Dilke (32 page)

To this case he devoted (and was to continue to devote for years to come) the closest possible attention. At first, before the trial, he appeared as a friend. Dilke had said in a letter to his constituents in August, 1885, that he would disprove the charge against him before attempting to continue his public career. This attitude, Stead announced, was an honourable one. He indicated his belief that Dilke was most probably innocent and offered him all possible assistance in demonstrating the fact. It was perhaps consistent with this attitude that Stead should express horrified disappointment at the course which was followed at the February trial; and even after the extremely harsh comments which he then printed about Dilke there were moments in the ensuing months when he still presented himself as a well-wisher, eager that Dilke might yet be vindicated by some fresh turn of events. Lady Dilke, willing no doubt to clutch at any straw, corresponded
with Stead and even went to see him during this period. But her intercessions did more harm than good. They merely served further to whet Stead's appetite for the case, and offered ground for misrepresentation. After their meeting Stead recorded that “at one point she said plainly that a heavy burden lay on her heart because she had brought all this trouble on her husband by trying to wean him from his worldly life; that if she had only let him go on with his intrigues and life of pleasure, none of the trouble would have come upon him; and it made her doubt whether it was not better to let men go on in their vice rather than try to raise them to a higher life.” “It was pitiable, ghastly,” Stead added, “to see her sobbing.”
⁶

Apart from the inherent improbability of Lady Dilke making these confessions to a sensational journalist who had already shown himself a determined traducer of her husband, Stead's reliability as a recorder of impressions and sifter of evidence is well indicated by the fact that he proceeded immediately afterwards to cite the private view of Sir George Lewis—“who was his own solicitor as well as Dilke's”—as decisive testimony against Dilke's innocence. There might have been some force in the point, were it not that Lewis in fact was Mrs. Crawford's solicitor, and not Dilke's.
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After this it is not necessary to attach too much weight to Stead's similar assertions that Dilke had been excluded from Lord Randolph Churchill's house because of “his forwardness, to use no stronger word,” to Lady Randolph, and that Sir Charles Mills (later Lord Hillingdon) believed that he habitually “had six intrigues going on at once.”

These and other stories which Stead was subsequently to relate (and print) about Dilke may or may not have been true, but the fact that they came from Stead is certainly no testimony to their veracity. It is impossible to read the files
of his paper for the weeks after the February trial without believing that his main interest was to print anything which would keep the case alive, and enable him to go on exploiting its sensationalism for some time to come. The
Pall Mall's
circulation had been dropping, its poor financial position was a current cause of dissension between its proprietor and himself, and it badly needed to attract new readers.

Later, however, Stead's general interest in the case was replaced by a more particularised emotion. He became seized with an abiding but self-righteous vindictiveness towards Dilke. He saw himself as the chosen instrument of public morality, protecting the innocent citizens of Britain against the impudent attempts of a shameless adulterer to climb back into their favour. He felt the same pride in his work as he expressed with unusual self-revelation about his similar (but possibly better-founded) attacks upon a man called Langworthy. “The fact that Langworthy was hissed off a platform in the interior of the Argentine because of what we had published,” he wrote in this connection, “abides with me as one of those permanent consolations with which a man can comfort himself in the days when he is depressed and disheartened.”
⁷
This spirit caused Stead, later in the year 1886, to take Mrs. Crawford on to the staff of his paper (presumably in order that she might be available for closer consultation
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) and to continue for many years, with unabated ferocity, his attacks upon Dilke. Even in the early 'nineties he was still distributing pamphlets, addressing meetings and engaging in long controversy in obscure magazines upon the subject. It is against the background of this knowledge that the opening of the newspaper attack against Dilke, with the
Pall Mall Gazette
at its centre, should be considered.

