Although Spain was the land of her mother’s birth, she made no reference to this aspect of her heritage in her diary. Nor did she refer in her Spanish diary to the activities of her brothers and sisters. And yet, in one of those curious near-crossings of paths, Henry was in Madrid at around the same time, researching the circumstances of their mother’s marriage at the church of San Millán fifty years before.
On 30 October 1901, Henry’s lawyer presented the Spanish courts with a Denuncia, a declaration that the marriage records in the church of San Millán had been falsified in such a way as to support his claim of legitimacy. In Spanish law at the time of Pepita’s marriage to Oliva in 1851, there had been no civil marriage and no divorce. Marriage was governed exclusively by canon law, with the ceremony performed in church by the parish priest. The only definitive proof of marriage, therefore, was the entry in the register of the parish church where the ceremony had taken place. In 1897, during the action to perpetuate testimony, Spanish lawyers acting for the Sackville family had checked and authenticated the entry in the register of the church of San Millán, which proved ‘a marriage valid and canonical to have been celebrated on the day mentioned between the persons named’. If, however, doubt could be cast on the marriage between Pepita and Oliva, then it might be possible to prove that Lionel had, in fact, married Pepita, and that Henry was legitimate and the heir to Knole.
The Spanish newspapers followed the Denuncia proceedings very closely, as did the press in England and France. The Heraldo was much taken with the way in which ‘the fantasies of romance appear mingled with the realities of life’, of a heroic young man from a distinguished and aristocratic English family who had come to Spain to defend his name and fortune. The Correspondencia also blamed ‘the covetousness which stops at nothing’ of Victoria and her husband, who had conspired to keep Henry out of inheriting Knole. Another newspaper reported Henry’s claim that he had left London for Paris towards the end of 1898 because ‘on several occasions his brother-in-law threatened to poison him’. The Sackville family was worried by the tone of the articles in the French press, too, in which, as Victoria complained, she had been ‘pretty well libelled’.
The Imparcial described how reality had ‘taken the aspect of a romantic novel, recalling the boldest inventions of Alexandre Dumas’, and its account, like the others, was riddled with errors, particularly about the more distant past. In its extravagant tale, Lionel met Pepita in Madrid:
Lord Sackville fell in love with her beauty, and the impetuous advances of his passion meeting with the resistance of pure honour, he offered to the handsome dancer his hand and his fortune. She accepted the offer, the lord and the dancer were validly married, receiving sacerdotal benediction before the high altar of the parish church of San Millán. Pepita Duran abandoned the stage and fulfilling with the most scrupulous fidelity her marriage vows, demonstrated by an exemplary life her love for the man who had elevated her from the humble social position in which she had been born to the lofty and eminent one suitable to the lineage of her husband.
The newspapers, in general, took Henry’s side. But, as the facts emerged, the following sequence of events seemed more likely, and it became clear what Henry, and a distant cousin he had recruited to his cause, had been up to in the spring and summer of 1901. In 1897, a young journeyman printer called Enrique Rophon Ortega, who was then employed at Algeciras railway station, had heard that relatives of Pepita were being sought with the promise that they might be entitled to part of her estate. This, as it happened, was non-existent, and the promise was really no more than an attempt by the lawyers to attract witnesses in the action to perpetuate testimony. As a great-nephew of Pepita’s mother, Catalina (and, therefore, a second cousin of Henry), Rophon thought that he might have a claim to some of this estate. It was not long before he realised that there was no property – the Villa Pepa at Arcachon having been sold years before – but by this time he had entered into a correspondence with Henry. Rophon realised that by helping Henry he might earn an, albeit smaller, share of a far larger prize, the Sackville inheritance, and he began to gather evidence in Spain in support of Henry’s claim. He started to receive money from Henry ‘to make investigations relative to the marriage which was alleged to have taken place’ between Lionel and Pepita, and by May 1901 he was working so hard on Henry’s behalf that he took leave of absence from his employers to devote himself full-time to the collection of evidence. Rophon interviewed some of the people who had given evidence in Gibraltar in 1897 and were now living in Madrid, including Oliva’s brother Agustin and his sister Isabel. His hope was to get them to change the evidence they had given in 1897, and to claim that Oliva had never, after all, been married to Pepita, that all those elaborate accounts of their wedding, and their reception afterwards, had been made up.
