IN AUGUST 1817, some two years after the Chancellor had ruled in her favour, Mary Ann gave her husband’s valet permission to take a day’s leave from work. The servant in question, James Capy, was used to taking orders from Lady rather than Lord Portsmouth. He was one of the many servants who had been hired by John Hanson in the spring of 1815, replacing those dismissed for giving evidence supporting a Lunacy Commission. Three days into his new position, Capy was ready to give up. Portsmouth had pinched him and pulled his ears, and tried to flog him. Capy told Lady Portsmouth and her father that he would not stay another day working under these conditions, but both persuaded him to continue, ‘saying they would make it worth my while’.
Capy remained, and spent enough time with his master to conclude that Portsmouth was ‘half an Idiot and half a Lunatic’. Portsmouth soon revealed his fascination with bleeding and lancets, and asked Capy to bleed him. Capy obliged, and witnessed the pleasure Portsmouth gained. Sent to fetch Portsmouth from the slaughterhouses of the towns they visited, Capy entertained his master with stories of ‘black jobs’. ‘[I] never saw anything like capacity or a sound mind in him,’ Capy later testified, ‘never for one minute – everything marked entire weakness from first to last and unsoundness too.’
In London, Capy lived with the Portsmouths when they stayed in rented houses in upmarket Wimpole Street, Harley Street, and Portland Place, since Lord Portsmouth had lost access to his previous London home in Lincoln’s Inn Fields after Grace’s death. But the recently married couple also set up a new home, Fairlawn Grove, at Acton Green. The house was ‘approached by a lodge and a carriage sweep to a portico entrance and a flight of stone steps to the hall’. There were twelve bedrooms, a conservatory, and a billiard room. The house was surrounded by twelve acres of land, of which eight were pleasure grounds, laid out ‘with every regard to good taste, and at considerable expense’. There was a double coach house and stables that could accommodate eight horses, as well as a cow-house, piggery, and fruit-house. Fairlawn’s location was its prime attraction. It was close to Chiswick High Road, and the main westerly route out of London, and thus ideal as a stopping point between central London and Hurstbourne. An area that had been known only for its market gardening became in the early nineteenth century the building plot for a number of substantial homes for the wealthy elite. Fairlawn combined ‘all the advantages of a town and country residence’, a later sales pitch said, and the Portsmouths could count the Rothschilds at nearby Gunnersbury Park among their neighbours.
Like his master, Capy was a newly married man when he started working in the Portsmouth household. As well as generous wages to compensate him for the difficulties he faced at work, Mary Ann regularly allowed Capy leave to return home to his wife in London. But Capy soon became suspicious that there was an ulterior motive for his dismissal. As Portsmouth’s valet, like his predecessor Seilaz, Capy was the servant who had the closest and most regular contact with Portsmouth. He helped him wash, get dressed, stood by him as he ate, accompanied him wherever he went, and at the end of the day helped him to bed. Capy was always by Portsmouth’s side, and knew all his routines and his many foibles. Nothing escaped his notice.
But every time Capy was sent home, the household routine at Fairlawn was broken, because his dismissal signalled the arrival of another man, William Rowland Alder. Alder was a Northumberland-born gentleman from Horncliffe, on the border with Scotland, about fifty miles south of Edinburgh. He was roughly the same age as Portsmouth, was said to have been a school friend of Mary Ann’s father, and had trained as a barrister. Alder had been a frequent visitor to the Portsmouth household ever since Capy had been hired, often staying overnight. It was obvious that, to Mary Ann, Alder was more than a family friend. But just what were they up to when he was out of the way? Capy was ‘determined to know’.
So when Mary Ann dismissed him one afternoon in late August 1817, Capy ‘made as though he went home’, and left the house, ‘but took with him a key which would enable him to let himself in quietly’. He stayed at a neighbour’s house until nine or ten o’clock at night, and then crept back into the house. Capy’s bedroom was on the floor above Portsmouth’s dressing room. The dressing room was positioned in the middle of the house, with doors leading to Portsmouth and Mary Ann’s bedroom on one side, and on the other, doors to the guest bedroom occupied by Alder. Capy ‘lay still’ in his bed, rigid with excitement, listening for every sound. At around midnight, he heard Lord and Lady Portsmouth, and Alder each retire to their rooms for the night. All fell silent. Then, about an hour later, there was the ‘distinct’ sound of Alder’s door into the dressing room opening, and footsteps of someone passing through into the Portsmouth bedroom.
