Inconvenient People (3 page)

A gentleman needed to take care of his health, and the naturally cautious Edward began to develop what one of the several physicians he consulted termed ‘hypochondriasis’. He turned up at his doctors’ premises fearing lumps in his throat, chest and arms; there were none. However, a non-imaginary abscess in his mouth put him in bed for eight days and affected his tea-tasting abilities longer than he cared for.

His success had provoked jealousy in the small world of City tea dealers, and his theatricality, eccentricity, youth and emulation of the ways of gentlefolk made him a very easy target. Rival dealer Mr Delafosse repeatedly called him ‘The Lad from the Lane’, implying callowness and lack of breeding, and there was general mirth at the dandyish white trousers that Edward now affected. Four times a year huge, fortnight-long auctions of tea took place at East India House in Leadenhall Street, with as much as a million pounds of tea changing hands and vast sums of money being spent by the thirty or so firms who sent their brokers along. The tea sales were well known to be a bear-pit, with between 300 and 400 men in attendance, all joshing, jesting, swapping scandal and making gibes – mostly good-humoured, but not always so. When bidding was fierce, the noise of howling and yelling carried for hundreds of yards outside the building, as though a riotous mob was making its way through the warren of City lanes.

Ahead of these crucial auctions Edward would become even more nervous and on edge, endlessly revising his calculations and his buying strategy and failing to get much sleep. He was, of late, additionally perturbed by the gossip, whispering and sometimes outright insults, and he wondered whether if he became a practised swordsman and pugilist he might feel more confident. But what would really make a man of him, he decided, was a wife. He had two particular ladies in mind, and before going down on one knee to either, in the spring of 1829 he spent £7,000 on a country seat – Oakfield House at Crouch Hill, Crouch End, to the north of London. He announced his intention to marry, his purchase of Oakfield House, and that he was planning to draft his will; and that’s when his real trouble began. ‘I’ll make you repent this before the end of the year!’ his mother declared.

The June tea sale at East India House was imminent, and Edward tried to compose his mind. He planned to buy 790 chests of tea, for about £15,000. But he also decided to use the event to expose to the wider world a practice that was bilking the Exchequer of tax revenue. Tea was heavily taxed, and the old East India House custom of selling off the first lots – known traditionally in the trade as ‘Directors’ Presents’ tea – at a deliberately low price was a mechanism for defrauding the Revenue. Edward planned to bid an outrageously high price for the Presents tea and to blow the gaff on the whole operation. Hatching this incendiary plan, together with his annoyance at his rivals’ spite towards him and his growing terror of his mother, played on his naturally frayed nerves, as the date of the auction approached.

William Low had noticed that Edward was becoming even more diligent in his attempts not to be overheard in Philpot Lane. Edward had always opened doors to check for an eavesdropper before starting any conversation with Low; now he did this several times during an exchange. He dropped his voice to a whisper, too – though a somewhat melodramatic whisper.

At least he had Crouch End. He escaped there as often as he could and his mother deigned to visit only on Sunday mornings. But he became alarmed by the darkness of the roads north out of the City and near his new home, in particular Hornsey Lane, where he knew that travellers had been robbed, and where he believed resurrection men carted their unhallowed loads. Many a North London village churchyard was being ransacked for corpses at the time, and the trial of Burke and Hare – who had killed instead of resurrecting – had ended in Edinburgh only five months earlier. Edward bought two pistols, to make himself feel safer as he travelled back and forth between Philpot Lane and Crouch End, in case any London-based ‘burkers’ should wish to make a fresh specimen of him. But, as he later admitted, he also sensed that he would feel safer in the tea world if he had a pistol in his pocket – not to fire, just to know that it was there.

The morning of the start of the June sale found him jumpy. His trousers were being jeered at as he marched into the East India House saleroom, approached the auctioneer and announced that he planned to start his bids for the Directors’ Presents tea at 5
s
per lb (it customarily went for 3
s
1
d
). This was a flouting of House etiquette, and some
men present shouted out, ‘Shame! Shame!’ Edward retired to the back of the hall where various dealers and brokers saw him striding up and down and looking highly agitated. Two of them, Mr Gibbs and Mr Varnham (who had both been interested in buying into Hodgson & Davies), later claimed to have noticed that even by Edward’s standards, his nerviness was out of the ordinary on this day.

After Edward had made his expensive purchases he announced that he planned to tell the Duke of Wellington how he had stepped in to prevent the defrauding of the Treasury; who knows, Edward proclaimed to anyone within earshot, the Duke might reward him with a title and public honours. When he later repeated this to his maternal uncle by marriage, James Brookbank, his uncle laughed ‘until his sides shook’, knowing that his nephew blended ludicrous pretentiousness with an ironic, oblique sense of humour.

Three weeks after the saleroom drama, on 27 June, the staff and servants at Philpot Lane heard a pistol shot in one of the first-floor rooms, where Edward and his mother were conferring. On entering, they were told that in being pulled from Edward’s pocket, the weapon had gone off accidentally. Mrs Bywater didn’t seem particularly shaken, and wherever the shot had ended up, it wasn’t embedded in her.

