by Roy Jenkins
William Goode had let Mrs. Crawford in on two occasions, both, he thought, in the spring of 1883. On these occasions Dilke saw her in the breakfast-room, and she went into no other room. On the first she left after eight or ten minutes, and on the second after fifteen to twenty minutes. He denied having passed on to Shanks any message about cleaning the windows. All three of the footmen fully confirmed Dilke’s own description of his morning habits.
Next came Ellen Drake, who had been under-housemaid from April, 1880, to March, 1883. She had never seen a lady in the house (other than Mrs. Ashton Dilke) except for one occasion, in the evening, when she came up from the basement and found Sarah in the hall talking to someone who was dressed in black and wore a large black hat. But Ellen Drake was not certain that this person “was a lady. She might have been a friend of Sarah’s.” Ellen Drake further testified that she normally cleaned Dilke’s bedroom with Sarah, sometimes while he was at breakfast, sometimes after he had gone out. There was no fixed time, and there was no prohibition on her being in any part of the house at any particular time, except that when she was first engaged, Mrs. Chatfield, still alive for her first year’s service, had impressed on her that Sir Charles disliked seeing housemaids about the house. Matthews made no impression upon her in cross-examination.
The last of this group of witnesses was Charles Grant, who had been Dilke’s coachman for fourteen years. His evidence was slightly against Dilke so far as Sloane Street was concerned (because it suggested that the latter’s 11-30 departure was not always very punctual) but very much in his favour on the point of his visits to Mrs. Crawford. He could not remember ever having driven to Sydney Place, but he remembered five or six visits to Young Street in the course of two years. Sometimes Dilke did not stay at all. He was ready to leave by the time that Grant had turned his horses. On the other occasions he remained only ten or fifteen minutes. Grant then stood the brougham at the door, and from his place on the box he could see through Mrs. Crawford’s drawing-room (which had windows at either end). He saw Dilke and a lady inside, and there was certainly no impropriety.
Next came Dilke’s three private secretaries. Bodley was first, and was subject to a rigorous cross-examination from Matthews—a fact which may partly have accounted for his later strictures upon this advocate’s methods. The main point was to challenge the witness’s statement that he invariably sat in his room at 76, Sloane Street with the door open, and that he would therefore have seen anyone who used the staircase in the morning. “Was that to facilitate a view of the housemaids going up and down with the slops?” Matthews asked. But Bodley, whose answers were at once adroit and arrogant, emerged comparatively unscathed from this and other questioning. H. G. Kennedy, whom Bodley had replaced, then told the court that he was aware of the pension to Mrs. Dessouslavy, and had indeed been responsible for a number of years for seeing that it was paid.
H. A. Lee, Dilke’s official private secretary at the Foreign Office, was last in this group. He testified to Dilke’s punctuality and regularity—“the most regular man I think I have ever met”—and to his almost invariable habit of arriving at the Foreign Office within a few minutes of twelve. He also said that he had referred to the Foreign Office library and had discovered that, on February 23rd, 1882, Dilke had dealt with and initialled about thirty despatches and drafts, in addition to the parliamentary questions; but there was nothing to show whether they had been done before or after the levée.
Mrs. Dessouslavy was next put into the box. She was an even worse witness than Dilke himself, for she was ill, deaf, had an imperfect understanding of English, and was probably rather stupid as well. Matthews showed no patience with her infirmities; on the contrary he assumed for her benefit his most brusque and intimidating cross-examination manners. “Now, Mrs. Dessouslavy, do answer something. I do not much care what it is if you will only answer,” he said on one occasion; and earned his one half-rebuke of the case from the President, who intervened: “If that is the case I think you might as well leave it.” The facts of her life, as Mrs. Dessouslavy presented them (although in an extraordinarily muddled way) appeared to be that she had been born near Neuchâtel in 1837; that after a period of service in England she had gone back to Switzerland and married in 1867 and lived with her husband until he died in 1876; that she had inherited property from her father and her elder sister which, together with the Dilke pension, enabled her to live without earning, although until her health deteriorated in 1881 she attempted various forms of work, such as keeping a cigar shop off the Brompton Road, taking in lodgers, and looking after a priest’s house at Petersham; that by 1884 her health had become still worse and that she therefore arranged for another sister to come from Russia (where she, too, was in service) in order to be with her; but that there being delay in the development of this plan she met Fanny by chance in the Tottenham Court Road and asked the girl to come and live with her, as a sort of companion-maid, until her sister arrived.
Matthews devoted himself to casting doubt on this story in order to suggest that her life had been passed in the indulgence or organisation of immorality. He tried to minimise her property and to make nonsense of her periods of employment in order to suggest that she had throughout been kept by Dilke. He insinuated that her lodging-house had been a disorderly one and that she had taken in Fanny so that the attractions of the house in Warren Street, already available for assignation, might be increased. Her memory for dates and figures and her slowness of reaction was such that he had some success in all these endeavours, and certainly reduced her to a state of utter confusion about her past life. But he failed completely to shake her denials that Warren Street had ever been used by Dilke, or anyone else, as a place at which to meet women; and throughout there was the impression that Matthews was overplaying his hand, and for once was losing the sympathy of the President.
