The five accusers stuck by their stories pretty well, although Clarke, who was obviously a complete hand at confusing the issue with trivial questions, claimed to find all kinds of discrepancies in their testimony; he also hinted, ever so delicately, that a couple of them might have been tight, had great fun about Lycett Green’s being a master of foxhounds, and took a nice injured line of surprise that in view of Cumming’s pledged word, stainless character, and so forth, they weren’t prepared to admit they’d been mistaken. His final speech was four times as long as that of Russell, who simply went straight at Cumming’s throat: why hadn’t he demanded to be brought face to face with his accusers, as any honest man would have done? He also reminded the jury that the five accusers weren’t alone in thinking Cumming guilty; the Prince, Williams, and Coventry thought so too.
In all that I read, I could put my finger on only one flat lie: the defendants' denial that there had been any arrangement to keep watch on Cumming’s play the second night. Well, I ask you! You’re told a man has been cheating, and don’t keep an eye on him next time? Pull the other one, Walker; you watch him like a lynx. According to Owen Williams, they’d told him they’d agreed to watch, but now, in the witness-box, they were claiming they’d done no such thing. Their reason was plain enough: they didn’t want to be thought of as spying on a fellow guest, and there was some fine wriggling under cross-examination—one of ’em, I think it was Lycett Green, absolutely said: 'Knowing the man had cheated, I looked, but not with a view to watching', which is as fine a piece of humbug as I could ha' thought up myself. Not that it made a ha’porth of difference: they’d seen what they’d seen, and held by it.
By the morning of the seventh day, with the cases of both sides completed, the thing was on a knife-edge: half the Town was positive Gordon-Cumming was the biggest cheat since Jacob, while t’other half held that Clarke had shown up the five accusers for unreliable idiots (if not vindictive parvenus) whose evidence wasn’t worth stale beans. Perambulating from the Park to the Temple during the day, I heard Cumming damned and defended in the clubs, but the farther east I walked, the more I encountered a truly British phenomenon: among the commonalty, the anti-Cummings wanted to see him done down for precisely the same reason that the pro-Cummings hoped he’d win: because he was a toff. The lord-haters were full of righteous indignation about the pampered rich rioting and gaming while honest folk went hungry, so to Hell with Cumming and the Prince of Wales and the lot of ’em; on the other side were the forelock-tuggers who thought it 'a bleedin' disgrice that a proper gent wot ’ad fought for Queen an' country' should be defamed by the likes o' them nobodies. No wonder the foreigners can’t understand us.
No doubt because I hoped to see him sunk to perdition, I could imagine several excellent reasons why the jury should find in his favour and award him thumping damages. Foremost in my mind still, you see, was the conviction that he couldn’t have cheated; spite and prejudice aside, it wasn’t in the man’s nature. But it was up to the jury now, and no doubt all hung on the direction they would receive from the venerable Coleridge. The early editions were carrying his summing-up at length, and I studied it eagerly in the corner of a Fleet Street pub, with a pie and pint to keep me company.
The day’s proceedings had begun with a protest from that ass Owen Williams, demanding to make a statement against the Solicitor-General, Clarke, who, says Williams, had accused him of an 'abominable crime—of sacrificing an innocent man'.
Coleridge couldn’t remember what exact words had been used, but told Williams that counsel could say what they dam' well liked in Court, and would Williams kindly keep quiet and give him, Coleridge, some judging-room, or words to that effect. After which Williams presumably retired, gnashing, and Coleridge addressed the twelve good men and true.
It must have been a sight to see, for he apparently played the wise, simple old codger, peering over his glasses while he told the jury what brilliant chaps Clarke and Russell and Asquith were: he didn’t say they were too clever by half, exactly, but he thought it no bad thing that 'the humble jog-trot' of his summing-up should intervene between their fireworks and the verdict.
Having put the wigged brigade in their place, he told the jury something that was news to me: that cheating at cards was an offence for which you could be nailed in court. He then went on to remind them that Clarke had said Cumming wasn’t interested in soaking his accusers; they would bear that in mind if the question of damages arose. (A hundred to eight he’ll tell ’em to find for Cumming, thinks I.) And another thing: whether they disapproved of gambling or not was beside the point, which was simply this: did Cumming cheat or not?
He rambled on, fairly reasonably it seemed to me, about the actual play, and the witnesses' testimony, and caused some mirth by describing Cumming’s system of betting as sounding like 'coup d'etat'. Well, he knew it couldn’t be coup d'etat, but it was some French expression or other … oh, coup de trois, was it? Ah, well … On he went, honest old Coleridge, as gentle and benign as could be, drawing the jury’s attention to various points, reminding them that it didn’t matter a hoot what he thought, it was up to them, and all he could do was raise questions for them, which they must answer. Only once did he rouse himself, to have a brief bicker with Clarke for seeming to turn up his nose at the social standing of some of the accusers. It wasn’t Lycett Green’s fault that his father was an engineer, was it? And if young Jack Wilson was a shiftless layabout, what was wrong with that? And if the Wilsons toad-ate the Prince, why, who did not?
Clarke said he hadn’t called Lycett Green’s father an engineer, and Coleridge said, well, if he hadn’t, his junior had. No he hadn’t, either, says Clarke, but Coleridge ignored him and said he didn’t see why a chap should be laughed at because his father was an engineer, and if a chap liked hobnobbing with the Prince, where was the harm, eh? It wouldn’t prejudice him against Gordon-Cumming, anyway, and that was the point.
Furthermore, this stuff about Gordon-Cumming losing his head didn’t impress the bench. Cumming had had lots of time to think before he signed the paper, and knew what he was doing. He hadn’t asked to be confronted by his accusers, either; pretty rum, that seemed to Coleridge. And he hadn’t returned his winnings—put ’em in the bank, 238 quids' worth. Well, well …
Having read this far, I felt the odds were shifting in the direction of the defendants, but you still couldn’t tell. Then the silly old buffer got on to a new tack: the Prince of Wales. Well, Coleridge couldn’t see the throne toppling simply because the Prince had played baccarat. The Prince had a busy public life, opening things and making speeches and listening to speeches, and a hell of a bore it must be, in Coleridge’s view, so if he wanted to enjoy himself of an evening, why not? Some people might say why not read the Bible instead of playing baccarat, but it was a free country, wasn’t it?
Sound stuff, in its way, interspersed with quotations from Shakespeare (including a bit of Henry V at Agincourt on the subject of honour), and other authors with whom he didn’t doubt the jury were familiar, and a few Latin tags to remind them that this was serious work—and then, at the end of his summing-up, when they must have been sitting in a restful fog, he left off playing the genial philosophising old buffer and delivered the thrust that settled the case once and for all.
Would an innocent man, he wondered, sign a document stating he had cheated, simply to prevent its being known that the Prince of Wales had played baccarat? Would a man allow himself to be called a card-sharp rather than have it known that the Prince had done something of which many people might disapprove? No, Coleridge couldn’t swallow that.
The jury retired … and that, blast it, was as far as the report went, so I set off for home, and it was in the gentle even-fall that I came on a newsboy hollering 'Verdict!' on the corner of Bruton Street, and there it was in the stop press: the jury had taken only thirteen minutes to find for the defendants.
So that was Cumming ruined. The twelve good men had declared him a cheat and a liar.
I confess it took me aback—splendid news though it was. How the devil had a jury of Englishmen, brought up to give a man the benefit of the doubt, come to that conclusion? Still, they’d been in court, and I had not—and they’d reached their decision double quick, hadn’t they just, in hardly more time than it would take to call for votes round the table. No doubts, apparently, and certainly no arguments.
Strangely, where opinion had been evenly divided before, it swung violently to Cumming after the verdict. One learned journal opined that you wouldn’t have hung a dog on the evidence that he’d cheated, and I heard it said on every side that the thing should never have come to trial at all: it should have been settled at Tranby, and would have been but for ill-advised zeal on the part of the Prince’s friends to save him from scandal.
The irony was that in spite of all the reverential treatment and may-it-please-your-royal-highnessing he’d received in court, the trial did Bertie more damage than any other incident in his well-spotted career. The press, as I’ve said, damned him from Belgrade to breakfast, and when he issued a statement (with the blessing, they say, of the Prime Minister and the Archbishop of Canterbury) protesting that he had a horror of gambling, and did his utmost to discourage it, he was seen for the windy little hypocrite he was, and hooted in the streets.
Cumming was finished socially and professionally, of course, and had the sense to resign, marry his American
