the Islands," the lot of Mrs. Norton seemed to possess all the elements of happiness. But there existed some fatal factor,—some lurking cypher, as it were—to mar the sweet equation of life; and domestic misery, wounded affection, and unmerited shame, was its well-known story. In 1829, when she was hardly out of her tutelage, she married Mr. George Chappie Norton, a briefless barrister of small fortune, younger brother of the third Lord Grantley,[1] and described as a selfish, worthless, indolent sensualist. In 1830, on the accession to office of Lord Grey, the once gay and still elegant Lord Melbourne was appointed Home-Secretary. He had been the contemporary and friend of Tom Sheridan, and had cultivated the acquaintance of his fascinating daughter. Giving heed to her entreaties, he appointed her husband to a vacancy (Lambeth) in the Divisional Magistracy of London; obtained for him the Recordership of Guildford; and induced the king to sign a patent for the legal use of the prenominal "Honourable." All went well for a time, and Norton's gratitude,— always fed by expectation of future benefits,—was effusive. But the minister had to remonstrate with the magistrate on the score of irregular attendance at his court; had no more lucrative office in his gift; and objected to indefinite pecuniary loans. Inde iræ! Now came mean, petty and vicarious revenge,—ill-treatment of his wife, which Leycester Stanhope and Edward Ellice were powerless to improve,—attempts to get by threats what toadyism had failed to obtain,—and finally the struggle to extort from his quondam patron the sum of £10,000 damages as compensation for alleged criminal intercourse with his wife. The trial took place June 22, 1836,—" Norton v. Melbourne,"—before Lord Chief-Justice Tindal and a special jury. Sir William Follett led for the plaintiff, but with a bad case, broke down hopelessly. The witnesses, chiefly servants who had been discarded for immoral character, were laughed out of court. The verdict for the defendant, given by the jury after a conference of a few seconds, was received with loud bursts of applause; and the Attorney-General, Sir John Campbell (with whom was Mr. Sergeant Talfourd), who led for Lord Melbourne, at the conclusion of the case late on in the evening, proceeded to the House of Commons, where he received quite an ovation. The examination of the witnesses for the plaintiff, in the sixpenny report of the trial before me, "Embellished with a Portrait and Memoir of the Hon. Mrs. Norton," led to details of the most filthy character, much, indeed, being suggested by asterisks as unfit for publication. After this disgraceful and scandalous affair, the couple lived apart for forty years,—squabbling from time to time about the management of their children, financial arrangements, and the copyright of her books, which the chivalric husband, who, happily for him lived before the passing of the Women's Property Act, took care to legally secure for his own benefit, as soon as they were severally issued. This sort of thing it was that extorted from the injured authoress a privately printed volume in 1854, entitled English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century; and in the following year, in pamphlet form, her impressive but too diffuse, Letter to the Queen on
- ↑ The Grantleys derive from the old baronial family of Coigniers (Conyers), which came into England at the time of the Conquest. It was the complicity of the Nortons with the Earls of Westmoreland and Northumberland, in an insurrection "to re-establish the holy religion of their ancestors," in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and the retribution which ensued, that suggested to Wordsworth his White Doe of Rylstone, or the Fate of the Nortons, and is the subject of several ballads in the Percy collection.
