Authors: Kate Summerscale
B007M836FY EBOK (16 page)
The scene echoed the moment in Anne Brontë’s
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
in which Arthur Huntingdon discovers his wife’s diary. The dissolute, unfaithful Mr Huntingdon wrests Helen’s journal from her: ‘I HATE him!’ he reads. ‘The word stares me in the face like a guilty confession but it is true: I hate him – I hate him!’ Huntingdon responds with glee to the evidence of his wife’s unhappiness and hatred. Having learnt from the journal that she plans to flee with their son and make a living as an artist, he confiscates her jewels and burns her paintbrushes and easels. ‘It’s well you couldn’t keep your own secret – ha, ha!’ he sneers. ‘It’s well these women must be
blabbing – if they haven’t a friend to talk to, they must whisper their secrets to the fishes, or write them on the sand or something.’
Out flew the web and floated wide
;
The mirror crack’d from side to side
;
‘The curse is come upon me,’ cried The Lady of Shalott
From Alfred Tennyson’s
The Lady of Shalott
(1842)
Westminster Hall, 14 June 1858
Henry’s counsel was the first to address the bench. ‘The Robinsons married in 1844,’ said Montagu Chambers QC, ‘Mrs Robinson being then the widow of a Mr Dansey, and possessed of between £400 and £500 a year, which was settled upon her to her separate use. After their marriage the Robinsons resided at Blackheath, Edinburgh, Boulogne, and in the neighbourhood of Reading. During their residence at Edinburgh in 1850 they became acquainted with Mr Lane, then studying for the law, who afterwards married a daughter of Lady Drysdale. He set up a hydropathic establishment at Moor Park, which is probably well known to your Lordships as having formerly been the residence of Sir William Temple.’
The three judges in the new Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes sat on a raised platform beneath a canopy hung with red curtains. Sir Cresswell Cresswell, a spindly sixty-four-year-old bachelor who wielded a lorgnette, was the Judge Ordinary, the official in charge of the court. Sir Alexander Cockburn, a short man of fifty-five with sharp, pouchy blue eyes, was Chief Justice of the Court of Common Pleas, the third highest-ranking judge in the land; he too was
a bachelor but, as was widely known among his peers, he had two children (aged twelve and nineteen) by an unmarried woman. Though he cut a dignified figure at the bench, Cockburn was a renowned socialite who often scrambled into court just in time for the start of the proceedings at eleven. Sir William Wightman was the least senior of the three in the court but the most experienced in law and in wedlock: at seventy-two, he had served as a judge for twenty-seven years and been married for thirty-nine. The judges had decided to hear the Robinson case without a jury: they would arrive at a verdict themselves. They wore horsehair wigs and red robes trimmed with ermine, heavy in the heat.
The sun funnelled in to the courtroom through a glass turret and a ring of round skylights in its dome, bathing the long desks and benches below. The stench of the city was pushing in, too. In the heat wave that laid siege to London that June, a ‘Great Stink’ of sewage lifted off the fat banks of the Thames and sifted into the Houses of Parliament and the adjoining courts at Westminster Hall. The temperature climbed, to eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit by noon and ninety degrees by three o’clock.
Mr Chambers – a former Grenadier Guardsman and parliamentarian of fifty-eight, with thick, dark eyebrows and a genial, knowing manner – continued: ‘Mr Robinson was a civil engineer, and necessarily a good deal from town. He had commenced building a house for himself in the neighbourhood of Reading. When they went thither they renewed their acquaintanceship with the Lanes, and they used often to visit Moor Park together. Still more frequently Mrs Robinson went there alone; and it will be proved that the intimacy between the respondents attracted the attention of some of the patients and servants of the establishment. Mr Robinson, however, remained perfectly convinced of the fidelity of his wife, until at last, in the year 1857, during an illness of Mrs Robinson, he made an accidental discovery of an extraordinary narrative
that at once opened his eyes to the impurity and infidelity of Mrs Robinson.’
Chambers and the other Queen’s Counsel wore black silk gowns, white shirts, white collar-bands, and bristly white wigs that lapped over their sideburns. They sat facing the judges’ bench, with their juniors behind them in gowns of coarse black cloth. A crowd of spectators filled the rest of the courtroom and the gallery that ran round the inside of the dome, the men in jackets, waistcoats and cravats, hats in their hands; the women in lace collars and wide, sprung skirts, their hair parted beneath flaring bonnets. Henry may have been among the spectators, though it is unlikely that either Isabella or Edward attended the trial; they would be kept informed by their lawyers of how the case unfolded. None of the chief protagonists was allowed to appear as a witness.
‘Mrs Robinson had been unwell,’ said Chambers, ‘and her husband then found several diaries in her handwriting which gave a most extravagant narrative of his wife’s impure proceeding. It would seem after Mrs Robinson became acquainted with Mr Lane at Edinburgh she, according to the diary, did not like him very much at first, but in a short time she admired him greatly. She even went into a detailed statement as to how he looked and how he was dressed. There were certain accounts of subsequent meetings at Moor Park, in 1854, which led to the conclusive inference that adultery had been committed.’
