The Disinherited
Page 20
It was now a year since the death of Old Lionel, and Max was ‘very sad on the anniversary’. But he felt for Victoria, too, capturing those conflicted emotions she felt for her father: ‘How you must miss him, having always lived with him and been by his side. He left us a legacy of trouble, poor old man!’
Although Henry’s claim to the succession crystallised on the death of his father, it took some time for the case to come to the courts. In October 1908, Henry petitioned for an official receiver to be appointed for the income from the Knole estates in Kent, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire and Sussex, while the action – initiated in 1907 – to decide the question of legitimacy was pending. This was, Victoria complained, Henry’s ‘systematic way of nagging at us’. As the judge, Mr Justice Eve, acknowledged, the appointment of a receiver might deprive Lionel of the means to defend his title, ‘doing a grave injustice to the defendant’. Nor did he think that the estates themselves were in any danger, so long as they continued to be administered by the current trustees, and no profits were distributed. In November, after at least one adjournment to allow Henry to go to Paris to visit his sick wife, he dismissed the motion.
Lionel had attended court and spotted Henry and Amalia sitting together, despite the fact that she had claimed she had nothing to do with her brother. Both of them had sworn affidavits declaring that they had always believed that they were legitimate. It also became clear, during the hearing, that Henry’s case would attempt to prove a marriage between her parents ‘by reputation’; that her father had recognised several of his children as legitimate until 1881, when Victoria went to live with him in Washington, and that his position had changed entirely since then. This distressed Victoria on two counts: first, that her mother’s reputation would be tarnished, and second, that ‘the whole campaign will be directed against me’. She was already beginning to hear on the gossip mill, that she had ‘turned Henry out of his inheritance by [her] machinations. I am made out a sort of heartless and clever adventuress.’ Vita, on the other hand, occasionally saw the funny side. In November 1908, she had gone with Violet Keppel to see a new play called The Marriages of Mayfair, which was obviously based on the Sackville situation. ‘It was amusing because it so closely resembles the story of my own case; peer who married a dancer while her husband was still alive, etc.’
As the evidence in support of a ‘marriage by reputation’ emerged, it made Victoria, the new Lady Sackville, feel ‘quite wretched & dread the trial more than ever’. She could not ‘bear to think of all the things they will say against my dear Mother’ and to ‘dread all those unpleasant revelations’ about Pepita’s rackety life just as Vita was coming out as a debutante. Victoria always thought that her husband was a little insensitive about these anxieties of hers; that he did not ‘seem to understand how much I mind my poor mother being made out an impropriety and I want everything to be done to stop throwing mud at her’. Her particular version of her own morals inclined to the prudish (despite her apparent acceptance of her husband’s infidelities and a fondness for off-colour jokes, which she recorded in her diary at the end of each year). She prided herself on living up to the family motto of ‘toujours loyal’, and on not being a flirt, like many of the fast set who surrounded her. And so it was especially difficult for her to be so dependent on evidence that implied her beloved mother had been rather loose.
Messages of support from friends, such as the American tycoon William Waldorf Astor, provided some consolation. ‘I have often thought . . . how anxious & worried you must be,’ he wrote to Victoria during the summer of 1909. ‘It is a venomous & spiteful attack that is made upon you & were the claimant anyone else I should suspect blackmail . . . I have myself passed from one trouble to another all my life . . . I have always found it best to face the music with courage, & this you will do.’ The Sackvilles were also soliciting evidence from former acquaintances of the late Lord Sackville: Lord Weardale, who remembered him at Arcachon; and Sir Hugh Wyndham who was with him in Berlin in 1868, and in Paris in 1871, and swore that Lionel had never introduced Pepita to him or spoken of her as his wife. They also received approaches from people who wanted to sell information, Lionel making a fruitless journey to Arcachon in March 1909 to see a man who had two irrelevant letters from the Comte de Clouet, which he wished to sell for £600.
