Edward was enraged by the contrast between his position and that of Henry Robinson. Henry emerged from the journal as ‘the consummation of human meanness, paltriness, rascality & cruelty’, Edward told Combe; his behaviour had left Isabella ‘anxious to escape, almost at any price, from the bondage of a union that had made her life well-nigh intolerable’. Yet this horrible husband, who was known to have a mistress and illegitimate children, was perfectly innocent in the eyes of the law.
George Combe was won over. ‘I was deeply moved by poor Lane’s distress,’ he reported to Sir James Clark. ‘Lane is broken down, & Lady Drysdale & Mrs Lane are living in agonising terror of publicity.’ Having so enthusiastically recommended Moor Park to his friends, Combe felt personally responsible for the doctor’s honour. He worked to distance himself from Isabella. She ‘professed a great interest in the new Philosophy,’ he told Clark, ‘but Mrs Combe & I never liked her’. Though she was ‘a clever intellectual woman’, her ‘deficient coronal region gave a cold low tone to her intellectual manifestations, that deprived her of all interest for us’.
Combe’s friends were astonished by the story. Isabella Robinson was ‘an extraordinary woman’, said Sir James Clark, ‘the first … that ever kept a record of her own infamy’. Marmaduke Blake Sampson, City editor of The Times and a keen supporter of phrenology, thought that Edward should take some of the blame even if he were innocent of adultery: ‘by devoting himself to her morning rides & allowing a mutual intercourse with the children he … paid her the greatest attention that it was in the power of a grave man enjoying a position in society to allow. He has touched pitch and has been defiled. Were he to recognise the consequences that have taken place as the legitimate results of his own want of perception, dignity, and prudence I should have more confidence in any representations he might make than can be felt while he represents himself a victim.’
Two days after Edward’s visit to Edinburgh, Henry Robinson wrote to Combe with his own account of the affair. Disingenuously, he claimed that he had not wished to inflict the painful story on Combe, but had just learnt from Robert Chambers that it had reached his ears – now ‘my pen is set free, and I obey the natural impulse to communicate to a kind and honored acquaintance the sad tale’. He told Combe that he was eager to correct any misrepresentations that Isabella might have circulated. He described the dismay, grief, surprise and horror he had felt upon reading the diary and making the ‘dread discovery’ that Isabella was conducting an ‘amour’ with Eugene Le Petit, ‘although there was room to hope that it had not reached a criminal extent’. He said that he had been even more horrified to find that his wife had since 1850 been ‘the slave of a passion for Dr E. L.’, which evolved in 1854 into a ‘criminal intimacy’. Henry offered to show Combe the corroborative evidence against Edward, as long as he treated it as ‘strictly private and confidential’.
Combe declined: ‘Now, your offer to lay before me, confidentially, the evidence of his criminality, would only complicate our difficulties; for I could not ask Dr Lane for any explanations, and we must condemn him unheard in his defence.’
Both Henry and Isabella had violated the boundary between the private and the public: Isabella by writing about Edward in her journal; Henry by reading and disseminating her secret words. Combe responded by working urgently to re-establish the distinctions between confidential and free information. He scrupulously separated out the public statements from the whispered allegations, matters of record from matters of rumour. By refusing to read the diary, he also made it easier for himself to believe in Edward’s innocence.
Edward thanked Combe for his protection: ‘you have acted towards me not only as a kind friend but as a man of honour – determined that at any rate, so far as in you lay, I shd not be stabbed in the dark’. Henry, by contrast, was behaving in a ‘furtive’, ‘under-hand & malignant’ manner.
Edward persisted in hoping that he could contain the scandal. ‘I speak to you,’ he wrote to Combe, ‘with all the … fullness of a son to a father’, an appeal that invoked the honesty but also the confidentiality of the family circle. He reminded Combe of ‘the peculiar circumstances of my position, which renders the avoidance of all publicity a matter of so much moment’. Lady Drysdale made the same point. ‘May I … entreat that you and Mrs Combe will consider this letter as strictly confidential,’ she wrote, ‘for every day I feel more sure that silence is our only safety.’
