Inconvenient People (26 page)

In the first week of October, three of Mrs Cumming’s fowls were found dead in their bird-house in the garden of Gothic Villa. Two days after this, she poured milk from a jug for the cats, but the creatures would not drink after sniffing it. In a state of high suspicion, Mrs Cumming had the milk jug and the remaining bird-meal sent to Dr Robert Barnes of Gloucester Terrace, Hyde Park, for analysis. Dr Barnes found that the scrapings from the bird-house contained acetate of lead, a poisonous substance used in dyeing and varnishing, while the dregs of milk contained Epsom Salts. As he later recalled, ‘Mrs Cumming was very much agitated and very much annoyed at the occurrence . . . She at first was inclined to think that her family had been the means of having it placed there to kill the fowls and for the purposes of annoying her.’ In fact, Dr Barnes said he was not confident that she understood that the unpleasant milk the cats had rejected was not poisonous, and that it had no connection with the poisoning of the fowls – which may well have been accidental, if, say, a workman had left odd-job-related acetate of lead in the garden or near the bird-house. Mrs Cumming remained perplexed and suspicious.

She now moved from Gothic Villa to Herbert Villa, Howley Place, when she discovered that the Hoopers and Inces had approached the Lord Chancellor and the Commissioners in Lunacy with a fresh request that she be sent to an asylum. They stated that her ‘unnatural’ wish to have no family life, alongside her erratic relationships with lawyers and agents, was proof that the Horns inquisition should have concluded with a verdict of insanity. Unwilling to be dragged back into the distressing private family tragedy, the Commissioners and Lord Chancellor declined to interfere.

It was at this point, on 1 February 1851, that the police broke into Mrs Cumming’s bedroom in Herbert Villa.

The following months Mrs Cumming spent shifting between Blackfriars, Edgware Road, Kennington, Bromley and St Leonards-on-Sea, taking her cats wherever she went. Her health declined, and an increasing weakness in both legs meant that she could walk only with difficulty.

She had appointed a new local agent, Ebenezer Jones, to help collect the rents for the Welsh properties, but Mrs Cumming quickly became
suspicious of Jones and sacked him. And rightly so: Jones was a spy for the Hoopers and Inces. Now a new round of persecution began. Put up to it by her family, Jones intended to prosecute Mrs Cumming for perjury in connection with an affidavit of hers drawn up during the suit with Hooper. Her family hoped that a judge would find Mrs Cumming not guilty of the charge by reason of insanity – a far quicker, and cheaper, route of getting her into an asylum and thereby achieving control of her money. But the perjury charge was instantly dismissed by a magistrate.

A simultaneous tactic was to malign Mrs Cumming not just to business associates but to local shopkeepers and suppliers, whenever her latest address was discovered. Her Welsh tenants were instructed by the Hoopers and Inces not to pay her any rent, and potential buyers were warned off making purchases of her land and houses. Although wealthy, Mrs Cumming’s cash flow was now drying up, and she became increasingly reliant for liquidity on a series of lawyers, whom she hired and fired with all the capriciousness and foul temper that she had shown in her dealings with servants over the years.

Looking down from her window at number 6 Edgware Road, at the Marble Arch end, where she had been given shelter by the family of James Oldfield, one of the Hutchinsons’ employees, she would see her daughters gazing up from the pavement. They would pace up and down outside the house, stopping passers-by and talking with them; once they gathered some policemen around them and pointed up at the window. Sarah Hutchinson saw them too. The servants at number 6 had been instructed not to allow Mrs Ince or Mrs Hooper inside, and Catherine Ince began a campaign of constant hammering on the door. Then, one day, she managed to rush past the servant who opened the door, dash up a flight of stairs, and, pushing another servant out of the way, burst into Mrs Cumming’s room. Exclaiming, ‘Mama!’, she threw her arms around the old lady’s neck. Mrs Cumming, ill and immobilised in her chair, believed she was being attacked. When Mrs Oldfield and the servants rushed in they heard her shouting, ‘Oh, I think she’s come to strangle me!’ However, of the frightening embrace, Mrs Cumming later insisted, ‘I reflected, on recovering from my momentary fear, and dismissed the impression that my daughter was about to strangle me.’

