Ultimately the barriers proved insufficient. Henry continued to spend time with the older gentleman and became careless at his job, to the point of dismissal. Henry’s “guardians” reported back to his parents that he had stayed out all night with Geldart and that the relationship between the two men was indeed sexual, as the parents had feared.15 Shortly thereafter, it was discovered that Henry had embezzled twenty-one pounds from the shop where he worked, and the police began to pursue him on charges of committing unnatural acts. Henry managed to elude capture long enough to arrive in the Scottish town where his parents lived. It is unclear what sort of protection Henry might have felt they could provide him, but none was forthcoming. Thomas Franklin refused to see his son, stating that “I have so often forgiven his disobedience to us his parents, but in this his last act, which is a severe stab to me, I will not screen him from justice.”16 Henry fled the town and was apprehended a short time later, at which point he confessed his criminal and sexual acts to the police.
Yet even after such an emotional conflict between father and son, Thomas did not shut Henry out of his life or leave him entirely to the mercies of the legal system. He wrote to the Home Office asking that his son be tried for the theft alone rather than the unnatural crime. He did not want to ascribe any of the responsibility for the sexual relationship to his son, and instead wrote to ask the home secretary to punish and make an example of Joseph Geldart, “to protect society from such monsters.” Thomas wrote, “I verily believe [Henry] would have been active and attentive to his masters, and a comfort to us again his parents had he not been bent by this wicked man and made a victim to his base purpose.”17 Although there was little more he could do, Thomas traveled to London to witness his son’s police-court hearing and wrote at least one further letter to the Home Office to plead for the mitigation of charges.
For the Franklins, controlling Henry was more important than hiding his relationship with another man, and they considered enlisting the help of friends preferable to any form of appeal to the state. They suspected the sexual nature of Henry’s relationship with Geldart before recruiting London friends to help keep an eye on the two men.18 Their decision sharply differs from the recorded concerns of Geldart’s family. In contrast to the Franklins, this family appears to have been wealthy and well connected. Their letters express very different concerns about how unnatural-assault charges might affect the family’s future.
In his first letter to Home Secretary Earl Grey, written on 8 July 1850, Thomas Geldart declared that he was “somewhat emboldened” to write “from being well-known as the Secretary of the town Missionary Society by the Dow[ager]. Lady Grey.”19 After dropping this hint of a personal connection, he went on to say that he wrote not so for the sake of his imprisoned brother but instead for his father, who was on his deathbed. He stated that the entire family must be assembled to pay their last respects. It was somewhat ironic to request Joseph’s release for this reason, because in the same letter Thomas describes his brother’s actions as a cause of great distress for their father and a significant factor in the rapid decline of his health. But neither the crisis within the Geldart family nor the connection between them and the Greys was enough to sway the home secretary, and the request for an early release was denied.20
Any appearance of genuine emotion in Thomas Geldart’s first letter quickly gave way to practical concerns in the second. After relating to Earl Grey that his father had just died, he again made a plea for his brother’s release, this time wholly for the benefit of the family’s reputation. Thomas wrote: “No tongue can tell the anguish of my spirit at the prospect of the public exposure of the pain that must be endured by many most respectable and innocent parties on the occasion of the funeral, should [my brother] not be permitted to be present.”21 The Geldart family had been spared the shame of Joseph’s arrest and trial more than ten months before because his name had appeared in the papers only as “Joseph Smith.”22 The Geldarts felt that Joseph’s absence from the funeral would have raised difficult questions among their friends and family, but they were nevertheless forced to face them, as the Home Office once again denied the request for release.
This example and others like it provide evidence of divergent concerns based on income and social class. While apprehensive about their son’s morals, the Franklins had to consider their family’s economic position as well. They could not afford to remove their son from temptation despite their fears for him, and at least part of their hope for their son’s reform was based on their need for him to be of some economic use to them in later life. The Geldarts, by contrast, based their appeal in the first instance on sentimental and familial emotion, and in the second instance on the need to maintain appearances within their social network. That the Geldarts and the Franklins were typical of their respective economic classes in these concerns is suggested by other examples in the court records.23
No acrimonious exchanges between the Franklins and the Geldarts occurred, presumably because the families existed in separate social and economic worlds and could ignore one another. The Franklins referred to Joseph Geldart in their letters only briefly, as a corrupting, older, “wicked man” who bore the responsibility for what occurred, while the Geldarts made no mention of Henry or the other Franklins at all. Yet cases in which a man was accused of taking advantage of someone younger and poorer were often those that generated the strongest confrontations between families, especially when the families had a long-standing relationship. These cases show just how powerful the charge of sex between men could be in disrupting usual patterns of class deference and gender hierarchy between and within families.
Such results were evident when John Richard Seymour was accused of engaging in unnatural acts with Charles Macklin. The significance of this case is indicated by the fact that in addition to the newspaper coverage it received, it was also one of the five trials selected for inclusion in the Annual Register of 1828. Along with providing a historical summary, Parliamentary summary, and upper-class obituaries, every year’s issue of the Annual Register summarized a handful of significant court cases. In the Annual Register account, John Richard Seymour was described as “a gentleman of rank, fortune, and education,” who, in spite of these social advantages, had been taken to court and ultimately convicted of unnatural acts on the word of only his servants.24 Because at that time all upper- and middle-class households had at least one servant, the role of the servants in this case was of concern to all men of even modest property.25
The courtroom testimony revealed that once the household staff of six began to suspect an affair between the master of the house and the young servant Charles Macklin, they organized themselves to spy on the two men. Phoebe Hopkins, the lady’s maid and head of the female servants, took the lead in the early stages of the investigation. She testified that “it was agreed between the servants to watch the parties. . . . I saw Hanna Watts (a nursery maid) kneeling on the steps, and looking under the door. She spoke to me, and I went to the door, and looked under. I saw Macklin leaning on the bed, and Mr. Seymour behind him.”26 Hopkins went on to describe the sexual acts they observed between the two men, of which the Annual Register noted only that “the witness here described, in the most explicit terms, what cannot be repeated.”27 The secret observations went on for several days, and several other servants took turns looking under the door to increase the number of witnesses. It was only after most of the household staff had witnessed sexual acts that Hopkins took the matter to Henry Boucher, the butler and head servant of the house. At the same time, Hopkins and three of the other female servants went to Mrs. Seymour and confronted her with the story of her husband’s behavior.
Although Phoebe Hopkins was well aware of the option of taking her charges to the courts, she and the rest of the household staff chose first to confront the Seymours. The family’s initial