Agricultural History Review, Volume 65 Part 1 (2017), p. 154

The trials of the king of Hampshire tells the story of John Charles Wallop, third earl of Portsmouth, who was declared insane in 1823 after a long, expensive and hugely controversial trial. Details about his mental state came from hundreds of witnesses, from lords to labourers, who variously provided evidence of Portsmouth’s strange habits: from an obsession with funerals (which he called ‘black jobs’) and bloodletting, to viciously beating his horses and an enthusiasm for labouring in fields alongside his farm workers, the latter being a particularly ungentlemanly thing to do. Lunacy commissions were not uncommon in Georgian England, but the scandal here was that the case was brought against him by his family, specifically his younger brother Newton Fellowes (born Wallop), who was trying to gain the Wallop property and title for himself and his eldest son.

Portsmouth was noticeably different from a young age: born in 1767, he was a slow learner with a debilitating stammer. At boarding school he regularly fouled the bed, and his schoolmates later commented on his ‘singularly foolish silly ways and antics’ (p. 33). When he met the 11-year-old Lord Byron, Portsmouth violently pulled his ears, starting a fight which ended with a window being broken and Byron declaring Portsmouth a ‘fool of an earl’ (p. 174).

That not everyone agreed with Byron was thanks in part to the efforts of Portsmouth’s family. Foyster sheds considerable light on the actions of the Wallops – especially its female members – in managing Portsmouth, his behaviour and his estates so as to project the best possible version of him for public consumption. Portsmouth’s mother Urania, countess of Portsmouth, was a fearsome figure who administered the family properties and provided her son with an allowance akin to the ‘pin money’ many elite Georgian wives received. As Portsmouth later complained bitterly, ‘I am never consulted on any business … I am not considered as Master in my own House’ (p. 69). Crucially, in being so controlling, Urania largely succeeded in concealing Portsmouth’s oddities from his peers in landowning society at least during her lifetime. In his early thirties, Portsmouth married Grace Norton, a middle-aged widow whom his family assumed would not produce heirs to interfere with plans for his younger brother to eventually inherit the title. Grace handled Portsmouth with kindness and even love, showing a real capacity for gently managing him and his interactions with the social world, these – of course – not being insubstantial given his responsibilities as a peer of the realm and a justice of the peace.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Urania and Grace appear not to have got along, but things only really started to go wrong after both their deaths (in 1812 and 1813, respectively). Within four months of Grace’s demise, the family’s trusted solicitor John Hanson saw his opportunity and arranged a surprise marriage between Portsmouth and his 23-year-old daughter Mary Ann. The Wallop family knew nothing of it until afterwards, and even Portsmouth seemed to have been unaware of the situation until the morning of the wedding though he apparently then freely consented, in part because Hanson spun it as a way to escape his family’s control. In a strange turn of fortune, his old adversary Lord Byron was the chief witness to the marriage, later testifying to Portsmouth’s sanity in a preliminary case heard before the Lord Chancellor (though Byron had himself been publicly disgraced by the time of the commission proper and was not called as a witness). Unfortunately for Portsmouth, Mary Ann treated her new husband with great derision, keeping a lover in the house (and even in her bed with Portsmouth present!) and meeting out violence and abuse on a daily basis. Portsmouth’s marriage to Mary Ann was eventually annulled and her children (almost certainly her lover’s rather than Portsmouth’s) declared illegitimate, though it was Portsmouth’s precarious personal situation during the marriage – and the risks to dynastic inheritance posed by a young wife – which ultimately precipitated the family decision to subject him to a commission of lunacy.

It is the evidence from Portsmouth’s trial that forms the meat of Foyster’s account, along with her painstaking research in the family archives where she has identified the letters and other records which she uses alongside legal papers held at Lambeth Palace Library and newspaper reports. Foyster deals deftly with these materials, assembling a hugely absorbing narrative and demonstrating a great eye for detail while never over-sensationalizing her story, however tempting that might have been. She also expertly weaves Portsmouth’s story into wider histories of mental illness, the aristocracy, and marriage and the family, as well as carefully signalling that which we cannot know from the surviving documents, including Portsmouth’s inner thoughts and true diagnosis. There is much in The trials of the king of Hampshire to interest agricultural, social and economic historians, not least in its detailed exploration of the relationships between one aristocratic family and the communities around them – whether the labourers and farmers on the Hurstbourne estate, or the newspaper-reading public in London – and in the dynamics of family, marriage and property amongst the Georgian elite. In this, it acts as a worthy companion to some of the recent biographies of women like Mary Eleanor Bowes, the countess of Strathmore and abused wife of Andrew Robinson Stoney (on which, see Wendy Moore’s Wedlock).

Yet this is at its heart a tragedy of one man. Much to his family’s surprise perhaps, Portsmouth went on to live for another three decades after the commission of lunacy concluded, maintained in the family mansion at Hurstbourne Park, where he imagined himself the king of Hampshire. This was a very different life to most lunatics in Georgian and Regency England (including some of Portsmouth’s relatives who were shut up in no doubt squalid private madhouses) and Portsmouth seems to have continued to inspire the respect of the local community, even whilst his antics revealed in the courtroom slowly came to be forgotten – at least until now.