By 9 June, when Henry arrived in Madrid with an interpreter called Albert Lens, who ran a translation bureau in Paris, Rophon was confident that Henry had a good case. They had new statements from several witnesses, and they had unearthed a number of technical discrepancies in the paperwork associated with the marriage of Pepita to Oliva. They had a certificate stating that the expediente, or file of documents that had to be prepared at the Vicaria, or diocesan offices, before a marriage licence was issued, had been lost. They had evidence that the marriage licence had been signed by a notary other than the one assigned to the job. And, on a third point of procedural irregularity, there appeared to be a blank space beside the marriage entry in the register itself (the 7th Book of Marriages, corresponding to the year 1851, folio 45). Henry and Rophon were all set to take action.
However when, for the first time, they approached a Spanish lawyer, Señor Laguna, with their case, he was not encouraging. Señor Laguna asked Rophon whether he had seen the marriage entry in the church register, whether it was free of erasure or alteration, and whether he had also seen the marriage licence (which would show that the expediente must once have existed). Rophon confirmed that he had seen all of these documents. It was at this point that Laguna advised him that the entry was the definitive proof of the marriage between Oliva and Pepita, and that any other evidence was irrelevant. Rophon and Henry despaired at this advice, and on 26 June, Henry left for Paris. Laguna’s opinion may, however, unwittingly or otherwise, have encouraged them to destroy the marriage licence, and to scratch out the names in the marriage entry and rewrite them. At the very least, such an action would serve to discredit the entry – the most conclusive piece of evidence in the Sackville case – even if it did not actually prove anything else.
Rophon stayed on in Madrid, and by the time Henry returned to his lodgings at the Café Paris in Madrid in October, with a woman said to be his wife, and an interpreter called Camille Lanquine, who was the nephew of Albert Lens, the entry had been clumsily altered – although not in a way that substantively changed the identity of Oliva, or the fact that he and Pepita had got married on 10 January 1851. Someone must also have visited the Vicaria in the summer of 1901, because another archive had been tampered with by the time Henry returned to Madrid. Minor changes had been made to the Book of Entradas, which recorded all the applications for marriage, and preceded the preparation of the expediente. Nothing, however, contradicted the fact that, in December 1850, Oliva and Pepita had visited the Vicaria in order to begin the process that would eventually lead to their marriage.
Henry and Rophon wasted no time in contacting another lawyer, Señor Lastres. They informed him that the marriage entry had been falsified (begging the question of how they knew of the falsification if they had not organised it themselves). And on 29 October, Señor Lastres visited the office at the church of San Millán, where he ‘discovered’ the altered entry, and then the Vicaria, where he looked at the changes to the Book of Entradas. The next day, a Wednesday, Lastres presented the Denuncia to the court on behalf of Henry, formally advising the authorities that records had been falsified and possibly a crime committed.
The Marriage Book Registe
r was impounded, and handwriting experts pored over the entries, examining other parish books of the past few years, to see if they could find writing similar to that which appeared in the falsified entry. In particular, the experts thought that the writing of one Ricardo Dorremocea, who had been a clerk in the San Millán parish office from 1897 to May 1901, resembled the hand which had traced the names above those which had been erased. Dorremocea was duly arrested on 7 November, and placed in solitary confinement.
Suspicion also attached to a former parish clerk, Pedro Cancela, and a warrant was issued for his arrest in Buenos Aires, where it was thought he had fled. It later transpired, however, that although Cancela had left the church in a hurry, he had done so in 1899 – several years before the likely falsification of the register – and his reason for doing so was not that he was fleeing the scene of a crime but because he had eloped with his mistress, leaving his wife behind in Madrid.
The problem with Henry’s case, however, was that other pieces of evidence tended to corroborate the authenticity of the original entry. In the municipal archives, for example, there was an extract from the marriage entry in a record kept for the preparation of statistics. Despite the condition of the book itself – some portions of which were ‘almost destroyed’, the Heraldo reported, ‘we do not know whether by the damp, or by the numerous mice who have their homes in the walls of our municipal house’ – the page containing the extract of the marriage of Pepita and Oliva was found intact and perfectly legible. It was quite clear that these two had been married on 10 January 1851, and, as the Heraldo continued, ‘that some person obliterated them and came back afterwards to rewrite them, perhaps with the idea that the alteration in the entry would raise doubts as to the legitimacy of the marriage’. There was also the fact that Señor Paredes, a Spanish lawyer who had acted for the Sackvilles in 1896–7, testified on 12 November 1901 that he had seen the entry in the marriage register in 1896, at which time it definitely recorded the marriage of Pepita and Oliva. This evidence was confirmed by another lawyer, Alfred Harrison, who had also seen and authenticated the original entry five years earlier.
