Only two of the protagonists’ papers have been preserved: those of William Henry Wentworth-Fitzwilliam and Lady Frances Doyne, who in 1902 were the eldest son and daughter of the dead Earl. Conceivably, their letters could focus the things that have been blurred: the personalities and motives of the conspirators, the evidence they had to support their charge against Billy. Potentially, they could transform into words the powerful currents of emotional static that we know, from the household records and the reports of neighbours, crackled along the corridors on the eve of the Earl’s funeral.
Frances Doyne was born at Wentworth, and grew up there during the 1850s and 1860s, before marrying Robert Doyne in 1867 and moving to Ireland. Her letters are stored in a large black chest in a garage in Yorkshire.
The chest, the type of patrician travelling trunk that would have taken two footmen to carry, dates from the mid-nineteenth century and contains over a thousand letters, densely packed in tight bundles. Covering the years 1840–1910, the letters have been kept inside their original envelopes. Each bears a stamp, a postmark, and the embossed crests of countless aristocratic families, fashioned in a myriad of colours, or the stencilled name of a famous or forgotten stately home.
The letters are revealing in what they do not reveal. For the years spanning the impostor affair, there are no letters at all. But chillingly, there are scores of empty envelopes. The dates, the postmarks, the family crests, the houses from which they were sent, show that the letters, written by members of the Fitzwilliam family to Lady Frances and her children, could have told the story of this controversial episode in the family’s history. But someone, at some point, has removed them.
Only one letter from the period – a tantalizing handwritten note delivered by a servant at Wentworth on the eve of the late Earl’s funeral – survives in William Henry Fitzwilliam’s otherwise extensive collection. If there was a dark secret behind Billy’s identity, it is one that his generation of the family seemed determined to take to their graves.
Hundreds of millions of pounds rested on the truth about who Billy really was. If, in 1902, when he succeeded his grandfather, it had been proved that he was an impostor, the Fitzwilliam title and fortune, the great estates, the industrial interests and the priceless art treasures would have passed down a different line. As long as a paper trail existed, if Billy really was the Earl who never should have been, as his aunt, Lady Alice, the chief conspirator, believed, his – and his descendants’ – phenomenal wealth would remain vulnerable to other family contenders who could prove that he was not the man he claimed to be.
Here, perhaps, lies the answer to the gaping void in the family papers – the systematic destruction in bonfire after bonfire of the Fitzwilliams’ twentieth-century history.
To find the truth about who Billy really was, or at least his version of it, it is necessary to look at a small bundle of papers – among the very few to have survived – that Billy kept securely in a safe at his house at Coollattin until the day he died.
Tied with a pink silk ribbon, marked with a handwritten label, ‘Controversial correspondence regarding the 7th Earl Fitzwilliam’s Inheritance’, the documents originate from Johnson and Long, the firm of solicitors Billy appointed to defend him against Lady Alice’s attack. The collection, numbering about ten documents, represents only a fraction of what must have been an extensive correspondence. Strict criteria appear to have governed which documents were deemed important enough to be kept. They shed no light on the evidence against Billy; they tell only his side of the story: they are the crucial testimonies of proof he needed to demonstrate that he really was who he claimed to be.
Their interest lies in what they say about the impostor allegation and in what kind of truth they tell.
3
According to Lady Alice, Billy Fitzwilliam was ‘a spurious child’ that had been substituted at birth.
It was an old ruse, one that had been around for centuries. There was even a word for such babies: changelings. In aristocratic and royal circles, precautions to guard against the danger of a substitution had long been in place. The Home Secretary was required to attend all royal births – a practice that continued until 1930, when the late Princess Margaret was born. Aristocrats were equally cautious; at births where the devolution of prestigious titles, great fortunes and vast tracts of land were at stake, interested parties from tangential branches of the family, or their representatives, were in attendance to ensure that a changeling was not introduced.
