The Britannica website [visit
link] tells us:
"Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, 2nd Baronet,
(born Sept. 4, 1843, London, Eng.—died Jan. 26, 1911, London), British statesman
and Radical member of Parliament who became a member of the Cabinet in William
E. Gladstone’s second administration but was ruined at the height of his career
when he was cited as corespondent in a divorce suit.
After leaving the University of Cambridge and making
a world tour, Dilke was elected to Parliament in 1868 and took an extreme
left-wing position, delivering a series of speeches strongly critical of the
monarchy. From 1874 on, however, with the Liberals in opposition, he moved
closer to his official leaders. In Gladstone’s second Liberal government, Dilke
was finally promoted to the Cabinet as president of the Local Government Board
in 1882.
Apart from his departmental activities, Dilke was
eager, with Joseph Chamberlain, to press the general Radical point of view
within the Cabinet. This eagerness led him to submit frequent resignations to
Gladstone. It also led him to a position of great political promise. By the end
of the government, in June 1885, Benjamin Disraeli’s prophecy of 1879 that Dilke
would be prime minister looked plausible.
The issue was never put to the test, for, a month
later, Dilke was cited as corespondent in a sensational divorce suit. Virginia
Crawford, the 22-year-old wife of a Scottish Liberal lawyer, told her husband
that she had been Dilke’s mistress since 1882. Dilke strenuously denied the
story, and, when the case was heard, in February 1886, there was adjudged to be
no evidence against him, although Crawford got his divorce. A press campaign, in
which the Pall Mall Gazette took the lead, made this an inadequate victory for
Dilke. To try to clear his name he got the queen’s proctor to reopen the case,
and a second hearing took place in July 1886. This went heavily against Dilke.
One of his public difficulties was that, although he rebutted Mrs. Crawford’s
allegations, he was forced to admit to having been her mother’s lover.
Six years later, Dilke returned to the House of
Commons and held the seat until his death. He was active in the Commons as a
military expert and as an exponent of advanced labour legislation. Much of his
energy, however, was devoted to gathering evidence that might clear his name.
The accumulated evidence showed decisively that much of Mrs. Crawford’s story
was a fabrication; whether there was a substratum of truth remains
uncertain."