Frame-Up

VICTORIAN SCANDAL by Roy Jenkins. 447 pages. Chilmark Press; Random House. $7.95.

On the morning of July 19, 1885, Sir Charles Dilke sat confidently on top of what Disraeli once called "the greasy pole" of British politi ". Disraeli himself, though a Tory, had acknowledged Liberal Dilke as "the most useful and influential" politician of his generation. Gladstone had just designated Sir Charles, then only 41, to succeed him as leader of the Liberal Party. As such, he was almost certain to become Prime Minister when Gladstone, then almost 76, stepped down. But before the fateful day was over, Dilke had a disastrous fall that smashed his career and arguably altered the course of British political history. The Dilke Case was the Profumo Affair of the Victorian era.

Youngest Ever. Long forgotten by all but avid devotees of Victoriana, Dilke and his scandal were recently and rather carelessly reconstructed in a melodrama (The Right Honourable Gentleman) that ran a year and a half in London and is now maintaining a precarious life on Broadway. The tragedy deserves more responsible treatment, and this it has been given by Roy Jenkins, a political historian who is Minister of Aviation in Britain's Labor government. After a study of all available evidence, some of it never before made public, Jenkins concludes that Dilke was framed and finished off by a cabal of malevolent in-laws and ex-mistresses.

Until the dark day dawned, fortune smiled relentlessly on Dilke. Heir to a minor publishing fortune, he was a first-class scholar and athlete at Cambridge, soon after graduation stood successfully for Parliament and then followed up his election with a sociopolitical study of the British Empire (Greater Britain) that hugely impressed the British intellectual and political establishment. At 39, he became the youngest member of the Gladstone Cabinet.

Unhappily, as was often the case with Victorian politicians, Dilke's private life was rather less exemplary than his public activity. He had a fatal attraction to the tigress type, and during his 20s and 30s he apparently conducted affairs with three or four appallingly predatory women--among them his sister-in-law's mother.

French Vice. The plot was sprung by his sister-in-law's sister, a Mrs. Donald Crawford, who suddenly informed her husband that she had been "ruined" by Sir Charles. What's more, she told him that Sir Charles had taught her "every French vice" and had persuaded her to play three-in-a-bed with himself and his housemaid. Mr. Crawford thereupon decided to sue his wife for divorce and to name Sir Charles as corespondent. Dilke duly protested that he had never laid a finger on Mrs. Crawford, but he knew that the prudish Victorian public would not believe him. So did Gladstone. He quietly dropped Dilke.

Cut dead by most of his friends, ripped apart by the gutter press, bewildered by expensive lawyers who gave him bad advice, belabored by indignant judges who prejudged him a monster of depravity, Sir Charles staggered pathetically through two sensational trials. Crawford won his divorce; Dilke was lucky to escape prosecution for perjury and perversion. His constituents turned him out of office.

With nothing left but cash and courage, Dilke grimly continued the fight. During the next decade a committee established to investigate the case produced evidence which strongly suggests that Mrs. Crawford's story was a lie from beginning to end. In fact, says Jenkins, Mrs. Crawford had an affair with a certain Captain Forster, from whom she had contracted syphilis. Unable to continue her marriage without disclosing her condition, Mrs. Crawford cynically decided to get both Dilke and a divorce in one fell swoop.

Fatal Split. Why did she want to destroy Dilke? Author Jenkins argues that despite his protestation of utter innocence, Dilke actually did have an affair with Mrs. Crawford before she was married; that Dilke refused to marry her; that she ruined him because he had "ruined" her. But nobody knows for certain. What is certain, or seems so on the evidence Jenkins supplies, is that Dilke was the only man who could hold the Liberals together. Within a year of his political demise the party split, and Gladstone's last administration foundered in failed majorities. One woman's vindictiveness, Jenkins suggests, had significantly tipped the balance of political power in Britain.

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