The Spy Who Painted the Queen

by Phil Tomaselli

  ACC

  Otherwise they look on you as a traitor?

  PAL

  Yes.

  ACC

  How did those letters from Baron Forster come?

  PAL

  Probably one or two through the ordinary post. They were always written in French.

  ACC

  Where were they written?

  PAL

  Once he sent me a postcard with a picture of his estate in Hungary and that was written in Vienna. He was here a year before the war broke out.

  ACC

  I suppose the letters came through Switzerland?

  PAL

  I do not know.

  ACC

  How did they actually reach you?

  PAL

  From the Dutch Minister. I think the very first letter which reached me came through his wife. He has a son who was in Switzerland with his wife and he said ‘My wife will forward you this letter.’ That was the only letter I received from him via Switzerland.

  ACC

  I suppose it was rather painful for you to be accused of being a traitor to Hungary where you had an established reputation. It would be very convenient for you to have a dual nationality.

  PAL

  I never thought of that. I am a British subject and my five sons are British.

  ACC

  I am going to suggest to you that you have in your mind the idea of resumption of Hungarian nationality after the war.

  PAL

  I do not believe I have.

  ACC

  I think you have expressed that wish in a letter.

  PAL

  I do not remember ever having expressed a wish like that.

  ACC

  It would be a solution to all your difficulties in Hungary.

  PAL

  I never thought of that.

  ACC

  You wrote a letter on the 30th of May to a friend in Switzerland and in that letter you said that you would like to recover your Hungarian nationality. Of course you may have said that with the object of tempering down this storm against you in Hungary.

  PAL

  To whom could I have written that, because I have no friends in Switzerland? Could I have answered the letter to Baron Forster in Switzerland?

  ACC

  You do not keep copies of your letters, do you?

  PAL

  No.

  ACC

  Did you hear from Baron Forster in May of this year?

  PAL

  Probably. I think I had a letter from him this year.

  ACC

  Do you keep your letters?

  PAL

  I keep all my letters. Mr Williams was asked to look after my papers. He is a chartered accountant.

  ACC

  What is his address?

  PAL

  Somewhere in the city – I do not know where.

  ACC

  Where would you put all your letters?

  PAL

  They are in my house at 3 Palace Gate. I left a key there.

  ACC

  I suggest that it was in a letter to Baron Forster that you intimated that you would like to recover your Hungarian nationality.

  PAL

  I do not believe that I have written such words: my feelings are such that it would be impossible for me to do so. If I was a single man it might have been easier, but I could not play such a game on my children.

  ACC

  It is not suggested that you would alter your sons’ nationality or even your own.

  PAL

  They accuse me of being a traitor to my country – I have all these letters – Baron Forster is on my side.

  ACC

  As a matter of diplomacy with the Hungarians you might have intimated that in your letter.

  PAL

  I do not think so. I do not know what they feel about me in Hungary. In my brother-in-law’s last letter received about three weeks ago, he says that a man whom I knew many years ago – a restorer of old modern pictures – came to him and said ‘I knew your brother Philip, but I have had nothing to do with him for a number of years. They have decided to put his pictures among the foreign artists.’

  ACC

  Did your letters from Baron Forster come through Madame van Riemsdyk?

  PAL

  Yes.

  ACC

  And probably through the Legation Bag?

  PAL

  One or two probably.

  ACC

  I suppose you answered them by the same medium?

  PAL

  Yes.

  ACC

  How many letters do you think you have written to Baron Forster all together?

  PAL

  Five, six or possibly seven. I am not sure.

  ACC

  You said just now that you sent through the Legation Bag altogether about six, so I take it those are the six. As a matter of fact none of the Forster letters came by post.

  PAL

  I gave him the address to send them to Madame van Riemsdyk.

  ACC

  They came through the Legation Bag?

  PAL

  I cannot say if they all did.

  ACC

  I suggest to you that they all went through the Legation Bag.

  PAL

  It is probable. I will not say yes or no.

  ACC

  I suggest to you that that was the reason you used the Legation Bag in order to send letters to Baron Forster in Vienna.

  PAL

  Yes, I was invited by Madame van Riemsdyk to do it.

  ACC

  But why did you not say so the first time we got on to the subject this morning? You said they were all ordinary letters, and suggested they were letters to your family.

  PAL

  I have been so much irritated already. I showed them all the letters. I take it for granted you know all about me.

  ACC

  It is a very serious matter. Here you are communicating with an enemy through a Legation Bag.

  PAL

  My conscience is absolutely clear.

