‘Our family greatly indulges secrecy’

BRAINS WERE NOT part of Portsmouth’s family inheritance. For all that the Portsmouth family would name their children after him, Isaac Newton was no blood relative. His books and papers were proudly displayed at Hurstbourne, but they had been the legacy of Catherine Conduitt, who married into the family. Her marriage to John Wallop was such a disaster that it ended in separation, and was later claimed in family legend to have been the inspiration for Hogarth’s series of paintings ‘Marriage à la Mode’.¹ In Portsmouth’s more recent family history, his uncle, Barton Wallop, had been made Master of Magdalene College in Cambridge. But this was no sign of academic distinction. According to one contemporary, Barton was ‘totally illiterate’.² Closer to home, Portsmouth’s youngest brother, Coulson, had attended Eton and would be elected MP for Andover in 1796. But he soon ran into debt, and drunkenness did little to enhance his limited abilities. By 1800, Pitt was receiving letters, approved by Urania, stating that he should step down before he made more of a fool of himself, for he was ‘little better than an Idiot’.³

Even if Portsmouth did not descend from the brightest of family trees, few would have suggested that this set him on the path to lunacy. But, while Barton and, to a lesser extent, Coulson Wallop were public figures, there were other members of Portsmouth’s family whose mental condition meant that they were kept hidden from sight. Insanity in this family was so shameful that it was locked away, and for decades kept secret. Nobody wanted to admit that madness ran through the family line.

At some point in 1799, Portsmouth’s mother ordered for him to be strapped down to his bed. Around the same time, and following a violent outburst from her son, Urania threatened to put him in ‘the custody’ of Dr Thomas Monro, chief physician at England’s most notorious madhouse, Bethlem hospital. By 1799, Urania had been a dowager countess for two years, and Lord Portsmouth was thirty-one years old. Whether she gave these orders and issued this threat before or after Portsmouth’s abduction-cum-escape attempt with Seilaz in July, we do not know. But something had happened to make Urania lose her cool: she was the ‘most sensible woman’ who had suddenly snapped. When she threatened her son with Monro, she told a person present that ‘I have foreborn from having done this long ago from motives of delicacy’.⁴

Urania’s words were remembered in the legal trials that Portsmouth later faced. That his mother had considered physical constraint and confinement for her son was a measure of how serious his condition had become, some argued. Her threats were presented as evidence that those closest to him had started to consider him insane well before any legal proceedings began. However, no servant could be produced to prove that Portsmouth had been strapped down, and, although Portsmouth was eventually examined by a Dr Monro, it was not in his mother’s lifetime, and it was by Thomas Monro’s son, Edward Thomas.⁵

Yet Lord Portsmouth was terrified when his mother uttered these words. For he knew that she had recent and personal experience of consulting with doctors for the insane, and that ‘motives of delicacy’ had not prevented her from confining her own sister, and his aunt, Dorothea, in a madhouse. His mother knew what she was talking about. To Portsmouth, these were not idle threats spoken in the heat of the moment, but an all too frightening possibility.

Urania was one of five children born to Coulson and Urania Fellowes. She and her two brothers, William and Henry Arthur, and sister, Mary (who died in July 1788), had been worried about Dorothea’s mental health from at least August 1785. ‘Our sister’s unfortunate situation’⁶ provoked many letters between the brothers and sisters, as they exchanged news of her condition, and debated what to do. Dorothea was unmarried, and living independently in a house on Twickenham Common. The challenge of responding to her illness was increased by her geographical distance from William, who lived at Ramsey Abbey near Huntingdon, and Haverland Hall in Norfolk, Henry Arthur, who, while having a house near Berkeley Square in London, was based at least some of the year in Eggesford, Devon, and Urania, who was at Hurstbourne in Hampshire.

While there were glimpses of hope and moments of recovery, with time, Dorothea’s condition worsened. Dorothea suffered from delusions of several kinds. She became convinced that none of her servants was to be trusted, and that they were conspiring to steal from her and profit after her death. She took offence and gave offence ‘anywhere, when the provocation seemed totally imaginary, in the street or in any public place’, according to William. Her belief that she had been insulted led to some kind of public altercation (never detailed) on two separate occasions in Covent Garden and at Cheltenham. She was becoming an embarrassment: when Dorothea went to Bath towards the end of 1790, Urania and her brothers dreaded what might happen in this hub of society gossip. ‘I am very fearfull that something shou’d happen to expose Her,’ wrote Henry Arthur.

