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To my family
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Dedication
Epigraph
INTRODUCTION: A BRIEF HISTORY OF MURDER, ACCORDING TO SOCIAL CLASS
PART I: THE LUCAN MYTH
PART II: THE STORY
The Lucans
John Bingham
The Clermont
Marriage
House Blue
PART III: THE INVESTIGATION
Murder
The Circle
Solutions
Plate Section
Endpaper
APPENDICES
Appendix I: Aristocratic Murderers
Appendix II: Domestic Murderers
Appendix III: The Lucan Family
Notes
Acknowledgements
Selected Bibliography
Index
Picture Credits
About this Book
Reviews
About the Author
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
‘Law! What law can search into the remote abyss of Nature, what evidence can prove the unaccountable disaffections of wedlock? Can a jury sum up the endless aversions that are rooted in our souls, or can a bench give judgment upon antipathies?’
GEORGE FARQUHAR, The Beaux’ Stratagem, 1707
INTRODUCTION
A Brief History of Murder, According to Social Class
‘Anything a Wimsey does is right and Heaven help the person who gets in his way.’
DOROTHY L. SAYERS, Strong Poison, 1930
Do earls commit murder?
It is an incendiary question, in a country obsessed with class. Why shouldn’t a peer of the realm be a murderer, the same as anybody else?
Why not indeed; yet murdering is something that they seldom do.
They have slaughtered to achieve advancement, of course, since historically that is how advancement was often achieved. An example: Richard Bingham, a soldier of fortune whose descendants became the Earls of Lucan, defended Ireland for Queen Elizabeth I and earned a knighthood for his savage efficiency. Peers have also killed by the careless exercise of inherited power. During the Irish potato famine of the 1840s, for instance, the 3rd Earl of Lucan cleared his Co. Mayo estate of poverty-stricken tenants, serving 6,000 processes for eviction, and eventually caused the workhouse gates to close in their ‘death like faces’.
But domestic murder: no.
In the last 500 years just eleven titled people*1 have been tried for murder in England, two of them twice. A twelfth person, the 7th Earl of Lucan, was named guilty in 1975 by an inquest jury.
Of the eleven who faced trial, six were convicted of murder, and four of manslaughter. All were tried ‘by their peers’; meaning by other titled persons. This right continued until 1948, as did the tradition of the silken rope, with which aristocrats could be hanged more soothingly than with hemp. A further right was ‘privilege of peerage’, which could be pleaded by those found guilty of a first offence. It did not extend to murder, but it allowed a peer to walk free from a lesser charge.
When, therefore, the 7th Earl of Pembroke was convicted of manslaughter in 1678, he got away with it. The Lord High Steward warned him that ‘his lordship would do well to take notice that no man could have the benefit of that statute but once’, but Pembroke carried on exactly as before. In 1680 he was found guilty of murder, and received a royal pardon. His status as an earl clearly brought him an outrageous degree of favour. This did not extend to every aristocrat: three have been hanged for murder in the last 500 years. Yet Pembroke’s treatment was far more typical. So too was the nature of his crimes. Both the deaths for which he was indicted were the product of boredom, booze and a belief that he could do whatever he liked at any given moment and too bad if somebody got hurt along the way. This, in murder and in much else besides, was the aristocratic way.
Pembroke’s sense of entitlement defined him. He lived within his own world, according to his own crazy code of conduct. So too did the 4th Baron Mohun, a posh thug acquitted of murder in 1699 after a drunken duel in Leicester Square; and the 5th Baron Byron, great-uncle to the poet, who in 1765 put a sword through his cousin’s stomach and was let off with a fine. Later Byron shot his coachman. He did so in the manner of somebody taking a pop at a pheasant, just as Lord Pembroke, in 1680, had killed an officer of the watch who happened to be on a street where he was brandishing his blade.
It is unsurprising that the lower orders should have been so frequently the victims of aristocratic murder. In 1760, for instance, the 4th Earl Ferrers shot a man named John Johnson, a steward for his family estate. Ferrers was described as being ‘of ungovernable temper, at times almost amounting to insanity’, although this may, of course, have been simply a manifestation of extreme arrogance. It is very difficult to tell, in these cases, where arrogance ends and lunacy begins.
