The higher echelons of the ILPU had much reason to wake up sweating in respect of Parnell. Its half-dozen presidents were among the biggest landowners in Ireland. It was from their sacred fields that Houston, indirectly, got his finance. The brief was simple enough. Anything, anywhere incriminating Parnell – here or in the US – that facilitated the Times/Salisbury conspiracy was the order of the day.
Relishing his task, Houston went about it, procuring the services of a fifty-two-year-old Dubliner by the name of Richard Pigott. This fat little parasite could not have been a more perfect choice for the intended business. Formally a journalist, now derelict, when he wasn’t power-begging he got by on fraud, busted for setting up a charity and stealing the donations, and you wouldn’t want to trust him dead. Well known in publishing circles and the courts alike, he was a dealer in pornography and a liar of repute, and therefore ideally suited for the chore in hand.
Paid a pound a day to dig dirt on Parnell, Pigott found nothing and so forged it, his sausage-like fingers tracing incendiary falsehoods as required. A dozen months of subterfuge followed, featuring liaisons in ill-lit hotels which for the most part, for reasons of security, were conducted in Paris. At one such rendezvous Houston pitched up with a co-conspirator named Dr Thomas Maguire. Virulent in his enmity towards Irish self-government, Maguire was an academic at Trinity College Dublin, periodically contributing royalist tosh via a rag called the Union, and was there to authenticate the letters.
Pigott concocted an outlandish provenance for his merchandise, false as the correspondence itself. There were mysterious ‘black bags, mislaid by revolutionaries’, wherein Fenian epistles from Parnell and his bloodthirsty mates were discovered. But nobody really cared where they came from, and that was certainly the case when Houston sold them on to The Times. The world’s worst newspaper was later to claim that it had never heard of Richard Pigott, a man everyone in Dublin had heard of, and especially the cops. The Times would have needed to look no further than its own indexes (as I did) to discover articles referencing Pigott’s career in misfeasance and four months in jail. Failing that, it could have asked Anderson, who was in regular contact with both the forger and The Times itself.
1887 turned into 1888, and The Times persisted in its onslaught, republishing ‘Parnellism and Crime’ in pamphlets and later as pocket-sized books. It couldn’t go on, and it didn’t. Parnell finally threw in the towel, not to the courts, but to Parliament. Denouncing his accusers in the House of Commons, he demanded a parliamentary inquiry into the articles and letters, and the source of the inquisition against him. It was like asking his torturers for an aspirin. The Leader of the House, W.H. Smith, wasn’t interested. Himself a member of the ILPU, he proposed instead a Parliamentary Commission, inadvertently letting it slip in debate that it was in fact a political trial.
Parnell was out of options: either that or destruction by a thousand cuts from The Times. At last Salisbury had him where he wanted him. Under his administration the law had visibly decomposed into what it actually was, a brazen instrument of the ruling elite. His understanding of justice was at the discretion of his prejudice, thus in matters Irish (or East End), truth didn’t have a chance. The judges selected for the Commission were all appointed by his government, all members of his club, the Athenaeum, and all vigorously opposed to Irish self-government. Maintaining continuity with the judicial shenanigans of Cleveland Street, Bro Sir Richard Webster was chosen to appear on behalf of The Times.
Not everyone in the Establishment, however, was as bereft of integrity as the Prime Minister. Although the ‘Commission Bill’ had been bullied through Parliament using an arcane device called ‘Closure’ to shut everyone up, in the House of Lords Salisbury ran into a dissenting voice. It belonged to an excellent gent by the name of Lord Herschell, who got to his feet on 10 August 1888: ‘Charges of the gravest character are made against those taking an active part in political life. To test these charges and inquire into them a tribunal has been appointed at the absolute discretion of their most vehement political opponents, who have always been bitterly opposed to them, and those who entertain these feelings towards them have also determined what shall be the limit and scope of the enquiry, as to which they have listened to not one word of remonstrance or protest whatever.’
During this Salisbury had gone temporarily deaf. He had an unwholesome view of parliamentary democracy, and would have been just as jolly presiding over a land fit for nothing but royals, bankers and riot police. He didn’t care if ‘Parnellism and Crime’ was without substance or whether the letters were fake. To him law was no different to propaganda – no right, no wrong, only what it wanted – and he wanted Parnell politically dead. The Irish Nationalist leader was charged with conspiracy by a conspiracy. These were the same politicians, in the same Parliament, with the same policemen, who were supposedly trying to catch Jack.