Finally, in the highly charged and politically sensitive years of the French Revolution, Dorothea became so emotionally involved in the unfolding events at home that she became convinced that her life was under threat from the ‘common people’ of Twickenham. Her interest in the Birmingham Riots of July 1791, which targeted Joseph Priestley, a former patient of speech therapist Samuel Angier, along with other dissenters and individuals thought sympathetic to the revolutionary cause, became obsessional. She followed events and the trials of the rioters in the newspapers, wrote letters to her sister Urania about them, and became so certain that the riots would spread, and her house (like Priestley’s) would be burned, that she moved out.⁷

The Fellowes family were fortunate in where Dorothea decided to go. She took refuge from her imaginary foes in the home of John Pridden, her father’s bookseller in Fleet Street. Pridden, and then his son, who shared the same name, spent years looking after the affairs of Dorothea, apparently inspired by admiration for ‘the venerable Coulson’, her father, whom John Pridden junior credited with setting him on his career path as an antiquary and architect.⁸ Dorothea was not an easy guest for the bookseller. In August 1791, William Fellowes recorded that, when he called in on his sister at Pridden’s house, and found that she had gone to back to Twickenham for the day, Pridden ‘told me, that she was hard to please, had affronted Mrs. P’ by sticking out her tongue, and ‘that his regard for the family induced him to put up with a great deal, meaning her temper’.⁹

Staying with Pridden long term was not an option, no matter how handsomely he was rewarded. Apparently unknown to Urania, in the autumn of 1788, her brothers discussed in their letters the possibility of Dorothea going to live at Hurstbourne. Portsmouth at this stage was still Lord Lymington, as his father was alive, and having finished school was probably living at home. It is a decision that Dorothea would have liked. She seems to have been in awe of her sister’s position and success, asking William at one point if a servant-companion she had recruited was ‘a proper person to sit at Ld Portsmouth’s Table’.¹⁰

If William and Henry Arthur foresaw a problem with their insane sister living alongside her mentally troubled nephew, they did not specify it. The scheme was rejected because of Urania’s health. Urania at this point was seriously ill. It was with some relief that in December Henry Arthur could write to his cousin, Robert Fellowes, ‘Lady Portsmouth is quite well again and I hope to see her so in a few days – the loss of Her wou’d be great indeed.’¹¹ If her brothers thought the presence of Dorothea would only increase the strain Urania was already experiencing with her oldest son, they were discreet enough to never record it.

By August 1791, Dorothea was in a ‘very deplorable situation’.¹² Urania in particular was anxious that a decision should be made about Dorothea’s future. She later voiced frustration to her cousin about William, her oldest brother, and his inability to make up his mind. ‘He is very apt to over Think himself, and to have little Patience, yet procrastinates everything … He never liked Trouble; or had firmness … to give dispatch to Business – But thinking, ever thinking, without Resolution.’¹³ William’s procrastination is a gift to historians, however. In tiny hand, he meticulously recorded lists of questions that he and ‘Lady P’ had to resolve regarding Dorothea’s care, a day-by-day account of his visit to London in August and September, and a remarkable document, dated September 1791, which he entitled ‘Reasons for confinement’.¹⁴

William was the first to come to London, on 25 August. Urania arrived ten days later. Henry Arthur was too ill to travel (he died the following January), but, a few days before William’s departure for London, Henry Arthur had written a long letter to him. ‘I shou’d be heartily glad to hear that she was in a place of security where she might be taken good care of,’ he wrote. A private madhouse was preferable to having a carer, or ‘keeper’, living with her, Henry Arthur perceived, ‘because a single person about Her at home may use Her ill and we know nothing of it’. ‘In my opinion there is not a doubt what to do,’ wrote Henry Arthur, ‘but the difficulty is – how to accomplish the end – with as little disturbance as possible.’¹⁵ Having made up their minds, the public scene that Dorothea might make as she was confined in a madhouse was what most troubled her siblings. This was a family problem that they did not want others to know about.

