Plowden was especially incensed by the fact that, at this point in time, a police magistrate was not admitted to the hallowed ranks of the judiciary. Bereft of wig or gown, he was given no uniform or external badge to signify his position. ‘It is almost of the essence of justice’, he would complain, ‘that it should at least look wise, and never has anything been better designed for this purpose than a judicial wig. There is no face so wise to look upon, that it may not be made to look wiser still in the framing of a wig. As his sword is to an officer, or his gaiters to a Bishop, so is the wig to a Judge.’ Nevertheless, the twinkling-eyed and discontented would-be judge was known for the efficiency of his dealings with the ragged crowd of London’s flotsam and jetsam that regularly found its way before him. Plowden was, quite simply, the Law in Marylebone.
On that October day, Mr Plowden’s courtroom presented a crowded scene. On the defendant’s side sat Herbert Druce, the accused, his head bowed. He had been spared the ignominy of the dock owing to his status as a gentleman. Close by sat the pale figure of the 6th Duke of Portland, who kept vigil day in and day out, alone amidst the brightly coloured throng of chattering ladies.
The task of Mr Plowden at this hearing was not fully to try the case, but rather to decide whether there was sufficient evidence to justify the committal of Herbert Druce for trial on the charge of perjury. The case was opened for the private prosecutor, George Hollamby, by the eminent barrister and Member of Parliament, Llewellyn Archer Atherley-Jones, KC. Atherley-Jones, who was later to become a judge, was also a leading Liberal politician. A dreamy idealist, his primary calling was to politics more than the law. His father, Ernest Jones, had been a leader of the Chartist movement in the 1840s, and had devoted his life to improving the conditions of working men. A man of affluent birth, Ernest Jones had given up his personal fortune to tour the country in worn-out shoes, campaigning for the rights of the poor. His inflammatory rhetoric had even landed him in prison, where he had continued unrepentantly to write polemical poems in his cell, it was said in his own blood. His son Llewellyn was to carry on his father’s progressive battle, albeit in a less colourful fashion. As a lawyer at the Bar, he authored several handbooks on the rights of miners, and as a judge in later years he was to become famous for his leniency towards homosexuals. He was not a man to shrink from the prospect of representing an Australian bushman who claimed to be a duke.
Atherley-Jones’ first task was the rather delicate one of explaining to the court that the defendant, Herbert Druce, was the son not of Thomas Charles and Mrs Druce, but of Thomas Charles Druce and a woman named Miss May.
‘Illegitimate?’ The magistrate’s blunt question cut through the charged courtroom atmosphere like a knife. Herbert Druce’s head hung even lower.
Counsel for the defence shot up from his seat like a bolt. ‘He was the son of the second wife!’ snapped Horace Avory, KC, representing Herbert Druce.
Horace Edmund Avory had been almost born into the Old Bailey. His father, Henry Avory, had been the chief clerk there for many years, and was said to know more law than many of the judges. Avory had therefore grown up surrounded by the cut and thrust of litigation. To the right of the legal spectrum and a fanatical advocate of the death penalty, Avory was a ruthless lawyer who, in later years, was to become the most feared of the ‘Hanging Judges’. He was well aware of his reputation, which he regarded with a certain amount of black humour. In his later years, when an acquaintance passed him by in the street as an old man and asked him how he was doing, he is said to have replied: ‘Oh, just hanging on, you know.’ Small and wiry, with a mummy-like, expressionless face, Avory was described as ‘the Sphinx of the courts’ by the Law Society Gazette. ‘Emotionless, austere, he holds the scales of justice in skinny, attenuated hands. One tries in vain to read the workings of the mind behind that mask-like face.’ To the witnesses he cross-examined and those in the dock that he was later to judge, Avory was known as ‘the Acid Drop’. Others described him as not so much dry, as ‘desiccated’.
