Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  Once the children had been sent to Loch Rannoch, the home of George’s elder sister Grace and her husband, Caroline was for a while so stunned that she could do nothing. The feverish impatience with which she had attempted to negotiate a settlement disappeared. On all sides, she was still urged to be “good”, to remain calm, to accept the inevitable. Her mother, who was not only upset herself but worried about Caroline’s health, urged her to keep quiet and let George and his lawyers alone for a while. She must realize she could do nothing on her own. But sitting at Hampton Court pining for her children was torture to Caroline. She grew sick of all the sensible advice. All the relief she could find lay in fighting, in doing something however apparently useless. “The anger of an individual against a set always sounds ridiculous,” she wrote to her nephew, “but some private wrong has generally been the cause of the important events of this world of changes.”43 She vowed vengeance on the Nortons and announced that her Austerlitz had scotched but not killed her. As she rode in Richmond Park and turned to gardening as a consolation she was all the time rebelling and arguing with herself in her own head. The law had given George their children but why should it not do more? Why did the law not allow a mother rights, too, rights that need not necessarily displace the father’s but exist alongside his? Excitedly, she talked to her friends about her thoughts. They all sympathized but gently tried to show her what a mighty colossus she would be taking on if she tried to change the law – it simply could not be done as she envisaged doing it. But, after several meetings with Caroline, her friend the lawyer Abraham Hayward realized that her passionate outpourings to him deserved more serious attention. He knew she would not listen to advice – he had given her masses and been ignored – and so, as a kind of merciful therapy, he introduced her to Serjeant-at-law Talfourd, the young Whig barrister who had specialized in infant custody cases and was known to be advocating changes in the law.

  This was exactly what Caroline needed. At once, the tone of her letters changed. She now had a sense of direction, a sense of solidarity with like minds. Instead of thrashing about helplessly she used her energies to compile a pamphlet setting down in an orderly fashion all the thoughts which had filled her head since the day George stole her children. It was a relief to be required to impose discipline upon herself, a relief to have work to do familiarizing herself not only with all the statutes she wished to see revoked but with all the cases she could cite as evidence of change being needed. Talfourd was invaluable because he had acted in so many famous cases in recent years. Through him, Caroline became familiar with the case of Mrs Greenhill, a young wife of irreproachable virtue who had discovered her husband was living with a mistress, also known as Mrs Greenhill, while away on business. She had left him, taking her three daughters all under the age of six, and had attempted to sue for separation and alimony. Talfourd had acted for her but in spite of the judge’s sympathy the court had upheld Mr Greenhill’s right to have the children. The judge deplored Greenhill’s conduct but ruled that “however bad and immoral” the court had “no authority to interfere.” Talfourd tried to appeal but discovered there was no court in the land, either civil or ecclesiastical, that would find for the mother. (Mrs Greenhill subsequently fled abroad with her girls.)

  Caroline, under Talfourd’s tuition, became an expert on case law. It astounded her to find that not only was she not the only mother legally robbed of her children but that hers was nowhere near the worst case. The knowledge steadied her. There was no more wild talk and extravagant vows of revenge: she got her head down and put in several hours every day of serious study. Nor was she as ill-equipped for it as she had supposed. On the contrary, she grasped points of law quickly and assimilated facts without difficulty. She also had a talent for spotting holes in arguments which stood her in good stead, and discovered within a very short time that not all lawyers were pillars of virtue. The law, in short, was after all nothing to be frightened of or intimidated by. Her so-called “weaker” feminine brain was more than capable of matching strong masculine ones. The more she learned the less respect she had, writing that it would have been preferable “to have followed a marching regiment than to see the seamy side of this intellectual trade.”44 Her confidence grew until she felt ready to write her pamphlet stating her point of view. It was the best piece of work she ever produced and she was rightly proud of it, so much so that she was prepared to have it privately printed, published and distributed. Her prose style, which had always been clear and direct, adapted itself well to polemic and gave the pamphlet a drive and vigour which demanded attention.

  It was entitled The Separation of Mother and Child by the Law of Custody of Infants Considered, an unwieldy heading chosen from a short list of five. Caroline said she had bitten the top off her pen trying to select the most accurate and comprehensive title and could not help it if it was awkward – it said what had to be said. The pamphlet began by making plain what the iniquitous law was and then attacked it systematically from every side. It explained that the mother of a legitimate child was excluded from all rights over the child from the very moment of its birth: the father had custody and there were no mitigating circumstances whatsoever. But this precious custody was itself a fraud. The father could give the child to a perfect stranger if he so wished because his much lauded custody was only nominal. Even a new-born baby sucking at its mother’s breast could be torn away and handed to anyone of the father’s choosing (as happened to a Mrs de Manneville in 1804). This was cruel. Everyone agreed it was cruel, but it was said it was only cruel in a few extraordinary cases and that the law could not bother itself with individual, untypical instances of misuse. Wrong, said the pamphlet. On the contrary, it was precisely with extraordinary individual cases that the law was concerned and did interfere. In any case, what was this “principle of natural justice” upon which the father’s sole rights of custody were founded? What was “natural” about it when in fact no father could look after a baby on his own but a mother could? The only “natural” thing was that a baby should stay with its mother who had given birth to it and was, on her own, equipped to feed and sustain it. Motherhood, said the pamphlet, was much vaunted. No thought was given to how the law harmed this ideal. “What degree of bodily agony or fear can compare with the inch-by-inch torture of this unnatural separation?” The mother suffered, the children suffered and the female character, “bred to think of motherhood as the highest fulfilment” suffered to the detriment of society as a whole. So let the law drop all talk about claims of nature.

