Inconvenient People (8 page)

Mr Perceval felt surprisingly little of the physical pain he endured. His agony was ‘the agony of mind occasioned by the incomprehensible commands, injunctions, insinuations, threats, taunts, insults, sarcasms, and pathetic appeals of the voices round me’. The voices ‘flocked’ about him ‘like bees’, issuing contradictory orders. When Herminet
Herbert brought him his breakfast of a basin of tea and small squares of bread and butter, one spirit would say, ‘Eat a piece for my sake’; another would say, ‘Refuse it for my sake’; and yet another would demand, ‘Don’t eat that piece, eat that one, for my sake.’ His hesitation as he tried, in anguish, to work out which spirit to appease would look to Herminet Herbert like rebelliousness and he would often be struck.

It felt to Mr Perceval as though the voices were mostly speaking inside his own skull, but sometimes they would sound as though they were emanating from another part of the room, or just hovering somewhere in the air. He counted over fourteen of them. Every voice was different and each was ‘beautiful, and, generally, speaking or singing in a different tone or measure, and resembling those of relations or friends’, as he put it. The voices of ‘contrition’ inhabited his left temple and forehead; those of ‘joy and honour’ were coming from the right. Over his eyebrows were two who were quicker and more ‘flaunty’ than the others: over the right eyebrow was the spirit of Mr Perceval’s eldest sister, and over the left, the spirit of Herminet Herbert.

Voices would sometimes address him in verse; once, a hurdy-gurdy appeared to circle his bed, playing a tune that made him weep to know that he had lost a father’s love. The music conjured up visions of him living in Portugal as a child and then as a young monk, who repaid the kindness shown to him by robbing the church and partaking of ‘unnatural’ lusts with other young monks; he then killed a pig for sheer enjoyment, plunging it alive into boiling water. During this episode the spirits told him that all his problems arose from an act of ingratitude in his childhood. Another voice told him that he was responsible for the drowning of an old woman on the City side of Blackfriars Bridge. Faces appeared on walls or furnishing fabrics – those of God, his family and his father, who began to weep: Mr Perceval felt the tears drop on to his own skin. ‘Thus my delusions, or the meshes in which my reasoning faculties were entangled, became perfected; and it was next to impossible thoroughly to remove them,’ he later wrote. Despite his confusion about time and place, Mr Perceval knew that he had a mother as well as brothers and sisters. His eldest brother came to visit him six months after he had been admitted, and stayed two days. He examined the niches in the parlour, saw the isolation cell, heard about the cold-water treatments, and on the
second night, he shook Mr Perceval’s hand and simply left. Just before leaving, he asked Mr Perceval why he insisted on talking with his mouth shut. When Mr Perceval raised his hand to his mouth as he spoke in reply, he was horrified to realise that this was so.

One day, when the buttercups and daisies were blowing in the meadows outside, something peculiar happened as Mr Perceval sat in his niche. When a command was being issued to him by one of the voices, he hesitated to obey it, suddenly realising that it was a ‘ridiculous’ request. In fact, it occurred to him that much of what the spirits were saying was quite ‘absurd’. From this point, he thought very deeply about every command he was given and began to compare what the voices said with what he heard and saw going on around him. He realised, for example, that other people would speak of Herminet Herbert as ‘Samuel Hobbs’, and so Mr Perceval deduced that this was probably his real name. He began to understand that he was in a madhouse – that it was in England, that it was near Bristol, that it was, in fact, Brislington House Asylum. It was June, and the
newspapers had not been a divine deceit: it really was 1831, and so Mr Perceval must be twenty-eight years old; and he had been deposited here by his eldest brother, who was called Spencer, some seven months earlier, when the snow was deep, as he remembered. Spencer hadn’t said goodbye when he had driven off in the snowdrifts.

Mr Perceval asked for a pocketbook, so that he could begin to keep the date and to write memoranda. On paper, he found, he could collect, arrange and rearrange his ideas. He began regularly to disobey his spirit commands, and found that no punishment resulted from this; therefore, he
reasoned
, they had no real power at all. His quieter, more pensive demeanour meant that Mr Perceval was released from his niche for much of the day now; he was allowed to sit alone in a parlour upstairs in a wicker chair and to take walks out in the yard without Samuel Hobbs. In the doorway to the yard he passed the surgeon who had operated on his damaged ear and he told the doctor, ‘Oh! sir, I have been in a dream, a fearful dream, but it is gone now.’

One day, Dr Francis Ker Fox also met him going into the yard
and asked him, ‘Pray, was it
your
father who was shot in the House of Commons?’ It was a heartless question, but it was a reminder of an actual biographical fact, and not one that the spirit voices were likely to have come up with. The insensitive question also prompted another train of renewed rational thought: that the Foxes were unable to understand that their patients had the full range of emotions and might be acutely sensitive to such a subject being brought up. Prime Minister Spencer Perceval had been shot dead by an embittered failed businessman, John Bellingham, on 11 May 1812 in the Commons lobby, and John Perceval, after recovering from his illness, would write, ‘I fear the death of my poor father was at the root of all my misfortunes . . . I do not YET understand his loss . . . a cruel blow [that] deprived my mother of a husband, and her family of a father.’ He began to piece together the order of events that had led to his brother Spencer, with their mother’s agreement, leaving him at Fox’s asylum one evening in the previous winter.

Their father, in private life at least, had been by all accounts a goodhearted man who strove to live by his Evangelical Anglican principles, and his death had shattered the family. He had not been wealthy, and his widow and twelve surviving children had been rescued from the threat of shabby gentility by a generous government grant. Mrs Perceval remarried in 1815, becoming Lady Jane Carr, but lost her second husband in 1821. Spencer the younger became an MP, ‘winning’ three rotten borough seats in succession, from 1818, and becoming an under-secretary at the Home Office.

John had been educated at Harrow and then joined the 1st Regiment of Foot Guards, The Grenadiers, with which he saw active service in Portugal in 1827. There, he had felt scared and bored in equal measure, greatly missing the studious life and the company of women. He was a withdrawn, bookish, analytical young man, much exercised by Evangelical questions, and had always found women more congenial than men. He was contemptuous of the heavy drinking, gambling and debauchery of his fellow Guardsmen. They in turn ribbed him about his piety, seriousness and love of solitude.

His Portuguese adventure taught him a dislike of parliamentary politics. In Mr Perceval’s view, the Duke of Wellington had sold the
Portuguese into the hands of a despot, King Dom Miguel I, for selfish, tactical reasons: ‘I felt . . . that we had been made fools and tools of . . . the blind instrument of power. My last attachment to the Tory party, and to the pride of being an Englishman, were then severed. I had thought my country upright, noble and generous, and that party honest and honourable. I now despised the one, and began to hate and fear the other.’ Such experiences forged within him an odd combination of radical and conservative: an acutely snobbish lover of the oppressed; a generous friend to the outcast who expressed contempt for those without aristocratic breeding; a very kind and exquisitely sensitive autocrat.

From Portugal, his regiment was sent to Dublin, and while his colleagues carried on roystering and rogering, Mr Perceval set up a Scripture study class. He found both Dublin society and the Irish poor far more interested in and respectful of religion than the English of all classes; and when he returned to his mother country to begin studies at Oxford, he worried that the irreligious attitudes he saw everywhere would tempt him into wickedness. He wanted a wife, but met few eligible women during his studies; in his spare time, he mingled only with other serious young men and they would pore over the Bible together. He often fasted, and now began to wake himself at intervals during the night in order to pray – to ‘watch’. Sometimes on these nights, he would have visions, and he noticed that they were often prophetic, but that the events foretold by the visions would feature certain discrepancies when they did come to pass. He began to believe that it was some disobedience within him which had led to his prophetic visions containing inaccuracies. ‘You do not understand this, my reader – nor do I,’ he would later write. ‘Suffice it to say, I was expecting the fulfilment of the divine prophecies concerning the end of the world, or the coming of the Lord.’ He could see no reason for the non-fulfilment, except that his soul was lacking faith.

His brother Spencer, and their good friend, Henry Drummond – banker, politician, economist and historian – had also been seeking a more satisfying religious experience and had become involved with the Irvingites, who had one of their bases at the Clydeside town of Row. The ‘Row Heresy’, or the ‘Row Miracles’, as their activities were variously called, of the late 1820s had involved healing, prophecy, automatic writing and ‘speaking in tongues’, and when John travelled to Row, he, too, fell in with the sect. One afternoon, at luncheon at the house of
a believer, one of the ‘inspired ladies’ left the table and called John out of the room. She led him into the drawing room, and with her arm raised and moving rhythmically, she exclaimed, ‘Hola mi hastos, Hola mi hastos, disca capita crustos bustos.’ John asked her what it meant and she said she didn’t know because the Holy Spirit was addressing him directly through her. ‘I could not help being awed,’ John wrote: ‘the sounds, the tone, the action were most impressive . . . I thought I recognized the marvellous work of the Almighty.’ (It turned out that it meant ‘Tarry ye not in Jerusalem’.) Before long, he too was channelling the Holy Spirit, and ‘opening my mouth, sang in beautiful tones words of purity, kindness and consolation . . . the words, the ideas even, were wholly unthought of by me, or at least, I was unconscious of thinking of them . . . The voice was given me, but I was not the master of it.’ He would throw his head back, and hear the beautiful sounds sailing up out of his throat. ‘I now attribute this sensation in a great measure to extreme nervous excitement,’ he would write later, ‘but at that time it led to the destruction of my new-formed peace and ultimately to my ruin.’