DOUBLE MYSTERY OF AN EARL’S BRIDE.

Otago Daily Times, Issue 19009, 3 November 1923, Page 14

DOUBLE MYSTERY OF AN EARL’S BRIDE.

His Honour, Judge Parry has bean contributing to the Weekly Despatch, London, a series of articles on-remarkable ctnSes before the law courts. In his recent article to hand by mail, he recounts a romance of real life as follows: —Facts wilder than Inventions. — To some modern thinkers the actual stories of the life of mankind unfolded bit by bit in the evidence of the witnesses in a law suit have a far stronger human claim on our attention and contain even ■: stranger elements of rdmanoe than the wildest inventions of the novelist. Looking back at the blameless but ' weary years of my apprenticeship in the law I often think to-day that the many dull hours I spent in the law library assimilating indigestible legal fodder might have been better used sitting in the back row of the Nisi Prius Court •watching a legal drama at first hand. Certainly I regret at this moment that I did not drop in to the Probate Court on that April morning in 1834 when the usher called on Euston v. Euston, and Charles Bussell set out to prove that the Earl of Euston was entitled to have his marriage annulled on the ground that at the time of his marriage his bride was a married woman with a living husband. One would have had -• to arrive early to squeeze into court, for the story was known to be a romantic one, and, as 1 say, the world loves a strange romance. Had Wilkie Collins or Mrs Henry Wood invented the facts of the case I doubt if even their art could have overcome the difficulties of making the story sound at all probable and they would have been accused of sinning against the probabilities of life and over-stretching the long arm of coincidence to get at grips with sensation. —ln the historical line.— If you turn to your Burke you will find that Henry James Earl of Euston “m. 29 May. 1871, Kate, dau. of John Walsh.’ Lodge more accurately, perhaps, calls the lady “Kate Walsh Smith, widow,’’ but neither of these voluminous auDiors tells us anything about the lady’s history, yet they must nave known, as Browning sang in a lyrical romance of another pretty lady, And, Robert Browning, you writer of playa, ■■ Here’s a subject made to your hand. It may be merely fanciful, but remembering the love affairs of Barbara Villiera and the Merry Monarch, the - ■ romance of his desctsndant seems consonant * with history. You remember how pleased Pepys was when he visited Whitehall and saw the dazzling, beautiful Lady Castlemaine walking with her nurse and baby in the gardens and the King coming up to the nurso and taking the child in his arms and dandling it. Charles II was inordinately proud of the boy. and in due course he was created Baron Sudbury, Viscount Ipswich and Earl of Euston. - Later on he became Duke of Grafton. Had Kate Walsh had a son, he too, might have been a Fitzroy and as great a lord as Barbara’s baby. And Kate, in her way, must have been as attractive to idle man as even Barbara herself. Of her lineage we know nothing. “John Walsh, Esq.,” of the peerages may have been a myth or a bricklayer. Like many other ladies her age is a matter of doubt and her matrimonial status was a puzzle for the lawyers. . —Leaving the circus rider.— The young Earl of Euston was only twenty-two years of age when he came ; across a girl named Kate Cook. Her ' real name was Walsh, but she appears to have formed a temporary alliance with a circus rider named Cook and lived in his name and under his protection. These gay ladies seem naturally‘attracted to the heroes of the circus. You will remember that the Duchess of Cleveland, the beautiful Barbara, deserted the Kiiig for Jacob Hall, the handsome rope dancer. That was at the end of her career, but Kate seems to have started with her circus rider but had left him apparently in 1870, when she met and enslaved the young Earl of Euston. For some months they seem to have lived together. She appears to have passed herself off .as twenty-four, and have told the Earl she was a widow. He found the lady so adorable that he was not content with the mere temporary possession of her but. he persuaded her to marry him. The marriage took place at Worcester on May 29, 1871, the witnesses being a church official and a • solicitor. She gave her name at the time as “Kata Walsh Smith, widow.” The Earl now settled on his bride the sum of £IO,OOO, appointing the solicitor her trustee. * —A previous marriage.— For some years they lived together, v - but not apparently in any great content. The happy pair quarrelled, the Earl’s : family were not desirous to welcome him ”■ back into the family circle either with or without Kate, and so, after the fashion of the heroes of romance who have overbought in the wild oats market, he sailed away to Australia to seek his fortune. This was in 1876, and once in Australia the young earl seems to have turned over a new leaf and after a while he made good, obtained Government employment, and settled down as a worthy citizen. Kate, for her part, does not to have mourned his loss, and consoled herself with a betting man. , This is the state of affairs when the S earl returns to England. His advisers ?,,■ appear to have made a great discovery -i’.'-and are in possession of facts which will empower the court to annul the unfortun- ■- ’ate marriage which he made at Worcester ” and enable him to choose a suitable from among the daughters of Debrett. The earl is informed that on July 6, 1863, his wife had married at St. Mungo’s Catholic Church, Glasgow George Manby Smith, a commercial traveller. In the certificate of marriage she was described as a spinster and the bridegroom as a t . bachelor. This Kate Walsh, or Mrs Smith, did not deny, but she had always that George Manby Smith had <d.|feen drowned at sea. fco’l” Her husband had undoubtedly sailed c -‘- fdr Australia from London, and .among ’ the list of passengers of the boat in which he was supposed to have sailed the name of G M. Smith appears. Kate seems to have asserted that this was her husband, and this man was undoubtedly drowned at sea. But inquiries had discovered that this man was not George Manby Smith at all, but George Maslin Smith, a stranger to Kate, with no right to a place "■ among the dramatis personae of her •“‘/romance. .The real George Manby Smith, the . bridegroom of St. Mungo’s Church, had .'been discovered in New Zealand and brought home to swear to his own identity and Kate’s. If the jury were satisfied that all this was true, then when Kate married the Earl of Euston at Worcester she was not a widow, the marriage was void, and she never became a countess. This was the story as set out in Charles Bussell’s brief, and no doubt when he went into court for the Earl he was satisfied that he had a winning case. Inder.v.,wick, for the respondent, was not withobt hope for his client, and did not /•■•believe that the man they had brought 1 -irom overseas was the real and original George Manby Smith. Moreover, ho had a second string to his bow if, when George Manby Smith appeared, they were ■ unable to dispute his identity. A The case proceeds with formal proof of documents, and then the crucial r moment arrives. George Manby Smith steps into the witness box. It is 21 years since he stood at the altar with Kale Cook. She is sitting in court and gazing at him with strange interest to saiisty

