The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (4 page)

Until, that is, some twenty years after the 6th Duke’s accession, when he was informed by his lawyers of a most fantastical set of assertions being made by an obscure widow in the church courts of London. A set of assertions that, if true, would call into question not only his entire inheritance, but the very future of Welbeck Abbey.

A grave’s a fine and private place…

A
NDREW
M
ARVELL

‘To His Coy Mistress’

Chancellor Tristram could not believe his ears. This was the most extraordinary application he had ever heard.

‘If I understand you correctly, Mrs Druce,’ he said, ‘you are requesting me to grant you a faculty for the exhumation of your father-in-law’s coffin, which was buried in consecrated ground at Highgate Cemetery. And the reason for this peculiar request is that you say he did not die thirty-four years ago in December 1864, as everyone believes, and indeed, was represented by his funeral at that time. Your assertion is that the funeral in 1864 was a charade, and that in fact your father-in-law carried on living in secret, under an assumed identity.’

The woman who stood before him continued to look ahead unwaveringly. ‘Yes, my Lord,’ she replied. ‘That is exactly what I seek.’

There was a collective catching of breath from the clutch of lawyers, journalists and curious onlookers crowded into the pews of the Wellington Chapel of St Paul’s Cathedral. From the tall, stained-glass chapel windows lately designed
by the illustrious Victorian craftsman, Charles Eamer Kempe, a thin shaft of sunlight hit the large font of Carrara marble somewhat incongruously installed in the centre of the room. Now known as the Chapel of St Michael and St George, the Wellington Chapel was at this time used for sittings of the consistory or church court. An application such as Mrs Druce’s would normally have been heard in private in chambers, but given the gravity of the allegations, Chancellor Tristram had ordered it to be heard in open court.

There was a long pause. Chancellor Tristram was at a loss. A diminutive and portly figure, he had always looked younger than his true age, even in his big wig and splendid scarlet robe. But despite his youthful looks, he was one of the most senior judges of the ancient church courts. He was also the last surviving member of the old civil courts or ‘Doctors’ Commons’, which had been reviled by Charles Dickens earlier in the century, and abolished in the 1890s. He was, in addition, a leading practitioner in the Chancery court that had recently taken over from the church courts in contentious matters relating to wills. Chancellor Tristram was a dry and seasoned lawyer, tough as the riding boots which he often forgot to take off when he got off his horse to take the train to London every day. He was known for his encyclopaedic knowledge of the law and hard-headed approach to legal argument. Encounters with eccentricity – if not downright madness – were a not uncommon feature of his professional life. There had been, for example, the 1867 case of a disputed will,
Smith and Others
v.
Tebbit and Others
, involving the will of a certain Mrs Thwaytes. Mrs Thwaytes – who had been left the then immense fortune of £500,000 – had been convinced
that she was the third person of the Holy Trinity and that her medical attendant, Dr Simm-Smith, was the Almighty, with whom she held frequent conversations by question and answer. She believed that Our Lord’s Second Coming and the Last Judgment would take place in her drawing room at Hyde Park Gardens, which she had decorated accordingly in white and gold. In her will, she left small sums to her relatives, and the residual estate to Dr Simm-Smith. Chancellor Tristram had represented Mrs Thwaytes’ relations in court. He had contended that the will was not duly executed, that the deceased was not of sound mind, memory and understanding when she made it, and that it was procured by the undue influence of Dr Simm-Smith and others. He won, and the will was set aside.

In contrast to Mrs Thwaytes, the woman who now stood before Chancellor Tristram on this blustery March morning of 1898 appeared to be of entirely sound mind. Anna Maria Druce was a pale woman on the ‘wrong’ side of forty, with a slightly receding chin and hooked nose. She bore trace of having once been very handsome. Her plain outfit – unadorned jacket with leg o’mutton sleeves and a straw boater perched on her head, hair screwed tightly in a simple bun – signalled genteel poverty, the all too common sight of a female member of the late-Victorian middle classes fallen on hard times. Despite this, Anna Maria had a mesmeric presence that seemed to hold all who heard her in thrall. Never had the chancellor come across a litigant so determined, so sure of her facts, and so well versed in labyrinthine court procedures. Mrs Druce knew every case in support of the ancient ecclesiastical jurisdiction for the granting of permission – known in technical legal jargon as a ‘faculty’ – for the exhumation of a corpse. She knew of the church court’s presumption against granting such permission, based on the sound premise that a dead body should stay where it had been laid to rest. She also knew the exceptional circumstances when such permission might be granted. She knew that the government had muddied the waters forty years before by introducing the Burial Act
1857, which in certain circumstances required the home secretary’s permission before an exhumation could be carried out. She could cite every exhumation case in the book, including the many upon which Chancellor Tristram himself had sat as ecclesiastical judge. He found it difficult to believe that this woman was mad.

And yet Anna Maria Druce’s case was, quite simply, extraordinary. Her father-in-law had been the late Thomas Charles Druce, a successful Victorian businessman who in the 1850s had owned and run a highly profitable London department store, known as the Baker Street Bazaar. T. C. Druce had occupied a spacious residence called Holcombe House in Mill Hill, then part of Hendon.
*
He had lived with a woman known as ‘Annie May’ for several years before finally marrying her in 1851, by which time she had given birth to three children out of wedlock. This was a highly unusual situation for a Victorian middle-class couple, and was kept secret from the children, who believed that at the time of their births their parents were married. The couple’s eldest son was Herbert Druce, born in 1846. He was followed by a son, Sidney, and a daughter, Florence. The first child born after T. C. Druce’s marriage in 1851 – and therefore the first legitimate issue – was Walter Thomas Druce, Anna Maria’s husband. T. C. Druce died in 1864 – or at least, so everybody thought. However, Anna Maria’s contention was that her father-in-law was still very much alive at that date, and that his ‘death’ and burial in 1864 were faked.

