The Heir Apparent (55 page)

Bertie made haste to leave Tranby Croft. The death of Mrs. Wilson’s brother gave him a welcome excuse to depart, and he stayed after the races in York at Eddy’s quarters in the Cavalry Barracks (10th Hussars).
²⁸
On 12 September 1890, his diary records: “Return to York 5. Take tea with Lord and Lady Brooke at Station Hotel, then return to Barracks.”
²⁹
The teatime conversation with Lady Brooke, who was traveling north to her stepfather’s funeral, was not recorded, but it seems unlikely that Bertie said nothing about the events of the past week. He was conscious, however, of his gentleman’s promise to keep the secret, and he sealed Gordon-Cumming’s signed paper, together with an account of the events by Owen Williams, and placed both documents in a packet that he sent to Knollys for safekeeping.
³⁰
On the same day he received a pathetic appeal from Gordon-Cumming, imploring him not to cut him; “the forfeiture of your esteem,” said Gordon-Cumming, is “the cruellest blow of all.”
³¹
This remained unanswered.

Early in January 1891, Bertie heard that the Tranby Croft secret was out, and Gordon-Cumming was preparing to bring an action for slander against the Wilson family. The American press had published Daisy’s
portrait beneath the headline “The Babbling Brook(e),” accusing her of having leaked the scandal and claiming that, but for her indiscretion, the cheating episode might have been kept secret. When Daisy wrote to the American editors pointing out that she had not been present at Tranby Croft that weekend, she was informed that the story had been sent by their London correspondent, “a lady moving in the best society.”
³²
Was this lady correspondent Daisy’s sworn enemy Mina Beresford, seizing the chance to aim yet another blow at her rival? In a letter to
The Times
in 1911, Daisy tried to clear her name, alleging that mourning for her stepfather meant that she was the last to hear of the scandal at Tranby Croft; but this rings hollow, as she chose to overlook the teatime meeting on York station.

Determined to avoid a damaging court case that would drag the prince into the witness box, the courtiers now tried frantically to silence Gordon-Cumming. They demanded an inquiry by a secret military tribunal, which would effectively preempt a court case. Gordon-Cumming tried to dodge this by resigning from the army, but the courtiers obstructed him. Owen Williams and Coventry then appealed to the adjutant general, Sir Redvers Buller, to order a military inquiry. To the fury of Marlborough House, Buller first agreed and then changed his mind, having been persuaded that a military inquiry would prejudice a civil action.
³³
Bertie’s brother Arthur, Duke of Connaught, who was colonel in chief of Gordon-Cumming’s regiment, refused either to intervene or to travel from Portsmouth to discuss the matter. “Being the Prince’s brother it was more than ever incumbent on me not to allow myself to be used in a way that might cause the world to think that Cumming was to be sacrificed to the Prince,” he explained. Putting “undue pressure” on the regiment with the aim of “smashing” Gordon-Cumming would only damage Bertie.
³⁴
This enraged Bertie, but Connaught was right. Quashing the court case would have been unconstitutional. It implied that the army was a state within the state, immune from and above the law. If the courtiers at Marlborough House had got their way, Gordon-Cumming might have become England’s Alfred Dreyfus—an officer wrongfully denied a civil trial
whose case became a cause célèbre, raising deep issues about the position of the army, and the monarchy, too.

Bertie’s attempt to block the court case was a public relations disaster. He was attacked in the press for plotting a royal cover-up, and Gordon-Cumming was portrayed as a martyr.
³⁵
Bertie worried especially about what his mother would think. “I know that the Queen has been shown every newspaper that attacks me about this affair,” he told Ponsonby.
³⁶
No matter that Victoria scrawled over Ponsonby’s note that she had seen none but the
Strand
and the
Pall Mall Gazette
, which ran a pro-Wales story written by the ubiquitous lawyer George Lewis. “Who tells the Prince of Wales these lies,” she wrote. “Would to God he would listen as little to tales as I do.”
³⁷
Bertie dreaded Victoria’s harsh words, and let it be known that he would refuse to go to Windsor if she intended to speak to him about gambling. The Queen’s friend Monty Corry intervened, imploring the Queen to speak gently to the prince (“He is sensitive and hard words will do harm”) and assuring Ponsonby that baccarat was a thing of the past.
³⁸
Bertie now took up whist. Victoria was well aware that Bertie was “in a dreadful state,” for “he has been dreadfully attacked.”
³⁹
Once she had given him her views about gambling, Knollys and Ponsonby agreed that “there was no use in the subject being pursued any further,” as it “would only irritate him and it might even cause a temporary breach.”
⁴⁰

