The Man Who Created the Middle East: A Story of Empire, Conflict and the Sykes-Picot Agreement

‘I enjoyed an advantage over most of my age,’ he was to write in a memoir, ‘in having access to the very large library at Sledmere, and, before I was twelve, I was quite familiar with the volumes of Punch and the Illustrated London News for many years back.’35 (#litres_trial_promo) He was particularly fascinated by military history, inspired no doubt by the large collection of old uniforms and muskets which lay about the house, a reminder of the days when his ancestor Sir Christopher Sykes had, in 1798, raised a troop of yeomanry to defend the Wolds against the French, and amongst his favourite books were Marshal Saxe’s Reveries on theArt of War and Vauban’s seventeenth-century treatise New Methods of Fortification. There were other rarer and more forbidden books too, such as Richard Burton’s translation of the Arabian Nights, the footnotes of which, with their anthropological observations on Arab sexual practices such as bestiality, sodomy, eunuchism, clitoridectomy and miscegenation, all contributed to his sexual education.

It was a bout of illness at this time that heralded the beginning of what was to be the most important part of Mark’s schooling. He was bedridden for a few months with what was diagnosed as ‘a congestion of the lungs’,36 (#litres_trial_promo) and when he recovered it was decided that the damp climate of Yorkshire winters was the worst thing possible for him. From then on he was to spend the winter months abroad travelling, at first with both his parents, and later, when Jessie ceased to accompany Tatton on these journeys, with his father alone. In the autumn of 1888, he made his first trip abroad, to Egypt, where he acquired a fascination for and some knowledge of antiquities from the cicerone of the ruling Sirdar, Lord Grenfell, to whom Tatton had been given an introduction. This elderly guide later recalled him as having been ‘the most intelligent boy I had ever met. Mark took the greatest possible interest in my growing museum; he very soon mastered the rudiments of the study; he could read the cartouches containing the names of various kings, and, with me, studied … hieroglyphics.37 (#litres_trial_promo)

In Cairo, Mark made a new friend in George Bowles, the son of an old admirer of Jessie, Thomas Bowles, who was staying with his family at Shepheard’s Hotel. They accompanied the Sykeses on a trip up the Nile, and the two boys became inseparable. Soon they were exploring on their own and Mark passed on to George his new passion for ancient artefacts. At Thebes the two boys bought themselves a genuine mummified head. ‘That it will one day find its way into the soup,’ wrote Thomas in his diary, ‘unless it soon gets thrown overboard I feel little doubt.’ They were nicknamed ‘the two English baby-boys by the Arabs’ and ‘distinguished themselves by winning two donkey races at the local Gymkhana, Mark having carried off the race with saddles, and George the bare-backed race; but two days ago they fell out, and proceeded to settle their differences by having a fight according to the rules of the British prize ring, in the ruins of Karnak – a battle which much astonished the donkey-boys. Having shaken hands, however, at the end of their little mill, they are now faster friends than ever, and are at present, I understand, organising a deep-laid plot to get hold of an entire mummy and take it to England for the benefit of their friends and the greater glory of what they call their museum.’38 (#litres_trial_promo)

This was the first of many trips that Mark was to make over the next ten years, which were to contribute more to his general development and education than anything he ever learned at school. ‘Before I was fifteen,’ he later wrote, ‘I visited Assouan, which was then almost the Dervish frontier … Then I went to India when Lord Lansdowne was Viceroy. I did some exploration in the Arabian desert, enjoying myself bare-footed amongst the Arabs, and I paid a trip to Mexico, reaching there just when Porfirio Diaz was attaining the zenith of his power.’39 (#litres_trial_promo)

In the spring of 1890, aged eleven, Mark returned from a trip with his father to the Lebanon to find that, against the wishes of his father, who would have preferred Harrow, he had been enrolled by his mother as a junior student at Beaumont College, Windsor, a Roman Catholic school often called ‘the Catholic Eton’. She chose the school, which stood on rising ground near the Thames at Old Windsor, bordering the Great Park, not for religious reasons, but because it was more likely to nurture an unorthodox character such as Mark’s. The Rector, Father William Heathcote, was a known libertarian who believed that qualities such as humour and loyalty should be encouraged. She also approved of the emphasis placed by the school on theatre.

Having been exposed to far more than most boys of his age, and with his precocious and rather rebellious nature, Mark was an object of curiosity from the very moment he arrived at his new school. ‘He was quite unlike any other boy,’ wrote a contemporary, Wilfred Bowring, ‘and most of the boys certainly thought him eccentric. He took no part in the games, but soon gathered round him and under him all the loiterers and loafers in playroom and playground.’40 (#litres_trial_promo) Instead of organized games, he devised elaborate war games and could often be seen charging across the playground, perhaps in the guise of an Arab warrior, or a Red Indian chief. ‘I can recollect him now’, continued Bowring, ‘at the head of a motley gang, all waving roughly made tomahawks, charging across the playground to meet an opposing band.’41 (#litres_trial_promo) He kept a stock of stag beetles, with which he amused people by getting them intoxicated on the school beer, and was also the subject of much hilarity on account of his haphazard manner of dressing and his scruffy appearance, a trait shared by his close friend Cedric Dickens. ‘I can see the two of them,’ recalled Cedric’s brother Henry, ‘wandering into a certain catechism class … on Saturday afternoons, always dishevelled and invariably steeped in ink to the very bone. It must have taken years to get that ink out … I can see him too pretending to hang himself by the neck in a roller towel in the lavatory, and precious nearly succeeding too, by an accident! It was my hand that liberated him. So far as my observation went, never doing a stroke of school work.’42 (#litres_trial_promo)

