The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse

by Piu Marie Eatwell

  And yet Anna Maria Druce’s case was, quite simply, extraordinary. Her father-in-law had been the late Thomas Charles Druce, a successful Victorian businessman who in the 1850s had owned and run a highly profitable London department store, known as the Baker Street Bazaar. T. C. Druce had occupied a spacious residence called Holcombe House in Mill Hill, then part of Hendon.* He had lived with a woman known as ‘Annie May’ for several years before finally marrying her in 1851, by which time she had given birth to three children out of wedlock. This was a highly unusual situation for a Victorian middle-class couple, and was kept secret from the children, who believed that at the time of their births their parents were married. The couple’s eldest son was Herbert Druce, born in 1846. He was followed by a son, Sidney, and a daughter, Florence. The first child born after T. C. Druce’s marriage in 1851 – and therefore the first legitimate issue – was Walter Thomas Druce, Anna Maria’s husband. T. C. Druce died in 1864 – or at least, so everybody thought. However, Anna Maria’s contention was that her father-in-law was still very much alive at that date, and that his ‘death’ and burial in 1864 were faked.

  The background to these remarkable claims was not set out in Anna Maria’s affidavit, but Chancellor Tristram knew of it from the gathering tide of newspaper reports and gossip that was already beginning to grip the late-Victorian public. According to these reports, Mrs Druce’s astounding contention – and the underlying reason for her application for the exhumation of her father-in-law’s grave – was that the man everybody in Baker Street knew as the businessman Thomas Charles Druce was, in fact, the late William John Cavendish-Scott-Bentinck, the 5th Duke of Portland. At that time, the Cavendish-Bentincks were one of the richest families in the country. Their official seat – that of the Dukes of Portland – was the vast and ancient Nottinghamshire estate of Welbeck Abbey. However, another branch of the family had inherited huge swathes of central London in the newly gracious districts of Harley Street and Marylebone. This was evidenced by the myriad streets and squares in their name: Great Portland Street, Portland Place, Cavendish Square, Great Titchfield Street, Bolsover Street. When the notoriously eccentric 5th Duke of Portland had died – apparently childless – in 1879, his cousin William had inherited the dukedom as the 6th Duke. But if the 5th Duke of Portland had indeed masqueraded under a double life as T. C. Druce of the Baker Street Bazaar, he would not have died childless. In fact, he would have had a legal heir – Walter Thomas Druce, the first legitimate son of T. C. Druce, and the husband of Anna Maria. Walter Thomas was now dead; but Anna Maria’s son Sidney was alive and well, and living in Australia. And it was for her son’s benefit that Anna Maria sought the faculty to open her father-in-law’s grave.

  According to Anna Maria’s story, T. C. Druce’s coffin had been filled with lead to mimic the weight of a dead body. The duke, who had tired of his complicated double life, had apparently simply decided to ‘bury’ his alter ego and return to his former life. This was, therefore, the reason for the application for a faculty to open the Druce family vault in the Highgate cemetery: for according to Anna Maria’s case, were the grave to be opened, it would be found to be empty. And if it was, Mrs Druce would be a step closer to proving that her son was heir to the Portland millions.

  Chancellor Tristram was perplexed. Much of the press reporting of Anna Maria’s story was patent nonsense. It was claimed, for example, that ‘Annie May’ – the woman T. C. Druce had married in 1851 – was the illegitimate daughter of the 5th Earl of Berkeley. Frederick Augustus Berkeley, the 5th Earl, had shocked society at the end of the eighteenth century by fathering a number of illegitimate children with Mary Cole, the daughter of a local butcher, and subsequently marrying her. But Chancellor Tristram would have known that Annie May could not possibly have been an illegitimate daughter of the Berkeleys. Any such offspring, after all, would have been at least fifty-five years old by the time of T. C. Druce’s marriage to Annie May in 1851: a highly unlikely prospect.

