by Roy Jenkins
Her other possible basis for a grievance against him was the part that he had played in getting Mrs. Ashton Dilke to warn her against Forster, and the rumour that he had intervened against Forster at the War Office. This might have made her bitter. It is difficult to believe that it would in itself have made her choose Dilke as the victim of her plot. It would have been so much easier to have chosen one of her earlier lovers. For Dilke to have qualified it seems likely that other considerations would have needed to be at work. First, a certain taste for notoriety in Mrs. Crawford, a positive desire that if her sins were to become known they should do so under the glare of the greatest possible publicity, and in association with one of the most eminent names amongst her acquaintances. Second, the existence of a climate of opinion or a body of rumour about Dilke which made him a not implausible victim of such a charge. It would not have done to have picked Gladstone, even allowing for his night prowling activities.[1] Third, some active outside encouragement, whether from a great personage like Rosebery or Chamberlain, or more probably from a small one like Mrs. Rogerson or Mrs. Eustace Smith. If it is accepted that some or all of these three considerations might have applied, there ceases to be any insuperable difficulty in explaining Mrs. Crawford’s choice of Dilke as her victim.
Can we further believe that, having once made the charges, Mrs. Crawford would have had the nerve to sustain them? This is obviously a question to which no firm answer can be returned. Clearly she would have needed to be a woman possessed, to a most unusual degree, of cool, malevolent courage. But we know her to have been an accomplished liar, resourceful in the search for plausibility and unintimidated by the paraphernalia of the law. And if she had a curious, unbalanced taste for notoriety this might have made the ordeals which she inflicted upon herself, and which for most people would have been crushingly burdensome, into something of a stimulant.
The greatest difficulty arises from her subsequent conversion to the Church of Rome. This occurred in 1889, and she was instructed by Manning himself. For reception into the Church and the hearing of her general confession he sent her to Father Robert Butler of St. Charles College, Bayswater. Nevertheless, her numerous conversations with Manning can hardly have failed to touch on her relationship with Dilke and the accusations, false or otherwise, to which she subjected him. Nor could the Cardinal Archbishop have failed to note what she said on these points. He had always given the closest attention to the Dilke case, and even had his interest shown any signs of flagging it would no doubt have been revived by Bodley, whom he would like to have chosen as his biographer and who was almost certainly his most intimate non-Catholic friend. Dilke, as has already been noted, claimed that in the summer of 1885 he “told everything” to Manning. At the beginning of 1889 he wrote to Manning again, sending him some notes which the Chesson committee had prepared upon the deficiencies of the trials. The Cardinal replied in distinctly friendly terms on February 26th:
“I could hardly have believed that so many oversights and omissions, and all against you, could have happened as in these two trials.
Nor how so many contradictions should have been possible. God grant that some light may spring up to clear you: and lift off from you the great suffering that is upon you.”
This was shortly before Mrs. Crawford’s confession. After it the Cardinal maintained his friendly relations with both Sir Charles and Lady Dilke. His only further known written comment, however, is contained in a letter which he wrote to Miss May Abraham (later Mrs. John Tennant) on March 9th, 1891. This was written within nine months of his death, and a great deterioration had taken place in his handwriting. Miss Abraham had written because Stead, still conducting his tireless anti-Dilke campaign, had again claimed that he had the Cardinal on his side. “Neither directly nor indirectly have I expressed either judgment or sympathy in what Mr. Stead has done,” Manning wrote. “The relation of confidence in which I have stood to both persons involved has absolutely closed my lips.”3
This was cryptic, and so far as written evidence is concerned Manning never cleared up the mystery. He left no paper which revealed his knowledge. In conversation he may have been less discreet. Sir Shane Leslie, whose work on a life of Manning had been interrupted by the war of 1914, wrote to Miss Tuckwell from Vermont in 1916 in the following terms: “There is no doubt the Cardinal thought your uncle innocent of the extreme charge. . . . Later I hope to be able to bring light from Manning’s point of view which will be pleasant to you.”4 On another occasion he wrote in still more definite terms: “I have plenty of proof that Manning really believed in Sir Charles’s innocence.”5 Sir Shane, however, when he eventually published his work on Manning, shone no new light upon the issue, but it appears that he based the conviction which he expressed to Miss Tuckwell upon conversations with Wilfred Meynell. Meynell was Manning’s “familiar,” who came as near as any man often does to knowing all of another’s thoughts and beliefs. The Abbé Alphonse Chapeau, of the University of Angers, whose new life of Manning is eagerly awaited and whose knowledge of the Manning papers is now unrivalled, gives credence to any expression of the Cardinal’s views which came via Meynell.
