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than one visiting doctor noted the detailed instructions Edward gave to his staff. However, because the doctors hired by Mrs Bywater intended to claim that he was suffering from ‘monomania’ – a partial insanity that could leave most of the intellect undamaged – this acumen in business matters did not prove that Edward was of sound mind.
    On 26 August, Mrs Bywater told clerk William Low that ‘in a few days’ the entire property would be hers. But she was overestimating the speed at which the Lord Chancellor moved, and weeks passed as the petition for the lunacy inquisition was pondered. Mrs Bywater then sacked Low and placed her son-in-law, Cornelius Pugh, in charge of the clerks; she went on to dismiss more of the staff at Philpot Lane and instructed them not to swear to Edward’s sanity at the forthcoming hearing.
    At the Retreat, Edward had lost weight and he was described as looking skeletal. Dr Burrows refused Francis Hobler the right to visit his client (visits to an asylum inmate were at the discretion of the proprietor and the signatory of the lunacy order) so the attorney complained directly to the Lord Chancellor, who advised Burrows, on 15 September, that he must allow Edward to start preparing his case for the inquisition. Edward told Hobler that the male attendants at the Retreat persistently made accusation, by gesture and imitation, that he was ‘addicted to unnatural offences’. They would also lift up the back flaps of his coat as he passed them, indicating that they thought him a sodomite. He was often unable to stop crying. Two of the doctors hired by Mrs Bywater, John Haslam and George Tuthill, reported that he wept because he had still not had sight of his baby rabbits, born at Tom Belcher’s; on another occasion he cried when he recalled the sweetness of the gingerbread he had eaten at the Lincoln’s Inn pastry cook’s shop on his last night as a free man. ‘The British public are interested in the success of my cause,’ Edward told Haslam, who noted it down as evidence that Edward’s grandiosity was pathological. But it was Edward, not Haslam, who would be proved correct, and the doctor was to discoverthat the public furore about wrongful asylum incarceration was growing.

The Clapham Retreat was demolished not long after this map of 1870 was drawn. No image of the building has survived.
    In November, Dr Burrows’s keepers caused outrage again. They had been apprehended by a group of angry Lambeth locals who attempted to rescue Freeman Anderdon. Anderdon was an elderly eccentric bachelor, who, despite having a fortune of thousands of pounds, chose to live in a run-down cottage in impoverished York Street, Lambeth Marsh. In the summer of 1829, he had begun to spend large sums on paintings, and his hovel was filling up with artworks, to the horror of his brothers, who were hoping that when he died his money would come their way. He was well liked in the neighbourhood as an amiable old man who preferred to wear ancient clothes, ragged footwear and a battered, huge-brimmed straw hat. On the night of 1 November he was seized near his front-garden wicket gate by Burrows’s men. A policeman of the new Metropolitan force noticed the ensuing street melee and recognising that Burrows’s standard note (‘The bearers are two of my attendants, authorised by thefamily . . .’) was not a certificate of lunacy, took the attendants into custody and kept them overnight in the local watch-house; in the bag they carried the policeman found rope and manacles. Anderdon decided to prosecute Burrows for assault, and although the legal case would not ‘come on’ until the following April, the notion of Burrows being no better than a kidnapper or a ‘burker’ was firmly in the public mind as the Edward Davies inquisition approached. Being ‘Burrowsed’ entered London slang, and after dark, citizens had one more sinister phenomenon to be wary of if a carriage and two strangers appeared to be