by Roy Jenkins
The second difficulty is one which (quite naturally) Russell did not mention in court and which is not discussed, as is the first, in the Dilke papers relating to the case, but of which J. L. Garvin makes much in his biography of Chamberlain.2 The aspect of Mrs. Crawford’s story which was likely to make most public impact was that relating to the girl, Fanny. In the unanimous view of Russell, James and Chamberlain, according to Garvin, it was impossible for Dilke to make an effective answer to the charges unless Fanny herself could be put into the box, able to deny the allegations about her own role and to stand up to cross-examination. For reasons which will be discussed later, Fanny was not available. Consequently, Garvin states, Russell and James decided to let the case rest where it was, and Chamberlain, most reluctantly, saw the force of their reasoning and concurred.
The argument is not altogether convincing. It is obvious that a firm rebuttal by Fanny as well as by Dilke would have been an advantage, but, it is not clear why the latter without the former should have led, as Garvin assumes, to the certainty of a verdict against Dilke. Whatever their chain of reasoning, however, the facts are that during the luncheon adjournment Russell, James and Chamberlain met and decided that the case should be left where it was, and that Dilke should give no evidence. When this decision was taken Dilke was not present. He was waiting in another room. Chamberlain was deputed to go and tell him what had been decided. Dilke accepted what he was told.
When the court reassembled after luncheon Sir Charles Russell announced the course which had been resolved upon. He did so in somewhat hesitant terms:
“Ought we to take upon ourselves the responsibility of putting Sir Charles Dilke in the witness-box where he might be put through the events of his whole life, and in the life of any man there may be found to have been some indiscretions—ought we to take upon ourselves that responsibility? After an anxious consideration of the matter we have come to the determination to leave the case where it stands. . .
Mr. Justice Butt, however, showed no hesitation in his subsequent remarks:
“Nothing can be clearer than the law on this subject—that is that the unsworn statement of a person in the position of Mrs. Crawford is not entitled to be received or even considered in a Court of Justice as against the person with whom she is alleged to have committed adultery. . . . Under these circumstances I have no hesitation whatever in saying that counsel have been well advised in suggesting the course which they have induced Sir Charles Dilke to take.”3
His Lordship then proceeded to dismiss the case against Dilke and to order the plaintiff to pay his costs. But he also gave Crawford his divorce. In law both decisions were no doubt correct but to the public they seemed ridiculously paradoxical. The verdict appeared to be that Mrs. Crawford had committed adultery with Dilke, but that he had not done so with her.
Nevertheless, Dilke was at first reasonably satisfied with the result. In his diary for February 12th he wrote:
“My case tried. I left myself absolutely in the hands of counsel and they took the right course in saying with the judge ‘no case.’ But Russell did it clumsily and (without my permission) talked of ‘indiscretions.’ He said possible indiscretions, but of course most of the newspapers left out possible.[4] But for this blunder the case stood well. Nothing could be stronger than the judge’s words, and ‘costs’ mean that Crawford had no ground for ‘reasonable suspicion,’ as in similar cases where there had been such ground costs had been left to be paid by each side.”4
He noted also that for several days letters of congratulations arrived in great quantities from all sorts of people. “Even the wary politician Harcourt congratulated warmly,” he added. Furthermore, James reported on February 13th: “I have seen a great many people at Brooks’s, the Reform and Turf Clubs. Everyone seems satisfied.” Dilke’s reply to this was somewhat severe: “The Turf Club,” he said, “was hardly the place to gauge opinion.”5
Dilke’s view of the whole position, indeed, was rapidly becoming less favourable. The verdict of the court was showing itself to have been a false release. It did not prevent the mounting against him of a considerable newspaper campaign. This was begun by the Pall Mall Gazette.
The Pall Mall Gazette—a London evening newspaper—was at that time under the editorship of W. T. Stead. Stead had been born in Northumberland in 1849, the son of a Congregational minister. He died in 1912, just over a year after Dilke’s own death, but in more dramatic circumstances. He was a victim of the Titanic disaster. He became editor of the Darlington Northern Echo at the age of twenty-two, and then moved to London in 1880 to serve under Morley on the Pall Mall. He succeeded to this editorial chair in 1883 when Morley became a member of Parliament. But Stead was a very different type of journalist from Morley. His interests were narrower, his mind was less cultivated, and, although he was a Liberal (and often an extreme one), his political affiliations were not of primary importance to him. He had force and courage, but he was an extreme egotist who became obsessed with a sense of his own power.[5] Furthermore, he possessed to an unusual degree the essential ingredients of moral intolerance—he was a puritan fascinated by sex. Professionally he was a sensationalist, and a pioneer of the highly personalised approach of modern journalism. He was the originator of the technique of the interview, and at the beginning of 1884 he had applied it with brilliant success by himself going to Southampton and obtaining an important statement of view from General Gordon who had just returned to England. This interview marked the beginning of the public agitation for the despatch of Gordon to Khartoum.
In the following year Stead applied his talents for personal investigation to a different field and in a more extreme form. He was anxious to promote a bill which would raise the age of consent from twelve to sixteen and generally make more difficult the abduction of young girls for purposes of prostitution. His method of drawing attention to the evil which he wished to combat was a direct one. For the sum of £5 he himself succeeded in purchasing and carrying off from her parents a child of thirteen. He published a full account of his activities in the Pall Mall Gazette and later re-published them as a pamphlet entitled The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon. The effect was considerable, and a change in the law was quickly carried through. Stead, however, had committed a technical offence and, with some of his associates, he was brought to trial at the Old Bailey in November, 1885. Most of the others were acquitted, but Stead himself, perhaps because he insisted on conducting his own defence, was convicted and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment. He bore the punishment with a good deal of self-righteous pride[6] and emerged from it just in time for the hearing of the Dilke case.
To this case he devoted (and was to continue to devote for years to come) the closest possible attention. At first, before the trial, he appeared as a friend. Dilke had said in a letter to his constituents in August, 1885, that he would disprove the charge against him before attempting to continue his public career. This attitude, Stead announced, was an honourable one. He indicated his belief that Dilke was most probably innocent and offered him all possible assistance in demonstrating the fact. It was perhaps consistent with this attitude that Stead should express horrified disappointment at the course which was followed at the February trial; and even after the extremely harsh comments which he then printed about Dilke there were moments in the ensuing months when he still presented himself as a well-wisher, eager that Dilke might yet be vindicated by some fresh turn of events. Lady Dilke, willing no doubt to clutch at any straw, corresponded with Stead and even went to see him during this period. But her intercessions did more harm than good. They merely served further to whet Stead’s appetite for the case, and offered ground for misrepresentation. After their meeting Stead recorded that “at one point she said plainly that a heavy burden lay on her heart because she had brought all this trouble on her husband by trying to wean him from his worldly life; that if she had only let him go on with his intrigues and life of pleasure, none of the trouble would have come upon him; and it
made her doubt whether it was not better to let men go on in their vice rather than try to raise them to a higher life.” “It was pitiable, ghastly,” Stead added, “to see her sobbing.”6
Apart from the inherent improbability of Lady Dilke making these confessions to a sensational journalist who had already shown himself a determined traducer of her husband, Stead’s reliability as a recorder of impressions and sifter of evidence is well indicated by the fact that he proceeded immediately afterwards to cite the private view of Sir George Lewis—“who was his own solicitor as well as Dilke’s”—as decisive testimony against Dilke’s innocence. There might have been some force in the point, were it not that Lewis in fact was Mrs. Crawford’s solicitor, and not Dilke’s.[7] After this it is not necessary to attach too much weight to Stead’s similar assertions that Dilke had been excluded from Lord Randolph Churchill’s house because of “his forwardness, to use no stronger word,” to Lady Randolph, and that Sir Charles Mills (later Lord Hillingdon) believed that he habitually “had six intrigues going on at once.”
These and other stories which Stead was subsequently to relate (and print) about Dilke may or may not have been true, but the fact that they came from Stead is certainly no testimony to their veracity. It is impossible to read the files of his paper for the weeks after the February trial without believing that his main interest was to print anything which would keep the case alive, and enable him to go on exploiting its sensationalism for some time to come. The Pall Mall’s circulation had been dropping, its poor financial position was a current cause of dissension between its proprietor and himself, and it badly needed to attract new readers.
Later, however, Stead’s general interest in the case was replaced by a more particularised emotion. He became seized with an abiding but self-righteous vindictiveness towards Dilke. He saw himself as the chosen instrument of public morality, protecting the innocent citizens of Britain against the impudent attempts of a shameless adulterer to climb back into their favour. He felt the same pride in his work as he expressed with unusual self-revelation about his similar (but possibly better-founded) attacks upon a man called Langworthy. “The fact that Langworthy was hissed off a platform in the interior of the Argentine because of what we had published,” he wrote in this connection, “abides with me as one of those permanent consolations with which a man can comfort himself in the days when he is depressed and disheartened.”7 This spirit caused Stead, later in the year 1886, to take Mrs. Crawford on to the staff of his paper (presumably in order that she might be available for closer consultation[8]) and to continue for many years, with unabated ferocity, his attacks upon Dilke. Even in the early ’nineties he was still distributing pamphlets, addressing meetings and engaging in long controversy in obscure magazines upon the subject. It is against the background of this knowledge that the opening of the newspaper attack against Dilke, with the Pall Mall Gazette at its centre, should be considered.
On the morning of February 13th, the day after the trial, the position was not too discouraging. The Times was censorious. The decision of the court was unintelligible, Dilke ought clearly to have gone into the box, and it was possible that his failure to do so would injure his future public career. But it was all put in rather tentative terms, and was more than counterbalanced by the Daily News, which declared unequivocally: “His character has now been vindicated after full and open trial, and he will be welcomed back to public life with a fervour increased by the sympathy excited by the imminent peril in which he has stood for the past six months.” The Daily Telegraph was also reasonably friendly. All this was too much for the Pall Mall Gazette. It swung into action that evening. After a characteristic expression of regret at having to comment at all, it announced that the Daily News verdict was the reverse of the truth. Dilke had made no attempt to clear his name. He had broken his pledge to his constituents. By not going into the witness-box he had indicated that he had something even worse to hide than that with which he was charged. “His friends expected more, his foes in their most sanguine moments never looked for worse.”
