Authors: Kate Summerscale
Bovill asked about the walks that Edward and Isabella took together.
‘I was in the habit of walking about daily with the different ladies and gentlemen in my establishment,’ said Edward. He emphasised that such walks were far from private. ‘The grounds are beautiful and spacious. All the walks are open to the patients, and to the servants, and to visitors. The neighbours who are friends also have access to them.’
Bovill asked him about the time that he was seen emerging from Isabella’s quarters.
‘When any of the ladies did not appear at breakfast I was in the habit of visiting them in their bedrooms,’ Edward informed the court. ‘I may have gone into Mrs Robinson’s room.’
Cockburn interrupted: ‘But I understood she was there not as a patient but as a friend.’
‘If I had known that Mrs Robinson was unwell I might have gone into her room,’ explained Edward, ‘but I don’t remember that I ever did go. I cannot swear that I never did, but I have no recollection of having done it. She generally had two rooms while remaining at Moor Park: a sitting room and a bedroom, one leading out of the other.’
Bovill asked about the study in which they were alleged to have had sex.
‘The study was free of access to all the patients when they wanted to see me, and friends came in there continually and
sat with me during the day or in the evening. It was my private room, and anyone who wanted to communicate with me came to it.’ On further questioning, he added, ‘There are three doors to my study. One is from the public dining room and another is opposite the pantry door. The servants occasionally use it as a passage room.’
‘In the whole of your acquaintance with Mrs Robinson from first to last,’ asked Bovill, ‘had you ever any criminal connection with her?’
‘Never,’ said Edward.
‘Did you ever take any liberties with her person?’
‘I never did.’
‘Did you ever conduct yourself towards her in any indelicate or improper manner?’
‘Never, in the smallest degree.’
‘Did you ever address to her any conversation or observation of an amorous description?’
‘I never did,’ said Edward. He added that he had once, chastely, kissed her. ‘In October 1855 she arrived with one of her children, and she was received in the hall by my motherin-law and myself, in the presence of a number of other persons. The hall is also a billiard room. On that occasion I gave her a kiss. I will tell you why. In the September previous my wife and I were anxious that our children should go to the seaside for change of air, but we were too busy to absent ourselves, and Mrs Robinson kindly volunteered to accompany them. She did so, and on her return to Moor Park I saluted her as I have stated.’ This, he said, was the only loving gesture he made towards her. ‘I never put my arm round her waist, or embraced her, or tempted her or caressed her. I never did anything to excite her passions in any way.’ He denied having a conversation with her about ‘obviating consequences’.
He had seen the diary, he said, and its statements were ‘utterly and absolutely false – a tissue of romances from
beginning to end, as far as they implicate me in anything improper’.
Did she ever take a lock of his hair?
‘She never cut off a lock of my hair.’
And did he walk with her in the evenings?
‘I may have walked after dusk with her on a summer’s evening, but in the month of October I never walked with her after tea-time.’
Bovill sat down, and John Karslake, Montagu Chambers’s junior, took the floor to cross-examine the doctor. Karslake was a striking man – six feet six inches tall, ‘magnificently handsome’, according to his friend and sparring partner John Coleridge, who was Bovill’s junior in the Robinson case, ‘manly and straightforward and powerful in all he says’.
In a quick monotone, Karslake asked Edward about the supposedly free access to his study.
The doctor conceded: ‘It was understood that the servants were not to pass through the study when I was there. The servants would generally knock before entering.’
Karslake asked him to elaborate on the nature of his friendship with Mrs Robinson.
Edward said that in Edinburgh, ‘the intimacy between my family and the Robinsons sprang up rapidly. We saw them nearly every day. We could hardly be more intimate as friends than we were at this time. Mrs Robinson and I frequently talked together on scientific subjects, on books, on phrenology, and other topics. I wrote her letters when she was absent from Edinburgh; sometimes long letters.’
Under further cross-examination, Edward agreed that he had given Isabella a locket.
‘I once presented Mrs Robinson with a locket, as a gift from my wife, which contained my children’s hair. She and my wife had exchanged lockets. That was at Edinburgh. My wife made her presents of that sort on one or two occasions.’
He was asked again about his visit to Isabella’s room.