Mrs Ince refused to leave, despite being asked to by her mother and by Mrs Oldfield, and continued to attempt – incongruously in
such a hostile, charged environment – to make small talk with the mother she had not seen for four and a half years. Mrs Cumming and Sarah Hutchinson noted that her eyes appeared to range around the room and linger on every object within it. When Mrs Cumming protested to her daughter that she had put her in York House Asylum knowing her not to be mad, Mrs Ince cried out, ‘Mr Haynes put you there, Mama, and we got you out!’ – a ludicrous allegation, as Haynes did not meet Mrs Cumming until three months after her incarceration. After an hour or so, Mrs Ince agreed to leave, but the next day she returned with Thomasine and a small group of strangers and repeatedly knocked at the door.

Mrs Cumming fled again, first to the Middlesex village of Southall, where she engaged a new servant, Mrs Albina Watson; then to Worthing on the south coast, and then to 5 Bloomsbury Place, near the seafront at Brighton. She was also accompanied by Sarah Hutchinson and received regular visits from Robert Haynes, Dr Barnes, yet another new physician Dr Henry Caldwell, and a local doctor, Dr Robert Hale. Her legs were now described as ‘semi-paralysed’, but each day, to get fresh air, she would ride out in her carriage, taking the cats with her.

But her freedom was coming to an end. Although her family had failed to obtain a new inquisition, the Lord Chancellor did give in to their requests that she should undergo an informal medical examination into the soundness of her mind. Sir Alexander Morison and a Brighton doctor, William King, were granted the authority to do this.

Mrs Cumming had been tracked down to Brighton by John Turner, the Inces’ and Hoopers’ latest solicitor – a talented snooper, who found her in the seaside town after she had been there just a month. On Monday 27 October 1851 Drs Morison and King, Mr Turner, Mrs Ince and the keeper and nurse of a London madhouse, gained entry to 5 Bloomsbury Place and hammered on Mrs Cumming’s bedroom door. ‘Who’s there?’ cried the old lady. ‘It’s me, your daughter,’ Mrs Ince replied. ‘I have no daughter now.’ ‘Yes you do, Mama!’ When at last they gained entry, the interrogation began: Morison and King questioned her for two and a half hours – about her fondness for cats, her aversion to her daughters, the properties she owned, why she kept moving house. Did she claim that her late husband had had ‘connexion’ with his nurses? Did she believe that Mrs Ince had tried to strangle
her in the Edgware Road? Did she think that her daughters had tried to poison her cats and birds? Mrs Cumming strongly denied the last two suggestions, and refused to speak ill of the dead; she would also not answer impudent questions about her finances. But she made a very unwise attempt at sarcasm, stating that ‘Oh I have dozens and dozens of cats, and not only do I take them with me on carriage rides, I’ve even appointed one as my coachman and another as my postillion’. Alas, Morison and King took this straight.

Three days later, in spite of a certificate issued by Dr Hale, stating that Mrs Cumming was too physically infirm to endure any more harassment and must on no account be moved, Morison, King, Turner, the madhouse proprietor and the nurse went again to 5 Bloomsbury Place. This time they were accompanied by Superintendent Chase, the aptly named head of Brighton police. Albina Watson, Sarah Hutchinson, Robert Haynes and Mrs Cumming locked themselves in the old lady’s bedroom but Chase broke the door down with such force that part of the frame came off. Mrs Cumming, seated in a chair near the bed, was unable to move and cried out in terror as her friends tried to comfort her. Robert Haynes grappled with the chief of police and threatened to throw him down the stairs. The madhouse owner, Cyrus Alexander Elliott, informed Mrs Cumming that he had come to remove her to Effra Hall Asylum, in Brixton, South London. A certificate for her removal, signed by Morison and King, was waved about.

Mrs Cumming cried out in pain as she was bundled downstairs, and it was only with difficulty that she could be got into the vehicle waiting outside, with Dr King shouting, ‘Don’t you know how to get someone into a carriage?!’ and giving her a massive, indelicate shove from behind. Not only was Mrs Cumming in physical agony, she had – since their creation – had a terror of the railways, so great that she had never ridden the iron horse, and was still using her carriage and four, like the Regency lady she had remained in this barbarous new age. She was in great distress at the prospect of experiencing the high speed, deafening noise, filth, commotion and enforced proximity to strangers that rail travel involved. (The extra alarm that railways could cause to patients had already been noted by the Commissioners in Lunacy, who in 1847 had issued a circular entitled ‘The Conveyance of Lunatics by Railway’.)

At Brighton station, the Effra Hall staff dragged her along the
platform by her elbows; she was unable to walk but this was interpreted as resistance. Mrs Hutchinson called out, ‘She is a lady, and she must travel like a lady!’ but was ignored. Her friends were not allowed to be in the same railway carriage as Mrs Cumming. The savagery continued at the other end, and the old lady was seen yelping in pain and fear when they arrived at London Bridge.

Effra Hall Asylum employed Dr William Vesalius Pettigrew as medical superintendent. He knew the Inces very well: in fact, two years earlier, Catherine had asked Pettigrew if he would come and observe her mother and give an opinion on her sanity. Pettigrew lived just around the corner from the Inces, and worked alongside John at the Pimlico Dispensary; he had treated Mrs Ince for bilious attacks. His closeness to the family was not noted by anyone at the time, not even the ever-vigilant Mrs Cumming herself. Pettigrew would be the only doctor to maintain that Mrs Cumming had no grounds whatsoever to believe she could be poisoned or strangled. He would also claim that the old lady’s peculiarities of gesture and the vehemence of her speech were typical of the insane.

Mrs Cumming spent most of her month-long stay at Effra Hall wrapped up warm, seated by a fire or propped up in bed. She wasn’t impressed by Effra Hall’s victuals, pushing away her roast beef and complaining, ‘I can get nothing else for dinner in this place but this bone.’

The Chancery appeal court had selected Dr Forbes Benignus Winslow to visit Mrs Cumming at Effra Hall, but when the doctor turned up at the madhouse on 30 October he was denied entry. Solicitors for the Hoopers and Inces, on the other hand, had been given full access to the patient. Six days later, Dr Winslow was visited in his Albemarle Street home by John Ince, who put to the doctor his own views of his mother-in-law’s state of mind. Winslow listened and then went on to study all the available documentation on the case. He needed to address in particular the three reasons for confinement that were given on Mrs Cumming’s lunacy certificate: her dislike of her children; her claim that they had attempted to poison her cats and birds; and her belief that Mrs Ince had tried to strangle her at Edgware Road. Winslow concluded that her dislike of her children was entirely understandable; and that for this reason it was not a delusion when she feared a poisoning attempt. He also noted that Mrs
Cumming had quickly admitted that she had been too rash in accusing Mrs Ince of strangulation. Dr Winslow was allowed into Effra Hall one week after his initial attempt, and during one of many interviews, Mrs Cumming asked the doctor, ‘How can I love my children when I recollect how they have treated their mother? But they wanted my money. If I had been poor, they would have left me alone.’

On 3 December, Dr Winslow gave his diagnosis in a carefully phrased letter to the Chancery appeal court:

Mrs Cumming told Dr Winslow that the anxiety she was experiencing meant she got little sleep at Effra Hall, and that she wished now to be left to die. But fate wanted to play with her for a little longer, and on 7 January 1852 her second pub-based lunacy inquisition began – this time at the Eyre Arms, a large tavern and assembly rooms situated near the end of Queen’s Road, St John’s Wood. The Lord Chancellor had assented to Dr Winslow’s request that Mrs Cumming be released from the asylum to live at Gothic Villa, Queen’s Road, because of her failing health. She was able to take with her a doctor’s widow, Mary Moore, with whom she had struck up a friendship, and whose companionship the Lord Chancellor himself had approved.