by Roy Jenkins
In the event any thought of a prosecution was abandoned before Dilke set off to take his wife to Royat. On August 5th Chamberlain was able to write decisively: “I have the best reasons for knowing that the present Government are most unlikely to initiate a prosecution for perjury.” James also reported in the same sense. Dilke believed that the Government took this decision because of advice that there was no possibility of Mrs. Crawford being believed in a criminal trial.[4]—Matthews, who had become Home Secretary, would have been in a good position to assess this—but it seems equally probable that they were influenced by the obvious advantages of magnanimity over vindictiveness. No further blows were needed to destroy Dilke’s political usefulness.
Social ostracism was also inevitable. Dilke’s inclination was to recognise this by resigning from all his clubs, but he was dissuaded by Sir Henry James. There was also the question of his membership of the Privy Council. The Queen was extremely anxious that it should be terminated and assumed that Salisbury or Gladstone would see that this was done. Gladstone agreed with her to the extent of believing that continued membership was inappropriate, although he thought that the initiative should come from Dilke himself. But it did not come, for Dilke thought, and no doubt rightly, that such an act would be construed as an admission of guilt. Gladstone, in these circumstances, was prepared to take no further action; and Salisbury never wished to concern himself with the matter. Dilke therefore retained the designation “right honourable,”[5] but he retained little else, so far as the general public was concerned, in the way of honour.
The slow journey which he made across France to Royat was therefore a dismal one, still more so perhaps than if there had been the challenge of a prosecution still to face. He remained away for a month, returning to England in the middle of September and going straight to Dockett Eddy. After a few days he removed to Pyrford and stayed there until early November, when he and his wife again went abroad, this time to Paris for four weeks. In December they opened 76, Sloane Street for the first time since the beginning of August.
Dilke was trying to find ways of occupying his time. He wrote a series of anonymous articles on European politics for the Fortnightly, which, with the anonymity abandoned, were later published in book form, and he contemplated journalistic work of a more executive nature. “What I want is work on foreign affairs, or rather external affairs, or foreign and colonial,” he wrote to his friend Thursfield of The Times in January, 1887. “I would prefer not to write, but to suggest and supervise foreign news, and to work up the subjects of leaders which others would write.”4 Dilke’s idea was partly to gain experience with a view to starting a new London evening newspaper, but it came to nothing, which was hardly surprising if his proposal was that he should work for The Times.
He continued to see some friends, but not to any extent those who had been in his circle immediately before the crash. Lady Dilke’s academic and professional connections were on the whole more faithful than his own acquaintances of the great world. James and Chamberlain were almost the only politicians of the front rank with whom he maintained any real contact. “You can’t think how dear James has been to us and about us,” Dilke wrote about the former. But the ex-Attorney-General, while always sympathetic and always available for consultation, was too mondain a figure to continue to fit easily into the rather dowdy atmosphere which had descended upon 76, Sloane Street. Even with Chamberlain intimacy became rather attenuated. Dilke saw him on October 1st, and received “an interesting picture of the political state.” They met again at the end of the year, but on January 11th, 1887, Chamberlain was writing: “I have so much to do in London that I fear I cannot call at 76, this time. If you want to see me for anything will you call at 40, Princes Gardens on Saturday morning at 11-30? In this case send me a line saying you are coming.”5 He was not a man to smother in false delicacy the change in the balance of a friendship.
Dilke, it must be admitted, was probably not a very stimulating companion during this period. His mind was too exclusively occupied with the search for new evidence against Mrs. Crawford, and with the possibility that at some stage he might successfully confront her in yet another action and at last demonstrate his innocence. Even had his former political friends been available, he would probably have preferred to dine and correspond with those whose interest in the case was almost as great as his own. Fortunately he succeeded in collecting such a band of adherents. Their leader was F. W. Chesson, a former constituent of Dilke’s who had long been active in a whole series of good causes. He developed the idea of forming a committee to investigate the case and to produce further facts to lay before the public. Dilke welcomed this plan enthusiastically and suggested that his former Trinity Hall friend, D. F. Steavenson, might be a useful legal member. Steavenson, in the earlier part of his life, had built up a £2,000-a-year practice at the Newcastle-upon-Tyne bar. Later he had moved to London, but had failed to achieve legal success there. In 1886 he was living quietly on his private money. He was able and willing to devote a great deal of time to work on the case. In 1891, Dilke, through the agency of Chamberlain, secured his appointment as a county court judge.
