Flashman And The Tiger

The trial came off in June of ’91, and it’s one of the regrets of my life that I was not present, if only to see stout Bertie in the witness-box, squirming under the inquisition of saucy jurors who didn’t know their place, unlike the judge and counsel who grovelled to him something servile, and did everything but tote him in and out of court in a palankeen. The proceedings lasted a week, and by all accounts it was one of the finest legal circuses ever seen, with the judge as ringmaster and nothing lacking but an orchestra and chorus girls. Knowing our revered Lord Chief Justice of the day, the ancient Coleridge, I wasn’t surprised, for he was a jolly old buck with a tremendous fund of good stories; once made a speech lasting twenty-three days, they tell me, and was responsible for the three-mile limit, in case you’re interested.

You may be sure I was sorely tempted once or twice to view the spectacle, but decided reluctantly to keep clear—when you’ve had a hand in engineering a disaster it’s best to stand well out from under to avoid falling debris. I knew Bertie and Co wouldn’t advertise my part in the affair, which was deplorable enough with-out the notorious Flashy being dragged in, and sure enough they didn’t. One or two who knew I’d been at Tranby quizzed me, but I took a stern and silent line—you know, shockin' biznai, old comrade, beyond belief, state o' the Army, damnable altogether , , , that sort of thing.

Aside from the verdict, which I’ll tell you presently in case you_ don’t know, the great sensation was the storm that burst over the head of our unfortunate Heir Apparent. God forbid I should ever feel sorry for the fat bounder, but even I was astonished at the way the press and pulpits laid into him; you’d have thought he’d been kidnapping nuns and selling ’em to the Port Said brothels. And all because he’d been playing baccarat! "Woe to the Monarchy!" wailed one rag, another spoke of a "chorus of condemnation", and the rest expressed shock and disgust, denounced his taste for the "lowest type of gambling", and recoiled from the spectacle of "the future King of England officiating at a gamblers' orgy". Even the Times went wild with terms like "regret", "concern", and "distress", a Scotch journal decided that "the Prince is evidently not what he ought to be", but the leader I liked best was the one that said the British Empire was humiliated and the rest of civilisation was pointing the finger at us.

As to the trial itself, you can go to the official record if you’ve a mind to, but I flatter myself you won’t learn much that I haven’t told you. The lawyers went back and forth over every blessed moment of those three nights, every shift of those damned counters, every syllable of who said what to whom, and what expressions they wore, and what they thought and why, over and over, and I dare say at the end of it the jury were as fogged as the public. The biggest guns of the day fought the case: Clarke, the Solicitor-General, no less, who appeared for Cumming, was reckoned the shrewdest mouthpiece of the day, while the defendants were rep-resented by two of the best hatchet-men in the business, Charles Russell and young Asquith—you know the latter as the buffoon who infests Number 10 Downing Street at the moment, and my recollection of him is as a shining morning face to which I once presented a prize at the City of London School, but for all that he was accounted a sharp hand in court, while Russell was a human hawk, and looked it.

Reading the press reports, I concluded that the evidence given didn’t differ much from what I myself remembered of events, and in nothing essential. Owen Williams had drawn up a précis of what had happened at Tranby, in which various holes were picked: there seemed to be uncertainty over the order of the interviews on the Wednesday evening, and some vagueness as to who had suggested presenting the damning document to Cumming—which wasn’t surprising, since it had been yours truly, and they were keeping me out of it. Elspeth likewise: I’d been worried that she might be called as a witness, since on the first night she’d sat as an onlooker, and on the second had for a time taken Lady Coventry’s place next to Cumming, but either they’d forgotten about her—or more likely they’d remembered, and had realised that the last thing the trial needed was her drivelling brightly in the witness-box. Like several others of the party, she wasn’t even mentioned.

None of which mattered to the case. Cumming, in evidence, repeated his flat denial of the charges, claiming that he’d lost his head and signed the paper only because he’d been persuaded that there was no other way to avoid a public scandal. He got in a sly thrust at Bertie by suggesting that H.R.H. had been chiefly concerned to cover his own ample rear—which, as I knew, was gospel true.