by Roy Jenkins
Dilke stood up in a crowded House and was received with a loud and prolonged hostile demonstration. One Conservative member attempted to get the Speaker to refuse him a hearing on the ground that he had violated his oath of allegiance. When the noise died down, Dilke delivered a speech which was long, dull, and painstakingly factual. Towards the end members were trooping out of the chamber and amongst the few who remained conversation was so general that the speaker could scarcely be heard. “. . . my want of vivacity,” Dilke noted, “tended to prevent the interruptions which had been organised. . . . This was exactly what I wished and intended. . . .”20 Gladstone followed, and delivered a full-scale, declamatory attack upon Dilke. He had the House behind him, but the unequalness of the battle gave him no desire to cut it short. “He simply tried to trample upon Dilke,” Lawson wrote. After the Prime Minister, Auberon Herbert insisted on speaking, and did so in terms which were much more provocative and much less soporific than Dilke’s. Not merely at the beginning, but throughout his speech, the House was in an uproar. In the middle strangers were spied by Lord George Hamilton, and the Press having been removed, the noise became still worse. When he concluded the division was taken, and Dilke was beaten by 276 votes to 2.
Honour being thus satisfied, Dilke could abandon a campaign which had brought him national fame (or notoriety) but which had rapidly become a political embarrassment to him. His summing-up, written many years later, was that “at Newcastle I made references to this subject (Court expenditure) which were accurate, though possibly unwise.”21 He never changed his basic beliefs about the Civil List or about monarchy in general, and even when he became a Minister he was pedantically careful not to vote for proposals against which he had committed himself a decade earlier. But he never again attempted to take the issue to the public. He realised that to link the fortunes of British radicalism with those of British republicanism would be to deliver a damaging and unnecessary blow to the former cause.
Although Dilke’s republicanism temporarily cost him many acquaintances, it restored to him the friendship of a near neighbour in Sloane Street, Miss Katherine Sheil, and precipitated his marriage with her. Miss Sheil was an orphan, a year older than Dilke, who lived with a Miss Courtenay, a family friend of the Dilkes. Her father, a captain in the 89th Foot, had died young. Her mother came of an old, well-connected Devonshire family and left her property in that county which brought her about £1000 a year. Dilke, writing in 1895, described his reconciliation with her in somewhat curious terms:
“I had seen a good deal of Miss Sheil in 1869 at Lady Heathcote-Amory’s, but we had quarrelled, as she generally managed to quarrel with her friends from her violent temper and unwillingness, in spite of the possession of strong opinions upon many points, to brook contradiction. For a long time we avoided one another, and I was only forgiven when the attacks on me in November, 1871, and the Bolton riot led to an expression of sympathy on her part, a sympathy which she had been far from having shown on previous occasions when it had been less needed, but might also have been pleasant.”22
On January 30th, 1872, the wedding took place. The ceremony was at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, Dilke’s parish church. Only three persons besides the participants were present—Dilke’s grandmother, his great-uncle from Chichester, and a stranger—and only four others, Trevelyan, Fitzmaurice, Ashton Dilke and Miss Sheil’s maid, knew that it was to happen. “I walked home with my great-uncle,” Dilke recorded, “after seeing my grandmother into her new home, which was next the church, while Katie, who had her brougham waiting, drove to Miss Courtenay’s and told her, and then to the station where we met.”23
Miss Courtenay did not allow failure to inform her beforehand to prejudice her against the arrangement. “A very suitable marriage,” she commented. “You are neither of you in love with one another, but you will get on admirably together.” “Miss Courtenay was, perhaps, at this time not far wrong,” Dilke reflected evenly. “I had a profound respect for Miss Sheil’s talent and a high admiration of her charm and beauty; and I think she had more liking than love for me.”24
Elsewhere in the same document, written long after her death, he supplied more details of her talents and beauty as well as of some of her other qualities:
