Notorious Victoria

by Mary Gabriel

  As the two grew more intimate, the natural conclusion seemed to be marriage, but Martin was reluctant to commit. He left for a holiday in Spain without Victoria that spring, but in notes scrawled on the steamship Aussonia’s letterhead he admitted she was not easily left or forgotten: “There were only two sorts of women,” he wrote, “the ones in whom you lost yourself and the ones in which you found yourself. . . . She had compelled him to go to her to think of her . . . demanding that was how he remembered her—an obsession. Suddenly taking possession of things. . . .

  “He paid for the fact that she was a stimulant by the fact that she was also an irritant. She vitalized him and accelerated him quite extraordinarily and yet she was in many ways almost extraordinarily disinteresting. . . . She was more alive than anyone I have ever met. Ordinary words don’t describe her. When you were with her everything became so thrilling, seemed so worthwhile, you looked at the world through her eyes and you saw miracles all around you. . . . She believed people were interesting and wonderful and they became it.”

  By November 1880 they were making public appearances together and by December they were engaged. On December 1, Martin wrote to his mother of the match: “I am very sorry that any of you should feel anxiety on my account when I feel none. I hope that by this post you will receive a letter from Julia [Martin’s older sister]. . . . Richard [Martin’s brother] had a long talk with [Victoria] last night, but I don’t know what he said; he was I think very much alarmed and preached at me on Sunday but after the interview last night he only said, ‘I like her very much.’ I hope he will write to you tonight & I hope will not have anything alarming to report. Julia says that she (Victoria) was very much better before they came up; she had eaten nothing and had not been to bed; & was very unhappy this morning & said that . . . she would not come between me & my people; but I hope we shall get over that. Your affectionate son, John Martin.”

  Victoria passed a critical test when she met Martin’s parents at their estate in Worcestershire, but just before Christmas her dream of marrying Martin was nearly ruined. Tennie said later that when the engagement was announced, “bales of letters poured into Mr. Martin’s bank blackening Victoria’s character.” The Treat pamphlet had resurfaced and Martin’s brother, Richard, warned him that he had become involved with—if not been duped by—an American adventuress. Martin was prepared to break off the engagement.

  When Victoria arrived in England, she was broken in spirit and health. Now, just as it seemed that her fortunes were about to change—that she had found the peace and security she craved—the same pursuers who she had believed had wrecked her life in America threatened to destroy her happiness again. Victoria was desperate not to let that happen. In January 1881, she published one issue of a newspaper called Woodhall & Claflin’s Journal, which featured on its masthead intertwined American and British flags. Its subject was ostensibly the “advocacy of great social questions” and “the higher instruction and improvement of woman,” but its real purpose was propaganda: to paint Victoria in the way she wished to be portrayed, not as the Treat pamphlet, with its charges of prostitution, drunkenness, and gambling, had drawn her.

  The journal’s tone was frantic and rambling. Under an article titled “Truth Crushed to Earth” Victoria wrote, “The development of circumstances demands that the silence which I have long imposed upon myself should be broken.” She took a high tone in opening her self-defense, unleashing a torrent of religious imagery that did little if anything to explain her situation: “Certain of those who might have been teachers of men have infused a poisonous leaven into the bread of life, and profaned the holy temple; whilst ready-voiced Slander, the zealous servant of Satan, goeth to and fro, as a pest-stricken wretch amongst a multitude, devastating goodness, desolating truth. . . . As all things in the spiritual world have their correspondence in the earth and in man, so the demoniacal serpent has a material human representative in Stephen Pearl Andrews.”

  Simply put, Andrews made her do it. She also claimed that she was the victim of anonymous persecutors, “vipers that sting unblemished reputations in the dark,” and that, as an “unprotected woman,” she was a target for “reckless slander.”

