by Neil McKenna
Fiske was still at home when Detective Officer Gollan called at George Street mid-morning. He did not appear to be at all surprised by the policeman’s visit. In fact, he seemed to be expecting it. Gollan began to methodically work his way through the cupboards and drawers in the sitting room and the bedroom, slowly and thoroughly reading every letter he came across. In the pen drawer of his desk he found three letters and two telegrams signed ‘Louis’, and concealed in a hatbox in the bedroom were a dozen or so photographs of young men (rather effeminate young men, it seemed to Detective Officer Gollan) and some newspaper cuttings about the case of the Young Men in Women’s Clothes.
‘I asked Mr Fiske if there was anything else,’ Gollan testified in court later. ‘After a little hesitation he said if I would leave the room he would produce the remainder that he had that could refer to the case.’
‘What did you say to that?’
‘I said I would not leave.’
‘What took place then?’
‘He said, “I will admit to you my weakness”, and he went and produced from behind the grate of the chimney piece a box containing an album containing a number of cartes de visite.’
‘Had you seen it when you were searching?’
‘No.’
‘What further took place?’
‘He said, “I have got a number of letters from Mr Boulton, but I have destroyed them.”’
‘Did he say anything further?’
‘He said, “I have written some foolish notes to Boulton but meant no harm by them.”’
Detective Officer Gollan left George Street having spent almost two hours searching. He sent a telegram to Inspector Thompson listing what he had found and awaited further instructions. They were not long in coming. At around 4 p.m. the same day, John Safford Fiske heard a loud knock at the front door. Detective Officer Gollan had come to arrest him and to take him into custody.
M r John Lothrop Motley despatched a confidential memorandum to the Secretary of State in Washington:
In cipher:
Mr Fiske – Facts as to his imprisonment in London and application for bail.
I have now to state that John S. Fiske, United States Consul in Edinburgh, was on the 9th instant arrested at that place and brought to London the next day. He is now held in Newgate on a Bench Warrant awaiting his trial.
He was required to find bail in four sureties of £500 each. He has employed able counsel as I am informed for his defence, and I have requested the United States Vice-Consul General at London privately to watch the case.
Mr Fiske of course hopes to establish his entire innocence of any misdemeanour, but he does not, as I understand, deny familiar acquaintance with Boulton, one of the men in women’s clothes indicted for felony, for conspiracy and for misdemeanour, nor the authorship of certain letters to him now in the hands of the prosecution.
I am informed that he wishes to send in his resignation, but if his letter to that effect can only be written on Newgate paper, I have caused it to be intimated to him that it should not be written.
For John Safford Fiske, Fortune and Fate had turned into the Furies and wreaked their wrath upon him. If convicted he would face many years in a filthy English prison, and if he emerged at all, he would be a broken man. Even if he were to prove his innocence, such as it was, there would be no return to the life of hopes and dreams and vaunting ambition.
If there was one consolation, it was that he was not entirely alone in his ordeal. Erné Boulton and Fred Park were in Newgate too, though there were bitter feelings in his heart towards Erné, once his ravishing and beloved Laïs and Antinous in one, now the spring and the source of this terrible nightmare in which he found himself trapped. Even cautious, clever, charming Louis Hurt had been arrested at the same time on the same charges and was also in Newgate. They made a strange quartet. They were tied together by dark and invisible threads of lust and love and they would stand, or most likely fall, together.
23
Dead or Disappeared
We have it on the authority of a usually well-informed daily contemporary, that peers of the realm are implicated with the dirty proceedings that will shortly come prominently before the public in a court of justice.
Reynolds’s Newspaper, 26th June 1870
V ery few people were surprised when the warrant for Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton’s arrest was finally issued in early June, five weeks after the arrest of Fanny and Stella. Indeed, the only surprise was that it had taken so long, given that Lord Arthur had been so publicly implicated in the scandal of the Young Men in Women’s Clothes from the very start.
As the weeks went by, there had been mounting public indignation over what was seen as deliberate foot-dragging on the part of the authorities in bringing Lord Arthur to justice. Rumours began to circulate that powerful forces were at work on his behalf. As the son of the fifth Duke of Newcastle, who had been Secretary of State for War, and as godson to Mr Gladstone, the current Prime Minister, the recently retired Honourable Member for Newark, it was said, was being shielded from prosecution.
As the evidence unfolded, it was clear to everybody that Lord Arthur was up to his aristocratic neck in the scandal. He knew both Boulton and Park: he had performed in public with Boulton and lived with him in private, apparently and astonishingly as man and wife. There were compromising letters, suggestive photographs, and at least two dozen sworn statements that put Lord Arthur at the dark heart of this wicked sodomitic conspiracy.
But the powers that be still hesitated, still delayed. Why? There were mutterings that Lord Arthur was being given time to settle his affairs and make good his escape; that he was about to flee abroad; indeed, that he had already flown and was now safely beyond the clutches of the Metropolitan Police.
Some newspapers, like the Pall Mall Gazette, were convinced that Lord Arthur knew too much. If he was arrested and brought to justice, there was a danger that he would implicate others – peers and politicians and personages – in the vast spider’s web of sodomy and scandal, and that the cankerous corruption at the heart of the ruling class would be exposed. ‘Peers of the realm are implicated with the dirty proceedings’ was the unambiguous verdict of Reynolds’s Newspaper, which prided itself on taking up the cudgels for ordinary folk against the bastions of birth and privilege.
The Pall Mall Gazette called for steely ‘resolution on the part of the Government’ not to yield to the influence of ‘the highest classes of society’ who were ‘on the side of hushing up a scandal of this magnitude’.
The suspicions of those who believed that the Government was intent on hushing up the scandal were strengthened, rather than diminished, when, on the day that the long-looked-for warrant was belatedly issued for his arrest, Lord Arthur Clinton was nowhere to be found. He had vanished off the face of the earth, leaving not a trace.
T he last person to have seen Lord Arthur was a cabman. At around two o’clock on the afternoon of Saturday, 28th May, Lord Arthur hailed a cab and told the cabman that he would need him to drive him around upon a variety of errands until that evening.
‘I took up my fare at the Opera Hotel, Bow-street,’ said the cabman, ‘and on depositing him at the same hotel at night I was sent to Long’s Hotel with a letter addressed to a gentleman stopping there. But the gentleman had gone abroad (so I was informed), and when I got back to the Opera Hotel to report the result, and to get my money, I was informed that Lord Arthur had gone also.’
And that was the last sighting of Lord Arthur Pelham-Clinton, at least as far as Inspector Thompson and his detectives could establish. The ports were being watched and his description had been circulated. But where he had gone was a mystery.
For those with a suspicious turn of mind, like Inspector Thompson, there was something not quite right about Lord Arthur’s six-hour cab journey around London. Why would a man who was about to disappear, seemingly in a puff of smoke, go to the trouble of bilking a cabman for a fare of £1? And why, if you were going to bilk a cab
man, would you be at pains to reveal that your name was Lord Arthur Clinton and that you were residing at the Opera Hotel, Bow Street?
Inspector Thompson could smell a rat. He had a nose for such things. He suspected that this seemingly aimless, six-hour cab journey was nothing more and nothing less than a diversion, a clever and cunning attempt to lay a false trail. The police would be trying to trace the movements of the man claiming to be Lord Arthur from the time the cabman deposited him at the Opera Hotel around eight o’clock. But what if the real Lord Arthur had crept away hours or perhaps even days before?
Speculation was rife. ‘We understand the police believe that Lord Arthur Clinton has gone to America,’ the Weekly Times reported. The Observer agreed, but added that ‘there are people who have affirmed that His Lordship has been seen in London, and notably at Ascot’.
Rumours of the death of Lord Arthur Clinton first began to filter through to Fleet Street during the afternoon of Saturday 18th June, just in time for the final editions of the evening papers. Facts were in short supply but it appeared that the troubled Lord Arthur had died in the remote village of Muddeford in Hampshire. Or was it Huddeford, as the Illustrated Police News reported? Or Nuddeford, as the Weekly Times had it?
There was speculation – hope even – that, as an officer and a gentleman, Lord Arthur had done the decent thing and shot himself through the head with a single silver bullet. Such a course of action was very much to be desired. It would have been Lord Arthur’s admission of guilt and a demonstration of his remorse. A clean and contrite conclusion to a sodomitic conspiracy which had caused a convulsion of the national mind. No washing of aristocratic dirty linen in public. No risk of further revelations. No need for a damaging and debilitating trial to further sap the nation’s sense of strength and virility.
But such sanguine – not to say sanguinary – hopes were dashed when it emerged that Lord Arthur had died of natural causes just a few days short of his thirtieth birthday. ‘The rumour which was current late on Saturday regarding the death of Lord Arthur Clinton is confirmed,’ the Daily Telegraph reported two days later. Lord Arthur, it appeared, ‘had been in the neighbourhood of Christchurch for some time, on a fishing excursion, passing under the title of Captain Edward Gray’.
Over the following week, more details of Lord Arthur’s final days and hours emerged. ‘We are in a position to give a trustworthy account of Lord Arthur Pelham Clinton’s fatal illness,’ the Lancet confided to its readers (though quite why the Lancet should take such an interest in Lord Arthur’s untimely death was curious, to say the least).
On Monday, 13th June, doctors attending Lord Arthur ‘found him suffering from sore throat and other symptoms of Scarlet Fever, which has been widely prevalent in the neighbourhood’, the Lancet continued. ‘Lodgings in the village were procured for him, and thither he was safely removed. The disease, though virulent, ran a normal course, and the patient appeared to be gaining ground.’ But complications set in on the morning of Thursday, 16th June, and Lord Arthur was unable to void urine. ‘The patient’, the Lancet reported, ‘had sunk very low, and, in spite of the free administration of stimulants, failed to rally. Telegrams were immediately despatched to his friends, and at five minutes past one on Saturday morning he died.’
Among those ‘friends’ of Lord Arthur who were telegraphed when his condition worsened was the ubiquitous and unsavoury Mr W. H. Roberts, his solicitor, who arrived in Muddeford early on the Friday morning to find his client still conscious and still rational, but in a state of ‘utter prostration’.
Just hours after Lord Arthur expired, Roberts took the extraordinary step of releasing a letter purportedly dictated by him from his ‘bed of sickness’. It was a deathbed denial of the accusations of sodomy made against him. ‘Nothing’, Lord Arthur declared, ‘can be laid to my charge other than the foolish continuation of the impersonation of theatrical characters which arose from a simple frolic in which I permitted myself to become an actor.’
If Mr Roberts and the late Lord Arthur (wherever he may be, looking down hopefully, or up, more probably, given the general dissipation of his short life) thought that this deathbed declaration of innocence would, to use a vulgar phrase, ‘wash’ with a hostile and sceptical public, they were much mistaken. The letter was greeted with universal incredulity and howls of raucous laughter.
On the ‘sad and wasted’ life of Lord Arthur Clinton, the Daily Telegraph confined itself to a few choice words. ‘There was nothing specially notable in his Lordship’s career,’ it wrote, ‘and it is expressing only the bare truth to say, that what was known reflected on him no credit whatever.’ Under the banner headline ‘A MIS-SPENT LIFE’, Reynolds’s Newspaper denounced him as ‘dissolute, debauched, reckless, and brainless’, ‘the disreputable scion of the Newcastle family’ and ‘a blackguard Lord’.
‘Lord Arthur’s inclinations’, the Porcupine wrote, ‘seem to have led him into the worst society, into the maelstrom of London dissipation, and he ended in being charged (wrongfully, let us hope) with one of the most abominable of crimes.’ The Porcupine concluded its moral spasm with a homily which might have been taken directly from the pages of the Old Testament. ‘Verily,’ it intoned piously, ‘those of us who are apt to envy the lot of high-born personages may take the lesson of Lord Clinton’s life and death profitably, though painfully, to heart.’
Lord Arthur’s funeral took place on what would have been his thirtieth birthday. ‘The funeral was unusually plain,’ the Weekly Times reported, ‘and the grave, though in a secluded spot was a common one.’ The main mourners present were Lord Arthur’s older brother, the present Duke of Newcastle, his uncle, Lord Thomas Clinton, and the ever-present Mr Roberts.
It was, in the opinion of many, a decidedly hole-and-corner affair, conducted with a mere nod to ceremony and with almost indecent haste. Lord Arthur’s family, it seemed, were falling over themselves to bury both his memory and his mortal remains as deep in the Hampshire earth as they possibly could.
Lord Arthur’s corpse was enclosed in no fewer than three coffins, one of them rumoured to be made of lead, a precaution for the prevention of contagion which struck some observers as really quite excessive. Engraved under the figure of Our Blessed Lord on the silver breastplate of Lord Arthur’s outer coffin was the simple text: ‘He hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.’ Opinion was divided as to whether this text was a reference to Christ in his capacity as Redeemer, or whether it was the family’s sad and poignant commentary on Lord Arthur’s short and dissolute life.
Even before the coffin was lowered into the yawning and hungry grave, there were those who openly doubted whether Lord Arthur was dead at all. The Nottingham Daily Guardian, which might be thought sympathetic to the Clinton family because of the local connection with the family seat of Clumber, reported that certain ‘persons of the critical and legal cast of mind profess to doubt the authenticity of Lord Arthur Clinton’s death’. ‘Is Lord Arthur Clinton really dead and buried?’ the Porcupine asked, speaking for many. ‘It is no secret that persons of a suspicious mind have been heard to say that the death of Lord Arthur is “all moonshine”.’
The sudden and strange disappearance and death of Lord Arthur Clinton raised more questions than answers. Why had he gone to ground in the small town of Christchurch, taking the nom de guerre of Captain Edward Gray? If he was, as he proclaimed, as innocent as the day is long, then why misdesignate himself in this way? It was a suspicious thing to do and plainly suggested that he did not wish to be found.
And why Christchurch? Mr Roberts’s assertion that Lord Arthur had gone there for a fishing holiday was unconvincing. Though the fishing in and around Christchurch was reputed to be excellent, anybody who knew Lord Arthur would swear that his passions were theatrical, and emphatically not piscatorial. Indeed, it was said that he did not know one end of a rod from the other and he thought that a reel was an Irish jig.
For stern logicians like Inspector Thompson, the whole affair
was baffling and bewildering. ‘It is understood’, the Daily Telegraph confided, ‘that Inspector Thompson has been specially employed to inquire into the circumstances of Lord Arthur Clinton’s decease.’ Clearly there were doubts, strong doubts, within the Metropolitan Police, within the Treasury, and quite possibly within 10 Downing Street, where Lord Arthur’s affectionate godfather, Mr Gladstone, still held sway.
But there were certain immutabilities that Inspector Thompson could grip hold of. Either Lord Arthur Clinton was dead or he was alive. If he was dead, he had died of natural causes, or he had taken his own life, or he had been murdered. Of these three possibilities, Inspector Thompson discounted murder. With the exception of poisoning, which could be tricky to detect, murder usually meant blood and gore and signs of violence. And there was not a scrap of evidence to suggest that Lord Arthur had been done away with.
Natural causes or suicide were both possibilities, but Inspector Thompson was unpersuaded. In his experience, the Lord Arthurs of this world did not willingly resign themselves to death or to doing the decent thing. And if Lord Arthur had planned to take his own life, why had he gone to the bother of disappearing and living under an assumed name? Why not simply blow his brains out in the comfort of his own home?
No. There were too many inconsistencies, too many contradictions. In Inspector Thompson’s experience, death was starkly factual and rarely admitted to the confusion and fancy footwork which characterised this particular case. Nothing was quite right, nothing seemed to fit: the strange six-hour cab ride, ‘Captain Edward Gray’, the posthumous letter, and the three coffins, one of lead – to make assurance triply sure? It might be supposed that this latter was a certain means to prevent poisonous miasmas leaching out from the corpse and spreading the contagion. On the other hand, it might equally be a clever means of keeping prying eyes out of the coffin and keeping Nosy Parkers, like himself, at bay.