Dilke (48 page)

One of the aspects of Mrs. Crawford's story which gave it a great air of verisimilitude was the wealth of detail which she was able to supply. Her account of changing cabs, of passing messages, of arranging meetings—the whole paraphernalia of deceiving her husband—carried a note of conviction. But once it is accepted that she had a considerable experience of intrigue with others and that she was ready to make what had in fact occurred with one man the basis of her accusations against another, this ceases to be even moral evidence against Dilke.
This consideration may also be taken to apply to her sensational three-in-a-bed story. If it were not true how could she possibly have thought of it? This was the natural and general reaction. But it might have been less general had the details of her activities with her sister, Mrs. Harrison, and in particular their relationship with Warner, been known to the public.

Some of the details which Mrs. Crawford gave could not of course have been the result of “transference.” Neither Forster nor Warner would have given her knowledge of the interior arrangements of 76, Sloane Street, or of the existence of a Dilke pensioner at 65, Warren Street. But there were several other sources from which she might have obtained these pieces of information. There was Mrs. Rogerson, who from her long-standing friendship with the Dilke family was probably well informed on both points. If, as Steavenson believed, she was party to a conspiracy, she could have briefed Mrs. Crawford most effectively; and even if she were not, she might have been a gradual source of much useful information. The same considerations apply to Mrs. Ashton Dilke. Alternatively Mrs. Eustace Smith might have planted the seed of the Warren Street idea in her daughter's mind. It is certain, as is shown by one of the anonymous letters which Dilke received in 1882, that there was some gossip about the nature of the Warren Street establishment; it is probable that Mrs. Smith helped to spread this; and it is unlikely that she would not have included her own family in the list of recipients. There is no difficulty in explaining how, if she had not gone there in the circumstances she described, Mrs. Crawford could have known of Warren Street.

There is more difficulty in explaining her “invention” of Fanny Gray. It can be seen how she might have conceived the idea of introducing such a character into her confession. Her mind might have been inclined by experience to move in such a direction, and she might have thought, intelligently and rightly, that the addition of this sensational detail would make her story appear more and not less plausible. It is also just possible to see how she might, perhaps from Mrs. Ashton
Dilke's servants, have known of Fanny's existence. But it is difficult to see how she could have known from this, or any other obvious source, what a good choice she was making. The mysterious and nervous Fanny, who would never appear in the witness-box because there was so much in her life which she wished to conceal, was the perfect victim of a false accusation.

What are we to believe? We should not of course exclude the possibility that on this point if not on others Mrs. Crawford was telling the truth. But there is no evidence to support her. On the contrary, there is a great deal of evidence against her story that Fanny was in the habit of spending almost every night with Dilke at Sloane Street. It also seems unlikely that, had either this suggestion or that concerning Mrs. Crawford been true, Dilke, while protesting his innocence, would have encouraged his wife and his friends to go chasing Fanny round the Home Counties, seeking statement after statement from her. But it seems equally unlikely that Mrs. Crawford, had she fixed purely by chance upon Fanny, should have been so singularly lucky in her choice. It is not entirely impossible that it was luck and nothing more; but it seems more likely, on the hypothesis that Mrs. Crawford was falsely implicating Dilke, that she had known or at least heard of Fanny through some other source, conceivably through Hill Street or through one of her lovers, and had realised that this girl, with her Dilke connection and her doubtful past, would be an almost perfect choice for the purpose.

Fanny Gray apart, it is therefore perfectly possible to sustain a view that Mrs. Crawford could have fabricated the whole of her charges against Dilke; and it is just possible, with a certain stretch of the imagination, to overcome the logical untidiness of Fanny. There still remains the question of whether it is psychologically plausible that Mrs. Crawford should have had the desire to perpetrate (and the nerve to sustain) this colossal fraud upon the British public. This question divides itself into three parts. First, could she have wished to do it? Second, could she have maintained her position throughout the period of public enquiry? And third,
would she not subsequently, when her Roman Catholicism became the centre of her life, have felt it necessary to make public retribution to Dilke?