It is a tribute to the monks of Beaumont that they made no attempt to force Mark into a mould into which he was not going to fit. Accepting that he would never have to earn a living, they seemed instead content with teaching him his religion. They made little attempt to ensure he did his school work, and his exercise books, rather than being crammed with Latin vocabulary and translations, were filled with entertaining histories based on Virgil and Cicero, illustrated with witty caricatures, a talent he had inherited from his mother. When Jessie, as she did from time to time, swooped down on the school to remove him to far-off places, the authorities simply turned a blind eye. ‘On several occasions,’ remembered Wilfred Bowring, ‘Lady Sykes, generally half-way through term, announced that she proposed to take Mark on a journey of indefinite length. Mark vanished from our ken for about six months, when he reappeared laden with curios from the countries he had visited. These curios nearly always took the shape of lethal weapons, most welcome gifts for his school cronies. He returned from these trips with a smattering of strange tongues … full of the habits, customs, history and folk-lore of the countries he had visited.’43 (#litres_trial_promo) Most boys, one might expect, would have been spoiled by this kind of upbringing. ‘Not so Mark,’ wrote one of his teachers, Father Cuthbert Elwes. ‘Though he was undoubtedly a remarkably intelligent and intensely amusing boy, his chief charm was his great simplicity and openness of character and entire freedom from human respect.’44 (#litres_trial_promo)

On his return to school, he invariably attracted a large crowd around him to listen to the extraordinary stories he had to tell. Sitting cross-legged and often puffing on a hubble-bubble, he regaled them with tales of being taken by his father to a mountain in the desert that was home to ‘the weird Druses of Lebanon’, whom few schoolboys could name, let alone place; of sleeping in tents on the edge of the Sea of Galilee; and of the dreadful scenes he witnessed in the lunatic asylum in Damascus, where wretched madmen imprisoned in tiny kennels, each six feet by five, ‘clamoured and howled the lifelong day; over their ankles in their own ordure, naked save for their chains, these wretched beings shrieked and jibbered! Happy were those who, completely insane, laughed and sang in this inferno.’45 (#litres_trial_promo)

‘He was a consummate actor,’ wrote Father Elwes. ‘On a wet day, when all the boys were assembled together in the playroom, he would stand on the table and entertain his schoolfellows with a stump speech which would go on indefinitely.’46 (#litres_trial_promo) His talents for acting and story-telling found their truest expression when he went up to the senior school in 1892, and they gained him the only award he was ever to win at school, the elocution prize for a play he wrote and directed himself, ‘A Hyde Park Demonstration’, in which he took the leading role of the orator. He also published his first piece of writing, an article for the first issue of the Beaumont Review, entitled ‘Night in a Mexican Station’, which was an account of an incident that had taken place during a trip to Mexico he had made with his father during the winter of 1891–2. They had taken an overnight train to the north of the country, and Mark demonstrated his powers of observation in his amusing descriptions of some of the passengers in the different carriages. Those in the ‘Palace on Wheels’, for example, included ‘The Yankeeized Mexican – viz, a Mexican in frock coat and top hat; the “Rurales” officer, a gorgeous combination of leather, silver and revolvers, etc; the American “drummer”, a commercial traveller …; and lastly, the conductor – a lantern-jawed U.S. franchised Citizen, a voice several degrees sharper than a steam saw.’47 (#litres_trial_promo)

One boy who fell under Mark’s spell during this period was his cousin, Tom Ellis, who had left Eton to enroll at Beaumont, a move that had been engineered by Jessie, who considered him a perfect companion for her son. ‘About 1894,’ he later wrote, ‘I was enveloped in one of her whirlwind moods by Jessica and flung into the society of a large, round, amiable boy of my own age. Three years of Cheam and one of Eton had produced a sort of palaeolithic cave-boy in me with a crust of classical education. Even so I think it took me about three minutes to succumb completely to Mark’s charm, even though he opened the conversation by demanding my opinion on the Fourth Dimension … I think Mark was as lonely as I was, for he adopted me and added me to the retinue which he employed for his romantic purposes.’48 (#litres_trial_promo)

Ellis often spent his holidays at Sledmere, which, he later recalled, ‘was to a boy of my age remarkably like fairyland. That is, anything might happen at any moment, and strange things did happen at odd moments … Strangest of all were the queer evenings when theoretically Mark and I were both abed and asleep. I would wander alone to Mark’s room, and whilst the elders played poker savagely Mark would talk high and disposedly of everything in the world and often of things not even discussed in public. It was my great good fortune to be introduced to the vile and ignoble things of the world by the only soul I have known who seemed to be completely proved against them. All those sexual matters, that are hinted at, boggled, hatched and evaded until the boy is initiated into a mystery in the grubby way of experience, were for Mark either dreary commonplace or subjects suited to Homeric laughter. At the same time Mark maintained that high matters should be gravely discussed with the aid of a two-stemmed hubble-bubble.’49 (#litres_trial_promo)

