One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  Gentlemen, I have done. To the best of my ability I have discharged my duty towards the unhappy gentleman at the bar. I have discharged it as an English advocate, I believe, ought to have discharged it – fearlessly and conscientiously. Let me urge you to discharge yours also fearlessly, firmly, and conscientiously … Tell the prosecutor in this case that the Jury-box is the sanctuary of English liberty … Tell him that the verdicts of English Juries are founded on the eternal and immutable principles of justice. Tell him that, panoplied in that armour, no threat of armament or invasion can awe you. Tell him that, though 600,000 French bayonets glittered before you, though the roar of French cannon thundered in your ears, you will return a verdict which your own breasts and consciences will sanctify and approve, careless whether that verdict pleases or displeases a foreign despot.120

  On the final day, Saturday, 17 April, the judge, Lord Campbell, ‘in the presence of one of the most crowded courts ever assembled at the Old Bailey’, summed up the evidence, making it clear that he expected a guilty verdict.121 At this point Bernard himself addressed the jury. The judge, he said boldly, had been wrong on various matters in his summing up. ‘I declare I am not the hirer of assassins’; those who had been in Paris had chosen of their own accord to help Orsini. As for himself and his friends: ‘We want only to crush despotism and tyranny everywhere. I have conspired, I will conspire everywhere, because it is my duty, my sacred duty, as of every one; but never, never, will I be a murderer!’122

  The jury was duly moved to pronounce Bernard not guilty, despite the evidence and the judge’s summing up in the opposite direction. According to James Gordon Allan, a barrister of the Inner Temple who printed James’s speech for the defence immediately after the trial, ‘a vehement burst of applause, which could not be controlled, followed the conclusion of the learned Counsel’s speech’, which was ‘delivered with the greatest oratorical power, and had a thrilling effect upon the audience’.123 Men, including many of the lawyers present, threw their hats in the air, and women waved their handkerchiefs and bonnets, while the crowd outside cheered.124 Bernard was not set free immediately, as other indictments of the same kind remained against him, though the attorney general indicated that he had no intention of pursuing them. Bernard was returned to Newgate prison, but Edwin James applied on Tuesday, 20 April for a writ of habeas corpus to allow him to be released on bail. At Westminster Hall that afternoon two friends stood bail of £500 each on Bernard’s behalf, and he was released to loud cheering.125 No further action was taken against him.

  The prolific chronicler of London life J. Ewing Ritchie remembered the scene after the famous verdict in his book About London, published two years later. He described the response of the newspaper boys waiting that day at the publishing office for their papers to be ready for delivery and chatting about the trial’s outcome:

  [T]heir admiration of the speech of Edwin James was intense. A small enthusiast near me said to another, ‘That ere James is the fellow to work ’em; didn’t he pitch hin to the hemperor?’

  ‘Yes’, said a sadder and wiser boy; ‘yes, he’s all werry well, but he’d a spoke on t’other side just as well if he’d been paid.’126

  No doubt James would have done so. As it was, his name was made. Though Friedrich Engels, on reading the reports of the trial, told Marx that he thought James’s speech was ‘feeble’ and ‘disjointed’, others were impressed by the florid language and obvious appeal to the jury’s patriotic feelings.127 Most newspapers pronounced the prosecution a mistake. The Times loftily warned foreign governments that they should be wary of pressing for such cases to be tried in England, where ‘our criminal procedure requires conclusive proof’ of a kind difficult to acquire.128 All the papers noted that parliament had rejected the Conspiracy to Murder Bill brought in by Palmerston, and that this had caused the fall of Palmerston’s government. The prosecution of Bernard had therefore always been unlikely to succeed in front of an English jury. The People’s Paper pointed out that the jurors were out for only an hour and twenty minutes that Saturday afternoon before bringing their verdict.129 Reynolds’s returned to the topic the following week, stating that cabmen outside Westminster Hall on Tuesday, 20 April fought to have the honour of taking Bernard, now a free man, to his destination.130 Bernard spoke that evening at Wyld’s Reading Room in Leicester Square, a favoured venue for meetings of the powerful group of exiles and English liberals, the Friends of Italy. A French club met there too; on 20 April, Bernard thanked the ‘jury of Englishmen’ on whom he had relied for justice. The audience applauded him, giving three cheers for Edwin James and another three for the jury.131

