Read The Spy Who Painted the Queen Online
Authors: Phil Tomaselli
The Spy Who Painted the Queen (9 page)
Thomson then raised the subject of sending information to the enemy and began to worm out to whom it was sent and who Madame G was:
ACC | I will put this to you â you wrote on the 30 |
PAL | I send information? What information? |
ACC | I am putting the question to you â political information on the state of the country. |
PAL | Never in my life have I mentioned even to my brother about the war. |
ACC | Did Baron Forster in any of his letters say anything to you about the treatment of prisoners of war in France? |
PAL | I do not remember Baron Forster or anyone else doing so. No, I know nothing about it. I have never corresponded about the war at all. |
ACC | Did he write to you on the ardent desire in Hungary for peace? |
PAL | I do not remember â I possess all his letters. |
ACC | He was going to put forward for you the claim that you had rendered services to the Hungarian government â of course that might be in the way of paintings and so forth. |
PAL | It is very difficult for me to talk of my own merits, but I have all honours which an artist can possess in Hungary, in Austria and, I may say, in Europe, and I received the French Legion of Honour, about thirteen years ago. I received all the high prizes before I was introduced for this Legion of Honour. |
ACC | When you wrote to Baron Forster what did you put on the letters? |
PAL | âTo His Excellency Baron Jules Forster'. Probably one time I would put âMember of the House of Lords' etc etc. |
ACC | What address? |
PAL | I write to his address in Budapest. |
ACC | Was there no intermediary address in Switzerland? |
PAL | No. |
ACC | I suggest to you that you have received a letter addressed from Geneva. |
PAL | That was probably from Madame Michaels who lives there with her daughter. As I mentioned before, I received one letter from Baron Forster through his wife who was staying in Switzerland with her son. No other letters came from Switzerland, except one of my brother-in-law's to a firm, which I never used. Then I received through Switzerland those two letters, as I told you, from Madame Michaels. |
ACC | Did Madame Michaels mention anything about the recovery of your Hungarian nationality? |
PAL | No, we [are] not on sufficiently familiar terms for that. |
ACC | I suggest to you that you did receive a letter from Geneva dealing with the question of your nationality. Who was it from? |
PAL | I do not remember. I received no other letters than the ones I have mentioned. I sent a letter to my sister Rosa two or three days ago which I put in an envelope. Sometimes I leave her letters without an envelope, because my brother gives it to my sister. She sent me her address in Budapest, so I put it in an envelope addressed to her. |
ACC | I am speaking now of the letters to Baron Forster. |
PAL | They were sent in an envelope addressed to him to Madame Riemsdyk and she would forward them by post. She told me she sent them on by post. Once or twice she was kind enough to send a telegram â when my mother died for instance. We sent her £2 or £3 for the expenses and she sends the letters registered. |
ACC | I put it to you that in one of your letters you wrote to somebody abroad, you sent a true picture of the situation in England â the political situation. |
PAL | Never in my life. |
ACC | Therefore if anybody wrote to you thanking you for this report they would be trying to lead you into a trap? |
PAL | Nobody wrote to me about it: nobody asked me about political matters. |
ACC | Has anybody written to you in Hungarian from Switzerland? |
PAL | I do not remember if that letter from my brother-in-law was written in Hungarian: he sent the first letter via Switzerland. |
ACC | Who was the Duchess de Guise? |
PAL | She died about 13 or 14 years ago and the Duke is married to a second wife who is Italian. |
ACC | Do you visit the Duchess de Guise when you are in Paris? |
PAL | I live there; we are the most intimate friends. |
ACC | Could anybody in correspondence with you have referred to her as âMadame G'? Could you in any of your letters to people abroad have mentioned the Duchess de Guise? |
PAL | Now I remember. You asked me if I had a friend in Italy. I had two letters during the war from Madame de Martino, whose portrait I painted before the war. |
ACC | I do not think that is the thing. I was wondering whether in your correspondence you ever mentioned the Duchess de Guise as Madame de Guise in the French fashion. |
PAL | No. There are no other people with whom I have been in correspondence. |
ACC | Is Madame de Guise pessimistic about the war? |
PAL | I do not know. My friend never wrote about the war: nor did I have any correspondence with his wife. |
ACC | Do you happen to know Madame Carlin, the wife of the Swiss Minister here? |
PAL | No, but I met him once. |
ACC | You knew he was married? |
PAL | I met him once, that is all: I never met her. |
ACC | Do you know anybody named Madame Gompertz, the daughter of an Austrian banker? |
PAL | No. |
(Some letters and a diary were handed over for investigation and Mr László was asked to leave the room for a few minutes)
On his return, Thomson showed De László great consideration by allowing him to go back to his studio and work:
We cannot consider this matter as cleared up in any way, but I do not want to upset your arrangements this afternoon, so I want to put this to you, that you should go and lunch now where you like, but that you should go with Inspector Parker: for I must be in a position to say that you have not been out of sight of an officer. Further, that Inspector Parker should be about your studio this afternoon and you must undertake not to use your telephone. Will that suit your wishes? The only alternative is a very unpleasant one in view of what has happened. We have definite information that you have been conveying information to the enemy, and that of course is a matter for which under ordinary circumstances, I have no choice but to put you under arrest. I do not want to do that in this case until we have gone a little further into the matter, so I am suggesting this as a middle course, that you should go out and have lunch and keep your appointment, and come down here again just after five.
A watch was placed outside De László's studio. Just in case.
At 5.30 p.m., De László returned and the questioning continued. He was asked about an erasure in his diary for 30 May 1917 and whether this might be connected with the letter he hotly denied he had sent to Geneva. His reply was that it would have concerned a sitter who had cancelled and this was his usual practice in such cases âto keep my book tidy'. After further questions relating to diary entries that De László said related to other sitters or about people with whom he had lunched, Thomson launched into the use of the diplomatic bag, following a question about whether De László knew Mr van Swinderen, the Dutch Minister in London. De László admitted to having met him only once before the war, to having lunched with him, at van Swinderen's invitation, a couple of months before the interrogation, and to having invited him to attend a house party for his friends the Raemaekers. Asked how he had been able to persuade him to let him use the diplomatic bag on the basis of so casual an acquaintance, De László said that he never really knew it was the diplomatic bag. At the start of the war he had contacted Madame van Riemsdyk asking her to be his intermediary in Holland, but he did not know how her letters came and it was on her suggestion that he had gone to van Swinderen, and he had taken her letter to him personally. After that he had taken a couple personally, but usually he sent them by hand.
Thomson then announced, âNow, I suppose you have gathered that we have been seeing some of your correspondence for some time.' De László said he had realised that, and Thomson immediately said, âI am going to read you a letter in French, it is a French translation of a letter, because the original was not written in French. Then I will ask you whether you have received the letter. It was written to you at 3 Palace Gate.' The letter of 14 June was then read to him (the one that mentioned his report was âof the highest importance').
De László's response was emphatic: âI have never received that letter, it cannot have been addressed to me. I do not know who can have written it; nor have I ever written anything about those things.' Thomson then told him it was believed that he had used the bag rather more than five or six times and De László admitted that each envelope may have contained more than one letter, perhaps two or three. Thomson reiterated he meant more than five or six sendings, then suddenly announced, âI think it is right to tell you that we have further information to this effect that in those letters you gave the exact date of the loss of English ships, the figures and statistics relative to the critical situation on account of the mines, and particularly the gossip about the King's view of the war.' This was material which, if correct, could lead to the death penalty, and De László immediately replied, âI do not understand it; I never wrote anything concerning the war.' When pressed over whether he had written anything about peace, he said he may have mentioned to his brother that he hoped there would be peace, but stressed he had never written to anyone about the war.
De László was questioned briefly about his Jewish origins and stated that he had destroyed none of the letters he had received. Thomson then returned to the subject of his wishing to regain his Hungarian nationality, as he thought he might have said something with a view to impressing his fellow former nationals. De László then returned (apparently) to the story he had told earlier about the Hungarian he had met at the start of the war. This time he named him as Sbenenyei [
sic
] and said he had actually been told not to meet him by Baron Forster, but had done so. The man had brought him various pieces he had received from Hungary â âunpleasant things' â and asked him to write something for the Hungarian press in response. De László had written something which he thought would be published in the responsible newspapers, but instead it had appeared in some kind of cheap journal or pamphlet. He certainly didn't think it implied a desire to get back his original nationality. Thomson also mentioned a letter to De László's sister, which he had written to her on the death of her son. This, he said, had impressed upon the censor the feeling that he was referring to Hungary as his home. De László denied the impression was intended.
Thomson then impressed upon De László the necessity, in time of war, to have the matters he had raised investigated, with which De László agreed. He again, however, denied having received the letter in question. They discussed Baron Forster and De László said that he had kept all his letters from him, but not copies of his letters to him, but that their contents could be deduced from the replies. In particular he referred to correspondence which had passed about meetings that his brother had had with Count Andrassy, leader of the Hungarian opposition in Parliament and president of the Art Society, about the naturalisation. Fortunately his brother had kept a copy of a letter he had received two years before the war talking about British naturalisation, which had convinced him that Andrassy was genuine. Having presumably seen the copied correspondence from MI5 and the Special Section, Thomson pointed out that this letter must have come through the diplomatic bag. De László responded that he couldn't say because it was only recently that he had started keeping the
couverts
(envelopes).
Thomson returned to the delicacy of his position: âYou were naturalized after the beginning of the war, yet, when you ought to have had everything smooth and open, you are sending letters clandestinely through the Legation Bag.' Expressing his regret, De László solemnly promised that they would never find any letters either sent or received by him about the war. When asked whether it had ever occurred to him that he was in breach of the censorship law, he said it had never occurred to him until he had heard van Swinderen discussing it on the phone in August 1916, and since then he had not sent anything by that route.
Thomson then produced a letter dated 24 July 1917 from Madame van Riemsdyk to Mrs De László, in which she said that she was sending it by âthe ordinary route'. Didn't this imply that she was using another route up to that time? De László was adamant that he had not sent anything out by that route, and said that he had promised as much to the Attorney General on meeting him. When he discovered Madame van Riemsdyk was still using the bag to send items to him, he had written to her asking her not to, and had later asked his wife to do the same thing. He was quite sure that of the five or six letters that had gone out through the bag, all had gone before August 1916.
