Inconvenient People (29 page)
Read Inconvenient People Online
Authors: Sarah Wise
‘Was there not one that you said was glazed?’
‘Oh no! I cannot help smiling at that.’
‘Did you ever say that?’
‘No, so help me God!’
‘Have you ever said it was like a waxen doll in a tailor’s shop, or any phrase of that kind?’
‘No, I have not. But it has been said so.’
‘But you never said it?’
‘On my oath.’
‘But I do not put you on your oath, you know?’
‘Oh sir, I am quite exhausted!’
A juryman said, ‘We are here as kind friends to you. You may tell us as many secrets as you like because we are friends of yours.’
Commissioner Barlow suggested she have something to drink: ‘A glass of wine, or brandy and water?’
Mrs Cumming didn’t take the bait.
Then it was over for the day. Barlow rose and said, ‘Good morning. I am afraid I have given you a great deal of trouble.’
‘I am afraid I have given
you
a great deal of trouble,’ Mrs Cumming retorted.
They were back at Gothic Villa three days later, and then again the following week, on the evening of Thursday 22 January. Again they
grilled Mrs Cumming about mortgages, legal expenses and the behaviour of Robert Haynes. Again, she declared she would not answer questions that she believed were impertinent. A servant knocked and came in to light the gloomy room with candles. ‘Would you like some light?’ asked a juryman of Mrs Cumming.
‘It is immaterial to me, sir.’
On and on it went, with Mrs Cumming occasionally stumbling but for the most part consistent in her answers to the repetitive questioning.
‘Have your daughters ever tried to poison you?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘Why can you not return to your natural affection for them?’
‘That [the alleged poisoning] is not the reason I changed my affection for them.’
A juryman now pleaded, ‘Will you allow me, as a friend, to make one suggestion? Dr Williams says that when you were at Bassaleg [Monmouthshire] you attended his church; the Reverend Mr Evans also says you attended his chapel. On those occasions you repeated that beautiful prayer of our Saviour, “Father, Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us . . .”’
‘I have no enmity towards them.’
‘I state this with the greatest affection towards you,’ continued the juryman. ‘God has put it that we are only to ask for His forgiveness of our sins, on the same ground that we are disposed to extend our forgiveness, not only to our children, but to all mankind.’
No answer.
‘Should you like to see your daughters now?’
‘No, I should not. I am in very bad health . . . I gave them money that I might have peace for the remainder of my days, and you see how much peace I have.’
‘Can you account for the several thousand pounds that you received by the sale of property, and by mortgage and otherwise?’
‘Yes, I can. I know very well. I have been persecuted so. And so I think that had better remain in my own breast until I am dead.’
‘But that allows a suspicion to rest in the minds of other persons which you could remove immediately. We do not wish to take your property from you.’
‘I do not suppose that as gentlemen you would.’
‘We only ask it as a test of your accuracy in your accounts and of your being able to manage your own affairs.’
Silence.
‘Do you know how many grandchildren you have?’ asked another juryman.
‘I cannot answer you that question for I have not seen them since two of them died.’
‘Do you know that Mrs Hooper is very ill?’
‘No, I do not.’
‘Should you not like to see her?’
‘I am very ill myself.’
‘Have you no desire to see her, being ill?’
‘No. I should be sorry to hear that she is ill.’
‘She is very ill.’
‘Indeed, I am sorry for it.’
‘Would you rather that Robert Haynes had your property than your daughters?’
‘No, and he never proposed such a thing to me . . . Mr Robert Haynes is not a particular friend of mine – he is my solicitor and has always treated me and behaved to me as a man of honour.’
Mrs Cumming once again slipped into silence when the Commissioner and the jurymen alleged that Haynes was nothing of the sort.
‘What is the greatest offence your daughters have committed against you?’ asked Barlow.
‘Do you not think it any offence for daughters to persecute their mother, so that I cannot get a moment’s peace, not anywhere I go? I am like a hunted dog, a vagabond.’
‘You imagine it,’ asserted a juryman.
‘No, sir, no.’
‘If you had them with you and experienced their kindness, you would not say so.’
‘Ah, sir . . .’
And with that, it was over, and they bade her goodnight.
