Inconvenient People (16 page)

The Friends sometimes rushed in too hastily to offer assistance where it was not wanted, and this tended to undermine the support they had gathered. In 1848, one Mr Pulverstoft, detained at Northampton Hospital, and a Mr Dixon, at Northwoods Asylum near Bristol, were infuriated to learn that the Society had raised their cases with the Lord Chancellor and the Commissioners in Lunacy, respectively. They had not been seeking intervention, but Gilbert Bolden had taken up the cudgels on their behalf anyway. Bolden also had to make an embarrassing volte face in the case of Captain Jonathan Childe, whom he had believed to be sane, until Childe repeatedly insisted – from his room at Hayes Park Asylum, Middlesex – that Queen Victoria was deeply in love with him. The
Medical Times
remarked: ‘The members of this Society are apt to see things through a hazy and distorted medium . . . They have wandered about the country, prepared to lend a willing ear to the idle story of every lunatic they could meet with; they have pestered the Home Secretary, and ever and anon obtruded their opinions and schemes upon such members of the Upper and Lower House as would listen to them.’ The public simply did not want these matters forced upon its attention, continued the editorial:
‘The hand of humanity will always draw a veil over such a domestic calamity.’

One of the governors of Northampton Hospital wrote of John Perceval: ‘His sympathies with the insane are of a very morbid character and his judgment to the last, feeble and weak.’ Mr Perceval admitted that he had suffered relapses in his mental condition, with which he had periodically had to battle, and that this had depleted his energies in the battle for England’s lunatics. For this he blamed the Brislington House operation on his temporal artery, holding to the concept that lunacy might be brought about by poor circulation of the blood in the vessels of the brain. But these vicious attacks on him and the Society took no account of how reasonable and lucid the Friends mostly were. In a letter to the Home Office, Mr Perceval took particular exception to the accusation that his plan was to liberate all madmen:

This letter was written in the midst of the biggest coup that Mr Perceval was to pull off – freeing a man after fourteen years of false imprisonment and in the process overturning five centuries of self-inspection at Bethlehem Hospital. While inspecting the conditions there, Mr Perceval came across Professor Edward Peithman, who had been certificated following a clumsy attempt to interest fellow Saxon Prince Albert in his schemes for educational reform. Failing to understand that England did not offer the same open-access approach to royalty as the German states, the professor believed that he could simply wander into Buckingham Palace and await an appointment with the German prince. The police were called to the palace on 29
June 1840 and Professor Peithman was escorted to the Whitehall office of the Home Secretary, the Marquess of Normanby. The professor had in advance of his palace visit sent the eleven volumes of his collected works, as well as his testimonials and diplomas, to Prince Albert. The Home Secretary concluded that this constituted serious harassment of His Royal Highness. Moreover, the professor’s intrusion into Buckingham Palace had occurred just nineteen days after the Queen had had a pistol brandished at her by one Edward Oxford, who was later to be found not guilty at his trial, by virtue of insanity. The Home Secretary (rather than the Commissioners in Lunacy) retained responsibility for all criminal and dangerous lunatics, and could himself recommend the incarceration of an individual deemed to be dangerous. As Peithman was treated as a pauper because of his lack of funds, only one medical certificate of lunacy was required, the other to be signed by a magistrate. A London magistrate and a doctor, informed by the Home Secretary himself that Peithman’s action had seemed that of a dangerous man, duly signed the papers during a hearing that was held behind closed doors, committing the professor to Bethlehem. And there he stayed for years, until Mr Perceval happened to drop by.

Bethlehem was at this time situated in St George’s Field, Southwark. The building was poorly maintained, and Professor Peithman’s cell, in which he spent twelve hours a day, was just eight feet square, gloomy and airless; he had little access to drinking water or washing facilities. Fluent in five languages, able to read Latin and Greek and knowledgeable in all the sciences, the professor was considered by the Bedlam officials to be harmless and tranquil, although his case notes do also show that he was described as ‘uncouth’, ‘untidy’ and with occasional ‘indecent propensities’; three of his keepers later testified that they considered him quite sane. But his many petitions to the Home Secretary were taken as proof of the professor’s ongoing unsoundness of mind. Meanwhile, attempts upon the life of Queen Victoria continued throughout the 1840s, creating a climate in which Peithman’s bid for freedom was unlikely to succeed. The Commissioners of the Metropolitan Police complained to the Home Secretary that their manpower and budget were being put under strain by the unpopularity of the royal couple. In 1848 Scotland Yard devoted many man-hours to keeping under
surveillance one Lieutenant Mundell, who stalked the streets with a loaded pistol, openly intent on revenge upon the Queen as he believed her to be instrumental in blocking his promotion. Unlike Peithman, Mundell
was
dangerous, but the police and the Commissioners in Lunacy had failed to persuade the Home Office to take action against him; one of the loopholes in the 1845 legislation was the lack of a clause empowering the police to detain a ‘wandering lunatic’ who was not a pauper and who did not belong to the raving variety of madman. Eventually, a relative of Mundell’s was persuaded to sign a lunacy order consigning him to private care. This was a shambolic situation, but one that did not surprise Mr Perceval: in his view, pistol-packing querulants such as Lieutenant Mundell, Daniel M’Naughten and John Bellingham could roam Whitehall for weeks, seething with grudges against royalty and government ministers, while a harmless eccentric like Professor Peithman had been instantly thrown into Bedlam.

