Dark Days of Georgian Britain
Page 23
By 1816 the system was a jumble of copper, copper tokens, fake copper tokens, debased silver, clipped gold, over-stamped foreign coins, and bank paper from eight hundred banks. Something had to be done, and quite unusually when something needed to be done in the Regency period, it was done!
It seems odd that a laissez-faire government, one that did little more than collect taxes, wage war and run a moderately efficient post office, should intervene to change the whole basis of money. However, the soundness of the monetary system was the very basis of the nation’s prosperity.
The preamble to the new 1816 law describes the problem
Whereas the silver coins of the realm have, by long use and other circumstances, become greatly diminished in number and deteriorated in value, so as not to be sufficient for the payments required in dealings under the value of the current gold coins, by reason whereof a great quantity of light and counterfeit silver coin and foreign coin has been introduced into circulation within this realm, and the evils resulting there from can only be remedied by a new coinage of silver money
The Coinage Act of June 1816 created a gold sovereign of 20s to replace the guinea of 21s. New silver sixpences and shillings were planned for February 1817, and silver crown and half crown coins were introduced. All silver coins were of a higher face value than the value of the metal; there was now nothing to gain from sweating or clipping them. On 16 September, Prime Minister Lord Liverpool approved the plan to take in the old silver coins and to distribute the new ones via the banks. This was kept secret, and like many secrets, caused panic when the news leaked out.
The first panic was in June when the Bill was passed. It started when the local banks showed some reluctance to take in the debased silver currency. It then spread to local businesses and then would cause distress to the poor who could not spend their money in the shops. This happened in Norwich in June; the Bank of England had to step in to guarantee the exchange of any silver that had not been debased or was not French or Irish.
In September, panic started again. Businesses all over the country had stopped accepting the old debased silver currency. A rumour had spread that the Bank of England would not accept the old coins, despite the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Nicholas Vansittart, stating the opposite in parliament in June 1816. By September, old coins were not being accepted in Smithfield Market and this spread throughout London. London pawnbrokers were not prepared to redeem the small pledges it had, to the disadvantage of both sides.
The Lord Mayor of London, Francis Hobler, stopped the panic by announcing that all silver coinage that was not foreign was still legal tender, and there was a controlled tumult as the Bank of England exchanged the silver coins for Bills of Exchange. It did not help in the building of confidence that the replacement coins were not ready until February 1817. However, the whole operation went relatively well; unlike many economic and social problems of the Regency, this one was solved with administrative efficiency and a lot of government intervention. This certainly explained where their priorities lay.
Chapter 20
Adultery
In July 1816, Lord George Thomas Beresford sued for damages from his erstwhile friend, the Honourable Thomas Taylour, the Earl of Bective. Beresford accused Taylour of the successful seduction of his wife, Harriet Beresford, and demanded the sum of £30,000 in compensation.
This was no twenty-first-century quickie divorce or twentieth-century legal court case with witnesses and co-respondents. It wasn’t a divorce at all; merely a demand for compensation as a prelude to a legal state known as ‘Divortium a menia et thro’ –‘separation from bed and board’. Under these conditions, neither party could remarry and any children would stay with the father. The wife would receive no financial support, and her future would range somewhere between uncertain and ignominious.
These legal separations were, in the parlance of Georgian times, ‘Crim. Con.’ cases; criminal conversation being the euphemism for sexual intercourse outside of marriage. The case of Beresford versus Taylour is not a well-known case, largely because it was not contested and there were no lurid details for the press to report. But these cases tell you a lot about the state of marriage in the Regency.
Because it was uncontested, no witnesses were called in this proceeding. However, the wife was never called even if there was a dispute about the facts. As a married woman, she had no separate legal identity. The aim of the hearing was to assess damages. Beresford was asking for more that he was ever likely to receive – by that time in history, £30,000 had only been awarded once. The compensation amount was more of a statement of social pretension than a realistic demand. It could only go down from this point. The prosecution would try to maintain the level of compensation and the defence would try to reduce it.