  Bernard’s fame was short-lived. By 1862 he had begun to have hallucinations and was confined in an asylum in London, where he died that November.132 As for James, he became an instant celebrity following his rhetorical success at the Old Bailey. Consequently he was much in demand during the summer of 1858, particularly for difficult, sensational, or in some way controversial cases. When Dickens’s solicitors Farrer and Ouvry took on Edmund Yates’s action against the Garrick, James was hired as the barrister, because, as Yates remembered in his Reminiscences, he ‘stood high’ at that time ‘in popular favour, having recently obtained the acquittal of Dr Bernard’. Yates describes him as a ‘fat florid man, with a large hard face’, with chambers in the Temple and rooms in Pall Mall:

  His practice was extensive, his fees enormous. I had many consultations with him, but found it difficult to keep him to the subject of my case: he liked talking, but always diverted the conversation into other channels. One day I took Dickens – who had never seen Edwin James – to one of these consultations. James laid himself out to be specially agreeable; Dickens was quietly observant. About four months after appeared the early numbers of A Tale of Two Cities, in which a prominent part was played by Mr Stryver. After reading the description, I said to Dickens, ‘Stryver is a good likeness.’ He smiled. ‘Not bad, I think’, he said, ‘especially after only one sitting.’133

  James could command huge fees; by 1861 he was apparently earning £7,000 a year, by which time he was a Liberal MP for Marylebone as well as a practising barrister. Dickens’s intuition that there was something dodgy about him was to be borne out that year, when James’s debts amounted to £100,000 and he was obliged to retire from the House of Commons and resign from the Reform Club. At the same time he was in trouble with his fellow benchers at the Inner Temple for borrowing money from a defendant while acting for the plaintiff in the same case. He was disbarred from practising law that summer.134 As Yates noted later, James soon left for America, where he denied on oath that he had been struck off at home, and attempted to practise at the bar in New York. But he ‘did no good’ there. ‘Six years afterwards he returned to London, called himself a “jurisconsult”, and advised on “shady” cases. He used to be seen walking the West End in a shabby Inverness cape.’135

  Disraeli’s whitebait dinner

  While Yates and Dickens were mulling over the question of taking the Garrick to court after its decision on 20 July to remove Yates’s membership, the main topic in the newspapers continued to be the Great Stink. In its round-up of the week’s news on Sunday, 18 July the Era, like all the other papers, hailed the parliamentary decision to get on with cleansing the Thames. ‘Good News for the Thames’, was its headline, and it chose an extended medical metaphor as its preferred way of welcoming the agreed plan:

  How far the treatment to which the physicians of the Board of Works have submitted the Thames in its prescription of infinitesimal doses of lime, is or was likely to benefit the patient and relieve the public nose, we neither know, and care not in future to inquire, for fortunately for London and the health of her pet patient the medical treatment has been altered … and a change of doctors has been decided on … The Government, tired of its brief responsibility as consulting physician, has washed its hands, not in, but of the Thames, and made over its treatment, moral and physical, to the Metropolitan Board of Works
, and with such ample powers, as are vast enough, we should think, to cleanse an Augean cesspool even more gigantic than the Thames. In plain words, the Metropolitan Board of Works is vested with plenary powers for the purpose of draining the metropolis, suburbs, and city, and carrying the collected sewage to so respectable a distance from the olfactory nerves of the inhabitants, that the most dog-like nostril cannot possibly discover its whereabouts … [T]he Board are allowed the space of five years and a half, and a bank account on the national exchequer to the tune of £600,000 a year, to be refunded by a forty years’ tax of 3d in the pound on all rateable property. This looks like business … Government has certainly done its part of the public duty both well and quickly, and it only remains for the Board of Works to do its share in the same immediate and energetic style.136

