Inconvenient People (45 page)

Mrs Ruck had the worst of it, though. Her husband would drive his carriage out into the countryside at three in the morning, and she would often go out into the woods and fields to coax him home. Much, much worse were his increasing accusations that she had been repeatedly unfaithful to him: he would accuse her of the ‘grossest improprieties’ in ‘the most coarse and disgusting language’.

In October 1857, the couple embarked on a journey to Welshpool and then Manchester, before heading south to Berkshire, to visit friends in Reading. The excursion involved rail and horse-drawn vehicles, and Mr Ruck drank heavily throughout – and loudly accused Mary Ann of infidelity with any stranger who entered their carriage or coach. Their travelling companion was retired surgeon Richard Barnett, who had known the Rucks for years; Mr Ruck now accused Barnett of attempting to poison him so that he could make off with Mary Ann. When staying at hotels, Mr Ruck claimed that his wife and strange
men made indecent signals to each other; he accused her of being a prostitute and said that the telegraph wires were ‘speaking north, south, east and west’ about her. The two alleged dead children of Mary Jones had been ‘tormenting him and talking to him all night’, he said, adding that Jones had murdered them.

By the time they reached Reading, Mr Barnett and Mary Ann had become convinced that Mr Ruck was a danger to other people, and possibly to himself. They called in Dr John Conolly.

Dr Conolly interviewed Mr Ruck on 3 November and was told all the stories about Mrs Ruck having connection with any man who had got into their carriage or compartment. ‘My opinion is that Mr Ruck entertains insane delusions of a dangerous kind, and requires restraint,’ the doctor wrote on the lunacy certificate, taking special note of Mr Ruck’s ownership of firearms. The second certificate was signed by Richard Barnett, who also wrote out the lunacy order for Mary Ann to sign – including the phrases, ‘partly hereditary’, ‘partly from intemperance’ and ‘profligate in his expenditure’. By law, this document was supposed to record only the signatory’s words and beliefs. In fact, Mary Ann did not know whether there was any insanity in the Ruck line, and later admitted that she had not read the lunacy order. Barnett claimed that he had read it over to her and that he had once heard Mary Ann say that Ruck’s late father and his brother were both ‘eccentrics’.

Mr Ruck found himself in Moorcroft House, where Dr George Stillwell – the nephew of Louisa Nottidge’s custodian, Dr Arthur Stillwell – had taken over as proprietor. Mr Ruck’s keepers – two brothers, called Randall – could see little the matter with the patient, who was permitted huge amounts of freedom. He did not attempt to escape during fox and stag hunts arranged by the asylum, or the long rambles in the meadows close to Moorcroft.

On 14 November 1857 Lunacy Commissioners Campbell and Gaskell made their first of four visits. ‘We have conversed with Mr Ruck and find that he is considerably improved and will shortly be discharged,’ they recorded. ‘It does not appear to us, however, that the delusions under which he labours are entirely removed.’ Mr Ruck persisted in telling the Commissioners and a succession of doctors that his wife had been ‘befouled’ by other men; he also remarked that he would ‘go two miles out of his way to avoid red petticoats’.

Dr Stillwell forbade anyone to visit Mr Ruck without the say-so of Mrs Ruck, as signatory of the lunacy order. All Mr Ruck’s outgoing correspondence was sent straight to his wife and never reached its addressees. When Mary Ann came to see her husband, one of the Randall brothers was requested by Dr Stillwell to spy through the keyhole; he reported that the couple were very affectionate with each other. But on later visits, Mr Ruck reiterated his accusations of adultery; Stillwell advised Mary Ann that it was best if she did not visit again, as it seemed to ‘excite’ him. Mr Ruck did manage to persuade one of the Randalls to post a letter for him in a postbox in Hillingdon, and in this way he was able to make contact with a solicitor, George Wainewright.

Mr Ruck’s brothers and sisters-in-law all believed in Ruck’s sanity and were furious to learn that hereditary insanity had been alleged, when no Ruck had ever been lunatic. It was on their advice that Mr Wainewright travelled to Montgomeryshire to gather first-hand testimonies. Here, he discovered that Mary Ann Ruck was very highly thought of in the locality and many people were willing to testify in writing that her husband’s allegations against her could only be explained by the increasing amount of alcohol he had been imbibing. This was the defence that solicitor Wainewright intended to use at the forthcoming inquisition; here was a plausible explanation for a basically sane man engaging in outrageous slanders. When, at last, on 14 June 1858, Mr Wainewright was able to inform his client of all these testimonials to his wife’s virtue and his own out-of-character behaviour, Mr Ruck announced, ‘What a fool I must have been!’, as though the solution to his dilemma had suddenly been found. And it is with this narrative – that he had been drunk, and not delusional – that Mr Ruck, his counsel and supporters came to the lunacy inquisition, petitioned for by Mrs Ruck, at St Clement’s Inn, Strand. It was a horrific ordeal for thirty-five-year-old Mary Ann; the awful testimony she had to relate and listen to ‘showed only her patience and fortitude’, in
The Times
’s view.

Mr Ruck’s counsel admitted his odd behaviour between spring 1856 and November 1857: all he had to do now was to continue to abstain from alcohol and his delusions would remain at bay. However, several of the Welsh witnesses called by Mary Ann’s counsel did not agree that drink had been at the heart of the problem. One of the Pantlludw servants, Mrs Williams, stated that Mr Ruck had appeared more ‘wandering’ than drunk when setting fires in the drawing room, or
unpacking and repacking his rubbish-filled trunk; indeed, when he was ‘tipsy’ he tended, rather, to be ‘quiet’, she said. A local surgeon, Hugh Lloyd, told the inquisition that Mr Ruck’s behaviour had not resembled any case of delirium tremens he had ever seen. Lloyd described Mrs Ruck as ‘a model of a woman’, but like each of the male witnesses testifying on behalf of Mrs Ruck, Lloyd was required to answer whether he had ever had ‘connection’ with her. Protests were voiced at this attempt to smear Mrs Ruck’s reputation in trying to defend her husband’s sanity, but the presiding Commissioner refused to intervene, although he knew that this was a ‘painful’ case and that ‘no one could help feeling commiseration for the unhappy lady’.

The jury requested Mr Ruck to speak for himself and answer questions directly, and so Ruck – described in
The Times
as ‘gentlemanly’, close to forty years of age, of dark complexion and with a slight beard – stated calmly and quietly that the delusions had been ‘the result of a disordered imagination’, and had entirely left him. He no longer believed in his wife’s infidelity, but he admitted that he had fathered two children upon his wife’s cousin, Mary Jones, as part of an ongoing clandestine affair, while Mrs Ruck was away from Pantlludw during the renovations. Mr Ruck told the inquisition that the strain of trying to keep this long-standing sexual relationship secret from his wife had led him to drink heavily. But he also blamed his lover: Jones would never tell him the whereabouts of his illegitimate children, which increased his anxiety and led to his mental confusion.

As with females accused of ‘moral insanity’, a man’s inability to fill his domestic role as a loving husband and respect-inspiring father could contribute heavily to an accusation of unsoundness of mind. A number of women in the nineteenth century were using the lunacy laws as a way of removing from their home a violent or extremely uncongenial paterfamilias – cheaper and less humiliating than a trip to the magistrate or (after 1857) the Divorce Court. The cases of Arthur Nowell (p. 432), John Gould (p. 398), Arthur Legent Pearce (p. 398) and Richard Hall (p. 437) appear to have had this subtext, with sympathetic doctors using the concept of moral insanity to help a wife to make the family home safe from a thuggish husband.

To excuse his illicit affair with Mary Jones, Mr Ruck laid the blame upon his wife. While Mrs Ruck’s camp maintained that the marriage had been a happy one, Mr Ruck and his blood family stressed that it
had failed by 1843, the year in which they alleged that Mrs Ruck made clear to her husband her aversion to intercourse with him. Mrs Ruck’s failure to be a good wife had led Mr Ruck to be a bad husband, was their argument; and he had turned to heavy drinking to cope with the stress of the situation.

Mr Ruck told the jury he had been rushed into an asylum by a vengeful wife, when all he had needed was to be sent somewhere quiet so that he could stop drinking and recover his wits. Testifying on his behalf, alienist Dr Harrington Tuke told the jury that ‘mania from drink’ was the second most easily curable form of insanity (after puerperal, or post-natal, mania). Seven other high-profile doctors testified that Mr Ruck’s was a case of ‘drinking mania’, that asylum incarceration was inappropriate and that the delusions would not recur so long as he did not drink.

Some specialists writing in these years estimated that perhaps as many of one-fifth of certified male lunatics had had their insanity brought on by drink, and while many delirium tremens cases got out of the asylum quickly, other men would spend years going in and out of asylum care, regaining a ‘sound mind’ but then returning to inebriation upon their release. Despite his boost from the eminent Harrington Tuke and his like-minded colleagues, the case for Mr Ruck’s sanity did not look good. At Moorcroft House, the patient had had no access to alcohol, yet as late as May 1858, when he had been ‘dry’ for seven months, he was still rambling on about red petticoats, murdered children and his wife’s gargantuan erotic appetite.

However, all of this was about to become mere background to a more elemental battle: the inquisition now turned into a trial of the workings of the certification system. George Stillwell was asked why he had written ‘hereditary predisposition’ next to Mr Ruck’s name in the Moorcroft House casebook, even though it transpired that the Ruck family had never been affected by unsound minds. Stillwell replied that this was what he had been told by Drs Conolly and Barnett.

The casebooks furnished even more contentious data. Stillwell kept his books a little too diligently, because alongside Mr Ruck’s notes was the information that John Conolly had been paid £15 by Stillwell for the admission of Mr Ruck to Moorcroft; it was also confirmed that Conolly was to receive a further £60 a year in connection with Ruck’s detention at the asylum. That is, Mr Ruck would have to stay
there if Conolly was to receive the £60. This looked very much like a conspiracy – and similar to one of John Perceval’s blackest accusations: that money changed hands for the arrest and ongoing detention of doubtfully certificated English folk.

After a twenty-minute conference, the Clement’s Inn jury returned a majority verdict of twelve to six in favour of Mr Ruck’s sanity. It was greeted with loud cheering throughout the hall.

The newspaper storms created by the Lytton and Turner cases blew once again. The
Daily News
led the charge: comparing the English asylum to the ‘bastille’, its editorial stated, ‘The question now becomes ventilated more and more every day. We thought it bad enough; but we were far from being prepared for the startling revelations brought to light by judicial investigations . . . Dr Conolly . . . breaks the spirit of the law, if not its express words, by consigning a rich patient – one for whom £400 a year is to be paid – to an asylum from which he receives an emolument.’

However, the
Journal of Mental Science
came out strongly in defence of Stillwell, stating:

The following year, Laurence Ruck sued Doctors Stillwell, Conolly and Barnett for assault and imprisonment. The case hinged upon Dr Conolly’s relationship with Moorcroft House. It was illegal for a proprietor, partner or ‘regular professional attendant’ of an asylum to sign an alleged lunatic into that institution. Stillwell’s casebooks strongly demonstrated formal links between himself and Conolly: there, in neat columns, it was written that Conolly received 15 per cent of the asylum’s annual profits, in the form of regular payments in connection with
eighteen of Moorcroft’s forty patients. The judge found in Mr Ruck’s favour and awarded damages of £500 against Conolly.