The Woman Who Lost Her Children

How Caroline Norton taught herself the law, and changed it for good

I’ve spent a lot of time in courts. Not as a defendant (at least, not yet!) but as a historian who keeps ending up in the sort of places where women’s lives were picked apart in public.

Courtrooms are where society decides what sort of woman it approves of. Or doesn’t.

Which is why I became so fascinated by Caroline Norton.

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Caroline’s is the first case featured in the new series from the Lady Killers team: Lady on Trial. Listen on Tuesday at 3 on Radio Four, or on BBC Sounds.

I talked about Caroline with Baroness Hale, aka Spider Woman, who was just as incisive and inspiring as I’d expected. Look how I gaze at her adoringly!

Brenda Marjorie Hale, Baroness Hale of Richmond, former President of the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom

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But on with the story…

It’s the twenty-second of June, 1836.

Westminster Hall is dangerously overcrowded. The spectators are packed shoulder-to-shoulder beneath the great medieval hammerbeam roof. Barristers are sweating. Journalists are scribbling.

At the centre of it all is the Prime Minister of Great Britain, Lord Melbourne, who’s been accused of adultery with a celebrated society beauty called Caroline Norton.

Westminster Hall, and Caroline herself

You can still stand in Westminster Hall today, and if you ignore the tourists and the security barriers, you can imagine the great political dramas that unfolded there, and the reputations which were made and broken.

The trial of Lord Melbourne was one of those moments.

And Caroline herself?

She wasn’t even allowed into court.

Lord Melbourne was being tried for so-called ‘Criminal Conversation.’ Basically, a husband sued another man for compensation for having slept with his wife. Rather like the wife herself was a piece of property the other lover had used, and damaged in the process.

Caroline’s husband George Norton had accused Lord Melbourne of having had ‘criminal conversation’ with his wife.

Caroline had married George when she was nineteen. They had ‘not exchanged six sentences’ before their engagement, she later recalled. Within weeks, he was violent towards her. He drank, shirked his work as a barrister, and lived increasingly off Caroline’s earnings as a writer.

Then he started hitting her.

When she was pregnant with her fourth child, he assaulted her so badly that she miscarried.

And then he did the most famously awful thing of all.

While Caroline was out of the house, George took their three sons away. Caroline went to visit them at their new home. As she sat downstairs, sobbing, she could hear her boys running about overhead.

She could hear them, but she couldn’t get at them.

But this was perfectly legal.

Meanwhile, her husband dragged her name through this enormous public scandal. In the adultery trial, servants testified that they’d seen Caroline and Melbourne kissing - but only on the cheek. A coachman described Caroline lying on a hearthrug with her clothes disarranged - but it turned out he’d been sacked for drinking. There was solemn discussion of marks on her underwear.

The jury eventually cleared Melbourne of adultery.

Caroline had won a moral victory. But she’d basically lost everything else.

She couldn’t see her children. And with no legal existence independent of her husband, who now hated her, she had almost no rights over the money she herself earned.

So she did something extraordinary.

She picked up her husband’s law books and started reading.

This is the part I love!

Caroline didn’t just complain that the law was unjust. She taught herself how it worked. She collaborated with sympathetic politicians. She wrote pamphlets that looked like legal textbooks. She learned to speak in the language the law respected.

And she became very, very good at it.

She was a very persuasive writer, asking, for example, whether ‘the woman who endures for nearly a year a tedious suffering, ending in an agony that perils her life’ truly had no rights over the child she bore.

It’s difficult now to imagine how radical that sounded.

Thanks to Caroline’s agitation, the Custody of Infants Act followed in 1839. It was limited and full of caveats, but it was a beginning. It was a step along a road towards emancipation, with later nineteenth century reforms allowing married women to keep their own earnings and property for the first time.

One of my favourite Caroline Norton moments came later, when tradesmen sued George Norton for debts she had run up in his name.

She’d discovered that if the law insisted husband and wife were one person, she could use that absurdity against him. Rather like getting revenge by maxing out your ex’s credit card.

The judge tried to silence her. ‘Madame, this is irregular!’

‘I will speak,’ replied Caroline.

And she did.

Caroline wasn’t totally awesome. She could be difficult, snobbish and contradictory. She always insisted she wasn’t a feminist, writing that women were naturally inferior to men. Perhaps she believed it. Or perhaps she understood perfectly well that she had to tone things down a bit in order to be listened to at all.

Today, in the rebuilt House of Lords, there is a huge mural representing Justice. The person asked to sit for the figure of ‘Justice’ was Caroline Norton. The woman who once had no legal existence became the image of the law.

Caroline in later life, left, and right, as Justice in the House of Lords

This weekly history newsletter, My Life in the Past is where I bring you stories like this — the ones that fell out of the textbooks, or were never in them to begin with.

I’m interested in women who rewrote laws. Women who sat on the wrong side of courtroom doors. Women whose lives, when you look at them closely, turn out to be considerably more complicated, and considerably more interesting, than the official version.

Some posts are tied to my current projects — just as Caroline Norton’s story features in Lady on Trial. But other posts are just things I’ve become obsessed with for reasons I can’t entirely explain.

Taking out a paid subscription supports my research, but this post is free, because I want it to travel far and wide.

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History, it turns out, is full of women like Caroline Norton. We just haven’t been looking in the right places.