Micat exitiale superbis
‘A fatal thunderbolt strikes down the proud’.
Motto beneath a painted mythological roundel
on the ceiling of the Speyers’ music room
This ... charge that you were a spy and a traitor
John Roskill, KC. Counsel to Sir Edgar Speyer,
28 October 1921
My interest in Edgar and Leonora Speyer really began in the music room of their great house at 46 Grosvenor Street, Mayfair, where I was drawn by curiosity about the case. The house (now the headquarters of an investment advisory company) has seen superficial changes since they left it in 1915 on what turned out to be, though they did not know it at the time, a journey into exile. The spacious music room, then a celebrated centre of London’s cultural life, running almost the length of the house and forming its focal point, is now a boardroom, divided by a long table. The portrait of Leonora by John Singer Sargent which then dominated the left-hand wall has been replaced by a mirror. The elaborate pipe-organ which faced it at the opposite end of the room was removed from its recess and the gap where the pipes stood has been crudely patched over. From the windows, the view of what was an Italian garden is marred by ugly extensions jutting out from the buildings opposite. But the Louis XV-style interior remains, with its delicate carved wood panelling and its high, painted allegorical ceiling. It takes little imagination to picture candelabras reflected in the mirrors, guests in evening dress, and the music-making that took place there a century ago, for Leonora was a concert violinist and music was at the heart of Edgar’s aesthetic life.
The Speyers customarily offered hospitality to distinguished foreign musicians and composers who happened to be in London. It was therefore natural that when in 1906 the elderly Edvard Grieg came to London on his way to receive an honorary degree from the University of Oxford, Edgar and Leonora should press him to spend a few days at Grosvenor Street. Edvard and his wife, the soprano Nina Grieg, arrived in the morning. After lunch, they found themselves ‘quite alone with our host and hostess’ and ‘fortunate enough to get to know them better’.1 The four retired to the music room, where Grieg sat at the piano and played several of his compositions. Then Edgar and Leonora persuaded Nina to sing. Which of Grieg’s songs she performed one would give much to know, for, as the composer noted with surprise, it moved Edgar to tears. My interest was heightened by this man of business who revealed a romantic sensibility.
In the first decade of the 20th century the name of Edgar Speyer was frequently in the news. Financier and entrepreneur, ‘King of the London Underground’, public benefactor, patron of music and the arts, a friend of the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, and his redoubtable wife Margot, a regular guest in Downing Street, Edgar was a known figure in London society, respected and admired, a metropolitan Maecenas. Yet his name today is virtually unknown except as that of the first of two men, separated by an interval of 90 years, to be struck, at the Government’s behest, from the roll of the Privy Council.*
Of German parentage and education, Speyer, who was granted British nationality at the age of 29, was not the first public man to become the target of national passions aroused by the Great War. Solely on account of his foreign birth, Prince Louis of Battenberg was forced to resign as first Sea Lord in October 1914, and the Lord Chancellor, Lord Haldane, was driven from office in May 1915 for his supposed pro-German sympathies. At the same time that Haldane quitted public life, Edgar and Leonora Speyer and their three young daughters left England to seek respite in America from a campaign of vilification that had pursued them since August 1914.
The peculiar distinction of the Speyer episode 1914– 1922, and its historical significance, lies in the extraordinary pitch of malignity and the unrelenting persistence with which Edgar Speyer was singled out and demonised across a period of more than seven years. He became a marked man, in effect an outlaw; or rather the law was amended in order to make him one. The authorities left no stone unturned in their efforts to track him down. In 1921, after a four-year investigation into his wartime activities, a judicial committee of enquiry found him guilty of disloyalty and disaffection to the Crown and of communicating and trading with the enemy. He was stripped of his British citizenship and his membership of the Privy Council. He returned to America, this time for good. The proceedings against him, followed through at the highest levels, furnish a unique and disturbing example of the coordinated concentration of state power – responding to press, political and popular forces at a time of supreme national crisis – against an individual.
The good man brought low, the generous benefactor repaid with rank ingratitude – the theme is as old as Shakespeare’s Timon or the Book of Job. The Morning Post, which had headed the pack of press organs to hound and harry him out of the country, showed more humanity on his death in 1932, when it described ‘the downfall of Sir Edgar Speyer’ as ‘one of the minor tragedies of the war’.2 That, by any reckoning, and whatever view one may take of the case, is fair comment.