But the case itself was much delayed. In January 1909, Pemberton told Lionel that ‘Henry wants to put off the case again to take more & fresh evidence abroad; he is maddening with his delays’. He suspected that Henry was beginning to realise just how poor his case was. Eventually, in September 1909, Letters of Request were sent by Henry’s lawyers to the Courts in Madrid, Granada and Valladolid, asking for permission to examine various witnesses in Spain and to collect relevant documents. These included the 1851 marriage entry, depositions from the Denuncia proceedings of 1901, and the record of the withdrawal by the public prosecutor of the criminal case against Rophon and Sanchez in March 1909.
In October, Henry applied for the case to be tried by a jury, in the hope that there would be some sympathy for the underdog. Counsel for the Sackvilles argued that the case should be tried before a judge alone, as it depended upon ‘the critical examination of documents’ and depositions, amounting to 2,000 folios of evidence, collected over the previous fourteen years and taken in Gibraltar, Bordeaux, Arcachon, Madrid, Copenhagen and London. There would be many complicated questions raised as to the admissibility of particular pieces of evidence. But, perhaps most important of all, it was ‘a case which might possibly raise in the minds of certain persons a great amount of prejudice, because it might be said: “Here is a title being taken away from a son and passing to a nephew.”’ Henry’s application was refused.
There seems to have been little action from Henry’s solicitors in following up the Letters of Request. Pemberton, who had believed for some time that the other side were dragging their feet, wrote to Nussey & Fellowes to ‘place on record the position which I find here at the present time as regards the Letters, and I shall use it at the proper time for the purpose of opposing to the utmost any application which the Petitioner may make to the Court in England to postpone the date appointed for the trial, on any ground connected with the Letters of Request referred to’. As predicted, Fellowes did indeed apply for the trial to be postponed from 22 November on the grounds that Henry had not had time to assemble the witnesses and evidence sought in the Letters of Request, and the case was postponed to February of the following year. ‘It is hard on poor Lionel, but I am glad the evil day is put off,’ wrote Victoria. Lionel’s brother Charlie, however, was increasingly frustrated: ‘Damn. Damn. Damnation . . . What awful bedints the other side are. I saw a fat dirty man who might be a Frenchman there, no doubt fat as a result of being “cuisined”.’
As the case approached, there was a last attempt at a face-saving deal by Amalia. In November, she met Lionel at her lodgings in Artillery Mansions, Victoria. She was thinking of getting married and suggested a compromise whereby Henry’s legitimacy would be acknowledged, in return for his giving up all rights of succession. Lionel dismissed this as a ‘ridiculous proposition’, so confident was he now of winning. Flora, on the other hand, was all set on revenge. One of her letters addressed to Henry as Lord Sackville at Hill Street fell into the hands of Lionel and Victoria. In it, she offered Henry 100,000 francs if he needed it, with a further 50,000 available, in order to help him ‘à les écraser entièrement . . . N’oublies pas de me trouver un service d’auto très chic à Londres to take me backwards and forwards from the Courts.’ A pathetic postscript begged her brother not to forget to send her some postcards of Knole. Flora was by now set on the path that the rest of her life would take. All her relationships, including a couple of broken engagements, seemed to founder on the twin problems of money (not enough of it) and religion (Flora’s divorce made remarriage difficult); her doubtful legitimacy further complicated matters. According to Mrs Cameron, one of the Sackvilles’ witnesses, she had, as a res
ult, ‘sunk very low indeed & went with pretty near any body – she was now living with a rich young man whom she would probably drop as soon as she had squeezed all the money out of him’.
* I have used the family epithet ‘Old’ to distinguish him from his nephew, ‘Young Lionel’.
See Notes on Chapter 9
10
In the High Court
On Tuesday 1 February 1910, the case eventually opened in the High Court in London before the Right Hon. Sir John Bigham. Over the next few days, the ‘Romance of the Sackville Peerage’, as it had been described in the press, attracted great attention, with its sensational ingredients of ancient wealth and modern manners, English aristocrats and their poor Spanish relations. There was particular interest in the United States, on account of the years the Sackville-Wests had spent at the British legation in Washington.
