APPENDIX I.

Letter from Thomas Palmer, Brother of William Palmer, to the Lord Chief-Justice Campbell.

The following extract from the Diary of Lord Chief-Justice Campbell will serve as introduction to the following letter:—

A LETTER TO THE LORD CHIEF-JUSTICE CAMPBELL.

After a struggle with internal emotions too dreadful to be described, amid the tears and lamentations of my family, the bereavement of a household knit together in bonds of strongest love and amity, and the smothered, not wholly-concealed indignation of relatives and friends, I address your lordship, not only as the man who has sealed my brother’s fate and borne him to the foot of the scaffold, but as the judge who will have to render an account to your fellow-men, to posterity, and to God of your dealing towards a human being whose fate was, to a certain extent, placed in your hands, and on whose destiny you operated in a manner hitherto unknown, at least in our days. The law, with bitter irony, propounds it is an axiom dear to Englishmen that a magistrate invested with powers like your lordship is “counsel for the prisoner”; but every man who witnesses the late mockery at the Old Bailey, in which you played so prominent a part, confesses—to his own heart, at least, whatever he may own in public—that a more infamous delusion has never been solemnly enacted before a British audience since those days of shame when Jeffreys went forth upon the “bloody assize,” and, in the name of Justice and the Law, consigned the young, the innocent, the helpless, and the stricken with years to the dungeon and the gallows, professing all the while to be actuated by a sense of duty to the Crown and to the people.

These may appear strong words, and this a heavy accusation, but I will demonstrate it to all who read this letter. What though I may not hope to move your lordship to justice, yet I may, at least, awaken within you a sense of that awful day which approaches you as certainly as it looms on my brother, and which, at your advanced age, cannot be far removed. I may awaken within you a feeling of compunction, or, at all events, of solemn reflection; for you, also, will have to stand before a Judge enthroned in majesty and power; before whom you will be, indeed, as nought; and when upon your brow appears the awful record of your administration of justice to the man whom you have condemned, in that hour also shall you remember this word from the brother of his affections. May it avail you before that terrific moment! May it serve to save yourself from yourself, and to warn you in time that it is the duty of a British judge to hear, not to condemn; to adjudicate, not to execute; to administer the law as the representative of the country, not to pervert it to his own purposes with the anxiety of a hangman.