  On the other hand, turning from the more lurid fantasies of the newspapers to the real legal issues raised by Anna Maria’s affidavit, Chancellor Tristram had to admit that there were disturbing elements to the case. T. C. Druce’s death certificate had not been signed by any medical officer – a fact that bothered the chancellor. And Anna Maria alleged that, when her husband Walter was interred in the Druce family vault in the cemetery at Highgate in 1880, the coffin beside his – that of T. C. Druce – had completely collapsed, giving the impression that it would likely have been empty. And then, there had always been whisperings about the extreme eccentricity of the 5th Duke of Portland. It was well known that the ‘burrowing duke’ had constructed an enormous maze of underground tunnels beneath his estate at Welbeck Abbey. A famous recluse, he had turned his back on the world. Was it not plausible that such a man might have led a secret life?

  Mrs Druce claimed, moreover, to have seen her father-in-law alive after his alleged death and burial in 1864. Some years after the supposed funeral, she said, she had been driving with her husband in a carriage in Castle Hill, Maidenhead, when she spotted the elder Druce in the street, accompanied by another man. She had immediately stopped the carriage and asked them who they were. The man accompanying the person Anna Maria believed to be T. C. Druce said that he was a warden at a private Richmond mental asylum, where his companion had been admitted as a patient, under the name of Dr Harmer.

  Could T. C. Druce/the duke have masqueraded as a lunatic named Dr Harmer after his supposed death in 1864, until his ‘real’ death in 1879? To assert as much seemed nothing less than preposterous. And yet Mrs Druce was not the only person to identify T. C. Druce and the asylum patient Dr Harmer as one and the same man. The identification was supported in court by Dr Forbes Winslow, a celebrity lunacy practitioner and a person for whom Chancellor Tristram would have had the greatest respect. Winslow’s father, Dr Forbes Benignus Winslow, had been a key witness in the famous 1843 trial of Daniel M’Naghten, a lunatic suffering from a persecution complex who had shot and killed the then prime minister’s secretary Edward Drummond, mistaking him for the prime minister himself, Sir Robert Peel. The elder Winslow’s intervention had led to M’Naghten’s trial for murder being called to a halt, and the establishment of the famous legal rules for insanity pleas in murder trials, the M’Naghten Rules. On the death of his father, Forbes Winslow junior had taken over his successful lunacy practice, and had been involved in a number of sensational cases. They included the campaign to release the American housewife Florence Maybrick, convicted in 1889 of poisoning her husband, James Maybrick, with arsenic.

  A rotund gentleman with large chops and a bushy beard, Dr Lyttleton Stewart Forbes Winslow cut an impressive figure when he appeared before Chancellor Tristram as a witness. This eminent Victorian had enjoyed a decidedly unusual upbringing, his illustrious father being of the view that lunatics should be cared for in the surroundings of a family home. Young Forbes Winslow had therefore grown up with the shrieks and groans of the insane as a normal child might have been rocked to sleep by his mother’s lullabies. The child who had been raised in a lunatic asylum dedicated his life to understanding the madness that had surrounded him, and by the 1890s was one of the most controversial and prominent lunacy experts of the day. He was in no doubt, he told Chancellor Tristram, that the photograph of T. C. Druce that was shown to him in court was that of his former patient, Dr Harmer. Dr Harmer, he stated, was under his care until his death about twenty years earlier, first at his asylum in Richmond, then at Sussex House in Hammersmith. He had given his profession as that of a homeopath.

  Dr Tristram remained some time in perplexed consideration of the issue. Faculties for the exhumation of bodies – for whatever reason, whether to retrieve valuables that had inadvertently been buried, make room for another body, or move a body to another grave – were granted every week in the church courts of Victorian England. The chancellor himself had granted more of them than he cared to remember. On the other hand, the actual plunder
and desecration of the crowded graveyards of England’s towns and cities was a cause of much contemporary disquiet. Rumours abounded of bodies being dug up for their hair, teeth and fat to provide the wigs, dentures and wax candles demanded by the wealthy. And there were tales of the so-called ‘Resurrection Men’, grave robbers who unearthed human remains for the dissecting tables of the scientists. Increasingly, the vaults of the wealthy were being protected by iron bars to keep out the grave robbers. Indeed, it was partly in response to such scandals that the Burial Act 1857 had been introduced, requiring a licence from the home secretary for disinterment of a body except in such cases where the body was to be disinterred and reinterred in consecrated ground. But Chancellor Tristram was absolutely certain that this was not a case where a licence from the home secretary would be required: after all, Highgate Cemetery was consecrated ground. After considerable reflection, he considered that Anna Maria Druce did have a legitimate interest in the disinterment, and had made out a case for it being carried out. He therefore granted the application for a faculty to exhume the coffin of T. C. Druce in Highgate Cemetery, to ascertain whether it did indeed contain a body. The faculty was to take effect in fifteen days, in the absence of objection from any interested party.

