The Chieftain: Victorian True Crime Through The Eyes of a Scotland Yard Detective (15 page)

Whether or not Clarke was right in his presumption that so few Fenian meetings were taking place in London or was unduly complacent, there is no doubt that Fenian activity in London increased in later years.

By early November 1865 the Home Office was presenting a stark picture of the level of support for the Fenians, with estimates (probably overstated) that there were the following numbers of sworn Fenians in the individual countries of the United Kingdom: England 7,000; Scotland 8,000; Wales 3,000; Ireland 400,000; and a further 681,000 in the United States of America. It was also estimated that 10 per cent of the Fenians in Britain were sworn for ‘special service’, i.e. ‘the destruction by fire of the cities, manufacturing towns, barracks, arsenals, shipyards and docks throughout England and Scotland’.
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The Home Office mood must presumably have been lifted by events on 11 November when the DMP located and arrested James Stephens and transferred him to prison at Dublin’s Richmond Bridewell. The Irish-American-dominated military council of the Fenians, including Thomas Kelly, Frederick Millen and William Halpin, met on 15 November and appointed Millen as provisional head organiser of the Irish Republic.
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However, he was not to stay long in that post as, in an operation engineered by John Devoy and Fenians in the prison service, Stephens escaped from prison on 24 November and went into hiding in Dublin.
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Thus, any euphoria in government departments and police forces was short lived.

While Stephens’ escape boosted Fenian morale, the events between September and November had persuaded him that the proposed Irish rising should be postponed and, despite opposition to any delay amongst some on the military council, Stephens won the day.
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One of the consequences of the postponement of the rising was that O’Mahony was deposed as president of the Fenian Brotherhood in America, his position being taken over by William Roberts who favoured the strategy of undertaking raids on Canada as a way of potentially stirring up further antipathy between the United States and Britain; thereby encouraging a political environment that could enhance, indirectly, the Fenian desire for delivering an independent Ireland. This shift in strategy quickly led to two factions developing amongst the American-based Fenians: one that supported the O’Mahony stance of directly supporting an insurrection in Ireland; the other the Roberts approach. This had the potential to dilute the American-based financial support available for Stephens and his colleagues.
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The year 1866 started quietly. There is evidence that the Scotland Yard detectives were still maintaining surveillance of Fenian movements between London and Ireland, and reporting on attempts that had been made to induce some marines to join the Fenians.
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However, the commissioner at least had sufficient time to focus on other ‘vital’ tasks, including a request to superintendents ‘to report on what arrangements they propose to make to preserve order and prevent snow balls etc., being thrown in parks and streets on Sunday next’.
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In Ireland, however, radical approaches were being planned and implemented to stem the Fenian threat; these have been succinctly summarised by Vincent Comerford:

Finding that the arrest and trial of the leaders and the uneventful passing of 1865 – the promised year of action – had not noticeably shaken the strength of the conspiracy, Dublin Castle resolved to abandon the attempt to combat subversion by ordinary legal processes. The securing of a handful of convictions that were supported by masses of incriminating documentation had been tedious work. It would be impossible, simply relying on the courts, to pin anything on the hundreds of brazen Fenian activists throughout the country known to the police, or on the scores of returned Irish-Americans standing around the street corners of Dublin in their square-toed shoes awaiting the call to action. The only answer was the suspension of
habeas corpus
: a bill was rushed through parliament on 17 February 1866 permitting the indefinite detention of any person in Ireland on warrant of the Lord Lieutenant. The haste was intended to give the Irish police the advantage of surprise. Hours before they could have received confirmation of a formal enactment they had moved against scores of suspects; within a week hundreds were in detention. For every one Fenian held an incalculable number fled to America (or Britain, where the immunities of the subjects were untouched), went to ground, or simply abandoned the conspiracy. The suspension of
habeas corpus
wreaked havoc on Fenianism in Ireland, shifting the odds in favour of the authorities.
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By July 1866 the total number of arrests under the
habeas corpus
suspension was 756 and, during the summer of 1866, Ireland was more peaceful than it had been for years.
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John Devoy was one of the many Fenians arrested, and was later tried and sentenced to fifteen years’ penal servitude. James Stephens and Thomas Kelly (by now the IRB’s ‘Chief of Staff’) successfully remained in hiding in Dublin and were eventually smuggled out of Dublin in March, and arrived in New York in mid-May 1866. Shortly after they arrived, 800 members of the Fenian Brotherhood, commanded by Colonel John O’Neill, ‘invaded’ Canada, crossing the Niagara River and occupying the village of Fort Erie. In a short battle there were fifty-two Canadian casualties (including twelve dead) and twenty-eight Fenian casualties (including eight dead), with approximately sixty Fenians captured and many desertions. O’Neill withdrew his forces and the United States authorities, implementing neutrality laws, seized the Fenians’ weapons and sent them home with paid passages. This ineffective display by the Roberts-led faction of the Fenian Brotherhood lent force to Stephens’ arguments that the ‘rising’ should be in Ireland.
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Though there would be two further (and equally ineffective) Fenian raids on Canada in subsequent years, they did not achieve the aim of raising USA-UK relations to a state of war.