William immediately set about getting Robert Darling Willis, a doctor who specialized in caring for the insane, to examine Dorothea. The rules governing the admission of patients to private madhouses had become much stricter since legislation in 1774. Private madhouses were institutions owned by individuals (who did not need a medical background), and operated as businesses for profit. Few were purpose built, but were private houses where troublesome but wealthy lunatics could be confined. Public alarm about cases of wrongful confinement, where perfectly sane people had been locked up by their relatives had led to the 1774 Act for Regulating Private Madhouses. This stipulated that all houses containing more than one lunatic had to be licensed and inspected once a year, and that patients should not be admitted without the order of ‘some physician, surgeon, or apothecary’.¹⁶ Willis was the perfect candidate for providing a certificate of Dorothea’s insanity. He was the son of Dr Francis Willis, whose controversial methods of treating George III, including using a straitjacket, gag, and restraining chair, had produced a royal recovery in February 1789, and earned a handsome financial reward from the grateful William Pitt. Robert would attend the King during his second period of madness, and had established his own credentials as an expert on insanity.¹⁷

However, all did not go smoothly. William took Robert Willis to see Dorothea at Fleet Street on 27 August. Like her nephew, who would be examined by numerous physicians years afterwards, Dorothea was not told the truth about the identity or occupation of her visitor. Instead, William told her that Willis was ‘transacting business’ for him. Willis talked to Dorothea, and she confided in him her worries about being insulted by the ‘common people’. But, having met her, Willis was not prepared to declare Dorothea insane, and told William that ‘confinement under the present circumstances would be improper’. Two days later, Willis provided a written explanation. ‘It appeared to me,’ he wrote, ‘that she was perfectly rational on all common topics’, but ‘she had taken up some peculiar ideas which made her act, in some points, much unlike herself.’ ‘This change in her mind’ was ‘probably dependent on a change of constitution owing to her time in life.’ In Willis’s view, it was Dorothea’s ‘change of life’, the menopause, that provoked her occasional irrational behaviour. Hence, ‘there is a probability of the symptoms wearing off by time alone’, and the most he would recommend was that she should ‘visit her relations or friends’, or they visit her, to provide some distraction from her negative thoughts.¹⁸

This was an unacceptable diagnosis for William, Henry Arthur, and Urania. Responding to William’s letter informing him of what Willis had said, Henry Arthur voiced what they all felt: ‘I do not see how she can visit her Relations or friends – or they Her in Her present disordered state.’ Her mental state rendered her unsuitable company. Only people used to being with ‘persons in Her unhappy way’ should be with her, thought Henry Arthur.¹⁹ The last thing her siblings wanted was for her to stay with them and so risk her odd behaviour reflecting on them. They wanted distance from Dorothea and her mental problems, and that meant her removal from their company and confinement in a madhouse.

Urania was shocked by news of Willis’s diagnosis, and hurried to London. Once there, she went with William, and their cousin Robert Fellowes, whom Urania had summoned to London ‘on this sad business’, to hear Willis’s opinion for herself. At this meeting, Willis ‘seemed to think Dorothea so little ill that he confessed, he did not know what to advise,’ William recorded. Urania insisted that Willis visit Dorothea for a second time, which he did, but he continued to hold the same view.²⁰

Unable to secure the signature they needed for the decision they had already reached, Dorothea’s family simply shopped around for another doctor to see Dorothea. Dr Samuel Simmons, who had been a physician to Bethlem Hospital since 1781, was another hard-line physician whose cruelty to George III would provoke the King to label him that ‘horrible doctor’.²¹ When Simmons visited Dorothea, she told him about the houses that could be burned by rioters in Twickenham. He then informed her that he was not a lawyer, as he had been introduced, but a doctor. Dorothea was furious and told Simmons ‘that if he would not leave the Room, she would’. She ran upstairs, and a servant was used to relay messages between the pair. Simmons had no hesitation at pronouncing that Dorothea’s mind was ‘deranged’ and that she ‘was not proper to be trusted without some person with her’.²² He completed a form to say that she was insane, and advised the family to confine her in Mr Robert Holme’s private madhouse, called Fisher House, in Islington.

The very next day, Urania, William, and Simmons met at Pridden’s house in Fleet Street and followed Simmons’ plan of pretending to take Dorothea to meet others whose property had been threatened in the recent disturbances. According to William, Simmons ‘performed his part so well that Poor Dorothea was most effectually deceived’. Robert Fellowes went with Dorothea, ‘and a most dreadful scene ensued upon their arrival’ at Fisher House. ‘Accusations of deception and much resentment followed’, and from her questions and remarks it became apparent that Dorothea was well aware of into ‘what sort of a House she had been introduced’.²³ Pridden was instructed to take care of all of Dorothea’s affairs at her house in Twickenham, and to tell her servants that their mistress had gone on a visit ‘into the Country’.²⁴

Dorothea spent the next twenty-six years of her life confined in Fisher House. She outlived all her brothers and sisters, and Dr Simmons who continued to treat her until his death in 1813. If she was suffering from the menopause in 1791, then she must have been a very old lady when she died at Fisher House on 8 December 1817.

