William Weldon (officer of arms)

His estranged wife was Georgina Weldon, campaigner against the lunacy laws, a celebrated litigant and noted amateur soprano of the Victorian era.

[4] On the death of his grandmother Weldon inherited £10,000 a year and in 1870 he leased Tavistock House in Bloomsbury, which had a small theatre that had been added by Charles Dickens, a former resident.

By 1878 he wanted to reduce or stop this payment, and tried to use Georgina's interest in spiritualism to prove that she was insane in an attempt to have her confined in a lunatic asylum kept by L. Forbes Winslow.

Georgina realised that something was wrong and, when people from the asylum arrived to take her away by force, she escaped and evaded capture for the seven days that the order remained valid.

However, having proved her point, Mrs Weldon publicised her story by giving interviews to the daily newspapers and the spiritualist press in an attempt to provoke her husband and the two doctors into suing her for libel.

[2] In 1882 Georgina Weldon successfully sued her husband for the restoration of her conjugal rights, but he refused to return to Tavistock House, the marital home.