IT WAS THE autumn of 1802. Ann Pope was in her late forties, married to a labourer, and she worked hard as a weaver in Whitchurch. Every year she went with a group of other local women to the woods and coppices that were on the edge of Lord Portsmouth’s estate to collect nuts. Strictly speaking, they were trespassing on his land, but few of the women saw it that way. They were simply harvesting a useful food source that would otherwise go to waste. There was no harm done to anybody, nor damage committed to any property. It gave Ann and her friends a chance to spend time together outdoors before winter set in, exchanging news and gossip. This was pleasurable work.
Except that this year the women were interrupted, and by Lord Portsmouth himself. His sudden appearance in the undergrowth surprised them all, and frightened a good many. Offended that the women were on his estate, he angrily turned them out of the coppice. But as they gathered their things, and started towards the road, Portsmouth stopped them and asked if any of the women could sing. Startled at his unusual request, but not wanting to cause any further offence, a young girl in their company offered to sing. When she had finished singing, Portsmouth reached into his pocket and gave the women a substantial sum of money, seven shillings, to share between them. He then asked them to return to the same place the next morning.
So began Ann’s twice to three times a week meetings with Portsmouth over the next two years. She, and ‘as many as a score of women old and young about Whitchurch and Hurstbourne’, became regular visitors to the estate. They always met Portsmouth outdoors among the trees and bushes, but his request for singing was never again repeated. Instead, Portsmouth wanted something altogether more intimate and bizarre. He started by asking the women if he looked well, and grew angry if they said he did. Saying that he was sick, he asked Ann and her friends to hold his wrist, and take his pulse. Then he took out a case of lancets, and ask them to bleed him. Ann declared that she never bled Portsmouth, and became so uncomfortable about his demands that she ‘tied up her right arm to show him that she could not do it telling him that she had hurt it’. Portsmouth talked ‘such stuff’ as Ann was ‘ashamed to repeat’, about ‘what sort of eyes, nose and nostrils such and such woman had’. He was obsessed with how women’s pockets bulged out, and told Ann that these women carried basins under their skirts so they could collect the blood of the men they bled. On one occasion, Portsmouth ordered Ann and the others to put their hands in their pockets, ‘and make them bulge out, and walk to the copse before him’.
Strange as Portsmouth was, Ann continued her visits. At the end of every meeting, Portsmouth gave the women money. The sums ranged from five shillings to half a guinea. ‘It was such an easy way of getting a little money,’ Ann later explained. The money ‘did them good, and as they knew his Lordship had plenty it could do him no hurt,’ she reasoned. Portsmouth’s preferences became so notorious that:
it was quite a common thing for women and girls about Whitchurch and Hurstbourne to go up toward the Park and try their luck if they heard that his Lordship was about there: and he might be seen in a high field on the lookout with his spy glass; and if he saw a woman going along one way or another he would be sure to go down to meet her and ask her to take blood from him.1
Stalking the women below him, Portsmouth found that not all were as difficult prey as Ann Pope. In time, both Ann and ‘old Dame Curtis’ persuaded their daughters to meet Portsmouth; this useful form of money-making ran through families. Sarah Adams, like her mother, Ann Pope, had married a labourer, and made her living winding silk. Described as a ‘pretty woman’, she started meeting Portsmouth when she was in her twenties, and he was in his forties. At their first meeting after she had taken Portsmouth’s pulse, Sarah pleased him by saying ‘he was very poorly’. Portsmouth agreed, and said ‘he was very giddy in his head’, and that ‘he wanted to lose a little blood’. When Sarah refused to take his blood, saying she did not know how, he told her that she ‘need not be afraid, for he had been bled by women in London’. He then slipped off his coat, rolled up his sleeve, ‘and showed her his arms, and the places where he had been bled; and there were several marks, and on both arms’. At their next meetings Portsmouth had to make do with Sarah telling him his fortune, or with Sarah pretending that she, like her mother, had injured her arm and so could not let his blood. Believing Sarah would never bleed him, Portsmouth asked her to describe the appearance of a local doctor’s three daughters, and, assuming they would know how to let blood because of their father’s profession, asked Sarah to bring them with her.