My lord, in one week—in some short days from this—William Palmer, my brother, will stand before his God; he will have to answer for his life, and for the sins of his life; he will have to endure that fearful scrutiny into his past from which even the best of us may well shrink with terror. But there is one crime for which he will not have to answer, and that is the crime for which your lordship has convicted him. My brother, William Palmer, is no murderer. His whole life, his whole character, his whole bearing at and since the trial are quite convincing of the fact. From childhood upward no man was gentler of heart; his charity was inexhaustible; his kindliness to all who were in distress was well known. To him the wanderer resorted in his afflictions; by him the poor and houseless were fed and comforted. I write in the face of the public, with my character as a gentleman and a clergyman at stake, and I avow only facts that cannot be denied. His liberality was a proverb, his frank sincerity, his courage, his faithful loyalty to his friends, his temperance, his performance of the duties of religion, his social relations in the character of father, husband, and son won for him the love and confidence of all who approached him; and though it is true that in one fatal instance he violated the laws of his country, and subjected himself to a severe penalty for an infringement of its commercial code, yet this excepted, his was in all respects the very opposite of that cool, calculating, cowardly, crafty temper which is essential to the poisoner, and which we know cannot co-exist with these qualities which my brother possessed from his earliest years down even to the day when your lordship sent him to his death. My lord, beware, lest while you convict of murder you are not yourself a party to a murder! It is not the first time that the annals of our own jurisprudence have exhibited traces of blood; it is not the first time that judges have persuaded juries to convict to death on circumstantial evidence. The records of every country abound in remarkable cases of persons judicially destroyed for crimes of which they were entirely innocent. A mistaken resemblance to the actual perpetrator, the fact of having been seen near the spot where the crime was committed, an apparent motive of self-interest, a confusion of manner when he was accused, or some other suspicious circumstance has contributed to bring the odium of guilt and consequent punishment on the wrong party. At one time cases of frightful injustice were committed by condemning individuals for murder when it was not proved that a murder had been perpetrated. The now well-recognised principle in criminal law—violated, indeed, by your lordship in my brother’s case—that no murder can be held as having been committed till the body of the deceased has been discovered, had, apparently, terminated this form of legal oppression until your lordship persuaded a jury to find a man guilty of blood where there was no actual positive proof that a homicide had at all been perpetrated, and when the chemical analysis had even demonstrated that it had not. Another, and perhaps one of the most common causes of prejudice in trials of this nature was the prevarication or the suspicious conduct of the party charged with the offence, and this, likewise, your lordship told the jury was proof of my brother’s guiltiness. Finding himself, though innocent, placed in an awkward predicament, the accused sometimes invented a plausible story in his defence, and the deceit being discovered, he was at once presumed to be in every respect guilty. Sir Matthew Hale mentions a melancholy instance of this kind. An uncle, who had the bringing up of his niece, to whom he was heir-at-law, correcting her for some offence, she was heard to say, “Good uncle, do not kill me!” after which she could not be found. The uncle was committed on suspicion of having murdered her, and was admonished by the judge of the assize to find out the child by the next assizes. Being unable to discover his niece, he brought another child, dressed like her, and resembling her in person and years; but, on examination, the fraud was detected, and upon the presumption of guilt which those circumstances afforded, he was sentenced to be hanged, and the sentence was executed. The child afterwards reappeared, when of age, to claim her land. On being beaten by her uncle she had run away, and had been received by a stranger; a jury, worked upon by suspicion, and probably also by a judge who pandered then, as judges pander now, to public prejudice, had thus murdered an innocent man; and that great Chief-Justice has preserved the fact as a warning for all time to beware of judgment in cases of life and death. Yet your lordship, who has succeeded that noble luminary of the law, forgot this memorable case in the moment when you ought most to have remembered it; though I take upon myself to say the circumstantial evidence against my brother was not half as powerful as that against this gentleman whose fate has thus been commemorated in vain by your lordship’s wise and Christian predecessor in the judgment seat. Yet do I believe that, as surely as the sun shines or that God lives in the heavens, there will come a day when my brother’s innocence will be demonstrated before all men, and though your lordship may not live to see it, yet will his blood cry out from his prison grave, and his fate will blacken the memory of all who were parties to his death with immortal infamy. For it is at your door the public will lay his conviction—not at that of the jury who were worked upon to convict, and who would have been more than men if they had resisted your looks, your gestures, your actions, and your arguments. My lord, since this conviction of death has been recorded I have seen William Palmer. I have visited him in his condemned hold. I have beheld that darling brother, the playmate of my infancy, the companion of my youthful sports, in whom my heart’s blood circulates, and with whom my love is entwined. And how did he present himself? And how did he bear our presence? I say, like Socrates in his cell; I say, like Sidney in the Tower; I say, like Calas before the wheel. He preserves a cheerful, an undaunted, an English heart and spirit, and I am proud of him even in his death doom. Your lordship has not crushed or trampled my brother’s soul. He maintains his energy and his hope in justice, not indeed from men, for he was condemned long since, but in the course of events, in