Perhaps more important than what Cardinal Manning believed, however, is what Mrs. Crawford did—or failed to do. It is impossible to believe that her reception into the Church of Rome was not of the deepest significance to her. It changed her whole life, to such an extent that the person who existed under her name after 1889 can hardly be reconciled with the one who existed previously. The teachings of that Church, it surely follows, must have had great influence upon her, particularly in the years immediately after her conversion. Yet the Catholic teaching on the Sacrament of Penance would clearly have imposed upon Mrs. Crawford, had she falsely accused Dilke, the absolute duty of doing everything possible to restore his good name. This, of course, she never attempted to do.
What force should be attached to this point? Should her failure to be truly penitent be taken as a final proof of her innocence and of Dilke’s guilt? This would be a most extreme conclusion. Against the fact that Mrs. Crawford’s behaviour may, from a religious point of view, have been incompatible with her having deceived the court must be set the equally salient fact that Dilke’s behaviour, from a practical point of view, was equally incompatible with his having done so. Had he been guilty he might no doubt have strongly protested his innocence. But it seems most unlikely that he would have encouraged the closest possible investigation into the case, or continued, for almost the whole of the rest of his life, to keep the issue alive and to urge others to do so too.
No firm judgment can therefore be based on the subsequent behaviour of either Mrs. Crawford or Dilke, The one neutralises the other. We must go back to the evidence, that presented at the trials and that subsequently accumulated. On this basis the balance of probability is against Mrs. Crawford. There seems little doubt that the greater part of the story she told about Dilke was false. It is just possible that there may at some stage have been a chance relationship, very different in form and of much shorter duration than that which she described. It might have taken place before her marriage, in the year between her return from a finishing school in Brussels and the beginning, in the summer of 1881, of her unhappy alliance with Crawford. If this were so, it would dispose of several difficulties. It would explain Dilke’s strong and persistent sense of legal grievance (he committed neither a crime nor a civil wrong) accompanied by a certain moral unease. It would also explain Manning’s failure to impose upon Mrs. Crawford the duty of restitution. The truth would have been almost as publicly damaging to Dilke as the falsehoods with which he was accused, and perhaps still more damaging to him privately. Silence, after so much noise, may therefore have appeared to the Cardinal to be the better course. Yet he still could have believed that Dilke had not perjured himself in the witness box[2] and was “innocent of the extreme charge.” Yet all this is pure surmise. There is no evidence to support it. At best it can be considered as no more than a possibility. W
hat is a probability, however, is that Dilke’s general pattern of life was not nearly so innocent as his relationship with Mrs. Crawford. Even if not guilty of the charge made against him he may have laid himself open to it and prejudiced his defence by his other activities. He was, perhaps, by the public standards of his age, a guilty man, but he was nonetheless, in all probability, innocent of that of which he was accused and that which brought about his downfall. He was that rare thing, the victim of a conspiracy, the main lines of which we can see, but the exact details of which (and, indeed, the identity of the other participants in which) are shrouded in mystery and are likely always so to remain.