Beresford’s representative recounted the marriage history at the Sheriff’s Court at Bedford Row on 17 June 1816. George had married Harriet Schultz, daughter of John Bacon Schultz, in 1808. She was ‘a lady of high connection, immense fortune and was endowed with every accomplishment’. This may or not have been true, but it was not meant as a compliment. This was a compensation case about loss of amenity, so it was very much in the interest of Beresford to portray his wife as something valuable.
After their first child, Harriet had fallen into a ‘derangement’ that today we would identify as post-natal depression. However, it was spun to George’s advantage; he had not abandoned her, he was a good man, later to be betrayed. He could possibly feel the compensation rising as Sergeant Best spoke on his behalf.
Another factor in assessing the compensation was the social standing of the people concerned; the higher the status, the more compensation. Nearness in social class would reduce it, as it would lessen the shame and humiliation. So there was little scope there to make money on the latter point; both were the sons of important aristocratic landowners in Ireland. Instead, Beresford’s representative went to great pains to point out how close the two families were. If Crim. Con. involved betrayal and calculation, the compensation would rise accordingly.
The successful seduction took place in the summer of 1815. George was, it was strongly pointed out, away from home only because he was a major general fighting for king and country. On receiving reports of the further derangement of his wife, he rushed home to care for her. However, acting on reports received, he obtained a key from her writing desk, which contained a letter, ‘couched in the most passionate language’ from Thomas Taylour, Earl of Bective, son of the Marquis of Headfort. It was a long and declamatory missive about a set of events that had already happened. In the letter, the Earl tried to qualm her fears about her reputation. ‘No man, presumptuous, confident or artful, would think you lightly won.’ He tried to reconfirm their love: ‘Search now that bosom, and see that it still loves Bective.’
This was the prosecution case. He had been the seducer. The seduction had been calculated. He had exploited her illness and the friendship of the families. How was Beresford going to bring up their three daughters without their mother? Before this, their life had been one of domestic harmony. George brought forward no less than five witnesses to prove it. And even now, George took care of her, rather than abandon her to ‘The London World’, a cauldron of vicious gossip about those who were caught defying convention or failing to be discreet about it.
Bective’s defence was brief. He was far from rich (this was not regarded in law as a relevant defence – when the aristocracy claimed for high Crim. Con. damages, bankrupting the defendant was part of the plan). He was young and naive. (The papers reported that he was ‘[a]n agreeable young man, born in the same year as her ladyship’.) He was sorry.
The jury took thirty minutes to agree compensation to George Beresford of £10,000.
Regency Crim. Con. cases varied in compensation and the starting figure was normally about £50, as in this example of two London skilled tradesmen in an uncontested case. Mr Atherton, a London goldbeater of Long Acre, was awarded £100 in compensation after
his wife was seduced by another goldbeater of the same street, a ‘Mr W------------N’. It was a mere three lines in the newspaper. With no aristocratic interest or prurient detail, the papers were not interested. Other papers were more forthcoming. His name was Mr Willshen; Mrs Atherton had been free and frequent in her unlawful conferences with him. This marriage was clearly not worth much. Lord Ellenborough considered that ‘the loss of such a wife could not have injured him materially’.1
The quality of the marriage affected the compensation considerably. Despite Francis Lee being a clergyman and friend of the Prince of Wales, he was offered a mere £500 in compensation when his wife was seduced by Captain Blaquire in Ramsgate. However, Lee was 40 when he married his 16-year-old wife. ‘It was a clandestine marriage…she being very beautiful.’ He had left her unprotected when he went to Spain for two years and his wife spent the time quietly cohabiting with her new lover. Lord Ellenborough, who presided over a lot of these cases, did not consider it an aggravated case, and the jury took the hint by offering the lowest possible figure that was commensurate with social acceptability for a member of the aristocracy.