She was not forgotten by her siblings. Urania worried about her sister’s living conditions, and confided in her cousin, Robert Fellowes, that Dorothea’s case had prompted her to read treatises about insanity, including those by Dr William Perfect. ‘I think she must lead a miserable Day!’ wrote Urania, and, as the anniversary of Dorothea’s confinement approached, she told Robert, ‘I am sure there is not a Day that my Thoughts are not turned on the wretched Catastrophe!’²⁵

Dorothea herself ensured that she was a trouble that did not go away because she wrote letters from the madhouse. She moved from imagining insults from her Twickenham neighbours to thinking her madhouse keeper had treated her with disrespect. But it was in 1799, the year that Urania threatened to strap her son to his bed, and send him to Dr Monro, that Dorothea’s letters took a more disturbing turn. On 3 May, 22 July, and 27 September, Dorothea wrote three separate notes ‘To the Legislature’. Of course, her notes never reached the authorities, but were forwarded to her family instead. In each, she complained that she was being poisoned. ‘Three or four years ago, I complain’d that my Head was hurt every morning, by something in my Breakfast milk,’ Dorothea wrote. She claimed to have informed Dr Simmons of her concerns, but nothing had been done. ‘How many different Drugs I have to Complain of, I don’t know; but, if the Poisons that are now mix’d with my Milk are continued, it is impossible that I can live,’ she declared. By July, Dorothea was convinced that her food as well as her milk was being tampered with, so that she dared not eat. ‘My fears for my Life have scarcely been interrupted,’ she wrote in September. Convinced that her doctors were conspiring against her life she made the following dramatic statement:

I must set down the vote of the unlawful assembly of the College of Physicians to Destroy me, as the greatest act of Violence and oppression that was ever offer’d to an Innocent Woman. If there has been greater injustice, it has not come within my knowledge.²⁶

If Dorothea’s experience had taught Urania anything, it was that confinement in a private madhouse, and treatment with drugs did not always work. Dorothea had been neither silenced nor cured. It may have been as much exasperation with her sister’s condition as with her son’s that led Urania to issue her threats against him. But if Urania’s threats to Portsmouth were never carried out, and she would describe her consent to have Dorothea confined as a decision that would ‘ever bear very hard on my Feelings’, Urania did not flinch from her resolve that confinement was a ‘necessity’ for Dorothea.²⁷ Urania tried to improve the comforts of confinement, but she never considered freedom for her sister. As Dorothea’s condition worsened, in Urania’s eyes, it became increasingly alarming, and the reason for her confinement more justified.

Portsmouth must have been aware of what had happened to his aunt, even if there is no proof that they ever met. For years, Dorothea’s condition was the subject of family discussion, and while her independent wealth could meet the costs of her care, her bills and accounts had to be managed by other family members. We know that Dorothea also wrote directly to Portsmouth, as we have one surviving letter to him, dated 18 November 1800. Addressed to ‘The Right Honourable The Lord Viscount Lymington’, and asking that she be remembered to Lord Portsmouth, and ‘the Mr Wallops’ and ‘Lady Wallops’, Dorothea either did not realize or remember that the 2nd earl had died three years beforehand, and that Lymington was now Lord Portsmouth. Dorothea was well informed of her status, however: she signed herself, ‘the unfortunate Dorothea Fellowes’.²⁸

There was madness on both sides of Portsmouth’s family. On his father’s side it was exhibited through the children of Portsmouth’s aunt, Lady Catherine Wallop. Catherine was the 2nd earl’s only sister, who in October 1770 had married Lockhart Gordon, the son of the 3rd earl of Aboyne. Lockhart became a Judge Advocate for the British army in Bengal, and died there in March 1788. Catherine remained in London throughout her marriage, and bore four children who survived into adulthood: Lockhart, Loudoun, Caroline, and Catherine. As a widow, Catherine supplemented her income by tutoring and lodging young ladies in her Kensington home, including a Rachel Dashwood, the illegitimate daughter and joint heiress of Lord Le Despencer. Lockhart and his younger brother Loudoun became fond of Miss Dashwood, whom they saw in their school holidays. On leaving school, Lockhart trained for the ministry, and Loudoun, like his father, for the army. As a soldier, Loudoun travelled abroad to Martinique and the West Indies, but also fell into debt, and at one point was imprisoned in New Prison, Clerkenwell. Meanwhile, Portsmouth’s widowed aunt, Catherine, and his cousin of the same name, paid visits to him at Hurstbourne in August 1802, and his cousin Catherine stayed with him again at some point between 1808 and 1810.²⁹ When in London, Portsmouth often called to see Lockhart and Loudoun: the cousins were on familiar terms.³⁰

