High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  II

  If one social injustice above all others emphasised the lack of rights for women it was their inability to escape an unhappy, and in some cases downright cruel, marriage. The most prominent case of a wronged woman seeking, but being unable to obtain, a divorce was that of Caroline Norton, who became the leader of the movement for reform of the law. She was the granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the playwright. Although she was an exotic beauty, the depressed finances of the Sheridan family left her short of prospective husbands. In what seems to have been an act of desperation she married George Norton, brother of Lord Grantley, in 1827, when he was twenty-seven and she was nineteen. Norton was a Tory MP and a barrister but, more significantly, his brother had no children, and he hoped to inherit the family estates.

  He physically and psychologically abused Caroline from the start: provoked not least, it seems, by his wife’s being cleverer and quicker witted than he was. In using these weapons against him she lacked the deference he expected. She testified later that the violence he had offered her was ‘such as is brought before the police-courts’.3 There were rows about money, and the state of the family finances caused the marriage to take a difficult turn. Caroline had some talent as a writer, and used the proceeds from volumes of verse to supplement the family budget. Between 1829 and 1833 the Nortons had three sons, which stretched the finances further. Norton was idle by disposition and relied on a favour from Lord Melbourne, the Home Secretary, to give him a post as a stipendiary magistrate on a salary of £1,000 a year. It did not improve his temper towards his wife that this favour was called in through her: it was she, not Norton, who knew Melbourne, a Whig with no political or social sympathy with Norton. Soon, Norton felt socially humiliated that his wife’s income helped support his family, and this attitude became even more toxic when he became jealous of her celebrity as a writer. She befriended Dickens, Disraeli, Thackeray and Tennyson, adding literary clout to her political salon.

  Her engagement with the world of letters deepened the more tiresome and unpleasant Norton became, and so the estrangement from him grew. She started to write novels. These increased her income, which upset him further. Her husband’s boorish aristocratic friends and their dull wives found Caroline vulgar and flashy. However, she entranced some men – not least Melbourne, who by 1834 was Prime Minister. He took to visiting the Norton house in Storey’s Gate, usually when Norton was not there. Norton found letters from Melbourne in his wife’s bureau and argued with her about them.

  Rumours abounded: fed not least by Grantley, a Tory who saw the chance to embarrass a Whig Prime Minister. Norton realised that if Melbourne were committing adultery with his wife, he could be sued for damages, leaving a healthy profit for him. The marriage broke down: Caroline was barred from the house and her children were taken away. Norton refused to make a financial settlement on Caroline as part of a separation. He blackmailed her emotionally, offering occasional visiting rights with the children provided she would agree to his not bankrolling her. Finally, he accused Melbourne of having had a ‘criminal conversation’ with his wife – the technical term for adultery – and sought to sue him for £10,000 damages. Melbourne was allegedly so panicked that he took to his bed, ill.4

  It is impossible to tell whether Melbourne and Caroline committed adultery. The jury thought they had not, and threw out Norton’s suit within hours, regarding the evidence given by his former servants as entirely unreliable, not least because of their bad characters and because they had been bribed by Grantley. Caroline, as wife of the litigant, was barred from testifying. Had Norton won he could have proceeded to sue for divorce: that was now not possible. However, Caroline had plenty of reasons to divorce Norton, not least that he exercised his right to remove her children far away from her – they were sent to Yorkshire – and to raid what was technically his but actually her money. When she left him in 1836 and tried to exist on her royalties, he had her earnings confiscated.

  Caroline appears from her writings, and from the testimony of others, to have been manipulative and something of an actress. However, she had one great advantage over her husband, not unknown in people of those qualities, which was popularity. Although some in society shunned her as a scarlet woman, she had enough friends not just to provide moral support, but friends in sufficiently high places to help her develop a campaign for the reform of the divorce law. Her opening salvo was a pamphlet published in 1837, Observations on the Natural Claim of the Mother to the Custody of her Infant Children; as affected by the Common law Rights of the Father. Sergeant Talfourd, a prominent judge and Member of Parliament best remembered now for his pioneering work on the law of copyright, was persuaded to introduce a bill in the Commons for the custody of infants, but it failed. Caroline wrote more pamphlets. She even wrote to The Times complaining about the injustice being done to her and women such as her.

  The stimulus for The Times letter was what she called ‘a very long, very coarse, and very violent attack’ upon her in the British and Foreign Quarterly Review that she had read ‘with astonishment’.5 She vigorously denied – with good reason – having written a pamphlet entitled Statement of the Wrongs of Women, which the Review had attributed to her; she was angry because the work was a feminist tract and, whatever else she was, Caroline was no feminist. ‘I believe’, she wrote, ‘the beauty and devotion of a woman’s character mainly to depend on the consciousness of her inferiority to man, and that the greatest suffering a right-minded woman can feel, is [to be] unable to respect and look up to her husband.’ Her own pamphlet had celebrated the ‘religious duty a woman owes her husband’. The Review had also accused her of having co-written Observations with the help of Talfourd, something she dismissed as a falsehood too as she did not know him at the time. She was outraged by ‘a cunning and plausible attempt . . . to create a prejudice against the [Infant Custody] Bill by mixing up my affairs with its discussion.’

  Talfourd tried again: and in 1839, with the aid of Lord Lyndhurst, a former Lord Chancellor, the Infant Custody Act reached the statute book. The burden of legal opinion was very much in favour of it: the Quarterly Review of Jurisprudence argued that the existing regulations had been ‘shockingly abused’.6 This was a landmark in women’s rights. If a woman had not had adultery proven against her in a court of law, she could have custody of any child under seven. Only one of Caroline’s three sons was sufficiently young, and Norton, whose vindictiveness knew no bounds, moved them to Scotland, where the Act did not apply. It was not until her youngest son died of lockjaw in 1842 that she was allowed custody of the other two boys – then aged thirteen and eleven – for half the year. The tragedy was another weapon against Norton: she later wrote that the death, from an infected cut in a riding accident, came ‘for want of the commonest care a mother would have given to her household’.7

  In the 1840s Caroline was the mistress of Sidney Herbert, who would be patron of Florence Nightingale’s nursing career. Caroline was, of course, unable to marry him: and when he married in 1846 the affair, which had lasted the best part of five years, ended. As their sons grew up Norton became more financially mean with Caroline. Her inheritance of a small annuity in 1851 prompted a further bout of parsimony from Norton, and reactivated her militancy in the cause of divorce reform. He was entitled not just to the proceeds of her literary work, but also to her legacy, despite their not having lived together for fifteen years.

  Caroline tried to play Norton at his own game. The only benefit of her having no legal rights was that her creditors could not sue her, but had to sue him. One did so in 1853, for £49 4s 6d owed for the repair and upkeep of Caroline’s brougham. In the consequent disclosure of the details of her financial affairs, it was discovered that on his death in 1848 Melbourne had left her a small legacy. Norton’s lawyers used this to smear Caroline again. This time at least she could defend herself, and made a good job it. ‘These tradesmen would have been paid if Mr Norton had not performed the greatest breach of faith that was ever a
ccomplished by man.’8 This referred to Norton’s having stopped her allowance. The judge said her onslaught was ‘irregular’, but she persisted, as the newspaper report put it, ‘with determination’. It was her finest performance.

  In one of those exposures of private matters that shocked the Victorians so deeply, but which even editors so refined as those at The Times knew sold newspapers, Caroline proceeded to air the intimate details of her and her husband’s business affairs. ‘I believe Mr Norton’s income to be about £3,000 a year . . . I was parted from him in 1836, and the following year he offered £500 a year until we could arrange our matters, but made me a compulsory allowance of £400 per annum. He stipulated that I should give up my children, and I said that I would rather starve than lose them.’ Norton had stopped her allowance in March 1852. ‘My husband can cheat me because I am his wife.’ She admitted an allowance was being paid to her, via Lady Palmerston, from Melbourne’s estate: in January and July 1852 it amounted to £291 5s on each occasion. She said it was discretionary. ‘Lord Melbourne is dead. No one is bound to give me one farthing.’

  The court found in Norton’s favour. Caroline renewed her career as a Times letter-writer, attacking her husband for having his lawyer claim he would pay an allowance to her only if she were not being supported by Melbourne’s estate.9 Since, she argued, Norton’s agreement to pay her had been concluded before Melbourne’s death, it could not have taken into account bequests she was supposed to be due from him. She said he had lied to save himself paying £500 a year. ‘Once and for all,’ she wrote, ‘I did not part from my husband on Lord Melbourne’s account; nor had Lord Melbourne anything whatever to do with our quarrel. I parted from Mr Norton because I persisted in an intention to take my children to my brother’s house, where my husband, on account of his own conduct, was not received.’ On 24 August 1853 he wrote to The Times ‘as a magistrate, an administrator of justice’ to seek to sustain his ‘public character’ – ‘my private one is safe in the hands of those who know me.’10 Norton attacked not just the judge, but even his own solicitor in the opening paragraphs of his complaint. Explaining how his estranged wife had been allowed to vilify him in court, he said: ‘Unhappily the judge and every one engaged for or against her in the cause seemed overpowered by Mrs Norton’s demeanour, and those who had a turn for the drama (of whom, unfortunately, my own solicitor was one) were suspended in breathless, helpless inaction.’

  He admitted he had made it no condition of an allowance that she should have no money from Melbourne: but also claimed that after Melbourne’s death his brother had opened a letter from him that asked for an annuity to be provided for Caroline. ‘I was surprised and disgusted,’ Norton wrote. She denied receiving it at the time, which was true, but within three years it was being paid, as had been established. He had asked their elder son to take the matter up with his mother: she had denied it to him, too, and he had relayed the denial to his father. Norton accused Caroline of lying to both of them, and whined about how much his sons cost him – one in the diplomatic service, the other at Oxford. It appears no one was advising him: the worst damage done to his reputation was by his own hand.

  Caroline wrote to the newspaper again on 2 September. It was not so much a letter as a fragment – and a substantial fragment at that – of autobiography. She began with irony, expressing her gratitude that he had put before the public matters her own discretion had kept concealed: but she wished to refute his accusations of extravagance, and of much else besides. ‘The charge comes ill from one who owes me £687, and who does not even deny the debt, but merely says he cannot be compelled to pay it, because, as was stated in court, he is not bound in law, but only “as a man of honour”.’11 Her main complaint was that ‘twice in my life he has endeavoured, on a false pretence, to rob me of my reputation.’ On that front, she washed all the dirty linen in society’s newspaper. She spoke of the ‘slander’ against her and of how she had ‘struggled like a drowning person against disgrace’.

  During the 1840s there had been attempts at divorce reform. Sir Howard Elphinstone, a Whig MP, had tried to introduce a Marriages and Divorces Bill in 1843. The divorce cases currently heard were in the ecclesiastical provincial courts, and a recent one had cost £1,500, the cost of which had fallen upon the woman: her adulterous husband was insolvent. The existing procedure – a suit at common law, an appeal to the ecclesiastical tribunal and, finally, a bill in Parliament – was, he argued, too complex. He wanted just one divorce court as, he said, ‘was the law of every Protestant country but this’.12 His seconder, William Ewart, said the average cost of a divorce was £800–900; in Scotland, where there were divorce courts, it was £30, which meant that even quite poor people could afford them. The government objected because of opposition from the Church; the measure was defeated, as was another attempt in 1852.

  After her public row with her husband, Caroline realised she had to broaden the argument from her own circumstances and deal instead with the plight of English womanhood. She urged several politicians of her acquaintance to speak for the cause in Parliament. The first blast of the new campaign was her pamphlet English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century, but it received little attention from a public grown weary of her and her case. A wider campaign was already under way for property rights for women, led by Barbara Bodichon, the leading feminist of the 1850s. She and other women supporting her were censorious of Caroline’s campaign, feeling her to be motivated unduly by self-interest and not enough by the condition of women generally. Caroline was no more of a feminist in the 1850s than in the 1830s, and found elements of Bodichon’s campaign unattractive.

  Independent of Caroline’s activities, Lord Cranworth, the Lord Chancellor, introduced a bill in the Lords in 1855 to make divorce more widely available. This prompted another pamphlet from Caroline, A Letter to the Queen on Lord Cranworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill, which drew on her own experiences and made the case for separated women to have rights to their own property. She wrote to the Queen, as she put it, ‘as one who has grievously suffered’, striking that note of personal interest that made it increasingly hard for others to assist her.13 She addressed the Sovereign not because she sought to take her wrongs ‘to the foot of the throne’ but because the Queen was a married woman with children. Caroline said that ‘I desire to point out the grotesque anomaly which ordains that married women shall be ‘non-existent’ in a country governed by a female Sovereign.’14 She was also conscious that any reform of the law would require the Queen’s assent.

  Caroline conceded that ‘there are bad, wanton, irreclaimable women, as there are vicious, profligate, tyrannical men: but the difference is this: that to punish and restrain bad wives, there are laws and very severe laws (to say nothing of social condemnation); while to punish or restrain bad husbands, there is, in England, no adequate law whatever.’15 She claimed the existing law put a premium on infidelity: a woman divorced for her adultery and who subsequently married the man who had cuckolded her husband suffered far less than the wronged wife who did not deserve to suffer at all. She described the cost of divorce as ‘an indulgence sacred to the aristocracy of England’.16 The only recourse to the poor man betrayed by his first wife and seeking a second was, she argued, bigamy, and children who were bastards. None of this, she said, pertained in Scotland, where divorce was possible, where women had a right to have their property protected, and where they could sue for divorce just as their husbands could. South of the border, class and gender justice prevailed.

  In English and Welsh divorce cases as the law stood an examination of both parties was conducted in the House of Lords, a practice one peer had denounced in recent years as ‘disgusting and demoralising’.17 Another, Lord St Leonards, had called the state of the law ‘a disgrace to the country’. Those who objected to a change in the law to make it equal with Scottish practice – where desertion and adultery were grounds for a woman to sue for divorce – seemed to suggest Scotland was a more immoral country than England.
Caroline said she understood the practice in Roman Catholic countries, where marriage was deemed indissoluble: but she could not understand how, in Protestant England, it could be deemed dissoluble by the male party only. In any case, since 1836, when Lord John Russell had sponsored the Act of Parliament that allowed civil weddings, many marriages had nothing to do with the Church. ‘Either let men renounce the privilege of divorce,’ she wrote, ‘and the assertion that marriage is a dissoluble contract, or allow the weaker party that refuge from intolerable wrong, which they claim as a matter of necessity for themselves.’18

  Much of this was sound: but Caroline could not resist a further assault on Norton. ‘Lord Melbourne’, she wrote, addressing directly a Queen of whom Melbourne had been almost as great a favourite as of Caroline – ‘declared that, so far as Lord Melbourne was concerned, he believed the action to be brought entirely as a means of obtaining money . . . he considered it was a political plot on the part of a small section of the Tories, to ruin him as Prime Minister. And’ – and here came a further sting – ‘I know that in this opinion your Majesty’s uncle, King William IV, entirely concurred.’19 She even adduced the heroine status of Florence Nightingale – then in the Crimea – as a reason why women required improved legal rights: though as Nightingale was unmarried, she had her own property rights. Cranworth’s bill failed, at the fall of the Aberdeen government, even though he continued as Lord Chancellor under Palmerston. Much of what Caroline had advocated in her pamphlets found its way into this bill, and as such she can be said to have been one of the architects of a reform first advocated more than 200 years earlier by John Milton. Cruelty, desertion, bigamy and incest were to be grounds on which a woman could sue for divorce, but not, as originally proposed, adultery: that was to remain a cause for a man only.