A reduction to £50 from a much higher claim would be a slap in the face, no matter what the social standing of the plaintiff. In the case of Jones v Houlton, Jones wanted £1,000 for the loss of the amenity of his wife, but the defendant was awarded £50 when the judge noted that Jones, observing his wife in the horse stables with Houlton, had ‘remained outside at the door with a relative, not like an exasperated husband at all, but as a limb of the law who was anxious to bring this action’. The judge also commented that Jones hardly knew Houlton, so there was no real betrayal of trust, and that Jones could not be sure that Mr Houlton was the first seducer. When offered the paltry sum, Jones, an attorney, went on to prosecute one of his own witnesses for perjury, or perhaps not saying what he had been paid to say, which in this case was probably the same thing.2
At the same Shrewsbury assizes, the case of Evans v Hughes was dismissed due to lack of evidence. There were two letters, suggesting a relationship between the defendant and the plaintiff’s wife. One was anonymous. It wasn’t enough for a separation, but the Chester Courant took the opportunity to provide its readers with other details; the couple’s child had been born a few days after their marriage in 1810; Mr Evans was spending a lot of time with a former intimate friend, Miss Emma Jones, who had recently suffered an unfortunate miscarriage. Readers were clearly expected to fill in the gaps. If illegal intercourse had been proved, it seems unlikely that Mr Evans would have been awarded more than £50. As it was, he remained married.
Illegal intercourse had to be proved for any compensation to be issued. By the nature of the deed it was largely done in private. Husbands with suspicions could hire a spy. For the aristocracy, it was the husband’s servants who provided the evidence. In the 1811 case of Verelist v Staples, this evidence was offered:
John Preston, the gardener, stated that, happening to attend in doors instead of the footman, he chanced to have business in the drawing room, where the defendant Major Staple and his mistress were together. She was standing against a table under the pier glass and the Major was standing with her. He had his left hand round her waist,____(here the witnesses gave a description of the exact attitudes of the respective parties but we must forebear to follow him). He said a great confusion was manifest, and left the room.
Sometimes there would be evidence of criminal intercourse that was simply not believed by the judge and jury. In the case of Holland v Lupton (September 1815) the defendant, a brewer, accused his wife of sexual intercourse in the cellar of one of his public houses. An employee of Mr Lupton, a Mark Osborne, reported that he had been in the habit of sleeping on the job next to the beer barrels in the basement. On one occasion he was interrupted by the wife and her lover creeping into the cellar in the pitch darkness. The paper went on to report that ‘the remaining part of his testimony afforded the most unequivocal proof of the depravity and the indelicacy of the criminal parties’. However, the defendant’s lawyer was not having this. Did Osborne really spend an hour, in the darkness, a yard away from the two criminal parties? Would two rich people choose three stretched out barrels to engage in their criminal conversation?
Mr Topping, the defendant’s lawyer, had done research on Mr Osborne. Osborne had lied about working for the London brewer Barclay Perkins; he had lied about his apprenticeship and credentials and had fabricated his personal background. Topping asked the jury for only nominal criminal damages. He brought witnesses to prove that it had not been a particularly happy marriage. For example, Holland had struck his wife in a public Manchester Street when Mrs Holland had an infant in her arms. Mr Topping’s expensive investigations repaid the investment. Mr Holland was compensated to the amount of a mere £100 after the jury considered the matter for ten minutes. It was likely that the jury would have just talked amongst themselves in the court rather than retire to consider seriously a verdict.
If the defence could prove that a wife had been complicit, then the compensation would fall dramatically. In the case of Mellis v Baker the judge instructed the jury that the compensation should not be large as the ‘plaintiff’s wife was not the most prudent or chaste of women’. Much to the disgust of the newspaper, the plaintiff was still awarded £750.3
If the woman was the seducer, compensation would still be due but would fall to almost nothing and the social shame would be unbearable. In the case of Haslam v Burn (1812), Lord Ellenborough pointed out to the jury that the ‘violation of the marriage contract meant some compensation must be given’, no matter what the moral weaknesses of the woman. In December 1812, a Mr Mortimer of the Militia Regiment received only £100 when his wife, aged 30, had an amour in Cheltenham. However, ‘the evidence suggested that the wife had beguiled him, rather than the defendant her’. The defendant was 20 years old.
Pleas of mitigation were various but predictable. Naivety was one. Mr Holden, accused of Crim. Con. with a Mrs Defries in 1810 ‘was in his minority when he became acquainted with the highly interesting and universally admired Mrs Defries’. His legal team added that this was in no way an indictment of her reputation, which seems hard to believe. If the husband himself had made improper connexions, this would reduce the amount of compensation, not because he had committed adultery himself, but because his behaviour showed, in the flowery language of the court reporters that ‘the plaintiff did no longer set a value on his jewel’.
It was not possible to receive nothing if Crim. Con. was proved; but it was possible to receive next to nothing. In the 1813 case of Green v Marden, the plaintiff was a modest army paymaster and the defendant was an even more modest navy clerk. There were no reputations to pay for here. Mr and Mrs Green had managed a mere two years in Sicily before she was sent away. She had flitted from lodging house to lodging house, spending money so quickly that Mr Green had to put a notice in the newspaper saying that he was not responsible for her debts. There was no betrayal of trust; the plaintiff did not even know the string of lovers she had seduced, one of whom jumped out of the window when challenged. She was said to have claimed that her second child was not her husband’s.
Compensation was set at one farthing.
Chapter 21
Regency Body Snatchers
During 1816, the Anatomy School of Great Marlborough Street in London advertised dissections of the human body ‘every Thursday, as usual’. These lectures were attended by medical students who needed the experience of dissecting bodies to obtain a medical degree. Such bodies were hard to obtain; apart from the corpses of executed murderers, there was no legal source. Hangings for murder brought in about fifty bodies a year; more were executed than that, but families would move heaven and earth to avoid their relatives being ‘anatomised’. London teaching hospitals were using about 500 corpses a year in the Regency period. So the other bodies had to come from somewhere. Private enterprise provided the solution.
The Borough Gang were Britain�
�s most famous ‘sack ’em up men’. They operated between 1802 and 1825. Membership and leadership varied over time, but membership probably never exceeded six. The prominent individuals, moving in and out of the group over the years, were Ben and Joseph Crouch, Joseph Naples and Israel Chapman.
Private enterprise had a solution to the problem of body snatching too. Jarvis and Company of 139 Longacre in London had a range of coffins, including the patent ‘unopenable’ coffin at 3½ guineas, available at a few hours’ notice. The coffins were essentially a set of steel and wooden boxes within boxes with no visible screws on the outside and no weak corners that could be prised open.
The poor were the main victims of the resurrection men. They could not use these metal-plated coffins even if they could afford them. Cemetery officials forbad their use, as it would make it impossible to reuse the ground for future burials. Iron coffins could only be used in family-owned ground. The poor could not afford to guard their loved ones either, knowing that after two weeks the body would be unusable anyway. The other was a practical problem; a witness at the 1828 select committee said that the body snatchers ‘seldom took the rich…as they were buried so deep’.
Robbing corpses from graves was not an offence at this time, although stealing property associated with the burial was. Robbers would strip the body and carefully leave all the property behind. It was always naked bodies that were placed in sacks – hence the name ‘sack ’em up men’. There was only a moderate sense of outrage about this activity in the newspapers. While the ghastly subject was not referred to very much, when it was talked about, it was treated in a jocular and almost childish way. After a bout of robberies, one newspaper announced that ‘the resurrection men have risen again’. In another newspaper, grave-robbery news was sandwiched between an article about curing chilblains and a new bridge in Galashiels.