Author Russell Croft has come to a different conclusion to mine regarding the soundness of mind of William Windham. In Inconvenient People, I briefly cover the “Windham Lunacy Commission” to illustrate how even the most bizarre and seemingly irrational behaviour could be considered perfectly sane if the jury were suspicious of the motives of the doctor who was claiming that a wealthy individual was a “lunatic”.

Dr Forbes Benignus Winslow, Windham’s chief medical accuser of insanity, was enduring a great deal of criticism on the grounds that he was over-diagnosing “mental disease” in people who were simply eccentric. What caused astonishment at the Windham Commission was Dr Winslow’s “scientific” finding of what he called “moral paralysis” – a diagnosis that was openly derided during the hearing. In fact, this episode contributed to the Lord Chancellor considering whether to ban all medical evidence from lunacy inquisitions and to allow, instead, the jurymen to rely on their own common sense by listening only to non-medical witnesses and interviewing the alleged lunatic at the start (rather than during) the proceedings.

My take is that William Windham was – unlike virtually everyone else in my book – genuinely mentally troubled (Dr Winslow’s daft diagnosis notwithstanding). But in his recently published novel Bring Him in Mad, author Russell Croft sees the young heir as a victim of his greedy uncle (who instigated the lunacy inquisition) and believes that witnesses had been bribed to make up stories about Windham’s behaviour.

“The real reason his relatives wanted him declared mad was that he had married Agnes Willoughby, a famous ‘pretty horsebreaker’,” Russell Croft wrote to me. “They wanted to invalidate the marriage and render any issue illegitimate. His uncle over-gilded things, however, and the suborned evidence of disgusting practices given at the inquisition proved counter-productive.”

So there you have it.

Bring Him in Mad is published by Create Space and is available as a paperback and digital download, priced £8.50. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Bring-Him-Mad-Russell-Croft/dp/1481025465/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=bring+him+in+mad&qid=1590584434&s=books&sr=1-1