LORD PORTSMOUTH INHERITED power as well as a fortune in property when he became the 3rd earl. As a member of the landowning elite, he was entitled to positions in local society, and as a peer a seat in the House of Lords. For most of his life, Portsmouth, like many of his fellow peers, took a minimal role and interest in political affairs. There was no expectation that he should. But because his trial for lunacy in 1823 coincided with a period of heightened political tension, the part he had taken attracted special attention.
In the first decades of the nineteenth century, the establishment was facing mounting criticism and the charge of ‘Old Corruption’. Calls for a wholesale reform of politics and the franchise looked ever more attractive in the shadow of the French Revolution. Radicalism and popular unrest were of daily concern to those in authority. While Parliament continued to pass legislation that served to protect the landed interest, such as the much reviled Corn Law in 1815, thousands of agricultural workers were facing a bleak future of hunger and distress. The massacre of demonstrators at St Peter’s Field, Manchester, on 16 August 1819, followed by the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of the radical ‘Orator’ Hunt in 1820, exposed a government that was willing to harness violence and intimidation to maintain its position. In this context, the revelation that a man of doubtful mental capacity could be entitled to vote in Parliament, simply by virtue of his title, was a glaring admission of all that was rotten about the ‘ancient regime’. It was Portsmouth’s additional misfortune that the one occasion when he participated in Parliamentary politics was when the position of the monarchy itself was at stake. Portsmouth’s indecision and inappropriate conduct during the trial of Queen Caroline in 1820 condemned him when he faced his own trial three years later.
In Portsmouth’s lifetime, land and wealth brought entitlement. Portsmouth’s father wrote letters to William Pitt seeking positions in government for his friends, and a church living for Reverend Garnett. The peers not only ruled the House of Lords, but they also dominated the House of Commons. As the Portsmouths’ Hampshire neighbour William Cobbett noted of Parliament, ‘one house filled wholly with landowners, and the other four fifths filled with their relatives’. It followed that, as soon as he was of age, Coulson Wallop, Portsmouth’s youngest brother, became MP for Andover. Coulson was not even present at his election, and his drunken, irresponsible behaviour did not stop Portsmouth seeking further favours for him. Within months of their father’s death, Portsmouth was writing a letter to Pitt wishing ‘to promote’ the ‘advancement’ of his brother Coulson, and asking that he be placed in ‘some situation which may give an addition to his income’. When Coulson’s problems with debt made a public life impossible, his older brother Newton Fellowes simply took over as MP for Andover.
While Coulson and Newton both qualified to be MPs just because they were the brothers of a peer, in this world of political favours, the Portsmouth family knew they held a trump playing card: their Irish estates. Close to thirteen thousand acres of land had been granted to Sir Henry Wallop in 1598 in County Wexford, south-west Ireland, along with a Norman Castle in Enniscorthy. The Portsmouth family paid precious little attention to their Irish property: only Newton Fellowes ever bothered to visit or make attempts at agricultural improvements. Yet the rental income from their Irish estates made a valuable contribution to the family’s income, and ensured that the reports from the bailiffs and receivers of rents in Ireland were carefully scrutinized.
The 2nd earl of Portsmouth did all he could to remind Pitt of his ‘interest’ in County Wexford, offering to support any candidates put forward for election there, and insisting that he had assisted the government’s cause ‘both with my purse and influence’. Such loyalty should ‘entitle me to expect some degree of attention’, he concluded in a letter seeking an appointment for one of his friends in July 1790.
Appointments, promotions, pensions, and even peerage creations were the bread and butter of politics at this time. They were the way to win friends and influence people, and Pitt’s in-tray was stuffed with letters like the 2nd earl’s. Perhaps he should have taken greater note of Portsmouth’s special pleading, for when the United Irishmen rose in 1798 they did not do so in Dublin, as had been anticipated, but further south in County Wexford. The surprise slaughter of a hundred militia by the United Irishmen at Oulart was followed by the storming of Enniscorthy and Wexford at the end of May. But as the rebels camped at Vinegar Hill, on the other side of the River Slaney from Enniscorthy Castle, they were surrounded by an army of some twenty thousand heavily armed men. On 21 June, a bloody battle was fought, with the rebels suffering defeat and heavy losses. What was ‘quite unprecedented’ about the 1798 Irish rebellion, a recent historian has concluded, ‘was the element of holy war’. In one example of sectarian violence, up to two hundred men, women, and children, most of whom were Protestant, were rounded up and either shot or burned alive in a barn at Scullabogue, County Wexford. Horrified at the scale of the violence, and increasingly fearful of French attempts to become involved, Pitt’s response following the Irish rebellion was to push for tighter control over Ireland, resulting in the 1801 Act of Union.