But how far was Edgar without fault in all this? The judicial verdict was unequivocal and pronounced with ‘no doubt whatever’.3 His conduct was reviled by the press as ‘one of the most odious chapters of the war’.4 The Times denounced him as a traitor, lucky to escape the hangman’s noose, the Irish Times maintaining that ‘throughout his eventful life Sir Edgar Speyer was consistently loyal to the Fatherland’.5 But Speyer himself, far from bowing his head in shame, indignantly repudiated what he called the ‘monstrous conclusions’ of ‘this partisan report’, whose findings he dismissed as ‘trivial beyond words’. In a strangely biblical expression, he blamed ‘this unrighteous action’6 on the Government that had set it in motion, whom he challenged to publish the evidence and let the public judge for itself.
Guilty or not guilty? Villain or victim? Scapegoat of nationalistic war-fever or one of Germany’s most ‘highly placed spies’7 and a traitor to his adopted country? Opinion has wavered: tentative, ambivalent and uncertain. A brief but luminous cameo of the episode, some half dozen pages in all, appeared in 1932 in E F Benson’s As We Are. In his sympathetic account, the author, who knew and liked the Speyers, nevertheless assumed that ‘no doubt the sentence was just’.8 By contrast Herbert Grimsditch, author of the 1949 entry on Speyer in the Dictionary of National Biography, suggested: ‘It may be that he was guilty of no more than minor technical offences’. Presumably on that basis, Dr C C Aronsfeld somewhat optimistically asserted in 1956 that ‘posterity seems to have sustained’ Speyer’s ‘forceful demurrer’.9 Professor Michael Brock, however, rejoined in 1982 that ‘Speyer was not entirely innocent’.10 More than 20 years later, in 2004, Professor Geoffrey Searle agreed that Speyer’s conduct ‘gave a rough justification’11 to his detractors, and Professor Theodore Barker, revising Grimsditch’s account for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, added, though without explanation, that ‘there can be no doubt of his pro-German sympathies’. In 1997 The Independent newspaper described him as ‘a convicted spy’ and the BBC attributed his disgrace to ‘collaborating with the Germans in the First World War’.12 The weight of these verdicts hardly suggests a ringing endorsement of innocence. Then, in 2007, Speyer found a champion in Dr Leanne Langley, who described his treatment as ‘a blemish on the nation, which deserves redress’, and predicted that fresh research ‘will surely lead to a posthumous clearing of Speyer’s name one day’.13 Sir Louis Blom-Cooper QC goes further. In his stimulating foreword to this book, he presents a trenchant and unsparing critique of the process that led to Speyer’s condemnation by what, in Sir Louis’s opinion, was a gross miscarriage of justice. Such comment from this distinguished lawyer suggests that the case would be a cause célèbre were it not so little known.
But where does all this leave Speyer and what is one to make of him? Perusal of these varying approaches left me, like Khayyám, having
heard great Argument
About it and about: but evermore
Came out by the same door as in I went.
My own acquaintance with Edgar Speyer began when I was engaged on a biography of a great judge, Lord Sumner. I was drawn to Sumner’s dissenting judgment in the case of Rodriguez v Speyer Brothers.14 The wider background to that case intrigued me. I sought to find out more about Speyer, realised that my own passing account of him was inadequate, and a few years later returned to him in a conference paper.15 After this preliminary essay I followed up his half-forgotten story in earnest.
What was called for was an impartial reconsideration of the facts. Whatever might be the outcome, the challenge was one to appeal both to the lawyer and to the historian. I saw my task as not so much to vindicate Speyer as simply to ascertain, if that were possible, where the truth might lie. 90 years after the publication of the report of the judicial enquiry and 80 years after Speyer’s death, I had no axe to grind other than a desire to find out what it was all about. But how to access the evidence to the truth, one way or the other?
Release in 2003 of the Home Office and Treasury Solicitor’s Department files, including the transcript of Speyer’s trial, came to my aid and offered the opportunity to attempt such a reconsideration: to raise the curtain, so to speak, on events last examined 90 years after the publication by a tribunal behind closed doors; to retrace the events condemned, to ascertain what actually happened and to place the episode in the wider context, human and historical, of an eminent man swept from his pinnacle by the cataract of total war.
As the subtitle suggests, this is a case-study, not a biography. Too little evidence is extant for a rounded character-sketch. Only scraps of correspondence remain. In 2012 Captain Scott’s farewell letter to Speyer was auctioned for more than £160,000, but its public interest derives from the writer rather than the recipient. In following the fortunes, or misfortunes, of Sir Edgar Speyer during and after the Great War, the present account has a focus narrower but more specific than that of a conventional ‘life’. Traitor, scapegoat or spy? My aim is simple: to lay before the reader a candid record of events, and in the light of those to encourage him or her to decide for themselves which, if any, of these descriptions comes closest to the truth.
Cambridge
November 2012