The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (5 page)

A rotund gentleman with large chops and a bushy beard, Dr Lyttleton Stewart Forbes Winslow cut an impressive figure when he appeared before Chancellor Tristram as a witness. This eminent Victorian had enjoyed a decidedly unusual upbringing, his illustrious father being of the view that lunatics should be cared for in the surroundings of a family home. Young Forbes Winslow had therefore grown up with the shrieks and groans of the insane as a normal child might have been rocked to sleep by his mother’s lullabies. The child who had been raised in a lunatic asylum dedicated his life to understanding the madness that had surrounded him, and by the 1890s was one of the most controversial and prominent lunacy experts of the day. He was in no doubt, he told Chancellor Tristram, that the photograph of T. C. Druce that was shown to him in court was that of his former patient, Dr Harmer. Dr Harmer, he stated, was under his care until his death about twenty years earlier, first at his asylum in Richmond, then at Sussex House in Hammersmith. He had given his profession as that of a homeopath.

Dr Tristram remained some time in perplexed consideration of the issue. Faculties for the exhumation of bodies – for whatever reason, whether to retrieve valuables that had inadvertently been buried, make room for another body, or move a body to another grave – were granted every week in the church courts of Victorian England. The chancellor himself had granted more of them than he cared to remember. On the other hand, the actual plunder and desecration of the crowded graveyards of England’s towns and cities was a cause of much contemporary disquiet. Rumours abounded of bodies being dug up for their hair, teeth and fat to provide the wigs, dentures and wax candles demanded by the wealthy. And there were tales of the so-called ‘Resurrection Men’, grave robbers who unearthed human remains for the dissecting tables of the scientists. Increasingly, the vaults of the wealthy were being protected by iron bars to keep out the grave robbers. Indeed, it was partly in response to such scandals that the Burial Act 1857 had been introduced, requiring a licence from the home secretary for disinterment of a body except in such cases where the body was to be disinterred and reinterred in consecrated ground. But Chancellor Tristram was absolutely certain that this was not a case where a licence from the home secretary would be required: after all, Highgate Cemetery
was
consecrated ground. After considerable reflection, he considered that Anna Maria Druce did have a legitimate interest in the disinterment, and had made out a case for it being carried out. He therefore granted the application for a faculty to exhume the coffin of T. C. Druce in Highgate Cemetery, to ascertain whether it did indeed contain a body. The faculty was to take effect in fifteen days, in the absence of objection from any interested party.

Anna Maria was jubilant. After all, she was one small step closer to proving that her son was heir to the Portland millions. As she left the west entrance of St Paul’s Cathedral to join the crowds in Ludgate Circus, a swarm of journalists gathered round her. The Druce–Portland affair – as the case was called – had already provided a field day for the penny press, the nascent tabloids of a new, media-hungry era. The British public – and indeed, the wider English-speaking world, for the case had been reported in newspapers as far afield as Newfoundland and New Zealand – was intrigued at the prospect of this diminutive woman single-handedly taking on one of the mightiest aristocratic families in England. Overnight, Anna Maria had become a celebrity, her case discussed in inns, parlours and private gentlemen’s clubs around the country.

Beyond the consistory court, however, legal machinery manipulated by other interested parties was beginning to grind into action. A few miles to the east of St Paul’s, at the far end of the great thoroughfare of Cheapside, urgent discussions were taking place at the offices of Messrs Freshfield & Williams of New Bank Buildings, solicitors to the businessmen of Threadneedle Street since 1743. The distinguished clients of Freshfields included no less an institution than the Bank of England. The discussions centred on Anna Maria Druce and the faculty that had been granted by Chancellor Tristram to take effect, subject to any objection from an interested party, in fifteen days’ time.

Two days after the hearing at St Paul’s Cathedral, a clerk left the doors of Freshfields and hurried down Cheapside. He hailed a horse-drawn cab, instructing it to make haste to the chambers of 12 King’s Bench Walk, Temple. In his hand, he bore a letter addressed to Chancellor Thomas Hutchinson Tristram.

