AT AROUND 1 P.M. on Tuesday, 2 July 1822, Lord Portsmouth, having ‘breakfasted with his Countess’, left his house in Great King Street to go for a walk. He was in ‘perfect good humour’, ‘telling his Lady he should soon return to her, and take an early dinner at three o’clock’. His meal arrangements sorted, Portsmouth headed down through the New Town towards Princes Street. On reaching Princes Street, Portsmouth turned to walk eastwards towards the Royal Hotel.
But it was then that the leisurely pace of this summertime excursion came to an abrupt end. Out of the hotel, apparently taking Portsmouth by surprise, stepped Fletcher Norton, the son of Caroline Elizabeth, a relation of Portsmouth’s first wife whom he had occasionally visited since his arrival in Edinburgh. The two men had a short conversation, after which Portsmouth was ‘prevailed’ to get into Mrs Norton’s coach, which was waiting for them outside Register House. The horses set off at great speed, leaving Edinburgh behind them and heading south. A few miles beyond Haddington, a market town in East Lothian, another coach was waiting for them, this one owned by Fletcher’s uncle, William Lord Grantley. The men changed coaches, and waiting inside the second coach was John Draper Coombe. Wasting no time, this coach travelled onwards, through day and night, until it arrived at the house of Lord Grantley in Wonersh, just outside Guildford, in Surrey, on the morning of 4 July. Portsmouth had travelled some 440 miles in just 51 hours.
On that journey south, Portsmouth’s version of what had been happening behind the closed doors of 32 Great King Street came pouring out. Portsmouth told Fletcher and Coombe a ‘long history’ of the ‘ill treatment he had received at Edinburgh’. Alder had ‘frequently knocked him down,’ he said, and his nights had been interrupted by Mary Ann requesting that Portsmouth fetch Alder when she felt unwell. At one or two in the morning, Portsmouth had to bring Alder into her room, and Alder, only partially dressed then got into bed beside Mary Ann to comfort her. Portsmouth squeezed his way into the other side of the bed, with Mary Ann lying between the two men. In the daytime, Mary Ann reduced the numbers of hours he was allowed out of the house, from five to two. Kept a prisoner in his own home, he was ‘locked up at six o’clock, as soon as it began to grow dark, in her ladyship’s dressing room, and there kept till bedtime’. Laura and Newton Hanson continued their accustomed cruelty towards him, sometimes whipping Portsmouth, and on other occasions simply hitting him until he fell to the floor.
If Mary Ann had hoped her reputation would not follow her to Edinburgh, she was mistaken. The party were forced to change lodgings upon arrival in the city ‘in consequence of the scandalous intercourse observed between Mr Alder and the Countess’. On three occasions they had to move, after they were ‘discarded for indecencies and improper behaviour’. It was Alder who eventually succeeded in renting the house in Great King Street.
This account of life in Edinburgh was so utterly different from that presented by the Hansons that unsurprisingly it led to some questioning at the Lunacy Commission. Portsmouth was quizzed about it during his examination, and attention was given to the letter home that he wrote, in which there was no mention of any problem. ‘We have it in evidence from Lord Portsmouth’s own lips,’ a juror recorded, ‘that he never wrote anything while he was at Edinburgh’, without Lady Portsmouth’s involvement. Portsmouth claimed that he only survived for so long in Edinburgh because he could talk to Mrs Norton. Indeed, the statement he made afterwards that, had it not been for her, ‘he should not have known what to do’, may unwittingly have given away the plot to remove him from Edinburgh. It was probably Mrs Norton who told the rest of Portsmouth’s family what was going on in Edinburgh, and it may have been her who advised him to take his walk along Princes Street that afternoon.
The Hanson family had their suspicions that something was up. John Hanson had his contacts in the legal world, even in Edinburgh. For all that Alder was physically strong and a bully, it was always John Hanson, never Alder, who called the shots in Mary Ann’s household. In June 1822, John Hanson wrote to John James, the writer of the signet in Edinburgh, who was a senior solicitor in the city. Hanson asked James to deliver a letter to his son, Newton, which gave instructions about how to safeguard Portsmouth. The day after the letter had been delivered, Portsmouth and Newton visited James in his chambers, and Portsmouth said he wanted protection from his brother, who had already tried to declare him a lunatic. With a lot of prompting from Newton, Portsmouth told James ‘that his brother had now formed a plan for carrying him off from Lady Portsmouth, who was then in the family way in order to alarm her and produce a miscarriage’. Portsmouth was convinced ‘that people employed by his brother were watching and dogging him in the streets, and he was afraid to go much abroad’. Newton ‘participated in the conversation’, encouraging rather than dispelling these fears. Portsmouth was frightened and he asked for help. James, seeing no signs of derangement or insanity in Portsmouth, ordered that two police officers be stationed at Portsmouth’s house.