Henry’s case collapsed. On 8 November, he left Madrid once again for Paris, and on the twelfth, Señor Lastres withdrew over ‘a disagreement between lawyer and judge upon a question of law’. In public, Señor Lastres continued to trumpet Henry’s good faith, but in private he is said to have told the Chief of the Judicial Police that Henry was a pillo (a rascal), and that it was just as well he had disappeared or he would have been put in prison. Although the Denuncia proceedings had collapsed, the fact remained that the marriage entry had been falsified, and the perpetrators not found. Ricardo Dorremocea was released from prison on bail, there being no further evidence against him; proceedings were formally suspended the following year, and Dorremocea was acquitted.
Henry’s weekly allowance, which he had been collecting once a week from a firm of bankers since December 1898, was stopped in November 1901, on the grounds that he had broken one of its conditions by setting foot in Spain. Little more was heard of him until the following year, when Henry’s solicitors, Messrs Osborn & Osborn, informed the Sackville solicitors, Messrs Meynell & Pemberton, that Henry had been making enquiries in Spain and France, ‘with the result that an entirely different complexion will now be put on the case’. He had, for a start, statements from various witnesses who had changed their story since 1897. Henry’s great-aunt, Micaela, for example, wrote to him in January 1902 to say that she had been misled in 1897 into making ‘certain declarations as to the legitimacy of his birth’, and that the lawyers had taken ‘advantage of their ignorance of the language’; otherwise she would never have claimed that Pepita’s children were illegitimate. She now insisted that Pepita and Oliva had never been married, and that their relations had never been other than professional. What she did remember, however, was Pepita’s marriage to ‘Lord Sackville’ in Heidelberg, when she was staying there for her husband’s medical treatment, and how the ceremony was celebrated ‘with great show’.
In July 1902, Henry brought his own action ‘for the purpose of examining witnesses and taking, preserving and perpetuating testimony’, concerning his claim to be the lawful and eldest son of Lord Sackville, and his solicitors signalled their intent to proceed with the matter ‘with every possible despatch’. Henry claimed that when the Sackvilles had brought their action for perpetuating testimony in 1897, it had been done at short notice, and at a time when he did not have the ‘pecuniary means’ to instruct lawyers; that is why he had not had the Sackville witnesses cross-examined in Gibraltar and Arcachon. He now needed to bring a similar action – for the same reason, that many of the witnesses were old and infirm, and their evidence needed to be taken before it was lost for ever. He particularly wanted to refute the provisions of a settlement made in June 1890, the month of Victoria’s marriage to Lionel, in which, on the basis that Lord Sackville did not have a male heir, the estate had been disentailed. Under these provisions, his uncle, William Edward, and his sons, would succeed; Victoria would receive an annuity; Victoria’s daughter, Vita, would eventually receive £10,000; and Henry would get nothing.
Despite the loss of his allowance, Henry, his lawyers said, now had the financial backing to bring the matter to a conclusion. Henry continued to send Rophon sums of money – and the odd bottle of medicine – in order to continue his lawsuit and to ‘make the light shine on all that my adversaries have done’.
Where this money came from is not entirely clear. It is likely, however, that Béon was somewhere in the background. At the time of the Denuncia proceedings, the Sackvilles had received a letter from Max’s old schoolfriend from Bordeaux, Joseph Lesnier, who was then in New York trying to find a market for his St Loubès wines. Lesnier referred to an article in the New York newspapers about the case in Spain, and laid the blame firmly on Béon: ‘c’est Henry de B . . . qui dirige cette affaire. Je le considère comme un triste, bien triste personage. He should be grateful to you and yet, instead, he’s blackmailing you. C’est ignoble de sa part . . .’ The Comte de Béon, former confidant and keeper of the Sackville family secrets, had recently married the wealthy Inés-Mercédès Sanz at a high-society, high-Catholic ceremony in Paris, presided over by the papal nuncio, the Archbishop of Baghdad, who discoursed on the distinguished histories of both families and the ‘nombreux services rendus à la France par la famille de Béon’.
In June 1901, Victoria received another letter (written anonymously in French, and sent from Paris), warning her ‘of a great danger which is threatening both your fortune and your position’. A member of her family, ‘who thinks he has a right to all your fortune’, the well-wisher continued, had
found in Paris money and powerful auxiliaries and you are possibly on the eve of great misfortunes. A search has been made in various quarters and compromising papers have been found. I have also heard of more or less mysterious journeys to Spain and Gibraltar . . . If then, dear Madame, you wish to keep your fortune and avoid the insults and scandal of a public lawsuit brought by the 3 remaining members of your family, go as soon as you can to France, try and see and gain to your side Monsieur L’Abbé Estevenet, Vicar of Belmont, near Vic-Fezensac [Gers]. He is the man I have spoken of, who holds all the threads in his hands.
There is a further reference to this mysterious Abbé in a begging letter to Henry, dated March 1902, from his interpreter Camille Lanquine, asking for money – ‘I beg of you to ask for some advance, however small it may be, from the Abbé.’ A decade later, the Abbé, a man of independent means, came briefly to prominence when he accused the directors of La Fédération Catholique de France, an organisation he had founded to raise funds for needy members of the clergy, of fraud. Perhaps his involvement in Henry’s case was an early experiment in speculation in support of a charitable cause. Whatever the case, the backing Henry received from these sources helped to confirm in Victoria a lifelong suspicion of priests.
Another source of funds may hav
e been the translation bureau, run by Albert Lens. Henry used to visit the office in the Place de la Bourse two or three times a week to have his correspondence with Rophon translated. Lens had travelled with Henry to Madrid in June 1901, and his nephew Lanquine had accompanied him four months later, and got to know Rophon very well. It was later claimed by Matias Paulus, another employee of the bureau, that ‘the profits realised by the bureau were utilised in connection with the affair of the inheritance’. Such an arrangement would not have been unusual. Syndicates were often set up to invest in speculative lawsuits, such as disputed succession cases. In a letter to Rophon in 1903, Henry referred to one of these, ‘the affair Humbert Crawford’, that was doing him a deal of harm: so many people had lost money in it but he hoped, nevertheless, to succeed in his own particular venture. Thérèse Humbert had just been tried and sentenced to five years’ hard labour for using a non-existent inheritance, which she claimed had been left her by a phony American millionaire called Robert Crawford, as collateral for large loans. A lot of creditors lost money, and the scandal had given the idea of speculative investment in inheritances a bad name.
In October 1902, after the Denuncia proceedings had finally been closed, Mr Pemberton advised the Sackvilles to go on the offensive and to find out who had altered the entry in the marriage register. He proposed to send Mr Brain to Madrid, where he would be helped by two of the other Spanish-based lawyers who had assisted in 1897, Alfred Harrison, who was now living in Barcelona, and Señor Paredes. Key to this investigation were the respective movements of Rophon and Henry between April and November 1901.
In December 1902, John Brain tracked Rophon down to Algeciras, where he was once again in the employ of the railway company. Mr Brain managed to interview a reluctant Rophon, who admitted that he had been in communication with Henry since 1897. The following day, however, Rophon became even more reluctant, ‘having slept upon it’, and, in view of the justice of his cousin Henry’s case, declined to supply any further information. Henry was very pleased with the way Rophon had behaved with Brain, when he heard about the interview: ‘You answered him well at his impertinent questions. He is such a scoundrel, and doing his best to work up more of his infamies.’ Brain and Pemberton were still no closer to working out who had falsified the register. On 29 December, Mr Brain wrote pathetically from the Hotel de Rusia in Madrid, updating Pemberton on his progress and the substantial costs involved: ‘I am writing this in bed before the translation is begun. I can’t get up to write because there is no one up to light the fire. Please excuse the pencil . . . I am in the position of a Spanish Prosecutor who has arrived in London to investigate a crime which has baffled the Public Prosecutor and Scotland Yard for more than a year.’ He was particularly conscious of the expense of the investigation (£1,250 for him alone over the past five months, and disbursements of £1,200 to Señor Paredes and £400 to Mr Harrison).
The Disinherited Page 17