James Norris seen through Wakefield’s eyes reminding Monro how cruel he made us look, he ordered him freed from the bulk of his restraints and the chain on his neck-ring extended from twelve inches to twenty-four. But this solicitude only made us look guiltier when, on June 7th, 1814, Wakefield and his party returned for a third visit and saw how quick we’d been to act after ten years of doing nothing.
It was too late another way. On the basis of his drawing, Arnald soon had an engraving underway of Norris in full iron regalia. As a broadside published that autumn, this made a shocking picture of a lunatic all sickly and woebegone, drooping like a parched tomato plant in a cone of guide hoops, a perfect image to illustrate Wakefield’s allegations of our unspeakable cruelty. Over the next several months, picture and allegations together sold a great many editions, tongues were set in motion, and by the usual course of these things, questions came to be asked in the House.
You can see where this is going.
The next Saturday the Bethlem governors met to horrify each other by reading out attacks on us in The Times and The Morning Chronicle. Inside an hour they had whipped themselves to such a lather as to appoint an emergency subcommittee to look into Wakefield’s allegations, for example, our patients were chained naked in their beds not for purposes of medical cure but revenge. The subcommittee consisted mainly of our own governors but for substance included three M.P.s and three peers, most notably the 6th Earl of Shaftesbury. The following Saturday, myself, Monro, Alavoine, assorted attendants, and several governors who’d served on the weekly subcommittee were called on the carpet.
From their questions, the committee wanted us assured how much we were appreciated. The response of the others was fawning gratitude, but both behaviours seeming to forget the enemy at the gates, when my turn came I reminded everybody it was the governors mainly to blame, for not putting pressure on the government to support us in a manner sufficient to make Bethlem work. A hard truth, for which I expected no thanks, but neither did I expect a cousin of Matthews named Staveley, who called himself a chemist, to stand up at the back and query me from a trembling piece of paper. “Mr. Haslam, on what grounds can you recommend still to persevere in the keeping of Mr. Matthews, after your assertion in The Sow and Sausage on the night of January 18th, 1809, that he was as well as you, and there was no more reason to confine him within these walls?”
Here I could have lied. I had already been publicly embarrassed on this point six years before, and it later showed up in an affidavit in support of Matthews’ habeas corpus challenge. On the public occasion, not knowing what else to do and hating myself as I did it, I swore up and down I was never in The Sow and Sausage that night, it must have been somebody else. My accuser that time, and the one in the tavern, had been a friend of Matthews named Dunbar, since then sadly—so Staveley informed us—deceased. Who was left to gainsay me? But it seemed I was now too inflexibly either in the mode of truth or too proud another way to contradict myself, with the consequence I said nothing, only sat perfectly still and waited for the moment to pass.
It never did, only infinitely expanded, like a vapour.
When a break was called, Shaftesbury, who’d sat frowning through my performance, leaned across the table and like a headmaster counselling a new boy in a slavish principle growled, “Don’t you know, Haslam, in any dispute those who understand nothing are naturally going to assume the innocence of one of the parties—”
“Yes, my Lord. Simpler that way—”
“So let’s not forget, shall we, which party this is.”
“Would that be the innocent one, my Lord—?”
“That would be the one,” he replied in a venomous tone, thinking—rightly—I mocked him.
“But haven’t you noticed,” I blurted, a swath of fear through my bowels, for nothing about the old grandee invited debate, “when everybody puts only their best furniture forward, the know-nothings come to assume the function of appearance is concealment? So the charge-layers, having that prejudice to their advantage, as well as a press daily more eloquent on the theme of fine exteriors and hidden vice, are too apt to carry the day.”
“Nonsense,” was his Lordship’s reply. He’d been making to stand. Now he sank back down. “The only reason the charge-layers have been carrying the day is the know-nothings are now corrupted by these republican elements. You’d think old Liverpool was still alive—”
Confused, unless he meant only that republicanism was as rampant now as then—“The 1st Earl, my Lord? No republican he, surely—”
“Played with republicans, my Lord? Not Liverpool, surely—”
“Surely, Haslam? You know about surely, do you? Surely Liverpool was ready to keep a lid on Europe by propping up the Revolution in France.”
“I never heard that before,” I could only say, for it genuinely flabbergasted me. Liverpool? Playing with republicans?
“No? And neither did you hear it just now. It’s history, Mr. Haslam. Unofficial, unwritten history, that’s all. Nobody that does know it cares. But if you ask me, it opened the door.”
“To what, my Lord?”
“Have you been listening, Haslam? Do you have any idea what this conversation has been about?”
“I believe I do, my Lord, in broad outline—”
Briefly then, before he spoke again, he regarded me. The malignance in his eyes had a quality to it immaculate, as if his hatred of me was so precisely calibrated to who and what I was it was clean of anything personal. “A word of advice to a medical man, Haslam. If you’d understand the contagion of madness plaguing this nation, you should think of politics as a tell-tale symptom. Book passage sometime to Calais, or Boston, and take a stroll around the town. You’ll find the disease there is florid. Has it not been said the Adam and Eve of America were born in Bethlem Hospital? Is anybody in this room surprised your Mr. Norris is a bloody Yank? Thank God, sir, this is England, where we do things another way and a son has the opportunity to remedy his father’s error.”
My God, he meant the Prime Minister, Liverpool’s son. “Error, my Lord?” I said.
This time he only shook his head and did get to his feet. “Stick to medicine, Mr. Haslam,” was all he muttered as he walked away, leaving me to puzzle what indeed our conversation had been about.
The report on us his Lordship had a hand in that day did much to register and advance his principles. Considering, it declared, what a mischievous lunatic Norris is, there could be no conceivable foundation to a charge of repugnance to humanity in the manner he’d been kept. His mode of securement, while risking offence to sheltered sensibilities, was on the whole merciful and humane, and no insupportable imposition, especially when you considered that no better restraint could be devised for a criminal at once so dangerous and of so curious a physiology. As for restraint more generally at Bethlem, all custodial energy there was dedicated to the cleanliness, health, and comfort of the patients—consistent, that is, with their security and the safety of the keepers. Little wonder, therefore, that Bethlem was equal if not superior to any asylum in the country, and all in all a shining credit to its governors, medical officers, and anybody else who was ever concerned in its administration.
Though this report was thought by some to err a little on the side of complacency, I don’t think anything less than so authoritative a conflation of clean bill of health and ringing endorsement could have silenced our critics in this reform-mad age, even for the hour it did. If only the truth struck so thrilling a chord. Wakefield was already, all on his own, insinuating himself with George Rose, the justice Crowther once fagged for, who was a keen advocate of reform for lunatics and by the way a good friend to the King. That spring Rose had attempted to secure passage of legislation for the tighter regulation of madhouses, and not just the private kind. When the legislation was struck down in the House, Lord Eldon as secretary of lunatics nastily observing, “There could not be a more false humanity than over-humanity with regard to persons afflicted with insanity,” Rose, with Wakefield, engineered the setting up of a House of Commons Select Committee on Madhouses, chaired by himself. A select committee it certainly was. Many on it had already been to see us in Wakefield’s tow, which should indicate which hospital they mainly had their guns trained on.