Caroline, victim of oppression, champion of rights.

Caroline Sheridan was both a society beauty, and a young woman of fine breeding, at a time when breeding mattered even more than today, and looks just as much.

Caroline Norton, née Sheridan, in 1832

She was one of three sisters nicknamed “the three graces”. In 1827, when she was eighteen, her particular grace was snapped up by a barrister and Tory MP, George Norton. Unfortunately, he was no use, as well as being a drunkard and violent. If you’re thinking, “wow! Just like a few MPs I could think of today,” well, you’re entitled to your thoughts. 

At least he didn’t hold his parliamentary seat long.

She used her connections to get him a job, but his performance was lousy and his behaviour reprehensible.

Eventually, his drunken abuse led to the breakdown of their marriage. He decided to sue for divorce. What’s more, he saw an opportunity to make some money. He could petition for divorce on the grounds of adultery. He started casting around for a good person to accuse of being his wife’s partner in adultery.

Now Caroline had many male friends. I don’t know whether that word ‘friends’ ought to have inverted commas around it or not. One of those friends, certainly of the inverted-commas type, was William Lamb, Second Viscount Melbourne. The historian Boyd Hilton says, “It is irrefutable that his personal life was problematic. Spanking sessions with aristocratic ladies were harmless, not so the whippings administered to orphan girls taken into his household as objects of charity...”

Well, at least Caroline Norton was no orphan, and probably aristocratic enough to avoid the whip. But was her friendship with such a man entirely innocent? It’s hard to say these days. Melbourne’s biographer David Cecil says it was, but Cecil seems blinded by hero worship of his subject. So, who knows?

Norton thought he knew, anyway. He sued Melbourne for ‘criminal conversation’, the legal expression for what was then the offence of adultery. Clearly, he hoped he’d make a packet out of the suit since Melbourne would want to avoid the embarrassment of the case coming to court. You see, the Viscount wasn’t just any old aristocrat, he was the Prime Minister of the day.

Sadly for Norton, Melbourne decided to stick things out. He did offer to resign, but the king – also quite a womaniser – told him not to. Even the Duke of Wellington – yes, the same one, of Battle of Waterloo fame – who was by then a leading Conservative politician, told him he saw no reason for the government to resign, and he certainly wouldn’t join a successor government, if this one fell due to the scandal. Then again, Wellington also enjoyed quite a reputation for his sexual conquests. He was particularly proud of having had affairs with not just one but two women (though not at the same time) who’d previously been lovers of Napoleon’s.

When the case came to court, on 23 June 1836, Norton came massively unstuck. The jury cleared Melbourne without so much as leaving the jury box. George Norton failed to get any money, and he’d even lost his petition for divorce.

And that’s what makes it so appalling that Caroline benefited not one jot. He’d taken her kids, but she couldn’t do anything about it. Her husband’s suit for divorce had failed, but she had no right to petition for one herself, so she remained stuck with him as her husband, even though they were living apart. 

Indeed, she couldn’t even sue him, because a married woman’s identity was subsumed by a legal fiction into her husband’s. Suing him would be tantamount to him suing himself.

She was still writing and earning money by it, but another weird provision of the law meant that all her earnings, as a married woman, belonged to him, and he enforced his rights. She was left dependent on any funds that he could bring himself to share with her. I’m glad to say that while she and Melbourne couldn’t renew their former intimacy, he did help her financially.

She also came up with a smart way of avenging herself of George. She ran up debts and had the collectors demand settlement from her husband. If he could take her earnings, well, he could damn well pay her debts.

When her husband learned that Melbourne had left her an annuity in his will, he simply stopped paying her a sum they’d finally agreed on and guaranteed in a contract he’d signed. She did try to sue him on this occasion, to make him honour his commitment, but lost the case on a technicality. His signature, as she pointed out, was clearly no bond.

The kind of abuse she had to put up with might have crushed many people. But Caroline had steely courage. Far from being broken by his behaviour, she rose to it as a challenge, becoming a champion of women’s rights. Politics, then as now, were dominated by the wealthy and powerful, so making any headway towards reform was extremely difficult. What progress she could obtain, however, she certainly achieved. Small steps, but important ones.

George Norton’s suit against Melbourne was heard in 1836. But already by 1839, Caroline’s campaigning had succeeded in getting the Custody of Infants Act passed. It was a small reform, but symbolically crucial. It gave divorced women custody of children up to the age of seven and guaranteed them rights of access beyond. It would prove hard to enforce, particularly by women who couldn’t afford the legal expense. It would also do Caroline no good, since it didn’t apply in Scotland, which is where her husband had taken her kids.

What made the measure important was only the recognition that women too had rights that needed to be respected.

She was also instrumental in getting the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act passed. Again, it was far from satisfactory, which failed to change a great many discriminatory provisions against women, but it was another first step towards necessary reform, in this instance of the law on divorce, beginning to make it a little more equitable. 

Caroline Norton was a gutsy woman. She was appallingly treated in a society dominated by the desires of men. And she reacted by working hard to reverse some of the worst abuses that she knew so well from having suffered them herself.

That’s the kind of person we need as badly today as we did back then.