Authors: Neil McKenna
To all intents and purposes, Fanny and Stella had vanished off the face of the earth. There had been neither sight nor sound of them since they were released on bail in July 1870. The months had gone by and not a squeak, not a whimper, not a whisper had been heard from them or about them. It was, perhaps, too much to hope that they were dead. Too much to hope that they had done the decent thing and died by their own hand. Or that they were dead from natural – or rather,
un
natural – causes, from the foul contagions that their course of life must necessarily have inflicted upon them. Or – vain hope! – that they had died from shame and remorse (though neither of them had yet exhibited the least bit – not a morsel, not a scrap, not a crumb – of these worthy Christian virtues).
If not death, then it was profoundly to be hoped that their disappearance was for good (in every sense of the word), that they had had the sense to flee these islands, never again to return and so disturb and upset the nation’s equanimity. More prosaically and more probably, they had gone to ground and were merely lying low. Even if they wanted to flee, or ‘scarper’ as their slang talk had it, good Inspector Thompson and his team of detectives were no doubt alert to that possibility and would be watching their every move, just as they had watched their every move for a year or more before their arrest.
All that might be said by way of mitigation and by way of compassion was that the families of Boulton and Park had exercised and demonstrated the most Christian charity and forbearance in giving these hunted and cornered beasts shelter and food, though a sound birching and a fatal dose of prussic acid might have been more to the point.
So it had come as a shock and a jolt after all these months to discover that Fanny and Stella and their confederates – eight of them in all – still had a case to answer and were to answer that case in the Court of Queen’s Bench, the highest court in the land, before the highest judge in land, the Lord Chief Justice, and a special jury.
J
ust before ten o’clock Fanny and Stella made their way with some difficulty through the crammed courtroom towards the plain and simple wooden bench where defendants and counsel alike would sit for the duration of the case. Both Fanny and Stella had flowers – ‘a bouquet of flowers’ – in their buttonholes and both were dressed, according to one of the witnesses, ‘somewhat more tastily’ than was quite common with young men.
‘Boulton was scarcely altered in looks since his appearance at Bow Street and, except for the faint shade of a moustache, he might still easily have been taken for a girl in boy’s clothes,’ the
Daily Telegraph
breathlessly reported. ‘Park, on the other hand, has grown stout, and his large whiskers have so altered his face as completely to deprive it of the feminine look which it wore a year ago.’
If Fanny and Stella were nervous, they did not show it. But they were subdued. Indeed, their demeanour was quite different from that bravado, that defiant jocularity which had so characterised – and in the opinion of many, so disfigured – their many appearances at Bow Street a year ago. Now, they had every appearance of being sober, serious and dignified young men. Fanny’s stoutness and luxuriant dark whiskers proclaimed her masculinity, and even Stella had made her nod to maleness with the ‘faint shade of a moustache’ that dear, dull Louis Hurt had begged her, in vain, to grow.
Gone, too, were those ‘campish’ ways of theirs: the constantly darting eyes, the cocked eyebrows, the pursed lips and the theatrically expressive faces. There was no more playing to the gallery. There was no more giggling or flirting or ogling or chirruping. There were no more hissing sibilants; no more contemptuous snorts; no more withering looks; no more tossings of actual or imaginary curls; no more flutterings of eyelashes; no more swishings of metaphorical bombazines. Every detail of Fanny and Stella’s outward appearance in the Court of Queen’s Bench that morning proclaimed them to be elegant, educated and civilised young gentlemen. This transformation, this miraculous migration from vicious effeminacy to virtuous manhood, was the work of one man: their new solicitor, Mr George Lewis.