The latest instalment of the Druce saga opened with the shocking revelation that the diary kept by Miss Mary Robinson – a key document in George Hollamby’s case – had, within the past few days, been stolen. Miss Robinson’s account, which was supported by her lady companion, Miss O’Neill, was that she had been shopping in a London street, when a man came up and told her there was a spider on her shoulder. She had put down her handbag, which contained the diary, to glance at her shoulder, only to reach for the bag a few moments later and find that it had gone. The incident was all the more suspicious since Miss Robinson had already complained to the police about the theft of several other letters and papers during the course of her voyage to England from New Zealand. Notices had been posted in the newspapers, offering a £100 reward for information leading to the diary’s return. But there had been no positive leads so far. Who had stolen the diary? Accusing fingers pointed at the agents of Herbert Druce and the 6th Duke of Portland.
George Hollamby’s solicitor, Edmund Kimber, next gave evidence to the effect that he had sought an expert opinion on the age of the paper on which the diary had been written. He had been informed that the paper could well date from before 1860. This accorded with the dates when Miss Robinson claimed she had kept the diary. Miss Robinson then declared that she had made a copy of the diary prior to it being stolen. Application was made to admit the copy in court in place of the original, but – after a great deal of legal wrangling – the copy was ruled by Plowden to be inadmissible in evidence. Miss Robinson, it was concluded, would have to rely on her own recollection of events when it came to her turn to give evidence, without any aide-mémoire.
Llewellyn Atherley-Jones then finally got to the substance of the case, with a lengthy restatement of the facts, including a summary of the events at the trial before Mr Justice Barnes in the probate court six years earlier. He explained that evidence had then been adduced as to T. C. Druce’s death and burial in 1864 by Herbert Druce, the nurse Catherine Bayly and Doctors Shaw and Blasson – Dr Blasson having died in the intervening years.
‘I think’, remarked Atherley-Jones, glancing at Horace Avory, ‘that my learned friend will probably assent to my statement that Dr Blasson is now dead, and has been dead for some time.’
‘Nothing,’ remarked Mr Plowden, with a twinkle in his eye, ‘is to be taken for granted in this case.’
Atherley-Jones went on to explain that the prosecution’s case was that Herbert Druce had lied on oath during the proceedings in the probate court before Mr Justice Barnes, when he had stated that T. C. Druce had died and was buried in 1864. The prosecution intended to prove this by calling witnesses who would testify to seeing Druce alive after 1864, to the fact of a ‘mock’ funeral, and to the fact that T. C. Druce and the 5th Duke of Portland were one and the same person.
The first witness for the prosecution was then called. This was the grave, elderly gentleman Robert Caldwell, who had told the secretary Amanda Gibson of his time spent treating the 5th Duke for his ‘bulbous nose’, and how he had been referred to the 5th Duke on the recommendation of the renowned medical man Sir Morell Mackenzie. Caldwell repeated his evidence in court in much the same terms as he had told his story to Amanda. Shown a number of photographs, he identified a large photograph of a clean-shaven man with large side whiskers as the 5th Duke of Portland, and two smaller photographs of a man with a bushy beard also as the duke, only this time posing as T. C. Druce in disguise.
It was now the turn of Horace Avory to cross-examine the witness. Even without the lawyer’s garb of wig and gown – this being a mere magistrates’ court – the stern face and skeletal figure of the future ‘hanging judge’ caused a hush of expectation as he rose to his feet.
‘Mr Caldwell.’ Avory’s voice was low, but keen as a knife. ‘Are you known in America as the “great American affidavit-maker?”’
The courtroom was suddenly very quiet.
‘Certainly not!’ replied the witness, highly affr
onted.
‘They do not think much of your affidavits there?’
‘I have only made two in my life!’ exclaimed Caldwell.
‘That is, one in this case and the other in the affairs of a Mr Stewart?’
‘Yes.’
‘You think that the one in this case is the most important? The most to come out of it?’ Avory asked coldly.
