Those last six words being the salient point. Twelve months for telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
The elation of the government was as spiteful as it was predictable. A reactionary weekly, the Saturday Review, positively levitated with glee: ‘The man Parke’s clients lust, first, for personal news, secondly, for dirty personal news, thirdly, for dirty personal news, if possible about persons with titles. He gives it to them; and the law has given him twelve months imprisonment. This is excellent. This man Parke is one of a gang.’ But not all were so partisan, and not a few knew exactly what this was about. ‘As we expected,’ wrote the editor of Reynold’s News,
the result of the trial of the young journalist Parke, has raised a storm of indignation not only at home, but abroad. The whole affair is considered part and parcel of the plan intended to whitewash the police and government from all participation in the frightful miscarriage of justice that has taken place … In his virulent address to the jury, and when passing what we can but consider a most vindictive sentence on the accused, Judge Hawkins emphatically declared that the libel was one of the grossest ever published without a single extenuating circumstance, and Mr Parke was made an example to others who dare tamper with the name of our virtuous and noble aristocracy. What, then, is the conclusion come to? Why, that the authorities were more anxious to conceal the names of those who patronised the horrible den of vice, than punish the principal patrons of the hideous place. Why were the wretched telegraph boys taken to the Old Bailey, whilst Lord Arthur Somerset, being duly warned of what had occurred, made his escape? All this requires, but we suspect will not obtain, satisfactory explanation.
This was the only part of this journal’s outrage that history confirmed. When the scandal finally bloomed into ritual debate at the House of Commons, it had already been controlled. By now Somerset had dissolved into the south of France, never to return. But here come all the Right Honourable Pecksniffs to yak it all over.
For the government, Attorney General Sir Richard Webster QC MP, also of the Athenaeum, spoke the only words of truth to come out of his mouth that night. ‘No good is done,’ he reminded the House, ‘by reporting cases of this description, and it is generally to the credit of reporters of the press, that they almost invariably refrain from reporting them.’77
Please bear this statement in mind.
In this instance, Webster was not alluding to Parke, but to the jailing of a pair of Cleveland Street victims, two boys hustled off in secrecy to serve relatively short terms of incarceration in exchange for keeping their traps shut.
Henry Labouchère, the aforementioned Member for Northampton, known to Queen Victoria as ‘that horrible lying Labouchère’, and to her son Edward, Prince of Wales, as ‘that viper Labouchère’, wasn’t so easily silenced. He’d come into that neo-Gothic marquee of duplicity burning with indignation at the jailing of Ernest Parke; and more than that, he had something to say about the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury.
My first charge is that Lord Salisbury and others entered into a criminal conspiracy to defeat the ends of justice. Instead of making every effort to punish offences, as far as I can see, every effort has been made to hush up the matter … Two boys have been sent to prison. Salisbury, and several other gentlemen ought also to be prosecuted. We have heard a good deal lately about criminal conspiracy. What is this case but a criminal conspiracy by the very guardians of public morality and law, with the Prime Minister at their head to defeat the ends of justice?78
You can’t really say it any clearer than that.
Labouchère’s use of the term ‘criminal conspiracy’ is interesting. It’s worth noting that not all conclusions of ‘conspiracy’ in respect of the events of 1888–89 are figments of modern imagination. This famous Victorian politician was arguing at the coalface of one such ‘conspiracy’, and it is his choice of word. Salisbury’s administration was in permanent ‘criminal conspiracy’, and as with the ‘nuclear industry’ of our day, telling the truth was not an option – it had to lie to survive.
Labouchère rehearsed his points, including the unusual protocol of a British Prime Minister tipping off a wanted criminal. ‘The importance of the point here,’ he said, ‘is why did Lord Salisbury interfere in the matter? Was it the responsibility of a Prime Minister and a Foreign Secretary to mix himself up in such matters? If he knew a warrant was going to be issued, surely the last thing a man in his official position should have done, was to communicate the fact to a friend of Lord Arthur Somerset?’ Then there was the associated peculiarity of the two boys, sentenced covertly and whisked away from the Old Bailey in secret.
Well, it was nothing of the sort, rejoined Webster: ‘The charge against Her Majesty’s Government is that it was agreed between the prosecuting and defending counsel with the knowledge of the Treasury Solicitor, that the accused should have light sentences as the price of silence, and that corrupt bargain was made with the knowledge of those in authority. I think the house will agree that, if true, more infamous conduct was never charged against persons in authority.’79
It was true. Half the Conservative House did agree, and the other half didn’t. Webster had, in fact, succinctly summarised the case he was put up to argue against (something he would do with less success in the ‘criminal conspiracy’ against the Irish Nationalist leader Charles Parnell*). With an appearance of ‘almost celestial virtue’ he repudiated the existence of this supposed ‘wicked and corrupt bargain’ between the courts and the Conservative government, at which a variety of Members rose, Ernest Parke’s boss T.P. O’Connor among them:
The Attorney General assumes an air of the most virtuous indignation because my Honourable Friend (Mr Labouchère) spoke for an arrangement between the prosecution and defence. The Attorney General is an experienced lawyer of many years practice, and he knows that arrangements of this kind are common … these arrangements between one side and the other are as common almost as criminal trials. In spite of all the Attorney General says, I maintain that there was such an arrangement here, and the object and meaning of it was to close the mouths of the persons in gaol, and in that way to save the criminals who their confessions might have exposed.80
The essence of the response from Sir Richard Webster was basically, ‘Not guilty, but I promise you we won’t do it again.’ It is axiomatic amongst lawyers that you do not propose a question to which you do not know the answer, and here Webster slipped. Referring to brothel-master Charles Hammond and his boy, who had come in for their share of invective, Sir Richard had this to say: ‘As to the circumstances under which Hammond did go to America, my own mouth is closed. I should be perfectly willing, and some day I shall be allowed, to state them. The Honourable and Learned Gentleman, the Member for South Hackney, knows them as well as I do.’81
The Honourable and Learned Gentleman in question was Sir Charles Russell, who immediately professed complete ignorance of the matter. ‘I know nothing about them,’ he said.
This was too ridiculous a falsehood for even Sir Richard Webster to swallow, and although Russell was on the same bent agenda, he replied, ‘The Honourable and Learned Gentleman’s memory misleads him,’ which is another way of saying, ‘You are lying like the label on a bottle of snake-oil.’
Indeed he was. Russell had appeared for a man called Newton (this on behalf of the Prince of Wales). On the application to move the case to the Queen’s Bench, Newton’s affidavit stated ‘that he had been a party to getting Hammond to go away on account of the blackmail he was levying on people in England’.
Who might these ‘people in England’ be? And rather than the police sending Partridge (and the mysterious Tyrell) to America with wads of cash, why wasn’t Hammond extradited from Belgium and prosecuted for the