July 29, 1861 --- Death of a Bankrupt Duke

Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, 2d Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, who single-handedly squandered most all of a huge family fortune, dies alone in the inelegant surroundings of a railway hotel. He was 64.

Massive real estate purchases - using primarily borrowed money - and prodigious spending habits led to his ruin. The Duke's entertainments had been legendary. On her last visit to the Duke's magnificent Buckinghamshire seat at Stowe in 1845, Queen Victoria was offended by the extravagance: "I am sure I have no such splendid apartments in either of my palaces." Two years later, His Grace fled to the continent, escaping debts of some £1.8 million. The collapse was total.

Bailiffs held a 40-day auction at Stowe in 1848. Holbein portraits, Sevres china, everything went, "to be sold in shops, to glitter in the public rooms of hotels, or decorate the mansions of self-made men." Stowe was abandoned; its "fish ponds choking up, its lawns unshorn, its walks unkept." Sir Charles Greville paid a visit and thought it "altogether a painful monument of human vanity, folly, and, it may be added, wickedness, for wicked it is thus to ruin a great House and wife and children."

Buckingham's wife, daughter of the Marquess of Breadalbane, whose own fortune was drained dry, had left him. From exile, the Duke inquired as to the possibility of being named Viceroy in India. Prime Minister Derby demurred, noting privately that the Duke's "character and habits of life would render his appointment to high office discreditable to any Government." His only son - forced to become a "man of business" - rose to the post of Chairman of the Great Western Railway and found a room for his profligate pater in the company hotel at Paddington Station.  "From the splendor of a prince the unfortunate Duke descended to the grade of a lodger." At his death, there is little sympathy; i.e. The Times: "[He] flung away all by extravagance and folly, and reduced his honor to the tinsel of a pauper and the baubles of a fool."

His son assumed the title. While he was able to settle the remaining family debts, he died without issue, bringing the Dukedom to an end.

A sketch of the Duke, still flush, in 1845 from the Illustrated London News

July 28,1854 --- An Irish Romance

John Carden, Deputy-Lieutenant of County Tipperary, stands trial for a foiled plot to abduct a wealthy young heiress for his bride.

Nothing else was talked of across Ireland, nor in much of England. Such crimes, once common in the untamed West country, are now rare. Miss Eleanor Arbuthnot, her fortune put at £30,000, was staying with the Goughs, her relatives in Clonmel. Carden, a man of fearsome local reputation, had approached Mr. Gough to request permission to present himself as a suitor but he was "rejected with indignation."

On 2 July, few noticed when Carden left early from Sunday services at Rathronan Church. He had to set his trap. As Eleanor and her sisters returned to Gough House, Carden and several ruffians ambushed their carriage. A frantic melee ensued; Carden's men were armed with "skull-crackers" while the Gough servants fought back with stones, one well-aimed rock hit the amorous Carden in the throat. He was also kicked in the chest by his would-be bride and his nose was broken by another young miss. He fled, leading his pursuers on a 20-mile chase which ended when his mare dropped dead.

The Attorney-General, who came down from Dublin to head the prosecution, tells the jury that Miss Arbuthnot avoided a "fate which no one can contemplate without horror." In Carden's carriage, police found a vial of chloroform (Sensation in court!). In her tearful testimony, the 20-year old maiden insists that at no time had she ever encouraged Mr. Carden's attentions. During Miss Arbuthnot's testimony, heard with "unmingled admiration", Carden sits with his hands over his still bandaged face, sobbing. Carden's lawyer admits an "outrage of a deep and aggravated kind" had been contemplated, but not accomplished. The jury agrees, finding Carden not guilty of "abduction with intent to ravish."  He does receive two years hard labor for "attempted" abduction and a lecture for his "pre-eminent audacity and turpitude."

The lighter sentence drew cheers, especially from the many Irish ladies in the courtroom. The Cork Examiner notes a strong pro-Carden feeling; Miss Arbuthnot is an outsider, after all, a "fair Saxon" (an Englishwoman) and "only the daughter of an Army clothier." A crowd of "Amazons" outside the courthouse gave three cheers for "the Carden of Bardane," expressing regrets that "such a fine man should be put away for the like of her."

According to Arbuthnot family lore, "During the years after his release from prison, Carden systematically followed Eleanor, often appearing unexpectedly in neighbourhoods where she was staying."

July 27, 1853 --- London's 1st Cab Strike

At midnight, London's cabmen head for home. The strike is on.  The Times reports that "never since the days of Charles II, when hackney carriages were first invented, have the sightseeing and outgoing public been reduced to such an extremity of helplessness."

