Inconvenient People (25 page)

Allegations about the filth at Belgrave Terrace, Mrs Cumming’s vile temper and bad language, her neglect of her husband, her accusations of his ‘gallantries’ with his female attendants, and her love of brandy were made by six servants and two of the captain’s former nurses. Elizabeth Browne, an elderly nurse, testified that during her nine weeks at Belgrave Terrace, at the start of 1846, Mrs Cumming had been cruel to the captain, that she kept her paper cash in her boots and slept with her boots on. Browne said she had been accused by her employer of impropriety with the captain. But when Commissioner Barlow asked Mrs Cumming if she had made such an allegation, Mrs Cumming replied, to the public’s great amusement, ‘Oh no, gentlemen, look at her face – it is not likely.’

Watching as this torrent of calumny flowed at Kennington was West End solicitor Robert Haynes. When he learned that Mrs Cumming was legally unrepresented, he made himself known to her at the close of the first day’s proceedings, offering her his services.

On Tuesday, 1 September the jury went to see the state of 1 Belgrave Terrace for themselves. It was indeed filthy and full of strewn rubbish, and Mrs Cumming’s own rooms had been filled with brandy bottles. The jury was horrified by the second-storey room that Mrs Cumming had used as a loft for her pet birds. Later that day, the Commissioner announced that there would be one week’s adjournment, so that Mrs Cumming could belatedly instruct counsel. She had been impressed by solicitor Haynes’s approach, and when proceedings began again on Tuesday the 8th, she began to take a more active role in the inquiry,
although anxiety had prevented her from sleeping during the adjournment and she was now eating very little.

Dr Millingen came to the tavern to repeat his assertion that Mrs Cumming was suffering from monomania. ‘I found her delusions unbending,’ he told the inquiry, running through all of Mrs Cumming’s angry accusations about her family, lawyers, the captain’s nurses and certain servants. When Millingen had told her at York House that an inquisition was to be held, she said of her family, ‘Here is another piece of villainy.’ Millingen told the jury – and this tale would be repeated many times against Mrs Cumming – that on viewing the laid-out corpse of the Inces’ dead young son she had accused John Ince of having murdered the boy and then painted and varnished the face, to disguise the true nature of his death. Mrs Cumming would later claim that what she had actually remarked out loud was that the dead child had been made up to look like a Regent Street tailor’s shop mannequin, waxen and doll-like – she had called it ‘a very handsome corpse’. John Ince may have added his own varnish to the tale.

Mrs Cumming was then questioned by her own counsel, Robert Haynes, and all the newspaper reporters present at the Horns hearings noted the lucidity of her answers and her impressive composure in such a mortifying environment. She spoke for an hour and a half, during which she was able to give a detailed account of her properties in Wales; repeated that she considered Ince, Hooper and Dangerfield to be dishonest; and claimed that she had always retained affection for her favourite child, Catherine. Yes, she had used far too strong language in her condemnations of Thomasine, but her eldest daughter and the trumpeter had behaved very badly towards her. And yes, unhappily, her late husband had been faithless throughout their marriage, had always kept low company and acted licentiously; the hired nurses themselves had complained to her of his behaviour when they came to her to give notice of their resignation. As for her pigeons and fowls, they were simply her hobby, and, along with the cats, produced no noxious smells in the house.

A succession of friends, business associates, servants and one of the captain’s nurses next spoke in Mrs Cumming’s defence, contradicting in detail the allegations of violence, rudeness, filth and eccentricity. The jury, press and public were told of a wife who showed great restraint in the face of her husband’s abusive and lewd behaviour; they
heard that he had regularly shouted ‘Bitch!’ and ‘Whore!’ at her and had claimed that Thomasine was not his child. The witnesses reported Mrs Cumming’s constant attempts to keep the house clean in spite of her husband’s love of squalor; the captain’s pawning of her personal effects in order to obtain cash for drink; her attempts to ensure that he ate regularly and well; and her touching love of animals, which were pampered but did not cause mess at Belgrave Terrace.