  As to her previous championing of free love, she denied ever promoting the concept, and if the Weekly had done so in its columns, she was not responsible: “I could not always read and select the contributions sent for me . . . articles favoring free-love appeared without my knowledge or sanction . . . but the evil done did not rest there. I became . . . as though I was morally responsible for utterances and doctrines which I loathe and abhor from the depths of my inmost being. I now openly vow, with all the earnestness of righteous indignation, that during no part of my life did I favor free love even tacitly.”

  She blamed Blood for not protecting her from Treat’s initial attack, saying that had he done so in 1874 in New York, “she would not now be under the painful necessity of laboring to clear her character from foul aspersions.”

  She further charged that Blood was the real author of the Treat pamphlet and also its publisher, and she suggested that her brush with death in 1873 was the result of having been slowly poisoned by an unnamed villain who readers were no doubt supposed to believe was also Blood.

  Victoria described herself as blameless concerning the end of her marriage to the dastardly Blood: “In 1875, while laboring under severe prostration in New York City, and when her life was in jeopardy, moved by a sudden impulse, Mrs. Woodhall suspecting the fidelity of her husband, followed him one evening to a house on Lexington Avenue. There, having entered a private apartment, she found her husband in the embraces of a woman. . . . She simply refused to live with Blood any longer, and started off on a long lecturing tour.”

  Victoria took her campaign of self-vindication to other newspapers as well, most notably The Cuckoo. In the April issues of that publication, several of Victoria’s Journal items were reprinted, but The Cuckoo also gave space to Victoria’s detractors, who expressed astonishment at her vehement rejection of “free-lovism” and “Colonel Bloodism”: “In the London Court Journal, not long since,” one detractor wrote, “was published (and no doubt paid for as an advertisement), a remarkable letter from Victoria C. Woodhall, which in barefaced mendacity has probably never been exceeded.

  “Would it be believed that even Mrs. Woodhall would have the effrontery to deny positively that she ever had any sympathy for, or was in any manner connected with, the doctrine of free love?

  “How do her free love followers and quondam worshippers in America relish this repudiation of them and their principles, by their former high priestess?

  “I read her paper regularly till it ceased publication, and it constantly, over her signature, advocated free lovism.”

  Victoria returned to New York later that year, partly to face her accusers head-on and partly to attempt a second presidential campaign. Her efforts on both sides of the Atlantic seemed alternately hysterical and pathetic. She had no chance of forcing her detractors to desist and absolutely no hope of being met with anything but mockery by announcing another White House bid, but gone were the restraining influences upon which she had previously relied. During her years with Blood, despite her claims against him, he had been a sobering influence. Now, left to her own devices, Victoria lashed out wildly for respectability.

  While she was in New York during that visit she passed Blood on the street but refused even to recognize him. He swooned at the sight of her and had to grab his companion’s arm to steady himself. It was likely that he knew she had been publicly abusing him in Britain, but he didn’t care. In fact, his friends said he still hoped to win her back. He had even written letters and published articles on her behalf to try to help her rehabilitation efforts, which she acknowledged as “justifiable” acts of reparation that amounted to too little too late. Blood eventually became resigned to his loss, saying simply, “The grandest woman in the world went back on me.”

  AFTER YEARS OF effort, the w
oman who formerly denounced marriage as a “hot little hell” won herself a third husband. Victoria and John Martin were married on October 31, 1883, at South Kensington Presbyterian Church in the presence of Buck Claflin and Tennessee. No one from Martin’s family attended the wedding; in fact, not until November 3 did John Martin send his parents a telegram announcing the union. In it he said briefly, “I think that my telegram will have led you to guess what I am to tell you, that I am & have long been, married to Victoria.”

  The marriage certificate indicated John Martin’s age as forty-two and Victoria’s as forty-five, but her age was crossed out and replaced by forty-two. She was described as the divorced wife of James Harvey Blood and as “Woodhull, Widow.” Under “Rank or Profession,” Martin was listed as “Banker,” but according to the marriage certificate, Victoria had neither a place in society nor an occupation.

