Inconvenient People (40 page)

The Somerset readers were outraged, and some of them (or was it the sub-editors?) staggered recklessly into verse. The following poem appeared in the newspaper on 19 July 1858: ‘Thoughts suggested and put together after perusing the leading article in the Somerset County Gazette of last week’

Many national newspapers were also reporting with horror the incarceration of Lady Lytton, and at the head of the pack was the
Daily Telegraph
, which condemned Lord Lytton and Derby’s government in strong language. Rebecca Ryves had written to all the newspapers with a full account of the seizure of Lady Lytton, but not surprisingly,
The Times
refused to print anything on the subject; the organ that was usually so loud in its criticism of lunacy law never once mentioned the Lytton affair. But in the
Telegraph
, ‘The right honourable novelist’ was portrayed as a traitor to his original Radical Liberal roots, a man whose hauteur prevented him from treating his electorate as anything but children: ‘He is an enemy to reform; his name is not associated with a single meritorious public act . . . He is an amazingly amusing story-teller; he knows how to interest young ladies in Italian poisoners, to idealise the corruption of Pompeii . . . agitating with his eloquence broad billows of crinoline.’ This was not entirely fair: the causes that Lord Lytton had effectively championed had been slave emancipation and the law of copyright (as we have seen), the abolition of the stamp tax, prison reform and open competition for places within the Civil Service (odd, though, for a confirmed nepotist). On 21 July, the
Telegraph
reported that it had received a huge number of letters from readers, proving that Lady Lytton’s plight was of national significance – international significance, even, given that it was the Secretary for the Colonies who stood accused of this assault upon the liberty that Britain claimed to be exporting around the globe.

The plot was backfiring spectacularly on its author, and his poorly constructed storyline was at the mercy of the critics. News had reached the Carlyles of the hustings furore and the incarceration. ‘The case looked very bad against Bulwer,’ wrote Jane Carlyle to her husband. Thomas Carlyle declared that Lady Lytton was ‘no more mad than I am, – tho’ unwise, ill-guided to a high degree, and plunging wildly under the heavy burden laid on her’. He knew that Lady Lytton’s behaviour could be called ‘mad’ in ‘common speech’, in the sense of excessive, disproportionate and rash; but Carlyle believed that this was ‘folly’, not madness, because unlike an insane person, she was capable of changing her ways. Carlyle felt pleased that he had thus worked out the answer to the universally perplexing question of what constituted madness and what did not: ‘I found that if you cd conceive a change of heart . . . it wd entirely cure her; whereas it wd do nothing
at a real madman . . . nothing, but alter the figure of his madness. This, for the first time is a real distinction I have hit upon in that abstruse matter.’

Lord Lytton’s mood and health both suffered, and one of his clerks at the Colonial Office described him in these weeks as ‘insolent, rude and feckless’, while Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote that he was ‘if not deranged, so much overworked as to be quite hors de combat’. Lord Lytton repeatedly tried to resign his post as public anger about what he had attempted to do to his wife increased. Lord Derby refused to allow him to do so, at a time when political talent was not abundant. So Lord Lytton was condemned to high office for the time being. Those who know about these things believe that in his year at the Colonial Office Lord Lytton achieved a great deal; but it is irresistible to quote the man who had locked up a sane woman saying, of the pink patches on the map, ‘If we give up these places, they will gradually relapse into primitive barbarianism.’

The Lytton children had been born to be cannon fodder for their parents. Poor Emily had only managed nineteen years’ service before expiring, but there was still Robert. Now Lord Lytton pushed this important pawn into the game. Lady Lytton had let it be known via her solicitor that she was intending to use the one-year-old Divorce Court to air all the filthy underlinen of the marriage (although quite how she would have managed this, having the status of certified lunatic, is difficult to understand). Lord Lytton sent Robert along to work out a compromise. Dr Hill entered her room and ‘began tapping that bay window of a paunch of his’; behind him stood a terrified Robert. For three hours, often in tears, Robert pleaded with his mother to abandon her plans for legal action. He had been told to offer Lady Lytton release from the asylum to a life of comfort, with Robert, on the Continent, and the sum of £500 a year to live on. In return, she would have to sign a perpetual truce, guaranteeing that she would no longer persecute Lord Lytton in person or in print. Having guessed that there must be real trouble brewing for her husband if he would stump up £500 a year, Lady Lytton agreed to these terms but now demanded £1,000 a year. Robert reported back to his father, and shortly afterwards lawyer Edwin James and Dr Forbes Benignus Winslow came to Inverness Lodge. The latter was there to ratify Lady Lytton’s removal from the asylum – to let
the world know that she was of sound enough mind to go free. Edwin James and ‘the dulcifluous Dr Forbes Winslow’ told her that her husband had agreed to the thousand a year and then left. At three in the afternoon of Saturday 17 July 1858, after twenty-five days in captivity, Lady Lytton was a free woman.

