‘I can’t remember why it happened,’ says Christina. Accounts differ: some say that it was an argument over what channel was showing on the television in the bar, some that it was during a row about sex discrimination. Whatever the reason, it did the unforgivable thing of making private emotion into a public display. ‘She threw a glass of wine in this girl’s face, and called her a tart, I remember that. I think she thought she was eyeing John. You can imagine, everybody was talking about it.’ It was a brief flash of fury, a sudden crack of a bar in the gilded cage. One can understand it, just as one can comprehend the compulsion to follow Lucan to the club every night. But this silly incident of the wine, which took place in 1972, was the sharp irruption of a slow, subterranean accretion of frustration. Not long afterwards came the separation of the Lucans, followed by the sequence of events that led to that other and much greater irruption, on 7 November 1974.
Up until 1972, the façade had been maintained. The evenings at the club had continued, as did the glamorous holidays: Venice, Rome, Monte Carlo (where the gamblers decamped in July, when the Clermont closed). Appearances were kept up: the invitation to this world read black tie and Balenciaga. But the marriage between these two unsuited, uncertain people, each utterly incapable of giving the other what they needed, grew steadily grimmer. So too did Lucan’s gambling. His life became a straitjacket that grew ever tighter as he chafed against it. If only they had bitten the bullet and cut loose from each other! Instead they ground on together, walking into the Clermont like two white-faced automata: the stilted chat over the vodka martini, the stiff and joyless dinner, and then the illusory escape of the tables. The elegant, exigent club became the terrain on which the Lucans fought out the Strindbergian battle of their marriage. Beneath the formalities, tension tugged like a wire thread in the air between them, snaking its way up the golden staircase into the chemmy room. He was defying her by gambling; and, in his mind at least, she was defying him by watching, her baleful silence simultaneously urging him on and mocking his obsession.
The Lucan myth has it that the deterioration of the marriage was entirely his doing. Veronica herself later said: ‘I had to be an obedient wife. If I did something he disapproved of, he would send me to my room to reflect on the errors of my ways.’21 According to Roy Ranson she became alarmed by Lucan’s habits, ‘more aware of the perceptible shift in her husband’s attitudes and behaviour’; meaning that he was growing ever more reactionary and immovable, as if the façade had become part of his very substance. And then – again according to Ranson – Lucan reverted to type in the most terrifying fashion. He began treating Veronica as if she were mad, and telling his friends and family that she was mad. It was ‘a vicious and unrelenting campaign to brand her insane’. This accusation is at the heart of the myth, and has been accepted as truth for the past forty years.
Except that, once again, there is another side to the story.
The police knew that Veronica, upon whose word their case depended, had a history of instability. Their explanation was to blame her husband for making her that way. As one of the investigating officers now says: ‘She was difficult. Some of the things she said…! You couldn’t be sorry for her or she’d eat you for breakfast. But she wasn’t all bad. She was pushed into madness.’ In other words, the fault had been Lucan’s. It was the gentlemanly behaviour of the supreme non-gentleman.
Yet the idea that Lucan tried to send his wife mad is, when one thinks about it, quite ludicrous. It is pure Grand Guignol. Could anybody possibly believe such a thing, except of a man like the Lucan of myth? ‘It must have been around the late 1960s when Lucan first decided that his wife had to go,’ speculated Ranson, with an air of faux-sagacity. His reasoning, or best guess, is that Veronica’s complaints against her husband’s gambling had become unbearable, and that therefore she had to be stopped. At this point Lucan was not considering murder, merely stating that she was off her head. Murder came later.
It is attested, for instance by Stephen Raphael, that Veronica did complain about Lucan’s gambling. She herself later referred to her understandable concern about provision for the children’s future.22 She also said: ‘I should have been more extravagant. He wouldn’t have had so much money to waste on gambling. I should have insisted on designer dresses;’23 slightly baffling remarks given the couple’s high-end lifestyle. Part of the problem, in fact, was that Lucan gambled in order to maintain it. His ambition, in so far as he had one, was to live like a lord.
