Behind the Palace Doors (29 page)

Gradually King George began to improve, and by April
1789 he was considered cured. A service of Thanksgiving was held at St. Paul’s Cathedral, and all of London seemed to celebrate. The only one who regretted the king’s recovery was his eldest son, George. The Prince of Wales hoped his father would remain mad, a state that would propel the heir to the regency and all the attendant powers of the sovereign. Alas, he would have to wait two more decades for that, drowning in debt all the while.

George III suffered through two more brief episodes of his strange disorder—first in 1801 and again in 1804. Then in 1810, when he was a little over seventy years old, permanent insanity came upon him. For the next decade Britain’s sovereign, beyond all reason and nearly blind, was confined to a set of apartments at Windsor Castle, shambling around with a long white beard. The only indication of the king’s former greatness was the badge of the Star of the Order of the Garter pinned to his chest. George finally found peace in 1820, when he died at age eighty-one.

George III and Queen Charlotte had thirteen children who lived to be adults, among them seven sons, including Ernest, Duke of Cumberland. As the fifth son, Ernest was too far down in the line of succession to rule Britain. Nevertheless, he did inherit the throne of Hanover—his family’s German kingdom—in 1837 (after the deaths of his four older brothers), and ruled there until his own death in 1851. Before assuming the Hanoverian crown, though, the duke was deeply involved in a murder mystery that remains unsolved
.

While most historians believe that it was a hereditary disorder known as porphyria that plunged George III into babbling fits of insanity, the behavior of his large brood of debauched sons no doubt contributed mightily to the king’s unsettled state of mind. The royal dukes were a troublesome lot indeed—“the damnedest millstones about the neck of any government that can be imagined,” the Duke of Wellington said of them. Ernest, Duke of Cumberland, was a particularly loathsome fellow—a tyrannical military officer known to torture his men, and a lecher who reportedly seduced his own sister. He was “at the bottom of all evil,” wrote his niece Princess Charlotte. But was he a murderer? Many of his contemporaries believed so.

Sometime after midnight on May 31, 1810, the duke claimed to have been awakened in his bedchamber at St. James’s Palace by a blow to the head. At first he thought a bat had flown into the room and hit him, but, he later testified, he was then struck several more times with his own sword by an assailant he couldn’t see. Dazed and bloody, he tried to make his way to his valet, Cornelius Neale, who was sleeping in the next room. “Neale!” he shouted. “I am murdered!” After a final thrust, according to the duke, the unknown attacker slipped out of the room and escaped.

It was during a subsequent search of the royal apartments that another of the duke’s valets, a Sardinian named Joseph Sellis, was discovered lying on his bed, his throat slit from ear to ear, with a bloody razor resting nearby. An inquest determined that it was Sellis who had entered the duke’s chamber and attacked him. Then, ruing what he had done, or fearing arrest, he went back to his own room and nearly beheaded himself.

Sellis’s corpse was unceremoniously buried beneath Charing Cross, with a stake reportedly driven through the heart as a symbol of the suicide’s eternal damnation. Meanwhile, tickets were issued to the curious who wished to view the death scene. Sarah Spencer (an ancestor of Princess Diana’s) was appalled: “Can you imagine … that the finest, most delicate ladies in town went in parties to look at those nasty rooms as a morning lounge, and to examine the slops of blood which covered the bed, the floor, and even the walls and pictures, of the scene of this horrible murder and suicide? It was a spectacle which I should think the stoutest heart would hardly bear to look at, and yet these soft beings were able to stand it, out of mere curiosity.”

In the same letter, Sarah also noted the duke’s quick recovery from his wounds and remarked blithely, “Thank Heaven, we shall have no court mourning to keep us in black gowns all the summer.”

Ernest’s convalescence was indeed brief, which may be explained by the superficial nature of his wounds. The royal physician Sir Henry Halford treated them the night Sellis died and immediately reported to King George: “One upon the side of the head above the right ear, which bled profusely but is not dangerous—another on the back of the right hand—a third upon the left—and two or three others of less importance upon various parts of the body.… There is no danger to the Duke of Cumberland’s life.” It was “a most providential escape,” the doctor concluded; a bit
too
providential, others said.

The conclusions of the inquiry into Sellis’s death—that he had killed himself after attacking the duke—did little to end the speculation surrounding the case. Too many questions were left unanswered, one of the most significant being motive.
The News
said it could not discover anything “to induce a man to imbue his hands in the blood of his benefactor and also ruin his own family.” It was strange that a man who had loyally served the duke for over a decade, and even named his son after him (Ernest served as godfather at the child’s christening four months earlier), would suddenly attack him so ferociously.

Sellis’s wife said that her husband had “frequently complained of a giddiness in the head,” and it was the opinion of Colonel Henry Norton Willis, the well-informed comptroller for Princess Charlotte’s household, that Sellis, disturbed in the mind, had been goaded into a fury by Ernest, who, “in his violent, coarse manner,” taunted him.

Cornelius Neale, the duke’s other valet, offered another possible motive at the inquiry. He testified that Sellis was of “a very malicious disposition” and hated Neale. “My opinion is … Sellis meant to murder the duke, thinking that the blame should be put on me.… I have no more doubt he did it to cause me to be suspected than I have of my own existence.”

