Dilke (34 page)

“The reason, as you know, why I am so anxious for you (which matters more than I matter at present or shall for a long time) to find yourself able if possible to take the offers made you, and vote for the second reading, is that
the dissolution will wreck the party, but yet leave
a
party—democratic, because all the moderates will go over to the Tories; poor, because all the subscribers will go over to the Tories; more Radical than the party has ever been; and yet, as things now stand, with you outside of it.”
²²

Chamberlain replied two days later in a harder and cooler tone:

“My pleasure in politics has gone, and I hold very loosely to public life just now. The friends with whom I have worked so long are many of them separated from me. The party is going blindly to its ruin, and everywhere there seems a want of courage and decision and principle which almost causes one to despair. I have hesitated to write to you again, but perhaps it is better that I should say what is in my mind. During all our years of intimacy I have never had a suspicion, until the last few weeks, that we differed on the Irish Question. . . . You must do what your conscience tells you to be right, and having decided, I should declare the situation publicly at once.

“It will do you harm on the whole, but that cannot be helped, if you have made up your mind that it is right. But you must be prepared for unkind things said by those who know how closely we have been united hitherto. The present crisis is, of course, life and death to me. I shall win if I can, and if I cannot I will cultivate my garden. I do not care for the leadership of a party which should prove itself so fickle and so careless of National interests as to sacrifice the unity of the Empire to the precipitate impatience of an old man
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—careless of the future in which he can have no part—and to an uninstructed instinct which will not take the trouble to exercise judgment and criticism.”
²³

The letter ended: “Yours very truly, J. Chamberlain,” a form which he had not used in his correspondence with Dilke for many years past.

Dilke replied at length and with pained agitation on May

“I need not say to you who know what I am what it has been to receive from you a letter which ends with a form of words intended to be cold by the side of that which for so great a number of years you have used to me. Your letter must have been written just at the moment when I was trying to express something of what I owe to your affection, which it seems that at this very time I had lost. . . . I care so much (not about what you name, and it is a pity that you should do so, for one word of yourself is worth more with me than the opinion of the whole world)—not about what people will say, but about what you think, that I am driven distracted by your tone. I beg you to think that I do not consider myself in this at all, except that I should wish to so act as to act rightly. . . . My seat here will go, either way, for certain, as it is a Tory seat now, and will become a more and more Tory seat with each fresh registration. If I should make any attempt to remain at all in political life, I do not think that my finding another seat would depend on the course I take in this present Irish matter. This thing will be forgotten in the common resistance of the Radicals to Tory coercion. . . . As to inclination, I feel as strongly as any man can as to the
way
in which Mr. Gladstone has done this thing, and all my inclination is therefore to follow you, where affection also leads. But if this is to be—what it will be—a fight, not as to the way and the man and the past, but as to the future, the second reading will be a choice between acceptance of a vast change which has in one form or the other become inevitable, and on the other side Hartington-Goschen opposition, with coercion behind it. I am only a camp follower now, but my place is not in the camp of the Goschens, Hartingtons, Brands, Heneages, Greys. I owe
something, too, to my constituents. . . . If I voted against the second reading, unable as I should be honestly to defend my vote as you could and would honestly defend yours, by saying that all turned on the promise as to the retention of the Irish members, I should be voting without a ground or a defence, except that of personal affection for you, which is one which it is wholly impossible to put forward.”
²⁴

Chamberlain wrote again the next day. It was a letter which began with a half apology—“I must have said more than I supposed, and perhaps in the worry of my own mind I did not allow enough for the tension of yours”—and finished “Yours ever sincerely,” which, while it was not his usual ending, could at least be considered an improvement on “Yours very truly.” But he was still full of complaint against those who would not agree with him, combining this, however, with a self-confident appreciation of his own political future: “On the whole—and in spite of all unfavourable symptoms—I think I shall win this fight, and shall have in the long run an increase of public influence!”
²⁵

