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By Root 158 0

during Victorian times, nor psychiatric analysis. Instead, Her Majesty’s lunatics were subject to a regime known as ‘moral treatment’. This was a recognisable Victorian concept. Mary was given a regular daily routine of exercise and occupation (which for her meant working in the laundry); regular meals of fairly bland food; and plenty of fresh air. She was also given relief from her poor and harsh surroundings. Her quality of life was probably significantly better than that she had enjoyed outside: she had a roof over her head, and she did not have to worry about food or money. This removal of a patient from their usual society was another aspect of Victorian treatment. By giving a patient refuge in the Asylum, the Victorians believed they would be able to neuter the immediate causes of insanity in their day-to-day life, leading to beneficial results. It was a recognition that community living could create problems as well as solutions.

Mary Ann Parr was a reasonably typical recipient of this treatment regime, in that she experienced it for the next thirty-seven years, until she died in 1900, aged seventy-one, from kidney disease. Many patients spent decades on site, and became institutionalised in the process. It was by no means a given, though, that this outcome would prevail. The discharge rate on the male side was around one in ten, and even greater on the female side, with slightly more than one in three patients being discharged. This was, in part, due to the patient make up. While the ‘pleasure’ men and women’s fate lay ultimately with the Home Secretary of the day, a significant proportion of patients arrived from the prison system with a fixed sentence. Once that sentence was complete, they were usually discharged to a local asylum for care.

***

The fact of Broadmoor’s opening does not explain the fact of Broadmoor’s creation. Every story has a beginning, and in Broadmoor’s case this is usually traced back to a spring day in 1800. It was on the evening of 15th May that year that King George III chose to attend the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, London, only to feel the whistle of two shots pass near him before he had taken his seat in the royal box.

The assailant was a member of the audience. James Hadfield was a young father from London convinced that he needed to secure his own death at the hands of the state. By suffering the same fate as Christ, Hadfield believed that his personal sacrifice would benefit all mankind by ushering in the Second Coming, and the Day of Judgement. This was a fact that would emerge later. For now, Hadfield was restrained in the orchestra pit of the Theatre as pandemonium raged around him.

It was clear that Hadfield was mad. Legally, though, he presented a problem. While he might be found not guilty by reason of insanity, this verdict was reserved historically for those described as ‘brutes’ or ‘infants’. The usual result was a discharge, sometimes to Bethlem, London’s historic hospital for the mad, more often to family or the local community for care, but certainly with no further oversight from the state. Such a discharge would have been extremely risky in Hadfield’s case, as it seemed entirely plausible that if let go, he might try something similar again.

Besides, Hadfield was neither brute nor infant. He was married, in regular employment in the silver trade, a war hero, as well as a family man. His case bore some similarities to those of two previous assailants on the Royal person, Margaret Nicholson and John Frith, neither of which had been resolved satisfactorily from a legal point of view. The memory of Nicholson and Frith would have been fresh in the minds of the lawyers brought in to deal with Hadfield. Now, the law was presented with another opportunity to find a way of managing the dangerous lunatic, and the English legal system was helped out of its difficulties to no small extent by the success of Hadfield’s lawyer, Thomas Erskine. Today we would consider a defence lawyer to be an automatic right, but they were a bit of an oddity in court until the 1830s,