Nature made me a gentleman… I live on the best that can be procured for credit, I never spend my own money when I can oblige a friend, I’m always thick on the winning horse, I’m an epidemic on the trade of a tailor. For further particulars, inquire of any sitting magistrate.
Of course, Pip’s dandified idea of a ‘gentleman’ is proved to be both shallow and anachronistic. No longer able to rely on his benefactor and source of wealth – the deported convict Abel Magwitch – he learns that he has to rise up the social ladder by his own efforts and hard work, not the deceptive chimera of inherited riches. In this sense, he comes close – by the end of the novel – to a very different and much more forward-looking definition of a ‘gentleman’, that of Samuel Smiles in his bestselling 1859 manual, Self-Help:
A well-balanced and well-stored mind, a life full of useful purpose, whatever the position occupied in it may be, is of far greater importance than average worldly respectability… Riches and rank have no necessary connexion with genuine gentlemanly qualities. The poor man may be a true gentleman – in spirit and in daily life, he may be honest, truthful, upright, polite, temperate, courageous, self-respecting and self-supporting – that is, be a true gentleman. The poor man with a rich spirit is altogether superior to the rich man with a poor spirit.
Cases of disputed identity such as the Tichborne trial or the Druce–Portland affair raised intriguing – and disturbing – questions for the late Victorian and Edwardian public. Did low-class pretenders to upper-class titles like the Tichborne claimant and Mrs Druce represent a liberating upheaval in the social order – a brave new world in which a butcher could just as well be a lord? Or were they idle, get-rich-quick fantasists seeking to avoid the modern, meritocratic challenge of ascending the social ladder through hard graft by harking back to an outmoded world of titles and inherited wealth?
In the case of the Druce affair, the complexity of the issues that it raised was more than matched by the compelling factual riddle at its heart. Was Thomas Charles Druce really the duke? Everybody had their opinion on the matter, divided between those who were convinced that the 5th Duke of Portland did indeed lead a double life, and those who were firmly persuaded that the whole affair was the most scandalous fraud. Indeed, the great beauty and mystery of the Druce case lay precisely in the fact that every statement met with an objection, and every objection with an explanation. Thus the discussions circled round and round the contents of the Druce vault, always ending where they began. Just what was in that grave?
On one point, however, one and all were united: that it was mighty strange that old Druce’s eldest son, Herbert Druce – who, although illegitimate, had inherited the Baker Street business through his father’s will, as the ‘official’ heir – was being so obstructive about his sister-in-law’s application to have the vault opened. For since Mrs Druce’s initial triumph in March before Chancellor Tristram, Herbert Druce, through his solicitors Freshfields, had cast every obstacle in Mrs Druce’s way. First, they had applied to the Queen’s Bench Division for a judgment that Chancellor Tristram had no jurisdiction to order the disinterment, without the permission of the Home Office. Then, when the Court of Appeal rejected that application, they contested Chancellor Tristram’s order directly in front of him. In order to try to find a way out of the impasse, the chancellor had suggested – during a crowded hearing at St Paul’s in July, packed with smartly dressed ladies – that Mrs Druce apply for an order to have the grave opened from the president of the probate court. This was because, alongside her application to the church court for a faculty to disinter the coffin, Mrs Druce had also commenced proceedings in the civil courts to have T. C. Druce’s will set aside on the grounds that he did not die. The application to the probate court should, Chancellor Tristram suggested, be for ‘letters of request’ addressed from the president back to himself, asking him to make the order for exhumation of the grave. In effect, the legal issue of disinterment was being batted between the church and secular courts, with the shadow of the home secretary and the (as yet unresolved) issue of a Home Office licence looming ominously in the background.
