The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton

For Caroline it was not an onerous task, the attractive Melbourne was the Whig of Whigs, rich, intelligent and louche, everything her grumpy, lazy Tory husband was not. Melbourne and her late father had been friends and she quickly found herself spending almost every afternoon alone with the raffish politician for the next five years. The drunken rows and assaults which had started on the Nortons’ honeymoon in 1827 became more frequent, and soon rumours about the amount of time Melbourne - by then Prime Minister - spent with ‘Norty’ Mrs Norton started to bubble and swirl.

 

Caroline Norton was a successful writer and earned hundreds, now tens of thousands of pounds, for her husband’s bank account. She was a brilliant mimic and outrageous flirt, admired by many men and feared for her beauty and wit by scores of women. Manipulated by his elder brother, the Ultra Tory Lord Grantley, George Norton sued Lord Melbourne for having had a ‘criminal conversation’ – the legal term for adultery - with his wife.

 

The trial in Westminster Hall on 22 June 1836 was a sensation, and George’s attempt to bring down the Whig government and extort the equivalent of a million pounds in damages from Melbourne failed. The jury saw the trial for what it was: naked politics masquerading as hurt feelings. George Norton was a cuckold whose rival had got away with it, and he was livid: Melbourne was found not guilty and began to keep his distance from Mrs Norton.

 

Caroline was left with nothing. All her possessions, her clothes, jewels, letters and manuscripts were seized by Norton who threatened to sell them. But her greatest loss was her three boys: seven year-old Fletcher, Brinsley who was five, and three year-old William. In 1836 when a marriage broke down a mother had no automatic right to see her children, let alone have custody of them. Mothers were not considered parents of their own children, and wives had no legal identity before the law which meant they could not sign a contract, keep their own earnings, sue for libel, sign a lease, make a will or inherit property, unless their rich father had set up a trust before they married to safeguard their property. George was within his legal rights to refuse to let her see her own children. In extremis Caroline learnt a lot about the law and it shocked her; she picked up her pen and went to war to change the law. 

 

Caroline Norton’s pamphleteering and networking between 1837 and 1839 resulted in the 1839 Infant Custody Act which allowed mothers of ‘unblemished character’ to have custody of their children until the age of seven and regular access to them thereafter. The first piece of feminist legislation to go on to the English statute book  changed family law for ever. But the law of which she was the architect did not apply to Scotland, and when her husband took the boys to his relations there she could do nothing about it. In the end it was the death of her youngest son from neglect in 1842, aged nine, which caused George Norton to relent and let her see her two remaining sons. 

 

In 1855 Caroline was back on the legal warpath again, this time with a 30,000 word pamphlet titled Letter to Queen Victoria, respectfully pointing out the absurdity of a wife’s invisibility before the law in a country and empire ruled by a wife and mother of nine children. Caroline’s powerful and persuasive prose informed the contemporary debate on divorce; her words appeared in four of the clauses in the Matrimonial Causes (Divorce) Act of 1857 which established a secular Divorce Court, thereby ending the process by which couples needed an expensive and laborious Act of Parliament – whose lordships frequently rejected a wife’s application - to end a marriage.

 

In 1870, seven years before she died, the work of Caroline Norton was also found in the wording of the Married Women’s Property Act, which allowed wives to retain some of their earnings. To us, Caroline Norton was a feminist. Almost always her name is prefaced by the words ‘the feminist' Caroline Norton, or 'feminist campaigner’ - but it would be more accurate to say that she was an accidental feminist.

 

Her work has benefitted wives and mothers for two hundred years since the famous trial. ‘The natural position of woman is inferiority to man. Amen!’ may seem an illogical remark for her to make, but her campaign for a mother’s right to have custody of her children and her desire for a married woman to have a legal identity was about justice, not equality with men. Like many of her female contemporaries, Caroline believed a woman’s place in society was by God’s appointment, ‘not by man’s devising.’

 

In her Letter to Queen Victoria on Lord Chancellor Cranworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill, Caroline Norton assured her majesty that she had ‘never pretended to the wild and ridiculous doctrine of equality.’ It is true Caroline was a good friend of Mary Shelley but Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist views as expressed in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman had not reached her.  

 

Caroline Norton has been claimed as a feminist because it was assumed that because her campaign was feminist, so was she. She is a heroine for every woman who has had a problem with a vindictive and heartless husband, a nineteenth-century heroine for the twenty-first century. 

 

 

 

The Criminal Conversation of Mrs Norton by Diane Atkinson is out now, published by Preface.