by Roy Lewis
But my professional career was reaching an entirely new level. I had become not only a social, but a legal lion. In view of the skills I had already demonstrated I was called upon to act as an election agent again, working for Captain David Pelham, the brother of the Earl of Yarborough. The Boston Advertiser reported cockades, brass bands, railway navigators smashing windows and a pitched battle in the streets: inevitably, Pelham’s opponent complained of shameful intimidation and bribery. Nevertheless, I steered Pelham home to a seat in the Commons and the Earl showed his gratitude thereafter by numerous invitations to his home. And his impressionable 14-year-old son, Lord Worsley, became even more dog-like in his devotion: he demonstrated what can only be described as an infatuation for me and my deeds. This led to my introducing him to some of the more elegant night houses and, I admit, calling upon him from time to time to endorse bills which were falling due at inconvenient, financially embarrassing times for me. But what should a man do, if not call on his friends when in trouble?
And trouble, in financial matters, there still was. Even though a cascade of briefs poured into my chambers and my earnings steadily rose until I was soon to become the highest-paid barrister in England—really, my boy, it’s true—I was still crippled by debt, paying as much as one hundred and eighty per cent to some of my creditors to avoid being dunned. I was constantly forced to take loans at exorbitant rates merely to pay interest of previous debts. The society in which I moved demanded expenditure at an alarming scale; the socially great sought my presence at their soirées; Sir James Duke and the Duke of Norfolk, Lord Pelham, Lord Combermere and Lord Wilton, the Earl of Yarborough and Viscount Palmerston—they all demanded my presence at their country houses and a procession of society ladies fluttered breathily into my arms—often paying for the pleasure later by way of loans of considerable size.
A social and legal lion.… It was a time when most of the ‘flash’ cases came my way at nisi prius: The Daily News briefed me in the libel suit brought by Lord Lucan, who was complaining of their criticisms of his conduct in the Crimean campaign: in the witness box I cut him to ribbons, deriding him and Lord Cardigan as being like two great schoolgirls in their private feuding which led to the disaster of the charge of the Light Brigade. I made the forgetful Lord Combermere, ancient hero of the Peninsular War, look the doddering fool he was—though he still cheerily invited me to his home where his wife refused to speak to me—and my table in chambers was littered with crim.con briefs.
But my aspirations towards a seat in Parliament seemed to have stalled; I was becalmed, as a man of your background might say. I still wanted—needed—to attain my political prizes, and they still seemed far distant … until I thought the opportunity had finally arisen at Southampton.
The vacancy caused by the sudden asthmatic death of Sir John Jervis, who had been elevated to the bench after the Horsham by-election, left a judicial seat open and Cockburn was the obvious choice to become Chief Justice of the Common Pleas. As a judge, he would have to relinquish his seat at Southampton, and I had the support of Palmerston and the Radical party.
But Cockburn dithered.
‘I’m reluctant to give up my present life, James,’ he confided to me, as he sipped at his brandy and water. ‘My large professional income will obviously drop if I take a seat on the Bench, the hurly-burly of political life will be lost to me and, well, to put not too fine a point on it, the pleasurable diversions which you and I have enjoyed together at The Nunnery will have to come to an end.’
Then, while he was still chewing things over in his mind, a by-election was called for Hull. Rather than wait upon Cockburn’s decision, I decided to throw my cap into that particular ring. After committing myself to a considerable degree of expenditure in that estimable town I then heard that Cockburn had decided to accept the Common Pleas after all. And at a subsequent meeting in the Reform Club I was persuaded by him and Palmerston and Sir James Duke that Southampton was a better bet than Hull, and that the voters there would welcome me with open arms.
So, as was reported in The Hampshire Advertiser, ‘Down came Mr James, duly labelled QC, endorsed with the crabbed and unmistakeably legal hand of Sir Alexander Cockburn.’
