Bedlam

by Greg Hollingshead

  I confessed I never knew any English Mesmerism practitioners or even that they existed.

  “Whether it all be imagination or no,” Dr. Clutterbuck concluded enigmatically, “there were many in those mad times who thought it wasn’t. And I don’t think you should be punished just because it happens you’re still one of’em. Don’t the doctors in this place understand there’s no better way to fix a man in a conviction, however absurd, than to persecute him for it?”

  That was Dr. Clutterbuck.

  Dr. Birkbeck, the second last time I saw him, cut short my tortuous account of the weeks preceding my imprisonment at Lille, observing only, “What happened in France was a mad business start to finish, eh Matthews? You know what Mr. Coleridge called it, don’t you? ‘The Giant Frenzy.’ As one tumbled head-over-heels by that tumult, you concur, I trust, with our poet’s designation?”

  I said I did.

  Later, as they were leaving, Dr. Birkbeck, who is a short, sturdy, jaundiced-looking fellow with a long chin, pumped my hand with terrific vigour, saying, “Matthews, if you’re mad, believe me, so was our mighty opponent of revolution, Edmund Burke.”

  Who foamed like Niagara, it’s been said, but I held my tongue.

  “To put the matter in a nutshell,” he concluded, releasing his grip, “you shouldn’t be in here.”

  Telling me this seemed to cheer him enormously, but he has a restless conceit about him, which over the next several days the injustice of my situation must have enflamed, for on their last visit to me, he and Clutterbuck brought along Monro himself, and as soon as the three arrived in my corner, Birkbeck rounded on Monro saying, “Tell us, Doctor, is there any particular subject apt to cause this man maniacal hallucinations?”

  Caught off guard by the question, Monro replied that to his knowledge there was not, though he did believe me unhinged.

  “I take it then, sir, you judge this Air Loom business to be more than a philosophical point?”

  Monro asked what heirloom business he referred to.

  Looking vexed, Birkbeck said, “Could you please, Dr. Monro, tell us in plain words why you think Mr. Matthews is insane.”

  Evidently Monro had no warning of anything like this on its way, or if he did, had been too busy floundering around in the usual birdlime of his understanding to heed it, for he only blustered out that while it might not convince any of us to hear him say it, he had a feeling he could positively rely on that I’m totally insane.

  Now Birkbeck drew himself up. “From what I can see, sir, the main proof you have of this man’s insanity is his inflexible resistance either to admit he’s mad or to render thanks to the medical officers of this hospital for the injustice they’ve done him in keeping him here. From my discussions with him, it’s evident he harbours a profound antipathy toward both yourself and Mr. Haslam, whom he holds primarily responsible for his twelve-year confinement. In the circumstances, sir, I find such antipathy so far from evidence of his madness as to constitute certain proof of his inviolable sanity.”

  Monro’s response to this outburst was briefly to look a little sheepish, particularly like one who has just received a short, sharp rap to the skull. He then emitted a series of protesting bleats.

  The two medical gentlemen have now submitted their affidavits, in which they make the strongest possible case for my sanity.

  So too have Mr. Sadler and Mr. Law as representatives of Camberwell Parish. Theirs gives an account of their interviews before the Bethlem and Grand Committees and also of what happened last week, when, still not giving up, they came again to demand my release and were told by Mr. Poynder—or so I was brain-said by Charlotte, luckily at the time freed from her chains long enough to be on her hands and knees scrubbing the clerk’s office floor, having just provided The Middleman a similar service performable in the same position—that I’m now considered a state prisoner (which I always was) and therefore officially out of Camberwell’s hands. While this is neither good news nor any kind at all really, at least such a statement included in the affidavit may rouse the judge to ask himself why on earth I’m a prisoner of the state.

  I understand there’s also an affidavit from Robert Dunbar declaring the Bethlem damp is destroying my health. This will be Margaret’s doing, inspired by my telling her I have an ulcer in my back. Another Dunbar affidavit—how he ran into The Schoolmaster at The Sow and Sausage and Jack mentioned I’m as sane as he is—is also in the file. Apparently Dunbar told the story to the subcommittee before they saw me. Let’s hope it counts for more in writing. As for The Schoolmaster, he won’t block my release, but he won’t enable it either.

