A very high stakes SCAND L

It was a society saga so shameful it put the Monarchy itself at risk: Why did Edward VII betray a war hero friend smeared with being a card cheat? A new book reveals the twist: he’d caught him in bed with HIS mistress

ONA glorious June morning in 1891, the pavement outside the Law Courts of the Queen’s Bench in London heaved with smart society ladies jostling for entry.

As the doors were opened, they hurried in to secure the best seats for a performance more eagerly awaited than any West End play.

Not only did it promise drama – with accusations of illegal gambling, cheating and betrayal among the aristocracy – there would also be some star players.

The key witness was Bertie, the Prince of Wales. The plaintiff was his former friend Sir William Gordon-Cumming, a Flashman-esque Army officer once described as ‘possibly the handsomest man in London and certainly the rudest’.

It was the friendship- turned-hostility between these two men that made the case so intriguing for spectators, and so troubling for Bertie’s mother, Queen Victoria, who rued her son’s propensity to get caught up in scandal.

Back i n 1870, he had been dragged i nto a divorce case involving one of his mistresses, the beautiful Lady Mordaunt, and forced to deny that they had been lovers. Twenty years later, he was back in court, his reputation on the line once more.

The case centred on whether the dashing Gordon- Cumming had cheated in a game of baccarat at a house party held the previous September at Tranby Croft, the home of industrialist Arthur Wilson.

With rumours rife that he had indeed cheated, Gordon-Cumming had brought a slander case against five of his accusers. Ironically, it was the efforts of the Prince of Wales’s aides to shield the Royal from scandal that had backfired and caused the court case to be brought, and the Prince to be dragged into the witness box.

This was just the kind of damaging publicity the Royal Family did not want.

As the Queen wrote to her eldest daughter, Vicky: ‘ The trial is indeed dreadful… the whole thing must do Ber tie harm… He must give up gambling and high play or the result maybe most dangerous… for the Monarchy almost is in danger if he is lowered and despised.’ The seemingly trivial matter of whether a sometime friend of the Prince had cheated at cards had far-reaching repercussions. It lifted the lid on the extravagant, louche behaviour in which the Prince and his upper-class cronies indulged, hardly endearing him to his future subjects who faced a prison sentence if caught gambling. It raised the question: Was such a man fit to be King? The Tranby Croft affair – also known as the Royal Baccarat Scandal – intrigued everyone from the top to the bottom of society as it was avidly reported and read in the popular papers. It is now the subject of a fascinating new book by Michael Scott – who, like Gordon-Cumming, served in the Scots Guards. The book re- examines the questions at the heart of the matter. Was Gordon-Cumming innocent or a cheat? And crucially, did the Prince of Wales betray one of his oldest friends to save his own reputation and eliminate a love rival? WILLIAM Gordon- Cumming had joined the Scots Guards in 1867, aged 18. He had fought in the Zulu War, and in wars in Egypt and the Sudan, and been decorated and promoted. He was even thought to have spied for the Directorate of Military Intelligence. In the lulls between wars, he spent his time hunting not only tigers and panthers but also other men’s wives – enthusiasms he shared with his friend the Prince of Wales.

He stayed at Sandringham on several occasions and even lent Bertie his London house for his trysts with Daisy Brooke, the beautiful, beguiling Countess of Warwick, dubbed ‘Babbling Brooke’ due to her inability to keep a secret.

Daisy had become the Prince’s mistress the previous year. She was 20 years his junior – Bertie was now a portly 48 – and she had a curvy figure, a tiny waist, baby-blue eyes, a bubbly wit, and a husband who tolerated her many infidelities. As we shall see, it was her promiscuity that would ultimately contribute to Bertie’s downfall.

In September 1890, Daisy had been due to join the Prince and GordonCumming at Tranby Croft in Yorkshire, where they would stay for the Doncaster races.

BUT to Bertie’s dismay, she was not able to join the usual collection of aristocrats, Army officers and courtiers also invited by the Wilson family, who had risen from lowly Humberside boatmen to super-rich shipping magnates in the space of two generations.

With Daisy absent, the Prince had to find another form of after-dinner entertainment and suggested a game of baccarat. The card game was illegal, but Bertie’s wishes had to be fulfilled, so his hosts hurriedly organised some card tables and seven people sat down to play.

At some point in the evening, Arthur Wilson’s son Jack became convinced that Gordon- Cumming, who was sitting on his left, was cheating. He whispered his suspicions to a neighbouring player, who wanted nothing to do with accusing a senior officer.

Later that night, Jack told his mother, who reacted with horror. ‘For goodness sake, don’t let us have a scandal here!’ she exclaimed.

When the card players reconvened t he following evening, GordonCumming won £ 225 ( £ 21,610 in today’s money) and the Prince congratulated him heartily on his luck.

Others were less convinced that it was simply good fortune and could not resist spreading the gossip.

Word reached Lord Coventry, head of the Prince’s household, who duly informed his master. In an attempt to settle the matter, the card players confronted Gordon-Cumming, who hotly denied the accusations.

Being accused of cheating at cards not only meant social ruin, it would spell the end of Gordon-Cumming’s military career for ‘conduct unbecoming’. But his accusers would not let the matter drop and threatened to broadcast the affair.

