Part 1

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MRS. GURNEY’S APOLOGY.

MRS. GURNEY’S APOLOGY.

IN JUSTIFICATION OF MRS. ——’S FRIENDSHIP.

PHILADELPHIA. WILLIAM BROTHERHEAD. No. 218 South Eighth Street. MDCCCLX.

[_Entered, according to the Act of Congress, July 23, 1860, by_ WILLIAM BROTHERHEAD, _in the Clerk’s Office of the District Court of the United States, for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania._]

PREFACE.

In presenting to the world the extraordinary document which follows, the Publisher deems it fit, by way of Preface, to advert briefly to the principal circumstances and persons connected with this great outrage, which it embodies, upon the sensibilities and morals of the public—distinctly repudiating, himself, any endorsement of the views of the misguided writer, and deeply regretting the scandal which has attached in consequence of her acts to the influential Society of Friends, and to the numerous high families, with which she is allied, both in England and America.

The Gurney Family is known wherever on the Eastern or Western continent, philanthropy, charity, liberality in its most comprehensive meaning, scholarship and literary ability of the highest order, or wealth in the most profuse exuberance, becomes the theme of the social circle or the text of the author’s pen. It is, moreover, one of the most notable and ancient of the English aristocracy, dating from the time of the Conqueror, ever since when they have held wealth and position in the County of Norfolk, where nearly all the various members of the name still reside. In England’s early and stormy days they rendered essential service to the State in many famous battles both at home and abroad—for it was at a comparatively recent date only that this till then redoubtable race became identified, through some of its branches, with the pacific and lowly doctrines of the Quakers.

They are closely connected with families here of the very highest respectability of character—the celebrated John Joseph Gurney having taken a wife from this city; and no man in the Society of Friends ranked equal to him in his day, either in religious influence, mental ability, or excellence of heart. His indeed gave the name to the Gurneyite Orthodox Friends, of which branch of that sect he was the acknowledged leader. He died about twelve years ago.

His only son, John Henry Gurney, who was the heir not merely of his father’s wealth, and name, but of his good character, is the betrayed husband of this story. He is the present representative in Parliament of King’s Lynn, Norfolkshire, and is noted for his liberal political sentiments. He is now forty years of age.

His wife, Mary Gurney, the author of this letter, was the daughter and only child of Richard Hanbury Gurney, a first cousin of John Joseph, and belonging to the elder, wealthier, and representative branch of the race—he, Richard, deceased only within a few years, having been a younger half-brother, and the only one, of the actual head of the Family—the venerable Hudson Gurney, of Keswick, F.R.S., F.A.S., Ex-High Sheriff of Norfolk, etc., etc.

Whilst Hudson Gurney it is true inherited principally the patrimonial estates, Richard, his half-brother, became the heir of his own mother, who had been a Miss Hanbury of the wealthy family of London brewers of that name. This fortune, over a million sterling, became at Richard’s death the inheritance of his daughter Mary, the author of this letter, now about twenty-eight years of age, and the mother of two or three children.

Samuel Gurney the eminent banker and philanthropist was a brother of John Joseph, and Mrs. Elizabeth Fry, whose labors and sacrifices to improve the discipline of the great prisons on both continents have won her a name to be envied, was his sister. Another sister was the wife, and zealous assistant, of Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, celebrated in the annals of British Emancipation.

Mrs. Gurney is thus allied by descent and marriage with families of the first note both in Europe and America, and holds in her own right an almost princely estate. She was constantly, up to the very period of her departure, anticipated in her lightest wish by a husband who knew no will but her own. With such surroundings, elevating her to the very highest sphere of English social life, with all its splendors and attractions, and securing to her the enjoyment of every rational pleasure, after thirteen years of married life, she voluntarily renounced her husband, her children and family, not in any moment of passion, but through a calm conviction of reason, as she herself states, and left England, the mistress of a common groom from her stables.

There can be no pardon nor extenuation for this great social crime.

But the motives which led to it are well worthy of the reader’s patient consideration. They are stated in her letter with logical precision, and at the same time with the apparent enthusiasm and tenderness of a heart which had suffered and loved intensely; and whatever the explanation, whether deducible from an exaggeration of facts, or an artful use of language, her words really seem to be stamped with the seal of social martyrdom.

Whilst the general tenor of the doctrines she enunciates cannot fail to administer a shock to every healthy mind, it is not necessary for the cause of morality, and it would be unjust indeed, to denounce her letter _in toto_.

Every authentic history of personal experience forms a helpful addition for the guidance and behavior of mankind.

The deplorable consequences of an early and hasty marriage, as portrayed in her own history, may serve as a useful beacon to rash youth in all ages to come.

Her earnest plea on behalf of Personal Merit cannot fail to win its way to many hearts—at least in this Country, the foster-home of the plebeiance and of democracy.

But to her concluding argument especially are attention and respect due.

The investigations heretofore made in this Country and Europe have developed a frightful catalogue of diseases and deaths resulting from inter-marriages; and more recent examinations in the wards of Hospitals, in the Asylums for Feeble-minded Children, in Institutions for the Deaf and Dumb, and Blind, trace directly those monstrosities and defects of organization, in a preponderating number of cases, to marriages of this character. Whether her immediate example furnished any confirmation on this head, the meagre details of the whole affair, which have been permitted to be divulged, do not afford any certain information; that it has been so in other branches of her family, and that the dread of it was upon her own mind, is most apparent in her letter.

Her authoritative and vehement invective against these internecine marriages, it cannot be doubted, will draw prominent attention to the subject; and on this account, and many others, some of which have been indicated, Mrs. Gurney’s Letter requires at least no “apology” for being made public.

MRS. GURNEY’S

APOLOGY.

PARIS, _January_ —, 1860.

DEAR E * * *:

Your name has been always on my lips and in my heart, and you alone of all the world have never questioned me. I come to you again, E * * *, as I have so often—as I did when we were children, when you folded me trustfully in your arms—and say to you: I am as I was then; and I hear you say: Tell me nothing, for I believe you always, and there must be no questioning between us.

What I shall write to you will not be to cast a doubt upon our perfect and entire sympathy by any explanation, but to fulfil what I feel to be a duty towards you—to put you in possession of all that may weigh in the least degree with those at all understanding my nature, before whom you care to justify your steadfast attachment to me, though the performance of this duty, dear E * * *, may impose upon me the revelation of my inmost life. If, in your judgment, there will be here presented aught of such justification, show it to them, wholly or partially, just as you think well, remembering that this is for your sake, not my own. My justification it would be needful to make before a much wider tribunal, for I have perpetrated an act which the whole conventional world have leagued together, in ignorance, prejudice and hypocrisy, to denominate a crime, and I could expect little or no sympathy from that wide bar of public judgment that knows nothing of me nor of my surroundings, and which never could be made to comprehend my nature; or, comprehending it, would not even then, at this day, be prepared to accept any argument or explanation in extenuation of my course.

E * * *, you remember me at fourteen; you remember the time we returned from the visit to Wymondham; you remember how, repulsing the cold influences overcoming me in spite of myself, I dashed down in the carriage the plain bonnet they had asked me to wear that day, and stamped on it, and let all my hair fall down upon my shoulders, and said: I am free. You remember it well. And then, at last, when the carriage reached the house, how we threw ourselves into each other’s arms, and I had no more courage, and feared to avow the act, telling them you sat down on it—and you were still; and then how I cried all night, that I denied the truth of my nature—that I was not free.

E * * *, that day repeated itself through my life—in every act, in the worship of God, in my marriage, in the very conception of my children; and I looked forward to its last repetition only in my death.

It is past now—my living death is over. I have chosen between the universal condemnation of the world and my own sense of right; not in any sublime way, but in the simple, truthful way my nature craved. I lie down in the evening and rise in the morning, for the first time since a child, blessing God for my existence. Nothing can rob me of this now but death alone. I have that treasure to a woman’s heart that a woman can alone understand—the open avowal of the love that controls her being. With it, part of it, all of it, is the man, free from prejudice, filled with every noble aspiration, who is its object. Should I, I ask you, have preferred the reputation which the world accords to her who, yielding to its forms, becomes daily the living lie it approves?

They who go on disposing of human instincts, human affections and human brains in their own way, according to their own sense of right and wrong, should go further; they should change their meeting-houses and churches into monasteries and convents, and watch the religious aspirations they would control by daily and nightly supervision. Into their homes they should introduce harem espionage, that the bodily instincts, which they hold in enforced compliance, may never have an opportunity to assert the truth about themselves.

Heresy and adultery, the two excommunicative words, which social life suspends over the doomed head of a woman who thinks and acts contrary to its rules of action, have not that full power and effect they are supposed to have. Nothing but actual physical imprisonment of the body, and, if it were possible, of the mind, can prevent a woman from becoming the secret avower of her belief and of her instincts. The excommunicative words do not restrain from either offence; they only develop that unquestionable vice of woman’s weakness, hypocrisy.

The brain, when infidel, is infidel by its own proper organization, and they who assail its infidelity strike vainly at the God who made it, and implanted it in every newborn soul; the body, when infidel to the connection in which it is placed, is so by its own proper instincts, and they, who attempt to control it, strike, likewise, at a law of its creation.

When will narrow-minded, bigoted men learn that the one absolute, controlling law of a woman’s nature is love—that it is the only good and desirable thing about a woman—the only reliable thing about her? They can trust her, with her love, to live in a house of prostitution; they cannot control her, without it, by the most absolute, social ostracism.

