by Neil McKenna
According to the collective wisdom of the counsel assembled in Westminster Hall that afternoon, such a perfunctory consideration meant one of two things: either the guilt of the defendants was so evident, or their innocence so shining, that little or no discussion was needed to reach a verdict.
‘Gentlemen, are you all agreed?’ the Clerk of the Court asked the Jurymen. ‘Do you find the defendants guilty or not guilty?’
‘Not guilty,’ replied the Foreman emphatically, at which there was an outbreak of wild cheers and whistles and loud cries of ‘Bravo!’
‘Upon all counts of the indictment?’ the Lord Chief Justice asked, struggling to make himself heard above the din.
‘Yes, my Lord. Not guilty on all the counts.’
As all eyes turned towards the defendants, Stella, with perfect timing, swayed melodramatically, and fell into a dead faint.
30
Clouds and Sunshine
Rose of the garden,
Blushing and gay. . .
E’en as we pluck thee,
Fading away!
Anne Fricker, ‘Fading Away’, 1854
MR ERNEST BOULTON begs to thank those managers who have offered engagements, but intends to resume the Drawing-Room Entertainment in which he originally appeared. He is desirous of meeting with a gentleman who is musical, has a good voice, and who could take one of the leading parts in the entertainment — Address, &c.
Reynolds’s Newspaper, 6th August 1871
J ust two months after her sensational acquittal at Westminster Hall, Stella was eager to be back in the theatrical saddle. Though the trial had taken a very considerable toll upon her fragile health and strength, she was nevertheless resolved to return to the stage at any and at all costs.
Besides, what choice did she have? A respectable life was closed to her for ever. Who would marry her now? The stench and taint of sodomy was upon her and she was now so notorious that even going on the pad was unthinkable. She would be recognised at once and hauled straight back to court.
Of course, she could always scarper abroad, as so many of her friends and acquaintance had done, like rats fleeing a sinking ship. But Miss Stella Boulton was made of sterner stuff. She had not come this far, through tribulations and through trials, through fire and through flame, to turn and run, to hide herself away from the light of day and live a haunted and hunted life.
No matter that she was notorious. No matter that her name was on everyone’s lips – for all the wrong reasons. Miss Stella Boulton was defiant. She would snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. She would steal fame from infamy. She would take up where she had left off, return to the stage and be a shining star. The world had most certainly not heard the last of Miss Stella Boulton.
But Stella had a problem. She needed a leading man.
Lord Arthur Clinton was dead and buried (though that strange story had more than its fair share of doubters and disbelievers). Dead or alive, Lord Arthur was, in any event, no longer at liberty to play Sir Edward Ardent to her Fanny Chillingtone.
So Stella took the bold and unusual step of advertising for a leading man. She had no idea how many – if any – applicants there would be. But at least one, Mr Louis Munro, a gentleman in the prime of life, rose to the challenge, and by the early autumn of 1871 Stella and her dashingly handsome new leading man (off stage as well as on stage) were embarked on an ambitious tour of the Midlands and the North.
‘Mr Ernest Boulton in his Drawing-Room Entertainment,’ the advertisement in the Liverpool Mercury proclaimed. ‘Mr Ernest Boulton in his unrivalled impersonation of the Female Character. As played before the Mayors of Oldham, Macclesfield and Other Towns to Crowded Houses.’
According to a gushing review in that organ, ‘Mr Boulton displayed considerable ability, particularly in the character of the four female cousins, in which the rapidity of change of dress and the alterations of voice, gesture, and general appearance were very striking. There was a numerous audience, and the entertainment gave the most unqualified satisfaction.’
Not all towns and cities were as enthusiastic as Oldham, Macclesfield and Liverpool, however. Towns in the South of England were considerably less enamoured of the theatrical and womanly charms of Ernest Boulton. In May 1872 the following announcement appeared in the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle:
PORTLAND HALL, SOUTHSEA
FOR TWO NIGHTS ONLY
Mr Ernest Boulton, assisted by Mr Louis Munro, will have the honour of giving his Select, Varied and Refined Drawing-Room Entertainment in which he will appear in those Wonderful Impersonations of Female Character which have won him world-wide celebrity.
The Entertainment will commence with a Fashionable Sketch, entitled ‘A CHARMING WIDOW’ (with the celebrated song ‘Fading Away’ sung by Mr E. Boulton)
To be followed by an Original Operetta (in ten minutes) composed expressly for Mr Boulton, and entitled ‘THE POWER OF GOLD’
To conclude with the Domestic Person Entertainment, entitled ‘CLOUDS AND SUNSHINE’.
(Constance, Mr Ernest Boulton, Ferdinand, Mr Louis Munro)
It was a dismal flop. ‘The beauty of the song, “The Fair Gipsy Maid”, was entirely destroyed by Mr Boulton, who, of course, was the Fair Gipsy Maid, singing far too loudly and without the slightest attempt at pathos,’ a scathing notice in the Hampshire Telegraph read. Mr Louis Munro ‘sang in a very wretched manner’, and taking everything together, the Telegraph concluded, ‘this is an entertainment which is scarcely one we can recommend’.
Other newspapers were even more damning. ‘This so-called “entertainment” is one of which we feel we cannot too strongly disapprove,’ the Hampshire Advertiser opined sternly in an editorial. ‘It is a class of performance pandering to a vitiated taste, and ought therefore to be discouraged in every possible way.’
Things went from bad to worse. Two months later a performance had to be abandoned amid scenes of near riot:
Ernest Boulton, of Boulton and Park notoriety, was to have given an entertainment at Aldershot on Monday evening but was prevented by a number of officers and others, who determined they would not hear him, and a regular row ensued, in the midst of which the gas was turned out, and the principal performer was glad to make his escape as best he could.
There were simmering private and professional tensions, too, and a few weeks after the debacle of Aldershot, Stella and the dashingly handsome Mr Louis Munro acrimoniously parted company.
As far as Stella was concerned it was good riddance. There would be no difficulty in replacing Louis Munro. Her good-looking and manly brother, Gerard, was shaping up very nicely and would be the perfect foil to her leading lady.
Stella and Gerard continued to tour the North of England, generally to great acclaim, though there were periodic ejaculations and expostulations of surprise and ire that the notorious Ernest Boulton was continuing to perform in drag and seemingly making a good living from it.
Beams of the morning,
Promise of day,
While we are gazing,
Fading away!
Despite Stella’s many professional triumphs, the past always came back to haunt her. When she was appearing in York, the Pall Mall Gazette fulminated against ‘the impudence of aged sinners’ performing in a cathedral city. And whenever any young man was arrested in drag, the name of Ernest Boulton was always brought up.
Stella was weary of it. And so at the end of 1873, she made two momentous decisions. She would change her stage name to Ernest Byne and she would go to America to find the fame and fortune that still eluded her in England. Besides, she was missing Fanny dreadfully and wanted to see her.
W hen Judge Alexander Park had stood up in Westminster Hall to give evidence on Fanny’s behalf, it was painfully obvious to everyone that he was a very sick man, and it came as no surprise when he died just six months later. Fanny and Harry, who had been released from prison in July 1871, were with him to the end.
Now there was nothing to keep either of t
hem in England. America would be a fresh start. They would make a new life for themselves, where no one knew them, where they would be free, in so far as it was possible, of the past. They had money, more than enough money, to live comfortably, and if the stories Fanny had heard about America were true, there would be no shortage of handsome American beaux for Harry and herself.
Much as she loved Stella, Fanny had always felt overshadowed by her sister’s beauty and by her talent. It was not that she resented Stella. She most certainly did not. But it was hard sometimes not to feel a little piqued when Stella was so determinedly hogging all the limelight, and she herself so constantly standing in the wings. In America she would have the chance to make her own way, to prove herself on the New York stage and find fame and fortune.
As Fred Fenton, ‘comedian’, Fanny carved out a modest career for herself in the ‘small business’ of the theatre: walk-on parts and character roles, nearly always in drag. She excelled, as she always had, at playing elderly and eccentric English dowagers, and for a short and glorious period she was resident at the famous Fifth Avenue Theater in New York. It was the closest she ever came to stardom.
S tella and Gerard arrived in New York in the spring of 1874. One of their first engagements was at the Theatre Comique where they reprised their successful English comedietta The Four Cousins, attracting favourable notices: ‘Ernest Byne in the character of Ellen, a domestic young lady, sang with much effort “A Pretty Girl Milking Her Cow”, and at the close of the piece, with Gerard in a duet entitled “Now With Joy My Bosom Bounds”.’
‘Two gentlemen who sat next to us’, the reviewer for the New York Clipper breathlessly confided, ‘discussed in audible tones the merits of Ernest Byne, believing him to be a woman. After enjoying their conversation, we took the liberty of informing them of the sex of the supposed lady, and handed them a programme to substantiate it, whereupon they were completely astonished and confused.’
Colonel T. Allston Brown, one of New York’s most flamboyant – and shrewdest – agents and managers, took Stella on and mounted a vigorous press campaign to announce his newest signing: ‘ERNEST BYNE, pronounced by the entire press of New York, Boston and London to be the most WONDERFUL impersonator of female character ever before the public, and whose debut in New York has met with such unparalleled SUCCESS.’ A selection of ‘OPINIONS OF THE PRESS’ followed, including an entirely fictitious quote from ‘The Times of London’ which declared that ‘anything more marvellous and clever than Ernest Byne’s impersonations cannot be conceived, the difficulty being in believing that he is not acting real life’.
In New York, Stella was a star, perhaps not of the first magnitude, but celebrated enough to have her likeness taken by the society photographer Napoleon Sarony, the brother of Oliver Sarony, the Scarborough photographer who had taken no fewer than thirty-four studies of herself and Lord Arthur after they had performed A Morning Call to great acclaim in that genteel spa.
In 1876, the New York Clipper was moved to hymn Ernest Byne in doggerel:
Your airs and graces make us all
Believe you must be feminine:
Your arts, though you’re no Harlequin,
Do well deserve a column, Byne.
As well as the joy of seeing Fanny and Harry again, it was quite possible – probable even – that in New York Stella was reunited with Lord Arthur Clinton, apparently back from the dead.
Ever since Lord Arthur’s sudden and convenient death from scarlet fever just days before the police closed in on him, there had been sightings of him here, there and everywhere. He was shooting in Scotland or racing at Ascot. He had been spotted in town, at the theatre, in fashionable restaurants, strolling in Hyde Park. Or he was living abroad, under an assumed name, in Paris, in Sydney, in New York. Especially New York. According to Reynolds’s Newspaper in October 1872, the dissolute peer was alive and well and living there: ‘Lord Arthur Clinton who was mixed up in the Boulton and Park business, and was reported dead, has been recognised several times at some of the New York Theatres and clearly identified.’
Three years later, in September 1875, the Northern Echo in Darlington reported that Lord Arthur Clinton was amongst the mourners at the funeral of his sister, Lady Susan Vane-Tempest, and the following year the Morning Post said that he was present in Dublin ‘at the Installation of the Duke of Connaught as Great Prior of the Irish Masons’.
In 1879, the grandly named Australian newspaper the Clarence and Richmond Examiner and New South Wales Advertiser proclaimed that ‘My Lord Arthur Clinton’ was not dead at all. He had, in fact, ‘only temporarily died to oblige his family’, the paper revealed, and now, after an absence of some years, he ‘has just appeared in the arena of London society alive and hearty’ having spent the past eight years in hiding in Australia.
S tella and Gerard returned to England in early 1877 and resumed touring as ‘The Wonderful Bynes’. With ‘Elegant Parisian Clothes and Costly Appointments’, the Wonderful Bynes offered a varied programme of ‘Songs, Eccentricities, Duets, Operettas &c’. All in all, it was ‘a most marvellous entertainment’, the theatrical bible the Era declared. ‘The Bynes are the talk of Grimsby’.
But the past could still catch up with Stella. In April 1879, ‘AN INDIGNANT NONCONFORMIST’ in Cardiff wrote to the Western Mail to complain about some ‘disgustingly suggestive’ posters placarded across the town announcing the forthcoming engagement at the Stuart Hall of ‘The Wonderful Bynes Company’ featuring ‘Mr Ernest Byne, the Unequalled Impersonator of Lady Characters’: ‘Will either Mr. John or Mr. Richard Cory, who are part-owners of the Stuart-hall, kindly inform the public who this “unequalled impersonator of lady characters” is, and also whether “the Wonderful Bynes Company” include Boulton and Park, or either of that notorious pair?’
In 1881, the Wonderful Bynes were in London. According to the census taken that year, Ernest Byne, ‘actor’, was living in lodgings at 21 Euston Street in Somers Town. Stella was thirty-two but she defied the advancing years by the simple expedient of knocking five years off her true age and proclaiming herself to be twenty-seven. She was still a fine figure of a woman and if she could get away with it, why should she not?
Spring’s fairest blossoms.
Summer’s bright day . . .
Autumn’s rich cluster,
Fading away!
J ust five days before Stella passed herself off as a still-blooming twenty-seven-year-old, Mrs Fanny Winifred Graham (née Park) breathed her last in Newark, New Jersey, where she had been looked after for some years past by Mr Oliver Hagen, a watchmaker, and his wife, Catherine. No cause of death was listed on her death certificate, a tactful omission which usually meant that syphilis and its fearsome complications were responsible.
The syphilitic sore on Fanny’s bottom, the sore that would not go away, the sore that had forced her to seek grudging treatment from the forbidding figure of Dr Richard Barwell at the Charing Cross Hospital, had finally caught up with her. Dr Barwell had managed to heal the sore, but he could not eradicate the syphilis from her body. As the years passed, the syphilitic poison slowly but surely gnawed away at Fanny’s body and Fanny’s mind until, at the last, half-mad and half-blind, racked with pain and paralysed, Fanny died aged thirty-four.
Dear garrulous, gossiping, glorious Fanny. Fanny: stout of heart, stern of feature and sweet of nature. Fanny: with her campish ways, her braying laugh and her low cunning. Fanny: not beautiful, certainly; frequently foolish; uncommonly lewd; invariably lustful. Fanny: always kind, utterly charming and generous to a fault, especially with her favours.
In her short span, Fanny had perfectly realised her true self. She had fashioned herself from the most unlikely and the most unpromising of clays. She had formed herself and shaped herself with nothing but the ingenuity of her own hands. She had stitched and sewn, knitted and glued, pinned, tied, taped and laced herself to miraculously contrive the strange and gaudy creature that was Mrs Fanny Winifred Graham (née Park).
Defiant, determined, brave and fearless, Fanny did not flinch and she did not flee. ‘How dare you address a Lady in that manner, Sir?’ Fanny had challenged Detective Officer Chamberlain with superb aplomb and frigid hauteur on the night of the arrest. Her courage never failed her, even in her darkest hours.
So Mrs Fanny Winfred Graham (née Park) lived and died. ‘N’importe,’ she would often say. ‘What’s the odds as long as you’re happy?’ It could have been her epitaph.
Fanny was laid to rest in Rochester, New York, alongside her beloved brother, Harry, who had died five years earlier in October 1876. A year’s imprisonment with hard labour in the House of Correction in Coldbath Fields was generally considered to be a sentence of death by another name. Appalling food, lack of sanitation and back-breaking work – designed to subjugate the strongest will – reduced even the most robust of men to physical wrecks. Harry died a broken man, but it was no small consolation that he died a free man.
At the time of her death, Fanny was neither rich nor poor, but comfortably placed and living off the income from her capital. Her estate was to be divided between the widow of her older brother Alexander and the devoted Catherine Hagen, who had nursed Fanny through her last, long illness. There was one other bequest: ‘I give, devise and bequeath the sum of £500 and also my Topaz ring now worn by me unto my friend Henry B. Warner, now of the City of San Francisco, California.’
Who was Henry B. Warner? Was he that handsome American beau that Fanny had hoped to meet, that ardent swain she had been searching for all the days of her life and thought she would never find? Was he the great love of her life? Had Henry B. Warner perhaps given Fanny the topaz ring as a love token? The ring was clearly important. It was the ring ‘now worn by me’, as Fanny had so scrupulously written in her last will and testament. Two years later, in the St James Hotel in St Louis, the legacy was given over to Henry B. Warner who signed a receipt for it in a shaky hand, as though he were labouring under great emotion.