Mark was fifteen now and driven by an insatiable curiosity about the world. Everything he read about he was keen to put into practice. Military history was still one of his passions and he eagerly introduced his new friend to Vauban’s New Methods of Fortification. No longer satisfied with merely looking at the diagrams, he decided they should bring them to life: ‘nothing would satisfy Mark but a model siege upon the lawn,’ recalled Ellis, ‘so shortly there rose a fortress about ten foot square, laid out strictly according to Vauban, bastions, lunettes, redans and all else. Guns were represented by door bolts, and I was told off to invest the fortress scientifically. With a saloon rifle apiece, we fired alternate shots, but any digging involved the loss of a shot. This meant that I dug madly while Mark shot … By the third day of the siege the lawn was a nightmare. I had closed upon the doomed fortress, and, joy of joys, I looked like beating Mark at one of his own games. About this moment Sir Tatton glanced at what had once been a fair lawn and was now a mole’s Walpurgis night. I faded into the horizon, but Mark came out of the situation manfully. Sir Tatton was then ploughing up the park “to sweeten the ground”. And Mark maintained that our performance was doing the same for the lawn!’50 (#litres_trial_promo)

These military games became more and more elaborate, with Mark calling on children from the village to play the part of troops, which he, being the young master, could command without opposition. He devised complicated battles in the park and paddocks, in which he devoted great attention to the working out of tactics and the designing of fortifications. Poor old Grayson often found himself drawn into these. ‘Witness the battle of Sledmere Church,’ remembered Tom Ellis, ‘which nearly brought about the death of Grayson … Mark ordained that the church was to stand the onslaught of the heretics, represented by old Grayson and the twins of Jones, the jockey. After a prolonged siege the heretics attempted to take the outer palisades of the church by escalade, and were repulsed with one casualty. Old Grayson, being eighty, was not of an age to stand a fall from a fifteen-foot ladder.’51 (#litres_trial_promo)

But not all was fun and games in Mark’s life, far from it. Tom Ellis wrote of ‘nightmare scenes amongst the grown-ups that faded as strangely as they began … Through these Mark walked quite steadily, with myself trailing dutifully in pursuit.’52 (#litres_trial_promo) The fact is that his mother’s behaviour was steadily deteriorating, and had been since the spring of 1887, when her lover, Lucien de Hirsch, had died suddenly in Paris of pneumonia, while she was in Damascus with Tatton. It had broken her heart, for in the short time she had spent with him she had had a glimpse of what life could have been like for her had she married a man of her own age and with her own interests. Both the knowledge of this and the loss of him proved too much to bear and she began to lose control. As part of a deal she had struck with Tatton before setting out on their last trip to the Middle East, that she would stay with him in Palestine as long as he wished, he had agreed to take a lease on a London house for her, 46 Grosvenor St. This is where she retreated when she returned home and where she was to spend more and more time in the years to come. Away from ‘the Alte’ and with a healthy disrespect for the conventions of society, she attempted to drown her sorrows in a hedonistic lifestyle. Soon the grand ground-floor rooms of this impressive Mayfair house were filled with the scent of cigarette smoke – smoking was a habit forbidden at Sledmere – and the sounds of merry-making, dominated by the rattle of the dice and the clink of the bottle, two vices to which Jessie was to become increasingly addicted.

There were more lovers too, mostly dashing army officers who took advantage of her generosity and did nothing to improve her state of mind. As her drinking increased, so did her indiscretions, until the vicious gossips and jealous spinsters of London drawing-rooms were whispering in each other’s ears with undisguised pleasure the new name coined for her by one of the wittier amongst them. To them she was no longer Lady Tatton Sykes, but Lady Satin Tights. ‘Nevertheless,’ she had written to Cardinal Manning in 1882, ‘I have … a real reverence for goodness and wisdom … and a desire … to try and utterly abandon my sinful and useless life.’53 (#litres_trial_promo) She did not give up the struggle. Society may have laughed at her behind her back, but amongst the poor and needy she was revered and blessed with a kinder nickname – ‘Lady Bountiful’. When she was at Sledmere, much of her time was spent in daily visits to dispense food, clothing or money to families in need, while in Hull, where slum housing and conditions for the poor were particularly bad, she was something of a heroine. She was known particularly for her work on behalf of poor children, and Lady Sykes’s Christmas Treat, for the Catholic children of Prynne Street, had become an important annual event. ‘I gave a Tea in Hull for the children of the Catholic School,’ she had written to Lucien on 31 December 1886, ‘which lasted from midday till 6.30 … There were 520 children, and I was carving meat for three hours. I think they enjoyed themselves poor things. Certainly they were very poor and 21 boys and 1 girl amongst them had no shoes or stockings, and in this bitter weather too. We made a huge sandwich for each child and gave them besides various mince pies and cakes. It was a great pleasure to me.’54 (#litres_trial_promo)

Nor was her charity confined to Sledmere. She lived at a time when philanthropy was almost a social imperative and in London there was no shortage of directions in which she might turn her attention. Her particular interest was the Catholic poor in the East End, mostly Irish immigrants who were flooding in to look for jobs which were better paid than back home, or at least thought to be so. In they swarmed into the cheapest and already most overcrowded districts, creating appalling slum ghettoes from which it was difficult for them to escape. ‘Whilst we have been building our churches,’ thundered the author of a pamphlet entitled The Bitter Cry of Outcast London, ‘and solacing ourselves with our religion and dreaming that the millennium was coming, the poor have been growing poorer, the wretched more miserable, and the immoral more corrupt.’55 (#litres_trial_promo) It was typical of Jessie to combine her social life and her charity work in a flamboyant style and she would often astonish people by leaving a party in full swing and going straight to the East End to dispense soup. Still dressed in her ball gown and sparkling jewels, she appeared to the homeless like a fairytale princess.