The police did nothing to prevent Portsmouth being bundled into Mrs Norton’s coach, but word of Portsmouth’s departure soon got back to the Hanson household. Newton knew he had to move fast. He ordered a coach, persuaded James to come with him by telling him it was ‘Lady Portsmouth’s wish’, and the two men set off in hot pursuit of Portsmouth’s coach. They chased Portsmouth across the length of the country, but their horses were no match for Grantley’s, and they did not arrive at the gates of Wonersh until early Friday morning.
Refused admission, Newton and John Hanson lost no time in organizing a legal challenge to events. They applied to a judge, John Bayley, at King’s Bench for a writ of habeas corpus, which was issued in Mary Ann’s name. The writ stated that Portsmouth had been ‘forcibly and against his will conveyed away from Edinburgh’, and that he was now being confined at Wonersh. Portsmouth was brought to be examined at Bayley’s house in Bedford Square on 8 July. Bayley questioned Portsmouth with no one else present, and found that Portsmouth responded ‘readily’. Portsmouth ‘expressed himself very decided in his unwillingness to return to Edinburgh’. He gave no indication that he had been taken against his will, or that he was now being kept against his will. Although Bayley was clear that his purpose was not to judge Portsmouth’s sanity, he later stated that if he had any doubts about his mind he would have taken steps to have him ‘watched and attended’. But he ‘discovered nothing which approached the character of an unsound mind’. Hence he told Portsmouth that ‘he was a free agent, and at liberty to go wherever he pleased’. There were no grounds for the writ of habeas corpus.
Within weeks, Portsmouth had returned to Hurstbourne. There he was ‘welcomed with the most cordial congratulation, by the numerous and respectable tenantry, and the population of Andover’. He attended the races that month at Winchester, shaking the hand of one of his friends with the words ‘Here I am amongst you again’. He was home.1
In the meantime, Mary Ann was in Edinburgh awaiting the birth of her child. It was the ‘urgent request’ of Professor Hamilton that Portsmouth’s departure from Edinburgh should be ‘concealed’ from her ‘as long as possible’. When his absence could not be hidden any longer, a surgeon let blood from her arm an hour or two before she was told the news, in the hope that would prepare her for the shock. On 11 July, Hamilton received a letter from Portsmouth asking that he be kept informed of his wife’s health, and told when the baby was born. Hamilton handed the letter to either Mary Ann or John Hanson, and it was not seen again.
The Hansons continued to maintain that Portsmouth had been removed from Edinburgh without his consent. Having failed to achieve their aims through the writ of habeas corpus, they now turned to the press. Newton Hanson wrote a letter to the Edinburgh Courant, which was then widely reprinted in other newspapers, in which he represented Portsmouth’s departure from Edinburgh as abduction, rather than an escape. The mastermind behind Portsmouth’s abduction was his brother, Newton Fellowes, it was claimed. Having written a series of anonymous letters to Hamilton, casting the legitimacy of Mary Ann’s baby in doubt, Newton Fellowes, along with fellow trustee Lord Grantley, planned to abduct Portsmouth. Portsmouth had no idea what was going to happen to him the day he stepped out from his house in Great King Street. ‘His Lordship had not a change of apparel of any description, nor had made the smallest preparation for such a journey,’ the letter declared. The ‘secret instrument of taking his Lordship away’ was amateur in some aspects: Coombe had decided to travel incognito, assuming the rather unimaginative name of ‘Captain Cook’. But its intention was deadly serious. Newton Fellowes was ‘presumptive heir’, and he had to do all he could to distance Portsmouth from the baby who threatened to deny him his future. Now that Mary Ann’s health was in an ‘alarming state’, the actions of Newton Fellowes might even cause a miscarriage, Hanson warned.
While Newton Fellowes was quick to print a press denial of his authorship of the letters to Hamilton, there was truth to many of the other accusations made by Hanson. Years later, as Coombe tried to secure payment from Fellowes for his part in the scheme, he produced a letter that Fellowes and Lord Grantley had written to him on 24 June 1822 instructing him to remove Portsmouth ‘from the custody and control’ of the Hansons. A number of previous attempts to achieve this had already failed, they wrote. Portsmouth had been mistreated in Edinburgh, they told Coombe, and so they authorized him ‘to act in the manner you may think best for the personal protection, benefit and credit of his Lordship and family’.
