A Different Class of Murder Read online

  The Sarsfields were an ancient Anglo-Norman family. They belonged to the ruling class in Ireland, yet had become almost pure native: Catholic, intermarried with the great Gaelic families. Nobody was ever more fervently Irish than Patrick Sarsfield, born in 1660 in Lucan, which stands south of Dublin on the River Liffey. There was once a Sarsfield Castle at the edge of the town. In the eighteenth century it was replaced with Lucan House, whose circular dining room is said – perhaps truly – to have inspired the Oval Office in the White House.

  Patrick fought fiercely for the Jacobite cause, and won Connaught for the deposed King James II. In 1693, when he was fatally wounded in the service of Louis XIV, he watched his blood spill and said: ‘If only this were for Ireland.’ His son James, six months of age, became the 2nd Earl of Lucan. He died without issue, and the Lucan earldom died with him.

  But it was restored to life, as earldoms can be, in the form of his great-nephew: Sir Charles Bingham, 6th Baronet, who in 1795 became the second incarnation of the 1st Earl of Lucan. Thus the title was a union of both the Irish sympathizer and the Irish conqueror, the man who brought Connaught to a Catholic king and the man who had ruled it for a Protestant queen. But the conqueror, for a while at least, would win out.

  The Lucan myth has it that the 3rd Earl – ‘great exterminator’ of the Irish, buffoon of the Crimea, self-righteous attacker of absolutely anybody who questioned him – is the true and typical representative of the family. Indeed the 3rd Earl is immensely convenient to the myth. How like him the 7th Earl must have been! How easy to strip the side-whiskers from the taut, glaring face of the 3rd Earl, whose portrait hung in the dining-room at 46 Lower Belgrave Street, and to see the resemblance to that later Lucan. And how inconvenient, therefore, to consider the five earls before and between, who were not like that at all.

  The 1st Earl, for instance, who enjoyed the title for only four years before his death in 1799, was far from being a monster of arrogance. He was a prominent Whig, a distinguished follower of Charles James Fox, and he had the wit to marry a talented woman: Margaret Smyth, a fine painter.4 Two of Margaret’s miniatures are displayed at Althorp, childhood home of Diana, Princess of Wales. This was by way of keeping things in the family. In 1781 the Binghams’ daughter Lavinia married the future 2nd Earl Spencer: a remarkable coup, given that she had nothing to offer beyond a conventional prettiness, and indeed she seems never to have relaxed into her elevated role. Perhaps she remained fidgety with the knowledge that an Irish baronet – as Lavinia’s father then was – was as nothing compared with the Spencers, their fabulous houses, their powerful alliances.5

  And this, really, is the thing about the Lucan earldom. For all that the myth portrays it as some sort of aristocratic archetype, in fact its holder was a ‘mere Irish peer’. Grand as hell, of course, but only relatively so.

  Laleham, the ‘country seat’, was nothing more than a large and well-placed house, although it was distinguished by the 2nd Earl’s taste. Like his parents, and notwithstanding the early scandal of the ‘criminal conversation’ action, Richard Bingham was a cultured, intelligent man. When he and his wife separated in 1804,6 and he began the continental wanderings which took him to a life in Italy with his mistress, he became a patron of the arts. The National Gallery of Washington now owns the three exquisite marble busts of his daughters that he commissioned from the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. ‘The thought of him in those days,’ says his great-great-great-granddaughter Jane, ‘travelling to Rome, finding this brilliant sculptor – not just a common or garden sculptor, he found the best.’ Jane’s brother, the 7th Earl, sold the busts in the 1960s.

  The 2nd Earl was one of the original twenty-eight representative peers for Ireland in the House of Lords, a position that was held until his death in 1839.7 His son also became a representative peer, although in no other way did he resemble his father. A portrait of him at the age of fourteen shows a fine, cold-eyed, rather brutish-looking boy with a dead rabbit slung casually over his shoulder. If one is seeking to understand his character through heredity, one can only look back to the soldier Richard Bingham; but that, as ever with such explanations, tells a partial story.