Chapter Seventeen
The Long Road Back
During 1887 and the immediately following years Dilke had to learn to live with his new situation in life. He still hoped that the fresh evidence which was being collected might form the basis for a decisive vindication of his name; but as time went by it became increasingly difficult to count upon this. Even if it did not happen he had to continue to live. He was only in his middle forties. He still had a restless energy and a great appetite for work. He had a new wife, with whom he was apparently very happy but who, perhaps because of her character, perhaps because of the circumstances in which he had married her, came to exercise an increasingly dominant influence upon him. His reputation had survived better abroad than in England, for although he had some staunch friends at home he also had a great number of enemies who were determined to prevent his return to public life. And he was still rich.
His plans for doing regular newspaper work came to little. He worked for a few months for the National Press Agency, but he soon grew tired of this, and concentrated instead upon his own writing. He achieved a considerable output. Apart from his work, already mentioned, on the current state of European politics, he wrote a further series of articles for the Fortnightly which were published in the winter of 1887-8. These were on the British Army, and like those on European politics were subsequently collected and issued in book form. In addition, he wrote a major, two-volume treatise, entitled Problems of Greater Britain, which was published in 1890. This was intended as a sequel to his youthful and highly successful Greater Britain, but was in fact quite different both in tone and scope. The later work was not a travel book, but a detailed analytical survey of the political, economic and military problems of the British Empire. It was a heavy work, and a tribute more to Dilke’s compendious knowledge than to anything else. The introduction, however, contained one penetrating shaft. In the second half of the twentieth century, Dilke thought, the powers of Central and Western Europe would no longer dominate the world scene; they would be replaced by the United States and Russia, although Britain might retain her place by virtue of her overseas connections. The book—“this record of the peaceful progress of Greater Britain which is made securer by his sword”—was dedicated to Field-Marshal Lord Roberts.
Dilke also did a good deal of journalism, mainly for American and Colonial papers, and was very highly paid—thirty guineas a column in the Colonies, he told Chamberlain—for anything he chose to write. He also travelled widely. In the autumn of 1887 he went to Turkey and Greece, and received almost a royal welcome in Athens. In the following year he went to India and stayed there for much of the winter, devoting many weeks to a study of the Indian Army under the guidance of Roberts, who was then commander-in-chief. He also pursued his military studies in Europe, being Gallifet’s guest at the French manoeuvres in the autumn of 1891 and a frequent visitor to our own on Salisbury Plain.
In 1889 he paid a visit to Bismarck at his country house at Friedrichsruh and wrote a somewhat censorious account of the austerities practised by the Chancellor, in his last days of power, when he was away from Berlin.
“The coachman alone wears livery,” Dilke wrote, “and that only a plain blue with ordinary black trousers and ordinary black hat—no cockades and no stripes. . . . The family all drink beer at lunch, and offer the thinnest of thin Mosel. Bismarck has never put on a swallow-tail coat but once, which he says was in 1835, and which is of peculiar shape. A tall hat he does not possess, and he proscribes tall hats and evening dress among his guests. His view is that a Court and an Army should be in uniform, but that when people are not on duty at Court or in war, or preparation for war, they should wear a comfortable dress. . . . The Prince eats nothing at all except young partridges and salt herring, and the result is that the cookery is feeble, although for game eaters there is no hardship. . . . A French cook would hang himself. There is no sweet at dinner except fruit, stewed German fashion with the game. Trout, which the family themselves replace by raw salt herring, and game form the whole dinner. Of wines and beer they drink at dinner a most extraordinary mixture, but as the wine is all the gift of Emperors and merchant princes it is good. The cellar card was handed to the Prince with the fish, and, after consultation with me, and with Hatzfeldt, we started on sweet champagne, not suggested by me, followed by Bordeaux, followed by still Mosel, followed by Johannesberg (which I did suggest), followed by black beer, followed by corn brandy. When I reached the Johannesberg I stopped and went on with that only, so that I got a second bottle drawn for dessert. When the Chancellor got to his row of great pipes, standing against the wall ready stuffed for him, we went back to black beer. The railway station is in the garden, and the expresses shake the house.”1
The radical Dilke was clearly unimpressed with the style of living of his High Tory host; but they appear nevertheless to have got on well enough together. Bismarck thought that Dilke’s knowledge of European politics was remarkable, and appeared to be attracted rather than repelled by the fact that his guest had become almost without influence. Dilke thought that the Chancellor was “dear in his polite ways,” and was interested to discover how bad were his relations with the Emperor, and how he had turned against absolutism because he believed that it led to women having too great an influence on politics.
