Late in the year 1872, the ancient cathedral at Lichfield was host to a mighty congregation of the social and ecclesiastical establishment of high Victorian England. The soaring magnificence of the stone vaults and the radiance of the precious Herckenrode glass were animated by the dancing light of many candles. They were being carried in procession along the cavernous, arcaded aisles, past attenuated stone shafts and acute gothic arches to the south aisle, where the whole devout pageant came to rest. Before them stood a newly constructed, elaborately canopied wall niche, which enclosed the white stone effigy of a slightly built, sleeping cleric of saintly and serious aspect (fig. 118).
The memorial had been designed by one of the greatest architects of the age, Sir George Gilbert Scott, who was immersed in the momentous task of restoring the entire historic fabric of the cathedral. This great endeavour had been set in hand by the subject of the new memorial, Henry Howard, former Dean of Lichfield, some fourteen years earlier. The superbly sculpted effigy, resting on an altar tomb, dressed in beautifully rendered loose clerical robes, holding a bible, had been carved by H. H. Armstead. By 1872, he had established a national reputation through his series of figures on Scott’s great Italianate Foreign Office building in Hyde Park. His fame had been consolidated by carrying out the huge frieze of famous figures that run round the base of the Albert Memorial in Kensington.
The sculptor and the architect were there to witness the ceremony of dedication, being performed by another legendary personality of the British Empire, Bishop George Augustus Selwyn. Prominent on kneelers, at the very forefront of the throng of worshippers, was Henrietta Howard, the Dean’s widow. She was supported by her eldest son George Howard, and her large family of ten children and their spouses. As the chanting of the choir faded into the echoing void above them, Bishop Selwyn pronounced a blessing over the memorial and led the congregation in a solemn prayer for the soul of the departed Dean. He went on to contrast the purpose of this memorial with those dedicated to perpetuating the names of great national figures such as kings, soldiers, statesmen or scholars. It was, he said, to commemorate Henry Howard’s quiet wisdom in perceiving the futility of the benefits of birth and learning and the fatal pride they engendered within the hearts of men, unless they were subjugated to the service of a purpose higher than the feeding of personal vanity and the gratification of the senses. Dean Howard, he said, had placed his formidable abilities at the service of God, his maker, who, he knew, esteemed the life of the humble widow or abandoned orphan above that of any crowned king or high priest who sought glory before men. Dean Howard had set out on a lifelong pilgrimage to place service to his Lord before all the inclinations and desires of his own nature, and had triumphed in that divinely inspired endeavour.
After a great anthem of celebration by the choir, the procession, followed by Henrietta Howard and the family, made its way across the nave to the great west door. At the heart of this solemn ceremony, walking modestly behind her mother, was Caroline Octavia Howard, a poised and beautiful fair-haired woman of thirty-three, who was known and admired by the great majority of the illustrious congregation.
If our reading of the events of her later life was correct, she was to become pregnant through a clandestine relationship with a man unacceptable to her family, and give birth to an illegitimate son scarcely twelve months after the unveiling of this monument to her father. Her condition, had it become known, would have been perceived as undermining her father’s lifelong dedication to upholding the rites of the Christian religion, one of the most sacred of which was the sanctity of marriage. To her mother, the shame and humiliation this would have projected upon her late husband, herself and her children, as a venerated clerical and aristocratic family, would have been impossible even to contemplate. However, through our research, we had concluded that this was the only credible interpretation of the actions and documents defining the end of Caroline’s life. What would this disaster have meant for those involved?
For Caroline, the disgrace would have been absolute. To have been discovered in the act of fornication, despite the benefit of her upbringing at the heart of a pious family, would have defined her as a ‘fallen woman’ for the rest of her life. How absolute her banishment from conventional society would have been would have depended on her reaction to her disgrace. If she were defiant, her actions would be interpreted as stemming from an evil character and she would have been kept completely out of sight by her family. If she were contrite and repentant, she might have slowly gained a measure of acceptance on the margins of social life but would not have been considered acceptable as a marriage partner by any respectable family.
For her mother, Henrietta Howard, the disgrace of her daughter would have drastically limited the number and quality of the people prepared to interact with her socially. This would have severely restricted the prospects of her remaining single children. For the older, married children, their own and their children’s positions would depend upon their own achievements, and their willingness to distance themselves from the scandal by never including or referring to their disgraced sister again.
However, once the story became known, the good name and social standing of the whole Howard family would have been damaged by association with sexual irregularity of this kind. Dalliances, mistresses, and even extraneous children, were all semi-acknowledged and accepted, provided the well-bred participants remained within the respectable confines of matrimony. But if Caroline had given birth to a child beyond this safe boundary, she would have been excluded from both marriage and society for the rest of her life.
How was it possible, then, that two years after Henry’s birth in January 1874 Caroline married Charles Philip Wilbraham? Of all the people in the world who could not, under any circumstances, contemplate marriage to a woman with a living child born outside the bounds of matrimony, it was a serving Church of England vicar. It was his specific role to uphold the values of family life in his parish, and insist upon the imperative of undergoing the ceremonial solemnising of marriage vows before any sexual contact took place between members of his flock, so as to avoid licentiousness and prevent unwanted children.
Setting an unblemished example in this sphere was central to the respect he commanded in his community. Nothing we had discovered about the life or character of Charles Wilbraham gave us any reason to think that he would have been prepared to contemplate entering into a personal relationship that compromised his core beliefs. In order for Charles Wilbraham to be able, let alone willing, to marry Caroline Howard in 1876, the fact that she had conceived and given birth to a child two years earlier would have to have been totally concealed from him and the outside world at large.
In a society of large complex households, relying upon servants who had access to the most intimate secrets of their employers’ lives, to conceal the process of pregnancy and childbirth was dauntingly difficult. Even if the secret was successfully kept at that key moment, the danger would remain throughout the child’s life. Some chance or malicious circumstance might arise at any moment to reveal his or her true identity, and ignite both the original scandal and the deceitful measures adopted to conceal it. If an ordained minister of the established church were found to have knowingly played a central role in the process, he would instantly have been debarred from acting as a priest for the rest of his life.
If Caroline was Henry’s mother, surely Charles Wilbraham must genuinely not have known it, or he would not have married her in 1876. And yet, as we looked again at the crucial weeks surrounding Henry’s birth in late 1873 and early 1874, there was no disguising the fact that Charles Wilbraham, as much as anyone else in our story, had initiated a rush of absolutely fundamental and unprecedented changes in his circumstances.
The decisions and actions he took seemed starkly out of character and were almost impossible to understand in the light of his settled and dutiful life up to that point. We had surmised that his move away from Audley might have been motivated by a desire to help his old friends, the Howards, remove Caroline from the influence of an unacceptable suitor, Robert Bateman. But his reckless discarding of his home, career and whole pattern of life did seem out of proportion with that objective. Had he, in fact, taken part in a much more desperate and serious attempt to cover up a scandal?
To find answers to these questions, we returned to the Bateman family to see if their actions at the moment of Henry’s birth suggested anything unusual. If Caroline’s marriage to Charles Wilbraham simply represented a determination by the Howard family to end an association of which they did not approve, Robert might well have been devastated and changed his way of life radically, but the rest of the Bateman family would not have been involved or affected. In this case, Robert’s own actions at the crucial period – leaving London, ceasing to exhibit at the Dudley, adapting Biddulph to his needs and living a reclusive life there – might simply have been a personal response to his thwarted love for Caroline. On the other hand, if he was about to be exposed as having ‘taken advantage’ of a refined and cultivated woman from a good family by introducing her to the immoral way of life of his degenerate artistic circle, the whole Bateman family would have been social outcasts. If there was any danger of this, there might be discernible traces of a concerted family plot to conceal the evidence and prevent catastrophe for all concerned.
