by the 13th, but there was no sign of him.
By the 15th he was posted absent without leave, and ten days later Captain Galloway noted in his Return:2 “It is presumed some accident must have happened to him, as there has been no account whatsoever from him.” Captain Galloway was obviously taking a charitable view of the disappearance of his ensign.
But a month later Wainewright was still missing. The March Return pointed out that every effort had been made to trace him: “Ensign Wainewright was written to agreeable (sic) to the address he left, but no answer has been received; his friends were there written to, who stated they understood he was lying ill at Bath, but that as soon as certain information could be obtained I should be informed thereof.”
By the time Captain Galloway wrote this Wainewright had been missing for six weeks, and without a word of explanation. However grievous his illness, it seems that he had been able to let his friends know, but not his regiment. Was the illness a precursor of the “acute disease” as he called it, which was to attack him within a few months? It seems more likely, and more in character, that he had become so bored and restless that the idea of returning after leave to a soulless military life miles from his London haunts had become intolerable.
Oscar Wilde was to write much later that the “reckless dissipated life of his companions failed to
2. WO 17/291
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satisfy the refined artistic temperament of one who was made for other things”.
But return he did eventually, for by the end of April he was back on the strength. In the British army in the 19th century, absence without leave automatically became desertion after 21 days, for which the penalties were very severe. No record of Wainewright being disciplined has been discovered. Perhaps the rules were elastic in the languid world of the officer class.
For example, Lord Cardigan, he of the disastrous charge of the Light Brigade, had bought himself a colonelcy for £40,000 and in the first two years of his service in the 11th Hussars was with his regiment for only four weeks.3
During Wainewright’s long absence, Napoleon had escaped from Elba and marched on Paris; another European conflict was imminent. Orders went out to the 16th in Canada to return home at once.
The regiment landed at Portsmouth in August, two months too late for Waterloo, though it eventually went on to join the army of occupation. But Wainewright took no part in all this; in May he resigned his commission. He may have been asked to do so after his long absence; more probably the thought of further service was unbearable. He had lasted barely a year, and that with a long absence in between.
His last few days in the Army he spent at Fort Cumberland, the bastioned stronghold at
3. Woodham-Smith, C. The Reason Why. Penguin, 1953
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Portsmouth which commanded the approach to the marshes and Langstone Harbour.
As he looked across Spithead to the Isle of Wight he could not have imagined that the next time he would see it, 22 years’ later, would be as a convict bound for the other side of the world. But there was no thought of ignominy now; on May 15th he sold his commission and his name appears for the last time in the Army List for June 1815. “Augustus Losack to be ensign by purchase vice Wainewright retd.”
Another career had failed, and he later dismissed this failure characteristically in one of his essays: “Several apparently trifling chances determined me against this mode of killing Time and humans.” The italics are his.
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CHAPTER 3
“THE BRINK OF MERE INSANITY”
He was free; the restraints of communal life has been lifted, he was his own master again. He wrote:
I was idle on the town, my blessed art touched her renegade; by her pure and high influences the noisome mists were purged; my feelings, parched hot and tarnished were renovated with a cool fresh bloom, childly, simple, beautiful to the simple-hearted.
He found solace in Wordsworth, weeping, as he said, tears of happiness and gratitude over his poems. But this elevated state did not last, for he fell ill. His serene state was broken, he was to say in one of his essays…
…like a vessel of clay by “acute disease, succeeded by a relaxation of the muscles and nerves which depressed me. Hypochondriasis! Ever shuddering on the brink of mere insanity!
Oscar Wilde surmised that Wainewright had “wandered through that terrible valley of melancholia from which so many great, perhaps greater, spirits have never emerged”.
The illness seems to have had a critical effect on his life and theories have been propounded to suggest that what could be recognised now as
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severe depression had turned him into a reckless spender and a criminal.
Havelock Ellis, the psychologist, who was also a literary critic and essayist, described Wainewright “the perfect picture of the instinctive criminal in his most highly-developed shape” and concluded in his book The Criminal in 1901 that he was probably insane at the time.
“It is extremely probable that he never recovered from the effects of that illness……if we possessed a full knowledge of every instinctive criminal we should always be able to put our hands on some organically-morbid spot”.
Jonathan Curling, who published a biography of Wainewright in 1938, hazarded a guess at sleeping sickness, Encephalitis lethargica, which could lead to cerebral derangement and turn a man into a criminal.
In January 2017, I showed one of London’s leading consultant psychiatrists, Dr Edward Burns, the above eight paragraphs to seek his medical opinion. He was told Wainewright was possibly a murderer, according to previous reports, but given no information about his past.
He dismissed Curling’s hypothesis saying it was unlikely that a physical illness would turn him into a murderer. People often searched for reasons, such as an illness, which turned for someone into a serial killer, but often there was no physical cause for these behaviours. Wainewright seemed rather to be suffering from a lack of empathy, suggestive of a dissocial or antisocial personality, probably brought on by something that happened in his childhood.
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As a psychiatrist, he would look in such a patient for anger brought on by a feeling of deprivation of love, or someone dying when he was young.
How closely Wainewright fits this diagnosis! His birth killed his mother, his father died while he was an infant leaving him to be brought up by a curmudgeonly grandfather in his seventies and his sharp-tongued grandmother, and provided for only grudgingly in the old man’s
