The lawyers would not be hurried; and things moved in leisurely fashion. Still, they moved to their appointed end; and, the necessary red tape being unwound, interrogatories administered, and the evidence of prying chambermaids and hotel servants collected and examined, in May, 1841, the case of James v. Lennox got into the list and was heard by Lord Denman and a special jury in the Court of Queen's Bench. Sir William Follett, the Solicitor-General, was briefed on behalf of the plaintiff, and Frederick Thesiger appeared for Captain Lennox.
In his opening address, Sir William Follett (who had not been too well instructed) told the jury that the petitioner and his wife "had lived very happily together in India, and that the return of Mrs. James to England was due to a fall from her horse at Calcutta." While on the passage home, he continued, pulling out his vox humana stop, the ship touched at Madras, where the defendant came on board; and, "during the long voyage, an intimacy sprang up between Mrs. James and himself which developed in a fashion that left the outraged husband no choice but to institute the present proceedings to recover damages for having been wantonly robbed of the affection and society of his consort."
At this point, counsel for Captain Lennox (who, in pusillanimous fashion, had loved and sailed away, rather than stop and help the woman he had compromised) cut short his learned friend's tearful eloquence by admitting that he was prepared to accept a verdict, with £1000 damages. As the judge agreed, the case was abruptly terminated.
This, however, was only the first round. In December of the following year, the next step was adopted, and a suit for divorce was commenced in the Consistory Court. As neither Mrs. James nor the Lothario-like Captain Lennox put in an appearance, Dr. Lushington, declaring himself satisfied that misconduct had been committed, pronounced a decree a mensa et thoro. All that this amounted to was merely a judicial separation.
The report in The Times only ran to a dozen lines. Considering that the paper cost fivepence a copy, this was not a very liberal allowance. Still, readers had better value in respect of another action in "high life" that was heard the same day, that of Lord and Lady Graves, which had a full column allotted it.
II
This was all that the public knew of the case. It did not seem much on which to blast a young wife's reputation. Dr. Lushington, the judge of the Consistory Court, however, knew a good deal more about the business than did the general public. This was because, during the preliminary hearing, held some months earlier and attended only by counsel and solicitors, a number of damaging facts had transpired.
Mrs. James, said learned counsel for the petitioner, had "been guilty of behaviour at which a crocodile would tremble and blush." A serious charge to bring against a young woman. Still, in answer to the judge, he professed himself equipped with ample evidence to support it. His first witness was a retired civil servant, a Mr. Browne Roberts, who had known the respondent's husband, first, as a bachelor in India, and afterwards as a married man in Dublin. At the beginning of 1841, he had received a call, he said, from a Major McMullen to whom Captain Craigie had written, asking him to take charge of his step-daughter on her arrival in London and see her off to his relatives in Scotland. When, however, the major offered this hospitality, it was refused. Thereupon, Mr. Roberts had himself called at the Imperial Hotel, Covent Garden, and suggested that she should come and stop with his wife; and this invitation was also refused.
Not much in this perhaps, but a good deal in what followed. Mrs. Elizabeth Walters, the manageress of the Imperial Hotel, said that on February 21, 1841, "a lady and gentleman arrived in a hackney cab, with luggage marked G. Lennox and Mrs. James, and booked a double room." Mrs. Walters had not, she admitted, "actually discovered them undressed, or sharing the bed," but "she would not have been surprised to have done so." Accordingly, when her travelling companion left the next morning, she taxed Mrs. James with misconduct. After telling her to "mind her own business," Mrs. James had declared that she and Captain Lennox were on the point of being married, and had then packed up and left the establishment.
"What exactly did she say?" enquired the judge.