  Anna Maria was jubilant. After all, she was one small step closer to proving that her son was heir to the Portland millions. As she left the west entrance of St Paul’s Cathedral to join the crowds in Ludgate Circus, a swarm of journalists gathered round her. The Druce–Portland affair – as the case was called – had already provided a field day for the penny press, the nascent tabloids of a new, media-hungry era. The British public – and indeed, the wider English-speaking world, for the case had been reported in newspapers as far afield as Newfoundland and New Zealand – was intrigued at the prospect of this diminutive woman single-handedly taking on one of the mightiest aristocratic families in England. Overnight, Anna Maria had become a celebrity, her case discussed in inns, parlours and private gentlemen’s clubs around the country.

  Beyond the consistory court, however, legal machinery manipulated by other interested parties was beginning to grind into action. A few miles to the east of St Paul’s, at the far end of the great thoroughfare of Cheapside, urgent discussions were taking place at the offices of Messrs Freshfield & Williams of New Bank Buildings, solicitors to the businessmen of Threadneedle Street since 1743. The distinguished clients of Freshfields included no less an institution than the Bank of England. The discussions centred on Anna Maria Druce and the faculty that had been granted by Chancellor Tristram to take effect, subject to any objection from an interested party, in fifteen days’ time.

  Two days after the hearing at St Paul’s Cathedral, a clerk left the doors of Freshfields and hurried down Cheapside. He hailed a horse-drawn cab, instructing it to make haste to the chambers of 12 King’s Bench Walk, Temple. In his hand, he bore a letter addressed to Chancellor Thomas Hutchinson Tristram.

  * Mill Hill used to be a part of the ancient civil parish of Hendon, within the historic county boundaries of Middlesex. Mill Hill as part of the Municipal Borough of Hendon was merged into the London Borough of Barnet, Greater London, in 1965.

  Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forebeare

  To digg the dust enclosed heare;

  Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,

  And curst be he that moves my bones.

  Epitaph of William Shakespeare

  Mr Bois, the superintendent of Highgate Cemetery, looked out of the window of the cemetery lodge and sighed. The pale, gaunt figure in widow’s weeds, fluttering anxiously up and down the paths of the cemetery in the chilly December light, flitting in and out of the rows of mossy tombstones and crumbling sepulchres, was by now a familiar sight. The stir Mrs Druce caused by her – virtually daily – visits to the cemetery was most unwelcome. She persisted in her demand that Mr Bois open the grave of her father-in-law, Thomas Charles Druce. This was despite him explaining to her countless times that, as far as he was concerned, he could not do so without the home secretary’s permission. Then there was the day she assaulted two of the undertakers who had been trying to dig up an old grave to make way for a new one, her absurd claim being that they had been attempting to dig a secret passage to the Druce family vault, in order to tamper with the remains buried there. She had even brought a mining engineer with her, to certify whether this was the case. And then, only a few days ago, a journalist from a national newspaper had come nosing around, asking for information about the funeral and burial of Mr Druce, thirty-four years back in December 1864. Mr Bois had given the man short shrift. While he himself had not been at Highgate Cemetery in 1864 – his tenure there had started two years later – the records clearly showed that Mr Druce had been buried at the cemetery in the family vault, on 31 December 1864. The respectable firm of undertakers Messrs Glazier and Son of Tottenham Court Road had carried out the arrangements. The vault at Highgate had cost £61, the shell of the coffin was lead, and the outer case of elm. The whole proceedings had been highly elaborate, with two four-horse coaches, heavily feathered and plumed, and twelve men involved in the affair.

  ‘Depend upon it,’ Mr Bois had told the journalist firmly, ‘I shall open the grave, and at the bottom, in the coffin concerned, I will find bones.’

  And yet, there were aspects of the case that caused Mr Bois to have some doubts. For instance, the owners of the vault had placed a stone slab over the bottom coffin – that of T. C. Druce – after the funeral of his widow Annie May, in 1893. Rumour had it that this was to conceal the true state of the coffin, which had collapsed at the funeral of his son Walter in 1880. Mr Bois could think of no other plausible explanation for this action. The case certainly intrigued him, and he had admitted as much to the reporter: ‘I shall be immensely curious about opening that grave. It is a unique case in my thirty-two years’ experience among the tombs of Highgate.’

  None the less, the digging up of graves at Highgate – officially or unofficially – was nothing new in those days. At a time when people often died young and the rituals of mourning were a national pastime, it was not uncommon for a bereaved husband or lover – his ardour cooled with the passage of time – to petition to recover jewels or other tokens of affection buried with his loved one. Mr Bois himself had known of several such cases. There had been, for example, the hushed exhumation by the poet and artist Mr Dante Gabriel Rossetti of the remains of his late wife, Elizabeth Siddal, in 1869, just three years after Mr Bois had started work at Highgate. Mr Rossetti, grief-stricken at the death of Elizabeth, had buried the manuscript of his poems alongside her in the Rossetti family vault. Seven years later, he regretted his impulsive action. In that case, the relevant government minister, Mr Henry A. Bruce, was remarkably amenable to granting a licence for the exhumation, having apparently overseen the commission of an altarpiece by Mr Rossetti for Llandaff Cathedral. On the evening of 5 October 1869, workmen removed the slab over the grave, dug down in the narrow space to the coffin, prised open the lid and lifted out the notebook of poems. Lid, earth and slab were then replaced, and the workmen tipped with beer money. The whole operation was conducted in the strictest secrecy and overseen by an acquaintance of Mr Rossetti’s, a dubious art dealer by the name of Charles Howell, who had been instrumental in persuading Rossetti to dig up the body. Howell later spread fanciful nonsense about Mrs Rossetti’s corpse, claiming that her hair still glowed red and luxuriant with posthumous growth.

  In the present case, however, the home secretary – Sir Matthew White Ridley – was stubbornly refusing to grant a licence for the exhumation of Mr Druce’s coffin. And here was another thing that could not fail to have struck Mr Bois, with his weighty experience of burials and exhumations. In the late Victorian period, licences for digging up graves were not uncommon. Why was this particular application meeting with so much resistance? Who was determined to stop the Druce vault being opened, and why?

  Had Mr Bois been able to contemplate the tombstones of the other Vi
ctorian grandees that lined the wooded walks of Highgate with the benefit of hindsight, he might have come to the conclusion that, if Mr Thomas Charles Druce had indeed led a double life as the 5th Duke of Portland, he was in good company with many others there laid to rest. In the same west side of the cemetery as the Druce vault – barely a stone’s throw away – lay the tomb of Catherine Dickens, the long-suffering wife of the late author and pillar of the Victorian literary establishment, Charles Dickens (whose remains, of course, repose in Westminster Abbey). Philanthropist, performer and patriarch, Dickens seemed the embodiment of the Victorian domestic virtues of family, hearth and home. But in fact, he had a secret mistress for much of his married life. She was the actress Ellen Lawless Ternan, twenty-seven years his junior (the same age as his youngest daughter), whom he housed in a succession of properties conveniently near him. While close friends and acquaintances were well aware of ‘Nelly’s’ existence (Dickens was to fall out permanently with the novelist Thackeray when he mentioned her name in public, outside the Garrick Club), virtually all correspondence relating to her was destroyed by Dickens himself and by zealous relatives after his death. Dickens’ relationship with Ellen was only made known to a wider audience in a revelatory biography by the author Claire Tomalin in the 1990s. It is now believed that the ‘official’ account of Dickens’ death in 1870 was a fabrication: that he did not, in fact, die having dinner with his sister-in-law Georgina at his home in Gads Hill, as the world was led to believe at the time, but rather in the house nearby, in which he had installed Nelly.