the discoveries of science, in the confession or conviction of those perjured witnesses against him; or, these all failing, in the God of truth. Though I never doubted his innocence, yet did I resolve to make all certain and positive before I hazarded this letter. I fell on my knees before him. I implored him by our past love and kindred, by our early recollections and hopes, by our common faith, by all the duties which he owed to man and God, to disburthen his conscience if he were guilty, and not to enter before the presence of his Creator with a falsehood upon his lips. I adjured him to say if he were guilty or not guilty. Oh, my lord! he did not wince; he did not change his noble composure; he spoke and looked all innocence. Calmly, earnestly, and solemnly he answered, and the seriousness of his words went into our hearts with the fullest persuasion of his perfect guiltlessness of blood; the most complete reliance on that dying tongue which never spoke falsely to one of us, but to whose language we listened ever with full assurance in its integrity and its faith. Under these circumstances, therefore, I make no apology for addressing your lordship. A great, a majestic duty is now imposed on you. If you shrink from executing it you are undone. There are but seven days between this and the irrevocable hour of death. All your repentance, all your shame will be unavailing if that dread sentence be rashly carried into effect. I ask you not to recommend a pardon for my brother—for that, I know, you will not do; but I ask you—for in you it lies—to obtain a respite for him till his guilt or innocence be demonstrated to the satisfaction of the world. Bear in mind that my brother’s counsel offered fearlessly at the trial that an experiment should be made. Bear in mind that some of the most able chemical analysts in the world have declared upon their oaths that if strychnia were administered it can be found; that the Attorney-General himself, to a certain extent, repudiated Dr. Taylor, and supported himself by Mr. Herapath’s supposition that strychnia was there, though Taylor could not find it; bear in mind that Taylor’s theory of the absorption and decomposition of strychnia was never heard of until this trial; that it was hit upon by him to bolster up his credit, and that all the ablest of the chemists at the trial unanimously repudiated it as a heresy, unworthy of credit, and whose fallacy they had themselves proved by actual experiment; bear in mind, I say, all this, and remember with what a harsh and angry denial you refused to permit such an experiment, though upon it depended the blood of a man. I say deliberately that if these chemists have sworn the truth, and that there is no strychnia discernible in Cook’s body, then will William Palmer be murdered as effectually under the semblance of English law as ever the most innocent was butchered under the worst forms of the Papal Inquisition; and that the most fearful responsibility of blood that ever rested upon human head will be upon those who refuse to concede the test which is now challenged. I ask that that experiment shall be performed, which will set at rest for ever the imputation of judicial murder that will sear your lordship’s character with the present and with the future; an experiment which may probably clear your soul from the stain of blood that it must risk if you oppose this application. What is there unusual, what is there criminal, what is there illegal in only asking for a respite until it be proved—as it can be proved incontrovertibly—whether Cook died of strychnia or not? And if he did not die of strychnia, then is my brother’s innocence made manifest, even to your satisfaction! While, if it is shown that he did so die, then is the voice of accusation silent for ever, and the much-vaunted majesty, the supposed impartiality and purity of English law vindicated in triumph before mankind. The precise mode in which this experiment might be made it is not for me to suggest. I have no objection that it shall be made in any way which may appear satisfactory to the Home Office, provided only that neither Dr. Taylor nor Dr. Rees is entrusted with its management. In this pair of worthies I have no confidence. The first pronounced my brother guilty of poisoning on grounds the most ridiculous that can be imagined, upon which even a Stafford Grand Jury did not think there was sufficient to warrant them in finding even a prima facie case for investigation at the assizes. He wrote letters to the newspapers branding the accused as a most desperate criminal; he largely assisted in getting up the prosecution, and was busily engaged all through the trial in writing notes and making suggestions to the Attorney-General and the other prosecuting counsel; he smiled perceptibly when the case was strong against my brother, and could not conceal his chagrin as it grew weak. As to Rees, he seems to endorse all that Taylor says, and I have no confidence whatever in him. A writer in the papers, who is unknown to me, makes a suggestion which you may bring if you choose before the Home Secretary; but it matters little by whom the experiment is made so that it is done by an honest man. “If it is proved,” says the writer, “that Cook died from strychnia, there is no difficulty in connecting Palmer with the administration of it. But if that fact is not proved, then the other circumstances do not lead to the irresistible inference of his guilt.” For the sake of all parties concerned in the case, for the sake of society at large, and, above all, for the sake of justice, let that point be set at rest; and let that be done in this manner—Mr. Herapath says he can detect strychnia wherever present. Then let there be a certain number of animals killed, some by strychnia and some by other means; let their interiors be taken out and put in jars, each separately and numbered, and verified with all the necessary formalities, Mr. Herapath being kept in the dark as to which was the poisoned jar and which was not; and if he then can distinguish between those which contained strychnia and those that did not, let the Home Secretary have the moral courage to step in and avert the disgraceful and horrible-to-contemplate possibility of having one day, in token of his acknowledged innocence, to wave a flag over the grave of William Palmer, to which he has been consigned upon insufficient evidence, despite of the revelations of science, and because (to use the words of Dr. Taylor), “society demands a victim.”

