The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse (9 page)

The writer of this memorandum had the first interview with Mrs Annie Druce when the claim [by the tax authorities] was made, and also had the task of informing Mr Herbert Druce of the true state of the case [i.e. his illegitimacy]. The interview was a very painful one. Mrs Annie Druce stated that she had been married but it ended with her being taken, as was not unnatural, very ill. When she had in part recovered she absolutely declined to give any further information
and declared herself ready to pay whatever was claimed by the Authorities at Somerset House. The writer saw the Authorities, heard the whole story from them, and obtained a discharge from the executors on payment of duty amounting to £3,200 on 16th May 1884.

Disconcerting as the meeting had been for Edwin, it was even worse for Herbert. In one moment, all his comfortable, middle-class illusions about himself had collapsed in a heap. The remote figure of his father – always something of a mystery to him – was now becoming, increasingly, a source of embarrassment. He dreaded the unearthing of some other secret, were the grave to be opened. As an illegitimate son of T. C. Druce, Herbert had nothing to gain if it were to be shown that his father was the 5th Duke of Portland. Since he was born out of wedlock, he would be automatically barred from inheriting any title. Conversely, he had everything to lose if the grave were empty: for if T. C. Druce did indeed ‘fake’ his death in 1864 in order to return to his life as the 5th Duke of Portland, his will – the instrument which bequeathed the Baker Street business to Herbert – would be set aside. It was vital, for Herbert’s interests, that there
was
a body in that grave; and given the secrets in his father’s life, he was not minded to take a chance on the fact by having it opened.

For the popular press, on the other hand, Herbert’s stubborn refusal to accede to his sister-in-law’s request, marshalling instead the mighty muscle of the top ranks of the legal profession against her, suggested at best a marked lack of chivalry, and at worst, that he had something to hide. As one contemporary newspaper remarked:

Public interest is now fully aroused in the mystery of the Highgate vault; and the growing opinion is that exhumation, and nothing but exhumation, can afford a solution of the strange case. The remark heard on every hand is: ‘If Mrs Druce be a deluded lady, why not have this straightway proved by opening the grave and the coffin therein?’

In the meantime, the occupants of Welbeck Abbey maintained a dignified silence. The 6th Duke of Portland gave not the slightest outward hint that the Cavendish-Bentincks were remotely ruffled at the prospect of being ousted from their ancestral seat by the descendants of a furniture salesman. Indeed, the Duke had no overt reason to comment, as no case had as yet been brought directly against him or the Portland estates. To date, the only proceedings currently on the court lists were Mrs Druce’s application for a faculty for exhumation of the vault in the church court, and her separate proceedings in the civil court to set aside the probate granted on T. C. Druce’s will. Each of these proceedings was being fought with dogged insistence by Herbert Druce. The case so far was therefore (at least, in public) an internecine conflict between rival branches of the Druce family, who either did or did not want T. C. Druce’s grave to be opened.

Behind the scenes, however, the man who two decades before had anxiously surveyed the ruined splendour of Welbeck as a pale and nervous twenty-two-year-old, was anything but complacent. After all, William the 6th Duke had never even met his eccentric predecessor. No official photo-graphs existed of the mysterious and elusive 5th Duke of Portland. Nobody knew how the ‘burrowing duke’ had passed
the bulk of his time, hidden from view in his underground labyrinth at Welbeck, or shut off from the world behind high walls at Harcourt House.

For all his lofty public indifference, the 6th Duke was, in private, deeply anxious. So much so that he instructed a leading firm of private investigators to hunt down every piece of information that could conceivably shed light on the 5th Duke’s movements, along with those of T. C. Druce.
*1
Furthermore, the 6th Duke’s solicitors actively co-operated and assisted Freshfields. Many and frequent were the letters that passed between the Berners Street offices of Baileys, Shaw & Gillett, the duke’s legal advisors, and those of Herbert Druce’s solicitors in Bank Street (the parties even fell out, on occasion, over who was to pay the investigators’ bills). Documents were exchanged, evidence assessed, anonymous agents were sent to shadow Mrs Druce’s every move. Above all, a common strategy evolved: that of using Herbert Druce as a ‘front’ to obstruct the proceedings as much as possible, in order for both parties to gather evidence to build a case. Surely it could not be so difficult to prove that the 5th Duke and T. C. Druce were in different places at the same time? Or to track down a birth certificate for T. C. Druce? Either of these would wipe out, in one fell swoop, the claim that they were one and the same person. Swarms of agents combed through parish records, interviewing hundreds of Druces the length and breadth of the country, in an attempt to uncover one or other of these vital pieces of evidence. They searched in vain.
†2

*

By the beginning of August 1898 the long vacation had arrived,
*3
and the grey-haired lawyers of Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn and the Temple hurried to pack their bags and file in a great exodus to the elegant squares of Brighton, or the fashionable resorts of the Lake District. Bundles of documents and pleadings lay stranded on deserted desks; mounds of post accumulated dust in neglected pigeonholes; rats gambolled under the silent floorboards of the winding passageways of the Royal Courts of Justice. Grass sprouted between the chinks of the paving stones in Lincoln’s Inn, to be chewed thoughtfully by idle ticket porters, taking refuge from the sun in the shadow of empty porches. There was just one duty judge left in town for emergencies. Even he came only once a week to town to sit in chambers, clean-shaven and unrecognizable, having dispensed with full-bottomed wig, scarlet robes and white wand in favour of a summer suit and dapper white hat, a strip of plaster on his sun-blistered nose.

And so, for the present, on a dusty desk of an empty court, the application to exhume T. C. Druce’s body stagnated. But the press sensation ran on throughout the whole summer of 1898. In fact, it seemed that neither the newspapers nor the public could get enough of the Druce affair. Enterprising individuals offered excursions to the Druce vault in Highgate, which was swift becoming the most-visited sepulchre in England. Four miles to the south, heads turned in unison
as horse-drawn omnibuses clattered past the entrance of the Baker Street Bazaar. The bazaar itself heaved with curious sightseers, hopeful of spotting the ghost of the unburied ducal tradesman stalking among the goods that had replaced the stock he left behind him, four-and-thirty years before. At a spiritualistic séance, a young woman fell into a trance and, when recovered, breathlessly related how she had ‘seen’ the Druce coffin, with nothing in it. ‘Mrs Druce’, announced the
Daily Mail
, ‘is now the most interesting woman in England. She occupies more space in the newspapers than is claimed by the Queen of England.’ In August the same newspaper announced a forthcoming ‘novelty for
Daily Mail
readers’ – no less than the imminent publication, day by day, of a serial story entitled
The Double Duke
, allegedly ‘founded on fact’ (although what facts was never stated). The serial was to be ‘quite the most interesting romance ever published in the
Daily Mail
.’ Where, wondered many a spectator of the media circus, did fact end and fiction begin?

Anna Maria Druce herself revelled in the attention. With the gracious condescension of a dowager duchess-in-waiting, she granted interviews to the newspapermen clamouring at her door. Anna Maria’s official story about her origins was suitably genteel. ‘I myself was a Miss Butler,’ she informed the gathered pressmen with haughty conviction. ‘My father being agent for Lord Pembroke, the latter acted for a time as my guardian. It was through going to the same school as my husband’s sister that I first met him.’ She had given ‘land steward’ as her father’s profession on her marriage certificate in 1872. In truth, however, Anna Maria was the daughter of a humble Irish paperhanger, a workman who scraped a living
hanging rich wallpapers in the houses of the wealthy and fashionable. She had met her husband Walter – the third son of T. C. Druce – when employed as governess to the Druce household. A tendency towards socially aggrandizing fantasies about their origins was not uncommon in women of modest background, who had ascended the Victorian social ladder. Wilkie Collins’ ‘official’ mistress Caroline Graves, for example, used to describe herself as the daughter of a gentleman called Courtenay, when she was in fact the daughter of a carpenter by the name of John Compton.

Given the lowliness of her origins, the fact that Anna Maria managed to reach the rank of governess was testimony to her determination. By the 1860s, however, it was becoming increasingly common for women from the working classes to enter this genteel profession, formerly the preserve of distressed gentlewomen. The increase in social mobility over the course of the century meant that the faded middle-class ladies, who had previously made up the ranks of the governess profession, slowly became infiltrated by a new, cannier, more upwardly mobile type. Contemporary observers, like Lady Elizabeth Eastlake, were scandalized. ‘Farmers and tradespeople are now educating their daughters for governesses as a mode of advancing them a step in life,’ she observed sniffily in 1848. As a result, ‘a number of underbred young women have crept into the profession who have brought down the value of salaries, and interfered with the rights of those whose birth and misfortune leave them no other refuge’.

