Sir Charles Dilke, 2nd Baronet

Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, 2nd Baronet ( born September 4, 1843 † January 26, 1911 ) was a British politician of the Liberal Party and the Radical within the Liberal Party. He became famous for a sensational trial for a divorce, the 1885 ended his career.

Life

His father was Charles Wentworth Dilke (1810-1869), 1st Baron Dilke, a Whig politician, who distinguished himself in horticulture ( founding member of the Gardeners Chronicle) and in preparation for the Great Exhibition in London in 1851.

Dilke studied at the University of Cambridge ( Trinity Hall ) and moved in 1869 as a Liberal Member of Parliament for Chelsea to the House of Commons. From 1880 to 1882 he was Under-Secretary in the Foreign Ministry from 1882 and in the Privy Council under the government of Gladstone. In the same year he became a member of the Cabinet as President of the Local Government Board, a 1871 established authority with domestic and trade policy responsibilities. He campaigned for better working conditions for workers and for unions and negotiated with the Conservatives in 1884 electoral reform from.

He was considered a candidate to succeed Gladstone as Prime Minister within the Liberals. His career ended in 1885, however, when he was involved in a divorce scandal. He had a relationship with the mother of his younger brother, who was married with the liberal politician and shipowner Thomas Eustace Smith, and at the same time with their daughter Virginia, who was married in the first year with Parliament members Donald Crawford, as their relationship in a divorce process in 1886 came to light. The named as suspects Dilke not testified on the advice of his lawyer in the divorce process, but the husband appealed to a confession of Virginia. The judge pronounced the divorce and that found the had not received any evidence of adultery against Dilke, Dilke but was cited as grounds for divorce, which the journalist William Thomas Stead took to a campaign against Dilke. The attempted whitewash through a second trial against the Prosecution ( Queen's Proctor ), but completely failed and perverted into its opposite, as he by Henry Matthews ( who was also as a Conservative Member of Parliament ) was cross-examined. While the career of Dilke was destroyed after this sensational trial, Matthews then made career and was thanks to funding by Queen Victoria Interior Minister ( Home Secretary ).

Dilke, who had lost his parliamentary seat in the elections in 1886, tried in sequence to continue to rehabilitate, for which he used a large portion of its assets, and described the confession of Virginia Crawford as wrong. From 1892 to 1911 he was again in Parliament for the electoral district of the Forest of Dean, but received no higher post more. He is also known for his book Greater Britain in 1868, and then a best-seller in the English public, in which he spoke out for a imperialistischs great-power ambitions of Great Britain. He coined thus a concept of political debate.

The divorce scandal was probably one of the inspirations for Oscar Wilde in his play An Ideal Husband (1895 ), in which it comes to blackmail a politician.

He was married since 1884 with the feminist, trade unionist and art historian Emilia Dilke ( 1840-1904, nee Emily Francis Strong). From a previous marriage she was before her marriage with Dilke as Francis Pattison known.