One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  Meanwhile he concentrated on his own and his family’s health, returning in October 1858 to Moor Park to try Edward Lane’s hydropathic treatment once more, and to show solidarity with the young man whom he liked and for whom he felt pity over the ghastly and still unresolved court case of the summer.35

  ‘Mad’ wives and vengeful husbands

  On Saturday, 3 July the judges in the case of Robinson v. Robinson and Lane reconvened at Westminster Hall as promised when they adjourned on 21 June. The Times reminded its readers on 5 July that on that occasion ‘an application to discharge Dr Lane from the suit, as there was no evidence against him, and to admit him as a witness on behalf of Mrs Robinson, had been refused by the Lord Chief Justice and Sir C. Cresswell, after consultation with Lord Campbell, the Lord Chief Baron, and Mr Justice Williams, contrary to the opinion of Mr Justice Wightman’.36

  At the recommencement of the case the lord chief justice, Sir Alexander Cockburn, announced that he had changed his mind and ‘now concurred’ in Mr Wightman’s doubts about the justice of the decision not to discharge Lane. In addition, he declared, a new factor had entered the equation, namely a bill which ‘was now pending before the Legislature, and had passed one House’. This bill, containing a set of amendments to the Divorce Act,

  was intended to introduce a clause for the purpose of solving those doubts, and of enabling the Court … to dismiss the co-respondent under such circumstances as those of the present case, and make him admissible as a witness … If that clause should become law, as they had every reason to believe it would, the Court would avail themselves of the power that would be given to them and discharge Dr Lane, and allow him to give evidence in the suit … [Therefore] the Court thought that the most proper and expedient course to pursue was to adjourn for the present the further consideration of the case.37

  Everyone connected to the case would now have to wait several months before it could reach its conclusion. Though Cockburn’s phrasing gave a strong hint that Dr Lane would be found innocent of adultery, the suit still hung over him with potential hurt to his marriage and damage to his business. Darwin, concerned about the effect of the scandal on Lane’s ability to continue at Moor Park, expressed relief to a correspondent from the Isle of Wight on 21 July that Lane’s practice did not appear to be suffering: ‘Dr Lane has his house full, I am glad to say.’38 Henry Robinson, meanwhile, got his solicitors to write to The Times on 7 July, accusing the paper of bias towards Lane:

  Notwithstanding the decision which you have pronounced on this case [in an article published on 5 July] before the evidence has been concluded, we earnestly hope that the public will suspend their judgment until Dr Lane has been examined, and the other evidence has been adduced which the petitioner is entitled to call. When this is before the Court the public will be able to judge whether Dr Lane is the innocent individual which you represent, and whether Mrs Robinson is in a sane state of mind or not. We ask this only in justice to the unfortunate petitioner.

  We are, Sir, your obedient servants, the solicitors for the petitioner.39

  The Times had certainly rooted for Lane in its many pieces on the case during June. Parliament passed the required amendment to the Divorce Act early in August, but the Robinsons, the Lanes, and everyone else had to wait until November for the case to reopen with Lane as a witness, and it was not until the following March that judgment was finally given.

  While it was in Henry Robinson’s interests that his wife be found not insane, in order that her journal accounts of adultery could be accepted by the court and Isabella and Dr Lane found guilty, Bulwer Lytton, newly appointed colonial secretary and dealing with important issues to do with Canada, was determined to prove his wife insane after the shenanigans at the hustings at Hertford on 8 June. On Thursday, 8 July, when he introduced the Government of New Caledonia Bill for its second reading in the House of Commons (it was later to be renamed the Government of British Columbia Bill, since the French objected to ‘New Caledonia’ as a name for the new province and Queen Victoria suggested ‘British Columbia’ instead40), he had already arranged for Rosina to be sent to an asylum. Needless to say, she did not go quietly. The whole story became public in the first two weeks of July.

  After the hustings fiasco Rosina returned to Taunton in Somerset, where she was visited by doctors sent from London by her husband; she wrote her demands to one of them, Frederick Hale Thomson, on 12 June. To keep silent, she demanded that her allowance be increased from £400 to £500 a year for her lifetime, not Bulwer Lytton’s; that her debts of £2,500 be paid off; that her husband should promise not to ‘molest, or malign, me, directly, or indirectly’, and ‘to leave me perfectly free to live and go, where I liked, and as I liked’.41 If Bulwer Lytton had taken Disraeli’s advice and attended to the money question, he might have been able to put an end to the dispute, though given Rosina’s wrath and impulsiveness, it is by no means certain that she would have quietened down. In the event, Rosina got no immediate reply from Thomson, and she raised the stakes in a further letter to him on 15 June, threatening to come up to London to confront Bulwer Lytton at the Colonial Office.42 Receiving no reply to this or a further letter, she tried again on 20 June, saying that Bulwer Lytton, ‘your infamous Employer, My Lord Derby’s rotton [sic] old dregs of Sodom, and Babylon, converted into a Colonial Secretary’, must now ‘take the consequences’. These would be that ‘despite of universal gagging and purchase of the most venal, and corrupt organ in the world, the English Press’, her husband’s behaviour would become ‘publicly and universally known’.43

  Three days later she was tricked into coming to London, supposedly to discuss her allowance, and was taken from her hotel in Clarges Street, off Piccadilly, to Wyke House in Brentford, just west of London. This was a fine eighteenth-century house used as an asylum by Dr Robert Gardiner Hill, a surgeon who, along with Dr John Conolly, was a pioneer of humane non-restraint for mental patients.44 Hill and his family lived in nearby Inverness Lodge, where he advertised that ladies ‘suffering under any of the milder forms of insanity, could be received into the private family of Mr R. Gardiner Hill’.45 Rosina duly spent her time while in Hill’s care in the family home. According to her account, she was ‘abducted’ by Hill, accompanied by an apothecary called George Ross, a male assistant, and two asylum nurses, one of them ‘a great Flanders mare of six feet high’, while Bulwer Lytton looked on.46 Her friend Rebecca Ryves asked two policemen to intervene, but they were shown certificates signed by Thomson and Ross which gave them the right to remove Rosina to the asylum. Most of the details of her removal, against her will, come from her highly coloured autobiography, A Blighted Life, published long after many of the people attacked in it were dead, but others confirmed at least some of the facts.47 On Tuesday, 29 June Rosina wrote to Rebecca Ryves from Inverness Lodge about Ross and Thomson signing the certificate of her insanity, and on Sunday, 4 July she reported a visit the previous day from some members of the Lunacy Commission, one of them being John Conolly. On 5 July she attacked an old enemy, Bulwer Lytton’s friend John Forster, ‘that ruffianly blackguard, Sir Liar’s oldest, most unscrupulous, and chief doer of dirty work’, reminding Rebecca that Forster ‘is the Secretary to this Farsical [sic] Commission of Lunacy’.48

  By now the press, which Bulwer Lytton had largely succeeded in muzzling over the Hertford incident, had got wind of the new scandal. The whole story started to appear, first in a local newspaper in Somerset, where Miss Ryves and other friends were rallying support for Rosina, then in the national press. Many recited the tale of the hustings as a prelude to telling the story of the ‘incarceration’ of Rosina. A penny pamphlet appeared, Extraordinary Narrative of an Outrageous Violation of Liberty and Law, in the Forcible Seizure and Incarceration of Lady Lytton Bulwer, in the Gloomy Cell of a Madhouse!!! and the Proceedings to Obtain her Release. The title page was decorated with a lurid illustration of ‘Lady Bulwer Lytton’s first interview with her Solicitor, in the dismal dungeon of Bedlam’. Th
e picture shows a frightened woman in her nightgown on a couch, with a skeleton in an alcove behind her, and a shocked-looking gentleman arriving to help her.49 A public meeting was held in Taunton on Tuesday, 6 July to offer Rosina support, and by the middle of the month a national paper, the Daily Telegraph, had become Rosina’s chief cheerleader in the press.50 The support of the Telegraph was vital; founded in 1855 and edited by Joseph Levy, it cost only a penny, while of its rivals, The Times cost seven pence, and the Daily News and Morning Post cost five. By 1856 Levy’s paper, which supported liberal and progressive causes such as the campaign against capital punishment and reform of the House of Lords, was outselling the others.51

  On 13 July alone the story, taken from the Somerset County Gazette, was told in the Morning Chronicle, the Birmingham Daily Post, the Liverpool Mercury, the Leeds Mercury, and many more daily papers. They made reference to the incarceration, the hustings, the penny pamphlet, the protest meeting in Taunton, and the amount of money Rosina had requested as a settlement. Bulwer Lytton was being assailed on all sides for his inhumanity, and by the infuriated Disraeli – so intimately and embarrassingly connected with his friend in Rosina’s telling of the story – for his stupidity and meanness with money. Another deluge of articles appeared on Thursday, 15 July, led by the Morning Chronicle with its arresting headline, ‘Extraordinary Proceedings. Appeal for Public Justice. Lady Bulwer Lytton in a Lunatic Asylum’.

  The Daily Telegraph went into battle on Rosina’s behalf on 12 July, beginning a merciless series of articles and letters to the editor about the case. Carlyle, escaping the London heat up in Scotland, received the gossip from Jane, who got it from the Daily Telegraph, but also directly from John Forster and his wife Eliza. Forster, of course, was closely involved as Bulwer Lytton’s agent and adviser and, particularly, as secretary to the Lunacy Commission. The Carlyles knew the Lyttons quite well, especially Rosina, whose side they had always taken in the fights between the couple. Jane sent Carlyle her news on 12 July, starting with the fateful day at the hustings, about which she had some colourful new details to relate:

  Lady B. true to her oath that she ‘would oppose “Sir Liar, Coward” at every step of his career’ – rendered herself, escorted by her Taunton landlady, the evening before his Election. For that night she kept her self incognita. But the Town was astonished in the morning, at seeing itself placarded all over with insults to Bulwer.

  In his absence (for he did not arrive till the business of the day commenced) his son, Robert Lytton, never dreaming who had done this thing, employed people to rush about and tear the placards down.52

  When Bulwer Lytton and Robert were on the platform at the hustings, Robert heard a commotion and saw ‘a prodigiously large woman, dressed entirely in white, with a white parasol, talking to the people about her’. Robert did not recognise his mother at first, but, as Jane Carlyle recounted, ‘at last the idea struck him “like a pistol shot” “it is my Mother”! (This was his own account to Mrs Forster).’ Robert told his father that Lady Lytton was here; Bulwer Lytton, notoriously deaf, and for that reason an unsuccessful speaker in parliament, did not understand until Robert screamed in his ear, ‘Your Wife is here!’ At this, Jane continues, quoting from the account Eliza Forster had given her,

  Sir Liar ‘staggered, turned as white as a sheet – cast one wild look at his wife – and rushed down the companion ladder’! – (the platform steps) near the bottom of which, by the kind foresight of somebody, his carriage and servants stood ready! He ‘jumped in – fell back almost fainting’ – and was gallopped [sic] back to Knebworth [his Hertfordshire country seat] – leaving his friends to speak for him! – Don’t you think the Lady had the best of the day here?

  Jane now comes on to more recent events, including ‘a report that he inveigled her up to London by the offer of “an amicable arrangement” and increased income – and then handed her over to a mad doctor – instead of a Solicitor!’53

  In his reply on 14 July Carlyle entered the excitement fully, calling Dr Thomson a ‘Scoundrel Flunkey’ and gamely declaring Rosina ‘no more mad than I am’, though certainly ‘unwise, ill-guided to a high degree, and plunging wildly under the heavy burden laid on her’. He was critical of Bulwer Lytton’s conduct ‘in finishing this frightful affair. No man of real humanity, I think, in any case would or could have kept the once Partner of his Life, if he could have possibly helped it, in a state of poverty, for one thing.’54 He wisely adds that he is sure Rosina will get out of the asylum and suggests that the best thing for him and Jane to do is ‘not to speak of it’.

  Sure enough, the Daily Telegraph begins its article on the subject on 15 July with the remark that ‘Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton has succeeded in hushing up the scandal of his wife’s arrest and conveyance to a madhouse at Brentford’. However, ‘a compromise has been extorted from the Secretary of State’:

  It is with pleasure that we record that this ignominious family war has been terminated, and the accusation of insanity has been abandoned; that Lady Lytton is confessedly qualified to treat with her husband upon terms of equality … [P]opular opinion has driven Lord Derby’s choice and brilliant colleague into a virtual surrender. It matters little whether Sir Bulwer Lytton, under cabinet influence, has found it necessary to save the reputation of the government as well as his own, but it is not to be forgotten that he employed attorneys, nurses and policemen to capture his wife; that she was forcibly consigned to a lunatic asylum – that medical certificates were obtained to prove her insanity, and that now, an explosion of national feeling having taken place, she is to be released and allowed to live in personal independence.55

  Rosina’s friends had suggested an inquiry by the Lunacy Commission, at which point Bulwer Lytton backed down, agreed to Rosina’s financial demands, and arranged for her to be released on 17 July and to go abroad for the summer with her luckless son Robert. The Times, which as a friend of Bulwer Lytton’s had kept silent about the scandal, confined itself to a short piece on 14 July, placed presumably by Bulwer Lytton, saying it was ‘requested to state’ that ‘all matters in reference to this lady’ are in process of being ‘amicably settled by family arrangements to the satisfaction of all parties concerned’.56 The Bulwer Lytton camp were so worried and angered by the surge of support in the press for Rosina and the attacks on her husband’s behaviour towards her that Robert Lytton was asked to write a letter to The Times on 17 July, denying the ‘exaggerated and distorted’ accounts in the Daily Telegraph and other newspapers.

  In his letter, Robert could not quite avoid the awkward truth that Rosina had been taken to Hill’s asylum against her wishes, but he put as favourable a gloss on his father’s actions as possible:

  I carried out the injunctions of my father, who confided to me implicitly every arrangement which my affection could suggest, and enjoined me to avail myself of the advice of Lord Shaftesbury [chairman of the Lunacy Commission] in whatever was judged best and kindest to Lady Lytton.

  My mother is now with me, free from all restraint, and about, at her own wish, to travel for a short time, in company with myself and a female friend and relation of her own selection.

  From the moment my father felt compelled to authorise those steps which have been made the subject of so much misrepresentation, his anxiety was to obtain the opinion of the most experienced and able physicians, in order that my mother should not be subject to restraint for one moment longer than was strictly justifiable.

  The certificates given by Dr Forbes Winslow and Dr Conolly are subjoined.57

  Robert explains that Conolly was consulted at his father’s request, while Forbes Winslow, another well-known expert in mental health – he had only recently been giving evidence in the Robinson case, being one of the experts called by the Divorce Court to discuss the connection between uterine disease and mental delusion58 – had been retained by his mother’s legal advisers. Robert had asked ‘my friend Mr Edwin James’ to ‘place himself in communication’ with Winslow. Bene
ath Robert’s letter are printed a short letter to James, dated 16 July, in which Forbes Winslow declares that, having examined Lady Lytton that day, his opinion is that her state of mind is ‘such as to justify her liberation from restraint’. However, he adds that, having read the medical certificates which allowed her to be restrained in the first place, and wishing to do justice to her husband’s actions, he cannot consider Bulwer Lytton’s ‘painful proceedings’ of the past few weeks to have been ‘harsh or unjustifiable’. Conolly’s letter, addressed to Bulwer Lytton, is even more awkward and contradictory, since he had visited Rosina at the asylum on 3 July and found her insane then. He stresses that though he had felt it his duty, when visiting her ‘at the private residence of Mr and Mrs Hill’, to express his ‘decided opinion’ on her state of mind at that time, he now has ‘much satisfaction in hearing of the arrangements which have been made for her leaving their family in the society of her son and her female friend’. It is clear from the phrasing of all these letters, and especially from the emphasis on Rosina’s being kept in the Hill family home and not in Wyke House itself, that they were the result of careful collaboration with Bulwer Lytton and his advisers.