“The whole thing has caused me the most serious annoyance & vexation,” wrote Bertie.
⁴¹
He canceled his spring trip to the South of France. The veins in his leg flared up; the doctors diagnosed “gouty muscular rheumatism” and once again forbade exercise.
⁴²
He put on weight. When equerry Arthur Somerset saw the forty-nine-year-old prince coming out of the Marlborough Club, he noticed that one side of his beard had gone gray.
⁴³

The management of the case for the defense was entrusted to George Lewis. Wearing a monocle and a fur coat even on hot days, Lewis was the inevitable society lawyer, a man of Mephistophelean cunning who knew all London’s secrets and excelled at keeping disputes out of the courts. “Whatever is going on, not merely before but
behind the footlights, is an open scroll to this astute, terrible, and within certain limits, very nearly omnipotent gentleman.”
⁴⁴
He had advised Bertie over the Mordaunt case in 1870, but it was his “lickerish servility” over the Beresford scandal, when he betrayed his clients, defied professional protocol, and showed Daisy Brooke’s infamous letter to Bertie, that earned him an invitation to Sandringham.
⁴⁵
Partly perhaps because he was Jewish and self-made, Lewis was resented by some members of Bertie’s court, and his handling of the Tranby Croft case was much criticized. Carrington thought he was out of his depth. “His sphere lay in the police courts and he was known in the legal profession for being dishonest and a blackmailer.” Lewis was so ambitious, claimed Carrington, that he refused to settle out of court with Gordon-Cumming: “He cannot resist the splendid advertisement of this miserable baccarat business.”
⁴⁶

The trial began at eleven a.m. on 1 June 1891. By ten thirty, the court was packed. The event was more like a society wedding than a trial. Women in smart summer dresses and fashionable bonnets peered through their opera glasses as Bertie entered the courtroom and positioned himself in a red morocco chair placed at the front of the court, on the left of the judge’s seat. Sitting where he was, and being who he was, he could hardly fail to influence proceedings.

Wearing a black frock coat, arms folded and smiling broadly, the prince listened to the opening speech on behalf of the plaintiff, Gordon-Cumming, by Sir Edward Clarke, solicitor general in the Salisbury government. After a mild and cautious beginning, Clarke, who was feeling his way, examined Gordon-Cumming. His lengthy questions were intended to show that Gordon-Cumming was innocent: He was a man of honor who had been sacrificed to save the courtiers. That evening, Ponsonby found Bertie “rather tired” from six hours in court, but relieved, “saying the case was going strongly against Cumming.” Clarke, Bertie told Ponsonby, “did not speak with any assurance as if he believed in his client’s innocence,” and Cumming’s evidence was “extraordinarily weak.”
⁴⁷

Tuesday, 2 June, was the day appointed for Bertie to give evidence. He betrayed no obvious nerves beforehand, though one of the journalists timed him stroking his beard for seven minutes, and another thought he looked “anxious and worn.”
⁴⁸
Francis Knollys sat directly behind him. In the witness box, Bertie was dignified and noncommittal. Clarke dealt courteously with him, and his answers were brief and given in a hoarse voice with great rapidity. When the lawyers had finished, a man from the jury stood up and asked the two questions the lawyers had not dared to ask but everyone thirsted to know. As banker, had the prince seen any cheating on the part of Gordon-Cumming? No, replied Bertie, and explained that it was not usual for the banker to look for cheating among friends. To the second question, whether at the time he believed the charges against Gordon-Cumming, he replied that he had had no choice but to believe them.
⁴⁹

Sir Charles Russell, the barrister appointed by Lewis, needed to show that Gordon-Cumming was guilty of cheating and that he had thereby wickedly abused the Wilsons’ hospitality. This was not easy, as the Wilsons’ evidence was neither consistent nor convincing. Lycett Green was “deplorable in every way; voice, manner and matter.”
⁵⁰
Under cross-examination he broke down and could remember barely anything, admitting that he had never heard of the system of
masse en avant
that Gordon-Cumming had used—a critical point in Gordon-Cumming’s favor. Knollys thought that Lycett Green “completely lost his head” out of nerves.
⁵¹
Refusing to remember may, however, have been a deliberate ploy on the advice of George Lewis, who considered that Lycett Green’s role at Tranby Croft had been “so unsympathetic that the less he remembered the better.”
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His incoherence was redeemed by his wife, Ethel, an assured witness who looked pretty in black, and on 4 June, Knollys reported to Ponsonby that Lewis had told him that “the general opinion in Court was that Cumming had not a chance.”
⁵³

