At Kitchiner’s on the Sunday night of the first week the parliamentary Inquiry into madhouses began, before the bell rang us in to dinner, I took my friend Jerdan aside. (Kitchiner had long since forgiven him and allowed him back on the Committee of Taste. Being of a generous mind, Kitchiner needed little persuading, and Jerdan’s alibi that he was out of town at the time helped smooth his reinstatement.) I took Jerdan aside to tell him I thought I’d discovered sufficient reason Matthews was still in Bethlem: his knowing too much about the 1st Earl of Liverpool’s republican connexions.
This piece of intelligence elevated the eyebrows of my journalist friend. When he recovered from his bemusement, he peppered me with questions to elicit every detail of my conversation with Shaftesbury, and subsequently Matthews. He then thought a moment and concluded, “As your lunatic assures you, John, there’s more to the story. Shaftesbury’s right: Nobody gives a tinker’s curse what the Prime Minister’s father did twenty-five years ago. They’re not going to rig a habeas corpus decision without good reason. The question is, What plan or error of his father’s is he concealing?”
“Could the answer not be simply he wanted him Prime Minister to have a paw kept on Matthews and others like him?”
“Why?”
“Republicanism—?”
“From what you’ve told me of Matthews over the years, John, he graduated from republicanism a long time ago.”
“Do they know that?”
“Even if they didn’t, they’re not going to interfere with every habeas corpus hearing of every lunatic republican. It must be something else. Do you know, John, I’ve spent twelve years listening to you agonize about this lunatic and now you finally have me interested?”
Later, dinner finished, too much of Kitchiner’s good wine consumed, as we put on our coats, I confessed to my friend how vulnerable I felt going before the parliamentary Inquiry with no real idea why Matthews was in.
“You’ve known from early days it was a Bow Street political decision, John,” he replied. “Isn’t that enough?”
“But why have I stood for it all these years?”
“I don’t know. Why have you?”
“What could I have done?”
“Resigned, if it bothered you so much.”
“Would that have got him out?”
“I shouldn’t think so. Perhaps these hearings will do it.”
“They’re not about that.”
“No, but you seem to think they’re about why you’ve kept him. Do you truly believe anybody cares? Any more than they care what a dead earl nobody liked once did? Isn’t this only Conscience, up to her tricks?”
“I should have done more for Matthews,” I said glumly.
“They used you, John. Just as they did Matthews. Try to understand it that way. You’ll experience a whole new range of emotions. Meanwhile, let me see what I can find out—”
Here his carriage arrived, and we said our goodnights.
Next morning, on May 1st, in a gritty chamber of Westminster Palace, the hearings got off to a sweating start with testimony from a brand new Hercules on the scene, a Yorkshire magistrate named Godfrey Higgins, who’d just arrived from shovelling a fresh steaming load of torture, murder, and arson out of the York Asylum stables. An atmosphere of huffing indignation thus established, Edward Wakefield rose to make his indictment of Bethlem, to illustrate which he passed round the picture of the late James Norris, consumption having in late February laid his enervated demons to rest. Wakefield’s performance proceeded pretty much as you’d expect—with two surprises. First was the enthusiasm the committee brought to his every word. To hear their gasps, you’d think their Bethlem suspicions so disturbing that if Wakefield didn’t confirm them quick, they must face the fact the only possible source of such depravity was the vulgar ferment of their own imaginations.
A second surprise: From the nature and order of their questions and also certain peculiar expressions on everybody’s lips, it was evident they were intimately acquainted with Matthews’ journal of Bethlem abuses. (Over the years, he’d crowingly read out favourite passages to me, pluming himself on the retaliation he’d make, so I knew the language.) For their convenience, the committee kept that seminal document on a little table behind and off to one side, for consultation at their leisure. A common sight became an honourable member squeezing out of his seat to refresh his memory.
So much for my satisfaction the charges of a madman could never touch us. But you have to wonder if the extraordinary precision, beauty, and uniqueness of Matthews’ penmanship didn’t itself promise truth to a degree the spawn of a mere printing press can only feign. What’s a product of mechanical duplication against a perfect original creation from a human hand?
Strange times. Seven years ago that spring we were tilted at by Butterclerk and Cluckbeck, the Quixote and Panza of modern medicine. Their delusions, though dangerous, were also ludicrous, and by a concerted effort we sent them packing. Now our assailants were Wakefield and Rose, a republican who’d linked arms with a close friend to the King, and those two had hoisted themselves on the shoulders of a pair of incarcerated madmen, one incorrigibly violent who in his last days sat for a pathetic memorial, the other who like God in Heaven has kept a record of universal suffering, and this pathetic memorial our accusers gazed at in awe and pity, and this record they pored over like Methodists consulting a missal.
What chance sanity against enemies so devoted?
First called to the stand were our new steward Mr. Wallet and our new matron Mrs. Forbes. Both fresh to their posts, neither hesitated to condemn everything ever done at Bethlem before their own merciful arrival. So enthusiastic a scourge was Wallet that he swore Monro is absent three months at a time and the subcommittee has never toured the place in its entire history, let alone every thirty days, as the rules state they must. This from a man who hadn’t been on the premises three months. On the positive side, we heard about his own enlightened initiatives, such as getting patients out of bed in the morning and to the stove room, until you thought, This fellow will go far.
Mrs. Forbes began by asserting she was hired because we wanted somebody “humane” (a word that as a member of the committee that hired her I don’t recall needing to be spoken). She then claimed she’d found patients lying abed four days in the week, clean patients confined as dirty, calm patients chained to walls, recalcitrant patients answered with violence from the keepers (who enchain, according to her, left and right without consulting anybody), and the apothecary—looking straight at me—giving nothing but powders, and then with a baffling reluctance.
In all it was a churlish, ungrateful day of testimony by tireless self-promoters, and I trudged out pretty besmirched.
Next morning first thing I went to see Matthews, to congratulate him on his journal having reached the committee.
He brightened. “That was my doing, Jack. Wallet was pleased to deliver it direct from my hand to Rose’s. Have they grilled you on it yet?”
“No.”
“It’s a rack they’ll split you on.”
“A Procrustean bed, you mean.”
He didn’t hear this, having an announcement to make. “I’ve decided to tell you why I’m in.”
“Good,” I said, my voice thin with calm.
“But the day after I do, you must do something for me: A personal tour of New Bethlem, leaving here at two in the afternoon.”
“Happily, James. Once you see for yourself what your improving suggestions have wrought, you’ll be grateful to live there. It’ll be your own Imperias Palace on earth.”
“Once I tell you why I’m in, Jack,” he said, ignoring this, “you’ll be still more vulnerable to destruction than now.”
“You mean the truth won’t set me free?”
“Not this truth, before this crowd.”
“Why sceptical of so virtuous a man as Wakefield, James? Surely your welfare’s at the top of his list.”
“I don’t like his presumption to know what my welfare is. There’s a new breed of tyranny on its way, Jack. The coercion I’m used to is the fruit of corruption. Mushrooms on the dungheap. Nobody intends it except the brutes, but that’s their nature. What’s coming is coercion organized behind bland eyes, with all the good rational folk staunch in support.”
“Hear, hear.”
“They will destroy you, Jack. Listen—” He meant to the workmen, who were starting that week to demolish the main building, beginning at the far end of the women’s wing, now almost empty, and moving inexorably in our direction. “They’re tearing down your old haunt.”
“They’re only tearing down my old haunt because my new haunt’s almost ready. James, you sound like an old man, to be suspicious of what’s coming, when what you’ve had here is—” There was no need to say more, only indicate our surroundings. “Let me remind you what awaits you in St. George’s Fields—with no small thanks to your unstinting advice to Architect Lewis—”
“I’m used to it here, Jack. I’d rather be up against you than a Wakefield any day. In your abstracted care than his willed.”
This statement I found shocking. I had no idea what answer to make to it. “You mean Blue-Mantle—” I attempted to correct him.
“No, I mean Wakefield. There’s a reason Blue-Mantle chose him.”
“And what is it?”
“What do you think?”
“James, this is sentiment. You must not prefer what I’ve done to you to anything in this world or any other. It would be unnatural.”
“I only prefer it to what’s coming.”
“You don’t know what’s coming.”
“I know one thing: the end of you as apothecary to Bethlem. It’s too evident, Jack, and it must be glaring in the new building, that you no longer belong. So the question now is, how easiest to effect your removal? I know. We’ll hobble you against their questions.”
“That’s why I’m here, James. To be further hobbled.”
“Very well. You shall be.”
“Proceed. I’m every inch ears.”
Matthews opened his mouth, then closed it. He put a hand to his head. I told him I could come back another time, when he felt stronger. He nodded. I took my leave.