IT WAS A common enough experience for a father, but that did not make it any less painful. In May 1807, William Litchfield was watching his daughter die. There were a host of diseases to which children could fall prey, and very little that a parent could do to prevent their being lethal. Wealth did not always act as a protector. As well as an older brother who probably died within the first few hours of life, Portsmouth had a younger brother and a sister who did not live beyond their childhood, and a further sister who died just before her seventeenth birthday. For the rich, children stood a greater chance of survival by the early nineteenth century than they had a century earlier. Of the ten children fathered by the 1st earl of Portsmouth, only one lived to adulthood, and even this child died before his father in 1749. But by the nineteenth century, as the population of England increased, and towns swelled in size with little regard to sanitation, the divide between the life expectancy of the rich and poor grew greater. Attention was eventually given to the plight of the urban working classes, but the squalor and appalling living conditions of the labouring poor in rural counties like Hampshire was all but forgotten. Babies and children paid a high price for this neglect.
By the standards of the time, Litchfield could afford a good quality of living for his wife and children. He had a steady income working as a carpenter on the Hurstbourne estate. With plentiful supplies of timber, and a wide range of farm and outbuildings, stables and cottages as well as the mansion to maintain, he was never short of work. He had been employed at Hurstbourne all his working life, beginning with service under the 2nd earl. This Lord Portsmouth had rewarded him with a cottage on the estate, about half a mile from the mansion. It was here that he brought his young wife to live, and where his children were born and raised.
But in spring 1807, Litchfield’s daughter became seriously unwell. Over the course of a fortnight her sickness grew worse, each day the girl growing weaker and suffering more pain. Desperate to help her, Litchfield approached his mistress, Grace, Lady Portsmouth. Grace ‘did everything she could for her’, sending her family’s physician, Dr Ludlow, to see the girl. But the doctor told Litchfield there was nothing he could do: as so often at that time, even if medics could diagnose the illness they could not offer a cure. A nurse was sent to tend the girl. It was obvious to everyone who saw her that she was dying, and all Litchfield and his family could do was sit and wait.
Litchfield had already been taken aback when Portsmouth had abruptly asked him during his meeting with Grace if he thought his daughter would die. The carpenter had known the 3rd earl since he was a boy, seeing him about the estate during his school holidays, and on his return from his tour abroad. In Litchfield’s opinion, Portsmouth was ‘nothing better than a fool’, a weak-minded man who had ‘no understanding’. It was Grace who always paid his wages and settled his accounts, but, because Portsmouth ‘was very fond of giving orders’, he would pretend to follow his instructions, ‘for peace and quietness’. Portsmouth was forever getting in the way of his work, so on one occasion Litchfield gave him a nail to drive, to try to keep him occupied. With this one nail, Portsmouth was ‘as well pleased as ever he was in his life’. Litchfield knew that Portsmouth was simple-minded, and was perhaps ready to forgive his direct questioning about his daughter, as long as his curiosity stopped there.
Now the girl was hours away from death. Nobody thought she would live to see another day. As she lay in the cottage, surrounded by her loving family, and cared for by a nurse, this tender deathbed scene was suddenly disturbed. Portsmouth, accompanied by the parish clerk, arrived at the cottage. The nurse went to the door and told Portsmouth that the girl was dying and was not fit to see him. But Portsmouth would not budge. So Litchfield came to the door, and Portsmouth repeated his request to see the dying girl. Litchfield refused, and asked both men to leave. The clerk went to stand on the other side of the hedge that surrounded the cottage, but Portsmouth remained on the doorstep. Litchfield ‘would not let his Lordship into the cottage; and so he stood at the door’. For ‘above an hour’ there was a stand-off between Litchfield and Portsmouth. This was a terrible battle of wills. Portsmouth was Litchfield’s master and social superior; he literally held the keys to his livelihood. His displeasure could result in unemployment and homelessness. As Litchfield stood his ground, and refused Portsmouth entry, he protected his family from an awful abuse of authority, and allowed his daughter to die in peace away from the prying eyes of a stranger. Yet he could not do what every father would have wanted, and be with her in her final moments. Having shared the agony of her dying over the last few weeks, he missed his child’s death. She died without him.
Portsmouth’s intrusion into Litchfield’s family tragedy continued. On being informed that the girl had died, Portsmouth went with the clerk to the parish church of St Andrew, Hurstbourne, to toll the bells for her. Portsmouth took pleasure in ordering and inspecting an expensive coffin, but left Litchfield to pay for it. Then, on the day of the girl’s burial, he met the small procession of Litchfield, his wife, and other children as they took her body from their home to the church. Complaining that they were quarter of an hour late, Portsmouth was dressed scruffily in a ‘common blue coat’. He took position in front of the body as if he were the undertaker, and led the party to the church. Once there, Portsmouth acted as a clergyman, singing the 88th Psalm, and then repeating six of its verses as the girl’s body was lowered into the ground. Many years later, as a seventy-four-year-old man, Litchfield testified in the legal proceedings that were brought against Portsmouth. The words he spoke as he concluded this story of his daughter’s death, and the part that Portsmouth played, spoke volumes. He ‘was very much hurt at it all: but what could he do,’ he declared. Deep pain, humiliation, and sheer helplessness cry out from manuscripts now hundreds of years old.1
Portsmouth’s habit of turning up uninvited to funerals, or ‘black jobs’ as he called them, became well known to his servants and estate workers. They knew that they could get Portsmouth out of a bad mood just by mentioning that there was to be a black job. On one occasion in London, Portsmouth disappeared all day after they told him a funeral was going to take place in Holborn. When he returned, ‘he said that he had got in as chief-mourner, and got some turkey and wine for lunch’. Servants fooled around with Portsmouth, placing a log on their shoulders ‘in the manner that a coffin is usually borne’, and he then followed them singing psalms.
Portsmouth’s fascination with funerals meant that, when the servant Samuel Osborne lay sick, he made frequent enquiries about him, and ‘expressed his hope he would die observing that then we should have the Blacks here’. When the head coachman’s wife was ill, Portsmouth visited the stables to see if she was dead, and when she did die, he went to the church to toll the bells for her. Portsmouth compared the number of funerals in Whitchurch and Hurstbourne, and liked to believe that there were a greater number in Hurstbourne, meaning ‘he was ahead’.2 In London, he knew all ‘the principal hearse drivers about the town’, and visited undertakers to ask if there were any funerals. If there were, Portsmouth would ‘join them in his phaeton, and drive so close as to touch the wheels of the mourning coaches: he would then laugh, and shake his whip at the coachman’. Coachman Charles Webb attended at least thirteen funerals with Portsmouth, and saw ‘his Lordship on foot walking by the side of the procession’.3
Portsmouth showed interest in the burials of those well below his social status. A former servant of Grace’s mother, who had gone blind in old age, was allowed to remain in the house at Lincoln’s Inn Fields where he died. Portsmouth was ‘Chief Mourner’ at his funeral, ‘not out of respect for the deceased’, another servant explained, ‘but because he liked to attend these things’. Portsmouth went to extraordinary lengths to pursue his interests. He was seen setting off in heavy rain to walk the mile from his house to the church at Hurstbourne to ring the bells when someone died. A former Hurstbourne servant ‘becoming insane was placed in the asylum at Bethnal Green where he died’. Portsmouth went to the undertakers in London ‘where the body lay and thence he followed it to the grave’. If the sight of a peer following the body of a poor lunatic was not unusual enough, then his payment for a poor woman’s coffin when she died in St Martin’s workhouse or his presence at the burial of a former mistress of St Giles’ workhouse was bound to be remembered.4
It was Portsmouth’s behaviour at these funerals that caused the greatest offence. ‘There was a box which was used as a privy in the churchyard’ at Hurstbourne, the carpenter Robert Wright explained. When his father-in-law died, since it was snowing ‘his Lordship had it brought down to the foot of the grave, and he and the clergyman got into it; his Lordship acted as clerk’. Portsmouth gave the responses in the service instead of the clerk, and said the ‘amen’ before him. Others saw him playing tricks and messing around until the corpse arrived, and then look sorrowful, twisting his face ‘into all manner of forms’.5
Park keeper John Godden was already appalled after he told Portsmouth that his wife was very ill and ‘his Lordship said he was glad of it and hoped she would die soon’. But it was his conduct at the funeral of another servant who died at Hurstbourne that he found most unbearable. Portsmouth ‘stood as Clerk with the Book in his hand, his Lordship was winking his eye at one and the other and laughing in such a shameful or at least in such a sad way’ that Godden ‘was obliged to leave the place, he was so much hurt at his Lordship’s ridiculous conduct at such a time’.6
Godden’s response to Portsmouth was telling: he walked away. Nobody challenged Portsmouth’s presence at these burials. His behaviour broke with all common decency and respect but it left people so aghast that they felt powerless to act. At an event that was already emotionally charged, no one wanted to risk making a scene or causing further spectacle by trying to stop Portsmouth. It was as if the horror and shock of what was unfolding froze everyone who witnessed it.