On the first point it was always easy to suggest a half motive for her action. She had become desperate to get rid of her husband, and she did not wish to implicate Forster. But this does not show why she wished to implicate Dilke, as opposed to some other victim. He was by no means the safest man to choose, for she must have known that by so doing she would provoke a national scandal, and subject her own conduct to the closest examination. Did she have some grievance against him? A French writer named Hector Malot wrote an imaginative reconstruction of the story which was published in England, under the title of
Josey
, in 1887. He assumed Dilke's innocence, and succeeded in building up a surprisingly convincing portrait of Mrs. Crawford's state of mind when framing the false charges. He did so, however, on the basis of an assumption that she had been in love with Dilke, had offered herself to him, and been contemptuously rejected. But Dilke never suggested that this was so.

Her other possible basis for a grievance against him was the part that he had played in getting Mrs. Ashton Dilke to warn her against Forster, and the rumour that he had intervened against Forster at the War Office. This might have made her bitter. It is difficult to believe that it would in itself have made her choose Dilke as the victim of her plot. It would have been so much easier to have chosen one of her earlier lovers. For Dilke to have qualified it seems likely that other considerations would have needed to be at work. First, a certain taste for notoriety in Mrs. Crawford, a positive desire that if her sins were to become known they should do so under the glare of the greatest possible publicity, and in association with one of the most eminent names amongst her acquaintances. Second, the existence of a climate of opinion or a body of rumour about Dilke which made him a not implausible victim of such a charge. It would not have done to have picked Gladstone, even allowing for his night prowling
activities.
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Third, some active outside encouragement, whether from a great personage like Rosebery or Chamberlain, or more probably from a small one like Mrs. Rogerson or Mrs. Eustace Smith. If it is accepted that some or all of these three considerations might have applied, there ceases to be any insuperable difficulty in explaining Mrs. Crawford's choice of Dilke as her victim.

Can we further believe that, having once made the charges, Mrs. Crawford would have had the nerve to sustain them? This is obviously a question to which no firm answer can be returned. Clearly she would have needed to be a woman possessed, to a most unusual degree, of cool, malevolent courage. But we know her to have been an accomplished liar, resourceful in the search for plausibility and unintimidated by the paraphernalia of the law. And if she had a curious, unbalanced taste for notoriety this might have made the ordeals which she inflicted upon herself, and which for most people would have been crushingly burdensome, into something of a stimulant.

The greatest difficulty arises from her subsequent conversion to the Church of Rome. This occurred in 1889, and she was instructed by Manning himself. For reception into the Church and the hearing of her general confession he sent her to Father Robert Butler of St. Charles College, Bayswater. Nevertheless, her numerous conversations with Manning can hardly have failed to touch on her relationship with Dilke and the accusations, false or otherwise, to which she subjected him. Nor could the Cardinal Archbishop have failed to note what she said on these points. He had always given the closest attention to the Dilke case, and even had his interest shown any signs of flagging it would no doubt have been revived by Bodley, whom he would like to have chosen as his biographer and who was almost certainly his most intimate non-Catholic friend. Dilke, as has already been noted, claimed that in the summer of 1885 he “told everything” to Manning. At the beginning of 1889 he wrote to Manning again, sending him
some notes which the Chesson committee had prepared upon the deficiencies of the trials. The Cardinal replied in distinctly friendly terms on February 26th:

“I could hardly have believed that so many oversights and omissions, and all against you, could have happened as in these two trials.

Nor how so many contradictions should have been possible. God grant that some light may spring up to clear you: and lift off from you the great suffering that is upon you.”

This was shortly before Mrs. Crawford's confession. After it the Cardinal maintained his friendly relations with both Sir Charles and Lady Dilke. His only further known written comment, however, is contained in a letter which he wrote to Miss May Abraham (later Mrs. John Tennant) on March 9th, 1891. This was written within nine months of his death, and a great deterioration had taken place in his handwriting. Miss Abraham had written because Stead, still conducting his tireless anti-Dilke campaign, had again claimed that he had the Cardinal on his side. “Neither directly nor indirectly have I expressed either judgment or sympathy in what Mr. Stead has done,” Manning wrote. “The relation of confidence in which I have stood to both persons involved has absolutely closed my lips.”
³