Capy waited. It was the middle of the night and the house was shrouded in darkness. He wanted to be certain about what he might see. With considerable willpower, he ‘lay still till it was light’. At around four in the morning, ‘as soon as light’, Capy slipped out of his bed and down the stairs, not putting on his shoes, for fear of alerting someone that he was coming. He went into the dressing room, and saw that the door of Alder’s room was open. He then:
opened one of the folding doors of Lord and Lady Portsmouth’s room as quietly as he could and went in. He had at once a view of the bed: the curtains of it were partly drawn; but on the side where [Capy] entered they were undrawn and he had full view of the bed within.
Capy saw ‘all three lying in bed together’. Alder was lying closest to Capy, under the covers, and undressed. Mary Ann was in the middle ‘lying with her right hand in Mr Alder’s bosom’. Portsmouth was on the far side, and lay with his back to his wife and to Capy. Mary Ann had her eyes closed, and was probably asleep. But Alder, lying on his back, and facing towards the dressing-room door, was awake. Capy said nothing, but stood still, surveying the scene. For ‘scarcely a moment’ the two men looked straight at each other. Time stopped. In that electrifying moment words were not needed. The look said it all: ‘I know that you know’. Capy, ‘satisfied that Mr Alder saw him’, bowed, and went out of the room.1
Capy’s testimony at Portsmouth’s Lunacy Commission in 1823 was dynamite. The Times printed it on their front page. For a husband to be made a cuckold by his adulterous wife was bad enough, but for him to allow that adultery to be committed in his bed while he lay there was intolerable. Such was the ‘brutalized state of his mind’ that Portsmouth submitted ‘to what no sane man could have endured’, it was surmised. Portsmouth knew that adultery had been committed, it was argued by those who sought to prove him insane, but he was ‘incapable of feeling the indignity or of attempting to resent or prevent it’. He was motionless beside his wife and her lover not knowing how else to act. A terrible insult was happening right next to him, but he just lay there. His mind had frozen him to the spot.
Unsurprisingly, Mary Ann and her family did everything they could to discredit Capy’s statement. Soon after Capy had witnessed Alder in bed with Mary Ann and Portsmouth, he was permanently dismissed from the household. The Hansons claimed that Capy was ordered to leave after ‘he had the audacity to attempt the honour of Lady Portsmouth’. Yet, when Capy sought a character reference from Mary Ann a year or so later, she could hardly refuse. When his good name was questioned in court, Capy even claimed that he had been intending to leave, and that he did so when a friend had married one of Mary Ann’s maidservants and needed the position.
Capy went into business soon after he left the Portsmouth household, and, with his wife who was a milliner, set up as a haberdasher and draper in London. The Hansons alleged that Portsmouth’s brother, Newton Fellowes, had offered Capy three hundred pounds for testifying at the Lunacy Commission, with Capy boasting to friends that as a consequence he would be ‘provided for for life’. Capy was represented by the Hansons as a dishonest individual who had stolen goods from Fairlawn when he worked there, and a man whose word could not be trusted. A business partner, who told later legal proceedings of a fallout with Capy that resulted in charges of assault, did not hesitate to brand him as a ‘bad character’. This character assassination had begun within weeks of Capy’s statement to the Commission. Mary Ann’s brother, Newton Hanson, wrote a letter to the editor of The Times, incensed at the ‘foulest and most malignant aspersions on my Lady Portsmouth’s conduct and reputation’. Capy had ‘the effrontery to pretend that he could distinctly see everything that was going on in a bed, with merely a part of the curtains undrawn, and only the upper half of the window-shutter open, at four o’clock in the morning’, he fumed.
Newton Hanson’s letter had a desperate air about it: did it matter if Capy could not ‘see everything that was going on’ in a marital bed, if there were three people in it? Mary Ann was reported (surely not using her exact words) to have responded to reading Capy’s account by exclaiming, ‘I have criminal intercourse with the schoolfellow of my father! It is monstrous.’ Yet the fact that her father had been content to marry her to a man of a similar age would not have been missed by many.
Certainly, by the time of the 1823 Commission, attempts by the lawyers employed by the Hansons to dismiss Capy’s account were clutching at straws. They even tried to argue that, if Portsmouth was asleep in the bed, he might not have been aware that Alder had entered it. As the Chief Commissioner responded incredulously, ‘What! Not of a third person being in the same bed with him and his wife?’ and the case risked descending into farce, the importance of what Capy saw was only further highlighted.2
Capy’s story was so sensational that it would never go away, but haunted the Hanson family for years to come. Much later, when they declared that Capy’s statement was false because for the whole of 1817 the Portsmouths had been unable to stay at Fairlawn due to renovation work, their claims fell on deaf years.3 It was too late. With Capy’s testimony, Portsmouth’s trial for sanity at the Commission had changed irrevocably. This was now a case about sex as well as madness. It was Capy, after all, who was first bold enough to assert before the Commission that Portsmouth’s interest in bleeding was all about sexual desire. Now that he added an account of adultery, the spotlight was on Portsmouth’s wife, Mary Ann, as well as on Portsmouth himself.