herself aye or no whether he has been recalled from the dead to rob her of her aristocratic status. Examined by Bussell, he tells the tale of his courtship. He was a Birmingham traveller staying in Glasgow on business in 1863. The beautiful Kate was living with her circus man, but she told George sad tales of his cruelty to her. The heart of the kind traveller is touched. He takes her under his protection, he carries her one summer morning in July to bt. Mungo, and makes Kate an honest woman, or as near thereto as circumstances will permit, for George Manby Smith had a real part in the melodrama. He, too, had a past—quite a romantic one for a Birmingham traveller. The Countess of Euston had been observing George carefully while he is giving evidence, and tells her solicitor that she cannot deny the identity of George. He tells the court every detail of their married fife. He, too, had found her affections more alluring than lasting. After five months of married life he h-.d faded away to New Zealand. He loons across the court at Kate and identifies the lady. She casts down her eyes and admits that he is the man. It would appear that this is enough to annul the marriage. There are more witnesses to identity. The individuality of George Maslin Smith is cleared up and it is proved by his widow that he was another, and a better Smith than George Manby, and that he was drowned at sea. But now we come to the strangest part of the story. Indenvick, nothing dismayed by the strength of the case against him, bends his bow to a second string. "Much-married Spinster.”— True, ho says, that George Manby Smith married his client in Glasgow, and was alive when he manned the Earl of Euston at Worcester, and therefore in the ordinary case that marriage should be annulled; but ho is going to prove that when Kate married George at Glasgow George was himself a married man with a wife living at Birmingham, and that therefore that was no marriage, and Hate had never been a widow, but was ready only a much-married spinster at the date of the Worcester wedding. If that ian be proved surely here is a romance that will out-Garvice Garvice and pale the fires of Miss Ethel Dell herself. William Henry Johnson is called. Ho tells the court that he had a sister named Mary Anne. She was married to a man named William Smith, and there was a family of four children. William Smith died in 1853. In the autumn of 1862 he was at Birmingham, and found that Marv Anne had consoled herself with another Smith, our very friend George Manby. In November, 1865, Mrs George Manby Smith was ill, and she died in 1867. But she was alive when her naughty husband went to Glasgow and fell in with Kate. Grotesque Melodrama.— George Manby had to admit that he married Mary Anne on June 26, 1862, and Kate on July 6, 1863. He told the court that he thought Mary Anne was dead before he married .again. He believed he had been told so by a friend, whose name he could not remember. He went back to Birmingham, but he made no inquiries .about her and did not go and see her grown-up sons who lived .n Birmingham. So the triangle was complete. Not the eternal triangle of modem romance but a new, grotesque, threesided melodrama. And here are the three sides of it: 1. The Earl married his Countess Kate in 1871 when she was the widow of George Manby Smith. 2. Countess Kate was not the widow of George Manby Smith in 1871, since he was living. 3. But George Manby Smith was never the husband of Countess Kate, because when he married her his wile was alive. Therefore we are landed in the geometrical impossibility that-Kate’s side of the triangle is bigger and better than the other two. "Which,” as Euclid justly remarks, “is absurd.” But .n law and drama and romance nothing Is absurd.