After the Camden Town murder, her mental and physical health began to deteriorate, and she spent most of her time away from London. She still saw Sickert now and then and continued to help him as best she could until she severed their relationship for good in 1913. A year later she was dead from cancer of the uterus.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE DAUGHTERS OF COBDEN
Ellen Melicent Ashburner Cobden was born on August 18, 1848, in Dunford, the family’s old farmhouse near the village of Heyshott, in West Sussex.
At the end of May 1860, when Walter was born in Munich, the eleven-year-old Ellen was spending the spring in Paris. She had saved a sparrow that had fallen out of its nest in the garden. “A dear little tame thing it will eat out of my hand and perch upon my finger,” she wrote a pen pal. Ellen’s mother, Kate, was planning a lovely children’s party with fifty or sixty guests, and was planning to take Ellen to the circus and to a picnic in an “enormous tree” with a staircase leading to a table on top. Ellen had just learned a special trick of “putting an egg in a wine bottle,” and now and then her father wrote special letters just to her.
Life back in England was not so enchanting. In the most recent letter from Richard Cobden, he told his daughter that a violent storm had slammed the family estate and torn up thirty-six trees by the roots. A severe cold front destroyed most of the shrubbery on the estate, including the evergreens, and the vegetable garden would be barren come summer. The report was like a foreshadowing of the evil that had entered the world through a distant city in Germany. Ellen’s future husband would soon enough cross the Channel and settle in London, where he would uproot the lives of many people, including hers.
Numerous biographies have been written about Ellen’s father, Richard Cobden. He was one of twelve children, and his childhood was a desolate, harsh one. He was sent away from home at the age of ten after his father’s disastrous business sense spiraled the family to ruin. Cobden’s growing-up years were spent working for his uncle, a merchant in London, and attending a school in Yorkshire. This period of his life was physical and emotional torture, and in years to come Cobden could scarcely bear to speak of it.
Suffering bears the fruits of unselfishness and love in some people, and it did with him. There was nothing bitter or unkind about Richard Cobden, not even when he was battered by his most derisive detractors during his polarizing political career. His great passion was people, and he was never far from his pained memories of watching farmers, including his own father, lose everything they owned. Cobden’s compassion for people gave him the mission of repealing the Corn Laws, a terrible piece of legislation that kept families poor and hungry.
The Corn Laws (corn meant grain) were enacted in 1815 when the Napoleonic Wars had left England almost in a state of famine. Bread was precious, and it was illegal for a baker to sell his loaves until after they had been out of the oven for at least twenty-four hours. If bread was stale, people weren’t as likely to overeat and would “waste not and want not.” The penalty for defying this law was harsh. Bakers were fined as much as five pounds and court costs. As a small boy, Richard Cobden watched the desperate come to Dunford and beg for alms or food that his own family could not afford.
Only well-off farmers and landlords profited, and they were the ones who would make sure that the price of grain remained as high in good times as it had been in bad. The landlords who wanted to keep prices inflated were the majority in Parliament, and the Corn Laws were not hard to pass. The logic was simple: Place impossibly high duties on imported foreign grains, and the supply in England stays low, the prices artificially high. The enactment of the Corn Laws was disastrous for the common worker, and riots broke out in London and other parts of the country. The laws would remain in effect until 1846, when Cobden won his fight to repeal them.