A comparison of the attitudes towards the Purger’s correspondence and that forged by Pigott is salutary. On the one hand the Establishment was exerting itself to prove Pigott’s letters genuine, while on the other it was dismissing Jack’s letters (Moab excepted) as ‘hoaxes’. Reality insists the opposite. Anyone who knew anything about Pigott knew his letters were forgeries, and anyone who didn’t could have read it.
Eighteen months earlier, Henry Labouchère’s magazine Truth had blown the scam. On 21 April 1887 it wrote that the first facsimile letter ‘was obtained from a person by the name of Pigott’. Did nobody at The Times see this? Could not the most humble office boy have pointed it out? Are we to believe that Robert Anderson’s secret police, charged with gathering intelligence into the activities of Irish desperados, were incapable of picking up a popular twopenny magazine?
What Truth published was indeed the truth, and what followed was a judicial atrocity evolving in extraordinary parallel with the Ripper. Let no one imagine this befoulment of police and politics spontaneously converted itself into the trade of saints when the topic turned to Whitechapel. Of what interest were a handful of murdered whores compared to the financial threat looming over Ireland? The Commission was gearing up for what Gladstone’s biographer described as ‘one of the ugliest things done in the name of law in this island during the century’.
Welcome to ‘Victorian values’.
At Dublin Castle the police administrator, William Joyce, was instructed to clear his desk, the authorities decreeing that he should act as ‘Chief Agent’ on behalf of the government in surreptitiously procuring such evidence and materials as would enable The Times to sustain, if that were possible, the accuracy of the allegations in ‘Parnellism and Crime’. Such instruction was echoed in London: ‘all the resources of the Home Office and Scotland Yard were at the disposal of The Times’.
Anderson and his detectives were suddenly very busy. The logistics of accruing ‘evidence’, often to include the bribing or blackmailing of witnesses, took up Anderson’s every minute throughout the autumn of the Whitechapel terror. Pigott is quoted as claiming ‘incessant journeys backwards and forwards to Paris’, and it is of course pure coincidence that he happened to be in the French capital in October 1888, when the Chief of the Criminal Investigation Department was also in Paris ‘on holiday’.
Outside of the ruthlessly duped Victorian public, only the cerebrally unfortunate could have countenanced this nonsense. After eighteen months of scheming and plotting and forging, we are invited to believe that Anderson was squatting on some boulevard with a croissant when the prize was finally in his grasp.
By the time Anderson left for Paris, his duplicity was approaching the industrial. His co-conspirator, Prime Minister Viscount Lord Salisbury, had said that ‘if secret service evidence comes naturally into our hands – and still more clearly fixes someone’s guilt, we shall be fulfilling an obvious and elemental duty in facilitating the proof of it before the Commission’. This raises the question, how could it have come unnaturally into their hands? Was it borne on a breeze through an open window? Who was the se
cret service working for and supplying information to if not Salisbury’s government, and the despicable old bastard was passing every tittle of it on to The Times.
It is, I think, significant that government files relevant to police activities during this period are closed to public scrutiny for perhaps another thousand years. In 1888–90 these documents were proscribed under the hundred-year secrecy rule, but one hundred years later they were reclassified in perpetuity, turning on its head the oft-heard bleat of the common parliamentary oaf, ‘If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.’
Salisbury’s government had everything to hide, as apparently did the government a century later. Anderson actually admitted, ‘We did a lot of illegal things,’ but so scandalous must be the content of these files that the British people are still not permitted to see what their politicians and policemen were up to 130 years ago.
The Special Commission began its hearings on 17 September 1888, nine days after the murder of Annie Chapman, and thirteen days before the ‘Double Event’. Anderson may well have heard that there had been a murder or two in London’s East End, but the business of destroying Parnell allowed little time for distraction, especially in respect of those forsaken sluts whose ritualised deaths, according to him, were their own fault. Parnell was the only ‘murderer’ of interest. Unable to cripple him by means of the niceties of Parliament, the government had created existential ‘crimes’ on his behalf, and was engaged in nothing less than prosecuting him for its own inventions.