Though she now led a life which was increasingly independent from her husband, Jessie was still Lady Sykes and she continued to play that role as she was needed, acting, for example, as Tatton’s travelling companion. She accompanied him to Russia in 1887, India in 1888 and Egypt in 1889. Her powers of flirtation remained undiminished and each trip netted her new admirers. In Russia a General Churchyard fell under her spell. In India, two young men, Richard Braithwaite and David Wallace, were rivals for her love, but it was in Egypt that she came closest to finding again the happiness she had felt with Lucien when she embarked on an affair with Eldon Gorst, a young diplomat and rising star in the Foreign Office who had been assigned to the British Consulate-General in Cairo. For two years they conducted a passionate relationship with periods of great happiness interspersed with the heartbreak of separation. There could be no future in their union, which, when it finally broke up, left them both heartbroken. Jessie was inconsolable.

Aged thirty-six, her sadness compounded in April 1891 by the death of her beloved father, she felt her life was beginning to cave in on her. Over the next two years, her drinking became heavier, her promiscuity more flagrant, and she began to haunt bookmakers’ shops and the premises of money-lenders, while those who cared for her looked on in horror, powerless to help, foremost amongst them her fifteen-year-old son.

Chapter 2

Trials and Tribulations (#ua5848302-924e-545c-a782-b5bf101cfb37)

Watching his mother’s slow deterioration was extremely difficult for Mark, and for the first time in his life, he began to dread her visits to Beaumont, fearing that she would be begging him to intervene on her behalf with his father, or, worse still, that she would be drunk. ‘I can still see Lady Sykes,’ recalled Henry Dickens, ‘descending on Beaumont like a thunderbolt, entering into tremendous fights with Father Heathcote, the then and equally pugnacious rector.’1 (#litres_trial_promo) At home he felt increasingly isolated, having no one to whom he could really turn. His tutor, ‘Doolis’, had left, as had his replacement, Mr Beresford, and his worries about Jessie were not the kind of thing he would have discussed with Grayson or any of the house servants. He began to spend more and more time with his terriers, the pack of which numbered six, and he took comfort in eating, which caused his weight to balloon. Then just at a time when he was at his most vulnerable, he formed a new friendship, in the form of the nineteen-year-old daughter of his father’s coachman, Tom Carter. Alice Carter, whose father had come to Sledmere from the neighbouring estate of Castle Howard, was anything but the ‘village maiden’. Tall, good-looking and stylishly dressed, she had a job as a teacher in the village school, and when she met Mark up at the house stables, he immediately captivated her. To an intelligent and literate girl such as her, who had seen little of the world, he was a romantic figure, fascinating her with tales of his travels through the Ottoman Empire, and impressing her with his fluency in Oriental languages. She also saw that he was very lonely.

Mark took Alice for walks with the dogs, rode with her, showed her all his favourite places in the park and in the house, and they spent many happy hours in the Library, where he showed her his best-loved books and read her stories from the Arabian Nights. He gave her a present of an inkwell made from the hoof of a favourite pony he had had as a child. A strong attraction soon developed between them, the eventual outcome of which was the consummation of their affair, in Alice’s recollection, on the floor of the Farm Dairy.2 (#litres_trial_promo) The romance lasted long enough for them to plan to elope to London, which they managed to accomplish for a short while. To keep such an affair secret in a tight-knit community such as Sledmere was, however, impossible, and gossip meant that they were soon tracked down by Jessie and forcibly separated, leaving them both distraught.

The repercussions of this affair were far-reaching. The Carter family had to leave Sledmere and were sent to London, where employment was found for them in Grosvenor Street, while Alice was set up in a house round the corner in Mount Street. Tatton was angry enough to threaten to disinherit his son, a step which Jessie somehow managed to dissuade him from. Instead, he was immediately removed from Beaumont School and forbidden from accompanying his father on his annual trip to the East. Instead he spent the winter of 1894 alone at Sledmere with his terriers, from whom he could not bear to be separated, and with a new tutor, a young Catholic called Egerton Beck, who was widely read and already the author of a number of papers on monastic history. A man of impeccable dress and manners, with a fascination for the past, he hit it off at once with his new charge, of whom he was to become a lifelong friend. Mark could not wait to take Beck into the Library, where they spent hours studying the papers of the Sykes ancestors, poring over the wonderful folios of engravings by Piranesi, and devouring the military histories that Mark loved so much.

In the spring of 1895, at the age of sixteen, Mark was sent abroad, to an Italian Jesuit school in Monaco, an unusual choice inspired by his mother’s friendship with the then Princess of Monaco, the former Alice, Duchess of Richelieu, whom Jessie had met in Paris, at one of her celebrated salons in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Jessie, Beck and three of his terriers accompanied him there, and they moved into a rented house, the terriers living out on the flat roof. ‘The atmosphere at Monte Carlo,’ Mark later wrote, ‘was a peculiar one for a boy of my years. It is quite natural to think of people going there for pleasure, but for study seems rather curious. I knew everything about the inner workings of the tables and knew most of the croupiers.’ Not as well as Jessie, however, who haunted the tables while her son was at school. One day word got out that she had disgraced herself by flinging her hat down on the table in fury after sustaining a particularly large loss.

As for the school itself, which Mark attended as a day-boy, he found the discipline stifling after the relaxed atmosphere of Beaumont, and much of his time was taken up with his terriers, whose number had grown to eight by the time they returned to England in July. Sadly in the autumn he had to leave them behind when he left for Brussels to undergo the final part of his education before going up to university, a stint at the Institut de Saint-Louis, a slightly less rigid school than the one in Monaco, but where the boys were still ‘very much overworked’. He was to take lodgings in a hotel during the term-time, which unfortunately forbade pets, so he had to bid farewell to his little family, with whom he was eventually reunited at Christmas.

Amongst the guests staying in the house that December was Jessie’s former admirer Thomas Gibson Bowles, with his daughters, Sydney and Dorothy, who was nicknamed ‘Weenie’. Sydney wrote an account of the stay in her diary. They arrived on Christmas Eve. It was snowing heavily and the Sykeses were giving a Christmas party in the house for the tenants. ‘Two whole cows [were] cut up, and the mince pies were without number. There were … fifty or sixty people come for the beef and we were struck by their good-looking, well-fed appearance.’ At dinner, Jessie gave presents to the two girls, a ‘lovely little box’ to Sydney and ‘a handsome writing desk’ to Weenie. ‘Lady Sykes is very nice and extremely kind-hearted,’ she noted.

On Christmas Day, which was ‘all snow and glitter’, a ‘great number of Carol singers came round all day, beginning as soon as we got down to breakfast’, but there was no church since Tatton had demolished the existing one in order to build a much grander Gothic church. Instead ‘Father Theodore and Mark and I and Grayson and the dogs (an ugly little crew of ten fox terriers) went for a long walk through the wood.’ She later noted, ‘Mark keeps ten together in order to observe their habits when living in lots. One of their habits is that when their leader gets old, they kill and eat him!’ At lunch they had the nicest crackers she had ever seen. ‘There was one I should think quite a yard and a half long, which Mark and I pulled. It went off with such a bang that Tap was quite frightened.’

Sydney found Tatton very kind, but also thought him rather silly. ‘It is impossible to help laughing at him,’ she wrote. ‘For instance, Mark is still very fat, too fat really, though not so bad as he used to be. But Sir Tatton, seeing him a trifle thinner than when he last saw him, said “Ah Yes! Yes! Wasting away, wasting away.” I roared. I simply couldn’t help it.’ There were more crackers at dinner, after which they played charades ‘which were very funny,’ noted Sydney. ‘One word was “Preposterous”, another “Drunk-ard”, another “Dyna-mite”, etc, etc. Mark seems to have a great talent for acting among his other accomplishments.’3 (#litres_trial_promo)

This was to be the last happy Christmas that Mark was to spend at Sledmere for many years to come, for life was about to take a terrible downward spiral. To begin with, the relationship between his parents had reached a new low. His mother’s drinking had reached the point where her faithful maid, Gotherd, had on several occasions to hide her scent to prevent her drinking that too, as well as resorting, when her mistress was in a particularly bad state, to such tactics as hiding her stays so that she could not go out and disgrace herself on the street. She was also severely in debt. As early as 1890, for example, she had owed as much as £10,000, a staggering sum equivalent to over £1,000,000 at today’s values, and, when pressed for the money by the Union Bank, had given them a letter purporting to be a guarantee for that amount signed by Tatton. When the bank had asked him to confirm this, he had denied that the signature was his. Jessie told him he was mad to suggest that she would commit such a fraud, and to avoid a scandal Tatton had paid up, but the incident had shaken him.

At 46 Grosvenor Street, the bills were piling up. To pay them, Jessie was borrowing money from unscrupulous moneylenders – a Mr Sam Lewis was one, a Signor Sanguinetti another – at the most exorbitant interest rates, and she was speculating on the stock market. She often found herself borrowing from one person merely to pay back another. She even sank to asking Mark to lend her money from his allowance. This time Tatton, supported by the bank, put his foot down and refused to help her, a decision in which he was also backed up by his new land-agent, his nephew, Henry Cholmondeley. In the winter of 1896, Tatton’s advisers, in particular a ruthless lawyer called Thomas Gardiner, Deputy Sheriff to the City of London, persuaded him to go one step further. A recent amendment to the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 stipulated that a husband would be declared free from all debts subsequently incurred by his wife if he advertised his refusal to pay up in a daily newspaper. In spite of his abject horror of the impending publicity, and the fact that this was hardly a gentlemanly thing to do, Tatton went ahead and became the first man ever to publish such a notice. It appeared in various newspapers on the morning of 7 December.

I, SIR TATTON SYKES, Baronet, of Sledmere, in the County of York, and No. 46 Grosvenor Street in the County of London, hereby give notice that I will NOT be RESPONSIBLE for any DEBTS or ENGAGEMENTS which my wife, LADY JESSICA CHRISTINA SYKES, may contract, whether purporting to be on my behalf or by my authority or otherwise.

In desperation Jessie now took to gambling and was soon losing sums as high as £530 a week at the tables and in the bookmakers’ shops. Her behaviour began to lose her friends, including Blanche Howard de Walden, the mother of Mark’s friend Tom Ellis. A nervous and delicate woman, she became afraid of Jessie, and put an end to the friendship between their sons. ‘I must admit,’ Tom later wrote, ‘that Jessica, partially caged and embittered, was terrifying. At last Mark and I saw that our friendship could not continue. Mark had been more than a friend. He had been a sort of miraculous Philistine striding through the difficult age of adolescence and bowling over the conventions that I could only blindly resent. We had never talked of religion and we had never discussed our mothers. These two things we kept sacred. We knew what was putting us apart, and I think it was bad for both of us. The parting had to come, and Mark shook hands with me a little ruefully and said suddenly “If we meet again we shall smile at this. If not, then was this parting well made.”’4 (#litres_trial_promo)

It is hard to believe that this enforced separation would not have left some ice in Mark’s heart, though what happened next was far worse, and may have inspired his former tutor, ‘Doolis’, to warn him, ‘Unless you strive and fight against circumstances, you will grow up a worthless, cruel, hard-hearted, frivolous man.’5 (#litres_trial_promo) He returned from Brussels for the Easter holidays, and instead of his terriers racing out of the house to greet him, barking wildly, tails wagging and tongues eager to lick his face, there was no sign of them. There was silence. The servants would not look him in the eye. Then, under instruction from his father, one of the grooms took him down Sylvia’s Grove, a long carriage drive named after his great-grandfather’s favourite dog. There, beneath a tall beech tree by an iron gate, he met with a dreadful sight; the bodies of his beloved dogs, suspended from a branch, hanged to death on the orders of his father.

