The Prince’s lover, a game of cards and a courtroom scandal that destroyed a Scots playboy
AMONG the many acquaintances made by Scottish aristocrat Sir William Gordon-Cumming by the age of 42, he supposed he had perhaps 20 true friends. And few of them depended on him more than the Prince of Wales.
It was, after all, to the Moray landowner’s London pad that the heir to the throne stole away for trysts with mistresses, knowing that his chum’s discretion could be guaranteed.
And yet, in his hour of need, the prince coldly cut him off and the Scot became a pariah. Not one of those 20 friends, he once reflected bleakly, had ever spoken to him again.
Were this a tale of modern Royals it would shake the House of Windsor to its foundations. Fortunately, then, the Prince of Wales in question is not Charles but Bertie, eldest son of Queen Victoria and, after her death, King Edward VII.
Nevertheless, this concerns the current heir. For the man his royal ancestor treated so shabbily was the owner of the Gordonstoun estate – which Prince Charles remembers with a shudder as the place where he spent several miserable years at school.
Is it too fantastic to wonder if he suffered there for the sins of his great-great grandfather? A new book, Royal Betrayal: The Great Baccarat Scandal of 1890 by Michael Scott lays those sins bare, revealing how the prince’s friendship with one of the most colourful characters of Victorian high society was sacrificed on the altar of expediency and jealousy.
Not that the dashing Scot comes out of the tale with much credit either. A swashbuckling army officer turned big game hunter, he once wrote of maiming an elephant, then amusing himself by firing from point blank range ‘several bullets at different parts of his enormous skull’.
Eton-educated, he was chief of Clan Cumming and owner of vast tracts of Moray by 18 and, by 20, had paid to be made an officer in the Scots Fusilier Guards. He was arrogant, an incorrigible womaniser and was famously described as ‘possibly the most handsome man in London and certainly the rudest’.
The one thing GordonCumming went to the grave insisting he was not, however, was a cheat at cards. Yet two drink-fuelled nights of baccarat at the Yorkshire mansion of a shipping family in the company of his old friend the Prince of Wales came to define the Scotsman’s life.
They led to a sensational court trial at which – to the horror of the Queen – her son was forced to appear and give evidence. And that led to a shock verdict and the banishment of Gordon-Cumming into the social wilderness.
ONE newspaper wrote, following the jury’s unfathomable decision, that he was condemned to ‘social extinction. His brilliant record is wiped out and he must, so to speak, begin life again. Society can know him no more.’
And all – it now seems – because the Prince of Wales would not lift a finger to help him. Why, then, had he turned his back on his friend? The answer to that may have little to do with the card game at Tranby Croft in Yorkshire where the prince witnessed no cheating. More likely, he was guided by what he had witnessed two days earlier.
The prince had returned to London early after travelling in Europe and had appeared at Gordon-Cumming’s house in Belgravia hoping for a tryst with his mistress Daisy Brooke, the Countess of Warwick. So long was her list of suitors and so frequently was she indiscreet about them she was known in London society as Babbling Brooke.
Sadly the prince had not taken full account of her promiscuity – or of his friend’s playboy reputation. He found the pair in bed together.
There was, then, a certain tension in the air as the prince, Gordon-Cumming and a selection of in-favour aristocrats arrived at the home of shipping magnate Arthur Wilson where they were to stay for the Doncaster races.
After dinner, the prince suggested they played his favourite card game, baccarat, which had been declared illegal a few years earlier because it was a game of luck rather than skill and large sums were frequently won and lost in minutes. Not that anyone dared remind the royal guest of that. Tables were hastily set up and seven of the gathering sat down to play.
It was Wilson’s son Stanley who first became suspicious the Scot was cheating. He believed Gordon-Cumming was furtively moving extra chips into his stake after winning hands, thereby increasing his pot – and he whispered the allegation to a neighbouring player who, fearing a scene, brushed it aside.
After the game, though, Stanley spoke to other members of the gathering and they resolved to watch GordonCumming closely on the next night of baccarat to see if they saw anything amiss. Several felt sure they did.
But were they really watching a cheat or did they simply fail to grasp some of the niceties of the game? There was evidence to suggest it was the latter – that the urbane clan chief was using a legitimate playing method known as coup de trois and his gauche accusers did not know what they were seeing.
Baccarat aficionado the Prince of Wales, surely, would put them right. He had, after all, seen no sign of cheating and had known the man whose reputation was on the line for many years. Yet when word reached the prince of the allegations, he refused to take his old friend’s side.
Instead he followed the advice of his panicking courtiers who feared the heir could wind up at the centre of an illegal gambling scandal. In doing what they said, a scandal is exactly what he brought about.
The prince prevailed on Gordon-Cumming to sign an undertaking never to play cards again in return for the matter being kept secret. The Scot had two issues with the proposal. First, if he signed, it would be tantamount to admitting his guilt and he hotly denied cheating. Second, he had grave doubts it would remain a secret.
