ABSTRACT
This played a major part in his choice as joint-venturer of a man who not only lived abroad but could not return to England. Eustace Clare Grenville Murray had been one of Yates's colleagues during his two years as a special, when Murray was a Paris correspondent for two of the papers Yates worked for, the Herald and the Daily News. He had begun his literary life as another of Dickens's young men, having contributed a much-admired series, 'The Roving Englishman', to Household Words. As a professional diplomat he had then been forbidden from engaging in journalism and was unable to resume till 1868, when he was cashiered after seventeen years' service abroad. Yates first met him after his return to England. Murray, at the time, needed outlets for his writing, and as the illegitimate son of a duke (the Duke of Buckingham), and a man of proven talent and some notoriety, he would have struck Yates as a potentially valuable catch for Tinsley's. Yates and Louisa were soon honoured with an invitation to afternoon-tea in his chambers at the Albany, but before the promising acquaintance could progress further, Murray suddenly had to leave England again. In June 1869 he was assaulted on the steps of his club, the Conservative, by Lord Carrington, whose father he had guyed in the Queen's Messenger,
the provocatively-named satirical magazine he had started a few months earlier. Murray took Carrington to court, but made the mistake of denying that he was the author of the offending article. In the meantime, his enemies had intimidated the printer of the Messenger into handing over papers that proved he was, and a counter-charge of perjury was brought against him. The first day's hearing of the assault case ended in a pitched battle described by the Times as a scene 'never before witnessed in an English court of justice', when Murray's forces vainly strove to regain possession of the papers. He won the case, but prudently fled before the third day's hearing of the perjury charge against him. The magistrate refused to recognize a medical certificate signed by a Parisian doctor which he sent to explain his absence, and he forfeited bail of £1,000.3 He became a wanted man and never set foot in England again.
