She Stands Accused
by Victor MacClure · English · Gutenberg #488 · 424,311 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: She Stands Accused
Author: Victor MacClure
Release date: April 1, 1996 [eBook #488]
Most recently updated: July 29, 2012
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/488
Credits: Produced by Mike Lough and David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SHE STANDS ACCUSED ***
Produced by Mike Lough
SHE STANDS ACCUSED
By Victor Macclure
Being a Series of Accounts of the Lives and Deeds of Notorious Women,
Murderesses, Cheats, Cozeners, on whom Justice was Executed, and of
others who, Accused of Crimes, were Acquitted at least in Law; Drawn
from Authenticated Sources
TO RAFAEL SABATINI TO WHOSE VIRTUES AS AN AUTHOR AND AS A FRIEND THE
WRITER WISHES HIS BOOK WERE WORTHIER OF DEDICATION
I: INTRODUCTORY
II: A FAIR NECK FOR THE MAIDEN
III: THE COUNTESS AND THE COZENER
IV: A MODEL FOR MR HOGARTH
V: ALMOST A LADY
VI: ARSENIC A LA BRETONNE
VII: THE MERRY WIDOWS
INDEX
I. -- INTRODUCTORY
I had a thought to call this book Pale Hands or Fair Hands Imbrued--so
easy it is to fall into the ghastly error of facetiousness.
Apart, however, from the desire to avoid pedant or puerile humour,
re-examination of my material showed me how near I had been to crashing
into a pitfall of another sort. Of the ladies with whose encounters with
the law I propose to deal several were assoiled of the charges
against them. Their hands, then--unless the present ruddying of female
fingernails is the revival of an old fashion--were not pink-tipped,
save, perhaps, in the way of health; nor imbrued, except in soapsuds. My
proposed facetiousness put me in peril of libel.
Interest in the criminous doings of women is so alive and avid among
criminological writers that it is hard indeed to find material which has
not been dealt with to the point of exhaustion. Does one pick up in a
secondhand bookshop a pamphlet giving a verbatim report of a trial in
which a woman is the central figure, and does one flatter oneself that
the find is unique, and therefore providing of fresh fields, it is
almost inevitable that one will discover, or rediscover, that the case
has already been put to bed by Mr Roughead in his inimitable manner.
What a nose the man has! What noses all these rechauffeurs of crime
possess! To use a figure perhaps something unmannerly, the pigs of
Perigord, which, one hears, are trained to hunt truffles, have snouts no
keener.
Suppose, again, that one proposes to deal with the peccancy of women
from the earliest times, it is hard to find a lady, even one whose name
has hitherto gleamed lurid in history, to whom some modern writer has
not contrived by chapter and verse to apply a coat of whitewash.
Locusta, the poisoner whom Agrippina, wanting to kill the Emperor
Claudius by slow degrees, called into service, and whose technique Nero
admired so much that he was fain to put her on his pension list, barely
escapes the deodorant. Messalina comes up in memory. And then one
finds M. Paul Moinet, in his historical essays En Marge de l'histoire,
gracefully pleading for the lady as Messaline la calomniee--yes, and
making out a good case for her. The Empress Theodora under the pen of
a psychological expert becomes nothing more dire than a clever little
whore disguised in imperial purple.
On the mention of poison Lucretia Borgia springs to mind. This is the
lady of whom Gibbon writes with the following ponderous falsity:
In the next generation the house of Este was sullied by a sanguinary and
incestuous race in the nuptials of Alfonso I with Lucretia, a bastard of
Alexander VI, the Tiberius of Christian Rome. This modern Lucretia might
have assumed with more propriety the name of Messalina, since the woman
who can be guilty, who can even be accused, of a criminal intercourse
with a father and two brothers must be abandoned to all the
licentiousness of a venal love.
That, if the phrase may be pardoned, is swatting a butterfly with a
sledge-hammer! Poor little Lucretia, described by the excellent M.
Moinet as a "bon petit coeur," is enveloped in the political ordure
slung by venal pamphleteers at the masterful men of her race. My friend
Rafael Sabatini, than whom no man living has dug deeper into Borgia
history, explains the calumniation of Lucretia in this fashion: Adultery
and promiscuous intercourse were the fashion in Rome at the time of
Alexander VI. Nobody thought anything of them. And to have accused the
Borgia girl, or her relatives, of such inconsiderable lapses would have
been to evoke mere shrugging. But incest, of course, was horrible. The
writers paid by the party antagonistic to the Borgia growth in power
therefore slung the more scurrile accusation. But there is, in truth,
just about as much foundation for the charge as there is for the other,
that Lucretia was a poisoner. The answer to the latter accusation, says
my same authority, may take the form of a question: WHOM DID LUCRETIA
POISON? As far as history goes, even that written by the Borgia enemies,
the reply is, NOBODY!
Were one content, like Gibbon, to take one's history like snuff there
would be to hand a mass of caliginous detail with which to cause
shuddering in the unsuspecting reader. But in mere honesty, if in
nothing else, it behoves the conscientious writer to examine the
sources of his information. The sources may be--they too frequently
are--contaminated by political rancour and bias, and calumnious
accusation against historical figures too often is founded on mere envy.
And then the rechauffeurs, especially where rechauffage is made from
one language to another, have been apt (with a mercenary desire to
give their readers as strong a brew as possible) to attach the darkest
meanings to the words they translate. In this regard, and still apropos
the Borgias, I draw once again on Rafael Sabatini for an example of what
I mean. Touching the festivities celebrating Lucretia's wedding in the
Vatican, the one eyewitness whose writing remains, Gianandrea Boccaccio,
Ferrarese ambassador, in a letter to his master says that amid singing
and dancing, as an interlude, a "worthy" comedy was performed. The
diarist Infessura, who was not there, takes it upon himself to describe
the comedy as "lascivious." Lascivious the comedies of the time commonly
were, but later writers, instead of drawing their ideas from the
eyewitness, prefer the dark hints of Infessura, and are persuaded that
the comedy, the whole festivity, was "obscene." Hence arises the
notion, so popular, that the second Borgia Pope delighted in shows which
anticipated those of the Folies Bergere, or which surpassed the danse du
ventre in lust-excitation.
A statue was made by Guglielmo della Porta of Julia Farnese, Alexander's
beautiful second mistress. It was placed on the tomb of her brother
Alessandro (Pope Paul III). A Pope at a later date provided the lady,
portrayed in 'a state of nature,' with a silver robe--because, say
the gossips, the statue was indecent. Not at all: it was to prevent
recurrence of an incident in which the sculptured Julia took a static
part with a German student afflicted with sex-mania.
I become, however, a trifle excursive, I think. If I do the blame lies
on those partisan writers to whom I have alluded. They have a way of
leading their incautious latter-day brethren up the garden. They hint at
flesh-eating lilies by the pond at the path's end, and you find nothing
more prone to sarcophagy than harmless primulas. In other words, the
beetle-browed Lucretia, with the handy poison-ring, whom they promise
you turns out to be a blue-eyed, fair-haired, rather yielding little
darling, ultimately an excellent wife and mother, given to piety and
good works, used in her earlier years as a political instrument by
father and brother, and these two no worse than masterful and ambitious
men employing the political technique common to their day and age.
II
Messalina, Locusta, Lucretia, Theodora, they step aside in this
particular review of peccant women. Cleopatra, supposed to have poisoned
slaves in the spirit of scientific research, or perhaps as punishment
for having handed her the wrong lipstick, also is set aside. It were
supererogatory to attempt dealing with the ladies mentioned in the Bible
and the Apocrypha, such as Jael, who drove the nail into the head of
Sisera, or Judith, who cut off the head of Holofernes. Their stories are
plainly and excellently told in the Scriptural manner, and the adding
of detail would be mere fictional exercise. Something, perhaps, might
be done for them by way of deducing their characters and physical
shortcomings through examination of their deeds and motives--but this
may be left to psychiatrists. There is room here merely for a soupcon of
psychology--just as much, in fact, as may afford the writer an easy turn
from one plain narrative to another. You will have no more of it than
amounts, say, to the pinch of fennel that should go into the sauce for
mackerel.
Toffana, who in Italy supplied poison to wives aweary of their husbands
and to ladies beginning to find their lovers inconvenient, and who thus
at second hand murdered some six hundred persons, has her attractions
for the criminological writer. The bother is that so many of them have
found it out. The scanty material regarding her has been turned over so
often that it has become somewhat tattered, and has worn rather thin
for refashioning. The same may be said for Hieronyma Spara, a direct
poisoner and Toffana's contemporary.
The fashion they set passed to the Marquise de Brinvilliers, and she,
with La Vigoureux and La Voisin, has been written up so often that the
task of finding something new to say of her and her associates looks far
too formidable for a man as lethargic as myself.
In the abundance of material that criminal history provides about women
choice becomes difficult. There is, for example, a plethora of women
poisoners. Wherever a woman alone turns to murder it is a hundred to one
that she will select poison as a medium. This at first sight may seem a
curious fact, but there is for it a perfectly logical explanation, upon
which I hope later to touch briefly. The concern of this book, however,
is not purely with murder by women, though murder will bulk largely.
Swindling will be dealt with, and casual allusion made to other crimes.
But take for the moment the women accused or convicted of poisoning.
What an array they make! What monsters of iniquity many of them
appear! Perhaps the record, apart from those set up by Toffana and the
Brinvilliers contingent, is held by the Van der Linden woman of Leyden,
who between 1869 and 1885 attempted to dispose of 102 persons, succeeded
with no less than twenty-seven, and rendered at least forty-five
seriously ill. Then comes Helene Jegado, of France, who, according to
one account, with two more working years (eighteen instead of sixteen),
contrived to envenom twenty-six people, and attempted the lives of
twelve more. On this calculation she fails by one to reach the der
Linden record, but, even reckoning the two extra years she had to work
in, since she made only a third of the other's essays, her bowling
average may be said to be incomparably better.
Our own Mary Ann Cotton, at work between 1852 and 1873, comes in third,
with twenty-four deaths, at least known, as her bag. Mary Ann operated
on a system of her own, and many of her victims were her own children.
She is well worth the lengthier consideration which will be given her in
later pages.
Anna Zwanziger, the earlier 'monster' of Bavaria, arrested in 1809, was
an amateur compared with those three.
Mrs Susannah Holroyd, of Ashton-under-Lyne, charged in September of 1816
at the Lancashire Assizes with the murder by poison of her husband,
her own son, and the infant child of Anna Newton, a lodger of hers, was
nurse to illegitimate children. She was generally suspected of having
murdered several of her charges, but no evidence, as far as I can learn,
was brought forward to give weight to the suspicion at her trial. Then
there were Mesdames Flanagan and Higgins, found guilty, at Liverpool
Assizes in February 1884, of poisoning Thomas Higgins, husband of the
latter of the accused, by the administration of arsenic. The ladies
were sisters, living together in Liverpool. With them in the house in
Skirvington Street were Flanagan's son John, Thomas Higgins and his
daughter Mary, Patrick Jennings and his daughter Margaret.
John Flanagan died in December 1880. His mother drew the insurance
money. Next year Thomas Higgins married the younger of the sisters, and
in the year following Mary Higgins, his daughter, died. Her stepmother
drew the insurance money. The year after that Margaret Jennings,
daughter of the lodger, died. Once again insurance money was drawn, this
time by both sisters.
Thomas Higgins passed away that same year in a house to which what
remained of the menage had removed. He was on the point of being buried,
as having died of dysentery due to alcoholism, when the suspicions of
his brother led the coroner to stop the funeral. The brother had heard
word of insurance on the life of Thomas. A post-mortem revealed the fact
that Thomas had actually died of arsenic poisoning; upon which discovery
the bodies of John Flanagan, Mary Higgins, and Margaret Jennings were
exhumed for autopsy, which revealed arsenic poisoning in each case. The
prisoners alone had attended the deceased in the last illnesses. Theory
went that the poison had been obtained by soaking fly-papers. Mesdames
Flanagan and Higgins were executed at Kirkdale Gaol in March of 1884.
Now, these are two cases which, if only minor in the wholesale
poisoning line when compared with the Van der Linden, Jegado, and Cotton
envenomings, yet have their points of interest. In both cases the guilty
were so far able to banish "all trivial fond records" as to dispose of
kindred who might have been dear to them: Mrs Holroyd of husband and
son, with lodger's daughter as makeweight; the Liverpool pair of nephew,
husband, stepdaughter (or son, brother-in-law, and stepniece, according
to how you look at it), with again the unfortunate daughter of a
lodger thrown in. If they "do things better on the Continent"--speaking
generally and ignoring our own Mary Ann--there is yet temptation to
examine the lesser native products at length, but space and the scheme
of this book prevent. In the matter of the Liverpool Locustas there is
an engaging speculation. It was brought to my notice by Mr Alan Brock,
author of By Misadventure and Further Evidence. Just how far did the use
of flypapers by Flanagan and Higgins for the obtaining of arsenic serve
as an example to Mrs Maybrick, convicted of the murder of her husband in
the same city five years later?
The list of women poisoners in England alone would stretch interminably.
If one were to confine oneself merely to those employing arsenic the
list would still be formidable. Mary Blandy, who callously slew her
father with arsenic supplied her by her lover at Henley-on-Thames in
1751, has been a subject for many criminological essayists. That she has
attracted so much attention is probably due to the double fact that she
was a girl in a very comfortable way of life, heiress to a fortune of
L10,000, and that contemporary records are full and accessible. But
there is nothing essentially interesting about her case to make it
stand out from others that have attracted less notice in a literary way.
Another Mary, of a later date, Edith Mary Carew, who in 1892 was found
guilty by the Consular Court, Yokohama, of the murder of her husband
with arsenic and sugar of lead, was an Englishwoman who might have given
Mary Blandy points in several directions.
When we leave the arsenical-minded and seek for cases where other
poisons were employed there is still no lack of material. There is, for
example, the case of Sarah Pearson and the woman Black, who were tried
at Armagh in June 1905 for the murder of the old mother of the latter.
The old woman, Alice Pearson (Sarah was her daughter-in-law), was
in possession of small savings, some forty pounds, which aroused the
cupidity of the younger women. Their first attempt at murder was with
metallic mercury. It rather failed, and the trick was turned by means of
three-pennyworth of strychnine, bought by Sarah and mixed with the old
lady's food. The murder might not have been discovered but for the fact
that Sarah, who had gone to Canada, was arrested in Montreal for some
other offence, and made a confession which implicated her husband and
Black. A notable point about the case is the amount of metallic mercury
found in the old woman's body: 296 grains--a record.
Having regard to the condition of life in which these Irishwomen lived,
there is nothing, to my mind, in the fact that they murdered for forty
pounds to make their crime more sordid than that of Mary Blandy.
Take, again, the case of Mary Ansell, the domestic servant, who, at
Hertford Assizes in June 1899, was found guilty of the murder of her
sister, Caroline, by the administration of phosphorus contained in a
cake. Here the motive for the murder was the insurance made by Ansell
upon the life of her sister, a young woman of weak intellect confined
in Leavesden Asylum, Watford. The sum assured was only L22 10s. If Mary
Blandy poisoned her father in order to be at liberty to marry her lover,
Cranstoun, and to secure the fortune Cranstoun wanted with her, wherein
does she shine above Mary Ansell, a murderess who not only poisoned her
sister, but nearly murdered several of her sister's fellow-inmates of
the asylum, and all for twenty odd pounds? Certainly not in being less
sordid, certainly not in being more 'romantic.'
There is, at root, no case of murder proved and accepted as such which
does not contain its points of interest for the criminological writer.
There is, indeed, many a case, not only of murder but of lesser
crime, that has failed to attract a lot of attention, but that yet,
in affording matter for the student of crime and criminal psychology,
surpasses others which, very often because there has been nothing of
greater public moment at the time, were boomed by the Press into the
prominence of causes celebres.
There is no need then, after all, for any crime writer who wants to
fry a modest basket of fish to mourn because Mr Roughead, Mr. Beaufroy
Barry, Mr Guy Logan, Miss Tennyson Jesse, Mr Leonard R. Gribble, and
others of his estimable fellows seem to have swiped all the sole and
salmon. It may be a matter for envy that Mr Roughead, with his uncanny
skill and his gift in piquant sauces, can turn out the haddock and hake
with all the delectability of sole a la Normande. The sigh of envy will
merge into an exhalation of joy over the artistry of it. And one may
turn, wholeheartedly and inspired, to see what can be made of one's own
catch of gudgeon.
III.
Kipling's line about the female of the species has been quoted,
particularly as a text for dissertation on the female criminal, perhaps
rather too often. There is always a temptation to use the easy gambit.
It is quite probable that there are moments in a woman's life when she
does become more deadly than the male. The probability is one which no
man of age and experience will lack instance for making a fact. Without
seeking to become profound in the matter I will say this: it is but
lightly as compared with a man that one need scratch a woman to come on
the natural creature.
Now, your natural creature, not inhibited by reason, lives by theft,
murder, and dissimulation. It lives, even as regards the male, but for
one purpose: to continue its species. Enrage a woman, then, or frighten
her into the natural creature, and she will discard all those petty
rules invented by the human male for his advantage over, and his safety
from, the less disciplined members of the species. All that stuff about
'honour,' 'Queensberry rules,' 'playing the game,' and what not will go
by the board. And she will fight you with tooth and talon, with lies,
with blows below the belt--metaphorically, of course.
It may well be that you have done nothing more than hurt her pride--the
civilized part of her. But instinctively she will fight you as the
mother animal, either potentially or in being. It will not occur to her
that she is doing so. Nor will it occur to you. But the fact that she is
fighting at all will bring it about, for fighting to any female animal
means defence of her young. She may not have any young in being. That
does not affect the case. She will fight for the ova she carries, for
the ova she has yet to develop. Beyond all reason, deep, instinct deep,
within her she is the carrier of the race. This instinct is so profound
that she will have no recollection in a crisis of the myriads of her
like, but will think of herself as the race's one chance to persist.
Dangerous? Of course she's dangerous--as dangerous as Nature! Just as
dangerous, just as self-centred, as in its small way is that vegetative
organism the volvox, which, when food is scarce and the race is
threatened, against possible need of insemination, creates separate
husband cells to starve in clusters, while 'she' hogs all the
food-supply for the production of eggs.
This small flight into biology is made merely for the dim light it may
cast on the Kipling half-truth. It is not made to explain why women
criminals are more deadly, more cruel, more deeply lost in turpitude,
than their male colleagues. But it may help to explain why so many
crime-writers, following Lombroso, THINK the female more deadly.
There is something so deeply shocking in the idea of a woman being other
than kind and good, something so antagonistic to the smug conception
of Eve as the "minist'ring angel, thou," that leaps to extremes in
expression are easy.
A drunken woman, however, and for example, is not essentially more
degraded than a drunken man. This in spite of popular belief. A
nymphomaniac is not essentially more degraded than a brothel-haunting
male. It may be true that moral sense decays more quickly in a woman
than in a man, that the sex-ridden or drink-avid woman touches the deeps
of degradation more quickly, but the reasons for this are patent. They
are economic reasons usually, and physical, and not adherent to any
inevitably weaker moral fibre in the woman.
Women as a rule have less command of money than men. If they earn what
they spend they generally have to seek their satisfactions cheaply; and,
of course, since their powers of resistance to the debilitating effects
of alcohol are commonly less than those of men, they more readily lose
physical tone. With loss of health goes loss of earning power, loss of
caste. The descent, in general, must be quicker. It is much the same in
nymphomania. Unless the sex-avid woman has a decent income, such as
will provide her with those means whereby women preserve the effect of
attractiveness, she must seek assuagement of her sex-torment with men
less and less fastidious.
But it is useless and canting to say that peccant women are worse than
men. If we are kind we say so merely because we are more apprehensive
for them. Safe women, with but rare exceptions, are notably callous
about their sisters astray, and the "we" I have used must be taken
generally to signify men. We see the danger for erring women, danger
economic and physical. Thinking in terms of the phrase that "a woman's
place is the home," we wonder what will become of them. We wonder
anxiously what man, braver or less fastidious than ourselves, will
accept the burden of rescuing them, give them the sanctuary of a home.
We see them as helpless, pitiable beings. We are shocked to see them
fall so low.
There is something of this rather maudlin mentality, generally speaking,
in our way of regarding women criminals. To think, we say, that a WOMAN
should do such things!
But why should we be more shocked by the commission of a crime by a
woman than by a man--even the cruellest of crimes? Take the male and
female in feral creation, and there is nothing to choose between them in
the matter of cruelty. The lion and the lioness both live by murder, and
until gravidity makes her slow for the chase the breeding female is by
all accounts the more dangerous. The she-bear will just as readily eat
up a colony of grubs or despoil the husbandry of the bees as will her
mate. If, then, the human animal drops the restraints imposed by law,
reverting thereby to the theft, murder, and cunning of savagery,
why should it be shocking that the female should equal the male in
callousness? Why should it be shocking should she even surpass the male?
