The Secret Rooms: A True Gothic Mystery (23 page)

The documents inside offered a dark answer to the mystery.

The key to it was an auctioneer’s report, submitted by Messrs Cox of St James and addressed to His Grace the Duke of Rutland in the autumn of 1907. Henry had regarded the contents of the report as absolutely secret; for almost two years he kept it in a locked drawer in his writing desk.

But on 5 January 1909 matters came to a head when, over breakfast at the castle, Henry told Violet that he needed to find £76,000 (the equivalent of £6 million at today’s values) –
immediately
.

Later that day, Henry caught the train to London. At some point during the course of the eighty-minute journey, he composed a note to Violet, which he handed to a delivery boy on his arrival at King’s Cross. Mindful of his bad temper at breakfast, and the humiliation of the situation, his tone was apologetic:

On Train

Darling, I know it must have annoyed you awfully, but I cannot avoid selling to clear as far as possible all liabilities from off the properties. Should this new deal come off it will practically effect this.

Always yr beloved

PS ‘Lumby’ [lumbago] made me dull and unappreciative this morning.

The threat of bankruptcy, rather than backache, was the true cause of Henry’s ill temper. His financial position had now reached a crisis. It was almost three years since his father had died and the £40,000 he owed the government in death duties was still outstanding; so were the ‘children’s portions’ – the £36,000 he owed his brothers and sisters under the terms of his father’s will.

Other liabilities loomed. At White’s, his club in St James’s Street, and at the House of Lords, rumours of punitive tax increases in the forthcoming budget were circulating. David Lloyd George, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was in the process of preparing his ‘People’s Budget’.
Its aim
, he announced, was ‘to wage implacable warfare against poverty and squalidness’. To raise the money for the sweeping welfare reforms he proposed, the chancellor was also waging war against the rich. He planned to increase income tax
and
inheritance tax: further, in the most significant redistribution of wealth hitherto seen, he intended to introduce a ‘super tax’ on incomes over £5,000.

All of these measures threatened to reduce Henry’s income and
increase his costs. ‘The estate cannot bear any further burdens,’ he wrote to John: ‘Something
must
be done.’

His remark was specious. What he was actually doing was concealing the truth from his son. As Henry had confided to Violet that morning, he knew exactly what was to
be done
. To settle the amounts outstanding, he was proposing to sell £76,000 worth of family heirlooms.

While land remained sacred to Henry, paintings and ‘joux-joux’ – his pet name for the jewels and precious
objets
he presented to his mistresses – were dispensable. Unsurprisingly for a man whose interests were confined to the maps that marked out the boundaries of his estates and anything he could hunt, shoot or fish within them, he had no interest in the treasures his predecessors had amassed over the centuries. The contents of his many properties – the precious collections of Old Masters, furniture, rare books and manuscripts – bored him. They were simply ‘old things’.

At Belvoir, when possible, he would get his daughters to show his guests around the castle.
‘My father was frankly philistine,’
Diana recalled: ‘The unfortunate guests, after the Sunday walk and a tremendous tea, were handed over to Letty
*
and me to be instructed about our family history and heirlooms and any legend we had picked up. If we were not to be found and he was forced to show them himself he would, with a gesture, wave a whole wall away – a wall studded with the finest Nicholas Hilliard miniatures – with a “Don’t worry about those: they’re all fakes.” ’

It was imperative that Henry kept his plan to sell the family heirlooms secret. They were not
his
to sell. They belonged equally to John. Under the terms of a complex legal agreement, drawn up by the 6th Duke in the mid-1850s, they had been formally annexed to the family’s estates. The word ‘heirlooms’, as defined in the agreement, had a far wider significance than in popular usage: from the gilt tableware in the butler’s pantry to the elaborate Gobelin tapestries that adorned the walls of the Regent’s Gallery, the term included any item of value. The agreement made Henry’s position quite clear:
the heirlooms were ‘settled’, meaning they were held in trust for the next heir. He could not sell them without John’s permission.

Regardless, Henry had not allowed this detail to stand in his way. As Cox’s report tells us, his plan to sell a number of valuable heirlooms had been in place for some time.

Secretly, in the autumn of 1907, Henry had selected the items himself. Realizing that, in a worst-case scenario, the castle’s treasures offered a means to raise the £76,000 he needed without having to sell land, one afternoon, he had taken a stroll through the state rooms and upstairs corridors at Belvoir. With only a cursory glance at the paintings he passed, and after rummaging through the fine porcelain and decorative silver displayed on the many occasional tables, he had picked out some fifty ‘old things’ for the saleroom. His selections were made without thought or care. He simply chose the paintings and ‘joux-joux’ he liked the least.

Then, choosing a day when John was in London, Henry invited Messrs Cox up to Belvoir to value them. As he showed them around the castle, pointing out the things that he had earmarked, he instructed them to put together a list of items which, if sold, would yield somewhere in the region of £76,000. Their report, submitted a few days later, reveals twenty-five of the treasures that he had selected at random:

Valuation of Selected Heirlooms

Pictures

Tom Cox

A few weeks before John left for Rome, when Henry could no longer put off paying the £76,000 he owed, he was confronted with the problem of how to realize these valuable assets. Quietly, on the side, and without telling John, he had already sold a few ‘heirlooms’. But even Henry, ‘philistine’ as he was, realized that the sale of works of art of such calibre would leave glaring gaps on the walls of the state rooms at Belvoir. He had to get John to agree to his plan.

On 5 January, after confiding in Violet, he had caught the train to London to see his lawyers. In the course of their meeting, he instructed them to alter the 6th Duke’s settlement agreement. Its original purpose was to ensure that the castle, its contents and the land that surrounded it stayed within the main line of succession. Under the terms of the agreement, they could not be sold, bequeathed by will or otherwise alienated: by operation of the law of entail they
had
to pass from one Duke to the next. Henry was asking his lawyers
to break the entail. If the heirlooms were to be separated from the family’s ‘settled’ estates, they would no longer belong equally to John.

There were thousands more besides the twenty-five items on Cox’s list. Over the years – by the very fact that the heirlooms were formally annexed to the settled estates – lawyers had meticulously listed them. The lists – one for each of the family’s properties – ran to pages and pages and encompassed any item worth more than £100: down to the last Fabergé egg, the lawyers had been careful to see that nothing was missed out. The potential cash reserve offered by future sales, as Henry recognized, was huge. Rather than haggle with John over the sale of specific heirlooms, it was far simpler to have them made over to him.

Still, however, he was confronted with a problem. The 6th Duke’s settlement agreement was a legal document; it had been specifically designed to protect the interests of the next in line. It could not be altered at whim. To
resettle
the heirlooms – i.e. to ‘
unsettle
’ them – he needed John’s agreement.

What is extraordinary is that Henry didn’t even talk to him about it. Effectively – and very obviously – he was disinheriting John; he was proposing to take away a portion of his inheritance worth millions. Yet he did not explain why he was doing it; far less did he make any effort to persuade John to go along with it. Instead, he simply instructed his lawyers to courier the resettlement agreement to him for signature.

John received it two weeks before he left for Rome. There are no letters in the Muniment Rooms at Belvoir to tell us how he felt, or what his reaction was, on first reading the agreement. But a remarkable letter from Violet survives.

On 19 February – more than three weeks after John had arrived in Rome – Violet handed the letter to a footman at Belvoir. It was marked
‘Urgent: Delivery by Hand’
.

In the grey light of a cold winter’s morning, a pony trap took the azure-coated footman to the railway station at Grantham. From
there, he caught a train to London. Arriving at King’s Cross, he hailed a hansom cab to 97 Cadogan Gardens in Chelsea.

Violet’s letter was to her brother Charlie. The previous day, Henry had told her that John had appointed his own lawyers to contest the resettlement agreement.

Violet was reporting the conversation that had followed.

Belvoir Castle

19 February 1909

Charlie dear,

Henry let out his heart to me yesterday and I was touched – and
fussed
– re John and him.

He says it is unheard of that in annals of father and son etc that there should now be 2 lawyers. Therefore he thinks to
start
with that it was most unfriendly to make the ‘business’ like this – ‘never has happened in his family before’. He thought he had always been an indulgent and kind father – John certainly
never
having done
anything
to please him – (
quite
true).

John must not be allowed, Charlie dear, to make any more breach. It is
most
impolitic, I can see.

Henry at this moment says quite gently and calmly and sadly that he can
never
forget or forgive John’s dreadful attitude to him.

I can’t disguise from you, C. dear, that it hurts me also to the quick that John should have slowly, and behind my back, brought such pain and hurt to his Father – it is a big slap in his face – from an unexpected quarter.

If only I had been told at the beginning. Why can John never have confided in me – he might have known I should have seen to his interests. He might have known that H. would also (considering him to be his
only son
). I can’t bear it – I think John is being ungrateful. Oh, it’s a cruel mess. It may mean a real break.

To me it’s all an earthquake – to a
sweet
home – when we are all such a happy family! I think we have
all
been wrong to let John think we despise Henry for his tempers etc. Anyhow, Henry is tender-hearted enough never never never to have behaved to
his
father like
that. I think John has been
terribly
badly advised and I think the sooner he undoes the ‘fighting feel’ of it the wisest.

Loving VR

Of course, I shall write to John. My
gentle
views.

I must admit Henry was quite gentle and
not
in a temper or violent but
just
I thought in all he said.