A handwriting expert—G. S. Inglis—was then called to give his view that the last anonymous letter to Crawford, received on July 17th, 1885, had been written by Mrs. Crawford herself in a disguised hand. He was also asked to look at an earlier anonymous letter, that written on June 10th and referring to Mrs. Crawford’s luncheon with Forster at the Hotel Métropole. He could not say that this one had also been written by Mrs. Crawford, though he was by no means certain that it had not. The reasons he gave for his belief were highly confusing, and he did not give the impression of convincing the court.
Sir Julian Pauncefote, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office and later ambassador to Washington, then made a brief appearance to testify to the fencing habit in the mornings at 76, Sloane Street, to the fact that there were normally five or six people present, and that they could attend on any morning they wished without previous notice. He was the first witness not to be cross-examined.
Mrs. Rogerson, whose curious status in the case emerged increasingly as that of a professional confidante, was next examined. In the summer of 1884, Mrs. Crawford, who was then ill, had written to her and asked her to call. She had done so, had found Mrs. Crawford in a very depressed condition, and had seen a great deal of her in the course of the next few weeks. During this time Mrs. Crawford made a “confession” to Mrs. Rogerson about her relations with Sir Charles Dilke. She told her some but not all the details which she later specified to her husband. She also told her, a little later, about her relations with Captain Forster. She said that she was in love with Forster; but that between herself and Dilke there had never been any real affection. She also told Mrs. Rogerson of adulterous relations with several other men, whose names Mrs. Rogerson was asked not to give.
Mrs. Rogerson said that she was a close and long-standing family friend of Dilke’s. She half believed Mrs. Crawford’s story about her relationship with him, because she could not otherwise imagine why it had been told her; and half disbelieved it because of its inherent improbability. But to be on the safe side she advised Mrs. Crawford immediately to break off the intimacy. This advice Mrs. Crawford apparently took; she did not after
wards see Dilke except at family tea-parties. Towards Forster Mrs. Rogerson was more accommodating. In the following spring he and Mrs. Crawford frequently met at her house, and after Mrs. Crawford’s confession to her husband, Forster sent from Dublin a letter for Mrs. Crawford to Mrs. Rogerson, which the latter forwarded. She did not tell Dilke about Mrs. Crawford’s original story, but when, in the spring of 1885, Crawford received an anonymous letter dealing with his wife’s relations with Dilke, Mrs. Crawford told Mrs. Roger-son about it, and Mrs. Rogerson told Dilke. This was the occasion on which she was alleged to have said to him: “Your sin has found you out,” but she was adamant that she had not. She might have said that the sins of the anonymous letter-writers would find them out.
Immediately after Mrs. Crawford left her husband she came to see Mrs. Rogerson and told her the full details. Mrs. Rogerson then took it upon herself to see Crawford and tried to persuade him to agree to a quiet separation or to anything which would prevent such a case coming before the public. Shortly after this she began to suffer from an illness which affected her reason and from which she did not recover for nine months. She could remember very little of what occurred during this period, and during the latter part of it she was under restraint. Soon after she recovered she received a copy of a statement which her brother—who was Stewart, Crawford’s solicitor—claimed to have taken from her at the beginning of her illness, together with a threatening letter from him stating that if she deviated from this statement in the witness-box she would have a very hard time.
Matthews put to her that she was the writer of the anonymous letter mentioning Mrs. Crawford’s Métropole lunch with Forster, basing himself on the somewhat flimsy support of its being written in magenta-coloured ink, as was a letter which she had sent to Stewart from Gmünden in the summer of 1885. She rejected this allegation, and he was not able to make very much of his other lines of attack. Her defence of having been out of her mind during the period about which he was asking was a more effective one than he had previously encountered in the case.
Three of Mrs. Rogerson’s servants were then examined—two Dalgleish sisters, her lady’s maid and housemaid, and Albert Talbot, her footman. They all testified to Mrs. Crawford having met Forster frequently at Mrs. Rogerson’s during the spring of 1885, and to their having been alone together in the house on some occasions. There was evidence of their having been seen sitting together on one chair. In addition, there was an occasion when Mrs. Crawford was staying in the house, when she left after dinner and did not return until nine o’clock the following morning. Matthews confined his cross-examination to asking the Dalgleishes whether they had not been dismissed for drunkenness by Stewart (after Mrs. Rogerson had been placed under restraint) and to suggesting that they had all three been suborned by Dilke through the agency of Mrs. Rogerson. Two private soldiers from the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry were then called. They gave evidence of a visit by Mrs. Crawford to Forster in Dublin at Easter, 1885. They were not cross-examined.
The next witnesses were Lady Dilke and her niece, Gertrude Tuckwell, later to be Sir Charles’s joint official biographer. Their brief evidence was designed to substantiate Dilke’s alibi for May 6th, 1882. Lady Dilke said that on that day her future husband had been with her at Mrs. Earle’s from before noon until half-past two or a little later. Miss Tuckwell gave evidence of Mrs. Crawford’s arrival in Oxford, for, ironically enough, the Crawfords were staying that week-end as the guests of Mark Pattison in the Rector’s Lodgings at Lincoln College. They reached the tennis courts near the museum at about five o’clock, which meant that she must have come by the train due in at 4-5 p.m.
