A Fugitive Englishman

by Roy Lewis

  So there you are, my boy. For the next few years I eked out a precarious living in this manner, on the fringe of the legal world. And I saw with frustration great cases that would have been meat and drink for me in the old days. I tell you, I lusted for some of those briefs – what a stir I would have made in the Tichborne Case – the claimant ruined by the hysterical outpourings of Dr Kenealy for the defence! What I could have done in the Chetwynd divorce hearing regarding the numerous female servants kept in the household as mistresses, or in defending Colonel Baker when accused of lifting the skirts of Miss Dickinson – an overheated, hysterical young woman – in a train carriage! And as for Lady Aylesford, when she and her husband were in the Divorce Court, what could I have not drawn out regarding her fast life at hunt meetings, racecourses and other locations where the loungers and butterflies of high society fluttered away their lives – while her husband favoured resorts of harlots and other debauchees of his own stamp!

  Such cases were custom-made for me! But I was denied them by the jealousy of Temple barristers. And in my reduced practice, my clients were inevitably poor, or ignorant, and the only way in which I could make any sort of return from the business was by spinning out my involvement with them as long as possible before I was forced to take legal action on their behalf . . . when I would be forced to hand them over to someone with a right of audience.

  But I struggled on, dealing with disreputable clients, producing an odd article for the magazines, and writing to the newspapers in defence of Garibaldi. But I was getting old.

  You know, I used to go out early each morning, walking to the City from the lodgings Eliza and I had taken at 11 Bayley Street. But I attended the courts only as a spectator. I was now virtually penniless, and all but forgotten. I often considered how far away was my present address in St Giles from Berkeley Square. I no longer wore my once famous coat with the astrakhan collar; I took to a worn, threadbare old Aberdeen to keep out the cold on my morning walks to the City. I passed the occasional old acquaintance: few acknowledged me.

  And as for this last winter, it’s been bitter. It’s when I contracted this damned cough . . . bronchitis. Then there’s the kidney problem. The year before, the damned fogs and snow saw off my old friend Alexander Cockburn. So I’ve outlasted him, anyway. What a claim to fame!

  Hah! The bitterness of age and defeat.

  What? Yes, my boy, of course I’ve often reflected on my rise and fall. My glittering success, and my martyrdom.

  I tell you, Joe, martyrdom can do wonders for a man. Or at least, for his reputation. Take President Lincoln, for example. Nowadays it’s fashionable to laud him to the skies as a great president, the Emancipator, the man who freed the slaves. But what was the reality, as I recall it? Many in his own party, the Republicans, derided him at the time for his indecision, his ineptitude, his gawky appearance, his unfitness for high office, his refusal to outlaw slavery in the Southern States. He couldn’t control his cabinet, Secretary of War Stanton held him in easy contempt, and the generals – McClelland, Grant, Burneside, Hooker, Halleck – all ignored his orders.

  I think I told you that shortly after my arrival in New York in 1861, I paid court to Judge Daly’s wife, a snobbish, gushing, sharp-tongued woman who had little love for anyone but her immaculate husband and who openly detested Abraham Lincoln for his lowly beginnings. ‘Old Abe,’ she freely announced to me, ‘or King Log as I call him, is mentally and physically long and loose in the joints. He is unfit for high position, unaware of the peril in which the country finds itself, merely content to be president, tell risqué stories and have Mrs Lincoln dress herself up in an undignified manner and hold levees.’

  I remember how Mrs Daly preened herself, smoothed down her voluminous skirt as she spoke.

  ‘She bullies him unmercifully, you know: that’s why he’s so meek. They say when he started his political career he tended to stay out late at meetings and return home somewhat the worse for wear. His wife would lock him out and tell him from the window that he could not come in. And there was the occasion when he called out in the street, “My dear, let me in I have something important to tell you.”

  ‘ “I don’t believe it,” Mrs Lincoln is said to have replied.

  ‘ “I have indeed,” pleaded the poor ungainly man in the tall black stovepipe hat. “I have something astonishing to tell you. I have been nominated for president!”

  ‘ “Pshaw,” Mary Lincoln replied in disgust. “Now I know you’re drunk!” and slammed down the window, cutting short his protests.’

  But in 1862, when I talked with Mrs Daly, I think she spoke for a great number of people in New York and Washington. They saw Lincoln as a second-rate Illinois lawyer and his wife as an upstart, affected, almost comical parvenu who was raised far above her real station in life.

  Getting himself assassinated changed all perceptions about President Lincoln, of course: it was perhaps the best political move in his career.

  As a martyr he became a national hero: North and South joined in reviling his murder and re-establishing his reputation and he was looked back upon as a sage and honourable president. Mind you, that was helped by his having been preceded by an incompetent in James Buchanan and followed by a corrupt idiot in Andrew Johnson. Martyrdom worked for Lincoln. . . .

