The public outcry following the imprisonment for adultery, in 1840, of Margaret Semini, the Maltese wife of Englishman George Dalzel, did obtain some beneficial effect. With refined colonial duplicity, the Governor, Sir Henry Bouverie, exercised his prerogative of mercy, and ordered that the iron bars recently inserted in the windows of the cells be removed. Call it window dressing, I guess.
If the wife refused to obey her husband she forfeited all her rights, few as they were- Giovanni Bonello
We do not know how long Dalzel paid for his wife to remain in prison. If his was a vindictive disregard of money, he could have left her there for her whole lifetime. His career with the government progressed, eventually being appointed official vendue master, an obsolete job description for auctioneer. He passed away on July 1, 1852, aged 48. In the latter part of his stay in Malta he lived at 2, Strada Alessandro, Valletta. His remains were buried at Ta’ Braxia Protestant cemetery, Pietà.
In Malta, Parliament decriminalised adultery in 1972. In Michigan, US, marital infidelity can still carry a penalty of life imprisonment.
The Maltese Semini family made their own rather substantial contribution to criminology. The misadventures of the wretched Margaret underlined the necessity to discard the criminal precepts of the Code de Rohan and quite possibly added impetus to the national movement for law reform.
The first Maltese researcher to take an interest in criminology was Detective Inspector Joseph Semini (born 1884), who in 1926 published Some Points on Criminology – one of the first Maltese law books written in English. He based himself on Italian criminology, but never refers to his sources – he obviously feared that being associated with anything Italian might prejudice his career.
Another Semini was instrumental in bringing about a milestone change in British case law. In 1948 a Staffordshire jury convicted George Semini, a 24-year-old Maltese worker, of the murder by stabbing of Joseph Gibbons “for insulting his girlfriend” in Newcastle-under-Lyme. In his case, on appeal, the “malevolent, maverick and calamitous” Lord Goddard, CJ, for the first time ruled that the defence of “chance medley” (sudden fight) that downsized murder to manslaughter could not be pleaded under British law. Semini was hanged on January 27, 1949, and his case remains the leading textbook doctrine in manslaughter defences in the UK and other common-law countries.
On October 10, 1842, 26-year-old Giovanna Zimelli, from the parish of St Dominic, Valletta, married Simon Rose, a wealthy British merchant, almost 20 years her senior. Born in Dornoch, near Inverness, Scotland, on June 1, 1797, Dornoch had settled in Malta in the 1820s. The couple celebrated their marriage in both the Roman Catholic and Anglican rites. At the time of marriage, Mr Rose solemnly undertook in the records of the bishop’s court to raise any offspring in the Catholic faith.
Sadly for Zimelli, now Jane Rose, her husband was a staunch Presbyterian, an active supporter of St Andrew’s Scots Church in Valletta. When, in 1855, the new church was built, Mr Rose topped the list of subscribers, with a personal contribution of £125. For this, and for his loyal faith, he was appointed deacon of that church.
Giovanna was a daughter of Ettore Zimelli, who lived at 152, Strait Street, a government clerk earning £50 a year, but also the consul in Malta for the King of Sweden and Norway. Ettore had somehow introduced the historian Fortunato Panzavecchia to Marshal Auguste Marmont, one of Napoleon’s most distinguished generals, when he stopped in Malta on his way to Egypt. Another of Ettore’s daughters, Teresa Giuseppina, had also married an English Protestant, Ensign John Wardle, in 1829.
By the time marital troubles started, the couple had three children: Hector, John and Maryanne, all Roman Catholics by baptism and education. In 1849, Mr Rose made clear his intention of relocating the family to Liverpool, claiming his business interests required his presence there. His wife proved most unwilling to follow him. She claimed that her husband wanted to take the children to England to force them to change their religion, in breach of the solemn undertaking made to her and to the Catholic curia before the wedding.
Panicking, she obtained a warrant of impediment of departure against him and the children. At the husband’s request, the court revoked the impediment of departure as far as it restrained him, but left it in place for the children. The court proceedings after that turned most acrimonious, no holds barred. Both parties retained leading lawyers: the wife had Dr Paolo Sciortino, the husband Dr GioBatta Mifsud and Dr Ignatio Schembri, who battled each other right royally.
This case was considered pivotal enough to merit publication by the British Press in a pamphlet that contains the main pleadings and judgments, translated from the original Italian into English.
The lawyers had a field day, driving their points home with a rhetoric that today sounds slightly dated and pompous, and often couched in not too elegant invective “how rash and imprudent is the step foolishly taken by the plaintiff”; “the defendant cannot observe but with horror... that it should be lawful for a wife not to follow her husband. Was ever anything heard more unchristian or uncivilised than such a pretension?”
The other party countered with observing that these “are things of such and so great futility as not to merit any consideration, if they did not serve to show that he who has recourse to such silly remarks gives the best proof of the want, on his part, of solid and just reasons”. Much in this vein.
The husband then had the law all in his favour, and the very concept of equality between the spouses appeared like a sinful aberration. The law crowned the husband the head of the family. The wife had an obligation to obey him. He was the sole arbiter of where the family was to reside. If the wife refused to obey or to follow her husband, she forfeited all her rights, few as they were. Children were subject to his paternal and parental authority.
Mr Rose could not deny he had announced his intention to renege on his obligation to bring up the children as Catholics once he left Malta. He had declared to witness William John Stevens Jr that he believed abiding by his promise to raise his children as Catholics would be a greater sin than breaking his promise. So his lawyers resorted to quibbling: a manifest intention to break an obligation has no legal effects – it is only the actual breach that would be legally relevant. Also, that promise was made in the ecclesiastical court. So it was only binding there, not in the civil tribunals.
The wife made a big thing about how grateful she was to her husband, how conscious she was of her duty to obey him and to follow him wherever he ordered. But she stressed that the promise to bring the children up in the Catholic religion had been determining in her decision to marry him. No way would she have entered matrimony with him had she not obtained that reassurance from him.
On December 28, the civil court, presided over by Judge Paolo Grungo, decided in the husband’s favour and lifted the impediment of departure that had restrained the children from leaving Malta. Ms Rose appealed. Her husband was appalled that she had the temerity to appeal; he could not believe that a woman would be “applying to tribunal after tribunal – against her own husband!”
Even if it were true that the husband had said he wanted to relocate to England to be able to raise his children as Protestants, would this be any reason at all for the wife to refuse to follow her husband, or for the children to be held from him?
The Court of Appeal delivered a highly solomonic decision. Judges Ignazio Gavino Bonavita, Francesco Chapelle and Paolo Dingli on April 22, 1850, revoked the children’s impediment of departure, but imposed on the husband a condition to bind himself in the records of the court that, wherever the common children would be conveyed, “he will do nothing contrary to their being educated in the Roman Catholic religion”. It failed to add how this condition would be enforced in the Protestant courts of Protestant UK.
One could sympathise with the Court of Appeal, torn between applying a law heavily weighted in favour of the man, a devout deference to the British overlord, and a traditional support for the national religion. The conflict between these three concerns ended in a compromise that, in practice, only safeguarded the interests of the British husband.
The published story ends here, but there is a twist to it. Ms Rose eventually followed her husband to England (did she have a choice? He could have starved her), and the couple later returned to Malta, where they had other children. She died aged 42, probably following childbirth, on August 13, 1857. Her infant daughter died nine days later.
Giovanna Rose, born Zimelli, was buried in the Protestant Msida Bastion cemetery – an indication that, after all, she had turned Presbyterian herself. Her husband passed away, just short of his 82nd birthday, on March 2, 1879, and lies buried next to his wife. I think he has the more dominant grave.
Margaret Semini’s was one mixed marriage gone abysmally wrong; Jane Rose’s marriage more or less avoided shipwreck. Others, in different ways, flash bright light on the mores and politics of the times.
A serious incident in October 1856 highlights the full palette of all the colonial tensions, the bigotry, the blurred, even misguided sense of nationhood prevalent in 19th-century Malta. The facts speak for themselves, though the social, religious and cultural issues raised by mixed marriages will need to be eased into a proper historical perspective if we are to understand this tragi-comic event at all.
We know quite a few details of the episode as at least five newspapers gave this unsavoury happening some prominence. The morning of Wednesday, October 1, had been scheduled for the wedding in Queen Adelaide’s Protestant church (St Paul’s Anglican Pro-Cathedral) between the Englishman Robert Turner and a Maltese native, Maria Carmela Borg, maiden surname Mamo. This low-profile event somehow gave rise to popular rioting and to grievous breaches of the peace.
The groom worked as a mechanic “in Mr Jackson’s new steam bakery”. This almost certainly refers to Henry Lord Jackson (1824-1906) who in 1851 had built the large Malta Steam Flour Mill in Marsa and had another flour mill where the Valletta lift now stands. Turner’s bride, a Maltese widow, rather advanced in age and “of the lower classes”, kept a “slop shop” in Strada San Paolo, Valletta. The term slop shop, now no longer in use, referred to a commercial outlet which sold cheap ready-made clothes, mostly sailors’ or other military uniforms, but also second-hand garments.
The bride’s choice of English fashion was the spark that set the Maltese crowd on fire- Giovanni Bonello
On their way to the church for the nuptial ceremony (“to the hymeneal altar” as one journalist put it), or on their way out (the newspapers disagree), the spouses were met by a reception they never expected would crown the happy event. A hostile crowd, first made up of a few individuals but which eventually swelled to about 300 irate hoodlums, surrounded the couple and “mobbed and insulted the bridal party by hooting and screeching” according to one source, and “chased and hounded them among shouting, cat-calls, brawling, whistling and loud laughter” according to another.
This unworthy popular protest almost certainly erupted as a spontaneous outburst by the canaille, though the pro-Italian exiles and anti-Jesuit Mediterraneo alleges that the crowd had been “incited by persons whose civil and religious duties should instead have driven them to teach peace and tolerance” – an obvious dig at the Catholic clergy. In truth, none of the other printed media take up this rather implausible ‘incitement’ claim.
The different papers variously described the throng: an immense mob of scoundrels, ragamuffins, a crowd of vagabonds, rowdy demonstrators, a mob consisting of 200 or 300 people of the lowest rabble, a gang that never stopped insulting the couple, a very large number of market boys (probably those hangers-on who, for a small tip, carried the shopping home from the food market).
This was neither the first nor the last mixed marriage to take place in Malta. So what appeared so special about it to trigger such a widespread popular commotion, not recorded on other similar occasions? A number of destabilising elements concurred: most were ‘nationalistic’ in origin, but another one profiled a more social dimension.
Those very angry people saw Ms Borg as publicly betraying her Malteseness – she was marrying an Englishman, she was marrying a Protestant in a Protestant church, and to add the final insolence, she was wearing English fashions.
All three represented highly treasonable affronts to her fellow Maltese. Separately, each of these anti-Maltese blows would have irked her compatriots. Together, they sparked off a popular riot that turned nasty and could have turned nastier still.
The newspapers concur in identifying the most provocative element of them all: the bride’s choice of English fashion as the spark that set the Maltese crowd on fire. Except for some upper-crust locals who sucked up to their colonial overlord, the British residents and the Maltese community dressed differently, as if to underline their separate identities and hold on in a visible manner to their cultural disparity. Nationality may have simmered in the genes, but it had to be dress-coded: no way could the ruled wear the same clothes as the rulers.
The snobbish British Malta Times sneers at Ms Borg because what the upstart wore was “only an imitation of an English costume” – a low native who had settled for an approximate fake; the genuine thing only graced genuine owners of the country.
What offended the mob above anything else was that a Maltese woman actually had the temerity to wear an English bonnet! That, in native patriotic eyes, constituted the epitome of colonial subservience. L’Ordine decried the outrage that Ms Borg actually “wore a hat” on her way to church, the unspeakable horror; Il Portafoglio Maltese attributed the irresistible provocation to the fact that she flaunted clothes “in the new fashion”, including a hat, in an alien style described dismissively by the lower classes, as a la Ingliża. Borg found herself to be a loser on both fronts: a laughable parvenu for the British, a shameless renegade for the Maltese.
A pinch of social envy compounded the patriotic affront. Ms Borg had lived in straitened circumstances, and now, because she had hitched up with an English mechanic working in a flour mill, there she was, flashing clothes tal-puliti. One who always hid under a faldetta, now showing off in a bonnet?
“The lady was dressed out rather showily, wore an English bonnet (emphasis in the original) and carried a French parasol – this attracted the attention of a lot of market boys who had known her in seedy days when her modesty was covered by the faldetta”. It was just the right dose of class resentment useful to kick-start a revolt of the ragged.
That uncouth mob could forgive many things, but at trying to improve oneself and climb the social ladder the rabble drew the line – the politics of envy flourished then no less than it does now. If you belonged to the disadvantaged classes, you had to make sure you were seen to behave like one, and no overstepping of boundaries, please, or you faced punishment. Ms Borg, the unwitting revolutionary, broke all the taboos – religious, political, patriotic and social, in an attempt to make a misguided fashion statement on her wedding day.
To be concluded.