Significant Sisters
Page 4
But the balance in the marriage, never very safe, had gone. Nobody, least of all Caroline and George, knew how to proceed any longer. The Sheridans alone were adamant: they were finished with George. They would not try to like him any more. They invited Caroline to accompany them on a European tour in the following spring and wanted her to come alone. But she knew George would not allow it. Her only hope of the family holiday she so desperately wanted was to persuade George to come and her family to accept him. Reluctantly, both sides agreed and off they all went in the spring of 1834. Almost at once things went wrong. George felt ill and since he prided himself on being unable to speak a single word of any foreign language he could not be left to recover on his own. Miserably, Caroline watched her family depart and turned to nursing George, which she did devotedly. Instead of having fun with her sisters she “sat at a window and yawned and caught flies”23 while from his bed George moaned and complained.
When he was well again they proceeded to Frankfurt where the Sheridans had agreed to wait. Unfortunately, Caroline arrived half-strangled. On the way, she had felt sick and asked George either to stop smoking his hookah pipe or to let her open a window. He refused to do either. Suddenly, Caroline snatched his pipe from him, slammed down the window and hurled it out. George jumped out of the moving carriage, recovered his precious pipe, got back into the carriage and then, placing his hands round her neck, told her what he would do if she ever did that again. She greeted her family in tears with the marks of George’s strong fingers on her throat for all to see. The Sheridans found it difficult to tolerate George at all and ostracized him. They took Caroline off into the countryside and she wrote “we scrambled about the hills and laughed our hearts out.”24 By the time they all returned to London she felt quite restored but in fact her good health was an illusion. She had an illness from which she was very slow to recover. George, as usual, did nothing but abuse her for their financial difficulties which he appeared to think were her fault. The rest of the year passed in a haze of work and worry, with the sick Caroline trying to write a novel that might at one blow solve her pecuniary problems. If it had not been for the support, both emotional and financial, of her beloved family she did not know how she could have survived. The £300 she received for her two prose tales (The Wife, and Woman’s Reward) did not, after all, make her fortune (nor did her three novels – her poems and journalism earned her much more).
There is no doubt that neither Caroline nor George was looking for a complete break. In fact, when they were apart from each other both their rages quickly subsided. George became remorseful and wrote begging Caroline to forgive him and she always replied acknowledging her part in any quarrel they had had. After the hookah pipe incident, for example, when her family had whisked her away from George, he wrote saying he was repentant and she replied that he was “a good, kind husband in the long run and don’t believe me when I say harsh things to you . . .”25 This was the way of things between them: their incompatibility led to violent scenes and then partings during which both regretted what had happened. If George had been a really strong, cruel, domineering tyrant Caroline would have nerved herself for a final break however much she dreaded the social consequences. But he was not. Mostly, because she was cleverer, she could manage George. If other people had not interfered she could certainly have gone on managing him to her own advantage with only the occasional fight.
But other people did interfere. First there was Augusta, George’s sister, and then a much more sinister figure, a Miss Margaret Vaughan who caused trouble between the Nortons throughout 1835. Miss Vaughan was a cousin of George’s from whom he was likely to inherit land and money. She came to stay near Storeys Gate early in 1835 just as Caroline was recovering from a miscarriage, and was one of the causes of another bitter quarrel between them. Then in 1836, the quarrel over but not forgotten by the Sheridans, Caroline and her boys were invited to spend Easter at Frampton Court, the home of Georgiana, who was now Lady Seymour. George had not been invited. No Sheridan wanted him under their roof again (which was of course interference of another kind). George, who heartily loathed the Sheridans and detested their house parties, did not give a damn. He much preferred going to Scotland to hunt or shoot. But Miss Vaughan told him he was being insulted. She said no gentleman ought to stand for such treatment and that he should not allow his family to go where he was not invited. She said she could not respect him if he allowed it. So George, who was oblivious to insults but desperate to keep in with his wealthy cousin, suddenly told Caroline she could not go to Frampton. He absolutely forbade it. Caroline retorted that he was being excessively stupid and certainly she was going. Furthermore, she told him she knew who was behind this sudden ridiculous command: Miss Vaughan. She said she would never have her in the house again. The stage was set for another grand row but they were both going out to dinner and so had to control themselves. On the way home George said that whatever Caroline did he was not having his sons leaving his house. He rushed into the house the minute they got home and told the servants that the boys were not to go out with their mother. Caroline managed to keep quiet.
Next morning, she crept out of the house and went round to her sister’s London house to confer with her. While she was there, one of her servants arrived in a great state to say that the children had been bundled into a carriage and taken to a secret destination. Caroline, knowing at once that it would be Miss Vaughan’s nearby house, went there immediately. She was admitted but denied access to her children – “I could hear their little feet running merrily overhead while I sat sobbing below – only the ceiling between us and I not able to get at them . . . if they keep my boys from me I shall go mad.”26 Miss Vaughan, after abusing her at length, ordered her out of her house and threatened to call the police if she did not leave at once. Meanwhile, back at Storeys Gate, George had ordered the door to be barred to her. She was now a cast-off wife, deprived of her children.