“. . . her extreme attractiveness of appearance, her singing, and her wonderful power of mimicry had given her a considerable position in society. On the other hand people were afraid of her . . . and she was known to have a violent temper. She was accused by her many enemies of laziness (but this only because very doubtful health caused her to lie down a good deal), of pride, of violence, and of mercilessness in ridicule. On the other hand (sic) with her exquisite prettiness of appearance, with her perfect taste in dress, and with her extraordinary powers of conversation, hers was a marked figure in every room. She did not go out very much on account of her health, which had been largely owing to a disappointment in love of which I knew. Her great talent and extraordinary powers of sarcasm made her the terror of the ordinary ‘dancing idiot,’ and her love affair had been with a man old enough to be her father, a very handsome man of great distinction, who was either married or believed to be by some; a fact which caused others to interfere and stop a half-engagement. Some used to speak of Katie as exquisitely lovely. She had features which would ruin most reputations for beauty—a large mouth, small eyes, and a turned-up nose. Her eyes, however, which had the blue-white so seldom seen, were, in spite of their smallness, perhaps her greatest attraction. Her voice was perfect. Her greatest beauties, however, were her arched hand, her neck, the pose and shape of her head, and her tiny ears. . . . She insisted on marrying me without settlements as far as personalty was concerned, and with only a curious kind of settlement as to her Devonshire estates, intended to facilitate their sale, upon which we were resolved and which took place at once. Her lawyer, to his horror, knew nothing of the marriage until he received a note from her on the day on which it took place. She was extravagant, and spent her capital as income—chiefly on horses and dress.”25
This difficult, distinguished woman was also a singer of some note—“the favourite pupil of Delsarte”—and a croquet player of match standard. The latter talent Dilke shared with her, and they used frequently to drive down to Wimbledon to play on the All England lawns there, as well as spending long weeks at the Granville Hotel, Ramsgate, which commended itself by the unusual possession of a ground so well drained that play was possible even in the wettest weather. It was there that they travelled when they met at Victoria Station after their clandestine wedding. Any more extended marriage journey was made temporarily impossible, both by Dilke’s conviction that he must first face his critics in the House of Commons, and by his unwillingness to go abroad again while, as he believed had been the case on the occasion of a visit at the end of 1871, he was likely to be watched by the French police. They suspected him, falsely in fact, of assisting in the smuggling out of ex-Communards. Eventually, at the instigation of Louis Blanc, Dilke received a written assurance from Casimir-Périer, later to be President of the Republic, but at the time writing on behalf of his father, the Minister of the Interior, that there would be no more surveillance.
By Easter both of the obstacles had been removed, and the Dilkes were able to leave for an extended visit to Paris. Here they “attended sittings of the Assembly at Versailles, drove over the battlefields, dined with the Louis Blancs to meet Louis’s brother, Charles Blanc, the critic and great master of style . . . met, at the Franquevilles, Henri de Pène and Robert Mitchell, the Conservative journalists; and saw Mignon, Katie’s favourite opera, and Rabagas.”26 Incomparably more important than all this, the visit marked the beginning of the close friendship between Dilke and Gambetta. They had met briefly the previous December, but it was during this Easter honeymoon that they got to know each other well. Whether arranging for the transportation of his father’s body from St. Petersburg or taking his wife on a voyage de noces, Dilke was never too occupied to make new contacts.
&n
bsp; Dilke was playing with the idea of writing a history of European politics in the nineteenth century, and was particularly concerned to enquire closely into the origins of the Franco-Prussian War. Much of his time in Paris was devoted to interviews in connection with the work. One of them was with Gambetta. Dilke had invited him to “breakfast,” as he always called it when in Paris, although both in time and composition the meal was much more the equivalent of luncheon. Gambetta came, and stayed the whole day, talking throughout with immense vitality. He and Dilke were both equally delighted with each other. Thereafter, whenever Dilke was in Paris, they spent much of the time together. Long “breakfasts” at the Café Anglais formed the regular background to their friendship. Sometimes they were alone; sometimes Gambetta produced one or two of those now rather shadowy figures of the early days of the Third Republic, men with names like a Paris street guide, Edgar Quinet or Denfert-Rochereau; and sometimes Dilke introduced Englishmen—Harcourt, Lord Randolph Churchill, and John Morley were amongst them—who were anxious to meet the great French orator.
