Norton Caroline Sheridan - The Criminal Conversation of Mrs. Norton

Also by Diane Atkinson

Elsie and Mairi Go to War

Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick

Copyright 2013, 2012 by Diane Atkinson
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Preface Publishing
This edition published in 2013 by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
All rights reserved

Chicago Review Press, Incorporated
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ISBN 978-1-61374-880-0

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Printed in the United States of America
5 4 3 2 1

For Pauline and Peter Tanner

Index

At an early hour yesterday morning, both the public and private entrances to the Court were thronged with people eager to procure any place from which they could hear the smallest portion of a trial which has excited so much interest. Their patience and perseverance, however, were but ill-rewarded, for the galleries of the body of the Court were filled before the public doors were thrown open, so high a sum as five and in some cases we believe even ten guineas having been given for a seat. The Court is peculiarly small the heat and the overcrowding can be very imperfectly imagined.

Morning Chronicle, 23 June 1836

T he twenty-second of June 1836, a warm drizzly day in London. A light wind cooled the men waiting impatiently at the big doors of the medieval Westminster Hall. A clearly annoyed Lord Chief Justice Sir Nicholas Conyngham Tindal took his seat. He ordered the doors to be shut and that only those with subpoenas be allowed in, and warned that unless silence prevailed he would adjourn the trial.

The case of Norton vs Melbourne was said to be motivated more by politics the desire of the Tories to bring down the Whig government than the hurt feelings of a husband allegedly cuckolded by the man who happened to be the prime minister of Great Britain. Lord Melbourne, in his fifties, was being sued by the Honourable George Norton, in his mid-thirties, for having had criminal conversation (sexual relations) with Nortons wife, the beautiful and well known writer Caroline Norton. Melbourne was raffish, urbane and witty; there was something of the Regency masher about him. He was old enough to be Carolines father and had indeed known her father, Tom Sheridan, and even her famously rackety grandfather, the playwright-turned-Whig-politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan, author of The Rivals and The School for Scandal, those two great comedies of the English stage.

The legal complaint was that Melbourne had denied Norton the benefits of domestic harmony and affections, which led to a dereliction of Carolines conjugal duties and Nortons conjugal rights. Damages of ten thousand pounds (almost a million today) were demanded from the prime minister for the loss of Mr Nortons enjoyment of his wifes body. This was the second time Lord Melbourne had been sued for criminal conversation with another mans wife, but on the previous occasion it had been settled away from the gaze of the press and the public when Melbourne paid off his lovers husband. Now the timing could not have been worse for the prime minister, or better for the Tories who were itching to bring down the reforming Whigs. Lord Melbourne through his legal team denied the charge and was pleading not guilty.

Rumours had circulated about Lord Melbourne and Mrs Norton for three or four years, and their affair had been the subject of satirical lampoons, although the cartoons were tamer than those of a previous generation, when Rowlandson and Gillray had been in their heyday. Some drawings punned and

The court was impatient for the preliminaries to be over and wanted to hear the details. The case had all the ingredients of a scandal sex and politics at the highest level, royal connections, great celebrity, a gorgeous and clever wife, a grumpy and doltish husband and an older richer lounge-lizard of an adulterer and would not disappoint. The mood was boisterous, high spirits threatening to tip out of control.

Designed by John Soane in the 1820s, the forty-foot-square room was filled to suffocation with members of the public and inquisitive junior barristers who had taken the day off and whose attitude Charles Dickens, reporting for the Morning Chronicle, found unbearable. He wrote in his account the following day of their very indecent behaviour, and thought them guilty of having only a very imperfect understanding of the behaviour of gentlemen in court. Dickens wrote to a friend that he was so exhausted by his shorthand recording of the fourteen-hour proceedings that he struggled to get out of bed the next day. The jury of ten merchants, a banker and a retired admiral, and the witnesses had to barge their way in to take their places, buffeted by the clamouring spectators.

During the proceedings every man in court would leave the building from time to time to answer calls of nature and take refreshment. There were no public lavatories or dining places, nor had there been even before the great fire of 1834, which had destroyed the Houses of Parliament. In the summer of 1836 Westminster Hall stood almost alone in a blitzed landscape of charred ruins, like a giant tooth in an otherwise empty mouth blasted by decay. The officials, barristers and the jury availed themselves of the facilities of Bellamys Tavern and Chophouse nearby or Howards coffee house, the haunt of Members of Parliament, or sought the cover of bushes or the ruined buildings. With the exception of female witnesses called to give evidence in this case the Nortons servants such occasions were all-male affairs. Food was available from coffee stalls, pie shops or street vendors.

On George Nortons formidable legal team was Sir William Follett, a kings counsel of precocious talent in his early forties. Mr John Bayley, in his sixties, a very experienced master of the common law, who had a clue to its labyrinth, would open the pleading, while Mr Richard Crowder assisted.

A mix of distinguished experience and eager ambition, these six lawyers were at the height of their powers in 1836, pacing the floor of the Court of Common Pleas in Westminster Hall, where civil cases had been heard for hundreds of years. Both sides anticipated a lengthy and lucrative trial.

The prize was the vindication of a husbands jealousy and a fortune in damages. The personal cost was potentially immense for both parties: for Caroline, the loss of her children and her reputation; for the prime minister the collapse of the government and the end of his political career.

George Norton, thirty-six, a barrister who did not practise, was the younger brother and heir-in-waiting to the childless third Lord Grantley of Wonersh, Baron of Markenfield in Yorkshire. Norton and his wife Caroline had three sons: Fletcher, aged seven, five-year-old Brinsley and eighteen-month-old William. Norton doubted the paternity of Brinsley, who had been born in 1831, the first year of his wifes alleged affair, and was also unhappy that his youngest child had the same Christian name as Melbourne. A criminal conversation trial was the first stage in the dismantling of a marriage. Until 1857 divorce could only be granted by an act of Parliament. A trial was an alternative to duelling, which had been outlawed in 1815 but persisted in semi-secrecy for at least another thirty years. The damages awarded could be crippling, and if they were not paid the defendant was liable to arrest and incarceration in a debtors prison, only to be freed when the debt was paid.