After this the general comment became less favourable. On February 15th the Manchester Guardian condemned Dilke’s behaviour at the trial and announced that “to ask us on the strength of this evasion to welcome him back as a leader of the Liberal Party is too strong a draft on our credulity or our good nature.” The Statesman commented in similar terms. It was reported that in Glasgow one of the Liberal Associations had passed a resolution declaring against Dilke’s inclusion in any Liberal Cabinet; to admit him would be to weaken party interests by condoning “unrighteousness and wrong.” Fortified by this support the Pall Mall returned to the attack with renewed vigour on the evening of the 16th. Its front page headline demanded to know why Dilke had not offered his resignation as member for Chelsea. This must be done at once, if his honour was to be in any way retrieved. The charges against him might still be false, but if they were true he was “worse than the common murderer who swings at Newgate.” He must still seek to disprove the allegations, which would otherwise continue to envelope him with “a black and hideous suspicion.”
Perhaps feeling that he had reached the limit even of his own capacity for denunciation, Stead then changed his tack. He began to attack Chamberlain instead of Dilke, and for a time his enthusiasm for this new task became so great that Dilke, by contrast, appeared almost as a wronged innocent. The new line started on February 19th with a small paragraph announcing that “the man really responsible for the fatal blunder committed by Sir Charles Dilke in not going into the witness-box is Mr. Joseph Chamberlain.” Three days later this was blown up into two front-page articles, one of them curiously entitled “The Case for Sir Charles Dilke, by One Who Knows It.” Two days after this there was another article which reached the conclusion that “Mr. Chamberlain . . . seems to prefer that his intimate associate should remain for ever under this crushing burden of suspicion rather than that he, Mr. Chamberlain, should admit a simple error of judgment.” Then, on February 27th, Stead published both sides of an acrimonious correspondence which had taken place between Chamberlain and himself during the previous week. Chamberlain had accused Stead of blackening Dilke’s character in order to maintain the sensational nature of his paper, and Stead had replied that Chamberlain had ruined the career of one who “broken in nerve and health had placed himself in your hands. You overruled his personal desire to enter the witness-box and the responsibility was, therefore, not his but yours.”
Chamberlain greatly disliked these attacks. He wrote to Dilke on February 22nd saying: “I am only too glad to be able in any way to share your burdens and if I can act as a lightning conductor so much the better”8; but he was worried, as Garvin makes clear, that so much of the public responsibility for what was now obviously a wrong decision (although Dilke generously denied this) should be placed upon his shoulders. In order, no doubt, to shift some of this weight he made in the course of this same letter of February 22nd a suggestion for fresh action to Dilke. “Of course,” he wrote, “if you were quite clear that you ought to go into the box, it is still possible to do so—either by an action for libel or probably by intervention of the Queen’s Proctor.”[9]9 It is difficult to gauge how decisive was this suggestion. Garvin discounts it. He points out, quite correctly, that Stead had put forward a similar idea in his issue of the same day. Indeed the latter had gone further and reported, probably on no authority, both that the Queen’s Proctor had begun to move and that Dilke had instructed his solicitors to place all available information before that official. And it hardly seems likely that Dilke, preoccupied with his troubles, would not have read any relevant item in the Pall Mall at the earliest opportunity. This opportunity, it seems, must have occurred before the receipt of Chamberlain’s letter, because this was a reply to a letter of Dilke’s (the correspondence was delivered by messenger) which itself commented upon another passage in that same evening’s issue of the paper. On the other hand Dilke himself afterwards wrote on Chamberlain’s
letter: “This was the first suggestion made to me of any rehearing of the case, and, although Brett, who was taking a great interest in it, was violently opposed to this course, and though Hartington and James and Russell were all under the impression that I should find no further difficulties, it was the course which I ultimately took.”10 On this point, therefore, we have Dilke’s own testimony against the thesis (of Chamberlain’s lack of responsibility for the next step) which Garvin was so anxious to prove, with the objective evidence, on this occasion, rather on Garvin’s side. But whether or not the first hint came from Chamberlain, there is no doubt which was likely to have the greater effect upon Dilke’s mind—a rumour printed by Stead or a suggestion, even if hedged about with counterbalancing considerations, from his closest friend.
At first, however, Dilke did not respond favourably to the prospect of a Queen’s Proctor’s intervention. This was partly because he was not clear what that official’s role was likely to be. The obvious purpose of an intervention would be to show that there had been no adultery between Dilke and Mrs. Crawford and that the divorce had therefore been given contrary to the facts of the case. But on March 2nd Dilke recorded: