Inconvenient People (21 page)

Religious fanaticism was the most frequent cause of insanity in women of all degrees of intellect, Conolly went on. Such afflicted women, ‘at once gloomy and presumptuous . . . are easily induced to believe that God speaks to them more directly than to others; they soon learn to despise their parents; they denounce their relatives and friends; write foolish or abusive letters to persons in their neighbourhood; interfere in every family; and put their whole trust only in the vilest flatterers of their folly, to whom their property is willingly confided.’
Nottidge
v.
Ripley
had shown, he claimed, ‘the peculiar danger of leaving imbecile, visionary, and fanatical women at large, particularly if possessed of property’. Unable to resist citing the rumours of sexual impropriety at the Abode of Love, Conolly wrote that it was immoral in a Christian country to have released Louisa to ‘legalized
robbery’ and to ‘the possibility of legalized prostitution’; this ‘mock religion’ destroyed ‘all sense of modesty’.

If Conolly’s proposals had been adopted, they would have made alienists key to the proper functioning of English bourgeois life. Yet Conolly had himself previously written at length of the inadvisability of asylum incarceration for anyone except the dangerous. His
Inquiry Concerning the Indications of Insanity
, published in 1830, had suggested that incarceration usually had a bad effect on patients and should be reserved for the utterly raving or the idiotic. As one present-day commentator has written, ‘Conolly’s changing views appear to mark an almost perverse shift, from enlightenment to error.’ The prospect of financial gain may have been the reason for this change of mind. By the late 1840s, the habitually spendthrift Conolly was the proprietor of three private asylums as well as a consultant at Moorcroft, where he received a percentage of patient fees – a fact that, as we will see in a later chapter, would cause huge damage to his reputation.

The implications of Pollock’s judgment were felt immediately by the Commissioners in Lunacy. In August 1849 they were informed by the Poor Law officials of Wem in Shropshire that all non-dangerous pauper patients in the Salop County Asylum were to be transferred to cheaper forms of care, such as the workhouse lunatic wards or boarding-out as single patients. The Commissioners by way of reply sent them a copy of Conolly’s letter and urged them to reconsider.

Dr Forbes Benignus Winslow, another successful and well-known alienist (who ran two madhouses of his own), in favourably reviewing Conolly’s letter despaired at the anger of an ignorant public, obsessed with wrongful detention and the alleged cruelty within asylums. It was threatening the progress of the profession in England, Winslow wrote (this had been Dr George Man Burrows’s lament twenty years earlier): ‘The public mind seems drunk, if we may so express it, with humanity upon this matter . . . If this feeling were allowed to dominate unreproved, the humanity-mongers would soon degrade the treatment of insanity into a branch of quackery, for none would be held fit to treat the insane but those willing to bow to the prejudices of ignorance and jealousy.’ Those who supported the liberation of uncured lunatics were, in effect, ‘accessories before the fact to many of the murders and suicides which, from time to time, shock society to its core.

‘We have all experienced the dread of kidnapping in early childhood,’ Winslow declared. ‘The public, made up of “children of larger growth”, has taken up the notion that medical men are kidnappers, or the instruments of kidnapping, and that lunatic establishments are the receptacles of their victims.’ In any case, he pointed out, malicious incarceration would involve the complicit co-operation of two doctors, an asylum proprietor, the visiting inspectorate or at least two Commissioners in Lunacy: how likely was that?

Emily’s family had by now become a focus of national interest. The very privacy and discretion that Conolly believed a properly functioning asylum system offered were not to be available to Mrs Nottidge. Worse still, she found that two of her daughters had become her dedicated enemies. Eight months after the successful damages claim, the Agapemonites Clara and Harriet were found lurking in the shrubbery at Rose Hill; they had travelled up from Somerset to assist Brother Thomas in his attempt to seize his son, George, now aged four, from his mother, Agnes. On 1 March 1850, Brother Thomas walked into the yard, addressed the little boy and then attempted to lead him away to a carriage, but was prevented from doing so when a stable hand intervened. Agnes and Cornelia then wrestled the child away, bolted the door and sent for the police. Officers came to guard the house as the Agapemonites made repeated attempts to intrude at Rose Hill.

Two months later, the Lord Chancellor was petitioned by Agnes and Ripley to make George a ward of court. The petition requested that Brother Thomas be restrained from bringing a writ of habeas corpus to obtain the boy, and from any future interference in George’s life. In the meantime, Louisa, Clara and Harriet had concocted a joint affidavit, blaming Agnes’s ‘rebellious’ temper for the failure of her spiritual marriage and vigorously refuting any criticism of the Agapemone. Lord Justice Knight Bruce, hearing the petition, pointed out that Brother Thomas had repudiated Agnes with ‘coarse, harsh and unmanly treatment’, and had for four years shown no interest in his own son. He believed that Brother Thomas had brought nothing to the marriage in terms of money, property or prospects. Of Thomas’s ostracism of the pregnant Agnes, the Lord Justice declared: ‘One is driven with shame and indignation to hope that there may not be a second human being capable of such extravagant indecency.’

Happily married sex was the right and natural thing, as Agnes’s pregnancy had illustrated. The perversity of repudiating a woman who had become pregnant as a result of her marriage, and demanding that the union remain unconsummated, was evidence of the upside-down world of the Agapemonites. In the Abode of Love, a child – the intended consequence of marital sexuality – was seen as unnatural; and sexlessness within the wedded state was something to be striven towards. And so now, for the second time, a Nottidge family lawsuit led to a significant legal judgment that went against the grain: the court awarded Agnes full power over George’s upbringing and education. Previously, despite the landmark 1839 Infant Custody Act – which for the first time permitted English mothers of proven ‘good character’ to bring a case for custody of a child under seven following a separation – there had been immense legal difficulty for any mother seeking sole care of her infant when she had deserted the marriage, when the father contested custody and he had no previous conviction for violence within the home. If Agnes were not granted custody of George, the boy would fall under the spell of ‘a fanatic, or pseudo-fanatic, preacher’, as Prince was described in the judgment of Knight Bruce, who continued, ‘As lief would I have on my conscience the consigning [of] this boy to a camp of gypsies.’

Agnes had always downplayed the informality of relationships at the Agapemone, possibly to exonerate her sisters: ‘I do not believe the reports which have been circulated on the subject of promiscuous intercourse as respects my sisters,’ she swore in an affidavit. ‘There were no secret or immoral proceedings in the acts of worship when I was with Mr Prince [but] I am certain that Mr Prince and Mrs Starky live in adultery, having seen her come out of his bedroom.’ However, it was sex that would dominate public discussion of the Agapemone for the rest of its existence. In the 1850s Prince’s behaviour became increasingly outlandish and dictatorial. Local newspapers reported that he would pick a fresh bride each week from the spouses of his followers. The women would sit on a revolving stage which the husbands spun, and when it stopped, whichever woman was sitting opposite Prince became his wife, spiritual or otherwise, for the week.

Prince’s ostentatious, narcissistic display was in evidence in 1851, when he astonished visitors to the Great Exhibition by driving around
Hyde Park in Queen Adelaide’s carriage with an immaculately caparisoned team of four horses. Dressed in ermine-trimmed scarlet robes, he was announced by a team of outriders: ‘Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord!’

To slough off the apathetic, to sniff out doubters and to haul in a new set of converts, Prince frequently changed Agapemone doctrine and shifted his ground on house rules. This capricious shuffling of the pack of his followers intensified as the decade went on – he had become a very moody Messiah. Locals told the press that they believed there had been as many as nineteen defections from the Agapemone in the mid-1850s. Lawyer James Rouse, an Agapemonite from the late 1840s, dressed up as a shepherd to make his escape at night over the Agapemone wall, since vigilance inside the compound had been stepped up. He and his brother-in-law later abducted Mrs Rouse when she was out riding in the carriage late one night. In some cases, those who had left the Abode were harangued and manhandled in order to get them to return. Clara Nottidge tracked down Hanna Styles, a thirty-two-year-old widow and grocery shop owner, in Dorchester, shouting, ‘I am God, I am God, I am God!’ as she tried to drag the apostate out of her bed and into a waiting carriage to return her to the Abode of Love.

Then the suicides began. John Williams hanged himself from a tree near the Agapemone farm at Higher Aisholt, using a luggage strap, in September 1854. Thomas Wilshire, a tax collector and overseer of the poor, cut his throat in May 1856. A female Agapemonite killed herself at Weymouth. A farmer called Scutt attempted suicide in the summer of 1856 but failed, and was subsequently sent to an asylum. All except Wilshire had signed over their money and property to Prince.

A wealthy Swansea family, comprising Arthur Maber, his son and four daughters, had become Agapemonites in 1848. In April 1851 one of the daughters, Charlotte, died; the coroner would later state that she had died of ‘disease of the brain’, and not tuberculosis, as the Agapemonites had claimed. Her sister, Mary, was fifty-six years old in June 1856, when she appeared to have fallen into ‘a despairing state’, according to Starky, who saw her walking alone in the Agapemone gardens one evening. The next morning, the house door and the gate into the lane were found ajar. On top of Mary’s sewing
box her sister Fanny found a note that read: ‘This is the day of judgement to me, and fearful perplexity. When I go, self will go from the Abode. If my wretched heart were not stone and unbelieving, what Beloved [Prince] said would have relieved me.’ Later that morning, Mary’s body was found in a trench used for sheep-washing, two miles away and close to the Agapemone-owned Blaxhold Farm, at Enmore. There were no signs of injury, and the coroner’s jury’s verdict was death from asphyxia by drowning, caused by suicide during a bout of ‘temporary insanity’. Mary’s much-loved six-year-old niece, Phoebe, had been seriously ill and would die soon afterwards; her sister Charlotte had died five years earlier. Did this mean that Phoebe and Charlotte were among the damned? Had Prince not declared that those who proved themselves mortal (by dying) were not to partake of Grace? Such doubts are likely to have been a powerful factor in Mary’s disastrous loss of faith in Christ, and, more importantly, in Prince.

The inquest gave the coroner, W. W. Munckton, the opportunity to air the latest allegations about life behind the high walls. He asked the Agapemonite witnesses if Mary’s unhappiness could have been caused by the turning upside-down of traditional social hierarchy by Prince. The coroner had heard that maidservants – the young and pretty ones, at least – were now mistresses of the Agapemone, and that this had led to a feeling of ‘de-gradation’ for the ladies at the Abode of Love. He understood that certain privileged individuals ate the best food, had the use of the best-furnished rooms, and now formed an inner sanctum around Prince, while other members of the sect had to accept a lowering of their living standards to fund increasing opulence for Prince and his favourites. Coroner Munckton had been told that any complaints voiced about this state of affairs were said to emanate from the Devil. Witness Starky denied all such stories, declaring that ‘We are all one in Christ’. (But even the loyal Starky had felt Prince’s displeasure and had for a while been demoted to bootblack/stable hand.) On the subject of money, Starky admitted that Mary Maber had transferred £1,700 to Prince at the time of her sister Charlotte’s death, and that in her will, Mary left everything to the Agapemone.

Coroner Munckton had intended to write to the Home Secretary about the Agapemone and to ask Whitehall to send someone down
to observe the inquest, in the interests of the public. Munckton had also been planning to institute his own inquiry because he believed the number of recent suicides gave ‘prima facie grounds for supposing there was something wrong in the establishment’. We don’t know why Munckton then changed his mind: in the end, the Home Secretary was never alerted, although another female member of the sect attempted suicide three months later.

It is tempting to believe that the emotional and spiritual traumas which led to the wave of suicides and suicide attempts were the result of ‘the Great Manifestation’. That shocking event cannot be safely dated, though it is likely to have taken place in the first half of 1856. The location, at least, is known. After the completion of the complex, the Agapemone chapel had become a sumptuous drawing room. Just as prayers and Sundays had no special status now that the Day of Judgement had arrived, no one place was particularly holy for the Agapemonites. The deconsecrated chapel/mystical drawing room had stained-glass lancet windows, a large crimson sofa, a red Persian carpet, a roof of oak, scarlet curtains, a green baize billiards table, oak and brass church furniture and fixtures, a large plaster statue of Prince’s symbols (the lion and the lamb), flanked by billiard cues, a harp, a mechanical organ called a euterpean and cases of books, most of which looked unread.