Flashman And The Tiger

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'état". Well, he knew it couldn’t be coup d'état, 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.