It is quite possible that, since for physiological reasons she is nearer
to instinctive motivation than the male, she cannot help being more
ruthless once deterrent inhibition has been sloughed. But is she in fact
more dangerous, more deadly as a criminal, than the male?
Lombroso--vide Mr Philip Beaufroy Barry in his essay on Anna
Zwanziger--tells us that some of the methods of torture employed by
criminal women are so horrible that they cannot be described without
outraging the laws of decency. Less squeamish than Lombroso or Mr
Barry, I gather aloud that the tortures have to do with the organs of
generation. But male savages in African and American Indian tribes have
a punishment for adulterous women which will match anything in that
line women have ever achieved, and men in England itself have wreaked
perverted vengeance on women in ways indescribable too. Though it may
be granted that pain inflicted through the genitals is particularly
sickening, pain is pain all over the body, and must reach what might be
called saturation-point wherever inflicted. And as regards the invention
of sickening punishment we need go no farther afield in search for
ingenuity than the list of English kings. Dirty Jamie the Sixth of
Scotland and First of England, under mask of retributive justice, could
exercise a vein of cruelty that might have turned a Red Indian green
with envy. Moreover, doesn't our word expressing cruelty for cruelty's
sake derive from the name of a man--the Marquis de Sade?
I am persuaded that the reason why so many women murderers have made
use of poison in their killings is primarily a simple one, a matter of
physique. The average murderess, determined on the elimination of, for
example, a husband, must be aware that in physical encounter she would
have no chance. Then, again, there is in women an almost inborn aversion
to the use of weapons. Once in a way, where the murderess was of
Amazonian type, physical means have been employed for the slaying.
In this regard Kate Webster, who in 1879 at Richmond murdered and
dismembered Mrs Julia Thomas, springs to mind. She was, from all
accounts, an exceedingly virile young woman, strong as a pony, and with
a devil of a temper. Mr Elliot O'Donnell, dealing with her in his essay
in the "Notable British Trials" series, seems to be rather at a
loss, considering her lack of physical beauty, to account for her
attractiveness to men and to her own sex. But there is no need to
account for it. Such a thing is no phenomenon.
I myself, sitting in a taberna in a small Spanish port, was once
pestered by a couple of British seamen to interpret for them in their
approaches to the daughter of the house. This woman, who had a voice
like a raven, seemed able to give quick and snappy answers to the chaff
by frequenters of the taberna. Few people in the day-time, either men
or women, would pass the house if 'Fina happened to be showing without
stopping to have a word with her. She was not at all gentle in manner,
but children ran to her. And yet, without being enormously fat, 'Fina
must have weighed close on fifteen stone. She had forearms and biceps
like a coal-heaver's. She was black-haired, heavy-browed, squish-nosed,
moled, and swarthy, and she had a beard and moustache far beyond the
stage of incipiency. Yet those two British seamen, fairly decent men,
neither drunk nor brutish, could not have been more attracted had 'Fina
had the beauty of the Mona Lisa herself. I may add that there were other
women handy and that the seamen knew of them.
This in parenthesis, I hope not inappropriately.
Where the selected victim, or victims, is, or are, feeble-bodied you
will frequently find the murderess using physical means to her end.
Sarah Malcolm, whose case will form one of the chief features of this
volume, is an instance in point. Marguerite Diblanc, who strangled
Mme Reil in the latter's house in Park Lane on a day in April 1871,
is another. Amelia Dyer, the baby-farmer, also strangled her charges.
Elizabeth Brownrigg (1767) beat the feeble Mary Clifford to death. I do
not know that great physical difference existed to the advantage of the
murderess between her and her older victim, Mrs Phoebe Hogg, who, with
her baby, was done to death by Mrs Pearcy in October 1890, but the fact
that Mrs Hogg had been battered about the head, and that the head had
been almost severed from the body, would seem to indicate that the
murderess was the stronger of the two women. The case of Belle Gunness
(treated by Mr George Dilnot in his Rogues March[1]) might be cited.
Fat, gross-featured, far from attractive though she was, her victims
were all men who had married or had wanted to marry her. Mr Dilnot
says these victims "almost certainly numbered more than a hundred." She
murdered for money, using chloral to stupefy, and an axe for the actual
killing. She herself was slain and burned, with her three children, by
a male accomplice whom she was planning to dispose of, he having arrived
at the point of knowing too much. 1907 was the date of her death at La
Porte, U.S.A.
It occurs when the female killer happens to be dramatical-minded that
she will use a pistol. Mme Weissmann-Bessarabo, who, with her daughter,
shot her husband in Paris (August 1920), is of this kind. She and the
daughter, Paule-Jacques, seem to have seen themselves as wild, wild
women from the Mexico where they had sometime lived, and were always
flourishing revolvers.
I would say that the use of poison so much by women murderers has
reason, first, in the lack of physique for violent methods, but I would
put alongside that reason this other, that women poisoners usually have
had a handy proximity to their victims. They have had contact with their
victims in an attendant capacity. I have a suspicion, moreover, that a
good number of women poisoners actually chose the medium as THE KINDEST
WAY. Women, and I might add not a few men, who would be terribly shocked
by sight or news of a quick but violent death, can contemplate with
relative placidity a lingering and painful fatal illness. Propose to a
woman the destruction of a mangy stray cat or of an incurably diseased
dog by means of a clean, well-placed shot, and the chances are that she
will shudder. But--no lethal chamber being available--suggest poison,
albeit unspecified, and the method will more readily commend itself.
This among women with no murderous instincts whatever.
I have a fancy also that in some cases of murder by poison, not only by
women, the murderer has been able to dramatize herself or himself ahead
as a tender, noble, and self-sacrificing attendant upon the victim.
No need here, I think, to number the cases where the ministrations of
murderers to their victims have aroused the almost tearful admiration of
beholders.
I shall say nothing of the secrecy of the poison method, of the chance
which still exists, in spite of modern diagnosis, that the illness
induced by it will pass for one arising from natural causes. This is
ground traversed so often that its features are as familiar as those of
one's own house door. Nor shall I say anything of the ease with which,
even in these days, the favourite poison of the woman murderer, arsenic,
can be obtained in one form or another.
One hears and reads, however, a great deal about the sense of power
which gradually steals upon the poisoner. It is a speculation upon
which I am not ready to argue. There is, indeed, chapter and verse for
believing that poisoners have arrived at a sense of omnipotence. But if
Anna Zwanziger (here I quote from Mr Philip Beaufroy Barry's essay on
her in his Twenty Human Monsters), "a day or two before the execution,
smiled and said it was a fortunate thing for many people that she was to
die, for had she lived she would have continued to poison men and women
indiscriminately"; if, still according to the same writer, "when the
arsenic was found on her person after the arrest, she seized the packet
and gloated over the powder, looking at it, the chronicler assures us,
as a woman looks at her lover"; and if, "when the attendants asked her
how she could have brought herself calmly to kill people with whom she
was living--whose meals and amusements she shared--she replied that
their faces were so stupidly healthy and happy that she desired to see
them change into faces of pain and despair," I will say this in no way
goes to prove the woman criminal to be more deadly than the male. This
ghoulish satisfaction, with the conjectured feeling of omnipotence, is
not peculiar to the woman poisoner. Neill Cream had it. Armstrong had
it. Wainewright, with his reason for poisoning Helen Abercrombie--"Upon
my soul I don't know, unless it was that her legs were too thick"--is
quite on a par with Anna Zwanziger. The supposed sense of power does not
even belong exclusively to the poisoner. Jack the Ripper manifestly had
something of the same idea about his use of the knife.
As a monster in mass murder against Mary Ann Cotton I will set you
the Baron Gilles de Rais, with his forty flogged, outraged, obscenely
mutilated and slain children in one of his castles alone--his total
of over two hundred children thus foully done to death. I will set you
Gilles against anything that can be brought forward as a monster in
cruelty among women.
Against the hypocrisy of Helene Jegado I will set you the sanctimonious
Dr Pritchard, with the nauseating entry in his diary (quoted by Mr
Roughead) recording the death of the wife he so cruelly murdered:
March 1865, 18, Saturday. Died here at 1 A.M. Mary Jane, my own beloved
wife, aged thirty-eight years. No torment surrounded her bedside [the
foul liar!]--but like a calm peaceful lamb of God passed Minnie away.
May God and Jesus, Holy Ghost, one in three, welcome Minnie! Prayer on
prayer till mine be o'er; everlasting love. Save us, Lord, for Thy dear
Son!
Against the mean murders of Flanagan and Higgins I will set you Mr
Seddon and Mr Smith of the "brides in the bath."
IV
I am conscious that in arguing against the "more deadly than the male"
conception of the woman criminal I am perhaps doing my book no great
service. It might work for its greater popularity if I argued the
other way, making out that the subjects I have chosen were monsters
of brutality, with arms up to the shoulders in blood, that they were
prodigies of iniquity and cunning, without bowels, steeped in hypocrisy,
facinorous to a degree never surpassed or even equalled by evil men.
It may seem that, being concerned to strip female crime of the lurid
preeminence so commonly given it, I have contrived beforehand to rob
the ensuing pages of any richer savour they might have had. But I don't,
myself, think so.
If these women, some of them, are not greater monsters than their male
analogues, monsters they still remain. If they are not, others of them,
greater rogues and cheats than males of like criminal persuasion, cheats
and rogues they are beyond cavil. The truth of the matter is that I
loathe the use of superlatives in serious works on crime. I will read, I
promise you, anything decently written in a fictional way about 'master'
crooks, 'master' killers, kings, queens, princes, and a whole peerage of
crime, knowing very well that never yet has a 'master' criminal had
any cleverness but what a novelist gave him. But in works on crime that
pretend to seriousness I would eschew, pace Mr Leonard R. Gribble, all
'queens' and other honorifics in application to the lost men and women
with whom such works must treat. There is no romance in crime. Romance
is life gilded, life idealized. Crime is never anything but a sordid
business, demonstrably poor in reward to its practitioners.
But, sordid or not, crime has its human interest. Its practitioners are
still part of life, human beings, different from law-abiding humanity by
God-alone-knows-what freak of heredity or kink in brain convolution. I
will not ask the reader, as an excuse for my book, to view the criminal
with the thought attributed to John Knox:
"There, but for the Grace of God, goes ----" Because the phrase might as
well be used in contemplation of John D. Rockefeller or Augustus John or
Charlie Chaplin or a man with a wooden leg. I do not ask that you should
pity these women with whom I have to deal, still less that you should
contemn them. Something between the two will serve. I write the book
because I am interested in crime myself, and in the hope that you'll
like the reading as much as I like the writing of it.
II. -- A FAIR NECK FOR THE MAIDEN
In her long history there can have been few mornings upon which
Edinburgh had more to offer her burghers in the way of gossip and rumour
than on that of the 1st of July, 1600. In this 'gate' and that 'gate,'
as one may imagine, the douce citizens must have clustered and broke
and clustered, like eddied foam on a spated burn. By conjecture, as they
have always been a people apt to take to the streets upon small occasion
as on large, it is not unlikely that the news which was to drift into
the city some thirty-five days later--namely, that an attempt on the
life of his Sacred Majesty, the High and Mighty (and Rachitic) Prince,
James the Sixth of Scotland, had been made by the brothers Ruthven in
their castle of Gowrie--it is not unlikely that the first buzz of the
Gowrie affair caused no more stir, for the time being at any rate, than
the word which had come to those Edinburgh folk that fine morning of
the first day in July. The busier of the bodies would trot from knot
to knot, anxious to learn and retail the latest item of fact and fancy
regarding the tidings which had set tongues going since the early hours.
Murder, no less.
If the contemporary juridical records, even what is left of them, be
a criterion, homicide in all its oddly named forms must have been a
commonplace to those couthie lieges of his Slobberiness, King Jamie. It
is hard to believe that murder, qua murder, could have been of much more
interest to them than the fineness of the weather. We have it, however,
on reasonable authority, that the murder of the Laird of Warriston did
set the people of "Auld Reekie" finely agog.
John Kincaid, of Warriston, was by way of being one of Edinburgh's
notables. Even at that time his family was considered to be old. He
derived from the Kincaids of Kincaid, in Stirlingshire, a family then
in possession of large estates in that county and here and there about
Lothian. His own property of Warriston lay on the outskirts of Edinburgh
itself, just above a mile from Holyroodhouse. Notable among his
possessions was one which he should, from all accounts, dearly have
prized, but which there are indications he treated with some contumely.
This was his wife, Jean Livingstone, a singularly beautiful girl, no
more than twenty-one years of age at the time when this story opens.
Jean, like her husband, was a person of good station indeed. She was a
daughter of the Laird of Dunipace, John Livingstone, and related through
him and her mother to people of high consideration in the kingdom.
News of the violent death of John Kincaid, which had taken place soon
after midnight, came quickly to the capital. Officers were at once
dispatched. Small wonder that the burghers found exercise for their
clacking tongues from the dawning, for the lovely Jean was taken by the
officers 'red-hand,' as the phrase was, for the murder of her husband.
With her to Edinburgh, under arrest, were brought her nurse and two
other serving-women.
To Pitcairn, compiler of Criminal Trials in Scotland, from indications
in whose account of the murder I have been set on the hunt for material
concerning it, I am indebted for the information that Jean and her women
were taken red-hand. But I confess being at a loss to understand it.
Warriston, as indicated, stood a good mile from Edinburgh. The informant
bringing word of the deed to town, even if he or she covered the
distance on horseback, must have taken some time in getting the proper
authorities to move. Then time would elapse in quantity before the
officers dispatched could be at the house. They themselves could hardly
have taken the Lady Warriston red-hand, because in the meantime the
actual perpetrator of the murder, a horse-boy named Robert Weir, in the
employ of Jean's father, had made good his escape. As a fact, he was
not apprehended until some time afterwards, and it would seem, from the
records given in the Pitcairn Trials, that it was not until four years
later that he was brought to trial.
A person taken red-hand, it would be imagined, would be one found in
such circumstances relating to a murder as would leave no doubt as to
his or her having "airt and pairt" in the crime. Since it must have
taken the officers some time to reach the house, one of two things must
have happened. Either some officious person or persons, roused by the
killing, which, as we shall see, was done with no little noise, must
have come upon Jean and her women immediately upon the escape of Weir,
and have detained all four until the arrival of the officers, or else
Jean and her women must have remained by the dead man in terror,
and have blurted out the truth of their complicity when the officers
appeared.
Available records are irritatingly uninformative upon the arrest of the
Lady Warriston. Pitcairn himself, in 1830, talks of his many "fruitless
searches" through the Criminal Records of the city of Edinburgh, the
greater part of which are lost, and confesses his failure to come on any
trace of the actual proceedings in this case, or in the case of Robert
Weir. For this reason the same authority is at a loss to know whether
the prisoners were immediately put to the knowledge of an assize, being
taken "red-hand," without the formality of being served a "dittay"
(as who should say an indictment), as in ordinary cases, before the
magistrates of Edinburgh, or else sent for trial before the baron
bailie of the regality of Broughton, in whose jurisdiction Warriston was
situated.
It would perhaps heighten the drama of the story if it could be learned
what Jean and her women did between the time of the murder and the
arrest. It would seem, however, that the Lady Warriston had some
intention of taking flight with Weir. One is divided between an idea
that the horse-boy did not want to be hampered and that he was ready for
self-sacrifice. "You shall tarry still," we read that he said; "and if
this matter come not to light you shall say, 'He died in the gallery,'
and I shall return to my master's service. But if it be known I shall
fly, and take the crime on me, and none dare pursue you!"
It was distinctly a determined affair of murder. The loveliness of Jean
Livingstone has been so insisted upon in many Scottish ballads,[2] and
her conduct before her execution was so saintly, that one cannot help
wishing, even now, that she could have escaped the scaffold. But there
is no doubt that, incited by the nurse, Janet Murdo, she set about
having her husband killed with a rancour which was very grim indeed.
"She has twa weel-made feet;
Far better is her hand;
She's jimp about the middle
As ony willy wand."
The reason for Jean's hatred of her husband appears in the dittay
against Robert Weir. "Forasmuch," it runs, translated to modern terms,
as whilom Jean Livingstone, Goodwife of Warriston, having conceived
a deadly rancour, hatred, and malice against whilom John Kincaid, of
Warriston, for the alleged biting of her in the arm, and striking her
divers times, the said Jean, in the month of June, One Thousand Six
Hundred Years, directed Janet Murdo, her nurse, to the said Robert
[Weir], to the abbey of Holyroodhouse, where he was for the time,
desiring him to come down to Warriston, and speak with her, anent the
cruel and unnatural taking away of her said husband's life.
And there you have it. If the allegation against John Kincaid was true
it does not seem that he valued his lovely wife as he ought to have
done. The striking her "divers times" may have been an exaggeration.
It probably was. Jean and her women would want to show there had been
provocation. (In a ballad he is accused of having thrown a plate at
dinner in her face.) But there is a naivete, a circumstantial air, about
the "biting of her in the arm" which gives it a sort of genuine ring.
How one would like to come upon a contemporary writing which would throw
light on the character of John Kincaid! Growing sympathy for Jean makes
one wish it could be found that Kincaid deserved all he got.
Here and there in the material at hand indications are to be found that
the Lady of Warriston had an idea she might not come so badly off on
trial. But even if the King's Majesty had been of clement disposition,
which he never was, or if her judges had been likely to be moved by her
youth and beauty, there was evidence of such premeditation, such fixity
of purpose, as would no doubt harden the assize against her.
Robert Weir was in service, as I have said, with Jean Livingstone's
father, the Laird of Dunipace. It may have been that he knew Jean before
her marriage. He seems, at any rate, to have been extremely willing to
stand by her. He was fetched by the nurse several times from Holyrood to
Warriston, but failed to have speech with the lady. On the 30th of June,
however, the Lady Warriston having sent the nurse for him once again, he
did contrive to see Jean in the afternoon, and, according to the dittay,
"conferred with her, concerning the cruel, unnatural, and abominable
murdering of the said whilom John Kincaid."
The upshot of the conference was that Weir was secretly led to a "laigh"
cellar in the house of Warriston, to await the appointed time for the
execution of the murder.
Weir remained in the cellar until midnight. Jean came for him at that
hour and led him up into the hall. Thence the pair proceeded to the room
in which John Kincaid was lying asleep. It would appear that they took
no great pains to be quiet in their progress, for on entering the room
they found Kincaid awakened "be thair dyn."
I cannot do better at this point than leave description of the murder as
it is given in the dittay against Weir. The editor of Pitcairn's Trials
remarks in a footnote to the dittay that "the quaintness of the ancient
style even aggravates the horror of the scene." As, however, the ancient
style may aggravate the reader unacquainted with Scots, I shall English
it, and give the original rendering in a footnote:
And having entered within the said chamber, perceiving the said whilom
John to be wakened out of his sleep by their din, and to pry over his
bed-stock, the said Robert came then running to him, and most cruelly,
with clenched fists, gave him a deadly and cruel stroke on the jugular
vein, wherewith he cast the said whilom John to the ground, from out his
bed; and thereafter struck him on his belly with his feet; whereupon he
gave a great cry. And the said Robert, fearing the cry should have been
heard, he thereafter, most tyrannously and barbarously, with his hand,
gripped him by the throat, or weasand, which he held fast a long time,
while [or until] he strangled him; during the which time the said John
Kincaid lay struggling and fighting in the pains of death under him.
And so the said whilom John was cruelly murdered and slain by the said
Robert.[3]
It will be seen that Robert Weir evolved a murder technique which,
as Pitcairn points out, was to be adopted over two centuries later in
Edinburgh at the Westport by Messrs Burke and Hare.
II
Lady Warriston was found guilty, and four days after the murder, on the
5th of July, was taken to the Girth Cross of Holyrood, at the foot
of the Canongate, and there decapitated by that machine which rather
anticipated the inventiveness of Dr Guillotin--"the Maiden." At the same
time, four o'clock in the morning, Janet Murdo, the nurse, and one of
the serving-women accused with her as accomplices were burned on the
Castle Hill of the city.
