. They were back at 3.10. The clerk of the court asked them: “How do you find on the issue whether the decree nisi of the 12th of February last was pronounced contrary to the justice of the case by reason of material facts not brought to the knowledge of the court?” The foreman replied: “We find that it was not pronounced contrary to the justice of the case.”

  It only remained for the President to dismiss the intervention with costs against the Queen’s Proctor, to make arrangements for the decree to be made absolute during the vacation, and to approve a suggestion that the jury should be renumerated at the high rate of a guinea a day. The case had gone as badly for Dilke as his worst fears could have foretold. His political future was clearly wrecked, and he faced other, more positive dangers as well.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The New Evidence

  When the court rose Dilke returned with his wife to Sloane Street. Two of their most faithful friends—Mrs. Jeune, whose husband,[1] ironically, was later to fill Hannen’s place as President of the Divorce Court, and Justin McCarthy, the novelist and Irish Nationalist M.P.—were waiting for them there. Dilke immediately set himself to writing (and issuing the same evening) an address to the electors of Chelsea. After outlining the way in which the form of the trial had told against him he concluded: “As far as public life goes, I have no option but to accept the verdict, while protesting once more against its justice. I can only, gentlemen, assure you, as I have already often solemnly assured you, and with equal solemnity sworn in court, that I am innocent of the charges brought against me, and respectfully and gratefully bid you farewell.”

  This message was published in the newspapers the following morning, together with a great volume of comment on the case. Although less coldly pharisaical than The Times, the Daily News was perhaps the most damning, in view of its almost fulsome attitude after the February trial and of its position as the principal Liberal organ. Its leading article began with the wish that it might still be possible to believe in Dilke’s innocence.

  “But the case has been so thoroughly investigated,” it continued, “that there is unfortunately no room for scepticism any longer to assert itself. No better tribunal for the trial of such an issue could well be found than Sir James Hannen and a special Jury from the City of London.[2] Sir James Hannen’s ability is equal to that of any Judge on the Bench, and his experience in the divorce court has extended over fourteen years. No one can read his summing-up without being convinced that every consideration in Sir Charles Dilke’s favour is fairly weighed, or that the result is irresistibly fatal to his innocence.”

  For the moment, however, Dilke’s most pressing problem was not whether people would believe in his innocence, but whether criminal proceedings would be taken against him. Even before the trial, as was seen, he envisaged the possibility of a prosecution for perjury. After the trial, when it was clear that his evidence had not been believed, these fears greatly increased. Nor were they a product only of his own mind. They were shared by Chamberlain and, to some extent, by James. Chamberlain wrote to Dilke on July 27th: “James is absolutely convinced that in the present state of the evidence a conviction and a heavy sentence would be certain. . . . The whole question turns, as I have said, on the possibility of getting fresh evidence. Will you await this possibility in prison or in a quiet home abroad?”1 Three days later he wrote advocating Dilke’s departure from England in still more urgent terms: “I cannot see what duty is fulfill
ed or what interest served by facing a prosecution, which I fear must come, and which may end in a sentence of seven or even fourteen years’ penal servitude.”2

  Dilke himself, however, had moved into a defiant mood. At first he had believed that his conviction for perjury might involve not only a prison sentence but also the confiscation of his goods. This, indeed, had been the state of the law until a few years previously, and it was a penalty which he was not prepared to face. Once he discovered that his property was not at stake he became less nervous. There was even an idea at one stage that he might himself invite a trial for perjury. James received this suggestion with dismay and replied saying: “You must do anything sooner than stand a trial now. The atmosphere must be cleared before justice would be done you, and as I have said before time may unravel much.” This wise advice turned Dilke’s mind away from the active course, but it did not persuade him to seek refuge abroad. He had to make a short visit to France, but this was to be in no sense a “flight.” To underline the fact he wrote to the Attorney-General in the new Conservative Government, Sir Richard Webster, giving him his address and announcing that he would return at once if proceedings were started.

  “I intend to remain abroad as short a time as Emilia’s arm, which is crippled with rheumatism, will allow,” he wrote to Chamberlain on July 28th, “and if a prosecution is begun we shall return at once, arm or no arm. I have put off going till the 13th to ‘face’ prosecution, which I think Stead[3] and The Times will force on. I do not expect a favourable verdict, but Emilia and I decided three months ago that seven years’ penal servitude is better for me, better for her, better for Wentie’s future, and better above all for our love and happiness than life in Paris. Emilia is quite able to conduct the case while I am in penal servitude, and will conduct it better than I should.”3