The sensation came with Sir Edward Clarke’s speech on Monday, 8 June. With the Prince of Wales sitting in court before him, Clarke demolished the Wilsons’ case against Gordon-Cumming. “Nobody except Stanley Wilson saw any foul play except a person who was
expecting to see it.”
⁵⁴
If Gordon-Cumming had intended to cheat he would never have placed his counters on white paper. As Bertie shifted uneasily in his seat, Clarke declared that Lord Coventry and Owen Williams had acted as false friends toward Gordon-Cumming, whom they had thrown over in order to shield the prince. “There is a strong and subtle influence of royalty,” urged Clarke, “a personal influence—which has adorned our history with chivalrous deeds; and has perplexed the historian with unknightly and dishonouring deeds done by men of character, and done by them … to save the interests of a dynasty or to conceal the foibles of a prince. This is what was in the minds of Lord Coventry and General Owen Williams.”
⁵⁵

“HRH is very greatly annoyed,” wrote Knollys that evening. Clarke’s swipes were gratuitous: “without any apparent object [he] brought in the Prince’s name as often and as offensively as possible.”
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Bertie resented Clarke’s “spiteful” attack: Clarke, however, was reported to be “quite unconscious” of having been severe or causing offense.
⁵⁷

Bertie was not in court on 9 June to hear the four-hour summing-up by Lord Coleridge, the Lord Chief Justice, virtually ordering the jury to decide against Gordon-Cumming. The jury retired for only thirteen minutes before returning with a unanimous verdict for the defendants. In court this was greeted with booing and hissing, and the Wilson family were mobbed as they left. Bertie, who was at Ascot, was hooted by the crowd. On the last day, his horse, The Imp, won a race and he received a tremendous ovation, which, he wrote, was “most gratifying especially after the way the Papers have abused and vilified me after the Cumming trial.”
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The toffs remained silent, however, as “dumb as fishes,” prompting Carrington, himself a Liberal, to reflect that “the people and the Liberals are far more loyal supporters of the Crown than ‘Society’ and the Tories—when Royalty is in real difficulty.”
⁵⁹

Clarke’s speech left a bitter taste. Queen Victoria thought it a “fearful humiliation” to see the future king dragged “through the dirt just like anyone else, in a Court of Justice.”
⁶⁰

But that was the point, really. The monarchy was not above the
law. Public opinion considered the verdict unfair, and Gordon-Cumming became a hero. The day after the verdict he was dismissed from the army and married a twenty-two-year-old American heiress, Florence Garner, usually known as Flip. He was received on his return to his native Forres with an address from the provost and “great rejoicings.”

“Such is
Scotch
morality and piety!” commented Bertie.
⁶¹

Bertie, meanwhile, plumbed new depths of unpopularity. Bishops deplored his gambling from the pulpit, the postbag at Marlborough House bulged with angry resolutions from Nonconformist churches denouncing his wickedness, and the press poured a torrent of moralizing upon his head.
⁶²
As
The New York Herald
’s L. J. Jennings wrote to Knollys, “anybody would think that he had broken all the ten commandments at once, and murdered the Archbishop of Canterbury.”
⁶³
The republican
Reynolds’s Newspaper
gloated that royalty was revealed as rotten to the core: Bertie had brought the monarchy to the verge of destruction.
⁶⁴
Queen Victoria worried about the damage, but, as Vicky pointed out, much though she abhorred gambling, the press campaign was hypocritical and exaggerated.
⁶⁵
In the
Pall Mall Gazette
, George Lewis tried to stop the stampede by deploring the double standards that led the press to vilify the nonpolitical Prince of Wales for committing a minor sin while turning a blind eye to adultery by politicians.
⁶⁶
Though gambling was abhorred by Nonconformists and sections of the middle and upper classes, its growing popularity among the working classes meant that Tranby Croft probably did little serious damage to Bertie’s standing.
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