The fact was that Portsmouth had been cruelly used by the Hansons and Alder for years. Newton Fellowes had remained a trustee of the Portsmouth estates, and he had never lost sight of the prize that was promised to him as heir. He continued to pursue Chancery actions that sought to protect the property that he saw as his to inherit. This ranged from the seemingly petty injunctions he brought about the felling of trees on the Hurstbourne estate, to the more serious accusations he pursued in the summer of 1821. By then, Newton had become convinced, with some justification, that income from the English and Irish estates was being siphoned off by the Hanson family before it reached the Portsmouth trustees.
Even when Newton Fellowes first heard that Mary Ann was pregnant, and that she and his brother were in Edinburgh, he may not have been concerned. There was no reason to believe that this pregnancy would end any differently from her others. But as the months went by, and Mrs Norton continued to send news of Mary Ann’s advancing pregnancy, for the first time it looked as though this baby would survive. Newton had to act, not just to safeguard his inheritance, but also that of his son, Henry Arthur, who had just come of age. Newton was too convinced, like others, of his brother’s impotence to ever entertain the notion that the baby might be legitimate. Fortunately for Newton, Mary Ann had been so blatantly unfaithful with her lover Alder that there was ample evidence to prove that the baby was a bastard. But he had to remove Portsmouth from Mary Ann’s clutches first, and before the baby was born.
That Portsmouth wanted to leave Mary Ann helped. The Hansons’ accusation of abduction fell apart when they could produce no proof that Portsmouth had been forced into that carriage. In broad daylight, in the middle of the capital city, not a single witness could be produced to say otherwise.
Portsmouth was miserable, and as he travelled away from Edinburgh he could feel relief. He thought he had escaped. But he could not foresee what would happen over the next few months, or know that six months later he would be facing a Commission of Lunacy. While the circumstances of his sudden departure from Edinburgh bore little resemblance to those he had experienced when he had been abducted by Seilaz more than twenty years earlier, the motives of those behind the scheme were remarkably similar. To both his brother, and to his wife and her family, Portsmouth was a valuable asset that neither party was prepared to give up. His wellbeing was always of secondary importance to his financial worth.
Having recovered from childbirth, Mary Ann left Edinburgh. She first used charm to try to win her husband back, writing letters to him. When these letters were withheld, she turned to intimidation. In the late afternoon of 2 October, ‘an open carriage and four, with two postilions, followed by two servants wearing the Portsmouth liveries, was seen approaching Whitchurch’. In the carriage was seated Lady Portsmouth, with her nurse and infant daughter. They stopped to rest at the White Hart Inn.
Portsmouth knew they were coming. The previous day, he had received a visit at Hurstbourne from Dr Bankhead and Mr France, a solicitor employed by the Hanson family. Bankhead tried to give Portsmouth a letter from Mary Ann, which Portsmouth angrily refused to accept. ‘She has disgraced herself by insulting me,’ Portsmouth declared, ‘and I will never live with her again.’ According to Bankhead, ‘the whole park was in a state of siege’. He found Portsmouth walking on the back lawn, accompanied by two or three men, one of whom was armed with a gun. Within sight of Portsmouth were forty or fifty labourers, ‘armed with bludgeons’. Portsmouth told Bankhead that the armed people were ‘necessary to protect him from the violence of the Hansons’. ‘He was afraid to go anywhere, on account of the Hansons,’ he said, ‘and the day before they had been endeavouring to get at him.’
When Mr France said that Mary Ann was on her way to Hurstbourne, Portsmouth would tolerate his unwelcome visitors no more. Two of Portsmouth’s men, followed by his gamekeeper, who was armed, marched France off the premises. After he had passed through the gate, they were closed and chained together, and ‘secured by bolts of an uncommon length and strength’. Men were then ‘stationed at them day and night, to guard against any new invasion’.
Meanwhile, ‘the people at Whitchurch’, hearing that Mary Ann had returned, assembled in front of the gates. ‘A party of men, dressed in smockfrocks, and others apparently labourers, were drawn up’, in order to oppose, by force if necessary, ‘that entrance on which her Ladyship was expected to insist’. Just beyond the Lodge on the park driveway, ‘two timber carriages were placed, without horses, to obstruct the way’. These obstacles, along with the trees on either side, would make it impossible for any carriage to pass through. Despite this show of loyalty for Lord Portsmouth, local opinion was divided. Some were ‘anxious for her Ladyship’s success’, while others declared that ‘she will never enter the mansion of this Noble Lord again’.