Ferrers was one of the few who did not get away with his crime. He was hanged at Tyburn, where he was denied the courtesy of the silk rope. This was the last occasion to date on which an aristocrat would be tried and convicted of murder in England. The excitable, damn ye sir passions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had pretty much burned themselves out, although it was not until the last duel was fought, in 1852, that gentlemen would cease their particular kind of terrorizing street violence.
There had been innumerable deaths by duelling, very rarely resulting in any kind of prosecution. Of the handful that were charged, the last was the 7th Earl of Cardigan, who with his hated brother-in-law, the 3rd Earl of Lucan, would later preside over the hundred-plus deaths that occurred during the 1854 Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimean War. Thirteen years earlier, Cardigan had been tried for shooting a fellow officer in a duel. ‘I have hit my man,’ he said. Yet in the House of Lords he was acquitted on a ludicrous technicality: his victim was wrongly named in the indictment, presumably in order to leave a loophole through which Cardigan could slide. ‘In England’, wrote The Times, ‘there is one law for the rich and another for the poor.’
That same year, 1841, the right to plead exemption from justice for a first offence was ended, but nobody really believed that privilege of peerage did not carry on regardless. In 1922, for instance, the public was convinced that Ronald True, a former RAF officer, had dodged the gallows because he was the illegitimate son of an unnamed peeress.
The thirty-one-year-old True had savagely murdered a prostitute in her London flat. His defence of insanity failed, and he was sentenced to death. However, when further medical evidence was presented to the Home Secretary, True was reprieved and sent to Broadmoor; and the public went berserk.
The sense of outrage was class-based. Even as True’s life was being saved, a pantry boy named Henry Jacoby, who had murdered his titled employer, was hanged despite a recommendation to mercy on grounds of youth. As it happened, True’s peeress mother was a creature of myth. He had simply been lucky. Yet the rage against his ‘escape’ from justice, and the collective belief in the hidden powers of privilege, were intense.
The acquittal of Sir Jock Delves Broughton, tried for murder in Kenya in 1941, also tugged at the idea that posh people can ‘get away with things’. Broughton was accused of killing the Earl of Erroll, the lover of his far younger wife. These three belonged to what was known as the Happy Valley set, a collection of beyond-bored white settlers, who slept with each other in between drinking themselves silly: symbols of the deadly decadence of lives in which
nothing is earned.
Although Broughton’s acquittal had not been a foregone conclusion, the idea that this man would hang – a baronet, an old Etonian – never seemed quite real. As the verdict was about to be delivered, the foreman of the jury winked at the defendant and gave him a ‘thumbs-up’ sign.1 Not all the Happy Valley set had rallied to his defence, although generally it closed ranks. And the stepdaughter of one of Broughton’s friends, to whom he confessed murder, kept his secret for almost forty years. ‘I can remember having it drilled into me’, she later said, ‘that a man’s life hung on it and that every time I spoke to the police I mustn’t say anything that might hurt him.’
On 19 June 1975, Richard John Bingham, 7th Earl of Lucan, also 13th Baronet Bingham of Castlebar in Co. Mayo, also 3rd Baron Bingham of Melcombe Bingham and a baronet of Nova Scotia, was named by a coroner’s court as the killer of his children’s nanny. Mrs Sandra Rivett, aged twenty-nine, was bludgeoned to death in the basement of Lucan’s Belgravia house on the evening of 7 November 1974. As there has been no formal sighting of the earl since a few hours after the murder was committed, he has never been brought to trial.
On the face of it the Lucan case followed a tradition of aristocratic murder, in that the earl was pronounced guilty of killing a servant. Except that this was not really the case, since Mrs Rivett was almost certainly not the intended victim. According to the ‘official’ version of events – the one propounded by the police, ratified by the inquest jury, and generally accepted ever since – Lord Lucan killed Sandra Rivett in error, believing her to be his estranged wife Veronica. In other words he had attempted to commit a classic domestic murder; which is something that earls do not do.