Gamhetta’s attraction for Dilke was partly political. Anyone who was French, republican, and a great world figure would have been three-quarters of the way to arousing his admiration. “My friendship with Gambetta,” he wrote, “perhaps meant to me something more than the friendship of the man. Round him gathered all that was best and most hopeful in the state of the young republic. He, more than any other individual, had both destroyed the Empire and made the new France; and to some extent the measure of my liking for the man was my hatred of those that he had replaced.”27 At the same time there was a degree of genuinely strong personal attraction, and Dilke could describe Gambetta, with perhaps a little exaggeration, as “for a long time . . . my most intimate friend.”
Back in England, Dilke settled down to a somewhat quieter political life than he had lived immediately before his marriage. He continued to be discontented with the Government, to act as secretary of the Radical Club, and to discuss in correspondence with Chamberlain the most violent measures for bringing Gladstone to heel. But neither in the House of Commons nor in the country did he speak much. His attitude was well summed up in a letter which he wrote on May 1st, 1873, to Miss Kate Field, a young American journalist whom he described as “a slightly outrageous person,” but who was nonetheless one of his closest friends during this period. “I am going to keep quiet until the general election as the best means of retaining my present seat,” he wrote. “If I should be turned out—look out for squalls—as I should then stand on an extreme platform for every vacancy in the North.”28
This temporary political withdrawal, combined with a gradual lessening of the ostracism of the winter of 1871-2, enabled the Dilkes to build up a more active social life. Dilke claimed that they did not go out much, partly because they were so wrapped up in each other and partly because of Katie’s ill-health, but said that they gave two dinners a week at 76, Sloane Street, and “saw a good many people in this way.” They saw most of Miss Field, and after her of William Harcourt. Henry James (the politician, not the novelist) was also an habitué of the house, as were Robert Browning, Kinglake the historian, and Monckton Milnes (by that time Lord Houghton). Among frequent foreign guests were Moret, the Spanish Minister in London, and Gavard, at that time at the French Embassy; among those who came less frequently were Ricciotti Garibaldi, the son of a more famous father, Mark Twain, the dancer Taglioni, who in her old age had become “the stupidest and most respectable of old dames,” and the tragédienne Ristori, then the Marchesa del Grillo. Stanley, the explorer, came on one occasion, but he struck Dilke as “brutal, bumptious, and untruthful,” and was presumably not asked again. The dinners were mostly for twelve people, and the menus were long rather than exciting.[4] During the first year of the married establishment at Sloane Street, 262 different people received and accepted invitations to dinner.
On at least one occasion the Dilkes offered a much more elaborate entertainment. For a sum of 12,000 francs (about £500) they engaged Brasseur, a famous comedy actor of the Théâtre du Palais Royal, to come to London with two other players and give six performances at 76, Sloane Street. For each evening from June 2nd to June 7th, 1873, more than fifty invitations were sent out.
Nor was it by any means entirely the case that Dilke never went out. He began at this time to visit Strawberry Hill, the house of Lady Waldegrave and of her fourth husband, Chichester Fortescue, then President of the Board of Trade; and he often dined with Harcourt and other political friends and acquaintances. But his great period of social activity did not come until the spring and summer of 1874. Then, in the sharpest possible contrast to the position two and a half years earlier, he was invited everywhere in London. This arose directly out of the publication of his second book.
In September, 1873, Lady Dilke had been delivered of a still-born son, and had been seriously ill as a result. As soon as she was well enough to travel her husband took her to Monaco, where they remained until after Christmas. While there Dilke wrote a short, satirical novel entitled The Fall of Prince Florestan. In twelve thousand words he recounted the story of a Cambridge undergraduate who succeeded unexpectedly to the throne of the Principality of Monaco, who there attempted to put into practice the liberal ideas he had learned in England, and who, in consequence of an unpopular collision with the Church, came to an early downfall. The beginning contained some agreeable satire on Cambridge life and English politics; the middle part made the most of the ludicrous aspects, less well known then to the English-speaking public than they are to-day, of a tiny court resting in theory upon the full panoply of feudal privilege, but in fact upon the enterprise of M. Blanc, the manager of the casino; and at the end a moral was drawn, although not too portentously, and addressed to the author’s French friends. “No system of government can be permanent,” he wrote, “which has for its opponents all the women in the country, and for supporters only half the men; and any party will have for opponents all the women which couples the religious question with the political and the social, and raises the flag of materialism. Women are not likely to abandon the idea of a compensation in the next world for the usage which too many of them meet with in this.”29 The whole thing was written with a delicate touch, and still makes easy and agreeable reading.