One thing was certain. If Henry was Robert and Caroline’s son, and this had become publicly known in 1873–4, the consequences for the Bateman family would have been draconian even in comparison with the fate of the Howards. The woman in such cases was always given the benefit of at least some mitigating justification, such as having been foolish and misled, or given alcohol or drugs, which led to the man coercing her and taking advantage of her innocence. The man, on the other hand, particularly if he was from a lower social class, was condemned outright as a voracious predator, an uncouth brute, ignorant of the codes of moral or gentlemanly behaviour. If he concealed his rapaciousness beneath a veneer of plausible refinement or silken sophistication, this was considered even more offensive and dangerous.
Surviving records show that neither Robert nor his wider family suffered this kind of public vilification. It follows, therefore, that if Robert was Henry’s father, and Caroline was his unmarried mother, the fact must have been concealed by a daring strategy, executed by a tight group of trustworthy individuals, at great personal risk to themselves. To succeed, it would have had to be contained primarily within the family, where everyone had a vested interest in keeping the secret, not only at the moment of crisis, the child’s birth, but all through the subsequent years.
Seen from this perspective, the behaviour of several members of Robert’s close family in late 1873 did betray signs of following a strangely integrated pattern, perhaps designed to obscure the details of Henry’s birth and upbringing from curious outsiders. Henry was to be taken abroad, immediately after he was born, to a remote area of the British Empire where no documentation of his parentage was required, and brought up as the son of Robert’s married sister Katherine, and her husband Ulick Ralph Burke, a barrister. Since Katherine already had a young daughter of her own, it was not anticipated that she would settle there and bring the child up, so a location was carefully selected where another reliable member of the family, Robert and Katherine’s elder brother Rowland, was involved in missionary work that centred on the care and education of children, especially boys. This would enable the child to be placed in an environment broadly supervised by a trusted relation who would not raise questions about his background, while Ulick Ralph pursued his duties as a lawyer. The ability to keep the process within the strict confines of the family made Lahore the perfect destination.
If these arrangements were driven by panic at the impending birth, one would expect them to be put in place only after the crisis became known in the summer of 1873. If they were activated before that, there would be no reason to suspect that they formed part of a deliberate subterfuge. So we were fascinated to discover that it was only in the middle of 1873 that Ralph Ulick was appointed as a barrister at the High Court in Lahore. He travelled out to take up his post accompanied by his wife, in mid-September – regardless of the fact that she should have been six months pregnant by then. Their arrival was recorded in Rowland Bateman’s journal in late September, as was Rowland’s journey back to Lahore on 10 December to spend Christmas there. Rowland’s biographer made no further mention of Katherine in India, or the birth of a son just after Christmas on 6 January, despite Rowland’s presence there.
If the truth was that Katherine had not been pregnant when she arrived, but had simply been present to receive the child and give essential credibility to his birth in Lahore, Rowland would not have compromised his integrity by lying in his journal. Equally, he would not have risked giving a truthful, written record of events, which would expose his brother Robert, and all those trying to help him, to disgrace if it were read by others. As Henry grew up, Rowland must have baptised him and overseen his education. The simple expedient of censoring any mention of him from written records of his work in India was clearly the safest and most honourable course of action.
Maconachie’s purpose in writing his book was to pay tribute to Rowland as a towering figure in the story of the Church Missionary Society’s work in the Punjab. He would not have dreamed of prying into or exposing a family secret of this kind, even if he had caught wind of it through rumour or gossip. The fact that he failed to list Robert or Caroline in the index, and went to elaborate lengths to avoid mentioning their names as the people who provided a loving and peaceful home for Rowland in his last illness, suggests that he might well have been aware of some impropriety attached to them.
If Caroline gave birth to Henry in the first days of January 1874, the crisis would have appeared in the second half of 1873. Once the pregnancy began to be visible, the first imperative must have been to get her out of sight, among people whose complete goodwill and discretion the Howards could depend on. One particular family had emerged from our research as the lifelong friends and confidants of the Howards – the Moncktons of Stretton Hall near Penkridge in Staffordshire. Although Caroline’s mother Henrietta had always been close to General Henry Monckton and his wife Anne, she also retained deep ties with Emma and Anna-Maria Monckton, the General’s unmarried sisters, who in the early 1870s lived at Brewood Hall, two miles from Stretton Hall. The particular circumstances of the village of Brewood lay at the heart of the relationship between the Howards and the Moncktons.