Unfortunately, my friends had not advised me well; it seemed Southampton had had enough of lawyers representing them. I well recall the campaign that was rolled out against me: I found myself in the middle of a battle at Pratt’s Riding School where a continuous chanting of No lawyers, No lawyers drowned out my election address. At the point where the platform on which I stood was overturned I beat a hasty retreat and although I manfully promised my supporters next day at the Royal Hotel that I would not be deterred and would continue the fight, on my return to London discretion—and financial embarrassment—prevailed and I decided otherwise. I had at that time taken a town house in Bedford Place. I told my supporters who gathered there that I was withdrawing from the bruising battle for the Southampton seat.
Unreasonably, Cockburn was somewhat sniffy with me for a while thereafter, and the Prime Minister himself was a little put out of countenance but in reality I had little choice: my financial situation was becoming alarming. I had spent freely at Hull and now again at Southampton and there was the likelihood of a general election the following year. I could not afford to buy a seat I might hold only for a short period. I needed to stiffen my financial sinews and await the best opportunity.
And that would mean I needed briefs in the election committees which would inevitably follow the appointing of a new House of Commons. I concluded that to seek a seat myself at that time was something beyond my financial capabilities.
So after the Southampton debacle I set aside political ambitions for a while and worked myself into a professional frenzy. I took everything I could: I found myself representing dog fanciers and jockeys, a mayor who failed to pay his wine bill in a brothel and a mourning relative who complained that the funeral coach had overturned on the way to the cemetery, leaving the dear departed lying in the road. We achieved substantial damages for the affront: natural in a Christian community! I attacked reputations and humbug, exposed scandals and hypocrisy, railed against aristocrats, brewery owners and politicians and attained columns of notices in the national press. Not that it was all court work: I needed to enlarge my social contacts. Christmas came and I took out a game licence and did some shooting at the Duke of Norfolk’s estates, at the Duke’s personal invitation; I was seen at Friday to Mondays in Hampshire, Kent and Nottingham and I fished in the Thames, the Ouse and the Wear. Then it was back to work. I sat as Recorder in Brighton, dealt with hearings for breach of promise and nuisance and I rode the circuit with success. Consequently, by the spring of the following year, when election fever was at its height, I was £4,000 richer … in theory, at least.
And after I attended Sir Richard Bethell’s big dinner at the Albion Tavern in Aldersgate Street, when the results of the general election were in the frenzied avalanche of work began again; retainers for the election committee hearings flooded into my chambers and I found myself scurrying between committee rooms, with the consequence that my name was being heard and noted in every county in England and not a few in Ireland, also.
I found my personal popularity with the political party of my choice rose also, not least because of the spat I had with Gladstone. I spoke in court, during Lyle v Herbert, a crim.con. case, of a former minister of the Crown who had once acted like a common detective, tracking the wife of a noble Duke through Italy, before becoming a witness to her frailty in the subsequent hearing for her adultery with Lord Lincoln.
Ha, yes, you remind me, I’ve already mentioned that particular episode to you. But did I tell you about the device used by the private enquiry agent? You see, when the grocer I was representing began to suspect his wife of infidelity he employed a detective who obtained proof of guilt with his patent crimconometer. The detective bored a hole in the bedroom wall and ran a string to it, tied to the bedsprings. The other end of the cord was at
tached to his device in the other room, which looked like a kind of thermometer, with a pointer which oscillated, recording the activity – and number of persons – in the bed beyond the wall. The grocer and his private enquiry agent waited, with cigars and porter, watching the crimconometer do its work and when the determined activity in the bedroom was at its height they rushed in and surprised the guilty couple, causing the adulterer to fall out of bed. They removed his boots so he couldn’t escape and went back into the other room to discuss the whole affair.
When the case came on the other side sneered about the ‘dirty activities’ of the enquiry agent: I responded by comparing it to Gladstone’s hunting down of the Duke of Newcastle’s wife when she ran off to Italy with Lord Lincoln. Gladstone’s furious reaction next day to what he considered as a slur – comparing him to a low-born private investigator – delighted Old Pam and the Liberal Party, as did the flurry of letters between Gladstone and myself: I had tweaked Gladstone’s nose, I was their darling, the social lion who had shown his legal teeth.
They talked to me, they flattered me, these political luminaries. They insisted I was needed in the House with my wit, my capacity for cutting satire, and my eloquence and political conviction. We all waited for the first by-election to come about, where I could follow my star.
But while I waited, an immensely important brief fell into my legal lap. It was just what my reputation needed; a sensational hearing with political overtones, a case which would elevate me to the position of perhaps the most well known advocate in England.
It all began with an explosion in the crowded Rue de Pelletier in Paris, at the corner of the grand boulevards crowded with people to welcome the appearance of Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie. They were on their way to the opera, to attend the benefit performance of the renowned baritone Massini. They were about to descend from the imperial Berlin coach when there was a thunderous roar and all hell seemed to fall in upon them.
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The procession had formed up in the Tuileries, the imperial coach escorted by a troop of Lancers, resplendent in their blue and white uniforms, along with the Imperial Guard under the leadership of the Commandant of Paris.
Dressed immaculately in black the Emperor sat beside Eugénie, in evening dress under a white cashmere cloak. With them was General Roquet, a hero of Waterloo. They were a little late arriving at the theatre but as the Lancers wheeled into review order the coachman reined in the horses to enter the carriageway where awaited the Master of Ceremonies and the Duke of Saxe-Coburg. Yes, that’s right, the same family as our own coxcomb Prince Albert. As the party was about to descend from the carriage, in the crowd Felice Orsini gave the signal and Antonio Gomez threw the first bomb.
The grenade landed among the Lancers and burst like a cannon, causing widespread destruction. The heavy glass candelabra above the entrance to the Opera crashed down in a thousand deadly fragments and almost immediately the second bomb was thrown, launched by the second assassin, Carlo Rudio. It killed the Emperor’s coachman and one of the horses; all the gas lamps in the street went out as shrieks of pain and cries of terror mingled with the clattering of wild hoofs and the shrill, terrified whinnying of frightened and injured horses.
As the Lancers clattered forward to shield the coach, the third bomb was thrown, this time by Orsini himself. It killed the other carriage horse and started a scurrying stampede of fugitives down the panicked boulevards.
All was confusion: Lancers, pedestrians, gendarmes, footmen and wild-eyed stallions dashed about in noisy confusion. A fourth grenade might have ended everything, but it never came.
The attempt on the life of the Emperor had failed. Napoleon III and his Empress emerged shakily from the ruined carriage and picked their way through the carnage into the Opera House. The first act of William Tell was over when they entered. News of the bombs swept through the theatre and the audience rose, cheered Emperor and Empress and the orchestra struck up triumphantly with the Bonapartist anthem Partant pour la Syrie.
Himself wounded, after throwing his bomb, Orsini had stumbled into Rue Lafitte, leaving a trail of blood; Gomez had taken refuge in the Ristorante Broggi; Rudio had concealed himself in a local tavern. But why had the fourth bomb not been thrown? The reason was that the fourth terrorist Guiseppe Pieri had been arrested before the first grenade had been launched and foolishly, in custody when he heard the first explosion, had cried out ‘Do what you want with me! The first blow is struck!’
Gomez was quickly arrested as was Rudio; before daybreak the Surété found Orsini asleep on his blood-soaked pillow.
Next morning, at the Café Suisse in London a little Belgian doctor called Simon Bernard was told of the events in Paris.
As you might imagine, my boy, the attempt upon the life of the Emperor enraged the French Government and sent a shudder throughout Europe, for it was the first time a bomb had been used in an attempted assassination, and the slaughter of innocent victims—eight dead and one hundred and fifty injured—was horrific. Very quickly, England’s reputation as a sanctuary for political exiles came under attack: the French Press, and Le Moniteur in particular described London as the ‘haunt of assassins’ and England as the ‘laboratory of murder’.
Palmerston bowed to French pressure and brought in a bill, the Conspiracy to Murder Act, which would give the Government power to treat plots hatched in England against foreign princes as felonies, triable in English courts. He failed to gauge the mood of the House; he was defeated, and immediately resigned. For, aided by French detectives the London police had discovered that the plan to assassinate Napoleon III had been hatched in London.
And the prime mover had been Dr Simon Bernard.
Orsini, Gomez, Rudio and Pieri had been the bomb throwers but Bernard had been the conspirator who preached revolution in France, Belgium and England; it was he who had persuaded Orsini that the assassination of the Emperor was a political necessity; it was Bernard who had helped manufacture the bombs in Birmingham, helped recruit the assassins, paid the conspirators, procured passports for them and acted as the go-between in London, Birmingham and Paris. He was arrested and charged before the magistrates at Bow Street. Meanwhile, Sir Fitzroy Kelly—old Applepip himself—had succeeded Cockburn as Attorney General and consulted several leading counsel as to whether a charge of murder would stick against Dr Bernard in an English court. I was one of those consulted.
I told Fitzroy Kelly I thought it could be done but by the time he approached me again I had done some hard thinking, and reached other conclusions.
I was always a gambling man—in the courts as well as the night houses. I could see significant possibilities in the Bernard case. And in those few days since the Attorney General first raised the matter with me I had evidence of the standing in which I was now held at the English Bar. As in the Palmer criminal trial, I was approached by both prosecution and defence. In addition, I had become aware of the political implications of the case. There was a platform of defiance that I could stand on—and rage.
Accordingly, when John Greenwood, Solicitor to the Treasury wrote to me offering me the brief for the prosecution I told him I had made my choice: defence attorneys had approached me and I had accepted their instructions. I would be acting for Dr Simon Bernard. For I realized that the brief, and the timing of the case, was of the utmost importance to me in my career.
You see, my boy, I’ve already told you that cross-examination is a peculiar skill but very alike to duel with the epée. One must attack aggressively, and defend stoutly, but it is also about badgering, deflecting, sniping, confusing, misleading, pricking, wounding, discountenancing and, finally, defeating. I was an acknowledged master of this skill. But there was another attribute for which I had become famous: the address to the jury.
I was known to be a capital man to a jury. My early training as a youth had been in the theatre, as I have mentioned. One needs a sense of theatre when one faces a jury. And aware as I was of the feeling which was sweeping the cou
ntry, the heat engendered in comments made before the magistrates, the uproar in the Commons when Palmerston tried to bring in a bill which the public believed was a mere pandering to the French, I knew that I was being presented with an outstanding opportunity.
As soon as I received instructions from the defence attorneys I visited Bernard at his ghastly accommodation in Newgate.
It was a gloomy location for a gloomy discussion. The facts were before me, incontrovertible, and as I talked with Bernard I did not prevaricate: I informed him that his position, legally, was a hopeless one. The only cheerful thing about the whole thing was Dr Bernard himself: he was a dark-haired man, aquiline-nosed, but his cheery demeanour was almost amusing. I’ve met some cool characters in my time—Billy Palmer was one of the leaders in that respect—but Simon Bernard was the most cold-blooded individual I had ever came across. There was no doubt that he had conspired with Orsini: the grenades had been bought by Orsini but it was Bernard who had manufactured them in Birmingham, who had arranged for their transport to France and who had given the conspirators constant support. His involvement in the assassination plot had been deep and his guilt obvious. Indeed, he freely admitted his involvement. For he believed he was fighting for a Great Cause.
And he was not one of those dark, bearded, mysterious beings you read about in the penny dreadfuls hawked around the streets. He gave the lie to the stage impersonator of a conspirator. When I talked with him in that damp-walled gloomy cell his countenance was clear and cheerful, his conversation as free as though we were merely discussing the chances of the favourite winning the Derby. He seemed totally unconcerned with the danger of his situation, the peril of his position—more, it was as though he regarded himself as a hero of the first order.
It was this that gave me the first inkling of an idea for the manner in which I would conduct his defence.