Sir William Gordon-Cumming, 4th Baronet
Sir William Alexander Gordon Gordon-Cumming, 4th Baronet, was a Scottish landowner, soldier, socialite and a notorious womaniser. He was the central figure in the royal baccarat scandal of 1891. After inheriting a baronetcy he joined the British Army in 1868 and saw service in South Africa, Egypt and the Sudan; he served with distinction for two decades and rose to the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Something of an adventurer, he also spent time hunting in the US and India.
A friend of Edward, Prince of Wales, for over 20 years, in 1890 he attended a house party at Tranby Croft in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where he took part in a game of baccarat at the behest of the prince. During the course of two nights' play he was accused of cheating, which he denied vehemently. After news of the affair leaked out, he sued five members of the party for slander; the Prince of Wales was called as a witness. The case was a public spectacle, widely reported in the UK and abroad, but the verdict went against Gordon-Cumming and he was ostracised from polite society.
A handsome, arrogant man, Gordon-Cumming was a philanderer, particularly with married women. In 1891, after the court case, he married Florence Garner, an American heiress; the couple had five children, but their relationship was unhappy. He was the grandfather of the writers Katie Fforde and Jane Gordon-Cumming.
Early life
William Gordon Gordon-Cumming was born on 20 July 1848 at Sanquhar House, near Forres, Morayshire. His parents were Alexander Penrose Gordon-Cumming—the third of the Gordon-Cumming baronets—and Anne Pitcairn. William was the second of the couple's four children and their eldest son. His uncle, Roualeyn George Gordon-Cumming, was a noted big-game hunter; and his aunt, Constance Gordon-Cumming, was a travel writer. Gordon-Cumming was educated at the English boarding schools Eton and Wellington.At the age of eighteen he inherited the baronetcy and became chief of Clan Cumming; his line had been traced from the fourth century, through Charlemagne. His inheritance included three Morayshire estates: Altyre near Forres, Gordonstoun near Elgin, and the village of Dallas. The estates totalled of poor quality land; the annual income from the estates in around 1890 has been given as either £60,000 or £80,000.
Military career
Although Gordon-Cumming had asthma and was blind in one eye, he purchased a commission as ensign in the Scots Fusilier Guards in 1868. He was promoted to regimental lieutenant and to the brevet rank of captain in the army by purchase on 17 May 1871, the last year in which commissions were available for purchase. He volunteered for service in South Africa in the Anglo-Zulu War, where he served gallantly and was mentioned in despatches; he was the first man to enter Cetshwayo's kraal after the Battle of Ulundi. That year he conveyed the condolences of the army to the ex-Empress Eugénie on the death of her son, Napoléon, Prince Imperial.Gordon-Cumming was promoted to the regimental rank of captain and the army rank of lieutenant-colonel on 28 July 1880. He served in Egypt during the Anglo-Egyptian War and in the Sudan in the Mahdist War, the last of which was with the Guards Camel Regiment in the Desert Column. He was promoted to the regimental rank of major on 23 May 1888.
He also found time for independent travel and adventure, stalking tigers on foot in India and hunting in the Rocky Mountains in the US; in 1871 he published an account of his travels in India, Wild Men and Wild Beasts: Scenes in Camp and Jungle. The work covers the best routes to travel to and from India and which animals are available for hunting in which season, as well as the equipment a hunter would need to take on an expedition. He concluded his work with the following:
The record of my doings might no doubt have been more acceptable to the general reader had it been more varied with matter other than mere slaughter, and had the tale of bloodshed been more frequently relieved by accounts of the geography, scenery, and natural history, human and bestial, of the country; but all these have been well described elsewhere, and by abler pens.
Royal baccarat scandal
In September 1890 Arthur Wilson, the 52-year-old Hull-based owner of a shipping business, invited Gordon-Cumming, along with Edward, Prince of Wales, to a house party at Tranby Croft in the East Riding of Yorkshire; Gordon-Cumming and the prince had been friends for over twenty years. Among the other people present that weekend were Wilson's wife, Mary, their son, Stanley, their daughter, Ethel, and her husband, Edward Lycett Green, who was the son of Sir Edward Green, 1st Baronet, a local Conservative politician. Several members of the prince's inner circle were also invited to stay, including Sir Christopher Sykes—the Conservative MP for Beverley—the equerry Tyrwhitt Wilson, Lord Coventry, Lord Edward Somerset, his cousin Captain Arthur Somerset, and Lieutenant-General Owen Williams, along with their wives. Also accompanying the party was Lieutenant Berkeley Levett, a brother officer to Gordon-Cumming in the Scots Guards and a friend of the Wilson family.During the evenings of the weekend, Edward insisted on playing baccarat, a game that was at the time illegal if gambling was involved; many of the house joined in, including Gordon-Cumming, Levett and Stanley Wilson. The prince acted as the dealer. On the first night of play, Stanley Wilson thought he saw Gordon-Cumming add two red £5 counters onto his stake after the hand had finished, but before the winnings had been paid, thus increasing the money paid to him by the bank—a method of cheating known in casinos as la poussette. He alerted Levett, sitting next to him, and both men thought they saw Gordon-Cumming repeat the act on the next hand.
After the second evening of play Lycett Green, Stanley Wilson and Arthur and Edward Somerset confronted Gordon-Cumming and accused him of cheating. Gordon-Cumming insisted they had been mistaken, and explained that he played the coup de trois system of betting, in which if he won a hand with a £5 stake, he would add his winnings to the stake, together with another £5, as the stake for the next hand. Edward, after hearing from his advisors and the accusers, believed what they had told him. In order to avoid a scandal involving the prince, Gordon-Cumming gave way to pressure from the attendant royal courtiers to sign a statement undertaking never to play cards again in return for a pledge that no-one present would speak of the incident to anyone else.
Despite the pledge of silence, rumours of the incident began to circulate and were brought to Gordon-Cumming's attention. In an attempt to stop the rumours, he demanded a retraction from five of the house party: Stanley Wilson, Ethel and Edward Lycett Green, Mary Wilson and Levett. With no withdrawal forthcoming, on 6 February 1891, Gordon-Cumming issued writs for slander against the five, claiming £5,000 damages against each of them.
The trial opened on 1 June 1891 at the Royal Courts of Justice, where entry to the court was only with a ticket. The Prince of Wales had been summoned as a witness, and he sat on a red leather chair on a raised platform between the judge and the witness box; his appearance was the first time since 1411 that an heir to the throne had appeared involuntarily in court.
The trial closed the following week, on 9 June 1891: the judge's summing up was "unacceptably biased" against Gordon-Cumming, according to Jason Tomes, Gordon-Cumming's biographer in the 2010 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The jury deliberated for only thirteen minutes before finding in favour of the defendants; their decision was greeted by prolonged hissing from some members of the galleries against the jury. The day after judgment was passed, the leader in The Times stated "He is ... condemned by the verdict of the jury to social extinction. His brilliant record is wiped out and he must, so to speak, begin life again. Such is the inexorable social rule ... He has committed a mortal offence. Society can know him no more." Gordon-Cumming's senior counsel, the Solicitor General Sir Edward Clarke, remained convinced of the blamelessness of his client and, in his 1918 memoirs, wrote "I believe the verdict was wrong, and that Sir William Gordon-Cumming was innocent".
Aftermath
As a result of the scandal, Gordon-Cumming was dismissed from the army the day after the trial concluded, and he resigned his membership of his four London clubs, the Carlton, Guards, Marlborough and Turf. The same day, 10 June 1891, he married his American fiancée, the heiress Florence Garner, who had supported him throughout the trial although Gordon-Cumming twice offered to break off their engagement because of the scandal. The service took place at the Holy Trinity church in Chelsea with only a small congregation. Major Vesey John Dawson of the Coldstream Guards was Gordon-Cumming's best man and Lord Thurlow gave the bride away. When the couple returned to Scotland a few days later the locals from near his estate had decorated the station, and pulled the couple and their carriage through the streets by hand. According to the former Lord Chancellor, Michael Havers, the lawyer Edward Grayson and the historian Peter Shankland, the local people did not care that society considered Gordon-Cumming a social outcast.The Prince of Wales was determined Gordon-Cumming should remain ostracised and he let it be known that anyone who acknowledged Gordon-Cumming or accepted invitations to shoot at the two Scottish estates Gordon-Cumming owned, would not be asked to Marlborough House—Edward's mansion in London—or be acknowledged at court. Edward wrote to his son, Prince George, the day after the trial "Thank God! – the Army and Society are now well rid of such a damned blackguard. The crowning point of his infamy is that he, this morning, married an American young lady, Miss Garner, ... with money!"