5  

Beautiful place. I have such a nice room.” Holloway was then a prison for both men and women serving short sentences. The governor was the courteous and sympathetic Colonel Milman, whose uncle had been “the great dean” of St. Paul’s, Henry Hart Milman. She spent another of her birthdays in jail—her forty-eighth—and the governor gave her a musk plant as a present. She kept goldfish and a newt she fed on minced beef. She was even allowed to collaborate with another prisoner in writing a play. She was a very high-profile inmate. On one occasion Milman called her to his office so that she could be served with a writ for costs against her. Only a little while later he was happy to send her with Miss Jackman, the matron, to the Middlesex Sheriff’s Court for judgment in the Gounod case.

The Queen’s Bench had already awarded her £1,640 for her services to Gounod as amanuensis and the costs of his stay at Tavistock House. The issue now was costs in the part Gounod had taken in the libels made by Wolff and others. The jury was out for a quarter of an hour and returned to award her £10,000. It was a joyous moment, and it drew a line under the emotional and turbulent years she had given to Gounod during his London exile. She never saw a penny of the money, nor did she expect to. Instead she commented breezily, “I shall be able to bother him for the rest of his life.”

This was a way of breaking up the tedium of a jail sentence not given to many. She was extremely popular with the warders and delighted them by directing from her prison cell a sensationalist newspaper story of a cockatoo trapped by its chain on the steeple of a church she could see through the bars of her window. A man named Charles Balshaw got the bird down in front of a wildly enthusiastic crowd drummed up by the press.

Before she left, she and Milman exchanged photographs, hers inscribed “To my dear Governor, in grateful memory of my six months in Holloway.” To forestall a demonstration, Milman sent her home fifteen hours before she was due to be released. She was not to be cheated of her martyr’s crown and returned the next day in a barouche and four. Accompanied by hundreds of supporters, she drove down into Piccadilly, where the horses were taken out of their shafts and a jubilant crowd dragged the carriage to Speaker’s Corner. It is said the people gathered there exceeded seventeen thousand.

There were in the sea of faces that stared up at her as she waved and smiled those whose interests in the occasion were quite narrow and specific. Her case had highlighted the need for a court of criminal appeal, and it had been a committee of political activists who had carried her down from Holloway and organized her triumphant reception. But such huge numbers indicated a more general enthusiasm. This was the apotheosis of her legal career and something even more valuable to her. She was loved. Eccentric or not, however foolhardy and exasperating she might be, there could be no question that she had won from the city a spontaneous demonstration not given to many Londoners. Plump and excitable Mrs. Weldon, in her silk dress and jacket and her borrowed white bonnet, was for a day the most famous woman in England. The monkey had vanquished the crocodiles.

Not everybody there that day knew or cared that the president of the Mrs. Weldon Release Committee, pumping her hand and praying silence for her speeches, was none other than her old adversary Dr. Forbes Winslow. For her it was a specially rich detail and a fine irony for her to savor. She had brought them all low—Harry and Gounod and now the mad doctors. Five years of press publicity, five years of doing things her way without regard for the dull proprieties of her mother or the remonstrances of her cowardly brother, had ripped like a bullet through asylumdom as well as the inequitable marital status of women. She could shake hands with Winslow with triumph in her eyes. Much of the credit for this changed public awareness was hers. Everyone present knew it.