Thereafter the correspondence dragged on for several weeks, but there was no longer any hope of its promoting real agreement. Sometimes it was acrimonious (on Chamberlain's side at least), and sometimes it was apologetic. Thus, on May 20th, Chamberlain complained bitterly about some of the speeches at a meeting of the London Liberal and Radical Council, over which Dilke had presided; but on the next day he wrote: “Your note makes everything right between us. Let us agree to consider everything which is said and done for the next few weeks as a dream.”
²⁶
During this period, however, Chamberlain was moved steadily away from the course which Dilke hoped he might follow. On May 16th, although racked with toothache, he attended a meeting of Hartington's supporters at Devonshire House and advised Whigs and radicals to sink their differences in a policy of common resistance to Gladstone. On May 27th he refused to attend a meeting of the Liberal Parliamentary party which
the Prime Minister had summoned at the Foreign Office. On May 31st he held his own decisive meeting of dissentient radicals in a committee room of the House of Commons. Of an attendance of a little more than fifty, forty-eight pronounced in favour of a straight vote against the second reading. In view of this, concessions by the Prime Minister on the retention of Irish members at Westminster would have been of little moment. They were not in any event forthcoming. Gladstone was unwilling to risk alienating Parnell for the doubtful prospect of conciliating Chamberlain. The vote in the House took place at one o'clock on the morning of June 8th. Chamberlain went into the “No” lobby with 92 other Liberals—46 of them his own radical followers—and 250 Tories. Dilke went into the “Aye” lobby with 229 other Gladstonians and 83 Irish Nationalists. The bill was defeated by a majority of thirty, and the third Gladstone Government, having failed in the sole task which it had set itself, was effectively at an end. So was the Dilke-Chamberlain political partnership.

Dissolution followed almost at once, and Dilke set about the task, which he would have regarded as hopeless even had his energies not been otherwise engaged, of defending Chelsea. His result there was declared on July 5th. He was out by 4,304 votes to 4,128. If anything this was better than he had expected. “The turnover in Chelsea was very small, smaller than anywhere else in the neighbourhood, and showed that personal considerations had told in my favour, in as much as we gained but a small number of Irish, it not being an Irish district, and had it not been for personal considerations should have lost more Liberal Unionists than we did.”
²⁷
This was a reasonable appraisal, and one which was fortified by comments in many of the letters of commiseration which reached Dilke. “No one but your husband could have polled so many Gladstonian votes,” Sir Henry James wrote to Lady Dilke. “London is dead against the Prime Minister.”
²⁸

Even if we discount a little both this and Dilke's own comment it is clear that the seat was not lost because of the divorce case. Nevertheless, the case meant that it was lost at a time
when it would be exceedingly difficult to find another. The situation was quite different from that which prevailed in 1878 when Dilke was receiving pressing offers to stand for Manchester, or in 1884 when he could have chosen any part of the old Chelsea division. Furthermore, for a man in middle age to lose a seat which he has held since the age of twenty-five is at the best of times a considerable blow. When it happens eleven days before the commencement of legal proceedings upon which his whole future depends and the omens for which look increasingly dark, it is apt to seem an almost insupportable further trial. It is not surprising that he awaited the outcome with deep foreboding.

“I had at this moment,” he wrote of the period between the election and the opening of the case, “through worry fallen into a condition of mental despondency. . . . I had made up my mind that untruth would triumph, that Stead, who had been professing to be strongly friendly to me since the Queen's Proctor's intervention had been asked for by myself, as he professed on his bidding, would turn round and insist on my prosecution for perjury; and, lastly, that in the then state of London opinion I should be convicted by a London special jury, and sent to penal servitude away from my brave and devoted wife for as many years as my strength might last—till death in fact.”
²⁹

This was the mood in which Dilke presented himself at the Law Courts on the morning of Friday, July 16th.