*
  
Mill Hill used to be a part of the ancient
civil parish
of
Hendon
, within the
historic county boundaries
of
Middlesex
. Mill Hill as part of the
Municipal Borough of Hendon
was merged into the
London Borough of Barnet
,
Greater London
, in 1965.

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forebeare
To digg the dust enclosed heare;
Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,
And curst be he that moves my bones.

Epitaph of William Shakespeare

Mr Bois, the superintendent of Highgate Cemetery, looked out of the window of the cemetery lodge and sighed. The pale, gaunt figure in widow’s weeds, fluttering anxiously up and down the paths of the cemetery in the chilly December light, flitting in and out of the rows of mossy tombstones and crumbling sepulchres, was by now a familiar sight. The stir Mrs Druce caused by her – virtually daily – visits to the cemetery was most unwelcome. She persisted in her demand that Mr Bois open the grave of her father-in-law, Thomas Charles Druce. This was despite him explaining to her countless times that, as far as he was concerned, he could not do so without the home secretary’s permission. Then there was the day she assaulted two of the undertakers who had been trying to dig up an old grave to make way for a new one, her absurd claim being that they had been attempting to dig a secret passage to the Druce family vault, in order to tamper with the remains buried there. She had even brought a mining engineer with her, to
certify whether this was the case. And then, only a few days ago, a journalist from a national newspaper had come nosing around, asking for information about the funeral and burial of Mr Druce, thirty-four years back in December 1864. Mr Bois had given the man short shrift. While he himself had not been at Highgate Cemetery in 1864 – his tenure there had started two years later – the records clearly showed that Mr Druce had been buried at the cemetery in the family vault, on 31 December 1864. The respectable firm of undertakers Messrs Glazier and Son of Tottenham Court Road had carried out the arrangements. The vault at Highgate had cost £61, the shell of the coffin was lead, and the outer case of elm. The whole proceedings had been highly elaborate, with two four-horse coaches, heavily feathered and plumed, and twelve men involved in the affair.

‘Depend upon it,’ Mr Bois had told the journalist firmly, ‘I shall open the grave, and at the bottom, in the coffin concerned, I will find bones.’

And yet, there were aspects of the case that caused Mr Bois to have some doubts. For instance, the owners of the vault had placed a stone slab over the bottom coffin – that of T. C. Druce – after the funeral of his widow Annie May, in 1893. Rumour had it that this was to conceal the true state of the coffin, which had collapsed at the funeral of his son Walter in 1880. Mr Bois could think of no other plausible explanation for this action. The case certainly intrigued him, and he had admitted as much to the reporter: ‘I shall be immensely curious about opening that grave. It is a unique case in my thirty-two years’ experience among the tombs of Highgate.’

None the less, the digging up of graves at Highgate – officially or unofficially – was nothing new in those days. At a time when people often died young and the rituals of mourning were a national pastime, it was not uncommon for a bereaved husband or lover – his ardour cooled with the passage of time – to petition to recover jewels or other tokens of affection buried with his loved one. Mr Bois himself had known of several such cases. There had been, for example, the hushed exhumation by the poet and artist Mr Dante Gabriel Rossetti of the remains of his late wife, Elizabeth Siddal, in 1869, just three years after Mr Bois had started work at Highgate. Mr Rossetti, grief-stricken at the death of Elizabeth, had buried the manuscript of his poems alongside her in the Rossetti family vault. Seven years later, he regretted his impulsive action. In that case, the relevant government minister, Mr Henry A. Bruce, was remarkably amenable to granting a licence for the exhumation, having apparently overseen the commission of an altarpiece by Mr Rossetti for Llandaff Cathedral. On the evening of 5 October 1869, workmen removed the slab over the grave, dug down in the narrow space to the coffin, prised open the lid and lifted out the notebook of poems. Lid, earth and slab were then replaced, and the workmen tipped with beer money. The whole operation was conducted in the strictest secrecy and overseen by an acquaintance of Mr Rossetti’s, a dubious art dealer by the name of Charles Howell, who had been instrumental in persuading Rossetti to dig up the body. Howell later spread fanciful nonsense about Mrs Rossetti’s corpse, claiming that her hair still glowed red and luxuriant with posthumous growth.

In the present case, however, the home secretary – Sir Matthew White Ridley – was stubbornly refusing to grant a licence for the exhumation of Mr Druce’s coffin. And here was another thing that could not fail to have struck Mr Bois, with his weighty experience of burials and exhumations. In the late Victorian period, licences for digging up graves were not uncommon. Why was this particular application meeting with so much resistance? Who was determined to stop the Druce vault being opened, and why?

Had Mr Bois been able to contemplate the tombstones of the other Victorian grandees that lined the wooded walks of Highgate with the benefit of hindsight, he might have come to the conclusion that, if Mr Thomas Charles Druce had indeed led a double life as the 5th Duke of Portland, he was in good company with many others there laid to rest. In the same west side of the cemetery as the Druce vault – barely a stone’s throw away – lay the tomb of Catherine Dickens, the long-suffering wife of the late author and pillar of the Victorian literary establishment, Charles Dickens (whose remains, of course, repose in Westminster Abbey). Philanthropist, performer and patriarch, Dickens seemed the embodiment of the Victorian domestic virtues of family, hearth and home. But in fact, he had a secret mistress for much of his married life. She was the actress Ellen Lawless Ternan, twenty-seven years his junior (the same age as his youngest daughter), whom he housed in a succession of properties conveniently near him. While close friends and acquaintances were well aware of ‘Nelly’s’ existence (Dickens was to fall out permanently with the novelist Thackeray when he mentioned her name in public, outside the Garrick Club), virtually all correspondence relating to her was destroyed by Dickens himself and by zealous relatives after his death. Dickens’ relationship with
Ellen was only made known to a wider audience in a revelatory biography by the author Claire Tomalin in the 1990s. It is now believed that the ‘official’ account of Dickens’ death in 1870 was a fabrication: that he did not, in fact, die having dinner with his sister-in-law Georgina at his home in Gads Hill, as the world was led to believe at the time, but rather in the house nearby, in which he had installed Nelly.

And then there was Dickens’ lifelong friend and fellow novelist Wilkie Collins, credited with the invention of detective fiction in his mystery novel
The Moonstone
(1868). A bachelor throughout his life, Collins, like the 5th Duke of Portland, preferred the company of those socially below him. A master of the double existence, he had two mistresses – Caroline Graves, a widow from a humble family, and Martha Rudd, also a working-class girl, with whom he had several children. When in the company of Martha he assumed the name William Dawson, and she and his children by her took the last name of Dawson themselves. Lodging very close to the Duke of Portland’s London residence with his ‘official’ mistress Caroline Graves, Collins’ separate household headed by Martha Rudd was installed at the top of the very same road. As a result, Collins was able to switch identities between ‘Collins’ the dilettante writer and ‘Dawson’ the family man, with the same ease that he changed his frock coat for his overcoat, according to the weather.

Victorian celebrities who had led less than straightforward private lives were represented equally well on the eastern side of the cemetery. For here were to be found the graves of the female novelist George Eliot (in real life Mary Ann Evans, author of
Middlemarch
). She was laid to rest next to her lover,
the philosopher and critic George Henry Lewes. The couple lived together in Richmond, despite the fact that when he met George Eliot, Lewes was already married to another woman, Agnes Jervis, with whom he had agreed to have an ‘open relationship’. In fact, Agnes had children by both Lewes and other men, several of whom were falsely registered on their birth certificates as Lewes’ children. Also living in Richmond, although not buried at Highgate, was the Victorian sensation novelist Mary Elizabeth Braddon – author of the bestselling novel
Lady Audley’s Secret
(1862). Her partner, the periodical publisher John Maxwell, was already married with five children when he met Mary, his wife conveniently locked up in an Irish asylum. Mary acted as stepmother to Maxwell’s children until his wife died in 1874, finally enabling the couple to marry. She had six children by him, several born before they were married.