Inconvenient People (59 page)

Mrs Lowe now wrote to her, curtly requesting that she desist from making libellous statements about her, since this was not how a gentlewoman should behave; moreover, she was holding back the course of lunacy reform, to which Mrs Lowe had dedicated her life. From then on, Mrs Weldon would ‘cut’ Mrs Lowe socially. Mrs Weldon
ran her own newspaper,
Social Salvation
, which went into libellous detail about her own battles and those of other wronged wives and harassed mediums. She used
Social Salvation
to ventilate her grievances against Mrs Lowe, and the spite in her comments reveals her at her very shabbiest. Remembering the day of her escape from Tavistock House, Mrs Weldon wrote:

Mrs Weldon never liked to join any agitation unless she could become Queen Bee. (Poor Mrs Walker, by the way, did return to Major Walker, found him living with a mistress, and died of grief not long after.)

In early 1879, Mrs Weldon sketched out a brief autobiography and published it in the radical newspaper the
London Figaro
. It was a deliberately defamatory article, by which Mrs Weldon hoped to entice her husband, Sir Henry de Bathe and Dr Winslow to launch libel proceedings, so that she could use court privilege to reveal the plot to incarcerate her. Sure enough, on 14 February 1879 she wrote in her diary, ‘No Valentine for me, but the very delightful news that Weldon and Sir Henry de Bathe have applied for a criminal information [for libel] against the
Figaro
.’ But she was disappointed that the trial made hardly a splash in the newspapers; not as disappointed as
London Figaro
’s editor, though, who was found guilty and sentenced to three months in prison and a fine of £100. Dr Winslow did not break cover to sue. Never mind, there was more to come: Mrs Weldon paid sandwich-board men emblazoned with the words ‘Body Snatcher’ to parade outside Winslow’s madhouses and 23 Cavendish Square. She gave a long lecture entitled ‘How I Escaped the Mad Doctors’ at her musical evenings (unlike most public speakers, she was able to break up her talks with songs) and later published it. Still Winslow did not sue. However, in the
British Medical Journal
he
listed once more the reasons why he had believed her to be of unsound mind (spiritualism; listening to an inner voice; seeing a shower of stars; grandiosity – in having fantastical schemes that she believed only she could achieve) and stated that he had kept strictly within the letter of the lunacy law. ‘I maintain that “auricular delirium” is one of the most unfavourable symptoms that exists in mental disorder,’ Winslow wrote. But while the doctor would not take the bait, a musical impresario whom Mrs Weldon had denounced as a ‘trigamist’ successfully prosecuted her in a criminal libel trial, and in May 1880 at the Old Bailey she was sentenced to four months in Newgate Gaol. She served only thirty-seven days and when she emerged, a huge crowd shouted, ‘Long live Mrs Weldon!’ and threw flowers at her. She now added prison costume to her platform performances, and sang two songs about life behind bars and how she had been ‘juggled into Newgate’.

But while she was inside, Harry had sold the lease of Tavistock House, which caused her huge distress – the music academy was now gone for good. Mrs Weldon hit back with a spectacular piece of bloody-minded litigation. ‘I have made up my mind that nothing shall keep me from the protecting arm and the sacred roof of so generous and anxious a husband’: she took a horrified Harry to court for restoration of conjugal rights (as we have seen, Louisa Lowe would swiftly copy Mrs Weldon’s action). During
Weldon
v.
Weldon
, the state of their marriage was discussed in detail, and the judge found in Mrs Weldon’s favour. It was a fantastic coup, underlining the sexual double standard and ensuring maximum embarrassment for dear old Poomps. While Harry’s appeal was pending, the 1884 Matrimonial Causes Act was swiftly passed. Nicknamed the Weldon Relief Act, this law made sure that a spouse would not face indefinite imprisonment for failure to obey a conjugal restitution decree, but would instead be treated as a deserter of the marriage, and therefore liable to financial and child custody penalties, should the deserted party choose to pursue them.

‘I wonder women can endure men,’ Mrs Weldon wrote in her diary at about this time, angry that legislation to get males out of a tight spot seemed to speed through as laws to assist females appeared to face endless delay. But very slowly, inch by inch, the absolute power of male heads of families and the legal disabilities of married women were being chipped away at, with legislation that
controversially allowed the state some role in family life (to protect wives and children from violence) and in sexual matters (to make men more answerable for a range of activities that were deemed to cause social harm). Parliament debated the private, personal and sexual life of the nation in the late 1870s and 1880s; this was partly the result of feminist-inspired pressure slowly making an impact, plus the piqued interest of the press in domestic and marital matters. The 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act gave magistrates and judges the power to grant a judicial separation to a wife whose husband had been convicted of an aggravated assault upon her; she could also be awarded custody of any children under ten years of age, and granted weekly maintenance. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 raised the age of consent for females from thirteen to sixteen and introduced a range of measures to assist the investigation and prosecution of sexual assaults and the trafficking of women. In 1886 the Contagious Diseases Acts, enforcing inspection and detention of prostitutes but not their clientele, were repealed, following years of feminist and libertarian opposition. In August 1889, an Act for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children assisted prosecutions for neglect and assault. Of even greater significance for Mrs Weldon, in 1882, the third Married Women’s Property Act was passed, allowing wives their own separate legal identity. They could now enter into contracts in their own right – and bring civil lawsuits independently of their husbands. In her desire for justice, Mrs Weldon immediately took advantage of the new legislation.

Between 1884 and 1888 she mounted a total of seventeen legal actions (she called the lawsuits her ‘children’), suing Harry, Winslow, Semple, Rudderforth, De Bathe, Gounod, Neal and the editor of the
Daily Chronicle
, among others. She turned herself into a legal expert, working at an office she had rented at Red Lion Court, Fleet Street, assisted by a former solicitor called Chaffers and a writ-server/general agent called Harcourt. The Royal Courts of Justice opened in 1884 in the Strand, a two-minute stroll from Red Lion Court, bringing under one roof at long last the various civil courts and their personnel. The new building was the appropriately modern setting for a new kind of plaintiff – a married woman; and a new kind of lawyer – female. Nicknamed ‘the Portia of the Law Courts’, Mrs Weldon’s insouciance, her sharp eye for the ludicrous posturings of her enemies, and a killer sense of timing often had the counsel, jury and spectators in fits; most of the trial reports contain the bracketed words ‘laughter’, ‘much laughter’ and ‘roars of laughter’. Some of the judges joined in with the knockabout aspect of the proceedings.

Showing up the arrogance and lack of consistency of the mad-doctors was fairly easy, and she did it with brio. Nevertheless, her first attempt against Winslow (for libel, trespass and assault) failed. The judge, Baron Huddleston, sympathised with Mrs Weldon, but stated that the doctor had acted within the letter of the lunacy law. Winslow had, said Huddleston, believed her to be mad – whether she actually was or not – and had found two independent doctors to interview her, separately, who also came to the same, if erroneous, conclusion.
All the paperwork had been in order, and there was no case for Winslow to answer.

In giving judgment, Baron Huddleston spoke at length of his amazement that an individual might be shut up in an asylum solely on the authority of a lunacy order that could have been signed by anyone. He was scandalised that even a ‘crossing sweeper’ could sign a lady or a gentleman into lunacy confinement. (Huddleston’s ‘crossing sweeper’ instantly became one of the most famous and titter-inducing judicial dicta of the late nineteenth century.) Huddleston ‘regretted to think that the plaintiff could have no redress for the serious inconveniences to which she had been put’.

Following this, Mrs Weldon’s arch-enemy, Winslow’s brother-in-law, William à Beckett, drew a surprisingly only semi-hostile cartoon of her for
Punch
(see
here
), as she gingerly trod the tightrope of the law and found that it was not enough simply to have the moral high ground.

Mrs Weldon knew Huddleston to be a member of the Garrick and suspected another Club conspiracy. So on April Fool’s Day 1884 she returned to court to ask for a new trial, which was granted by Justice Manisty, who declared that he could not think of a more important case, involving as it did the liberty of the person. ‘It is revolting to one’s sense of right that merely because the person has some strange or eccentric ideas, therefore she is to be shut up for life,’ Manisty said.

Winslow had a much more hostile time of it the second time around, as well as during the later trial of Dr Semple. Justice Hawkins – the judge at the latter trial – even joined in the mockery of Winslow. In fact, this was a terrible time in the life of the doctor, and his natural ebullience had departed, no matter how blithe he appeared in court. Upon the death of his mother in March 1883, his brother-in-law à Beckett demanded that Winslow sign over to him an equal share in the profits from the Hammersmith madhouses. A Chancery suit followed, which Winslow would eventually lose, and the practice and business that his father had built up was slipping away from him by the time of his roasting at the law courts. He would very shortly have to abandon all connections with his asylums, keeping only one single patient – Cecil Wellesley, forty-nine, a former naval lieutenant, installed in Winslow’s new family home on Hammersmith Mall.

At the trials it was established that Semple and Rudderforth’s interviews
had been technically ‘separate’, as the law required, with each man leaving the room for a few minutes; but this little piece of choreography (a ‘Dutch barometer conversation’ if ever there was one) had hardly achieved the independent medical assessments intended by the Lunacy Act. What’s more, Winslow had drawn up his lunacy order ahead of Mrs Weldon’s interviews; however, a lunacy order was not intended to ‘capture’ a patient but to receive one into an asylum, following the examinations. Justice Hawkins asked Winslow if it were normal for ‘servants’ (that is, the keeper and the nurses) to seize the lunatic, and when Winslow confirmed that it was how all asylums were run, the judge said this should be altered, no doubt abhorring, as Baron Huddleston had before him, the world-turned-upside-down nature of the lower orders laying hands upon their ‘betters’, with the full backing of the law.

Not one of the witnesses, from Sergeant Banger and Bell the caretaker to her choir members and neighbours, had ever entertained the notion that Mrs Weldon was insane. The judge had very much not wanted Mrs Weldon to summons her own mother, nor to read out portions of their correspondence, feeling that this would drag private, family life into the public arena. Nevertheless, she did so, and so heightened did the emotion become during the trial that one juror fainted when Mrs Weldon finished reading from a letter to Mama, dated 26 February 1878: ‘I don’t understand how anybody with blood in their veins would not fly from such persecution as I have suffered,’ she had written. ‘I am struggling against loss of money and reputation. Everybody for nine years seems to have been misinterpreting my object, &c. So it is always with those who have great ideas, &c.’ When she turned to ask Winslow if these words had appeared to him to be those of a madwoman, the juryman swooned and the judge adjourned for the day. Now that mother and daughter were fully reconciled, Mrs Treherne gave evidence that she had never seriously considered her daughter anything more than eccentric, and strongly denied that insanity ran in her late husband’s family. ‘Mama, dear, you may now go,’ said the plaintiff, dismissing her from the box with an informality that had probably never been seen before in a law court.

Yet again the Commissioners in Lunacy failed to cover themselves in glory. In the witness box, the Commission secretary Charles Spencer Perceval (nephew of John Perceval) was shambolic, unable
to confirm whether it was normal for a proprietor to write out a lunacy order for an admission into his own asylum. When the judge asked if the Commissioners visited private asylums, Perceval replied that they visited each house six times a year, and more often if there were ‘special circumstances’ but that there could be two months between visits. This alarmed Justice Hawkins, who wondered whether someone could be snatched and kept for days or even weeks in an asylum without the Commissioners knowing of a complaint of wrongful incarceration; Perceval confirmed that this couldn’t be ruled out.