Inconvenient People (5 page)

Edward realised that he had been betrayed by William Lawrence. ‘Oh God! I am now nearly overpowered by my feelings,’ he wrote to him. ‘Instead of the benefits which you expected, or pretended to expect . . . from the change of air, change of scene, and such hypocritical cant, what do I experience? Falsehood, increased restrictions, confined rooms . . .’ On the night of the 17th, Mrs Wardell overheard Francis Hobler beneath Edward’s window proposing a rescue attempt. She informed Mrs Bywater of this and at half past eight on the morning of the 19th, Dr Burrows’s carriage arrived to take Edward away. It would have been illegal for Burrows to have signed a patient into his own madhouse, but William Lawrence and Thomas Blundell now signed certificates of lunacy for Edward’s admission to Burrows’s Clapham Retreat. Mrs Bywater had filled out the lunacy order. Edward put up no fight.

The tea merchant had his own bedroom and sitting-room suite at the Retreat, and shared the asylum with eighteen male and four female patients; the males included four clerks, two army officers, a surgeon,
a silversmith, a tobacconist, a bricklayer and a wine merchant. He was allowed as many as twenty visitors a day, and the staff from Philpot Lane trooped along regularly. In fact, Edward carried on running the business from the madhouse, demonstrating that he still knew a hawk from a handsaw in commercial matters. More than one visiting doctor noted the detailed instructions Edward gave to his staff. However, because the doctors hired by Mrs Bywater intended to claim that he was suffering from ‘monomania’ – a partial insanity that could leave most of the intellect undamaged – this acumen in business matters did not prove that Edward was of sound mind.

On 26 August, Mrs Bywater told clerk William Low that ‘in a few days’ the entire property would be hers. But she was overestimating the speed at which the Lord Chancellor moved, and weeks passed as the petition for the lunacy inquisition was pondered. Mrs Bywater then sacked Low and placed her son-in-law, Cornelius Pugh, in charge of the clerks; she went on to dismiss more of the staff at Philpot Lane and instructed them not to swear to Edward’s sanity at the forthcoming hearing.

At the Retreat, Edward had lost weight and he was described as looking skeletal. Dr Burrows refused Francis Hobler the right to visit his client (visits to an asylum inmate were at the discretion of the proprietor and the signatory of the lunacy order) so the attorney complained directly to the Lord Chancellor, who advised Burrows, on 15 September, that he must allow Edward to start preparing his case for the inquisition. Edward told Hobler that the male attendants at the Retreat persistently made accusation, by gesture and imitation, that he was ‘addicted to unnatural offences’. They would also lift up the back flaps of his coat as he passed them, indicating that they thought him a sodomite. He was often unable to stop crying. Two of the doctors hired by Mrs Bywater, John Haslam and George Tuthill, reported that he wept because he had still not had sight of his baby rabbits, born at Tom Belcher’s; on another occasion he cried when he recalled the sweetness of the gingerbread he had eaten at the Lincoln’s Inn pastry cook’s shop on his last night as a free man. ‘The British public are interested in the success of my cause,’ Edward told Haslam, who noted it down as evidence that Edward’s grandiosity was pathological. But it was Edward, not Haslam, who would be proved correct, and the doctor was to discover
that the public furore about wrongful asylum incarceration was growing.

In November, Dr Burrows’s keepers caused outrage again. They had been apprehended by a group of angry Lambeth locals who attempted to rescue Freeman Anderdon. Anderdon was an elderly eccentric bachelor, who, despite having a fortune of thousands of pounds, chose to live in a run-down cottage in impoverished York Street, Lambeth Marsh. In the summer of 1829, he had begun to spend large sums on paintings, and his hovel was filling up with artworks, to the horror of his brothers, who were hoping that when he died his money would come their way. He was well liked in the neighbourhood as an amiable old man who preferred to wear ancient clothes, ragged footwear and a battered, huge-brimmed straw hat. On the night of 1 November he was seized near his front-garden wicket gate by Burrows’s men. A policeman of the new Metropolitan force noticed the ensuing street melee and recognising that Burrows’s standard note (‘The bearers are two of my attendants, authorised by the
family . . .’) was not a certificate of lunacy, took the attendants into custody and kept them overnight in the local watch-house; in the bag they carried the policeman found rope and manacles. Anderdon decided to prosecute Burrows for assault, and although the legal case would not ‘come on’ until the following April, the notion of Burrows being no better than a kidnapper or a ‘burker’ was firmly in the public mind as the Edward Davies inquisition approached. Being ‘Burrowsed’ entered London slang, and after dark, citizens had one more sinister phenomenon to be wary of if a carriage and two strangers appeared to be lurking.

The Lord Chancellor had urged the Davies–Bywater–Pugh family to try to reach a compromise before the expensive public proceedings began. He wished they would make a ‘private arrangement, on account of the extraordinary delicacy of the investigation’, but neither Edward nor his mother would call off the hearing. Mrs Bywater wanted the business, and Edward – according to his counsel – wanted ‘to emancipate himself from the thraldom of his mother’. Francis Hobler had collected fifty-one affidavits in support of Edward’s sanity – many of them from old friends who testified to his eccentric, melodramatic nature and clumsy attempts at humour, and who placed his seeming bizarreness into the context of a lifetime. Hobler claimed that he could deliver the Lord Chancellor three times the fifty-one sworn statements, but that he did not want to overwhelm His Lordship.

More bad news for Mrs Bywater was that one of the doctors sent along by the Lord Chancellor himself had strongly disagreed with the majority of medical men. Dr William MacMichael reported that, following several interviews, he had concluded that Edward had a theatrical manner, an over-polite way of conversing, a high opinion of himself, yet while ‘diffuse’ in conversation, he was coherent if he was patiently listened to. He seemed easily roused to anger, but he was not delusional. Dr MacMichael said that the seclusion at the Retreat had probably been good for him, and that if he were allowed to return to his Crouch End house he would fully recover his equilibrium. Since the cause of his ‘irritation’ was still
in situ
at Philpot Lane, it was not a good idea for him to return while his mother was there, wrote the doctor.

Forty medical witnesses turned up at the Gray’s Inn Coffee House on Monday 14 December, the first day of the inquisition. This was a record number: not even Lord Portsmouth’s dilemma, six years earlier,
had brought out such a crowd of physicians. Coroners’ inquests and lunacy inquisitions regularly took place in the largest ‘public’ building an area possessed, and very often these were inns and taverns. Competition for seats was keen, and the newspaper reporters noted the high proportion of beautifully dressed ladies of fashion who crammed themselves into the coffee house. The case would feature certain huge stars of the Bar, the brightest of whom was Henry Brougham, former Whig leader of the House who within a year would become Lord Chancellor himself; and with the likely chance that intimate and sexual matters not normally in the public realm would be discussed during the proceedings, this was the must-see show in town. (Four years earlier, Brougham’s closing address at a lunacy inquisition at the Gray’s Inn Coffee House had been accompanied by the sound of workmen hammering beneath him in an attempt to shore up the floor, which was straining under the weight of the multitude who had crowded into the room.)

Like coroners’ inquests, inquisitions were heard before a ‘special jury’ which could vary in number between twelve and twenty-four, at the discretion of the Lord Chancellor. In an era when only male householders of property over a certain rateable value were permitted to serve as jurors, an additional limitation placed on the pool of lunacy jurymen was the ability to understand the medical as well as the legal arguments of a
de lunatico inquirendo
. Magistrates predominated on the special juries, and many of the same men turned up again and again as inquisition jurors.

Proceedings in the Davies case were overseen by Commissioner William Phillimore, who told the jury they would need to be certain that Edward was unable to take care of himself and of his property. ‘Unsoundness of mind’ was the term that had been used since a landmark judgment of 1802 and was tantamount to ‘a declaration of lunacy’, he explained. ‘Unsoundness of mind, as when the mind had been worn out by cares, grief, old age or disease’, came under the legal sense of lunacy; additionally, ‘weak-mindedness’, ‘imbecility’ and ‘idiocy’ could all render one unable to manage one’s affairs – intellectual derangement was just one of the conditions recognised as ‘unsoundness’. The jury need not worry about fine distinctions, Phillimore told them, but were solely to examine Mr Davies’s ability to manage his property and himself. The Commissioner also expressed
the wish that there would be no personal attacks upon Mrs Bywater during the hearing; clearer evidence of popular ill feeling against her has not survived, but Phillimore’s request indicates that strong support for Edward had come to his notice. Various newspapers and journals had alluded to the ‘excitement in the popular mind’ and ‘public dissatisfaction’ since the seizure of Davies and the attempted seizure of Freeman Anderdon but had declined to go into detail, perhaps to avoid being accused of taking sides before the Davies hearing opened.

The doctors who had been hired by Mrs Bywater presented the various incidents already described as clear proof that Edward was of unsound mind and unable to run a business. But William Low and others loyal to the tea dealer recast each incident of apparent insanity to reveal the ‘slant’ that was being given to Edward’s behaviour.

Mrs Martha Ings, to whom Edward was planning to lend the £200 he had wanted to cash at Hankey’s, was the owner of a small brew-house at Mount Pleasant, Holborn. The doctors produced her in court to tell the tale of the July morning on which Edward had called upon her to settle up for the horse he had recently bought from her. He had appeared ‘extremely excited . . . [with] a wild and extravagant manner’. He had torn off his neckcloth, untied his shoes and begun jumping up and down on the sofa, she told the inquisition. But Henry Brougham drew from her the admission that, put another way, all he had done was to walk to her house on a very hot day in July, arrived sweating, taken off his neckcloth and shoes to cool down, and rather than jumping up and down on her sofa, had flung his long limbs across it as he felt comfortable in her company – so much so, in fact, that he proposed to lend her a vast sum of money. Brougham similarly befuddled Aunt Brookbank, who became flustered when the lawyer challenged her account of how Edward had behaved at Brixton Hill: ‘Don’t be excited, Ma’am,’ he told her, ‘don’t be “wild”, “boisterous”, “irritated”. It’s rather dangerous, you know – you see the consequences.’ The spectators were by now laughing openly and loudly at Edward’s accusers. Commissioner Phillimore was surprisingly lenient in his attempts to rein in the rowdy and partisan crowd. Despite outbreaks of foot-stamping or hissing when a doctor said something particularly detrimental about Edward’s sanity, Phillimore only occasionally threatened to adjourn proceedings if better behaviour was not shown.