Historically, it had been known as the Deanery Manor of Brewood: it always passed into the ownership of each succeeding Dean of Lichfield Cathedral, since the rents formed part of his stipend. In the early nineteenth century, General Monckton had arranged to lease the whole manor from his friend Dean Howard because it adjoined his land at Stretton Hall. Thus, up until the Dean’s death in 1868, the Moncktons had held all the land and assets of Brewood as tenants of Caroline’s family.
The General had intended Brewood Hall to act as a dower house for his wife after his death, but she never went there. Instead, it was used intermittently by various members of the Monckton family. From the 1860s it was the home of the General’s sister Emma Frances Monckton; when she becamse unwell in 1870 her sister Anna-Maria left her home in Bristol to join her as nurse and companion. Emma died in 1872, whereupon her sister returned to her own home at 1 Codrington Place, Clifton, Bristol, where she died five years later.
In 1880 it is recorded that Brewood Hall was let to Sir Thomas Boughey while his own home, Aqualate Hall, was being remodelled. Despite enthusiastic searching by the current Monckton family, there are no records that the house was let between 1872 and 1880. So it seems likely that in the summer of 1873, this quiet, secluded old house that the Howards regarded almost as their own property, stood fully furnished and empty. It was set back behind outbuildings and heavy wooden gates down a tiny rutted lane beyond the village boundary.
The combination of the deep friendship with the Moncktons and lifelong associations with the village must have made this the perfect place for Henrietta Howard to arrange for Caroline to disappear into in the autumn of 1873 without arousing undue curiosity. With her own servants carefully brought from outside the area, Henrietta Howard could present Caroline’s condition as an acute illness for which complete rest and isolation had been prescribed, while Henrietta visited and renewed her relationship with her old friends. It does seem strangely coincidental that Charles Wilbraham should have gone to so much trouble to select this place to move to from Audley in the crucial last months before Henry’s birth and a mere two years before his own unexpected marriage to Caroline Howard.
If the first part of the plan to cover up Caroline’s pregnancy involved the birth of the baby in a safe, secluded place, followed by smuggling him out to India, once in Lahore the child was effectively given a new identity as the son of Katherine and Ralph Ulick Burke. He then remained conveniently out of sight for the five years’ duration of his adoptive father’s term of employment in the High Court in Lahore. This period of invisibility was essential to allow any suspicion aroused by Caroline’s absence over the last months of 1873 to be dissipated.
At the same time it appeared that a second phase of the strategy was being implemented, centred on the frantic activity of Charles Wilbraham and designed to pave the way for his marriage to Caroline at the first possible opportunity in February 1876. If Charles was a party to the conspiracy this would be the decisive element in the success of the whole cover-up strategy. It would rely upon his publicly acknowledged reputation for absolute honesty and dedicated piety. This had been established by his tireless labour over thirty years to educate and improve the lot of his impoverished parishioners, whose lives were circumscribed by the filth and danger of the ten coal mines around the village of Audley. Presumably, from his arrival in Penkridge in January 1874, just two years before his marriage, he would have been prepared to pronounce himself betrothed to Caroline Howard had anyone challenged her character or moral probity. His moral endorsement of her would move the balance of plausibility overwhelmingly in her favour against any accusation of sexual promiscuity circulating in Brewood, which lay in his new parish of Penkridge.
The problem was that if Charles knew the accusations to be true, why was he prepared to abandon his innate integrity by getting involved in, and lending his authority to, a deceitful attempt to escape the consequences of wrongdoing, as he would have seen it? Surely his honesty was the Achilles’ heel in the whole scheme, especially as he was not a member of either the Bateman or Howard families, and therefore not bound into them by bonds of tribal loyalty or self-interest. As a matter of fact, however, it is not strictly true that he had absolutely no family link with the Batemans. Robert’s brother John had married the Hon. Jessy Caroline Bootle-Wilbraham in 1865. She was the granddaughter of Edward Bootle-Wilbraham, 1st Lord Skelmersdale, uncle of Charles Wilbraham. So Charles Wilbraham and Jessy Caroline were second cousins. It was only as we struggled to understand why Charles might have allowed himself to become absorbed into a close-knit conspiracy to protect the Bateman name that we remembered this connection between himself and Jessy Caroline.
John’s marriage to Jessy Caroline in 1865 had defined the high water mark in the Batemans’ fortunes, by establishing him as the brother-in-law of a wealthy aristocrat of his own age, the 2nd Lord Skelmesdale, who had a massive Palladian mansion and estate at Lathom Hall near Ormskirk. What we had not understood, because we had not looked into it earlier, was the absolute contrast between the meandering decline into provincial anonymity of John and Jessy Caroline Bateman, and the focused, driving political ambition that saw her brother Baron Skelmersdale rise to the highest reaches of the aristocracy and achieve appointments at the very heart of power and privilege at court and in parliament.
Edward Bootle-Wilbraham had succeeded his grandfather in 1853, when he was almost seventeen years old. He had entered politics at the first possible opportunity by taking his seat in the House of Lords on his twenty-first birthday, 12 December 1858. From that moment he began a spectacular progress up the political ladder, in the course of which he developed alliances with two of the most powerful professional politicians of the day. Although from the outset of his career he was associated with the Conservatives, centred on Lord Derby and Benjamin Disraeli, in August 1860 he married Lady Alice Villiers, daughter of George Villiers, 4th Earl of Clarendon, the great Liberal foreign secretary of the mid-Victorian age.
In 1866, Lord Skelmersdale received his first important appointment as lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria. He retained this post until his friend Benjamin Disraeli became leader of the Conservative Party in 1870. Disraeli immediately promoted him to Conservative chief whip in the House of Lords. This was a crucial position of trust for a leader based in the House of Commons who needed to mobilise support among the still powerful and independent peers in the Upper House.
The Conservatives were in opposition, but by 1873 Gladstone’s administration was coming to an end and, in early 1874, Disraeli won for the Tories their first absolute majority in the Commons for thirty years. By this time, Lord Skelmersdale had become a key figure, operating at the heart of Disraeli’s political inner circle. The same year, he was promoted again to membership of the Privy Council, the government’s advisory body to the Queen. Lord Skelmersdale continued to hold these vital liaison roles, between Disraeli, the Queen and the House of Lords, throughout the 1870s. His reward was to be raised to the tip of the aristocratic hierarchy as the 1st Earl of Lathom in 1880, after which he served three terms as Lord Chamberlain of the Queen’s Household. This was a position that almost defined the heart of the establishment, where political power coalesced with the ceremonial splendours of the monarchy.
Suddenly, as we came to comprehend the true extent of the Bootle-Wilbraham family’s climb into the innermost sanctuary of political power, the potential began to appear for an entirely different dimension to a scandal centred on Robert Bateman and Caroline Howard. The last months of 1873 were the most crucial of Disraeli’s career. After six years in opposition, he was preparing to fight a general election which would enable him to establish his stature as a seminal figure in nineteenth-century politics. He was preparing to redefine the old Tory Party as the socially progressive ‘One Nation Conservatives’ by combining radical legislation, such as his Public Health Act (1875), Education Act (1876), and Employers and Workers Act (which enabled workers to sue employers in the civil courts if they broke legal contracts), with romantic imperial gestures such as the Royal Titles Act (1876), which created Queen Victoria Empress of India.