The other members of the committee were Howel Thomas, a Local Government Board official; W. A. McArthur, who had just become a member of Parliament and was later to be a Liberal Whip; Clarence Smith, former sheriff of the City of London and subsequently Liberal M.P. for Hull, East; and Canon MacColl, a clergyman whose political interests made him a frequent correspondent of both Gladstone and Salisbury. The last three were in no way close friends of Dilke. Chesson died in 1889, but the committee continued, and in 1891 a pamphlet incorporating some of the findings of its members was published. They did not publish everything because of an expressed wish not to involve “other persons besides those hitherto named in the case,” and also, perhaps, because of a desire to avoid libel suits. In addition, Dilke himself, working through a solicitor and providing large sums of money for the employment of detectives, accumulated other new evidence. These two sources provide the information additional to that forthcoming at the two trials upon which any definitive view of the case must be based.
Before it is considered, however, it is perhaps relevant to give the facts about Mrs. Crawford’s subsequent career. This, too, must be a factor in any final judgment. When she was divorced from her husband she was twenty-three years of age; she was in ill-health; she had enough money of her own to live on, but she was not rich; and she was the most notorious woman in England. Forster, whom she had probably wished to marry, was no longer available. It was not easy to see how she would shape her future life.
She did not remain long at her sister’s house, but removed in the course of 1887 to a flat of her own in Oxford and Cambridge Mansions, in the Marylebone Road. In that neighbourhood she lived for more than forty years. At first, as has been said, she did some journalistic work under Stead for the Pall Mall Gazette. This arrangement did not last long. By the end of 1889 Stead had ceased to be editor and Mrs. Crawford’s interests had moved in another direction. In the course of that year she became closely acquainted with Manning and was received into the Roman Catholic church by the Cardinal himself. Thereafter her religion was the centre of her life, although, as it appeared from outside, it was its social rather than its mystical aspects which primarily attracted her. She was associated with St. Joan’s Social and Political Alliance, a Roman Catholic society concerned with securing, by means other than those which Mrs. Crawford had herself employed, a greater influence for women in politics. She became chairman of this body and also of the St. Joseph’s Home for Girl Mothers. In 1909 she was one of the founders of the Catholic Social Guild and served for many years as its honorary secretary. But her social work, while clearly arising directly out of her religious beliefs, was not confined to Roman Catholic outlets. She was a member of her local Board of Guardians for thirty years, and in 1919 she was elected to the St. Marylebone borough council as its first Labour member. She remained on the counci
l for twelve years, and played a major part in building up the borough’s public libraries. In 1931 she moved to Kensington and lived on Camden Hill for the remainder of her life.
She had also a large literary output, partly on socio-religious subjects and partly works of criticism. In 1899 she wrote a series of essays on nineteenth-century European writers, including Daudet, Maeterlinck, Huysmans and D’Annunzio, which were published under the title Studies in Foreign Literature. In the following year she wrote a small book on Fra Angélico, and also published a work entitled Philanthropy and Wage Paying. Ideals of Charity, Catholic Social Doctrine and The Church and the Worker were the titles of her other works in this latter genre. The Church and the Worker, written as a textbook for the Catholic Social Guild, sold more than 50,000 copies before it went out of print. She also published a descriptive work on Switzerland and a life of Frederic Ozanam, a French Catholic thinker who had been one of the leaders of the Society of St. Vincent de Paul. This last book appeared as late as 1947. She died, at the age of 85, on October 19th, 1948. She had never re-married, and towards the end of her life had become extremely reluctant to discuss the events of the ’eighties. Perhaps she had forgotten that they ever occurred. To some of those who knew her in her later years she appeared a rather formidable old lady. But others were struck by her devoutness, by her untroubled mind, and by the force and sympathy of her character. “The day of her death was the feast of St. Peter of Alcantara,” one who knew her well has written, “a saint whose human sympathy, charity and realisation of the spirit of penance were reflected in Mrs. Crawford’s own life.”
