Document – Caroline Norton, excerpt from English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century (1854)

Document

I shall now give a narrative of my own case, as an example of what can be done under the English law of 1853. If the publication fail to draw any permanent attention to the law itself, at least it will remain a curious record of injustice, in a country especially boastful of its liberal and magnanimous enactments.

. . .

The treatment I received as a Wife, would be incredible if, fortunately (or unfortunately), there were not witnesses who can prove it on oath. We had been married but a few weeks when I found that a part of my lot was that which generally belongs to a lower sphere—and that, when angry, Mr. Norton resorted to personal violence.

After our honeymoon, we lived for a short time in chambers Mr. Norton had occupied as a bachelor; in Garden Court, Temple; and, on the first occasion of dispute, after some high and violent words, he flung the ink-stand, and most of the law books, which might have served a better purpose, at the head of his bride. We had no servants, only an old woman, who had taken care of these chambers for some years, and who offered me the acceptable consolation, that her master was not “sober,”—and would regret it “by-and-bye.”

After this happy beginning I accompanied my husband to Scotland. We had been married about two months, when, one evening, after we had all withdrawn to our apartments, we were discussing some opinion he had expressed; I said, (very uncivilly,) that “I thought I had never heard so silly or ridiculous a conclusion.” This remark was punished by a sudden and violent kick; the blow reached my side; it caused great pain for many days, and being afraid to remain with him, I sat up the whole night in another apartment.

Four or five months afterwards, when we were settled in London, we had returned home from a ball; I had then no personal dispute with Mr. Norton, but he indulged in bitter and coarse remarks respecting a young relative of mine, who, though married, continued to dance,—a practice, Mr. Norton said, no husband ought to permit. I defended the lady spoken of, and then stood silently looking out of the window at the quiet light of dawn, by way of contrast. Mr. Norton desired I would “cease my contemplations,” and retire to rest, as he had already done; and this mandate producing no result, he suddenly sprang from the bed, seizing me by the nape of the neck, and dashed me down on the floor. The sound of my fall woke my sister and brother-in-law, who slept in a room below, and they ran up to my door. Mr. Norton locked it, and stood over me, declaring no one should enter. I could not speak,—I only moaned. My brother-in-law burst the door open, and carried me down stairs. I had a swelling on my head for many days afterwards, and the shock made my sister exceedingly ill.

On another occasion, when I was writing to my mother, Mr. Norton (who was sipping spirits and water, while he smoked his cigar) said he was sure “from the expression of my countenance,” that I was “complaining.” I answered, that “I seldom could do anything else.” Irritated by the reply, Mr. Norton said I should not write at all, and tore the letter up. I took another sheet of paper, and recommenced. After watching and smoking for a few minutes, he rose, took one of the allumettes I had placed for his cigar, lit it, poured some of the spirits that stood by him over my writing book, and, in a moment, set the whole in a blaze. But Mr. Norton vouchsafed no other notice of my alarm, than that it would “teach me not to brave him.”

On another occasion, some time before the birth of my youngest son, I being at breakfast, and my eldest child playing about the room, Mr. Norton entered; he desired me to rise and leave the place I was sitting in, as it faced the park, and it amused him to see the people pass by. I demurred, and said I was not well, and that he should have come down earlier if he had any fancy or choice about places. We had no other word of dispute. Mr. Norton then deliberately took the tea-kettle, and set it down upon my hand; I started up from the pain, and was both burnt and scalded. I ran up to the nursery, and the nurse got the surgeon who lived next door to come in and dress my hand, which remained bound up and useless for days. When this was over, I enquired where Mr. Norton was? and received for reply, that after I had been hurt, he had simply desired the servant to “brush the crumbs away,” in the place he had desired me to yield; had then sat down there and breakfasted; and had since gone out—without one word of apology or enquiry.

. . .

