The Chieftain: Victorian True Crime Through The Eyes of a Scotland Yard Detective (16 page)

Before the summing-up, several ‘below-stairs’ members of the Cardigans’ household were called to give evidence in Lilley’s defence, but after Hayes’ evidence their journey to the court hardly seemed necessary. The jury returned a ‘not guilty’ verdict, and Lilley was released. No prosecution appears to have been taken against Hayes. However, the issue returned to haunt Clarke the following year.

In June 1867, Lilley brought a case against Lord Cardigan for false imprisonment and malicious prosecution that was heard over two days at the Court of Queens Bench. Much of the same ground was covered again, with the countess continuing to stress the excellence of her memory. No further evidence from Hayes was forthcoming as he had died the previous January, but Clarke was called and responded to questions about his investigation. Lord Cardigan confirmed Clarke’s version of events and appears not to have displayed any criticism of the handling of the case by Clarke.
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The jury, finding for Lilley, awarded him £400 damages in addition to the £45 that Cardigan had already paid into court.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is difficult to understand why Clarke recommended Lilley’s arrest, rather than that of Hayes. Of course, whether Hayes was guilty of the offence or not was never tested in court, but Clarke was probably the butt of a few jokes back in the sergeants’ office at Old Scotland Yard. For Lord Cardigan, the £445 plus legal expenses and the costs of reimbursing the Metropolitan Police for Clarke’s services would have represented only a small proportional increase in the costs of his lavish lifestyle. However, after his death in March 1868 the countess had to pay off debts of about £365,000 by realising capital assets. The countess remarried and lived into the twentieth century but, in her memoirs published in 1909, did not mention the case of the missing cheques; perhaps she had forgotten.
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Scotland Yard and the Fenians

August 1866 – January 1867

At the end of June 1866, the defeat of a reform bill drafted by Lord Russell’s administration catalysed the resignation of the government; the subsequent General Election brought in a Conservative administration led by Lord Derby, with Spencer Walpole as Home Secretary and a new chief secretary in Dublin Castle, Lord Naas (soon to inherit the title of the Earl of Mayo). This last appointment introduced a fresh attitude to the policing of Fenianism, including a greater use of undercover detectives and political surveillance in Britain and other locations (e.g. Paris) where the Fenians were known to be active. Soon after his appointment, Lord Naas also asked a young barrister, Robert Anderson (who had been working closely with his brother, Samuel Anderson, the Crown solicitor in Ireland), to prepare a précis of secret and other documentary evidence on the Fenians.
⁶⁰

In July, the new government and the Metropolitan Police were rudely awakened by the activities of the Reform League who, after a peaceful meeting in Trafalgar Square on 2 July, went ahead with a further meeting in Hyde Park on 23 July 1866 despite a ban on the meeting being imposed by the Home Secretary. On the day, thousands of people turned up. Finding the park gates closed, the mob pulled down the railings; the police were overwhelmed and soldiers were sent in. Mayne himself was wounded and many policemen seriously injured, but Mayne’s subsequent offer of resignation was refused. Some described the events that day as almost the last great expression of the traditional London crowd, and others viewed it as a revolution narrowly averted.
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The extent of involvement of Clarke and his colleagues in these events is unclear, but these were difficult times for the police.

Lord Naas started to apply pressure in August for changes in the strategy of policing Fenianism, by suggesting to the Home Secretary that ‘from four to six detectives from the Police Forces in England be assigned to Glasgow, Liverpool and Manchester to ascertain whether Fenian agents are being actively engaged in carrying on the conspiracy’.
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Perhaps lulled by a false sense of security created by the withdrawal of
habeas corpus
in Ireland, Walpole refused but, shortly after, directed Mayne to explore the Fenian issue in Liverpool. Mayne then wrote to the Liverpool chief constable, Major Greig, early in September and sent on this occasion Inspector Williamson and Sergeant Mulvany ‘to co-operate with your officers and those sent from Ireland in discovering the Fenian Conspirators’.
⁶³
On 15 September, Williamson reported back that house searches had only revealed ‘a few treasonable songs and some drill books’. He added: ‘Although the Fenian spirit exists in Liverpool, there is no extensive organization, and no drilling or meetings of Fenians in numbers takes place … For some months past the Fenian cause has been in a depressed state in this town.’
⁶⁴
Further activity in October suggested that this was an unduly complacent assessment, as Mulvany had to return to Liverpool to deal with the case of four men who were arrested in Liverpool when unable to account for the possession of a number of rifles, bayonets and phosphorus (used in incendiary devices), apparently obtained from military sources.
⁶⁵
The items had probably been stolen from military bases in England, or ‘liberated’ from them by soldiers who had been seduced into the Fenian camp. Indeed, the modern perspective is that Liverpool was the centre of the Fenian conspiracy in England at that time and, when an informant finally provided details of an extensive Fenian organisation in Liverpool, even Mayne was convinced of the seriousness of the problem.
⁶⁶

In September, Lord Naas suggested deploying experienced army personnel on mainland Britain, including Captain William Whelan, who had been working to help root out Fenianism in the army. Apparently this idea was also rejected though it seems that Whelan did unofficially deploy informers on the mainland and Mayne certainly wrote two letters to Whelan in mid-September 1866 asking him to communicate to him the enquiries he had been making about the Fenian conspiracy.
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Unfortunately, details of Clarke’s role in the policing of the Fenian conspiracy during 1866 are unknown, as no specific mention of him was found in any of the surviving archived reports or newspaper accounts on the Fenians that have been located relating to this period. He only emerges publicly again, in the Fenian context, in January 1867. However, as Clarke’s name also only appeared in the national newspapers in relation to two criminal cases during 1866, it seems likely that he was engaged for much of the rest of his time on some form of unpublicised anti-Fenian activity. Meanwhile, as 1866 moved to its conclusion, events in America were developing in ways that would bring Clarke more into the Fenian limelight in 1867.

In New York, Stephens and the Fenian military council had started to strengthen their military leadership by attracting some senior officers with Civil War experience who were dedicated to revolutionary republicanism. Of these, Gustave Paul Cluseret was appointed ‘Commander-in-Chief’ of the Fenian insurrectionary force. Cluseret was a Frenchman who had been an officer in the
garde mobile
during the revolution of 1848 and later served in Algeria, before joining Garibaldi’s volunteers in Italy in 1860. This was followed by service in the Union Army in the American Civil War, where he achieved the rank of brigadier general.
⁶⁸
On appointment by Stephens, Cluseret selected two other foreign veterans of the Civil War as his military adjutants, Octave Fariola and Victor Vifquain.
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Fariola and Clarke were later to become briefly acquainted and, because Fariola has left probably the most extensive archival and newspaper record of the Fenian conspiracy between August 1866 and November 1867, the following account will draw heavily on his experiences. The two main sources of Fariola’s recollections were intended for quite different audiences: firstly, a statement or ‘confession’ given to the British authorities in late 1867 or early 1868 (now held in the National Archives); and secondly, a series of newspaper articles written by Fariola and published in late 1868 in the Fenian-supportive newspaper
The Irishman
.
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The following account tries to tread the common path that emerges from these different sources.

Octave Fariola (full name Octave Louis François Etienne Fariola de Razzoli) was born in 1839. He was a Swiss citizen but was brought up in Belgium where he attended the military academy in Brussels, being commissioned as a lieutenant in about 1856, before assisting in Garibaldi’s campaign in Italy in 1859–60, where he acquired his revolutionary republican credentials and contacts. Married in Brussels in 1863, Fariola and his wife immigrated to Louisiana where he joined the Union army at New Orleans on 10 July 1863 as a staff officer for General Nathaniel Banks, before serving in the 2nd Engineer Corps d’Afrique. He was honourably discharged as a lieutenant-colonel on 29 January 1866, and was living as a planter in Louisiana with his wife and young son when he received a series of letters from Cluseret, between August and October that year, inviting him to become Cluseret’s chief of staff in a new enterprise. When Fariola’s crop (probably cotton) in Louisiana was destroyed by caterpillars (a common fate) he finally decided that he needed to find other sources of income and travelled to New York in early November to meet Cluseret, only on arrival discovering that the object was the liberation of Ireland by the Fenians, and that his role would be the organisation of the Fenian insurrectionary force.
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Before agreeing to accept the post, he had a long interview in New York with James Stephens. In his later confession Fariola reported that: ‘The whole of his statement was so extra-ordinary that I came to the conclusion that if he was not telling the truth he must be a fool or a scoundrel of the worst character.’
⁷²

In his newspaper articles Fariola also echoed the concerns that John Devoy had expressed on Stephens’ military proficiency: ‘I do not profess to be a competent judge of a man’s abilities; still if I might venture to give an opinion on Mr Stephens’s it is that they are of a very high order in most things.
I except military matters
[Fariola’s italics] in which he is worse than incompetent.’
⁷³
Stephens, possibly believing his own propaganda, informed Fariola that the Fenians had 50,000 organised men on Irish soil, three steamers, funds for 20,000 rifles, as well as torpedoes and Greek Fire (an incendiary compound based on white phosphorus). Fariola would be paid £60 a month, six months in advance. He was only later to discover, when he reached Europe, that little or no money was forthcoming and that the Fenians only had one very old steamer which was sold for $14,000 – the only money that was left in the Fenian exchequer by the end of 1866.
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Before he agreed to accept the job of chief of staff, he sought certain conditions:

I should not be called upon to take any share in the insurrection until it would have been clearly demonstrated that the majority of the Irish people were intent upon the overthrow of both aristocracy and monarchy … [and] … the establishment of a
de facto
Government having some degree of organization, and a certain extent of territory of its own. I objected in doing anything for the conspiracy within the British jurisdiction [on the British mainland], and this was a
sine-qua-non
condition.
⁷⁵

Receiving Stephens’ agreement to these terms, Fariola left New York on 14 November 1866 on the SS
England
, arriving in Liverpool where he narrowly avoided being arrested, before travelling via London, where he purchased a revolver, to Paris. Arriving on 3 December 1866 and finding no money waiting for him, he raised funds from his wife’s family and by pawning his watch.
⁷⁶

Despite the clear evidence that the availability of funding and the organisation of Fenian activities did not match Stephens’ hyperbole, Fariola persisted in his task. Before he left America, Fariola had learnt that the plans for the rising involved Stephens leaving for Ireland at the end of December or beginning of January:

… with a number of officers, arms, and ammunitions in quantity. [Stephens] pledged himself that within three days of his making his call upon the Irish Republican Brotherhood he would have 30,000 men assembled in three bodies, in three given points, and provided with arms and ammunition; which being done it remained for the Military Commander, at the head of such an army – for they were drilled men, officered by American officers – to wrest Ireland from English clutches … The plan of the C.O.I.R. [Chief Organiser of the Irish Republic] was, in my view, utterly absurd, and I ventured to point that out.
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The absurdity, as far as Fariola was concerned, was that 30,000 assembled men would only become an effective army through a process of training and organisation that would take time. In his confession, Fariola clearly indicates that his own proposals (influenced by his experiences with Garibaldi), if implemented, would have established an insurgency in south-west Ireland using guerrilla tactics involving small groups of no more than thirty men; cutting railway lines and telegraphic communications; establishing barricades and attacking the constabulary when found in inferior force. However, despite the suitability of Fariola’s tactics to the Irish countryside, and the number of volunteers available, his instructions were abandoned during the last stage of preparations.
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