Dilke (31 page)

You will well understand how absolutely recognition on my part of an external barrier is separate from any want of inward confidence, the last idea I should wish to convey.

Nor can I close without fervently expressing to you my desire that there may be reserved for you a long and honourable career of public distinction.

Believe me always,
Yours sincerely,

W. E. Gladstone
²⁴

Dilke received this letter with reasonably good grace—better than that with which Chamberlain had accepted the Local Government Board—and returned a friendly answer to Gladstone. But his exclusion was damaging not only to his political prospects but also to his private reputation. It created in the public mind a greater presumption of his guilt than had hitherto existed; and he can hardly have failed to reflect on the mischance that the formation of the Government could not have been delayed for two weeks. Had this been so, and had he in the interval secured even a formal verdict in his favour, it would have been much more difficult to exclude him. But the mischance occurred, and the exclusion took place. What it meant to Dilke emerges most clearly from a letter which he wrote to Chamberlain immediately after the latter's acceptance of office:

“I feel that our friendship is going to be subjected to the heaviest strain it has ever borne, and I wish to minimise any risks to it, in which, however, I don't believe. I am determined that it shall not dwindle into a form or pretence of friendship of which the substance has departed. It will be a great change if I do not feel that I can go to your house or to your room as freely as ever. At the same time confidence from one in the inner circle of the Cabinet to one wholly outside the Government is not easy, and reserve
makes all conversation untrue. . . . I intend to sit behind (in Forster's seat), not below the gangway, as long as you are in the Government. There is one great favour which I think you will be able to do me without any trouble to yourself, and that is to let my wife come to your room to see me
between
her lunch and the meeting of the House.
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The greatest nuisance about being out is that I shall have to go down in the mornings to get my place, and sit in the library all day. . . .”
²⁵

At this stage, however, Dilke's thoughts were too concerned with what was about to happen at the Law Courts to be much occupied with events either at Westminster or in Whitehall.

The Case of Crawford v. Crawford and Dilke was heard before Mr. Justice Butt on Friday, February 12th. Dilke appeared with a formidable array of legal and personal advisers. Sir Henry James, out of office like Dilke himself, although for different reasons, remained his principal but unpaid counsellor. James's skill and experience, however, were fortified by those of Sir Charles Russell, who had been appointed Attorney General ten days before
^[1]
and who was then the foremost advocate at the Bar. Russell had more divorce court experience than James. But he did not stand in the same position of friendship to Dilke, and his services were not available for nothing. On the contrary, his brief was marked with the figure, phenomenal for those days, of 300 guineas; and the junior, Searle, had in consequence to be rewarded with a proportionate fee. Chamberlain was also in court, to give support and to be available for consultation on any nontechnical point.

During the morning Crawford went into the box, and was led by his counsel through the confession which had been made to him. Mrs. Crawford was not in Court. Two witnesses only were called to offer corroborative evidence. The first was Anne Jamieson, who had been parlourmaid in the Crawfords' house from the beginning of 1882. She stated that, in February, 1883, when Crawford came to London later than his wife, Mrs. Crawford spent the two intervening nights away from home, returning on the first occasion at about 7-30 in the
morning, and on the second at some unspecified hour. Anne Jamieson also said that, during the session of 1883, she remembered Sir Charles Dilke paying a series of morning calls upon Mrs. Crawford. He came about once a fortnight at noon or 12-30. The visits lasted approximately half an hour, and while he was there his carriage waited in the street. Mrs. Crawford received him in the ground-floor drawing-room and gave orders that, during the visit, no one was to be admitted. Under cross-examination by Russell, Anne Jamieson said that Mrs. Crawford, in July, 1885, had told her “to tell Mr. Crawford all that I knew about Sir Charles Dilke.” She also admitted a series of visits to the house from Captain Forster, first stating that these began in 1883, but later correcting this to 1884.

The second witness was George Ball, who had been butler to Mrs. Harrison, one of Mrs. Crawford's elder sisters, at her house in Cromwell Road. Mrs. Crawford had told Anne Jamieson that she had spent the nights away from home at this house. Ball was called in order to refute this. He was not cross-examined.

This was the case for the plaintiff, and it was one which put Dilke and his advisers in a position, as it appeared to them, of extreme difficulty. No evidence of any legal force had been offered against Dilke. This was fully recognised by Mr. Justice Butt. In the course of his summing-up he was to say: “I cannot see any case whatever against Sir Charles Dilke. By the law of England, a statement made by one party in the suit—a statement made not in the presence of the other—cannot be evidence against that other. I cannot see the shadow of a case.”
¹
In these circumstances, should Dilke be put into the witness-box to deny upon oath the uncorroborated story which Mrs. Crawford had told to her husband and which he had repeated to the court? There was no legal advantage to be gained. The purpose of such a course would be to convince the public not the judge. But there were two objections. The first was the belief, held by all Dilke's legal advisers and expressed by Russell, that if their client went into the box he would be open to cross-examination about the whole of his
past life and about his relations with Mrs. Crawford's mother in particular; and the fact that Crawford was known to have spent a good deal of money—employing two men and two women in the task——trying to hunt up pre-1882 evidence against Dilke's general character may have added to their fear. But it was a curious fear, for there seems no doubt that under the rules of evidence as they existed in 1886 (and as they exist to-day) such questions would have been inadmissible. They would have dealt with matters not at issue and, as such, were excluded by the Evidence Further Amendment Act of 1869.
^[2]
If Dilke had been asked about his adultery with Mrs. Eustace Smith an objection from Sir Charles Russell would almost certainly have been enough to rule out the question.
^[3]

The second difficulty is one which (quite naturally) Russell did not mention in court and which is not discussed, as is the first, in the Dilke papers relating to the case, but of which J. L. Garvin makes much in his biography of Chamberlain.
²
The aspect of Mrs. Crawford's story which was likely to make most public impact was that relating to the girl, Fanny. In the unanimous view of Russell, James and Chamberlain, according to Garvin, it was impossible for Dilke to make an effective answer to the charges unless Fanny herself could be put into the box, able to deny the allegations about her own role and to stand up to cross-examination. For reasons which will be discussed later, Fanny was not available. Consequently, Garvin states, Russell and James decided to let the case rest where it was, and Chamberlain, most reluctantly, saw the force of their reasoning and concurred.

