The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (8 page)

Whether the 5th Duke faked his death as T. C. Druce in 1864 or not, there is no doubt that he left Welbeck Abbey for the last time on Sunday, 1 September 1878. For a year he lay ailing at Harcourt House, and finally died there on 6 December 1879. On his own instructions, the 5th Duke’s funeral was an understated affair. He had asked in his will that the burial expenses ‘be as small as possible consistently with decency’, that the funeral take place early in the morning, and that the usual attendance of family be dispensed with. Accordingly, he was buried in Kensal Green cemetery, with minimal ceremony.

Withdrawn from the world in his secret ducal suite and underground passages, shut up in his darkened carriage, possessed of a multitude of wigs, tall hats and muffling collars, the movements of the 5th Duke had been a mystery even to his closest aides. If he had chosen, like so many of his neighbours, to adopt a secret identity, would anyone have been any the wiser?

In any event, a certain determined lady from Marylebone had been doing some digging of her own.

*
  
T
he average height of the Victorian male was about
five feet
six
inches
.

When Adam delved and Eve span,
Who was then the gentleman?

Sermon by
J
OHN
B
ALL
,
a leader of the fourteenth-century Peasants’ Revolt

August 1898, in the south of England, was sunny, warm and unusually dry. In the long, sultry afternoons that blended imperceptibly into twilight, there was one subject alone that – more than the Dreyfus affair or the Fashoda incident – animated the conversation of bowler-hatted commuters in the packed carriages of suburban trains; one subject that was sure to spark off a lively discussion over the dinner table; one subject that was eagerly debated over cigars in the overstuffed armchairs of private members’ clubs. That subject was, naturally, the Druce case. Everybody agreed that it was quite the best ‘rummy go’ since the Tichborne case, over twenty years before.

The Tichborne case had been the legal
cause célèbre
of the 1870s. The baronetcy dated from 1601, when Sir Benjamin Tichborne was knighted by Elizabeth I. His descendants inherited great wealth, together with the position of one of the leading titled families in England. In 1854, Roger Tichborne, heir to the baronetcy, disappeared in a shipwreck off the coast of South America. He was widely accepted to have drowned, the insurance was paid, and his will proved. The only person who refused to accept his death was his mother, the Dowager Lady Tichborne. Clinging to the belief that her son was still alive, Lady Tichborne advertised extensively in newspapers the world over for anybody with information to come forward. A butcher calling himself Thomas Castro, from Wagga Wagga, Australia, duly presented himself in 1866, claiming to be the missing heir.

Despite his unrefined manners and coarse appearance, Lady Tichborne embraced the claimant as her son. She gave him an allowance of £1000 a year, accepted his illiterate wife as her daughter-in-law, and handed over to him the letters and diaries of her missing son. He gained an enormous following, with hundreds of people signing a petition for his claim to be recognized. Other Tichborne relatives, however, were convinced that the would-be claimant to the Tichborne title was one Arthur Orton from Wapping, who had sailed for Chile in the early 1850s and ended up in Australia. At a civil trial that lasted from 1871 to 1872, over a hundred people swore that Castro was indeed the missing baronet. However, a very strong point against him was the absence of certain tattoo marks borne by the original Roger Tichborne. In the event, he lost the civil case and was subsequently tried for perjury in 1873, found guilty, and sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment.

For a time, the man from Wagga Wagga was a popular hero. When, in 1875, Parliament unanimously rejected a motion by his counsel, Dr Kenealy, to refer the case to a Royal Commission, there were threats of a riot in London, and the military had to be held in readiness. He was finally released
in 1884, by which time the fickle public had lost interest in him. He died, destitute and in oblivion in 1898 – the year Mrs Druce first brought her claim before Chancellor Tristram. The Tichborne mystery was a legal and factual puzzle that was never resolved. Everybody had a theory as to the truth of the matter. Chancellor Tristram himself had been one of the lawyers involved in the case, and had his own views on the affair. His suspicion, he told his colleagues, was that the claimant was an illegitimate brother of the lost baronet.