Even if Capy was a born liar, and the three-in-a-bed story a figment of his crude imagination, there were plenty of other witnesses who were prepared to come forward and give their versions of Mary Ann’s relationship with Alder. Alder was a trustee of the marriage settlement made between Mary Ann and Portsmouth on 7 March 1814, but there is no evidence to prove that he was present in the Hanson household on the morning of their wedding, or at the church. There was plenty of opportunity in the legal proceedings about Portsmouth’s marriage that followed to speculate that Mary Ann’s affections were already tied elsewhere, but nobody ever suggested that her relationship with Alder had begun before her marriage. Instead, it seems likely that their sexual liaison began in the summer of 1815. Portsmouth and his wife had gone to Southend, the seaside resort on the Essex coast, for a holiday. Alder visited them there, and Mary Ann, as well as one of her sisters, joined him on a boat trip across the Thames estuary to Kent. Portsmouth was not invited, and the party were gone for three or four days.
Frequent overnight visits by Alder to Fairlawn followed. Neighbours saw Mary Ann and Alder taking walks on the common together, sometimes alone, and on other occasions with Portsmouth walking behind them. There was no attempt by Mary Ann and Alder to conceal the nature of their relationship: they walked openly arm in arm. People remarked, ‘Here’s Lady P. and her flash man’, and did so within Portsmouth’s hearing, but he did not react. In turn, Mary Ann went to London three or four times a week, alone. A housekeeper remembered how Mary Ann left Fairlawn soon after breakfast, in general more dressed up ‘than usual’. She took gifts of ‘venison, game, poultry, and fruit’ with her, and returned in the evening exhausted, and then went straight to bed. The visits to town stopped as soon as Alder was at Fairlawn.
Witnesses saw a transformation in Alder’s appearance. In his late forties, and ‘not a comely looking man’, one servant at Hurstbourne Park mistook Alder for a tradesman when he first visited in the autumn of 1817 because he was dressed so ‘shabby’. But over the course of time, Alder smartened up. He had a ‘handsome brown coat, military trousers, and spurs’. As their relationship developed, Alder and Mary Ann became ever more confident about displaying their affection for each other in public. To the servants who saw them, they acted more like husband and wife than Lord and Lady Portsmouth. An upholsterer thought Alder was Lord Portsmouth when he first came to work in the household. At mealtimes, Alder sat next to Mary Ann, with Portsmouth removed to the bottom of the table. According to Capy, Alder and Mary Ann played the equivalent of footsie under the table: ‘they would set knee to knee, and foot to foot’, and ‘he would pick a bit off her plate, and she would pick a bit off his’. All of this was in the presence of Portsmouth: Alder ‘put his hand round her ladyship’s waist’, but ‘his lordship never complained of this’.4
Accounts of Mary Ann’s relationship with Alder demonstrated that their adultery was blatant, and carried on in the face of Portsmouth. Mary Ann was not the sweet, innocent girl who had been dragged into an arranged marriage by a cruel father. Instead, she was a woman who delighted in the pleasures of sex, and took little effort to hide her real feelings. If Portsmouth’s first wife, Grace, had been an angel, then Mary Ann was surely a harlot.
Evidence of Mary Ann’s relationship with Alder was crucial in determining that the call for a Lunacy Commission succeeded in late 1822, when the first had failed in 1815. But when the Commission met, it was interested not so much in how Mary Ann’s adultery had destroyed her marriage, as in why Portsmouth seemed to be ‘insensible to such pollutions’. People began to ask what Portsmouth knew and understood about sex, as well as what he could do. Did Portsmouth have either the physical or emotional capacity for sex? Was it shock or ignorance that left Portsmouth in an apparent state of stupor before a man who should have been his rival?
Portsmouth’s naivety and gullibility could be breathtaking. He said that Alder had been introduced to him as a medical man. His wife, Portsmouth told a family friend, ‘was subject to hysterics’ (a generic term used to describe female complaints), and ‘had a bad state of health’. When this friend told Portsmouth that Alder was no medic, Portsmouth insisted that he must have been ‘for he was in the habit of attending her ladyship at night’. Portsmouth even defended Alder’s night-time visits, telling Capy that, as Alder was a doctor, ‘it was proper that he should attend Lady Portsmouth at night’. Portsmouth was also ready to believe Mary Ann and her brother Newton when they told him that ‘Alder was so ruptured that he could not get a child’. ‘His lordship was pleased at the idea of Alder not being able to do it,’ commented a friend.