The Irish leader had sought to clear his name, but now, together with sixty-four members of his party, he found himself on trial, charged with ‘a conspiracy seeking absolute independence of Ireland from England, that they had promoted an agrarian agitation against the payment of rent with a view to expelling from Ireland the “English Garrison”, and, most important, that by their speeches and money payments they incited persons to sedition and the commission of crimes, including murder’.
In other words, it was a legalised rendition of the lies serialised in The Times and the newspaper proclaimed it as such: ‘The Special Commission Bill was adopted by Parliament with the object of instituting a thorough enquiry into the whole of the “charges and allegations” embraced in our articles on “Parnellism & Crime”.’ The whole lousy charade should have been thrown out on day one. Question one from the judges should surely have required the identity of the accusers. Yet the authors hid in secrecy.
So here were the Irish and their leader, democratically elected Members of Parliament, subject to a criminal inquisition, predicated on anonymous slanders in an English newspaper. Much of the American press looked on open-mouthed. ‘Respect for The Times,’ commented the Nation, ‘without regard to the kind of men who are behind it [i.e. the entire British state], is really a discredit to a civilised nation in our day.’
What this was was a classic example of the aggressor presenting itself as victim, throwing its autocratic weight about in time-honoured fancy-dress tradition. Paradoxically, the government’s biggest cannon was also its weakest point. Everything hinged on the letters, and thus Webster stalled for time. Forgeries or not, his intention was to postpone the day of reckoning, anticipating that by then the damage to the Nationalist cause would be so catastrophic as to render it beyond repair. Time favoured such a scenario. Over the next sixteen months the judges would sit for 128 sessions, during which 150,000 questions would be asked of 445 witnesses.
To plunge the depths of Anderson’s input would mean kicking in the door to another book. It would be a startling volume, exploring a long career in serial hypocrisy and dazzling misfeasance. His chicanery on behalf of the ‘Commission’ is well represented across a spectrum of crooked enterprises, but nowhere with more dishonour than in the matter of HM Prisons. Wearing a different hat, Anderson was Secretary to the Prison Board, a title and office he had imported from Ireland. Irrespective of his function as a Commissioner of Metropolitan Police, this put him in charge of everyone Her Majesty locked up, most specifically ‘political opponents’, i.e. the Irish.
Without access to documents the government fears to show us, it’s impossible to fully assess the degree of official felony. However, we get the gist of the rot on the rind from a retired detective by the name of Patrick McIntyre, who described himself as ‘Late of the Political Department of Scotland Yard’. Between February and May 1890, McIntyre published a series of reminiscences in Reynold’s News. In the introduction he kicks off with ‘I propose to compare the old detective system with the new Criminal Investigation Department’ under honest Bob; ‘my account of the secret service will give me a good opportunity of revealing how bogus conspiracies are got up’.
Even by the flexible standards of our day, McIntyre’s revelations are staggering. Barring one, he writes: ‘In the whole series of dynamite plots, the hand of the spy, or agent provocateur, is clearly visible.’ His account records a catalogue of such police conspiracies, reserving special approbation for undercover coppers who had infiltrated the Land League: ‘It is distinctly creditable to the young Irishmen in the League, that they held themselves aloof from outrage when they were being egged on by men who only joined The League for the purpose of associating it with dynamite conspiracies and other criminality.’ McIntyre then turns his attention to the more primitive of our species, that popular police employee the coppers’ nark, men who would sell Ireland for a £5 note: ‘These people see their opportunity when any government is in a perturbed state of mind. They seize the “flowing tide that leads to fortune”. Their intrigues produce conspiracies. What does the provoking-agent do when he finds the prevailing danger is diminishing in quantity? He manufactures more “danger”! Not a single plot in England,’ asserts McIntyre, ‘had not been incited by the police.’ Such an allegation would be incredible were there not copious evidence supporting it, and none more noxious than in the case of a man called John Daly.
Daly was an active Irish Nationalist, fitted up with explosives by Special Branch at Birkenhead Docks in Liverpool in 1883. The police’s motive, as proclaimed by Sir Edward Jenkinson, was to put the fear into Daly’s associates and the public alike, as ‘obtaining a conviction would have more effect on the public mind than prevention of an outrage’. In other words, a PR exercise that Jenkinson admitted took three attempts before the bombs were successfully planted.