Convention was broken at Billy’s birth. He was born thousands of miles from Wentworth in the wilds of Canada; there were no other members of the Fitzwilliam family present. Tucked among the bundle of documents Billy kept in his safe is a tattered fragment of newspaper, torn from the pages of The Times, dated 5 September 1872, some six weeks after the event. The circumstances of his birth, as the report reveals, were bizarre:
… near Fort William and on the borders of civilization – but it may well be confessed, of an uncouth and uncomfortable civilization, it may be mentioned that a son and heir to the noble house of Fitzwilliam has been born on the banks of the Kaministiquia River, on the north shores of Lake Superior.
The report continued:
An Ontario paper, in mentioning the birth of the infant, remarks that ‘the cries of the young stranger will be echoed by those of Indian papooses, and the tender sympathy of the tawny squaws in their wigwams with the coroneted mother in her tent, will show a touch of nature which makes the whole world kin. Unless the waves of the democratic revolution surge over England, or this last shoot of an ancient tree be untimely cut off, a native Canadian will succeed to one of the noblest titles, most princely estates, most honourable and honoured names in England and England’s history.’
A ‘stranger’ indeed – a cuckoo in their nest, so Lady Alice and her brothers and sisters believed. Lord Milton, their elder brother, they alleged, had been guilty of a fraudulent and criminal act. Moments after giving birth, and on his instructions, Lady Milton, the ‘coroneted mother’, had been knocked unconscious by chloroform, so that Billy, the son of a white settler, could be substituted for the couple’s newborn baby girl.
Billy’s documents reveal the substance of the conspirators’ allegation, but in the process of selecting which were kept, any letters or legal briefs containing details of the evidence his accusers held to corroborate their charge were deliberately destroyed. It is clear, however, that in 1896, the year the aunts and uncles first alleged that he was an impostor, Billy had no means of refuting it. It seems he himself did not know who he really was; all traces of his entry into the world appeared to have been lost.
His parents had been dead for many years; Laura, Viscountess Milton, had died in 1886, and Lord Milton almost ten years before her. Billy’s birth certificate, a key piece of evidence in his defence, had disappeared. If he was to prove that he was not the changeling his aunts and uncles believed him to be, witnesses to his birth, and his birth certificate, had to be found.
Billy knew he would receive no help from the Fitzwilliam family. From the outset, they had refused to credit his existence. Traditionally, the Fitzwilliams had celebrated the arrival of a new heir with lavish parties for tens of thousands of their tenants and employees. When Billy was born, there was silence from Wentworth: no announcement, no acknowledgement even. The British Press limited itself to carrying extracts from Canadian and American newspapers. Clearly the Fitzwilliams’ response had been ‘no comment’; it was as if Billy was being wiped from the family history even as his life began.
In 1896, at the age of twenty-four, Billy, Viscount Milton, was compelled to search for the proof he needed behind his family’s back. He hired a solicitor who also practised as a special investigator – the early-twentieth-century equivalent of a private detective. His name was Thomas Bayliss.
Some years later, Bayliss described his brief. ‘Certain members of the family said the Viscount was not the son of the late Viscount and Viscountess Milton, s
uggesting that he was a spurious child introduced into the bed of the Viscountess … My work as a specialist extended over a period of several years – from 1896 to 1900 inclusive. I was not allowed to make inquiries from members of Viscount Milton’s family, and inquiries had to be made in Canada, the United States and abroad. I wrote many hundreds of letters and consulted very many documents in various parts of the country, with the object of tracing the pedigree of Viscount Milton, and of procuring evidence of his legitimacy.’
Five people, as Bayliss discovered, had been present at Billy’s birth: his parents, Lord and Lady Milton; a midwife called Hannah Boyce; Dr Thomas Millar; and a nursemaid named Tilly Kingdon. In 1900, Bayliss, after a four-year investigation, finally succeeded in tracking down two of them: the doctor and the midwife. Both were asked by Johnson and Long, Billy’s solicitors, to make a statement about the circumstances surrounding his birth.