The novel was published anonymously on March 16th, 1874. Dilke had at first tried to conceal his identity from his publisher, Daniel Macmillan, but this attempt foundered when Macmillan objected, on the ground that he must protect the interests of the author of Greater Britain, to some jokes at Dilke’s own expense which, by a rather elaborate stratagem, had been included in Prince Florestan. “As a republican,” one passage ran, “I had a cordial aversion for Sir Charles Dilke, a clever writer, but an awfully dull speaker, who imagines that his forte is public speaking, and who, having been brought up in a set of strong prejudices, positively makes a merit of never having got over them.”30 Macmillan was then let into the secret, and a highly complex memorandum of Dilke’s wishes and intentions was drawn up and accepted by the publisher. The first edition was to be strictly anonymous and “Mr. Macmillan’s secrecy as a man of honour” was “to be relied upon to this end.” If, however, “the work is, as it most likely will be, a success,” the author undertook to make known his name on the appearance of the second edition, Dilke was to receive no payment for the first edition, but as a substitute he stipulated that the book should enjoy both expensive binding and extensive advertising. There should be full-page advertisements in the Pall Mall Gazette, the Saturday Review, and the Academy. He was also to receive fifty presentation copies, which were to be carefully packed, addressed to Mr. Robert Allnert, not marked on the outside, and delivered to No. 6 sitting-room on the ground floor of the Grosvenor Hotel at Victoria Station. It was all very elaborate. Provision was also made for Macmillan to bring out an edition in French. “If not seized in France the work would have a large sale there,” Dilke stated, “and if seized there would sell in Belgium.”31
Dilke was right in predicting the success of the book. Within two days of publication it had been reviewed in five London dailies, and a spate of notices continued for some time. It became the fashionable success of the moment, and was the more talked about because of the mystery surrounding its authorship. The wildest guesses were made at this, but Dilke’s name was mentioned as a possible object of the satire rather than as its author. The editor of the Pall Mall Gazette was convinced that Matthew Arnold was the author, while others confidently attributed the book to pens ranging from Benjamin Jowett’s to a Cambridge undergraduate’s. Frederic Harrison was alone in making a correct guess, and wrote urging Dilke to “make the joke better” by revealing his identity. It had always been Dilke’s intention to make such a revelation, and he required little urging, even although Macmillan was at this stage suggesting to him that it would be better to maintain the incognito. It was broken by Lady Dilke, on arrival at a party, causing herself to be announced as “Princess Florestan.”
What were Dilke’s motives in writing the book and in presenting it to the public in the manner described? In part, no doubt, as his official biographers suggested,32 he found it a convenient way of explaining to his acquaintances, as he had failed to do by more direct methods, that he could combine a theoretical preference for republicanism with a belief that it was unwise to attempt to upset even the most absurd government if it suited the people who lived under it. In part, also, he wished to present himself to the London social world in a more attractive light. He was widely thought of as a dull extremist. This was not a very engaging combination, and anything which was known to come from his pen would have started with a strong prejudice against it. If he wrote anonymously he would still this prejudice; if he wrote a light-hearted satire he might achieve a new reputation for the unknown author; and if the book were a success he could reveal his identity and exchange something of this reputation for his own. This is how matters in fact worked out, and it may well be that this was how he had planned them. Certainly he was delighted with the changed social atmosphere which followed the revelation of his identity. From a position of semi-ostracism he passed quickly to being the much sought-after, fashionable success of the moment. There were a few, however, who stood out against the stream, and in noting two attacks on his views which appeared several months after the general change, Dilke added the revealing comment: “Everything that was needed to set me right with cultivated people had not been done at once by Prince Florestan . . .”33 But a great deal had been done, and Dilke was very pleased that it was so.