The first part of the new evidence which was accumulated between 1886 and 1891 concerned Mrs. Crawford’s relations with Captain Forster and other men. At the second trial, it will be remembered, she admitted her adultery with Forster, but said that she had not known him prior to February 15th, 1884; and she resolutely denied that she had been guilty with others. In particular, she said that Frederick Warner—the “F.W.” of her diary—was scarcely known to her. On this showing her statement that she had implicated Dilke because it was he who had “ruined” her had some plausibility; and Matthews, in his address to the jury, stressed the point that Dilke had been her first lover.
The first aim was to show that Mrs. Crawford’s liaison with Forster had begun well before 1884. The evidence on this point came primarily, but not entirely, from those associated with 9, Hill Street, the house of assignation to which Forster had admitted in cross-examination that he had taken her. The witnesses were therefore, in Chamberlain’s words, somewhat “tainted,” but there were a sufficient number of them to render it highly unlikely that they were all lying. The house had been kept by a Mr. and Mrs. Harvey, who sometimes passed under the name of Murray. Harvey or Murray owned a number of other brothels as well, but at the end of 1884 he parted from his wife, which led to the closing down of 9, Hill Street. There was also some danger of police action against the house, and Mrs. Harvey, indeed, was subsequently prosecuted and fined £150. It was difficult to get her to produce a statement (which may have been because, as she eventually admitted, she had been given £100 by Sir George Lewis on Forster’s behalf as the price of her silence), but she eventually signed a declaration that she remembered the visits of Forster and Mrs. Crawford as extending over a long period, although she was imprecise about the dates.
The other Hill Street witnesses were more specific. There were six of these. The first was Mrs. Sarah Anne Thomas, who had been a friend of Mrs. Harvey’s and had stayed with her in February, May and December, 1882. She had a distinct recollection of seeing Forster and Mrs. Crawford (who passed under the name of Captain and Mrs. Green[6]) at Hill Street during the first and last of these visits. Mrs. Thomas’s husband, John Thomas, signed a joint statutory declaration with a Mrs. Mary Ballard, who had been housekeeper at 9, Hill Street in 1880 and 1881, which went back even farther. They said that they had seen Mrs. Crawford (or Miss Smith as she then was) at the house in April or May, 1881. A Mrs. Emily Hallett, who had been temporary housekeeper, testified in a similar form to her having come with Forster on several occasions in the winter of 1882-3.
“On one occasion,” Mrs. Hallett stated, “the lady did not keep her appointment, and while waiting for her Captain Forster told me that the lady was married to an old man who she did not like and that she was always after him, Captain Forster, not he after her as he had another lady who he liked better.”6
Mrs. Winifred Barzettelli, also an employee at the house, made a declaration in roughly similar terms, relating to the same winter. She added that she thought Mrs. Crawford had “a very nice voice,” but “was a plain-looking woman with an ugly turned-up nose.” The last of this group of witnesses was Mrs. Susan Etheridge, who had replaced Mrs. Ballard as permanent housekeeper at the beginning of 1882. Her evidence was regarded as of particular value, because she made her declaration in St. Bartholemew’s Hospital where she was dying of tuberculosis. Her statement began with a dramatic reference to her awareness of her rapidly approaching end—which did indeed occur within a few days. She testified to frequent visits by Captain Forster, accompanied sometimes by Mrs. Crawford and sometimes by other women, between February, 1882, and June, 1884. At times they came together as often as twice a week.
