Dilke

A Victorian Tragedy

Roy Jenkins

Introduction

I A Determined Preparation

II A Greater Britain

III Member for Chelsea

IV An English Republican

V The Birmingham Alliance

VI The Dust without the Palm

VII A Laborious Promotion

VIII A Radical amongst the Whigs

IX A Dying Government

X Mr. Gladstone's Successor?

XI Mrs. Crawford Intervenes

XII An Inconclusive Verdict

XIII The Case for Dilke

XIV The Case for Mrs. Crawford—and the Verdict

XV The New Evidence

XVI What was the Truth?

XVII The Long Road Back

XVIII An Independent Expert

XIX A Quiet End

Appendix I
List of Characters concerned with the Case

Appendix II
List of addresses in the Case

References

My principal source of information has been the Dilke Papers in the British Museum. They were placed there by Miss Gertrude Tuckwell in 1938. She was the niece of the second Lady Dilke and the literary executrix of Sir Charles. She had used the papers to complete the standard biography of Dilke which had been begunby Stephen Gwynn, Irish Nationalist M.P., and which was published in 1917. This amply-proportioned two-volume work is still invaluable to any study of Dilke, even though it eschews the divorce case and makes most ruthless use of Dilke's own writings, omitting, altering and even interpolating without any indication of what has been done.

Moreover, Miss Tuckwell clearly exercised her own censorship over the papers. Dilke himself was addicted to laceration (see p. 279
infra
.), but it seems clear that much which he left intact was subsequently excised by Miss Tuckwell. In addition she stipulated in the terms of her bequest to the Museum that Dilke's papers dealing with the case should not be available for inspection until 1950 had passed and the death of Mrs. Crawford had occurred. Later she made the terms still more strict. When both these qualifications had been fulfilled Mr. Harold Macmillan was to pronounce whether the papers could be seen. The Prime Minister (then Foreign Secretary) discharged this duty in the autumn of 1955 and freed the papers; in addition he gave to the Museum a box of papers which Miss Tuckwell had placed in his custody before her death. The hitherto reserved volume and the papers which were made available by Mr. Macmillan provide the bulk of the new information which I have used in the chapters on the case.

References are given in most cases to the volume and folio number of the document quoted. This practice has, however, been made more difficult by the decision of the Manuscript Department of the Museum to re-arrange the Dilke Papers between the time of my working on them and the publication of this book. As a result all references have had to be changed; and as some of the new volumes are still without folio numbers these folio numbers have in
some cases been omitted. In chapters 13 and 14 the quotations to which no references are given are from the transcript of evidence taken at the second trial.

The list of those to whom I am indebted is long. Mr. Mark Bonham Garter, who suggested the subject to me; Mr. P. M. Williams, Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford; Mr. Harry Pitt, Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford; Mr. J. E. S. Simon, Q.C.; Mr. W. H. Hughes; Mr. Geoffrey Roberts; Mr. Anthony Barnes; Lady Waverley (the daughter of J. E. C. Bodley); Miss Violet Markham; Mr. Christopher Dilke; Mr. Eustace Roskill, Q.C.; the late Mr. Harry K. Hudson (who was Dilke's private secretary from 1887 and who died only a few months ago); Mr. Francis Bywater; Lord Beaverbrook; Sir Frederick Whyte; and my successive secretaries, Mrs. P. C. Williams and Miss Julia Gill. To all these and to others whom I have not mentioned, I am very grateful.

London, June, 1958

ROY JENKINS

Since this book was first published in 1958 the events and the characters with which it deals have formed the basis of a novel (
The Tangled Web
, by Betty Askwith, published in 1960), a television court drama (
The Dilke Case
, produced by Granada in 1960) and a highly successful stage play (
The Right Honourable Gentleman
, by Michael Dyne, first presented at Her Majesty's theatre in 1964). The first and third of these offered new, imaginative solutions to the Dilke riddle. But they uncovered no new facts. So an element of mystery still persists. This new edition does not claim to dispel it. Like the first edition, it leaves the reader, in the last resort, having to choose between a balance of probabilities. But it does offer a little new information about Cardinal Manning's attitude to the case, as well as a new surmise about the nature of Dilke's relationship with Mrs. Crawford. These changes occur in chapter 16. Otherwise, apart from adjustments to the description in chapter 15 of Rosebery's relationship to the case, the book is substantially the same.

ROY JENKINS

London, January, 1965

Sir Charles Dilke died in 1911. Although he was then twenty-five years past the zenith of his career his name was still a great one. But in the years that have since gone by his fame has crumbled rapidly. There are few to-day to whom he is more than a rather shadowy Victorian politician who became involved in a half-forgotten scandal.