Back at the Eyre Tavern, each side delivered a lengthy summing-up. Counsel for Mrs Cumming said the case against her was no more than a concoction comprising the exaggerations of ‘dismissed servants and disappointed lawyers’. Commissioner Barlow reminded the jury
that the landmark judgments of Lord Eldon, Lord Chancellor between 1801 and 1827, had stated that non-lunatic unsoundness of mind, such as ‘senile imbecility’, also fell within the jurisdiction of an inquisition: the jury could bring in a verdict of ‘imbecility’ and consequent inability to manage affairs without declaring that Mrs Cumming was actually insane, or in need of asylum incarceration. It was important for it to be established as clearly as possible where eccentricity and caprice ended and derangement commenced. The Commissioner quoted Leonard Shelford, barrister and law writer, whose influential 1833 work,
A Practical Treatise on the Law Concerning Lunatics, Idiots and Persons of Unsound Mind
, stated:
Derangement assumes a thousand different shapes both in character and in degree. It exists in all imaginable varieties, from the frantic maniac chained down to the floor, to the person apparently rational on all subjects and in all transactions save one, and whose disorder, though latently perverting the mind, yet will not be called forth except under particular circumstances and will show itself only occasionally.
A sound mind is one wholly free from delusion . . . Weak minds, again, only differ from strong ones in the extent and power of their faculties; but unless they betray symptoms of a total loss of understanding, or of idiocy, or of delusion, they cannot properly be considered unsound.
An unsound mind is marked by delusion, mingles ideas of imagination with those of reality, those of reflection with those of sensation, and mistakes the one for the other, and such delusion is often accompanied with an apparent insensibility to, or perversion of, those feelings which are peculiarly characteristic of our nature.
The true criterion, the true test of the absence or presence of insanity, where there is no frenzy or raving madness, seems to be the absence or presence of what, used in a certain sense of it, may be comprised in a single term, viz, delusion.
Shelford’s maxims on legal decisions about lunacy were frequently cited at inquisitions and gave a lucid framework for decision-making. But as often as not, juries did not appear to act in accordance with these highly respected points:
A. The law requires satisfactory evidence of insanity.
B. Insanity in the eye of the law is nothing less than the prolonged departure without an adequate external cause from the state of feeling and modes of thinking usual to the individual when in health.
C. The burthen of proof of insanity lies on those persons asserting its existence.
D. Control over persons represented as insane is not to be assumed without necessity.
E. Of all evidence, that of medical men ought to be given with the greatest care and received with the utmost caution.
F. The medical man’s evidence should not merely pronounce the party insane, but give sufficient reasons for thinking so. For this purpose, it behoves him to have investigated accurately the collateral circumstances.
G. The imputations of friends or relations are not entitled to any weight or consideration in inquiries of this nature, but ought to be dismissed from the minds of the judge and jury, who are bound to form the conclusions from impartial evidence of facts and not be led astray by any such fertile sources of error and injustice.
Commissioner Barlow pointed out that the medical men were divided on Mrs Cumming’s mental state, and that the jury ought to give greatest weight to the evidence of those doctors who had had the most amount of contact with Mrs Cumming. Barlow declared he had been most alarmed by Mrs Cumming’s ‘hatred’ of her children and her refusal to answer fully the questions put to her about her property. The jury must decide whether her antipathy to her children was justified, or whether it arose from ‘any morbid disposition’. Her love of her cats, he felt, could be discounted, as eccentricity; but her behaviour regarding her will was rather more alarming, and her moving from house to house also struck him as odd. And he was concerned at her rapid hiring and firing of solicitors.
The jury went out, returning one hour and twenty-five minutes later. They found that Mrs Cumming was of unsound mind, and had been so since 1 May 1846.
It was not the verdict that most had expected.
The Lancet
led the charge of the outraged: ‘With the exception of the cats, the malady appears
to have affected, in some way or another, all the living creatures connected with the inquiry.’ The journal stated that if the public had been able to read the full transcript of the inquisition, it would have been even more shocked by the jury’s verdict: it believed that the evidence had pointed in entirely the opposite direction. The Inces and the Hoopers had triumphed, said
The Lancet
, because of the dirt they had thrown at solicitor Robert Haynes.