  George Bingham was born in 1800, just as the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland’ was established. Two years earlier the Lucans’ original home in Mayo, Castlebar House, had been destroyed and pillaged in an anti-Protestant rebellion, and they were obliged to rehouse themselves. It would not be long before the fire of Irish violence blazed again, its flames fanned no end by the future Earl.

  He was no adventurer like his Elizabethan forebear. He had no need to be. The Lucan title was starting to hit its heights. George could afford to buy commissions in the army through the ‘purchase’ system, an absurdity intended to preserve the gentlemanliness of the officer class.8 By 1826, having bought his way through the ranks, the young Lord Bingham became a lieutenant colonel in the 17th Lancers. But by the time he inherited his earldom, in 1839, he had turned the grim force of his attention away from the military, towards Ireland, where his 61,000 acres now housed some 100,000 tenants.

  The 3rd Earl’s tenets were industry, economy and good husbandry: remarkably unlike his great-great-grandson. He wanted to reform the farming of his Co. Mayo estates, which was the right idea in principle. In practice, it meant that many of his tenants would be evicted. The indigenous southern Irish lived on and from the land. Pitiful smallholdings, planted with their staple crop of potatoes, were subdivided over and over again.9 And so when famine came to Ireland in the 1840s, the effects of these land ‘clearances’ would be appalling: a tragedy of the type that would now be associated with the developing world.

  The potato crop failed in 1845–6 and 1848. The country was said to have turned colour overnight, from green to scorched black. Ireland became a mass grave; but Lord Lucan did not falter in his programme of reform. He served an estimated 6,000 processes for eviction. Fifteen thousand acres were cleared, entire small villages replaced by fields and, in one case, a racecourse. A dairy farm was built using stones from the walls of demolished streets. And Lucan’s desire to improve his estate grew ever more justified, in his eyes, by the fact that his tenants were unable to pay their rents yet refusing to leave. In every way, clearance was the answer.

  The death of around one million people was certainly one way of clearing Ireland. Another way was emigration: one and a half million left the country. For those who stayed, the workhouse was a theoretical safety net, but in 1846 the Castlebar workhouse in Mayo was declared to be out of funds. Lord Lucan was chairman of its board of governors. From his London house at Hanover Square, he wrote regretting the situation and complaining that as he had received no rental income he was unable to subsidize the establishment further.10 The workhouse doors were closed. Families lay outside, beyond hunger and hope, their children with ‘death like faces and drum stick arms that seemed ready to snap’.11 Priests gave the sacrament in doorways, by roadsides.

  It is easy to say that Lucan was deliberately cruel towards Ireland, although he did not see it that way; but he also seems to have been powerfully irritated by the place.12 It did not fit with his vigorous, humourless, frighteningly single-minded personality, which considered that certain things had to be done so there was no point in arguing about them. Certainly he was prepared to defend himself, with the utmost stridency. In February 1847 he took to the floor of the Lords, contesting the assertion that he had closed the workhouse. In March he rose again to state that there had, undeniably, been processes served for rent, but that only people who did not understand Ireland would confuse these with evictions.13

  Two years earlier, The Times had published a letter from a man who had observed the unspeakable situation in Mayo. This gave Lord Lucan credit for being ‘one of the few landlords left in the west of Ireland who reside on, and perseveringly endeavour to improve their property’. Despite being called ‘a great exterminator’, he had at least ‘looked the matter in the face’. It was a brav
ely argued case, in its way, but its logic collapsed against this simple statement from an English engineer sent to work in Ireland. ‘If only’, he wrote, ‘the people had been treated with a little kindness.’

  The 1851 census found the population of Ireland to have fallen by almost two and a half million in a decade. It also recorded that the Earl of Lucan, together with his wife, four daughters, and fifteen servants, was living at Laleham House, by now a treasure trove of precious marbles. The previous year a strange event had occurred: a man named Charles Holden confessed that, twenty years earlier, he had killed a prostitute with a blow to the head, and buried her in the grounds of the house. He had dug the grave with a spade taken from Lord Lucan’s toolshed. When the case was heard at the local Petty Sessions House, where Lucan was one of the magistrates, Holden suddenly admitted that the supposed victim was alive and well ‘in a public-house in Chertsey’. The identity of the body in the Laleham House grounds remains a mystery.