Scandal erupted soon after Loudoun’s return from military duty in September 1803. Miss Dashwood had married Matthew Allen Lee, but had separated from him within a short time. She remained legally married, and, thanks to her inheritance and a generous allowance from her husband, a very wealthy woman. Both Loudoun and his brother Lockhart paid her many visits, and Loudoun declared his love for her, which he said she welcomed. Then, on 15 January 1804, the two brothers, both armed with pistols, abducted Mrs Lee from her home and took her in a carriage on a journey that they intended to end in Wales. Reverend Lockhart attempted to place a ring belonging to Loudoun on Mrs Lee’s finger in an imitation of a wedding ceremony, and Mrs Lee was seen throwing a locket from the carriage with the words: ‘the charm that has preserved my virtue hitherto is dissolved … now welcome pleasure’. They stopped for the night at Tetsworth in Oxfordshire, where Loudoun shared a bed with Mrs Lee. Her servants back in London had alerted the authorities to events, and the law finally caught up with the brothers in Gloucester, where they were arrested. They were brought back to London, and charged with the offence of forcibly abducting Mrs Lee, ‘for the purpose of enjoying her property, marrying her, or defiling her person’. If found guilty, the brothers faced the death penalty.

Lockhart and Loudoun were tried at the Oxford assizes in March 1804. The newspapers had been following the case since the brothers’ arrest in January. The courtroom and streets surrounding the court were so packed with eager spectators that the judge and lawyers had to push their way through the throng to reach their places. The trial opened with the case for the prosecution. Much was made of the social background of the brothers: they had ‘the polish of gentility, and the refined advantages of high birth and elegant education’, and so they should have known better. Greed and lust had won them over. A number of Mrs Lee’s servants testified that they and their mistress had been threatened at gunpoint when she was abducted. Then Mrs Lee took the stand. Her evidence lasted two hours, beginning with an account of how she had stayed with Mrs Gordon when she was fourteen years old. But then the case against the brothers unravelled. Her answers to questions about the abduction made it apparent that she had been a party to the plan, and that she saw the journey as a romantic elopement not a forced abduction. She admitted that at Tetsworth she had intercourse with Loudoun, and had welcomed him into her bed. Rather than being a victim, she revealed herself to be a wicked temptress, who had no religion. When she said she ‘did not believe in Christianity’, the judge brought the case to a sudden halt. He ordered the jury to acquit the brothers because there was no evidence of force. As the acquitted brothers left the court, ‘the mob cheered them with loud huzzas’. The disgraced Mrs Lee had to shelter from the crowds’ insults and wait until it had dispersed before hastening away.³¹

In their letters to each other, the Portsmouth family remained resolutely quiet about this set of events. They were no doubt horrified about how the family name was drawn into the case. Witnesses and Mrs Lee were asked about the family connection between Mrs Gordon and her brother, the 2nd earl of Portsmouth. The story had become a public sensation, reported by newspapers across the land, and Loudoun, feeling frustrated that he had not had his turn in court to present his defence would not let it drop. A month after the trial, he published a lengthy attack on Mrs Lee, arguing that he and his brother were ‘the dupes of an artful and treacherous woman’. In this publication, which went through several editions, Loudoun tried to boost his claims of respectability by boasting of his family ties with the Portsmouths. He wrote that their solicitor, John Hanson, acted for the brothers at the Oxford assizes, and Mr Serjeant Best had been sent to give them legal advice, ‘at the express desire of the Earl of Portsmouth’. Three years later, Mrs Lee published her own ‘vindication’ of her conduct. The crowd at the Oxford assizes may have been on the side of the Gordons, but the press remained convinced that they ‘had certainly no claim to popular respect’. As a clergyman, Lockhart’s behaviour was particularly ‘unpardonable’. The death of Lockhart’s wife a few months after the trial was attributed to shock and grief.³²

Loudoun and Lockhart had brought notoriety and shame to the family, but their trial in Oxford did not put an end to the troubles they would present. On 8 October 1810, Urania wrote to her son Newton to tell him that Loudoun ‘has Relapsed’. At the breakfast table of Lord Grantley, who by this time had become a family member through his sister’s marriage, and in ‘Mixed Coy’ (Company), Loudoun ‘Broke Forth’. He said that he was the man who was described in the Book of Revelations as bringing peace on earth, and that he planned to fight Bonaparte in single combat on the plains of Almeida, and was confident of his success. Grantley met this outburst with a response that calmed the situation, according to Urania. He ‘cooley told Him He was right, and He would go a part of the Way with Him to London, and promote his Journey’. If Grantley had started the journey with Loudoun, it ended with Loudoun being taken by ‘two Persons to a Private House in London’.

Urania and Portsmouth now had two of their relatives confined in private madhouses. Since Urania described Loudoun’s behaviour in 1810 as a relapse, it seems probable that he had experienced a mental breakdown before, and possibly had already spent time in a madhouse. Insanity may have been how Loudoun’s family explained his abduction of Mrs Lee in 1804, although this cause was not one that was explored by the press coverage of the case.³³

Like Dorothea Fellowes, Loudoun wrote letters from his captivity. Soon after the October 1810 incident Loudoun sent a letter to Lord Grantley’s brother, General Chapple Norton, ‘couch’d in very Sensible Language’. In his letter, he stated that ‘He is sensible of his Malady, and … become very Well, and begs to be Liberated.’³⁴ The General shared the contents of the letter with the family, but, like Dorothea, Loudoun was never released. At some point, he was cared for by Dr John Warburton, and then moved to Laverstock House asylum, a large private madhouse near Salisbury, owned by the Finch family, which was renowned for the humane treatment of its inmates, and success at achieving their cure. Nevertheless, Loudoun was still there in January 1828. In June the previous year, aided by his brother, Loudoun had tried but failed to escape. Lockhart’s claims that his brother’s confinement was no longer necessary fell on deaf ears.³⁵

In October 1810, it was left to Urania to ‘Communicate this Sad Tale’ of Loudoun’s breakfast-time scene to his mother. Urania was sympathetic towards her sister-in-law, and admired her courage. Telling Newton of this meeting, she said Catherine Gordon ‘bore’ the news ‘with feelings of One, accustomed to be … Burdened, and with the Resignation to Providence of “Give me Patience Thy Will be Done!”’. Perhaps Mrs Gordon won Urania’s support because she was another mother enduring the consequences of having a mentally disturbed son.

When Urania spoke to Mrs Gordon about Loudoun, she had to ‘conceal it from her Daughter, who is not to hear of it’.³⁶ Since Caroline Gordon had died in 1801, this daughter must have been Catherine. Why Catherine could not be told of her brother’s fate is not made clear, but it may be because she too was in a fragile mental condition. By September 1824, Catherine was also confined in a private madhouse, in her case the one owned by Dr John Warburton. We know this because, once their mother died, Lord Portsmouth and his trustees became responsible for meeting the cost of the care of his two cousins. In June 1836, Drs Finch and Warburton were still chasing their fees.³⁷ Could this have been the case of one mad person supporting the care of two others?

‘Our family greatly indulges secrecy’, wrote Urania to her cousin Robert Fellowes on 14 January 1792. She had just received Robert’s letter bearing the ‘Formidable’ news that her brother Henry Arthur had a ‘Cancerous Complaint’. Henry Arthur had stayed with her at Hurstbourne in the early part of December, and she ‘witness’d my poor Dear Brother Henry’s ill-state of Health’, but he never complained of pain and she did not realize that he was so seriously ill. ‘That my poor dear Henry should conceal so afflicting a Malady from me … does not surprise me’, explained Urania, because the family was so good at keeping secrets.³⁸

There was no greater testament to this family’s success at keeping secrets than the total lack of reference to the insanity and confinement of Dorothea Fellowes, and Loudoun and Catherine Gordon in the legal proceedings that faced Portsmouth. There were enough cases of insanity running through families for people to know that it could be inherited. When Newton first called for his brother to be subject to a Commission of Lunacy in November 1814, Dorothea was still alive, and Loudoun if not Catherine was confined in a private madhouse. Newton, and then his son, would hardly have wanted to bring attention to their other mentally troubled relatives, but they could not control what witnesses said, and no one made the connection between Portsmouth and his ‘unfortunate’ aunt or cousins. This was all the more remarkable given the doctors who were chosen to examine Portsmouth. Drs Francis Willis and Thomas Warburton were relatives of the physicians who had examined Dorothea and confined Catherine, and Dr Alexander Robert Sutherland had been put in charge of the medical care of Dorothea since the death of Dr Simmons. While each of these doctors thought Portsmouth was of ‘unsound mind’, none of them suggested that his condition was hereditary.