However, Haynes failed fully to exonerate himself from the suspicion that he had sought to enrich himself at Mrs Cumming’s expense. Lord Justice Knight Bruce, hearing one of the ramifications of the Cumming saga in the Court of Appeal, stated: ‘From my judicial recollection of the facts of the case, from the condition of Mrs Cumming, her acts,
and her association with some persons
[my italics], I am most clearly of opinion that there never was a lady who more needed protection, and that the proceedings in lunacy were proper.’
Mrs Cumming, after years of outrageous fortune, was probably not as surprised by the verdict as everyone else. She was allowed to return to Gothic Villa to continue her decline into the grave. But the steel remained. Within a week she petitioned the Lord Chancellor and the Lords Justices of Appeal for a ‘traverse’ – a denial of the findings of the inquisition at common law, which would allow her to manage her affairs pending a third inquisition. Towards the end of March, the Lord Chancellor visited Gothic Villa, to establish for himself Mrs Cumming’s psychological state – and to explain how expensive a traverse would be to implement. The old lady was adamant that the cost was immaterial to her. The Lord Chancellor reported that he had found her to be ‘as rational and composed, free from heat, passion or violence as any rational person with whom I ever conversed. She understands how expensive it will be and so wishes to proceed.’ He then remarked upon the huge cost of Mrs Cumming’s sixteen days of humiliation at the Eyre Arms: the bill came to more than £6,000.
A fresh inquisition was ordered, and so it all started up again. Mrs Cumming had been allowed to keep Mrs Moore as her attendant-companion; she had also retained Dr Winslow, who begged each side to call off the fight, to allow the seventy-four-year-old whatever time she had left to be free of the anxiety of yet another hearing. The Inces and Hoopers deeply disliked Dr Winslow’s presence but their attempt
to have him replaced was thwarted by the Lord Chancellor. In fact, the Lord Chancellor made Winslow the old lady’s gatekeeper. The family continued to haggle for all their own legal costs to come directly from Mrs Cumming’s estate, and so once again, the nation was treated to the unwholesome sight of an accused individual being expected to foot the bill of her accusers. The only comforting fact was that the Inces and the Hoopers had almost bankrupted themselves in their attempt to obtain their mother’s money; but this also meant that they simply could not now afford to back down.
What was also noted as odd by commentators was that during the ‘traverse’ – pending the preparations for the third inquisition – Mrs Cumming was permitted control over her affairs, with the sole exception that she could not transfer any of her property. However, any contracts she had signed after 1 May 1846 would later on be deemed by a court to have been void.
On and on Mrs Cumming battled, and her last miserable year of life was punctuated by visits from alienists, lawyers and Commissioners, each asking the same tedious questions. Dr Winslow and Mrs Moore were with her in her bedroom on Midsummer’s Day 1853 when she died, with a mad-doctor in attendance attempting to discover how well her mind worked. She was telling him that she had forgiven her children, but no, she had no wish to see them again. Dr Winslow sat by as her final mumbling words were sifted for sense, or its opposite.
Peace at last in Kensal Green Cemetery. ‘The merciful hand of death has removed a long-suffering victim to the manifold abuses of our lunacy legislation,’
The Lancet
announced, spotting the fairy-tale elements of the events:
No case could demonstrate more urgently the necessity for vigorous and radical reform in the law that could permit such atrocities to be enacted. The case of the much-persecuted Mrs Cumming – a history in itself, a romance, but of that kind the truth of which is stranger far than fiction, but for its notorious reality – might be assumed to be a tale contrived for the express purpose of exposing the imperfections of the law of lunacy.
All that her tragic case had led to, continued the journal, was the
passing of the 1853 Act for the Regulation of Proceedings under Commissions of Lunacy, which attempted to lessen the expense of inquisitions. A greater number of cases could now be heard without a jury, if so desired, speeding up the process.
The Lancet
remained unimpressed: ‘True to his [the Lord Chancellor’s] Chancery education, he would guard property with jealousy; the far dearer right of liberty is immolated without remorse . . . Without trial and without notice, by violence or by fraud, any person may be seized by the agents of a private trader, and incarcerated in a madhouse, on complying with certain easy formalities.’