And this love, what is it? It is a power present always in the world, which, recognized by two like natures, thenceforth binds them to each other, beyond the control, and in violation, if need be, of any other law—as my mother’s love bound her to my father, and my father’s love bound him to her, and gave me my being—a being cradled in the tenderest, truest passion that ever existed between two human beings.

How long have I been in ascertaining and yielding myself up to this divine law! What wasted years! What subjections derogatory to the vilest nature! What hypocrisy, dishonoring to God! What suffering have I caused this man, assigned to me alone, since that day on which I first in him recognized myself!

It seems so long ago; it seems far longer to me than the time makes it; it seems as if an eternity had rolled backward to that day.

Oh, I had questionings of right and wrong in that fathomless interval of despair, far other, far deeper, than all I had been taught or could be taught by their lips—questionings that brought me to the very brink of death.

Why should I have loved him? Why do I love him? What is it I love in him? All this I have asked myself a thousand times, and there has never been, can never be, an answer to all this questioning.

Yet I say now to you: Why should I not love him? What is there not to love in him? My heart only answers: What is there in me that I should be loved, that I should know that joy which in its tiniest moment makes all years of other time a mockery?

And these questions do we ask each other daily and nightly forever.

And yet there is one reason, they say, why I should not have loved him—one word there is which the world places as an impassable barrier between us—a word that has never crossed my lips till now—a meaningless word, and yet involving in their eyes a crime as great as that adultery which I commit—just as great, for both are equally meaningless as touching our relation.

And that word expresses the social position he bore me. Rather than have been his lawful wife even, I might have been a king’s mistress, or any nobleman’s paramour, with less offence.

And I, who was the reputable bawd of marriage rites, was I above him? I, a daily offence against decency in obedience to the same social law that would have forced him to life-long humility? Was I above him? How? In what way? I, sunk, in the abasement of my own weak unnatural compliance, below the veriest nameless outcast? Could I be above anything? Was he not at least my peer? He, who, if we leave too such vapid questions of distinction, is Hyperion to a Satyr compared in person with me—short, fat, little body that I am!

I have silently asked myself in his arms, when I dared not soil our lips with their utterance, about these words—groom and adulterer. Yet well I knew that they had no relation to our love—that they were but words—that a true soul no social contamination defiles or degrades—that nobility unrecognized and virtue an outcast, wherever placed, are eternally the same.

I had learned these lessons from a parent’s lips. The example of my own true-hearted mother had taught me this. My own life had been given me in violation of society’s teachings.

Noble-hearted woman! who could say (I their child, and the only one that blessed at last their union, nearly a year old then:) Richard Gurney, I have withholden from you nothing; I have sacrificed all at the altar of love—even my little Marian—yet I ask no formal bond of union in return; I care not for it. What I had when our little one’s life began—what I have now—what I know nothing can deprive me of now—your love—contents me. And he as nobly answered: Not for the sake of it, Mary, for it will have but little acknowledgment from my kindred or the world; but for the pride of the open avowal, and for the sake of our little girl, I marry you.

And this love, so true, so self-immolating, met, as he anticipated, with no approbation from his family. You remember how my husband, as an especial favor, asked Miss ——, and would solicit the members of his family, to accompany me to see my mother—a woman as far above them all in every instinct of her soul as was my father—the true representative of the Lords of Gournai and Le Braii.

Yet such was the affectation of superiority they always persevered in!

I know the world says we who are of English lineage never look so low to find high things.

This is not, and was never, true of me nor of my blood. I would, were it needful to find my ideal, as my father before me, search through any situation, just as men dig down for jewels; and I would have delved to the uttermost profound for that which I now possess. But he whom I loved was not so far; he was near me by the permission of that social law we have offended. The home of his family became established near my own. He was oft actually beside me, and separated only by that word from me; nay, he had right to touch me by permission of this social law—was charged temporarily with the safety of my life even—could speak to me, but respectfully—respectfully! He who was in reality of kindred blood, and made for me—for me—whom they paid court to, not because of the instinct of that blood, but because of the narrow thrift of my kinsmen.

But enough of this. I might have spared myself the contempt that tingles through my veins.

I loved him, E * * *; that was all. He became all I did, all I said, my very life. If I say more I may err, for I truly know no more, and shall never know more than this.

The whole scope and measure of a woman’s heart and brain, and the whole purpose of her being, is love; and her whole knowledge forces itself into one inquiry: Am I worthy of the love of him I love? And does he love me? But I have thought over all this social matter, and have asked myself if I could have loved him better if he had not been what he was—if he had been a member of Parliament? Well, they had been plenty in our family—there were, among the rest, uncle Hudson, and cousin Charles, and cousin Edward Buxton, and cousin Priscilla’s husband; so, too, father had consented to be; and finally, Jackey himself was there, and filling Walpole’s chair, or at least the edge of it. And what was it but too palpable a sham? We all knew this—men and women—and we lived on it meanly, enjoying the empty honor and the empty praises of those in truth below us, because they so stupidly praised us. Oh, it was so foolish, all this member of Parliament pride! I loved William rather because he was not a member of Parliament—at least because it was not his aspiration. And then, if he had been an elder of the meeting? He!—what think you of that, E * * *? Or my Lord Bishop of Norwich—the Lord of diluted _pater nosters_—was he above him? Are these the things to marry a breathing woman to? Does any one think a _liaison_ with the Bishop would have ennobled me?—or the embraces of the elder?

It is scarcely needful to say to you, my dear, that in the above there is not the slightest personal disrespect intended to Mr. Pelham or any other individual being.

True men are not such. A woman’s instincts repel such forms of men. You may dress the real as meanly as an American slave, or you may elaborate the attire of the counterfeit to the antipodes of this—to pontifical robes—and the living soul of a woman will never fail to distinguish the false from the true.

Why you yourself, E * * *, would have wept your eyes out, I am sure, if I could have deliberately linked myself to the lifeless purpose in which the vitality of such beings ends.

He is not one of these. He is a man, E * * *, whom I love. Do you wonder I love him? It is because he is a man—a man, and not a hollow make-believe.

It is so with every true woman. In her love she recognizes no distinction of position. The gods of her idolatry, like the statues of the Greeks—whether standing in a rough warehouse or in the Louvre—remain unchanged in the calmness of their beauty and power. We ask nothing more of them but themselves, to gaze upon them, to become intoxicated, and to die with the love of them. Such seems to me the man to whom, by the profoundest law of my nature, I yield my being.

But will the world understand this? Perhaps it is the accident of my place and estate, that, surrounding me with what passes by the name of power, made me see its emptiness—that, uniting me to the highest representative of a religion in the person of a son who put it lightly off, made its meaningless character apparent—that, teaching me to strengthen a family distinction by the unconscious sacrifice of myself to him in whose control I had been somehow left, taught me to question if it were right, and at last to rise above and throw off the chains of an unnatural compliance.

My intercourse and secret correspondence with you from my early girlhood taught you how wayward, how passionate I was; and those letters are so much a part of me that I cannot write anything again as they were written.

You have preserved them; read them again, even to the days that followed my unnatural blood-kin union and its results.

Blood-kin union it was. Intermarriage always.

There was the marriage of my husband’s uncle John with my aunt Elizabeth, first cousins.

Blood-kin union of my husband’s father and mother, third cousins.

Intermarriage of my husband’s uncle, Henry Birkbeck, with Jane Gurney, third cousins.

Intermarriage of my husband’s father with Mary Fowler, cousin of his first wife.

Is it strange that such unions should prove unfortunate? Elizabeth Gurney and Jane Birkbeck only survived their marriages a year. Jane Gurney, my husband’s mother, lived but four or five years of marriage life.

There, too, in the case of grandfather and aunt Agatha, was the anomaly of father and daughter marrying sister and brother.

There was the marriage of my husband’s cousin Henry with Jane Birkbeck, his second cousin.

Then came the marriage of Catharine Gurney with her first cousin, Edward Buxton.

Then Rachel with Thomas Buxton, another pair of first cousins.

About a year thence, after the interesting grief on his part at the death of his aunt Fry, our uncle Buxton, and his old Balls, John Henry brought about his marriage with me, both of us the great grandchildren of the same pair—I, a thoughtless girl then staying at Earlham, and he nearly twice my age. But I don’t blame them. Heaven knows their ignorance of my nature, and the utter want of congeniality in everything between his and me.

You know the ideal my heart and passions craved, and you know this reality circumstances and family considerations brought me; and you know from the day of that marriage I was silent. For when body and soul were in this, at last, both gone, I resolved to bear all patiently and submissively—to act and be the lie to the last. Indeed, as years wore on, it became almost my nature. I lost my inner light, as they say. I became a woman to look down from my social position and dwell in the proprieties forever.

There was then but one hope for me, and that hope was based upon the fact that I could not write to you. The pure, simple instincts of my girlhood, the ungratified passions, the real intelligence, lingered in me still. I dared not write to you—to you, who knew me so well, I dared not confess what my life had become. Yet more—I still had faith in my nature, because I felt I was silently degrading the crowning act of my mother’s life by my weak and unnatural submission. I had faith over all when I first shrunk from the compliance with my vow, and when I prayed its living fruit might be in her image and not in mine. I felt then the force of nature * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *