Charles Augustus Howell

Charles Augustus Howell (10 March 1840 – 21 April 1890) was a Portuguese-British art dealer and alleged blackmailer who is best known for persuading the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti to dig up the poems he buried with his wife Elizabeth Siddal. His reputation as a blackmailer inspired Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes story "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton".

Life Howell was born in Porto, Portugal to an English father, Alfred William Hervey Howell, and a Portuguese mother. He claimed to have aristocratic Portuguese ancestry and would wear a red ribbon of the Portuguese Order of Christ, which he proclaimed to be an inherited family order. He moved to Britain in his youth, allegedly after having been caught cheating at cards.

In 1858, Howell left Britain shortly before his friend Felice Orsini attempted to assassinate Napoleon III, leading to rumours that Howell was involved in the plot. He returned in 1864.

Howell was the friend and business agent of both Rossetti and John Ruskin. Ruskin employed him as a secretary between 1865 and 1868. Ruskin trusted Howell with "affairs needing delicate handling and a wise discretion". This was usually to manage Ruskin's discreet charitable donations. But Howell sought increasingly to obtain complete control of Ruskin's finances. Howell organised the exhumation of Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife Elizabeth Siddal and the retrieval of the poems that he had left in her coffin in 1869. He was able to do this because he knew the then Home Secretary, Henry Bruce, who granted permission for it to be done. Rossetti insisted that the exhumation be kept absolutely secret.

Howell also became a business adviser to Algernon Swinburne, becoming "not only his man of business but also the partner of his amusements and the recipient of his confidences". Some "burlesque and indecent letters" which Swinburne wrote to Howell were somehow acquired by George Redway, a publisher, who used them to blackmail Swinburne into giving up the copyright of one of his poems.

Howell's connection with the Rossetti family is said to have ended when he was alleged to have persuaded his lover Rosa Corder to create fake Rossetti drawings. In 1883, Corder gave birth to Howell's daughter, who was christened Beatrice Ellen Howell.

In the late 1880s, he joined the Order of the White Rose, a Neo-Jacobite society, along with James Abbott McNeill Whistler.

Death

Howell died in 1890 under strange circumstances. He was found close to a Chelsea public house with his throat slit, with a coin in his mouth – either a sovereign or half-sovereign. Hall Caine called him a "soldier of fortune" and Algernon Charles Swinburne said he was "the vilest wretch I ever came across".

Howell's reputation as a blackmailer was the inspiration for the Sherlock Holmes story "Charles Augustus Milverton". Howell was also the basis of the character De Castro in Theodore Watts-Dunton's novel Aylwin.