Mr George Lewis was a very different kettle of fish from the beleaguered Mr Abrams who had single-handedly and with great gallantry acted as the Forlorn Hope of Fanny and Stella’s defence from the moment of their arrest, but who, it had quickly become apparent, was floundering badly in the face of the magnitude and complexity of the charges levelled against them. Mr George Lewis was ferocious and formidable. He was a force to be reckoned with, provoking fear and love in equal measure. He was an implacable prosecutor and a determined defender, and he had a growing reputation as the man to turn to when scandal threatened. The Prince of Wales himself had consulted him when he was named as a lover – as one of several lovers – of Lady Harriet Mordaunt in the sensational action for divorce brought by her husband, Sir Charles Mordaunt. Mr George Lewis had advised His Royal Highness to go into the witness box and had, by all accounts, so perfectly coached him in what to say and how to say it that he was credited with saving not only the Prince’s tattered reputation, but also the institution of the Monarchy itself.
Mr George Lewis was a different sort of a solicitor from the commonality of solicitors. More of a general: a Marlborough or a Wellington or a Napoleon. He was obsessed with each and every detail of a case. Nothing, however small, however insignificant, escaped his notice, and yet he always kept his eye on the great game. He would tell his clients what to wear, what to say, how to act – in court and outside court. His clients were his puppets, they were putty in his extraordinary hands.
In person, Mr George Lewis was quiet, polite, unassuming. Indeed, most of those present in Westminster Hall for Fanny and Stella’s trial hardly noticed this young-looking, slightly built man, prematurely grey and with abundant Dundreary whiskers who accompanied them into court. He looked like a clerk and he liked it that way. He did not want to stand out from the crowd. He liked to be unobtrusive and self-effacing. He liked to beaver away behind the scenes, delving and digging, dissecting and directing.
Mr George Lewis was nothing if not rigorous. Rigour was the beginning, the middle and the end of his work as a solicitor. He left nothing to chance. He would devour depositions and scour witness statements looking for errors, anomalies, contradictions. And he made sure that he read everything himself. Indeed, shortly after taking on the case of the Young Men in Women’s Clothes, he had presented himself at Mr Pollard’s office at the Treasury and insisted on reading through each and every deposition and document, each and every letter and note and report connected with the case.
Mr George Lewis wanted to find out everything there was to know, and more besides. His methods were said to be as unorthodox as they were audacious. He had an extensive and unrivalled network of informants – ‘a spider’s web of narks and spies’, as one disgruntled observer put it – which he would use to devastating effect in turning up new evidence that the police would never have found in a month of Sundays. He revelled in theatrical flourishes, producing surprise new witnesses, like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat.
Mr George Lewis disliked injustice in any shape or form. The case of Boulton and Park, friendless, despised and beleaguered, and with all the apparatus and power of a merciless State ranged against them, may have touched a chord of sympathy and compassion within him and prompted him to offer his services. That and the fact that the case was widely regarded not just as unwinnable, but also as toxic, a case that would infect and poison all those who had dealings with it. Whatever the reason, now that he had taken the case, Mr George Lewis let it be known to one and all that he would fight for Fanny and Stella with every fibre of his being. He would fight and he would win.
Of the eight men whose names were listed in the Indictment, only four were present in court. Lord Arthur Clinton was dead and buried, supposedly of scarlet fever, but there were many who thought he was merely playing dead, that he was comfortably ensconced abroad, cocking a snook at the police and at the public morals. Three of the defendants, Martin Luther Cumming (the Comical Countess), William Somerville and Cecil ‘Sissy’ Thomas, had never been interviewed, let alone apprehended, and were to be tried in their absence. That left just four defendants who were there in the flesh: Ernest Boulton, Frederick Park, Louis Hurt and John Safford Fiske.
Many if not most of those who had managed to push and squeeze themselves into the small courtroom found themselves not a little baffled and bewildered by the charges. It appeared that none of the defendants were charged with
actual
acts of buggery or sodomy, nor even with acts falling short of buggery or sodomy. No, they were charged with ‘conspiracy to solicit, induce, procure and endeavour to persuade persons unknown to commit buggery’. It struck many present that morning, from the highest to the lowest, that such a charge was somehow incomplete and rather lopsided. Was it really possible to convict persons for the thought but not for the deed? It was like bread without butter, cakes without ale, pie without mash. How could you prove the intention without the act? And where would it all end? If minds were now to be read, if private thoughts and whims and wishes and fancies were now constituted crimes, who then was safe from the long arm of the law?