Portsmouth had drawn sufficient attention and support to dissuade Mary Ann from attempting to enter the estate. She came no closer than Whitchurch. But the victory in this battle was not all his. Barricaded in his own home, Portsmouth was literally scared out of his wits. The paranoia that had begun in Edinburgh, when the Hansons convinced him that his brother had placed spies on every street corner, had continued at Hurstbourne. Here he believed his wife and her family were intent on ambushing him and returning him to the horrors of their fold. He had enemies everywhere, and from all sides. His brother did nothing to allay his fears, even employing the services of two Bow Street officers at Hurstbourne. Surrounded by armed men, kept ‘in a sort of captivity’ within his mansion, and afraid to go out, Portsmouth was experiencing even less freedom at Hurstbourne than he had in Edinburgh.
In a constant state of agitation and alarm, with all the drama, disturbance, and disruption of the last few months, Portsmouth faced examination from doctors. It turned out that taking Portsmouth from Edinburgh was just the first step in a much larger plan that Newton Fellowes had for his brother. Just five days after Bayley had dismissed the habeas corpus writ, Newton Fellowes arranged for Portsmouth to be seen by the physician of Bethlem Hospital, George Tuthill. Tuthill, whose occupation was not disclosed to Portsmouth, saw him again at Hurstbourne in October and January 1823. Dr Sutherland, who had cared for Portsmouth’s mad aunt, Dorothea, saw Portsmouth for the first time on 10 August. Both Sutherland and Tuthill were convinced that Portsmouth’s mind was unsound. Fellowes was gathering the evidence he needed for his son to make a request for a Lunacy Commission that autumn.
But the Hansons were equally capable of gaining medical opinion to show that Portsmouth’s mind was sound. Bankhead had been employed by them to examine Portsmouth during his October visit. It was Bankhead who dropped the bombshell to Portsmouth that his nephew, Henry Arthur, had applied to the Chancellor for a Commission of Lunacy against him. At this, Portsmouth seemed ‘surprised and indignant’, Bankhead remembered. But that Portsmouth was of ‘a very nervous habit’ was hardly surprising given all he had endured, Bankhead told the Commission. Bankhead was a man who was not easily frightened, he declared, but with armed men lurking in the bushes, even he found himself very ‘alarmed’. No wonder Portsmouth was on edge. Bankhead, who could boast of thirty years’ experience, did not believe Portsmouth was insane. ‘If Lord Portsmouth were under the protection of humane persons, he would be as well able to attend to the management of his own affairs as any man,’ he told the Commission. At Hurstbourne, he had even given Portsmouth a dose of advice: ‘I said that if he had an honest agent, an honest steward, and an honest banker, he could manage his affairs.’ With good people around him, Portsmouth would be set right.
Bankhead might have added an honest wife to his list, for it was Mary Ann’s actions that had undone Portsmouth, and perhaps had even set him on a path towards insanity. In Edinburgh, she had played on his ignorance of sex, telling him that an injury meant Alder was incapable of being the father of her child. At the same time, Portsmouth had worked out that Dr Hamilton was something to do with pregnancies and babies. Mary Ann had ‘assured’ her husband that, ‘if she only saw Dr Hamilton, he should have a child’. Hamilton was ‘the cleverest fellow in the world’, Portsmouth repeated to a friend, for after just one consultation his wife had become pregnant. It was such a ridiculous notion that, on hearing it, the Commission collapsed into laughter.
Yet Mary Ann also planted the seeds of another idea into Portsmouth’s head. Perhaps to mock him for his foolishness, she suggested that after the birth they would return to Hurstbourne, and ‘he was to have a throne erected, and to receive his company’. As he travelled south from Edinburgh in Grantley’s coach, Portsmouth told Coombe of this idea, and said that it was from this throne that he planned to ‘receive the congratulations of the county upon the birth of his child’. He was to be the King of Hampshire.