THE prince countered, telling him: ‘What can you do? There are five accusers against you.’ – leaving his friend horrified that he was willing to take the word of ‘a parcel of inexperienced boys’ over his.
To his eternal regret, he did sign, and soon realised he had been a fool. ‘If I had not lost my head,’ he said later, ‘I would not have signed that document.’
Over the months that followed, everything the secret document had been intended to circumvent happened. Gordon-Cumming received an anonymous letter telling him rumours about his cheating at cards were now the talk of the Turf Club in London. He appealed several times to the prince, telling him ‘utterly it remains in your power’ to intervene, but his pleas were ignored. As the rumour mill continued to portray him as a cheat, he filed a writ against his five accusers for slander.
And when they refused to retract their claim that he was a cheat, he took them to court, exposing the illegal leisure pursuits of his former friend the Prince of Wales.
Why had the prince allowed himself to follow such wrongheaded advice? Could it be he had allowed his anger at finding his friend and his mistress in bed together to cloud his judgment?
According to Michael Scott, that little scene in the bedroom turned a warm friendship into ‘barely concealed enmity’ – and revenge was almost certainly the prince’s primary motive. If so, he got it – but at massive cost to his own reputation.
The Royal Household’s efforts to distance the heir to the throne from the court case failed completely as he was cited both as a witness and a participant in the illegal, late-night card game played for stakes higher than most working class families earned in a month.
And so, on June 1, 1891, one
of the trials of the century opened at London’s Royal Courts of Justice, with demand for a seat on the public benches at such a premium that it became an all-ticket affair.
On a platform between the judge and the witness box sat the fidgeting prince – the first heir to the throne to appear involuntarily in court since 1411 – as the plaintiff’s counsel, Sir Edward Clarke, told the jury: ‘It is a simple question, aye or no, did Sir William GordonCumming cheat at cards?’
The prince told the jury he had seen no sign of cheating. But, when asked about his reaction to claims of foul play, he answered: ‘The charges appeared to be so unanimous that it was the proper course – no other course was open to me – to believe them.’
The New York Times was not impressed with the witness, who ‘kept changing his position’ and ‘did not seem able to keep his hands still’. The paper also reported the future king’s answers were barely audible.
Gordon-Cumming, by contrast, made an ‘admirable witness’, according to The Illustrated London News, ‘leaning easily on the rail, his grey-gloved left hand resting easily on the bare right, perfectly dressed, his tones equable, firm, neither over-hurried nor over-deliberate, cool, but not too cool’.
Days later, the Scot appeared to be coasting to victory. In his closing speech, Clarke lampooned his client’s accusers, depicting one of them, Edward Lycett Green, as ‘a Master of hounds who hunts four days a week’ and Stanley Wilson as a feckless wastrel born into money. His client, meanwhile, was a war hero with an impeccable record.
Applause rang from the public galleries. Yet, when the jury retired, they deliberated for only 13 minutes before finding in favour of the defendants. This time there were boos and hisses from spectators – and gasps of amazement from the press. Had they been listening to the same trial?
Gordon-Cumming was summarily dismissed from the upper classes. He promptly resigned his membership of four gentlemen’s clubs, the Carlton, the Guards’, the Marlborough and the Turf and offered to break his engagement with his American heiress fiancée Florence Garner. She would not hear of it and they married the day after the case ended, thereafter retiring to his Scottish estates.
A small paragraph in the London Gazette completed the humiliation. It said: ‘Major and Lieutenant-Colonel Sir William G GordonCumming, Bart., is removed from the Army, Her Majesty having no further occasion for his services.’ The prince was absent on the last day of the trial. He had a prior engagement at Ascot where he found himself booed. Imagine betraying a friend as he had done, people whispered. And why? To cover up his gambling habit?
Had they suspected his other motive – that he was cheating on the Princess of Wales and had discovered his friend in bed with his mistress – it is unlikely they would have thought any more of him.
FOR Gordon-Cumming, the fall from grace did nothing for his humility. In Scotland, he spent his bride’s inheritance without compunction and was repeatedly unfaithful, driving her to alcoholism, which made him all the more contemptuous. She had become a ‘fat little frump,’ he said.
At length, the Scottish estates were sold and the pair moved to Dawlish in Devon where, by the time of her death in 1922, they had effectively separated.
When Gordon-Cumming died eight years later, his house at Gordonstoun was obtained by Kurt Hahn who established a school there. The Duke of Edinburgh and his sons, Charles, Andrew and Edward, all became pupils – some of them less happily than others.
And, it seems, a gambling protocol was established: Royals bet on horses – never at high stakes card games. j.brocklebank@dailymail.co.uk Royal Betrayal: The Great Baccarat Scandal of 1890, by Michael Scott, Amazon, £7.99.