But the doctor’s daughters escaped Portsmouth’s attentions because one day Sarah relented. Delighted to have got his way at last, Portsmouth took off his coat, and turned up his sleeve. He produced a long piece of white tape, about three yards long, with which Sarah tied his arm. She then used the lancet, provided by Portsmouth, to puncture his arm. Drops of blood were collected by Dame Curtis who held a basin below. Portsmouth said nothing during the whole procedure. Sarah then placed a patch of cloth over the place where she had let blood; Portsmouth put his coat back on, and gave Sarah and Dame Curtis seven shillings to share.
The occasion was repeated at least a dozen more times, Sarah becoming a clear favourite. Portsmouth gave her a present of a red leather case containing a collection of lancets, which she produced as evidence to show the Commission of Lunacy many years later. When Sarah pretended to Portsmouth that she had lost the case, he gave her another, this time silver mounted. She saw Portsmouth over the course of at least five years.2
Why did Portsmouth behave in this way? Were his encounters with these local working women evidence of his eccentricity, his simple-mindedness, or his insanity? People at the time struggled to find meaning in Portsmouth’s behaviour, and to uncover some kind of explanation for it, in part because, if it was a sign of his madness, it was a symptom that was unique to him. Even other mad people did not behave in this way.
We can discount Portsmouth’s blood-letting as a form of self-harm. Today people with learning disabilities or mental illness may exhibit signs of distress through forms of self-harm, which can include cutting and wounding. Yet Portsmouth wanted others to bleed him; he did not bleed himself. A few drops of blood did not amount to serious pain or harm.
Bleeding was used by respected physicians and by many individuals as a common cure for a range of ailments at the start of the nineteenth century. Many educated people believed that health depended upon the correct balance of the body’s humours. Letting blood was a way in which an excess of fluids could be released, and the optimal temperature of the body restored. Portsmouth’s own grandfather, Coulson Fellowes, had made regular payments to a practitioner to be bled.
Blood-letting was also used in treatments of people with mental health problems: it was one of a range of cures that was tried on George III during his mental breakdowns. John Haslam declared that in his extensive experience of treating patients that were mad or melancholic bleeding was ‘the most beneficial remedy’. Those who were insane were often insensible to pain, he claimed, so they did not feel the impact of the lancet, ‘the drawing of blisters, or the punctures of cupping’.
Yet bleeding also had its critics. It could do more harm than good, it was argued, and in some cases even cause an individual exhibiting insanity to degenerate into idiocy. ‘Ideotism,’ wrote one physician in 1806, ‘may originate in … excessive use of the lancet in the treatment of active mania.’
It is feasible that, as a child and young man, Portsmouth’s parents had treated him by bleeding. He had certainly learned to associate ill health with bleeding: he told the women that he was unwell and therefore needed to be bled, and on at least one occasion said that it was because he was ‘giddy in his head’ that he wanted bleeding. The more alarming possibility, that bleeding had caused Portsmouth’s mental problems, and that its continued practice only worsened his situation, was never raised in the legal proceedings brought against him.
There was certainly something sinister about Portsmouth’s meetings. Their secrecy and his odd beliefs about women with basins under their skirts suggested to those who later heard stories of these encounters that they were more than a habitual response to ill health. Most troubling was how to interpret the enjoyment that Portsmouth gained from being bled. The frightening possibility that Portsmouth was a masochist who got sexual pleasure from bleeding loomed large in later questioning about these incidents. In the nineteenth century, some believed that blood-letting increased virility: it gave welcome release of sexual energy as well as any bad humours. For Portsmouth, perhaps painful childhood experiences had become twisted into a form of sexual enjoyment.
It was a suggestion that preyed so much on the minds of the women who bled Portsmouth that they denied it before the accusation even arose. After her description of her copse meetings, the exchange between Ann Pope and the lawyer Mr Powell at the 1823 Commission of Lunacy went as follows:
Powell: Did he ever show you anything?
Ann: Oh, no! never (laughter)
Powell: You misunderstand me, woman. Did he take anything out of his pocket?
Ann: Yes, a lancet.
Ann went on to declare, ‘During all these times Lord Portsmouth never took the least liberty with me or the other women.’ Sarah Adams agreed, saying that Portsmouth ‘never touched’ her. Sarah made it clear that, although she started seeing Portsmouth when she was single, she continued meeting him after she was newly married. The implication was that, if there was something sexual going on, her husband would never have let her meet Portsmouth. Nobody suggested that these women’s husbands might have connived in the arrangement.3
Yet Portsmouth’s behaviour was so disconcerting that no woman ever met him on her own. There was safety in numbers. A sense that there was something wrong, and perhaps immoral, in their activities also meant that Sarah Adams refused to meet Portsmouth on one occasion ‘because it was a Sunday morning’.4
Grace knew that her husband met local women on their estate. How much she was aware of what happened during these encounters is not clear, and whether Portsmouth ever betrayed his love of lancets to her is not known. It was about the time that Portsmouth first started meeting women on his estate that Seilaz had sent his letter accusing Portsmouth of sodomy; his wife was already busy dealing with the fall-out of his relationships.