  This was the kind of event that punctuated Lord Lucan’s long and complicated life. Obviously the skeleton in the garden was nothing to do with him, any more than the 1872 murder of his lady friend; nevertheless he did seem to attract the most remarkable controversy. Now, in the 1850s, he was raring for a return to military action. He applied for a post in the Crimea, and became a lieutenant general with command of the cavalry division.

  The Crimean War, an inconclusive campaign fought by Britain and France to halt Russian predations into the collapsing Ottoman Empire, is best known for two things: the activities of Florence Nightingale, who organized the first base hospitals of modern times; and the Charge of the Light Brigade, a cavalry attack during the Battle of Balaclava in October 1854, during which almost half the brigade of around 660 men were killed, injured or captured. Half the horses also died, cut down from under their riders. A surviving officer said: ‘Through God’s mercy I have been saved from one of the most horrible engagements that ever British soldiers were sent into.’14

  Although some historians now attribute a certain strategic value to the Charge of the Light Brigade, it was regarded at the time, and indeed for many years thereafter, as nothing short of a shambles. Among its casualties was the 3rd Earl of Lucan, who in a report to the war office described the charge as ‘very brilliant and daring’. He was reported to have been ‘wounded slightly’, although this did not take into account the injury to his reputation.

  The order for the charge had come from Lord Raglan, commander of the British forces. Unfortunately it was made upon the wrong guns. The intended target was a retreating Russian artillery battery. What was actually attacked was a battery that was fully prepared and armed. Why this happened is still unclear, although it was hardly helpful that the man in command of the Light Brigade, Lord Cardigan, was on non-speaking terms with the man in command of the cavalry, Lord Lucan. The unbelievable silliness of this meant that the order could not be properly assessed by the two men who had to enact it. It also meant that everybody, afterwards, could try to pass the blame on to somebody else.15

  Lucan, severely criticized by a panicky Raglan, was recalled to England in February 1855. In September both he and Cardigan faced the censure of the Crimean Commissioners’ inquiry.16 It hardly needs saying that Lucan went berserk. He would, he said, tear to pieces those parts of the report that affected the cavalry. The Times, which now took an almost daily pleasure in teasing him, wrote that ‘Lord Lucan, with his usual discretion, has hit upon the notable plan of abusing the Minister of War, the Judge-Advocate, and the Chelsea Court, by way of bettering his case’. In December he sued the Daily News, which had referred bluntly to ‘the Lucan-Cardigan scandal’, but lost the case. ‘Did not he and Lord Cardigan’, asked counsel for the defence, ‘behave more like two great schoolgirls than Generals?’ Nevertheless, and despite the apparent frankness of the inquiry proceedings, the Chelsea Report itself was a whitewash. Cardigan and Lucan had been protected by their own kind.

  Some 120 years later, a spectator in the House of Lords shouted an accusation at a peer who was speaking on a housing bill, whom he had mistaken for the 7th Earl of Lucan. In fact the speaker was Lord Raglan, who replied: ‘Right battle, wrong man.’

  In 1881 it was reported from Ireland that the 3rd Earl had sent a boat to the island of Inishturk and had its twenty-two families transported at gunpoint to the workhouse. He was still fighting his battle against his tenants, and still failing to realize his vision of a wondrously transformed estate. But by now the Irish were retaliating in a more organized way. The Land League, which sought radically to change the system of land ownership, was at its height, as was violence against the ruling class. When Charles Stewart Parnell, president of the League, spoke out against the evictions from Inishturk, the name of Lord Lucan was greeted with hisses. He got off lightly, in the circumstances.

  Had he been born a century earlier, in a time arguably more fitting to him, the 7th Earl of Lucan might well have become a cavalry officer in the Crimean War; but he would never have embarked upon that death struggle with his Irish tenants. In no way was that his nature. As it was, he simply accepted the rents from the Mayo estate, which have not been paid since his disappearance. ‘De Valera told us not to pay ground rent to absentee landlords,’ said one of his tenants in 1994, ‘and they don’t come much more absent than Lord Lucan.’