Sir Francis Jeune, the president of the probate court, duly heard Mrs Druce’s application for letters of request. In the course of the hearing, he was most impressed by a witness presented to him in support of her case. This witness was a respectable elderly lady called Mrs Hamilton. She appeared in court dressed entirely in black, with a deep veil. Mrs Hamilton testified that she had seen Thomas Charles Druce on two occasions after his alleged ‘death’ in 1864. The letters of request were therefore duly issued by Sir Francis to Chancellor Tristram, asking for the faculty to be granted. The civil judge evidently shared the chancellor’s view that the simplest way to settle the matter was simply to open the grave, to see if T. C. Druce’s body was there. He stated as much in a letter to Sir Kenelm Digby, under-secretary of state to the Home Office. Herbert Druce promptly appealed against the judge’s order. His appeal was roundly rejected.
Why was Herbert Druce so vehemently opposed to the exhumation of his father’s body? A stout man of fifty-two with a hooked nose and copious beard, Herbert bore an uncanny physical resemblance to his father. Like him, he appeared to be the embodiment of late Victorian respectability. He had been groomed by T. C. Druce to take over the prosperous family business in Baker Street, and he ran it with capable hands. When he was not poring over the firm’s accounts in the Baker Street office, he would retire to the luxurious villa that he occupied with his wife and family in Circus Road in the affluent London suburb of St John’s Wood. But all was not as it seemed in Herbert’s life, and his placid exterior concealed a tumult of deeply felt emotion.
Until a decade before, Herbert had been in complete and blissful ignorance of his illegitimacy, which had only surfaced as a result of the actions of his meddlesome sister-in-law, Anna Maria. The fact that he – along with his two younger siblings – had been born a bastard had been revealed during a most uncomfortable meeting with his mother, Annie May, and the Druce family solicitor, Edwin Freshfield.
Edwin, a senior partner of the law firm Freshfields, had been alerted to the fact of Herbert Druce’s illegitimacy by the unlikely source of the tax authorities. This was because Anna Maria Druce, believing (incorrectly) that Herbert could not inherit under his father’s will because of his illegitimacy, had informed the tax authorities of this fact. The Inland Revenue concluded that as the named beneficiary of his father’s estate, Herbert could inherit, but that because the first three children were illegitimate, the wrong amount of estate duty had been paid. Edwin Freshfield was therefore left with the unpleasant task of confronting Annie May – in the presence of Herbert – over the fact that she had not been married to T. C. Druce at the time of the birth of these children. Many years after the meeting, Edwin still cringed at the recollection, as he recorded in a later memorandum to the Home Office:
The writer of this memorandum had the first interview with Mrs Annie Druce when the claim [by the tax authorities] was made, and also had the task of informing Mr Herbert Druce of the true state of the case [i.e. his illegitimacy]. The interview was a very painful one. Mrs Annie Druce stated that she had been married but it ended with her being taken, as was not unnatural, very ill. When she had in part recovered she absolutely declined to give any further information and declared herself ready to pay whatever was claimed by the Authorities at Somerset House. The writer saw the Authorities, heard the whole story from them, and obtained a discharge from the executors on payment of duty amounting to £3,200 on 16th May 1884.
Disconcerting as the meeting had been for Edwin, it was even worse for Herbert. In one moment, all his comfortable, middle-class illusions about himself had collapsed in a heap. The remote figure of his father – always something of a mystery to him – was now becoming, increasingly, a source of embarrassment. He dreaded the unearthing of some other secret, were the grave to be opened. As an illegitimate son of T. C. Druce, Herbert had nothing to gain if it were to
be shown that his father was the 5th Duke of Portland. Since he was born out of wedlock, he would be automatically barred from inheriting any title. Conversely, he had everything to lose if the grave were empty: for if T. C. Druce did indeed ‘fake’ his death in 1864 in order to return to his life as the 5th Duke of Portland, his will – the instrument which bequeathed the Baker Street business to Herbert – would be set aside. It was vital, for Herbert’s interests, that there was a body in that grave; and given the secrets in his father’s life, he was not minded to take a chance on the fact by having it opened.