There is something odd about the early hour at which the executions took
place. The usual time for these affairs was much later in the day, and
it is probable that the sentence against Jean ran that she should be
executed towards dusk on the 4th of the month. The family of Dunipace,
however, having exerted no influence towards saving the daughter of the
house from her fate, did everything they could to have her disposed of
as secretly and as expeditiously as possible. In their zeal to have done
with the hapless girl who, they conceived, had blotted the family honour
indelibly they were in the prison with the magistrates soon after three
o'clock, quite indecent in their haste to see her on her way to the
scaffold. In the first place they had applied to have her executed at
nine o'clock on the evening of the 3rd, another unusual hour, but the
application was turned down. The main idea with them was to have Jean
done away with at some hour when the populace would not be expecting the
execution. Part of the plan for privacy is revealed in the fact of the
burning of the nurse and the "hyred woman" at four o'clock at the Castle
Hill, nearly a mile away from the Girth Cross, so--as the Pitcairn
Trials footnote says-"that the populace, who might be so early astir,
should have their attentions distracted at two opposite stations... and
thus, in some measure, lessen the disgrace of the public execution."
If Jean had any reason to thank her family it was for securing, probably
as much on their own behalf as hers, that the usual way of execution
for women murderers should be altered in her case to beheading by "the
Maiden." Had she been of lesser rank she would certainly have been
burned, after being strangled at a stake, as were her nurse and the
serving-woman. This was the appalling fate reserved for convicted
women[4] in such cases, and on conviction even of smaller crimes.
The process was even crueller in instances where the crime had been
particularly atrocious. "The criminal," says the Pitcairn account of
such punishment, "was 'brunt quick'!"
Altogether, the Dunipace family do not exactly shine with a good light
as concerns their treatment of the condemned girl. Her father stood
coldly aside. The quoted footnote remarks:
It is recorded that the Laird of Dunipace behaved with much apathy
towards his daughter, whom he would not so much as see previous to her
execution; nor yet would he intercede for her, through whose delinquency
he reckoned his blood to be for ever dishonoured.
Jean herself was in no mind to be hurried to the scaffold as early as
her relatives would have had her conveyed. She wanted (poor girl!) to
see the sunrise, and to begin with the magistrates granted her request.
It would appear, however, that Jean's blood-relations opposed the
concession so strongly that it was almost immediately rescinded. The
culprit had to die in the grey dark of the morning, before anyone was
likely to be astir.
In certain directions there was not a little heart-burning about the
untimely hour at which it was manoeuvred the execution should be carried
out. The writer of a Memorial, from which this piece of information is
drawn, refrains very cautiously from mentioning the objectors by name.
But it is not difficult, from the colour of their objections, to decide
that these people belonged to the type still known in Scotland as the
'unco guid.' They saw in the execution of this fair malefactor a moral
lesson and a solemn warning which would have a salutary and uplifting
effect upon the spectators.
"Will you," they asked the presiding dignitaries, and the
blood-relations of the hapless Jean, "deprive God's people of that
comfort which they might have in that poor woman's death? And will you
obstruct the honour of it by putting her away before the people rise out
of their beds? You do wrong in so doing; for the more public the death
be, the more profitable it shall be to many; and the more glorious, in
the sight of all who shall see it."
But perhaps one does those worthies an injustice in attributing cant
motives to their desire that as many people as possible should see Jean
die. It had probably reached them that the Lady Warriston's repentance
had been complete, and that after conviction of her sin had come to her
her conduct had been sweet and seemly. They were of their day and
age, those people, accustomed almost daily to beheadings, stranglings,
burnings, hangings, and dismemberings. With that dour, bitter,
fire-and-brimstone religious conception which they had through Knox from
Calvin, they were probably quite sincere in their belief that the public
repentance Jean Livingstone was due to make from the scaffold would
be for the "comfort of God's people." It was not so often that justice
exacted the extreme penalty from a young woman of rank and beauty. With
"dreadful objects so familiar" in the way of public executions, it was
likely enough that pity in the commonalty was "choked with custom
of fell deeds." Something out of the way in the nature of a dreadful
object-lesson might stir the hearts of the populace and make them
conscious of the Wrath to Come.
And Jean Livingstone did die a good death.
The Memorial[5] which I have mentioned is upon Jean's 'conversion' in
prison. It is written by one "who was both a seer and hearer of what
was spoken [by the Lady Warriston]." The editor of the Pitcairn Trials
believes, from internal evidence, that it was written by Mr James
Balfour, colleague of Mr Robert Bruce, that minister of the Kirk who
was so contumacious about preaching what was practically a plea of the
King's innocence in the matter of the Gowrie mystery. It tells how Jean,
from being completely apathetic and callous with regard to religion or
to the dreadful situation in which she found herself through her crime,
under the patient and tender ministrations of her spiritual advisers,
arrived at complete resignation to her fate and genuine repentance for
her misdeeds.
Her confession, as filleted from the Memorial by the Pitcairn Trials, is
as follows:
I think I shall hear presently the pitiful and fearful cries which
he gave when he was strangled! And that vile sin which I committed
in murdering my own husband is yet before me. When that horrible and
fearful sin was done I desired the unhappy man who did it (for my own
part, the Lord knoweth I laid never my hands upon him to do him evil;
but as soon as that man gripped him and began his evil turn, so soon as
my husband cried so fearfully, I leapt out over my bed and went to the
Hall, where I sat all the time, till that unhappy man came to me and
reported that mine husband was dead), I desired him, I say, to take me
away with him; for I feared trial; albeit flesh and blood made me think
my father's moen [interest] at Court would have saved me!
Well, we know what the Laird of Dunipace did about it.
"As to these women who was challenged with me," the confession goes on,
I will also tell my mind concerning them. God forgive the nurse, for
she helped me too well in mine evil purpose; for when I told her I was
minded to do so she consented to the doing of it; and upon Tuesday, when
the turn was done, when I sent her to seek the man who would do it,
she said, "I shall go and seek him; and if I get him not I shall seek
another! And if I get none I shall do it myself!"
Here the writer of the Memorial interpolates the remark, "This the nurse
also confessed, being asked of it before her death." It is a misfortune,
equalling that of the lack of information regarding the character of
Jean's husband, that there is so little about the character of the
nurse. She was, it is to be presumed, an older woman than her mistress,
probably nurse to Jean in her infancy. One can imagine her (the stupid
creature!) up in arms against Kincaid for his treatment of her "bonny
lamb," without the sense to see whither she was urging her young
mistress; blind to the consequences, but "nursing her wrath" and
striding purposefully from Warriston to Holyroodhouse on her strong
plebeian legs, not once but several times, in search of Weir! What is
known in Scotland as a 'limmer,' obviously.
"As for the two other women," Jean continues,
I request that you neither put them to death nor any torture, because I
testify they are both innocent, and knew nothing of this deed before it
was done, and the mean time of doing it; and that they knew they durst
not tell, for fear; for I compelled them to dissemble. As for mine own
part, I thank my God a thousand times that I am so touched with the
sense of that sin now: for I confess this also to you, that when that
horrible murder was committed first, that I might seem to be innocent, I
laboured to counterfeit weeping; but, do what I could, I could not find
a tear.
Of the whole confession that last is the most revealing touch. It is
hardly just to fall into pity for Jean simply because she was young and
lovely. Her crime was a bad one, much more deliberate than many that, in
the same age, took women of lower rank in life than Jean to the crueller
end of the stake. In the several days during which she was sending for
Weir, but failing to have speech with him, she had time to review her
intention of having her husband murdered. If the nurse was the prime
mover in the plot Jean was an unrelenting abettor. It may have been
in her calculations before, as well as after, the deed itself that the
interest of her father and family at Court would save her, should the
deed have come to light as murder. Even in these days, when justice is
so much more seasoned with mercy to women murderers, a woman in Jean's
case, with such strong evidence of premeditation against her, would
only narrowly escape the hangman, if she escaped him at all. But that
confession of trying to pretend weeping and being unable to find tears
is a revelation. I can think of nothing more indicative of terror and
misery in a woman than that she should want to cry and be unable to.
Your genuinely hypocritical murderer, male as well as female, can always
work up self-pity easily and induce the streaming eye.
It is from internal evidences such as this that one may conclude the
repentance of Jean Livingstone, as shown in her confession, to have been
sincere. There was, we are informed by the memorialist, nothing maudlin
in her conduct after condemnation. Once she got over her first obduracy,
induced, one would imagine, by the shock of seeing the realization of
what she had planned but never pictured, the murder itself, and probably
by the desertion of her by her father and kindred, her repentance was
"cheerful" and "unfeigned." They were tough-minded men, those Scots
divines who ministered to her at the last, too stern in their theology
to be misled by any pretence at finding grace. And no pretty ways of
Jean's would have deceived them. The constancy of behaviour which is
vouched for, not only by the memorialist but by other writers, stayed
with her until the axe fell.
III
"She was but a woman and a bairn, being the age of twenty-one years,"
says the Memorial. But, "in the whole way, as she went to the place of
execution, she behaved herself so cheerfully as if she had been going
to her wedding, and not to her death. When she came to the scaffold, and
was carried up upon it, she looked up to 'the Maiden' with two longsome
looks, for she had never seen it before."
The minister-memorialist, who attended her on the scaffold, says that
all who saw Jean would bear record with himself that her countenance
alone would have aroused emotion, even if she had never spoken a word.
"For there appeared such majesty in her countenance and visage, and
such a heavenly courage in her gesture, that many said, 'That woman is
ravished by a higher spirit than a man or woman's!'"
As for the Declaration and Confession which, according to custom, Jean
made from the four corners of the scaffold, the memorialist does not
pretend to give it verbatim. It was, he says, almost in a form of words,
and he gives the sum of it thus:
The occasion of my coming here is to show that I am, and have been, a
great sinner, and hath offended the Lord's Majesty; especially, of the
cruel murdering of mine own husband, which, albeit I did not with mine
own hands, for I never laid mine hands upon him all the time that he was
murdering, yet I was the deviser of it, and so the committer. But my
God hath been always merciful to me, and hath given me repentance for
my sins; and I hope for mercy and grace at his Majesty's hands, for his
dear son Jesus Christ's sake. And the Lord hath brought me hither to
be an example to you, that you may not fall into the like sin as I have
done. And I pray God, for his mercy, to keep all his faithful people
from falling into the like inconvenient as I have done! And therefore I
desire you all to pray to God for me, that he would be merciful to me!
One wonders just how much of Jean's own words the minister-memorialist
got into this, his sum of her confession. Her speech would be coloured
inevitably by the phrasing she had caught from her spiritual advisers,
and the sum of it would almost unavoidably have something of the
memorialist's own fashion of thought. I would give a good deal to know
if Jean did actually refer to the Almighty as "the Lord's Majesty,"
and hope for "grace at his Majesty's hands." I do not think I am being
oversubtle when I fancy that, if Jean did use those words, I see an
element of confusion in her scaffold confession--the trembling confusion
remaining from a lost hope. As a Scot, I have no recollection of ever
hearing the Almighty referred to as "the Lord's Majesty" or as "his
Majesty." It does not ring naturally to my ear. Nor, at the long
distance from which I recollect reading works of early Scottish divines,
can I think of these forms being used in such a context. I may be--I
very probably am--all wrong, but I have a feeling that up to the last
Jean Livingstone believed royal clemency would be shown to her, and that
this belief appears in the use of these unwonted phrases.
However that may be, Jean's conduct seems to have been heroic and
unfaltering. She prayed, and one of her relations or friends brought "a
clean cloath" to tie over her eyes. Jean herself had prepared for this
operation, for she took a pin out of her mouth and gave it into the
friend's hand to help the fastening. The minister-memorialist, having
taken farewell of her for the last time, could not bear the prospect of
what was about to happen. He descended from the scaffold and went away.
"But she," he says, as a constant saint of God, humbled herself on her
knees, and offered her neck to the axe, laying her neck, sweetly and
graciously, in the place appointed, moving to and fro, till she got a
rest for her neck to lay in. When her head was now made fast to "the
Maiden" the executioner came behind her and pulled out her feet, that
her neck might be stretched out longer, and so made more meet for the
stroke of the axe; but she, as it was reported to me by him who saw
it and held her by the hands at this time, drew her legs twice to her
again, labouring to sit on her knees, till she should give up her spirit
to the Lord! During this time, which was long, for the axe was but
slowly loosed, and fell not down hastily, after laying of her head, her
tongue was not idle, but she continued crying to the Lord, and uttered
with a loud voice those her wonted words, "Lord Jesus, receive my
spirit! O Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world, have
mercy upon me! Into thy hand, Lord, I commend my soul!" When she came to
the middle of this last sentence, and had said, "Into thy hand, Lord,"
at the pronouncing of the word "Lord" the axe fell; which was diligently
marked by one of her friends, who still held her by the hand, and
reported this to me.
IV
On the 26th of June, 1604, Robert Weir, "sumtyme servande to the Laird
of Dynniepace," was brought to knowledge of an assize. He was "Dilaitit
of airt and pairt of the crewall Murthour of umqle Johnne Kincaid of
Wariestoune; committit the first of Julij, 1600 yeiris."
Verdict. The Assyse, all in ane voce, be the mouth of the said Thomas
Galloway, chanceller, chosen be thame, ffand, pronouncet and declairit
the said Robert Weir to be ffylit, culpable and convict of the crymes
above specifiet, mentionat in the said Dittay; and that in respect of
his Confessioun maid thairof, in Judgement.
Sentence. The said Justice-depute, be the mouth of James Sterling,
dempster of the Court, decernit and ordainit the said Robert Weir to be
tane to ane skaffold to be fixt beside the Croce of Edinburgh, and there
to be brokin upoune ane Row,[6] quhill he be deid; and to ly thairat,
during the space of xxiiij houris. And thaireftir, his body to be tane
upon the said Row, and set up, in ane publict place, betwix the place
of Wariestoune and the toun of Leyth; and to remain thairupoune, ay and
quhill command be gevin for the buriall thairof. Quhilk was pronouncet
for dome.
V
The Memorial before mentioned is, in the original, a manuscript
belonging to the Advocates' Library of Edinburgh. A printed copy was
made in 1828, under the editorship of J. Sharpe, in the same city.
This edition contains, among other more relative matter, a reprint of
a newspaper account of an execution by strangling and burning at the
stake. The woman concerned was not the last victim in Britain of
this form of execution. The honour, I believe, belongs to one Anne
Cruttenden. The account is full of gruesome and graphic detail, but the
observer preserves quite an air of detachment:
IVELCHESTER: 9th May, 1765. Yesterday Mary Norwood, for poisoning her
husband, Joseph Norwood, of Axbridge, in this county [Somerset], was
burnt here pursuant to her sentence. She was brought out of the prison
about three o'clock in the afternoon, barefoot; she was covered with a
tarred cloth, made like a shift, and a tarred bonnet over her head;
and her legs, feet, and arms had likewise tar on them; the heat of
the weather melting the tar, it ran over her face, so that she made a
shocking appearance. She was put on a hurdle, and drawn on a sledge to
the place of execution, which was very near the gallows. After spending
some time in prayer, and singing a hymn, the executioner placed her on a
tar barrel, about three feet high; a rope (which was in a pulley through
the stake) was fixed about her neck, she placing it properly with her
hands; this rope being drawn extremely tight with the pulley, the tar
barrel was then pushed away, and three irons were then fastened around
her body, to confine it to the stake, that it might not drop when the
rope should be burnt. As soon as this was done the fire was immediately
kindled; but in all probability she was quite dead before the fire
reached her, as the executioner pulled her body several times whilst
the irons were fixing, which was about five minutes. There being a good
quantity of tar, and the wood in the pile being quite dry, the fire
burnt with amazing fury; notwithstanding which great part of her could
be discerned for near half an hour. Nothing could be more affecting than
to behold, after her bowels fell out, the fire flaming between her
ribs, issuing out of her ears, mouth, eyeholes, etc. In short, it was so
terrible a sight that great numbers turned their backs and screamed out,
not being able to look at it.
III: -- THE COUNTESS AND THE COZENER
It is hardly likely when that comely but penniless young Scot Robert
Carr, of Ferniehurst, fell from his horse and broke his leg that any of
the spectators of the accident foresaw how far-reaching it would be
in its consequences. It was an accident, none the less, which in its
ultimate results was to put several of the necks craned to see it in
peril of the hangman's noose.
That divinely appointed monarch King James the Sixth of Scotland and
First of England had an eye for manly beauty. Though he could contrive
the direst of cruelties to be committed out of his sight, the actual
spectacle of physical suffering in the human made him squeamish. Add
the two facts of the King's nature together and it may be understood
how Robert Carr, in falling from his horse that September day in the
tilt-yard of Whitehall, fell straight into his Majesty's favour. King
James himself gave orders for the disposition of the sufferer, found
lodgings for him, sent his own surgeon, and was constant in his visits
to the convalescent. Thereafter the rise of Robert Carr was meteoric.
Knighted, he became Viscount Rochester, a member of the Privy Council,
then Earl of Somerset, Knight of the Garter, all in a very few years. It
was in 1607 that he fell from his horse, under the King's nose. In 1613
he was at the height of his power in England.
Return we for a moment, however, to that day in the Whitehall tilt-yard.
It is related that one woman whose life and fate were to be bound with
Carr's was in the ladies' gallery. It is very probable that a second
woman, whose association with the first did much to seal Carr's doom,
was also a spectator. If Frances Howard, as we read, showed distress
over the painful mishap to the handsome Scots youth it is almost certain
that Anne Turner, with the quick eye she had for male comeliness and
her less need for Court-bred restraint, would exhibit a sympathetic
volubility.
Frances Howard was the daughter of that famous Elizabethan seaman Thomas
Howard, Earl of Suffolk. On that day in September she would be just over
fifteen years of age. It is said that she was singularly lovely. At that
early age she was already a wife, victim of a political marriage which,
in the exercise of the ponderous cunning he called kingcraft, King James
had been at some pains to arrange. At the age of thirteen Frances had
been married to Robert Devereux, third Earl of Essex, then but a year
older than herself. The young couple had been parted at the altar, the
groom being sent travelling to complete his growth and education, and
Frances being returned to her mother and the semi-seclusion of the
Suffolk mansion at Audley End.
Of the two women, so closely linked in fate, the second is perhaps
the more interesting study. Anne Turner was something older than the
Countess of Essex. In the various records of the strange piece of
history which is here to be dealt with there are many allusions to a
long association between the two. Almost a foster-sister relationship
seems to be implied, but actual detail is irritatingly absent. Nor is
it clear whether Mrs Turner at the time of the tilt-yard incident
had embarked on the business activities which were to make her a much
sought-after person in King James's Court. It is not to be ascertained
whether she was not already a widow at that time. We can only judge from
circumstantial evidence brought forward later.
In 1610, at all events, Mrs Turner was well known about the Court, and
was quite certainly a widow. Her husband had been a well-known medical
man, one George Turner, a graduate of St John's College, Cambridge. He
had been a protege of Queen Elizabeth. Dying, this elderly husband of
Mistress Turner had left her but little in the way of worldly goods,
but that little the fair young widow had all the wit to turn to good
account. There was a house in Paternoster Row and a series of notebooks.
Like many another physician of his time, George Turner had been a
dabbler in more arts than that of medicine, an investigator in sciences
other than pathology. His notebooks would appear to have contained more
than remedial prescriptions for agues, fevers, and rheums. There was,
for example, a recipe for a yellow starch which, says Rafael Sabatini,
in his fine romance The Minion,[7] "she dispensed as her own invention.
This had become so widely fashionable for ruffs and pickadills that of
itself it had rendered her famous." One may believe, also, that most
of the recipes for those "perfumes, cosmetics, unguents and mysterious
powders, liniments and lotions asserted to preserve beauty where it
existed, and even to summon it where it was lacking," were derived from
the same sources.
There is a temptation to write of Mistress Turner as forerunner of
that notorious Mme Rachel of whom, in his volume Bad Companions,[8] Mr
Roughead has said the final and pawky word. Mme Rachel, in the middle of
the nineteenth century, founded her fortunes as a beauty specialist (?)
on a prescription for a hair-restorer given her by a kindly doctor.
She also 'invented' many a lotion and unguent for the preservation and
creation of beauty. But at about this point analogy stops. Both Rachel
and her forerunner, Anne Turner, were scamps, and both got into serious
trouble--Anne into deeper and deadlier hot water than Rachel--but
between the two women there is only superficial comparison. Rachel was a
botcher and a bungler, a very cobbler, beside Anne Turner.
Anne, there is every cause for assurance, was in herself the best
advertisement for her wares. Rachel was a fat old hag. Anne, prettily
fair, little-boned, and deliciously fleshed, was neat and elegant.
The impression one gets of her from all the records, even the most
prejudiced against her, is that she was a very cuddlesome morsel indeed.
She was, in addition, demonstrably clever. Such a man of talent as Inigo
Jones supported the decoration of many of the masques he set on the
stage with costumes of Anne's design and confection. Rachel could
neither read nor write.