The horror of what had happened stunned Caroline for several weeks. It was the first time her children had been brought into a quarrel and she found this development changed everything. She was so distressed and upset about their welfare that all other considerations were swept from her mind. She wanted to be re-united with them and nothing else mattered. She was willing to humiliate herself, to beg George’s forgiveness even though she had done nothing wrong, to admit she had been harsh or unreasonable – anything. But to her astonishment George was implacable. She could not see the children. He had taken them down to his brother’s house at Wonersh Park where they would remain behind high walls and locked gates. Then came the most unexpected and dramatic development of all: he was going to sue her for divorce on the grounds of the alienation of her affections by Lord Melbourne unless she agreed to a separation in which the children would live with him, she would claim no allowance from him, and she agreed to live with her brother. They were monstrous terms which Caroline could not possibly have agreed to and for which there was no incentive since she was not even to share the children. She rejected them outright. George immediately filed his divorce suit.
It was the sensation of the year implicating as it did the Prime Minister. Caroline, when the news was brought to her, could not quite take it in. It was too ridiculous. Lord Melbourne was only a friend, as George, who had been present at most of their few meetings at Storeys Gate and had accompanied her to Melbourne’s residence, perfectly well knew. Obviously, there had been more interference. This time it was from Lord Grantley and his Tory cronies who had realized the splendid capital they could make out of George and Caroline’s domestic squabble. The newspapers of the day enjoyed themselves hugely printing scurrilous paragraphs about the beautiful Mrs Norton and the powerful Lord Melbourne. The Age and the Satirist, two of the most scandalous sheets, included not only Caroline but her sisters in all the innuendo and speculated openly about their reputations, mentioning in the process every gentleman who had ever been seen with them.
Caroline realized finally that s
he was trapped. The children had been taken from her which gave George the ace card in all their negotiations. Whatever happened next, whether his absurd divorce suit succeeded or not, he would still have the children. This, she was told, was the law. She refused to believe it. What had she done? She was innocent – she had not even left George much less committed adultery and she could prove it – so how could the law give George the children? What meaning did the word “innocent” have if the law did not protect her? She consulted all the eminent lawyers of her acquaintance and looked up law books herself. The result was the same. She learned, “piecemeal” as she put it, what the law regarding married women said. She found she could not even apply to any court in the land for a hearing because a married woman had no legal existence. Fear began to dominate her actions. She was so terribly afraid that at first she could see only two alternatives: either she must abase herself and placate George somehow or she must abduct the children, take them abroad, and spend the rest of her life as an outlaw. But, however hard she tried, George would not be placated. “My hope,” she wrote, “was to come peaceably to an arrangement; I will not say to outwit him but to secure the boys . . .”27 Nor did she succeed in her abduction though she went down to Wonersh Park and tried. “I failed,” she wrote dismally. “I saw them all; carried Brin to the gate, could not open it, was afraid they would tear him to pieces they caught him so fiercely. And the elder one was so frightened he did not follow . . . If a strong arm had been with me I should have done it.”28
What hurt her most and eventually brought her to a third alternative was the reaction of those nearest to her. All her family and Lord Melbourne and every friend of her acquaintance counselled caution and best behaviour. They agreed it was unfair and that she was greatly wronged but insisted that the best thing to do was lie low and not inflame George any more. If she was very, very careful and very, very good he might relent sufficiently to let her at least see the children. She must not do anything to draw further attention to herself. Melbourne in particular urged docility. He told her that since they were innocent they should not make a fuss. It would perhaps be better if they did not meet for a while. George, he said, was “a gnome” and “quite frightful” but perhaps she ought to beg him to take her back. Caroline lashed him for his cowardice (“all I say is worse women have been better stood by”).29 Her mortification when she saw the expression on Melbourne’s face as she told him about the divorce action was dreadful. She never forgot “the shrinking from me and my burdensome and embarrassing distress.”30 In spite of his written instructions not to visit him she did go to his house in South Street – and was turned away by the servants on his order. The flowers he sent round afterwards were useless to ease her bitterness (“I could not put them in vases without sitting down to cry”).31 He made her feel vulgar and disgusting – “It is the vanity of woman . . .” she wrote to him “which has misled me into a painful struggle of hope and fear instead of quietly taking my place in the past with your wife Mrs Lamb and Lady Brandon . . .”32
Slowly, and very painfully indeed, Caroline began to see why she was being so unfairly made a victim: because she was a woman. Everything worked against her. It was not just the hard legal facts she was up against but that amorphous thing called public opinion. Even before any trial, whatever its outcome, she was being judged and pilloried because she was a woman, and had behaved in a way women were not supposed to behave. She saw how it had all begun with her success in society. She realized how her beauty and her vivacity were great misfortunes because they had made people cast her in a role she had not in fact been playing. “Why, I am handsome,” she wrote to her nephew “. . . but you may depend upon it it is the last thing a woman need wish to be and I do nothing but curse my regular eyebrows and straight profile and wish myself different, yea even if it were to be ugly – but to be tolerable were a thing to thank heaven for in one’s prayers.”33