If in late 1873 or early 1874, when he was on the very threshold of power, a damaging sexual scandal had emerged, implicating Lord Skelmersdale’s family, there can be little doubt that Disraeli would have dispensed with the services of his chief whip in the House of Lords, at least until the furore had died down. Even later, he would have been extremely cautious about proposing him for sensitive posts, especially ones involved in projecting the symbolic sanctity of the Queen Empress. If a public scandal involving the Bateman name had threatened to emerge in late 1873, Lord Skelmersdale, Disraeli’s ruthless political fixer, would have had no compunction in applying overwhelming pressure on the participants to prevent any damage to the Tory Party’s electoral prospects or to his own political career.
In the case of an illegitimate child in his sister’s family, he would need to ensure that knowledge of the birth was suppressed, and that the scandal would not reappear later or lay him open to blackmail through his pivotal role close to the centre of power. This could be achieved only by the removal of the baby, as far away as possible, the moment it was born. Then he needed to organise the marriage of the mother to an absolutely trustworthy person of impeccable moral standing, whose willingness to become her husband guaranteed her good character in the eyes of the world. It cannot have taken Lord Skelmersdale and his sister Jessy Caroline Bateman long to realise that they had, within the safe confines of their own family, an unmarried cousin, a venerated clergyman in his mid-sixties, of unblemished character, who fitted the role perfectly.
Their problem must have been to persuade Wilbraham to abuse the sanctity of the Christian marriage bond by committing himself to enter into it dishonestly with someone who was about to give birth to a child fathered by another living man. It is not difficult to imagine the hushed intensity in Charles’s study in the vicarage at Audley as the circumstances of Caroline Howard’s pregnancy were explained to him by John Bateman and his cousins, Jessy Caroline and Lord Skelmersdale. Charles would have struggled to come to terms with what they were telling him about the daughter of Dean Howard, whose memorial he had just witnessed being dedicated in Lichfield cathedral. How strained the atmosphere must have been, as they outlined the possible repercussions for the family should Disraeli, or Queen Victoria herself, sever their relationship with the Bootle-Wilbrahams. What response could Charles have made to their assertion that the fate of three families – the Howards, the Batemans and the Wilbrahams – hung on his willingness to intervene and avert a catastrophe for them all?
How Charles must have longed for them to leave, and allow him to confront the profound implications their scheme had for the faith in which he had put his trust all his life. He needed to think, and to pray for guidance, before he could respond to so morally complex a dilemma. The only undertaking he could give, if there was any prospect of his doing what they were asking, was to agree to go and speak to Caroline, as one fallible human being to another. He needed to understand the intensity of the forces that had driven her to abandon the virtuous path down which she had been guided by her saintly father.
How agonising his dilemma must have seemed as he knelt alone in his empty church, scouring his conscience for a truthful, valid response to the conflict between the doctrinal clarity of scripture on physical abstinence except within marriage, and the inexhaustible forgiveness and love of Christ for the penitent sinner. How often did he read and re-read St John’s account of the woman taken in adultery:
And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and when they had set her in the midst, They say unto him, Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act. Now Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned: but what sayest thou? This they said, tempting him, that they might have to accuse him. But Jesus stooped down, and with his finger wrote on the ground, as though he heard them not. So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her. And again he stooped down, and wrote on the ground. And they who heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, beginning at the eldest, even unto the last: and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst. When Jesus had lifted up himself, and saw none but the woman, he said unto her, Woman, where are those thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee? She said, No man, Lord. And Jesus said unto her, Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more.
Clearly, there was a refusal to condemn outright the woman taken in adultery – but, equally, there was no attempt to disguise or condone the sin itself.
Charles Wilbraham was not simply being asked to acknowledge his own human frailty, which in itself made him ineligible to pass judgement or punish Caroline. His family were proposing that he take advantage of the fact that she was not married to marry her himself, solely to discredit anyone who discovered the true nature of her condition. The problem was that from Charles’s perspective, Caroline Howard’s pregnancy demonstrated that she was already conjoined with another man in the eyes of God, which made the passage from St John’s Gospel directly relevant to him. Were Charles to marry Caroline and fulfil that commitment physically, he would be complicit in compounding the error of fornication by breaking the sacred bond between her and the child’s father and entering into an adulterous relationship with her himself. This made a mockery of the sublime aspiration to absolute mutual faithfulness that lay at the heart of Christian marriage. For a true believer like Charles, it was the sincerity of the intention, not the cynical repetition of a ritualistic formula of words, that legitimised and sanctified Holy Matrimony. And yet, how would the other Charles Wilbraham have responded – the adventurer, the traveller to remote places, the ex-military man of the world, who revelled in the adventure of crossing the scalding passes of Afghanistan and the arctic wastes of Greenland?
As a man, despite all he knew about Caroline’s circumstances, it must have been bewitching to be left alone with this tall, pale, beautiful woman to talk privately. He was a clerical bachelor in his mid-sixties, who existed in a world where interaction between the sexes was contained within a rigid framework of repressive formality. Simply to be alone with her, imbued with the radiance of imminent motherhood, in an atmosphere in which all the usual taboos were negated, would have been intoxicating. Her very condition embodied the reality of the relationship between human love and physical desire which the society around them sought to deny. For Charles to talk openly to a wise, gentle woman, bravely facing the condemnation of the whole world outside that room, about the compulsive desires that had impelled her and her lover to give expression to their feelings must have been a deeply revealing and disturbing experience.
Surely he was shocked to discover his own ability to empathise with Caroline’s account of the pain of forbidden love, and to recognise echoes of it deep within himself. Did it reawaken the memory of his devotion to Beatrix Egerton, and her father’s disdainful rejection of him? How thrillingly new to him those hushed confidential talks must have been, when this beautiful, enigmatic creature opened her broken heart to him and acknowledged her and Robert’s inability to contain the urgency of their desires within the confines of their families’ wishes. She must have wept bitterly, and prayed with him for forgiveness, both for her lapse from grace and for the shame she had brought on her father’s memory.
Charles must have been convinced of her absolute sincerity, or he could never have taken the perilous decision to risk his life and reputation, to save her from disgrace. As their meetings progressed, he must have found greater and greater solace in a relationship that illuminated hidden areas of his own personality, which had remained confined within a shroud of reticence and inhibition all his life. Slowly, the combination of identifying with her obsessive love, cruelly forbidden by others, and the heady intimacy generated by her willingness to acknowledge the nature and intensity of her own deepest feelings must have mesmerised the lonely old parson, until he found himself falling in love with the enthralling, tragic figure fate had put in his path.
Despite her indissoluble bond to Robert Bateman, of which her unborn child was the living witness, Caroline’s friendship with Charles also imperceptibly mutated into a spiritual empathy. It was built on mutual respect and kindness, and offered the prospect of a dignified, useful life in the desolate years ahead, when all prospect of being reunited with the man she loved seemed utterly out of reach. However, Charles had to find some way to resolve the conflict between his love for her and his continuing devotion to the service of Christ, before he could take action to save her.
By 5 November 1873, the day he went to dinner at Keele Hall, and left a note for Lord Hatherton proposing himself for the living of Penkridge, he must have succeeded in finding a solution to this dilemma. It was a decision that, at the moment he took it, seemed to offer him a miraculous solution to his mental anguish but, as the years went by and its consequences became more evident, was to test his faith and willpower to the limits of their endurance. In November 1873, I believe that Charles decided to be true to his deepest feelings and marry Caroline, but never to consummate that loving relationship physically, so that in the eyes of the church the relationship could be considered unfulfilled.
Theirs was to be a spiritual union. They were to plight their troth to each other, but they were not to be ‘made one flesh’, as Caroline had bound herself physically to another man, who was still alive, and had a child by him. Caroline’s reputation would be protected by Charles’s willingness to marry her, which would have been unthinkable unless her moral standing was beyond reproach. The moment we looked at the events surrounding almost all the central characters of our story in this light, the puzzling anomalies seemed to evaporate. Their actions, no matter how bizarre and outlandish they had seemed before, now formed a comprehensible pattern that told an extraordinary story.
