Inconvenient People (4 page)

At Philpot Lane, Burrows and Lawrence found that Edward’s pulse was quick, and the tea dealer complained of headache, dry mouth and poor sleep. Burrows claimed that Edward said to him, ‘Come here, I have something to show you,’ and pulled out of his pocket a miniature portrait, a small china slipper, some beads and other trinkets. Edward explained that the picture was a portrait of a ‘Lady D’ to whom he was attached, but Burrows recognised a slightly damaged painting of a naked Danaë with Zeus. Edward said the slipper was an emblem of the lady’s foot. When he pulled his pistol out, Burrows insisted that he put it back in his pocket. The alienist subsequently told Mrs Bywater that Edward should on no account be allowed to go around with a loaded gun.

On the evening of Saturday 1 August, Edward strode into the bank of Hankey & Co. in Fenchurch Street and went into the partners’ room, where he found his banker, elderly William A. Hankey. He insisted on reading to Hankey from various books he had brought along, to demonstrate to the old man that, despite his defective early education, he was now a man of some attainments. He seemed ‘hasty and flurried’, Hankey testified later; he had been anxious to shut up the business for the evening. When Edward reappeared at the bank on Monday, he trapped Hankey in his chair by leaning on its arms, gazed into the banker’s face and asked him earnestly if he still felt that Edward was a man with whom he could do business. Hankey reassured him that he was. When Edward went out to the counter and tried to cash a cheque for £200 (which he wanted to lend to ‘his woman’, he said), Hankey nipped round the corner to Philpot Lane and alerted Mrs Bywater. As the pair entered the bank, Edward dashed out. From the bank, he ran round to
a dancing academy in Change Alley, where he was spotted pretending to execute complicated steps; then on along Fleet Street, through the Temple Bar, and onwards to a pastry cook’s shop in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, where he ate a pennyworth of gingerbread; and then to Furnival’s Inn Coffee House in Holborn. From here, he sent a note to the attorney with whom he had agreed to make his will, requesting that he come to the coffee house the next morning, to take instruction. He booked himself a bed for the night at the Inn, but at one o’clock in the morning woke the establishment by ringing the handbell in the passageway. When the head waiter arrived, Edward demanded that the house be searched as he had heard pistols going off, and insisted that there must be thieves in the building. When the waiter angrily complained that he had woken the whole house, Edward threw himself on his knees and craved the waiter’s forgiveness. Then it happened again at six o’clock in the morning. As the waiter remonstrated with him, Edward made an improper remark about some young women who were passing down the corridor towards the washrooms, along the lines of, ‘If they weren’t married, I wouldn’t mind engaging in certain activities with them.’ (The newspapers declined to give more precise wording than this.)

Edward was up and dressed and awaiting his attorney at around eight o’clock, when a carriage pulled up at Furnival’s Inn. The other coffee house customers watched as two men strode in, seized Edward and marched him out of the building and towards the carriage. Some left their breakfast and followed them out, and on the pavement a small crowd instantly gathered, barracking the two men and attempting to grab Edward. Attempts at crowd ‘rescue’ were common in London at the time; when an individual’s liberty of movement appeared to be threatened by any authority figure, it was often contested by bystanders. Parish constables and (from September 1829, the month after Edward was seized at Furnival’s Inn) the Metropolitan Police frequently found
themselves outnumbered and surrounded when trying to question or apprehend a beggar, pauper or child. The mob violence that had characterised city life throughout the eighteenth century and first few years of the nineteenth was fading into memory, but as late as 1820, genuine political mass protests had been used as a shelter for gangs of street robbers, who came along not to demonstrate but to steal and terrify. What remained in the generally better-behaved 1820s was a hair-trigger anti-authoritarianism of people who took being policed as an imposition, not a public service. When the crowd outside Furnival’s Inn demanded to know on what authority the young man was being removed, the two men brandished a piece of paper, on which was written: ‘10 Montague Street, The bearers are two of my attendants, authorised by the family of Mr Edward Davies, who is insane, and also by me, to take charge of him, and convey him to his house at Hornsey. George Man Burrows MD.’ One of the crowd shouted out that this was not a certificate of lunacy, to which one of Burrows’s men replied that Davies was not being taken to an asylum, only to his own home, so this informal note did not indicate forcible confinement. This seemed to satisfy the people on the street, and the protest melted away.

Burrows’s men drove Edward to Oakfield House, where a succession of doctors now came to talk to him, sometimes singly, sometimes in battalions. One of the physicians, Benjamin Hands, found Edward in his four-poster bed at noon, with his arm around his hunting dog, describing the mastiff as his most faithful friend. He spoke in an excited whisper, insisting that the four-poster curtains be closed. Hands thought that in Edward’s situation, he too might have felt his dog to be his best friend. The doctor also disapproved of the fact that keepers Mr Mitten and Mr Sherrey – ‘Mr Burrows’s satellites’, as Hands called them – had made themselves thoroughly at home and spent a great deal of time at Edward’s billiard table.