  The rest of the pamphlet was concerned with attacking objections to access if the law had to stand. The argument ran that if mothers knew they might get custody of their children this would encourage them to leave their husbands. This was contemptuously dismissed as specious. “It is monstrous to represent that as a temptation which can at best be but a slight mitigation of misery.” No woman ever wished to leave her husband because if she did she committed social suicide and was only pushed to it in extremity. It was men who might be influenced by thoughts of having or not having custody – a man might be “restrained from indulgence of a vicious inclination” if he thought leaving his wife might lose him his children. The real crux of the matter was whether the rights of the father had to amount to the exclusion of the mother. The father’s right to control his children’s education was conceded; his right to retain them under his own roof was arguable, but the right to deprive a mother totally was unacceptable.

  The pamphlet appeared early in 1837. Just before its publication and the distribution of 500 copies to MPs and other influential figures, Caroline wrote to Mary Shelley (the poet’s widow who had written asking how to get a pension for her father, the philosopher William Godwin, and had become a friend). “I think there is too much fear of publicity by women; it is reckoned to be such a crime to be accused and such a disgrace . . . that they wish nothing better than to hide themselves and say no more about it.”45 But she did not wish to hide. She wished to stand up and cl
aim attention, however great the cost. And it was great. Going out to a party after the court case was agony for Caroline. Her first appearance was at Lady Minto’s where she was “cut” while talking to the kindly Lady Stanley. “I said to myself this is their world, this is their morality”46 and she proudly lifted her head and consoled herself with thoughts of her own worth compared to such miserable wretches. It was not a form of consolation which worked very effectively. Every time she suffered from what she called “the privy nip” Caroline hated it. She had to force herself on, repeating to herself that she did not care. Braving grand establishments like Lansdowne House, home of the Earl of Shelburne and one of the great social centres of the era, took courage. On her first outing there she wrote, “People were very civil indeed to me which was lucky for I was dreadfully nervous.”47 The men were more civil than the women, a fact noted by the women and resented by them so much that their own incivility increased in proportion. Nothing, said Caroline, exceeded women’s cruelty to women. But she would not be sent to a nunnery real or figurative. She would not act as though she were a bereaved person. So she dressed with even greater care than usual and sparkled even more than usual and only at home, at night, did she weep with misery at the hardness of her lot. “No man, perhaps no woman . . . knows what it is to bear undeserved disgrace (as I do).”48

  All the time Caroline was working on her pamphlet she was thinking of and worrying about the welfare of her children. They were in Scotland but the servants who looked after them were friendly to Caroline, who had often stayed in Lady Grace and Sir Neil Menzies’ household. Through them, bits of news drifted down to her. They were not reassuring bulletins. She knew Grace was a hard woman who considered whipping a cure for all childish misdemeanours, but stories of Brinsley being stripped and tied to a bedpost and whipped for defending his mother were extreme even for that “haughty and intemperate” woman. Brin, she was told, had said Mama wouldn’t let him be punished but Mama was five hundred miles away and incapable of defending him. She knew that George himself loved his children and would never harm them but George was hardly with them and, when he was, imposed a discipline that Caroline had always feared too harsh. Little things hurt most. George did not beat his children but he made his authority clear in silly ways. “He has ordered the youngest child to go by the name of Charles – he was christened William Charles Chapple – the affectation and insincerity of the whole thing makes my heart burn.”49 But poor little Willy (aged two) having his name altered just as he had learned to say it was as nothing compared to what happened to Fletcher, the eldest (seven) but the most frail. “All the petty things he could do to spite me he has done. We used to dispute about a dentist being allowed to gold wire his (Fletcher’s) jaw (he is underjawed). I had a horror of this . . . he took him yesterday – had it done – and merely remarked ‘I can do what I please now with you, my boy.’”50 This was typical of George. The suffering of children was never real to him as it was to Caroline who saw how all three would be deeply affected according to their different temperaments. She thought Willy, although youngest, would survive best. He was physically the strongest and most like George whereas Brinsley (five) was most like her. He was imaginative and daring and aroused hostility. Fletcher was the most sensitive. She knew that “a continual battle” would go on in his mind “between what he knows and what he comprehends.” The thought of what all three were going through made her wish at her lowest moments that she had never had children at all. “I wish,” she wrote, “I had never had any children – pain and agony for the first moments of their life – dread and anxiety for their uncertain future . . .”51

  The pain, instead of lessening with time, grew worse, particularly when Caroline heard any of her boys was ill. Early in 1837, just as Talfourd introduced his bill to reform Infant Custody into the first session that year, she heard that William had been ill. She wrote begging George to return him to London and let her nurse him. She was now living with her favourite Uncle Charles at 16 Green Street in Mayfair and did not see why that should not be approved by George as a suitable place. George, meanwhile, was feeling more kindly towards her and towards the world in general because Miss Vaughan had finally died and left him £2,000 plus an estate in Yorkshire. He was also missing Caroline and was tired of his domineering brother who had dared to cheat him out of a foal he claimed was his. So he wrote back saying he would return the children to London although not to his wife’s house – they would stay at his own town house and be looked after by Augusta. But Caroline could see them every day. Caroline was ecstatic, although the ecstasy was replaced by anguish when she first saw her sons. Their unkempt, neglected air distressed her deeply. William in particular had changed, “. . . this sharp, talkative little being does not seem to me my fat fair baby. They grow up in such a moment.”52 And she had missed so many of those vital moments. The daily visits she made did not seem enough to make them up – she wanted her children at home with her, doing ordinary everyday things, filling the silent house with noise and chatter. Most of all she wanted them to herself, not to share with either George or more often Augusta there. Each day she grew more restless and each day leaving became harder. Brinsley in particular was hard to part from. Every time she was forced to go he clung to her and she had to remove his arms from around her neck on Augusta’s orders. Then suddenly, without warning, just as everything seemed to be going well, Caroline received a message saying the boys had been sent to Wonersh, to Lord Grantley’s. She could not understand it and pleaded for an explanation but none was forthcoming. Obviously, George was once more under Grantley’s influence. Meanwhile, as soon as the boys arrived at Wonersh, they got measles. Caroline heard they were very sick, especially Brinsley. She went down to Wonersh, forced her way in and saw the children just long enough to see how ill and pale and “pining” they were before Grantley returned and had Brinsley torn out of her arms. Shaking and hurt (she said she felt as if a cartwheel had gone over her by the time she had been forcibly ejected) Caroline returned to London to find a further communication awaiting her. George was making a final offer: either she gave up her struggle to get her children and accepted an annual allowance of £300 or George would publicly repudiate her debts and all financial responsibility for her in the newspapers.

  At this juncture Caroline broke down. She was ill and exhausted. She asked Talfourd not to press his bill for the moment while she attempted a reconciliation through a new mediator, Sir John Bayley, who was one of George’s lawyers. “I am in such pain with my wretched head that I can hardly write,” she wrote to her brother. “It is so bad when I am, or have been, agitated and I am in a fever.”53 If this mediation failed, she added, she might as well drown herself. As she had no money, she thought it might be the best solution. “I am scrambling about with sixpences about butter,” she went on, “. . . it is very uncomfortable for I have no ready money at all now and I have borrowed off Charlie.”54 She was reduced to sending out for a pennyworth of potatoes because she could not find “either a chandler or a grocer who would trust me” although she had “a willing butcher, milkman and coal merchant.” It was a case of trying to live well on nothing a year but “as I have not a farthing . . . all shopping must soon cease.”55 Yet when it came to negotiations with Sir John he was surprised at how little Caroline cared about money. He had started by believing her reputation and thinking she must be “a vain and frivolous woman” but after three meetings discovered she had been “greatly wronged”. All his client’s abused wife cared for was the welfare of her children and Sir John publicly stated that he “blushed for human nature” when he realized how she was being treated. With his concern Caroline’s confidence grew. “I really believe at last I am to settle and be comfortable,” she wrote to her brother. “God grant it.”56 But nothing was granted. Unless she signed away her children and accepted a pittance George would not grant a legal separation. Negotiations broke down. The children were returned to Scotland. Caroline turned with renewed vigour to lobbying
for Talfourd’s reintroduced bill.

  The bill reforming Infant Custody was passed in the Commons, while Melbourne was still Prime Minister, in May 1838 by ninety-one to seventeen votes (a very small attendance in a house of 656 members). But in August the Lords threw it out, again with a very small number present. Caroline remarked bitterly, “You cannot get Peers to sit up to three in the morning listening to the wrongs of separated wives.”57 The British and Foreign Review chose this moment to publish a vicious attack on Caroline as the instigator of the bill to which she replied (although everyone begged her not to), under the name Pearce Stevenson, in another pamphlet A Plain Letter to the Lord Chancellor on the Infants Custody Bill. It was over emotional and long-winded, ‘not nearly as impressive as her first pamphlet, but it helped to get the bill passed. There was a further debate, which incensed Caroline because the general assumption was made that all women at variance with their husbands must be unchaste,. and then the bill went through both houses in 1839. Children under seven were now allowed to reside with their mother if the Lord Chancellor agreed to it and if the mother was of good character. The irony for poor Caroline was that as her sons were again in Scotland they were outside the jurisdiction of the Lord Chancellor. But nevertheless she now had hope and began assembling her case to present to the Lord Chancellor. George, at the same time, began having her house watched in the hope that he could thwart any good character references by proving men visited her while she was alone.