The strikers are angry over a new law which, among other things, set fares at sixpence a mile, down from 8p. The law was prompted by the countless complaints of fare-gouging from the public during the Great Exhibition of 1851. Fare disputes will also now be immediately referred to the nearest police court. Within days of the new law, a cabman was hauled off to jail when he could not pay a five shilling fine.

The strike plunges London into chaos. The scene at the city's many railroad termini is particularly confusing. Hundreds of travelers, caught unawares, find their luggage piled at kerbside. The coarse, jocular remarks of the idle cabmen only add to the discomfiture of the stranded. The omnibuses still run - although the profiteering operators hike fares 25% - but Londoners "of quality" eschew such declasse transit and take to the pavement. An eyewitness wrote, "Several instances of ladies in high degree in a state of comparative exhaustion were observed." The Times demands that the strike be met with "firm resistance." The Illustrated London News finds the absence of the cabs quite tolerable: "No longer having public stables in their midst, the great highways of the metropolis ceased to be offensive to the eyes and to the noses of the public."

By the second day, while the cabmen remained parked, there suddenly appeared all manner of conveyance. The cartoon here is from Punch and shows a man in evening dress off to the theatre in a wheelbarrow! The government held firm to the sixpence, while agreeing to discuss side issues such as "back fares" on those occasions when a driver was taken far from the central city.

By day three, it was obvious that the strike had failed. Restive drivers, with no income, could not remain parked forever. On Monday morning, London's streets were back to normal and so were the cabs, "All went on as before - neither less extortionate, nor more civil, nor more clean."

July 26, 1865 --- The Rode Murder

The Queen is "pleased" to respite the death sentence imposed on 21 year old Constance Kent, sentencing her instead to life in prison. Thus, the sensational five-year old mystery of "Rode Hill House" is finally brought to a close.

In a Devizes courtroom, Constance had come forward a few days earlier to answer "Guilty" in a clam, barely audible voice, to the charge of killing her half-brother. Constance is the daughter of Samuel Kent, a rather loutish factory inspector who first seduced and - upon the death of his wife - then married Constance's governess. Settling in the Somerset village of Rode, Kent and his new wife soon had a son of their own. Constance was never happy in Rode Hill House and ran away at least once.

Late one night in June, 1860, 4-year old Francis was found slain in the privy; his throat horribly slashed. While baffled magistrates could only blame "person or persons unknown," many villagers suspected the unpopular Mr. Kent. Enter finally Scotland Yard's first "super-sleuth" Inspector Whilcher. He shocked everyone by quickly arresting Constance, his theory was that she killed the boy out of jealousy.  The police searched everywhere for Constance's missing nightdress (with telltale bloodstains?).  Constance explained that the garment must have been "lost in the wash." The dress was never found and the grand jury refused to indict. Whilcher became so obsessed with the case he was forced to resign.

The Kents moved to Wales but without Constance who entered a convent. The case languished until a Brighton curate came forward with Constance in tow to confess. In her written statement, Constance recalled how she "thought the blood would never come" as she drew the razor across the neck of the sleeping child. Admitting her guilt, she sat silently (The Daily Telegraph remarked on her "expression of dull stupidness") as she was sentenced to hang. The respite is not generally accepted; The Saturday Review  rejected any hint of insanity: "She was not mad; only pre-eminently wicked, crafty, unfeeling, treacherous, vile, deceitful and hard-hearted beyond almost all human experience."

However, the mystery being finally solved, few wanted the gallows for such a young woman. She was to spend the next twenty years in various of Her Majesty's prisons. Released from Portland Prison in 1885, she vanished, leaving behind several "much admired" mosaics in the chapel.

July 25, 1865 --- The General was a Lady

The retired Inspector-General of the Army Medical Department, Dr. James Miranda Barry dies at home in London. Notification of Barry's death is sent immediately to Army headquarters at the Horse Guards along with the incredible news that the doctor was a woman.

The news is quickly hushed up; a fellow medical officer declared: "There can be no doubt among those who knew him that his real physical condition was that of a male in whom sexual development had been arrested about the sixth month of fetal life." 70-years old at her death, Dr. Barry had concealed her gender upon enlistment in 1813, rising to Surgeon Major by 1827, and became Inspector-General in 1858, succeeding Florence Nightingale's nemesis, Sir John Hall. Yet, the sainted but quite prickly Miss Nightingale also had her run-ins with Gen. Barry. When later informed of the General's gender, Florence declared, "I should say she was the most hardened creature I ever met throughout the Army."

There had been rumors and speculation for years. Lord Albemarle, who met her while she was serving in Capetown, recalled her thusly: "In appearance a beardless lad with—reddish hair and high cheekbones. There was a certain effeminacy in his manner which he was always striving to overcome. His style of conversation was greatly superior to that one usually heard at a mess-table in those days."

