Inconvenient People (38 page)

What happened next is reported in two different versions by onlookers: some say Lord Lytton almost swooned upon the platform, but managed to get down the ladder and into a waiting carriage, in which he fainted good and proper, as the driver galloped him back to Knebworth. Lady Lytton claimed that he jumped the palings into Mr Austin’s garden and ran across the flowerbeds, trampling the flowers, then locked himself into Austin’s dining room.

There is a variant, too, regarding Lady Lytton’s apparel. Robert told John Forster that he had spotted ‘a prodigiously large woman, dressed entirely in white, with a white parasol’. Quite a while later, now calmly able to give his own view, Lord Lytton himself believed it had been white – ‘an elderly woman in a gay white dress, holding a white parasol, her face daubed with the coarsest paint, her eyebrows strangely blackened, forcing her way, gesticulating and gibbering . . .’ White is the colour emblematic of lunatics, as it is for ghosts; it is instantly other-worldly. But a yellow Lady Lytton somehow has the greater power – odder, creepier, as she hove into view across the fields, flapping her fan, which contrived to remain green in all accounts.

From the hustings, Lady Lytton addressed the crowd, for over an hour, about her husband’s many shortcomings. ‘The moment the cowardly brute took to flight,’ she wrote later,

Lady Lytton was spot on with her allegation that there was an orchestrated campaign to ignore or malign her and to puff and protect her husband.
The Times
was edited by John Delane, a friend of Dickens and Forster, and the newspaper employed Lord Lytton’s brother Henry as a foreign news contributor; protection of Lord Lytton is highly likely to be the explanation for the very odd exclusion of any mention of Lady Lytton’s hustings appearance from that newspaper. However, she found an unexpected new ally – the
Daily Telegraph
, which had been founded three years earlier to target and call to account certain sections of the establishment. Ironically, its creation had been hugely assisted by Lord Lytton’s parliamentary support for the removal of the stamp tax on newspapers: the
Daily Telegraph
was the first ‘penny paper’ to achieve success following the repeal of the tax. It would go on to reproduce in full the column inches of pro-Lady Lytton coverage in the Somerset newspapers.

Lady Lytton and Mrs Clarke were back at their Taunton hotel by the early hours of the next day, and Lady Lytton was ill in bed for the following two days. At 11 a.m. on 11 June, a servant came to her room presenting the card of one Dr Frederick Hale Thomson, of 4 Clarges Street, Piccadilly. Just as Lady Lytton was saying that she wanted no visitors as she was unwell, Mrs Clarke rushed up and urged her to lock herself in. Mrs Clarke then stood across the doorway as, moments later, the doctor, a nurse and lawyer William Loaden mounted the stairs. Loaden shouted that he would kick the door in, but Rosina called out that there was no need as she had no fear of them. So just as she was ‘sitting up in bed, arranging the frills of my night things’, in strode Dr Hale Thomson, a little man with black hair and dark eyes; he was known to his friends as Bullet-Proof Thomson, for his success in duelling. He was accompanied by a six-foot-tall ‘giantess’ of a woman. They sat either side of her bed, and the doctor took her pulse and engaged Lady Lytton in lengthy conversations about national and European politics and the political views of Lord Lytton – subjects of which she was knowledgeable but which signally failed to excite her. He took her pulse at several times during the chat, raised her eyelids to look at her pupils and examined her teeth. After about an hour, Dr Hale Thomson went into the room next door, and Lady Lytton heard male voices conferring, one of them Loaden’s. She later learned that he was interviewing the hotel staff individually to
find out if Lady Lytton had ever been unkind or violent to them. They all said no.

Lady Lytton later wrote that the doctor came back into the room at about five o’clock and said to the giantess, ‘Well, I don’t know. I think I never saw anyone in sounder mind or body. What do you think?’ The giantess, wiping away tears, replied, ‘Why, really, sir. I do think this is one of the cruellest outrages I ever witnessed or heard of.’ ‘Humh,’ said the doctor, and went out of the room again for another two hours. When he came back he showed Lady Lytton some letters she had written to her husband and to Loaden four years earlier and said to her, ‘Now, Lady Lytton, I want you to oblige me by writing me a note, stating what terms you will accept from Sir Edward, to never again expose him as you did at Hertford on Wednesday.’ She protested that all she had ever sought was £500 a year, and for the payments to be made on time and in full; also for £2,500 of debt run up over the past twenty-six years to be paid off, and a written promise by her husband never to persecute her, and to allow her to publish and to live where she liked. She said she had gone to the Hertford hustings mainly to show the public that she was neither dead nor raving mad, as she had heard that her husband had been telling these lies. Dr Hale Thomson seemed happy with this, and said that he would leave at once for London and that he hoped to be able to provide her very shortly with a new legal document that would ratify the annual sum of £500, to be paid punctually. Mrs Clarke told Lady Lytton that the doctor seemed to be trustworthy, and so Lady Lytton allowed matters to stand at that, and the visitors left. What she hadn’t known was that a second asylum attendant and a carriage and four belonging to that establishment had been parked opposite the hotel, in preparation for her removal, which it had been assumed would be a simple matter.

Ten days later, Lady Lytton had still not heard from Dr Hale Thomson, and her two letters requesting to know whether Lord Lytton had agreed to her demands had not been acknowledged. So with Mrs Clarke and an old friend, Rebecca Ryves, she travelled up to London, arriving unannounced at the doctor’s house in Clarges Street at noon on 22 June. Dr Hale Thomson welcomed them, invited them to stay for dinner but evaded her questions about whether an agreement had been reached. Lady Lytton said she would return at six o’clock and
that if her husband had not assented to her demands in writing by then, she would go to a magistrate with the letters she had in her possession that proved him to be a double-perjurer. This brinksmanship proved to be unwise.

When she took a carriage back to Clarges Street at six, she spotted an ‘impudent-looking, snub-nosed man, who was walking up and down, and stared at me in the most impudent and determined manner’. The folding doors in Dr Hale Thomson’s drawing room were closed; earlier they had been fully open. From the partitioned-off space, Lady Lytton could hear the murmuring of low voices. The doctor kept her waiting half an hour, and then walked in with a ‘tall, raw-boned, hay-coloured-hair Scotchman’, an apothecary by the name of George Ross, who kept a pharmacy in Fenchurch Street. Lady Lytton tried to leave but in the hall her way was blocked by alienist Dr Robert Gardiner Hill and by the snub-nosed impudent man from the street (who turned out to be Mr Ross’s assistant), two asylum nurses, one of them a ‘great Flanders mare of six feet high’ (it helped if madhouse nurses were substantially built), and Dr Hale Thomson’s ‘very idiotic-looking footman’. Seeing this ‘blockade’, Lady Lytton exclaimed, ‘What a set of blackguards!’ and Dr Hale Thomson – who had, as she put it, ‘that horrible mad-doctor’s trick of rolling his head and never looking at anyone, but over their heads, as if he saw some strange phantasmagoria in the air above them . . . wagging his head, and phantom-hunting over mine, with his pale, poached-egg-unspeculative eyes’ – said, ‘I beg you’ll speak like a lady, Lady Lytton.’ She turned back, and opening the folding doors in the drawing room, from where she had heard the murmuring, she found her husband and lawyer Loaden. ‘You cowardly villain,’ she said to Lord Lytton. ‘This is the second time I have confronted you this month. Why do you always do your dirty work by deputy, except when you used to leave the marks of your horse teeth in my flesh, and boldly strike a defenceless woman?’ Whereupon, her husband rushed down the back stairs and out into Clarges Street.

Miss Ryves challenged the ambushers to try to detain her, which of course they could not, and so she went outside, where she asked the first young man she saw – waiting at the corner of Piccadilly – for help in fetching a cab to rescue her friend who was about to be abducted to a madhouse. The pale young man whispered, ‘I am
very sorry, I can’t interfere.’ It was Robert Bulwer-Lytton. ‘Talk of novels!’ expostulated Lady Lytton in her written memories of that day.

Miss Ryves asked two policemen to intervene, but when they entered number 4 they were presented with the certificates signed by Dr Hale Thomson and the apothecary Ross and so supported the removal of the patient. Lady Lytton said she would not put up a struggle but that her accusers would regret what they had done. Mrs Clarke warned them that a public investigation would follow, but she was laughed at, and Dr Hale Thomson remarked that Lady Lytton had no friends, and that Sir Edward ‘is at the top of the tree’. ‘You’ll see,’ replied Mrs Clarke.

While Miss Ryves returned to Taunton, taking with her the incriminating letters, Mrs Clarke was allowed to accompany Lady Lytton. The carriage that had been sent by the asylum took the party through Hyde Park, where Lady Lytton claimed that she saw friends out for drives, or strolling in the park, and that some of these recognised her and waved kisses, in ignorance of the nature of her journey and fellow passengers.

She was deposited at Wyke House, in Brentford, Middlesex, an eighteenth-century mansion in thirty acres of garden and ‘pleasure ground’. She was shown into a large but low-ceilinged bedroom, its windows nailed shut except for an allowable three inches at the top, and with two female keepers present. Through the window Lady Lytton saw thirty to forty female patients gathering strawberries in the grounds. Dr Gardiner Hill entered and suggested that she take a walk in the warm evening air. She was having none of this: ‘Mr Hill, I sent for you to order you to remove those two keepers from my room for I am not mad, as you very well know, and I won’t be driven mad by being treated as a maniac, and as for walking out, or associating with those poor creatures out there, if they really are insane, I’ll not do it, if I am kept in your madhouse for ten years.’ ‘Madhouse, madhouse, nonsense!’ was Dr Hill’s response. ‘Lady Lytton, this is no madhouse, and those are my children.’ Dr Hill based his regime on the illusion that this was a family home and that the patients were there as house guests and could move freely among Mr and Mrs Hill and their ten noisy children.

The doctor left with the two attendants, but alarmingly, he locked the door behind him. Half an hour later a girl of fourteen came in with tea and strawberries. This was Hill’s eldest daughter, Mary, whom Lady Lytton instantly adored. ‘How he and his odious vulgar wife came by such a child, I can’t imagine,’ she wrote. ‘[Mrs Hill is] a thoroughly vulgar, selfish, inane “British female”, as they very properly and zoologically call themselves.’ Lady Lytton was very proud of her Irish ancestry, and ever aware of her own social rank, she spent her time in captivity tripping over Mrs Hill’s dropped ‘h’s’.

At night-time, more unexpected privation: she was allowed only two inches of candle by her bedside, to prevent attempts at self-immolation. In the morning, she found how very bad the water was at the asylum, which was a problem, because it was proving to be an extremely hot June, and despite the palatial proportions of Wyke House, the asylum was stuffy and oppressively hot.

Dr Hill’s memories of Lady Lytton’s first day at Wyke House were rather different. His journal records her using violent language and attempting no control over her feelings. Upon arrival she had made ‘gross and calumnious charges against persons of high rank’, and more specifically mentioned instances of ‘unnatural connection’ between
her husband and Disraeli. Not for the first time, a lady was considered unsound because she conversed without inhibition about sexual matters. She ‘speaks of it openly’, wrote Hill, and ‘did not appear to be the least ashamed when relating the circumstances to my wife’. Sometimes sobbing she would talk ‘in the most disgusting way and charging innocent and virtuous women with unchaste and licentious conduct’. Lady Lytton was well aware of this double standard: ‘In this highly moral country (very!) there is no amount of vice not only tolerated but admitted in men; it being only considered horrible for a woman! and more especially a victim wife, to allude to such things, especially when . . . elles appellent un chat un chat.’