From the sum of these statements several significant details about the Hill Street arrangements emerged. The meetings there between Mrs. Crawford and Captain Forster normally took place between eleven and twelve in the mornings. They were known in consequence as “the early people.” They occupied two rooms while they were in the house, a sitting-room which led on to a bedroom. The curtains of the latter were always kept drawn, with the gaslight burning. Forster paid a sovereign for each occasion on which he used the rooms.
The statements also brought out one other fact of importance. They involved not merely Mrs. Crawford but her sister, Mrs. Harrison. This sister, Helen, was four years older than Mrs. Crawford; she was married to Robert Harrison, a partner in the stockbroking firm of Hickens, Harrison and Co., and a brother of Frederic Harrison, the positivist writer; and she becomes from this point a key figure in the investigation of the case. She was mentioned in the declaration of Mrs. Thomas as having been at Hill Street in 1880 and 1881, but not with Forster. Mrs. Harvey, however, said that she had been there with Forster and also with Mrs. Crawford, all at the same time. Dilke stated that it was Mrs. Harrison who, in the autumn of 1886, first gave him the Hill Street address, and it was probably on the assumption that she was the originator of the connection that he wrote later to Chesson: “I happen to know that (Mrs. Crawford) took Forster there—i.e., she was the habitué of the house.”7
Mrs. Harvey, in her statement, cast the net still more widely over members of the Smith family. She said that Mrs. Ashton Dilke used also to visit Hill Street—accompanied by Forster. Dilke, however, appended a note at the side of this section of the statement saying that he did not believe it, although he had also received information via Chamberlain that Mrs. Dilke had at one period been living abroad with an unspecified man.
The next piece of evidence relating to Forster and Mrs. Crawford came from Captain Ernest Martin, who had been an intimate friend of Forster’s. Martin stated: “Forster used to boast of his conquests over women and frequently confided to me . . . various particulars in reference to intrigues he was carrying on with ladies married and single.[7] He made no disguise of his illicit connection with Mrs. Harrison and spoke of her in contemptuous terms, and he mentioned Mrs. Donald Crawford as having frequently compromised herself with him. . . .”8 Martin was apparently sceptical of Forster’s success, and entered into a curious arrangement by which, in order that he might be convinced, a telegram should be sent to him informing him when Forster was at Hill Street with Mrs. Crawford. He would then go and watch them leave. Mrs. Hallett, the temporary housekeeper at 9, Hill Street, confirmed the incident, saying that she had sent the telegram. In response to it Martin went to Hill Street and, between noon and on
e o’clock on May 7th, 1883, observed the departure of Forster and Mrs. Crawford. It should be stated that the value of Martin’s evidence is diminished by the fact that, when he gave it, he had quarrelled with Forster, and, the latter claimed, had tried to blackmail him.
Another statement came from Catherine Ruddiman, who had been a parlour-maid in the service of the Crawfords at 3, Sydney Place in 1882. She had been subpoenaed as a witness for Crawford at the second trial, but Matthews had not called her. She stated that during 1882 there were frequent calls from both Forster and Robert Priestley (the “R.C.P.” of the diary). Dilke called on only one occasion. When Forster or Priestley were in the house she was told to say that Mrs. Crawford was not at home to any other caller. On the occasion of Dilke’s visit she was not so instructed.
The next group of evidence came from Mrs. Harrison’s servants. The principal one was George Ball, who had been her butler at 73, Cromwell Road, from November, 1879, to March, 1885, and who had appeared briefly in the witness-box at the first trial. He joined with his wife and George Reeves, Mrs. Harrison’s footman, in giving written testimony that in the summer of 1882, when Mrs. Crawford had told her husband that she was going to stay with her sister at Cowes (and when there was no suggestion that she had been with Dilke) she had not in fact appeared there. Ball also testified that Mrs. Crawford had been acquainted with Forster as early as January, 1882, and that, during the early months of that year he and she had frequently called on Mrs. Harrison at the same time. Mrs. Harrison, he believed, had first met Forster at a ball in Gloucestershire at the end of 1881.