For the popular press, on the other hand, Herbert’s stubborn refusal to accede to his sister-in-law’s request, marshalling instead the mighty muscle of the top ranks of the legal profession against her, suggested at best a marked lack of chivalry, and at worst, that he had something to hide. As one contemporary newspaper remarked:
Public interest is now fully aroused in the mystery of the Highgate vault; and the growing opinion is that exhumation, and nothing but exhumation, can afford a solution of the strange case. The remark heard on every hand is: ‘If Mrs Druce be a deluded lady, why not have this straightway proved by opening the grave and the coffin therein?’
In the meantime, the occupants of Welbeck Abbey maintained a dignified silence. The 6th Duke of Portland gave not the slightest outward hint that the Cavendish-Bentincks were remotely ruffled at the prospect of being ousted from their ancestral seat by the descendants of a furniture salesman. Indeed, the Duke had no overt reason to comment, as no case had as yet been brought directly against him or the Portland estates. To date, the only proceedings currently on the court lists were Mrs Druce’s application for a faculty for exhumation of the vault in the church court, and her separate proceedings in the civil court to set aside the probate granted on T. C. Druce’s will. Each of these proceedings was being fought with dogged insistence by Herbert Druce. The case so far was therefore (at least, in public) an internecine conflict between rival branches of the Druce family, who either did or did not want T. C. Druce’s grave to be opened.
Behind the scenes, however, the man who two decades before had anxiously surveyed the ruined splendour of Welbeck as a pale and nervous twenty-two-year-old, was anything but complacent. After all, William the 6th Duke had never even met his eccentric predecessor. No official photo-graphs existed of the mysterious and elusive 5th Duke of Portland. Nobody knew how the ‘burrowing duke’ had passed the bulk of his time, hidden from view in his underground labyrinth at Welbeck, or shut off from the world behind high walls at Harcourt House.
For all his lofty public indifference, the 6th Duke was, in private, deeply anxious. So much so that he instructed a leading firm of private investigators to hunt down every piece of information that could conceivably shed light on the 5th Duke’s movements, along with those of T. C. Druce.*1 Furthermore, the 6th Duke’s solicitors actively co-operated and assisted Freshfields. Many and frequent were the letters that passed between the Berners Street offices of Baileys, Shaw & Gillett, the duke’s legal advisors, and those of Herbert Druce’s solicitors in Bank Street (the parties even fell out, on occasion, over who was to pay the investigators’ bills). Documents were exchanged, evidence assessed, anonymous agents were sent to shadow Mrs Druce’s every move. Above all, a common strategy evolved: that of using Herbert Druce as a ‘front’ to obstruct the proceedings as much as possible, in order for both parties to gather evidence to build a case. Surely it could not be so difficult to prove that the 5th Duke and T. C. Druce were in different places at the same time? Or to track down a birth certificate for T. C. Druce? Either of these would wipe out, in one fell swoop, the claim that they were one and the same person. Swarms of agents combed through parish records, interviewing hundreds of Druces the length and breadth of the country, in an attempt to uncover one or other of these vital pieces of evidence. They searched in vain.†2
*
By the beginning of August 1898 the long vacation had arrived,*3 and the grey-haired lawyers of Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn and the Temple hurried to pack their bags and file in a great exodus to the elegant squares of Brighton, or the fashionable resorts of the Lake District. Bundles of documents and pleadings lay stranded on deserted desks; mounds of post accumulated dust in neglected pigeonholes; rats gambolled under the silent floorboards of the winding passageways of the Royal Courts of Justice. Grass sprouted between the chinks of the paving stones in Lincoln’s Inn, to be chewed thoughtfully by idle ticket porters, taking refuge from the sun in the shadow of empty porches. There was just one duty judge left in town for emergencies. Even he came only once a week to town to sit in chambers, clean-shaven and unrecognizable, having dispensed with full-bottomed wig, scarlet robes and white wand in favour of a summer suit and dapper white hat, a strip of plaster on his sun-blistered nose.