The last witness for the Queen’s Proctor was Samuel Barnett, Vicar of St. Jude’s, Whitechapel. He testified that in the early part of 1884, when Mrs. Crawford was doing charitable work in his parish, she had received a letter there “from some officer in barracks.” The witness had reported this fact to Crawford. After Dilke himself had been recalled briefly on one or two points not of major importance, Sir Walter Phillimore said: “That will be the case, my Lord, for the Queen’s Proctor.”
It was by no means a wholly satisfactory case, but it was one which made look implausible several aspects of the story Mrs. Crawford was expected to tell. Furthermore, it offered convincing evidence of her adultery with Forster, which she had hitherto denied. How she would deal with these difficulties remained to be seen.
Chapter Fourteen
The Case for Mrs. Crawford—and the Verdict
The Normal procedure at this stage would have been for Matthews to make his opening speech and then to call such witnesses as he wished, perhaps beginning with Mrs. Crawford. Instead he appealed to the President for permission to call Mrs. Crawford immediately, on the ground that he could not tell what she was going to say in reply to some of the evidence which had just been offered. This, he said, would make it very difficult for him to open first. After a moment’s hesitation the President agreed.
Mrs. Crawford then went into the box. She was twenty-three years old at the time and an attractive, although hardly beautiful young woman. She had been brought up as a member of a large family. She was the sixth of ten children and the fourth of seven daughters. As a child her home had been partly in London and partly in Northumberland, where her father, Eustace Smith, was a rich Tyneside ship-repairer, the son of the founder of Smiths’ Docks. Her education, however, had been mainly in France, where, although not a Roman Catholic, she had been sent to a convent school. She returned to England at the age of seventeen ready for the season of 1880. She had married fifteen months later, having apparently refused one earlier proposal. Despite this one refusal her marriage had been dictated, not by any love for her husband, but by a determination to get away from her parents’ house, where her mother, a woman of strong but difficult character, followed a habit of making life impossible for all the daughters in turn.
Mrs. Crawford was a woman of lively mind and considerable intelligence. At the trial she created an immediate impression of clarity and incision. She was not strictly Matthews’s witness—it was her husband, not she, who was his client—and this necessitated the following procedure. The President himself conducted her through a four-question examination-in-chief. Was she willing to give evidence? Had she read her husband’s evidence at the last trial? Was it true? Was it in particular true that she had committed adultery with Sir Charles Dilke? When she answered “yes” to each of these questions he handed her over to Matthews, who then began what was in part a supplementary examination-in-chief and in part an extremely courteous cross-examination. Matthews asked her 332 questions, and another thirty-five on re-examination. Phillimore in cross-examination asked her 551 questions. Her ordeal was a little longer than Dilke’s, but considerably less gruelling. She was rarely at a loss for a satisfactory answer, she showed no signs of distress, and she apparently impressed the court as a truthful and straightforward witness. Whether the story she told was in fact the truth remains to be seen.
Matthews first asked her about her visit to Warren Street on February 23rd, 1882. She said that she returned to London that winter on February 13th and went to stay with her parents for a short time. On Monday, February 20th, she moved into 3, Sydney Place, the house which she and her husband had taken for the session. On the following morning Dilke came to see her there. Her evidence continued:
He asked me to meet him at another house. I refused for a long time. I did not know what he meant. Then he explained, and at last I promised to go. He gave me the address, but he would not allow me to write it down. He made me repeat it, and he described the house to me.
Q.: What description did he give you of the house?
A.: He told me the number of the house, but in case I made a mistake he told me it was a house on the north side of Warren Street—that there were two tall narrow houses together just alike, and the one I was to go to was the one which had three bells to it. I was to ring one of those bells.
Q.: Did he fix t
he date on which you were to go?
A.: Yes, he asked me to go on the following Thursday, at half past eleven.
Q.: Did he tell you how to go?
A.: He told me I was to drive there, and that I was to drive in a hansom, and that I was to change hansoms on the way, and that I was to get out at the corner of Warren Street and walk up to the house, and that when I arrived at the house I would be let in by a woman, and that I was to go straight upstairs to the back room on the first floor and not to speak to anyone, and that he would be there waiting for me.
Q.: Did you go on the Thursday?
A.: Yes, I went.
Q.: And found the house he had described?
A.: I found the house, yes.
Q.: Do you remember who opened the door to you?
A.: A woman opened the door, but I did not look at her; I did not speak to her; I went straight upstairs.
Q.: Which room did you go into then?
A.: It was a bedroom. There was a large bed standing against the wall on the same side as the door. The fireplace was opposite the bed, and I think there were two windows at the end of the room. It was furnished like a bedroom.
Q.: Was Sir Charles Dilke there when you arrived?
A.: Yes, he was waiting for me.
Q.: In that room?
A.: In the room. The curtains were drawn, and there were lights in the room.
Q.: Did you ask him or did he tell you anything about the house?
A.: I asked him what house it was, and he said it belonged to an old servant of his, and that he made use of the room when he wanted it.