Three days later Edward consulted Sir William Lawrence, one of the most eminent and fashionable surgeons of the day, at his home, just off Whitehall. This was another maternally unauthorised expenditure. Edward wanted Lawrence to look at his throat, which felt sore and constricted – he was always worried that his celebrated palate would begin to let him down. Edward explained to Lawrence that he thought he might have damaged his throat during ferocious rows with rivals at the June tea sale, and from there went on to tell Lawrence the whole story – his brave stand against the Customs fraud, the opprobrium of the tea trade, the insults, sneers and grimaces in the street. Lawrence found it hard to keep up as Edward veered from subject to subject, speaking rapidly and with an intensity that the topics did not seem to warrant. There was nothing wrong with Edward’s throat, Lawrence decided, but he agreed to call in at Philpot Lane a few days later. When Lawrence turned up, Mrs Bywater nobbled him, before he had the chance to see his patient, and told him her own version of events. When Edward was at last alone with the surgeon, he repeated his complaints and asked Lawrence to listen as he grabbed various books and declaimed
page after page of poetry to the bemused surgeon, often interrupting himself to open the door to check if there was anyone there.

Edward was in despair. His mother had decided to take back some of the property in Montgomeryshire that she had signed over to him, comprising a number of buildings in the parish of Kerry, near Newtown. Her solicitor was now asking questions about Hodgson & Davies that Edward found impertinent. He also discovered that his mother had contacted Dr Thomas Blundell, one of the various physicians Edward had previously consulted. She told Dr Blundell she was worried about her son’s behaviour, and when Blundell turned up at Philpot Lane, he asked Edward if he had ever been guilty of * * *, as the newspapers of the day infuriatingly put it. Later in the Davies case, * * * would be used to refer to both sodomy and masturbation, but it is not known which of the two Blundell was alluding to during this encounter. Sodomy was illegal (in fact, it was still on the statute book as a capital offence); and masturbation was severely censured. Edward was shocked and would later say that he thought Blundell ‘a dirty filthy fellow’. Blundell told Mrs Bywater her son had ‘a screw loose’ but later (unconvincingly) protested that in saying this he had not been referring to his head but his thorax, affecting his lungs and throat.

At last, the dam of Edward’s fury burst and he shouted at his mother for having arranged the consultation without asking him first. It was probably then that Edward had an inkling of what she had in store for him.

In July he made a series of panicked visits to friends, relatives and professionals in a wild search for advice, assistance and sympathy. He fled to his aunt and uncle Brookbank in Brixton Hill. Edward had previously written to his aunt that he believed himself protected by a supernatural power, which was always hovering at his shoulder and had informed him that he was destined to be a great man. He was very ‘boisterous’ the night he arrived, his aunt noted, and when he wandered down to the field at the end of her garden, he became alarmed that passers-by returning from the Epsom Races were staring at him. She also claimed that Edward had told her that his mother wanted to murder him. When Mrs Bywater arrived at her sister’s house, he fled.

He turned up at the lodgings of his friend, George Griffiths, a bank clerk, in Margaret Street, north of Oxford Street, apologising for not
having seen him for some time, but saying that he had been ill. He pointed to his forehead, explaining that it felt hot inside. When the two men subsequently bickered about who had been the more negligent in keeping in touch, Edward declaimed haughtily: ‘Sir, it is beneath the dignity of a citizen to visit anyone in furnished apartments.’ ‘Nonsense, Davies,’ said Griffiths, ‘how can you talk so silly?’ Whereupon Edward drew his pistol and said, ‘Nonsense, sir, nonsense? By God, sir, do you see this?’ Griffiths later said this had made him afraid, but that Edward had swiftly put the weapon away and they had chatted for a short time more. Much later – suspiciously later, in fact – Griffiths reported the incident to Mrs Bywater, who insisted that he sign an affidavit stating what had transpired on that evening.

On 28 July Edward went to Mayfair, to the Grosvenor Street premises of Dr Peter M. Latham. He brought with him a pamphlet reporting the 1823 Lord Portsmouth lunacy dispute, in the belief that Latham had given evidence at the hearing in favour of Portsmouth’s sanity (the medical witness had in fact been Latham’s father). The Lord Portsmouth hearing had been notorious for its length (seventeen days) and cost (£25,000), but at the end of it, John Charles Wallop, third Earl of Portsmouth, had been declared of unsound mind and his marriage declared invalid and his sole child illegitimate. Edward took a chair, pulled it close to Latham and, seizing the doctor’s arms, trembling and earnest, he said in a whisper (though there was no one else in the room) that he had a tale to relate of the greatest horror. He then flung himself away and searched every corner of the room, asking if it was possible that they could be overheard and begging Latham to lock the door. Standing in the middle of the room, he tore off his cravat and opened his shirt in a theatrical way, striking his forehead with the palm of his hand. Then he returned to the chair and told a story that Latham found difficult to follow. He talked for an hour but never seemed to get round to the ‘tale of horror’. Only when Edward was on the point of leaving did he turn around at the door and tell Latham that a few days earlier his mother had revealed that a relative had been insane. Edward insisted that Latham come to Philpot Lane the next day, and as he left, he turned and declaimed: ‘If you fail, dread the revenge of a madman, for I carry loaded pistols.’ Laughing loudly, he departed. (Later, Edward would claim that he had meant this to be a joke, adding that Latham did indeed turn up the next day, so could not possibly have taken his words seriously.)

In the meantime, William Lawrence had contacted one of the nation’s most eminent ‘alienists’ (lunacy specialists), George Man Burrows, and with Mrs Bywater’s consent brought him along to Philpot Lane to examine Edward. Burrows was passed off as just a friend of Lawrence, and Edward had no idea that this consultation about his throat problems was in fact an informal lunacy examination. Burrows, fifty-eight years old in 1829, was tall and had a commanding presence, ‘well calculated to inspire respect in the class of patients under his care’, his obituarist would note. For six years he had owned the Clapham Retreat asylum in South London. With twenty to thirty patients, of both sexes, the Retreat was considered one of the best-run of London’s forty or so private madhouses, in which were detained, in 1829, around 2,000 patients.