  LONDON, OCTOBER 1885

  As Mrs. Martin, Victoria would be an eminently respectable wife, first and foremost, and she would put as much energy into that occupation as she had into all her past pursuits. She did nothing halfway. And though her wedding with Martin was simple in the extreme, their romance would be enduring, passionate, and embattled.

  Mr. and Mrs. Martin moved into a home at 17 Hyde Park Gate, London. It was an expansive dwelling on a storied street just south of Hyde Park. The small culde-sac would be home to Winston Churchill, the sculptor Jacob Epstein, and Leslie Stephen, the father of Virginia Woolf.

  No. 17 was in the middle of a block of urban mansions. The brick and gabled home seemed enchanted and alive with greenery. Its gardens were bursting with roses, ivy, and jasmine, which at night, by the light of the electric globes hung throughout the trees, seemed even richer and fuller. The interior was resplendent with marble sculptures, purple velvet drapes, and mosaic tables. White bearskin rugs covered parquet floors. The Martins’ household staff included one of the best cooks in London. Both Victoria and John viewed the home and garden as a sanctuary where they could shut out the rest of the world.

  Apparently Martin left reluctantly every day for his office at the family bank at 68 Lombard Street, from which he wrote Victoria scores of brief but loving notes.

  My dear little wife—I pray that this may find you safe & well in our blessed home: God keep you well. Make me feel every minute that your heart is with me as much as mine is with yours.

  Darling Wife, I turned back as I was leaving the office to write a line to you, as I took up my pen your letters came in. God bless & keep you, your letters lighten my heart. I cannot bear to think that you are sad in our dear home while I am away. Make me feel that my influence keeps you happy.

  Darling, I was so grieved to see you troubled at the thought that I should be absent a few hours: my heart went out to you, & is with you every minute. Do not vex yourself; I do not think that we shall suffer any annoyance or impediment in making our home the sweetest in London; I shall hurry home this evening to find you well & happy.

  When Martin was called away for the night, Victoria was equally despondent.

  My darling husband I am so lonely tonight weary of life. I went into the drawing room this evening just to peek through the door and see my darling sleeping but it was all dark. I hope you are all very well and happy. I need your precious arms around me this moment I am sleeping in the north room I cannot go upstairs.

  Precious darling and you are not here with your loving arms around me to keep me from harm how can I go into our dear holy bedroom I cannot do it I shall sleep on the lounge. I cannot do it my eyes are [filled] with tears I want my precious husband.

  As a spiritualist, Victoria believed that every person had a perfect spouse who would remain with them even in the next life. It appeared that in John Biddulph Martin, Victoria had found hers.

  AS ALWAYS, TENNIE followed Victoria along whatever path she traveled and soon she found herself a husband as well. Her choice was a man strikingly like Cornelius Vanderbilt—perhaps Tennie had learned a lesson by missing the chance to become the thirty-five-year-old widow of the richest man in America.

  In August 1884, Francis Cook was an elderly widower with three grown children. He headed Britain’s largest fabric manufacturer and distributor, Cook, Son & Company, and owned a palace near Lisbon, the Portuguese title Viscount of Monserrate, and a residence overlooking the Thames called Doughty House—also home to a magnificent art collection. Like Vanderbilt, he had an eye for the ladies and was enamored of the vivacious Tennie.

  Tennessee, as she now resumed calling herself, got to work on her new “old boy.” She half warned, half threatened that if she did not marry him before her parents died, she would not care to have any man. She also enlisted the help of Cook’s dead wife, telling him she had received a message from the late Mrs. Cook, who advised her husband to marry Miss Claflin. One year later he did.

  In October 1885, Tennessee married Francis Cook and the news was reported back in New York. Predictably the reports were accompanied by juicy morsels about the “irresistible” Tennie and the “notorious” Victoria. When eighty-nine-year-old Buck Claflin died three weeks later at Victoria’s home in London, the sisters blamed his demise on their continued persecution in the press.

  Victoria wrote a letter to the New York Sun: “My father, Reuben B. Claflin, died of grief caused by the malicious libel published in the World of October 25th. Has not our family suffered enough? Please insert this notice for our heart-broken family.”

  In fact, Buck had suffered a stroke. But no death associated with the Claflins could be attributed to so simple an explanation as natural causes. Scotland Yard was even called in to investigate after a writer identified only as “Justice” sent a letter to the Lord Mayor of London calling the death “sudden” and Buck’s burial “mysterious.”

  The outraged John Martin was prepared to come to the rescue of his wife’s family by offering a reward for Justice’s identity, but the inquiry was quietly dropped when it became clear that the letter had been written by a member of the Claflin family.

  NEW YORK CITY, APRIL 1886

  The following year, Tennessee ventured back to America. Victoria and John Martin had already dared set foot there in 1884, when Martin delivered a lecture in Philadelphia to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. There had been few repercussions and little notice in the press that the Woodhull had returned. Tennie’s trip home would be greeted with much more attention, however. The previous month she had become Lady Cook when Francis Cook was made a baronet for endowing London’s Alexandra House and a concert hall for impoverished student artists.

  Lady Tennessee Cook, and the wealth the title implied, quickly became a magnet for blackmailers. She even received a request for money at her husband’s estate in Lisbon from the foreman of one of the juries that had acquitted her in the obscenity case in New York. Cook and Martin joined forces to root out and prosecute the blackmailers; they published a card in The Sun offering five thousand dollars to anyone who would reveal and secure convictions against blackmailers working against their wives. They also offered five hundred dollars to each detective who had been ordered by Captain Thomas F. Byrnes to follow Tennessee during her stay in New York. (Under Byrnes’s direction, police were apparently ordered to keep an eye on the woman who had once been responsible for so much mischief.)

  Byrnes was a formidable foe. He was the most famous detective of his time and had quietly amassed a private fortune by dealing with blackmailers for prominent men on Wall Street and for members of New York’s elite “400”—the chosen few who could fit comfortably into Mrs. John Jacob Astor’s ballroom. Byrnes had been well acquainted with Victoria and Tennessee during their tenure in the city, keeping an eye not only on their banking activities but on their involvement in the International as well. It was Byrnes’s men who broke up many of the International’s marches and who were assigned the responsibility of keeping the Commune out of New York. In 1886, he wrote a book called Professional Criminals of America, which w
as a rogues’ gallery of New York criminals. One of the “adventuresses” sounded suspiciously like Victoria: “She has a large circle of acquaintance among moneyed men, and has also a ready perception, a glib tongue and a keen, instinctive knowledge of human nature. These qualities she is constantly turning to the utmost pecuniary account. . . . In the evenings she receives calls from numerous bankers, brokers and others, whom she elegantly and pleasantly entertains, and meanwhile ‘talks them’ into, wheedles or coaxes or argues them into favorable notice of any scheme she may have at the time a pecuniary interest in. . . . By her earnings in this line, sub rosa, of course, she makes the major part of the family income. . . . This lady is widely known by Wall Street and Broad Street magnates.”

  A letter from Victoria to her third husband, John Biddulph Martin. (Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library, ca. 1886)

  Getting no satisfaction from Byrnes’s detectives and no apparent help in tracking down blackmailers, Martin turned in the direction of Blood, perhaps at Victoria’s urging. She had hinted while trying to woo Martin that Blood had been responsible for all manner of deviltry and it would not have been unlike her at this point in her life to suggest that Blood was continuing to work behind the scenes to wreck her happiness.

  That spring, Martin hired a New York detective agency, Moony & Boland, to find Blood. On April 2, 1886, the agency reported to him that a man fitting Blood’s description—about fifty, very thin, with a “gray ruddy complexion and eyes and hair to match”—had died in December 1885. The detectives reported: