The Heir Apparent (54 page)

In the summer of 1890, Bertie gave up dancing. “I am getting too old and fat for these amusements,” he told Georgie.
¹
He had suffered the previous year from phlebitis, a painful swelling of the veins behind the knee, and the doctors ordered him to avoid exercise.
²
Instead of dancing he feasted on opera.

Driven by the dynamic Gladys de Grey, a member of the Marlborough House set who acted as a one-woman Arts Council, the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden was undergoing a revival, and Bertie’s patronage was crucial. This was the season when Nellie Melba took London by storm, and Bertie saw her twice in
Roméo et Juliette
. He went to sixty-seven theater performances that year.
³
Attending the opera meant eating a short and early dinner; the shortness did not matter to him, but the earliness was a “real sacrifice.”
^*
Often he stayed
at the opera for only an hour or so before “going on” to an evening party. As Daisy wrote, the special achievement of Marlborough House was “to turn night into day.”
⁴

Bertie returned from his cure in Homburg in early September 1890 in time for the Doncaster races. For years he had stayed with “
good old
Xtopher” Sykes, but Sykes was ill and had dissipated much of his fortune on entertaining the prince. “I do not wish him—with his reduced income—to spend a farthing on my account—I shall be furious if he gives me a birthday present!” said Bertie in 1889.
⁵
Instead he stayed in 1890 with Arthur Wilson, a wealthy shipowner from Hull, at his house, Tranby Croft. On 8 September 1890 at twelve thirty, Bertie and his retinue boarded the special train from King’s Cross. Daisy Brooke was on the list, but she canceled at the last minute on account of the death of her stepfather, Lord Rosslyn, two days before.
⁶
Traveling with the prince were Christopher Sykes and Sir William Gordon-Cumming. A lieutenant colonel in the Scots Guards, the forty-two-year-old Bill Cumming was a red-faced veteran of the Zulu War and Khartoum; caustic-tongued and arrogant, he was a bachelor who boasted of “perforating” (his word) large numbers of “the sex,” including Lady Randolph Churchill and Lillie Langtry.
⁷
He had first stayed at Sandringham back in 1881, and Bertie allegedly borrowed his Belgravia house (2 Harriet Street) for secret assignations.
⁸

The royal party reached the local station of Hessle near Hull at five fifteen. Bertie found the architecturally undistinguished Italianate mansion of Tranby Croft “new and comfortable,” and the Wilsons “most kind and hospitable.”
⁹
As well as courtiers such as Owen Williams, Lord Coventry, and Lord Edward Somerset, Podge’s brother, the party included the Wilsons’ twenty-two-year-old son, (Arthur) Stanley, his sister Ethel and her husband, Edward Lycett Green, and a young Scots Guards officer named Berkeley Levett.

After dinner, at about eleven p.m., someone suggested playing baccarat.
The game was Bertie’s current craze, and it was the fashion at country house parties. It was also illegal, a recent High Court ruling having declared it a game of chance rather than skill.
^†
That night at Tranby Croft, Bertie was the banker. There was no baccarat table in the house—old Arthur Wilson disliked the game—so one was improvised by placing three whist tables together and covering them with a piece of colored tapestry. Acting as croupier was Bertie’s unofficial bookie, the pearl-studded Reuben Sassoon.
¹⁰
A member of the Jewish dynasty of Bombay bankers, Sassoon had not worn European clothes until adulthood; he often stayed at Sandringham, but it was unkindly remarked of him that he “never opened his mouth, except to put food into it.”
¹¹
He distributed the leather counters stamped with £2 or £5 and engraved on the reverse with the Prince of Wales feathers in gold that Bertie always carried when he traveled. The banker is the only player in baccarat who needs skill in calculating his risks, and he must watch carefully the stakes made by the players before deciding whether to deal another card and risk paying out.
^‡

That night, Bertie noticed nothing unusual. Young Stanley Wilson, however, thought that he saw something odd about Gordon-Cumming’s play. Gordon-Cumming had a piece of white paper with two columns marked B and P on which he made a dot with a pencil to record whether the bank or the player won. Sitting with one hand clasped over the back of the other on the table before him, he placed his stakes on the white paper. He played according to a system known as
coup de trois
or
masse en avant
, whereby if he won, say, £2, in a coup,
he would leave his red £2 counter and add his winnings of £2 and another £2, thus tripling his stake.

Stanley Wilson, who was sitting next to Gordon-Cumming, saw, or thought he saw, Gordon-Cumming surreptitiously push out £5 counters to add to his £5 stake when the players’ cards were good. When the players’ cards were bad, Gordon-Cumming withdrew money from his stake. Wilson turned to his friend, the twenty-seven-year-old Berkeley Levett, who was sitting on his other side, and (as he related later in court) whispered, “My God, Berkeley, this is too hot!”

“What on earth do you mean?” said Levett.

“The man next to me is cheating.”

Levett watched, too, and noticed that when the banker declared, Gordon-Cumming added two counters to his stake, and was paid £15. He turned to Wilson and said, “It is too hot.”
¹²

After the game was over and the party had retired to bed, Wilson followed Levett to his room. Levett threw himself down on the bed.

“My God!” he exclaimed. “To think of it—Lieutenant Colonel Sir William Gordon-Cumming Bart caught cheating at cards!”

“What on earth can we do?” said Wilson.

“For goodness’ sake don’t ask me!” said Levett. “He is in my regiment and was my captain for a year and a half. What can I do?”
^§
13

This late-night conversation between two excited young men sounds like something out of a Flashman novel, but it was to have momentous consequences that rocked the monarchy.
¹⁴
Stanley Wilson was a young “masher” with a carefully tended black mustache, who had dropped out of Cambridge and prided himself on doing nothing very much.
¹⁵
Levett, as an officer in Gordon-Cumming’s regiment, owed him loyalty, but he made no attempt to restrain or silence his young friend or protect his brother officer.

Stanley Wilson walked out of Levett’s room and told his mother what he had seen. “For goodness’ sake, don’t let us have a scandal here,” she exclaimed.
¹⁶
The next morning, Stanley told his brother-in-law Lycett Green, who told his wife. Already five people knew of the secret.

The following evening there was baccarat again. This time Gordon-Cumming was watched by five pairs of eyes. Once again the prince was banker, and once again the two young men saw, or thought they saw, Gordon-Cumming cheat, flicking out extra counters with a long, flat carpenter’s pencil when the cards were favorable.

The next day, after the races, the Wilson family decided to say something. With Lycett Green acting as spokesman, they approached Lord Coventry and told their story. Owen Williams was called in. Lycett Green, who was very angry, threatened to denounce Gordon-Cumming at the races unless he signed a document admitting his guilt. Owen Williams, ramrod straight and mustached, insisted that the prince must be told at once. He made no attempt to investigate the Wilsons’ story, in spite of the fact that they were unknown outsiders. Nor did he discuss the matter with Gordon-Cumming, an old friend and brother officer.

Much has been written about Tranby Croft, but much remains unexplained. For a start, the behavior of the Wilsons. If Mrs. Wilson really wanted to avoid a scandal, the obvious course was either to involve her husband (which she was oddly reluctant to do) or to confront Gordon-Cumming herself. As her friend Lady Middleton, who was Gordon-Cumming’s sister, wrote: “Oh Mrs. Wilson if I had thought your son or husband was doing such a thing I would have warned him privately for your sake.”
¹⁷
Going to the courtiers could only make matters worse. When Lycett Green saw Owen Williams, he burst out: “I will not be a party to letting Gordon-Cumming prey on society in future.”
¹⁸
Perhaps this was Yorkshire puritanism speaking, but Lycett Green’s anger seems to have been fired by Gordon-Cumming’s reputation as a seducer of wives.

The behavior of Owen Williams is puzzling, too. Especially perplexing is his failure to find out for himself whether Gordon-Cumming had indeed cheated. The Wilson family had little experience of baccarat, their evidence was inconsistent, and they were expecting to see Gordon-Cumming cheat. The only one of them who had not been influenced by anyone else was Stanley.