Daly was followed and arrested in Birmingham, where the cops gilded the sting with Fenian romance. The nub of it was that Daly ‘planned to hurl the grenades from the Strangers Gallery in the House of Commons’. Forestalling this fiction by no means denied the politicians its propaganda value. If he’d had the bombs (which he hadn’t), and if he’d thrown them into Parliament (which he didn’t), Matthews would have had his own head blown off, with the unwished-for loss of Parnell’s head as well.
Because Daly had not brought such atrocity to the House of Commons, the Home Secretary decided to stage a facsimile of the event on his behalf. A set was built at Woolwich Arsenal and a bunch of tailors’ dummies were cast as politicians. The Right Honourables sat around a table while a grenade was detonated in their midst. Needless to say, these dummies were all killed stone dead, one of them receiving as many as forty-seven shrapnel wounds to his stuffing. Only an Irishman could have done such a thing, and Daly was duly sentenced to prison for life.
Incarceration in a British jail, in this case Chatham, was especially harsh for Irish political prisoners. They were kept in isolation and subjected to constant brutality. McIntyre informs us that Daly was so badly beaten by warders ‘that the very walls were painted with blood’. He was one of many of his nation’s patriots – some guilty, but just as many not – who saw their futures mocked by those same indifferent walls. Contact with relatives was vindictively proscribed, one letter in and one out were allowed every six months, and strictly no visitors.
Had Daly’s niece Kathleen Clarke written of all Ireland’s outrage it would not have survived the censor. I quote from an acco
unt published years later in her book Revolutionary Women: ‘The Birmingham Chief of Police,’ she wrote, ‘lay dying, and in a statement to the press confessed that John Daly had been convicted on perjured [police] evidence, and that he could not die in peace with the knowledge of it on his mind.’
This news wasn’t rushed to the gates of Chatham prison. Daly heard nothing of it, and four more years went by. One morning in the autumn of 1888, the fifth year in which he’d been confined in silence, a warder appeared, informing him he had a visitor and instructing him to follow him to a designated room. Trying to get into a Victorian prison was sometimes almost as difficult as getting out. Relatives would have to petition for months for the briefest of visits, and only under exceptional circumstances would permission be given.
The visitor who awaited Daly was Richard Pigott, now employed in the blackmail department of Metropolitan Police. Here was the very icon of government duplicity offering his fat little forger’s hand. He and Daly had known each other in Dublin in the old republican days. It must have been a joy for Daly to see him, but not to hear what he had to say. He was empowered, he said, to offer Daly his freedom in exchange for the betrayal of Parnell. If Daly would give evidence he would in return ‘have liberty, protection, and an income for life’.
Daly didn’t have a clue what was happening in the world outside his cell, and with sickening lies, Pigott moved in to exploit his ignorance. ‘Parnell,’ he said, ‘has attributed the Phoenix Park murders to the Fenians. He is lying against you and your organisation.’ Don’t accept the offer, continued the wretch, ‘because you want to betray him for money, but because you want to vindicate yourself against his calumnious slanders’.
Every dirty mischief of Salisbury’s regime was encapsulated in that moment. They had robbed Daly of his life when it suited, and now they offered him his life back when it suited them differently. Daly told Pigott to fuck off. He would rather rot in an English hell than mortgage his freedom to such dishonour. Who had sanctioned this visit? How was Pigott able to swan in and out of prisons at will? Somehow Parliament got wind of it, and there was a hoo-ha on the opposition benches. Only two men in the kingdom could have authorised it, and an irate Member asked the Home Secretary if it was him. Matthews gave a categorical denial, and that left only the Secretary to the Prison Board, Robert Anderson. Time after time Anderson denied any association with either the Commission or The Times, raising the question, how did that newspaper’s solicitor, Mr Soames, also gain access to Chatham jail with similar bribes and then threats to Daly? The prisoner’s intransigence caused Soames to freak. If Daly didn’t want his freedom, he’d get worse treatment in his cell: ‘Severe punishment will follow,’ Soames vowed, Daly’s incarceration graduating from the terrible to the intolerable.
They All Love Jack Page 81