The Dead Duke, His Secret Wife, and the Missing Corpse

The extraordinary story of the Druce-Portland affair, one of the most notorious, tangled, and bizarre legal cases of the late Victorian and Edwardian eras

In 1897 an elderly widow, Anna Maria Druce, made a strange request of the London Ecclesiastical Court: it was for the exhumation of the grave of her late father-in-law, T.C. Druce. Behind her application lay a sensational claim: that Druce had been none other than the eccentric and massively wealthy 5th Duke of Portland, and that the—now dead—Duke had faked the death of his alter ego. When opened, Anna Maria contended, Druce’s coffin would be found to be empty. And her children, therefore, were heirs to the Portland millions. The extraordinary legal case that followed would last for 10 years. Its eventual outcome revealed a dark underbelly of lies lurking beneath the genteel facade of late Victorian England.