Inconvenient People (19 page)

Ripley also visited the Commissioners in Lunacy, and as a result of his agitation, Lord Shaftesbury sent a memorandum to the Home Secretary, who in turn contacted Metropolitan Police Commissioner Richard Mayne, who sent a ‘confidential person’ down to Spaxton to investigate the activities and beliefs of the Abode of Love. The secret agent read his notes to the Commissioners in Lunacy on his return; these have not survived, but whatever was in them failed to cause alarm, since no further action was taken. The Commissioners in Lunacy wrote to Ripley apologising that they had no powers to interfere any further in the matter but assuring him that Prince and his sect were under ‘the consideration of the government’. Again, no paperwork survives to tell us any more about this surveillance and assessment.

In the meantime, Thomas Cobbe, the brother of Clara’s husband William, had also travelled from London to snoop around the Abode of Love in an attempt to gather evidence that could be used to have the wealthy William put into an asylum – or at least to find a legal means of preventing the sect from getting any more of his money. The doctors Thomas consulted on his return to London advised that
William appeared to be suffering from ‘monomania’, his partial insanity limited to religious matters, but urged caution in attempting to have him certified, and Thomas proceeded no further. However, he too called in on the Commissioners in Lunacy to ask their advice. Their response is not known, but it is noteworthy that both Ripley and Cobbe felt able to make face-to-face contact with a Whitehall body in order to discuss intimate family matters; the urgency and distress of the issue of insanity seems to have broken down the traditional gulf between governmental departments and officials and members of the public.

Dr Arthur Stillwell, meanwhile, was determined to ‘re-cover’ Louisa, to return her alienated self – the person she had been before meeting Prince in 1843. After the first few months Louisa was permitted to go out on her own in the immediate locality of the asylum; such outings allowed Dr Stillwell to gauge the extent to which patients had recovered their wits and to see whether they could ‘conduct themselves in the world’, as he put it. He also asked the Commissioners in Lunacy to come to Moorcroft House to interview Louisa. They spoke to her at length but were concerned that they were unable to ‘open up’ her mind on the nature of her religious beliefs. All she would reply was, ‘I believe in the same God as you do.’ They were additionally alarmed at the bitterness she expressed about Emily and about her non-Agapemonite family members. She stated no other delusional opinions except those regarding Prince and the Agapemone; but – as the Edward Davies case also shows – many alienists insisted in these years that monomania was characterised by insanity in one area only, with the rest of the mind seemingly unaffected. The Commissioners decided not to order her release.

Keeping a keen eye on the Nottidge case were John Perceval and the Alleged Lunatics’ Friends. Sympathising entirely with Louisa’s stubbornness about her religious beliefs, Mr Perceval wrote that she had every reason not to want to open up to the Commissioners, who, she had rightly guessed, would be unable to enter into any meaningful discussion of doctrinal matters. Louisa had described Prince to the Commissioners as ‘the tabernacle in which the spirit of God dwelt’, and in this she had been correct, wrote Mr Perceval to a national newspaper: St Paul had stated that each Christian must regard other Christians as a tabernacle of God. She had said that she was immortal – well, that too was entirely in accordance with
Scripture, and anyone holding such a view ought not to be condemned to a madhouse. Mr Perceval had himself, after all, seen close up the intolerance shown to the Irvingite sect, of which his brother, Spencer, was now a senior member.

Eight more interviews with the Commissioners in Lunacy would take place over the coming months; all resulted in the declaration that Louisa was of unsound mind.

Louisa appears to have been infuriated and terrified in equal measure, but she was convinced that another life awaited her, with her true family, at the Agapemone. Now in her mid-forties, she had been controlled by her parents all her life; even her finances were still being administered by her brother-in-law. As an ageing spinster, she was considered to be little more than the refuse of a society that worshipped domesticity, motherhood, moneyed leisure, physical beauty and fecundity. Prince and the enclosed little world he had created presented another way of life – a rival set of values that could allow her to be treasured, not scorned. It had given her a vigorous new sense of purpose and usefulness: Prince had encouraged her to go out proselytising and collecting funds, at Weymouth and Brighton, and she had proved very capable in this role. Her spiritual family at Four Forks (the community now numbered about sixty converts) passionately wanted her to be among them; even more importantly, Louisa could not bear separation from her beloved, favourite sister, Harriet. Most significantly, perhaps, the charismatic Prince seems to have excited emotions within her she could not recall ever having had before. And the money she wanted to hand over to him would be placed into communal funds, from which all the Agapemonites would draw whatever they needed, and even whatever, within reason, they desired. Her mother seemed keen that her father’s bequest should be eaten away slowly, paying for long years of unjust, lonely, shameful incarceration at Moorcroft House; she herself was footing the bill for the iniquity that had been practised upon her. Her mother was now revealed to be chief among those ‘enemies of God’ of whom Prince had warned her so often.

Emily knew that she had used extreme measures to bring her beloved child to heel – but what choice did she have when she had seen her corrupted and exploited by diabolical people? Having lost
Clara and Harriet and, for a while, Agnes and Cornelia, to the sect, Emily was determined to use modern medical advances to cure Louisa of her religious delusion. And she was determined that Louisa’s £6,000 should not go to Prince. In the meantime, Emily had to try to keep the Nottidge name out of the newspapers. If her daughters’ association with improper heretics should become known, Emily would end her days in disgrace and ostracism and her family would bear the shame and damage to their reputation for generations.

On 6 January 1848, after fourteen months of detention, Louisa asked Dr Stillwell if she could have use of a carriage to visit the doctor’s wife, who lived at Laurel Lodge, not far from the asylum. Her request was granted, but Louisa instead made her way to a small family hotel in Cavendish Square, central London. She then notified Clara’s husband, William Cobbe, that he was to come and collect her and bring her back to the Agapemone. When Cobbe arrived at the hotel they spoke for many hours. No one at Spaxton had known of her fate, following her disappearance from Waterman’s cottage, so Louisa told Cobbe about life at Moorcroft House, that she believed her kinsmen only wanted her money, and that as soon as she was free, she would give it all to the Agapemone. But it was not to be. When the pair arrived at Paddington station to start their journey to Somerset, Louisa noticed one of Moorcroft House’s attendants walking towards them on the platform. Someone must have notified Dr Stillwell of Louisa’s arrival in London and the doctor may have guessed that she would plan to travel to Somerset by train. Louisa was returned to Moorcroft House, distressed but not putting up a struggle.

When Cobbe returned to the Agapemone and told the brethren of her incarceration, senior members of the sect began to agitate for her formal discharge. Cobbe and Harriet’s husband, Reverend Lewis Price, insisted that Louisa be re-examined, and on 9 May 1848 two more Commissioners came to Moorcroft. Their verdict was that although she had spoken ‘in a very rational manner’, she was nevertheless ‘of unsound mind’. Louisa had refused to talk to them about religious matters. Indeed, she later explained that she knew that so long as she gave honest answers about her beliefs, she would remain in the asylum. Not wanting to be dishonest, she kept quiet.

Emily implored the Commissioners not to allow Louisa’s release,
because ‘she worships a false god’. Agnes told them, ‘If my sister were discharged, she would return to Mr Prince and would do anything he told her. He is far from a moral man . . . I believe that when I was one of Mr Prince’s followers I was not in my right mind.’ Edmund Nottidge, meanwhile, not in the best of emotional health himself, swore that around Somerset ‘Mr Prince is generally reputed to be and believed to be insane’.

Dr Stillwell thought that Louisa was ‘as mad on 9 May when the Commissioners saw her as she had been at other times. Persons labouring under religious delusions usually become gloomy and of low spirits, and are the more likely to commit an injury upon themselves by suicide.’ He could, though, see that Louisa’s physical health was declining as a result of her detention – she was significantly thinner and more wan-looking than upon her arrival eighteen months earlier. The only delusion she had ever expressed was on religious matters, and this monomania did not appear to prevent her from being competent to manage her own affairs; therefore, he now said, he agreed with the Commissioners (with one objector among their number), who strongly recommended, on 15 May 1848, Louisa’s ‘temporary’ removal from confinement for reasons of health. The Act of 1845 had allowed such a discretionary discharge for non-violent or non-disruptive patients. But Louisa’s case was filled with contradiction: she was declared to be delusional yet able to cope with everyday matters and to be rational most of the time. This was the bind that a diagnosis of monomania often created. So should monomaniacs be incarcerated, or left to live within the community? Adding to the confusion, Louisa had been found to have suicidal thoughts but was set at liberty in case she harmed herself if she were forced to stay in the asylum. Muddying the waters even further, Bryan Waller Procter, a Commissioner with seventeen years’ experience, declared that the reason no formal lunacy inquisition had been mounted in the Nottidge case was that Louisa’s illness had been deemed ‘temporary’ in nature; but this contradicted his colleagues’ findings that her persistent religious delusion was unchanging and unchangeable. Louisa’s case had brought to the surface the highly unsatisfactory elements of the monomania theory of insanity.

