Free The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife and the Missing Corpse by Piu Marie Eatwell

dressed entirely in black, with a deep veil. Mrs Hamilton testified that she had seen Thomas Charles Druce on two occasions after his alleged ‘death’ in 1864. The letters of request were therefore duly issued by Sir Francis to Chancellor Tristram, asking for the faculty to be granted. The civil judge evidently shared the chancellor’s view that the simplest way to settle the matter was simply to open the grave, to see if T. C. Druce’s body was there. He stated as much in a letter to Sir Kenelm Digby, under-secretary of state to the Home Office. Herbert Druce promptly appealed against the judge’s order. His appeal was roundly rejected.
    Why was Herbert Druce so vehemently opposed to the exhumation of his father’s body? A stout man of fifty-two with a hooked nose and copious beard, Herbert bore an uncanny physical resemblance to his father. Like him, he appeared to be the embodiment of late Victorian respectability. He had been groomed by T. C. Druce to take over the prosperous family business in Baker Street, and he ran it with capable hands. When he was not poring over the firm’s accounts in the Baker Street office, he would retire to the luxurious villa that he occupied with his wife and family in Circus Road in the affluent London suburb of St John’s Wood. But all was not as it seemed in Herbert’s life, and his placid exterior concealed a tumult of deeply felt emotion.
    Until a decade before, Herbert had been in complete andblissful ignorance of his illegitimacy, which had only surfaced as a result of the actions of his meddlesome sister-in-law, Anna Maria. The fact that he – along with his two younger siblings – had been born a bastard had been revealed during a most uncomfortable meeting with his mother, Annie May, and the Druce family solicitor, Edwin Freshfield.
    Edwin, a senior partner of the law firm Freshfields, had been alerted to the fact of Herbert Druce’s illegitimacy by the unlikely source of the tax authorities. This was because Anna Maria Druce, believing (incorrectly) that Herbert could not inherit under his father’s will because of his illegitimacy, had informed the tax authorities of this fact. The Inland Revenue concluded that as the named beneficiary of his father’s estate, Herbert could inherit, but that because the first three children were illegitimate, the wrong amount of estate duty had been paid. Edwin Freshfield was therefore left with the unpleasant task of confronting Annie May – in the presence of Herbert – over the fact that she had not been married to T. C. Druce at the time of the birth of these children. Many years after the meeting, Edwin still cringed at the recollection, as he recorded in a later memorandum to the Home Office:
    The writer of this memorandum had the first interview with Mrs Annie Druce when the claim [by the tax authorities] was made, and also had the task of informing Mr Herbert Druce of the true state of the case [i.e. his illegitimacy]. The interview was a very painful one. Mrs Annie Druce stated that she had been married but it ended with her being taken, as was not unnatural, very ill. When she had in part recovered she absolutely declined to give any further informationand declared herself ready to pay whatever was claimed by the Authorities at Somerset House. The writer saw the Authorities, heard the whole story from them, and obtained a discharge from the executors on payment of duty amounting to £3,200 on 16th May 1884.
    Disconcerting as the meeting had been for Edwin, it was even worse for Herbert. In one moment, all his comfortable, middle-class illusions about himself had collapsed in a heap. The remote figure of his father – always something of a mystery to him – was now becoming, increasingly, a source of embarrassment. He dreaded the unearthing of some other secret, were the grave to be opened. As an illegitimate son of T. C. Druce, Herbert had nothing to gain if it were to be shown that his father was the 5th Duke of