Portsmouth’s routine was disrupted by Alder’s visits. He complained that his sleep was disturbed by Mary Ann getting out of bed in the middle of the night, or that he was forced to sleep on the sofa because Mary Ann turned him out of their bed. He was sufficiently aware of his wife’s intimacy with Alder to start referring to her as ‘Mrs A’. But Portsmouth told the doctors who examined him that he could do nothing to stop Alder. Alder, he argued, was a stronger man, and he was right to be afraid of him.
Intimidated by Alder, Portsmouth seemed to have little idea of what Alder and his wife were doing when they were in bed together. Portsmouth appeared to know neither how babies were made nor how long a pregnancy was expected to last. In earlier historical times, Portsmouth may have been called ‘an innocent’, a kinder term than the ‘idiot’ label that was used by the nineteenth century. Sexual innocence was certainly a description that could be applied to Portsmouth. According to Capy, when he asked Portsmouth ‘if he knew anything of the intercourse of the sexes, he said not’. Capy obliged by telling Portsmouth the facts of life, but Portsmouth did not believe a word, telling Capy that he was a ‘foolish fellow’ for thinking such things. When doctors examined Portsmouth for the Lunacy Commission, they were astonished that a man in his fifties, who had been married twice, could have so little knowledge about sex. Dr Latham told the Commission that he thought Portsmouth had ‘no more idea of sexual intercourse, gestation, and pregnancy, than a blind man has of colours, or a deaf man of sound’.
The full extent of Portsmouth’s sexual ignorance was revealed when the Commission asked him about Mary Ann’s pregnancies. At his first examination, Portsmouth declared that he thought a woman was pregnant for nine years, only correcting his mistake at his second appearance before the jury. His confusion may have arisen from the fact that Mary Ann fell pregnant soon after beginning her relationship with Alder, but she suffered a series of miscarriages, of which Portsmouth was not always aware. When she became pregnant again, to Portsmouth, his wife seemed to be permanently expecting a baby. So Portsmouth told Dr Baillie that Mary Ann was pregnant for fifteen months at one time, and that the child should have been born in January, but Newton Hanson, Mary Ann’s brother, had told him that ‘it was put off for a little while, and so it did not come till March’. This baby was probably stillborn, or miscarried, for Mary Ann never gave birth in March to a child that survived. There were witnesses that stated that Mary Ann had a miscarriage in Bognor, Alder being the first person allowed in her room to see her. Another probably occurred around the time Portsmouth, Alder, and Mary Ann stayed at the Abercorn Arms in Stanmore, where Mary Ann ‘appeared to be very low’ and servants were told that they should not ‘go near the Countess’s room’. Portsmouth could show kindness to Mary Ann on these occasions, and concern for her health, but he remained convinced that she was suffering from nothing more serious than the perennial female symptoms of hysterics and nervousness. When he was later told of the truth behind these confinements, Portsmouth was content to repeat a popular myth about miscarriages, that they were ‘in consequence of the child being ill-begotten’. How any child was ‘begotten’ he did not know.
Portsmouth did not make the connection between sex and pregnancy. He told some doctors that he never had sex with Mary Ann, but that he believed the babies she bore were his. ‘I firmly believe,’ stated Capy, ‘that when Lord Portsmouth saw the vein rise, from the arm being tied, that was all the idea he had of sexual intercourse.’ Portsmouth’s sexual world was about lancets and blood. According to Coombe, Portsmouth ‘had the mind of a child with the passions of a man’. He sought to satisfy those passions. When he told the eminent doctor Sir George Tuthill that he had been to Mrs Wood’s brothel in London, he said that he had taken his lancets, and that he believed other gentlemen went there with their own lancets, ‘and for no other purpose’. The idea that sex could be about having a loving or physical relationship with a woman did not enter his mind.5
Marriage gave Portsmouth neither sexual knowledge nor experience. Mary Ann took no interest in enlightening her husband. The early signs were not good. As well as noting that the clothes of the ladies still had their shop-tickets attached (indicating a rushed wedding), the chambermaid at the inn where Portsmouth and Mary Ann spent their first night of married life together thought their bed showed a suspicious absence of activity for a newly married couple.
