Capitalising on his manly mien and personality, Breezy Bill, now approaching fifty and wearing pince-nez in private, strode nightly about the stage, declaring his love for Queen, country and innocent womanhood, foiling the foe at every turn. The audience loved him. Admired and acclaimed, living up to his motto Carpe Diem, blessed with a wife, three children and a loving mistress, with good business sense and membership of the better London clubs, he seemed unassailably successful, without a care or enemy in the world.
The year 1897 marked Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Terriss had turned fifty, though was said to be younger, and Jessie Millward was thirty-six. Richard Prince, who gave his age as thirty-two, was now thirty-nine and in a dangerous, desperate plight. Nothing is known about how Prince became acquainted with Terriss. It may have been during the run of The Union Jack in 1888. Perhaps Terriss gave the younger actor a walk-on job; it was not unusual for struggling actors to be encouraged or patronised by an established star. Perhaps there was some ground for the uncharitable rumours that were later circulated about some sexual association. What is known is that during the run of The Harbour Lights, Terriss caused Prince to be sacked after the swarthy Scot had made an offensive remark about him. Later on Terriss, out of generosity it is said, sent, or caused to be sent, small sums of money to Prince when he was out of work via the Actors’ Benevolent Fund, and he apparently used his influence to get the younger man on the provincial tours in which Prince occasionally appeared.
But the managers of these touring companies found him increasingly unemployable. One of them, Ralph Croydon, a theatre manager in Newcastle, hired Prince towards the end of October 1897, at 25s a week, but soon sacked him, because in rehearsal he was ‘absolutely incapable … absurdly dramatic’ and unable to remember the lines of quite a small part. ‘Ah!’ exclaimed Prince on hearing of his dismissal, ‘I have two enemies now!’ He informed the manager that the other was Terriss – ‘the dirty dog’. ‘You’re mad!’ said Mr Croydon. ‘Yes!’ said Prince. ‘And the world will ring with my madness!’ Another manager received a letter from Prince that said: ‘You hell-hound! You Judas! You have got me out of my engagement by blackmailing me to get on yourself! You cur! I am not a woman, you hound! How dare you blackmail a Highlander!’
Abject but useless apologies would follow such outbursts, which were also heard in theatre dressing rooms, where Prince was known as Mad Archer. He wearied company members with diatribes about the management and other actors, who he claimed had impeded or prevented his advancement. Prince was just as rabid with his pen, sending effusive messages of congratulation and condolence to politicians and royal persons whenever the occasion, birthday or bereavement, arose. He also wrote poems and plays, one of which, Countess Otto, he sent to an up-and-coming young actor, Fred Terry. It was written in longhand in exercise books. Terry made no immediate acknowledgement or return of the script and soon received the following postcard – ‘Sir, please return play Countess Otto at once. If you are hard up for money will send it. Terriss, the Pope, and Scotland Yard. I will answer in a week – Richard A Prince.’
Despite the consolation of Sunday services in Westminster Abbey, which he often attended, Prince’s professional and private life must have been miserable. When ‘resting’, he was employed in an ironworks in Dundee, where the workmen ‘used to torment him because he was soft’. He was ‘very strange in his ways’, according to a foreman, ‘and very jealous’. Once in 1895, when his wretchedness or sense of drama got the better of him, Prince jumped in the Regent’s Canal. His vanity probably kept him from killing himself. ‘I am a member of the handsomest family in Scotland!’ he is said to have exclaimed.
But in November 1897, after being sacked by the Newcastle manager, his poverty was extreme. Existing on handouts from the Actors’ Benevolent Fund, which had been prompted by a letter from Terriss, Prince lived in a bed-sit near Victoria Station, in Buckingham Palace Road. The rent was 4s a week, which a sympathetic landlady, Mrs Darby, reduced to 3s. He had no luggage or possessions; his clothes, apart from those he wore, had been pawned. He fed on bread and milk. On 9 December he received what was to be his last payment (10s) from the Benevolent Fund.
On Monday, 13 December, he tried to get a complimentary seat for a show at the Vaudeville Theatre by showing his card at the box office. It read: ‘Richard Archer Prince, Adelphi Theatre’. Asked if he was employed there, he replied: ‘No, I’m not. But I was. I suppose I should have written “Late Adelphi Theatre”. But other people don’t, so why should I?’ No ticket was given him, and he became so abusive that he had to be removed from the theatre foyer. He said he would go to the Adelphi a few yards away and tell Mr Gatti how he had been treated. Mr Gatti owned both the Vaudeville and the Adelphi. Prince failed to see him, but at the stage door of the Adelphi he inquired as to when Mr Terriss arrived at the theatre and when he left.
That night or the next, Miss Millward heard raised voices in Terriss’s dressing room; Prince was there. She asked Terriss later if anything was the matter; he was dismissive and said: ‘This man’s becoming a nuisance.’ On Wednesday, she again visited his dressing room, haunted by a feeling of impending ill – she had had a dreadful dream in which Terriss, dying, fell into her arms in some barren room. She asked for some remembrance of him. Amused, he gave her his watch and chain, with her picture in the lid. Another member of the Adelphi company who had a prophetic dream of death was Terriss’s understudy, Mr Lane. Meanwhile the show went on. It was called Secret Service. Written by William Gillette, it was a four-act drama set during the American Civil War.
In another part of London, Mrs Darby asked her poor Scottish lodger when he would be able to pay his overdue rent. He told her she would be paid when he received a certain letter; he would then be ‘one way or the other’. Mrs Darby asked him what he meant. Prince replied: ‘That is best known to God and man.’
That certain letter arrived on the morning of Thursday, 16 December. It informed him that the Benevolent Fund had terminated his grant. Penniless, starving and poorly clad under his slouch hat and cloak, he set off on foot towards the West End for the last time. In the Strand he happened to meet his step-sister and asked her for some money. She said she would rather see him dead in the gutter than give him anything. If she had, he said later, he would never have bent his steps towards the Adelphi Theatre. He waited outside its warmth and glamour with a crazy resolve to kill.
Will Terriss spent the early part of that Thursday afternoon playing poker with Fred Terry in the Green Room Club. At four o’clock, he and a friend, Harry Greaves, a surveyor, dined in Jessie Millward’s flat in Princes Street, Hanover Square. The two men settled down to play chess after their meal, and at about seven o’clock Jessie Millward left them to finish their game while she went on ahead. ‘I must get down to the theatre,’ she said. ‘I hate being rushed.’ They followed soon afterwards, riding in a hansom cab to Maiden Lane, the narrow street that runs behind the Adelphi and the Vaudeville. They got out at the street-corner and walked the short distance towards the rear of the Adelphi. Its stage door was then in Bull Inn Court.
There was another entrance, a pass door, which also served as the royal box entrance. This was in Maiden Lane. It now serves as an exit door of the present theatre, being marked, then and now, by the royal crest above the door; the present stage door is right beside it. Terriss used this pass door to avoid his fans, and Greaves accompanied him to the theatre, probably in case a particular person should prove again to be a nuisance. The door was kept locked. In the dank, gas-lit street Terriss fumbled in a pocket for his key.
As he inserted it in the lock and opened the door, a dark figure that had been lurking near Rule’s Restaurant rushed across the street and with great force stuck a kitchen knife in Terriss’s back. Another blow slashed Terriss’s side as he turned. A third thrust penetrated his chest.
The attack was carried out in silence. Jessie Millward, in her dressing room above the door, heard Terriss