Back in London, the suspension of
habeas corpus
in February 1866 probably provided a short respite for those detectives at Scotland Yard who had been working on Fenian-related matters. Clarke at least was diverted on to another investigation; as it turned out he might have preferred to have remained on Fenian surveillance, as the case proved not to be his finest hour.

A Diversionary Task for Clarke – The Case of the Missing Cheques

On 1 March 1866, following an approach to Commissioner Mayne, George Clarke was hired by Lord Cardigan to investigate the disappearance of two letters containing cheques sent by the Countess of Cardigan. The 7th Earl of Cardigan, James Thomas Brudenell, was a man who had been both hated and fêted during his lifetime. Born in 1797, Brudenell had been educated at Harrow and Oxford University. Having purchased a commission in the army, he had a chequered career. He was charged in June 1824 by a Captain Johnstone of having debauched Johnstone’s wife Elizabeth, whom Brudenell later married in 1826 after divorce proceedings had been completed. In 1837, after his father’s death, he inherited the earldom and the Deene estate in Northamptonshire, a mansion in Portman Square and an annual income of £40,000. In 1840 he fought a duel on Wimbledon Common with Henry Tuckett (a former army officer); Tuckett was seriously wounded and Cardigan was charged with ‘intent to murder’. As a member of the House of Lords, Cardigan was eligible to be tried by peers and elected to do so, receiving a ‘not guilty’ verdict, essentially on a legal technicality. By 1840 his public image was so bad that his appearance in the audience at Brighton’s Theatre Royal provoked a storm of hisses which lasted at least half an hour and, to enable the performance to begin, he was forced to leave.
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When the Crimean War started in March 1853, Cardigan was given command of the Light Cavalry Brigade under his brother-in-law Lord Lucan; the two men were not bosom friends. On 25 October 1854 Cardigan led the famous ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ at Balaclava. Ambiguity in the orders that he received meant that the brigade rode at the wrong target, directly at a battery of Russian guns rather than at British guns which were in the process of being captured by the Russians. Out of some 676 mounted men, the total casualties were 21 officers and 257 other ranks (including 158 killed or captured), and about 335 horses were killed or had to be destroyed. Nonetheless, the reports that reached home indicated that Cardigan had led the charge with great bravery and on his return to Britain he was greeted by cheering crowds. Later, rumours began to circulate that his conduct may have been less than heroic, particularly in the context of a premature retreat up the valley after he had reached the rear of the Russian guns.

Cardigan had separated from his first wife in 1846 after an unsatisfactory relationship in which neither partner remained faithful; Elizabeth died in July 1858 and later that year Cardigan (by then 60) married the 33-year-old Adeline de Horsey who had openly become his mistress in 1857. This was a situation much frowned upon by Queen Victoria and contemporary society, which left Adeline a social outcast. Such was the colourful background of the couple that Clarke now found himself working for.

