Black Diamonds (5 page)

Maud showed the letter to Billy; wary of sending money directly to Hannah, he wrote a short note to Mr Barker: ‘Lady Fitzwilliam has received the enclosed from Mrs Boyce, I have not allowed her to send anything as I thought it safe to leave that matter in your hands. Will you send £5 or £10 on my behalf.’

Quite why Billy ‘thought it safe’ to leave the transaction to Mr Barker is unclear. Perhaps it was because he doubted the credibility of her original statement, and did not want to be seen to be paying her, as if she were a bought witness.

One further inference remains to be drawn from Billy’s documents.

On 10 March 1902, Thomas Bayliss, the solicitor and special investigator hired by Billy between 1896 and 1900, appeared before the Lord Chief Justice at the Royal Courts of Justice in London, charged with professional misconduct. Billy, who three weeks earlier had succeeded to his grandfather’s title and fortune, had instigated proceedings to have Bayliss struck off the rolls.

There had been a serious falling-out
between the peer and his private detective. On the face of it, the dispute appears to have been about money. Billy accused Bayliss of embezzling £1,500, claiming he had submitted ‘fictitious’ invoices to account for the stolen money. Bayliss argued that the invoices, far from being fabricated, represented his charges for the special investigation into Billy’s legitimacy, conducted over a period of four years.

The judge ruled that Bayliss had submitted a ‘fictitious claim’ for his work. Bayliss lost the case; he was found guilty of serious professional misconduct and struck off the rolls. The assumption, from the published court report, and the verdict in the case, is that Bayliss was corrupt; more crucially, the implication in the judge’s ruling was that the ‘strange allegations as to Earl Fitzwilliam’s identity’, as one newspaper referred to the case, were a figment of Bayliss’s imagination.

Bayliss may have been guilty of some form of embezzlement, but Billy’s documents show that what he said in court was true. He had investigated Billy’s legitimacy, and he had played an important part in procuring the evidence necessary to rebut the impostor charge: moreover, a letter from Johnson and Long shows that in 1900, Bayliss was the lawyer responsible for coordinating Billy’s defence in anticipation of a legal challenge by the Fitzwilliam family. Bayliss had, as he claimed in court, submitted a detailed brief to Billy’s barrister, Mr Butcher. Writing in November 1900, Billy’s solicitor attached a note to the brief: ‘In lieu of the questions submitted by Mr Bayliss’s case, Counsel is requested to advise Lord Milton what steps he should take in order to guard against any attack such as is suggested on the part of certain members of his family.’ Intriguingly, neither Bayliss’s brief nor Mr Butcher’s response has survived among Billy’s collection of documents; they have been pruned. The supposition has to be that both documents contained negative information, possibly details of the evidence on which Lady Alice’s allegation was based.

Oddly, the £1,500 pounds at issue (the equivalent of around £105,000 today) was money that Billy had already made available to Bayliss. It is unlikely that he would have advanced such a large sum had he not been anticipating a costly and difficult investigation, involving inquiries abroad. Though a sizeable figure, it was not a huge amount to a man who had recently inherited £2.8 million, or £3.3 billion at today’s values; so why would Billy want to quibble, and so publicly, over what for him was a relatively small sum?

It seems that Bayliss possessed information that Billy wanted to suppress; a breach of confidence, or the fear of it, was what drove him to bring the case.

The two men had parted company at the end of 1900. Shortly after, Billy served a Writ of Attachment on the solicitor to recover the £1,500 he claimed he owed him. Bayliss responded angrily; an extract from the letter he sent to Billy was read out during his trial:

You cannot be surprised
that I intend to hit out hard. By your underhand shuffling I consider you have forfeited all claims to the confidence about your affairs that I scrupulously observed. I have been interviewed by a representative of the Press to whom I have given information of your dealings with me.

The precise nature of Billy’s ‘underhand shuffling’ was not specified in court. Nor did anything ever appear in the Press. What is clear, though, is that Billy, after receiving the solicitor’s threatening letter, wanted to silence him – and for good. If it had been simply a matter of money, he could have pursued the debt recovery action via the Writ of Attachment. Instead, he chose to lodge a complaint with the Law Society, the solicitors’ governing body. To seek to have Bayliss struck off the solicitors’ rolls was a more vitriolic way to proceed; if successful, it ensured censure and humiliation, and an end to Bayliss’s legal career.