Family secrets have their costs, and Urania came very close to paying a high price for keeping Dorothea’s condition a secret. Henry Arthur did not reveal the seriousness of his illness to his sister and brother, but, when he died on 29 January 1792, a much bigger secret came to light. Henry Arthur had never married, and controversially his father had left him, not his older brother, William, the Eggesford estate. By his death, Eggesford was said to be worth ‘more than half a million’.³⁹ Henry Arthur had let his family know that he intended to repeat his father’s decision of favouring Urania’s second son, Newton, rather than her oldest, Lymington, by making him his heir. Since Lymington stood to inherit the Portsmouth estates, this should not be seen as any slight or indication of his uncle’s regard for him. Lymington’s future interests were already taken care of, and Henry Arthur was set to favour his next oldest nephew. Henry Arthur also led Urania to expect that he would leave her oldest daughter, Henrietta Dorothea, the jewels of her aunt, Mary Fellowes, which he had in his safe-keeping.⁴⁰

The bombshell on his death came when his family turned the key attached to his watch to open his travelling case. Inside was his will, written in his hand, dated 16 September 1789, with a codicil of 5 January 1791. He left everything to a woman they had never heard of, Martha Brown, and her two children, whom he regarded as his own. Any child born to Martha within forty weeks of his death was also given a legacy of ten thousand pounds. When the shocked family investigated the identity of Martha Brown, they discovered that she was married to a soldier who had been in the East Indies for the last twelve years. In her husband’s absence, she had been running a bawdy house for ‘girls of the town’, and was known as ‘Mother Brown’.⁴¹ That Henry Arthur had been conducting a secret relationship with ‘so Bad a Woman’ was truly shocking to Urania and her family. ‘It seems hardly credible so sensible a Man could fall into such Deep laid snares,’ wrote Urania to her cousin.⁴²

The lawyers, led by John Hanson, and overseen by Reverend Garnett, were set to work. While nobody tried to deny that Henry Arthur had a relationship with Martha, however disgraceful this would have been, the family needed to prove that he had been duped into making this will. Demonstrating that Martha had deceived Henry Arthur by pretending the children were his own was fairly straightforward. Witnesses testified that Martha had not had any baby since her husband left the country twelve years before, and when Martha brought children to Hanson’s house and claimed that their father was Henry Arthur, investigation showed that they were in fact the children of another woman. Martha was forty-nine years old, and when threatened with a search by midwives to determine whether she was seven months pregnant, as she originally claimed, she retracted her statement and admitted that she had not seen Henry Arthur since the previous July.⁴³

Martha’s claims on the Eggesford fortune were falling apart, but, for Urania to win it back for Newton, she needed to demonstrate that she was held in her brother’s ‘Esteem and Regard’ up to the point of his death.⁴⁴ Written evidence of affection for his sister would show where Henry Arthur’s true intentions lay. But this is where Urania had a problem: all the recent letters she had from her brother also discussed their sister, Dorothea. Proceedings in the court of Chancery had already brought unwelcome publicity to the family’s affairs, and Martha’s ‘scandalous fraud’ had been the subject of much newspaper reporting.⁴⁵ The last thing Urania wanted was the matter of her sister’s condition to be dragged into the papers. She told her cousin that she could only feel ‘great comfort in the thought of avoiding every step which will produce a Publication of so much unhappiness’.⁴⁶

Urania went to extraordinary lengths to protect her son’s inheritance without revealing her sister’s case. She became so paranoid that her letters to her cousin could fall into the wrong hands that she stopped referring to Dorothea by name, and instead left a blank or inserted ellipses when she wrote about her.⁴⁷ Being pressed by the lawyers to produce a letter to her from Henry Arthur, she took her scissors to one that he had addressed to her, ‘My Dear Raney’, on 24 September 1791. She cut out all references to Dorothea and her doctor’s opinions. Sending a copy of the letter to Robert Fellowes with boxes drawn around the sections she had cut out, Urania explained that she did this ‘for my Conscience sake to my Brother Wm and my own Feelings on the Subject’. Such was her determination that Dorothea’s fate should remain a closely guarded secret that she said ‘I did not like even Mr Garnett should be left to Guess who the Doctors opinion was favourable to’.⁴⁸ Incredibly, Garnett, Urania’s closest friend, who was fighting her cause in the courts, was not in on the secret of Dorothea.

Urania’s actions were much to the annoyance of her lawyers, who decided that they could not use the letter that she had defaced. But their efforts to contest Martha Brown’s claims on Henry Arthur’s estate eventually paid off. ‘No man was ever more imposed on by artifice and fraud than the Testator,’ declared the Solicitor-General. Martha was confined in the Fleet while she was unable to pay off her legal costs. Newton, still a minor, was confirmed as his uncle’s heir, and, in August 1794, a royal licence granted Newton the right to take on the surname of his great benefactor, Fellowes.⁴⁹

Portsmouth’s family was one that had shown itself more than capable of fighting over property and inheritance, and one that was prepared to lock up its mentally unstable members for decades at a time. Dorothea’s condition had forced Urania to read up about insanity: if she was familiar with Perfect’s works, then she was up-to-date with thinking about the causes and treatment of madness. Urania had also become aware of the legal options for protecting the property of the insane as she had been part of the family’s discussion of whether they should seek a Commission of Lunacy for Dorothea.⁵⁰ Yet the idea of confining Portsmouth to a private madhouse was never suggested in all of this family’s extensive correspondence, and comparisons between him and his aunt and cousins were never recorded. Why?

It could be because at this stage none of Portsmouth’s family thought of him as mad. To be sure, during his childhood and youth he had shown many worrying indicators of problems to come. He had plentiful learning difficulties, and his early problems with toileting, as well as struggles with speech, bore comparison with many of the signs that other parents used to identify idiocy. His lack of self-awareness and social skills, as well as susceptibility to suggestion, we might associate with autism.

Yet, if Portsmouth had been subject to the legal tests for idiocy, which commonly included questions assessing memory for dates (such as his birthday), or ability to reason and complete simple arithmetic, he would have passed them with flying colours. He was nothing like the thirty-year-old Walter Long Warren who in 1735 was said to have ‘so weak a judgement, capacity and understanding’ that he would give away all his estate ‘for a piece of gingerbread’. Portsmouth had been slow at school, but he had acquired some learning, unlike Fanny Fust, whose family protested against her marriage to Henry Bowerman in 1787 on the grounds of her ‘total insanity or imbecility of mind’. Fanny had the mind of a three-year-old, it was claimed, and despite the best efforts of her mother and school teachers she could not read, spell, do needlework or hold any conversation ‘whatsoever, even on the most trifling subject’.⁵¹

Portsmouth did not match the characteristics of those being labelled as idiots, but nonetheless his mind had not developed as it should. There was no obvious cause for Portsmouth’s condition. No evidence suggests that there were problems with his birth, and there is no record of epileptic fits, which at this time were thought to trigger mental breakdown. Without a clear cause, coping with Portsmouth was never going to be straightforward. His family had time on their hands, and under Urania’s watch they had tried a variety of responses. Quick-fix solutions failed (his stammer remained); time away at school or abroad only offered temporary relief. Legal protection was sought with the 1790 deed, but the Seilaz incident showed how easily Portsmouth could be subject to abuse and fraud.

Portsmouth was a liability but this did not make him insane. There is no evidence at this time of Portsmouth suffering from delusions like his aunt and cousins. He could be capable of rational thought, and controlled in his actions. In this context, Urania’s threats to restrain her son and have him sent to Dr Monro could be understood as the words of a woman who was overwhelmed with worries about the mental health of her sister. With madness on her mind, and faced with her challenging, unreliable, and frequently irritating son, Urania had overreacted, and used words that reflected what was uppermost in her thoughts. She never intended for her threats to be carried out, and, apart from Portsmouth himself, nobody took her words seriously. It was only in later years, and after her death, that her words were remembered. For a woman who placed so much importance on keeping insanity a family secret, it is ironic that her threats would be used to raise questions about her son’s mental condition.

Angry and exasperated, in 1799, it was clear to Urania that her son needed tight control if he was going to avoid incidents like the Seilaz one in the future. Confinement in a madhouse was not an option for her oldest son and heir. She started to seek another kind of keeper for her son: a wife.