On the morning of February 13th, the day after the trial, the position was not too discouraging.
The Times
was censorious. The decision of the court was unintelligible, Dilke ought clearly to have gone into the box, and it was possible that his failure to do so would injure his future public career.
But it was all put in rather tentative terms, and was more than counterbalanced by the
Daily News
, which declared unequivocally: “His character has now been vindicated after full and open trial, and he will be welcomed back to public life with a fervour increased by the sympathy excited by the imminent peril in which he has stood for the past six months.” The
Daily Telegraph
was also reasonably friendly. All this was too much for the
Pall Mall Gazette
. It swung into action that evening. After a characteristic expression of regret at having to comment at all, it announced that the
Daily News
verdict was the reverse of the truth. Dilke had made no attempt to clear his name. He had broken his pledge to his constituents. By not going into the witness-box he had indicated that he had something even worse to hide than that with which he was charged. “His friends expected more, his foes in their most sanguine moments never looked for worse.”

After this the general comment became less favourable. On February 15th the
Manchester Guardian
condemned Dilke's behaviour at the trial and announced that “to ask us on the strength of this evasion to welcome him back as a leader of the Liberal Party is too strong a draft on our credulity or our good nature.” The
Statesman
commented in similar terms. It was reported that in Glasgow one of the Liberal Associations had passed a resolution declaring against Dilke's inclusion in any Liberal Cabinet; to admit him would be to weaken party interests by condoning “unrighteousness and wrong.” Fortified by this support the
Pall Mall
returned to the attack with renewed vigour on the evening of the 16th. Its front page headline demanded to know why Dilke had not offered his resignation as member for Chelsea. This must be done at once, if his honour was to be in any way retrieved. The charges against him might still be false, but if they were true he was “worse than the common murderer who swings at Newgate.” He must still seek to disprove the allegations, which would otherwise continue to envelope him with “a black and hideous suspicion.”

Perhaps feeling that he had reached the limit even of his
own capacity for denunciation, Stead then changed his tack. He began to attack Chamberlain instead of Dilke, and for a time his enthusiasm for this new task became so great that Dilke, by contrast, appeared almost as a wronged innocent. The new line started on February 19th with a small paragraph announcing that “the man really responsible for the fatal blunder committed by Sir Charles Dilke in not going into the witness-box is Mr. Joseph Chamberlain.” Three days later this was blown up into two front-page articles, one of them curiously entitled “The Case for Sir Charles Dilke, by One Who Knows It.” Two days after this there was another article which reached the conclusion that “Mr. Chamberlain . . . seems to prefer that his intimate associate should remain for ever under this crushing burden of suspicion rather than that he, Mr. Chamberlain, should admit a simple error of judgment.” Then, on February 27th, Stead published both sides of an acrimonious correspondence which had taken place between Chamberlain and himself during the previous week. Chamberlain had accused Stead of blackening Dilke's character in order to maintain the sensational nature of his paper, and Stead had replied that Chamberlain had ruined the career of one who “broken in nerve and health had placed himself in your hands. You overruled his personal desire to enter the witness-box and the responsibility was, therefore, not his but yours.”

Chamberlain greatly disliked these attacks. He wrote to Dilke on February 22nd saying: “I am only too glad to be able in any way to share your burdens and if I can act as a lightning conductor so much the better”
⁸
; but he was worried, as Garvin makes clear, that so much of the public responsibility for what was now obviously a wrong decision (although Dilke generously denied this) should be placed upon his shoulders. In order, no doubt, to shift some of this weight he made in the course of this same letter of February 22nd a suggestion for fresh action to Dilke. “Of course,” he wrote, “if
you
were quite clear that you ought to go into the box, it is still possible to do so—either by an action for libel or
probably by intervention of the Queen's Proctor.”
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It is difficult to gauge how decisive was this suggestion. Garvin discounts it. He points out, quite correctly, that Stead had put forward a similar idea in his issue of the same day. Indeed the latter had gone further and reported, probably on no authority, both that the Queen's Proctor had begun to move and that Dilke had instructed his solicitors to place all available information before that official. And it hardly seems likely that Dilke, preoccupied with his troubles, would not have read any relevant item in the
Pall Mall
at the earliest opportunity. This opportunity, it seems, must have occurred before the receipt of Chamberlain's letter, because this was a reply to a letter of Dilke's (the correspondence was delivered by messenger) which itself commented upon another passage in that same evening's issue of the paper. On the other hand Dilke himself afterwards wrote on Chamberlain's letter: “This was the first suggestion made to me of any rehearing of the case, and, although Brett, who was taking a great interest in it, was violently opposed to this course, and though Hartington and James and Russell were all under the impression that I should find no further difficulties, it was the course which I ultimately took.”
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On this point, therefore, we have Dilke's own testimony against the thesis (of Chamberlain's lack of responsibility for the next step) which Garvin was so anxious to prove, with the objective evidence, on this occasion, rather on Garvin's side. But whether or not the first hint came from Chamberlain, there is no doubt which was likely to have the greater effect upon Dilke's mind—a rumour printed by Stead or a suggestion, even if hedged about with counterbalancing considerations, from his closest friend.