  But for me, martyrdom didn’t quite work out like that. I was a martyr to the moral panic that swept over the Inns of Court in the 1850s. But why was I treated so severely? There were others who were attacked for worse, professional sins, like Kenealy in the Tichborne Case, and Kennedy in the Swinfen hearings, and even the Lord Chancellor, Lord Westbury, managed to survive financial scandal and claims of nepotism . . . but I was the one singled out for special treatment. So why me, when they couldn’t even prove any professional misconduct, merely unwise private behaviour?

  My guess is that I’d made just too many enemies. Maybe it was because I’d become too friendly with Lady Palmerston and a few other political wives, and tongues wagged; there were many at the Bar who envied my rapid rise and the huge fees I was winning, together with my prospective elevation to a knighthood; politically I was too radical in my views for many of the old fogies in Parliament, not least in my support for the unions in the building industry.

  So I was singled out to be punished. The charges were trumped up, of course: the Benchers at the Inner Temple could not point to any professional misbehaviour, the only area in which they had real jurisdiction. No, I was made a martyr to hypocrisy and self-seeking aristocrats and jealous, small-minded men.

  So, for me, martyrdom brought no rise in esteem, however. Unlike Lincoln. That’s one of the injustices in the world, don’t you agree? When the full facts were known about my disgrace, when I finally returned to England and personally stated my case, no one – apart from my close friends – seemed to want to know. And yet in my own way – on a smaller stage than Old Abe, admittedly – I had every right to rehabilitation. I had every right to have my merits recognized, my achievements lauded, my political and legal talents rewarded.

  Instead, well, I was caricatured by Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities and by Trollope in Orley Farm, my achievements were glossed over, my name no longer heard in polite society and here I am now, years later; well, you see my condition and circumstances. A humble, mean dwelling, a single servant, a back-room desk in a minor attorney’s office . . . all a far cry, a great distance, from the Old Bailey successes, my home in Berkeley Square, my early days at Cobham Park, and the drawing rooms of the Upper Ten Thousand. . . .

  Or am I deceiving myself? Am I ending my life, as many do, in a whimper of self-deceit?

  Hell and damnation, is that brandy bottle also finished?

  AFTERWORD

  It is almost twenty years now since my stepfather, Edwin James, passed away. His death occurred shortly after our last conversation in 1881, just before I married Mary Ring.

  Oddly enough, my natural father died about the same time: he had managed to marry his thirty-year-old act
ress Agnes Cameron, and sire another two children before expiring. It was the only time he had ended a marriage in a natural way, I suppose. I did not attend his funeral: he was really a stranger to me. After that, well, I was involved with my sea voyages to Australia and South America, and my wife bore me several children and with the money she brought to our union – she was a wealthy young widow when we married – I set about establishing my shipping business, but it was hard work. All of this activity drew my attention away from the remainder of the story Mr James had narrated to me: I was a busy man.

  But I am forced to admit I was also reluctant to put pen to paper once more, in recounting his history, for I feared that during his time in New York he had become infected with that disease to which Americans are particularly prone: the telling of tall stories. I felt unsure whether I could believe his account of his involvement with Colonel Lafayette Baker and the Secret Service, and his pursuit with Major Charles DeRudio (as he now styles himself) of the fleeing John Wilkes Booth. And his views about Secretary of War Stanton’s involvement in the assassination of President Lincoln seemed to me to be somewhat far-fetched. As for the Cork Revengers. . . .

  However, I recently read that James Sadleir had been murdered in Switzerland. It was put down to an attempted robbery, but I certainly wondered whether the Cork Revengers had at last found their man. Moreover, last year my business expanded so well overseas that I found it convenient to open an office in New York. While there I was able to find some leisure time to browse in the archives of the New York Times and the New York Clipper and I discovered that many of the events Mr James described were true: the John Heenan case, Mary Real, Henry Hayward, the police corruption, the scandals, the Draft Riots and the political personalities like Matt Brennan, who ended as Police Commissioner in New York and was himself jailed for corruptly allowing a murderer to escape custody. And, to my surprise, I learned Mr James had not lied about his namesake who had, inadvertently, drawn the fangs of the Cork Revengers as far as my stepfather was concerned: there had indeed been another sporting editor at the Clipper, called Ed James, who wrote a number of accounts of his pugilistic heroes – such as Fistiana, and Life of John Heenan . . . and penned, in addition, The Life and Times of Adah Menken. He went blind in the 1860s, but lives still.

  And when I came across the published reminiscences of Colonel Lafayette Baker I began to think again about Mr James’s account of his involvement in great events in the 1860s. The book made no specific mention of Mr James – but then, why should it if my stepfather was, like Charles DeRudio, in fact working as a secret agent? However, I was surprised to learn that Mr James’s account of the hunt for John Wilkes Booth was circumstantially correct and his views about Secretary of War Stanton were not entirely fanciful: they were echoed in Colonel Lafayette Baker’s own account – where the existence of the damaged diary of the assassin is revealed, and Stanton’s conspiratorial involvement with Booth is hinted at. Colonel Baker died shortly after publication of his book; it is rumoured he’d been poisoned by arsenic-tainted beer provided, some say, by his brother-in-law at the instigation of the War Department. Stanton’s arm was long.