Barry's rise through the medical corps was delayed several times due to repeated breaches of discipline; she fought at least one duel and was ordered home to London under arrest on more than one occasion. The truth remains a mystery; The Dictionary of National Biography suggests she was the granddaughter of a Scottish earl adding, "The motive of her singular conduct is stated to have been love for an army surgeon." Even the servant woman who had been with her for years was shocked to learn her master had been her mistress all along.

The General has become a latter-day heroine for feminists; "So far ahead of her time that, to achieve her purpose, she renounced her sex." In 2009, it was announced that a movie based on her life was to be made starring Natascha McElhone.

July 24, 1837 --- Poor Mr. Cocking

Several thousand people are looking on as Robert Cocking, a 61-year old painter and amateur aeronaut, lifts off from London's Vauxhall Gardens to test his homemade parachute. He and his contraption are suspended beneath the giant Nassau balloon. The parachute is described as being "not very unlike an umbrella turned upside down," an inverted cone with a wicker basket attached for Mr. Cocking. The frame, 107' in circumference, is made of tin and it is covered in the finest Irish linen. Cocking's theories had "engrossed very nearly all his attention" for years.

As the great balloon rises, his plan is to get up to at least 8000 feet before releasing himself. However, the weight of his apparatus slows the balloon's ascent. The balloonists, Spencer and Green, jettison much of their ballast in a bid to rise higher. The balloon drifts over South London where it vanishes into a bank of clouds making it unsafe to drop any more ballast for fear of what's below. Finally, over Greenwich and only a mile up, the balloonists advise Cocking they can get no higher. From his basket, Cocking yells, "Well, now I think I shall leave you. Good night, Spencer. Good night, Green." With that, he severs the tether.

The balloon, freed of the weight, shot up like a skyrocket. Sadly, Cocking goes the other direction at much the same pace. In Norwood, a man described the chute's descent as like a stone through a vacuum. With a tremendous crash, Cocking's basket and chute slam into the ground at a farm near Lee. A shepherd is first to reach him. Cocking has been spilled from the basket, his head badly cut, his wig tossed some distance away. A few groans are the only brief sign of life. Carried by cart to the Tiger's Head Inn, Cocking soon died of his injuries.

At the inquest, Mr. Gye -the operator at Vauxhall - said Cocking had been extremely confident in his machine and "exhibited no apparent want of nerve." A Professor Airey testified that the chute was "insufficient to support the individual within the limits of velocity required by nature for the preservation of life." The coroner's jury placed no blame, ruling that Cocking's death could be attributed to "misfortune."

The only criticism was directed at the innkeeper who had charged sixpence to see the mangled body; the coroner found the publican's ghoulish scheme "deserving of peculiar censure and deprecation."

Mr. Cocking's parachute (courtesy of ssplprints.com)

July 22, 1869 --- A Horse-Whipping in Clubland

Lord Charles Carrington (left) is convicted of assault, having horse-whipped Eustace Grenville-Murray on the steps of the Conservative Club.

Grenville-Murray is an illegitimate son of the bankrupt Duke of Buckingham, and edits a satirical journal called The Queen's Messenger.  In which publication, he had recently attacked the Carrington family. They were labeled, "Nottinghamshire nobodies... bargaining bumpkins with a peddler's nature," whose "purchased" peerage is a "very shocking outrage."

Having thrashed the author, Carrington stood over him in the street and shouted, "You may feel yourself disgraced." The fashionable world reveled in "a row of the 18th Century kind." At Carrington's arraignment, a courtroom brawl erupted between partisans of the original combatants. The magistrate fled and The Spectator looked on disapprovingly, "Such a failure of dignity has rarely, if ever, been witnessed in an English court." Even the muck-raking weekly Tomahawk dismissed the raucous proceedings as a "bear-garden."

As the trial. finally opens, Grenville-Murray is portrayed by his attorney as the victim of a "cowardly and dastardly attack." On the stand, Grenville-Murray glibly denies authorship of the offending piece, noting however that it is "very well-written." Carrington's attorney says the young Lord had acted only as any "high-minded, honorable and gallant young gentleman" would have done. The jury, of course, could not but convict him, adding however that the assault had been "committed under the circumstances of the strongest provocation." The judge sets the fine at only £100, condemning the Queen's Messenger as a publication which "must excite in the breasts of every well-minded person the utmost abhorrence."

With a perjury charge almost certain, Greville-Murray opted to flee to France where he continued to use his pen to skewer aristocratic pretensions. In absentia, he was booted out of the Conservative Club; the membership committee declared: "A man who connects himself with scurrilous journalism must not
expect to be considered a fit companion for gentlemen."

Lord Carrington, whip-in-hand, from Vanity Fair, 1874.