  According to the myth the 7th Earl shared with his great-great-grandfather an unwavering faith in his own righteousness, a belief that what he wanted was what mattered, and hang the collateral damage. Thus the same blinkered urges that caused the deaths of thousands in Ireland also led to the attempted removal of a vexatious wife. This, of course, comes back to class: the notion of droit de seigneur. Both the 3rd and the 7th Earl of Lucan had something of this in them, but it manifested itself in very different ways. For one thing, the 3rd Earl could never resist pleading his own case. When the 7th Earl was called upon to defend himself, to the police and the law, he did not do so. The 3rd Earl would have relished a trial: he would have been arguing with the prosecution, proclaiming that he had been falsely arraigned, almost enjoying himself; he did not shirk life.

  Not that he would ever have been in such a position. He had simply walked out on his wife, in that decisive way of his, and taken up with other women as he pleased. He had the money to do it, of course. And, despite his obsession with bending public opinion to his will, he had a paradoxical disregard for it: he lived as he chose, and he had the courage of his choices. The 7th Earl merely believed that he lived as he chose. In fact his choices became illusory, circumscribed.

  So for all that the Lucan myth takes the 3rd Earl as a kind of ancestral template for the sins of the great-great-grandson, there is in fact scant similarity between the two. Unless, of course, one believes that both were similarly, brutally, arrogantly violent.

  George Charles, the 4th Earl, who succeeded to the title in 1888, marked a return to those earlier, civilized Lucans. He pulled off no small feat in mending relations with his Irish tenants. His father, naturally enough, had a low opinion of his tenure as MP for Mayo.

  In 1859 he married a daughter of the Duke of Richmond, which meant that the 7th Earl was twice descended from illegitimate children of Charles II.17 (‘And you’ve been right royal bastards ever since,’ said his friend Dominick Elwes.) Socially speaking, George represented the high point of the earldom. And he lived, accordingly, in a lordly style.18 The Lucan wealth, never vast but capable of providing every usual comfort, was irrevocably diminished by the 4th Earl. Many years later, the 7th Earl would write to his uncle, saying: ‘Nothing has been ventured in this family since our great-grandfather ran up a grocer’s bill of £4,000.’ In a way it was these two Lucans who most resembled each other. They would probably have been friends. Both were bon vivants and sporting gamblers, both had a conviction that life should be lived in luxury, and neither had a strong sense of how to pay for it. Where they differed was in their marriages, and in the 4th Earl’s capacity for contentment. But then
, he lived in an age when the worries of aristocrats were more easily forestalled.

  Yet in 1906 he admitted to his son that he had lived in fear of bankers for fifty years. Twice he came close to being declared bankrupt; a fate that would be realized in 1975 by the 7th Earl. He died in 1914, aged eighty-four, just two months before the outbreak of war: in every sense, he had calmly absented himself from the approaching carnage.

  It was his decent, dependable heir, George, who had to deal with it all. He had taken control of the estates in 1900, which saved his father from his first threat of bankruptcy. At first George must have thought that all was well: in 1901 he was living at Gorhambury, near St Albans, with his wife, his two-year-old son, and nineteen servants. Four hundred years earlier, Gorhambury had been home to the daughter of Sir Richard Bingham, conqueror of Connaught. Now it was rented from the Earl of Verulam, who could no longer afford to run it. Twenty years later George Lucan would be in the same position, frantically trying to let Laleham House.

  The following year the house was put up for auction. Laleham, said the advertisement ominously, was ‘purchasable on favourable terms’; its 83 acres represented ‘ripe building land’. In July 1922 the bidding opened at £7,500.19 There was no response. Nevertheless in August the 5th Earl, gamely keeping up appearances, staged a large party in its grounds for the Laleham Regatta.

  The Lucans were far from alone in this need to sell off their money-eating houses. The late 1870s had seen the upper class at the tranquil zenith of its fortunes, sitting among the ancestral portraits as if all had at last been achieved. Seven thousand families owned four-fifths of the British Isles. Two hundred and fifty families had 30,000 acres or more. The Lucans were among this number, although they did not compare with those, like the Dukes of Westminster and Devonshire, whose wealth was near limitless.