At first, however, Dilke did not respond favourably to the prospect of a Queen's Proctor's intervention. This was partly because he was not clear what that official's role was likely to be. The obvious purpose of an intervention would be to
show that there had been no adultery between Dilke and Mrs. Crawford and that the divorce had therefore been given contrary to the facts of the case. But on March 2nd Dilke recorded:

“I became aware that the Queen's Proctor had put on detectives to try to prove the truth of a portion of the statements which had been made by Mrs. Crawford to her husband and I wrote to James to ask him how the Queen's Proctor could intervene except in the other sense. James replied: ‘Stephenson (the Queen's Proctor) is a brute and cannot be acting in accordance with any principle. It cannot be right for the Queen's Proctor to intervene in order to prove that a woman
is
entitled to a divorce.'”
¹¹

Dilke was also influenced by the fact that Manning, as well as his own legal advisers and Hartington, was against any action. The Cardinal was in close contact with Dilke at this time. On February 17th he had written rather archly:

My dear Sir Charles Dilke,

Mr. Bodley has just been with me and you know with what we have been occupied. I have not forgotten any part of our conversation last summer and it has been constantly in my mind these last days. My first impulse would be to come to you, but I did not know what would be in accordance with your wish. You know how truly,

I am always faithfully yours,
Henry E. C. Archbp.
¹²

A week or so later Lady Dilke had asked Manning to intervene with Stead, who claimed to be an intimate friend of the Cardinal's and who had certainly received his support at the time of the Maiden Tribute case. Manning responded at least to the extent of asking Stead to go and see him. It is possible that this interview may have had something to do with the shift of the
Pall Mali's
attack to Chamberlain, although Stead was much later to claim that throughout he had Manning's support for his strictures on Dilke. After the interview Manning wrote to Lady Dilke advising that
Dilke should for the time being keep as quiet as possible and that he should neither leave the country nor, unless his constituents should demand it, attend the House of Commons. In the same letter (dated March 2nd) he also discountenanced any action by Dilke to reopen the case. “All active attempts, such as Mr. Stead seems to propose,” he wrote, “would only more widely spread and keep alive the excitement . . . which will lose its intensity if met by silence. . . . In trials so great all human efforts fall short.”
¹³

Dilke took neither of these pieces of advice. The first he rejected with remarkable alacrity, and on March 3rd he made his first appearance in the new Parliament, being welcomed with particular cordiality by Joseph Cowen, the member for Newcastle, but less warmly by many others.
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He kept silent in the House, however. Against the second piece of advice Dilke acted three weeks later. Towards the end of March he offered to place all the information in his possession at the disposal of the Queen's Proctor. In mid-April, having received no response, he wrote formally and publicly to that official stating that the charges made against him were not only unsupported but untrue, and that he was prepared to deny them on oath. In consequence of this letter he was able to inform a meeting of 2,000 of his constituents held at Preece's Riding School in Knightsbridge at the beginning of May that he had succeeded in inducing the Queen's Proctor to intervene in what he described as “the natural and proper way,” that is to attempt to show that the divorce had been given upon the basis of an adultery which had never taken place. Dilke noted: “My part in procuring this intervention had been the chief one, but it had been contrary to the advice of my friends.”
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