‘I do not understand.’ The witness looked baffled, but an uneasy glint came into his eye. He shuffled and looked down at his feet.
A further barrage of questions from Avory revealed that Robert Caldwell had, just four years before, attempted to sell an affidavit he had sworn to the New York Herald for the colossal sum of $10,000. The affidavit claimed that a New York judge, Henry Hilton, had embezzled money from the widow of an American millionaire, Alexander Stewart, by forging her late husband’s will. Remarkably, the lurid drama of the tale Caldwell had told in this first affidavit included another case of the theft and exhumation of a corpse – this time the body of the millionaire Stewart, which Judge Hilton had allegedly dug up and reburied in a cellar. The story in Caldwell’s affidavit had some basis in truth, as the Stewart case had indeed been the subject of notorious wrangling in the New York courts. Alexander Turney Stewart was an Ulster-born entrepreneur who had settled in the United States in the 1820s, and made an immense fortune from running some of the world’s first department stores. His death provoked a flurry of litigation on the part of various branches of his family, including allegations of fraud against his close friend and the executor of his will, Judge Henry Hilton. However, there was no doubt that the more outlandish claims in Caldwell’s affidavit could only have been a fabrication. The information about his attempts to sell his version of the Stewart story to newspapers in the United States had been obtained by an agent of the 6th Duke of Portland, and passed on by the Duke’s solicitors to those acting on behalf of Herbert Druce.
‘They say of you over there,’ Horace Avory began quoting from an American newspaper headline that he brandished before the court, “Mr Caldwell deals only with men who are dead.” Have you noticed that peculiarity about your affidavits?’
‘No, Sir!’ The reply was unconvincing.
Next, Avory confronted Caldwell with the proposition that he was in fact in Ireland, employed as an accounts clerk in Londonderry for a man called Mr Christy, during the period from 1863 until 1871. This was the very time that he had claimed, in his sworn testimony, to be treating the duke for rhinophyma at Welbeck. Worse, Avory asked Caldwell whether it was not the case that he had been discharged from Christy’s in disgrace, for embezzling his employer’s money. Was this not the real reason why he had left for New York in such haste in 1871?
For a moment, the witness seemed to be hunting for a response to the allegations thrown at him. ‘I know what you are driving at!’ he exclaimed at last. ‘I had a brother who was for some years with Christy. It is a case of mistaken identity.’
‘Was he a twin?’ Avory asked sarcastically.
‘Not that I know of,’ the witness replied.
Caldwell proceeded to explain that his brother was named William and he Robert, and that because neither of them liked their first names, they exchanged them. It was his brother, not he, who had embezzled Christy. The deed of assignment fraudulently conveying his employer’s property that was shown to him by Avory was signed ‘Robert Caldwell’ by his brother, not himself, as they had changed names. However, the story of a doppelgänger, or double, who had supposedly committed the various crimes of which Caldwell stood accused by Avory, became harder and harder to maintain as the cross-examination continued. Especially when Avory called out for a gentleman named Mr Ballantine to stand up in court. Mr Ballantine – a tall, burly man with an Irish lilt – rose to his feet and confirmed that the man in the witness box was indeed Robert Caldwell, whom he recalled from his days as an accounts clerk in Christy’s at Londonderry. Yet Caldwell doggedly persisted with his increasingly dubious story of a fraternal alter ego.
‘My brother wrote like me, talked like me, and looked like me!’ he said, flustered.
‘Was he as truthful as you, or more so?’ Avory shot back. The question raised raucous laughter from those assembled in the courtroom.
‘I am truthful!’ cried the witness.
All was now lost for Caldwell, however; whatever credibility his story might once have had was in tatters. It only remained for Avory to twist the knife.
‘You say that in 1855 you consulted Sir Morell Mackenzie. Are you aware that Sir Morell Mackenzie was then only seventeen or eighteen years of age?’