At home Dilke continued to suffer a great deal of ostracism and occasional insults. His name had become something of a music-hall joke, and a ribald ditty which ran as follows achieved a wide currency:
Master Dilke upset the milk,
Taking it home to Chelsea,
The papers say that Charlie’s gay,
Rather a wilful wag.
This noble representative,
Of everything good in Chelsea
Has let the cat, the naughty cat,
Right out of the Gladstone bag.[1]
On a similar level, obscene messages were frequently written across his doorstep in Sloane Street. Sometimes incidents of a more serious nature occurred. On one occasion he was refused communion at his parish church (at Pyrford, not in London), and on another Canon Barnett of Whitechapel (who had appeared as a witness in the case) rose to a fine height of self-righteousness by ostentatiously cancelling a lecture on the châteaux of the Loire, accompanied by illustrated lantern slides, which Lady Dilke had been asked to give at Toynbee Hall. The Times offered competition to the Canon by trying to pretend that Dilke did not exist. It refused to print a word of any of his speeches, to review his books, or to mention him in any form. This agitated Dilke a good deal, as he regarded it “as a great check on usefulness of any form.” He wrote to Chamberlain to ask him if he could do anything to get the ban removed. The latter replied in very friendly terms saying that he would prefer to wait until he had seen Buckle (the editor) in person. Two weeks later, however, on December 3rd, 1890, he wrote in less encouraging terms: “I have seen Buckle to-day and am not very hopeful—though I think I have shaken him. But Walter is behind and he is an obstinate old gentleman.”2 It was clear that Dilke could hope for no help from The Times.
The key question was when he might attempt a return to politics. In 1887 his part in public life was reduced to the chairmanship of the Chelsea Board of Guardians and membership of the vestry.[2] But the possibility of a re-entry to a much wider field did not seem too distant. In November, 1887, he received a warm l
etter from Mr. J. Cooksey, the editor of a local paper in the Forest of Dean, where there was a by-election pending, pressing him to pay a visit to the radicals there, and clearly holding out the possibility of the candidature. Three months later he received similar tentative offers from Merthyr Tydfil and the northern division of West Ham. All three of the constituencies were safe radical seats.
Dilke might have been expected to leap at these chances. But he did not do so. This was partly because he knew that, as soon as he made a move, Stead and others would mount a great new campaign against him, the result of which would probably be the withdrawal of the tentative offers and great damage to his prospects of future success. Partly, also, it was because his sights were still fixed above the mere securing of another seat in Parliament. He wished to come back into the inner councils of his party, and this made it desirable that he should move only with the approval of Gladstone and the other leaders. This was not easy to obtain. Relations between Gladstone and Dilke were almost non-existent during this period, although there was an occasional indirect contact through James.[3] This contact was sufficient to make it clear that, for the time being, Gladstone regarded silence as Dilke’s best policy.
In August, 1888, Chamberlain came to visit Dilke at Dockett and urged him to stand both for Parliament and for the newly established London County Council. The first elections to the County Council were to take place in November of that year. Dilke was strongly pressed to allow his name to go forward for Fulham, even though he would have left for India before the contest began. “Stead can’t fight your shadow,” a supporter encouragingly wrote. But Dilke declined; and perhaps he was right, for apart from what Stead might or might not have done, even the rumour of his candidature caused the publication of a petition of protest backed by influential signatures.