In February 1866 the Countess of Cardigan had written two letters enclosing uncrossed cheques for £18 16
s
and £1 10
s
, for goods supplied. She had then handed the letters to Robert Lilley, the groom of the chambers (a position in the household staff only second to that of the steward), requesting that they be registered and posted. Lilley was a long-serving member of the household staff who had been employed by Cardigan prior to his marriage to Adeline. A week later, surprised that she had received no receipts for the cheques, the countess contacted the addressees and discovered that they had not received the letters or the cheques. She was then told by her bank that the larger of the two cheques had been cashed on 14 February in London by someone who had been handed a £5 note, and the balance of £13 16
s
in gold and silver. Fortunately, as was the habit in those days, the bank had kept a record of the number of the £5 Bank of England note. The bank advised the Cardigans to contact the police, and Clarke was sent across to Portman Square on 1 March to investigate the situation. Realising that the £5 note needed to be traced, Clarke visited the Bank of England on 2 March and provided the number of the note and asked to be notified if it was traced. Clarke then interviewed the Cardigans and the substantial number of ‘below-stairs staff’ at Portman House. During his interview with Lilley, the somewhat truculent groom of the chambers claimed that he could not remember being handed the two letters by the countess in the first place.
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On 9 or 10 March, the all-important £5 note was traced to Thomas Hobson, the proprietor of Cole’s truss shop at Charing Cross, who had received the £5 note from a man calling himself William Gaskell. Gaskell had told Hobson that he was a hall porter in a nobleman’s family. Further inquiries revealed that the true identity of William Gaskell was in fact John Hayes, the hall porter at Cardigan’s house in Portman Square, who had been employed by the Cardigans for only a few months. However, on 12 March, when Clarke took Hobson to Portman Square, Hobson did not immediately recognise Hayes as the man to whom he had sold the truss, possibly because Hayes was by then dressed in full livery with his hair powdered. Nevertheless, Hobson later mentioned in court that ‘Hayes [later] came to me and said he was the man who changed the note, and hoped I would say nothing about it, as he would have to criminate one of his fellow-servants’.
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Indeed that was precisely what Hayes did, by informing Clarke that Lilley had asked him to change a £5 note, and he had handed over 5 sovereigns in exchange for it.

By 13 March, Clarke had clearly decided to focus his attention on Hayes and Lilley, and, together with Lord Cardigan, re-interviewed the two men individually. Hayes repeated his assertion that he had received the £5 Bank of England note from Lilley, and Lilley denied it. Clarke later recalled in court that ‘Lord Cardigan appealed to me in the room to know what was to be done. I think I said “My Lord, if all this is true, Lilley must have stolen the letter”.’
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Though this does not sound like a deep conviction of Lilley’s likely guilt, Clarke nonetheless arrested Lilley that evening and, together with Lord Cardigan, took him to Marylebone Police Station where Lilley was charged with stealing the letters, later appearing at two hearings at the Marylebone Police Court when he was committed to trial at the Middlesex Sessions in June, and bailed.

The case was heard at the Guildhall, Westminster, on 2 June in front of a jury, Mr Bodkin (assistant judge) and several magistrates. Harry Poland appeared as counsel for the prosecution, for whom the main witnesses were the Countess of Cardigan, Hayes and Clarke.
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The countess, who seems throughout to have been convinced that Lilley was the guilty party, insisted that her memory was particularly accurate and that she clearly recalled handing the two letters to Lilley. However, in cross-examination by Lilley’s counsel, her memory came into question when she admitted that there had been a previous incident in which her rings had gone missing; she had insisted that they had been stolen and a policeman had been called, but the rings had been found in a pocket in her dress. The credibility of the hall porter, John Hayes, was completely compromised in cross-examination, not least by his attitude in the witness box and the disquieting information that Hayes had left his former employer (the Reform Club) under a cloud, as he was suspected of financial irregularity. In addition, he had left his previous rented accommodation owing his landlord £20. By the time that he had completed his evidence Lilley’s defence team seemed to have right on their side when concluding that: ‘Hayes had the strongest motives for sheltering himself by accusing someone else…’
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