Those who saw Portsmouth at these events were left with the impression that he was a man stunted in emotional growth. A person with a ‘feeling mind’ would not want to be constantly attending funerals, but for Portsmouth these events were ‘a mere trifle’. If one of his horses was ill, he would cry his eyes out, but show no sorrow at the funeral of a little girl. Portsmouth was so immature that, instead of sadness, he experienced pleasure at a funeral. He talked to his servants about funerals ‘in a way that showed that he had a great delight in them’. To Wetherell, a lawyer who was fighting to prove Portsmouth was insane at the 1823 Lunacy Commission, Portsmouth’s response to the death of Litchfield’s daughter showed a ‘savage joy’. His haunting of the dying and his appearance at funerals was nothing less than an ‘imitation of foul and obscene beasts of prey’, and showed the disposition of a vampire.7
Away from such colourful comparisons, Portsmouth’s behaviour was troubling because it could also provoke inappropriate responses from other people. Funerals were not just social rituals but were intended to be deeply serious religious occasions. Portsmouth officiated and read psalms at funerals ‘in such a manner as to excite other feelings than one would desire on such an occasion’, coffin-maker Richard Poore explained. ‘Every person’s countenance showed it’; as they stood around the grave, people stifled laughter as their attention was drawn to Portsmouth’s antics. The awkwardness of the moment could produce giggles rather than tears. ‘It was quite a mockery of what should be solemn if anything should,’ Poore concluded.8
Portsmouth’s social position meant that there were occasions when he was expected to take a lead role in directing the religious worship of his household, estate, and local community. In the early nineteenth-century, the Church of England was under threat from dissenting groups, Catholic incomers, and reformist pressures. Aristocrats like Portsmouth were meant to form the backbone of the Established Church, upholding its traditions, hierarchy, and order. Yet, aside from the disruption he caused during funerals, Portsmouth’s behaviour during church services and at home when he conducted household prayers undermined the Church. He sang hymns out of tune, gave responses too loudly and too soon, and gabbled through prayers in front of his servants at breakneck speed. Portsmouth set the schoolgirls at the church in Acton ‘a laughing’ at his loud ‘hems!’ and they commented ‘what a fool he was to make such a noise in the church’. Instead of setting an example by showing respect to clergy, Portsmouth laughed at them. One Sunday on his return from a service conducted by an elderly clerk at Andover, ‘his Lordship continued all the way home mocking the old man, repeating his words, and imitating his manner’. Portsmouth once proceeded reading the evening prayers in the chapel at Hurstbourne immediately after he had finished the morning ones, leaving at least one servant unable to stay; ‘I could not bide for laughing’. He paid so little attention to the meaning of what was being said that, when the parson had a cold and cough during a service in the church at Hurstbourne, Portsmouth copied his coughs and splutters in his answers.9
Portsmouth had gathered enough religious instruction from his childhood and schooling to know what was expected of him, and to some church ministers he presented no problem. He could conform. Reverend Pedden said that Portsmouth’s conduct in church was ‘most exemplary’; Reverend Heslop shared a pew with Portsmouth and thought ‘he prayed with devotion’. Reverend McCarthy observed that Portsmouth was ‘very attentive to the service’, and, along with other churchgoers, only complained and grew restless if his sermons were too long.10
But whereas outward conformity was not always an issue for Portsmouth, his behaviour raised difficult questions about the relationship between religious practice and belief. What did the weak-minded Portsmouth understand about religion, and could he develop a religious faith? The jury at his Lunacy Commission wanted to know whether any clergyman had refused to give Portsmouth the sacrament. Did his immoral and irreverent conduct or his simple-mindedness mean that he should be prevented from being a communicant? The Reverend Antrobus answered that, if Portsmouth had ever wanted to receive communion, ‘I should have felt very much distressed how I should act.’ Antrobus thought Portsmouth ‘utterly incapable of knowing anything of a matter so serious,’ was uncertain whether he understood ‘the nature of the Lord’s Prayer,’ but believed Portsmouth was not wholly ignorant of ‘a future state and a Supreme Being’. The extent of Portsmouth’s ignorance could be astonishing: he was very fond of singing a psalm that began with the words ‘The Lord Himself, the mighty Lord’, because, it was claimed, he thought that the ‘Lord’ was himself. But other clergy stuck to the principle that no man had the right to deny the sacrament to any person seeking it, except perhaps to ‘evil-doers’.11
While his limited intellectual abilities did not disqualify Portsmouth from participating in this key Christian ritual, some thought that they should have prevented him from assuming a prominent place in the worship of his household and community. It made a mockery of religion to have a man with so little understanding taking prayers and being allowed to direct religious services. Just as the Portsmouth case exposed the shallowness that underlay so much of the elite social calendar, so his conduct relating to religious affairs revealed the problems facing the Established Church. Having a title and an estate had come to take precedence over religious knowledge and spiritual experience. So long as Portsmouth went along with the routine forms of worship, it did not matter if he had little sense of what he was doing, or what the words he repeated meant. Religious devotion had become measured by adherence to a number of routine practices, and it could take a fool to jolt people out of their familiar but mindless performance.
Portsmouth’s conduct upon religious occasions and his love of black jobs forced people to confront the depths of their beliefs. Sex and death were the taboos that Portsmouth disregarded with such insensitivity that, while some were left feeling alarmed, hurt, or simply numb, others were faintly amused. While a good number of the lunatics who were confined in madhouses across the country exhibited a morbid fascination, Portsmouth was unusual because he was more interested in the funeral that would follow than in death itself. His desire to see Litchfield’s daughter die was never repeated, but he remained a follower of funerals until he was called before the Commission. For Portsmouth, a funeral was a social occasion with bell-ringing, procession, and ceremony. It was a time when he delighted in the attention he could attract, and he appeared oblivious to its reason or the person who was being laid to rest. The feelings of others did not seem to cross his mind. By taking the emotions and the religious faith out of the ritual of burial, Portsmouth left people with a sense of hollowness that was as horrifying as the grave itself.
After listening to stories like Litchfield’s, the jury had to decide what caused Portsmouth to behave in such socially unacceptable and insensitive ways. Did his actions arise from the weak mind of a fool, or the perverted mind of a lunatic? Fundamentally, was Portsmouth capable of understanding the differences between right and wrong?