I pray that one day some-one will prove my innocence.
Florence Maybrick
Anyone who knew anything about James Maybrick knew two things. 1) He was a Freemason. 2) He was a junkie.
James ran on junk. His entire nervous system was wet through with arsenic. He put it in his wine, he put it in his tea, and he put it in his food. Maybrick’s drug-taking was so well known amongst his contemporaries that it all but defined him. He swallowed arsenic like a condiment, and never said no to the occasional shunt of strychnine. Both were potentially lethal, but over the years he’d developed a gargantuan tolerance, and to kill him with either would have required enough to flatten an elk.
In loony paradox he was also a ‘hypochondriac’, in perpetual anxiety about his health while relentlessly doing everything he could to destroy it. After his death 163 medicine bottles were found distributed between his home and his office. There were fifty-one different medicines, both patent and prescribed, in his dressing room alone. ‘He made a perfect apothecary’s shop of himself,’ said Baroness von Roques, ‘as we all know.’
Everyone did know. A close friend and a captain in the cotton-shipping business, John Flemming, remembered Maybrick in action at his office in Norfolk, Virginia.
He was cooking in a small pan above an oil stove. I saw him deposit a grey powder in his food resembling light-coloured pepper.
‘You would be horrified, I daresay,’ said he, ‘if you knew what this powder is.’
‘There’s no harm in pepper,’ said Flemming.
‘It is arsenic,’ said Maybrick. ‘I am now taking enough arsenic to kill you.’1
The minimum fatal dose of this colourless, odourless and tasteless metallic poison is two grains (about a match-head) for an adult human. Maybrick could swallow treble that and go back for a chaser. ‘He used to call continually at my shop,’ recalled a Liverpool pharmacist, Edward Heaton, ‘sometimes four or five times a day, for what he called his “pick-me-up”, but which was liquid arsenicalis.’2
Such statements about Maybrick were commonplace on either side of the Atlantic. Ten days before his death another seafaring friend, the aforementioned Captain P.J. Irving of the White Star Line, had come to dine with the Maybricks at Battlecrease House. His host was amiable enough, although Irving sensed something was amiss. Cornering Edwin after dinner, he asked why James was looking so quag. ‘Oh, he’s killing himself with that damned strychnine,’ was the younger brother’s reply.3
It didn’t unduly surprise Irving to hear that Maybrick was poisoning himself, because ‘everybody knew Jim was always taking some medicine or another. His office was more like a chemist’s shop than anything else.’ In a press interview published after the ‘trial’, Irving related how he had met Edwin and James that same day at the latter’s offices in Knowsley Buildings, Liverpool West: ‘He picked up a glass which he partly filled with water, and then pulled out of his breast pocket a small packet, the contents of which he emptied into the glass, and afterwards drank the whole concoction.’4 It was probably strychnine.
But it wasn’t strychnine or arsenic that killed James Maybrick. Arsenic was his drug of choice, and getting hold of enough of it was more often than not an ongoing obsession. Even by Victorian standards there were strict rules on its acquisition. Since the Poisons Act of 1851, arsenic was no longer sold raw, and even small quantities had to be mixed, by statute, with indigo, charcoal or soot. For a man with a habit like Maybrick’s, these restrictions were an impediment, and so, like all addicts, he scored wherever he could.
In February 1889 he got lucky – more than lucky, he hit the jackpot. A young salesman by the name of Valentine Blake had come to Liverpool in hopes of revitalising ramine grass as a viable substitute for cotton. It was to be made by an entirely new chemical process, superior to anything preceding it, and as chance would have it, James was chosen to hear about it.
Like everyone else in cotton he despised ramine, but he became animated when he heard about the secrets of the new production method, which apparently involved copious amounts of the magic ingredient As2O3, or arsenic trioxide. Addiction took over, and thereafter the conversation turned on Blake’s naïvety and Maybrick’s craftiness. ‘Maybrick asked me whether I had heard that many inhabitants of Styria, in Austria, habitually took arsenic internally and throve upon it?’ When Blake acknowledged that he had, Maybrick then shifted his focus from the stoned-yodellers to an individual, in this instance one of the world’s most notorious degenerates. Had Blake heard of Thomas de Quincey and his seminal work on junk, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater? Another confirmation stimulated further interest in Maybrick, and Blake must have wondered what had happened to the ramine. But, ever anxious to sell it, he played along with the de Quincey theme, speculating on how any man could possibly take nine hundred drops of laudanum a day.
‘One man’s poison is another man’s meat,’ retorted Maybrick, and then got down to it: ‘There’s a so-called poison which is like meat and liquor to me.’ Dare Blake ask what that might be? ‘I don’t tell everybody,’ said Maybrick, ‘and wouldn’t tell you,’ but seeing it was Blake who had mentioned it, it was arsenic. ‘I take it when I can get it, but the doctors won’t put any into my medicine except now and then as a trifle, that only tantalises me. Since you use arsenic,’ he continued, ‘can you let me have some? I find a difficulty in getting it here.’5
The upshot was a quid pro quo deal. Maybrick would do his best with the ramine grass, and Blake would make a present of all the arsenic that was left over from his employer’s now perfected experiments – in all, about 150 grains. Later that month Blake returned to Liverpool for further discussions and delivery on the agreement. That evening Maybrick walked through his front door with enough arsenic to slab the immediate neighbourhood.
Although he was considered so by himself and probably everyone else, Maybrick wasn’t actually a hypochondriac at all. What he was, was sick from trying to stay well. He’d been swallowing poison for years, doubling the dose of anything prescribed, and then wondered why he felt ill. It was this insane cycle of drug-taking to ameliorate the effects of drug-taking that brought him constantly into the presence of doctors, and that Michael Maybrick saw over the Christmas of 1888 as an opportunity to exploit.
James travelled to London to see Dr Fuller at his brother’s apartments on Sunday, 14 April 1889, and again on the following Sunday, 21 April, when he saw Fuller at his house. ‘He was a man who seemed inclined to exaggerate his symptoms,’ said Fuller; ‘he complained of pains in his head and of numbness, and said he was apprehensive of being paralysed.’ After an hour of examination Fuller could find little wrong with him: ‘I told him he was suffering from indigestion, and that I was perfectly certain there was no fear of paralysis. He seemed a nervous man. It is almost impossible to say what is the cause of constant disturbances in the nerves.’6
How about strychnine, although James told Fuller nothing of that, or of the arsenic either. In ignorance of his visitor’s pernicious ‘pick-me-ups’, Fuller prescribed two anodyne palliatives, ‘one an aperient, and the other a tonic with liver pills’. Neither contained the remotest trace of anything poisonous, and whatever ‘medicine’ followed these visits (notoriously ‘the London Medicine’) was concocted and sent via the mails by Michael Maybrick.
Getting James down to London to see Fuller was part of an emerging strategy, a ‘campaign’ as the Ripper called it, of which Florence was already a part. Although neither of them could have known it, both were key protagonists in a miasma of wickedness which, from a psychopathic point of view, couldn’t have looked rosier.
In the previous month, March 1889, Florence had also travelled to London, booking rooms in the names of ‘Mr and Mrs Thomas Maybrick’ at Flatman’s Hotel, Henrietta Street. Flatman’s was situated in one of the capital’s most fashionable areas, and Mrs Maybrick wore her most chic of Parisian togs – staff at the hotel said they had never seen such pretty shoes. Florie had every reason to look her best. She was in town for two entirely different but organically interlocking reasons. The first was to seek legal advice on a separation from the fifty-year-old junkie, and the ancillary and primary reason for this was a consolidation of permanence with the man she loved.
How utterly tragic was this woman’s fortune. She was a one-sided Romeo and Juliet. It was for a night in bed with Alfred Brierley that a senile judge was to sentence her to death.
In the shadows of Saturday, 23 March 1889, under the sobriquet of Thomas Maybrick, Brierley slipped into the hotel for some dick fun. Apparently it didn’t go too well. Maybe he got the guilt in respect of his friendship with James; maybe he simply didn’t love her. ‘He piqued my vanity,’ wrote Florence years later. But either way, she was never going to kiss Alfred Brierley again.
In the ordinary daylight came regret. He had told her that he loved another, and Flatman’s had become a place where they rent rooms. Meantime, amidst her sorrow and putting on the pretty shoes, something sinister was in progress outside the hotel. Hostile eyes watched with interest. She and Brierley left Flatman’s early on Sunday afternoon, agreeing that they should never meet in such circumstances again.
For the next three nights she stayed at Kensington Gardens with the family of John Baillie Knight, an intimate family friend who had known Florence since she was a little girl. The following day, Monday, 25 March, her ever solicitous brother-in-law Michael called at the Baillie Knight house in Kensington and took Florence out to dinner and a show. At least, that’s what he claimed in a subsequent newspaper interview which appeared in the New York Herald after the ‘trial’. He was trying to play the concerned relative, pretending that his sister-in-law’s impending death sentence was nothing to do with him. ‘Nothing would please me more,’ he said (knowing nothing like it was going to happen), ‘than to hear that the Home Secretary’s decision is that Mrs Maybrick shall go free. It has been published that I never liked her, that I avoided her house. All this is untrue. My relations with her were always pleasant. Only three weeks before my brother died – the day after she was with Brierley in London, in fact – I took her to dine at the Café Royal in Regent Street, and took her to the theatre, does that look like I disliked and distrusted her?’7
No, it looks like lying. He was lying because it was he who had hounded her to the very steps of the gallows, and he was lying over this ‘fantasy soirée’ at the Café Royal. It was in fact not three but seven weeks before James was murdered; moreover, there was no way Michael Maybrick took Florence Maybrick or anybody else out to dinner on that last Monday in March 1889.
Throughout the day and into the night of 25 March 1889, Michael was organising and later brown-nosing at a smoking concert he’d directed on behalf of the Artists Volunteers.
Florence returned to Liverpool on 28 March. It isn’t known if she and Brierley met again during her London stay, or whether the Metropolitan Police were still watching her after she had left the hotel on Sunday the 24th. ‘One of the strangest features of this strange case,’ wrote the author Trevor Christie, ‘was a subsequent article in the New York Herald’s London edition, to the effect that the police trailed Mrs Maybrick to the Hotel, and kept her under surveillance throughout her stay. The police saw her drive up to Chapel Place, and watched that part of the building. They were aware of “John’s” having driven her to the Grand Hotel and the theatre, and they produced a photograph of that person which the Landlord of the House immediately identified.’8 This was John Baillie Knight.
‘The [Flatman’s] waiter, Alfred Schweisso,’ continued the Herald, ‘who gave evidence for the prosecution at Liverpool, says he does not want to testify in any more criminal cases at Liverpool or elsewhere, as he wasn’t treated well.’ Schweisso had been bullied by the police, made to say what he knew was nonsense. It would be premature to get into the so-called ‘trial’ or its preliminaries. Suffice it to say that the Crown couldn’t have got up its phoney and criminally wicked charges without a parroted testimony from this waiter.
So corrupt were these proceedings, so palpable the stitch-up, that in a remorseful confession Schweisso wrote to Alexander Macdougall,9 a Scottish barrister who, with hopeless fortitude, was campaigning to prove Mrs Maybrick’s innocence:
I should be too glad to do that which would be of assistance to your Committee in getting Mrs Maybrick released. I am very sorry that I did not act as I ought to have done, inasmuch as it was a matter of life and death. But I was really afraid of the consequences that might happen. I will give you an instance. When I arrived at the Coroner’s inquest I met an Inspector. He said, ‘Will you be able to recognise Mrs Maybrick?’ I said I should not. He said, ‘Keep with me, and I will take you so as you can see her, because you will be sworn, whether you can recognise her or not.’ I saw her twice before I was taken to recognise her by order of the Coroner. You are aware that at the Coroner’s Court the Coroner dealt chiefly on Mrs Maybrick’s movements in summing up, and that it was published in the local papers that the case would be quashed up. I told the Inspector this. He said, I have seen it myself, but I have a different opinion, for it’s going to end against her.
Anyone of a moderately enquiring mind might wonder how it was that this unnamed Police Inspector could know that.
Schweisso goes on to describe a matrix of chicanery holding this coroner’s court together, concluding his letter with: ‘I give you this statement voluntarily, to show you, as far as I’m concerned, that it was a regular got up case of the police.’10
A got-up case it was. It was a culmination of scheming instigated by Michael Maybrick; and with no shortage of informants inside the Maybrick marital home, he was well aware of the domestic ferment he was poised to walk into. The ‘Whore’ had inadvertently delivered herself into his hands at Flatman’s Hotel, and he was almost ready to act. He would of course enjoy all the usual support from coroners, coppers and courts.
Anyone looking to cook up a motive for murder was spoiled for choice. Florence continued to supply all the ammunition needed. The day after her return from London, James took her to Aintree for the Grand National, the highlight of the racing year. At some point Florence was escorted arm-in-arm up the course by Alfred Brierley, and when they finally got home her husband freaked. ‘I was expecting a tragedy in the family,’ wrote one of the Maybricks’ oldest friends, ‘but I was looking at it from the other party. James had gotten wise to the Flatman’s Hotel affair, and I was expecting him to plug Brierley at any time.’11 Instead he took it out on his wife, smacking her in the face and telling her to get out. A servant girl called Brierley (no relation) was sent to fetch a cab. The fracas then moved into the hall, where Maybrick ‘raved and stamped like a madman’. Another servant, Mary Cadwallader, was an eyewitness. ‘She had on a fur cape. He told her to take it off as she was not going to go away with that on. He had bought it for her to go up to London in’ (to see ‘her aunt’, the lying bitch).
Cadwallader attempted to intervene. ‘Oh, master,’ she begged, ‘please don’t go on like this, the neighbours will hear you.’ He didn’t give a fuck what the neighbours heard, and didn’t want to hear her: ‘Leave me alone, you don’t know anything about it.’ But Cadwallader was undeterred. ‘Don’t send the mistress away tonight. Where can she go? Let her stay until morning.’ By now Maybrick was bellowing, ‘By heavens, Florie, if you cross this doorstep, you shall never enter it again.’ He became so exhausted, said Cadwallader, ‘he fell across an oak settle and went quite stiff. I did not know if he was drunk or in a fit. I sent the cab away and we got Mrs Maybrick upstairs and Mr Maybrick spent all night in the dining room.’12
By morning the blow to Florie’s face had matured into a black eye. She took it around the corner to show to a neighbourhood friend by the name of Matilda Briggs, seeking her advice about a separation. It was decided that she should see a solicitor, but first Mrs Briggs took her to see Florence’s physician, Dr Hopper, who apparently had her trust. She told him that James had beaten her, that she couldn’t bear him to touch her, that they slept in separate beds. Notwithstanding this, Hopper thought an attempt at reconciliation was the best option, and later that day he went to Battlecrease to have a go at it. Tragically, he succeeded. The couple agreed to try to forgive and forget, and James sealed the deal by consenting to pay Florie’s debts. But the marriage was broken; she was an adulteress with little love for James, and ten weeks later he was dead.
Following her husband’s murder, the machinery of state preservation, last visited upon a Bradford milkman, was now visited upon Florence Maybrick. The motive was precisely the same as with William Barrit: to blame anyone, destroy anyone, hang anyone, who might threaten Her Majesty’s ruling elite. Jack was at the heart of it, and from the beginning Michael Maybrick knew he was on a win–win. He moved on his own family with the pleasure of Satan, accusing his brother of one horror, his brother’s wife of another, and taking care of the documentation for both. There would be forged letters, phoney medical prescriptions, and a forged will. No one can lie like a psychopath, and nothing keeps its mouth shut like Masonry. The ‘Mystic Tie’ was its raison d’être, and having debased everything the Fraternity claimed to stand for, Michael now made it his servant.