‘Mrs Robinson slept in whatever room was vacant when she came to Moor Park. I repeat, that I never remember having been in Mrs Robinson’s room in the morning. I have been in her room in an evening. It was early one evening in 1855. I might have dropped into her room in the evening on more than one occasion but I can’t recollect having done so. On that occasion I met Mr Thom there.’
Karslake asked whether this was her bedroom.
‘It was her sitting room, not her bedroom,’ Edward replied. ‘I was never in her bedroom at any time in the evening.’
When in 1856 did Mrs Robinson visit, asked Karslake, and had they corresponded since then? He was trying to establish the extent of their conversation after Henry’s discovery of the diaries in May.
‘The date of Mrs Robinson’s visit in 1856 was August or September,’ said Edward, slightly changing his previous estimate of late September or October. ‘I may have corresponded with her after that visit. I saw Mrs Robinson last in December 1856.’
He was asked when he had learnt of Henry Robinson’s decision to take the case to court.
‘I did not know for certain, until July 1857, that Mr Robinson had instituted a suit against Mrs Robinson in the ecclesiastical court. I heard of it from my gardener. I saw a report of some proceedings in the November of that year. It was about two lines, I believe, in
The Times
, stating that a divorce had been obtained. My gardener, John Burmingham, told me his sister had been up as a witness.’ This was Sarah Burmingham, who had also testified on Henry’s behalf in the current case.
And did he correspond with Mrs Robinson after that?
‘I had no communication with Mrs Robinson in 1857,’ said Edward, ‘or with any person in reference to that lady.’
Bovill rose to re-examine his witness, and asked him to describe more fully what he knew about the divorce suit.
‘The report I saw was in
The Times
of the fourth of December 1857,’ said Edward. ‘It merely stated that the suit was promoted by Mr Robinson against Mrs Robinson by reason of adultery; that Dr Addams was about to open the case for the husband, when the Admiralty Advocate, for the wife, said he would offer no opposition; and that the Court pronounced sentence of divorce.’ By ‘divorce’, here, he meant a divorce
a mensa et thoro
, a separation; the Admiralty Advocate to whom he referred was Dr Phillimore.
Cockburn asked Edward whether Isabella had made contact with him when that case was heard in the church court.
‘I was not communicated with on behalf of Mrs Robinson when that suit was commenced. I understood I was implicated in the proceedings instituted by Mr Robinson.’
Bovill reminded Cockburn that the doctor could not have been examined in the suit in the ecclesiastical court.
Cockburn corrected him: it was true that he could not have been examined
ex proprio motu
(of his own accord), he said, but if Mrs Robinson had chosen to resist the suit she could have made him a witness.
Edward was permitted to leave the witness box. He had conducted himself with restraint, refraining from making any attacks on Isabella, calmly denying the charges of adultery. He was courteous, poised, detached, free from rancour, passion or intensity. In his letters to George Combe he had been far more outspoken. Then, he had been keen to persuade Combe of his innocence; now, he had a debt to pay Isabella, who was fighting the divorce petition for his sake.
Bovill summed up for Isabella. Henry’s case, he said, rested entirely on the diary. ‘I would first observe that it contains no explicit statement of Mrs Robinson’s guilt.
Some of the most eminent men in the kingdom have proved that the disease under which she was labouring was likely to excite her imagination, and cause her to imagine what had never taken place. The fact that she had suffered under that disease for several years has also been proved, and the means taken by her and her husband to effect a certain purpose tended to aggravate that disease.’ This was a euphemistic reference to the form of contraception used by Henry and Isabella. Bovill did not specify their method: they might have used a device such as a syringe or a cervical cap, which could cause physical irritation and therefore, it was believed, provoke mental derangement; or it might have been that Henry withdrew before ejaculation, with the same consequences.
Bovill drew the court’s attention to the diary’s frequent references to the writings of Shelley: it was fair to infer, he said, that Isabella had also been struck with events in Shelley’s life, and with the fact that he had imagined things that had never existed’. He contended that the diary entries were ‘not records of fact but expressions of feeling’, pointing out that the apparently incriminating entry of 7 October 1854, in which Isabella and Edward first kissed, was not composed that day but the next, ‘after a night of sleeplessness and dreaming’.
Bovill read again several of the diary extracts that tended to show Isabella’s instability, drawing attention to one – dated 25 May, in an unspecified year – in which she claimed to have betrayed Henry a month before their marriage. He argued that Henry’s counsel had failed to incriminate Edward Lane: ‘Several months’ notice has been given of the examination of Dr Lane, yet not a single question could be asked him by Mr Karslake tending to impeach his credit.’ He returned to the central contention of Isabella’s defence, the argument that for a woman to record such disgraceful episodes was itself evidence of madness. ‘If what she described occurred,’ he
asked, ‘is it credible that she should day by day have written with her own hand a record of her infamy?’
Rather, Bovill argued, the erotic passages were experiments in fiction. The extracts relied upon by Henry’s lawyers, after all, were skilfully constructed. When Isabella recounted her first tryst in the Moor Park glade, she did not blurt out her extraordinary news; she began the entry by recreating the innocence of the morning, withholding from the diary her knowledge that Edward desired her. Such entries, Bovill said, suggested that Mrs Robinson was contemplating a novel.
‘I hope that “contemplating a novel”,’ said Cockburn, ‘is no sign of a diseased mind.’ There was laughter in the court.
‘By no means,’ said Bovill, ‘but the novel she contemplated was connected with events in which she imagined she had taken part. Never before has it been sought to have a lady found guilty of adultery upon such evidence as this.’
Montagu Chambers then addressed the court on Henry’s behalf: ‘The very journal shows that Mrs Robinson is a sane woman, capable of discussing even the most abstruse and difficult questions. It is the journal of a very romantic but, nevertheless, of a very clever woman, competent to discuss science and subtle subjects.’
Cockburn interjected: ‘There is not a lunatic asylum where you will not find persons able to do the same.’ The spectators laughed. The judge had dryly pointed out to Bovill that literary aspirations were not in themselves proof of madness; now he reminded Chambers that intellectual sophistication was not evidence of sanity.
‘The foundation of the defence,’ continued Chambers, ‘is that Mrs Robinson was labouring under a uterine disease, but that foundation is one of sand. No evidence has been given as to her present state of health, or as to the time when her disease was supposed to have terminated. We do not even know precisely what was the disease with which she was afflicted.’
He reminded the court of the early entries about Edward Lane. ‘It appears that he was in the habit of reading passages of poetry to Mrs Robinson, and she very clearly records her first love for that gentleman. She called him a handsome man the first time she saw him.’ When Edward ‘made himself free with another woman’, he added, she found him ‘not so agreeable’. To Dr Lane’s credit, said Chambers, he had for several years rejected the advances of Mrs Robinson, responding to her overtures with coldness and reserve. Eventually, though, ‘he unfortunately was not able to resist the temptation that was thrown in his way by the allurements of an agreeable and loving woman’. The fact that no one had seen him act with great familiarity to Mrs Robinson, said Chambers, was only ‘proof that he was a cautious man, and not that he was free from guilt’.
Cockburn adjourned the trial. The judges, he said, would take time to consider their decision.
Over the next few days, most of the newspapers that in the summer had been so inclined to exonerate Edward Lane were silent on the subject. The
Daily Telegraph
, which earlier in the year had described the diary as ‘nonsense in a notebook’, even ran a piece that suggested that the doctor might be guilty: ‘No one reading her journal, with the events of each day minutely recorded, could possibly doubt the truthfulness of what is set down.’ Edward Lane’s evidence, the newspaper argued, had not dispelled the mystery surrounding the case. He had confirmed everything in the diary bar the sex, and his cross-examination had resurrected the prickly question of why Isabella had not denied adultery – and called him as a witness – when the case was heard in the church court. ‘Dr Lane has been lucky enough to be able to avail himself of an Act passed, it would seem, specially for his benefit, by which he is empowered to figure in the witness box, and give testimony to his own innocence. But no one who knows much of human nature will be disposed to give implicit credence to
the testimony of a gentleman so peculiarly circumstanced.’ His lawyers’ argument that Isabella was insane, said the
Telegraph
, was ‘a very convenient theory’.