was about this time in the early 19th century, said Dr Burns that attempts were made to separate out different mental disorders and consider treating them in different ways. In 1801 Phillipe Pinel published Traité Médico-philosophique sur l’Aleniation Mentale; ou la Manie in which he described “manie sans delire” - insanity without delusions.
This was defined in the 1830s as “moral insanity” by James Pritchard of Bristol Royal Infirmary in his Treatise on Insanity and Other Disorders of the Mind. The condition is neatly defined by Duhaime’s Law Dictionary as a disease of the mind in which the individual is bereft of ethical judgment or feelings but still fully functioning intellectually. Later, it became relabelled as psychopathic personality. Here we have the template for a cold-blooded killer, possibly a poisoner, a crime regarded with particular horror because it is premeditated and usually achieved over a period by stealth, as the victim is gradually dosed to death. The Times, reflecting on the use of poisons for murder in 1865, wrote:
The poisoner may be a smooth-faced plausible person, without any external symptoms of
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depravity, liable to no wild and furious outbursts of passion, imagining mischief secretly in the deep of his (sic) heart.
Could this be Wainewright, never fully recovered from his great torments? He may well have stepped over that “brink of insanity” of which he wrote. Nevertheless, he went on to tell positively of his recovery from illness.
Two excellent secondary agents, a kind and skilful Physician and a most delicately-affectionate (though young and fragile) Nurse brought me at length out of those dead black waters, nearly exhausted with so sore a struggle.
The nurse may have been his wife-to-be, Eliza, whose step-father, in one of the coincidences in the Wainewright story, was to die in the very barracks in Fermoy in which Wainewright had idled away his very brief military career.
He had not returned to Linden House after resigning his commission; perhaps the ignominy of doing so would have been too great and he would not have had so much of his highly-prized independence.
Instead he had taken lodgings in a boarding house run by a Mrs Frances Abercromby and her three young daughters at Mortlake, not far from Chiswick. It was a fateful day when Wainewright entered their lives. Two were to die suddenly and painfully.
Mrs Abercromby had married twice. Born Frances Weller, in Claygate, Surrey, she wedded in 1794 a widower named Cooper Ward. She was only 20, so had to have the consent of her father,
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a builder, which is noted in the Mortlake parish records. A son, John Cooper Ward, was born a year later, a daughter, Eliza Frances Ward, the future Mrs Wainewright, appeared in the summer of August 1796.
Cooper Ward was not long for this life, dying a few years later, leaving Frances in her twenties with two tiny children, but she soon married again, this time to an army officer, Lieut. John Bateman Abercromby. By him she had two further daughters, the first, Helen Frances Phoebe Abercromby, born in 1809, was to meet her untimely end in the Wainewright household under very strange circumstances. In 1810 she had a sister, burdened with the name Madalina Rosa Hibernia Burdett Abercromby, the Hibernia no doubt being imposed by her father who spent long periods in Ireland.
Lieut. Abercromby held his commission in the Royal Artillery Drivers, a small corps of the Royal Artillery which deployed gun carriages on the field of battle, for the army needed hundreds of horses to drag around the batteries of six-pound and three-pound guns.
It was not a sought-after section of the army in which to serve, for the Drivers had a dire reputation. Their antecedents were the scoundrel private contractors who had supplied horses to the artillery on the field of battle before the corps was founded in 1806, and who were known as being more likely to drive their charges away from the sound of gunfire as towards it.
Even after the Drivers became part of the army, military authorities of the time talked of them as being more interested in plunder than in their
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duty and of being the “scourge of the army”. The officers, it was said, were seldom if ever with their men. Abercromby was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1806 and bought his way to become a first lieutenant two years later, according to the Army Lists of the period.
Lieut. Abercromby served with a unit of the 6th Battalion Royal Artillery under the command of Captain Richard Dyas which had a strength of some 500 men - drivers, shoeing smiths, collar makers and veterinary surgeons. They had been for a number of years in Ireland, a fruitful source of supply for both men and horses, stationed mainly in Athlone, but on October 1st, 1811, they were re-deployed to Fermoy, where Wainewright was to serve.
Bateman Abercromby died suddenly that year, leaving Frances widowed a second time, with Bateman’s two small daughters, their step-sister Eliza, now 15, and her brother John, who appears to drop out of the Abercromby story at this stage, possibly dying as a child. His mother was now even worse off than she was before. Her two daughters by Abercromby had been left by their father “not one shilling to save them from the workhouse” as a court was to hear many years later.
She had some income from a bequest of her father, freehold and leasehold property in Mortlake, which produced about £100 a year in rent, but it was not enough. She appealed to the Board of Ordnance for help in bringing up Bateman’s two daughters and was granted an allowance of £10 a year for each until they were 21 years-old.
In the trials which were to follow, Lieut. Abercromby is several times described as a
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“meritorious officer” and there is one reference to his being killed in service, which he may have been, but not in the main British deployment of the time in the Peninsular Ward in Spain and Portugal as his name does not appear in the list of officers who served there.
Wainewright was not long in the boarding house at Mortlake, but long enough to decide to marry Eliza – an act he was later to describe as “injudicious”. Six weeks or so after she became 21, and old enough to wed without consent, she and Wainewright, who was by now living in Craven Street, off the Strand, were married on November 13, 1817 by the curate at the nearby church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, overlooking what is now Trafalgar Square.
There was a marriage settlement dated the day before the wedding, altering the legacy from his grandfather. Wainewright would continue to draw the interest on the annuities, but after his death, his new wife and any children of the marriage would inherit.
One of the witnesses at the wedding was his cousin Edward Foss who he had recently painted in oils. A few years later he was to forge Foss’s signature, defraud the Bank of England and set himself on the road to perdition.
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CHAPTER 4
‘DIAMOND RINGS ON OUR FINGERS’
Wainewright recalled in one of his own essays for the London Magazine that his illness had prevented “steady pursuit”, or work, as we know it, and “varied amusements” had been deemed essential to his cure,