But Grace was wise enough to know that village gossip about her husband’s habits needed to be curtailed if she were to protect him. She instructed John Godden, a park keeper at Hurstbourne, to try to stop Portsmouth going into the coppices. She told Godden that she knew ‘his Lordship was in the habit of meeting women there: and she was afraid that his Lordship might get into some mischief’. There seems little doubt that she confronted Portsmouth about these meetings, and told him that they could not continue. For one time Portsmouth ‘came crying’ to Godden, ‘begging and beseeching him to intercede for him with a couple of children who he said had threatened to tell Lady Portsmouth of him’. When Godden found the children, who were young, they said that they had seen Portsmouth meeting the women again. Portsmouth had already given them a guinea to keep quiet. Afraid of the power of little children to condemn him, and knowing that Grace disapproved, Portsmouth acted guilty, and like a naughty child who had been caught in the act.5
Despite Grace’s best efforts, Portsmouth’s desire to be bled, and his interest in lancets, continued for many years. It was an addiction. He sent servants to buy cases of lancets when he was in London, and a gardener to the cutler to have them sharpened. A valet for Portsmouth for two years from 1822 described how his master folded up the waistcoat containing his lancets and slept with it under his pillow at night. Portsmouth was depicted as a solitary figure, standing for hours on end by the window of his house in Hanover Square, looking for women. Spying one, he would ask this valet ‘if he did not see the basins she carried sticking out at her side’?6
The most damning evidence that Portsmouth got a sexual kick from bleeding came not from a woman, but from a man, James Capy. From March 1815 until the end of 1817, Capy worked as Portsmouth’s valet. According to Capy, Portsmouth asked him ‘almost every morning to bleed him’. ‘His idea was that every woman carried a basin and lancets for the use of men,’ Capy explained, adding that Portsmouth often asked him if Capy’s wife ‘did not carry them, both basin and lancets, and if the housemaid had not them and in which pocket they carried them and the like’. Sometimes Capy tied up Portsmouth’s arm with tape and drew a lancet over the skin without touching it, and this satisfied him. Just the anticipation of the act seemed to be enough. The earl took an ‘unnatural delight’ in this, and, when his arm was tied, he watched ‘the rising of the veins’, and ‘continued applying his other hand to himself in such a manner as to show that he felt a very depraved gratification from it’. ‘His Lordship had undoubtedly the unnatural idea that bleeding was the act of copulation,’ Capy told the courts.7
Even if Portsmouth’s desire to be bled had not started as a sexual one, some of the doctors who examined him for the Commission of Lunacy thought it had become one. Portsmouth proudly showed Dr Sutherland his case of lancets, and told him that ‘even the sign of the operation of bleeding being made, that of putting the fingers to the arm gave him pleasure’. He told Dr Tuthill that, when his arm was bound, the lancets produced ‘a certain fullness of the parts of the generation’, and that ‘he knew not and never had known of any other means of producing the same effect’. Given a choice of giving up his wife or his case of lancets, he would rather abandon his wife, he said.8
Of course, by interpreting Portsmouth’s behaviour and thinking as inspired by sexual desire, those who judged him could find a rational answer for something that was otherwise irrational. It did not help Portsmouth that, even twenty years on, Sarah Adams was noted by reporters at the Commission to be a ‘pretty woman’. Few could imagine an encounter with such a woman that was not sexual.
For those who sought to prove that Portsmouth was insane, his blood-letting practices condemned him as a man with a sordid mind. This behaviour showed that he had crossed the line from the sexual naivety usually associated with idiocy, to the perversion and immorality of insanity. Rather than the helpless victim of fate, he was the maker of his own misfortune. There he was, creeping around in the shadows and the dark corners of his estate, mixing with village women, while Grace, in the house high above him, remained pure and innocent. Sex for Portsmouth had become so detached from a human relationship that it was immaterial to him whether the person holding the lancet was male or female. It was the inanimate object of a needle and the sign of his body’s response to it that turned him on.
