Authors: Kate Summerscale
B007M836FY EBOK (19 page)
On 3 December 1857, the Consistory Court at Doctors’ Commons, an ancient yard next to St Paul’s Cathedral, was presented with Henry Robinson’s petition for a divorce
a mensa et thoro
– a divorce from bed and board, or a judicial separation. His evidence, which was heard in private, consisted of the diary extracts and the testimony of two Moor Park servants. Henry’s petition was one of the last, perhaps the very last, to be heard under the old system. Isabella, as she had promised Edward, did not resist the suit. Her counsel rose to say that he felt that he could offer no opposition on her behalf. The court granted Henry his separation and
The Times
reported the case in a few
lines the next day, making no mention of the circumstances of the adultery or the name of the alleged adulterer.
Under the terms of her marriage settlement, Isabella kept her private income after the separation, though she no longer accrued as much interest on her funds. An economic crisis in late 1857 had reduced the value of many investments. She now received about £390 a year, which after Alfred’s expenses of £150 left her, she said, with ‘scarcely enough to live as a gentlewoman’ – £300 a year was considered the minimum required to run a middle-class household with one servant. While living with Henry, Isabella had been among the most affluent of her class; now she had almost dropped out of it altogether. Henry hoped to reduce her income still further.
Henry was staying in Balmore House that month, with Otway and Stanley, who were home for the holidays, and with one of his two illegitimate daughters, whom he planned to introduce to society in Reading. On 12 December, nine days after securing his separation from Isabella, he wrote to Robert Chambers to give him permission to divulge the details of the diary to their friends in Edinburgh. Chambers told the story of Isabella’s ‘impassioned and disgusting’ escapades to George Combe, who relayed it to his friend Sir James Clark.
Clark, who had treated Keats in Rome during his final illness, was one of Queen Victoria’s favourite physicians; it was he who had arranged for Combe to read the heads of the Royal children. Combe apologised profusely to him for having introduced him to the inhabitants of Moor Park, adding that though he had no doubt that Isabella was to blame for the affair, the doctor would ‘pay a sad penalty’. Combe noted that Henry Robinson was said not to have ‘reverenced the conjugal vow’ himself.
Edward was in London for Christmas, in a six-storey Georgian house in Devonshire Place, Marylebone. With him were his wife, his motherin-law, his children and his three brothers-in-law. George Drysdale was now a practising physician, having received
his medical degree in Edinburgh in 1855, and Charles was a medical student at University College London, having abandoned his career as an engineer in the same year.
On 28 December 1857, Edward learnt that the rumour of his misconduct was abroad, and he wrote to Combe the next day with a ‘full, flat, peremptory, & indignant denial’ of the affair with Isabella. He claimed that he could not account for the diary entries about him – Isabella must have been ‘half out of her mind’, he said. She had not resisted the judicial separation, he told Combe, because ‘she had done
me
an incalculable injury, & she determined that, at whatever cost, she wd not add to it by mixing up my name publicly with such a scandal’. Two days later – on 1 January 1858 – Lady Drysdale followed this up with her own letter to the Combes: ‘You will believe my solemn words when I declare that Lane is most perfectly innocent – nay that when Mary and I often urged the necessity of having the unfortunate woman … as she had such an unhappy home, Lane was always loath to yield to our entreaties considering her a bore.’
Edward went to Edinburgh to defend himself in person, catching the express train that left London at 9.15 a.m. on Saturday 2 January, and reached the Scottish capital at about 10 p.m. The next morning, he spent two and a half hours talking to George Combe at his house in Melville Street. Edward fiercely protested his innocence. Isabella’s diary entries were fantasies, he said: her religious doubts had thrown her ‘clean off the rails of common sense & common propriety’. In her journal’s pages ‘fact and fiction were recklessly jumbled together’ and ‘a loose rein was too frequently given to a prurient & diseased imagination’. He claimed that he had not flirted with Isabella in Edinburgh; in fact, he had always taken a book with him on their carriage rides to the coast in order to have a means of escape from her ‘facile’ conversation. ‘I never wrote a line to Mrs R,’ he said, ‘which might not be proclaimed at the market cross.’ The
doctor said that he was eager to sue Henry for defamation, but his solicitor had advised him against doing anything that would publicise the story, since his reputation ‘would be ruined equally by success as by failure’.
Edward’s indignation was genuine. Isabella’s experience of their relationship probably bore little resemblance to his own. The sentimental terms in which she recounted their trysts, the passion and longing that she attributed to him, may indeed have struck him as fantasies, derived more from romantic literature than reality. In the rhapsodic rhetoric of some of her diary entries she may even have implied that they had sexual intercourse when they did not. She had also been careless: by writing her diary and leaving it lying around, she seemed to have wantonly inflicted pain on him and his family. Edward’s only recourse was to pit his word against the diary’s words, to insist that Isabella had made it all up. He turned on his former friend. She was ‘a rhapsodical & vaporing fool’, he wrote, ‘a vile & crazy woman’ given to ‘moonshine lucubrations’.
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’, ‘underhand & 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.’