Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum (2 page)

It was clear
that Hadfield was mad. Legally, though, he presented a problem.
While he might be found not guilty by reason of insanity, this
verdict was reserved historically for those described as ‘brutes’
or ‘infants’. The usual result was a discharge, sometimes to
Bethlem, London’s historic hospital for the mad, more often to
family or the local community for care, but certainly with no
further oversight from the state. Such a discharge would have been
extremely risky in Hadfield’s case, as it seemed entirely plausible
that if let go, he might try something similar again.

Besides,
Hadfield was neither brute nor infant. He was married, in regular
employment in the silver trade, a war hero, as well as a family
man. His case bore some similarities to those of two previous
assailants on the Royal person, Margaret Nicholson and John Frith,
neither of which had been resolved satisfactorily from a legal
point of view. The memory of Nicholson and Frith would have been
fresh in the minds of the lawyers brought in to deal with Hadfield.
Now, the law was presented with another opportunity to find a way
of managing the dangerous lunatic, and the English legal system was
helped out of its difficulties to no small extent by the success of
Hadfield’s lawyer, Thomas Erskine. Today we would consider a
defence lawyer to be an automatic right, but they were a bit of an
oddity in court until the 1830s, and it was only because Hadfield
had been charged with treason that the ancient statutes granted him
a right to counsel. Erskine took advantage of this position to
argue a revolutionary defence: that the law actually allowed for
partial insanity; that is, it included recognition of those people
who suffered from bouts of periodic mental illness, and otherwise
enjoyed periods of lucidity. Hadfield was such a person. He was
diligent and rational when he was not in a religious frenzy. He was
found not guilty, and remanded to Bethlem while Parliament
regulated the judge-made law. The result was the passing of the
Criminal Lunatics Act 1800. This Act gave Hadfield his new status,
and the law the power to detain him until ‘His Majesty’s pleasure
be known’, the legal form for an indefinite sentence. Duly
sentenced, and despite a brief escape from Newgate Prison, Hadfield
remained a guest of His Majesty until his death in 1841.

Of course,
with the new sentence there quickly came further Hadfields, all
similarly afflicted and all requiring some form of secure
accommodation. As luck would have it, Bethlem had outgrown its city
space and was on the verge of moving to larger premises, so the
Government negotiated the first dedicated space for criminal
lunatics when the new Bethlem opened in St George’s Fields in 1816.
Two new wings were built as what became known as the State Criminal
Lunatic Asylum. It was an opportunist move, rather than a long-term
one. When space at Bethlem reached capacity a few decades later,
further space was purchased at Fisherton House Asylum in Salisbury,
though this also only bought a little more time. As the national
population mushroomed during the nineteenth century, so too did the
small subset that comprised the criminal lunatics.

The Home
Office, under Secretary Sir George Grey, decided in the late 1850s
to identify a piece of land on which to build a dedicated special
hospital. The site at Crowthorne, part of the Crown estate of
Windsor Forest, was chosen for being reasonably isolated, yet also
easily accessible from London. Crowthorne itself barely existed at
the time, but Wellington College was being built nearby and was due
to gain a station on the London and South East Railway, so the area
was ripe for development. Broadmoor itself was to be perched
high-up on a ridge within the forest, commanding a magnificent and
suitably healthy view across the countryside below.

Plans were
shelved briefly when the Whig Government fell, and Grey removed
from office, but as a result of Parliamentary enquiries into
lunacy, it was not long before the Criminal Lunatic Asylums Act
1860 was passed. This allowed the Government to act on its plan and
fund construction of its own asylum. Sir George Grey was back in
post by the time building had begun, and under his instruction the
Home Office’s prison architect, Sir Joshua Jebb, was given the task
of designing the structure. Within three years, an army of convicts
had supplied their forced labour, the woods had been cleared,
several brick boxes reached up to the sky, Jebb was on his death
bed, and Broadmoor was open for business.