And so, for the present, on a dusty desk of an empty court, the application to exhume T. C. Druce’s body stagnated. But the press sensation ran on throughout the whole summer of 1898. In fact, it seemed that neither the newspapers nor the public could get enough of the Druce affair. Enterprising individuals offered excursions to the Druce vault in Highgate, which was swift becoming the most-visited sepulchre in England. Four miles to the south, heads turned in unison as horse-drawn omnibuses clattered past the entrance of the Baker Street Bazaar. The bazaar itself heaved with curious sightseers, hopeful of spotting the ghost of the unburied ducal tradesman stalking among the goods that had replaced the stock he left behind him, four-and-thirty years before. At a spiritualistic séance, a young woman fell into a trance and, when recovered, breathlessly related how she had ‘seen’ the Druce coffin, with nothing in it. ‘Mrs Druce’, announced the Daily Mail, ‘is now the most interesting woman in England. She occupies more space in the newspapers than is claimed by the Queen of England.’ In August the same newspaper announced a forthcoming ‘novelty for Daily Mail readers’ – no less than the imminent publication, day by day, of a serial story entitled The Double Duke, allegedly ‘founded on fact’ (although what facts was never stated). The serial was to be ‘quite the most interesting romance ever published in the Daily Mail.’ Where, wondered many a spectator of the media circus, did fact end and fiction begin?
Anna Maria Druce herself revelled in the attention. With the gracious condescension of a dowager duchess-in-waiting, she granted interviews to the newspapermen clamouring at her door. Anna Maria’s official story about her origins was suitably genteel. ‘I myself was a Miss Butler,’ she informed the gathered pressmen with haughty conviction. ‘My father being agent for Lord Pembroke, the latter acted for a time as my guardian. It was through going to the same school as my husband’s sister that I first met him.’ She had given ‘land steward’ as her father’s profession on her marriage certificate in 1872. In truth, however, Anna Maria was the daughter of a humble Irish paperhanger, a workman who scraped a living hanging rich wallpapers in the houses of the wealthy and fashionable. She had met her husband Walter – the third son of T. C. Druce – when employed as governess to the Druce household. A tendency towards socially aggrandizing fantasies about their origins was not uncommon in women of modest background, who had ascended the Victorian social ladder. Wilkie Collins’ ‘official’ mistress Caroline Graves, for example, used to describe herself as the daughter of a gentleman called Courtenay, when she was in fact the daughter of a carpenter by the name of John Compton.
Given the lowliness of her origins, the fact that Anna Maria managed to reach the rank of governess was testimony to her determination. By the 1860s, however, it was becoming increasingly common for women from the working classes to enter this genteel profession, formerly the preserve of distressed gentlewomen. The increase in social mobility over the course of the century meant that the faded middle-class ladies, who had previously made up the ranks of the governess profession, slowly became infiltrated by a new, cannier, more upwardly mobile type. Contemporary observers, like Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, were scandalized. ‘Farmers and tradespeopl
e are now educating their daughters for governesses as a mode of advancing them a step in life,’ she observed sniffily in 1848. As a result, ‘a number of underbred young women have crept into the profession who have brought down the value of salaries, and interfered with the rights of those whose birth and misfortune leave them no other refuge’.
The canny, low-born adventuress Becky Sharpe, the devious and unscrupulous anti-heroine of William Thackeray’s mid-century novel Vanity Fair, is an example of exactly the type to which Lade Eastlake was referring. Employed as a governess by a country baronet, Becky manages to carry off the son of the house, before abandoning him for greater prizes down the line. And then there is Lydia Gwilt, the scheming governess featured in Wilkie Collins’ 1866 novel Armadale – a fortune-hunter and, even worse, a murderess. Not to mention the devious Lucy Graham, the doll-like blonde in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). Far from conforming to the Victorian female domestic ideal of the ‘angel in the house’, Lucy, a former governess, turns out to be a criminal who has attempted murder, committed bigamy and abandoned her child. The admittedly very different heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre (1847) is also a governess, who breaks convention by marrying the master of the house.
The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse Page 6