The argument is not altogether convincing. It is obvious that a firm rebuttal by Fanny as well as by Dilke would have been an advantage, but, it is not clear why the latter without the former should have led, as Garvin assumes, to the certainty of a verdict against Dilke. Whatever their chain of reasoning, however, the facts are that during the luncheon adjournment Russell, James and Chamberlain met and decided that the case should be left where it was, and that Dilke should give no evidence. When this decision was taken Dilke was not present. He was waiting in another room. Chamberlain was deputed to go and tell him what had been decided. Dilke accepted what he was told.

When the court reassembled after luncheon Sir Charles Russell announced the course which had been resolved upon. He did so in somewhat hesitant terms:

“Ought we to take upon ourselves the responsibility of putting Sir Charles Dilke in the witness-box where he might be put through the events of his whole life, and in the life of any man there may be found to have been some indiscretions—ought we to take upon ourselves that responsibility? After an anxious consideration of the matter we have come to the determination to leave the case where it stands. . .

Mr. Justice Butt, however, showed no hesitation in his subsequent remarks:

“Nothing can be clearer than the law on this subject—that is that the unsworn statement of a person in the position of Mrs. Crawford is not entitled to be received or even considered in a Court of Justice as against the person with whom she is alleged to have committed adultery. . . . Under these circumstances I have no hesitation whatever in saying that counsel have been well advised in suggesting the course which they have induced Sir Charles Dilke to take.”
³

His Lordship then proceeded to dismiss the case against Dilke and to order the plaintiff to pay his costs. But he also gave Crawford his divorce. In law both decisions were no doubt correct but to the public they seemed ridiculously paradoxical.
The verdict appeared to be that Mrs. Crawford had committed adultery with Dilke, but that he had not done so with her.

Nevertheless, Dilke was at first reasonably satisfied with the result. In his diary for February 12th he wrote:

“My case tried. I left myself absolutely in the hands of counsel and they took the right course in saying with the judge ‘no case.' But Russell did it clumsily and (without my permission) talked of ‘indiscretions.' He
said
possible indiscretions, but of course most of the newspapers left out possible.
^[4]
But for this blunder the case stood well. Nothing could be stronger than the judge's words, and ‘costs' mean that Crawford had no ground for ‘reasonable suspicion,' as in similar cases where there had been such ground costs had been left to be paid by each side.”
⁴

He noted also that for several days letters of congratulations arrived in great quantities from all sorts of people. “Even the wary politician Harcourt congratulated warmly,” he added. Furthermore, James reported on February 13th: “I have seen a great many people at Brooks's, the Reform and Turf Clubs. Everyone seems satisfied.” Dilke's reply to this was somewhat severe: “The Turf Club,” he said, “was hardly the place to gauge opinion.”
⁵

Dilke's view of the whole position, indeed, was rapidly becoming less favourable. The verdict of the court was showing itself to have been a false release. It did not prevent the mounting against him of a considerable newspaper campaign. This was begun by the
Pall Mall Gazette
.

The
Pall Mall Gazette
—a London evening newspaper—was at that time under the editorship of W. T. Stead. Stead had been born in Northumberland in 1849, the son of a Congregational minister. He died in 1912, just over a year after Dilke's own death, but in more dramatic circumstances. He
was a victim of the
Titanic
disaster. He became editor of the Darlington
Northern Echo
at the age of twenty-two, and then moved to London in 1880 to serve under Morley on the
Pall Mall
. He succeeded to this editorial chair in 1883 when Morley became a member of Parliament. But Stead was a very different type of journalist from Morley. His interests were narrower, his mind was less cultivated, and, although he was a Liberal (and often an extreme one), his political affiliations were not of primary importance to him. He had force and courage, but he was an extreme egotist who became obsessed with a sense of his own power.
^[5]
Furthermore, he possessed to an unusual degree the essential ingredients of moral intolerance—he was a puritan fascinated by sex. Professionally he was a sensationalist, and a pioneer of the highly personalised approach of modern journalism. He was the originator of the technique of the interview, and at the beginning of 1884 he had applied it with brilliant success by himself going to Southampton and obtaining an important statement of view from General Gordon who had just returned to England. This interview marked the beginning of the public agitation for the despatch of Gordon to Khartoum.

In the following year Stead applied his talents for personal investigation to a different field and in a more extreme form. He was anxious to promote a bill which would raise the age of
consent from twelve to sixteen and generally make more difficult the abduction of young girls for purposes of prostitution. His method of drawing attention to the evil which he wished to combat was a direct one. For the sum of £5 he himself succeeded in purchasing and carrying off from her parents a child of thirteen. He published a full account of his activities in the
Pall Mall Gazette
and later re-published them as a pamphlet entitled
The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon
. The effect was considerable, and a change in the law was quickly carried through. Stead, however, had committed a technical offence and, with some of his associates, he was brought to trial at the Old Bailey in November, 1885. Most of the others were acquitted, but Stead himself, perhaps because he insisted on conducting his own defence, was convicted and sentenced to three months' imprisonment. He bore the punishment with a good deal of self-righteous pride
^[6]
and emerged from it just in time for the hearing of the Dilke case.