One Victorian thief encountered a heady mix of jewels, travel and society ladies during a life peppered with adventure – if rather hampered by having to spend much of it behind bars, writes James Morton

In late Victorian England, the aristocracy were often careless with their possessions – or their servants were. Jewel cases regularly disappeared from hotel rooms, staterooms on liners, and railway stations – and sometimes the maids and manservants were involved. However, one theft that was wholly opportunistic was by Harry Villiers or Thomas or Williams, the great Victorian sneak thief known as Harry the Valet, when in late 1898 he snatched the Duchess of Sutherland’s jewels at the Gare St Lazare in Paris.


In his memoirs, he claimed that he had married while young, stolen to give his wife money and when, after serving a four-month sentence, he found his wife had died, he set out to avenge himself on society – something he did successfully for the next 30 years.


As for the jewels, he had met a well-known actress, Hetty F, at Ascot races and had squired her around town. When she told him she was going to Ostend for the season, he followed her, financing the trip with £500 he received for a ladies’ jewel case.


There he saw the detective Teddy Gough, who was on holiday. Thinking he was after him for the jewel case, Harry fled. His money finally ran out in Paris and Hetty would lend him no more. Quite by chance, he saw an English party on the platform at the station, snatched an unattended jewel case and high-tailed it to meet Hetty at a hotel. Spreading the jewels in front of her, he told her these were his family heirlooms. She wanted them all. He refused, and in a fit of pique she reported him to the Préfecture.


Weeks later, Gough found him living in Cathcart Road, London, after he had received £10,000 for most of the jewels from a fence.


At the committal proceedings, a stylishly dressed woman whose name was not made public, told the magistrate that she had met The Valet in Brighton. She had loaned him money and generally supported him. She also agreed she had told the police of the theft. What more treats would come out at the trial?


It was all a disappointment because he pleaded guilty. Richard Muir, prosecuting, told the court that when Harry had produced the jewels, the woman, whom he said was ‘married to a gentleman of blameless character’ and so he would not name, had insisted on putting them all on in bed, and allowed Harry to sleep with her that night. The next morning, he had ‘a very hard job to get them back from her’.


Harry had an impressive record. He had been acquitted of another diamond snatch in December 1895 and promptly received 15 months in Monte Carlo for stealing banknotes. He had been under constant observation at railway stations since his return to England and, said Muir, it was more because of his skill than that of his watchers that this was his first conviction since. The judge invited Villiers to explain what had happened to the remainder of the jewels, offering a discount on sentence if he did so. Harry declined and received seven years penal servitude.


Muir let slip that the woman Villiers called Hetty was the adventuress Maude Richardson, real name Louisa Lancey. A former Gaiety Girl, she had retired in 1883 to lead a less demanding and more lucrative life.


In 1894 when she was in Cape Town, she met Harry Andrew, an officer in the Black Watch who was, in fact, a thoroughly bad hat himself. In the words of the subsequent divorce case, they lived an ‘immoral life’ together until, giving false names, they married in Aden in 1896. The deception was out of fear that if his parents discovered this wholly undesirable liaison they would stop his trust fund.


Andrew then went to Africa on an expedition. Maude said she hoped it would show his family he was made of something after all. But it may be she had simply tired of him. The expedition over, he expected to meet her in Melbourne but she wrote asking him to return to London. He declined and she took up with Villiers in 1898.


Andrew’s divorce suit petition was based on her admitted adultery. She cross-petitioned with an allegation of adultery that she later withdrew, much to the chagrin of the spectators in court. She also alleged his behaviour had conduced her adultery, something that would defeat his petition.


Both were represented by fashionable counsel, while Harry as co-respondent and serving prisoner went unrepresented. Would she go into the witness box? To the dismay of the spectators, she did not. The jury found that Andrew’s bad behaviour had indeed been conducive to the adultery. He had not paid her a penny since the marriage, expecting her to live on her own income, which he estimated to be between £300 and £400 a year. Andrew appealed to the judge to exercise discretion in his favour, but he refused.


Despite her betrayal, Villiers remained devoted to Maude. When interviewed in Lewes prison over the divorce, he told the solicitor, ‘he could not make out why the lady had given him away, as he loved her’.


After his release, he again went to France, stealing jewellery from a Maharajah in Nice, for which he received five years. When he stole a bag in Nimes, 20 days after his release, he collected another five. In his memoirs, serialised in Thomson’s Weekly News in 1927, he wrote that as he was now older than 70 and, afraid of another sentence, he was retiring.


James Morton is a former criminal law specialist solicitor and now a freelance journalist