My lord, I have been told by lawyers that all presumptive evidence of crime should be admitted cautiously, for the law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer. And there is a famous case which so strongly illustrates this noble principle of the law that I may remind your lordship of it here. The mother and reputed father of a bastard child were observed to take it to the margin of the dock in Liverpool, and, after stripping it, to throw it into the dock. The body of the infant was not afterwards seen, but, as the tide of the sea flowed and reflowed into and out of the dock, the learned judge who tried the father and mother for the murder of their child, observed that it was possible the tide might have carried out the living infant, and the prisoners were acquitted. The case is mentioned by Garrow, one of the ablest and purest judges that ever adorned the bench; and it has been brought before me as illustrative of the wise and merciful caution which the judges of the past were used to exercise before they persuaded juries to condemn men who might possibly be innocent. How your lordship would have decided this trial had it taken place before you, and had the public Press, under the influence of insurance societies, hounded on the many to a cry for blood, I can easily anticipate; but that the great judge who ruled for mercy adjudicated according to the well-known principles of the Constitution is what I am assured by every man who has made the English law his study, and who is too pure to be influenced by a shout of “Crucify him! crucify him!” will admit without the slightest shadow of a doubt. Take, again, the ordinary case which I find mentioned in an anonymous letter in one of the morning papers, and which, I am informed, is so strongly illustrative of the caution exercised in all criminal cases where the judge is impartial, and where medical science must occasionally be fallible, that it needs no words of mine to add to its force. Its value is increased by this fact, that neither I nor any person connected with my family has the least knowledge of who the writer is, and, therefore, no considerations but those which do him honour can be supposed to operate on his mind.