  ACC

  Your conscience may be clear, but my mind is not clear at all about this.

  PAL

  I am very sorry about it. I did it in good faith.

  Thomson then raised the subject of sending information to the enemy and began to worm out to whom it was sent and who Madame G was:

  ACC

  I will put this to you – you wrote on the 30th of May sending certain information and saying that you would like to recover your Hungarian nationality.

  PAL

  I send information? What information?

  ACC

  I am putting the question to you – political information on the state of the country.

  PAL

  Never in my life have I mentioned even to my brother about the war.

  ACC

  Did Baron Forster in any of his letters say anything to you about the treatment of prisoners of war in France?

  PAL

  I do not remember Baron Forster or anyone else doing so. No, I know nothing about it. I have never corresponded about the war at all.

  ACC

  Did he write to you on the ardent desire in Hungary for peace?

  PAL

  I do not remember – I possess all his letters.

  ACC

  He was going to put forward for you the claim that you had rendered services to the Hungarian government – of course that might be in the way of paintings and so forth.

  PAL

  It is very difficult for me to talk of my own merits, but I have all honours which an artist can possess in Hungary, in Austria and, I may say, in Europe, and I received the French Legion of Honour, about thirteen years ago. I received all the high prizes before I was introduced for this Legion of Honour.

  ACC

  When you wrote to Baron Forster what did you put on the letters?

  PAL

  ‘To His Excellency Baron Jules Forster’. Pro
bably one time I would put ‘Member of the House of Lords’ etc etc.

  ACC

  What address?

  PAL

  I write to his address in Budapest.

  ACC

  Was there no intermediary address in Switzerland?

  PAL

  No.

  ACC

  I suggest to you that you have received a letter addressed from Geneva.

  PAL

  That was probably from Madame Michaels who lives there with her daughter. As I mentioned before, I received one letter from Baron Forster through his wife who was staying in Switzerland with her son. No other letters came from Switzerland, except one of my brother-in-law’s to a firm, which I never used. Then I received through Switzerland those two letters, as I told you, from Madame Michaels.

  ACC

  Did Madame Michaels mention anything about the recovery of your Hungarian nationality?

  PAL

  No, we [are] not on sufficiently familiar terms for that.

  ACC

  I suggest to you that you did receive a letter from Geneva dealing with the question of your nationality. Who was it from?

  PAL

  I do not remember. I received no other letters than the ones I have mentioned. I sent a letter to my sister Rosa two or three days ago which I put in an envelope. Sometimes I leave her letters without an envelope, because my brother gives it to my sister. She sent me her address in Budapest, so I put it in an envelope addressed to her.

  ACC

  I am speaking now of the letters to Baron Forster.

  PAL

  They were sent in an envelope addressed to him to Madame Riemsdyk and she would forward them by post. She told me she sent them on by post. Once or twice she was kind enough to send a telegram – when my mother died for instance. We sent her £2 or £3 for the expenses and she sends the letters registered.

  ACC

  I put it to you that in one of your letters you wrote to somebody abroad, you sent a true picture of the situation in England – the political situation.

  PAL

  Never in my life.

  ACC

  Therefore if anybody wrote to you thanking you for this report they would be trying to lead you into a trap?

  PAL

  Nobody wrote to me about it: nobody asked me about political matters.

  ACC

  Has anybody written to you in Hungarian from Switzerland?

  PAL

  I do not remember if that letter from my brother-in-law was written in Hungarian: he sent the first letter via Switzerland.

  ACC

  Who was the Duchess de Guise?

  PAL

  She died about 13 or 14 years ago and the Duke is married to a second wife who is Italian.

  ACC

  Do you visit the Duchess de Guise when you are in Paris?

  PAL

  I live there; we are the most intimate friends.

  ACC

  Could anybody in correspondence with you have referred to her as ‘Madame G’? Could you in any of your letters to people abroad have mentioned the Duchess de Guise?

  PAL

  Now I remember. You asked me if I had a friend in Italy. I had two letters during the war from Madame de Martino, whose portrait I painted before the war.

  ACC

  I do not think that is the thing. I was wondering whether in your correspondence you ever mentioned the Duchess de Guise as Madame de Guise in the French fashion.

  PAL

  No. There are no other people with whom I have been in correspondence.

  ACC

  Is Madame de Guise pessimistic about the war?

  PAL

  I do not know. My friend never wrote about the war: nor did I have any correspondence with his wife.

  ACC

  Do you happen to know Madame Carlin, the wife of the Swiss Minister here?

  PAL

  No, but I met him once.

  ACC

  You knew he was married?

  PAL

  I met him once, that is all: I never met her.

  ACC

  Do you know anybody named Madame Gompertz, the daughter of an Austrian banker?

  PAL

  No.

  (Some letters and a diary were handed over for investigation and Mr László was asked to leave the room for a few minutes)

  On his return, Thomson showed De László great consideration by allowing him to go back to his studio and work:

  We cannot consider this matter as cleared up in any way, but I do not want to upset your arrangements this afternoon, so I want to put this to you, that you should go and lunch now where you like, but that you should go with Inspector Parker: for I must be in a position to say that you have not been out of sight of an officer. Further, that Inspector Parker should be about your studio this afternoon and you must undertake not to use your telephone. Will that suit your wishes? The only alternative is a very unpleasant one in view of what has happened. We have definite information that you have been conveying information to the enemy, and that of course is a matter for which under ordinary circumstances, I have no choice but to put you under arrest. I do not want to do that in this case until we have gone a little further into the matter, so I am suggesting this as a middle course, that you should go out and have lunch and keep your appointment, and come down here again just after five.

  A watch was placed outside De László’s studio. Just in case.

  At 5.30 p.m., De László returned and the questioning continued. He was asked about an erasure in his diary for 30 May 1917 and whether this might be connected with the letter he hotly denied he had sent to Geneva. His reply was that it would have concerned a sitter who had cancelled and this was his usual practice in such cases ‘to keep my book tidy’. After further questions relating to diary entries that De László said related to other sitters or about people with whom he had lunched, Thomson launched into the use of the diplomatic bag, following a question about whether De László knew Mr van Swinderen, the Dutch Minister in London. De László admitted to having met him only once before the war, to having lunched with him, at van Swinderen’s invitation, a couple of months before the interrogation, and to having invited him to attend a house party for his friends the Raemaekers. Asked how he had been able to persuade him to let him use the diplomatic bag on the basis of so casual an acquaintance, De László said that he never really knew it was the diplomatic bag. At the start of the war he had contacted Madame van Riemsdyk asking her to be his intermediary in Holland, but he did not know how her letters came and it was on her suggestion that he had gone to van Swinderen, and he had taken her letter to him personally. After that he had taken a couple personally, but usually he sent them by hand.

  Thomson then announced, ‘Now, I suppose you have gathered that we have been seeing some of your correspondence for some time.’ De László said he had realised that, and Thomson immediately said, ‘I am going to read you a letter in French, it is a French translation of a letter, because the original was not written in French. Then I will ask you whether you have received the letter. It was written to you at 3 Palace Gate.’ The letter of 14 June was then read to him (the one that mentioned his report was ‘of the highest importance’).

  De László’s response was emphatic: ‘I have never received that letter, it cannot have been addressed to me. I do not know who can have written it; nor have I ever written anything about those things.’ Thomson then told him it was believed that he had used the bag rather more than five or six times and De László admitted that each envelope may have contained more than one letter, perhaps two or three. Thomson reiterated he meant more than five or six sendings, then suddenly announced, ‘I think it is right to tell you that we have further information to this effect that in those letters you gave the exact date of the loss of English ships, the figures and statistics relative to the critical situation on account of the mines, and particularly the gossip about the King’s view of the war.’ This was mate
rial which, if correct, could lead to the death penalty, and De László immediately replied, ‘I do not understand it; I never wrote anything concerning the war.’ When pressed over whether he had written anything about peace, he said he may have mentioned to his brother that he hoped there would be peace, but stressed he had never written to anyone about the war.

  De László was questioned briefly about his Jewish origins and stated that he had destroyed none of the letters he had received. Thomson then returned to the subject of his wishing to regain his Hungarian nationality, as he thought he might have said something with a view to impressing his fellow former nationals. De László then returned (apparently) to the story he had told earlier about the Hungarian he had met at the start of the war. This time he named him as Sbenenyei [sic] and said he had actually been told not to meet him by Baron Forster, but had done so. The man had brought him various pieces he had received from Hungary – ‘unpleasant things’ – and asked him to write something for the Hungarian press in response. De László had written something which he thought would be published in the responsible newspapers, but instead it had appeared in some kind of cheap journal or pamphlet. He certainly didn’t think it implied a desire to get back his original nationality. Thomson also mentioned a letter to De László’s sister, which he had written to her on the death of her son. This, he said, had impressed upon the censor the feeling that he was referring to Hungary as his home. De László denied the impression was intended.