The background to these remarkable claims was not set out in Anna Maria’s affidavit, but Chancellor Tristram knew of it from the gathering tide of newspaper reports and gossip that was already beginning to grip the late-Victorian public. According to these reports, Mrs Druce’s astounding contention – and the underlying reason for her application for the exhumation of her father-in-law’s grave – was that the man everybody in Baker Street knew as the businessman Thomas Charles Druce was, in fact, the late William John Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, the 5th Duke of Portland. At that time, the Cavendish-Bentincks were one of the richest families in the country. Their official seat – that of the Dukes of Portland – was the vast and ancient Nottinghamshire estate of Welbeck Abbey. However, another branch of the family had inherited huge swathes of central London in the newly gracious districts of Harley Street and Marylebone. This was evidenced by the myriad streets and squares in their name: Great Portland Street, Portland Place, Cavendish Square, Great Titchfield Street, Bolsover Street. When the notoriously eccentric 5th Duke of Portland had died – apparently childless – in 1879, his cousin William had inherited the dukedom as the 6th Duke. But if the 5th Duke of Portland had indeed masqueraded under a double life as T. C. Druce of the Baker Street Bazaar, he would not have died childless. In fact, he would have had a legal heir – Walter Thomas Druce, the first legitimate son of T. C. Druce, and the husband of Anna Maria. Walter Thomas was now dead; but Anna Maria’s son Sidney was alive and well, and living in Australia. And it was for her son’s benefit that Anna Maria sought the faculty to open her father-in-law’s grave.

According to Anna Maria’s story, T. C. Druce’s coffin had been filled with lead to mimic the weight of a dead body. The duke, who had tired of his complicated double life, had apparently simply decided to ‘bury’ his alter ego and return to his former life. This was, therefore, the reason for the application for a faculty to open the Druce family vault in the Highgate cemetery: for according to Anna Maria’s case, were the grave to be opened, it would be found to be empty. And if it was, Mrs Druce would be a step closer to proving that her son was heir to the Portland millions.

Chancellor Tristram was perplexed. Much of the press reporting of Anna Maria’s story was patent nonsense. It was
claimed, for example, that ‘Annie May’ – the woman T. C. Druce had married in 1851 – was the illegitimate daughter of the 5th Earl of Berkeley. Frederick Augustus Berkeley, the 5th Earl, had shocked society at the end of the eighteenth century by fathering a number of illegitimate children with Mary Cole, the daughter of a local butcher, and subsequently marrying her. But Chancellor Tristram would have known that Annie May could not possibly have been an illegitimate daughter of the Berkeleys. Any such offspring, after all, would have been at least fifty-five years old by the time of T. C. Druce’s marriage to Annie May in 1851: a highly unlikely prospect.

On the other hand, turning from the more lurid fantasies of the newspapers to the real legal issues raised by Anna Maria’s affidavit, Chancellor Tristram had to admit that there were disturbing elements to the case. T. C. Druce’s death certificate had not been signed by any medical officer – a fact that bothered the chancellor. And Anna Maria alleged that, when her husband Walter was interred in the Druce family vault in the cemetery at Highgate in 1880, the coffin beside his – that of T. C. Druce – had completely collapsed, giving the impression that it would likely have been empty. And then, there had always been whisperings about the extreme eccentricity of the 5th Duke of Portland. It was well known that the ‘burrowing duke’ had constructed an enormous maze of underground tunnels beneath his estate at Welbeck Abbey. A famous recluse, he had turned his back on the world. Was it not plausible that such a man might have led a secret life?

Mrs Druce claimed, moreover, to have seen her father-in-law alive after his alleged death and burial in 1864. Some years after the supposed funeral, she said, she had been driving
with her husband in a carriage in Castle Hill, Maidenhead, when she spotted the elder Druce in the street, accompanied by another man. She had immediately stopped the carriage and asked them who they were. The man accompanying the person Anna Maria believed to be T. C. Druce said that he was a warden at a private Richmond mental asylum, where his companion had been admitted as a patient, under the name of Dr Harmer.

Could T. C. Druce/the duke have masqueraded as a lunatic named Dr Harmer after his supposed death in 1864, until his ‘real’ death in 1879? To assert as much seemed nothing less than preposterous. And yet Mrs Druce was not the only person to identify T. C. Druce and the asylum patient Dr Harmer as one and the same man. The identification was supported in court by Dr Forbes Winslow, a celebrity lunacy practitioner and a person for whom Chancellor Tristram would have had the greatest respect. Winslow’s father, Dr Forbes Benignus Winslow, had been a key witness in the famous 1843 trial of Daniel M’Naghten, a lunatic suffering from a persecution complex who had shot and killed the then prime minister’s secretary Edward Drummond, mistaking him for the prime minister himself, Sir Robert Peel. The elder Winslow’s intervention had led to M’Naghten’s trial for murder being called to a halt, and the establishment of the famous legal rules for insanity pleas in murder trials, the M’Naghten Rules. On the death of his father, Forbes Winslow junior had taken over his successful lunacy practice, and had been involved in a number of sensational cases. They included the campaign to release the American housewife Florence Maybrick, convicted in 1889 of poisoning her husband, James Maybrick, with arsenic.