Inconvenient People (17 page)

During his time in Germany with Professor Peithman, Mr Perceval forged some important links on the Continent and fed the Alleged Lunatics’ Friend Society details on systems such as the Prussian full judicial inquiry before lunacy certification; and the French and Belgian
conseil de famille
system, where relatives and the alleged lunatic put their cases before an independent tribunal. But in England Shaftesbury would not countenance any system that had been devised by a Continental autocracy. For his part, Mr Perceval believed the English
lunacy system was out of keeping with Magna Carta and that the Commissioners in Lunacy were a ‘hideous “Holy Office” . . . restoring us to the cruelty of the Inquisition . . . that monstrous tribunal’. The secretive nature of the Commissioners’ modus operandi was likely to increase ‘the general servility of mind which exists in the country where it is admitted of’. How could England have ended up with such an illiberal system – more appropriate to nations in which the Church demanded total abasement from its populace, he wondered? This was not entirely fair, though, as it was the Commissioners who, once roused, had set about freeing the professor from Bedlam. And it did not occur to Mr Perceval, in his anti-Papist passion, that the countries whose lunacy procedures he was hoping could be emulated were Catholic, while Protestant England was persisting with its occult and mysterious system of incarceration.

These inconsistencies notwithstanding, the Peithman case reflected well on Mr Perceval and his Friends and raised the Society’s profile, encouraging more ‘victims’ to come forward. The Society’s surviving paperwork strongly suggests that it was mainly males who presented themselves, or were being winkled out as subjects of wrongful incarceration: the documents show a ratio of twenty-two males to five females in the known cases of people helped by the Society to fight malicious certification or prolonged detention. It is difficult to know how far this gender imbalance reflects an unwillingness among mid-nineteenth-century women to come forward with their complaints, especially to a Society that had no females on its executive; or how far sane males were disproportionately likely to find themselves landed in a private asylum as a result of family disputes about cash, property and inheritance. John Perceval was clear that wrongful confinement was not just a man’s problem, informing the Home Secretary, in 1840, that daughters were as likely as sons to be the victims of parents who wished to prevent an unsuitable marriage, that women were just as likely to adopt unorthodox religious opinions, and to fail to curb their behaviour to suit ‘the sobriety and severity of the age in which they live . . . Husbands also have incarcerated their wives to enjoy their property in the arms of an adulteress; sons have sworn away the liberty of their mother and have deprived them of their possessions. We cannot therefore hesitate to give females every protection.’

Nine years after Mr Perceval wrote this, the legislation of 1845 and the new Commissioners faced the first celebrated female case of abduction and highly questionable asylum incarceration. Mr Perceval found the woman’s dilemma ‘a perfect illustration of the dangerous defects and abuses of our present laws’. He made sure he had a ringside seat.

^fn1
See Appendix 3
here
for brief sketches of individuals who the Society believed had been wrongfully certified as lunatics or had been kept in confinement long after they had become well.

LOUISA JANE NOTTIDGE
lived in a mansion close to the village of Wixoe, Suffolk, with her mother, Emily, her father, Josias, and four sisters. A fifth sister had married London merchant Frederick Ripley, and there were also two brothers: one had gone into the Church, the other into business. Josias, a retired wool merchant in his early eighties, was very comfortably off, and in 1842 he settled £6,000 upon each of his unwed daughters, who ranged in age from twenty-four to forty (Louisa). In his will he granted Mr Ripley power of attorney over their financial affairs for as long as they remained spinsters. Upon marriage, each daughter’s property would come under the full control of her husband, as per the law of the land.

Louisa and three of her unmarried sisters were more devout than respectability required and attended the parish church of St John the Baptist at Stoke by Clare, near Wixoe. In 1843, a new incumbent arrived at Stoke. Reverend Henry James Prince had come to Suffolk after being dismissed by the Bishop of Bath and Wells from a curacy in Charlinch, Somerset, where his zealous revivalist preaching had caused offence to many a wealthy farmer – Prince had declared certain of them to be ‘unsaved’ – and his doctrinal eccentricities had led almost to riot on occasion. The Charlinch faithful had also been unsettled by the allure that Prince held for women and girls. Prince had brought to Stoke his brother-in-law, Reverend Samuel Starky, also out of favour with the Bishop of Bath and Wells. Starky and Prince shared a house at Stoke, where they would soon receive daily visits from Louisa and her sisters Harriet, thirty-seven, and Agnes, twenty-four. Their parents strongly disapproved of these unchaperoned meetings; Josias had no respect for Prince and Starky’s religious views, and Mrs Nottidge would not have them inside Rose Hill, the family home. Stoke soon
proved to be as incendiary as Charlinch, and the Bishop of Ely dismissed the pair.

The clergymen had been members of the ‘Lampeter Brethren’, students who had proved to be particularly argumentative and provocative during their time at St David’s theological college, Lampeter. Graduating in 1839, Prince and Starky and certain other Brethren founded a mission called the Agapemone – from the Greek, meaning ‘abode of love’ – with branches in Brighton, Weymouth, Swansea and Charlinch. When Prince set up the Adullam Chapel in Windsor Street, Brighton, Louisa, Harriet and Agnes, now joined by their sisters Clara, thirty-two, and Cornelia, twenty-nine, rented a house nearby to be able to hear him preach. His seashore sermons were said to be especially affecting. The Nottidge sisters would also travel with him, unchaperoned, to Weymouth, Wales and the West Country, putting up in hotels and lodging houses – behaviour that called their social standing and appreciation of decorum into question. They paid Prince’s travel and hotel bills as well as their own.

Their parents were aghast, but their requests that the sisters return to Rose Hill were ignored. Even in the spring of 1844, when Josias’s health failed, they were reluctant to leave their little god and come home to Suffolk. As Mrs Nottidge would later state: ‘I sent for them from Brighton when he was dying; and when they came, they told me they should not have done so but for “the will of God”.’

Josias died in May, and when the Nottidge daughters went back to Brighton, Emily decided to go with them in an attempt to salvage some propriety for her girls. She would not allow Prince into the house she had rented for herself and her daughters, and on one occasion, Emily would testify, he had forced his way into the lodgings and she had had to lock herself in the bedroom to prevent him intruding upon her.

It got worse. In June 1845 Louisa, Harriet, Agnes, Clara and Cornelia went to Somerset to attend the opening of the Trinity Free Church at Four Forks, near the hamlet of Spaxton in the parish of Charlinch. This chapel, which Prince, Starky and their supporters had built, would provide a more permanent home for the Agapemone, which had continued to recruit new followers. The Agapemonites attracted adulation and hostility in pretty much equal measure. Itinerant preaching, with ecstatic shouting and bellowing, and stress placed on the most
unlikely syllables in a sentence, had caused annoyance in various southern and western counties and led to complaints to the magistracy. A Somerset newspaper, the
Bridgwater Times
, noted that young girls in particular appeared to be attracted to the open-air ranting and singing. Colonel Howard, a Weymouth magistrate, complained to the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, about the disturbances that Prince and his followers were causing; Howard had recently committed three young women to the county lunatic asylum at Forston, for religious delusions that had been whipped up by Prince. He alleged that women wishing to join the Agapemonites had to present themselves naked, and if they refused to do so they were told that they were damned for eternity. Howard wanted the Home Secretary to send an investigator, such as an officer from Bow Street, to Weymouth with a view to finding legal means of clamping down on the sect’s activities. The Home Secretary wrote to the mayor of Weymouth, asking for more detail, which was duly presented, but no further action was taken by Whitehall.

Criticism of the Agapemone was growing in Brighton too, and when one of the Lampeter Brethren defected and began to explain to the town’s citizens the heretical nature of some of Prince’s doctrines, attendances at the Adullam Chapel fell. For Prince had declared that the Sabbath was not sacred, that prayer was pointless, that blood relationships and friendships were meaningless, that the Day of Grace had passed and the Day of Judgement had arrived, and that only his own followers would be saved. When Prince shortly afterwards abandoned Brighton for Wales and the West Country, he damned it by composing a new hymn:

Only Louisa returned to her mother’s Brighton accommodation following the opening of the chapel at Four Forks, and Emily berated her for the impropriety of travelling by herself, in a carriage, on the Sabbath. Louisa replied that Prince had written a prayer which revealed that it was ‘the will of God’ that she should do so. Louisa burst into tears as she told Emily the shocking news of what had happened at
the Giles Castle Hotel in Taunton, where the Nottidge daughters had been staying. Prince, with Starky by his side, had commanded Harriet to marry one of his most loyal disciples, twenty-five-year-old Reverend Lewis Price. Next, Agnes was told that she was to marry ‘Brother’ George Thomas. And two days later Clara was ordered to marry William Cobbe, a relatively new convert to the Agapemone. Each of these men was younger than his Nottidge bride-to-be (in Harriet’s case, by fifteen years). Prince, himself thirty-four, was the widower of a woman who had been significantly older than him, although his second wife, Julia Starky, was of similar age to her husband. Agnes had caused some annoyance to Prince when she had appeared reluctant to be betrothed to order; she had also asked her intended if some of her £6,000 could be set aside in trust for her, and Brother Thomas had agreed to this. But he then changed his mind, telling Agnes that he had discovered that God forbade such a settlement. Trust settlements, under the law of equity, were a way of allowing married women to own and control a proportion of their own property, and helped to get round some of the legal and financial disabilities imposed upon wives by common law. But the considerable cost of drawing up and implementing such an arrangement meant that only an estimated one in ten of all English marriages in these years featured separate property settlements.

Prince had told the three women that these marriages were the will of God; and that it was also the will of God that they should be spiritual unions only. He said that because the Day of Judgement had arrived, and the Agapemonites were the only redeemed among humanity – had been reborn as pure Spirit, casting off all matters of the flesh – no further children were to be brought into the world. So Agnes was silenced when she asked why she would not be allowed to become a mother. For the same reason Prince declared that all previous ties of affection – to family and friends – were nullified. Harriet, Agnes and Clara were therefore forbidden to tell their mother about their impending marriages.

Louisa had been permitted to travel to inform Emily of the weddings and also that Brother Thomas was coming to Brighton that night, and that he would be staying at Emily’s rented home. Emily protested that this was ‘very improper’, but Louisa told her that it was the will of God. It must have been, because at ten o’clock Brother Thomas
arrived and installed himself upstairs in the house. Emily fled to a friend’s home. When it became clear the next morning that he would stay another night, Emily packed her things and returned to Rose Hill.

Prince now reluctantly allowed two of the fiancées to go to Rose Hill to pick up clothing and personal belongings; but he advised them to read the Book of Jonah beforehand and to ponder the implications of disobedience to God’s commands. During this rushed visit, Emily failed to change her daughters’ minds. She was not present at the service, at St Mary’s, Swansea, on 9 July 1845, where Reverend Starky gave away each of the three spiritual brides, who wore black, with white hats and black veils. Some £18,000 now passed directly to the control of the Agapemone.

Clara’s spiritual husband, William Cobbe, twenty-nine, had been a senior engineer of the Bristol & Exeter Railway Company and now spent his considerable wealth on developing the Spaxton Agapemone. He had donated his own land at Four Forks as well as some existing cottages and outbuildings and would go on to create a fantastic Abode of Love behind high walls, comprising a main house with over twenty bedrooms, a chapel, terraced pleasure grounds, a shrubbery, glasshouses (in which orchids were grown), stables and a granary. Over the chapel flew a flag with Prince’s freshly invented insignia, depicting a lion and a lamb, and his motto, ‘Oh hail, holy love!’ In addition, four farms in the locality were bought with the Agapemone’s rapidly increasing funds, so that the community of the saved could be self-sufficient and would not be starved out, should local tradesmen decide to impose boycotts.

The Abode of Love took a long time to complete, and the sect was still peripatetic. While the Nottidge cash provided a big boost to building work, many other moneyed professionals and people of independent means were continuing to respond to Prince’s charisma. The Agapemone was their true family, he declared, and as in all families, resources must be pooled for the common good. Prince had an idiosyncratic way of soliciting funds from the faithful: ‘The Lord hath need of £50,’ one letter read, ‘to be used for a special purpose unto His glory. The Spirit would have this made known to you. Amen.’