The Sun.
London, England, 1862-01-22 00:00:00

MAILS DITE.

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China, Penang, and Singapore, via Southampthn.Jan.
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... ... ...
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3.
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via Marseilles
ut Jan. --,
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pton Jan.
Jan. 21
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California, and British Columbia,,

THE WIND.HAM CASE.

The adjourned inquiry into the state of mind of
Mr. W. F. Windham, of Felbrigg-hall, Norfolk
was resumed yesterday in the Westminster Ses-
sions-house, before Mr. Warren, Q.C., one of the
Masters in Lunacy, and a special jury.
Mr. Jackson, a solicitor, produced several letters
addressed to him by Mr. Windham.
This closed the evidence for the defence.

Mr. Russell then addressed the jury for Lady
Sophia Giubilei, the mother of the alleged lunatic.
His client, he said, had no personal interest in this
case apart from the interest of her son, but the Lords
Justices had thought that in an inquiry into the
mental sanity of her own child she should not be
doomed to be a mere passive spectator, and he
thought it would admitted that her counsel had not
hitherto abused the power granted to her to be
present and take part in the proceedings. Mr. Cham-
bers in his able opening speech had stated that Lady
Sophia was to be taken as concurring in the petition
against her son. That statement was not correct.
Lady Sophia had never concurred—she did not now
concur—in these proceedings; but, on the contrary,
all her sympathies, interests, and wishes were with
her son. It would be unnatural, indeed, for a mo-
ther, except upon the clearest grounds and for the
most incontestable reasons, to assist in branding her
own child with the stamp of mental incapacity.
Perhaps the only gratifying feature in this case was
that Mr. Windham—of whom it had been said that
his heart was not capable of good and that he
had no moral feeling—bad during his whole
life, beginning from his earliest youth, con-
stantly expressed the deep and earnest affection
which-he entertained for his mother. It was not
surprising, therefore, that Lady Sophia, instead of
concurring in the petition against her son, should
disapprove and condemn it. She regretted and
grieved over the faults which undoubtedly had
stained his youth ; but those features of the case
had been greatly softened by the evidence for the
defence, and Lady Sophia looked forward with con-
fidence to the result of the interview which the
Master and the jury proposed to have with her son.
The jury had to consider a case surrounded by pre-
judice and falsehood, but he :trusted they would
rivet their attention upon its real merits. He hoped
they would pause long before they fixed upon Mr.
Windham the stain of insanity—before they took
from him on the very threshold of manhood that
which made manhood a thing to be prized—the
sense of personal freedom and personal independ-
ence. They had been told this inquiry would have
a sobering effect upon him, enabling him to distin-
guish real from pretended friends, and, if so, it
would serve a great and beneficial end. By a ver-
dict in his favour they would give him an opportu-
nity of retrieving the follies of his youth—the follies
of a raw, riotous, unrestrained, untutored youth—
and of playing a part which, though not conspicu-
ous by great deeds, might not be altogether un-
worthy of the name he bore and of the social
, position into which he was born.
Mr. Karslake was then heard for Mr. Wind-
ham. He rejoiced to hear from Mr. Russell that
there was at least one of the relatives of Mr. Wind-
ham who did not appear in the ranks of the
petitioners against him. He had thought until a
recent period that there were two parties in this in-
quiry—the accuser and the accused ; but the jury
had been told that, in addition to the other anoma-
lies which surrounded the case, there was no recog-
nised accuser at all, and that Mr. Chambers
appeared there as a friend of the Court for the pur-
pose of assisting it in ascertaining whether Mr.
Windham was insane or not. The result of the
inquiry, whether favourable or the reverse to Mr.
Windham, would be to saddle him with a charge
of some £15,000 or £20,000, and for that enormous
burden he would have to thank the petitioners, be-
cause they had chosen to bring forward a case
which could not be proved in evidence, and because
they had acted throughout, not in a fair, honest,
and judicial spirit, but as partisans for the purpose
of depriving Mr. Windham of his property, which
was the only thing they cared a straw about. It
must be admitted that, besides the prejudice excited
by the petitioners against Mr. Windham, the pre-
judice which the alleged lunatic had created by his
own acts weighed heavily upon him now. Even in
contracting his marriage Mr. Windham had done
an act which was calculated to disgust society. He
should have thought, however, that when it had
been proved that General Windham, Mr. Hook,
and the other petitioners had made numerous affi-
davits in the Court of Chancery for the purpose of
inducing the Lords Justices to issue a commission
of lunacy against their youthful relative, and after-
wards had refused to pledge their oaths before the
public to the truth of these statements, the case
ought at once to have been brought to an end. No
doubt he should hear some specious reasons from
Mr. Chambers for not calling General Windham
and the other petitioners as witnesses; but he sub-
mitted that if the jury were satisfied that the mo-
tives of General Windham were not so disinterested
as they had been represented to be, and that he had
declined to appear in the witness-box and to sub- '
mit himself to a cross-examination in the face of the
public from a well-grounded indisposition to repeat
in open court the statements which he had made
to the Lords Justices, there was no reason,
however specious, which could remove the im-
pression from their minds that General Wind-
ham had acted incautiously and unfairly. It was
not his intention to contest the right of the
petitioners to institute a proceeding which they
honestly believed to be necessary and likely to be
justified by the result. If General Windham and
the rest of the band of petitioners were really of
opinion that their statements in the Court of Chan-
cery amounted to proof of insanity—if they were
satisfied that their allegations could be confirmed
by unimpeachable evidence in open court—no fault
could be found with them for the course they had
adopted, even though they might saddle Mr. Win-
dham with an enormous debt and expose to the pub-
lic gaze every folly and vice of his early years.
But, he repeated, the petitioners had acted through-
out, not as judges of the cause, but as partisans, and
had done everything in their power to excite a pre-
judice in the public mind against their young rela-
tive. Instead of going to Mr. and Mrs. Martin,
who above all other persons knew the early his-
tory of Mr. Windham, they had produced in the
Court of Chancery a series of statements upon which
they did not venture to rely before a jury, and they
had been guilty of a deliberate concealment of evi-
dence, because they knew it would not suit their
purpose. It would be recollected, moreover, that
they had carefully kept out of sight the character
and peculiarities of old Mr. Windham; and yet the
jury had heard from Dr. Conolly that it was im-
possible to judge of young Mr. Windham without
knowing something of his treatment in early life
and the influences to which he was then exposed.
The truth was, he believed, that young Mr. Wind-
ham was in many respects a counterpart of his
father, all whose frailties and foibles were perfectly
well known to the petitioners, who, nevertheless,
acting in the spirit of partisans, had done every-
thing they could to conceal them from the jury.
During the course of the case for the petitioners,
two pictures, one of which must necessarily be
untrue, had been drawn by Mr. Windham. Ac-
cording to Mr. Chambers, in his opening speech,
backed by a number of policemen, Mr. Windham
was a congenital imbecile, continually slavering
at the mouth, talking ircohe ently, and screeching
and howling like a madman. That picture had been
utterly wiped out by Dr. Winslow, Dr. Mayo, and
Lord Alfred Hervey, who had favoured the Court
with another portrait of Mr. Windham, equally in-
consistent with the first and with truth. Mr. Wind-
ham, according to the two doctors and his uncle,
although of unsound mind and incapable of
managing his affairs, was so little of an imbecile
that any person might converse with him for hours
without perceiving that there was anything the
matter with him at all. But the real issue before
the j ury was not whether Mr. Windham was of un-
sound mind, or whether he was incapable of
his affairs, but whether he was incompe-
tenta
conduct of his affairs by reason of un-
soundness managing
ninetshgseof mind. It might be true that many of
his acts had been profligate and vicious; but what
the jury had to consider was, not whether Mr. Wind-
ham had spent his youth in excesses of various