Noble Blood - The Butler, in the Bedroom, with a Sabre

Episode Date: October 15, 2019

In the middle of the night on an otherwise quiet spring evening, Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, was attacked in his bedchamber by an assailant wielding a sword. The Duke survived, and in the chaotic aftermath, the household discovered the Duke's valet, dead by apparent suicide. But as the details of that night emerged, the story became murky. More questions than answers remain now to a murder mystery that will never be solved.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, The cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Noble Blood, a production of IHeart Radio and Aaron Manky. Listener discretion is advised. If you had been alive in the early 1800s, you almost certainly would have been familiar with the cartoons of George Crookshank. In fact, if you're alive now, your problem. probably familiar with them, even if you don't know his name. Crookshank became most famous doing illustrations for the books of his friend Charles Dickens. He was the one who did the first edition

of Oliver Twist. But Cruikshank initially rose to prominence with political cartoons he did for the satirical periodical, The Scourge. He did one cartoon in 1816 that's particularly interesting, featuring Ernest Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, after he requested an increased salary from Parliament, and that request was rejected. Ernest was the fifth son of King George III, and if you're trying to place him in the grand line of British monarchy, he's also the uncle to Queen Victoria.

In the crookshank drawing called the Financial Survey of Cumberland, the Duke is being thrown out of the Parliament building with a firing cannon. The cannonball hits him square in the rear, ripping the seat of his pants. A little piece of parchment with his request for the 6,000 extra pounds flutters in the smoke. In the background of the cartoon, the Duke's new wife, Frederica, is wearing a skimpy yellow dress that struggles to contain her Zafdug figure. In polite society, the new Duchess was of, shall we say, questionable morals.

Ernest was her third husband. Her first husband had died, and then she became informal. engaged to Ernest's brother, that is, until she got pregnant by someone else. She married the child's father, only for him to die conveniently just as she was set to divorce him and marry Ernest. Rumors of husband number two being poisoned had already made their way to British court. In the cartoon, Frederica gazes lustily after three rather ugly soldiers, while saying, ah, who could resist lovers such as these? But there's something else interesting in the cartoon, visible only. only if you look closely.

You see, the new Duchess and her three less than attractive lovers are standing on a hill, and that hill is painted with a brown splotch. From far away, it looks like it could be mud. But when you look closer, through the brown paint, you can see the remnants of a ghostly figure. Someone Cruikshank had drawn and then decided to cover over. Some restored versions of the cartoon reveal that the literally hidden figure is a man. But a man drawn grotesque, with big, bulging fish eyes, wearing only a night shirt. A red gash marks his slit throat, and he holds a razor aloft still dripping blood.

Is this a razor that I see before me? The figure says in his speech bubble, thou canst not say I did it. You see, the Duke of Cumberland's wife wasn't the only one with the specter of murder hanging over her. The figure is a man named Celis, the Duke of Cumberland's former valet, who was found to have killed himself, but under more than mysterious circumstances. Why did Crockshank decide to self-censor the cartoon? Did he think that the implication that the Duke committed murder was a step too far? The truth is, he was most likely protecting himself from a libel lawsuit.

The Duke had already proven himself litigious against people who suggest that Cellis' death was anything other than a suicide. Crookshank would have wanted to avoid a lengthy and expensive trial and the possible subsequent prison sentence. But still, if you look closely at the cartoon, the figure is still visible, just barely. An eternal reminder of the gruesome death that occurred one May night at one of the most prominent homes in London, the ghost of a figure at the heart of a murder mystery that to this day still remains unsolved. My name is Dana Schwartz, and this is Noble Blood. It was an unseasonably warm evening at the end of May in 1810 when Ernest, the Duke of Cumberland,

returned to his residence at St. James Palace after an evening at an opera benefit for the Royal Society of Musicians. It had been an overall unpleasant evening. The room had felt stuffier than normal, and his suit stuck to him in the heat. All in all, he was glad to be home, to put on his night things and retire to his bedroom. All was quiet in St. James's palace. At least it was, until after midnight. At 12.30 a.m., the Duke woke to blows raining down on his head. Two blunt blows, then frenzied cutting.

Later, the Duke would say that in the dreamy haze of semi-sleep, His eyes still struggling to adjust to the darkness, he thought a bat had made it into his room, a leathery thing with sharp claws that had come down through the chimney and mistakenly attacked him. But he only thought that for a moment, before the third blow. When the third blow came down, the Duke was able to make out the flash of a metal weapon,

illuminated only by the single dim lamp in the room. Dazed, injured, the Duke pulled himself from the bed and tried to make it across the room. The assailant slashed him across the thighs. The Duke called out to the valet on duty that night. Neil! the Duke shouted. Neil, I am murdered, and the murderer is in my room! Cornelius Neil flung himself into the room,

brandishing a fire poker, prepared to do battle. But the assailant was gone, out the opposite door. The room was empty, but for the Duke of Cumberland, still alive but bleeding on the floor. And, a few feet away, still glinting in the dim light, the would-be murder weapon. The Duke's old military saber. The saber he had used as a colonel commander of the military forces defending the southern regions of Great Britain against France. Though blood still gushed from the wound on the Duke's head,

his life had been saved by the fact that the assassin seemingly had struck him with the flat side of the saber and not its sharpened edge. Neil raised the alarm. Within minutes, the entire household was roused, summons that they could all get a handle on what exactly had just happened. Though everyone was still dazed from sleep in various states of pajamas and whatever formal attire could have been hastily thrown on, it still only took a few minutes for the household to realize that someone was missing.

Neil was actually the Duke's second valet. His first valet was a man named Joseph Sellis. Celis had been off-duty that night, but as a member of the household, he still lived at St. James Palace, and should have heard Neil's alarm and come running. And yet, there was no sign of Celis. With the Duke still lying on the floor, his thighs and head freshly bandaged,

Neil and two other men set out to find the missing valet. They knocked at his door. No answer. Sellis, Neil said at the door, Sellis, man, come out. This was unlike Joseph Sellis. He was famously punctual and disciplined. Other staff members found themselves

even slightly resenting him for the endless hours and devoted service he put in with the Duke, often foregoing his own breaks. Neil rapped at the door again. Sellas, I say, open up. The men tried the knob. To their utter surprise, they found it locked.

Neil and the two men raced down the hallway, through a second corridor down into the kitchen, and then back up through another staircase that they ascended in order to get into Sellis's room through a back entrance. Their breath caught in their throats as they tried that back door. Open. Sellis was still in bed, but it soon became obvious why he had not joined them in assembling with the rest of the staff. The body of the valet was sitting up in bed, propped up by peasant.

pillows as if he were moments away from pulling out a book to read. But his eyes were flat and colorless. Blood pooled beneath him, a stain of red, vast as a lake that blossomed from his neck all the way down his torso. Salas' neck was slashed, a seemingly self-inflicted wound. Salas, it appeared, had been the mystery assailant. But his assassination attempt had been unsuccessful, and so he ran in retreat back into his own bedroom after abandoning the bloody murder weapon on the floor of the Duke's chamber. Sellis himself had actually been the one to sharpen the blade of that saber for the Duke only a few days earlier. And so, in shame and disgraced after his supposed assassination attempt, knowing he would soon be discovered and

arrested, or maybe just wrecked with guilt, Celis then slit his own throat. At least, that was the story the men of the Duke's household slowly put together in their minds as they took in the scene, its gruesome victim and the overwhelming stench of warm salt and iron and death. But in the ensuing hours as the sun rose over London and the details of the night crystallized as the night's fog evaporated, servants began to bite their lips and look at one another from the corners of their eyes. Certain wrong details stuck out like sharp poking feathers in a goose-down pillow. Tiny things that left an unpleasant prickle in the back of the mind of anyone who thought about them for too long.

Because even as the police ruled Sellis' death as suicide, things just didn't quite add up. For one, Celis' throat hadn't just been slid. The cut had been so deep that the man was nearly decapitated. the white of his spine was visible through the gore. The bone had been the only thing to stop the blade. The question that lingered on the tongue of everyone who had seen the body was, what kind of man could possibly do that to himself? But then the second, more dangerous question,

was the one that had to be banished before it was even fully formed, because maybe Celis hadn't taken his own life. Maybe the real question was, what kind of man had done it to him? There were a few details that seemed to indicate foul play with Celis' death. For one thing, Sellis had been left-handed, and the physician who examined the body said that the wound had been inflicted with the right hand, a slash from left to right. The setup of Celis' locked room also seemed strange. Sellis's hands had no blood on them

from either his attack on the Duke or his own supposed suicide and a basin of water sat on a chest of drawers tinged pink with blood supposedly where Celis had rinsed his hands but the chest of drawers was on the opposite side of the room as the bed and right next to that basin

on the chest of drawers was the bloody straight razor that Salas had supposedly used to kill himself the only weapon in the room and again they were were both on the opposite side of the room as the bed, so Celest would have had to race into the room, lock the door behind him, slash his throat, then place the razor down neatly on the dresser, wash his hands, then get into bed, all while his head was all but dangling from his body.

And there was another problem. Celis had no motive. He had a wife and four children. He was a highly respected and well-liked member of the staff, close to the Duke and the entire royal family. He was so trusted that he was one of only two people to have a key to Queen Charlotte's royal bedchambers, the other person being Queen Charlotte herself. And the very next day after his death, Sellis was planning on accompanying the Duke to Windsor, and Sellis's wife said he had been looking forward to it. Sellis had been in the Duke's personal employee for five years, and according to his wife, Marianne, he enjoyed his job and felt nothing but respect and gratitude for the monarchy that permitted his livelihood. Why would he want to kill the man that gave him a job? But over the

course of the inquiry that followed his mysterious death, details about Sellis' past began to slowly emerge. Joseph Sellis had grown up in Corsica, the tiny French island in the Mediterranean, but he had traveled all over the world as he worked his way up in his career, until he finally landed at the prestigious post working for the Duke of Cumberland. Before settling in England, he had worked in New York City for a man named Mr. Church. Sellis was hardworking and dedicated and quickly became one of Church's most trusted servants. But then, Mr. Church's desk was robbed. The thief had smashed open a chest and taken a gold watch, a diamond pen, and a large sum of cash.

Church rounded up every member of his staff and interrogated them individually, and in the end he determined that Sellis had been the thief. Not only did Celis have free access to Mr. Church's private study, but they also found in Celest's possession a rather incriminating hammer, one that looked like it might have been used to smash open a certain chest of valuables. Celis was immediately dismissed from his post, but because all the evidence was circumstantial, Mr. Church didn't take legal action.

Church also did something peculiar for a man he was firing for thievery. He gave Sellis a large severance payment, so he'd be able to find his footing elsewhere. After that, Salas made his way to England, taking up a post with the Earl of Mount Edgecombe. It was through his work there that he met the Duke of Cumberland and eventually began working for the royal family. The fact that Celis had been a one-time suspected thief

was a major point brought up in the inquest trial about his death. After all, what is petty thievery but one step away from violent murder? One more element of his time in New York working for Mr. Church also came up. Supposedly, in his time in America, Sellis had been a revolutionary, a strong anti-monarchist. According to a maid named Martha Perkins, who worked for church at the time, Sellis had been heard to say, Damn the king and all the royal family of England,

and the man who throws a stone at the king deserves a seat in the House of Commons. It's possible that those were just the words of a young man at the start of his career, caught up in revolutionary fervor. Or maybe Celis had been plotting the murder of a member of the royal family for years, slowly working himself up into their good graces,

pretending for all the world that he was a supporter of the crown, never letting the mask drop, not even for his wife, all so that years later he could bungle an assassination attempt of someone not actually even in line for the throne. Cornelius Neal had his own theory for why Celis would have wanted to attack the Duke. According to Neal, the entire thing had been an attempt by Celis to frame him, Neal, for the Duke's murder. At the inquest, Neil testified that Celis had a very malicious disposition.