After the trial was over, I consulted whether a divorce “by reason of cruelty” might not be pleaded for me; and I laid before my lawyers the many instances of violence, injustice, and ill-usage, of which the trial was but the crowning example. I was then told that no divorce I could obtain would break my marriage; that I could not plead cruelty which I had forgiven; that by returning to Mr. Norton I had “condoned” all I complained of. I learnt, too, the LAW as to my children—that the right was with the father; that neither my innocence nor his guilt could alter it; that not even his giving them into the hands of a mistress, would give me any claim to their custody. The eldest was but six years old, the second four, the youngest two and a half, when we were parted. I wrote, therefore, and petitioned the father and husband in whose power I was, for leave to see them—for leave to keep them, till they were a little older. Mr. Norton’s answer was, that I should not have them; that if I wanted to see them, I might have an interview with them at the chambers of his attorney. I refused, and wrote as follows to my solicitor, who had conveyed his decision to me:—

“However bitter it may be to me, I must decline seeing my children in the manner proposed. I say nothing of the harshness, the inhumanity of telling me I must either see them at the chambers of his solicitor, or not at all; but I say it is not DECENT that the father of those children should force me, their mother, out of the very tenderness I bear them, to visit them at the chambers of the attorney who collected the evidence, examined the witnesses, and conducted the proceedings for the intended divorce. I say it is not decent—nay, that even if I were guilty, it would not be decent to make me such a proposal. But I am innocent.—I have been pronounced innocent by a jury of my countrymen—I have been solemnly and publicly declared innocent by the nobleman against whom that ill-advised action was brought. Why, then, are my children kept from me?—from me, whom even their own witnesses proved to be a careful and devoted mother? Mr. Norton says, the Law gives him my children. I know it does, but the Law does no more; it does not compel me to endure more than separation from them; and sooner than allow them to connect my visits in their memory with secrecy and shame, I would submit never again to behold them till they were of an age to visit me without asking permission of any human being.”

More than once Mr. Norton’s advisers have shown more feeling for me than my husband himself; and on this occasion his solicitor wrote:—“Mr. Norton has made the appointment to see the children here—I cannot but regret it.”

. . .

During the years over which my separation from these children extended, several attempts were made by Mr. Norton either to compel me to his own terms, or to bring about reconciliation. In the Spring immediately following the Trial (after my first efforts to obtain my children had been rejected) I suddenly received from him a most extraordinary note, saying, that he considered our difference “capable of adjustment,” and hoped I would meet him alone, in an empty house, No. 1 Berkeley street, where he would wait for me. I received this communication with doubt and distrust; increased rather than diminished by the impatience shown by Mr. Norton to obtain an answer, for which he sent twice in the course of the afternoon. He then wrote to say, that “nothing could be effected without mutual confidence,” and as he could not come to my uncle’s house (where I lived) he hoped I would come to his own residence. This, I consented to do. We had a long wretched interview. He besought me once more, to “forget the past” and return home. He laid the blame of all that had happened, on his friends and advisors; said the trial was against his will and judgment, and that he longed to “take me to his heart again.” He complained of the coldness with which I received these proposals; but I did not refuse. He recalled my poor children from Scotland; and sent notes almost daily to my house. Those letters began, “My Carry,” “My dear Carry,” and were signed, “Yours affectionately.” Two of them (in allusion to my fear of meeting him) bore the playful signature of “GREENACRE,”—the name of a man who had been recently hung, for enticing a woman to his house by promising marriage, and then murdering her and cutting her to pieces.

After a month of this strange correspondence, I received a note from him, to say the masculine sister had arrived to stay with him. A dispute followed, as to what I had or had not said to this lady. Mr. Norton complained that I had stated to her that I did not intend “honestly” to return to him; but “to return for the sake of my children and my reputation;” and that I had said “I never would live with him again.” Our reconciliation was broken off: my children were sent back to Scotland; and the next notice taken of my existence, by the husband who had wooed my return; who had begged me to meet him in an empty house, assuring me nothing could be effected “without mutual confidence;”—who had signed himself GREENACRE, in familiar and caressing letters, jesting upon my fears and doubts as to trusting myself alone at that meeting;—and who had, in the first instance, desired his servant the day after my departure, to open the door of my home “with the chain across;”—the next step, I say, taken by the husband whose real story was so little known to the public, was to impose on that public by an advertisement respecting his legal liability for me, commencing,—

“Whereas on 30th March, 1836, my wife, Carolina Elizabeth Sarah, left me, her family, and home, and hath from thenceforth continued to live separate and apart from me,”&c.