At the heart of the case was a profound irony: Victoria was put in the extraordinarily ambiguous, and invidious, position of needing her own illegitimacy – a subject from which she had always shrunk – to be proved very publicly in order for her husband to inherit. In Pepita, Vita described how her mother usually lived in an unreal world, ‘a world of her own creation’, but that with ‘The Case’, she was brought up against facts ‘which struck at very deep, real feelings in her early self’. ‘For one thing, she cherished a deep devotion to her mother’s memory, and could not bear the details of her mother’s most private, intimate life being dragged out into publicity. For another, she had an almost morbid shrinking from the fact of her own illegitimacy, and now here she was placed in the position of hearing her illegitimacy and that of her brothers and sisters insisted upon by the very men who were working to gain a superb inheritance for her husband.’ As a result, ‘she was torn between the most intimate ties that can humanly exist: her mother, her father, her brother, her husband, her home. For, of course, Knole was her home, the only real home she had ever known, and, to all of us [or, more particularly, to Vita], Knole meant as much as any human being.’ Victoria herself was not to be called as a witness, but she would have to listen over the coming days as the story of her life was told again, with all its petty snubs and humiliations – beginning in Arcachon where she was not allowed to play at the Villa Pepa with the neighbours’ children.
Sir Edward Clarke opened by presenting Henry’s petition that ‘on a date between the 1st January, 1863, and the 5th day of August, 1867, which date at present the Petitioner cannot give more particularly, at a place unknown to him, Lord Sackville, then Lionel Sackville-West, was lawfully married to Josefa Duran de Ortega; that they lived and cohabited together as man and wife . . . [and] that the Petitioner [born in 1869] is the son of that marriage’. He therefore prayed for a ‘declaration of legitimacy’. There were to be two main strands to Sir Edward’s case: proving a legally binding marriage between Lionel and Pepita, and proving that there was a ‘marriage by reputation’. In the event of his failing actually to prove the former, he hoped that evidence for the latter would be so overwhelming as to prove his case. It was the case for the ‘marriage by reputation’ that Victoria dreaded.
This argument hinged on a number of declarations by Old Lionel himself: the birth certificates of several of his children, which he had signed as the husband of Pepita, and the marriage certificate of his daughter Flora; the personal correspondence with the Béons, in which he described Pepita as his wife; the fact that he had administered Pepita’s estate after her death as if she had been his wife; even the letters he wrote to Pepita herself, in which he referred to her as ‘my little wife’. It was as if Lionel’s voice was being heard from beyond the grave, as unreliable and as muddled as ever: ‘I never described Pepita as my wife . . . I will not swear I never described her as my wife. I did not commonly speak of her as my wife . . . I don’t recollect ever saying that I was the legitimate father of Flora. I will not swear I did not.’ And so on. At one point, in a reference to a declaration signed at Arcachon, this former representative of Britain to the United States acknowledged that, ‘It has not been my habit in life to read documents carefully before I signed them, I have been decidedly careless in that respect.’
There was also the testimony of Fritz Holst, a retired colonel in the Danish army, which had been taken on commission at the British consulate in Copenhagen the previous spring. Holst had met ‘Count and Countess West’ in Arcachon during the summer of 1868, while he was convalescing from an illness, and had contacted Henry in 1903 when he first read about his claim in the newspapers. Colonel Holst recalled how he would never have introduced his wife to the Wests if he had had any suspicion that they were not married. His evidence also included a letter from Lionel on the death of Pepita, which referred to the very sad death ‘of my poor wife’, Pepita. Henry’s contention that Lionel and Pepita were considered as man and wife at Arcachon in the 1860s was further supported by depositions taken in 1897, in the action to perpetuate testimony, and more recently at Bordeaux in May 1909, from a series of coachmen, painters, butchers, seamstresses, hairdressers, washerwomen and wine merchants.