My opinion, Neil said, is Celis meant to murder the Duke, thinking the blame should be put on me. I have no more doubt he did it to cause me to be suspected than I have of my own existence. Sellis did hate Neil. Neil was the one in charge of making purchases for the household, and Celis thought that he was swindling the Duke. He had written in a letter to the groom, I have been told, sir, that Mr. Neal cheats his royal highness in everything he buys. The man is as great a villain as ever existed. Maybe Sellis wanted to protect the Duke so badly from Neil's wickedness that he was willing to attack the Duke if it meant Neil getting framed. Another theory, Celest was a secret Catholic. The Duke was a vehement

anti-Catholic, and so it was possible that Celis might have wanted him dead to avenge his faith. Of course, Celis never gave any indication in his life that he was Catholic. He baptized all four of his children in the Church of England. But, remember, he was born in Corsica, which seemed highly suspicious. But the trial also yielded suspicious details about the Duke and his behavior in the aftermath of that eventful night. According to the Duke, the assailant had given him 17 wounds and left him in a state of agony for somewhere between six weeks to two months. The attack had happened at the end of May, and according to the Duke, it wasn't until the beginning of August that he was able to leave the house.

But that wasn't quite true. The Duke was out of bed three days after the attack, and he had made his first public appearance less than two weeks after. Was he exaggerating the wounds to bolster public sympathy? Or were they far more minor than anyone had been led to believe? Maybe because there wasn't an attack on him at all. Maybe the wounds were so minor because they were the results of the Duke or the Duke and Neil as a team staging a cover-up. The inquest was exhaustive.

The foreman of the jury was a man named Francis Place, a well-known radical politician who hated the monarchy and made his thoughts very clear and very public. Even so, the verdict was unanimous. There was no proof to furnish any other explanation for that night. other than that Celis had committed suicide. The case was, as they say, closed. But that didn't mean people stopped talking. Two years after Salas's death, a man named Henry White Jr. was found guilty of libel

for implying in his radical wig publication that Celis' death had been an elaborate cover-up. He got 15 months and a 500-pound fine. White believed that Celis had caught the Duke and Cornelius Neal in Flaigranti, having a gay affair, and that Celis seemed tempted to go public. His suicide then was really a murder

to preserve the Duke's reputation. Another theory? That Celis himself had actually rejected the Duke's advances, and that the Duke needed to have him killed out of a combination of shame, embarrassment, and the fear of him going to the press. Even after the inquest had formally cleared the Duke's name, and even after the libel trials continued to protect his name,

the public still believed, deep down, that somehow the Duke had been involved and, most likely, with something involving some sort of secret homosexual affair. But the most damning cloud of the Duke's guilt didn't emerge until 1827, nearly two decades after Celis' death, when a man by the name of Captain Charles Jones

wrote a memoir. Jones had been the Duke's 8,000. aid to camp during the Napoleonic wars, and the two men met again on Christmas Eve, 1815, when the Duke couldn't sleep, when he lit a fire and asked his friend to sit with him. In what Jones described as a gloomy frenzy, the Duke told Joan that he believed he had not one sincere friend in the whole world. Something dark and terrible flashed across the Duke's face then, and despite his closeness to the fireplace, Jones felt himself shudder. The Duke looked into Jones's eyes.

Swear to me, my dear Jones, that you will never divulge what I am going to say to you, for my mind requires relief. It is more than I can bear, the Duke said, wanting to unbosom myself, but not knowing whom to trust. In his memoir, Jones wrote, Had I known what was to follow, no power on earth could have induced me to have heard the dreadful confession. but heard it he did. According to Jones, the Duke spoke as follows. You know that miserable business of Celesses, that wretch.

I was forced to destroy him in self-defense. The villain threatened to propagate a report, and I had no alternative. The Duke had continued to speak, but the confession knocked the wind out of Jones, and the Duke's words became nothing more than dizzy buzzing, and Jones recorded no more of the confession. Of course, the true details and reasons for Celis's death

will now, almost certainly, never come to light. They're buried with him in an unmarked grave somewhere between the bottom of Northumberland Street and the gateway to Scotland Yard. Sellis was buried with the Christian rituals of a suicide, in the middle of the night in the utmost secrecy in order to prevent curious crowds. But they say his ghost still haunts St. James Palace.

According to some, Celis sometimes appears in the very room where he died. A specter drenched in blood, his throat slashed and his jaw unhinged and hanging in a silent, final, gruesome scream. People say on the anniversary of his death, they can hear the sound of a ghostly struggle in the middle of the night between two men, then the sound of a blade on the night. flesh, and everyone reports the smell, the sickly sweet iron stench of warm blood that's carried along with Celis's restless spirit. That's the tale of Celis's mysterious death.

Noble Blood will be back with a new episode in two weeks, but stay tuned after these brief sponsor messages to hear how the story of the Duke of Cumberland ends. What's up, everyone? I'm Ago Vodom. My next guest, you know from Stepbrose, Others Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network. It's Will Ferrell. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo.

My dad gave me the best advice ever. I went and had lunch with them one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot. I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings. I'm working my way up through, and I know it's a place that come look for up and coming talent. He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet. Yeah. He goes, but there's so much luck involved. And he's like, just give it a shot.

He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat. Just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck.

Yeah. Listen to Thanks Dad on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to how.

help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ernest Augustus, the Duke of Cumberland, it seemed, carried the stain of scandal with him everywhere for the rest of his life. There was that terrible affair with Cellus, then his shocking marriage to a twice-widoed woman, and then, in 1830, another mysterious suicide.

In the early weeks of that year, gossip papers began circulating rumors that the Duke was having an affair with a woman named Lady Graves, a mother of 15, and the husband of Lord Graves, the Duke's Lord of the Bed Chamber and a household comptroller. That February, Lord Graves left his wife a note, saying that he never, for a moment, doubted her faithfulness. And then he slit his throat. There was never any real proof that the Duke was a murderer, but that did nothing to diminish his black reputation.

The Duke's own niece, Princess Charlotte, wrote that he was, quote, at the bottom of all evil. His family and the country wanted him out of England, and, in 1837, they finally got their wish. You see, when King William IV died, the crown of England and its holdings all went to William's niece, Queen Victoria. But the tiny Germanic kingdom of Hanover

still operated under Salick Law, which meant that women couldn't be in the line of succession. And so the throne went to the next male relative in line, the dead king's brother, Ernest Augustus. For all of his disgraces in England, Ernest was a generally successful king of Hanover. He was the first ruler of Hanover to actually live there since George I, and he reigned for 14 years, until he died at the age of 80. There's a statue of King Ernest Augustus of Hanover in front of Hanover Central Station, with the king on a majestic horse wearing a

majestic feathered cap. Its inscription reads, in German, to the father of the nation, from his loyal people. Noble Blood is a production of IHeartRadio and Aaron Manke. The show is written and hosted by Dana Schwartz, and produced by Aaron Manke, Matt Frederick, Alex Williams, and Trevor Young. Noble Blood is on social media at Noble Blood Tales, and you can learn more about the show over at Noble Bloodtales.com. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Everyone, I'm Ago Vodam. My next guest, it's Will Ferrell. My dad gave me the best advice ever. He goes, just give it a shot.

But if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit. If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration. It would not be on a calendar. of, you know, the cat, just hang in there. Yeah, it would not be. Right, it wouldn't be that. There's a lot of luck. Listen to Thanks, Dad, on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.