It is highly probable that Anne Turner made coin out of the notes which
her late husband, so inquisitive of mind, had left on matters much more
occult than the manufacture of yellow starch and skin lotions. "It was
also rumoured," says Mr Sabatini, "that she amassed gold in another and
less licit manner: that she dabbled in fortune-telling and the arts of
divination." We shall see, as the story develops, that the rumour had
some foundation. The inquiring mind of the late Dr Turner had led him
into strange company, and his legacy to Anne included connexions more
sombre than those in the extravagantly luxurious Court of King James.
In 1610 the elegant little widow was flourishing enough to be able to
maintain a lover in good style. This was Sir Arthur Mainwaring, member
of a Cheshire family of good repute but of no great wealth. By him she
had three children. Mainwaring was attached in some fashion to the suite
of the Prince of Wales, Prince Henry. And while the Prince's court at St
James's Palace was something more modest, as it was more refined, than
that of the King at Whitehall, position in it was not to be retained at
ease without considerable expenditure. It may be gauged, therefore, at
what expense Anne's attachment to Mainwaring would keep her, and to what
exercise of her talent and ambition her pride in it would drive her. And
her pride was absolute. It would, says a contemporary diarist, "make her
fly at any pitch rather than fall into the jaws of want."[9]
II
In his romance The Minion, Rafael Sabatini makes the first meeting of
Anne Turner and the Countess of Essex occur in 1610 or 1611. With this
date Judge A. E. Parry, in his book The Overbury Mystery,[10] seems to
agree in part. There is, however, warrant enough for believing that the
two women had met long before that time. Anne Turner herself, pleading
at her trial for mercy from Sir Edward Coke, the Lord Chief Justice, put
forward the plea that she had been "ever brought up with the Countess of
Essex, and had been a long time her servant."[11] She also made the like
extenuative plea on the scaffold.[12] Judge Parry seems to follow some
of the contemporary writers in assuming that Anne was a spy in the pay
of the Lord Privy Seal, the Earl of Northampton. If this was so there
is further ground for believing that Anne and Lady Essex had earlier
contacts, for Northampton was Lady Essex's great-uncle. The longer
association would go far in explaining the terrible conspiracy into
which, from soon after that time, the two women so readily fell
together--a criminal conspiracy, in which the reader may see something
of the "false nurse" in Anne Turner and something of Jean Livingstone in
Frances Howard, Lady Essex.
It was about this time, 1610-1611, that Lady Essex began to find herself
interested in the handsome Robert Carr, then Viscount Rochester. Having
reached the mature age of eighteen, the lovely Frances had been brought
by her mother, the Countess of Suffolk, to Court. Highest in the King's
favour, and so, with his remarkably good looks, his charm, and the
elegant taste in attire and personal appointment which his new wealth
allowed him lavishly to indulge, Rochester was by far the most brilliant
figure there. Frances fell in love with the King's minion.
Rochester, it would appear, did not immediately respond to the lady's
advances. They were probably too shy, too tentative, to attract
Rochester's attention. It is probable, also, that there were plenty of
beautiful women about the Court, more mature, more practised in the arts
of coquetry than Frances, and very likely not at all 'blate'--as Carr
and his master would put it--in showing themselves ready for conquest by
the King's handsome favourite.
Whether the acquaintance of Lady Essex with Mrs Turner was of long
standing or not, it was to the versatile Anne that her ladyship turned
as confidante. The hint regarding Anne's skill in divination will be
remembered. Having regard to the period, and to the alchemistic nature
of the goods that composed so much of Anne's stock-in-trade at the sign
of the Golden Distaff, in Paternoster Row, it may be conjectured that
the love-lorn Frances had thoughts of a philtre.
With an expensive lover and children to maintain, to say nothing of her
own luxurious habits, Anne Turner would see in the Countess's appeal a
chance to turn more than one penny into the family exchequer. She was
too much the opportunist to let any consideration of old acquaintance
interfere with working such a potential gold-mine as now seemed to lie
open to her pretty but prehensile fingers. Lady Essex was rich. She
was also ardent in her desire. The game was too big for Anne to play
single-handed. A real expert in cozening, a master of guile, was wanted
to exploit the opportunity to its limit.
It is a curious phenomenon, and one that constantly recurs in the
history of cozenage, how people who live by spoof fall victims so
readily to spoofery. Anne Turner had brains. There is no doubt of it.
Apart from that genuine and honest talent in costume-design which made
her work acceptable to such an outstanding genius as Inigo Jones, she
lived by guile. But I have now to invite you to see her at the feet of
one of the silliest charlatans who ever lived. There is, of course, the
possibility that Anne sat at the feet of this silly charlatan for what
she might learn for the extension of her own technique. Or, again, it
may have been that the wizard of Lambeth, whom she consulted in the Lady
Essex affair, could provide a more impressive setting for spoof than she
had handy, or that they were simply rogues together. My trouble is to
understand why, by the time that the Lady Essex came to her with her
problem, Anne had not exhausted all the gambits in flummery that were at
the command of the preposterous Dr Forman.
The connexion with Dr Forman was part of the legacy left Anne by Dr
Turner. Her husband had been the friend and patron of Forman, so that
by the time Anne had taken Mainwaring for her lover, and had borne him
three children, she must have had ample opportunity for seeing through
the old charlatan.
Antony Weldon, the contemporary writer already quoted, is something
too scurrilous and too apparently biased to be altogether a trustworthy
authority. He seems to have been the type of gossip (still to be met in
London clubs) who can always tell with circumstance how the duchess came
to have a black baby, and the exact composition of the party at which
Midas played at 'strip poker.' But he was, like many of his kind, an
amusing enough companion for the idle moment, and his description of Dr
Forman is probably fairly close to the truth.
"This Forman," he says,
was a silly fellow who dwelt in Lambeth, a very silly fellow, yet had
wit enough to cheat the ladies and other women, by pretending skill in
telling their fortunes, as whether they should bury their husbands, and
what second husbands they should have, and whether they should enjoy
their loves, or whether maids should get husbands, or enjoy their
servants to themselves without corrivals: but before he would tell them
anything they must write their names in his alphabetical book with
their own handwriting. By this trick he kept them in awe, if they should
complain of his abusing them, as in truth he did nothing else. Besides,
it was believed, some meetings were at his house, wherein the art of the
bawd was more beneficial to him than that of a conjurer, and that he was
a better artist in the one than in the other: and that you may know his
skill, he was himself a cuckold, having a very pretty wench to his wife,
which would say, she did it to try his skill, but it fared with him as
with astrologers that cannot foresee their own destiny.
And here comes an addendum, the point of which finds confirmation
elsewhere. It has reference to the trial of Anne Turner, to which we
shall come later.
"I well remember there was much mirth made in the Court upon the showing
of the book, for, it was reported, the first leaf my lord Cook [Coke,
the Lord Chief Justice] lighted on he found his own wife's name."
Whatever Anne's reason for doing so, it was to this scortatory old scab
that she turned for help in cozening the fair young Countess. The devil
knows to what obscene ritual the girl was introduced. There is evidence
that the thaumaturgy practised by Forman did not want for lewdness--as
magic of the sort does not to this day--and in this regard Master Weldon
cannot be far astray when he makes our pretty Anne out to be the veriest
baggage.
Magic or no magic, philtre or no philtre, it was not long before Lady
Essex had her wish. The Viscount Rochester fell as desperately in love
with her as she was with him.
There was, you may be sure, no small amount of scandalous chatter in the
Court over the quickly obvious attachment the one to the other of this
handsome couple. So much of this scandalous chatter has found record by
the pens of contemporary and later gossip-writers that it is hard indeed
to extract the truth. It is certain, however, that had the love between
Robert Carr and Frances Howard been as chaste as ice, as pure as snow,
jealousy would still have done its worst in besmirching. It was not, if
the Rabelaisian trend in so much of Jacobean writing be any indication,
a particularly moral age. Few ages in history are. It was not, with
a reputed pervert as the fount of honour, a particularly moral Court.
Since the emergence of the lovely young Countess from tutelage at Audley
End there had been no lack of suitors for her favour. And when Frances
so openly exhibited her preference for the King's minion there would be
some among those disappointed suitors who would whisper, greenly, that
Rochester had been granted that prisage which was the right of the
absent Essex, a right which they themselves had been quite ready to
usurp. It is hardly likely that there would be complete abnegation of
salty gossip among the ladies of the Court, their Apollo being snatched
by a mere chit of a girl.
What relative happiness there may have been for the pair in their
loving--it could not, in the hindrance there was to their free mating,
have been an absolute happiness--was shattered after some time by the
return to England of the young husband. The Earl of Essex, now almost
come to man's estate, arrived to take up the position which his rank
entitled him to expect in the Court, and to assume the responsibilities
and rights which, he fancied, belonged to him as a married man. In
respect of the latter part of his intention he immediately found himself
balked. His wife, perhaps all the deeper in love with Rochester for this
threat to their happiness, declared that she had no mind to be held by
the marriage forced on her in infancy, and begged her husband to agree
to its annulment.
It had been better for young Essex to have agreed at once. He would
have spared himself, ultimately, a great deal of humiliation through
ridicule. But he tried to enforce his rights as a husband, a proceeding
than which there is none more absurd should the wife prove obdurate. And
prove obdurate his wife did. She was to be moved neither by threat nor
by pleading. It was, you will notice, a comedy situation; husband
not perhaps amorous so much as the thwarted possessor of the
unpossessable--wife frigid and a maid, as far, at least, as the husband
was concerned, and her weeping eyes turned yearningly elsewhere. A
comedy situation, yes, and at this distance almost farcical--but for
certain elements in it approaching tragedy.
Badgered, not only by her husband but by her own relatives, scared no
doubt, certainly unhappy, unable for politic reasons to appeal freely
to her beloved Robin, to whom might Frances turn but the helpful Turner?
And to whom, having turned to pretty Anne, was she likely to be led but
again to the wizard of Lambeth?
Dr Forman had a heart for beauty in distress, but dissipating the
ardency of an exigent husband was a difficult matter compared with
attracting that of a negligent lover. It was also much more costly. A
powder there was, indeed, which, administered secretly by small regular
doses in the husband's food or drink, would soon cool his ardour,
but the process of manufacture and the ingredients were enormously
expensive. Frances got her powder.
The first dose was administered to Lord Essex just before his departure
from a visit to his wife at Audley End. On his arrival back in London he
was taken violently ill, so ill that in the weeks he lay in bed his life
was despaired of. Only the intervention of the King's own physician, one
Sir Theodore Mayerne, would appear to have saved him.
Her husband slowly convalescing, Lady Essex was summoned by her family
back to London. In London, while Lord Essex mended in health, she was
much in the company of her "sweet Turner." In addition to the house
in Paternoster Row the little widow had a pretty riverside cottage at
Hammersmith, and both were at the disposal of Lady Essex and her lover
for stolen meetings. Those meetings were put a stop to by the recovery
of Lord Essex, and with his recovery his lordship exhibited a new mood
of determination. Backed by her ladyship's family, he ordered her to
accompany him to their country place of Chartley. Her ladyship had to
obey.
The stages of the journey were marked by the nightly illness of his
lordship. By the time they arrived at Chartley itself he was in a
condition little if at all less dangerous than that from which he had
been rescued by the King's physician. His illness lasted for weeks, and
during this time her ladyship wrote many a letter to Anne Turner and to
Dr Forman. She was afraid his lordship would live. She was afraid his
lordship would die. She was afraid she would lose the love of Rochester.
She begged Anne Turner and Forman to work their best magic for her aid.
She was afraid that if his lordship recovered the spells might prove
useless, that his attempts to assert his rights as a husband would begin
again, and that there, in the heart of the country and so far from any
refuge, they might take a form she would be unable to resist.
His lordship did recover. His attempts to assert his rights as a husband
did begin again. The struggle between them, Frances constant in her
obduracy, lasted several months. Her obstinacy wore down his. At long
last he let her go.
III
If the fate that overtook Frances Howard and Rochester, and with them
Anne Turner and many another, is to be properly understood, a brief word
on the political situation in England at this time will be needed--or,
rather, a word on the political personages, with their antagonisms.
Next in closeness to the King's ear after Rochester, and perhaps more
trusted as a counsellor by that "wise fool," there had been Robert
Cecil, Lord Salisbury, for a long time First Secretary of State. But
about the time when Lady Essex finally parted with her husband Cecil
died, depriving England of her keenest brain and the staunchest heart
in her causes. If there had been no Rochester the likeliest man in the
kingdom to succeed to the power and offices of Cecil would have been the
Earl of Northampton, uncle of Lord Suffolk, who was the father of Lady
Essex. Northampton, as stated, held the office of Lord Privy Seal.
The Howard family had done the State great service in the past. Its
present representatives, Northampton and Suffolk, were anxious to do
the State great service, as they conceived it, in the future. They were,
however, Catholics in all but open acknowledgment, and as such were
opposed by the Protestants, who had at their head Prince Henry. This was
an opposition that they might have stomached. It was one that they might
even have got over, for the Prince and his father, the King, were not
the best of friends. The obstacle to their ambitions, and one they found
hard to stomach, was the upstart Rochester. And even Rochester would
hardly have stood in their way had his power in the Council depended on
his own ability. The brain that directed Robert Carr belonged to another
man. This was Sir Thomas Overbury.
On the death of Cecil the real contenders for the vacant office of First
Secretary of State--the highest office in the land--were not the wily
Northampton and the relatively unintelligent Rochester, but the subtle
Northampton and the quite as subtle, and perhaps more spacious-minded,
Thomas Overbury. There was, it will be apprehended, a possible weakness
on the Overbury side. The gemel-chain, like that of many links, is
merely as strong as its weakest member. Overbury had no approach to the
King save through the King's favourite. Rochester could have no real
weight with the King, at least in affairs of State, except what he
borrowed from Overbury. Divided, the two were powerless. No, more than
that, there had to be no flaw in their linking.
The wily Northampton, one may be certain, was fully aware of this
possible weakness in the combination opposed to his advancement. He
would be fully aware, that is, that it was there potentially; but when
he began, as his activities would indicate, to work for the creation
of that flaw in the relationship between Rochester and Overbury it is
unlikely that he knew the flaw had already begun to develop. Unknown to
him, circumstance already had begun to operate in his favour.
Overbury was Rochester's tutor in more than appertained to affairs of
State. It is more than likely that in Carr's wooing of Lady Essex he
had held the role of Cyrano de Bergerac, writing those gracefully turned
letters and composing those accomplished verses which did so much to
augment and give constancy to her ladyship's love for Rochester. It is
certain, at any rate, that Overbury was privy to all the correspondence
passing between the pair, and that even such events as the supplying by
Forman and Mrs Turner of that magic powder, and the Countess's use of it
upon her husband, were well within his knowledge.
While the affair between his alter ego and the Lady Essex might be
looked upon as mere dalliance, a passionate episode likely to wither
with a speed equal to that of its growth, Overbury, it is probable,
found cynical amusement in helping it on. But when, as time went on,
the lady and her husband separated permanently, and from mere talk of a
petition for annulment of the Essex marriage that petition was presented
in actual form to the King, Overbury saw danger. Northampton was
backing the petition. If it succeeded Lady Essex would be free to marry
Rochester. And the marriage, since Northampton was not the man to give
except in the expectation of plenty, would plant the unwary Rochester
on the hearth of his own and Overbury's enemies. With Rochester in the
Howard camp there would be short shrift for Thomas Overbury. There would
be, though Rochester in his infatuation seemed blind to the fact, as
short a shrift as the Howards could contrive for the King's minion.
In that march of inevitability which marks all real tragedy the road
that is followed forks ever and again with an 'if.' And we who, across
the distance of time, watch with a sort of Jovian pity the tragic
puppets in their folly miss this fork and that fork on their road
of destiny select, each according to our particular temperaments, a
particular 'if' over which to shake our heads. For me, in this story of
Rochester, Overbury, Frances Howard, and the rest, the point of tragedy,
the most poignant of the issues, is the betrayal by Robert Carr of
Overbury's friendship. Though this story is essentially, or should be,
that of the two women who were linked in fate with Rochester and his
coadjutor, I am constrained to linger for a moment on that point.
Overbury's counsel had made Carr great. With nothing but his good looks
and his personal charm, his only real attributes, Carr had been no more
than King James's creature. James, with all the pedantry, the laboured
cunning, the sleezy weaknesses of character that make him so detestable,
was yet too shrewd to have put power in the hands of the mere minion
that Carr would have been without the brain of Overbury to guide him.
Of himself Carr was the 'toom tabard' of earlier parlance in his native
country, the 'stuffed shirt' of a later and more remote generation. But
beyond the coalition for mutual help that existed between Overbury
and Carr, an arrangement which might have thrived on a basis merely
material, there was a deep and splendid friendship. 'Stuffed shirt' or
not, Robert Carr was greatly loved by Overbury. Whatever Overbury may
have thought of Carr's mental attainments, he had the greatest faith in
his loyalty as a friend. And here lies the terrible pity in that 'if' of
my choice. The love between the two men was great enough to have saved
them both. It broke on the weakness of Carr.
Overbury was aware that, honestly presented, the petition by Lady Essex
for the annulment of her marriage had little chance of success. But for
the obstinacy of Essex it might have been granted readily enough. He
had, however, as we have seen, forced her to live with him as his wife,
in appearance at least, for several months in the country. There now
would be difficulty in putting forward the petition on the ground of
non-consummation of the marriage.
It was, nevertheless, on this ground that the petition was brought
forward. But the non-consummation was not attributed, as it might have
been, to the continued separation that had begun at the altar; the
reason given was the impotence of the husband. Just what persuasion
Northampton and the Howards used on Essex to make him accept this
humiliating implication it is hard to imagine, but by the time the
coarse wits of the period had done with him Essex was amply punished in
ridicule for his primary obstinacy.
Sir Thomas Overbury, well informed though he usually was, must have been
a good deal in the dark regarding the negotiations which had brought the
nullity suit to this forward state. He had warned Rochester so frankly
of the danger into which the scheme was likely to lead him that they had
quarrelled and parted. If Rochester had been frank with his friend, if,
on the ground of their friendship, he had appealed to him to set aside
his prejudice, it might well have been that the tragedy which ensued
would have been averted. Enough evidence remains to this day of
Overbury's kindness for Robert Carr, there is enough proof of the man's
abounding resource and wit, to give warrant for belief that he would
have had the will, as he certainly had the ability, to help his
friend. Overbury was one of the brightest intelligences of his age. Had
Rochester confessed the extent of his commitment with Northampton there
is little doubt that Overbury could and would have found a way whereby
Rochester could have attained his object (of marriage with Frances
Howard), and this without jeopardizing their mutual power to the Howard
menace.
In denying the man who had made him great the complete confidence which
their friendship demanded Rochester took the tragically wrong path
on his road of destiny. But the truth is that when he quarrelled with
Overbury he had already betrayed the friendship. He had already embarked
on the perilous experiment of straddling between two opposed camps. It
was an experiment that he, least of all men, had the adroitness to bring
off. He was never in such need of Overbury's brain as when he aligned
himself in secret with Overbury's enemies.
It is entirely probable that in linking up with Northampton Rochester
had no mind to injure his friend. The bait was the woman he loved.
Without Northampton's aid the nullity suit could not be put forward, and
without the annulment there could be no marriage for him with Frances
Howard. But he had no sooner joined with Northampton than the very
processes against which Overbury had warned him were begun. Rochester
was trapped, and with him Overbury.
For the success of the suit, in Northampton's view, Overbury knew too
much. It was a view to which Rochester was readily persuaded; or it was
one which he was easily frightened into accepting. From that to joining
in a plot for being rid of Overbury was but a step. Grateful, perhaps,
for the undoubted services that Overbury had rendered him, Rochester
would be eager enough to find his quondam friend employment. If that
employment happened to take Overbury out of the country so much the
better. At one time the King, jealous as a woman of the friendship
existing between his favourite and Overbury, had tried to shift the
latter out of the way by an offer of the embassy in Paris. It was an
offer Rochester thought, that he might cause to be repeated. The idea
was broached to Overbury. That shrewd individual, of course, saw through
the suggestion to the intention behind it, but he was at a loss for an
outlet for his talents, having left Rochester's employ, and he believed
without immodesty that he could do useful work as ambassador in Paris.
Overbury was offered an embassy--but in Muscovy. He had no mind to bury
himself in Russia, and he refused the offer on the ground of ill-health.
By doing this he walked into the trap prepared for him. Northampton had
foreseen the refusal when he promoted the offer on its rearranged terms.
The King, already incensed against Overbury for some hints at knowledge
of facts liable to upset the Essex nullity suit, pretended indignation
at the refusal. Overbury unwarily repeated it before the Privy Council.
That was what Northampton wanted. The refusal was high contempt of the
King's majesty. Sir Thomas Overbury was committed to the Tower. He might
have talked in Paris, or have written from Muscovy. He might safely do
either in the Tower--where gags and bonds were so readily at hand.