Portsmouth’s lack of initiative and interest may have been a relief for Mary Ann, but it was incomprehensible to others. The explanation must lie, it was assumed, in Portsmouth’s own inadequacy. It was concluded that Portsmouth was impotent. His impotence meant that he allowed Alder to enter his bed, ‘to perform those operations which it was supposed nature had inhibited to him’, as a lawyer so delicately put it. ‘Being so impotent,’ Dr Latham told the Commission more directly, ‘it is not unreasonable that he should feel no curiosity upon the subject of sexual intercourse.’ If he couldn’t do it, then why should he want to know?
We will never discover the truth behind the claims that Portsmouth was impotent. Portsmouth in turn admitted and then denied them. He did not even know what impotence meant, telling Dr Monro that he was impotent in one breath, and then saying that he had sex with Mary Ann in the next. Impotence was certainly a convenient label, which allowed people to align sexual with mental incompetence. It gave them an easy way of understanding a man and his sexual preferences that were otherwise so out of the ordinary. With his stories of blood-letting, Capy had raised the frightening spectre of Portsmouth as a man who was sexually capable but mentally unable to know how to behave. But to argue that Portsmouth was impotent was to return him to a childlike state of both physical and emotional immaturity.
Byron, a man whose own sexual reputation was never free from suspicion, took great delight in the suggestion that Portsmouth was impotent. Writing to Hobhouse from Genoa, following news of the Portsmouth Commission, Byron said he ‘knew nothing of his ignorance of “fuff-fuff-fuff”’. As Portsmouth was ‘of a robust[i]ous figure – though not a Solomon’, Byron ‘naturally imagined he was not less competent than other people’. But now it turned out that this big man could not perform. The only sexual arousal he experienced was from ‘the tape and lancet’, a fact that Byron said he would remember and ‘try on some great emergency’. Portsmouth the fool and sexual weirdo had become a laughing stock.
But the story of his marriage to Mary Ann could also invite sympathy. She made no attempt to hide her relationship with Alder from her husband. Instead, she taunted Portsmouth about it, making him post letters to Alder that appointed times and places for their liaisons. While she fawned upon Alder, she neglected Portsmouth. Then, one day, Capy said Portsmouth ordered him to fetch the book entitled Aristotle’s Master-piece from Mary Ann’s bedroom. Aristotle’s Master-piece, not by Aristotle at all, was the sex manual of the day. It had already gone through at least twenty editions. Mary Ann, Portsmouth said, had asked him to explain the contents of the page that she had turned down. On fetching the book, Capy saw the section that she had selected. It was on ‘the insufficiency of man’. Mary Ann, who ‘was in bed at the time’, twice sent for Portsmouth to join her, asking him to come with the book. But Capy told Portsmouth, ‘it was not a fit book for him to read’, and that he was ‘certain Lady Portsmouth did not want it’. No respectable wife would.6
That a wife might attempt to teach her husband what to do in bed was unthinkable in the early nineteenth century. It signalled how Mary Ann’s adultery had led to a total breakdown of order in the Portsmouth household. Mary Ann should have been subservient to Portsmouth’s wishes, not the other way round. Alder had taken Portsmouth’s place at the meal table, and in his bed. Mary Ann enjoyed humiliating her husband. The horror for everyone who witnessed this, and for those who later heard about this marriage, was that Portsmouth did nothing.
Mary Ann knew she was in the wrong. She had lost her mother to typhus within a month of her marriage to Portsmouth. Her brother, Newton, was said to blame their mother’s death on the shock of Mary Ann’s marriage. Without her mother, the kindly figure beloved by Byron as well as her own children, Mary Ann had no moral compass. She was certain that her relationship with Alder would invite criticism from her father. Servants were ordered to hide Alder’s hat and coat when John Hanson came to stay at Fairlawn. On an occasion when her father’s visit was unexpected, Alder made away in a coach so he would not be seen. Her pregnancies were more difficult to keep secret. There may have been some truth to a story that Portsmouth told a doctor about one of his wife’s miscarriages. Mary Ann had lost the baby, Portsmouth said, after Newton Hanson had run up against her, knocking the unborn child on the head. Mary Ann risked bringing shame on the whole family if she bore a bastard, and this may have provoked her brother to take the most extreme steps to end her pregnancy.7
But Mary Ann had no intention of ending her affair. She had obeyed her father by marrying Portsmouth, but that did not mean that she had to love her husband. She was not prepared to sacrifice her happiness, or to assume the role so often admired in women at this time of patient resignation. Mary Ann would be neither victim nor martyr. Impotent, perhaps, in body as well as mind, Portsmouth was treated by Mary Ann with scorn, not pity. As her feelings for Alder became ever more intense, her frustration with Portsmouth increased. Her cruelty to Portsmouth became more pointed, and took forms that even Portsmouth could not miss. This was a couple and a marriage that was heading for catastrophe.