Yet in her first interview after the murder, given in January 1975 to the Daily Express, to whom she was under contract, Veronica said something quite different:
I never complained about him being out so late. After all that usually meant he was bringing home more for the family. On the good days there would be a trip to Cartier for me and a handsome present. It could amount to £4,000 or more. I still have the diamond bracelet he bought there for me… I have never known anyone so generous.24
So Ranson’s theory, that Lucan was desperate for his wife to shut up and let him get on with his gambling, is only part-supported. And what exactly was he achieving, anyway, by trying to send her mad? It was not as though he could really behave like Earl Ferrers, or like Mr Rochester, and keep her stashed away somewhere. A stay in an institution would be of limited length.
It could be said that Lucan’s objective was to prove Veronica an unfit mother in a subsequent custody case. But he began expressing concerns about her condition in 1967, and the couple did not actually separate until the start of 1973. This was an extraordinarily long game to play, for a man who increasingly enjoyed the snap, crackle and pop of chemin-de-fer. It could also be said that he behaved out of straightforward sadism, that he was exacting revenge upon her for being the wrong sort of wife. But why, after nearly four years of average-to-miserable marriage, would this really rather arcane idea have occurred to a not especially imaginative man? Why not leave at once, rather than waiting six years?
The reason could, of course, have been something altogether simpler, although this seems never to have occurred to the mythmakers. Lucan was telling the truth, as he saw it. By 1967 Veronica was – in her husband’s view – giving the strong appearance of needing treatment, and he tried to get it for her. Simple as that. Why was it so difficult for the police to consider even the possibility that Lucan was not, in fact, concocting stories about Veronica’s mental state? That he was not taking her to psychiatric clinics for the fun of it: it wasn’t much fun, after all? Because any suggestion that Lucan had done these things from genuine motives would have blown an almighty hole through the police version of events.
Veronica herself later stated that she had suffered post-natal depression, which first manifested itself after Frances was born in 1964 and recurred with her two subsequent babies. ‘I felt less and less well with each child,’ she said. ‘These days I would have been given the right medication and got over it.’25 This, according to the police, was the seed from which sprang Lucan’s devilish plot to treat her as insane. Yet in a bizarre contradiction Ranson wrote that Lucan had at first been sympathetic to Veronica, but after the birth of George in 1967 he ‘proved unable to cope’ and told friends that she was behaving oddly: this may not have been perfect uxorious behaviour, but it does not equate to seeking to send her mad.
Her sister Christina wholeheartedly agrees that Veronica had a bad time after the births of her children. She also states, firmly and from intimate knowledge, that the difficulties began earlier. ‘There had been psychological problems for a long time.’ As James Fox wrote in the Sunday Times Magazine, Veronica ‘was suffering from emotional disorders at the age of eight’. In other words, these were not invented by Lucan.
Only prejudice, prejudice against those terrible aristocrats, could engender belief in the story that Lucan wanted to do that. An alternative to the myth, put forward by people who were actually there at the time, and who have no reason to say this now except a frustrated desire to provide some balance, is that
Lucan was not trying to make Veronica ill. He was trying to help her. His efforts were haphazard and incompetent; almost certainly, the treatment was not always of the right kind (although later a psychiatrist would state that Veronica’s condition had been controlled by the prescription of lithium). Nevertheless there is evidence to suggest that, in the first instance, Lucan’s behaviour proceeded from straightforward concern about his wife.
This is not to say that he was an exemplary husband, or that he was anything other than baffled by a complex situation. He did not display the kind of empathy that would be expected today. That was not his nature. He wanted the problem to go away, so that, as Christina says, ‘the two of them could go on together’. He was as out of his depth as Veronica was said to be at the Clermont; he was Prince Charles again, albeit without the mistress, standing in rigid masculine bewilderment as his wife hurled herself against her own distress. And his refuge, gambling, was so much part of the problem that it required ever-deeper plunges to push away reality.