Did Rochester know of the springe set to catch Overbury? The answer
to the question, whether yes or no, hardly matters. Since he was gull
enough to discard the man whose brain had lifted him from a condition in
which he was hardly better than the King's lap-dog, he was gull enough
to be fooled by Northampton. Since he valued the friendship of that
honest man so little as to consort in secret with his enemies, he was
knave enough to have been party to the betrayal. Knave or fool--what
does it matter? He was so much of both that, in dread of what Sir Thomas
might say or do to thwart the nullity suit, he let his friend rot in the
Tower for months on end, let him sicken and nearly die several times,
without a move to free him. He did this to the man who had trusted him
implicitly, a man that--to adapt Overbury's own words from his last
poignant letter to Rochester--he had "more cause to love... yea, perish
for.. . rather than see perish."
It is not given to every man to have that greater love which will make
him lay down his life for a friend, but it is the sheer poltroon and
craven who will watch a friend linger and expire in agony without
lifting a finger to save him. Knave or fool--what does it matter when
either is submerged in the coward?
IV
Overbury lay in the Tower five months. The commission appointed to
examine into the Essex nullity suit went into session three weeks after
he was imprisoned. There happened to be one man in the commission who
cared more to be honest than to humour the King. This was the Archbishop
Abbot. The King himself had prepared the petition. It was a task that
delighted his pedantry, and his petition was designed for immediate
acceptance. But such was Abbot's opposition that in two or three months
the commission ended with divided findings.
Meantime Overbury in the Tower had been writing letters. He had been
talking to visitors. As time went on, and Rochester did nothing to bring
about his enlargement, his writings and sayings became more threatening
Rochester's attitude was that patience was needed. In time he would
bring the King to a more clement view of Sir Thomas's offending, and
he had no doubt that in the end he would be able to secure the prisoner
both freedom and honourable employment.
Overbury had been consigned to the Tower in April. In June he complained
of illness. Rochester wrote to him in sympathetic terms, sending him a
powder that he himself had found beneficial, and made his own physician
visit the prisoner.
But the threats which Overbury, indignant at his betrayal by Rochester,
made by speech and writing were becoming common property in the city
and at Court One of Overbury's visitors who had made public mention of
Overbury's knowledge of facts likely to blow upon the Essex suit was
arrested on the orders of Northampton. In the absence of the King and
Rochester from London the old Earl was acting as Chief Secretary of
State--thus proving Overbury to have been a true prophet. Northampton
issued orders to the Tower that Overbury was to be closely confined,
that his man Davies was to be dismissed, and that he was to be denied
all visitors. The then Lieutenant of the Tower, one Sir William Wade,
was deprived of his position on the thinnest of pretexts, and, on the
recommendation of Sir Thomas Monson, Master of the Armoury, an elderly
gentleman from Lincolnshire, Sir Gervase Elwes, was put in his place.
From that moment Sir Thomas Overbury was permitted no communication with
the outer world, save by letter to Lord Rochester and for food that was
brought him, as we shall presently see, at the instance of Mrs Turner.
In place of his own servant Davies Sir Thomas was allowed the services
of an under-keeper named Weston, appointed at the same time as Sir
Gervase Elwes. This man, it is perhaps important to note, had at one
time been servant to Mrs Turner.
The alteration in the personnel of the Tower was almost immediately
followed by severe illness on the part of the prisoner. The close
confinement to which he was subjected, with the lack of exercise, could
hardly have been the cause of such a violent sickness. It looked more as
if it had been brought about by something he had eaten or drunk. By this
time the conviction he had tried to resist, that Rochester was meanly
sacrificing him, became definite. Overbury is hardly to be blamed if he
came to a resolution to be revenged on his one-time friend by bringing
him to utter ruin. King James had been so busy in the Essex nullity
suit, had gone to such lengths to carry it through, that if it could
be wrecked by the production of the true facts he would be bound to
sacrifice Rochester to save his own face. Sir Thomas had an accurate
knowledge of the King's character. He knew the scramble James was
capable of making in a difficulty that involved his kingly dignity, and
what little reck he had of the faces he trod on in climbing from a pit
of his own digging. By a trick Overbury contrived to smuggle a letter
through to the honest Archbishop Abbot, in which he declared his
possession of facts that would non-suit the nullity action, and begged
to be summoned before the commission.
Overbury was getting better of the sickness which had attacked him when
suddenly it came upon him again. This time he made no bones about saying
that he had been poisoned.
Even at the last Overbury had taken care to give Rochester a chance to
prove his fidelity. He contrived that the delivery of the letter to the
Archbishop of Canterbury should be delayed until just before the nullity
commission, now augmented by members certain to vote according to the
King's desire, was due to sit again. The Archbishop carried Overbury's
letter to James, and insisted that Overbury should be heard. The King,
outward stickler that he was for the letter of the law, had to agree.
On the Thursday of the week during which the commission was sitting
Overbury was due to be called. He was ill, but not so ill as he had
been. On the Tuesday he was visited by the King's physician. On the
Wednesday he was dead.
Now, before we come to examine those evidences regarding Overbury's
death that were to be brought forward in the series of trials of
later date, that series which was to be known as "the Great Oyer of
Poisoning," it may be well to consider what effect upon the Essex
nullity suit Overbury's appearance before the commission might have had.
It may be well to consider what reason Rochester had for keeping his
friend in close confinement in the Tower, what reason there was for
permitting Northampton to impose such cruelly rigorous conditions of
imprisonment.
The nullity suit succeeded. A jury of matrons was impanelled, and made
an examination of the lady appellant. Its evidence was that she was
virgo intacta. Seven out of the twelve members of the packed commission
voted in favour of the sentence of nullity.
The kernel of the situation lies in the verdict of the jury of matrons.
Her ladyship was declared to be a maid. If in the finding gossips and
scandal-mongers found reason for laughter, and decent enough people
cause for wonderment, they are hardly to be blamed. If Frances Howard
was a virgin, what reason was there for fearing anything Overbury might
have said? What knowledge had he against the suit that put Rochester
and the Howards in such fear of him that they had to confine him in the
Tower under such miserable conditions? In what was he so dangerous that
he had to be deprived of his faithful Davies, that he had to be put in
the care of a Tower Lieutenant specially appointed? The evidence given
before the commission can still be read in almost verbatim report. It is
completely in favour of the plea of Lady Essex. Sir Thomas Overbury's,
had he given evidence, would have been the sole voice against the suit.
If he had said that in his belief the association of her ladyship with
Rochester had been adulterous there was the physical fact adduced by the
jury of matrons to confute him. And being confuted in that, what might
he have said that would not be attributed to rancour on his part? That
her ladyship, with the help of Mrs Turner and the wizard of Lambeth, had
practised magic upon her husband, giving him powders that went near to
killing him? That she had lived in seclusion for several months with her
husband at Chartley, and that the non-consummation of the marriage
was due, not to the impotence of the husband, but to refusal to him of
marital rights on the part of the wife because of her guilty love for
Rochester? His lordship of Essex was still alive, and there was abundant
evidence before the court that there had been attempt to consummate
the marriage. Whatever Sir Thomas might have said would have smashed as
evidence on that one fact. Her ladyship was a virgin.
What did Sir Thomas Overbury know that made every one whose interest
it was to further the nullity suit so scared of him--Rochester, her
ladyship, Northampton, the Howards, the King himself?
Sir Thomas Overbury was much too cool-minded, too intelligent, to
indulge in threats unless he was certain of the grounds, and solid upon
them, upon which he made those threats. He had too great a knowledge of
affairs not to know that the commission would be a packed one, too great
an acquaintance with the strategy of James to believe that his lonely
evidence, unless of bombshell nature, would have a chance of carrying
weight in a court of his Majesty's picking. And, then, he was of too big
a mind to put forward evidence which would have no effect but that of
affording gossip for the scandal-mongers, and the giving of which would
make him appear to be actuated by petty spite. He had too great a sense
of his own dignity to give himself anything but an heroic role. Samson
he might play, pulling the pillars of the temple together to involve
his enemies, with himself, in magnificent and dramatic ruin. But
Iachimo--no.
In the welter of evidence conflicting with apparent fact which was given
before the commission and in the trials of the Great Oyer, in the
mass of writing both contemporary and of later days round the Overbury
mystery, it is hard indeed to land upon the truth. Feasible solution
is to be come upon only by accepting a not too pretty story which
is retailed by Antony Weldon. He says that the girl whom the jury of
matrons declared to be virgo intacta was so heavily veiled as to be
unidentifiable through the whole proceedings, and that she was not Lady
Essex at all, but the youthful daughter of Sir Thomas Monson.
Mrs Turner, we do know, was very much a favourite with the ladies of
Sir Thomas Monson's family. Gossip Weldon has a funny, if lewd, story
to tell of high jinks indulged in by the Monson women and Mrs Turner in
which Symon, Monson's servant, played an odd part. This Symon was also
employed by Mrs Turner to carry food to Overbury in the Tower. If the
substitution story has any truth in it it might well have been a Monson
girl who played the part of the Countess. But, of course, a Monson girl
may have been chosen by the inventors to give verisimilitude to the
substitution story, simply because the family was friendly with Turner,
and the tale of the lewd high jinks with Symon added to make it seem
more likely that old Lady Monson would lend herself to such a plot.
If there was such a plot it is not at all unlikely that Overbury knew of
it. If there was need of such a scheme to bolster the nullity
petition it would have had to be evolved while the petition was being
planned--that is, a month or two before the commission went first into
session. At that time Overbury was still Rochester's secretary, still
Rochester's confidant; and if such a scheme had been evolved for getting
over an obstacle so fatal to the petition's success it was not in
Rochester's nature to have concealed it from Overbury, the two men still
being fast friends. Indeed, it may have been Overbury who pointed
out the need there would be for the Countess to undergo physical
examination, and it may have been on the certainty that her ladyship
could not do so that Overbury rested so securely--as he most apparently
did, beyond the point of safety--in the idea that the suit was bound to
fail. It is legitimate enough to suppose, along this hypothesis,
that this substitution plot was the very matter on which the two men
quarrelled.
That Overbury had knowledge of some such essential secret as this is
manifest in the enmity towards the man which Lady Essex exhibited, even
when he lay, out of the way of doing harm, in the Tower. It is hard
to believe that an innocent girl of twenty, conscious of her virgin
chastity, in mere fear of scandal which she knew would be baseless,
could pursue the life of a man with the venom that, as we shall
presently see, Frances Howard used towards Overbury through Mrs Turner.
V
As a preliminary to his marriage with Frances Howard, Rochester was
created Earl of Somerset, and had the barony of Brancepeth bestowed
on him by the King. Overbury was three months in his grave when the
marriage was celebrated in the midst of the most extravagant show and
entertainment.
The new Earl's power in the kingdom was never so high as at this time.
It was, indeed, at its zenith. Decline was soon to set in. It will not
serve here to follow the whole process of decay in the King's favour
that Somerset was now to experience. There was poetic justice in his
downfall. With hands all about him itching to bring him to the ground,
he had not the brain for the giddy heights. If behind him there had been
the man whose guidance had made him sure-footed in the climb he might
have survived, flourishing. But the man he had consigned to death had
been more than half of him, had been, indeed, his substance. Alone,
with the power Overbury's talents had brought him, Somerset was bound to
fail. The irony of it is that his downfall was contrived by a creature
of his own raising.
Somerset had appointed Sir Ralph Winwood to the office of First
Secretary of State. In that office word came to Winwood from Brussels
that new light had been thrown on the mysterious death of Sir Thomas
Overbury. Winwood investigated in secret. An English lad, one Reeves,
an apothecary's assistant, thinking himself dying, had confessed at
Flushing that Overbury had been poisoned by an injection of corrosive
sublimate. Reeves himself had given the injection on the orders of his
master, Loubel, the apothecary who had attended Overbury on the day
before his death. Winwood sought out Loubel, and from him went to Sir
Gervase Elwes. The story he was able to make from what he had from the
two men he took to the King. From this beginning rose up the Great
Oyer of Poisoning. The matter was put into the hands of the Lord Chief
Justice, Sir Edward Coke.
The lad Reeves, whose confession had started the matter, was either dead
or dying abroad, and was so out of Coke's reach. But the man who had
helped the lad to administer the poisoned clyster, the under-keeper
Weston, was at hand. Weston was arrested, and examined by Coke.
The statement Coke's bullying drew from the man made mention of one
Franklin, another apothecary, as having supplied a phial which Sir
Gervase Elwes had taken and thrown away. Weston had also received
another phial by Franklin's son from Lady Essex. This also Sir Gervase
had taken and destroyed. Then there had been tarts and jellies supplied
by Mrs Turner.
Coke had Mrs Turner and Franklin arrested, and after that Sir Gervase
was taken as an accessory, and on his statement that he had employed
Weston on Sir Thomas Monson's recommendation Sir Thomas also was roped
in. He maintained that he had been told to recommend Weston by Lady
Essex and the Earl of Northampton.
The next person to be examined by Coke was the apothecary Loubel, he
who had attended Overbury on the day before his death. Though in his
confession the lad Reeves said that he had been given money and sent
abroad by Loubel, this was a matter that Coke did not probe. Loubel told
Coke that he had given Overbury nothing but the physic prescribed by Sir
Theodore Mayerne, the King's physician, and that in his opinion Overbury
had died of consumption. With this evidence Coke was very strangely
content--or, at least, content as far as Loubel was concerned, for this
witness was not summoned again.
Other persons were examined by Coke, notably Overbury's servant
Davies and his secretary Payton. Their statements served to throw some
suspicion on the Earl of Somerset.
But if all the detail of these examinations were gone into we should
never be done. Our concern is with the two women involved, Anne Turner
and the Countess of Somerset, as we must now call her. I am going to
quote, however, two paragraphs from Rafael Sabatini's romance The Minion
that I think may explain why it is so difficult to come to the truth of
the Overbury mystery. They indicate how it was smothered by the way in
which Coke rough-handled justice throughout the whole series of trials.
On October 19th, at the Guildhall, began the Great Oyer of Poisoning, as
Coke described it, with the trial of Richard Weston.
Thus at the very outset the dishonesty of the proceedings is apparent.
Weston was an accessory. Both on his own evidence and that of Sir
Gervase Elwes, besides the apothecary's boy in Flushing, Sir Thomas
Overbury had died following upon an injection prepared by Loubel.
Therefore Loubel was the principal, and only after Loubel's conviction
could the field have been extended to include Weston and the others. But
Loubel was tried neither then nor subsequently, a circumstance regarded
by many as the most mysterious part of what is known as the Overbury
mystery, whereas, in fact, it is the clue to it. Nor was the evidence of
the coroner put in, so that there was no real preliminary formal proof
that Overbury had been poisoned at all.
Here Mr Sabatini is concerned to develop one of the underlying arguments
of his story--namely, that it was King James himself who had ultimately
engineered the death of Sir Thomas Overbury. It is an argument which I
would not attempt to refute. I do not think that Mr Sabatini's acumen
has failed him in the least. But the point for me in the paragraphs is
the indication they give of how much Coke did to suppress all evidence
that did not suit his purpose.
Weston's trial is curious in that at first he refused to plead. It is
the first instance I have met with in history of a prisoner standing
'mute of malice.' Coke read him a lecture on the subject, pointing out
that by his obstinacy he was making himself liable to peine forte et
dure, which meant that order could be given for his exposure in an open
place near the prison, extended naked, and to have weights laid upon
him in increasing amount, he being kept alive with the "coarsest bread
obtainable and water from the nearest sink or puddle to the place of
execution, that day he had water having no bread, and that day he had
bread having no water." One may imagine with what grim satisfaction Coke
ladled this out. It had its effect on Weston.
He confessed that Mrs Turner had promised to give him a reward if he
would poison Sir Thomas Overbury. In May she had sent him a phial of
"rosalgar," and he had received from her tarts poisoned with mercury
sublimate. He was charged with having, at Mrs Turner's instance, joined
with an apothecary's boy in administering an injection of corrosive
sublimate to Sir Thomas Overbury, from which the latter died. Coke's
conduct of the case obscures just how much Weston admitted, but, since
it convinced the jury of Weston's guilt, the conviction served finely
for accusation against Mrs Turner.
Two days after conviction Weston was executed at Tyburn.
The trial of Anne Turner began in the first week of November. It would
be easy to make a pathetic figure of the comely little widow as she
stood trembling under Coke's bullying, but she was, in actual fact,
hardly deserving of pity. It is far from enlivening to read of Coke's
handling of the trial, and it is certain that Mrs Turner was condemned
on an indictment and process which to-day would not have a ghost of
a chance of surviving appeal, but it is perfectly plain that Anne was
party to one of the most vicious poisoning plots ever engineered.
We have, however, to consider this point in extenuation for her. It is
almost certain that in moving to bring about the death of Overbury she
had sanction, if only tacit, from the Earl of Northampton. By the time
that the Great Oyer began Northampton was dead. Two years had elapsed
from the death of Overbury. It would be quite clear to Anne that, in
the view of the powerful Howard faction, the elimination of Overbury was
politically desirable. It should be remembered, too, that she lived in
a period when assassination, secret or by subverted process of justice,
was a commonplace political weapon. Public executions by methods cruel
and even obscene taught the people to hold human life at small value,
and hardened them to cruelties that made poisoning seem a mercy. It is
not at all unlikely that, though her main object may have been to help
forward the plans of her friend the Countess, Anne considered herself a
plotter in high affairs of State.
The indictment against her was that she had comforted, aided, and
abetted Weston--that is to say, she was made an accessory. If, however,
as was accused, she procured Weston and Reeves to administer the
poisonous injection she was certainly a principal, and as such should
have been tried first or at the same time as Weston. But Weston was
already hanged, and so could not be questioned. His various statements
were used against her unchallenged, or, at least, when challenging them
was useless.
The indictment made no mention of her practices against the Earl of
Essex, but from the account given in the State Trials it would seem
that evidence on this score was used to build the case against her. Her
relations with Dr Forman, now safely dead, were made much of. She and
the Countess of Essex had visited the charlatan and had addressed him as
"Father." Their reason for visiting, it was said, was that "by force
of magick he should procure the then Viscount of Rochester to love the
Countess and Sir Arthur Mainwaring to love Mrs Turner, by whom she had
three children." Letters from the Countess to Turner were read. They
revealed the use on Lord Essex of those powders her ladyship had been
given by Forman. The letters had been found by Forman's wife in a packet
among Forman's possessions after his death. These, with others and with
several curious objects exhibited in court, had been demanded by Mrs
Turner after Forman's demise. Mrs Turner had kept them, and they were
found in her house.
As indicating the type of magic practised by Forman these objects are
of interest. Among other figures, probably nothing more than dolls of
French make, there was a leaden model of a man and woman in the act of
copulation, with the brass mould from which it had been cast. There
was a black scarf ornamented with white crosses, papers with cabalistic
signs, and sundry other exhibits which appear to have created
superstitious fear in the crowd about the court. It is amusing to note
that while those exhibits were being examined one of the scaffolds
erected for seating gave way or cracked ominously, giving the crowd a
thorough scare. It was thought that the devil himself, raised by
the power of those uncanny objects, had got into the Guildhall.
Consternation reigned for quite a quarter of an hour.
There was also exhibited Forman's famous book of signatures, in which
Coke is supposed to have encountered his own wife's name on the first
page.
Franklin, apothecary, druggist, necromancer, wizard, and born liar, had
confessed to supplying the poisons intended for use upon Overbury. He
declared that Mrs Turner had come to him from the Countess and asked him
to get the strongest poisons procurable. He "accordingly bought seven:
viz., aqua fortis, white arsenic, mercury, powder of diamonds, lapis
costitus, great spiders, cantharides." Franklin's evidence is a palpable
tissue of lies, full of statements that contradict each other, but it is
likely enough, judging from facts elicited elsewhere, that his list
of poisons is accurate. Enough poison passed from hand to hand to have
slain an army.
Mention is made by Weldon of the evidence given by Symon, servant to Sir
Thomas Monson, who had been employed by Mrs Turner to carry a jelly and
a tart to the Tower. Symon appears to have been a witty fellow. He was,
"for his pleasant answer," dismissed by Coke.
My lord told him: "Symon, you have had a hand in this poisoning
business----"
"No, my good lord, I had but a finger in it, which almost cost me my
life, and, at the best, cost me all my hair and nails." For the truth
was that Symon was somewhat liquorish, and finding the syrup swim from
the top of the tart as he carried it, he did with his finger skim it
off: and it was believed, had he known what it had been, he would not
have been his taster at so dear a rate.