Even more disastrous had been her general manner in company which laid her open to misunderstanding. She had complained of the unfairness of it to Melbourne himself in a spirited letter she wrote while at a house party in Scotland. After a jolly evening, during which Caroline (who was without George) had entertained the guests and been at her merriest, the eldest son of the Earl of Tankerville had come into her bedroom at two in the morning expecting to sleep with her. She related exactly what happened to show Melbourne how two and two were added up to make five in her case: “‘Don’t be angry,’ says he. ‘Well’ says I . . . ‘I did not think you had been so wicked!’ ‘It is not so very wrong’ says he. ‘Pshaw,’ said I coolly ‘are you come here to teach me right or wrong? I really wonder at you – first for being so much worse than I thought you, secondly for being such a fool as to suppose any woman would give herself to you after four days merely because there was no other in the house for you to make love to, thirdly for being ass enough to come in here when you know (—) can hear every step or tone in the room if he is not sleeping.’ ‘I’m sure you’re enough to chill anyone,’ responded my offended visitor, ‘but I don’t care. I came here and I shan’t go.’”34 It took her a good half-hour to talk him out of the room (he finally burst into tears, buttoned his shirt up, and left) and afterwards she locked her bedroom door. But it was incidents like that which revealed to her how misjudged she was. She had incurred a reputation and now that she was being sued for divorce this reputation, so monstrously unjust, would count against her. She was beautiful, witty, extrovert, flirtatious, daring and therefore she must be guilty. A man with a similar reputation was merely thought manly. Even if his guilt was proven this only enhanced his status in people’s eyes. But, found guilty or innocent, Caroline was going to lose.
It was this realization which made her decide to fight, to take the law into her own hands and change it. But first there was the ordeal of the trial in June 1836. It was traumatic for her. Since she had no legal existence, she therefore could offer no defence and have no representation. She had to sit at her mother’s home in Hampton Court only able to send notes objecting to particularly vicious bits of “evidence” as they came up. She had been prepared for lies but what appalled her was “the loathesome coarseness and invention of circumstances which . . . made me a shameless wretch.”35 She wept when she heard a maid testify that she had been “painting her face and sinning with various gentlemen” at the precise moment when she had just been delivered of her third baby. It was this coarseness which she said “drove me quite wild.” She struggled to endure the ordeal cheerfully – “I wished to seem in as good spirits as I could to the poor worn Mother”36 – but could not stop herself crying half the night. Every afternoon she rode in Richmond Park, feeling sick and ill with worry, returning in the early evening fearful of hearing some new piece of vile slander had been produced in Westminster Hall. It was midsummer and the nights were long, especially since she could not sleep. She wanted to hear about the trial and yet she did not want to hear. She knew that there did not exist any incriminating evidence but cringed when it was reported how everyone had laughed as the supposed damning letters from Melbourne were read out (“I will call for you at half-past-four. Yours M.”) Being made a laughing stock was almost as unendurable as being branded an adultress.
At last, and really very quickly, the end came. Without calling any of the witnesses who would have proved Caroline’s innocence the jury threw the case out. “I was in Westminster Hall,” wrote Lord Seymour, Caroline’s brother-in-law, “with Bentinck just in time to hear the cheers with which the verdict was received.” Caroline sobbed with relief as soon as she heard. “It’s given against him – against Norton! And my children CAN’T grow up believing in their mother’s shame – oh, I have spent such a long, long day and half a night waiting – but it is over.”37 Next day, The Times rejoiced with her and described her as “a calumniated lady.” The entire Sheridan family celebrated the news with her and Caroline wrote to her brother that she had finally managed to stop crying and had “put on my cork jacket and becom
e more buoyant.”38
It was a short-lived buoyancy. George might not have expected really to win damages from Melbourne but, once the plot failed, his rage knew no bounds. Caroline wrote that she had heard “he has been giving drunken dinner-parties every evening and swearing he will bring me to his feet – he is gone quite mad – he wants someone to shew him he can be proved a beast.”39 Meanwhile, she still had no access to her children who were at Wonersh Park. In July she went down there, greatly daring, on a day when she had heard Lord Grantley would be out and managed to snatch a short interview with the boys until Lord Grantley returned unexpectedly and “behaved with his usual cold-blooded brutality.”40 She had no idea what was going to happen next. “As to what I shall do,” she wrote, “I don’t know. I hope I may not live long enough to do anything. I have spit blood twice, for 2 or 3 days at a time this last fortnight and am so weak I can hardly stand.”41 Her hopes were raised by George allowing her half-an-hour with her children, in front of his witnesses, at her brother’s house but then she heard a rumour that this was a prelude to whisking them off to Scotland. Before they disappeared, she managed a secret meeting in St James’s Park, thanks to a servant, but found it agonizing. “My eldest . . . gave me a little crumpled letter he had had in his pocket a fortnight directed to me . . . He was so dear and intelligent.”42