After hearing the Wilsons tell their story, Owen Williams went
straight to the prince before dinner and told him that the only way to prevent the scandal getting out the next day was to compel Gordon-Cumming to sign a paper agreeing never to play again. This was the first that Bertie had heard of the affair. Rather than question Gordon-Cumming’s guilt, he, too, believed the charges. When someone asked him about this later, in court, he replied, “The charges appeared to be so unanimous that it was the proper course—no other course was open to me—than to believe them.”
¹⁹
Williams and Lord Coventry then saw Gordon-Cumming and told him that he had been accused of foul play. Gordon-Cumming hotly denied the charges. “Do you believe the statements of a parcel of inexperienced boys?” he asked, and demanded to see the prince.
²⁰

After dinner, the Wilsons told their story to Bertie, who listened without saying much. Then it was Gordon-Cumming’s turn. Once again he denied the charge, but all Bertie said was “What can you do? There are five accusers against you.”
²¹
After a few minutes, Gordon-Cumming was asked to leave the room. Half an hour later, Owen Williams summoned him back and, in his oddly mincing voice, asked him to sign a document. In exchange for a promise from the prince, the courtiers, and the Wilson family to preserve silence, Gordon-Cumming was to undertake “never to play cards again as long as I live.”
^‖
When Gordon-Cumming objected that signing would be tantamount to an admission of guilt, they agreed, but asked him to sign all the same, as it was the only way to prevent Lycett Green from telling everyone at the racecourse the next day. Under pressure, Gordon-Cumming agreed to sign, and early the following morning he left the house on foot and made his way to London.

Why did Bertie put his name to the paper? As Queen Victoria later wrote, “The incredible and shameful thing is that others dragged him into it and urged him to sign this paper, which of course he should never have done.”
²²
Bertie was indeed foolish to sign. He dropped his old friend Gordon-Cumming and went along with the Wilsons, whom he barely knew, accepting their story without asking any questions. By signing, he also made it clear that he was playing an illegal gambling game.

A lawyer who reexamined the case in 1977 concluded that Gordon-Cumming was innocent, on the grounds that no man who intended to cheat would deliberately place his counters on a white paper where they were clearly visible.
²³
There seems good reason to argue quite the opposite: that Gordon-Cumming was guilty. In fact, everyone cheated. Bertie’s insistence on high play at country house parties was widely resisted. Lord Derby heard stories that the prince “tries to induce young men to play, and is angry when they will not.… It is added, which if true is worst of all, that he resents refusals to play when, as often happens, they tell him they cannot afford it.”
²⁴
Being pressured to play validated cheating; it was a legitimate way of defying the spoiled and bullying prince. Anita Leslie once asked an old courtier whether Gordon-Cumming had, in fact, cheated. “Of course he cheated,” was the reply. “We all did. It was such a nuisance being made to play and lose money … and the young men longed to be dancing instead. But Cumming cheated
too much
and he had a lot of enemies.”
²⁵
And the witnesses, Stanley Wilson and Berkeley Levett, were too young and naïve to realize what was going on.

Gordon-Cumming was a long-standing member of the Marlborough House set. The owner of thirty-eight thousand barren Scottish acres, he could trace his pedigree back to Charlemagne. The Wilson and Lycett Green families were second-generation nouveaux riches. If cheating was widespread and usually overlooked, why did Bertie side with the Wilsons’ new money and throw his friend Gordon-Cumming to the Yorkshire wolves? A legend persists that Gordon-Cumming was
a scapegoat for Bertie, who had himself cheated. But no one suggested this at the time, and there’s nothing to support it.
²⁶
It’s possible that Bertie wanted to make an example of Gordon-Cumming, who had insolently won £225 off him in two nights.
^a
Or perhaps he wanted revenge. Two days before the Tranby Croft party, Bertie had walked into Gordon-Cumming’s London house, so the story went, and discovered Daisy Brooke in his arms.
²⁷
Whether or not he was guilty of cheating, Gordon-Cumming had humiliated Bertie and had to be dropped into outer darkness. The trouble was, he refused to go quietly.