Of the eleven titled people tried by their peers, none was accused of a domestic killing. This kind of murder assumed ascendancy in the nineteenth century, along with the middle classes who specialized in it. In doing so they have, like the mad aristos, defined a certain kind of Englishness. The Adelaide Bartlett case, the Croydon poisonings, the cases of Charles Bravo, Madeleine Smith, Florence Maybrick, Dr Crippen, George Joseph Smith, Armstrong, Wallace:*2 these are murders redolent of the parlour and the suburb, of passion among the antimacassars, of small sums neatly folded into life insurance policies. Impossible to conceive anything more different from the flashing, dashing, devil-may-care behaviour of Earl Pembroke and his like.
Domestic murder was a careful little business, for all its terrible riskiness. It was madness, but it looked like sanity. It was murder under wraps, behind curtains, committed most frequently with poison: a secret stream trickled discreetly into cocoa or a tea-time scone. It happened in places like Pimlico and Balham. Unlike aristocratic murder, it was committed by women as well as men. And it was done, typically, to maintain appearances, rather than to wreck them. It sought to retain the status quo by removing the element that threatened it. The brief period in 1910, in which Crippen played happy house with his mistress while his wife lay in the cellar, cut into small and harmless pieces, symbolized the state of unassuming bliss to which the domestic murderer aspired.
Crippen’s is a classic story because it centres upon something that everybody can understand: an unhappy marriage. So too does that of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters. Their love affair culminated, in 1922, in the murder of Mr Thompson. His wife was almost certainly innocent, but she was hanged for complicity. A woman of unusual allure, eight years older than the boy who had clubbed her husband to death, she did not command the sympathy of the Old Bailey. The judge disliked her, on what he called principle. In fact the prejudice against her was atrocious; but it is hard for a courtroom to be free of prejudice. When Crippen’s mistress Ethel Le Neve was tried as an accessory to murder, she was in a position very similar to Edith Thompson with regard to the facts, but her air of poor-little-me vulnerability did her no end of good.
What motivated these murders was an abundance of emotion. But what caused them was lack of money; and the need for it, to keep up a front. Money, in fact, is the key to domestic murder. Crippen could not afford to divorce his wife, so he disposed of her instead. Edith Thompson dreamed of leaving her husband, but did not dare because she feared the loss of respectability. So again the answer was murder. Murder, all too often, was what happened when alternative action was too expensive.
No such cataclysm was necessary when the future 2nd Earl of Lucan fell in love with the wife of the future 12th Duke of Norfolk, formerly Lady Elizabeth Belasyse, a daughter of the Earl of Fauconberg. Freedom, in such circles, could be bought. Lady Elizabeth obtained a divorce in 1794 and married the Hon. Richard Bingham that year; in 1795 he became Lord Bingham when his family was granted its earldom.
That is not to say that there was no scandal. Indeed the scandal was intense. The divorce was the eighteenth-century equivalent of a tabloid sensation, after ‘an action for Criminal Conversation’ was brought by ‘Mr Howard, the presumptive heir to the illustrious house of Norfolk, against Mr Bingham, son of Lord Lucan’. Criminal conversation was a peculiarly droll euphemism, which in essence meant anything but conversation. The Times, nudging and winking like nobody’s business, wrote ‘that Mr. Bingham had paid his addresses to her Ladyship before Mr. Howard had, that she was extremely attached to Mr. B., and that a considerable time after her marriage with Mr. H. this unhappy attachment was again revived’. Lord Howard was awarded £1,000 in damages, but of course the defence could afford to pay. Bingham’s family owned thousands of acres in Mayo; Elizabeth brought to the marriage an estate in Macclesfield.
They could also afford to brazen out the shame. It was not forgotten, but it was absorbed into the sheer scale on which they lived. Nevertheless a criminal conversation action was a horrible business. Was it worth it? The Lucans themselves split after ten years. The earl, who again had the means to escape, moved to Bologna, and eventually married his Italian mistress.