A scandal involving another Mrs Robinson had blown up in 1857, and with it a controversy about the printing of private gossip. In March, the novelist Elizabeth Gaskell published a biography of Charlotte Brontë, who had died in 1855, in which she described a love affair between Charlotte’s brother Branwell and Lydia Robinson, a ‘mature and wicked’ married woman who employed him in the 1840s as a tutor to her sons. ‘The case presents the reverse of the usual features,’ wrote Mrs Gaskell; ‘the man became the victim; the man’s life was blighted, and crushed out of him by suffering, and guilt entailed by guilt; the man’s family were stung by keenest shame.’ The woman in question, now Lady Scott, threatened legal action against Mrs Gaskell’s publishers in May 1857, with the result that the book was withdrawn and altered.
When the Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes opened at the beginning of 1858, Henry Robinson became the eleventh person to lodge a petition for a divorce a vinculo matrimonii – from the bonds of marriage. This form of divorce would have the same effect as the death of a spouse: if Henry won his suit, he would, like a widower, be free to take another wife.
The new court conducted its proceedings in public. It aspired to be seen to protect and to punish, defining what was allowed within marriage while demonstrating the very visible disgrace that awaited those who transgressed. Among the key components of the Divorce Act were a provision for the protection of married women’s property, which entitled wronged wives to keep their own earnings, and a relaxation of the standard of proof required to prove adultery. Most importantly, the process was simpler. Henry Robinson and others like him would not have been able to afford a full divorce before 1858.
Having already convinced the church court of Isabella’s adultery, Henry had reason to feel confident that the new court would grant his petition. Where Doctors’ Commons had required two witnesses to adultery, this court needed just one. A guide of 1860 explained: ‘To require absolutely evidence of two witnesses to facts scarcely ever otherwise than secret, is, in most cases, to ensure a defeat of the suit and a denial of justice.’ Nor did Henry’s counsel need to establish adultery beyond a reasonable doubt; since this was a common law rather than a criminal trial, he had only to persuade the judges that his case was more probable than Isabella’s.
Henry’s solicitors advised him that though his case against Edward Lane was comparatively slight, a man petitioning for divorce was now obliged to name his wife’s alleged lover as co-respondent. This might work to Henry’s financial advantage: if his petition was successful, Edward could be ordered by the court to pay him costs and damages. In February 1858, Henry served papers on both Edward and Isabella.
In the Consistory Court, Isabella had shielded Edward by letting Henry’s suit go through unopposed, but there was no way of keeping the doctor out of the secular proceedings. To protect Edward now, she would have to deny adultery.
Isabella and Edward’s barristers met to formulate their case. On 22 April, Isabella denied adultery via her solicitor, and the next day Edward did the same. Edward organised for the diary to be transcribed by copyists, at a cost of £150, so that his counsel could use it in his defence.
In the first five months of 1858, 180 petitions were brought before the Divorce Court judges. It was not until Monday 10 May that the court granted its first divorce, but the dissolutions then came apace: by lunchtime the next day, the court had divorced eight couples. ‘I cannot help expressing my satisfaction at the manner in which the new Act works,’ said Lord Campbell, the Lord Chancellor, who had helped to formulate the Divorce Act.
‘Now all classes are placed upon the same footing.’
Several of the earliest petitioners to the court were solicitors. As lawyers, they were quick to see the possibilities of the new Act; and, like Henry Robinson, they were modern middle-class men, more interested in revenge than reputation, more eager to secure their freedom than to preserve their families’ honour. The evidence was necessarily tawdry. On 12 May, a solicitor called Tourle accused his wife of seducing their neighbour’s son. His witnesses were his nephew, who had happened upon Mrs Tourle and the neighbour’s son in her drawing room, ‘red and confused’; his servant, who claimed to have seen the young man with his arm around Mrs Tourle’s waist in her dining room one afternoon in November 1856; a coachman, who said he saw the pair kissing in the woods in the summer of 1857; and the staff of a hotel in Albermarle Street, London, who testified that they had shared a room. On the basis of these sightings of a couple on the edge of sex, the divorce was granted.
As the judges rattled through their roster, they were setting out what constituted cruelty, how to prove adultery, the limits of a man’s dominion over his wife and children. In doing so, they besieged the public with tales of domestic misery. ‘Everybody with whom one speaks of any wretched marriage,’ ran an editorial in the Daily News at the end of May, ‘at once matches the case with another, which brings up the mention of a third; so that the imagination becomes haunted with images of cursed homes.’ Even Queen Victoria seemed suddenly worried about the institution: ‘I think people marry far too much,’ she wrote to her newlywed daughter Vicky in May; ‘it is such a lottery after all, and to a poor woman a very doubtful happiness.’ Charles Dickens, whose novels had done much to glorify the middle-class Victorian home, had himself slipped into domestic crisis. On Friday 11 June, three days before the Robinson case began, he issued a statement in which he announced that he and his wife, Catherine, had signed a deed of separation. By drawing up a private agreement, Dickens at least avoided the publicity of the courtroom. In the newspapers, he denied rumours that he had committed adultery, either with a young actress or with his wife’s sister. The ‘breath of these slanders,’ he said, had assailed his readers ‘like an unwholesome air’.
See Notes on Chapter 8
9
BURN THAT BOOK, AND BE HAPPY!
Westminster Hall, 15 June 1858
By Tuesday 15 June, news of the Robinson trial had spread. When the court convened at 11 a.m., several eminent lawyers pressed into the stifling courtroom to watch the proceedings. Among them was the former Lord Chancellor Henry Brougham, famous for successfully defending Queen Caroline on a charge of adultery when George IV tried to divorce her in the 1820s. Lord Brougham may have been aware of Isabella’s ancestry, which was not mentioned in the course of the trial: in the 1820s he had sat in the House of Commons alongside her grandfather John Christian Curwen, a fellow landowner in the north-west of England. The first reports of Robinson v Robinson & Lane appeared in that day’s press.
Of the three judges at the bench, Sir Cresswell Cresswell was the most au fait with the intricacies of the new law, having been in charge of the Divorce Court since January, but Sir Alexander Cockburn was to dominate the proceedings. He enjoyed the limelight, and the Robinson trial was already attracting more attention than any yet heard by the court. He also had a special interest in allegations of madness, having made his name at the bar in 1843 by securing an acquittal on the grounds of insanity: he had called nine doctors to the Old Bailey to testify that his client, Daniel M’Naghten, had been in thrall to ‘a fierce and fearful delusion’ when he tried to assassinate the Prime Minister, Robert Peel. The verdict revolutionised ideas on mental delusion and criminal responsibility, making the insanity plea commonplace in the criminal courts. A lawyer could now argue that his apparently sane client had committed a crime in a moment of madness – or, as the barristers in Isabella’s case would suggest, had falsely confessed to a crime while prey to insanity.
Forsyth, for Edward Lane, began. Usually, it was counsel for the respondent rather than for the co-respondent who addressed the judges first, but Isabella had agreed to let Edward’s counsel lead; this meant that his lawyers would be able to cross-examine her witnesses, but hers could not cross-examine his. Their hope was that the case against Edward would quickly collapse, and with it the case against Isabella.
‘My learned friend has admitted,’ said Forsyth, ‘that he has not sufficient evidence to fix the co-respondent, but the consequences of suspicion are so serious to Dr Lane that I would not feel justified in foregoing the opportunity of addressing your Lordships and calling evidence. Dr Lane’s honour, reputation, domestic happiness, and means of existence are all at stake in the inquiry.’
The court, he noted, had deemed the journal admissible against Isabella but not against Edward: ‘As against that gentleman it must be taken to be non-existent, as if it had never been written. I will, therefore, dismiss all consideration and allusion to that journal.’
Without the evidence of the diary, said Forsyth, ‘could any case be more meagre upon which to charge adultery against a co-respondent than the present? Here is Dr Lane, a young man with a wife and family, accused of adultery with a woman fifty years of age, because he has been seen walking with her in his own grounds and whispering to her at the dinner table, and because she has been seen in his study, which was an open thoroughfare to all the household; and he has been once met coming out of her rooms.’
He reminded the court that the doctor consorted with all the lady patients at Moor Park. ‘Dr Lane had been urged by Mrs Lane’s mother to show every attention to Mrs Robinson – to drive with her, and ride and walk with her in the park. Lady patients will be called to prove that they have never seen anything to justify them in supposing there was the slightest shade of suspicion against the parties. I say fearlessly that, with the exception of the evidence of the witness Warren, there is nothing whatever in the case to raise suspicion. The opposite side has not dared to produce one letter from Dr Lane to Mrs Robinson, although many passed between them. It is said that Dr Lane was once seen coming out of Mrs Robinson’s chamber; but the fact is, that gentleman is in the habit of visiting all the lady patients’ chambers. Mrs Robinson might have been unwell, and nothing is more likely that under such circumstances Dr Lane should have extended his visits as far as her room.’ He assured the court: ‘I will get rid of every rag or shred of suspicion against Dr Lane.’
Forsyth’s first witness was Auguste Giet, a former butler at Moor Park whose duties had included the supervision of the pantry near the doctor’s study.
Giet testified that Levi Warren, the stable boy who had given evidence the previous day, made a trip from Moor Park to London in 1856. Afterwards, Giet said, the boy told him that he had had a meeting with ex-Inspector Field and Henry Robinson, whom he had told ‘that he had never seen Dr Lane with his arm around Mrs Robinson’s waist’. Giet added: ‘He also told me that he had never seen them in that position.’
Forsyth produced two letters that Warren had written to Giet and he showed them to the butler, asking him to confirm that the letters were in Warren’s hand. Giet said that they were. Forsyth showed the court one of these letters, in which Warren asked the butler to keep quiet about what he had confided in him.
The lawyer enquired whether Giet remembered seeing Mrs Robinson at Moor Park. Yes, the butler replied, but he had never noticed her walking with Dr Lane.
Forsyth asked about the location of the study in which Isabella and Edward were alleged to have committed adultery. Giet confirmed that the servants used the study as a shortcut from the pantry to the dining room.
The butler was told that he could step down from the witness box. Even without his evidence, it had been easy enough to dismiss the testimony of a disaffected stable boy; the judges could now disregard it altogether.
Forsyth called Caroline Suckling, the fifty-three-year-old wife of Captain William Suckling, a distant relative of Lord Nelson. The Sucklings were regula
r guests at Moor Park. George Combe had met them there in 1856, and taken a dislike to their eight-year-old daughter, Florence Horatia Nelson Suckling; Combe described her in his journal as ‘a spoiled only child & heiress, about whom I gave her mother advice’.
Mrs Suckling testified that she was staying at Moor Park in September 1854, and had a clear recollection of Mrs Robinson’s presence there.
‘I never saw any communication between the doctor and that lady. I saw Mrs Robinson in conversation with him, in which conversations I myself often joined; but there was no difference in the treatment by Dr Lane of Mrs Robinson and any other lady there.’
Forsyth asked Mrs Suckling about Mary Lane.
‘Dr and Mrs Lane were on the most excellent terms,’ said Mrs Suckling. ‘She was about twenty-five years of age, and was a friend of Mrs Robinson.’
Questioned further about the intimacy between the doctor and Isabella, Mrs Suckling said that she had once seen Dr Lane walking with her on the public terrace outside the house. ‘But he was in the habit of walking with every lady patient and every gentleman patient by turns on the terrace and in the park.’
Mrs. Robinson's Disgrace: The Private Diary of a Victorian Lady Page 14