There is only one explanation for these two utterly contrasting sets of evidence: bribery. There can be no reconciling of the oppositions in the Cumming case unless we assume that certain witnesses had been induced to tailor their evidence either to suit the Ince–Hooper axis, or to ensure Mrs Cumming’s liberty. The Hoopers and the Inces had £30,000 to gain from depriving their mother of control of her estate, while Mrs Cumming had a deep pocket with which to tempt witnesses to refute her family’s allegations. Immersion in the surviving written accounts suggests that the case against Mrs Cumming was got-up. A sense of orchestration rises off the page – the pat-ness of the anti-Cumming camp and the mysterious visits paid to the Inces and Hoopers by certain servants point to a conspiracy. An unloved mother could have her uncontrollable mouth, extreme moodiness and periods of confusion – caused by an unhappy marriage, illness and old age – turned against her for financial gain. All that was needed were medical men happy to pathologise Mrs Cumming’s eccentricities and strong opinions. And fortunately for the Hoopers and Inces, Drs Millingen, Morison, Wilmot, Johnson and Driver, together with Commissioners Campbell and Prichard, testified that Mrs Cumming’s intense dislike of her family was so unnatural as to be a symptom of insanity.

James Cowles Prichard was a scientist of extraordinary intellectual gifts, being an early, pre-Darwinian evolutionary thinker, and in his alienist work developing, from the mid-1830s, the concept of ‘moral insanity’ – what we would today describe in terms of ‘personality disorder’, or any psychological or behavioural disorder that leaves rationality intact. The concept of moral insanity had deep roots in both philosophical and medical thinking, and in France at the turn of the century, Philippe Pinel and his student, Jean-Etienne Esquirol, had made huge advances in exploring ‘non-intellectual insanity’, or
manie sans délire
– mania without delusion. But Prichard explored
the idea, and theorised it, through clinical observation. In his
Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders Affecting the Mind
(1835), he described moral insanity as:

Prichard’s ideas framed much of the discussion of Mrs Cumming’s mental state.

Others believed that any deviation from maternal affection was a strong indicator of moral insanity. To a lesser extent, lack of familial warmth in a male could also be made into a case of unsoundness of mind, as Edward Davies had found to his cost. Prichard admitted that the borderline between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ was a perilous one to try to define with exactitude; he was responding to those who worried that the concept of moral insanity could bring within its remit all kinds of unorthodox behaviour. Other critics of his theory stated that there could be no emotional disturbance without some degree of intellectual disturbance. Still others wondered whether moral insanity was a transient condition; or whether it was the prelude to what would inevitably become full-blown intellectual collapse.

With regard to Mrs Cumming, there was a more mundane refutation of Prichard’s view: that there was nothing unnatural or morbid about her dislike of her children because they had behaved so very badly towards her. And unfortunately for the Goneril and Regan of this case, Robert Haynes had drummed up no fewer than five doctors, who examined Mrs Cumming at York House and were willing to go on record that they found her to be of unusually sound mind for an aged lady who had suffered so much anxiety and ill health.

The newspaper reporters soon came over to Mrs Cumming’s side; she was sparky and witty and highly quotable. Could it have been this Fleet Street change of heart, together with Mrs Cumming’s perfectly
reasonable demeanour as a witness, that ensured the hearing would not go as the Hoopers and Inces wished? Or was it the announcement by Mrs Cumming’s counsel that an important new witness was on his or her way from France to testify? On 22 September, after an adjournment of a fortnight, Mrs Cumming entered the room at the Horns ‘gay and smiling and evidently in high spirits’, according to one newspaper reporter. Both sets of counsel announced that the inquisition was being abandoned, and that ‘an arrangement’ between the interested parties had been agreed. This was unprecedented. Commissioner Barlow, confessing himself flummoxed as to how to proceed, said he needed to have a word with the Lord Chancellor. Mrs Cumming’s counsel declared that, pending a final decision, Mrs Cumming could no longer be detained at York House. On the announcement of the restoration of her liberty, Mrs Cumming was immediately surrounded by a crowd of cheering friends and well-wishers, who bore her away to a carriage.