Mr Perceval had only accidentally come across Peithman, during an 1850 pastoral visit to Bedlam patient Arthur Legent Pearce, who had been confined ten years earlier following a violent assault upon his wife. After obtaining an interview with the professor, Mr Perceval decided to campaign to release Peithman as well as Pearce. ‘My heart bled at the confinement of a man of so elegant a mind,’ he wrote of Peithman. An old friend of the professor’s had written to Perceval stating that those who did not know him might see ‘a certain eccentricity or abruptness of manner . . . but geniuses are proverbially eccentric’. Perceval believed Peithman was ‘a harmless innocent’ and had been incarcerated because in the mid-1830s he had offended an illustrious Dublin family. Peithman was educating the sons of the second Lord Cloncurry (Valentine Lawless) at their home at Lyons Castle, Country Kildare. Peithman had been found the position by the Marquess of Normanby, Lord Lieutenant in Ireland at the time. When a maid in the household had become pregnant by the eldest son, Peithman had refused to take the family’s side and to lie to a magistrate after the maid threatened to make public her dismissal. The Marquess of Normanby went on to become the very Home Secretary who spirited Peithman into Bedlam. Many who came to know of the Peithman case smelt an enormous rat.

Mr Perceval’s agitations at last bore fruit, though the correspondence, held at The National Archives, reveals the contempt in which he was held by certain Whitehall men: ‘No answer, he is half crazy himself’, scribbled Lord Palmerston on the back of one plea from Mr Perceval. In February 1854 the Commissioners released Peithman on a three-month probationary trial, and he went to stay near Mr Perceval and his family in their out-of-London home in Herne Bay, Kent. Unfortunately, the professor wasted no time in writing to Albert and Victoria, explaining what had happened to him. And when he received a reply from Prince Albert expressing sympathy but stating that he had no powers to effect any compensation, Peithman one day walked into the chapel of Buckingham Palace during Sunday service to talk to the Prince. He then found himself back in custodial care, this time in the Middlesex County Asylum at Hanwell.

The nation took the side of the professor in the ensuing kerfuffle, and John Perceval explained that in the German states, royalty, ministers and all authority figures welcomed deputations into their presence – you could even thrust a petition into an important person’s carriage, or buttonhole them at their place of worship, he argued. Professor Peithman simply could not understand that in England, the land of liberty, power was not quite so approachable. Mr Perceval said that many English people believed that there was a growing isolation and arrogance on the part of the powerful, and indeed,
Punch
ran a piece about the professor, entitled ‘What on Earth Has He Done?’ The article stated that ‘several of what the authorities might call “very impertinent questions” crowd upon us. Firstly, What has Dr Peithman done? Secondly, Why send him to a lunatic asylum? And thirdly, If it was proper to send him there, why take him out again?’ Moreover, the fact that the Home Secretary had retained exclusive powers to order asylum detention for a suspected violent lunatic in a modern quasi-democracy was a horrible thought to Tory and Liberal Lunatic Friend alike. For many, it raised the spectre of the infamous
lettre de cachet
system of the French
ancien régime
, whereby without trial or tribunal a person deemed an enemy of the state could be confined to prison (and, less commonly, an asylum) by the simple order contained in a private letter from a minister.

Testimonials to Peithman’s sanity poured into the Home Office, and the Middlesex magistrates themselves insisted that he be liberated.
In late August 1854, Peithman was released from Hanwell, on the condition that he leave the country immediately in the company of Mr Perceval, who would ensure that he had everything he needed on his journey and that he would be reunited with his family, who were now settled in the Rhineland town of Elberfield.

The requirement that a harmless and extremely unworldly man should be forced to leave the country caused greater furore in the press. It meant sweeping under the carpet a dreadful miscarriage of justice, as the chief Middlesex magistrate, Reverend Dr J. A. Emerton, wrote to the Home Secretary:

The Germans were furious too, and great indignation was expressed that a Prussian subject should have been so treated, and denied redress. Englishmen who had come to official harm in the German states were recompensed and their grievances looked into. Albion must explain herself, Oberbürgermeister Jochman told the Prussian Upper Chamber. But Albion didn’t. On these matters Albion didn’t even explain herself to her own citizens. Professor Peithman received neither apology nor compensation.