What I Am Reading: "The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse: An Extraordinary Edwardian Case of Deception and Intrigue" by Piu Marie Eatwell

I’m planning on reading The Proud Tower soon, so I am trying to immerse myself in turn of the century Europe as best as I can. True crime seemed like a good way to dip the first toe in, especially since I only pursue true crime that is old enough to be my grandparent. This historical mystery story bills itself as Edwardian, because that is when a lot of the investigation and legal activity took place; but the story goes back deep into the Victorian era, and even beyond.

The Victorians had a number of famous legal cases. There was R. v. Dudley & Stephens, which established that sailors weren’t allowed to eat each other even if they were hungry. There was the  Royal Baccarat Scandal, which established that if the Prince of Wales said you cheated, then you cheated. There were all of Oscar Wilde’s sad cases. This book is about the Druce case; which bears the most resemblance to another Victorian case that I was only recently made aware of, the Tichborne case. In both cases, an Australian came to London to try to stake a claim to a noble title, and lost after extensive legal wrangling.

The Druce case involves the Earldom of Portland; the claim is that the 5th Duke of Portland, William Cavendish-Bentinck-Scott, lived a double-life as Thomas Charles “T.C.” Druce, an affluent furniture merchant in London. After the Duke died in 1879 at the age of 79, the title passed to a distant relative; but in 1897 Druce’s daughter-in-law alleged that the title should have passed to her son, as Druce and the Duke had been the same person. Years of off-and-on legal drama and press attention followed, until the matter was put to rest in 1907.

The reason that this was even conceivable was that both Druce and the Duke were notorious recluses and eccentrics who shunned the company of others and otherwise led strange social lives. Druce (who died in 1864) was a notorious womanizer who lived with various women out of wedlock, and was something of a pariah because of it, beyond his general standoffishness. The Duke carved extensive tunnels and underground rooms under his estate of Welbeck Abbey to hide from the sun, and preferred the company of servants to that of other noblemen (though he communicated with them only through notes at various points).

The two eccentrics were long dead by the time the legal case reared its head in 1897. The case originated with Anna Maria Druce, the widow of Druce’s son Walter. Druce had liked Walter little and his wife less, and she had had to go into the workhouse after her husband’s death when no financial support from her extended family was forthcoming.

The media, having been primed for this kind of storyline by the Tichborne case, was all over it. Laws passed within previous decades to improve schooling and repeal taxes on postage had led to an explosion of literacy, and the Victorians were massive fans of cheap papers, tabloids, scandal sheets, and the like. Some of the copy was accurate, some exaggerated, some entirely fabricated. Victorian culture loved a mystery, says author Piu Marie Eatwell, hence the popularity of Sherlock Holmes and the enduring cultural presence of Jack the Ripper.

Anna Maria Druce did not last through the whole case. Destitute, she lost her attorneys (or “solicitors” since this is Britain) when she floated bonds to finance her pursuit (payable in the event of her success) and fell in with shady characters. She was also clearly in mental decline by the time the end came in 1901. Her claim had focused on Druce’s son and heir, Herbert, and attempted to force him to exhume his father, whereupon the casket would be considered to contain a brick of lead rather than a body. Herbert, with everything to lose and nothing to gain, stalled with the help of several prominent attorneys, and with support from the 6th Duke and his resources.

Eatwell is an attorney, and gets into some (very easy-to-follow) detail about how some of the cases are civil, some are criminal, some involve libel, and some perjury; I have mostly dispensed with this, partially because I neglected to include these details in my notes. In any event, Anna Maria Druce’s last hearing, where she rambled in incoherent agitation, bereft of any legal assistance or of the witnesses she had lined up earlier, ended in her case’s dismissal in 1901. The vault would not be opened. This was only the first stage of the story, however.

Eatwell paces the revelations well, as the story goes through its twists and turns. Anna Maria passes from the picture (and from history, as her fate is unclear) both because of her legal case’s disintegration but also because of an evolving understanding of the situation. One early revelation, especially for Herbert Druce, was that he was illegitimate, as T.C. had not been married to his mother when he was born (hence the claim of Anna Maria’s son, as Walter would have been the first legitimate offspring of Druce / “The Duke”). However, this was not the end of it – the reason that T.C. Druce hadn’t been married to the mother of his children was that he had still been married to his secret first wife, all the way back in 1816, with whom he had had children. Hence, if he had secretly been the Duke, the children from his first marriage (the Crickmer marriage) would have been the heirs to the seat, not Anna Maria’s son. The relevant one of these neglected children was George Druce, who emigrated to Australia and had a son, George Hollamby Druce. This Druce grandson was an Australian bushman who had lived his life in various hardscrabble frontier occupations, and was a tinkerer who worked on a perpetual motion machine. He came to London in 1903, in the company of a shady Australian lawyer, to pursue his claim.

His case, which worked its way through the legal system, was against the softest target, Herbert Druce; rather than the 6th Duke or against another noble family who had inherited part of the 5th Duke’s vast and profitable estate. Eatwell fills us in on the proceedings first, then goes into the background. The civil case against Herbert was heard in 1907, with liberal lawyer Llewellyn Atherley-Jones for the prosecution and future “hanging judge” Horace Avory for the defense. The Australian side presented several witnesses who claimed knowledge of the Duke’s double-life: a man and two women, each claiming to have known him in various stages of his life and been told the secret (there were other more technical and paper-based thrusts to the case, but these are the eyewitnesses). These witnesses, however, were utterly destroyed upon cross examination by Avory, who (backed by a well-funded investigatory apparatus) was able to prove that the witnesses had lied about their own backgrounds and whereabouts at the relevant times. A ghoulish aspect of the story that passes unremarked upon is that, on multiple occasions, it was proven that someone lived in one place and not another because they left behind a dead son or daughter in the relevant time and place.

Despite these critical developments, the trial was cut short when Herbert Druce suddenly changed his mind, and gave his consent for his father’s disinterment. This was carried out by police in December of 1907, led by police investigator Walter Dew. I appreciate the fact that I was actually somewhat surprised when the body of T.C. Druce was actually in his crypt, thus proving that he had not faked his death to return to the other half of his double-life as the Duke of Portland.

Yes, that’s right. It was all a lie. The third part of the book is the unraveling of this fraud by Inspector Dew. One of the phony witnesses fled to America and had himself committed to an asylum before he could be prosecuted for perjury, but the other two, the two women, were found guilty and sentenced to hard labor. One of them told her story to the investigators: that she, as someone who had had a vague connection to the Duke’s property, had been hired to create a diary of “her time with the duke.” This diary was supposed to be used by George Hollamby Druce, his edge-case Australian attorney Tomas Coburn, and the various sketchy British lawyers, hack journalists, Druce/Crickmer relatives, and financiers who glommed on to him as their grift; just as an earlier generation of scum had glommed onto the more hapless Anna Marie Druce. However, the perjurer, Mary Ann Robinson, had been called to testify about the diary, which she had not expected and was not prepared for. She and the other woman, Margaret Hamilton, who had also offered her services to Anna Marie Druce due to her distant and semi-plausible connection to the family, had just been pawns in the larger scheme to extort money.

Inspector Dew was interested in pursuing the higher-ups, Hollamby Druce, Coburn, and the rest. However, the investigation was shut down by his superiors. One of the private detectives working the Druce side of the case was retired Inspector John Conquest, and the London Police could not afford the black eye that would come from having him tied up in the perjury investigation. In addition, various members of the nobility had been among those who had bought some of Hollamby Druce’s bonds to finance his case, and they would be implicated as well; as would the disinformation-spreading society wife of a dissolute family (distantly related to the Duke’s) that did not need any more bad publicity. There were a lot of good reasons to leave the matter at Hamilton, Robinson, and Caldwell (the man who had fled to the United States).

So that was the end. The main conspirators went free, back to Australia or wherever else. Maybe some of them believed it, maybe they were just trying to get rich, maybe it was something else. Most of them went out and lived the rest of their lives. Dew became famous for having caught serial killer Hawley Harvey Crippen, and the Druce case ended up as just a footnote of his career.

In the last couple of chapters, Eatwell zooms out to the story of some of her archival research. I always love stories about dusty old books, even before I started doing archival research myself; and this brings a few additional revelations. In her searches through records that were sometimes sealed or sometimes just too dense to have been gone through before, she found things that would have blown up some of the popular narratives of the case. For instance, the claimant side and the media reported that Druce and the Duke dropped into and out of the historical record at corresponding times, thus providing a necessary condition to the theory. In fact, in evidence that was compiled but never went to trial, there were plenty of records of them being in two different places on the same day, including one occurrence where Druce actually took a load of furniture from the Duke, thus putting them in the same house at the same moment in one servant’s retelling. She also found the police photographs of the disinterment of Druce, which had been suppressed in their time (with the gruesome casket photo reproduced here).

The most interesting thing, however, was yet another layer to the story. The case’s progress forward, not least in the popular imagination, was fueled by Druce’s own scandalous double-life, with his hidden second family. Druce really did have a lot to hide. But, according to a tantalizing letter in Avory’s files, a woman wrote in claiming to be the 5th Duke’s daughter, a second secret family on the other side of the ledger. An important aspect of the defense’s case was that the Duke was believed to have been unable to father children due to an injury, thus rendering it impossible for him to have been the promiscuous and obviously fertile Druce. However, the doctors at the time were wrong, his injury could allow for continuing fertility.

The disadvantageous information of the Duke’s children was likely suppressed by the defense team, and Eatwell thinks it is only an oversight that left this document in the records rather than consigning it to destruction. But, thanks to this oversight, she was able to track down the eccentric Duke’s daughter, who was left in the care of a lower-class servant family. Since the woman mentioned her children in her letter to Avory (pleading for information on other members of her family), Eatwell was able to track them down as well through the census and other records, and determined that both of them went into the military, and served honorably in World War 1; with one also serving in World War 2. In a postscript, Eatwell describes how the family of one of these servicemen, the grandson of the Duke, got in touch with her and told her their story; and how the grandson did learn, from his mother, who his grandfather was. She notes how this family, unlike Druce’s spurned first family, looked forward, and not back for revenge on those who had put them in their circumstances. I have sympathy for revenge, so I’m not sure that I share this appreciation, but it does seem to have worked out better for them.

This story was pretty low-stakes. The people within it were wealthy and powerful, but not to the point where one would have heard of them otherwise. Britain has lots of wealthy nobles. It is a great example, however, of what you can find in history, and what you can’t. It has social implications regarding the rise of scandalous, tabloid journalism (a journalist was fueling part of the Hollamby Druce claim) and of the late Victorian interest in detectives, as criminology and forensics arose as an actual practice. It talks about how the pursuit of Old World claims to nobility interested some in the New World of the Americas and Australia, even as they sought to create their own less aristocratic social order; there is a letter from Mark Twain to a friend advising him not to press such a claim, as the resources brought to bear against him would be overwhelming.

Eatwell says toward the end that the Druce affair was

“like a reflection seen through a glass darkly… [the investigators, including herself] had polished the mirror of the past just a little more, revealing another detail of the underlying image. But to re-create it to perfection would be impossible. Worse than impossible, it would be a lie. Because it would imply that time can be recaptured in its entirety – that nothing is lost by the passage of years. But the past is always the past, and something is always lost; just as something is always preserved; and, also, discovered.” (p. 290-91).

This is one of the things that I find very romantic about the study of history. For some reason, too, I associate this aspect very strongly with the Victorians. They are so familiar and yet so alien, bafflingly archaic yet comfortably modern, so near to us and yet forever over the edge of living memory (and English-speakers, usefully). We look to them as symbols of repression and oppression, but we also look to their obsessions with death and with detection for our own tales of magic and mystery. The Last Victorian (who in my quick take would be Ethel Lang, the 70th-oldest person ever recorded and the last person to have lived under Queen Victoria) is no longer with us, yet was as recently as 2015. We still set fiction in the Victorian era, and their top hats and smog are instantly recognizable, perhaps even comfortable if only because we know it isn’t “real.” It’s not our world.

Despite their familiarity, whether we are otherizing them or identifying with them, they are fundamentally unknowable to us. In discussing the most famous Victorian crime, Alan Moore says, in his coda to From Hell,

“Kock’s Snowflake begins with an equilateral triangle, which can be contained within a circle, just as the murders are constrained to Whitechapel 2nd Autumn, 1888. Next, half-sized triangles are added to the triangles’ three sides. Quarter-sized triangles are added to the new shape’s twelve sides, and so on. Eventually, the snowflake’s edge becomes so crinkly and complex that its length, theoretically, is INFINITE. Its AREA, however, never exceeds the initial circle. Likewise, each new book provides fresh details, finer crennelations [sic] of the subject’s edge. Its area, however, can’t extend past the initial circle. Autumn, 1888. Whitechapel. What have we to look forward to? Abberline’s school nickname, of the make of Mary Kelly’s shoes? Koch’s Snowflake: gaze upon it, Ripperologists, and shiver.” (Dance of the Gull Catchers, p. 23).

No matter how much we flesh it out, Eatwell is right that something never survives. We cannot experience history in its entirety. Maybe with From Hell on my mind, this was brought home to me in another piece of modern Victoriana that I recently consumed, the Showtime show Penny Dreadful. There is one episode, a season-opener, set in London on the day that Alfred, Lord Tennyson, died: October 6, 1892. The show’s portrayal of the citywide mourning, the pealing bells, the urchins making a quid by selling black ribbons, brought home to me that there really was an October 6, 1892, and that there will never be again. We didn’t experience it, nobody alive today did. But it happened all the same, and however many billion-plus people were alive at that point in time experienced it in a way that we can never fully recreate, even if we had access to every relevant record ever produced, with none having been suppressed or destroyed in the war. We can never uncover all of their secrets. We can’t know why Anna Maria Druce, who may have just been unstable, decided that her stepfather was the Duke of Portland. Even when we try to learn things, we just come up with more mystery: the 5th Duke’s daughter, Fanny Lawson (nee Ashbury), had two brothers, apparently also the Duke’s children. One died young, but the other disappears from the historical record entirely. Maybe there really was a valid claimant to the seat somewhere? We couldn’t know.