Fanny and Stella (and the absent Comical Countess) were also charged with a second offence: that they ‘unlawfully and wickedly did conspire, confederate, combine’ to ‘openly and publicly pretend and hold themselves out and appear to be women and thereby to inveigle, induce and incite divers of the male subjects of Her Majesty improperly, lewdly and indecently to fondle and toy with them as women and thereby openly and scandalously to outrage public decency and to offend against public morals’.
(Not that anyone could ever have been fooled – even for a moment – by the Comical Countess. Miss Martin Luther Cumming might publicly pretend and hold herself out to be a woman until she was blue in the face, but, in her case, wishes were emphatically not kisses. She was and would always be a clownish and clowning fat young man, blowsily and badly dressed as a woman, an object of fascination, repulsion, ridicule and – strangely – sometimes pity.)
Here again, some of those present in Westminster Hall had the unworthy thought that when all was said and done, this second charge of conspiracy and confederation amounted to not much more than dressing up in drag and flirting with gentlemen.
Not to put too fine a point on it, the case against the four young men was all at sea. Everything was upside-down and inside-out and back-to-front. The judicial cart was being put before the horse. Instead of being tried for the crimes they had committed, these four young men were on trial for crimes they had yet to commit, for crimes they might have thought about, or talked about, or imagined for a moment in their mind’s eye – or not, as the case may be. No wonder that some were reminded of nothing so much as the strange topsy-turvy trial of the Knave of Hearts for stealing the tarts in Mr Lewis Carroll’s curious and entertaining book,
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
.
A
ll the might and main of the great Ship of State had been brought to bear upon the Young Men in Women’s Clothes. Every cannon had been primed and loaded and trained and targeted upon Fanny and Stella, ready to fire a deadly broadside. The Attorney-General himself was to lead the charge, which was a rare and notable occurrence, usually reserved for only the gravest of grave cases, for the most serious of seditioners and for the highest of high treasoners. And even then, it had been many a long year – long beyond the memory of most there that day – since the Attorney-General had stripped down to his long drawers and stepped into the ring for a bare-knuckle, bloody fight, ably seconded by the Solicitor-General brandishing a sponge soaked in vinegar. And it had been centuries, quite literally, since an Attorney-General had personally prosecuted a case of sodomy – two hundred and forty years, almost to the day, in fact, since Sir Robert Heath, Attorney-General to Charles I, had stood up in Westminster Hall to denounce the Earl of Castlehaven for multiple acts of sodomy with his servants.
Defending Fanny and Stella (and Louis Hurt and John Safford Fiske, who might just as well have been numbered among the absentee and absconded defendants for all the notice anyone took of them) was the flower of the British Bar, if that was not too great a stretch of the imagination to describe the half-dozen or so overstuffed, barrel-chested, bewhiskered and bewigged barristers who formed the thin red line bravely holding back the massed and powerful armies of an outraged Britannia.
Any prosecuting counsel worth his salt (and the Attorney-General was generally allowed to be well worth his salt) knew only too well that his opening address to the jury could make or break the case. A good opening speech was half the battle won, it was the first and most deadly salvo, ripping through the defence with devastating accuracy. A clever prosecutor was like a skilled general, carefully choosing his ground, exploiting the topography and marshalling his forces to maximum advantage. Indeed, a clever prosecutor could often outwit his adversary and win his case by the brilliance and vigour of his opening address.
But today, as he stood up to deliver his opening speech, it was clear that the Attorney-General was not his usual self. He was not comfortable, he was not confident and he was not easy. It was plain to all that Sir Robert Collier would rather be anywhere than in the Court of Queen’s Bench in Westminster Hall leading the prosecution in a trial about which he clearly had his doubts. For all the rhetorical flourishes and folderols of his opening address, it was evident that his heart was not really in it. His speech was weak and colourless, the thinnest of thin gruel, insubstantial to the point of incorporeality. It was not so much what Sir Robert said, or even the way he said it, it was simply that he lacked conviction. And, because he lacked conviction, his words fell on stony ground.