***

For the first
nine months of its existence, Broadmoor was a female only hospital.
This was because the site design included fewer buildings on the
female side, and they were finished first. The one female block was
in a separate compound to the five male blocks that made up the
initial building phase (a further block for each sex was finished
within the next few years). It was only when these five blocks were
ready, and the remaining convict labour retrenched to what would
become Block 6 that coaches of men from Bethlem and Fisherton began
replicating the women’s arrival. That process began on 27th
February 1864. Patients like Oxford and Dadd were amongst those
transferred.

By the end of
1864, there were two hundred men and one hundred women in the
Asylum, though the numbers would swell further until there were
around five hundred patients at any time, in a ratio of roughly
four men to one woman. Of course, the social mix within the walls
varied from month to month and year to year over the duration of
the Victorian period. However, some statistics from the first
year’s intake of patients serve to give a flavour of the typical
make up of this unique community, and how they had ended up
there.

Around a
quarter of the men and 40% of the women were murderers; many others
had attempted to kill. Otherwise, the average patient had probably
been caught stealing, or, if he was male, setting fire to
something. There were sex offenders too amongst the men, including
paedophiles and those who had committed bestial acts. Those were
all demonstrably serious offences. The law though, could pass a
pleasure sentence for any crime, with the result that a relatively
few patients were also treated at Her Majesty’s Pleasure on what
appear to be more trivial matters, such as vagrancy, sending
threatening letters or even attempting suicide.

Most of the
men had been labourers or tradesmen in their previous lives, though
around one in ten had served in the forces. The latter figure
included soldiers and sailors who had seen actions in the campaigns
of Empire across the globe. The professional class was represented
too, including by patients such as Dadd, with his intellectual and
artistic background. In contrast, most of the women were housewives
or labourers, with comparatively few women coming from more
privileged backgrounds. The suggestion has been made that, since
many women had attacked their own children, the middle class
Victorian lady was not likely to be found at Broadmoor. Any
murderous tendencies such a lady might have had would have been
deflected by her distant relationship with her offspring, and thus
thwarted by the presence of the nanny.

The poorer
nature of the female class is perhaps reflected in the fact that
while around two-thirds of the men were married, fewer than half
the women were. These were workers more often than homemakers.
There was a disparity in education too: most of the men could read
and write, but only a third of the women could.

Attempts were
made to categorise the patients, much as diagnoses might be made
today. One of the tasks that befell the Victorian doctor in lunacy
was to ascribe a ‘cause of insanity’ to each case. Sometimes these
were what were termed as moral circumstances, such as: intemperance
and vice; religious excitement; being unlucky in love; anxiety; and
poverty. Yet even with the Victorians’ fondness for morality, most
causes were assigned to physical conditions, even if these were not
fully understood, such as fever, head injuries and childbirth.
Patients were also categorised by the activity that they undertook
as part of their treatment. And, although the popular conception is
that the Victorian asylum was a house of raving madmen, in reality
around a third of the patients were well enough either to be
employed in the Asylum or in its farm.

***

If that serves
to give a flavour of who was within the walls, it does not answer
the question of how they came to be there. In keeping with the
nature of Broadmoor, this question has both a legal and a medical
side to the response. These twin tacks are reflected in the
separate elements both of the name given to the Asylum, and the
epithet given to the patients: ‘criminal’ and ‘lunatic’.

That the
patients were all criminals is down to their judicial history.
Every patient had been arrested for a crime, and then dealt with by
the courts. Most of these had been found ‘not guilty by reason of
insanity’ (at least until 1883, when the standard form became
‘guilty, but insane’, in a vain hope to deter lunatics from their
actions by denying them innocence), just as James Hadfield had been
so found in 1800. These were the ‘pleasure’ men and women, destined
to remain in Crowthorne until what was now Her Majesty’s Pleasure
was known. Although the balance varied, roughly two-thirds of the
patient population at any time were ‘pleasure’. These patients had
been declared insane usually at their trial or before it. Some
patients did not even get as far as making a plea, while others
were found insane on arraignment, when they came to stand in the
dock, but before any evidence was heard. If a case went to full
hearing, the jury would have delivered a verdict of insanity based
on the evidence put forward, usually by the defence.

The yin to
this yang were the ‘time’ patients. These criminals were all
guilty, but not initially insane. After their conviction, they had
been given a custodial sentence by the courts, and became
prisoners. Sentence length varied: most convicts at Broadmoor were
serving somewhere between five and ten years, though their number
included murderers who were serving a life sentence, commuted from
their appointment with the gallows. The usual passage into
Broadmoor for the convict patient was that during their sentence
they had become insane, and therefore in need of treatment in an
asylum. Those with lesser sentences tended to be farmed out to the
county asylum network, with Broadmoor reserved only for the more
truculent types. The second way in, somewhat rarer, was that they
faced the death penalty, and the Home Secretary had ordered a
special inquiry into their sanity. A number of murderers were
respited to Broadmoor’s care in this way. Usually they retained the
guilty verdict, such as Mary Ann Parr; exceptionally they might
become an innocent ‘pleasure’ patient instead, such as Christiana
Edmunds. This escape route from the clutch of death (or even
incarceration) might beg the question of whether any fake lunatics
were to be found within the walls. Evidence exists that suggests
the possibility arose, though also that an attempt to feign mental
illness was often without success. Broadmoor’s staff were wise to
the possibility of malingerers, and there was a revolving door that
returned as many convicts to the prison system as it received;
quite apart from which, a sane convict soon discovered that sharing
space with the lunatics was not necessarily preferable to the
greater rationalities of jail. The more intriguing question to
consider is whether any sane murderers cheated the noose. This is
an investigation that also reveals a time when mental illness was
understood rather differently to how it is today.

For the
lunatics were, by definition, insane. Though they were no longer
diagnosed as being affected by the moon, they were affected by
things that did not so affect the other, non-lunatic people. There
was an element of mystery about their disease, something intangible
about how it made effect upon their bodies. The word ‘lunatic’ has
itself become a somewhat guilty word of late, an incorrect way of
describing a sufferer from mental illness. This seems a shame: the
word is ripe for reclaiming by those afflicted by the moon. It is a
word of great power, and potentially empowerment. It aptly conveys
the loss of control and influence over one’s actions to forces both
outside our control, and not fully understood.

The Victorian
definitions of insanity were different to our own, though they
recognised the same phenomena. I have already written about the
idea of ‘moral’ and ‘physical’ causes, something which only began
to die out as the nineteenth century drew to a close. As far as the
doctors were concerned, these causes then manifested themselves in
defined diseases, each of which might be inferred by observing the
patient’s habits, as well as through interview.

These diseases
are still recognisable today: mania, melancholia, dementia.
Monomania was an obsession with a single subject; amentia, absence
of mind, would be described as learning disabilities, now
recognised as something completely separate from mental illness. To
these cognitive deficiencies, the Victorians added the concept of
moral insanity. This was a disease free of delusions, but where the
mind was unable to think and behave properly as it should. Although
it did not fit the modern term of psychopath, itself a rather
overworked word, it is perhaps the nearest to it that the
Victorians acknowledged. Of course, for all these diseases, it was
not sufficient to merely be a sufferer for a plea of insanity to
succeed: the defendant’s legal team also had to show that the
disease had led to the action, and that consequently any mens rea
was absent.

So it was
these patients who were given the ‘pleasure’ sentence. They either
stood in court, or did not even make it that far, while legal
argument was had as to whether or not they were culpable for their
actions. The basic rules covering the insanity defence were laid
down by the McNaughten Rules in 1843. Daniel McNaughten had killed
the private secretary of Sir Robert Peel, almost certainly in
mistake for the Prime Minister, and then, far worse, upset the
popular press by being found not guilty for the crime by reason of
insanity. It took the entire House of Lords to deliver guidance
that effectively confirmed the correctness of McNaughten’s verdict,
and guaranteed that he was spared the noose. McNaughten ended up
first in Bethlem and then in Broadmoor while his Rules lived
on.