The 55-year-old ’flu-ridden John Charles Wallop, 3rd Earl of Portsmouth, his feet in a basin of warm water, shivered in the dock with fever but also with fear. Would the jury, assembled in 1823 in London’s jam-packed Freemason’s Hall at the end of an unpredecentally sensational two-week trial, find him eccentric, delusional, simple-minded or, instead, stark raving mad?
Elizabeth Foyster, a historian and senior lecturer at Clare College, Cambridge, was alerted to this enthralling, almost unbelievable true story with the caveat that the vastness of the material in Lambeth Palace archives concerning a scarcely remembered trial of a hugely wealthy, relatively obscure aristocrat had deterred anyone else from attempting to make sense of it. Foyster, a writer with a brilliant lightness of touch who preserves every illuminating detail, including the ‘shop tickets’ still attached to dresses worn for an indecently hasty wedding, was the perfect person to take on the challenge.
For long periods of his life the earl had ostensibly lived in his grand Hampshire house in the manner in which his class were expected to exist, managing his estates, socialising with the neighbours, marrying a decent woman, hobnobbing with the rich and famous.
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