Yet Bayliss was nearing seventy: in 1902, his career was almost over. It seems that Billy’s true aim in discrediting his professional integrity was to destroy the credibility of the information his solicitor had threatened to reveal.

Billy’s documents cannot be regarded as conclusive. In offering a resolution to the mystery of his identity, they raise more questions than they answer. That the heir to one of Victorian England’s greatest industrial fortunes was born in a wooden shack in an Indian camp, miles from anywhere, in a region plagued by mosquitoes and black flies is in itself mysterious.

As vouched for
by his sister, Lady Mabel Smith, Billy had a ‘perfect horror of publicity’: an obsession with secrecy, as she remembered, had been one of his chief characteristics from childhood. But why, from such an early age, had he been so secretive? Was it because he knew he was not his father’s son? Or was there something else he wanted to hide?

Billy’s documents point to his father, William, Viscount Milton. He, if Lady Alice is to be believed, was the guilty party; a man so desperate to produce a son and heir that he was prepared to abandon his newborn baby daughter and replace her with Billy.

4

William, Viscount Milton, the eldest son of William, the 6th Earl Fitzwilliam, was born in July 1839. He died just thirty-eight years later. It was beginning to look as if the family was cursed: he was the second of three successive heirs to die before reaching the age of forty.

In William’s case, the Fitzwilliams were doubly cursed. His death, in 1877, came as a relief.

‘
One of the hard lessons
one has to learn, one which I fear I have been rebellious about, is to trust one’s children cheerfully to God when they suffer,’ wrote his mother, Harriet, Countess Fitzwilliam, on the afternoon he died. ‘I have been a long time learning it – but I hope I know it now. I call to mind so often now the time when my dear William seemed to stand very near to death as a little boy – how I prayed for his life to be spared! And could not say “Thy Will Be Done” and now I remember how much sooner he might perhaps have been with his God had I been more submissive, how much suffering he and others might have been spared and now I do most earnestly hope that his sufferings may not have been in vain and that we may all learn all that God in His mercy designed us to learn from it.’

To the British public, in the course of his short life, William Milton became a hero – one of the most famous and fêted of the nineteenth-century explorers. At the age of twenty-four, after an epic and hazardous journey across the Rocky Mountains, he discovered a land route that linked the Atlantic to the Pacific. On his return to England in 1864 he received a rapturous response from the Press. ‘Lord Milton is something better than a Lord; he has proved himself to be a fine, heroic young man, of true English pluck and daring,’ wrote
The Ilustrated Times
. ‘Lord Milton,’ the panegyric continued, ‘is no shiftless Lord Dundreary, neither is he a mere pleasure-hunter, but a genuine Englishman – a splinter off the old Hartz rock – brave, tough, wise, energetic.’ Milton’s book,
The North-West Passage by Land
, an account of his journey published in 1865, ran into five editions in eight months and was still in print at the end of the century.

Yet he was no hero to the family. After his death, his name was taboo.

‘
My grandfather never spoke about his father
,’ recalls Billy’s granddaughter, Lady Barbara Ricardo. ‘We never knew anything about him. Were never told anything. Never knew about the book he wrote of his great adventures in Canada. There wasn’t even a copy of it in the library at Wentworth. There were tens of thousands of books there – not one single copy!’

More than a century after Milton’s death, his great-grandson, Michael Bond, set out to retrace his journey across North America and Canada. ‘I couldn’t believe there was so little to go on. It was like trying to build an ancient invertebrate from its trace fossils. He has all but been blanked from the family records. Remarkably for the heir to an Earldom, even his will has disappeared.’

Bond had touched the edge of the void in the family archives; it is from the mid-nineteenth century, around the time of Milton’s birth, that the destruction of the Fitzwilliam papers begins. ‘I imagined that the family would have been proud of its explorer son,’ Bond wrote. ‘So where were the biographies, the photograph albums, the archived letters, the gilt-framed portraits and the relics of the Wild West?’