The Portsmouth estates were situated at the very centre of the 1798 rebellion. Enniscorthy Castle became a prison for the few surviving rebels who were caught and not immediately slaughtered on the spot. Within a week of events at Vinegar Hill, Portsmouth, who had succeeded as 3rd earl the year before, was writing to his uncle, Bennett Wallop, about the rebellion. ‘The long dreaded misfortunes have at length taken place on my estate in Ireland,’ he began. ‘Within this month the greater part of my tenants there have been murdered, every building on my estate burned and the whole laid completely waste by the Wexford rebels.’ But then Portsmouth reached the point of his letter:
should peace be restored to that unhappy country tomorrow, I cannot expect to receive my rents for many years to come! It is therefore utterly out of my power to give you any pecuniary assistance. The loss of the better half of my property reduces me to a state of the greatest distress – and after payment of the existing burdens on my English estates, will … leave me a subsistence on the most contracted scale.
What mattered to Portsmouth about the rebellion was how it would impact upon his finances. Loss of life, and the destruction to homes and land that would burden everyday existence for the survivors, was of no interest. Events in Ireland simply served to excuse him from extending financial support to his uncle. Portsmouth’s claims that his Irish estates represented more than half of his income, and that he would be left on a subsistence, were preposterous. A year later, in March 1799, Portsmouth was still using the ‘heavy misfortunes’ he had suffered due to the Irish rebellion as a reason for not giving pecuniary help to his relatives. In a letter to Pitt, Portsmouth asked that his brother Coulson be given a post ‘tenable with his seat in Parliament’, to ‘render his situation comfortable’. Since the rebellion, he argued, he could not afford to support his brother himself.
Portsmouth’s letters epitomize the very worst of the English absentee landowner. They are staggering in their insensitivity and selfishness. But it is significant that Portsmouth’s letter to his uncle ended up in Pitt’s correspondence files. Pitt needed to know what landlords of Irish estates were thinking. Portsmouth’s letter to his uncle and his subsequent one to Pitt showed that Portsmouth was a man for whom politics only became relevant when matters of self-interest were at stake. This was valuable information. Portsmouth might be of use to Pitt in the future as he held lands that were strategically important, and because he was open to receiving favours in return for support. For Portsmouth’s letters betrayed him as a man devoid of any political consciousness: his allegiance could be easily bought.1
Throughout his life, despite his control over his property being restricted, or perhaps even because of it, Portsmouth maintained a keen sense of his social position. He insisted upon his social inferiors addressing him correctly, and was easily offended if others did not acknowledge him, or show the respect that he was owed because of his title. Indeed, he could show an inflated sense of his own importance and capabilities, at one point taking initial steps to become a magistrate, which, fortunately for all concerned, was never carried through. It was Portsmouth’s right and privilege to sit with the judges at the Winchester assizes, and, in London, Portsmouth frequently spent several hours at a time on the Bench of the Old Bailey. There is no indication that Portsmouth ever attempted to influence the decisions of the judges he sat beside, but, in hindsight, his interest in the trials of violent thieves, murderers, and rapists appeared odd, even voyeuristic.