The fit of blind rage on his father’s behalf that inspired such a vicious and cruel act was the result of him having found out that Alice Carter had given birth to Mark’s child, a boy she had named George. It was a fact of which Mark was ignorant and was to remain so for the rest of his life. Though Jessie had succeeded in keeping the pregnancy a secret from Tatton, it had been impossible to prevent him finding out once the child was born, as she felt strongly that she had to persuade him to take financial responsibility, and it is a tribute to her strength of character that she managed to achieve this. She then arranged for Alice’s cousin, Mary Page, and her husband, Frederick Lott, to adopt the baby. George was brought up in Sheerness, where Frederick worked in the docks, and here Alice was allowed to visit him in the guise of his aunt. Jessie impressed it upon her that on no account was she to attempt to make any contact with Mark, whose interests and honour were not to be compromised. ‘She totally accepted this,’ her granddaughter, Veronica Roberts, later confirmed. ‘I imagine that Jessica must have been very persuasive and very forceful too. Alice also probably had a great feeling of guilt. She no doubt felt that she had misled this boy and was now paying for it. She always held this strong belief that nothing whatsoever should damage Mark’s reputation.’6 (#litres_trial_promo)

What saved Mark from being completely dragged down by the hideous events being played out around him was going up to Cambridge University, in the Easter term of 1897. He was accompanied by Beck and an Irish valet, MacEwen, an old servant of his mother’s. Jessie had chosen Jesus College, for reasons thoroughly typical of her. She had originally intended him to go to Trinity, but on arriving late for her appointment with the Master had given as her excuse, ‘I’m sorry to be late, but I’ve been at the Cesarewitch.’ When he replied ‘Oh, and where may that be?’ she interpreted his ignorance of turf affairs as stupidity, turned tail and headed to the neighbouring college, which happened to be Jesus, to put her son’s name down there. ‘I was going to make sure,’ she said later, ‘that my son was not put in the charge of a lunatic!’7 (#litres_trial_promo)

Mark was hardly the run-of-the-mill Cambridge student. ‘I must say I was not impressed by him when he first came,’ wrote one of the dons, Dr Foakes Jackson. ‘He struck me as a rather undeveloped youth whose education had been neglected. I considered that he would soon vanish from the scene and be no more heard of. By slow degrees I realized that Sykes was a man of exceptional powers. I discovered that he was one of those people who really understand the traveller’s art and can educate themselves by observation … [He] showed even as a lad an extraordinary grasp of all that was really important in the countries he visited and surprised those who knew him by the breadth of his interests.’8 (#litres_trial_promo) His evident charm and intelligence allowed him, just like his mother, to get away with murder. ‘About once a week,’ recalled Foakes, ‘his man McEwen appeared in his place with a message to the effect that Mr Sykes regretted that he “could not attend upon my instructions that day”, the words being evidently those of McEwen.’9 (#litres_trial_promo) His tutor, the Rev. E. G. Swain of King’s, soon realized that his new charge had little, if any, interest in the tasks ahead of him, such as passing exams, but was, on the other hand, head and shoulders above most of his fellow students when it came to knowledge of the world and of the important things in life, and was also excellent company. ‘He never failed to be unobtrusively amusing,’ he recalled, ‘and, since none of us had had experiences like his, he was always interesting. His experiences of travel, acute observation, retentive memory and great powers of mimicry supplied him with means of entertainment such as no one else possessed …’ He was impressed too by how unspoiled he was. ‘It would be hard to find,’ he wrote, ‘another instance of a wealthy young man, completely his own master, who lived so simply or held so firmly to high principles.’10 (#litres_trial_promo)