Coke, with his bullying methods and his way of acting both as judge
and chief prosecutor, lacks little as prototype for the later Judge
Jeffreys. Even before the jury retired he was at pains to inform Mrs
Turner that she had the seven deadly sins: viz., "a whore, a bawd, a
sorcerer, a witch, a papist, a felon, and a murderer, the daughter
of the devil Forman."[13] And having given such a Christian example
throughout the trial, he besought her "to repent, and to become the
servant of Jesus Christ, and to pray Him to cast out the seven devils."
It was upon this that Anne begged the Lord Chief Justice to be merciful
to her, putting forward the plea of having been brought up with the
Countess of Essex, and of having been "a long time her servant." She
declared that she had not known of poison in the things that were sent
to Sir Thomas Overbury.
The jury's retirement was not long-drawn. They found her guilty.
Says Weldon:
The Wednesday following she was brought from the sheriff's in a coach to
Newgate and there was put into a cart, and casting money often among the
people as she was carried to Tyburn, where she was executed, and whither
many men and women of fashion followed her in coaches to see her die.
Her speeches before execution were pious, like most speeches of the
sort, and "moved the spectators to great pity and grief for her." She
again related "her breeding with the Countess of Somerset," and pleaded
further of "having had no other means to maintain her and her children
but what came from the Countess." This last, of course, was less than
the truth. Anne was not so indigent that she needed to take to poisoning
as a means of supporting her family. She also said "that when her hand
was once in this business she knew the revealing of it would be her
overthrow."
In more than one account written later of her execution she is said to
have worn a ruff and cuffs dressed with the yellow starch which she had
made so fashionable, and it is maintained that this association made the
starch thereafter unpopular. It is forgotten that with Anne the recipe
for the yellow starch probably was lost. Moreover, the elaborate ruff
was then being put out of fashion by the introduction of the much more
comfortable lace collar. In any case, "There is no truth," writes Judge
Parry, in the old story[14] that Coke ordered her to be executed in the
yellow ruff she had made the fashion and so proudly worn in Court. What
did happen, according to Sir Simonds d'Ewes, was that the hangman, a
coarse ruffian with a distorted sense of humour, dressed himself in
bands and cuffs of yellow colour, but no one heeded his ribaldry; only
in after days none of either sex used the yellow starch, and the fashion
grew generally to be detested.
Pretty much, I should think, as the tall 'choker' became detested within
the time of many of us. After Mrs Turner Sir Gervase Elwes was brought
to trial as an accessory. The only evidence against him was that of the
liar Franklin, who asserted that Sir Gervase had been in league with the
Countess. It was plain, however, both from Weston's statements and from
Sir Gervase's own, that the Lieutenant of the Tower had done his very
best to defeat the Turner-Essex-Northampton plot for the poisoning of
Overbury, throwing away the "rosalgar" and later draughts, as well
as substituting food from his own kitchen for that sent in by Turner.
"Although it must have been clear that if any of what was alleged
against him had been true Overbury's poisoning would never have taken
five months to accomplish, he was sentenced and hanged."[15]
This, of course, was a glaring piece of injustice, but Coke no doubt had
his instructions. Weston, Mrs Turner, Elwes, and, later, Franklin had
to be got out of the way, so that they could not be confronted with the
chief figure against whom the Great Oyer was directed, and whom it was
designed to pull down, Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset--and with him his
wife. Just as much of the statements and confessions of the prisoners in
the four preliminary trials was used by Coke as suited his purpose. It
is pointed out by Amos, in his Great Oyer of Poisoning, that a large
number of the documents appertaining to the Somerset trial show
corrections and apparent glosses in Coke's own handwriting, and that
even the confessions on the scaffold of some of the convicted are
holographs by Coke. As a sample of the suppression of which Coke was
guilty I may put forward the fact that Somerset's note to his own
physician, Craig, asking him to visit Overbury, was not produced.
Yet great play was made by Coke of this visit against Somerset. Wrote
Somerset to Craig, "I pray you let him have your best help, and as much
of your company as he shall require."
It was never proved that it was Anne Turner and Lady Essex who corrupted
the lad Reeves, who with Weston administered the poisoned clyster that
murdered Overbury. Nothing was done at all to absolve the apothecary
Loubel, Reeves's master, of having prepared the poisonous injection, nor
Sir Theodore Mayerne, the King's physician, of having been party to its
preparation. Yet it was demonstrably the injection that killed Overbury
if he was killed by poison at all. It is certain that the poisons sent
to the Tower by Turner and the Countess did not save in early instances,
get to Overbury at all--Elwes saw to that--or Overbury must have died
months before he did die.
According to Weldon, who may be supposed to have witnessed the trials,
Franklin confessed "that Overbury was smothered to death, not poisoned
to death, though he had poison given him." And Weldon goes on to make
this curious comment:
Here was Coke glad, how to cast about to bring both ends together, Mrs
Turner and Weston being already hanged for killing Overbury with poison;
but he, being the very quintessence of the law, presently informs the
jury that if a man be done to death with pistols, poniards, swords,
halter, poison, etc., so he be done to death, the indictment is good if
he be but indicted for any of those ways. But the good lawyers of those
times were not of that opinion, but did believe that Mrs Turner was
directly murthered by my lord Coke's law as Overbury was without any
law.
Though you will look in vain through the reports given in the State
Trials for any speech of Coke to the jury in exactly these terms, it
might be just as well to remember that the transcriptions from which
the Trials are printed were prepared UNDER Coke's SUPERVISION, and that
they, like the confessions of the convicted, are very often in his own
handwriting.
At all events, even on the bowdlerized evidence that exists, it is plain
that Anne Turner should have been charged only with attempted murder.
Of that she was manifestly guilty and, according to the justice of the
time, thoroughly deserved to be hanged. The indictment against her was
faulty, and the case against her as full of holes as a colander. Her
trial was 'cooked' in more senses than one.
It was some seven months after the execution of Anne Turner that the
Countess of Essex was brought to trial. This was in May. In December,
while virtually a prisoner under the charge of Sir William Smith at Lord
Aubigny's house in Blackfriars, she had given birth to a daughter. In
March she had been conveyed to the Tower, her baby being handed over to
the care of her mother, the Countess of Suffolk. Since the autumn of
the previous year she had not been permitted any communication with her
husband, nor he with her. He was already lodged in the Tower when she
arrived there.
On a day towards the end of May she was conveyed by water from the Tower
to Westminster Hall. The hall was packed to suffocation, seats being
paid for at prices which would turn a modern promoter of a world's
heavyweight-boxing-championship fight green with envy. Her judges were
twenty-two peers of the realm, with the Lord High Steward, the Lord
Chief Justice, and seven judges at law. It was a pageant of colour,
in the midst of which the woman on trial, in her careful toilette,
consisting of a black stammel gown, a cypress chaperon or black crepe
hood in the French fashion, relieved by touches of white in the cuffs
and ruff of cobweb lawn, struck a funereal note. Preceded by the
headsman carrying his axe with its edge turned away from her, she was
conducted to the bar by the Lieutenant of the Tower. The indictment was
read to her, and at its end came the question: "Frances Howard, Countess
of Somerset, how sayest thou? Art thou guilty of this felony and murder
or not guilty?"
There was a hushed pause for a moment; then came the low-voiced answer:
"Guilty."
Sir Francis Bacon, the Attorney-General--himself to appear in the same
place not long after to answer charges of bribery and corruption--now
addressed the judges. His eloquent address was a commendation of the
Countess's confession, and it hinted at royal clemency.
In answer to the formal demand of the Clerk of Arraigns if she had
anything to say why judgment of death should not be given against
her the Countess made a barely audible plea for mercy, begging their
lordships to intercede for her with the King. Then the Lord High
Steward, expressing belief that the King would be moved to mercy,
delivered judgment. She was to be taken thence to the Tower of London,
thence to the place of execution, where she was to be hanged by the neck
until she was dead--and might the Lord have mercy on her soul.
The attendant women hastened to the side of the swaying woman. And now
the halbardiers formed escort about her, the headsman in front, with the
edge of his axe turned towards her in token of her conviction, and she
was led away.
VI
It is perfectly clear that the Countess of Somerset was led to confess
on the promise of the King's mercy. It is equally clear that she did not
know what she was confessing to. Whatever might have been her conspiracy
with Anne Turner it is a practical certainty that it did not result in
the death of Thomas Overbury. There is no record of her being allowed
any legal advice in the seven months that had elapsed since she
had first been made a virtual prisoner. She had been permitted no
communication with her husband. For all she knew, Overbury might indeed
have died from the poison which she had caused to be sent to the Tower
in such quantity and variety. And she went to trial at Westminster
guilty in conscience, her one idea being to take the blame for having
brought about the murder of Overbury, thinking by that to absolve her
husband of any share in the plot. She could not have known that her plea
of guilty would weaken Somerset's defence. The woman who could go to
such lengths in order to win her husband was unlikely to have done
anything that might put him in jeopardy. One can well imagine with what
fierceness she would have fought her case had she thought that by doing
so she could have helped the man she loved.
But Frances Howard, no less than her accomplice Anne Turner, was the
victim of a gross subversion of justice. That she was guilty of a cruel
and determined attempt to poison Overbury is beyond question, and, being
guilty of that, she was thoroughly deserving of the fate that overcame
Anne Turner, but that at the last she was allowed to escape. Her
confession, however, shackled Somerset at his trial. It put her at the
King's mercy. Without endangering her life Somerset dared not come to
the crux of his defence, which would have been to demand why Loubel had
been allowed to go free, and why the King's physician, Mayerne, had not
been examined. To prevent Somerset from asking those questions, which
must have given the public a sufficient hint of King James's share in
the murder of Overbury, two men stood behind the Earl all through his
trial with cloaks over their arms, ready to muffle him. But, whatever
may be said of Somerset, the prospect of the cloaks would not have
stopped him from attempting those questions. He had sent word to King
James that he was "neither Gowrie nor Balmerino," those two earlier
victims of James's treachery. The thing that muffled him was the threat
to withdraw the promised mercy to his Countess. And so he kept silent,
to be condemned to death as his wife had been, and to join her in the
Tower.
Five weary years were the couple to eat their hearts out there, their
death sentences remitted, before their ultimate banishment far from the
Court to a life of impoverished obscurity in the country. Better for
them, one would think, if they had died on Tower Green. It is hard to
imagine that the dozen years or so which they were to spend together
could contain anything of happiness for them--she the confessed would-be
poisoner, and he haunted by the memory of that betrayal of friendship
which had begun the process of their double ruin. Frances Howard died
in 1632, her husband twenty-three years later. The longer lease of life
could have been no blessing to the fallen favourite.
There is a portrait of Frances Howard in the National Portrait Gallery
by an unknown artist. It is an odd little face which appears above
the elaborate filigree of the stiff lace ruff and under the
carefully dressed bush of dark brown hair. With her gay jacket of red
gold-embroidered, and her gold-ornamented grey gown, cut low to show the
valley between her young breasts, she looks like a child dressed up. If
there is no great indication of the beauty which so many poets shed ink
over there is less promise of the dire determination which was to pursue
a man's life with cruel poisons over several months. It is, however, a
narrow little face, and there is a tight-liddedness about the eyes which
in an older woman might indicate the bigot. Bigot she proved herself
to be, if it be bigotry in a woman to love a man with an intensity that
will not stop at murder in order to win him. That is the one thing that
may be said for Frances Howard. She did love Robert Carr. She loved him
to his ruin.
IV: -- A MODEL FOR MR HOGARTH
On a Sunday, the 5th of February, 1733, there came toddling into that
narrow passage of the Temple known as Tanfield Court an elderly lady by
the name of Mrs Love. It was just after one o'clock of the afternoon.
The giants of St Dunstan's behind her had only a minute before rapped
out the hour with their clubs.
Mrs Love's business was at once charitable and social. She was going,
by appointment made on the previous Friday night, to eat dinner with
a frail old lady named Mrs Duncomb, who lived in chambers on the third
floor of one of the buildings that had entry from the court. Mrs Duncomb
was the widow of a law stationer of the City. She had been a widow for a
good number of years. The deceased law stationer, if he had not left her
rich, at least had left her in fairly comfortable circumstances. It
was said about the environs that she had some property, and this fact,
combined with the other that she was obviously nearing the end of life's
journey, made her an object of melancholy interest to the womenkind of
the neighbourhood.
Mrs Duncomb was looked after by a couple of servants. One of them, Betty
Harrison, had been the old lady's companion for a lifetime. Mrs
Duncomb, described as "old," was only sixty.[16] Her weakness and bodily
condition seem to have made her appear much older. Betty, then, also
described as "old," may have been of an age with her mistress, or even
older. She was, at all events, not by much less frail. The other servant
was a comparatively new addition to the establishment, a fresh little
girl of about seventeen, Ann (or Nanny) Price by name.
Mrs Love climbed the three flights of stairs to the top landing. It
surprised her, or disturbed her, but little that she found no signs of
life on the various floors, because it was, as we have seen, a Sunday.
The occupants of the chambers of the staircase, mostly gentlemen
connected in one way or another with the law, would be, she knew abroad
for the eating of their Sunday dinners, either at their favourite
taverns or at commons in the Temple itself. What did rather disturb
kindly Mrs Love was the fact that she found Mrs Duncomb's outer door
closed--an unwonted fact--and it faintly surprised her that no odour of
cooking greeted her nostrils.
Mrs Love knocked. There was no reply. She knocked, indeed, at intervals
over a period of some fifteen minutes, still obtaining no response. The
disturbed sense of something being wrong became stronger and stronger in
the mind of Mrs Love.
On the night of the previous Friday she had been calling upon Mrs
Duncomb, and she had found the old lady very weak, very nervous, and
very low in spirits. It had not been a very cheerful visit all round,
because the old maidservant, Betty Harrison, had also been far from
well. There had been a good deal of talk between the old women of dying,
a subject to which their minds had been very prone to revert. Besides
Mrs Love there were two other visitors, but they too failed to cheer the
old couple up. One of the visitors, a laundress of the Temple called
Mrs Oliphant, had done her best, poohpoohing such melancholy talk, and
attributing the low spirits in which the old women found themselves
to the bleakness of the February weather, and promising them that they
would find a new lease of life with the advent of spring. But Mrs Betty
especially had been hard to console.
"My mistress," she had said to cheerful Mrs Oliphant, "will talk of
dying. And she would have me die with her."
As she stood in considerable perturbation of mind on the cheerless
third-floor landing that Sunday afternoon Mrs Love found small matter
for comfort in her memory of the Friday evening. She remembered that old
Mrs Duncomb had spoken complainingly of the lonesomeness which had
come upon her floor by the vacation of the chambers opposite her on
the landing. The tenant had gone a day or two before, leaving the rooms
empty of furniture, and the key with a Mr Twysden.
Mrs. Love, turning to view the door opposite to that on which she had
been rapping so long and so ineffectively, had a shuddery feeling that
she was alone on the top of the world.
She remembered how she had left Mrs Duncomb on the Friday night. Mrs
Oliphant had departed first, accompanied by the second visitor, one
Sarah Malcolm, a charwoman who had worked for Mrs Duncomb up to the
previous Christmas, and who had called in to see how her former employer
was faring. An odd, silent sort of young woman this Sarah, good-looking
in a hardfeatured sort of way, she had taken but a very small part in
the conversation, but had sat staring rather sullenly into the fire by
the side of Betty Harrison, or else casting a flickering glance about
the room. Mrs Love, before following the other two women downstairs, had
helped the ailing Betty to get Mrs Duncomb settled for the night. In the
dim candle-light and the faint glow of the fire that scarce illumined
the wainscoted room the high tester-bed of the old lady, with its
curtains, had seemed like a shadowed catafalque, an illusion nothing
lessened by the frail old figure under the bedclothing.
It came to the mind of Mrs Love that the illness manifesting itself in
Betty on the Friday night had worsened. Nanny, she imagined, must have
gone abroad on some errand. The old servant, she thought, was too ill to
come to the door, and her voice would be too weak to convey an answer to
the knocking. Mrs Love, not without a shudder for the chill feeling of
that top landing, betook herself downstairs again to make what inquiry
she might. It happened that she met one of her fellow-visitors of the
Friday night, Mrs Oliphant.
Mrs Oliphant was sympathetic, but could not give any information. She
had seen no member of the old lady's establishment that day. She could
only advise Mrs Love to go upstairs again and knock louder.
This Mrs Love did, but again got no reply. She then evolved the theory
that Betty had died during the night, and that Nanny, Mrs Duncomb being
confined to bed, had gone to look for help, possibly from her sister,
and to find a woman who would lay out the body of the old servant. With
this in her mind Mrs Love descended the stairs once more, and went to
look for another friend of Mrs Duncomb's, a Mrs Rhymer.
Mrs Rhymer was a friend of the old lady's of some thirty years'
standing. She was, indeed, named as executrix in Mrs Duncomb's will. Mrs
Love finding her and explaining the situation as she saw it, Mrs Rhymer
at once returned with Mrs Love to Tanfield Court.
The two women ascended the stairs, and tried pushing the old lady's
door. It refused to yield to their efforts. Then Mrs Love went to the
staircase window that overlooked the court, and gazed around to see if
there was anyone about who might help. Some distance away, at the door,
we are told, "of my Lord Bishop of Bangor," was the third of Friday
night's visitors to Mrs Duncomb, the charwoman named Sarah Malcolm. Mrs
Love hailed her.
"Prithee, Sarah," begged Mrs Love, "go and fetch a smith to open Mrs
Duncomb's door."
"I will go at all speed," Sarah assured her, with ready willingness, and
off she sped. Mrs Love and Mrs Rhymer waited some time. Sarah came back
with Mrs Oliphant in tow, but had been unable to secure the services of
a locksmith. This was probably due to the fact that it was a Sunday.
By now both Mrs Love and Mrs Rhymer had become deeply apprehensive, and
the former appealed to Mrs Oliphant. "I do believe they are all dead,
and the smith is not come!" cried Mrs Love. "What shall we do, Mrs
Oliphant?"
Mrs Oliphant, much younger than the others, seems to have been a woman
of resource. She had from Mr Twysden, she said, the key of the vacant
chambers opposite to Mrs Duncomb's. "Now let me see," she continued, "if
I cannot get out of the back chamber window into the gutter, and so into
Mrs Duncomb's apartment."
The other women urged her to try.[17] Mrs Oliphant set off, her heels
echoing in the empty rooms. Presently the waiting women heard a
pane snap, and they guessed that Mrs Oliphant had broken through Mrs
Duncomb's casement to get at the handle. They heard, through the door,
the noise of furniture being moved as she got through the window. Then
came a shriek, the scuffle of feet. The outer door of Mrs Duncomb's
chambers was flung open. Mrs Oliphant, ashen-faced, appeared on the
landing. "God! Oh, gracious God!" she cried. "They're all murdered!"
II
All four women pressed into the chambers. All three of the women
occupying them had been murdered. In the passage or lobby little Nanny
Price lay in her bed in a welter of blood, her throat savagely cut. Her
hair was loose and over her eyes, her clenched hands all bloodied about
her throat. It was apparent that she had struggled desperately for
life. Next door, in the dining-room, old Betty Harrison lay across the
press-bed in which she usually slept. Being in the habit of keeping her
gown on for warmth, as it was said, she was partially dressed. She had
been strangled, it seemed, "with an apron-string or a pack-thread," for
there was a deep crease about her neck and the bruised indentations as
of knuckles. In her bedroom, also across her bed, lay the dead body of
old Mrs Duncomb. There had been here also an attempt to strangle, an
unnecessary attempt it appeared, for the crease about the neck was very
faint. Frail as the old lady had been, the mere weight of the murderer's
body, it was conjectured, had been enough to kill her.
These pathological details were established on the arrival later of
Mr Bigg, the surgeon, fetched from the Rainbow Coffee-house near by by
Fairlow, one of the Temple porters. But the four women could see enough
for themselves, without the help of Mr Bigg, to understand how death
had been dealt in all three cases. They could see quite clearly also
for what motive the crime had been committed. A black strong-box, with
papers scattered about it, lay beside Mrs Duncomb's bed, its lid forced
open. It was in this box that the old lady had been accustomed to keep
her money.
If any witness had been needed to say what the black box had contained
there was Mrs Rhymer, executrix under the old lady's will. And if Mrs.
Rhymer had been at any need to refresh her memory regarding the contents
opportunity had been given her no farther back than the afternoon of the
previous Thursday. On that day she had called upon Mrs Duncomb to take
tea and to talk affairs. Three or four years before, with her rapidly
increasing frailness, the old lady's memory had begun to fail. Mrs
Rhymer acted for her as a sort of unofficial curator bonis, receiving
her money and depositing it in the black box, of which she kept the key.
On the Thursday, old Betty and young Nanny being sent from the room, the
old lady had told Mrs Rhymer that she needed some money--a guinea. Mrs
Rhymer had gone through the solemn process of opening the black box,
and, one must suppose--old ladies nearing their end being what they
are--had been at need to tell over the contents of the box for the
hundredth time, just to reassure Mrs Duncomb that she thoroughly
understood the duties she had agreed to undertake as executrix
At the top of the box was a silver tankard. It had belonged to Mrs
Duncomb's husband. In the tankard was a hundred pounds. Beside the
tankard lay a bag containing guinea pieces to the number of twenty or
so. This was the bag that Mrs Rhymer had carried over to the old lady's
chair by the fire, in order to take from it the needed guinea.
There were some half-dozen packets of money in the box, each sealed
with black wax and set aside for particular purposes after Mrs Duncomb's
death. Other sums, greater in quantity than those contained in the
packets, were earmarked in the same way. There was, for example, twenty
guineas set aside for the old lady's burial, eighteen moidores to meet
unforeseen contingencies, and in a green purse some thirty or forty
shillings, which were to be distributed among poor people of Mrs
Duncomb's acquaintance. The ritual of telling over the box contents, if
something ghostly, had had its usual effect of comforting the old lady's
mind. It consoled her to know that all arrangements were in order for
her passing in genteel fashion to her long home, that all the decorums
of respectable demise would be observed, and that "the greatest of
these" would not be forgotten. The ritual over, the black box was closed
and locked, and on her departure Mrs Rhymer had taken away the key as
usual.
The motive for the crime, as said, was plain. The black box had been
forced, and there was no sign of tankard, packets, green purse, or bag
of guineas.
The horror and distress of the old lady's friends that Sunday afternoon
may better be imagined than described. Loudest of the four, we are told,
was Sarah Malcolm. It is also said that she was, however, the coolest,
keen to point out the various methods by which the murderers (for the
crime to her did not look like a single-handed effort) could have got
into the chambers. She drew attention to the wideness of the kitchen
chimney and to the weakness of the lock in the door to the vacant rooms
on the other side of the landing. She also pointed out that, since the
bolt of the spring-lock of the outer door to Mrs Duncomb's rooms had
been engaged when they arrived, the miscreants could not have used that
exit.
This last piece of deduction on Sarah's part, however, was made rather
negligible by experiments presently carried out by the porter, Fairlow,
with the aid of a piece of string. He showed that a person outside the
shut door could quite easily pull the bolt to on the inside.
The news of the triple murder quickly spread, and it was not long before
a crowd had collected in Tanfield Court, up the stairs to Mrs. Duncomb's
landing, and round about the door of Mrs Duncomb's chambers. It did not
disperse until the officers had made their investigations and the bodies
of the three victims had been removed. And even then, one may be sure,
there would still be a few of those odd sort of people hanging about
who, in those times as in these, must linger on the scene of a crime
long after the last drop of interest has evaporated.
III
Two further actors now come upon the scene. And for the proper grasping
of events we must go back an hour or two in time to notice their
activities.
They are a Mr Gehagan, a young Irish barrister, and a friend of his
named Kerrel.[18] These young men occupy chambers on opposite sides
of the same landing, the third floor, over the Alienation Office in
Tanfield Court.
Mr Gehagan was one of Sarah Malcolm's employers. That Sunday morning at
nine she had appeared in his rooms to do them up and to light the fire.
While Gehagan was talking to Sarah he was joined by his friend Kerrel,
who offered to stand him some tea. Sarah was given a shilling and sent
out to buy tea. She returned and made the brew, then remained about
the chambers until the horn blew, as was then the Temple custom, for
commons. The two young men departed. After commons they walked for a
while in the Temple Gardens, then returned to Tanfield Court.
By this time the crowd attracted by the murder was blocking up the
court, and Gehagan asked what was the matter. He was told of the murder,
and he remarked to Kerrel that the old lady had been their charwoman's
acquaintance.
The two friends then made their way to a coffee-house in Covent Garden.
There was some talk there of the murder, and the theory was advanced by
some one that it could have been done only by some laundress who knew
the chambers and how to get in and out of them. From Covent Garden,
towards night, Gehagan and Kerrel went to a tavern in Essex Street, and
there they stayed carousing until one o'clock in the morning, when they
left for the Temple. They were not a little astonished on reaching their
common landing to find Kerrel's door open, a fire burning in the
grate of his room, and a candle on the table. By the fire, with a dark
riding-hood about her head, was Sarah Malcolm. To Kerrel's natural
question of what she was doing there at such an unearthly hour she
muttered something about having things to collect. Kerrel then,
reminding her that Mrs Duncomb had been her acquaintance, asked her if
anyone had been "taken up" for the murder.
"That Mr Knight," Sarah replied, "who has chambers under her, has been
absent two or three days. He is suspected."
"Well," said Kerrel, remembering the theory put forward in the
coffee-house, and made suspicious by her presence at that strange hour,
"nobody that was acquainted with Mrs Duncomb is wanted here until the
murderer is discovered. Look out your things, therefore, and begone!"
Kerrel's suspicion thickened, and he asked his friend to run downstairs
and call up the watch. Gehagan ran down, but found difficulty in opening
the door below, and had to return. Kerrel himself went down then, and
came back with two watchmen. They found Sarah in the bedroom at a chest
of drawers, in which she was turning over some linen that she claimed
to be hers. The now completely suspicious Kerrel went to his closet, and
noticed that two or three waistcoats were missing from a portmanteau.
He asked Sarah where they were; upon which Sarah, with an eye to the
watchmen and to Gehagan, begged to be allowed to speak with him alone.
Kerrel refused, saying he could have no business with her that was
secret.
Sarah then confessed that she had pawned the missing waistcoats for two
guineas, and begged him not to be angry. Kerrel asked her why she had
not asked him for money. He could readily forgive her for pawning the
waistcoats, but, having heard her talk of Mrs Lydia Duncomb, he was
afraid she was concerned with the murder. A pair of earrings were found
in the drawers, and these Sarah claimed, putting them in her corsage. An
odd-looking bundle in the closet then attracted Kerrel's attention, and
he kicked it, and asked Sarah what it was. She said it was merely dirty
linen wrapped up in an old gown. She did not wish it exposed. Kerrel
made further search, and found that other things were missing. He told
the watch to take the woman and hold her strictly.
Sarah was led away. Kerrel, now thoroughly roused, continued his search,
and he found underneath his bed another bundle. He also came upon some
bloodstained linen in another place, and in a close-stool a silver
tankard, upon the handle of which was a lot of dried blood.
Kerrel's excitement passed to Gehagan, and the two of them went at
speed downstairs yelling for the watch. After a little the two watchmen
reappeared, but without Sarah. They had let her go, they said, because
they had found nothing on her, and, besides, she had not been charged
before a constable.
One here comes upon a recital by the watchmen which reveals the
extraordinary slackness in dealing with suspect persons that
characterized the guardians of the peace in London in those times. They
had let the woman go, but she had come back. Her home was in Shoreditch,
she said, and rather than walk all that way on a cold and boisterous
night she had wanted to sit up in the watch-house. The watchmen refused
to let her do this, but ordered her to "go about her business," advising
her sternly at the same time to turn up again by ten o'clock in the
morning. Sarah had given her word, and had gone away.
On hearing this story Kerrel became very angry, threatening the two
watchmen, Hughes and Mastreter, with Newgate if they did not pick her
up again immediately. Upon this the watchmen scurried off as quickly as
their age and the cumbrous nature of their clothing would let them.
They found Sarah in the company of two other watchmen at the gate of
the Temple. Hughes, as a means of persuading her to go with them more
easily, told her that Kerrel wanted to speak with her, and that he was
not angry any longer. Presently, in Tanfield Court, they came on the two
young men carrying the tankard and the bloodied linen. This time it was
Gehagan who did the talking. He accused Sarah furiously, showing her the
tankard. Sarah attempted to wipe the blood off the tankard handle with
her apron. Gehagan stopped her.
Sarah said the tankard was her own. Her mother had given it her, and she
had had it for five years. It was to get the tankard out of pawn that
she had taken Kerrel's waistcoats, needing thirty shillings. The blood
on the handle was due to her having pricked a finger.
With this began the series of lies Sarah Malcolm put up in her defence.
She was hauled into the watchman's box and more thoroughly searched. A
green silk purse containing twenty-one guineas was found in the bosom of
her dress. This purse Sarah declared she had found in the street, and as
an excuse for its cleanliness, unlikely with the streets as foul as they
were at that age and time of year, said she had washed it. Both bundles
of linen were bloodstained. There was some doubt as to the identity of
the green purse. Mrs Rhymer, who, as we have seen, was likelier than
anyone to recognize it, would not swear it was the green purse that had
been in Mrs Duncomb's black box. There was, however, no doubt at all
about the tankard. It had the initials "C. D." engraved upon it, and
was at once identified as Mrs Duncomb's. The linen which Sarah had
been handling in Mr Kerrel's drawer was said to be darned in a way
recognizable as Mrs Duncomb's. It had lain beside the tankard and the
money in the black box.
IV
There was, it will be seen, but very little doubt of Sarah Malcolm's
guilt. According to the reports of her trial, however, she fought
fiercely for her life, questioning the witnesses closely. Some of them,
such as could remember small points against her, but who failed in
recollection of the colour of her dress or of the exact number of the
coins said to be lost, she vehemently denounced.
One of the Newgate turnkeys told how some of the missing money was
discovered. Being brought from the Compter to Newgate, Sarah happened to
see a room in which debtors were confined. She asked the turnkey, Roger
Johnson, if she could be kept there. Johnson replied that it would cost
her a guinea, but that from her appearance it did not look to him as if
she could afford so much. Sarah seems to have bragged then, saying that
if the charge was twice or thrice as much she could send for a friend
who would pay it. Her attitude probably made the turnkey suspicious.
At any rate, after Sarah had mixed for some time with the felons in the
prison taproom, Johnson called her out and, lighting the way by use of a
link, led her to an empty room.
"Child," he said, "there is reason to suspect that you are guilty of
this murder, and therefore I have orders to search you." He had, he
admitted, no such orders. He felt under her arms; whereupon she started
and threw back her head. Johnson clapped his hand on her head and felt
something hard. He pulled off her cap, and found a bag of money in her
hair.
"I asked her," Johnson said in the witness-box, "how she came by it,
and she said it was some of Mrs Duncomb's money. 'But, Mr Johnson,' says
she, 'I'll make you a present of it if you will keep it to yourself, and
let nobody know anything of the matter. The other things against me
are nothing but circumstances, and I shall come well enough off. And
therefore I only desire you to let me have threepence or sixpence a
day till the sessions be over; then I shall be at liberty to shift for
myself.'"
To the best of his knowledge, said this turnkey, having told the money
over, there were twenty moidores, eighteen guineas, five broad pieces,
a half-broad piece, five crowns, and two or three shillings. He
thought there was also a twenty-five-shilling piece and some others,
twenty-three-shilling pieces. He had sealed them up in the bag, and
there they were (producing the bag in court).
The court asked how she said she had come by the money.
Johnson's answer was that she had said she took the money and the bag
from Mrs Duncomb, and that she had begged him to keep it secret. "My
dear," said this virtuous gaoler, "I would not secrete the money for the
world.
"She told me, too," runs Johnson's recorded testimony, "that she had
hired three men to swear the tankard was her grandmother's, but could
not depend on them: that the name of one was William Denny, another was
Smith, and I have forgot the third. After I had taken the money away she
put a piece of mattress in her hair, that it might appear of the same
bulk as before. Then I locked her up and sent to Mr Alstone, and told
him the story. 'And,' says I, 'do you stand in a dark place to be
witness of what she says, and I'll go and examine her again."'
Sarah interrupted: "I tied my handkerchief over my hair to hide the
money, but Buck,[19] happening to see my hair fall down, he told
Johnson; upon which Johnson came to see me and said, 'I find the cole's
planted in your hair. Let me keep it for you and let Buck know nothing
about it.' So I gave Johnson five broad pieces and twenty-two guineas,
not gratis, but only to keep for me, for I expected it to be returned
when sessions was over. As to the money, I never said I took it from
Mrs Duncomb; but he asked me what they had to rap against me. I told him
only a tankard. He asked me if it was Mrs Duncomb's, and I said yes."
The Court: "Johnson, were those her words: 'This is the money and bag
that I took'?"
Johnson: "Yes, and she desired me to make away with the bag."
Johnson's evidence was confirmed in part by Alstone, another officer of
the prison. He said he told Johnson to get the bag from the prisoner, as
it might have something about it whereby it could be identified. Johnson
called the girl, while Alstone watched from a dark corner. He saw Sarah
give Johnson the bag, and heard her ask him to burn it. Alstone also
deposed that Sarah told him (Alstone) part of the money found on her was
Mrs Duncomb's.
There is no need here to enlarge upon the oddly slack and casual
conditions of the prison life of the time as revealed in this evidence.
It will be no news to anyone who has studied contemporary criminal
history. There is a point, however, that may be considered here, and
that is the familiarity it suggests on the part of Sarah with prison
conditions and with the cant terms employed by criminals and the people
handling them.
Sarah, though still in her earliest twenties,[20] was known already--if
not in the Temple--to have a bad reputation. It is said that her closest
friends were thieves of the worst sort. She was the daughter of an
Englishman, at one time a public official in a small way in Dublin. Her
father had come to London with his wife and daughter, but on the death
of the mother had gone back to Ireland. He had left his daughter behind
him, servant in an ale-house called the Black Horse.
Sarah was a fairly well-educated girl. At the ale-house, however, she
formed an acquaintance with a woman named Mary Tracey, a dissolute
character, and with two thieves called Alexander. Of these three
disreputable people we shall be hearing presently, for Sarah tried to
implicate them in this crime which she certainly committed alone. It is
said that the Newgate officers recognized Sarah on her arrival. She had
often been to the prison to visit an Irish thief, convicted for stealing
the pack of a Scots pedlar.
It will be seen from Sarah's own defence how she tried to implicate
Tracey and the two Alexanders:
"I freely own that my crimes deserve death; I own that I was accessory
to the robbery, but I was innocent of the murder, and will give an
account of the whole affair.
"I lived with Mrs Lydia Duncomb about three months before she was
murdered. The robbery was contrived by Mary Tracey, who is now in
confinement, and myself, my own vicious inclinations agreeing with hers.
We likewise proposed to rob Mr Oakes in Thames Street. She came to me at
my master's, Mr Kerrel's chambers, on the Sunday before the murder
was committed; he not being then at home, we talked about robbing Mrs
Duncomb. I told her I could not pretend to do it by myself, for I should
be found out. 'No,' says she, 'there are the two Alexanders will help
us.' Next day I had seventeen pounds sent me out of the country, which
I left in Mr Kerrel's drawers. I met them all in Cheapside the following
Friday, and we agreed on the next night, and so parted.
"Next day, being Saturday, I went between seven and eight in the evening
to see Mrs Duncomb's maid, Elizabeth Harrison, who was very bad. I
stayed a little while with her, and went down, and Mary Tracey and the
two Alexanders came to me about ten o'clock, according to appointment."
On this statement the whole implication of Tracey and the Alexanders by
Sarah stands or falls. It falls for the reason that the Temple porter
had seen no stranger pass the gate that night, nobody but Templars going
to their chambers. The one fact riddles the rest of Sarah's statement in
defence, but, as it is somewhat of a masterpiece in lying invention,
I shall continue to quote it. "Mary Tracey would have gone about the
robbery just then, but I said it was too soon. Between ten and eleven
she said, 'We can do it now.' I told her I would go and see, and so went
upstairs, and they followed me. I met the young maid on the stairs with
a blue mug; she was going for some milk to make a sack posset. She asked
me who were those that came after me. I told her they were people going
to Mr Knight's below. As soon as she was gone I said to Mary Tracey,
'Now do you and Tom Alexander go down. I know the door is ajar, because
the old maid is ill, and can't get up to let the young maid in when she
comes back.' Upon that, James Alexander, by my order, went in and hid
himself under the bed; and as I was going down myself I met the young
maid coming up again. She asked me if I spoke to Mrs Betty. I told her
no; though I should have told her otherwise, but only that I was afraid
she might say something to Mrs Betty about me, and Mrs Betty might tell
her I had not been there, and so they might have a suspicion of me."
There is a possibility that this part of her confession, the tale of
having met the young maid, Nanny, may be true.[21] And here may the
truth of the murder be hidden away. Very likely it is, indeed, that
Sarah encountered the girl going out with the blue mug for milk to make
a sack posset, and she may have slipped in by the open door to hide
under the bed until the moment was ripe for her terrible intention. On
the other hand, if there is truth in the tale of her encountering the
girl again as she returned with the milk--and her cunning in answering
"no" to the maid's query if she had seen Mrs Betty has the real
ring--other ways of getting an entry were open to her. We know that the
lock of the vacant chambers opposite Mrs Duncomb's would have yielded
to small manipulation. It is not at all unlikely that Sarah, having been
charwoman to the old lady, and with the propensities picked up from her
Shoreditch acquaintances, had made herself familiar with the locks on
the landing. So that she may have waited her hour in the empty rooms,
and have got into Mrs Duncomb's by the same method used by Mrs Oliphant
after the murder. She may even have slipped back the spring-catch of the
outer door. One account of the murder suggests that she may have
asked Ann Price, on one pretext or other, to let her share her bed. It
certainly was not beyond the callousness of Sarah Malcolm to have chosen
this method, murdering the girl in her sleep, and then going on to
finish off the two helpless old women.
The truth, as I have said, lies hidden in this extraordinarily
mendacious confection. Liars of Sarah's quality are apt to base their
fabrications on a structure, however slight, of truth. I continue with
the confession, then, for what the reader may get out of it.
"I passed her [Nanny Price] and went down, and spoke with Tracey and
Alexander, and then went to my master's chambers, and stirred up the
fire. I stayed about a quarter of an hour, and when I came back I saw
Tracey and Tom Alexander sitting on Mrs Duncomb's stairs, and I sat down
with them. At twelve o'clock we heard some people walking, and by and by
Mr Knight came home, went to his room, and shut the door. It was a very
stormy night; there was hardly anybody stirring abroad, and the watchmen
kept up close, except just when they cried the hour. At two o'clock
another gentleman came, and called the watch to light his candle, upon
which I went farther upstairs, and soon after this I heard Mrs Duncomb's
door open; James Alexander came out, and said, 'Now is the time.' Then
Mary Tracey and Thomas Alexander went in, but I stayed upon the stair
to watch. I had told them where Mrs Duncomb's box stood. They came out
between four and five, and one of them called to me softly, and said,
'Hip! How shall I shut the door?' Says I, ''Tis a spring-lock; pull it
to, and it will be fast.' And so one of them did. They would have shared
the money and goods upon the stairs, but I told them we had better go
down; so we went under the arch by Fig-tree Court, where there was a
lamp. I asked them how much they had got. They said they had found fifty
guineas and some silver in the maid's purse, about one hundred pounds
in the chest of drawers, besides the silver tankard and the money in the
box and several other things; so that in all they had got to the value
of about three hundred pounds in money and goods. They told me that they
had been forced to gag the people. They gave me the tankard with what
was in it and some linen for my share, and they had a silver spoon and
a ring and the rest of the money among themselves. They advised me to be
cunning and plant the money and goods underground, and not to be seen to
be flush. Then we appointed to meet at Greenwich, but we did not go.[22]
"I was taken in the manner the witnesses have sworn, and carried to the
watch-house, from whence I was sent to the Compter, and so to Newgate.
I own that I said the tankard was mine, and that it was left me by my
mother: several witnesses have swore what account I gave of the tankard
being bloody; I had hurt my finger, and that was the occasion of it. I
am sure of death, and therefore have no occasion to speak anything but
the truth. When I was in the Compter I happened to see a young man[23]
whom I knew, with a fetter on. I told him I was sorry to see him there,
and I gave him a shilling, and called for half a quartern of rum to make
him drink. I afterwards went into my room, and heard a voice call
me, and perceived something poking behind the curtain. I was a little
surprised, and looking to see what it was, I found a hole in the wall,
through which the young man I had given the shilling to spoke to me, and
asked me if I had sent for my friends. I told him no. He said he would
do what he could for me, and so went away; and some time after he called
to me again, and said, 'Here is a friend.'
"I looked through, and saw Will Gibbs come in. Says he, 'Who is there
to swear against you?' I told him my two masters would be the chief
witnesses. 'And what can they charge you with?' says he. I told him the
tankard was the only thing, for there was nothing else that I thought
could hurt me. 'Never fear, then,' says he; 'we'll do well enough. We
will get them that will rap the tankard was your grandmother's, and that
you was in Shoreditch the night the act was committed; and we'll have
two men that shall shoot your masters. But,' said he, 'one of the
witnesses is a woman, and she won't swear under four guineas; but the
men will swear for two guineas apiece,' and he brought a woman and three
men. I gave them ten guineas, and they promised to wait for me at the
Bull Head in Broad Street. But when I called for them, when I was going
before Sir Richard Brocas, they were not there. Then I found I should
be sent to Newgate, and I was full of anxious thoughts; but a young man
told me I had better go to the Whit than to the Compter.