Portsmouth proudly took his position in the House of Lords. Driving his phaeton in Piccadilly one day in 1812, Portsmouth stopped when he saw his Hampshire neighbour, the magistrate and clergyman Robert Wright. When Wright enquired why Portsmouth was in London, Portsmouth told him that he was there to vote on the ‘Catholic question’. Parliament was debating whether there should be an emancipation Bill, allowing Catholic Irish MPs to sit at Westminster. At this point, a friend of Wright’s, who was walking with him, and whom Wright knew held opposite views to Portsmouth, declared, ‘a very pretty judge, you are, my Lord of the Catholic question’. Whether this was intended as an insult that questioned Portsmouth’s ability to vote because of his limited intelligence, or because he was a Protestant landowner in Ireland, we do not know. But Portsmouth did not hesitate with his rebuff. ‘I think Sir I am as well qualified to give a conscientious vote on that subject as you are!’ he replied, and this was spoken ‘with a great deal of spirit,’ Wright remembered. A raw nerve had been touched: Portsmouth’s sensitivity about his rights was clear, and he was ready to defend them.2
In the House of Lords, so far, Portsmouth’s attendance had passed unnoticed. He took advantage of his privilege as a peer to appoint domestic chaplains, and he occasionally delegated the right to sit in the House to proxies. His company could be valued precisely because he did not talk politics. Long-time family friend and Hampshire neighbour Sir James Burrough never talked about political affairs with Portsmouth, but liked him the more for it. ‘I have frequently laughed with him,’ Burrough told the Commission. ‘I like merry company; that is my taste.’ Burrough was no unreformed country gent: he had earned his knighthood through his career in the law, and had acted as counsel for Portsmouth during the Seilaz trial. He admitted that Portsmouth’s conversation was about matters that ‘did not require any mental exertion: that is to say on topics connected with farming, horses and the common transactions of the neighbourhood’. Yet this respected judge, who was known for his straight talking, presented a convincing case for Portsmouth’s sanity. ‘The more I saw of his mind the more I was convinced that his mind was perfect,’ he told the jury. A clever and successful man such as Burrough would not waste his spare time with a fool.
Portsmouth’s position in the House of Lords might never have attracted comment if it had not been for the events of 1820. For much of this year, the nation was gripped by a fever of excitement, curiosity, and scandal as George IV tried to divorce his wife, Caroline of Brunswick. ‘Since I have been in the world,’ recorded one diarist, ‘I never remember any question which so exclusively occupied everybody’s attention, and so completely absorbed men’s thoughts and engrossed conversation.’
George had loathed his wife from the moment they met, but their arranged marriage went through in 1795. He had no intention of giving up his lavish lifestyle or lovers, frequently quarrelled with Caroline, who was no shrinking violet, and gave up living with her altogether after their daughter, Charlotte, was born nine months later. Irritated by her very existence, George falsely accused Caroline of adultery in 1807, and piled on the pressure for her to leave the country. This she did in 1814, in return for £35,000 per year. When Charlotte died three years later, nobody thought to inform her mother, and Caroline was not invited to the funeral. ‘A more contemptible, cowardly, selfish, unfeeling dog does not exist,’ wrote one political diarist about George; ‘the worst man he fell in with in his whole life,’ the Duke of Wellington was recorded as saying.
On 29 January 1820, the insane and elderly George III died, and his son became King. Much to his horror, Caroline prepared to return to England. He might not want her as his wife, but Caroline was determined to be his Queen. George thought divorce was his only option, but his own infidelities meant that seeking legal recourse in the church courts was a non-starter. Instead, he pursued a Bill of Pains and Penalties in the House of Lords, which charged Caroline with adultery, and if successful would have stripped her of her royal title and position.
The proceedings, which quickly became referred to as a ‘trial’, began on 17 August. All peers were required to be present. There was plenty of evidence that the Queen had committed adultery while abroad, and, by having relationships with her Italian servants, she had chosen her lovers unwisely. But the trial was still a public relations disaster for George. Testimony from low-born foreigners was always going to raise popular xenophobia, and the underhand way in which evidence was gathered against Caroline, such as the use of spies and common thieves to steal her personal papers, did nothing to strengthen the case against her. Outside the Lords, publicity about the trial mounted as the Queen gathered support from a vast range of people, many of whom had never been engaged by politics in this way before. Women sympathized with her position as a wronged wife and mother; the respectable middle classes, affronted by the immorality of the monarchy, debated the case; and political radicals latched on to her cause as a convenient way in which they could criticize authority and corruption. All the while, the air of blatant hypocrisy hung heavily over George.