Yet this argument was introduced to the courts and largely rested on the evidence of one man, Portsmouth’s valet, Capy. Capy’s description of Portsmouth proved contentious on a number of points, and it stood as a lone voice among the others who had been asked to bleed Portsmouth. The village women were all adamant that Portsmouth had never behaved ‘indecently’ before them. Lawyers warned the jury at the Commission of Lunacy that ‘things very obscene might sound extraordinary; but they must not infer madness too hastily’. Other aristocrats engaged in dubious sexual practices. The jury were reminded of the case of the exotically, yet reassuringly foreign-sounding Kutzmanoff, who had been found ‘hanging and dead, after being placed there for the gratification of his abominable desires by a common prostitute’. This was worse than anything alleged against Portsmouth, ‘yet it was never construed into a proof of insanity’.9 Sane men might be perverse.
Portsmouth’s habits became notorious. Lord Byron joked to a friend that to Portsmouth:
we owe … the greatest discovery about the blood since Dr Harvey’s; – I wonder whether it really hath such an effect – I never was bled in my life – but by leeches – and I thought the leeches d-----d bad pieces – but perhaps the tape and the lancet may be better – I shall try on some great emergency.10
Yet while Portsmouth’s behaviour could trigger a range of responses from humour to horror, he himself remained ignorant of why this behaviour might attract such attention. Others took over from Grace in tutoring Portsmouth that his love of bleeding was wrong. When Portsmouth appeared before the Commission of Lunacy that had been brought against him, ‘there was a crafty attempt at delusion’, it was claimed. Portsmouth tried to convince the jury that ‘he never had been bled but by professional gentlemen’, and, when pressed upon the point, Portsmouth claimed ‘that he had given over the use of lancets for several years’.11 It was better that Portsmouth deny the practice altogether, his lawyers clearly thought, than be drawn into the types of questions that had been posed by the doctors who had examined him.
By the time he was brought before the Commission in 1823, Portsmouth was well rehearsed in the wrongs of admitting to being bled by the women on his estate, but whether he understood why it could be seen as wrong was less clear. Hannah Curtis and her friends clung to their view that Portsmouth was a harmless idiot, not a dangerous madman. They told the Commission he ‘must have been quite a natural’, the popular term for a fool or idiot. He was ‘altogether simple,’ Ann Pope said. His requests exploited nobody, but when granted gave him pleasure and the women financial reward.
It was twenty years or more after their first meetings that the women’s stories were told, and the private fascinations and habits of Portsmouth became public. When they did so their words were explosive because they threatened to expose a man who bared his flesh and allowed himself to be vulnerable to women well below his social status. Even if these were not sexual liaisons, Portsmouth’s meetings were inappropriate social encounters. Collectively described as ‘unskilful and ignorant persons’, Sarah Adams, Ann Pope, and Hannah Curtis could not even sign their names at the end of their witness statements.12 These village women should have been Portsmouth’s social and intellectual inferiors. But Ann Pope, Sarah Adams and their company punctured not only Portsmouth’s skin but the illusion that Portsmouth was a normal, functioning aristocrat.
There was a dark side to Portsmouth’s character that for many years remained hidden. So when stories of Portsmouth’s blood-letting activities were first told they were hard to believe. How could a man maintain such utterly different personas, one in public, another in private, for so long a time? At the first attempt to call a Commission of Lunacy in 1815, lawyers for Portsmouth asked the Chancellor:
Did your Lordship ever hear of so strange a kind of madman as a man who could personate everywhere a person in his senses except in his own Park, a lunatic of this description must be an admirably good player in order to perform all these characters.
If Portsmouth only showed his weaknesses in front of his social inferiors, then he ‘is a man who shows very good discretion and caution, in short he is no madman’, it was argued.13
But now a jury had to decide which of the ‘characters’ that Portsmouth had played was the true Lord Portsmouth. Who was telling the truth, and who had the greatest insights into his state of mind? For the jury of fellow peers and wealthy men, this meant listening to the stories of women and men whose working lives had brought them into most frequent and closest contact with Portsmouth. It was these ordinary, often poor and illiterate people, who had seen Portsmouth off his guard. Unaccustomed as they were to paying attention to the words of their social inferiors, and as uncomfortable as their stories could make them feel, the jury felt compelled to listen. And given a public platform and the opportunity to speak, ordinary people just kept those stories about Portsmouth coming.