Inconvenient People (20 page)

The following month, Louisa brought a lawsuit in the Court of Exchequer against Ripley and Edmund on the grounds of assault and false imprisonment. The judge was the Right Hon. Sir Frederick Pollock, Lord Chief Baron of the Court of Exchequer. To Emily’s horror, the national newspaper reporters were in attendance when the hearing began in Westminster Hall on Saturday 23 June 1849. Despite appalling physical conditions, the place ‘was crowded to suffocation throughout the day’, reported
The Times
. The judge complained of the stench in the court – the ventilation system of the new Houses of Parliament and the Hall had been an expensive disaster – and as the temperature rose steadily it was found that the windows could not be opened. A cholera epidemic was killing 14,000 Londoners at the time, and the miasmatic theory held that ‘bad air’ caused the deadly disease; but this didn’t seem to have deterred anyone from coming along to witness the latest legal case concerning false incarceration.

In his opening statement, Louisa’s counsel stated that his client wanted not just to erase the stigma of insanity from herself, but to show the world that Frederick Ripley and her brother had connived with her mother to falsely imprison her in a lunatic asylum. Moreover, they had made her pay for this injustice from her own pocket. Louisa believed that her certification had been undertaken for pecuniary greed.

Three questions would dominate the three-day hearing. On what grounds was it asserted that Louisa had been of unsound mind? Was the Agapemone an heretical sect? Why did they play hockey?

Witness after witness from the Abode described Louisa as ‘ladylike’ and ‘gentle’. John Williams, a gentleman and a former farmer, testified that she had never been a ‘serious’ woman, but that since ‘she had glimpsed the spirit of God’ she had become ‘joyous’. Life in the Agapemone was about mirth, pleasure, music, gardens, games, reading, riding – it was ‘life made easy’. But if Williams had thought this lotus-eating revelation would recommend the Abode of Love to the court, he had misjudged the mood.

All the Agapemone witnesses denied that Prince was, or had ever claimed to be, the Messiah. William Cobbe told the court: ‘Mr Prince is not the head of us, but God is. God has the care of us. We look up to Mr Prince with respect, but not with veneration, nor with reverence, but we look up to God in that way. I should say it would be a gross delusion to look up to Prince as God.’ Mrs Julia Prince confirmed that her husband’s teachings were identical to that of the Church of England, except that prayer was no longer of any use, since the Day of Grace was past and the Day of Judgement had arrived.

Reverend Lewis Price admitted under pressure that hockey was ‘a manifestation of goodness for God’, which caused hilarity among the onlookers. He denied that Prince habitually signed his letters ‘Amen’ and that he requested local tradesmen to address their bills to him in the form, ‘My Lord, The Agapemone, Four Forks, Spaxton’. Lewis Price insisted that the Agapemone was not a sect but ‘a private family’. As well as the incomprehensibility of holy hockey, the spectators were baffled by the Agapemonite assertion that blood family could be broken down and wholly replaced by a ‘family’ of fellow feeling and shared spiritual certainties. This was a social heresy.

The law teams included some of the stars that glistened brightest in the Victorian legal world. Future Lord Chancellor Sir Frederick Thesiger, defending Ripley, stated that it was nobody’s right to interfere with the sincerely held beliefs of an adult. But in a speech that met with huge applause from the stifling and stewing onlookers, Thesiger said he would reveal that the Agapemonites ‘creep into families, and there spread dismay and desolation’; he hoped to show that Louisa had not been ‘a free agent, and had been . . . drawn into a low, degrading and disgusting association’. It had been her blood family’s high moral duty to rescue her, and he asked the jurymen whether, if they had had daughter after daughter seized away for £6,000 each by these mercenary people, they would not have tried all available means to win her back.

But now rose the brilliant Alexander Cockburn, a future Lord Chief Justice of England. He said that Louisa had endured many months of odious confinement simply for seeking to worship the Almighty in the way that had seemed sincere and correct to her, even though this may have seemed to others to have been the worship of ‘a most
presumptuous sect’. And even if she was mistaken, the Almighty would look with compassion upon such errors and ‘pardon the mistaken energy of his creatures’, he claimed. Cockburn realised that there was no need to whiten the image of the Abode of Love: his appeal was to English liberty, which must be extended to ‘half-wits’ (
The
Times
’s devastating description of all the Nottidge daughters) and even to charlatans themselves, since their beliefs were errors, not madness.

The judge, Baron Pollock, closely questioned the Commissioners in Lunacy about their reasons for believing Louisa to be insane. Commissioner Mylne admitted that Louisa constituted no danger to herself or to others. Then why detain her? the judge demanded. Pollock tripped up Dr Stillwell, too, when the latter revealed that Louisa had been allowed out on her own. Surely, the judge argued, the fact of being allowed out of an asylum alone was sufficient proof that the patient was not insane.

Baron Pollock’s summing up was a blow to the alienist profession:

So long as such strange religious opinions were not ‘forced offensively, or contrary to law, upon the public notice, or against public morals’ they should be tolerated – although Pollock understood ‘the horror and disgust’ the public felt for the ‘strange fancies’ that had been adopted by certain religious movements in recent years.

The Agapemonites could have done more to avoid being viewed as fortune hunters, the judge continued. Had the three Nottidge daughters drawn up marriage settlements, this would have thrown off all suspicion of mercenary motives in three men marrying older women. (Agnes, as already stated, had of course asked for just such an arrangement.)

Pollock told the jury that the defendants had acted on Mrs Emily Nottidge’s assertions alone. They had seized Louisa and had her certificated without an inquisition. ‘They should have had the sanction of
the law for such a step,’ he said of the defendants, and this rendered them liable to whatever punishment the jury thought fit to apply.

The jury was out for an hour. They came back in with a majority verdict in favour of Louisa, but imposed damages of just £50 (she had been seeking £1,000), stating that they did not think Ripley and Edmund had acted for financial gain or any other ‘unworthy’ motive.

Pollock’s opinion that only those dangerous to themselves or to others should be incarcerated was applauded by all the national newspapers, who saw the judge as reasserting English liberty in the face of an intrusive alienist profession. Not surprisingly, with a few exceptions alienist reaction to Pollock was indignant. The most thorough rebuttal came from Dr John Conolly, who in July 1849 published his response as an open letter, ‘A Remonstrance with The Lord Chief Baron Touching the Case Nottidge versus Ripley’. Conolly, risking a libel action from Louisa, asserted that there was no room for doubt as to the actual insanity of Louisa Nottidge. He argued that danger was far from the sole criterion to be taken account of when asylum committal was under consideration. His letter placed great faith in what mad-doctors were capable of, in terms of both curative measures and improving society. Conolly’s position on the role of asylum care was social and civic-minded, and in opposition to the libertarian defence of the individual put forward by Pollock. Conolly believed that families and society in general needed freedom from the anxiety, shame and moral contamination to which the behaviour of the mentally unsound subjected them.

His point of view was based on a blend of humanitarianism and something altogether more worldly. Conolly wanted sufferers of delusions (those prone to ‘suggestions made by voices in the air, or words written in the sky’) to receive the best possible care and chance of cure. But additionally, he knew that dynastic prestige and wealth were at risk if only dangerous family members were to be committed: the asylum had a broader role in dealing with those individuals whose disturbed behaviour interfered with the social system. Conolly believed that the following were sufficient grounds for incarceration:

It was morally right, argued Conolly, that society should be helped to become more pleasant and more decent by the removal of its upsetting and disgusting elements and those who did not know right from wrong. He recommended medical intervention for the many sorts of waywardness found in youth (both boys and girls), as this would check the progression to full-blown insanity, which was inevitable if adolescent introversion, promiscuity, narcissism, drunkenness, hilarity and financial recklessness went untreated. The best-run asylums, Conolly claimed, diverted thoughts, calmed morbid excitement, roused the apathetic and restored control of reason.

Conolly’s letter was even-handed in attributing bad moral habits, mental delusion and weakness of intellect to both males and females. But when he moves on to discuss the Nottidge case, a gendering of misbehaviour becomes apparent. In a passage entirely based on hearsay, Conolly described Louisa as a ‘weak-minded lady’, who shunned her mother and experienced ‘insane delusional worship of a mere man’. He quoted Emily, who had apparently told him of ‘a tendency to mental disorder [that] existed in some of her children’. According to Emily, the Nottidge daughters all had ‘weak understanding’ and Louisa was ‘the least intellectual’. However, although Edmund had spent time at Moorcroft House, there is no evidence to corroborate this hereditarian opinion of a devastated mother who had lost four of her children to the Abode of Love.

Placing Louisa in Moorcroft House had therefore been the correct course of action, Conolly asserted. Louisa had needed protection because she had been unable to take care of herself or her property. But it is hard to understand why Louisa’s lack of wisdom and judgement, in handing over her whole estate to Prince, should be regarded as proof of insanity. She had had the choice of having her money administered for her by Ripley, or by Prince, and she simply chose one form of control over another. As she would later claim, ‘I enjoyed more the benefit of it [her money] than I ever did before.’