Lucan’s sister Jane says frankly: ‘He might have contributed to Veronica’s illness, because of his lifestyle, which was pretty un-family.’ At the same time, as a doctor, Jane believed that Veronica ‘needed psychiatric care, and she got it. But I don’t know if she had a good psychiatrist, or if John just found somebody who would dope her. I was aware that she was taking a lot of medication. So I don’t know.’ Meanwhile Kaitilin, who lunched with Lucan most Sundays, urged him to take the problem seriously. In the past she had been willing to get psychiatric help for her son. Now she recommended it for his wife. Later, when Kait explained some of this to the police, it was dismissed on the grounds of family bias. Kait, wrote Ranson, ‘was almost as obsessed with her daughter-in-law’s behaviour as was her son’.
Yet Christina, whose loyalties were inevitably conflicted, nevertheless is insistent upon the facts. In this she is supported by her husband, with whom she assumed eventual care of the Lucan children. She does not apportion blame within the original problem: only with how this was later portrayed. ‘The situation was impossible,’ she says, ‘because Veronica wasn’t well. It wasn’t her fault. But that was why it started to fall apart.’
And she had a very acerbic tongue, and when she wasn’t well she would say some really quite cruel things. John had tremendous family back-up – Kaitilin, Sally and William [his younger sister and her husband, the Reverend William Gibbs]. They would all have helped Veronica too. But no one was going to be allowed in. That was the problem. She relied on me, quite a lot, but it was a sort of up and down thing. It was very sad. I mean, I probably knew her better than anybody in the world at that time, including her husband, and I knew she was desperately unwell.
With each child that was born, the situation was getting worse… Veronica was getting absolutely desperate to have a son – and then we were away on holiday, and the call came through that she’d had a boy. And we were so happy, all of us, weren’t we? We thought all her problems will be over now. She adored George. I mean he was absolutely her angel. But in herself she was much worse.
At first Lucan tried to deal with this, ineffectually. He did not behave like Ian Maxwell-Scott, who simply threw up his hands and lived away from home, saying that he could not tolerate his wife’s behaviour. Lucan continued to defend Veronica, as he had done at the start of the marriage. ‘There was a row with somebody at the club, who Veronica said had been rude to her. And he very much stood up for her.’ Then, after George’s birth, he took her to the Priory, the psychiatric nursing home in Roehampton now much favoured by celebrity addicts. ‘That’, says Christina, ‘is what gave rise to the rumour that he was trying to have her put away, or something. But he was taking her to try and persuade her to have treatment.’
With regard to the damning allegations that Lucan sought to make his wife unstable, Christina says:
Well, those would be her allegations, you see. Because the time she’s referring to, trying to be forced, was when he took her to the Priory – and then when they got there she ran away, which I believe is perfectly normal practice if you are unwell. But that was turned into the fact that he was trying to incarcerate her.
‘He says I’m mad,’ Veronica would later tell her sister. ‘He’s made me like that because he’s always trying to shut me up in places.’ She reiterated this belief at her lunches with Zoe Howard. ‘She kept telling me’, says Zoe, ‘that John wanted to put her in – not a lunatic asylum – but have her committed. She was slightly… She was quite clever. She could win over anybody. She was very clever at giving the right impression when needed. You’d feel sorry for this poor woman who’s got this awful husband…’ Despite some misgivings Zoe spoke in Veronica’s favour at the 1973 custody hearing, although their closeness ended after Veronica threw an insult at Greville Howard.
It is said that Lucan’s set did not hide their dislike of Veronica. Certainly that became true. However, as with any marriage where there are opposing camps, there is the crucial question of what had happened, in the first place, to provoke the taking of sides. ‘The press put it that they just didn’t like her,’ says Christina. ‘Nobody. But it’s never been explained perhaps why they didn’t. I mean she was always telling John that people had snubbed her and things, and he believed her. And then I think it must have come as quite a shock to him to realize that he’d been wrong.’
Veronica had never got along with Lucan’s family. Now there were problems with his friends. Daniel Meinertzhagen says: ‘She had an acid tongue.’ Several examples of this are cited, which by definition cannot be verified; although Ranson admits that the Howards, for instance, were ‘alienated’ by Veronica. Incidents are also recalled by the Shand Kydds and by Lucan’s old friend from Eton, who says: ‘I think we were all as supportive as we could have been of Veronica, without being enthusiastic about doing it. Because of John, you know?’ As for the idea that Lucan himself drove Veronica to a state of instability: ‘No, that’s not right. That needs to be said.’
Of course all this comes from the Lucan camp. It might therefore be argued that these people are, even now, when it no longer makes any difference, trying to bolster him; this, after all, is the accusation that has been thrown at them for the past forty years. In fact commentators on the case have generally admitted that there were ‘shocking outbursts in public’, or that ‘Lady Lucan was aggressive and unbalanced [with] a long history of psychiatric illness’,26 although the blame for this always somehow migrates to her husband. Meanwhile the recollections of Lucan’s friends are supported by a complete outsider, the former nanny to the Maxwell-Scott children. She has detailed memories of Grants Hill in Uckfield, even down to the food (crayfish and raspberries) that was served at weekend parties attended by members of the Clermont set, including the Lucans. The nanny, who observed the situation between the couple, recalls that on several occasions ‘Veronica had tantrums, big time’.
Shocking for me, seeing people behave like that, but also trying not to notice because it wasn’t my place to notice. I remember Susie [Maxwell-Scott] saying John is just pushed to the limit. There was palpable friction between Veronica and John. It’s like he almost looked forlorn, despairing, rather than aggressive and confrontational with her. Sort of – oh God. Embarrassed. I think embarrassed.
That, indeed, would be the reaction. Lucan would have been inhibited from confronting the situation; although that would not have been easy for anybody. Until this point his life had been a comfortable, one might say selfish business. He had absolutely no idea what to do when it proved impossible to recapture that golden pleasure in existence. The 3rd Earl of Lucan, whom his great-great-grandson is assumed to resemble, would have simply strode away from it all, as he did from his own much less problematical marriage; but not even an aristocrat could do that anymore. There was money to consider, the welfare of the children, the endless ramifications that normal people had to deal with. The freedom that had gone with unquestioned mastery was no longer Lucan’s to command. What was left was
a set of behaviours, a manner, a demeanour. He was imprisoned in the cage of class. Within the thoroughbred exterior was nothing that could deal with the reality of his marriage. He could not communicate directly with his wife, which meant that she could not with him. Anyway the thoroughbred exterior was what she liked. That does not mean that these people felt nothing: those who keep emotion locked away suffer just as much as those in whom it is on display. But for this couple, for what they may have regarded as the foreseeable future, the only possibility was to go on, spending evenings at the Clermont, spending money, dressing correctly, eating away at each other’s strength and sanity.
When Lucan took Veronica to the Priory in 1967, and she refused to enter the clinic, the ensuing scene culminated in her agreeing to see a psychiatrist instead. ‘I only did it’, she later said, ‘to show him that I would co-operate. He told me that it was the sign of a mentally ill person when they refused to have treatment.’27 She was prescribed lithium, which helped. She was also given fluphenazine, an anti-psychotic drug that caused restless movement: Veronica’s foot would tap relentlessly as she sat on the widows’ bench (the rocking back and forth, which has also been ascribed to the drug, was a longstanding habit). These were terrifyingly powerful drugs to be taking. It was later said that they were ‘partly’ to blame for Veronica’s paranoia and hallucinations. The suggestion, in other words, was that the fault (or some of it) lay with her husband’s malevolent insistence upon treatment.28
Veronica’s third pregnancy, with Camilla, was extremely difficult.29 After the birth in June 1970, she moved between psychiatrists. Among others she saw Dr Ann Dally, a controversial but free-thinking woman whose experience in obstetrics and gynaecology suggests she would have had a grasp on this situation.30 Veronica left a holiday in Monte Carlo to visit Dr Dally, although later she implied that seeing these psychiatrists was a false move directed by Lucan. ‘He was always sending me to doctors, then he would appear personally to pay the bill and ask them questions about me. He considered it his right as my husband to know. I fell into the trap of taking up some of my lonely life with doctors who would talk to me.’31
A Different Class of Murder Page 17