Not surprisingly, upon release Louisa abandoned for ever ‘the enemies of God’ and fled to the Agapemone, where on 29 May she transferred all her stock holdings to Henry James Prince – £5,728 7
s
7
d
worth of Three
Per Cent government consols – without consulting Frederick Ripley, her trustee. He did not contest this, perhaps unwilling to insist upon his custodial role in her finances in such controversial circumstances.

The Abode of Love that she installed herself in, for the final ten years of her life, was now a complete little world in itself. Its relations with its neighbours had deteriorated: the walls were heightened, and bloodhounds were kept on the premises, to deter intruders. A siege mentality was developing. As Reverend Starky explained: ‘We have no business with the world, nor has the world anything more to do with us. We have no saints. We simply give ourselves to God, of whom this mansion is the seat. At yonder gates we leave the world behind; its words, its laws, its passions, all of which we hold to be the devil’s kingdom.’

It is not easy to winnow fact from rumour in the story of the Abode of Love. The paucity of babies and children at Four Forks gave rise to wild tales of infanticide and burial beneath the complex’s spectacular lawns; or, less wildly, it was attributed to the forcible separation of man and wife that was demanded by Prince. The
Bridgwater Times
(always hostile to the sect) would speculate on 29 January 1852 that the Agapemonites ‘must be cursed with barrenness, or the whereabouts of their progeny shrouded in mystery’. The practice of burying deceased members in the garden was perfectly legal but added to the sense that something awful was going on behind the walls. Indeed, the death of one female Agapemonite in 1851 was not reported to the authorities for a full month, and such refusal to deal with the outside world intensified suspicion about the secretive community.

More prosaically, the Agapemone was resented for its lack of charitable activity. Even on the Sabbath, Prince would lead his followers in a cavalcade around the narrow lanes of Charlinch, in the coach and four he had bought from the estate of the late dowager Queen Adelaide (a presumptuously materialistic purchase for such a spiritual man); but the Agapemonites failed to fulfil their expected role in the local economy of providing cash donations to the local poor, or at least coal, food, clothing or nursing assistance. Prince was said to have been attacked by a mob in his carriage and could have been killed had not the farmers who had instigated the assault called off the attackers.

Louisa enjoyed sailing through the countryside in the coach, accompanied by various Agapemonites astride beautifully kempt horses (Prince’s own mount was called Glory) and a pack of fine dogs. But, as the eldest member of the Four Forks community, she took no part in the scandalous games of hockey that took place in the grounds, in which both men and women participated. The yokels who stood up on ladders and branches to peer over the wall saw this activity as unnatural; it could not be right that mature, moneyed men and women should wield large sticks in pursuit of a small ball – running, shouting, sweating, laughing. They even did it on Sundays. (Though people had been hitting a ball, and each other, with curved sticks for centuries, what we recognise today as field hockey was relatively new to Britain in the mid-nineteenth century: the first official club was formed in London in 1849. Throughout the Nottidge case, hockey would have to be explained to witnesses, and one had it described to him as ‘a game something like football’.) On the
evening of 5 May 1849 – one year after Louisa had returned to the Abode of Love – labourer Isaac Thomas and his friends clambered into positions that gave a clear view over the wall and saw forty men and women playing hockey. One of Isaac Thomas’s cronies, or Thomas himself, threw a stone, which hit, but did not injure, Prince. Twenty male Agapemonites then rushed out of the Abode’s gate (hockey sticks in hand), and three of them beat Isaac Thomas so badly that his skull was visible to the surgeon who later attended him. In their defence at the ensuing trial, the Agapemonites said that for many months they had endured the stoning of their chapel windows, stones being lobbed over the wall into the gardens, and the persistent shouting of obscenities; they believed that Isaac Thomas was the ringleader. The court’s verdict was that the Agapemonites should have requested the aid of the law and not taken their own defensive action. Damages of £11 were imposed upon them, but since Isaac Thomas had been seeking £20, it seems the court had some sympathy with the Agapemone’s predicament.