Shocked at the idea of Bertie’s name being dragged into a dispute that could easily become public, Lord Coventry and Lieutenant-General Owen Williams, another of the Prince’s advisers, panicked. If it became known that the Prince was illegally gambling and squandering huge sums, it would be disastrous for his reputation.

They told the Prince that the only way to prevent a scandal was to force Gordon-Cumming to sign a statement agreeing to ‘preserve silence with reference to an accusation which has been made in regard to my conduct’ on those two nights and never to play cards again ‘as long as I live’.

If he did not sign, he would be publicly denounced and warned off

every racecourse in the land. Yet, as Gordon-Cumming pointed out, if he did sign, it was tantamount to admitting his guilt.

He appealed to the Prince but Bertie was unsympathetic, saying: ‘What can you do? There are five accusers against you.’

Aghast that he was willing to believe ‘a parcel of inexperienced boys’, Gordon- Cumming signed the statement. The Prince and other members of the house party signed it too. So when GordonCumming received an anonymous letter repeating the accusation, he was horrified. He asked to see the Prince in a last effort to resolve the matter but Bertie, to his dismay, had cut him off.

Why would he so betray an old friend? The new book reveals tantalising evidence. For just two days before the party gathered at Tranby Croft, the Prince of Wales returned early from a trip abroad and went to Gordon- Cumming’s house on Harriet Street, hoping for a tryst with the delectable Daisy.

MUCH to the Prince’s chagrin, he found Daisy already busy in t he bedroom – with GordonCumming. Bertie left in confusion and embarrassment. It was then, believes Michael Scott, that his friendship with Gordon-Cumming turned to ‘barely concealed enmity’. So when the time came for the Prince to support his former friend over his cheating disgrace, none was given.

Realising that he had been hung out to dry, Gordon-Cumming then sued his accusers for slander.

Despite the Royal Household’s efforts to keep Bertie out of the witness box, it was inevitable that the Prince of Wales would be called. The ham-fisted efforts to save him from scandal had backfired spectacularly.

The Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Coleridge, was appointed to the case, perhaps in the expectation that he would deliver the ‘right’ verdict. Then aged 70, Coleridge kept a pet ferret under his robes and was prone to dropping off in court: his pretty young wife sat next to him and would prod him awake with her fan.

The press and public flocked to court, hopeful that, as one newspaper put it, the ‘ rottenness of t he Engli s h ar i s t o c r a c y wil l be exposed’.

The defendants’ lawyers argued that Gordon- Cumming’s signed ‘confession’ was evidence of his guilt. His own team countered that he had only signed under duress.

His lawyers portrayed him as a war hero, who had ‘risked his life for you and yours’, his sword stained with the blood of his country’s foes.

His accusers, by contrast, were mainly spoiled rich kids who had barely done a day’s work between them. Their evidence was con- tradictory and inconsistent, their memories sketchy. They evidently disliked Gordon- Cumming, who was described as ‘arrogant, swashbuckling, and womanising’.

The jury, who were ‘ not particularly bright looking’, as one reporter noted, delivered a surprise verdict in favour of GordonCumming’s accusers.

Those i nside t he courtroom were a mazed. The ev i d e n c e had seemed to favour GordonCumming, yet he had been defeated by a bunch of idle young men and the Establishment.

There were angry boos and hisses from t he crowds. The Wilson family were jeered when they emerged from court, while Gordon- Cumming was cheered. He was portrayed in the press as a martyr. But it was not enough. He was dismissed from the Army and shunned by society.

HIS fiancee, a pretty young American heiress named Florence Garner, stood by him, doubtless unaware of his dabbling with Daisy Brooke. They married shortly after the court case and retired to live on his Scottish estates. He repaid her by chasing other women and running through her money.

Gordon- Cumming brooded for decades and when Edward VII, as Bertie became, died in 1910, Gordon-Cumming considered reopening the case to clear his name, but was dissuaded. He died in 1930, taking to his grave the mystery of whether he had really cheated.

However, it was the Prince of Wales who fared much worse.

Bertie had not attended t he last day of the trial but had gone to Ascot, where he was booed. What kind of man, people asked, would betray a friend as he had done? And why could he get away with gambling the kind of sums that would have fed a working-class family for years, using his own personal gambling chips, the epitome of profligacy?

His popularity plummeted and the court case established a principle that would affect the Royal Family for ever more: that the people had a right to know what the monarchs and their heirs got up to in their private lives, however outrageous it might be.

He was attacked in the press for his part in the ‘cover-up’, bishops denounced him from the pulpit, and there were demands that he step aside, leaving his eldest son to take the crown.

The other unresolved question is why the Prince, Gordon-Cumming’s long-term friend, was so quick to side with his accusers, rather than simply brush the matter aside, tell them to drop their claims and have a quiet word with him.

If he had hoped to wreak revenge on his love rival – a ‘damned blackguard’, as he now called him – then he paid a very high price.

He hunted panthers, tigers – and the wives of other men

Royal Betrayal: The Great Baccarat Scandal Of 1890, by Michael Scott, is available from Amazon, priced £7.99.