There was evidence produced at the inquiry that Sellis did indeed have issues with Neale. A letter he wrote to one of the
duke’s bedchamber grooms, Captain Benjamin Stephenson, was read aloud at the hearing. In it, Sellis asked Stephenson to tell the duke “of the roguery of this man.” He then continued, “I have been told, sir, that Mr. Neale cheats His Royal Highness in everything he buys.… This man is as great a villain as ever existed.” This bit of evidence was far from compelling, however, as it forced the conclusion that after documenting his accusations against Neale, Sellis then tried to kill Ernest to prove what a monster Neale was, only to cut his own throat when he was about to be caught.

“Sellis was not his own executioner,”
The Independent Whig
declared, echoing a belief widely shared by many. Rumors about what really happened that fateful night were rampant and dogged the duke for years. Some concluded that Sellis had caught Ernest in a compromising position with Neale and had to be silenced; others said that the valet had rejected the duke’s advances and was killed as a result. And, they posited, Ernest’s wounds were self-inflicted to cover the crime.

Given the duke’s nasty reputation, people were prepared to believe the worst. Nearly twenty years after Sellis’s death, Charles Greville wrote in his journal of “the universal and deep execration” in which Ernest was held, noting, “Sellis’s affair was never cleared up.… Everybody believes there is some mystery of an atrocious character in which he is deeply and criminally implicated.”

Ernest successfully prosecuted several publishers for criminal libel after they alluded to his guilt, but that did little to enhance his standing. Rather, it only “induced multitudes of people to believe the calumnies,” as the foreman of the original inquiry noted in a letter to the duke’s attorney.

A libel trial in 1833 was notable for Ernest’s testimony. He told the jury that he had seventeen wounds, not the five or six the royal physician had reported to King George. He also stated that the wounds were so severe that “I was in a state of agony, I suppose, from six weeks to two months.… It was not,
I believe, till the beginning of August that I was able to leave the house.” Actually, historian John Wardroper has noted, he was out of bed in three days and made his first public appearance less than two weeks later.

At the same trial, the duke’s lawyer addressed for the first time the suspicions that surrounded his client. He denied that Ernest “endeavoured, by inflicting wounds upon himself, to induce the belief that the deceased valet had attempted to assassinate the duke.” That, he declared, would have been “worthy not only of a Machiavel, but of the most wicked of the human race.” Perhaps the lawyer never stopped to consider that that was exactly how many people—including members of his own family—perceived Ernest.

The questions surrounding Sellis’s death remained unresolved long after the duke (who eventually became king of Hanover) died in 1851. Then, in 1899, a significant document, written more than seven decades earlier, was donated to the Royal Library at Windsor. It was the memoir of Ernest’s private secretary, Captain Charles Jones, and it contained some startling revelations. The duke, Jones claimed, actually confessed to killing Sellis.

It was Christmas Eve, 1815, five years after the valet’s death. The Duke of Cumberland was “in a gloomy phrenzy,” Jones wrote, and said that “he believed he had not one sincere friend in the whole world.” After some hours in this agitated state, he supposedly told Jones that he had much on his mind—“more than I can bear. I want to unbosom myself but know not whom to trust.”

Jones tried to calm the duke, writing “that I would freely sacrifice my existence on the spot if it could procure for him the slightest of his wishes, & indeed I felt most perfectly ready & willing to do so, for the state in which I saw H.R.H. [His Royal Highness] gave me the greatest of pain.” But, he added, “had I known what was to follow, no power on earth could have induced me to have heard the dreadful confession.”

After swearing his secretary to secrecy, Ernest at last spoke of the fatal night five years before. “You know how I am treated & you can feel for me more than I deserve,” Jones reported him saying. “You know that miserable business of Sellis’s, that wretch, I was forced to destroy him in self defense, the villain threatened to propagate a report & I had no alternative.” The duke had more to say, but, Jones wrote, “thunderstruck & breathless I could scarcely hear the remaining statement & will therefore not set it down.”

The confession, according to Jones, seemed to have eased Ernest’s conscience. “H.R.H. ever afterwards appeared to me more cheerful,” he wrote, “and to have lost a certain weight which appeared to be hanging on his mind.” But for Jones, the burden of hearing it was shattering. “I have never known peace of mind since,” he reported. “In fact H.R.H. had thrown the black secret of his guilt from his own into my breast. From this time I became gloomy, lost all spirit & energy, was unwilling to meet the duke and invented all sorts of excuses to be absent from his table.”

Despite what he claimed were serious reservations, Jones remained in his master’s service for another five years. Then, when he believed he was dying in 1827, he made out his will and wrote his memoir. “He has laid on me a weight that is pressing me by degrees to the grave,” Jones stated on the opening page. “I find it impossible to quit this life with the secret of a murder upon my conscience.… A thousand contending reflections place me upon the rack. I must destroy the little reputation which remains to a man whom I had devoted my very existence.”

Compelling though it may be, Jones’s memoir does not offer definitive proof of the duke’s culpability in Sellis’s death. Indeed, some historians have dismissed it as a possible misunderstanding of what Cumberland actually said. Therefore, unless more evidence is uncovered, this royal murder mystery remains unsolved.