Inconvenient People (39 page)

Lady Lytton would claim that Dr Hill sent all his other patients down the road to his own large private home, Inverness Lodge, and that she had the villa all to herself. Many private asylum keepers who had leases on more than one building would decant and shuffle patients in this way – a relatively informal arrangement that was acceptable to the Commissioners in Lunacy so long as conditions at each building met their standards. But it seems much more likely that Dr Hill moved Lady Lytton to Inverness Lodge and kept his lunatics in the villa,
because, though roomy, Inverness Lodge would have been a tight fit for forty patients, twelve Hills, plus servants and attendants. Certainly, her letters to Rebecca Ryves are headed ‘Inverness Lodge’. Dr Hill would turn out to have one very good reason to keep Lady Lytton in his own home rather than in the asylum proper.

Dr Hill gave her use of a maid, Sparrow, incongruously strapping and dark; but it was his daughter Mary that she preferred to spend most of her time with, along with a fat, friendly tortoiseshell cat, and a cow that she claimed Dr Hill left out in an arid field in full sun. She and Mary worked hard at the nearby pump to give the cow some water, which, according to Lady Lytton, was seen by Dr Hill as further evidence of her unsound mind. Mary Hill and Lady Lytton took long rides together in a brougham, including trips to Acton, Hanwell, Isleworth and on one hot July dusk, to Richmond Hill, to look at a beautiful sunset. On no occasion did Lady Lytton attempt to escape.

The practice of mixing family and patients had many drawbacks, even for a man as facilely genial as Dr Hill. His own diary revealed his disgust at one Mrs Burkitt, whose ‘feelings are quite perverted. She whistles as she sits at cards, and sometimes makes use of expressions before my children which are quite horrifying . . . I have every reason to believe that if she had unconditional liberty she would be extremely dangerous.’

Dr Hill kept notes on Lady Lytton’s habits. She would rise each day at around 11 a.m. or noon and preferred to stay in her room when she had no carriage rides organised. She used a great deal of rouge and refused to allow anyone into her room while she was dressing and making herself up. She regularly made abusive comments about John Forster, saying that he was ‘drunk every day of his life’, which Hill took to be proof that she was delusional. As was her claim that not long ago she had bought a diamond bracelet for twenty guineas (in fact, such a purchase would not have been out of character). Her other fantasies, Hill believed, were that her husband had bitten into her cheek, and that an attempt to poison her had been made at Llangollen. During another conversation, Lady Lytton told Hill that her husband had boasted to her that he had had the run of London brothels before he was thirteen years old, and had told her that ‘a man had a right to have connection with his own daughter if she was
pretty enough’. On 11 July she shouted about Disraeli being a sodomite so loudly that the servants had to run around closing the windows in case passers-by in the street should hear.

After around ten days’ incarceration, Lady Lytton was visited by Bryan Waller Procter and Dr Samuel Gaskell from the Lunacy Commission. All Commissioners in Lunacy, wrote Lady Lytton, were ‘patent humbugs’, with the exception of seventy-year-old Procter, who had been a Commissioner since 1832. He was now on the colossal salary of £1,500 a year, though his health had been damaged by his gruelling schedule of visits to the nation’s asylums. In Lady Lytton’s snooty view, Procter was ‘by far the best and most gentlemanlike’ of the Commissioners; she didn’t appear to have known how very friendly Procter and his wife were with her husband. Procter listened carefully to Lady Lytton’s story but told her that he had been shown her obscene messages to Lord Lytton and his friends (many of whom were also friends of Procter): ‘Those letters, I confess, startled me.’ She startled him further by repeating the sodomy allegation and speaking of a seraglio of boys in an Eastern land made use of by Disraeli; she also told him that her husband often surrounded himself at Knebworth with women dressed up as men.

The visitors wanted to know why she was accusing Dr Marshall Hall of being her daughter’s murderer. Lady Lytton pointed out that she had made her accusation ten years ago, to the doctor himself, and that it was very odd that only now was it being put forward as evidence of her unsoundness of mind.

Dr Hill asked why she had been so insistent on Lord Lytton’s level of maintenance to her: ‘I must really say, Lady Lytton, that I think you are unreasonable to Sir Edward, for £400 a year is a very good allowance.’ ‘It might be for a mad-doctor’s or attorney’s wife,’ she retorted, ‘and even then, they might be so very unreasonable to want it paid in coin instead of promissory notes [IOUs].’

Lady Lytton asked Dr Hill directly if he had ever seen anything during her time with him that suggested she was not sane. ‘I’d rather not give an opinion,’ he replied. She pointed out that Dr Hill must have believed her to be of sound mind, otherwise he would not have allowed his daughter Mary to be alone with her for long spells. Dr Hill did not respond. He simply cleared his throat and reminded the visiting Commissioners that they must not be late for their train.

Two more visitors came to Wyke House later that week: Dr John Conolly (‘who would sell his mother for money’, and, worse, was admired by Charles Dickens) and Dr William Charles Hood of Royal Bethlehem Hospital. Hill wrote in his journal that, after the pair had left, Lady Lytton had expressed a wish to cut Hood’s throat; before too long, Hill would be in a similar frame of mind with regards to Hood.

Hood was the well-regarded superintendent of Bethlehem – the new broom who had come in following the Peithman scandal (as told in
Chapter Three
). Even John Perceval thought highly of him. Yet he would not have done so had he known of Hood’s role in the Lytton affair: the thirty-four-year-old physician had been sent by Lord Lytton to find proofs of his wife’s madness. Lytton had written to Hood to ask him to ‘examine as carefully and pathologically as you can her physical state, ascertain if her heart be sound or not . . . I also believe [there may be] uterine disease, such as cancer or tumour . . . Uterine disease . . . is in itself so often a concurrent malady with cerebral afflictions or morbid delusions of imagination and that . . . would form an additional evidence of diseased intellect.’ Hood’s reply does not appear to have survived, but no gynaecological slander was subsequently used against Lady Lytton.

Lady Lytton’s solicitor had requested that the Commissioners allow him to see the certificates and lunacy statement that had led to her confinement at Wyke House. He now informed Lady Lytton that the certificates had stated that both her parents had died mad – in fact, neither had. It was also claimed that she had attempted suicide and that she was a drunkard – again, both allegations were untrue. Other matters set down as evidence of her unsoundness were her allegation that her husband had committed sodomy with Disraeli; that he had paid
The Times
not to publish details of what had happened at Hertford; that Dr Marshall Hall had been paid to put a swift end to Emily’s life; and that she believed that the Somerset yeomanry would rise up and march if she were disappeared into an asylum.

The certificate and statements were clearly of highly questionable validity. Lord Lytton’s position looked even more vulnerable when it was borne in mind that the only doctors a man of his stature and influence had been able to procure to undertake the certification were an obscure Fenchurch Street pharmacist and Dr Hale Thomson, who
had not enjoyed an illustrious career, having several times come close to being sacked from the Westminster Hospital for incompetence. But Lady Lytton was to hear nothing more from the Commissioners in Lunacy. Appealing to the Lord Chancellor himself would have been pointless, since that post was at the time being filled by Sir Frederick Thesiger, another good friend of Lord Lytton; as was Lord Shaftesbury, the head of the Lunacy Commission. It was no bizarre delusion of Lady Lytton’s that many of the powerful men who could have helped her were either part of Lord Lytton’s social circle or had good reason not to rebuff or offend him. By now she had been able to work out another possibly sinister connection. Dr Hill was a native of Lincolnshire, and in 1835 he had been employed as house surgeon at Lincoln’s large county asylum, becoming a hugely popular figure in the town and eventually its mayor. And who had been MP for Lincoln until 1841? Lord Lytton.

Dr Hill’s predecessor at the Lincoln county asylum had already abolished the use of strait-waistcoats, iron whole-leg hobbles, handcuffs, finger-confining instruments and manacles. Dr Hill improved still further the conditions and treatment of the insane at Lincoln and gained national fame for his advanced methods. Dr John Conolly came to visit Lincoln and took careful notes on the regime there. Dr Hill believed that kindness was the most effective way to maintain order within the institution and that it offered the best chance of effecting a cure. He was convinced that ‘non-restraint’ diminished the number of escape attempts and suicides. He admitted that there were incidents of violence by patients within the nation’s asylums, but that one could stand on London Bridge for an hour each day and see black eyes everywhere – they were considered to be perfectly normal. He asked: ‘If Liberty generates such trifles, who is the man so thin-skinned as to shudder at its occasional manifestation among the insane?’

Nevertheless, kindness and courtesy at Inverness Lodge were of little help to someone who had been wrongfully confined. Lady Lytton’s appetite fell away because of her anxiety, and the quality of her sleep was poor too. When she closed her eyes, the scene in Clarges Street arose in her mind. ‘I feel my health is giving way,’ she wrote to Rebecca Ryves. She awoke on the morning of Saturday 10 July ‘from one of those terrible dreams which have now haunted me for a fortnight, dreams that I am escaping over high walls and house-tops’.
Dr Hale Thomson and apothecary Ross’s faces, swathed in swirling veils of black crêpe, pursued her, and each time she ran, they would re-form themselves in front of her, and she was being chained down in a dark, deep dungeon when she woke in a sweat to the perfectly mundane horror of Inverness Lodge, Brentford. As she later wrote, if you keep someone locked up in Buckingham House or the Palais des Tuileries, a palace will nevertheless become a dungeon. It was the function of the asylum that terrified, not its physical manifestation.

Meanwhile, in Somerset, Lord Lytton and solicitor William Loaden had come to the Giles Castle Hotel and demanded that Mrs Clarke hand over all of Lady Lytton’s papers. Mrs Clarke (‘my Koh-i-noor’, ‘my deputy tigress’) refused, and when voices became raised, a commercial traveller who overheard the argument insisted on seeing the men’s written authority for their demand. When they failed to produce it, he called a constable and had them ejected.

So angry were the townsfolk, when they heard from Mrs Clarke and Miss Ryves of what had taken place during the visit to London, that a public meeting was convened at short notice, chaired by one Mr W. R. Hitchcock. Various speakers wanted to place on record that during her three years of living in Taunton, Lady Lytton had never shown any signs of unsoundness. The meeting resolved:

This wasn’t quite the rising of the Somerset yeomanry that Lady Lytton had predicted. Still, the
Somerset County Gazette
, while acknowledging ‘her undoubted peculiarities of temper’ and admitting that she was ‘unamiable’, haughty and capable of harsh words, devoted entire pages to the outrage committed against one of its citizens. The abduction into the asylum had been how the French
ancien régime
and
their Bastille had operated, said the
Gazette
: was Lady Lytton to be the modern-day Man in the Iron Mask? The newspaper called for a public inquiry to be held before every lunacy certification, stating that ‘only a nation of savages’ would have the sort of admissions system prevalent in England. ‘So strongly do the plot and detail savour of the “atrocious fraud” and “abominable conspiracy” of the modern romance writer,’ the
Gazette
editorialised, ‘that one might easily imagine it to have been the sole invention of such a genius.’ Which of course it was: Lord Lytton had plotted his wife’s disposal just as he plotted his novels and dramas. But how infuriating that real people would not oblige him by acting and speaking as he dictated.