[4] Charles Thomas Pearce lived for some time at St. Dunstan's Villa, Regent's Park, the home of his sponsor, Sir Richard Rawlinson Vyvyan (1800–1879), Tory politician, Fellow of the Royal Society, a geologist and a metaphysician.
It was also in 1849 that he was acquitted of a charge of manslaughter brought by the reformer Thomas Wakley,[3] (an appointed coroner) after his brother David Richard Pearce's death from cholera.
The prosecution dropped the case during trial after a judge concluded the death was unrelated to Pearce's attempt, authorised by another physician, to treat it by homoeopathy.
From 1872–76, he ran a Hydropathic & Homeopathic Clinic at 'Woodstock House', 19, Nottingham Place, York Gate, Marylebone, in London, until it was closed by a well-publicised scandal involving a fraudulent patient, named Frank Hans Hamilton, and Charles's matron – whom, it was intimated in court, had borne his child.
In 1878, he founded the Hydropathic Establishment & Sanatorium at Durleston Park, on the cliffs above Swanage, Dorset, with his much younger mistress, Annie Kay, who went by the pseudonym of 'Mrs.