A few of the facts in Chambers’s synopsis were wrong. Edward Lane was already married when the Robinsons met him in 1850, and he was by then studying medicine, having qualified as a lawyer three years earlier. Isabella was attracted to him immediately, according to the diary; only later, in pique, did she write sharply about him. And Henry read Isabella’s diary in 1856, not 1857. Mistakes were often introduced in the relay of information before a trial – Henry had given his story to his solicitor, who had then instructed
the barristers – but the error about the date on which he read the diary may have been deliberate. A husband was expected to act swiftly on discovering his wife’s infidelity, and a delay in seeking legal redress could count against him. ‘The first thing which the Court looks to when a charge of adultery is preferred,’ advised a divorce guide of 1860, ‘is the date of the charge relatively to the date of the criminal fact charged, and the date of its becoming known by the party alleging it.’ Any lapse of time would give rise to the possibility that Henry had condoned Isabella’s adultery, or connived with her to undo their marriage. Either would be a bar to divorce.
‘I propose,’ said Chambers, ‘to put in evidence certain diaries written by Mrs Robinson. They will establish Mrs Robinson’s guilt, but I am bound to confess that I entertain some doubt whether your Lordships will consider it sufficient as against Dr Lane.’
At this, Edward Lane’s counsel, William Forsyth QC, got to his feet. He said that he objected to the admission of the diaries as evidence against either of the respondents. ‘If Mrs Robinson is found guilty of adultery, it can only be with Dr Lane,’ argued Forsyth, a long-faced Scot of forty-five, ‘but her admissions or confessions, if the diary is so taken, can be no evidence against him, and therefore ought not to be used at all.’
The issue of the diary’s status as evidence was to vex the court throughout the trial. The rules suggested that it could be used against Mrs Robinson (as a confession) but not against Dr Lane (as an accusation).
The judges conferred, and announced that they considered the diaries admissible, against her if not him. Cresswell explained: ‘If several persons are indicted for burglary or conspiracy, and one of them makes a confession inculpating the rest, against whom there is no other evidence, it is quite true that his statement would not be evidence against anybody else, but could not the man himself be convicted?’
‘No,’ said Forsyth.
In moments of impatience, Cresswell twiddled his spectacles on their stick. Before delivering a crushing put-down he often adopted an expression of unusually attentive politeness. He addressed Forsyth: ‘I would be glad to see any authority for that statement from the learned counsel.’
Forsyth took his point no further and Isabella’s counsel, Dr Robert Phillimore, quickly abandoned his own plan to contest the introduction of the diary. He rose to say that he had been about to object to it on Mrs Robinson’s behalf, ‘but after the expression of opinion I have just heard from the court I will not proceed’. The defence lawyers’ first strategy – to destroy the main evidence against their clients by eliminating the diary – had collapsed.
Chambers called for Isabella’s journals to be produced for the court. He asked the clerk to read from them, but first warned that their contents might embarrass innocent parties. ‘The diary contains the names of two young men whom Mrs Robinson apparently endeavoured to corrupt,’ he said, deftly introducing an image of his client’s wife as a predatory and ageing seductress. ‘My impression is that her endeavours did not prove successful, although I will admit that it is quite possible they did. She accused them of coldness and restraint, and a desire to escape from her; and therefore I will not, if I can avoid it, introduce their names, especially as they seem to have been young men.’
With this, Chambers indicated to the clerk of the court the relevant passages in the three volumes of the diary dating from 1850, 1854 and 1855. At a long table just below the judges’ bench, the clerk read aloud a short extract about Isabella Robinson’s first encounter with Edward Lane in 1850, another about a poem that she had written under the title of ‘Spirit Discord’, and another about the ‘preponderance of Amativeness’ that she identified in her character.
Then he turned to the entries on which Henry’s case rested.
The first was that of 7 October 1854, in which Isabella and Edward first kissed among the ferns: ‘Oh, God! I had never hoped to see this hour, or to have any part of my part of love returned. But so it was.’ The clerk moved on to the extract of 10 October, which described the ‘bliss’ Isabella experienced with Edward in a carriage taking her from Moor Park to Ash railway station. ‘I leaned back at last in silent joy,’ read the clerk, ‘in those arms I had so often dreamed of.’ The final words from this entry, about the doctor’s ‘unselfish’ love-making, were omitted. Since the passage was read out at the behest of Henry’s lawyers, perhaps it was Henry who chose to delete this last clause, which implied that his own sexual technique was less satisfactory than that of Edward Lane. There may have been a limit to how far he would humiliate himself in his efforts to get rid of his wife.
The last entry the clerk read that day was from 14 October (in fact, the passage was written in October 1855, though this was not made clear in court) and described how Edward seduced Isabella in the house at Moor Park. ‘The doctor … caressed me, and tempted me, and finally, after some delay, we adjourned to the next room and spent a quarter of an hour in blissful excitement.’ This entry included the line in which Edward advised Isabella to ‘try to obviate consequences’, a suggestion that had moved her to tears.
The Sunday newspaper the
Observer
declined to publish the diary extracts, not just because they were lewd, but also because they were written vividly enough to excite a reader: ‘it would be quite improper to print them in a family newspaper’, explained the editor. ‘They contain admissions in all but the plainest terms of the criminality imputed to the unfortunate lady in question, and they are moreover penned with a degree of descriptive ability which renders them most dangerous reading. Under such circumstances it has been considered the wiser course to omit them altogether.’ The idea that certain kinds of writing were dangerous – especially
to young women – was commonplace: usually the culprits were French novels, but Isabella Robinson’s diary showed that a middle-class Englishwoman could assault her own decency in prose.