Let me just stop and interview myself here. Are you saying that Michael Maybrick set James Maybrick up as Jack the Ripper, murdering him with the state’s acquiescence, and blaming Florence Maybrick for the deed?
How about 100 per cent?
Michael had been whispering into receptive ears. No one can know exactly what came out of his mouth in respect of James, but the substance of it isn’t difficult to construe. Certainly it is known what toxic murmurs he put about regarding Florence, and extrapolating from the one presents a useful idea of the other.
We will come to these accusations, and to Michael’s ‘regret’ at having to make them, in due course. But make them he did, and was he not a man of unimpeachable honour? In the spring of 1889 the authorities had reason enough to believe that the nightmare who had been terrorising Whitechapel was in his grave. It was a welcome development, but there was a caveat. It was believed that Florence Maybrick had discovered the truth of a terrible secret. Most dangerously, she was now the guardian of a scandal that a legion of lickspittles, including the Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, had criminalised themselves to secure.
Masonic anxieties that Jack had generated in life were now transferred to the havoc he might wreak in death. At all costs, Bro James Maybrick had to be disassociated from Freemasonry, and his wife permanently shut up. As a pillar of the Fraternity, a pillar of society, Michael Maybrick was only too ready to help. It goes without saying that in reality Florence knew nothing, because there was nothing to know. It was a lie within a lie. But that was all it took for the System to kick in – witness the cops at Flatman’s Hotel – ultimately crushing her inside the well-rehearsed mechanism of an Establishment cover-up.
James Maybrick died in the arms of his best friend, George Davidson, on the evening of 11 May 1889. Thereafter, Florence was entrapped in the System, isolated and silenced. Virtually everyone had deserted her, but why had they deserted James? The only thing he’d done wrong was to get himself murdered, yet those who had been his intimates, particularly in Freemasonry, abandoned him. The nineteenth-century conventions of Masonic interment were quite specific, and there must have been those who wondered why tradition was flouted so brutally in respect of James. How was it that this hapless victim of homicide, a city worthy who counted so many of Liverpool’s most prominent Masons amongst his business associates and friends, should go to his maker without a Masonic contingent present, much less a Masonic wreath?13
‘There is no privilege appertaining to the Fraternity,’ claimed a prominent Masonic periodical in 1882, ‘of which Masons in general are so tenacious as the right of Masonic burial. So earnestly is this regarded that many, long before the approach of the dread messenger, request some brother, in case he should be the survivor, to see that this last token of respect to his memory be paid; and, in many instances, they select the Brother who is desired to officiate upon the solemn occasion.’
In this case, Bro Michael Maybrick.
‘In view, therefore, of the value set upon this privilege by the great majority of Masons in deference to the feelings of the relatives and friends of the deceased, and with proper regard for the reputation of our craft before the public, no accessory which will lend dignity and solemnity to the ceremony should be neglected.’14
Sharing both blood and Masonic brotherhood with James, Bro Michael put himself in charge of the funeral. Surely of all people he should have assured Masonic solemnities for his wretched sibling. Instead he was secretly laughing at the graveside.
The vicar who buried James at Anfield Cemetery, the Reverend C.R. Hyde, had been his friend for twenty years, and was himself a prominent Mason. For a description of the funeral James should have had, we might do worse than turn to the Liverpool Daily Post of 12 February 1897, when Bro Hyde himself was interred.
From the gates of the cemetery the cortege passed through a double line of Freemasons who flanked the road. The deceased gentleman was Chaplain of the Kirkdale Lodge (1756) and a considerable number from this Lodge were present, while Brethren from other Lodges were in attendance. The chief portion of the assembly at the graveside consisted of Freemasons.
