Authors: Kate Summerscale
B007M836FY EBOK (28 page)
Since the summer in which the Robinson trial began, claims of insanity had become highly contentious. In June 1858, the novelist (and hydropathy enthusiast) Edward Bulwer-Lytton had his wife Rosina abducted and forcibly detained in a private asylum after she denounced him as a liar at a public hustings. Rosina was certified insane by John Conolly, the alienist who had treated Catherine Crowe; but when she was re-examined, after a furore in the press, both he and Forbes Winslow declared her sane. Detailed reports also appeared in the newspapers about the apparently unjustified confinements of a Mrs Turner, a Mr Ruck and a Mr Leech. A diagnosis of madness, especially a convenient diagnosis, was now treated with new scepticism.
A string of troubling cases came before the court in the weeks after Edward Lane gave his evidence. On Saturday 27 November, Sir Cresswell Cresswell returned to the petition of Caroline Marchmont, who wanted a judicial separation from her husband, a former clergyman, on the grounds of his cruelty. She had brought the huge sum of £50,000 to their marriage, her petition explained, and she and her husband had quarrelled about money from the start. Mr Marchmont was in the habit of demanding cash from her, she said, £100 at a time. He would stand over her, ‘very white’, while ‘his eyes flashed fire’. He abused her when she refused him, calling her a ‘hell-fire, spit-fire cat’, a ‘dirty slut’, a ‘drunken faggot’ and worse. Mr Marchmont claimed that he was provoked: his wife was stingy and controlling with her money, suspicious, foul-mouthed and irritating, especially on the (frequent) occasions on which she drank too much sherry.
Several witnesses testified that Mr Marchmont had
repeatedly forced his wife back to the family home (when he found her hiding at her sister’s, for instance, or in a coal hole, or fleeing over a garden wall) but they gave different accounts of the measure of violence with which he did so. Mrs Marchmont said that her husband once broke into their bedroom to find her writing in an account book in which she kept a record of the treatment that she suffered at his hands. He snatched the book and threw it in the fireplace, at which she reached in to the flames to pull it out. According to Mrs Marchmont, he grabbed the book as she rescued it from the hearth and struck her with it, blackening her face. Mr Marchmont claimed that it was she who smacked him in the face with the burning book, so hard that its clasp cut him under the eye. The jury had to decide whether Mr Marchmont had exercised his rights as a husband or acted with cruelty. On 30 November the court found for Mrs Marchmont and she was granted a judicial separation.
The
Saturday Review
disapproved, arguing that Mrs Marchmont’s provocations were quite as bad as her husband’s greed and occasional violence. In the interests of the greatest happiness of the many, it insisted, a judicial separation should be granted only in the ‘gravest emergency’: ‘a married couple should endure a very considerable amount of discomfort, incompatibility, personal suffering, and distress, and yet should continue to live together as man and wife’.
In
Evans v Evans & Robinson
, a long-running case that came back before the court on 5 December, the husband’s evidence of his wife’s adultery had been gathered by Charley Field, the same private investigator employed by Henry Robinson. Field kept a diary of his surveillance. He hired rooms in Mrs Evans’s apartment block in Marylebone, and arranged for a gimlet-hole to be bored in her sitting-room door; through this, several servants saw her having sex with another man. Their evidence was admissible, the judge said, but he disapproved of Field’s methods of securing it. ‘The
people of England,’ declared Baron Martin, who delivered the verdict, found it abhorrent ‘to have men running after them wherever they went and making notes of all their actions.’
In the Divorce Court on 13 December, Esther Keats, the young wife of the owner of the Piccadilly grocery emporium Fortnum & Mason, confessed to having committed adultery with Don Pedro de Montesuma, a Spanish musician, in hotels in London, Dover and Dublin. Mrs Keats’s counsel argued that Frederick Keats had neglected his wife by leaving her alone in Brighton for long periods while he attended to business in London, and had later condoned her infidelity by allowing her back in to the family home. Mr Keats’s counsel urged the court to dismiss the charge of neglect; otherwise, he said, ‘what would become of the wives of members of Parliament, who for six months in the year went to the House of Commons at four or five in the afternoon and remained till twelve or one in the morning? – what would become of the wives of members of the legal profession, who were absent on circuit for six weeks together?’ If a husband’s absence were justification for a woman’s adultery, many of the middle-class wives of England would be licensed to fornicate. Mr Keats’s petition for divorce was granted, and Don Pedro was ordered to pay him £1,000 in damages.
On 19 December,
Reynolds’s Weekly
observed that the cases in the Divorce Court ‘seem to indicate that amongst the high, the moral, the respectable, and the Christian classes … adultery is in a highly flourishing, if not exceedingly rampant, condition’. A week later Queen Victoria wrote to Lord Campbell, the chief designer of the Divorce Act, to ask if he could suppress some of the stories coming out of the court. ‘These cases … fill almost daily a large portion of the newspapers, and are of so scandalous a character that it makes it almost impossible for a paper to be trusted in the hands of a young lady or boy. None of the worst French novels from which careful parents try to protect their children can be
as bad as what is daily brought and laid upon the breakfast table of every educated family in England, and its effect must be most pernicious to the public morals of the country.’ Campbell replied, regretfully, that he had no power to limit the newspaper stories. On 10 January he confided to his diary his anxieties about the new court: ‘like Frankenstein, I am afraid of the monster I have called into existence’.