In 1825 it all happened again, unbelievably, when the Lucans’ younger son was named in a crim. con. action brought by Viscount Lismore. Out into the courtroom came all the sordid details: a servant of the viscountess testified to seeing the adulterous pair on a sofa, where ‘their general appearances, and especially the disorder of their dresses, manifested unequivocally the guilty intercourse which had just passed between them’. And so the evidence continued, damaging but not fatally so (Bingham went on to a career in diplomacy). Edith Thompson suffered in a similar way when her love letters were read out at the Old Bailey, but for her the stakes were immeasurably higher.
Bingham’s older brother, the 3rd Earl of Lucan, would also later separate from his wife. He had married Lady Anne Brudenell, sister of the duelling Earl of Cardigan, in 1829. From 1854 they lived apart. Lucan maintained an establishment in Mayfair and at Laleham House, the family residence built by his father on the Thames, some eighteen miles from London. His countess, getting away as far as possible, made her home on the Isle of Wight, with six servants. Living apart could be a civilized business, if money eased the way.
The earl found his own amusements, meanwhile, and continued to do so into old age. A codicil to his will, written when he was eighty-three, made provision for the children of an Elizabeth Anne Powell. And eleven years earlier, in 1872, he had given some intriguing evidence at the trial of Marguerite Dixblanc, a Belgian cook who was accused of killing her French mistress, Marie Riel, at a house in Park Lane.
The nineteenth century saw several cases in which the tables were turned, and servants killed employers. In 1840 a valet, François-Benjamin Courvoisier, was found guilty of cutting the throat of Lord William Russell, son of the Duke of Bedford.2 In 1849 Sarah Thomas battered to death a mistress described as ‘tyrannical, peevish, and violent’; petitions were made for mercy, but to no avail. Like Courvoisier, the girl was hanged. So too was Kate Webster, who in 1879 killed her mistress, Julia Martha Thomas, at a house in Richmond, dropping a box containing body parts from the nearby bridge.3
Webster was a career criminal. Nevertheless the murder she
committed seems to have been born of passion, as surely as if the servant-employer relationship had been a marriage: a final, calamitous explosion at the end of a period of high tension, in which the mere placing of a tea tray with too defiant a ‘clink’ can seem like an act of dangerous rebellion.
So too it had been in April 1872, with Marie Riel and Marguerite Dixblanc. At the inquest for what became known as ‘The Park Lane Murder’, which bore certain resemblances to the crime of which the 7th Earl of Lucan would be accused, a doctor described finding the dead body of Madame Riel, a widow aged forty-two. There had, he attested, been ‘a fearful amount of violence’.
At this time, and indeed until 1977, an inquest jury had the right to name a person whom it judged to be guilty, who would then be committed for trial. The 1872 jury showed commendable scruples before doing this, rather more so than would be shown 100 years later towards Lord Lucan. Eventually a majority verdict was delivered: ‘Wilful Murder against the woman known as Dixblanc.’ At her Old Bailey trial, Dixblanc testified that Riel had started an argument as she was cooking dinner, whereupon she had seized Riel by the throat. Issuing an instant dismissal, Riel taunted her: ‘And what will become of you when you leave here; you will have to go upon the streets.’ Dixblanc replied: ‘I shall not be so long on the pavé as you have been’: an interesting aside. The maid then battered her mistress to death, and hauled the body into the pantry in an attempt to conceal it.
Although Madame Riel’s home, number 13, was relatively small (two servants only at the time of her death), it still seems quite remarkable that she should have been living amid the richissime, between the great town houses of the Earl of Grosvenor and the Duke of Wellington. She did, however, have a gentleman supporter living nearby, another member of the aristocracy: none other than the 3rd Earl of Lucan.
The earl’s friendship with Madame Riel emerged in the most oblique and, in so far as was possible, the most discreet of ways. At the inquest, a maid gave evidence as to how, when her mistress had apparently gone missing, Riel’s daughter had asked her to go for assistance.
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