Michael Maybrick denied his brother these solemnities. Apart from near family and a few friends, what James got was predominantly a contingency of the staff from Battlecrease. Among them was a twenty-eight-year-old nursemaid to Florie’s kids by the name of Alice Yapp. She made no particular secret of her dislike for her employer. They were about the same age, probably as pretty as each other, but Yapp was a servant with nothing, and Florence her mistress with it all. I think it’s indicative of the resentment Yapp felt that she would turn up at the ‘trial’ carrying one of Florie’s Parisian silk parasols.
Raise your eyes across the grave and you’re looking at another nasty piece of work, the counterfeit friend Matilda Briggs. Mrs Briggs was an intimate of the deceased, and like Yapp had personal reasons for despising Florence. She loathed her because she had been ‘madly in love with James’,15 had made a desperate effort to marry him, and might well have pulled it off had not the adulterous little slut from Alabama turned up.
According to Florence Aunspaugh, both Briggs and Yapp ‘hated Florence Maybrick’, although Briggs camouflaged her bitterness behind a mask of saccharine benevolence.16 Though of course ignorant of Michael’s Whitechapel horror story, these two women were easy prey for a psychopath, predisposed in their animosity and only too eager to be walk-ons in his nightmare.
In a post-‘trial’ interview he denied any relationship with either, most particularly the accusation that Alice Yapp was acting as his ‘spy’ in the Maybrick household. ‘There is not a shadow of truth in such a report,’ he countered with commanding rectitude. ‘Why should I want to have a spy upon Mrs Maybrick, I should like to know?’17
The question is answered with another. Why was Florence Maybrick not at her husband’s funeral? Why was she semi-comatose in a stinking bed, abandoned in her own excrement, locked in a bedroom at Battlecrease House with no one in attendance?
Without Yapp and Briggs in the equation, it would have been infinitely more difficult for Michael to have got away with it. Without their willing acquiescence he might not have got away with it at all. Yapp was a harridan. In the context of such wickedness, to call her a mere ‘spy’ was a compliment.
Following her child’s incarceration, Florence’s mother, Caroline von Roques, wrote in her despair to the one individual whose Masonic clout she misguidedly imagined could help her:
TO HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS, THE PRINCE OF WALES
As the daughter and as the widow of a Freemason, and as an accepted member of the American Order for Women, the Eastern Lodge, I approach your Royal Highness with the entreaty that the [?] of my need, for the protective and fraternal respect of all Free and Accepted Masons and kindness of the Members of the Order. I now approach your Royal Highness under equally terrible conditions. The unjust and cruel punishment for an unproven offence has been the sentence to my young, delicate, well-born and innocent daughter, Mrs Maybrick. She has endured for 3 years a living death amongst the lowest class, taken from her family, her mother, her children, her station, deprived of all worldly interests, shamed and ruined, through the mere suspicion of her legal Brother in Law and treacherous friends – gossip of servants [?] [?] against her – a stranger, alone, friendless, brotherless, a mere girl, a widow, the daughter and the granddaughter, and the widow of a Mason.
All emphasis is hers. Baroness von Roques knew something that her son-in-law’s Masonic contemporaries had mysteriously forgotten: that James was a Mason, and Florence ‘the widow of a Mason’. What she didn’t know was that Michael had fingered James as the Ripper, and that this functioned as an insurance policy for him to get away with anything he liked. The Victorian state had cast its mantle around the terrible secret, and as guardian of it Michael truly was ‘On Her Majesty’s Service’. He could snigger at their stupidity and relish the fun, indulging in the inevitable vaudeville of Her Majesty’s ‘justice’. A circus of bent coppers and zombie coroners was in his wake, and as with the milkman Barrit, the journalist Ernest Parke and the politician Charles Stewart Parnell, it was justice made into a mockery.
The imprisonment of Florence Maybrick represented a triumph of the rot. Totally framed and utterly innocent, she suffered ‘an unjust and cruel punishment for an unproven offence’, predicated on nothing but the fabricated ‘suspicion of her legal Brother in Law’, a serial killer called Michael Maybrick.
The desperation in von Roques’ text tells us almost all we need to know about ‘the Maybrick Mystery’. ‘I appeal to your Royal Highness,’ she continues,
and plead as the Head and Chief of English Masons, mercy and justice and freedom where ever dispensed may be taken into serious consideration. Some months since the documents proving my rights to such considerations were shown to his Lordship the Earl of Lathom by a member of the Skelmersdale Lodge (1380). I had achieved through his influence to approach Her Majesty the Queen at a time when [my time?] when my awful sorrow as a mother and a grandmother. His Majesty’s just heart has heretofore shown to the cause of mothers [brothers?] and children.18
It was like dropping a line to Adolf on behalf of Anne Frank. The well-being of this lot was precisely why Florence had been sentenced to life imprisonment. I naturally make no accusation against Fat Ed. He was as ignorant of Florence Maybrick as he was spared the bother of reading her mother’s letter. It went to his private secretary, Bro Sir Francis Knollys, who forwarded it to the Masonic Secretary to the Prince and intimate pal of the Ripper, Bro Colonel Thomas Shadwell Clerke. Clerke dismissed it as a ‘legal matter’, and nothing further was ever heard of it.19
Nothing more was heard from the Earl of Lathom either. His lodge, the Skelmersdale, was but one of many at which this fabulously wealthy aristocrat sat as Grand Master. His baronial heap at Ormskirk in Lancashire played frequent host to the masters of the state, Viscount Lord Salisbury among them.
This corpulent reprobate, England’s Prime Minister, was well aware of ‘the Maybrick Mystery’, and it was he who recommended that Her Majesty should show no mercy in respect of the public agitation to free Mrs Maybrick. Salisbury was the boss cunt of his class, dominating the executive, and a ‘dangerous leader to be placed in command of a body so easily influenced for evil’. Such was the opinion of his parliamentary contemporary Lord Rosebery: ‘I hope the Noble Marquis will excuse me when I say that he is a little impetuous in the use of the weapon committed to his charge. If he is not hacking about and dealing death and destruction with it, he is always threatening with it.’20
But let us return to Salisbury’s Liverpool host, the Earl of Lathom. Chamberlain to the Queen, Master of her Swans, he was Provincial Grand Master of Lancashire. Among his other lodges was the Liverpool Lodge of Harmony (32), in which James Maybrick was a fellow Companion, and the exclusive London chapter St George’s (42), where he enjoyed the company of Bros Colonel Shadwell Clerke and the serial killer Michael Maybrick.
Caroline von Roques didn’t have a hope in hell, and neither did Florence. They were up against a government within a government, a judiciary within a judiciary, and a police force within a police force. Jack the Ripper was as much a part of the ‘Mystic Tie’ as its Grand Master, Bro the Prince of Wales himself.
Because the British state was rotten to the core, Bro Jack got away with it. Nothing could be allowed to threaten Masonry, because the whole venal dinosaur of the Victorian ruling elite couldn’t function without it. If you wanted your bit of ribbon, you pressed your fingertips together and bowed out backwards like you were sucking on a gallstone.
In December 2013 the journalist Nick Cohen wrote a characteristically incisive piece in the Observer. What he writes of the English governing class and its Civil Service is as accurate now as it was 130 years ago: ‘The best way to imagine the British Establishment, is to picture a committee that never meets. There is no chain of command, which might leave incriminating paper trails; no controlling intelligence. Its members do not need to wait for instructions from on high, they know what to do without being told.’
Three great corruptions were simultaneously in progress in 1889. They were the conspiracy to frame Charles Parnell, the conspiracy to bury the Cleveland Street scandal, and the conspiracy to hide Jack the Ripper. To this substantial list we can add another: the conspiracy to frame Florence Elizabeth Maybrick.