The stories emerging from the Divorce Court were turning out to be disturbing in two ways: bestial in their violence and lust; and uncertain in their meaning. The court was trying to reform the institution of marriage by subjecting it to scrutiny, but seemed to be succeeding only in exposing its contradictions. A broken marriage always generated incompatible narratives, just as a diary always created a partial story. It might not become clear, either by reading private words or by testing a private relationship in a public forum, what had really happened, let alone where justice lay. The cracked-open marriages brought before the court seemed signs of a society in which men and women had become entrenched in separate worlds.
It took the Divorce Court judges three months to reach a verdict in
Robinson v Robinson & Lane
. On Wednesday 2 March 1859, a fine, mild, dry day in London, Cockburn, Cresswell and Wightman again gathered on the bench. The light leaked in to the courtroom through the glazed panes in the roof and the fans over the doorways.
Cockburn addressed the court. In a judgment that the newspapers characterised as ‘elaborate and eloquent’, he proceeded to undo all the arguments that had been brought before him, and to set out a new way of deciding the suit.
Henry Robinson’s case, he said, rested entirely on the entries in the diary, all the corroborative evidence having been dismissed. The judges had found the journal uncommonly
revealing, Cockburn said: Mrs Robinson’s ‘inmost thoughts and feelings, even where one would most have expected secrecy, are set forth without hesitation or reserve’. She emerged from its pages as a ‘woman of more than ordinary intelligence and of no inconsiderable attainments’ who appeared to have had ‘great and sincere affection’ for her children. What she lacked was sound sense and judgment: her imagination was too vivid and her passions too strong.
Cockburn’s portrayal of Isabella was far milder and more sympathetic than those that had appeared in the press. His private life may have influenced his view of her – as the lover of an unmarried woman who had borne him two children, he knew that a ‘fallen’ woman was not necessarily a wicked one. He was also aware of the wretchedness of Isabella’s marriage: having read the whole diary, he and his fellow judges knew of Henry Robinson’s infidelity and rapacity, neither of which had been alluded to in court.
The judges had found no evidence, said Cockburn, that Mrs Robinson was insane. If the scenes that Isabella narrated had been ‘the delusions of a disordered mind,’ as the defence lawyers claimed, ‘we should, no doubt, have found, what is usual in such cases, the statement or confession of them to others, not a mere recording of them among the other events of her life in a secret journal, to be seen by no eye but her own’. Isabella’s capacity for secrecy, he implied, was evidence of sanity.
Not all of the judges had been of this mind the previous summer: Wightman had argued on 21 June 1858 that it was ‘evident’ that Isabella was ‘labouring under delusions of a peculiar character, arising from chronic disease’. Either he had been persuaded to change his views by March 1859, or he was over-ruled by Cockburn and Cresswell.
If Isabella had been mad, Cockburn continued, ‘probably, too, we should have found more distinct and unequivocal statements of the full consummation of her desires than are
to be met with in the diary. Certainly, we should not have found, in so many instances, complaints of imperfect pleasure or of painful disappointment.’ As Cockburn noticed, the realism of the diary rested not only on its naturalistic detail and its precision about dates and times and weather conditions but also on its accounts of sexual frustration (the ‘half-realised bliss’ of her first encounters with Edward) and of humiliating rejection (at the hands of Thom and Le Petit as well as the doctor). In several passages, Isabella showed herself painfully alive to the discrepancy between her fantasies and her experience. Such entries could hardly be construed as the products of delusion.
Cockburn then turned to the arguments of Henry’s lawyers, only to dismiss those too. The diary, he said, was not a confession of adultery. It contained ‘no clear and unequivocal admission of adultery having taken place’. The passage that most strongly suggested a consummation, said Cockburn, was that in which Edward, after a passionate encounter with Isabella, ‘desired her to take care to “obviate consequences”, but even here the “consequences” referred to may have been those of detection in a criminal intimacy, not those resulting from actual adultery’.
In Isabella’s descriptions of her amorous moments with the doctor, Cockburn said, ‘the language is ambiguous. It may be taken to import actual consummation or to refer only to indecent familiarities and caresses.’ He conceded that the court would usually be inclined to ‘give the fullest effect’ to accounts of this kind, to infer adultery from scenes of illicit intimacy, but he believed that the language of Isabella’s diary should ‘be construed by a different rule’. When writing about men to whom she was attracted, her imagination and passion led her ‘beyond the bounds of reason and truth’, and she was ‘prone to exaggerate and overcolour every circumstance which tended to her gratification’. Since Isabella had taken erotic pleasure in writing down her experiences, he suggested, she
was likely to have heightened and embroidered the truth: the diary’s prime purpose was not to document her past but to delight her present. ‘It is plain that she dwells with impure gratification on the portraiture of these scenes, and on the details of the guilty endearments and caresses which she narrates,’ Cockburn said. ‘To statements so made it is not open to us to add anything by way of inference.’
The Divorce Court rarely heard direct evidence of sexual intercourse. It depended on inference, on deducing a consummation from evidence of desire and opportunity. There was little doubt of either in this case. But Cockburn claimed that although something illicit had obviously gone on between Edward and Isabella, he could not be sure of what. By refusing to infer, even from a written confession, he effectively surrendered the court’s power to interpret.
Cockburn concluded by dismissing Henry Robinson’s petition for divorce. ‘We regret the position of the petitioner,’ he said, ‘who remains burdened with a wife who has thus placed on record the confession of her misconduct; or, at all events, even if the most favourable view be taken of the case, of unfaithful thoughts and unchaste desires; but we can only afford redress on legal proof of adultery, and that proof we cannot find in the incoherent statements of a narrative so irrational and untrustworthy as that of Mrs Robinson.’
Of the 302 petitions for dissolution brought before the court in its first fifteen months, Henry’s was one of only six to be refused. Isabella had won.