  I had hoped to talk with Major Charles DeRudio, in order to confirm Mr James’s account of their adventures together in New York and Washington, but that sturdy soldier, one-time assassin and survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn was in service with the 7th Cavalry at Fort Meade in the Dakota Territory and not available to me. Though he did write to me a courteous letter, in which he complained about lending his Austrian binoculars to General Custer, a loss he has, it seems, neither forgotten nor forgiven!

  So perhaps it was not a simple matter of tall story-telling on Mr James’s part. . . .

  But my final decision to tell the story arose out of the recent publication of the autobiography of one of the most successful fraudsters of our time: Austin Bidwell, one of the four men who robbed the Bank of England in 1872 of the massive sum of £100,000 by the cashing of forged bonds and bills of exchange. When I perused this published account I was taken aback to discover that in the late 1860s the Bidwell brothers, in carrying out extensive forgeries and frauds in the United States, had actually used Mr James as their legal adviser!

  When he was telling me his story in those miserable lodgings in Bayley Street years ago, Mr James had seemed open enough about his various activities, even of a doubtful moral kind, but on one matter he remained somewhat reticent. Shortly before he returned to England, he said, he had gained a ‘windfall’ from some legal representation, but he declined to explain this in detail. Now, in reading Austin Bidwell’s From Wall Street to London Prison, I discovered how he had obtained that windfall, if the forger Bidwell is to be believed: Edwin James obtained the huge fee of $5,000, enough to enable him to return to England and try to resume his legal career in London, by working with Austin Bidwell and his brother George in a complicated swindle that targeted New York banks!

  When I read Bidwell’s account I could understand why Mr James had been reluctant to discuss the source of that $5,000.

  According to Austin Bidwell, when he and his brother attempted a massive $240,000 fraud on the Jay & Cooke Bank in New York they used Edwin James as their lawyer to provide them with a respectable ‘front’. There can be little doubt that he was fully aware of what they were up to, in using forged bank bonds, but when the scheme collapsed because of an eagle-eyed detective called George Elder, Mr James was questioned by the banks but protested that he was merely the Bidwells’ lawyer and negotiator, quite innocent of their nefarious intentions. A defence he had used on several occasions! No action was taken against him; the Bidwells fled to Europe, where they launched numerous frauds culminating in their 1872 attack upon the Bank of England which led to their imprisonment in Newgate – but at that point my stepfather, with the money he had received from the Bidwells, deemed it appropriate to return to England and escape the suspicions which were swirling around in New York with regard to his behaviour.

  This surprising account was enough to encourage me to go back to Mr James’s story, if only to round off some of the edges and expose some of the weaknesses of that remarkable man by way of independent sources rather than his own conversation.

  I did of course ask some questions of my mother but although she confirmed his account of his saving her during the Draft Riots she seemed reluctant to provide any other information, certainly nothing about his adventures with Colonel Lafayette Baker, or Charles DeRudio, and later, the Bidwell brothers. As for the Cork Revengers and Seamus O’Gonagle, when I mentioned the actress Adah Menken, she merely rolled her eyes. On the other hand, she remained stubbornly proud of Mr James’s former status as a leading Queen’s Counsel and it seemed she never lost her faith in my stepfather. I remember on one occasion, becoming irritated by some glowing comment she had made to me regarding his personality and achievements, I rounded on her, my patience snapping. I demanded of her – how, after experiencing one marriage to a shady swindler like my natural father Joachim Stocqueler – how could she have chosen for a second husband a rogue such as Edwin James?

  My mother looked steadily at me for a few moments, and her blue eyes widened as she said quietly, ‘Don’t you understand?’

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘He saved my honour. He saved my life.’ And then she added, ‘He was my hero!’

  To that I found little response. There seemed little more I could say in considering the life of Edwin John James, former QC, MP. So. . . .

  Requiescat in pace.

  Joachim Edgar Stocqueler

  Managing Director

  Stocqueler Shipping Line

  1897

  By the same author

  Design for Murder

  Dead Ringer

  Breaths of Suspicion

  The Arnold Landon Novels

  Shadowmaker

  Dragonhead

  Grave Error

  Headhunter

  The Ways of Death

  Dead Secret
/>
  An Assumption of Death

  The Ghost Dancers

  The Shape Shifter

  Suddenly as a Shadow

  Angel of Death

  A Short-Lived Ghost

  The Cross Bearer

  Bloodeagle

  A Wisp of Smoke

  The Devil is Dead

  Men of Subtle Craft

  A Trout in the Milk

  Most Cunning Workmen

  A Gathering of Ghosts

  Goddess of Death