Inconvenient People (27 page)

Commissioner Barlow was in the chair once again, and he told the jury that they must decide whether Mrs Cumming was of sound or unsound mind. If she were sound, that was the end of the matter; if they found her unsound, they must decide at what point she had become so, and whether she would still be able to take care of herself and her property. Mrs Cumming was to be examined in person, but Barlow believed she was in such frail health that he and the jury would probably have to go to Gothic Villa for the interview.

But Mrs Cumming did make it to the Eyre Arms for the first day, looking ‘a confirmed invalid’ and observing the proceedings with an air of ‘bewilderment’. She sat and listened to the very similar pattern of testimonies to that presented at the Horns Tavern, five and a half years earlier. The inquisition began with three servants alleging filth and disorder at Gothic and Herbert Villas, as well as extreme eccentricity, wild mood changes and a love of liquor. Yet, as before, those testifying on behalf of Mrs Cumming would soon contradict these allegations. Mary Rainey and the Hickeys, in particular, did not make a good impression, Rainey failing to dispel the idea that she had been an abusive and occasionally violent employee, and admitting that she had regularly allowed the Hickeys into Herbert Villa to stay the night. Mrs Hickey told the unlikely tale that she had tracked down John and Catherine Ince’s address using the trade directory so that she could tell them of her worries about Mrs Cumming; Mrs Cumming’s counsel suggested that Hickey had been in the Inces’ pay in the first place.

Counsel for the Hoopers and the Inces alleged that solicitor Robert Haynes had been the evil genius behind the 1846 compromise deal, so that he could gain sway over Mrs Cumming and over her money. The incident of a will that she wrote but never signed, bequeathing Haynes and his wife large sums of money, was brought up to support this argument, and so was an allegation that Haynes had sold Gothic Villa and another house in Queen’s Road to Mrs Cumming at inflated prices. (This latter point was disproved by two independent house agents.)

When one witness claimed that she had revoked one of her wills, Mrs Cumming staggered to her feet and shouted, ‘That is a gross falsity! It is a vile conspiracy!’ When the same witness claimed that she had often been under the influence ‘of something she had been partaking of’ (i.e. drink), she called out: ‘It is very unmanly in a man saying that, when he is, perhaps, in the habit of doing it himself!’

Alienated from her children, Mrs Cumming had developed monomaniac fears about her personal safety, suggested the Hooper–Ince lawyer, and she had persisted in saying that an attempt had been made to strangle her and to introduce poison into her home. The counsel told the jury that ‘there were persons studiously active in cherishing these delusions operating upon that subject in the mind of the lady’. He meant Robert Haynes. Mrs Moore, said the counsel, was a plant
in Mrs Cumming’s life, placed there by Haynes. Moore had ‘huge mesmeric power’ over the old lady and ‘telegraphed’ signals to tell her how to answer any questions from doctors that might have betrayed Mrs Cumming’s madness. The contemporary mesmerism, or hypnotism, furore led some to fear that one human being’s consciousness could be controlled by another individual; the allegation of mesmeric telegraphing implied that Mrs Moore wielded occult power over Mrs Cumming and added a new uneasy, paranoiac element to the case.

John Ince was unable to attend, suffering from ‘nervous depression’, giddiness, numbness, the partial paralysis of one hand and a loss of vision in one of his eyes, and so it was Catherine Ince who had to come to the Eyre Arms to explain that their poor mother had fallen into the power of an unscrupulous lawyer who intended to deepen the hostilities between them in order to gain the entire estate when Mrs Cumming died.

Surgeon Thomas Wilmot, who had signed her lunacy certificate of 1846, was asked what insanity was. He replied that he had never seen a decent explanation of it. Then how could he have certified Mrs Cumming as mad? ‘I considered she was labouring under delusions.’ How did he know that they were delusions? Wilmot cited the filthy state of her house; and said that the swollen condition of the captain’s prostate gland meant that it was agony for him to pass so much as a teaspoonful of water, and so he could not have been capable of ‘inconstancy’. He might have had the desire, said the surgeon, but not the means to act upon it.

When told that Mrs Cumming insisted on cutting up her pets’ food with a clean silver knife and fork, the jury thought she had given the cats their own cutlery to eat with, and they asked for clarification on this point. And her sarcasm caught her out again: a hostile witness claimed that she had once accused one of the landlords at whose property she had lodged of weighing every single feather in the bed that she was to sleep in. This had been her mordant way of pointing out how parsimonious the landlord was, yet it was quoted as evidence of bizarre, delusional thoughts.

Nineteen doctors came to the second inquisition; ten claimed that Mrs Cumming was of unsound mind, nine that she could take care of herself and her affairs. Dr Winslow was one of four star turns,
along with John Conolly, Sir Alexander Morison and Dr Edward Thomas Monro. These were the huge authorities: Monro was a veteran of 400 such hearings, and in only two cases had the jury ever returned a verdict that was at odds with his evidence.

Dr Winslow stated that he had examined few individuals as evidently sane as Mrs Cumming, and he refused to budge from this position under ferocious questioning. Being mistaken was not the same thing as being delusional, he said, regarding her fears about her family’s behaviour. Dr Winslow was ridiculed by one of the Hooper–Ince lawyers for the latitude of his approach to madness, and he read back to the doctor a passage from his 1843 work,
The Plea of Insanity in Criminal Cases
: ‘Insanity does not admit of being defined . . . The malady assumes so many forms, and exhibits itself in such Protean shapes, that it is out of our power to give anything the semblance of a correct or safe definition as could be referred to as a standard in doubtful cases of derangement of the mind.’ Dr Winslow stated that the past nine years had done nothing to shift his position, but a significant point was scored when counsel extracted from him the admission that old age, rather than insanity, could affect an individual’s ability to manage his or her affairs. Forgetfulness and wilfulness came under the umbrella of ‘unsoundness’ of mind, and proving full-blown mania was not the sole purpose of a lunacy commission, he was reminded. Commissioner Barlow told Dr Winslow of the case of an elderly man who thought that one of his legs was his own but that the other belonged to celebrated actress and singer Madame Vestris, and that when asked to walk, the man said he could not do so without checking with the lady for permission. Dr Winslow agreed that ‘so absurd a notion’ would indeed be an indication of an unsound mind. Quite how it connected to Mrs Cumming was anybody’s guess.

Dr Robert Barnes was another staunch (paid) defender of Mrs Cumming’s sanity, echoing Dr Winslow in his belief that the seemingly outrageous claims of poisoning and strangulation were not delusional because of the complex background to the case; and anyway, Dr Barnes pointed out, he had often taken note that Mrs Cumming regularly checked over her own accusations and questioned the correctness of her conclusions, but mad people never attempted to probe and rationalise their beliefs. Furthermore, Barnes – a hereditarian – reported that he had done as much ancestral research as was
possible, and had concluded that there was no lunacy among Mrs Cumming’s antecedents and relatives. Like Dr Winslow, he had a very broad notion of what constituted madness, stating, ‘We are all under some delusion or other . . . I think there is in every mind soundness and unsoundness.’ Dr Barnes cited beliefs in Mormonism, clairvoyance and mesmerism as proof that extremely unlikely concepts could be ardently believed in by huge numbers of perfectly sane individuals.

Dr John Conolly, too, told the Eyre Arms that Mrs Cumming was sane and more than competent to manage her financial affairs. He believed that the insane could suppress mention of their delusions, but not for very long: ‘One never fails to bring it out,’ he said. Appearing to contradict his own 1849 stance – that incarceration was necessary for all forms of mental unsoundness – Conolly strongly denied at the Eyre Arms that those who were simply of feeble memory ought to be put in asylums.

Dr James Davey, resident physician of the huge Colney Hatch county asylum north of London and a former assistant of Dr Conolly’s, damaged his own career in allowing himself to be corralled by the lawyers into stating that anyone who did not believe in mesmerism and clairvoyance (as he ardently did) could be said to be of unsound mind. This extraordinary statement would be picked over sneeringly for many months in the medical press.

Adding an extra complication for the jury, Sir Alexander Morison stated that while he considered Mrs Cumming not to be insane, she was ‘an imbecile’, and therefore of unsound mind: ‘There is a good deal of playful shrewdness about her in some respects . . . [but] she appears to me to be under the control of anybody that approaches her.’ He was supported by Dr Edward Thomas Monro who testified that he had no doubt that she was insane, citing her suspicion of strangulation and of poisoning as proof. Yet under cross-examination, Monro admitted that he did not know that a noxious substance had been found in the bird-house sample, which could have explained Mrs Cumming’s reaction.

Mrs Cumming was not well enough to attend the Eyre Arms after the first day, and so on the morning of Tuesday, 13 January the twelve members of the jury and Commissioner Barlow took themselves along
to Gothic Villa. In the drawing room were Mary Moore and servant Esther Blake, along with one of Mrs Cumming’s general practitioners, Dr Henry Caldwell; also present were one of her lawyers, Mr Southgate; Mr Petersdorff for the Inces and Hoopers; and a shorthand-writer. Even for a spacious St John’s Wood drawing room, this was quite a crowd. The room was kept gloomy as the ophthalmia was raging again in the old lady’s right eye, making her intolerant of light.

Commissioner Barlow addressed Mrs Cumming as if she were a small child, but the inquisitor’s nonsense soon met with Miss-Havisham-like retorts.

Commissioner Barlow: ‘You have not seen so many people for a long time?’

Mrs Cumming: ‘No.’

‘Do you remember seeing me in the year 1846 – it is some time ago?’

‘I have not forgotten you.’

‘This is a better house than you had at Belgrave Terrace?’

‘Yes, it is.’

‘You had cats there.’

‘Yes, I had cats.’

‘I think you had pigeons?’

‘Yes, I had. If it was any mark of insanity to keep pigeons, there are a good many people who would be taken to the madhouse.’

The Commissioner asked a number of questions about her purchase of Gothic Villa and another house in Queen’s Road, and in particular wanted to know the size of the mortgages.

‘I do not know that I am authorised exactly to expose my private affairs in that way,’ the old lady replied. ‘Do not deem me impertinent to you, Mr Barlow.’

‘May I ask the amount of money – the interest that is paid?’

‘Why, I consider it, Mr Barlow, a private affair, and as I am persecuted so much about my property, I think it right to keep those affairs in my own breast. Do not deem me impertinent in giving that answer.’

‘I understand you to say that you have been persecuted. What makes you think you have been persecuted? Who do you think to have persecuted you about your property?’

‘My two daughters.’

‘Anybody else?’

‘No, not now.’

‘You mean Mrs Ince and Mrs Hooper?’

‘They have most grossly persecuted me. Wherever I go I am persecuted by them, the moment they find me out.’

‘In what way do they persecute you?’

‘By coming to my house and annoying me, and putting me in the position I am placed in at present when they get at me.’

‘This house is a very comfortable one . . .’

‘Yes, but I am not speaking of the house, I am speaking of the inquiry which is taking place with regard to my sanity.’

‘You mean they took out a commission, in 1846?’

‘Yes, they did.’

‘Had not Mr Cumming something to do with it?’

‘He had – it was so, nominally – they said he did it.’

Commissioner Barlow asked the old lady about the captain: ‘Was he a person quiet, and of good temper? I am told you treated him with kindness sometimes, and sometimes not.’

‘He is dead, and let all faults be buried with him.’

‘Was he a free-living gentleman with ladies? Do you remember, because there is some allegation about his nurses?’

‘He had some very bad nurses.’

‘Are you quite sure of that from your own personal observation?’

‘Yes.’

‘You had no doubt about it in your own mind?’

‘No, because I had ocular demonstration of it.’

‘I do not like to ask you about that more minutely . . .’

‘I could not enter into it for decency’s sake – decency would not allow me.’

Commissioner Barlow now reverted to financial matters. It is not clear whether this hopping about was aimed at testing the intellectual reflexes of the old lady, or was attributable to the lack of method that seems to characterise Commissioner Barlow.

Of the rental for the house in Queen’s Road that Mrs Cumming owned and leased out, he asked, ‘How much is it – what do you get for it, I mean? Do you remember what it is a year?’

‘I do, but my daughters make all inquiries to know how much this estate is, and how much the other, and that makes me more reserved now.’

‘But I do not come here by order of your daughters.’

‘No, I know you do not.’

Commissioner Barlow probed her about Robert Haynes: ‘Do you have confidence in him?’

‘The most implicit confidence.’

Barlow wanted to know how she had first met Haynes, and she was cagey about this, saying, ‘I did not know that I was obliged to state the details.’

‘I will not oblige you to say anything that you do not like, but still, these gentlemen [the jury] suggest that I should put questions to you, and they will draw their own inferences if you do not answer them. But at the same time I am bound to inform you that you are not compelled to answer any question which is disagreeable to you.’