The inquisition had cost her over £5,000 (the cost of Edward Davies’ lunacy hearing), but had still not cleared her of the allegation that she was of unsound mind and unfit to manage her affairs. The deal that had been worked out by the rival lawyers – which would stop the ongoing expense of the inquiry and (in the touchingly naive view of the Lord Chancellor and the Lunacy Commissioners) help to repair the fractured family – was to place Mrs Cumming’s property under the care of three trustees. One trustee would be appointed by Benjamin Hooper and John Ince; another by Commissioner Barlow; and the third by Mrs Cumming’s friend of twenty years’ standing, Stephen Hutchinson, a civil engineer. Mrs Cumming was to have sole use of her money during her lifetime, but after her death, one-third was to pass to Catherine, one-third to Thomasine and one-third to whoever Mrs Cumming wished; if the latter failed to be nominated, this third would automatically pass to her two daughters. It was stipulated that neither son-in-law was to have any control of the funds left to their wives.

The
Sun
newspaper editorialised that the Cumming compromise was an extremely worrying new feature of lunacy procedure:

The Lancet
was more terse: ‘A compromise with a lunatic!’ By being asked to sign a legal agreement, Mrs Cumming was being deemed to be of sound mind, yet the agreement itself did not declare her to be sane and therefore competent to sign.

Why had she been smiling so much that last day at the Horns? Had she realised that this legally shambolic outcome could be used to her advantage at a later date? Or was she looking forward to never again having to set eyes on the Hoopers and the Inces? Mrs Cumming went straight from Kennington to stay with Stephen Hutchinson and his wife Sarah at Vauxhall, and remained with them for some months. During this time she made an astonishing discovery: she found out that the revised settlement of 1809 that her father had made following her disastrous marriage was invalid; his original bequest, giving her ‘absolute’ – rather than solely ‘life’ – interest in her property, was therefore still in force. This made her position considerably more powerful: it gave her the right to dispose of her property as she saw fit, and to bequeath it to whomever she liked. Instantly she repudiated the Horns agreement, and, newly invigorated by this good news, set about making large-scale changes in Monmouthshire – selling properties and land, making repairs and re-drafting tenancies. She had to take the trumpeter to court to get back the deeds of the Welsh holdings. Much of her paperwork had been seized by the Hoopers and the Inces during her stay at York House and Hooper told her that he would return the deeds only if she settled half of her estate upon her grandchildren. Mrs Cumming refused, sued him to obtain the documents – and won. When the Hoopers counter-sued a few months later, the court decreed that she must settle the fairly paltry sum of £50 a year upon Hooper. In both these legal actions Mrs Cumming was treated by the law as a sane person.

By October 1847 Mrs Cumming was living at Gothic Villa, 59 Queen’s
Road (today Queen’s Grove), St John’s Wood, a house she had bought from her solicitor Robert Haynes. She believed that her family had not traced her to this address, and indeed St John’s Wood was a wise choice for anyone who wished to lie low or lead a surreptitious life. Behind the high walls of a St John’s Wood villa, many a wealthy Victorian man housed his mistress, and the roofed-over pathways from garden gate to front door that were a feature of some of the houses gave nosy parkers at first-floor windows only the briefest glimpse of who was coming and going. The area’s moneyed seediness was expressed physically, in lush shrubberies and bushes, the lilac and laburnum trees that whispered, curtains of Virginia creeper, high garden walls and doorways with peepholes. But the seclusion offered by its architecture meant that St John’s Wood could protect other secrets, too. Poor mad Mary Lamb (sister of Charles, and murderess of their mother) lived out her last years in the 1840s at number 41 of the now disappeared Alpha Road. Next door at number 42, another elderly single patient, Mrs Parker, signed into his own care by the illustrious Dr Alexander Sutherland, was being abused by her nurse, as the Commissioners in Lunacy would discover. In fact, Sutherland housed most of his 185 patients under single care in St John’s Wood and Maida Vale. Not for nothing did Wilkie Collins route Walter Hartright’s night-time walk with the Woman in White along Avenue Road, past the end of Queen’s Road; while the novel’s villain, Count Fosco, lived at the fictional 5 Forest Road, St John’s Wood.