So appealing was this idea to Portsmouth that he stuck with it, even after he had left Mary Ann. He kept turning it over in his head. Over the months it festered, grew and then developed another purpose. From being intended as a seat of celebration, in his mind Portsmouth constructed a throne of judgement. From his throne, Portsmouth ‘should pass judgement on those who had offended him,’ he said. Top of his list was Alder, who was to be hanged and gibbeted, followed by both John and Newton Hanson, who were to be hanged. Mary Ann, whom he called Mrs A or Mrs Alder, was to be transported for life. The plans became ever more elaborate. Portsmouth told Dr Ludlow that he thought that it would ‘augment the pomp’ if the county militia and yeomanry were present when he gave out his sentences. He believed that a firm of London upholsterers were constructing his throne, and he gave a builder at Hurstbourne detailed instructions about what should happen following its delivery. He wanted a gallery to be erected in the dining room where the throne was to sit, and an additional door to be fitted, to ‘afford free ingress and egress for the persons who were to come’. Portsmouth was expecting the place to be packed, with all eyes on him as he exacted his revenge. He told all his servants that he was to be ‘King of the county of Hants’, with specially made robes to match the role. He had written to the Lord Chancellor, he said, and was just waiting for him to give permission for the sentence to be carried out. Portsmouth repeated these assertions again and again, perhaps eight to ten times to one Hurstbourne servant, and each time he did so they became even more real in his mind.
Just a week before the Commission began on 10 February 1823, Portsmouth was still talking about his throne. By then, he was utterly confused. He told doctors he was impotent, yet declared that Mary Ann’s child was his. There was concern that Portsmouth did not understand the aim of a Lunacy Commission, and that he thought it had been called by the Chancellor as a trial of the Hansons, not him. He remained convinced that Mary Ann wanted to get him back in order to further harm him. His paranoia was all too evident: he believed that he saw his wife pass in front of a window of the house where he was staying, and saw her ‘kissing her hand to him’. He had rejected this advance, he said, by turning away, but, unwilling to take any chances, gave orders that Mary Ann should not be admitted entrance to his house, and that his pistols and guns should be made ready.
Frightened by Mary Ann, Portsmouth’s impatience to be questioned before the jury of the Commission stemmed from his belief that he was aiding in her prosecution. Emboldened by the success of his first appearance on 18 February, when Portsmouth gave such a credible performance of his sanity that the newspapers wondered why the Chancellor had called a Commission, Portsmouth put himself forward for a second round of questioning on 26 February. It was then that Portsmouth was asked about the throne.
Coached by his legal team, Portsmouth was prepared for this line of questioning, and ready to downplay the significance of his claims to be the King of Hampshire. ‘He answered with very considerable emotion,’ his lawyer reminded the jury. ‘At the time he talked of that,’ he said, ‘he was labouring under great distress, on account of the loss of a dear and much respected wife.’ Without his wife, Mary Ann, he had said crazy things. Asked if he thought himself the King of Hampshire, Portsmouth said that by that ‘he only meant that his fortune and situation in the county were considerable’. In Hampshire, he argued, ‘he was a sort of King’. He was like a King; after all, hadn’t everyone been paying him respect for years? Nobody had tried to publicly deny his position until now. Next, Portsmouth was asked how he intended to use the throne. ‘To receive the congratulations of his friends on his return’ to his home, he answered. Was a coronation necessary? ‘Oh no,’ was his reply.
Stressed by his experiences in Edinburgh he may well have been, but the explanation that he was upset by his split from his wife was hardly convincing after all the jury had heard about her. Nevertheless, it remained difficult to designate Portsmouth’s ideas as the delusions of a madman. It was important to understand how delusions were created, Dr Ainslie explained to the Commission. Portsmouth’s delusions were the result ‘either from the fermentations of his own mind, the errors of his own judgement, or the false impressions produced from the statements of others’. In the case of the throne, ‘his Lordship first stated his intention to sit in a chair; the chair afterwards grew into a throne, then it extended to a throne from which to administer justice’. Remembering all the times he had sat watching the trials of wrongdoers at assizes and the Old Bailey, Portsmouth had developed an idea that had perhaps been first suggested to him by his wife. He had built upon it, adding layer upon layer until it made sense to him. That took brains capable of thought and imagination. Wanting to dispense justice upon those who had so badly used him was perfectly rational. Portsmouth was attracted to the idea of a throne because his mind was weak, but it was no evidence of insanity. ‘His Lordship’s mind may be restored to almost its original state, by kind and judicious treatment,’ Ainslie concluded. Then there would be no need for Portsmouth to be King.2
‘The attention of the fashionable world has lately been a good deal occupied by the singular manner in which Lord Portsmouth was removed from Edinburgh, and the proceedings consequent thereon,’ reported newspapers in July 1822. Portsmouth’s dramatic departure from Edinburgh marked the moment when his life story went public. Aided by Mary Ann’s attempt to re-enter Hurstbourne Park, and fuelled by the letters submitted to the press by both the Hanson and Fellowes sides, public interest mounted as the legal case for a Commission of Lunacy was submitted, and then accepted. By the time the much anticipated Commission began on 10 February 1823, it was clear that this was going to be a bitter struggle between two families over the future of one man.
