The Lost Casebooks of Sherlock Holmes (18 page)

So much is history, as is the change in Professor Alphonse Bertillon's view on the usefulness of fingerprints. During the day or two left to us in Paris, he became almost a friend to Sherlock Holmes. The two men were now disposed to regard their past differences as something of a joke, each assuring the other that he had never really said the things that were reported—or that, if he had said them, he had never really meant them.

We came back to Baker Street by the night ferry to Charing Cross and arrived home in good time for lunch. That evening, as I watched Holmes arranging some experiment or other upon the familiar stained table, I brought up the subject that had lain between us for the last few days.

‘If you are right about Balincourt, Holmes …'

‘I am seldom wrong in such matters, Watson,' he said gently, without looking up.

‘If that man tampered with the box of capsules in the Élysée Palace …'

‘Quite.' He frowned and took a little brush to dust a surface with white powder.

‘Then it was not an old man's lust that destroyed him, though it gave the opportunity.'

‘Quite possibly.'

‘Balincourt or one of their spies knew that Faure was about to change his policy—that he would turn to the
Dreyfusards!
That he would order a retrial! She had persuaded him.'

‘I daresay,' he murmured, as if scarcely hearing me.

‘It was not a love philtre but an instant poison, after all, disguised among the other capsules!'

He looked up, the aquiline features contracting in a frown of irritation.

‘You will give me credit for something, I hope! My first analysis in Paris was confirmed by a more searching examination here. What was in the remaining capsules was a homoeopathic quantity of canthar. They call such pills “Diavolini”. The truth is that their contents would not even stimulate passion in a man, let alone kill him. Their effect, if any, is entirely upon the mind.'

He returned to his studies.

‘Then we witnessed it, after all!' I exclaimed.

‘Witnessed what, my dear fellow?'

‘The assassination of the President of France by those who had most to fear if Dreyfus were found innocent!'

‘Oh, yes,' said Holmes, as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world. ‘I had never supposed otherwise. However, it would not do for you to give that to the world as yet, Watson, in one of your little romances. Sleep on it a little, my old friend. Speaking of romances, there is one that requires our attention without delay.'

He took a bundle of papers from a Gladstone bag and broke it open. A pile of well-filled foolscap envelopes slithered out randomly across the table.

‘I have made my promise to Gustave Hamard,' he said. ‘Madame Steinheil has paid me in kind. All debts are now discharged.'

He took the first sheaf of papers, on which I just had time to catch sight of a few names and phrases in a neat plain hand. ‘General Georges Boulanger … Colonel Max von Schwartzkoppen, König-grätzstrasse, Berlin … Pensées sur le suicide du Colonel Hubert Henry … Les crimes financières de Panama … L'affaire de Fashoda … Colonel Picquart et le tribunal …' An envelope lay addressed in black ink to Major Count Ferdinand Walsin-Esterhazy, Rue de la Bienfaisance, 27, Paris 8°.

The fire in the grate blazed whiter as the first pages burned. Holmes turned to take another envelope and emptied it. There fluttered down to the floor a note on the stationery of the Italian Embassy in the Rue de Varenne, inviting Colonel Schwartzkoppen to dine with Colonel Panizzardi. He scooped it up and dropped it into the flames. The fire blazed again and a shoal of sparks swept up the chimney. For half an hour, the secret ashes of the Third Republic dissolved in smoke against the frosty starlight above the chimney-pots of Baker Street.

The Case of the Blood Royal

I

The adventure of ‘The Final Problem' formed a concluding narrative to
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
. In the following case, its readers may find a prologue to that fateful and famous death-struggle at the Reichenbach Falls. They will also find an epilogue, twenty years later, with which I now begin.

Sherlock Holmes was not present on 1 February 1911 to see justice done. His part in the investigation had ended at the Falls of Reichenbach and it was judged best that he should now remain concealed from public scrutiny. We were assembled in the Lord Chief Justice's Court at the Royal Courts of Justice, a large wainscotted chamber of oak carved in the Gothic fashion with curtains and hangings in dark green, the Royal Arms in bold relief. Even had Holmes wished to observe the trial of Edward Mylius, he might have found himself too busy at that moment with another matter. He was so greatly trusted by Lord Stamfordham and the Royal Household that he was more urgently engaged in an attempt to obtain from Daisy, Countess of Warwick, the love letters of the late King Edward VII, written to her ladyship when that monarch was still Prince of Wales. It was a delicate and expensive negotiation but my friend succeeded in averting another palace scandal.

Upon the judicial bench, in wig and scarlet robe, sat the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Alverstone. Below him the Attorney-General, Sir Rufus Isaacs, was in attendance for the Crown. On the bench behind Sir Rufus was the Home Secretary, Mr Winston Churchill, accompanied by Sir John Simon, then Solicitor-General and our future Lord Chancellor. Mrs Churchill and a number of other ladies sat in the Judge's Gallery. I was one of the few on the public benches, such was the success of the government in preventing advance information about the nature of this hearing. No indictment was laid before a magistrate or presented to a grand jury. The case was brought directly by the Attorney-General, whose office requires no such preliminaries in charges of this sort.

We were gathered almost
in camera
for a Special Jury to determine an issue of the gravest consequence. Whether Our Sovereign Lord, King George the Fifth of Great Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India, had been guilty of the wilful crime of bigamy on the island of Malta in the year 1890, as defined by the Offences Against the Person Act 1861.

Few people who lived during the years from 1890 until 1911 escaped some rumour of this scandal. Until 1892, when his elder brother the Duke of Clarence died suddenly at the age of twenty-eight, Prince George had not been in the most direct line of succession to the British throne. It was still occupied by his grandmother, Queen Victoria. After her, Prince George's father was to succeed as Edward VII. Then it was supposed that the Duke of Clarence would succeed as elder son and after him any children he might have. These last hopes were cruelly ended on 14 January 1892 by the death of the young Duke of Clarence. George, ‘The Sailor Prince', who had looked forward only to the life of a naval officer, became heir apparent to his father.

In the following year, 1893, Prince George was betrothed to his dead brother's fiancée, Princess May of Teck, and the couple were married a few weeks later. Yet even before the day of the betrothal passed, on 3 May, the
Star
newspaper reported that the future King had already contracted a morganatic marriage in 1890 or thereabouts with the daughter of a British naval officer. The
Star
was a mere rag of a newspaper which had risen to fame by its salacious reporting of the Whitechapel Murders in 1888 and its invention of the vulgar sobriquet ‘Jack the Ripper'. However, its charges against the future King had been made and were not to be ignored by the gossips.

Prince George himself had been twenty-five years old in 1890, if that was the year alleged, and commander of the first-class gunboat HMS
Thrush
, sailing via Gibraltar to the West Indies. The ship was laid up at Gibraltar for more than two weeks, awaiting the torpedo boat that she was to tow across the Atlantic. It can do no harm now to reveal that the unnamed naval officer whose daughter's name was associated with the future king's was Admiral Sir Michael Culme-Seymour, who commanded the Mediterranean Squadron. Sir Michael had also been Naval Aide-de-Camp to Queen Victoria for five years while Prince George was a child. There were two Culme-Seymour daughters, Laura who was to die in 1895, and Mary, who married Captain Trevelyan Napier in 1899.

The story was taken up by the press and aired from time to time in
Reynolds News
, the Brisbane
Telegraph
, and the
Review of Reviews
. Worse still, however, was the allegation arising from the reports that, before Prince George's betrothal to Princess May, two children were born of this former union.

Upon the death of King Edward in 1910 and Prince George's accession to the throne as King George V, it might have been hoped that such gossip would die of repetition. Quite the contrary. The embers were fanned again in the very weeks preceding the opening of the new King George's first parliament and the coronation ceremony itself. Holmes later showed me His Majesty's comment upon the allegation of a morganatic marriage. ‘The whole thing is a damnable lie,' King George wrote in his forthright quarter-deck manner, ‘and has been in existence now for over twenty years!'

The accused, who was called up to the dock on that winter morning in 1911, was one of many to repeat the story. However, he was surely the most deserving of the law's attention. Edward Mylius was a thin saturnine man of thirty, dressed in black, who lived in Courtnell Street, Bayswater. He was the English editor of a republican magazine, the
Liberator
, published in the Rue St Dominique, Paris, by Mr Edward Holden James, a cousin of the famous American novelist. Mylius had denounced King George's coronation in an article entitled ‘Sanctified Bigamy', which condemned the Church of England for its complicity in having knowingly wed a married man to Princess May and for preparing to crown the bigamist. A copy of the article was sent by its author to every Member of Parliament and the unsavoury matter was even raised in the House of Commons by Mr Keir Hardie and others. Mylius assured his readers that after a few years of his first secret marriage and the birth of two children, Prince George ‘foully abandoned his true wife and entered into a sham and shameful marriage with a daughter of the Duke of Teck'.

During the winter of 1910 there had been much discussion among members of the government of Mr Asquith as to the advisability of prosecuting Mylius for a criminal libel on the monarch, this being by far the most scurrilous version of the story to be published. Mr Churchill, as Home Secretary, was most anxious to proceed against the ‘buffoon', as he called him. Yet a prosecution for a criminal libel on the sovereign had not been brought since the worst days of King George IV in 1823. The Law Officers of the Crown advised the cabinet on 23 November of the danger that lay in giving courtroom publicity to Mylius and his story. If it were to be done none the less, they said, it had best be done quickly and quietly. He was arrested on 26 December, held to bail for £20,000, which he could not possibly find, and kept in strict confinement, allowing him no opportunity of communicating with the press before his trial.

The first that the public knew of the case was when they read in the newspapers of 2 February that the trial was over. It was stated in court and in the papers that neither King George nor the Culme-Seymour daughters had been in Malta in 1890. Sir Michael, though by now elderly and in poor health, gave evidence of this, as did his surviving daughter.

There was one moment when a chill touched my spine. Sir Rufus Isaacs, like a handsome dark-eyed eagle in wig and gown, was examining Mary Culme-Seymour—as I still call Mrs Napier. In answer to his question, she replied that she had never so much as met Prince George from 1879, when she was eight, until 1898, five years after his marriage to Princess Mary. It was not the truth and there was public proof of that! As Holmes and I had reason to know, not only had she met him but on one occasion she and Prince George had opened the dancing at a grand ball in Portsmouth Town Hall on 21 August 1891. Worse still, the fact had been reported at length in the
Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle
at the time, for anyone who cared to read it! Happily for Sir Rufus Isaacs, this was not a newspaper that Mylius had seen. This untruth or slip of memory did not, of course, make Mary Culme-Seymour the wife of Prince George. At the same time, it might have opened the way for the accused man to dismiss her evidence, if only he had known of the error.

Mylius had refused to be represented by counsel. Instead he issued a most impudent subpoena which summoned King George to give evidence and to be cross-examined upon it! This device would have been outrageous, had it not been so foolish. The Attorney-General knew the law of the constitution, if Mylius did not. The sovereign cannot be summoned as witness in a court where he is the source of justice. It is true that Edward VII before coming to the throne gave evidence in the Mordaunt divorce case and in the Tranby Croft libel action, when one of his friends had cheated at baccarat in his presence. He did so as Prince of Wales, however, and not as monarch.

As the cold February evening drew in, Mylius endeavoured to justify the truth of his libel. He could not do so to the satisfaction of the jury, which took against him from the start. All day, Mr Churchill had sat behind Sir Rufus Isaacs, murmuring to him the questions that should be put to witnesses and, more importantly from the view of Holmes and myself, warning him of the answers that were not to be pursued. Mylius, of course, stuck to his story. Thank God that, in one or two essentials, the scoundrel had got it wrong!

In that marble temple, which forms the lobby of the Central Criminal Court, I afterwards overheard Mr Churchill's comment to Sir Rufus Isaacs. A few minutes earlier, Edward Mylius had been taken down the steps of the Old Bailey dock, after the Lord Chief Justice had sentenced him to a year's imprisonment and a substantial fine. The smile of a portly cherub lit the Home Secretary's face.