The Case was heard before Sir James Hannen (who was referred to in the transcript as “the Right Honourable the President”
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) and a special jury. The Queen's Proctor was represented by Sir Walter Phillimore, Q.C., H. Bargrave Deane and Marshall Hall, the last-named then so junior that he was allowed to take no part in the proceedings. For Crawford there appeared Henry Matthews, Q.C., Inderwick, Q.C. (who had led in the first trial) and R. S. Wright. Mrs. Crawford had Lockwood, Q.C., and H. F. Thompson. Murphy, Q.C., held a watching brief for what was rather mysteriously referred to as “a person interested in the proceedings” and who was in fact Captain Forster. Dilke was described by
The Times
as having been refused leave to appear, but as “sitting in court with the Attorney General, Q.C., the Rt. Hon. Sir Henry James, Q.C., and Mr. Searle.” The array of legal talent was formidable. The court, it need hardly be said, was crowded to the doors.

Almost at the beginning the odds were further weighted against Dilke. At the conclusion of his opening speech Sir Walter Phillimore proposed that Mrs. Crawford should immediately be put into the witness-box. The following interchange then took place:

The Right Hon. the President: “No, you must leave that entirely to me.”

Sir W. Phillimore: “Then I shall have to ask your Lordship at what time Mrs. Crawford shall be called, and certainly I shall have to ask that Sir Charles Dilke shall not be called until after Mrs. Crawford.”

The President: “I may say at once I cannot assent to that. The issue lies on the Queen's Proctor to lay such evidence before the Jury as he thinks will establish the case.”

Sir W. Phillimore: “If your Lordship pleases. Then that is a settled matter which was a matter of some difficulty in my mind with regard to the conduct of this case.”

No decision could have underlined more thoroughly the curious form which this second trial was to take, or done more to undermine Dilke's interests. Had the form of the case coincided with its substance—was Dilke guilty of the accusations made against him or was he not—the natural course would have been for Mrs. Crawford to specify her charges, for Dilke to answer them as best he could, and for the court to decide between them. The reversal of this procedure meant that Dilke in his evidence had to seek to controvert allegations before they were fully made and to demonstrate, not merely that specific charges were false, but that he could never have had an adulterous relationship with Mrs, Crawford. Furthermore, Mrs. Crawford was given the inestimable advantage, if she wished to fabricate a story, of sitting in court and hearing Dilke's defence before she formulated her attack. She could, if she desired, shape her evidence to circumnavigate his rebuttals.

Before Dilke was put into the box the evidence given at the first trial was read to the court, and so were the last two anonymous letters which Crawford had received, together with a correspondence between Mrs. Crawford and Crawford's solicitor, Stewart, all of which had been “put in” in February. The correspondence had taken place in July, 1885, after Mrs. Crawford's confession to her husband, when Stewart was endeavouring to persuade her to go to his office and make a
written statement. This she hesitated to do, and Stewart attempted pressure, first by informing her that Dilke denied the charges and alleged a conspiracy, which allegation she would have to meet. She replied to this by writing: “I am horribly frightened at the prospect of Sir Charles Dilke fighting the case, as it complicates it so dreadfully.” Stewart then adopted a more threatening tone.

“I wish to say,” he wrote, “that your husband is resolved, at all costs, to obtain a divorce, and that it will depend on you whether it is obtained quietly, without unnecessary exposure and without implicating others, or after offensive investigations, and with the painful, but unavoidable necessity of making charges against many others whom you may wish to protect—I mean female relations of your own—and another co-respondent, Captain Forster. It will depend on you, therefore, which course is adopted. If you will assist in supplying the necessary information, a great deal which is painful to yourself and incriminating (to) others will be avoided, which will not be the case otherwise.”

Dilke then took the stand. For the remainder of the morning and a short time after the luncheon adjournment he was examined-in-chief by Phillimore. Early in the afternoon his cross-examination by Matthews began and was continued for the remainder of the day and for a short time on the Saturday morning. Matthews asked him 453 questions. Phillimore then re-examined him for half an hour.