But the real compelling cause of the action was the connection he had recently formed with a woman whom he had picked up in London, during Ascot week. Agnes Willoughby, alias Rogers, in the words of counsel, “was not the chastest of the chaste; her favours in love-affairs were not few; she was known to the police.” On August 30th, 1861, having come of age on the 9th, he married her and settled £800 a year on her, to be increased in 1869 to £1,500. She had been, up to that time, living with a man named Roberts, and after the marriage the three lived together.
The action was defended by Windham and his associates, who, in the event of his being declared a lunatic, would have lost the rich harvest of plunder they were reaping. A pitiful feature of the case, and one tending to prejudice the public against the petitioners, was that Windham’s mother, naturally unwilling to see her son branded as a madman, gave evidence for him.
“What,” asked Pilate, “what is truth?” Of the more than 150 witnesses called during the progress of the case, a number declared they had never noticed any peculiarity about Windham, save “perhaps he was exceedingly high-spirited. He always behaved like a gentleman.” Yet his career forbids us to believe anything of the kind.
It did not take the special jury of twenty-four “good men and true” very long to deliberate upon the concluding speeches of counsel. In half an hour they returned, with the astonishing verdict, “That Mr. Windham is of sound mind and capable of taking care of himself and his affairs.” This announcement was received with cheers.
Both the verdict and its public reception reflect the feeling of the time on questions of lunacy. The terrible scandals and revelations of sane persons having in the past been “put away” by relatives for sake of gain were fresh in the public mind, and no conceivable evidence short of that of homicidal mania would have sufficed for a jury at that period. Windham was left to his own devices. The costs of the action, coming out of his estate, amounted to £20,000, and with the extravagance and robbery that went on, unchecked, around him, speedily embarrassed the unhappy creature. The vile parasites of the woman he had married had sole control. They even appeared at Felbrigg, and gave orders for the valuable timber to be cut down and sold. His wife, who had never made a secret of the fact that she loathed him, went off with some one else; but Windham, who in a lucid moment had brought divorce proceedings against her, condoned the offence, and she returned for just as long as there was any plunder to be obtained from the wreck of his fortunes. Later, she was living with a man named Jack Abel, who then kept a public-house, the “Lord Camden” (still standing) in Charing Cross, Norwich. Abel was an unscrupulous, but successful horse-dealer, who had, in earlier years, been in league with a gang of smugglers trading between Wells and Thetford, and supplied the horses carrying their illicit merchandise.
Meanwhile, Windham was throwing away money and property with both hands. A passing mania for coaching led him to set up a Norwich and Cromer coach, which became the terror of the countryside. To travel in or on “Mad Windham’s” coach, or to be on the road when it came past, was equally hazardous, and a respected Norfolk cleric still recalls his solitary encounter with the maniac in a cloud of dust, with four rearing horses, and a stentorian voice, yelling, “Out of the way, d——n your eyes!”
There was every element of uncertainty about “Mad Windham’s” coach. It was uncertain as to whether he would not suddenly decide to go to Yarmouth instead, and equally uncertain whether, wherever it was, you would get there safely; but, once there, certitude of a sort was reached, in your unalterable determination not to return by him, and, if needs were, to walk back.
The story of his financial expedients is a long one, but it ended in July, 1864, with final and irrevocable bankruptcy. He had completely dissipated the residue of his extensive property, and was dependent upon an allowance made by his uncle, whose efforts to save him from himself had met with such misrepresentation. To keep him employed and out of mischief, he was induced to accept a situation at £1 a week, to drive the “Express,” Norwich and Cromer coach; and when that enterprise failed—chiefly, we may suppose, because he drove it, and because of an absurd prejudice the passengers cherished against acquiring broken necks—it was kept on the road solely for the same purpose; until, indeed, he fell in love for the hundredth time. On this occasion it was a Norwich barmaid who had caught his fancy. She thought coaching “low,” and he gave it up, to please her.
The poor fool was drawing to his end. A few weeks longer of a miserable existence at the “Norfolk Hotel,” where he had one solitary room, and it was all over. He died there, after a few hours’ illness, February 2nd, 1866. A clot of blood on the lung cut his career short, in his twenty-sixth year. His body was removed to Cromer, and thence to the family vault at Felbrigg, where it lies among the real Windhams and the sham. Tom Saul, an old coachman, together with a few cronies of the Norfolk Tap, were the mourners.
Felbrigg had already passed out of the family, and had been purchased by a man whose career was itself a romance.