  This neat summary captures the general mood in the press. Though there were still questions and sceptical remarks about the ability of the much-maligned Metropolitan Board of Works to pull together and produce a timely result, there was wide agreement that at last a decision had been made, and it was up to everyone to support it, while keeping a watchful eye on the authorities which had been appointed to the task. On Wednesday, 21 July The Times editorial chewed over the subject yet again, declaring that while ‘the agency selected’ might not be popular, Mr Thwaites and his colleagues must be allowed to get on with it. Not for the first time the paper complained that it had been warning of disaster for at least ten years, and found itself grateful for the horrible hot weeks of June: ‘The stench of June was only the last ounce of our burden, or rather it was an accidental flash of light which brought a great fact before our eyes. That hot fortnight did for the sanitary administration of the metropolis what the Bengal mutinies did for the administration of India. It showed us more clearly and forcibly than before on what a volcano we were reposing.’137

  With parliament tying up the loose ends of legislation before the end of the session, the papers carried out their assessment of the achievements of the Derby ministry. The end of term was to be marked ceremonially by the ritual of cabinet members sailing down the Thames from Westminster to Greenwich, where they partook of the annual ‘whitebait dinner’. It was held this year on Saturday, 24 July, and parliament sat right up to that day to clear its collective desk. As the Illustrated London News remarked on the 24th, the two houses were ‘just about sweeping up the crumbs of legislation’. ‘The numerous Committees of Inquiry have closed their labours, even that on the Thames has made its report; and silence reigns in the long corridors on the river front.’ (The Lords remained busy, though; their committee rooms looked out, not on the stinking Thames – ‘the great sewer of the metropolis’ – but on Old Palace Yard in the interior of the building.138)

  While the act to cleanse the Thames received the most notice from the press, there was also praise for the India Act, steered through by Lord Stanley with Disraeli’s help. Lord Derby was praised by several papers for standing firm against the attempt by the archbishop of Canterbury, John Sumner, and his fellow lords spiritual, to introduce Christianity to India, now that it was to be governed directly by the British government instead of the now defunct East India Company. Sumner spoke at the third reading of the Government of India Bill on Friday, 23 July, saying he was far from ‘desiring any open attempt on the part of Government either to overthrow the false religion with which, unhappily, we have to deal’ or to convert the populace wholesale by force or bribery. He did, however, wish to establish that the Bible would be read in schools and that ‘the idolatrous rites and festivals of the Hindoos’ would be given up. Derby replied with calm authority, as reported in The Times:

  My lords, after what has fallen from the most rev. prelate, I may be permitted to observe that while I think that due protection ought to be given to the professors of all religions in India, and nothing should be done to discourage the efforts of Christian missionaries in that country, on the other hand I am quite certain that it is essential to the interests, the peace, and the well-being of England, if not also to the very existence of her power in India, that the Government should carefully abstain from doing anything except to give indiscriminate and impartial protection to all sects and all creeds.139

  Derby was the hero of the hour in the Lords, as Stanley and Disraeli had been in the Commons. Bentley’s Miscellany in its round-up in August noted that the India Bill had been tricky, with lots of different opinions, though there was general agreement that the East India Company’s rule had been disastrous and must be abolished. Disraeli, the magazine said, had succeeded in making the India Bill a national rather than a party matter, and Stanley had introduced ‘a large amount of common sense’ into the bill.140 The queen had shown a close interest in its long passage through parliament. On 15 August she encouraged Derby to draft the proclamation for India with due regard for generosity and equality.141 When the now Viscount Canning became viceroy of India later in the year, she wrote to him acclaiming the ‘enormous Empire which is so bright a jewel’ in the crown, and which she ‘would wish to see happy, contented, and peaceful’. She was glad, she wrote, that the proclamation included freedom of religious worship for Indians.142

  Other news in the press round-ups included sorrow at the failure again of the attempt to join the Atlantic telegraph cable, and pleasure in its (short-lived) success in August.143 Punch reminded readers on 21 August that the Great Eastern, or Leviathan as it insisted on calling the doomed vessel, was still stuck at Deptford doing nothing except being a tourist attraction. In ‘What to do with the Leviathan’, the magazine suggested that ‘the whole of the sewage of this dirty London’ could be ‘emptied into her many holds; and, when all of them are full, let her sail with the cargo right out to sea, and discharge it in the middle of the ocean’, where ‘no human nostrils are likely to be offended with it’. Since the ship was ‘commercially in rather low water, it would not take much to bail her out’. In Punch’s unkind opinion, Brunel’s great ship ‘would make a first-rate floating sewer’.144

  There was praise for the smooth working of the Divorce Act, now being amended to take account of anomalies such as that of Edward Lane’s legal status. The English Woman’s Journal, begun in March 1858, recorded its satisfaction with the act and the justice now being given to both ‘betrayed husbands and oppressed wives’.145 The Era reminded readers that the Divorce Act had been passed the previous year against violent opposition and grim warnings that society would collapse under the weight of failed marriages. On the contrary, ‘it is found in experience that only those seek release who are driven by dire necessity’. The number of petitions had not been huge, the marriage tie had not been taken less seriously than before, and the act was working well.146 The treatment of patients in lunatic asylums also loomed large, as did court cases in which allegations of insanity were contested. On 27 July the Morning Chronicle reported on the lunacy case of Mary Jane Turner which had opened in York Castle with Edwin James representing Mary Jane; on the same day the paper dedicated its editorial to an attack on the ‘easy platitudes’ and ‘soothing generalizations’ offered each year by the Commissioners of Lunacy. Their reports conceal ‘crying wrongs, which, if they were but made known, would awaken against the perpetrators feelings of public indignation’.147

  Surprise was expressed by some newspapers at the relative success of Derby’s minority government in the early months since its arrival in power. The Era in its article ‘The Closing Session’ on 1 August declared that Derby’s government had ‘steadily won the confidence of the country’. It was remarkable that a Tory government had brought in the ‘Jew Bill’ where Liberal leaders had failed to do so. The Thames and India Acts were the crowning achievement of a brief but eminently successful session.148 The Times on the following day singled out Disraeli for both praise and criticism: he ‘contributed his industry, his resolution, and his oratorical power, and at the same time entailed on the ministry the suspicion which attaches to the successful tactician who is supposed, with some
reason, to be entirely exempt from any political prejudices’.149

  The last remark expresses the general belief that Disraeli was a politician of boundless personal ambition but little party or national loyalty. He certainly was personally ambitious and not overly scrupulous in his methods, but he showed during this short session of parliament that he could also act in the interests of party and country. The Times noted that justice had been done to Baron de Rothschild, India had been sorted out, and the cleansing of the Thames had at long last been decided on – all of these measures owing much to Disraeli. The next session would probably be taken up with the topic of political reform, according to the paper, though the Derby government might at any time fall under ‘some unexpected blow’, as Palmerston’s had done six short months before. If so, The Times concluded, Lord Derby could at least claim that he had formed a ministry ‘which conducted affairs for several months with tolerable credit and success, notwithstanding the disadvantage of a nominally hostile majority in the House of Commons’.150

  The whitebait dinner took place on the evening of Saturday, 24 July. Disraeli told Lady Londonderry on that day that he and his colleagues had been working ‘morning, noon, & night to close the Session’. He had just come from a Saturday morning sitting of the House of Commons, and a cabinet meeting was about to follow at three o’clock before he could get off to Greenwich at six ‘for the fish dinner – the Carnival of Politics’. He was ‘so tired’, he wrote, that he could ‘scarcely guide [his] pen’.151 He told Sarah Brydges Willyams two days later that the dinner had been eaten ‘with a good relish’. ‘A great deal of nonsense’ had been talked, as is usual, especially ‘when you have won the day’.152 Punch marked the event a few days later with a topical poem entitled ‘How Father Thames Appeared to the Cabinet, on the Road to the Whitebait Dinner, and What He Said to Them’. The poem names various cabinet members and the opinions and measures with which each is associated – Stanley with India, Bulwer Lytton, rather perversely in the light of recent events concerning him, with ‘pleasure’, Disraeli with everything: