Rebel Britannia

19th March 1872:

Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke MP finally succeeded on this day in getting the House of Commons to hold a formal debate on the abolition of the monarchy. When the vote was taken at the end, his motion was defeated by 276 votes to 2.

At various times (and variously with and without the capital initials), Dilke (1843-1911) was a Liberal, a Radical, and a Republican. He campaigned for everyone to have the vote, and in favour of most of the other progressive causes of his time.

He was never an isolated outsider, though; he knew how to work within the governmental system to win reforms, and amongst his solid achievements as a leader of the anti-Whig faction of the Liberal Party, he is credited with enabling important advances towards democracy in the 1880s.

For a good while, Dilke was seen almost universally as a future prime minister. (Understandably, this prospect horrified Queen Victoria, who was very angry when Dilke was appointed to Gladstone's cabinet). How different our history might or might not have been had this happened is an intriguing topic for speculation; even with his radicalism mellowed by career and trammelled by office, it would surely have been interesting, to say the least, to have had a republican, democrat, feminist PM at the end of the 19th century.

His political advance was derailed, however, in the way that such advances so often are - by a sex scandal. And this was perhaps the most extraordinary political sex scandal this country's ever seen. "MP Denies Three-in-a-Bed Romp" is only the beginning of the thing.

In July 1885, Dilke - at that time an admired and effective government minister - was a widower, still fairly young, and it was no secret that women enjoyed his company. But when a 22-year-old woman named Virginia Crawford, who was being divorced by her husband, made public allegations against Dilke, it all began to go terminally wrong.

Crawford was the sister of Dilke's sister-in-law, and she claimed that the MP had seduced her when she was an 18-year-old newly-wed. During their affair, she said, "He taught me every French vice." (And as we all know, there's no vice so shocking as a French one. Your Spanish, your Italians, they do their best, bless them, but ... ).

Dilke, she further claimed, had insisted that a young servant girl named Fanny join them in bed. Dilke denied ever having sex with Virginia, though he didn't deny that he'd had two separate affairs with her mother, before and after his own first marriage. The eventual outcome of the Crawford divorce case was a bizarre ruling that Virginia was indeed guilty of adultery with Dilke - but that there was no evidence to suggest that Dilke had committed adultery with Virginia.

The case made Charles Dilke a national laughing stock, and he never again held ministerial office. Today, most historians believe that Dilke was the victim of a conspiracy and that he was innocent of Victoria's allegations. Possibly, he was targeted to prevent a republican entering Number Ten, but a more likely explanation is that Virginia wanted to secure a divorce without publicly naming her actual lover, and so chose Dilke as a credible scapegoat.

If so, it's good to note that, although he lost his parliamentary seat in 1886 as a result of the scandal, he re-entered the Commons in 1892 for the Forest of Dean, where he championed the interests of the miners, and remained an MP for the rest of his life. He also enjoyed a happy second marriage to a feminist trade unionist.

(Virginia Crawford lived until 1948, becoming a long-serving Labour councillor, a well-known writer, and the founder of the Catholic Women's Suffrage Society.)

Incidentally, the 19th March was an appropriate date for Dilke's anti-monarchy debate. On that day in 1649, parliament voted to abolish the House of Lords on the incontestable grounds that it was "useless." (During 1658-59, it was replaced by another house known as the Other House.)

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Sources:

https://spartacus-educational.com/Charles_Dilke.htm

Critics of Empire by Bernard Porter (I.B.Tauris, 2008)

www.independent.co.uk/voices/threeinabed-stories-1615951.html

www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Abolition-Of-The-House-Of-Lords/