The canny, low-born adventuress Becky Sharpe, the devious and unscrupulous anti-heroine of William Thackeray’s mid-century novel
Vanity Fair
, is an example of exactly the type to which Lade Eastlake was referring. Employed as a governess by a country baronet, Becky manages to carry off the son of the house, before abandoning him for greater prizes down the line. And then there is Lydia Gwilt, the scheming governess featured in Wilkie Collins’ 1866 novel
Armadale
– a fortune-hunter and, even worse, a murderess. Not to mention the devious Lucy Graham, the doll-like blonde in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s
Lady Audley’s Secret
(1862). Far from conforming to the Victorian female domestic ideal of the ‘angel in the house’, Lucy, a former governess, turns out to be a criminal who has attempted murder, committed bigamy and abandoned her child. The admittedly very different heroine of Charlotte Brontë’s novel
Jane Eyre
(1847) is also a governess, who breaks convention by marrying the master of the house.

The obsession of the nineteenth century with the figure of the ‘governess’ matched its preoccupation with that of the ‘gentleman’. In fact, virtually every self-respecting Victorian novel had to have one in its cast of female characters, usually of the scheming sort. This was another reflection of the intense social anxieties of the age, of which the ‘governess’, like the ‘gentleman’, became a potent symbol. For whether she was a distressed member of the gentry or social upstart, the governess also reflected a new social fluidity, at once both dynamic and destabilizing. She was a reminder that, in this brave new world, one could go up – but also down – the social ladder with startling rapidity. ‘Reader, I married him,’ Jane Eyre triumphantly asserts – words that would have filled the average Victorian mistress of the house with dread for the safety of her son.

Whether Annie May, the widow of T. C. Druce, had any such misgivings when Anna Maria arrived as a governess in the Druce household in the early 1870s, has not been recorded. By then, old T. C. Druce had been dead about ten years. After her husband’s death, Annie May had moved from the palatial house in Mill Hill to a rather more discreetly grand address at 43 Belsize Square. There she was slightly more socially adventurous than in the days when her reclusive husband was alive, venturing forth in a carriage and pair and regularly spending the season in Brighton. Of the six Druce children, only three remained in the house – Florence, Walter and Bertha. Anna Maria was taken on as a governess to the fifteen-year-old Bertha.

With her pale complexion, black hair and forceful personality, the new governess was more than a match for the rather insipid Walter, four years her junior. A passionate romance followed, ending in the governess’ dismissal. Walter followed Anna Maria until a succession of pleadings and reproaches by a family friend persuaded him to leave her and return to the family in Belsize Square. Anna Maria, however, held the final and fatal trump card. Late in 1872, the former governess paid a visit to the former mistress in Belsize Park. What was discussed at that meeting, neither the elder Mrs Druce nor Anna Maria ever divulged. What is known, however, is that a marriage was arranged swiftly afterwards. On 9 December 1872, in the wettest year on record in England, Anna Maria Butler married Walter Thomas Druce at the parish church of St John in Upper Holloway, amidst strong winds and heavy rain. She was twenty-four years old; he was just twenty, and therefore under the then legal age of majority. Eight months
later, on 7 August 1873, their eldest daughter, Florence, was born.
*4

Walter Druce did not know much about old T. C. Druce – he was, after all, a mere twelve years old when his father died – but he did keep saying that there was a certain mystery about him, some family secret that he did not fully comprehend. After all, why had T. C. Druce waited so long before he finally married Annie May?

Given the unpromising start to their relationship, the marriage between the high-spirited ex-governess and weak-willed draper’s son was never going to be easy. For a while, the couple made an attempt at farming in Staffordshire. Florence was followed by four other children: Marguerite in 1874, Sidney George in 1876, Charles Walter in 1877, and finally Nina Bertha in 1878. The couple lived extravagantly, eating into the capital left to Walter in his father’s will. But by 1880 Walter’s health was deteriorating, and after a number of business failures, the family returned to London. In November of that year, Walter died from typhoid. He was buried in the family vault at Highgate, beside the coffin of his father.