‘Gentlemen,’ wrote Dr Millar in response to the lawyers, ‘the indisputable facts connected with the birth of Viscount Milton are as follows’:
Sometime in July 1872 – I forget the exact date and have no means of verifying it – the late Viscountess Milton was delivered of a son (the present Viscount Milton), about 9 o’clock or 10 o’clock in the evening at Pointe de Meuron the head of navigation of the Kaministiquia River in a little wooden shanty, 12 miles from Fort William, a Hudson Bay post situated at the mouth of the above-named river in the province or department of Alghany, Canada.
The late Lord Milton, the nurse brought out especially for the purpose of attending her ladyship, and myself as medical attendant, were the only persons present, and no other person except the children’s nurse attended and then only occasionally during the convalescence of her ladyship. As mentioned by you, chloroform was administered, but not to the point of producing complete unconsciousness, only for the mitigation of pain (I add this detail, for I know nothing of the purport or import of your inquiries on this point, so have thought it better to be quite explicit).
The child’s name, date of birth, parentage and other particulars etc were recorded by the Governor of the Fort in the district court, and the birth was also made the subject of an article in the Toronto Globe. My intercourse with Lord and Lady Milton extended over a course of 4 or 5 years during which time, with few intermissions they were under my daily observation. Excepting a Catholic priest and the household of the fort, there were no white people for many miles around, consequently no white women or children ever visited us, our only visitors were Indians – for the most part patients of mine – black flies and mosquitoes and plenty of them.
Hannah Boyce’s statement, sworn before a Commissioner of Oaths in London, concurs with Dr Millar’s:
While we were at Pointe de Meuron Lady Milton on the 25th [sic] of July 1872 gave birth to a son. I delivered her. Just at the last pains Dr Millar came into the room and gave her a little chloroform. I was the first who saw and handled the child and there is absolutely no doubt it was a male child. While we were at Pointe de Meuron there were no other white people there, only Indians.
Both Boyce and Millar categorically refute each of Lady Alice’s allegations: Viscountess Milton had given birth to a boy, not a girl; she had not been chloroformed to the point of unconsciousness at any point during, or after, labour; a ‘changeling’ could never have been substituted because, in an area populated by Indians, there were no other white babies for miles around.
The two testimonies leave no room for doubt. Billy was clearly who he claimed to be: the legitimate heir to the 6th Earl’s title and fortune. His case seems cut and dried.
But was it?
There are some strange anomalies in Billy’s documents.
In January 1901, after Hannah Boyce had made her statement in London, she sent Mr Barker, Billy’s solicitor, a ‘small cutting’ from, as she claimed, ‘an old diary written on the day of Lord Milton’s birth’. The entry, just one sentence, read:
1872 July 26 – the first cry from a lovely boy gave joy to each of our little party in the lonely forest where no other white persons ever live.
How fortuitous that a line written thirty years previously should so succinctly inform the reader of two of the points Billy’s lawyers were so anxious to hear. The handwriting is shaky and spidery, more obviously that of a sixty-eight-year-old than that of the thirty-eight-year-old Boyce would have been in 1872. The diary entry is dated 26 July, yet oddly, and evidently written with the same pen and at the same time, ‘1872’ is scrawled above it. It is curious that the year was recorded six months into the diary: on the original document, someone has put a large cross in pencil beside ‘1872’, as if they too found it odd. Was Hannah Boyce telling the truth or was she perhaps a little too eager to please?
Among Billy’s documents there is a letter from Hannah Boyce to Billy’s solicitor, Mr Barker, which shows that she was paid £5 for her testimony; not personally by Billy, but through Barker. It was a lot of money to a village midwife, as she then was – the equivalent of a year’s wages.
Twelve years later – in 1913 – Billy would pay her again. More than a decade after he had become the 7th Earl Fitzwilliam, Hannah, who had fallen on hard times after a street hawker had swindled her of her life savings, sent his wife, Maud, a letter, begging for her help:
Dear Lady Countess Fitzwilliam will you please excuse me being the old nurse of Lady Milton I trust you will pardon the liberty I am taking writing. It is now very many years I well remember being sent to 4 Grosvenor Square to see the Countess Fitzwilliam, she that engaged me to travel to Canada with Lady Milton as her nurse and midwife. Neither shall I ever forget the joy of Lord and Lady Milton at the birth of a son. As you do not know who I am I will remind you of my calling on you at the Castle Ryde. I gave you an advertisement I had cut from a Canadian paper of the birth of the present Lord Fitzwilliam. Mr Raymond Barker seen me several times as I went to London and signed an affidavit for which he gave me five pounds at that time. I never thought I should ever require help I am now over 80 years old I have been ill for several months I am getting better but cannot get strength. I have worked very hard helping the poor mothers in the village over their confinement. Four years ago I lost all our life savings leaving us with only the old age pension to depend on. I can only appeal to your sympathy if you could help me a little just now I should be most grateful. Again apologizing for writing to you it is the first time I ever wrote a letter asking any one to give me help I am very sorry to do so now. I remain your humbl [sic] servant, Hannah Boyce.
Maud showed the letter to Billy; wary of sending money directly to Hannah, he wrote a short note to Mr Barker: ‘Lady Fitzwilliam has received the enclosed from Mrs Boyce, I have not allowed her to send anything as I thought it safe to leave that matter in your hands. Will you send £5 or £10 on my behalf.’
Quite why Billy ‘thought it safe’ to leave the transaction to Mr Barker is unclear. Perhaps it was because he doubted the credibility of her original statement, and did not want to be seen to be paying her, as if she were a bought witness.
One further inference remains to be drawn from Billy’s documents.
On 10 March 1902, Thomas Bayliss, the solicitor and special investigator hired by Billy between 1896 and 1900, appeared before the Lord Chief Justice at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, charged with professional misconduct. Billy, who three weeks earlier had succeeded to his grandfather’s title and fortune, had instigated proceedings to have Bayliss struck off the rolls.
There had been a serious falling-out between the peer and his private detective. On the face of it, the dispute appears to have been about money. Billy accused Bayliss of embezzling £1,500, claiming he had submitted ‘fictitious’ invoices to account for the stolen money. Bayliss argued that the invoices, far from being fabricated, represented his charges for the special investigation into Billy’s legitimacy, conducted over a period of four years.
The judge ruled that Bayliss had submitted a ‘fictitious claim’ for his
work. Bayliss lost the case; he was found guilty of serious professional misconduct and struck off the rolls. The assumption, from the published court report, and the verdict in the case, is that Bayliss was corrupt; more crucially, the implication in the judge’s ruling was that the ‘strange allegations as to Earl Fitzwilliam’s identity’, as one newspaper referred to the case, were a figment of Bayliss’s imagination.
Bayliss may have been guilty of some form of embezzlement, but Billy’s documents show that what he said in court was true. He had investigated Billy’s legitimacy, and he had played an important part in procuring the evidence necessary to rebut the impostor charge: moreover, a letter from Johnson and Long shows that in 1900, Bayliss was the lawyer responsible for coordinating Billy’s defence in anticipation of a legal challenge by the Fitzwilliam family. Bayliss had, as he claimed in court, submitted a detailed brief to Billy’s barrister, Mr Butcher. Writing in November 1900, Billy’s solicitor attached a note to the brief: ‘In lieu of the questions submitted by Mr Bayliss’s case, Counsel is requested to advise Lord Milton what steps he should take in order to guard against any attack such as is suggested on the part of certain members of his family.’ Intriguingly, neither Bayliss’s brief nor Mr Butcher’s response has survived among Billy’s collection of documents; they have been pruned. The supposition has to be that both documents contained negative information, possibly details of the evidence on which Lady Alice’s allegation was based.
Oddly, the £1,500 pounds at issue (the equivalent of around £105,000 today) was money that Billy had already made available to Bayliss. It is unlikely that he would have advanced such a large sum had he not been anticipating a costly and difficult investigation, involving inquiries abroad. Though a sizeable figure, it was not a huge amount to a man who had recently inherited £2.8 million, or £3.3 billion at today’s values; so why would Billy want to quibble, and so publicly, over what for him was a relatively small sum?
Black Diamonds: The Rise & Fall of an English Dynasty Page 3