On the second day of Edward’s house arrest, Burrows himself drove up to Crouch End, and on entering Oakfield House at about three in the afternoon, he heard an almighty crash. When he came into the drawing room he found Edward covered in blood and brawling with the keepers, who were being pulled at by Edward’s servants while the two hounds barked at them all. Spotting Burrows’s carriage approaching, Edward had tried to escape through the window, fearing that he would
be driven away to a lunatic asylum. When the keepers had grabbed him, his arm had smashed a windowpane. Edward’s loyal servants shouted at Burrows and tried to force him from the room and at this point the doctor warned that he would use a ‘strait waistcoat’ on Edward if he would not calm down. The use of such an implement on even a raving lunatic had become hugely controversial by 1829, and the very threat of its use on a gentleman within his own home would prove to be a black mark against Burrows. Edward swiftly calmed down, and Burrows told him that he was simply paying him a routine visit.

The next day, two of the Philpot Lane staff called on Edward at Crouch End and subsequently reported to Mrs Bywater that he seemed ‘as well as usual’. She was furious to hear such news, for she had wasted no time in petitioning the Lord Chancellor to hold a commission
de lunatico inquirendo
– the ‘lunacy inquisition’ process that dated back to 1324. ‘Inquisition’ was an unfortunate antique term allowing those so minded to elide the horrors of the Spanish Tribunal of the Holy Office with the seemingly mysterious and sinister probing of an English mind for oddity and eccentricity, with a view to a lifetime of incarceration for failure to conform. Inquisitions were held on individuals who had money or property which, if they were indeed of unsound mind, could be squandered or stolen as a result of mental incapacity to manage their affairs. This was intended to be a protective move, placing the assets ultimately under the jurisdiction of the Lord Chancellor. However, in reality the task of managing a lunatic’s affairs was handed to two committees – one, a committee ‘of the estate’, and the other ‘of the person’ – which were entitled to a percentage of the patient’s wealth that they were administering. Their activities were unaudited and they could potentially levy huge ‘expenses’ claims for their time spent in dealing with the lunatic’s estate. It was the make-up of these committees, and their interest in the assets, that roused suspicion in many quarters whenever a lunacy inquisition was instigated.
Cui bono
? The alleged lunatic, or those who sought to become committee members, in charge of the purse strings? This was how Mrs Bywater’s petition for an inquisition on her son would be interpreted: for many, it was simply a grab for control of the lucrative business, the running of which would naturally
pass to her once Edward was deemed legally incapable of overseeing it.

In most instances, however, people suspected of being lunatics did not face an inquisition. After the passing of the 1828 Madhouse Act, the normal process was for two doctors separately to interview an alleged lunatic. Each would then sign a lunacy certificate, upon which he stated his reasons for believing the patient to be insane.
^fn2
In 1829, there were an estimated 14,500–16,000 people in England and Wales who had been officially identified as insane, but only a small percentage of these had been wealthy enough to have required the inquisition process. In the 1820s, a total of 373 inquisitions took place, with over two-thirds of the subjects being male – a figure that suggests strongly the comparative wealth of males (who were the main inheritors of family money and who, when they married, obtained a wife’s entire property); and suggests less strongly, the high bar set for males to prove their impeccably rational and seemly behaviour, if they wished to retain full control of that wealth.

The Agrippina of Philpot Lane had quickly set about securing affidavits regarding Edward’s instability in order to support her petition to the Lord Chancellor. Her own main argument was that she had felt her life to be in danger since he had fired the pistol on 27 June. She persuaded banker Hankey to open a new account in her name and she transferred funds across from Hodgson & Davies. She was shelling out, apart from anything, for eight doctors to interview Edward with a view to swearing to the Lord Chancellor that he was mad. Not one of them knew him of old, and all believed that his fear of his mother was ‘morbid’ and ‘unnatural’, and that his claim that he was widely disliked in the tea trade was ‘delusional’. But as they were in the pay of Mrs Bywater, it is not surprising that these were their conclusions.

Mistakenly believing that William Lawrence thought him sane – unaware that Lawrence had been co-opted by his mother – Edward continued to confide in him. Lawrence soothed him and persuaded him to agree to go to ‘a lovely house on Regent’s Park’, where he could collect himself and spend some time in quietness. So on
14 August, after ten days’ confinement at home, Edward was driven to Mrs Mary Wardell’s at 14 Portland Terrace, on the north-west edge of the park. Mrs Wardell ran a small licensed house for the care of the insane, and as Edward still had not been certificated as a lunatic, this was highly irregular. He and Mrs Wardell took an instant dislike to each other, and she later recalled him as ‘very wild’ at first, wandering about the passageways with a candle, gesticulating, and asking her if she knew who he was. Wasn’t his nose a fine nose? he asked. Didn’t she know he was a snuff-maker to Jupiter and that he was going to be a greater man than Peel or Wellington? He rose at five in the morning the next day and shouted ‘Murder! Murder!’ out of the window. Mrs Wardell was even less pleased when a young attorney turned up, demanding to see Edward and reassuring him that he would assemble plenty of affidavits to vouch for his sanity at the forthcoming inquisition. Francis Hobler, who was on his way to becoming a minor London legal celebrity, said he intended to sue for a writ of habeas corpus, to force the delivery of Edward to a court of law to investigate his detention. Mrs Wardell overheard the conversation and had Hobler thrown out, but on successive hot summer nights he stood beneath Edward’s window and the two men discussed Hobler’s progress long into the small hours.