This was cryptic, and so far as written evidence is concerned Manning never cleared up the mystery. He left no paper which revealed his knowledge. In conversation he may have been less discreet. Sir Shane Leslie, whose work on a life of Manning had been interrupted by the war of 1914, wrote to Miss Tuckwell from Vermont in 1916 in the following terms: “There is no doubt the Cardinal thought your uncle innocent of the extreme charge. . . . Later I hope to be able to bring light from Manning's point of view which will be pleasant to you.”
⁴
On another occasion he wrote in still more definite terms: “I have plenty of proof that Manning really believed in Sir Charles's innocence.”
⁵
Sir Shane, however, when he eventually published his work on Manning, shone no
new light upon the issue, but it appears that he based the conviction which he expressed to Miss Tuckwell upon conversations with Wilfred Meynell. Meynell was Manning's “familiar,” who came as near as any man often does to knowing all of another's thoughts and beliefs. The Abbé Alphonse Chapeau, of the University of Angers, whose new life of Manning is eagerly awaited and whose knowledge of the Manning papers is now unrivalled, gives credence to any expression of the Cardinal's views which came
via
Meynell.

Perhaps more important than what Cardinal Manning believed, however, is what Mrs. Crawford did—or failed to do. It is impossible to believe that her reception into the Church of Rome was not of the deepest significance to her. It changed her whole life, to such an extent that the person who existed under her name after 1889 can hardly be reconciled with the one who existed previously. The teachings of that Church, it surely follows, must have had great influence upon her, particularly in the years immediately after her conversion. Yet the Catholic teaching on the Sacrament of Penance would clearly have imposed upon Mrs. Crawford, had she falsely accused Dilke, the absolute duty of doing everything possible to restore his good name. This, of course, she never attempted to do.

What force should be attached to this point? Should her failure to be truly penitent be taken as a final proof of her innocence and of Dilke's guilt? This would be a most extreme conclusion. Against the fact that Mrs. Crawford's behaviour may, from a religious point of view, have been incompatible with her having deceived the court must be set the equally salient fact that Dilke's behaviour, from a practical point of view, was equally incompatible with his having done so. Had he been guilty he might no doubt have strongly protested his innocence. But it seems most unlikely that he would have encouraged the closest possible investigation into the case, or continued, for almost the whole of the rest of his life, to keep the issue alive and to urge others to do so too.

No firm judgment can therefore be based on the subsequent behaviour of either Mrs. Crawford or Dilke, The one neutralises
the other. We must go back to the evidence, that presented at the trials and that subsequently accumulated. On this basis the balance of probability is against Mrs. Crawford. There seems little doubt that the greater part of the story she told about Dilke was false. It is just possible that there may at some stage have been a chance relationship, very different in form and of much shorter duration than that which she described. It might have taken place before her marriage, in the year between her return from a finishing school in Brussels and the beginning, in the summer of 1881, of her unhappy alliance with Crawford. If this were so, it would dispose of several difficulties. It would explain Dilke's strong and persistent sense of legal grievance (he committed neither a crime nor a civil wrong) accompanied by a certain moral unease. It would also explain Manning's failure to impose upon Mrs. Crawford the duty of restitution. The truth would have been almost as publicly damaging to Dilke as the falsehoods with which he was accused, and perhaps still more damaging to him privately. Silence, after so much noise, may therefore have appeared to the Cardinal to be the better course. Yet he still could have believed that Dilke had not perjured himself in the witness box
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and was “innocent of the extreme charge.” Yet all this is pure surmise. There is no evidence to support it. At best it can be considered as no more than a possibility. What is a probability, however, is that Dilke's general pattern of life was not nearly so innocent as his relationship with Mrs. Crawford. Even if not guilty of the charge made against him he may have laid himself open to it and prejudiced his defence by his other activities. He was, perhaps, by the public standards of his age, a guilty man, but he was nonetheless, in all probability, innocent of that of which he was accused and that which brought about his downfall. He was that rare thing, the victim of a conspiracy, the main lines of which we can see, but the exact details of which (and, indeed, the identity of the other participants in which) are shrouded in mystery and are likely always so to remain.