"When I came to Newgate I had but eighteenpence in silver, besides the
money in my hair, and I gave eighteenpence for my garnish. I was ordered
to a high place in the gaol. Buck, as I said before, having seen my hair
loose, told Johnson of it, and Johnson asked me if I had got any cole
planted there. He searched and found the bag, and there was in
it thirty-six moidores, eighteen guineas, five crown pieces, two
half-crowns, two broad pieces of twenty-five shillings, four of
twenty-three shillings, and one half-broad piece. He told me I must be
cunning, and not to be seen to be flush of money. Says I, 'What would
you advise me to do with it?' 'Why,' says he, 'you might have thrown it
down the sink, or have burnt it, but give it to me, and I'll take care
of it.' And so I gave it to him. Mr Alstone then brought me to the
condemned hold and examined me. I denied all till I found he had
heard of the money, and then I knew my life was gone. And therefore I
confessed all that I knew. I gave him the same account of the robbers as
I have given you. I told him I heard my masters were to be shot, and
I desired him to send them word. I described Tracey and the two
Alexanders, and when they were first taken they denied that they knew Mr
Oakes, whom they and I had agreed to rob.
"All that I have now declared is fact, and I have no occasion to murder
three persons on a false accusation; for I know I am a condemned woman.
I know I must suffer an ignominious death which my crimes deserve, and I
shall suffer willingly. I thank God He has given me time to repent, when
I might have been snatched off in the midst of my crimes, and without
having an opportunity of preparing myself for another world." There is
a glibness and an occasional turn of phrase in this confession which
suggests some touching up from the pen of a pamphleteer, but one may
take it that it is, in substance, a fairly accurate report. In spite of
the pleading which threads it that she should be regarded as accessory
only in the robbery, the jury took something less than a quarter of
an hour to come back with their verdict of "Guilty of murder." Sarah
Malcolm was sentenced to death in due form.
V
Having regard to the period in which this confession was made, and
considering the not too savoury reputations of Mary Tracey and the
brothers Alexander, we can believe that those three may well have
thought themselves lucky to escape from the mesh of lies Sarah tried to
weave about them.[24] It was not to be doubted on all the evidence that
she alone committed that cruel triple murder, and that she alone stole
the money which was found hidden in her hair. The bulk of the stolen
clothing was found in her possession, bloodstained. A white-handled
case-knife, presumably that used to cut Nanny Price's throat, was seen
on a table by the three women who, with Sarah herself, were first on the
scene of the murder. It disappeared later, and it is to be surmised that
Sarah Malcolm managed to get it out of the room unseen. But to the last
moment possible Sarah tried to get her three friends involved with her.
Say, which is not at all unlikely, that Tracey and the Alexanders may
have first suggested the robbery to her, and her vindictive maneouvring
may be understood.
It is said that when she heard that Tracey and the Alexanders had been
taken she was highly pleased. She smiled, and said that she could now
die happy, since the real murderers had been seized. Even when the three
were brought face to face with her for identification she did not lack
brazenness. "Ay," she said, "these are the persons who committed the
murder." "You know this to be true," she said to Tracey. "See, Mary,
what you have brought me to. It is through you and the two Alexanders
that I am brought to this shame, and must die for it. You all promised
me you would do no murder, but, to my great surprise, I found the
contrary."
She was, you will perceive, a determined liar. Condemned, she behaved
with no fortitude. "I am a dead woman!" she cried, when brought back to
Newgate. She wept and prayed, lied still more, pretended illness, and
had fits of hysteria. They put her in the old condemned hold with a
constant guard over her, for fear that she would attempt suicide.
The idlers of the town crowded to the prison to see her, for in the time
of his Blessed Majesty King George II Newgate, with the condemned hold
and its content, composed one of the fashionable spectacles. Young
Mr Hogarth, the painter, was one of those who found occasion to visit
Newgate to view the notorious murderess. He even painted her portrait.
It is said that Sarah dressed specially for him in a red dress, but that
copy--one which belonged to Horace Walpole--which is now in the National
Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, shows her in a grey gown, with a white
cap and apron. Seated to the left, she leans her folded hands on a table
on which a rosary and a crucifix lie. Behind her is a dark grey wall,
with a heavy grating over a dark door to the right. There are varied
mezzotints of this picture by Hogarth himself still extant, and there is
a pen-and-wash drawing of Sarah by Samuel Wale in the British Museum.
The stories regarding the last days in life of Sarah Malcolm would
occupy more pages than this book can afford to spend on them. To the
last she hoped for a reprieve. After the "dead warrant" had arrived, to
account for a paroxysm of terror that seized her, she said that it was
from shame at the idea that, instead of going to Tyburn, she was to be
hanged in Fleet Street among all the people that knew her, she having
just heard the news in chapel. This too was one of her lies. She had
heard the news hours before. A turnkey, pointing out the lie to her,
urged her to confess for the easing of her mind.
One account I have of the Tanfield Court murders speaks of the custom
there was at this time of the bellman of St Sepulchre's appearing
outside the gratings of the condemned hold just after midnight on the
morning of executions.[25] This performance was provided for by bequest
from one Robert Dove, or Dow, a merchant-tailor. Having rung his bell
to draw the attention of the condemned (who, it may be gathered, were
not supposed to be at all in want of sleep), the bellman recited these
verses:
All you that in the condemned hold do lie,
Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die.
Watch all and pray; the hour is drawing near
That you before th' Almighty must appear.
Examine well yourselves, in time repent,
That you may not t'eternal flames be sent:
And when St 'Pulchre's bell to-morrow tolls,
The Lord above have mercy on your souls!
Past twelve o'clock![26]
A fellow-prisoner or a keeper bade Sarah Malcolm heed what the bellman
said, urging her to take it to heart. Sarah said she did, and threw the
bellman down a shilling with which to buy himself a pint of wine.
Sarah, as we have seen, was denied the honour of procession to Tyburn.
Her sentence was that she was to be hanged in Fleet Street, opposite the
Mitre Court, on the 7th of March, 1733. And hanged she was accordingly.
She fainted in the tumbril, and took some time to recover. Her last
words were exemplary in their piety, but in the face of her vindictive
lying, unretracted to the last, it were hardly exemplary to repeat them.
She was buried in the churchyard of St Sepulchre's.
V: -- ALMOST A LADY[27]
Born (probably illegitimately) in a fisherman's cottage, reared in a
workhouse, employed in a brothel, won at cards by a royal duke, mistress
of that duke, married to a baron, received at Court by three kings
(though not much in the way of kings), accused of cozenage and
tacitly of murder, died full of piety, 'cutting up' for close on
L150,000--there, as it were in a nutshell, you have the life of Sophie
Dawes, Baronne de Feucheres.
In the introduction to her exhaustive and accomplished biography of
Sophie Dawes,[28] from which a part of the matter for this resume is
drawn, Mme Violette Montagu, speaking of the period in which Sophie
lived, says that "Paris, with its fabulous wealth and luxury, seems to
have been looked upon as a sort of Mecca by handsome Englishwomen with
ambition and, what is absolutely necessary if they wish to be really
successful, plenty of brains."
It is because Sophie had plenty of brains of a sort, besides the
attributes of good looks, health, and by much a disproportionate share
of determination, and because, with all that she attained to, she died
quite ostracized by the people with whom it had been her life's ambition
to mix, and was thus in a sense a failure--it is because of these things
that it is worth while going into details of her career, expanding the
precis with which this chapter begins.
Among the women selected as subjects for this book Sophie Dawes as a
personality wins 'hands down.' Whether she was a criminal or not is a
question even now in dispute. Unscrupulous she certainly was, and a good
deal of a rogue. That modern American product the 'gold-digger' is
what she herself would call a 'piker' compared with the subject of
this chapter. The blonde bombshell, with her 'sugar daddy,' her alimony
'racket,' and the hundred hard-boiled dodges wherewith she chisels
money and goods from her prey, is, again in her own crude phraseology,
'knocked for a row of ash-cans' by Sophie Dawes. As, I think, you will
presently see.
Sophie was born at St Helens, Isle of Wight--according to herself in
1792. There is controversy on the matter. Mme Montagu in her book says
that some of Sophie's biographers put the date at 1790, or even 1785.
But Mme Montagu herself reproduces the list of wearing apparel with
which Sophie was furnished when she left the 'house of industry' (the
workhouse). It is dated 1805. In those days children were not maintained
in poor institutions to the mature ages of fifteen or twenty. They were
supposed to be armed against life's troubles at twelve or even younger.
Sophie, then, could hardly have been born before 1792, but is quite
likely to have been born later.
The name of Sophie's father is given as "Daw." Like many another
celebrity, as, for example, Walter Raleigh and Shakespeare, Sophie
spelled her name variously, though ultimately she fixed on "Dawes."
Richard, or Dickey, Daw was a fisherman for appearance sake and a
smuggler for preference. The question of Sophie's legitimacy anses from
the fact that her mother, Jane Callaway, was registered at death as "a
spinster." Sophie was one of ten children. Dickey Daw drank his family
into the poorhouse, an institution which sent Sophie to fend for herself
in 1805, procuring her a place as servant at a farm on the island.
Service on a farm does not appear to have appealed to Sophie. She
escaped to Portsmouth, where she found a job as hotel chambermaid.
Tiring of that, she went to London and became a milliner's assistant.
A little affair we hear, in which a mere water-carrier was an equal
participant, lost Sophie her place. We next have word of her imitating
Nell Gwynn, both in selling oranges to playgoers and in becoming an
actress--not, however, at Old Drury, but at the other patent theatre,
Covent Garden. Save that as a comedian she never took London by storm,
and that she lacked Nell's unfailing good humour, Sophie in her career
matches Nell in more than superficial particulars. Between selling
oranges and appearing on the stage Sophie seems to have touched bottom
for a time in poverty. But her charms as an actress captivated an
officer by and by, and she was established as his mistress in a house
at Turnham Green. Tiring of her after a time--Sophie, it is probable,
became exigeant with increased comfort--her protector left her with an
annuity of L50.
The annuity does not appear to have done Sophie much good. We next
hear of her as servant-maid in a Piccadilly brothel, a lupanar
much patronized by wealthy emigres from France, among whom was
Louis-Henri-Joseph, Duc de Bourbon and later Prince de Conde, a man at
that time of about fifty-four.
The Duc's attention was directed to the good looks of Sophie by a
manservant of his. Mme Montagu says of Sophie at this time that "her
face had already lost the first bloom of youth and innocence." Now, one
wonders if that really was so, or if Mme Montagu is making a shot at a
hazard. She describes Sophie a little earlier than this as having
developed into a fine young woman, not exactly pretty or handsome, but
she held her head gracefully, and her regular features were illumined
by a pair of remarkably bright and intelligent eyes. She was tall and
squarely built, with legs and arms which might have served as models
for a statue of Hercules. Her muscular force was extraordinary. Her lips
were rather thin, and she had an ugly habit of contracting them when she
was angry. Her intelligence was above the average, and she had a good
share of wit.
At the time when the Duc de Bourbon came upon her in the Piccadilly
stew the girl was probably no more than eighteen. If one may judge
her character from the events of her subsequent career there was an
outstanding resiliency and a resoluteness as main ingredients of her
make-up, qualities which would go a long way to obviating any marks that
might otherwise have been left on her by the ups and downs of a mere
five years in the world. If, moreover, Mme Montagu's description of her
is a true one it is clear that Sophie's good looks were not of the sort
to make an all-round appeal. The ways in which attractiveness goes,
both in men and in women, are infinite in their variety. The reader may
recall, in this respect, what was said in the introductory chapter about
Kate Webster and the instance of the bewhiskered 'Fina of the Spanish
tavern. And since a look of innocence and the bloom of youth may, and
very often do, appear on the faces of individuals who are far from being
innocent or even young, it may well be that Sophie in 1810, servant-maid
in a brothel though she was, still kept a look of country freshness and
health, unjaded enough to whet the dulled appetence of a bagnio-haunting
old rip. The odds are, at all events, that Sophie was much less
artificial in her charms than the practised ladies of complacency upon
whom she attended. With her odd good looks she very likely had just that
subacid leaven for which, in the alchemy of attraction, the Duc was in
search.
The Duc, however, was not the only one to whom Sophie looked desirable.
Two English peers had an eye on her--the Earl of Winchilsea and the Duke
of Kent. This is where the card affair comes in. The Duc either played
whist with the two noblemen for sole rights in Sophie or, what is more
likely, cut cards with them during a game. The Duc won. Whether his win
may be regarded as lucky or not can be reckoned, according to the taste
and fancy of the reader, from the sequelae of some twenty years.
II
With the placing of Sophie dans ses meubles by the Duc de Bourbon there
began one of the most remarkable turns in her career. In 1811 he took a
house for her in Gloucester Street, Queen's Square, with her mother as
duenna, and arranged for the completion of her education.
As a light on her character hardly too much can be made of this stage in
her development. It is more than likely that the teaching was begun at
Sophie's own demand, and by the use she made of the opportunities given
her you may measure the strength of her ambition. Here was no rich
man's doxy lazily seeking a veneer of culture, enough to gloss the rough
patches of speech and idea betraying humble origin. This fisherman's
child, workhouse girl, ancilla of the bordels, with the thin smattering
of the three R's she had acquired in the poor institution, set herself,
with a wholehearted concentration which a Newnham 'swot' might envy,
to master modern languages, with Greek, Latin, and music. At the end of
three years she was a good linguist, could play and sing well enough to
entertain and not bore the most intelligent in the company the Duc
kept, and to pass in that company--the French emigre set in London--as
a person of equal education. If, as it is said, Sophie, while she could
read and write French faultlessly, never could speak it without an
English accent, it is to be remembered that the flexibility of tongue
and mind needed for native-sounding speech in French (or any other
language) is so exceptional as to be practically non-existent among her
compatriots to this day. The fault scarcely belittles her achievement.
As well blame a one-legged man for hopping when trying to run.
Consider the life Sophie had led, the sort of people with whom she had
associated, and that temptation towards laissez-faire which conquers all
but the rarest woman in the mode of life in which she was existing,
and judge of the constancy of purpose that kept that little nose so
steadfastly in Plutarch and Xenophon.
If in the year 1812 the Duc began to allow his little Sophie about
L800 a year in francs as pin-money he was no more generous than Sophie
deserved. The Duc was very rich, despite the fact that his father, the
old Prince de Conde, was still alive, and so, of course, was enjoying
the income from the family estates.
There is no room here to follow more than the barest outline of the Duc
de Bourbon's history. Fully stated, it would be the history of France.
He was a son of the Prince de Conde who collected that futile army
beyond the borders of France in the royalist cause in the Revolution.
Louis-Henri was wounded in the left arm while serving there, so badly
wounded that the hand was practically useless. He came to England,
where he lived until 1814, when he went back to France to make his
unsuccessful attempt to raise the Vendee. Then he went to Spain.
At this time he intended breaking with Sophie, but when he got back to
Paris in 1815 he found the lady waiting for him. It took Sophie some
eighteen months to bring his Highness up to scratch again. During this
time the Duc had another English fancy, a Miss Harris, whose reign in
favour, however, did not withstand the manoeuvring of Sophie.
Sophie as a mistress in England was one thing, but Sophie unattached as
a mistress in France was another. One wonders why the Duc should have
been squeamish on this point. Perhaps it was that he thought it would
look vulgar to take up a former mistress after so long. At all events,
he was ready enough to resume the old relationship with Sophie, provided
she could change her name by marriage. Sophie was nothing loth. The idea
fell in with her plans. She let it get about that she was the natural
daughter of the Duc, and soon had in tow one Adrien-Victor de Feucheres.
He was an officer of the Royal Guard. Without enlarging on the all-round
tawdriness of this contract it will suffice here to say that Sophie and
Adrien were married in London in August of 1818, the Duc presenting
the bride with a dowry of about L5600 in francs. Next year de Feucheres
became a baron, and was made aide-de-camp to the Duc.
Incredible as it may seem, de Feucheres took four years to realize what
was the real relationship between his wife and the Prince de Conde. The
aide-de-camp and his wife had a suite of rooms in the Prince's favourite
chateau at Chantilly, and the ambition which Sophie had foreseen would
be furthered by the marriage was realized. She was received as La
Baronne de Feucheres at the Court of Louis XVIII. She was happy--up to a
point. Some unpretty traits in her character began to develop: a violent
temper, a tendency to hysterics if crossed, and, it is said, a leaning
towards avaricious ways. At the end of four years the Baron de Feucheres
woke up to the fact that Sophie was deceiving him. It does not appear,
however, that he had seen through her main deception, because it was
Sophie herself, we are told, who informed him he was a fool--that she
was not the Prince's daughter, but his mistress.
Having waked up thus belatedly, or having been woken up by Sophie in her
ungoverned ill-temper, de Feucheres acted with considerable dignity. He
begged to resign his position as aide to the Prince, and returned his
wife's dowry. The departure of Sophie's hitherto complacent husband
rather embarrassed the Prince. He needed Sophie but felt he could not
keep her unattached under his roof and he sent her away--but only for a
few days. Sophie soon was back again in Chantilly.
The Prince made some attempt to get de Feucheres to return, but without
success. De Feucheres applied for a post in the Army of Spain, an
application which was granted at once. It took the poor man seven years
to secure a judicial separation from his wife.
The scandal of this change in the menage of Chantilly--it happened in
1822--reached the ears of the King, and the Baronne de Feucheres was
forbidden to appear at Court. All Sophie's energies from then on were
concentrated on getting the ban removed. She explored all possible
avenues of influence to this end, and, incidentally drove her old lover
nearly frantic with her complaints giving him no peace. Even a rebuff
from the Duchesse de Berry, widow of the son of that prince who was
afterwards Charles X, did not put her off. She turned up one day at the
Tuileries, to be informed by an usher that she could not be admitted.
This desire to be reinstated in royal favour is at the back of all
Sophie's subsequent actions--this and her intention of feathering her
own nest out of the estate of her protector. It explains why she worked
so hard to have the Prince de Conde assume friendly relations with a
family whose very name he hated: that of the Duc d'Orleans. It is a clue
to the mysterious death, eight years later, of the Prince de Conde, last
of the Condes, in circumstances which were made to pass as suicide, but
which in unhampered inquiry would almost certainly have been found to
indicate murder.
III
Louis-Henri-Joseph, Duc de Bourbon and Prince de Conde, seems to have
been rather a simple old man: a useless old sinner, true enough,
but relatively harmless in his sinning, relatively venial in his
uselessness. It were futile to seek for the morality of a later age in a
man of his day and rank and country, just as it were obtuse to look for
greatness in one so much at the mercy of circumstance. As far as bravery
went he had shown himself a worthy descendant of "the Great Conde." But,
surrounded by the vapid jealousies of the most useless people who had
ever tried to rule a country, he, no more than his father, had
the faintest chance to show the Conde quality in war. Adrift as a
comparatively young man, his world about his ears, with no occupation,
small wonder that in idleness he fell into the pursuit of satisfactions
for his baser appetites. He would have been, there is good reason to
believe, a happy man and a busy one in a camp. There is this to be
said for him: that alone among the spineless crowd of royalists feebly
waiting for the miracle which would restore their privilege he attempted
a blow for the lost cause. But where in all that bed of disintegrating
chalk was the flint from which he might have evoked a spark?
The great grief of the Prince's life was the loss of his son, the young
Duc d'Enghien, shamefully destroyed by Bonaparte. It is possible that
much of the Prince's inertia was due to this blow. He had married, at
the early age of fourteen, Louise-Marie-Therese-Mathilde d'Orleans,
daughter of Louis-Philippe, Duc d'Orleans and the Duchesse de Chartres,
the bride being six years older than her husband. Such a marriage could
not last. It merely sustained the honeymoon and the birth of that only
son. The couple were apart in eighteen months, and after ten years they
never even saw each other again. About the time when Sophie's husband
found her out and departed the Princesse died. The Prince was advised
to marry again, on the chance that an heir might be born to the large
fortune he possessed. But Sophie by then had become a habit with
the Prince--a bad one--and the old man was content to be left to his
continual hunting, and not to bother over the fact that he was the last
of his ancient line.
It may be easily believed that the Prince's disinclination to marry
again contented Sophie very well. And the fact that he had no direct
heir was one in which she saw possibilities advantageous to herself.
The Prince was then sixty-six years old. In the course of nature he was
almost bound to predecease her. His wealth was enormous, and out of
it Sophie wanted as
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