Daily Mail

Of course I’m not mad — I’m the King of Hampshire!

- ROGER LEWIS

Buckingham­shire, Somerset and County Wexford in Ireland. Could Portsmouth be trusted with such an inheritanc­e? When it came to ledgers and account books, he was eagleeyed. But otherwise, as Grace found, he was prone to mental breakdowns and delusions.

Pious and angelic, Grace died while at prayer at the side of the bed. Within a few months, in 1814, Portsmouth had married Mary Anne Hanson, the daughter of his crooked solicitor. She blatantly cuckolded him with his own manservant, William Rowland Alder.

Portsmouth remained asleep while his new bride enjoyed herself with another man next to him in the same bed. that Portsmouth had ‘failed to react to the adultery and cruelty’ was used against him at the lunacy trial.

On top of everything else, Mary Anne and Alder regularly beat him up and locked him outside in the rain.

The Commission of Lunacy also heard about the violent pranks he played on servants. When a footman broke a leg, Portsmouth jumped on top of him and broke it again, exclaim- ing that ‘it served him very right’. He liked to visit schools and command the masters to flog the children. ‘His lordship was evidently gratified by seeing the punishment inflicted.’ He also beat his pets.

Portsmouth was definitely crackers. Or as Foyster says: ‘He was a man who had no moral boundaries.’

The jury at the lunacy trial concurred — and Portsmouth was officially declared insane.

This meant any contract he had made was retrospect­ively revoked — including his marriage to Mary Anne. She slunk away to Canada, where she died destitute in 1870.

Portsmouth was lucky to avoid incarcerat­ion in an asylum. Instead he was kept under house arrest in Hurstbourn­e Park, his mansion near Basingstok­e. Here he built a throne room and declared himself King of Hampshire.

He died in 1853, aged 86, thus ending an intense gothic soap opera. And though his brother, Newton, at long last inherited everything and became the fourth Earl, he was dead within the year.

THIS is a schizophre­nic book. One moment the reader has intense sympathy for poor old John Charles Wallop, the third earl of Portsmouth, who in 1823 — though ‘not a senseless fool but a man with feelings who could be hurt like anyone else’ — was the subject of a Commission of Lunacy, a grim legal proceeding to establish whether he was of unsound mind.

The next moment, evidence is produced about his peculiarit­ies, such as his fondness for whipping his horses mercilessl­y, and you’d happily lock Portsmouth up and throw the key in a pond.

On the whole, Portsmouth was a pitiful and abused figure — and elizabeth Foyster, a Cambridge historian, wishes to present him as more sinned against than sinning.

Portsmouth had what we would now call learning difficulti­es, but which in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was termed idiocy.

He was cross-eyed, had a red and contorted face and spoke only with immense difficulty, as he possessed a disabling stammer. Indeed, to say Portsmouth was no oil painting is the literal truth: ‘no portrait of him was commission­ed.’

Yet insanity did not stop aristocrat­s from voting on constituti­onal matters in the house of Lords. Portsmouth himself, despite being ‘unable to reason’, sat as a governor on the boards of schools and hospitals, presided as a high Sheriff, and mixed with judges at the Assizes.

He also had numerous ‘mentally troubled relatives’, including a cousin, Lockhart, who was convinced his future had been foretold in the Book of Revelation, and another, Loudon, who ‘planned to fight Bonaparte in single combat on the plains of Almeida’.

On one occasion Lockhart and Loudon joined forces and abducted a Mrs Lee, spirit- ing her away to Wales ‘for the purpose of defiling her person’.

Because Portsmouth’s parents had a growing suspicion that all was not right with their boy, they sent him away to be raised by hampshire neighbours, who happened to be the family of Jane Austen.

The Austens, too, had a retarded child. It was hoped that the novelist’s parents would help Portsmouth to improve his enunciatio­n of simple words. Interestin­gly, Portsmouth had a genius for maths; and when he became fluent in French, his stammer disappeare­d.

The adult Portsmouth’s knowledge of sex was sketchy. he thought a woman was pregnant for nine years, and when the facts of life were explained to him, he did not believe any of it.

He was 32 when he married Grace norton, daughter of the Speaker of the house of Commons. She was 47. ‘Grace thought Lord Portsmouth was sane. But perhaps that showed how little she knew him,’ says Foyster drily.

Other members of the family were not in the dark. Portsmouth’s brother, newton, who stood to be next in line in the absence of any other legitimate issue, organised the Commission of Lunacy to protect the ancestral fortunes, which were spread across

 ??  ?? Callous: The Doctor And The Lunatic
Callous: The Doctor And The Lunatic

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