The most important friendship that Mark struck up in his first term at Cambridge was with the distinguished scholar Dr Montague Rhodes James, then Dean of King’s. He was a historian, amateur archaeologist, expert on medieval manuscripts, writer of ghost stories and an excellent mimic, and it was his habit to hold open house each evening in his rooms on the top floor of Wilkins’ Buildings in King’s College and he would leave his door ajar for any student who wished to visit. ‘To a very large number of them,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘he was the centre of their Cambridge life. It is safe to say that not one of them ever found him too busy to talk to them, play games with them, make music with them on that very clangy piano, and entertain them with his vast stores of knowledge, his inexhaustible humour and his unique power of mimicry. The tables were piled deep with books and papers, with perhaps a whisky bottle and siphon standing among them.’11 (#litres_trial_promo) Mark and James were made for one another. ‘On many an evening,’ James later wrote in his autobiography, ‘he would appear at nine and stay till midnight: I might be the only company, but that was no deterrent. Mark would keep me amused – more than amused – hysterical – for the whole three hours. It might be dialogues with a pessimistic tenant in Holderness, or speeches of his Palestine dragoman Isa [sic] … or the whole of a melodrama he had seen lately, in which he acted all the parts at once with amazing skill. Whatever it was there was genius in it.’12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Acting was one part of his life at Cambridge to which he gave one hundred per cent, becoming a leading member of the Cambridge Amateur Dramatic Club, acting in and directing productions such as Sheridan’s The Critic, as well as designing and drawing the posters that advertised them. It was a good way of temporarily forgetting the problems that overshadowed his life. His mother was now in deeper trouble than ever. The effect of his father’s advertisement had been to bring all her creditors out into the open, each one clamouring for payment. Since no one would now lend her any money, she could no longer resort to the expedient of borrowing from one to pay off another. In a last-ditch attempt to settle the matter once and for all, Tatton’s lawyers drew up an agreement under which, in return for her promise ‘not to speculate any more on the Stock Exchange or to bet for credit on the Turf’, she would receive a lump sum of £12,000 to discharge her existing liabilities, and a guarantee of a future allowance of £5,000 per year plus ‘pin money’ out of which she would pay all the household and stable accounts in London. The signing of this might have solved the problem had it not been for the fact that, paying exorbitant interest rates of 60 per cent, the true sum borrowed by Jessie since 1890 was £126,000, meaning there were still massive debts which she had kept secret, and by the spring of 1897 the creditors were once again banging at the door. They were led by one Mr Daniel Jay, of 90 Jermyn Street, a moneylender with the telegraphic address ‘BLUSHINGLY, LONDON’, whom Mark was later to refer to as ‘the biggest shark in London’.13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Tatton’s lawyer, Gardiner, advised him to stand firm and not pay his wife a penny more. He arranged for him to leave the country for three months and, in the meantime, put the house in Grosvenor Street up for sale and gave notice to all the servants. He also made it his business to collect any information he could which might be eventually used against Jessie. He sent his men to Yorkshire, for example, to collect statements from people willing to testify as to her drinking. One such affidavit, from the second coachman at Sledmere, James Tovell, told how he had collected her one morning in July 1894. ‘I could not understand her orders,’ he said, ‘and she kept me driving her about from about 10 until 3 o’clock and was unable to tell me where she wished to go.’ He went on to state that ‘her conduct was so notorious that onlookers frequently chaffed me on her condition’. Robert Young, the assistant stationmaster at Malton, said, ‘her conduct was the subject of conversation amongst the men’.14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Seeing that he was getting nowhere, Jay now decided to take his case to court to force the payment of the debts. His case was straightforward; that he had consistently lent money to Lady Sykes, and, as evidence of this, the court would see five promissory notes all signed in 1896 by both Sir Tatton and Lady Sykes, for sums ranging from £1,200 up to £5,000. He had made repeated requests for their repayment, but to no avail. There was also an important letter, apparently signed at Grosvenor Street, on 2 January 1897, asking Jay to accept security for payment until the return of Sir Tatton from the West Indies in March. The problem was that Tatton denied that the signatures on the notes and the letter were his.

After an initial delay of one month, owing to Tatton having fallen victim to a bout of bronchial pneumonia, the case finally opened in the Queen’s Bench on 12 January 1898. Heard before the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Russell of Killowen, it was loudly trumpeted and closely followed by an eager pack of journalists from all the daily papers. It is easy to imagine how the ears of the press must have pricked up when they heard the opening address of Mr J. Lawson Walton QC, acting for Jay, for he did not understate ‘the eccentricities of character which marked the defendant in the knowledge and estimation of his friends’.15 (#litres_trial_promo) He described a man of great wealth who had few outside pursuits other than church-building and horse-breeding and who, though he never betted himself, had sowed the seeds of such an interest in his young wife by expecting her to accompany him to racecourses all over England. As a result of this, he told the court, she ‘engaged to a considerable extent in that form of excitement’. Sir Tatton was also parsimonious to a degree that he was prepared to allow an overdraft of £20,000 to permanently exist at his bank, in spite of the heavy interest, because he could not bear to call up the cash to pay it off. In addition to this, the jury were told, he was a recluse who never went out into society – since they were married, she had never once been out to a party or out to dine with him – and who shirked responsibility for the payment of almost all expenses necessary for the upkeep of two houses.

After giving a brief account of the charges, he called Jessie to the stand, and in his cross-examination of her enlarged the picture of the extraordinary Sykes marriage. Nominally, she told the jury, she was to have £1,000 a year, but it was always a fight to get it. She had found herself living in a house ‘as large as Devonshire House’16 (#litres_trial_promo) to which very little had been done since 1801 and which then had no drains. Sir Tatton paid for nothing, and whenever she applied to him for money he was very tiresome. At one point, before the birth of her son, she had even been obliged to sue him for her pin money. As a result of this attitude, she had, with his knowledge, begun to borrow money, and had been doing so for eighteen years. Her debts had consequently increased like a snowball ‘and time did not improve them’. She knew, she claimed, it was ‘an idiotic thing’17 (#litres_trial_promo) to do, and would never have done it had she been able to get the money elsewhere.

Cross-examined by Tatton’s junior QC, Mr Bucknill, she elicited laughter from the court when, in answer to his question as to whether she considered her husband was a sound business man, she replied that in her opinion he was ‘as capable of managing his own affairs as most women’.18 (#litres_trial_promo) As an example, she cited the fact that instead of reading his letters, many of which contained share dividends, he often just threw them in the wastepaper basket. She had once found, she recalled, a warrant for a very large sum from Spiers and Paul in the bin, and had asked him to give it to her as a reward. She also intimated to the court that Tatton knew about her betting and was very proud when she won. He would tell everybody he saw about it, and always wanted £100 out of her winnings. When asked if she was angry after he had placed the advertisement in the newspapers, she replied, ‘You are not angry with people who are like children … He is like a child in many ways … Yes, like a naughty child.’19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Most of the notes in question, she told Mr Bucknill, were signed in Grosvenor Street, and she had explained to Tatton that she wanted him to sign them in order for her to get money. It was unlikely, she had assured him, that he would ever have to pay up. When questioned closely about the times and dates of the various notes, she became vague, saying Tatton ‘did not mind what he signed’ and repeating, ‘He would not give me any money, so I had to borrow.’ As Bucknill piled on the pressure she was reduced to repeating the defence that ‘Sir Tatton knew all about it, but he had a bad memory.’20 (#litres_trial_promo)

Re-examined by Mr Walton, Jessie reiterated that all the signatures purporting to be Sir Tatton’s were made by him, in her presence. These included those on two cheques for £1,000 signed in 1895 in Monte Carlo, and cashed at Smith and Co.’s Bank, which Tatton subsequently claimed to be forgeries. ‘Sometimes he used to say he had signed guarantees, sometimes that he had not,’ Jessie rambled on, her testimony having become rather disconnected. ‘It never made any difference to our way of living. He never treated me as having been guilty of a great crime. I do not think he realized what forgery meant. I have never had a cross word with him about it. I went over to Paris last October and lunched with him, and he said “Oh, it’s all the lawyers. It’s not my fault.”’21 (#litres_trial_promo) Laughter filled the court room.

Two of Mark’s tutors were now called. Robert Beresford, who succeeded Doolis, told Mr Walton that, in his opinion, the signatures were those of Sir Tatton, though in cross-examination by his defence counsel, Sir Edward Clarke, he admitted that the last document he had seen him sign had been as far back as 1892, and that the more recent signatures ‘were blurred and unlike his normal signature’. When asked by Lord Russell if he considered Sir Tatton an intelligent man, he caused a stir by answering that he had always thought him to be suffering from incipient insanity. ‘He would go about in ten coats,’ he told a surprised court. ‘You don’t mean that literally?’ asked Lord Russell, adding, ‘You mean two or three.’ ‘No I don’t,’ he replied. ‘I mean seven or eight overcoats one over the other … I can swear to that distinctly, because there were five covert coats, and one or two silk coats.’ When Egerton Beck was called to the stand and told the court that, in spite of Sir Tatton being ‘habitually a sober man’, one signature did not look as if it were written by a very sober person, Sir Edward asked, ‘That observation as to sobriety does not apply to Lady Sykes?’22 (#litres_trial_promo) Luckily for Jessie, Lord Russell forbade that line of questioning.

The third day of the trial began with Lord Russell asking Tatton to make two copies of the letter of 2 January, with two different pens. While he was doing this, Sir Edward Clarke opened the case for the defence. The question before the jury, he said, was a simple, if serious, one. Did Sir Tatton sign the notes, or were they forgeries by Lady Sykes? ‘A case more painful to an English gentleman,’ he continued, ‘could not be imagined.’ Called to the stand, Tatton ‘gave his evidence in a low voice with a slow, nervous, hesitating manner, and kept repeating his answers over and over again, repeatedly fingering the Bible which lay on the desk before him, and occasionally raising it and striking the woodwork sharply to emphasise what he said.’ He had never seen the notes and he had never signed them, and he had certainly not written the letter of 2 January. He had never had any need to borrow money, he said, preferring to keep an overdraft at the bank, which could run to any amount, since the bank had securities. After the advertisement had appeared, he had agreed to make a final payment of his wife’s liabilities ‘to avoid scandal! To avoid scandal! To avoid scandal!’23 (#litres_trial_promo)

Cross-examined by Mr Walton, Tatton caused much amusement by asking if his lawyers could ‘refresh his memory’ about the details of the alleged Monte Carlo forgeries. So great in fact was the laughter when Mr Walton said ‘No!’, that Lord Russell had to threaten to empty the courtroom. Walton then did his best to try and show that Tatton really had very little memory of what he had signed and what he had not, but he could not sway him from the basic fact that when it came to the Jay notes, he was adamant that he had nothing to do with them. The copies he had made earlier of the 2 January letter were then shown to the jury, Tatton complaining that the pens he had had to write with were too thin. When Mr Walton said that that was because the original was written with a quill pen, Tatton stated, ‘Well, I have not used a quill pen for 40 years,’24 (#litres_trial_promo) leaving his interrogator floundering.

Mr Walton, who saw his case collapsing, now revealed that Mark was in court, and, though he realized that ‘it was a painful thing to ask him to give evidence on the one side or the other’,25 (#litres_trial_promo) he invited Lord Russell to call him onto the stand so that he might be questioned as to the veracity of these dates. This the Lord Chief Justice refused to do, though he told him that he could do so himself if he so wished. Though at first Walton decided against this course of action, on the morning of the following day, destined to be the last of the trial, he changed his mind.

It was a devastating experience for Mark to be forced into the witness box to testify that one of his parents was a liar, and, as Sir Edward Clarke told the jury in his summing up, his evidence was so vague and therefore so inconclusive that he might have been spared the ordeal. It was given in a barely audible whisper. In his final address, Sir Edward gave no quarter to Jessie, whom he described as a woman of ‘discreditable character’, for whom there could be ‘no sympathy and perhaps no credence’. When it came to the turn of the counsel for the plaintiff, Mr Walton accused Tatton of being a man without honour. ‘The disaster of victory,’ he told the jury, ‘would be infinitely greater than the disaster of defeat. To himself, if he won the case, there would be the degradation of the wife of twenty five years, to Mr Mark Sykes the dishonour of his mother, and to Lady Sykes, it might be, other proceedings in a criminal court. At present Sir Tatton might wish to win this case, but in the evening of his days would he wish his name to be clouded with the dishonour of his wife?’26 (#litres_trial_promo)