Portsmouth did his duty and attended every day of the trial. This was no mean feat: the trial lasted until 9 September, when the House adjourned until 3 October, and then continued until 10 November. Henry Brougham, counsel for Caroline, gave a speech that lasted two whole days, and was so charged with emotion that at its close Lord Erskine was said to rush from the chamber in tears. The record keeper for the House of Lords remembered that Portsmouth’s behaviour ‘was perfectly proper, and did not excite remark one way or the other’. Portsmouth looked attentive. Burrough, who served as one of the judges in the trial, recalled seeing Portsmouth in the House of Lords, and, while they never talked of the trial, they often had some ‘trifling conversation’ as they passed. All appeared orderly and correct.
But then came the votes. On 6 November, the Lords had to decide whether to give the Bill a second reading. In effect, the vote asked the Lords to choose between the King (in which case the trial would proceed) and Caroline (which would require a vote against a second reading and the end of the trial). Which way would Portsmouth vote? The King stood for authority, hereditary power, the establishment, and tradition: the very essence of all the peerage represented. At a personal level, the King, like Portsmouth, had an adulterous wife but was not free from sexual scandal himself. Yet Portsmouth also had much in common with Caroline. Like her, he had been an embarrassment, and he had also suffered the consequences of being excluded from exercising the powers that should have come with his social position. As Caroline stood in the House of Lords, the only woman in a sea of men, Portsmouth may well have understood what she was feeling, and sympathized and identified with her. He had been in her position for much of his life.
On 6 November, Portsmouth voted with the majority, in favour of a second reading. The majority was a small one, of twenty-eight members. The Bill continued to be debated until 10 November, when the Lords were asked to vote whether the Bill should be read for a third time. Knowing how tight the majority had been days earlier, the atmosphere was tense. ‘Public expectation hung upon every vote,’ counsel for Portsmouth remembered. Brougham bent forward ‘with breathless anxiety, to listen to the votes as they were delivered’, marking down on paper as each vote was cast. The votes were looking equally divided, and too close to call. With so much at stake, every vote mattered. At last, the Chancellor reached the bench of earls. Each stood in turn to declare his vote. They reached Portsmouth. He stood. He paused. ‘There was a solemn stillness – a death-like silence pervading the house – it was only broken by a whisper of “Give him time – Give him time.”’ The wait was long and painful. Finally, Portsmouth cast his vote. This time he voted for Caroline.
Portsmouth was not the only person to change his mind. Four others, including two bishops, also voted for the second reading, but against the third. This shift sealed the fate of the Bill. With a Lords majority of only nine votes in favour of a third reading, the Bill could not continue, and Caroline was acquitted, much to the delight of her supporters. Celebrations broke out across the country, as Portsmouth’s name, along with the others who had joined the debate on 10 November and voted for Caroline, was printed in the newspapers.
But Portsmouth would be remembered for ‘voting both ways’, while others would be forgotten, because of the manner in which he cast his vote. That hesitation was fatal. He appeared muddled. He later told Coombe that ‘he did not know for what he voted: he believed he voted both ways’. It was not the quality of the debate that had convinced him to vote differently, but genuine confusion. A man whose basic ignorance of how to vote had previously led him to vote both ways at school governors’ meetings had now been publicly exposed in the highest political setting. Under pressure, and with all those eyes looking at him, he panicked, and ended up voting a different way simply to get the moment over. Afterwards, he could not be certain what he had done.
When Portsmouth came to face his trial before the 1823 Lunacy Commission, more evidence came to light that cast doubt upon his understanding of the importance of the occasion. Two letters that Portsmouth had written from the House of Lords were produced. The first was an affectionate one to Mary Ann, expressing pleasure that her health was recovering (she may have just had a miscarriage), and hoping to see her at Fairlawn when the House adjourned in September. ‘I am my dearest Love your affectionate love’, Portsmouth signed it. The second was an angry note, headed the House of Lords, 5 October, and addressed to Reverend Antrobus in Acton. Portsmouth complained to Antrobus that his clerk, John Markham, had objected to his singing and prevented him from attending church. Portsmouth therefore directed that Antrobus should give him ‘a severe reprimand’. There was nothing to the complaint: the clerk certainly did not appreciate the ‘loud’ and ‘very unpleasant’ sound that Portsmouth made when he tried to sing, but he had never dared to suggest that this should stop him from coming to services.