Angry, and full of scorn, I consulted my solicitor whether I was compelled to bear this fresh outrage. I showed him the letters Mr. N. had written just before this pretence of being a forsaken husband:—“have I no remedy?”—“No remedy in the LAW. The LAW can do nothing for you: your case is one of singular, of incredible hardship; but there is no possible way in which the LAW could assist you.” My brother did all that could be done—he desired his solicitors to publish a letter stating that “the whole of the statements contained in Mr. Norton’s advertisement were false”—an imputation which remains on it to this day. After the insult of the advertisement, there was a pause of some weeks; and then Mr. Norton wrote to say he wished an arbitration in our affairs; the arbitrator he named, was Sir John Bayley; and as the history of the reference is given later, I do not here enter into it; further than to say that Mr. Norton, after solemnly pledging himself in writing, to abide whatever decision might be come to, utterly refused to be bound; quarreled with his arbitrator; and broke off the negotiation. A year and a half afterwards, he requested Sir Frederick Thesiger to act as referee; whose opinion I give in his own words:—“The accommodation proposed by Norton is one in which you are to give way upon every subject, and he is not to recede upon one; and it seems to me to be ridiculous to talk of conciliation upon such a footing.”. . . “It is impossible not to be struck with the vacillating and vexatious course which Norton has pursued; exciting hopes only to disappoint them, and making promises apparently for the opportunity of breaking them.” Friends mediated; men of business wasted their time in vain; Mr. Norton’s promises were ropes of sand.

In 1842—two years after Mr. Norton had evaded the chance of exposure by declining to defend my petition under the Infant Custody Bill—he once more asked me to be “reconciled” to him, and to return to live with him. Though this was not arranged, yet from that time there was a degree of peace and friendliness established, which, for the sake of my sons (of whom I had already lost one), I was more than willing—I was anxious—to maintain. Mr. Norton’s letters again became caressing and flattering; he visited me at the house of my uncle Mr. C. Sheridan, and after Mr. Sheridan’s death, at my own. When I wrote to him from abroad, in 1848, he sent one of my letters triumphantly to my mother, to prove to her what good terms we were on. He followed me to Germany, and said he did not think I ought to “travel alone.” Down to the time of my mother’s death, and the dispute respecting her annuity,—whatever under-current of bitterness and distrust there might be on my part, or of caprice on his—we remained on familiar and friendly terms; and he relapsed into the old habit of entreating my interference for his interests, with such of my family or friends as had political influence; as he had done when we lived together in one home.

. . .

We will take then, first, the law as to marriage, and divorce.

The Roman Catholics have one clear unvarying rule on this subject. They make marriage a sacrament. They have laws that apply to cases of dispute,—“separation de corps et de biens,”—provision for the wife,—award as to children,—but the marriage itself is simply indissoluble; lasting, as the words of the Church ceremony imply, “till DEATH do us part.”

We do not make marriage a sacrament. It is difficult to say what we hold it to be. Lord Hardwicke’s Marriage Act, of 1754, declared null, all marriages not celebrated by a priest in orders: and made it indispensable that the ceremony should take place in some parish church, or public chapel, unless by special licence from the Archbiship of Canterbury. Lord John Russell’s Act, of 1836, permits persons, on the contrary, to be married according to any form they choose; not sacerdotally; merely by repairing to the Registrar, and giving certain notices, and procuring certain certificates; so as to acquire a right to have the ceremony performed in places registered and appropriated for the purpose. Marriage, therefore, in England, is a religious ceremony or a mere civil contract, at the pleasure of the parties: thus meeting the requisitions of all sects of the Protestant Church. It is besides,—practically,—a sacrament for the poor, and a civil contract for the rich: as the rich break it by application to Parliament; and the poor are put frequently on trial for bigamy, from not being able to go through that expensive form. It is,—practically,—a sacrament for the wife, and a civil contract for the husband; the husband can break it almost as a matter of course, on proof of the wife’s infidelity; the wife, though, nominally able to apply for a divorce, seldom or ever obtains one. I believe there are but three cases on record in the House of Lords, or marriages broken on the wife’s petition.

. . .

But we have only to look back on the origin of divorce in England, to comprehend, that the protection of the woman was the last thing considered in the framing of its laws. Whether we ought to adopt the view taken by Roman Catholics, and consider marriage as a sacrament; or whether (as Milton bitterly wrote, when arguing his right to get rid of the wife who was no “help-mate” to him) persons once wedded, should be compelled, “in spight of antipathy, to fadge together and combine as they may, to their unspeakable wearisomeness;—forced to drawn in that yoke, an unmerciful day’s work of sorrow, till death unharness them,”—is no longer an argument in Protestant England. Divorce, in its fullest interpretation;—divorce, which breaks the marriage utterly, and allows of a new choice; the children of which new choice shall be as legitimate and as capable of inheriting by succession, as the children of any other marriages, is the established law of our land.

. . .

Since the days of King Henry, divorce has remained an indulgence sacred to the aristocracy of England. The poorer classes have no form of divorce amongst them. The rich man makes a new marriage, having divorced his wife in the House of Lords: his new marriage is legal; his children are legitimate; his bride (if she be not the divorced partner of his sin, but simply his elected choice in his new condition of freedom), occupies, in all respects, the same social position, as if he had never previously been wedded. The poor man makes a new marriage, not having divorced his wife in the House of Lords; his new marriage is null; his children are bastards; and he himself is liable to be put on trial for bigamy: the allotted punishment for which crime, at one time was hanging, and is now imprisonment.

. . .

Now it is consistent with all the discretion of justice, that far greater leniency should be practically extended, to a sex whose passions, habits of life, and greater laxity of opinions, make their temptations greater and their resistance less, than is the case among women; and a proportionate severity may well be shewn to that other sex, whose purity is of infinitely greater importance. But to say that divorce,—if permitted at all,—should be permitted to one party only; that Lord Chancellor Thurlow’s principle, (that each case should depend on its own particular circumstances for decision, and on the moral impossibility of actual reunion), should be superseded by the doctrine that only one party can be wronged sufficiently to deserve the extreme remedy, is surely so obvious an absurdity, that will scarce bear arguing upon: and would simply be adding one more anomaly, to laws, in which already the jealous and exclusive guarding of masculine rights, is often the foundation of most preposterous wrong.

Called upon to give assent to such a law, even Majesty might feel something of the helplessness of sex: and muse on that accident of regal birth, which has invested her with sacred and irrevocable rights, in a country where women have no rights. The one Englishwoman in England whom injury and injustice cannot reach: protected from it for ever: protected, not as a Woman, but as QUEEN: as England’s Symbol of Royalty: and called upon in that capacity, by the law officers of the Crown and “faithful lieges in Parliament assembled,” to complete and perfect by her consent, the power of men’s laws. Sign manual and royal assent, necessary for perfecting and completing those laws, under a female reign,—in a country where the signatures of married women are legally worthless; where they cannot lay claim to the simplest article of personal property,—cannot make a will,—or sign a lease,—and are held to be non-existent in law!

. . .

If this pamphlet be an appeal to English justice, it ought not to be disregarded because it is a woman’s appeal; or because it is MY appeal. On justice only, let it rest. Think if the smallest right be infringed for men,—if the rent of a paddock remain unpaid, or a few angry words of libel be spoken, how instantly the whole machinery of the law is set in motion, to crush out compensation; and think what it must be to spend all one’s youth, as I have spent mine, in a series of vain struggles to obtain any legal justice! Or, do not think at all about me; forget by whose story this appeal was illustrated (I can bring you others, from your own English law books); and let my part in this, be only as a voice borne by the wind—as a cry coming over the waves from a shipwreck, to where you stand safe on the shore—and which you turn and listen to, not for the sake of those who call,—you do not know them,—but because it is a cry for HELP.

Review

1. 1. How does Caroline’s husband attempt to ‘teach her not to brave him’ by means of physical violence?

2. 2. How does the current legal system compound the abuse Caroline experiences at her husband’s hands?