Nevertheless, the public was ill-prepared for what they heard. Stories of blood-letting, ‘black jobs’, abduction, adultery, and cruelty to man and beast took the ‘fashionable world’ by surprise. As the days of the Commission wore on, and more shocking evidence was produced, seats in the Freemasons’ Hall became harder to find, and news of the stories told there reached a larger and wider audience. Byron, perturbed that he was not invited to testify, eagerly awaited letters about the case to reach him in his foreign exile.
Stories about Portsmouth were a revelation because he had put up such a convincing performance of sanity for so long. Many witnesses to the Commission, and no doubt others who had known him, were unwilling to relinquish their view that Portsmouth was weak-minded but not insane. Yet Portsmouth was a disturbing figure, however he was categorized. He had crossed the taboos of sex and death with little sense that he was doing anything wrong. But he had also unsettled this society’s confidence in its ability to judge itself. For if Portsmouth was not the person he first appeared, neither were many others who featured in his life story. His devoted mother was perhaps a harsh disciplinarian; the loyal valet, the schemer with blackmail on his mind; the trustworthy family solicitor, a man who would sacrifice his daughter for personal ambition; the innocent young wife, a harlot; the patient younger brother, a man who put his inheritance before his sibling’s happiness. When character could not be known, and when the apparently sane as well as the alleged insane could deceive people, who was left to trust?
After seventeen long days of this trial, it was decision time for the jury. Weighing up the evidence meant determining who had known the truth about Lord Portsmouth: the privileged men and women who shared a similar social status to those on the jury, or the servants and labourers who had worked for Portsmouth. Through the words of more than a hundred witnesses, the jury had been taken on a journey into Portsmouth’s past. It had taken many twists and turns. From the awkward, stammering boy who never grew up, to the young man who was easily misled. From the aristocrat who hosted and attended many society functions, to the man who could not relinquish perverted obsessions. From the husband who did not appear to grieve upon the death of his first wife, to the cuckold who failed to react to the adultery and cruelty of his second. Portsmouth attracted sympathy and revulsion in equal measure. He was a man who didn’t quite fit, either in the society of the sane, or in that of the insane. After all his secret pleasures had been revealed there could be no turning back to his life before the Commission. Nobody would want his company now, even if the jury judged that he had a weak, rather than unsound mind. Nor did he belong in the world of the insane. His had always been a unique mind, which gave him some remarkable capabilities, as well as profound weaknesses. Even his delusions had logic to them. While much of his behaviour, especially recently, seemed to point to an unsound mind, there was a nagging sense that Portsmouth was not entirely to blame for his condition. Had he been driven to this state of mind by others, and was rescue still possible? Lingering doubts also remained about the real motives for this Commission. Whose best interests would an ‘unsound mind’ verdict serve?
After the counsel for each side of the Commission had completed their final speeches, the Chief Commissioner, Mr Trower, gave his summary. This had been ‘no ordinary case,’ he said, as its length had indicated. ‘A vast number of medical men’ had pronounced that Portsmouth was of unsound mind. Bankhead had not seen Portsmouth since October, and even Dr Latham, who had originally thought Portsmouth sane, had changed his mind on his fourth visit. Dr Ainslie was alone in still insisting that Portsmouth was sane. The Commissioner then reminded the jury of the circumstances of Portsmouth’s marriage to the present countess. Portsmouth had been a ‘patient sufferer’, and the Commissioner asked ‘whether a man, capable of submitting to all this, could be considered as of sound mind, and competent to the management of his own affairs’. He referred to Portsmouth’s faults, ‘his ringing of bells – his attention to black jobs – his familiarities with his servants – his adventures with the female peasants on his estate – his tapes – his lancets, and all the other singularities and weaknesses which he had displayed; and from these,’ he asked, ‘what conclusion could be drawn as to the state of his Lordship’s mind?’
The jury retired at six o’clock. They returned an hour and a quarter later. Fitzroy, the foreman, put to them: ‘Those that are of opinion that John Charles Earl of Portsmouth is a man of unsound mind, and incapable of managing himself or his affairs, will hold up their hands.’ Every member of the jury ‘instantly’ held up his hand, and the verdict was pronounced to be unanimous. Portsmouth had been returned a lunatic, not a King.3