Inconvenient People (13 page)

Reluctantly – and with a majority verdict of six to four – the Commissioners declared Paternoster sane and free to leave Kensington House.

During his forty-one days in the asylum, Paternoster had used his journalistic and clerical talents to attempt a survey of his thirty-seven male fellow inmates (there were twenty-five female patients, too, but
the sexes were segregated and so he had little chance to speak to any of the women). He believed that many of the males were perfectly sane, and stated that he had found not one case of what could be termed ‘mania’, while others were merely ‘imbecile’, or ‘weak-minded’, or elderly and confused. Every one of these men would have benefited from being in a non-custodial environment, Paternoster believed, and after asking them how they came to be at Kensington House, he concluded that many had been ‘put away’ in order that their property and money could be controlled. Of the thirty-three male patients that Paternoster did get to speak to, eighteen knew who had put them into the asylum: eight had been confined by a wife; four by a mother; three by a father; one by a sister; one by a brother, and one by a son. Paternoster recognised that only the press interest – which had come about purely by the lucky coincidence that the newsmen were at Marlborough Street as his plight was being heard – had saved him from becoming just like these men, enduring a lifetime in unlawful imprisonment.

In early October 1838 he instructed his solicitors to write to
The Times
that he was now free; and Mr Perceval, reading the letter, and fascinated to hear that Paternoster had succeeded in being freed by the Commissioners, got in touch right away.

So did William Bailey, an inventor and businessman in his late forties, who had managed to lose a substantial amount of money in a speculation in the early 1830s. His wife then had him committed into Hoxton House Asylum in East London, in October 1835, assisted by Mr Bailey’s brothers, who also wanted to put a stop to his ‘extravagant’ behaviour. He spent fifteen months at Hoxton House until the Metropolitan Commissioners freed him. The following year, he spotted Paternoster’s solicitor’s letter in
The Times
; in responding to it he also met Mr Perceval, and he told both men – who had by now formed a friendship – of his plight. They promised to help him fight in the courts for redress for this wrongdoing; but Mrs Bailey and the brothers were on the march again, and with the help of a pliable pair of doctors, they had Bailey re-committed. At each madhouse he was taken to, the proprietors expressed reluctance to detain Bailey longer than a few days, as there appeared to be nothing even eccentric about him. And so
the family moved him from the lunatics’ ward of the Tothill Fields bridewell in Westminster, to Warburton’s in Bethnal Green, to Kensington House, to Tow’s madhouse just behind the church at Battersea. Here, Messrs Paternoster and Perceval would hang about beneath Mr Bailey’s window at dusk, and Mr Bailey was able to throw down to them documents that included written permission for Mr Perceval to act for him in his battle to be declared sane. But then Mr Bailey was moved again, this time to Fairford House Asylum in Gloucestershire. The Metropolitan Commissioners informed Messrs Paternoster and Perceval that they were considering Mr Bailey’s case, but that each time they wished to interview him, he would be whisked off to a new asylum on the orders of Mrs Bailey, which they were reluctant to countermand; their much-preferred mode of proceeding was to persuade the person who had signed the lunacy order to accept that the patient had regained his or her sanity and to permit the liberation. This approach often worked, but whenever a signatory refused to compromise, the Commissioners were shown to be nervous and ineffectual about using the powers they possessed to free a patient. Richard Paternoster claimed that the Metropolitan Commissioners had never revoked a private madhouse licence, and had only ever mounted one prosecution of a lunacy doctor.

The packages tossed from the window of Tow’s allowed Perceval and Paternoster to compile a petition which they hoped to present to both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Using his family’s extensive social and political connections, Mr Perceval requested Sir Henry Hardinge, the War Secretary, to present Mr Bailey’s case to the Commons, and the Duke of Wellington to present it to the Lords. He received an evasive answer from the former and ‘a cold, forbidding reply’ from the latter, which disgusted Mr Perceval, who wrote of ‘these High, but not high-minded, Tories, despising the prisoner’s prayer and being unwilling to mix up their reputation with that of one under the cloud of the imputation of lunacy’. Captain George Brooke-Pechell, the Radical Liberal MP for Brighton, agreed to present the Bailey petition, but the Commons took no notice of it.

Mr Bailey was eventually freed by the Gloucestershire magistrates in September 1842. He intended to fight a common-law case against
his conspirators but found – as had so many released alleged lunatics – that he had neither the money nor the mental energy for the battle, which had to be started within six months of liberation. What’s more, all his personal papers and other chattels had been confiscated by his wife and brothers during his incarceration, something that had also happened to Richard Paternoster during his time at Kensington House. The loss of documentation had the potential to undermine any legal case the men might wish to bring. Mr Bailey had also suffered the loss of his potentially lucrative drawings of concepts for improving the design of mail coaches and for the widening and lowering of Blackfriars Bridge. Mr Bailey and Mr Paternoster never got their belongings back.

And then there were four: Lewis Phillips was a manufacturer of glasswares and lamps who ran his profit-making Regent-Street-based firm in partnership with his brothers, Samuel and Ralph. On 18 March 1838 he was seized by keepers from Thomas Warburton’s madhouse and taken in a hackney coach to one of his notoriously ill-managed and brutally run asylums. Six months later, when Phillips felt that if he could not get free he would indeed become insane, he finally agreed to sign a document that his brothers had repeatedly put in front of him – relinquishing all his interest and rights in the firm. He signed on 8 September and, as part of the deal, was immediately taken to St Katharine Docks and put on board the
Antwerpen
, bound for the Belgian city. Here, recovering his equilibrium, he regretted the bargain, returned to England, arranged to visit his mother in the Edgware Road but fell into the trap that she had sprung: Mrs Phillips was in on the plot and had alerted Samuel and Ralph, who arrived with Warburton’s keepers. Lewis Phillips made a run for it and managed to remain free. He was utterly ruined but was determined to obtain any redress that Messrs Perceval and Paternoster could suggest.

The small band was growing: Captain Richard Saumarez, RN, had for years been concerned about Chancery lunatics and the vulnerability of their fortunes to unauthorised and unaudited charges – and sometimes even outright theft. An Act to improve their situation had been passed in 1833, increasing official visitation and laying down new rules for those who administered their estates, but in Captain Saumarez’s view the Act had failed significantly to improve the lot of the Chancery patient. The captain had two brothers who had been confined by their father (not incorrectly, in the captain’s view, though he believed single-patient care would have been more appropriate): Frederick Saumarez had been in Brooke House, Clapton, since 1823, and Paul, a vicar, in Cowper House, Chelsea, since 1834. As a teenage midshipman aboard the
Spartan
during the Napoleonic Wars, Captain Saumarez had helped pulverise several castles on the Adriatic coast; now he was laying siege to the lunacy laws.

The group was joined by surgeon John Parkin, a much-published epidemiologist. He was pondering whether there was a connection between malaria and volcanic eruptions, and whether cholera was linked to tropical hurricanes, when he suffered a breakdown; he then spent time in an asylum and became concerned at madhouse conditions. Even more muscle came a little later, with the arrival in their circle of Luke James Hansard, of the parliamentary-printer firm, whose
family had two female members in asylum care; and solicitor Gilbert Bolden, who was filled with alarm that a sane English citizen could be ‘disappeared’ if a sufficiently malevolent person should wish to exploit the lunacy law loopholes.

Buoyed by the financial and moral support of the Perceval–Paternoster group, some of the asylum survivors managed to mount their own legal cases, in default of any statutory right to a hearing and compensation. Richard Paternoster himself sued his father and the other conspirators and won; while Lewis Phillips won £170 from his family and Thomas Warburton when he sued them for conspiracy.

The group had no formal identity yet, and each man was happy to tackle one particular aspect of the cause or to join with another in a campaign of letter-writing, pamphleteering and the lobbying of MPs and government departments with demands for change. They sought a total overhaul of asylum admission procedures, including the right to a jury hearing for anyone accused of being of unsound mind: the jury system, they believed, was ‘the privilege which belongs to every Englishman, of knowing his accusers, the charges brought against him, and of being present at every examination relating to his case, in person, or by attorney’. They also wanted an appeals system that would rescue from confinement anyone who had recovered their wits after certification. Additionally, a magistrate should examine all certificates, whether of pauper or private patients, before any asylum admission, and should be satisfied that asylum care was the best course of action for that individual. The Scottish lunacy certification system interposed the figure of the local sheriff, and many wished that English legislators would use the magistracy in this way, to make asylum admission a civic, not purely medical, matter – removing the final say from physicians.

The men felt that there was an urgent need, too, for coroners’ hearings to be held whenever a patient died in care; and for an invigorated new inspection system to stamp out the appalling treatment and poor conditions each man had witnessed for himself. To defeat the greedy, they advised that, the moment any patient was certificated, his or her property be placed in government hands and invested in safe government bonds and gilts, so that the full sum could be returned to the patient upon recovery. ‘By such a provision, the public would completely defeat the ends and manoeuvres of the evil-designing,’ declared the group, in its first annual report. ‘No immediate member
of the family, or other relation, or base deceiving friend, could then have any pecuniary interest in irritating such will, upon base motives, from its quiescent daily rule of home duties, or from its social peace.’ Most urgently, the men demanded a Select Committee to inquire into the entire lunacy system of England and Wales.

In this battle, they faced one obstacle even more enormous than apathy and lack of parliamentary time. Anthony Ashley Cooper was the ultra-Evangelical Tory peer whose efforts on behalf of the downtrodden were conferring on him a saint-like status. (Cooper was known as Lord Ashley until 1851, when he became the seventh Earl of Shaftesbury; for convenience, he will be referred to here as Shaftesbury.) He would die in 1885 immensely proud that he still had the same outlook and opinions he had formulated in early adolescence. To many, this was very unfortunate, since he positioned himself at, or close to, the heart of most social questions between the late 1820s and mid-1880s. John Perceval wrote that ‘it is known how much weakness and futility is combined in him, with much nobleness and generosity’. Others were much harsher: Thomas Mulock, a journalist who campaigned to improve the lunacy laws, believed that Shaftesbury was ‘void of the honest manliness which openly retracts error . . . wriggling himself into notice with fresh schemes of sham benevolence’; while a later opponent simply called him ‘a Jesuitical old humbug’.