  The affidavits go next to the judge, a Justice LeBlanc, of whom nothing is known. He decides if he sees me or no. If no, our habeas corpus has failed.

  I expect The Schoolmaster will file a detailed, explicit affidavit saying the court must ensure this automaton on whom he is the world expert should not be allowed to join too many others like him roaming the nation at the expense of royal safety, with an addendum to defend his honour, swearing he was never in The Sow and Sausage on the night claimed by Mr. Dunbar, who’s evidently been imposed on by a stranger cunning enough to tell him what he wanted to hear.

  There will also be an affidavit from Monro, a terrible flood of self-inflating gabble that will spell out the ways I’m a living menace to the royal family, the Government, and the public, and conclude by declaring me the most deranged lunatic he ever met with in a career dating back to the birth of his grandfather.

  One affidavit I do know of (by means of Charlotte) is from one “Peter Mortimer,” who rode with me in ‘96 in that coach from Dover to Dartford on my final return from France. In it he declares me a danger to his Majesty and his subjects. This Mortimer it turns out is not only a Bethlem governor and member of the Grand Committee that recently refused to discharge me, but the very same wretched puppet of a French magnetic agent named Chavanay who accosted me on the Channel boat, stretching himself beside me on the deck and whispering, “Mr. Matthews, are you acquainted with the art of talking with your brains?”

  When I replied in the negative, he said, “It is effected by means of the magnet.”

  That, I now learn, was my induction to the horror, but try telling that to the Bethlem governors.

  Of course, Liverpool’s letter instructing them to keep me will be part of the package.

  From the pens of what other enemies, that I never even knew I had, affidavits will flow, I don’t know.

  No one in here has any information. Even Charlotte’s brain-sayings have grown intermittent and unhelpful. I don’t know why. She was always good at keeping in touch.

  It’s a waiting game.

  With the ulcer in my back now a weeping suppuration, I no longer recline like the carved perpetual maniacs above our gates but lie curled on my bed, staring at the wall. Each brick and the pattern it makes with the rest is familiar to me as the image of my own hand, or soul. If there’s a distinction between brick, hand, soul, I no longer know what it is. Thus my imprisonment informs me. Instructs me to mouth Goodbye Mags, goodbye Jim. And wonder how even for a little while I could have imagined these bricks won’t be all I’ll ever know again.

  Sometimes too I wonder if I should have gone to France in the first place and done there what I did, seeing as how it’s enabled them to pretend the purpose of my imprisonment has been to let me know I should not have, when its true purpose has been to save their necks by shutting me off from the world, thereby seeking to perplex my understanding of who I am. They think if only I lose sight of my identity, I’ll lose sight of theirs and, if I do happen to remember it, will have no sane audience to inform, and on the rare occasion that I do, as an inmate of this place will command no authority to be heard. By this tortuous punishment they pretend to tell me, Now, don’t you ever do that again. A curious injunction, even were it not a fiendish ploy. Well, would I do it again? Now that by that same “punishment” I am in a position to observe first hand how such daily coe
rcion operates, of course I would. Who could call himself a man who wouldn’t?

  Unfortunately, getting out is another story. We have a lunatic in here named Barrington who’s convinced he can see and breathe and travel underground. Every other day he needs to be stopped from digging a hole in the yard to bury himself. I think sometimes I must be his unhappy brother.

  84 LEADENHALL STREET

  DECEMBER 11TH, 1809

  Dearest Jamie,

  And so we arrive at the eve of the Court’s decision, which should be tomorrow or next week but in any case soon. Jamie, we’ve done all we can, and nothing remains but to hope. With Truth on our side, Justice should be too, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned these twelve years, it’s the Law doesn’t work that way.

  Here, in short, is my worry: The assumption of all knowing parties when informed of your case is that those who want you in will justify your imprisonment under the Traitorous Correspondence Bill of 1793—viz., your supposed correspondence with French revolutionists—for this is their best (if not only) legal means to counter our medical argument. Yet, so far as we can determine, they haven’t done it. Which means either they’re incompetent or like the Bethlem governors and medical officers they don’t know why you’re in, or have forgot, in which case we’ve won…Or else you remain so great a threat to them they don’t dare invoke that bill lest it open the door to revelations too damning to themselves. If this latter is the case, their position may be securer than we know and their influence, as you have feared, extend deeper than the courts, in which case we were defeated before we began.

  Jamie, I indicate the matter so nakedly only to see it sharp and clear for myself. I think you know it already. In any case we shall both know the outcome of all our efforts before you read this. Let’s hope when you do read this you’re home again, and we can laugh together over what I can only pray are unfounded fears.

  Tour loving Margaret

  CHARLOTTE

  The most fascinating part of telling the French segment of my story to Dr. Clutterbuck, aside from the little impression it made on him, has been how the discipline of the telling has marshalled my memories to a coherence they never knew. Lately individuals from those years have populated my mind like denizens of a cam-era obscura. I shall here letter them, and so put to better use than roaming my cell the hours to our habeas corpus outcome.

  When, in February 1793, David Williams abandoned our shared cause of peace, leaving me stranded with my hired carriage, he broke my heart. One day your beloved brother, the only hero you ever had, departs forever the parental strife, leaving you guilty and abandoned. What can you do but throw yourself weeping at the legs of first one parent then the other, your world split wide open, and who will be left to love you tomorrow? What can a child do but peacemake? Knowing what Williams’ undelivered oral message must be, I went direct to Lord Liverpool—in those days still Baron Hawkesbury—and laid it all before him: information even more remarkable than Lebrun’s begging letter for peace. What was it? That Lebrun’s government sought the assistance of the British government to crush their then-opposition, the bloodthirsty Jacobins, and so end the war and the mounting Terror.

  With Hawkesbury I had a connexion, having already delivered on his behalf letters and valuables to the French government, and vice versa—services for which, as I reminded him, I’d not been paid. He received this information in a noncommittal, I would almost say doubting fashion, as if he hardly knew who I was. Superciliously he informed me the Government, if it saw any point, would form an answer in due course. Once it did, and I was the one chose to convey it to France, they’d contact me. I told him I’d wait. But when a month passed and nothing happened, the news from Paris growing daily more dire and rioting spreading through the French provinces like grass fires, one morning toward the end of the second week in March I proceeded to Hawkesbury’s office frantic for an answer and was denied access even to the building. This telling me where things stood, I shot straight back to Paris. Answer or no answer, papers or no papers.

  My arrival occurring on March 19th—the very day after the French commander Dumouriez’ defeat by the Austrians at the Battle of Neerwinden—Lebrun, still French foreign minister, was tail-wagging eager to receive any friend of David Williams, and a regular beagle of despair when he learned I carried no message from Grenville.

  Perchance M. Matthews can himself provide some inkling as to British demands for peace?

  Mais oui, I sighed (lifting a trembling hand to my brow). But might I first impose on Monsieur for a bed for the night?

  Bien sûr, M. Matthews. J’ai agi sans aucune consideration, vous êtes épuisé. Demain, c’est assez bientôt.

  Next morning, over a late breakfast in my stateroom, I provided Lebrun with a hand-lettered outline of the Allied campaign (including diagrams for an attack on Toulon), along with a step-by-step guide for France to negotiate peace with England.

  He went away rubbing his hands like a cuckold in a farce.

  After lunch he was back, for clarification of the step-by-step guide. Over breakfast the following morning, I presented him with a thirteen-page memorandum in question-and-answer form, the questions British demands, the answers positions France would do well to adopt. I wish I could say this memorandum and the outline of the Allied campaign arrived fluidically. In fact, they cost me two entire nights of thinking and lettering. I was feeling my way in the dark.

  But we did attack Toulon. In the course of my London interviews I had picked up certain hints. An informed guess.

  The documents passed. Though the French executive council refused (as my “guide” required them) to admit responsibility for the war; transfer what remained of the French royal family from prison in France to England and provide £500,000 for their maintenance there; move the Assembly out of Paris; restore Avignon to the Pope; give England a few islands, one of them Tobag; and entirely disarm, in which event England would immediately follow suit; the French council did declare themselves prepared to grant various concessions involving the frontier, as well as the indemnification of Savoy and of the German princes. On April 2nd, they voted to respond in good faith to the “British demands” and so obtain peace with England.

  With this in writing and sealed with the French seal, I returned to London, but the British government in its wisdom rejecting the overture, I met again with Hawkesbury (who lo and behold would see me again). But from his reluctance to acknowledge I ever did any service to the country, as well as from certain things he arrogantly let drop at that interview, I glimpsed the abomination of our Government’s larger intention. I staggered out of there horrified at the iniquitous gulf this country was hunkered at the brink of. All night I wandered the Thames bank, trying to think why I shouldn’t fill my pockets with rocks and wade in. The plain fact was I’d been used. And Williams too. The bastards’ nefarious workings infected everything they touched, and they touched everything. But as the sun come up over Redriff, I knew what I had to do: gallop back to Paris, like a horse to battle demons in a flaming stables.

  The above was as far as I got last week in my lettering when Margaret come in to tell me how our habeas corpus went. At first as she approached, seeing she carried no hamper of goods to ease a continued stay, I imagined good news. Then I saw her face: blank shock—and something else, or was it?

  The writ has failed. The judge has ruled I’m wholly unfit to be at large. Margaret’s twelve years’ struggle has come to this.

  Solemnly, after she next told me the good part—that the judge ruled I be given my own dry upper room, to be fitted out at moderate expense by the steward (meaning Sir Archy), with my own fire, and my health seen to—she recounted the interview with The Schoolmaster she had just come from.

  As soon as he sat her down in his office (now the small room off the main-floor hall, where he used to only see patients), he set about to impress upon her how he’s wanted me out since the day I arrived and what a shame it is for all concerned that Liverpool’s let
ter has now rendered my release impossible.

  This was flim-flam, pure and simple. “You sought that letter,” she said.

  Well, yes, they did, he acknowledged with guilty haste, Monro insisted upon it, but only after the committee doubted my friends would secure me. And he explained how at the time I was admitted, there was no official procedure, but as a matter of fact it was the magistrates of Bow Street that first charged I be held, with Camberwell Parish only paying my keep. For this reason, the Bethlem governors always considered me in by government direction. That’s why a letter from Liverpool had been sought, to regularize (read legalize) the arrangement and put the finances of my keep on a solid footing. Still, they were ready to let me go, if only Justice LeBlanc ordered it. But he didn’t. The matter thus clarified, The Schoolmaster fixed upon Margaret a look (it seemed to her) a sublimely uneasy balance of sympathy with us and complacence with the status in quo.

  “But there was something else,” she told me. “A relief he couldn’t conceal. If I didn’t know better, I’d say that over the years he’s grown too attached to let you go.”

  “That’ll be Haslam,” I said, meaning, Not The Schoolmaster. Though I knew that if I said no more, what I did say had the appearance of an empty rejoinder, I kept mum. The matter was too complicated: Haslam would also want my freedom.

  Rammer-straight on her wood seat, directing a cold stare at The Schoolmaster, Margaret had said, “What happens now?”

  “Nothing, I’m afraid. Mrs. Matthews, you must believe me when I tell you that habeas corpus was absolutely the only way to fetch your husband home. LeBlanc’s decision has been in every respect unfortunate. But I must say your husband’s cause wasn’t helped by the fool’s-cap investigation of Butterclerk and Cluckbeck. If those two comedy-clowns hadn’t aggravated Monro with their deafness and blindness to lunacy, your husband would be with you today.”