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lurking.
    The Lord Chancellor had urged the Davies–Bywater–Pugh family to try to reach a compromise before the expensive public proceedings began. He wished they would make a ‘private arrangement, on account of the extraordinary delicacy of the investigation’, but neither Edward nor his mother would call off the hearing. Mrs Bywater wanted the business, and Edward – according to his counsel – wanted ‘to emancipate himself from the thraldom of his mother’. Francis Hobler had collected fifty-one affidavits in support of Edward’s sanity – many of them from old friends who testified to his eccentric, melodramatic nature and clumsy attempts at humour, and who placed his seeming bizarreness into the context of a lifetime. Hobler claimed that he could deliver the Lord Chancellor three times the fifty-one sworn statements, but that he did not want to overwhelm His Lordship.
    More bad news for Mrs Bywater was that one of the doctors sent along by the Lord Chancellor himself had strongly disagreed with the majority of medical men. Dr William MacMichael reported that, following several interviews, he had concluded that Edward had a theatrical manner, an over-polite way of conversing, a high opinion of himself, yet while ‘diffuse’ in conversation, he was coherent if he was patiently listened to. He seemed easily roused to anger, but he was not delusional. Dr MacMichael said that the seclusion at the Retreat had probably been good for him, and that if he were allowed to return to his Crouch End house he would fully recover his equilibrium. Since the cause of his ‘irritation’ was still
in situ
at Philpot Lane, it was not a good idea for him to return while his mother was there, wrote the doctor.
    Forty medical witnesses turned up at the Gray’s Inn Coffee House on Monday 14 December, the first day of the inquisition. This was a record number: not even Lord Portsmouth’s dilemma, six years earlier,had brought out such a crowd of physicians. Coroners’ inquests and lunacy inquisitions regularly took place in the largest ‘public’ building an area possessed, and very often these were inns and taverns. Competition for seats was keen, and the newspaper reporters noted the high proportion of beautifully dressed ladies of fashion who crammed themselves into the coffee house. The case would feature certain huge stars of the Bar, the brightest of whom was Henry Brougham, former Whig leader of the House who within a year would become Lord Chancellor himself; and with the likely chance that intimate and sexual matters not normally in the public realm would be discussed during the proceedings, this was the must-see show in town. (Four years earlier, Brougham’s closing address at a lunacy inquisition at the Gray’s Inn Coffee House had been accompanied by the sound of workmen hammering beneath him in an attempt to shore up the floor, which was straining under the weight of the multitude who had crowded into the room.)
    Like coroners’ inquests, inquisitions were heard before a ‘special jury’ which could vary in number between twelve and twenty-four, at the discretion of the Lord Chancellor. In an era when only male householders of property over a certain rateable value were permitted to serve as jurors, an additional limitation placed on the pool of lunacy jurymen was the ability to understand the medical as well as the legal arguments of a
de lunatico inquirendo
. Magistrates predominated on the special juries, and many of the same men turned up again and again as inquisition jurors.
    Proceedings in the Davies case were overseen by Commissioner William Phillimore, who told the jury they would need to be certain that Edward was unable to take care of himself and of his property. ‘Unsoundness of mind’ was the term that had been used since a landmark judgment of 1802 and was tantamount to ‘a declaration of lunacy’, he explained. ‘Unsoundness of mind, as when the mind had been worn out by cares, grief,