Was he an embarrassment, Bond wondered. Had he done something inexcusable? Searching through the family archives, at the bottom of one meagre file containing rough drafts of Milton’s speeches, a few scraps of letters, and some notes from his secretary, Bond made a significant discovery, one that accounts for the mystery surrounding Milton’s life and explains why his name was taboo. ‘I found a small bundle of papers that would transform the way I looked at Milton,’ he wrote. ‘At first they resembled unpaid bills: lists of products and a signature, some numbers, his name at the top. But they turned out to be prescriptions for medicines, and not for the common cold: opium, lavender oil, belladonna, orange rind, chloral hydrate, strychnine, potassium bromide. Such sedatives and stimulants were common remedies at that time for epilepsy.’

The bad blood of a man who appeared to be among the most blessed in mid-Victorian England gives the impostor affair a fresh twist.

‘
Fits are treated as madness
and madness constitutes a right as it were to treat people as vermin,’ Lord Shaftesbury, whose son, Maurice, was an epileptic, remarked in 1851.

In the mid-nineteenth century, epilepsy was tragically misunderstood. Doctors diagnosed it as a form of madness: there was no cure for it, and no understanding of what caused it. Deriving from the Greek word
epilepsis
, meaning ‘a taking hold of’, a state of being seized by some power of a mysterious nature, even its name supported the belief that it had some supernatural cause.

A terrifying and stigmatizing mythology had formed around the disease, still lodged in the popular consciousness centuries after it had been created. Islamic lore attributed epileptic fits to the blow of a ghost; in the Ottoman Empire, they were said to betray an illicit sexual love affair, brought on by a jealous spirit’s attempt to choke the guilty party. But in mid-Victorian England, to devout Christians like Earl Fitzwilliam, it was the verdict of the Bible that was the most damning. When Christ healed a child suffering convulsions, the episode was represented as the casting out of a demon: ‘a spirit taketh him and he suddenly crieth out; and it teareth him that he foameth again’ (Luke 9:39).

Over the centuries, the treatment for epilepsy had been as barbarous as the views attributed to its cause. In the first century, at the Colosseum in Rome, epileptics waited to drink the blood of mutilated gladiators: ‘They think it most valuable to sip the blood, still warm, still flowing, from the wounded themselves and thus to imbibe the breath of life immediately from the fresh opening,’ Pliny recorded. In later centuries, various body parts were prescribed to treat the disease: the sixteenth-century Parisian physician Jean Fernel recommended a mixture of mistletoe, powdered human skull and peony seeds gathered when the moon was waning. When Milton was growing up, miners in the pit villages around Wentworth used an old folk remedy to treat epileptic fits: a dried calf’s tongue was tied with a piece of string and placed around the afflicted person’s neck.

The ingredients of Milton’s prescriptions and the few letters that survive from his doctors indicate that he was sent to the top medical specialists of the day. From the onset of his illness, his parents spared no expense in the search for a cure for their eldest son and heir. Milton was treated by Sir Alexander Morrison, a prominent Edinburgh physician, and a disciple of a group of French doctors, based at the notorious Paris lunatic asylum, Salpêtrière. Though widely regarded as the leading experts of their day, their views were almost as malevolent as the Ancients’, serving only to heighten the stigma and shame attached to the illness.
Dr Beau, who conducted a study of sixty-seven epileptics
at the Salpêtrière asylum in 1833, concluded that his patients’ epilepsy had been caused by sorrow, morbid terror and masturbation. Dr Beau’s findings were replicated in further experiments conducted by other experts during the 1830s and 1840s. Even as late as the 1880s, the British neurologist Sir William Gowers was still attributing epilepsy to excessive masturbation.

Demons, self-abuse, fear; it was hardly surprising the Fitzwilliams themselves took fright.

During much of Milton’s childhood, their solution, which was typical of their class, was to keep him out of sight. Like other wealthy ‘lunatics’, he was exiled from his family from an early age, funnelled into the shadowy network of ‘madhouses’ that offered a cloak of secrecy: the private asylums and single-lodging establishments, both at home and abroad, that had proliferated in the first half of the nineteenth century.

His fits began before he was eleven years old. In 1850, Milton’s father sent a letter to his father, the 5th Earl, from the Fitzwilliams’ estate in Ireland.