‘I do not mean to say I saw Sir Morell Mackenzie then,’ Caldwell replied hastily. He went on to explain that he was given a recommendation to Sir Morell in 1857, but carried it about with him for several years, before presenting it. The courtroom tittered. Caldwell, however, obstinately stuck to his story that he had treated the 5th Duke for a bulbous nose in the 1860s, and that he visited him both at Welbeck and the Baker Street Bazaar. He distinctly remembered the underground picture gallery and ballroom at Welbeck. He had also had dinner and stayed overnight at the Baker Street Bazaar, as the guest of the duke (disguised as Druce) and his family.
‘And suppose those underground rooms, picture gallery and ballroom were never constructed until 1872, your whole story must be untrue?’
‘Well, I am not to suppose anything at all; but I do not accept it as a fact,’ the witness replied.
‘And if there was no bedroom, kitchen nor dining room at the Baker Street Bazaar, your story must be untrue?’
There was a long pause. Finally, the reply came: ‘I should say so.’
But Avory was not yet finished. Next, he confronted Caldwell with the fact that there was a tombstone erected in a Londonderry cemetery to a child of his called Caroline. Caldwell attempted to assert that this child was also that of his brother William, despite the inscription on the tombstone, which stated: ‘Sacred to the memory of Caroline Matilda, the dearly-beloved child of Matilda and Robert Caldwell, who died 18 June, 1867, aged seven months.’ Eventually, however, he was obliged to admit that the child was his own. The ruse of the ‘twin brother’ had finally been shattered.
‘Now we have got it, definitely!’ Plowden exclaimed.
Horace Avory smiled to himself. It was the answer for which he had been waiting. The Acid Drop had his first victim.
*
The second witness for the prosecution was Miss Mary Robinson – the lady from New Zealand, whose diary had been so shockingly pillaged from her handbag in a London street. She told essentially the same story that she had related earlier, to Amanda Gibson. She had been born, she said, on a negro plantation in Virginia, the daughter of wealthy plantation owners. She had been sent to England for safety during the American Civil War. She had known T. C. Druce in the 1860s, through her aunt at Tunbridge Wells. Mr Druce frequently talked to her about his country estate. She became on intimate terms with him, and he frequently joined in with their family events. In the summer of 1862, she said, Druce had attended a children’s party with her in Rochester, where there were private theatricals. They had performed Little Red Riding Hood, and Mr Druce played the grandmother. He wore a nightdress, with a grandmother’s cap tied with strings. She also told the story of how she became T. C. Druce’s/the 5th Duke’s amanuensis or ‘outside correspondent’, through the mediation of the writer Charles Dickens. She had met Dickens, she said, when he was on a tour of Boston. For several years she had acted as a ‘go-between’ for the duke at Welbeck, accepting letters on his behalf which were addressed to her under the pseudonym ‘Madame Tussaud’.
When it came to Horace Avory’s turn to cross-examine Miss Robinson, he remarked contemptuously that he had some doubt whether he ought to cross-examine the witness at all; but lest any wrong inference might be drawn, he would put a few questions. He turned first to the alleged appearance of T. C. Druce/the duke at the children’s party in 1862, expressing a certain dry surprise a
t the spectacle of the 5th Duke of Portland dressed up as the grandmother in Little Red Riding Hood.
‘Supposing Mr Druce was being operated on by the surgeon Sir William Fergusson at that time, he could not be the man who was at the children’s party?’
‘You only say suppose,’ the witness replied coolly. But she had got her dates fatally wrong.
‘Did he look like a man who had been seriously ill?’ probed Avory.
‘He did not do anything particular at the party,’ came the witness’s stonewalling response.
Avory then dealt with the issue of Miss Robinson’s alleged relationship with Charles Dickens. Dickens, it appeared, was – according to his authorized biography – in Liverpool in May 1868. If this was the case, how was it to be reconciled with Miss Robinson’s story of meeting him in Boston at that time? No reply was forthcoming.
The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse Page 14