This decline has perhaps been inevitable, for his fame has had no base of solid attainment to which to anchor itself. He did not rise above the lower ranks of the Cabinet and there are no memorable measures which are popularly associated with his name. His career, broken as it was by the great scandal of the Crawford divorce case, was almost entirely an affair of promise and influence on others rather than of achievement. Had the case not occurred and shattered his life the story might have been very different. He was very near to high office and great power when the blow fell. If, as he himself insisted and as the evidence now available makes likely, he was the victim not of his own actions but of an elaborate conspiracy, his case was unique in recent British history. Few men of wealth and influence have found themselves hopelessly imprisoned in a net of entirely fabricated accusations. More, no doubt, have looked likely candidates for the premiership without in fact achieving that office. But no one, other than Dilke, has got within striking distance of 10 Downing Street and then been politically annihilated by a woman's false accusations.

In these circumstances the unravelling of the case, which dominated Dilke's own mind for more than a third of his life, inevitably becomes a major part of the interest of recounting his life and occupies a correspondingly large section of the
book. But it would be a great mistake to see Dilke as a not very significant politican who achieved fame through his involvement in a divorce case. On the contrary, had the case never occurred, his name would to-day almost certainly be better known.

Moreover, the course of politics might have been markedly different. The discussion of political ‘might-have-beens' is never the most useful historical pursuit, and the year 1886, when Dilke's influence could have been most decisive, is so full of events which might easily have gone otherwise that too much significance cannot be attributed to any single difference. Nevertheless, there is obviously a strong possibility that, had Dilke retained his full influence over Chamberlain the Liberal split might have involved only a Whig, and not a radical, secession from Gladstone. It was not that Dilke was notably less imperialist, more favourable to the Irish or more dazzled by Gladstone than Chamberlain. But he had an instinctive and deep-seated loyalty to the left which the latter entirely lacked; and his character was less ruthless and more compromising.

Had Dilke's influence prevailed many events might therefore have unfolded themselves differently. The twenty years of Tory hegemony which began in 1886 might have been avoided, the Irish question might have been settled much earlier, and, with this out of the way, a more radical Liberal party might have turned, in the ‘nineties, to a massive programme of social reform. The effect on the emergence of the Labour party (which attracted much of Dilke's sympathy in his later years) might clearly have been considerable. The Crawford divorce case must therefore be recorded not only as a personal disaster for Dilke, but also as a major political event.

Charles Wentworth Dilke was born at 76, Sloane Street, on September 4th, 1843. He was the first child of the marriage of his father, also called Charles Wentworth Dilke, with Mary Chatfield, the daughter of an Indian Army captain. Mary Dilke, almost certainly unhappy in her marriage, was to bear one more child, Ashton Dilke, born in 1850, before she fell into a decline which led to her death in 1853. Her influence on her son Charles was not great. She left him with a low church devoutness, but he was to grow out of this by the age of twenty. More important, perhaps, was her firm desire to entrust his upbringing to her father-in-law rather than to her husband. “But moral discipline your grandfather will teach you,”
¹
she wrote to Charles a short time before her death.

It was not that Wentworth Dilke, as the father was known, was a dissolute man. In his early life he was admittedly idle, and did no work until his marriage at the age of thirty. This habit he apparently acquired in Florence, where, after leaving Westminster School, he had been sent to live with the British Consul, Baron Kirkup. It persisted throughout his time at Cambridge and his first years as a young man in London. During this period, in the words of his son, “he was principally known to his friends for never missing a night at the Opera.” After his marriage, however, he manifested a wide range of practical energies. Through his connection with the Royal Horticultural Society he founded two specialised but profitable periodicals—the
Gardeners' Chronicle
^[1]
and the
Agricultural
Gazette
—and added to his already comfortable means. He was an active member of the Society of Arts, and the experience which he gained through the organisation by the Society of a national exhibition of “art manufactures” led him to be one of the first to put forward the idea of the Great Exhibition of 1851. With three other members of the Society, Wentworth Dilke waited upon Prince Albert in 1849. At this meeting it was decided to proceed with the plans for the Exhibition. Six months later Wentworth Dilke was appointed one of an executive committee of four, and took a large share of the administrative responsibility for the whole enterprise.

When the Exhibition showed itself a great success, Wentworth Dilke was accorded his full share of the credit. He became—and remained—a close associate of the Prince Consort and a man who had the full approval of the Queen. He was offered, but declined, a knighthood. He achieved some international repute, and was showered with presents and minor decorations by foreign sovereigns. He established himself as a great man in the field of exhibitions; and as exhibitions were very much the fashion of the age this gave him an occasional occupation of importance for the rest of his life. He was British Commissioner at the New York Industrial Exhibition of 1853, at the Paris Exhibition of 1855, and at a number of smaller displays. He was one of the five royal commissioners for the London Exhibition of 1862, and when he died of influenza at St. Petersburg in 1868 the occasion of his visit was to represent England at a Horticultural Exhibition. In the meantime he had been made a baronet in 1862—by the personal act of the Queen—and had sat in the House of Commons for three years as the Liberal member for Wallingford.

The aspect which he presented to the world was that of a highly successful man. He had a wide range of acquaintance—English and foreign, political, scientific and literary—and a comfortable fortune. He had established his family at 76, Sloane Street, on the border of Belgravia and Chelsea, a lease of which he had taken immediately after his marriage, and he rented Alice Holt, a small country property near Farnham.