“To establish,” he says, “a perfect chain of circumstantial evidence, every circumstance in the case must be proved beyond all cavil. And the first and most important and absolutely indispensable circumstance in a case like that of Palmer’s is the fact of a murder having been committed. That is the groundwork of the circumstantial fabric, without which the rest of the edifice topples over. It is a circumstance of which merely the conduct, however suspicious, antecedent or subsequent to its occurrence, of the alleged murderer furnishes no valid proof. To convict a man of poisoning, you should distinctly trace the death of the deceased to poison.

“Take a case in point. It is of frequent occurrence in this country that a woman is charged with the murder of her newly-born infant. She is unmarried; she is proved to have been suspected of pregnancy, and to have denied the fact; she is proved to have been recently delivered of a child; she has been seen going to a water-closet, and, after she has left, there are found, rammed down the pipe of that water-closet, the dissected members of an infant’s body; a knife smeared with blood is discovered hidden away, and traced to the prisoner’s possession; she has made no provision for the reception of the child, which, should it survive the moment of its birth, must prove an incubus upon its mother and a living witness to her shame. Here are circumstances of a damning nature. A strong motive, a cool premeditation, a mutilated body, and physical traces which cannot be mistaken. Mark the result. A surgeon is called at the trial, and states that he cannot positively swear that the child was born alive; that it may by possibility have been born dead; that there being no proof that the child was ever alive, he cannot be sure that it was killed by being cut in pieces. In that case there is no Professor Taylor, who, while the case was pendente lite, has written letters in a newspaper stating that ‘society demands a victim,’ and whose sworn testimony is to the effect that, inasmuch as 99 children in 100 are born alive, his solemn belief is that so was this child, and that he has therefore come to the conclusion that the cutting off of its head was the cause of death. There is no Chief Justice to tell the jury that they are to take all the circumstances surrounding the case into consideration, and that, although it was not proved beyond a doubt that death was the result of mortal agency, yet if they arrived at the conclusion that the prisoner had a strong motive for destroying the deceased, and had possession of an instrument by which to effect that purpose, there was a prima facie case made out which would lead them to the next question, namely, was the state of the body, or was it not, consistent with the fact of a violent death? There is no infuriated and Press-prejudiced populace regarding the prisoner as a great criminal, and thirsting after her blood. No! The judge says to the jury you cannot, according to the law of the land, whatever your suspicions in this case may be, find a verdict of guilty; there is no proof of a murder having been committed, and the prisoner must be acquitted on that charge. That may be a vicious law, but it is the law, and had no more right to be violated in the case of William Palmer than in that of any other individual. If it be, the whole proceedings of the trial are a mockery and a delusion—a disgraceful pandering to out-of-door prejudices and a lasting disgrace to this country.”

This is the language of a man who writes as an unprejudiced observer, and, I am told, with a deep knowledge of the law. If it be, as he says, that this is the law in cases of this nature, with what face can my brother be executed when precisely the very reverse was done by your lordship in his case, and, when forgetting or despising all the precedents of mercy with which our jurisprudence abounds, you took only the sanguinary view of the evidence, and enforced everything against the prisoner by argument, by gesture, and by look.

That the law is wise in exercising this salutary caution I think may be proved even by the testimony of the actor who next, after your lordship, had most influence in the verdict against my brother—I mean Dr. Taylor. In that writer’s work on “Poisons,” page 139, I find the following statement:—“It often happens, in the hands of the ablest analyst, that the last steps of a process lead to a result very different from that which was anticipated at the commencement; and, therefore, a suspicion derived from a few incipient experiments is very likely to be overthrown by continuing the investigation. In the Boughton case Dr. Rattray gives an opinion, in the first instance, that the poison administered to the deceased was arsenic; but he subsequently attributed death to laurel-water! A case occurred within my knowledge where arsenic was pronounced to be present when sulphuric acid was really the poison. In another case, tried at the Kingston Assizes in 1832, the medical witness admitted that at the coroner’s inquest he stated the poison to be arsenic, but by subsequent experiments he found that it was oxalic acid, and in a case which has but recently occurred the poison was at first stated to be oxalic acid, but on a more careful examination it was shown to be arsenic!” Whether or not all the unhappy persons in whose cases these chemical mistakes were thus made, and thus coolly avowed, suffered death is not stated, but, as I am told that one of them, Donellan, was certainly executed, and as it is even now a question deeply involved in doubt whether the person whom he is supposed to have poisoned was poisoned at all, and the most able medical authorities incline to the opinion that he was not, it is likely that the others also were as ruthlessly sacrificed to what is called “public opinion,” and that they have been sent to their graves with the stigma of murder when they were, in fact, but victims to medical delusions, or toxicological mistakes, which are as coolly confessed by Taylor as if they were merely ordinary trifles, not affecting in any way the life and death of the wretches whose interests were at stake.

My lord, how comes it to pass that not one of these most important facts was mentioned by Taylor at the trial? that his henchman, Rees, who swore exactly as Taylor swore, did not give the jury the slightest information upon these questions of vital value to the prisoner? Why were they kept back from the knowledge of the jury? Why were they concealed from your lordship? It was proved at the trial that Dr. Harland sent Stevens his medical notes of the first post-mortem examination; that Stevens handed them over to Taylor, and that, up to the third day of the trial, Taylor withheld, even from the knowledge of the Attorney-General and the Crown solicitor, that he possessed these notes, which contained circumstances strongly favourable to the case of the prisoner. Was not his silence as to the medical facts just mentioned of a piece with his suppression of this material document? Your lordship made no comment to the jury upon this extraordinary conduct. You severely attacked Mr. Nunneley, you bitterly censured others of the witnesses for the defence, you weakened, by all the means within your power, the effect of their evidence when it told for the prisoner; but not one syllable of censure had you for Taylor, who kept the jury in ignorance of these facts, and the cases mentioned by him in his own book, though he was sworn in the language of the law to tell “the truth and the whole truth.” The whole truth, indeed, he did not tell; otherwise these matters which I have now quoted would have come before the jurors, and, as I believe, with all-powerful influence.

If the wilful suppression of evidence by the prosecution had ended with Taylor the case would have been infamous enough; the Crown would have showed that it prosecuted for victory, not for truth, for I take it to be the unquestioned duty of a prosecutor, more especially when he is backed by the Crown authorities and the Home Office, not merely to squabble for a petty triumph on a prisoner charged with murder, or to attempt to higgle a jury out of an adverse verdict, but to present not a part but the whole case fairly before the public—the features favourable to a prisoner as well as those that are unfavourable, the weak portions of the accusations against him as well as those that are strong, so that the jury, who are (in theory) his judges, may see and know every circumstance, however minute, and, from an aggregate of the whole, come to a right conclusion as to the verdict which they are to pronounce. But this salutary rule was not followed by the Crown prosecutors in the present case; they wilfully deceived and misled the counsel for my brother, and by this trick, which I shall presently expose, they deprived the prisoner of two of the most material witnesses, who could prove his innocence, that it was possible for man to have. The first of these witnesses was a man named Henry Cockayne. Your lordship remembers the questions which Serjeant Shee put to that wretched Bates; and you recollect also, I doubt not, the artful way in which he answered those questions. It was of importance to my brother to show for what purpose he had purchased, and in what manner he had used, the strychnia, which he never denied, and does not now mean to deny, that he bought from Roberts on the Tuesday.