The Druce–Portland affair differed from the Tichborne case in many respects, but they did both tap into issues of pressing concern to the late Victorian public: social anxiety about an increasing class fluidity, coupled with resentment at a society which, still rigidly organized according to class divisions, refused to grant due recognition to those who had climbed the ladder on merit. In the eighteenth century, there had been little doubt as to who could claim the status of a ‘gentleman’. The term defined a specific class of people, essentially the landed gentry, about whose membership there was little dispute. During the course of the nineteenth century, that situation was to be revolutionized. The increasing impact of industrialization, the advent of ‘new money’ in the form of fortunes coming from far-flung regions previously considered off the social map – the industrial north, the countries of the New World – all made the definition of the term ‘gentleman’ increasingly open to debate. ‘New money’ was making wealthy men of businessmen as opposed to the traditional, landowning classes. A new, more flexible definition of the word ‘gentleman’ was therefore required. In Dickens’ novel
Great Expectations
(1861), set in the late Georgian period, the
hero Pip, an orphan who inherits a fortune from a secret bene-factor, starts life aspiring to be a ‘gentleman’ in the wrong sense: not someone to be distinguished for his chivalry, self-sacrifice and heroic conduct, but rather a swell or a dandy, idling away his time on gambling and drinking with the rowdy group of young men who form the fast set of ‘The Finches of the Grove’. This is the image of the ‘gentleman’ represented by Regency dandies, the most prominent of which was ‘Beau’ Brummel. Generally, they were middle-class men trying to ape aristocratic manners, like the dissolute chancer Dazzle in Boucicault’s comedy of 1841,
London Assurance
:

Nature made me a gentleman… I live on the best that can be procured for credit, I never spend my own money when I can oblige a friend, I’m always thick on the winning horse, I’m an epidemic on the trade of a tailor. For further particulars, inquire of any sitting magistrate.

Of course, Pip’s dandified idea of a ‘gentleman’ is proved to be both shallow and anachronistic. No longer able to rely on his benefactor and source of wealth – the deported convict Abel Magwitch – he learns that he has to rise up the social ladder by his own efforts and hard work, not the deceptive chimera of inherited riches. In this sense, he comes close – by the end of the novel – to a very different and much more forward-looking definition of a ‘gentleman’, that of Samuel Smiles in his bestselling 1859 manual,
Self-Help
:

A well-balanced and well-stored mind, a life full of useful purpose, whatever the position occupied in it may be, is of far greater importance than average worldly respectability… Riches and rank have no necessary connexion with genuine gentlemanly qualities. The poor man may be a true gentleman – in spirit and in daily life, he may be honest, truthful, upright, polite, temperate, courageous, self-respecting and self-supporting – that is, be a true gentleman. The poor man with a rich spirit is altogether superior to the rich man with a poor spirit.

Cases of disputed identity such as the Tichborne trial or the Druce–Portland affair raised intriguing – and disturbing – questions for the late Victorian and Edwardian public. Did low-class pretenders to upper-class titles like the Tichborne claimant and Mrs Druce represent a liberating upheaval in the social order – a brave new world in which a butcher could just as well be a lord? Or were they idle, get-rich-quick fantasists seeking to avoid the modern, meritocratic challenge of ascending the social ladder through hard graft by harking back to an outmoded world
of titles and inherited wealth?

In the case of the Druce affair, the complexity of the issues that it raised was more than matched by the compelling factual riddle at its heart. Was Thomas Charles Druce
really
the duke? Everybody had their opinion on the matter, divided between those who were convinced that the 5th Duke of Portland did indeed lead a double life, and those who were firmly persuaded that the whole affair was the most scandalous fraud. Indeed, the great beauty and mystery of the Druce case lay precisely in the fact that every statement met with an objection, and every objection with an explanation. Thus the discussions circled round and round the contents of the Druce vault, always ending where they began. Just what
was
in that grave?

On one point, however, one and all were united: that it was mighty strange that old Druce’s eldest son, Herbert Druce – who, although illegitimate, had inherited the Baker Street business through his father’s will, as the ‘official’ heir – was being so obstructive about his sister-in-law’s application to have the vault opened. For since Mrs Druce’s initial triumph in March before Chancellor Tristram, Herbert Druce, through his solicitors Freshfields, had cast every obstacle in Mrs Druce’s way. First, they had applied to the Queen’s Bench Division for a judgment that Chancellor Tristram had no jurisdiction to order the disinterment, without the permission of the Home Office. Then, when the Court of Appeal rejected that application, they contested Chancellor Tristram’s order directly in front of him. In order to try to find a way out of the impasse, the chancellor had suggested – during a crowded hearing at St Paul’s in July, packed with smartly dressed ladies – that Mrs Druce apply for an order to have the grave opened from the president of the probate court. This was because, alongside her application to the church court for a faculty to disinter the coffin, Mrs Druce had also commenced proceedings in the civil courts to have T. C. Druce’s will set aside on the grounds that he did not die. The application to the probate court should, Chancellor Tristram suggested, be for ‘letters of request’ addressed from the president back to himself, asking him to make the order for exhumation of the grave. In effect, the legal issue of disinterment was being batted between the church and secular courts, with the shadow of the home secretary and the (as yet unresolved) issue of a Home Office licence looming ominously in the background.

Sir Francis Jeune, the president of the probate court, duly heard Mrs Druce’s application for letters of request. In the course of the hearing, he was most impressed by a witness presented to him in support of her case. This witness was a respectable elderly lady called Mrs Hamilton. She appeared in court dressed entirely in black, with a deep veil. Mrs Hamilton testified that she had seen Thomas Charles Druce on two occasions after his alleged ‘death’ in 1864. The letters of request were therefore duly issued by Sir Francis to Chancellor Tristram, asking for the faculty to be granted. The civil judge evidently shared the chancellor’s view that the simplest way to settle the matter was simply to open the grave, to see if T. C. Druce’s body was there. He stated as much in a letter to Sir Kenelm Digby, under-secretary of state to the Home Office. Herbert Druce promptly appealed against the judge’s order. His appeal was roundly rejected.

Why was Herbert Druce so vehemently opposed to the exhumation of his father’s body? A stout man of fifty-two with a hooked nose and copious beard, Herbert bore an uncanny physical resemblance to his father. Like him, he appeared to be the embodiment of late Victorian respectability. He had been groomed by T. C. Druce to take over the prosperous family business in Baker Street, and he ran it with capable hands. When he was not poring over the firm’s accounts in the Baker Street office, he would retire to the luxurious villa that he occupied with his wife and family in Circus Road in the affluent London suburb of St John’s Wood. But all was not as it seemed in Herbert’s life, and his placid exterior concealed a tumult of deeply felt emotion.

Until a decade before, Herbert had been in complete and
blissful ignorance of his illegitimacy, which had only surfaced as a result of the actions of his meddlesome sister-in-law, Anna Maria. The fact that he – along with his two younger siblings – had been born a bastard had been revealed during a most uncomfortable meeting with his mother, Annie May, and the Druce family solicitor, Edwin Freshfield.

Edwin, a senior partner of the law firm Freshfields, had been alerted to the fact of Herbert Druce’s illegitimacy by the unlikely source of the tax authorities. This was because Anna Maria Druce, believing (incorrectly) that Herbert could not inherit under his father’s will because of his illegitimacy, had informed the tax authorities of this fact. The Inland Revenue concluded that as the named beneficiary of his father’s estate, Herbert
could
inherit, but that because the first three children were illegitimate, the wrong amount of estate duty had been paid. Edwin Freshfield was therefore left with the unpleasant task of confronting Annie May – in the presence of Herbert – over the fact that she had not been married to T. C. Druce at the time of the birth of these children. Many years after the meeting, Edwin still cringed at the recollection, as he recorded in a later memorandum to the Home Office: