The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse
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To my sister Pieta Dalglish,
for whom, as for me, the past is always present
Welbeck Abbey, 1889
Contents
Cover
Welcome Page
Dedication
Dramatis Personae
Epigraph
Act 1: Burial
Scene 1: Welbeck Abbey, December 1879
Scene 2: St Paul’s Cathedral, March 1898
Scene 3: Highgate Cemetery, March 1898
Scene 4: Baker Street and Cavendish Square, 1860s
Scene 5: The Streets of London, Summer 1898
Scene 6: Featherstone Buildings, December 1898
Scene 7: The New London Law Courts, Three years later
Act 2: Resurrection
Scene 8: Bury St Edmunds, October 1816
Scene 9: On Board RMS Oroya, May 1903
Scene 10: An Office on London Wall, March 1907
Scene 11: Marylebone Police Court, October–December 1907
Scene 12: The Druce Vault, December 1907
Scene 13: The Police Court, One week later
Act 3: Revelation
Scene 14: London and Welbeck, December 1907
Scene 15: London and Worksop, January 1908
Scene 16: Holloway Prison, January 1908
Scene 17: A London Hotel, September 1898
Scene 18: Sledmere House, East Riding, 1870s
Scene 19: A Library in Nottingham, October 2013
Scene 20: Welbeck Abbey, October 2013
Epilogue: An Obscure Grave, London, December 2013
Postscript
Preview
Plate section
Notes
Acknowledgments
Select Bibliography
Picture Credits
About this Book
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About the Author
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An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
Dramatis Personae
ATHERLEY-JONES, LLEWELLYN
Barrister representing George Hollamby Druce/the prosecution in the perjury trial of R. v. Herbert Druce.
AVORY, HORACE
Barrister representing Herbert Druce/the defence in the perjury trial of R. v. Herbert Druce.
BAILEY, HORSEMAN
Solicitor at Baileys, Shaw & Gillett, legal representatives of the Dukes of Portland.
BARNES, MR JUSTICE
Judge on the probate action brought by Anna Maria Druce to set aside the will of T. C. Druce in 1898.
BAYLY, CATHERINE
Long-serving nurse to the Druce family; testified to the death of T. C. Druce in legal proceedings.
CALDWELL, ROBERT
Witness for the prosecution/George Hollamby Druce in the perjury trial of R. v. Herbert Druce.
CAVENDISH-BENTINCK, CHRISTINA ANNE JESSICA, LATER LADY TATTON SYKES
Descended from the 3rd Duke of Portland. Married Sir Tatton Sykes, Baronet of Sledmere House, Sledmere, Yorkshire in 1874.
CAVENDISH-BENTINCK, WILLIAM JOHN ARTHUR CHARLES JAMES, 6TH DUKE OF PORTLAND
A cousin of the 5th Duke of Portland, inherited the dukedom when the 5th Duke died in December 1879. Died in 1943.
CAVENDISH-BENTINCK, WINIFRED ANNA, DUCHESS OF PORTLAND
Wife of the 6th Duke of Portland.
CAVENDISH-BENTINCK-SCOTT, WILLIAM JOHN, 5TH DUKE OF PORTLAND
referred to as ‘the 5th Duke’, ‘Marquess of Titchfield’ or ‘Lord John’
The second of four sons to the 4th Duke of Portland, previously the Marquess of Titchfield, inherited the dukedom in 1854. Notorious eccentric. Alleged to have led a double life as T. C. Druce of the Baker Street Bazaar. Died in December 1879.
CAVENDISH-BENTINCK-SCOTT, GEORGE FREDERICK, LORD
referred to as ‘Lord George’
Younger brother of the 5th Duke of Portland. English Conservative politician and racehorse owner, notable for his role with Disraeli in unseating the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, over the Corn Laws. Died in mysterious circumstances in 1848 at the age of forty-six.
COBURN, THOMAS KENNEDY VERNON
Australian barrister, legal advisor and confederate of George Hollamby Druce.
COOPER-MATHIESON, VENI
see Amanda Gibson, below
Australian novelist, mystic and self-help guru extraordinaire. Worked in 1907 as secretary to the Druce-Portland Company.
CUFFE, HAMILTON JOHN AGMONDESHAM, 5TH EARL OF DESART
referred to as ‘Lord Desart’
Treasury Solicitor and Director of Public Prosecutions.
DEW, WALTER, DETECTIVE CHIEF INSPECTOR
A leading detective at Scotland Yard CID, in charge of the Druce case at a late stage of the proceedings.
DRUCE, ANNA MARIA
Daughter-in-law to Thomas Charles Druce, married his son Walter Thomas in 1872.
DRUCE, FRANCES ELIZABETH (‘FANNY’)
The first daughter of T. C. Druce, generally regarded as his favourite.
DRUCE, CHARLES EDGAR
Great-grandson of T. C. Druce and cousin of George Hollamby Druce. Lived in Sydney.
DRUCE, GEORGE
The second son of T. C. Druce; emigrated to Australia.
DRUCE, GEORGE HOLLAMBY
Son of George Druce; came from Melbourne, Australia.
DRUCE, HERBERT
Eldest son of T. C. Druce and Annie May. Inherited the business at the Baker Street Bazaar. Refused to give permission for T. C. Druce’s grave to be opened.
DRUCE, SIDNEY
Eldest surviving son of Anna Maria Druce; emigrated to Australia.
DRUCE, THOMAS CHARLES
London businessman who made a fortune from the department store the Baker Street Bazaar. Ostensibly died in December 1864. Alleged to have been the 5th Duke of Portland in disguise.
DRUCE, WALTER THOMAS
Son of T. C. Druce, married Anna Maria Druce in 1872.
FRESHFIELD, EDWIN
Senior partner at the firm of Freshfield and Williams, legal advisor to Herbert Druce; in charge of the Druce case.
GIBSON, AMANDA
later known as Veni Cooper-Mathieson
Australian novelist, mystic and self-help guru extraordinaire. Worked in 1907 as secretary to the Druce-Portland Company.
HAMILTON, MARGARET LOUISE JANE
Witness for the prosecution/George Hollamby Druce in the perjury trial of R. v. Herbert Druce. Known as the ‘Veiled Lady’.
HENDERSON, KENNETH
Grandson of Fanny Druce, T. C. Druce’s daughter. Managing editor of The Idler, which produced a series of pamphlets advertising the Druce case.
JEUNE, SIR FRANCIS
President of the probate division of the High Court.
KIMBER, EDMUND
Solicitor; legal representative of George Hollamby Druce.
MARLOW, THOMAS AND HENRY
Brothers; shady figures on the fringes of the London underworld.
MAY, ANNIE
Wife of T. C. Druce and mother of Herbert Druce.
PLOWDEN, ALFRED CHICHELE
Police magistrate, acting magistrate at the preliminary hearing of R. v. Herbert Druce.
ROBINSON, MARY ANN, ALSO KNOWN AS MARY ROBINSON
Witness for the prosecution/George Hollamby Druce in the perjury trial of R. v. Herbert Druce.
SHERIDAN, JOHN
; Journalist for Lloyd’s Weekly Newspaper.
STATHAM, ARNOLD
Barrister representing Anna Maria Druce.
SYKES, LADY TATTON, NÉE CHRISTINA ANNE JESSICA CAVENDISH-BENTINCK
Descended from the 3rd Duke of Portland. Married Sir Tatton Sykes, baronet of Sledmere House, Sledmere, Yorkshire in 1874.
SYKES, SIR TATTON, 5TH BARONET
Landowner, racehorse-breeder, flower-hater and church-going eccentric. Seat at Sledmere House, Yorkshire. Married Jessica Cavendish-Bentinck in 1874.
TRISTRAM, THOMAS HUTCHINSON, CHANCELLOR
Judge at the hearing of Anna Maria’s case in the church court/consistory court at St Paul’s Cathedral. Twice granted a faculty for the opening of the Druce vault.
TURNER, THOMAS WARNER
Land agent for the 6th Duke of Portland, placed in charge of much of the evidence-gathering in the Druce case. His father, J. F. Turner, was land agent to both the 5th and 6th Dukes.
YOUNG, ALEXANDER
Accountant, old friend of T. C. Druce and executor of Druce’s will. Defendant to proceedings brought in the probate division of the High Court by Anna Maria, Druce v. Young.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,…
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE,
As You Like It, ACT II, SCENE VII
Act 1
Burial
I set forth to pave the way for discovery – the dark and doubtful way.
WILKIE COLLINS, The Woman in White
Mrs Druce at T. C. Druce’s grave in Highgate Cemetery
(the Penny Illustrated Paper, 18 March 1899)
Eccentric men have peculiar habits; they do not seem to move in the same sphere with other mortals, but are actuated by different influences from those which affect the bulk of mankind.
GEORGE FREDERICK GRAHAM
English Synonyms Classified and Explained (1857)
It was a dark, windy winter evening a few days before Christmas 1879. The occupants of the saloon carriage of the train of the Great Central Railway Company that rattled from King’s Cross Station in the direction of Sheffield were tense and silent. In the carriage sat a young man of twenty-two. He was pale, with a high forehead and heavily hooded eyes. Also in the carriage sat five other people: two younger men, a sickly boy, a pensive and alert-looking little girl of six years old, and an older woman who regarded the other occupants with anxious attention. All the party were dressed in sombre black, the garb of deep mourning. Every so often, the countryside bordering the line would light up as the train approached a town: Luton, Northampton, Leicester or Nottingham. In the wells of shadow in between, nothing was discernible from the carriage window, save – as the train toiled further north – the dark mass of Sherwood Forest.
After about three hours, the train came to a screeching halt at the small station of Worksop, about fifteen miles from Sheffield. Worksop Station was a newish building constructed some thirty years previously for the Great Central Railway Company (then known as the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway). It was a somewhat preposterous affair, with its mock-Jacobean pinnacles, rustications, scrolls, scraps, lozenges and other whatnots. A small market town for much of its history, Worksop had seen a burst of growth with the construction of the Chesterfield Canal in 1777 and the arrival of the railway in 1849, both of which ran through the settlement. The discovery of a sizeable coal seam had brought a rush of new inhabitants to what had been a sleepy country town, nestled in the shadow of Sherwood Forest.
Other occupants of the train might have been surprised to see the saloon carriage party – who were clearly of a well-to-do sort – descend at such a humble spot as Worksop. Nevertheless, it appeared that they were expected, as an inquisitive crowd enveloped the group as soon as they emerged from the train, their white faces and dark clothes catching the light of the oil lamps as they made their way across the platform to the old-fashioned carriage that awaited them. ‘The young duke! Did you see him?’ was the excited whisper that went round.
After a long and dreary drive through wet country lanes, the party that included the ‘young duke’ – for that was the identity of the pale and heavy-eyed young man of twenty-two – arrived at its destination. Welbeck Abbey, like the nearby town of Worksop, was situated near the northern end of Sherwood Forest. The area was known as ‘the Dukeries’ – there being no fewer than four ducal seats within a few miles’ radius. Welbeck Abbey had been the principal seat of the Dukes of Portland since 1809, but by 1879 there was little to be found of the original ‘Abbey’, apart from the name. The abbey had been founded as the chief seat of the white-cassocked Premonstratensian monastic Order in the twelfth century. During the Dissolution, the house had been handed by Henry VIII to his prominent administrator, Richard Whalley of Screveton. Afterwards, it had passed to Whalley’s son, then through a series of sales and transfers to Lord Talbot, heir to the Earl of Shrewsbury, and finally in 1607 to Sir Charles Cavendish, a son of one of the best-known figures of the Elizabethan age, Bess of Hardwick.
Bess was a friend of Queen Elizabeth I, but while she shared many of her characteristics – including her first name and shrewd personality – she did not, like her, live and die a maiden. Quite to the contrary; by the end of her career, she had married no fewer than four times, and accumulated a fortune in landed estates across the country. She was also, by her many marriages and complex network of family connections, a remote ancestor of most of England’s nobility, and even boasted royal connections.
The portrait of Bess that hung in the great hall of Welbeck in 1879 – and remains in the abbey to this day – reveals a woman with a broad forehead and a determined line to her mouth. She is handsome as opposed to beautiful, and her hands are shapely. Most importantly of all, the huge wealth acquired from her marriages is symbolized in the quadruple string of pearls that dangles around her neck, down to her waist. Bess had a passion for building, which amounted almost to the pathological. One biographer says of her:
All her life she was surrounded by masons, carpenters, brick-dust. She could not cease building, and her workmen were still busy when she died. It was said that she believed a prediction that she could not die as long as she was building.
We have reason to be grateful for Bess’ building mania, for she built some of the finest houses to be seen in England today. It is also possible that she passed on her fetish for construction work to at least one of her descendants, who was to occupy the abbey in later years.
Welbeck Abbey reached the Dukes of Portland through the marriage of Lady Margaret Cavendish Holles-Harley to the 2nd Duke of Portland in 1734. The Portland dukedom was a relatively new title. Back in 1689, an earldom had been bestowed on the Bentinck family in recognition of the close friendship between William III and his protégé, the Dutchman Hans-Willem Bentinck. Hans-Willem had been one of the principal organizers of William’s invasion of England in 1688, and had sailed to England with the Prince of Orange. The Portland dukedom was created for Hans-Willem’s eldest son in 1716. In 1801, William Henry Cavendish-Bentinck, the 3rd Duke of Portland, changed the family name from plain Bentinck to Cavendish-Bentinck, in recognition of the alliance between the Bentinck and the Cavendish families that dated back to the 2nd Duke’s marriage to Lady Margaret. The latest incumbent of Welbeck Abbey had been William John Cavendish-Bentinck-Scott, the 5th Duke of Portland, commonly referred to as ‘Lord John’, who had died on 6 December 1879, ostensibly without issue. As a result, the Portland title had devolved on to a cousin – twenty-two-year-old William John Arthur Charles James Cavendish-Bentinck, the new 6th Duke of Portland. He was the pale young man travelling to Welbeck on the winter day of which we speak.
William was only a second cousin of the 5th Duke. His father was Lieutenant-General A. C. Cavendish-Bentinck, whose descent was through the 3rd Duke. William had been born on 28 December
1857, and it must have then seemed a remote possibility that, in less than twenty-five years, he would succeed to one of the greatest dukedoms in the land. The other members of the party arriving at Welbeck that evening were the new duke’s half-brothers and sisters and his beloved stepmother: his mother having died when he was a few days old, they were his closest family. The pensive, alert-looking little girl, the new duke’s half-sister, was to be famous in later life as the socialite and Bloomsbury Group hostess Lady Ottoline Morrell.
The entrance to Welbeck Abbey was then one of the most unusual of any stately home in England. Before reaching the lodge at the entrance to the estate, the new visitors drove through glorious woodland. The silhouettes of native oaks, elms and yews, dotted with more exotic specimens in the form of cedars and Himalayan firs, clustered in black shadows at the side of the track, the frosty silence interrupted only by the occasional whirring of a pheasant’s wings or the rustle of a squirrel scampering through the frozen bracken. However, as soon as the carriage reached the lodge, it was plunged into a black-mouthed tunnel that cut through the side of a slope beside the lodge gates. The tunnel was not entirely dark, however; periodically, shafts of pale light entered through circular skylights in its roof, and gas jets set along its walls glowed with incandescent blue. The extraordinary underground entrance to Welbeck Abbey had been created by the 5th Duke of Portland. As they travelled through the darkness, the people in the carriage must have wondered what could have induced the duke to create such a sepulchral and cavernous subterranean entrance to his estate, when he could have driven to his front door entirely above ground, and through some of the most beautiful woods in England.
After a few minutes the coach party was abruptly catapulted into daylight as the tunnel opened onto a gravelled driveway leading to the abbey. The great house itself was imposing enough: a Palladian-style building with turrets and an elaborate façade that seemed to yearn for a clear blue Italian sky, rather than the leaden English cloudscape that weighed upon it. The mansion was perched on the edge of a huge ornamental lake that stretched to the horizon. As the carriage drew closer, however, it was clear that the place was deserted and unkempt. The driveway at the entrance was covered in wild grass and builders’ rubble, and temporary planks had been placed to enable the carriage to reach the front door. The hall inside had no floor, and again temporary boards had been laid to allow the new residents to walk on it. The new duke and his party were met at the door by anxious estate staff: the agent, house steward, clerk of works and some others.