Both letters came back to haunt Portsmouth. In the context of a Commission that produced so much evidence of her violence and cruelty, Mary Ann may have hoped that Portsmouth’s letter to her would demonstrate his affection towards her. Instead, it only showed how deluded Portsmouth could be about the nature of his marriage and the character of Mary Ann. This was not a marriage in which ‘absence made the heart grow fonder’. There was similarly no substance to Portsmouth’s assessment of the Acton clerk: Antrobus replied with a letter that ‘endeavoured quietly to remove the delusion from his Lordship’s mind’.
But what was most damning about both letters was when and where they were written. As Wetherell, counsel for the petition of lunacy against Portsmouth, explained in his summing up:
Instead of listening to one of the ablest addresses ever made, in defence of what was considered by the speaker of it … to be an important attack to the constitution, he was addressing a letter to Mr. Antrobus, to complain of his parish clerk. He was engaged in a trial, but it was of poor Markham, and not of the Queen.
Portsmouth’s mind was unfocused. Rather than listening to the evidence that had been gathered against Caroline from her time abroad, ‘his Lordship’s mind was wandering in the church and churchyard at Acton’. He wasn’t paying attention to the debates that had captured the nation’s attention, but was obsessing about his own little domestic world. Even this he had got all wrong.3
By the time the Lunacy Commission was brought against Portsmouth, Queen Caroline was dead. Her cause was quickly dropped by political radicals after her trial. They no longer saw her as an appropriate symbol for their aims, and her acceptance of an enormous annual pension funded by the taxpayer in March 1821 further alienated her from public support. When she arrived at George IV’s lavish coronation in July, she was refused entry to the Abbey, and the doors of Westminster Hall were shut in her face. The crowds outside were hostile to her attempts to gain entry. Only when she died a month later would people again rally to her side, insisting that her coffin made its way through the City of London, much to the government’s annoyance. The plaque on her coffin, which read ‘Caroline of Brunswick, Injured Queen of England’, never made it to her grave, however. Someone removed it the night before her coffin left Harwich, meaning ‘she departed England unmarked’.
Some of those who had tried Queen Caroline were also those who judged Portsmouth in February 1823. Eldon was the Chancellor for both Caroline and Portsmouth, and Caroline’s lawyer, Brougham, was employed by the Fellowes family to prove Portsmouth was insane. Portsmouth’s defence lost little time in reminding Brougham that he had relied upon Portsmouth’s vote in the Lords. Once Portsmouth had delivered his verdict on the third reading, Serjeant Pell recalled ‘the face of his learned friend beaming with delight at the triumph which he enjoyed from the vote then delivered’. Pell ‘could not but marvel now’, less than three years later, to see Brougham ‘endeavouring to prove that that the person’ who delivered that vote ‘was a madman’. Portsmouth had been used, just as the radicals had used Caroline, for as long as he had been politically expedient. The hypocrisy that Pell exposed prompted applause from the audience at the Commission, which was joined by some members of the jury.
Outside the Freemasons’ Hall, and in the days immediately following the end of the Commission, there was an attempt to make some political mileage out of the fact that Portsmouth had been permitted to sit and vote in Parliament, despite his questionable sanity. On 1 March 1823, some seven to eight thousand ‘respectable’ people met in Winchester castle-yard to discuss petitioning the government about the ‘present alarming state of agricultural interest’. It was one of a series of county meetings that were held in England since the start of the year. Present were the two big names in radical politics, both of whom held land in Hampshire, Cobbett and ‘Orator’ Hunt. Hunt, who had been held in Ilchester gaol since the Peterloo Massacre, had only been released the previous autumn, and was greeted as a hero with cheers of ‘bravo!’ Cobbett and Hunt spoke for two different forms of petition, but it was Hunt, with his calls for universal manhood suffrage, and a complete reform of Parliament, who won out.
But Hunt overstepped the mark when he referred to Portsmouth’s trial. He ‘animadverted on the affliction of Lord Portsmouth, which called forth strong and general marks of disapprobation,’ The Times reported. Sir Thomas Baring, who was Chairman of the meeting, and also a member of the jury that had tried Portsmouth, rose to speak. Hunt’s remarks ‘gave him inexpressible pain,’ said Baring. It was to him ‘a matter of deep regret’ that ‘any individual should have had so little of human feeling in his composition as to allude to the melancholy case of a noble but hapless person’. Baring told the crowd how he had sat on Portsmouth’s Lunacy Commission for the last three weeks:
harassed in mind and in body by the fatigue and anxiety of such an inquiry, he had travelled all night to be present at this meeting. (Applause)…if Mr Hunt had seen the unhappy nobleman, as he had seen him, examined by 23 gentlemen, and placed in the condition in which he stood, he would, he thought, have forborne from making any allusion to his heavy and bitter calamity. (Hear). The spectacle was calculated to have drawn tears from any man, even had he a heart of adamant. (Hear, hear).
Hunt, judging the public mood had swung against him, changed his tune. ‘In explanation’, he responded that ‘the mere reading of Lord Portsmouth’s case, in the newspapers, had drawn tears from him’. He had only raised the case ‘to show one instance of the manner in which votes were given in passing acts of Parliament’. The debate then moved on.
Hunt’s words showed a surprising lack of sensitivity in part because he had personal experience of coping with the effects of mental disability. His own brother, described as a ‘harmless fool’, was confined in Warburton’s private madhouse in Hoxton. But, while nobody dared to refer to this, his words were also politically miscalculated. Hunt went too far because he had been critical of an individual member of the House of Lords, who was also a local aristocrat. In Winchester, he might have thought he could bring national politics closer to home by referring to Portsmouth, but his words betrayed a deep misunderstanding of popular sentiment. Whatever he was, and to a great extent however he conducted himself, Portsmouth was the key aristocratic figure in this county’s community. As the largest landowner in the county, Portsmouth was perceived as its representative in the House of Lords. He was their man. As such, he would always command respect and loyalty. While many people were critical of the corruption that was endemic in politics, and could yearn for a reform of Parliament, they did not seek a wholesale change in the political system. That would mean revolution, and the recent example in France was enough of a reminder of the horrors that could bring.
Just as the British people came to ‘distinguish the person from the office’ of monarchy in this period, allowing them to show support for George IV at his coronation, even though this followed a year of public unrest over Queen Caroline, so they could also put the institution before the individual in Parliamentary politics. The personal qualities, and in particular the morals of both George IV and Portsmouth, were manifestly unsuited to their positions of authority. But this did not disqualify them from office. Dr Stephen Lushington, another lawyer who spoke in the Lords for the Queen, and was counsel in legal proceedings involving Portsmouth that followed his Commission, understood the politics of the time all too well. Portsmouth’s vote in Caroline’s trial proved nothing about his sanity, because, he explained:
the members of the House of Peers did not undergo a scrutiny as to their capacity before they voted; and without meaning any disrespect to that most honourable house, he thought it possible there might even now be a member of it … who, on inquiry, might be found to possess not a perfectly sound mind. It was not one of the privileges of that house that its members were to be assumed sound by virtue of a seat in it.
Queen Caroline’s trial was relegated in history to an ‘affair’, a ‘domestic melodrama’ that did no long-term damage to the monarchy. So also, argued Lushington, Portsmouth’s distressing case, and any other individuals who might be suffering from similar ‘calamities’, should not be allowed to affect the strength of the House of Lords. Indeed, to score political points by drawing attention to the personal misfortunes of one man could be regarded as utterly heartless, distasteful, and even cruel. Portsmouth’s case invited a display of emotion, and, if the correct response was tears and sympathy, then it lost all its political potency. Hunt was silenced and nobody else attempted to score political points by referring to Portsmouth’s case. Such was local sensitivity that neither of Hampshire’s newspapers mentioned Hunt’s speech, and even the reporter for The Times did not go as far as to specify the precise words Hunt used to describe Portsmouth. There might be other members like Portsmouth, but the future of the House of Lords was safe, at least for now.4
When the public spotlight was on Portsmouth, he had messed up. His conduct during the Queen Caroline trial earned him unwelcome notoriety. ‘So long as he was sane, he took no part in politics,’ recorded a future editor of Complete Peerage, as he noted Portsmouth’s vote in the Queen’s trial.5 But so far, aged nearly fifty-three, the only prominent person harmed by Portsmouth’s behaviour was himself. All that was about to change.