She made a brisk shopping trip on that very hot evening, ate a rushed meal in a Belgravia hotel, took a train to Dover and reached Calais on the Monday morning.

On that same morning, most of the national newspapers dutifully published a letter from Robert, written from his father’s house at 1 Park Lane. Robert stated that after conferring with Lord Shaftesbury, and in accordance with his father’s wishes, he had decided that foreign travel was the best form of care for his mother. Robert stated that she never had been placed in an asylum, but had simply spent some time in the private residence of a medical man, living among his family. (This is the significance of Dr Hill shifting Lady Lytton from Wyke House to Inverness Lodge.) Robert continued that during this stay, which had been entirely misrepresented in some sections of the press, his father had only sought the best medical opinion available in order that Lady Lytton should not be restrained a moment longer than was strictly justifiable. Below Robert’s letter were printed the weasel words of two doctors in a tight spot. John Conolly informed the world that Lord Lytton’s course of action had been entirely justified, and that he was happy with the arrangements Lord Lytton had made for Lady Lytton to be with her son and companion Rebecca Ryves. Dr Winslow wrote that his interview with Lady Lytton had permitted him to proclaim that she could be freed from restraint, and, he added, ‘I think it but an act of justice to Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton to state that . . . the course which he has pursued throughout these painful proceedings cannot be considered as harsh or unjustifiable.’ Privately, though, the incident had worried Winslow, who feared that suspicions of mis-certification damaged the standing of English doctors. As we will see in the next chapter, his own high reputation was suffering a great deal at this time.

The pen certainly hadn’t been mightier than the sword in poor Robert Lytton’s hands. Commentators soon pointed out various inconsistencies in the case. To start with, Conolly’s and Winslow’s ‘certificates’ made no reference to those concocted by Dr Hale Thomson and apothecary Ross, by which Lady Lytton had been forcibly seized. Moreover, why did Robert append Winslow and Conolly’s opinions while arguing that Lady Lytton had never been in an asylum but in a private residence? Why, when she was restored to liberty, was she spirited out of the country at high speed? And why had the Commissioners in Lunacy spoken not one word on the matter? ‘An Englishman’ wrote to the
Daily Telegraph
to say, ‘The more enquiries we make into the matter, the more convinced we are that a great wrong was attempted, and has now been glossed over.’

It was always Lady Lytton’s contention that this group of powerful men protected each other and performed each other’s bidding. The documents that Robert Lytton collected together and safe-housed at Knebworth, plus the huge Bulwer-Lytton correspondence files at Hertfordshire Archives and Local Studies, contain proof that this was no delusion. Not only was John Forster up to his neck in it, Lord Shaftesbury himself had connived at a scheme that was illegal as well as unethical. Forster had been secretary to the Commissioners in Lunacy since 1855, and in 1861 would become a Commissioner himself.

It started with a row in March 1859 about foul-mouthed Mrs Burkitt
and the Commissioners’ suggestion that Inverness Lodge was not a ‘suitable abode’ for this lady, and their description of Hill’s home as ‘a lodging house’. Ever prickly, Hill wrote a furious letter to John Forster, pointing out how very helpful he, Hill, had been in the matter of Lady Lytton: ‘I have written evidence to show that Lady Lytton was placed in confinement by your advice and the Commissioners’, long before the certificates of lunacy were signed. I should not have alluded to this matter if I did not feel that there was a prejudice against me. Indeed, I have been so worried of late that it has affected my health and I am becoming careless as to the result. I begin to think that a man had better break stones than have the care of lunatics.’ Lord Shaftesbury himself wrote to Hill to state that Forster had shown him this vaguely blackmailish-sounding letter; Shaftesbury summoned Hill to his office to reveal this ‘written evidence’. Hill noted in his journal on 12 March 1859, ‘Received also a most insulting letter from Mr Forster’, in which Forster called Hill’s allegation ‘a wicked and calumnious falsehood’. Hill replied to Shaftesbury that he would be happy to come along with the documentation but that he would be bringing his lawyer with him. To Forster, Hill wrote that ‘the language with which you conclude your note is so utterly beneath the notice of a gentleman that I should find it derogatory to myself to reply’.