Sir Edward Clarke was on shakier ground when it came to proving, with documentary evidence, the fact of a marriage, at some place (the petitioner did not know where) and at some time (the petitioner did not know when) between Lionel and Pepita. All he had was an old story that Lionel had once been involved in some sort of marriage ceremony with Pepita; a claim by the former Danish consul in Arcachon, Edward Kirstein, to have read somewhere that they had been married in Madrid; and a piece of paper purporting to show they had been married in Frankfurt. This last was Amalia’s Bulletin de Naissance, a document issued for the purpose of information only, to describe the contents of a birth certificate. As in her actual birth certificate, the document described Amalia as the lawful daughter of Lionel Sackville-West and his wife, Josephine Duran de Ortega. But it differed in one significant respect from the original from which it appeared to be abstracted: the statement ‘Father and mother married at Frankfort-on-Maine’ had been added. Despite the fact that Lionel had signed the paper on the back, the judge would not admit the document as evidence. It was not, he argued, an ‘authentic’ legal document in the same way a birth certificate was; and, in any case, many questions were raised over its dodgy provenance (apparently, it had been given to Henry by the Comte de Béon). Furthermore, nothing had ever come of enquiries made by Nussey & Fellowes into any marriage ceremony performed by diplomatic representatives in Frankfurt. Indeed, Lionel had denied, when interviewed in 1897, that he had ever been in Frankfurt with Pepita after 1853.
Sir Robert Finlay, the Sackvilles’ lead counsel, outlined his case towards the end of the first day. He claimed that Sir Edward Clarke had told only part of the story – and, in particular, that he had ignored the evidence of the late Lord Sackville himself, taken in the action to perpetuate testimony. What Lord Sackville had said over and over again was that any deliberately misleading statements had been ‘made simply and solely for the purpose of saving the reputation of this lady with whom he was living; that there was never a marriage of any sort or kind, and that the children were all illegitimate’. As for Sir Edward Clarke’s attempts to prove a ‘marriage by reputation’, ‘I submit that more flimsy evidence was never adduced. It is the evidence very largely of tradesmen – butchers and so on and house painters . . . What you want in order to constitute evidence of reputation is some evidence of persons moving in the same social circle, and more particularly of those who know something of the husband – who are connected with him and to whom he would have introduced the lady as his wife.’
Sir Robert Finlay drew attention to the fact that no English people ever visited Lionel and Pepita in Italy, Paris or Arcachon, and that no members of the Sackville family were present at any of the baptisms – for the simple reason that ‘the universal reputation in the family was that this lady was not married to Mr Sackville-West’. In contrast to the ‘absolutely worthless’ evidence of ‘persons in a very inferior position of l
ife’, the Sackville evidence was to come from family members and friends, and diplomatic colleagues – witnesses such as Colonel Cornwallis West; Lord Saumarez; the Reverend George Alexander Trevor, curate of Withyham from 1850 to 1857 and a former trustee of the family estates at Knole; Sir Campbell Munro; and the American Mrs Elizabeth Cameron, who claimed that it had always been understood in Washington that the Misses West were illegitimate. When it came to Arcachon, Sir Robert Finlay relied on the evidence of the posher English residents: Harry Johnston, for example, and the chaplain Samuel Radcliff, who said they had known all along that Pepita was Lionel’s mistress, not his wife. Many of the people who had known the Sackvilles intimately appeared in court, either in person or as voices, through depositions taken ten years before, such was the eerie effect of the perpetuation of testimony.
The Sackvilles’ central argument, however, was that ‘for a great many years’, Pepita was married to Oliva, and that Oliva did not die until 1888 – of cancer of the tongue, in the arms of his mistress Mercedes, in hospital in Madrid. Therefore, ‘during the whole time of this connection between Mr Sackville-West and this lady [Pepita] she was a married woman, and if any marriage had taken place it would have been utterly invalid’. A great chain of evidence supported the fact of a marriage between Pepita and Oliva: the sequence of marriage applications, licences, registers, and so on; and the evidence of those, such as Oliva’s sister, Isabel, who had attended the marriage itself in 1851. The alterations to the marriage register in Madrid were simply a forgery designed to discredit this crucial piece of evidence, for it was only if doubt could be cast on the marriage between Pepita and Oliva, that it might be possible to prove that she had married Lionel instead.