He had a number of valuable brood mares in a paddock, separated from the adjoining land only by a thin fence, over which the dogs were in the habit of leaping and hunting these animals (nine in all), so much so that even Bates was obliged to admit that one of them, the “Duchess of Kent,” had slipped her foal; and it is a fact that “Goldfinder” had suffered from a like mishap, though Bates refused to acknowledge it. Indeed, Bates would scarcely admit anything, or give a direct reply to any of the questions put to him. Here is an example, taken from the verbatim report of the trial—“Can you give me any notion of their value?” “I do not pretend,” answers Bates, “to tell the value of the stock myself.” No one had asked him to do so, yet this stable-boy, brewer, farmer, or whatever else he chooses to call himself, who has been about horses all his life, could not give Serjeant Shee a notion of the value of these brood mares. “Do you know,” pursued the serjeant, “that one of them sold for 800 guineas?” Now, Bates knew this as well as my brother himself, but mark his answer—“I have heard so.” Again, he is asked—“Were any of them in foal shortly before or at the beginning of the month of November?” Bates, you will remember, was in the stables and paddocks every day, yet he answers this question, “I cannot say whether they were or not. I should suppose there were some in foal.” A witness who answered in this way would probably have been rebuked by any fair judge, and ordered to answer the questions put to him; but your lordship, who was so dreadfully sarcastic on Mr. Nunneley and Dr. Macdonald, had no word of reproof for Bates. This man was again asked, “had any complaint been made about dogs going about the paddock?” Mark the artful way in which he evaded this interrogatory—“I think I once said to Harry, ‘The turf seems a good deal cut up here; how is it?’” Your lordship sees Bates had not been asked what he had said to Harry (this was Cockayne), but he had been asked about repeated and well-known complaints made by my brother as to the way in which his mares were constantly hunted by the dogs in the neighbourhood; and you now see, though you would not at the trial, the evasive and equivocating way in which he replied. Serjeant Shee then proceeded—“What did you see on the turf that induced you to make that observation?—I saw it cut up, which I supposed to be with horses’ feet, for they could not cut it up without they galloped. Did you attribute that to anything?—I attributed it to the mares galloping about. Had you any reason to think they had been run by dogs?—I never saw any dogs run them.” This was no answer to the question, but your lordship said not a word, and this Bates, who was with Day in the paddock, who, to use the words of the Attorney-General, “was a hanger-on of Palmer’s, working in his stables,” could not tell, as he pretended, how it was that the mares were galloping about and cutting up the turf. The serjeant then proceeded—“Did Harry keep a gun there?—I have seen a gun there. (This again was not a direct answer, but an evasion.) Did he keep a gun, which belonged to his master, for any purpose?—I have seen a gun at the paddock. Did it belong to his master?—I cannot say. Did you ever see it used?—No. Was it in a condition to be used?—I never had it in my hands to examine it.” In ordinary cases I am told that where a witness misconducts himself in this manner, the Crown immediately gives him up, and the judge informs the jury that no reliance is to be placed on his testimony. But, so far from abandoning him, the Attorney-General relied all through upon this man, and pressed against my brother the effect of the evidence which he gave. Now, your lordship was told at the trial, by Serjeant Shee, that the object for which the poison was purchased was to destroy these dogs. Bates was found to admit that a gun was kept in the stables, and though he cunningly kept back for what purpose the gun was used, yet was there another witness on the back of the indictment who had been examined before the coroner, and who was present in the Court, of whose evidence your lordship was well aware, for it was in the depositions, and this witness the Crown withheld from the jury. Had Cockayne been called, as he ought to have been called, he would have proved that he kept a gun loaded in the stable, by order of my brother, to shoot the dogs that worried his brood mares; that he had also threatened to poison them, that the strychnia was purchased for that object, and that he had missed dogs since then which had been in the habit of prowling about the paddock and hunting the mares. That my brother left poisoned food about the place is a matter which can be proved only by himself, for these things are not always trusted to servants; and, as it is a positive medical fact that animals to which this poison has been given go away into secret, concealed, and quiet places, where they die undiscovered, and would be mortally attacked in so short a time that they could not get to their own homes. Is it not almost demonstrated that this has been the case here, and that my brother is thus made the victim of circumstances, harmless in themselves, but which, having occurred at this precise period, tell now with fearful weight upon his unfortunate case? The Crown may cry out, “Produce the dogs, and show us the strychnia in them.” With how much more freedom may the condemned man say, “Produce the poison from Cook’s body before you hang me to satisfy a medical theory invented for this trial and broached against me by a deadly foe!”

In the same way, the non-discovery of the money which Cook is said to have possessed at Shrewsbury was urged by your lordship as startling evidence against my brother, and you signified to the jury, by gestures, by looks, and shakes of the head, that my brother had fraudulently got possession of that money, and poisoned Cook in order to conceal the fact. But your lordship was well aware at the time, for it was in the depositions of Saunders, who was also in Court, and who had been examined before the coroner and the Grand Jury, that Cook had sent for Saunders on the Monday before his death, that he had paid him £10 (his account), and excused himself for not paying any more, by stating that he had given my brother all his money to take with him to London, to settle his affairs. Thus the disposal of the money was accounted for by Cook himself; and Saunders, whose testimony was thus highly favourable to my brother, ought to have been called to prove this fact. But, strange to say, Saunders, though in Court, was not called; he waited until the end of the case for the prosecution, and then was sent away by the Crown lawyers, who not only thus deprived the prisoner of the advantage of his testimony, had they called Saunders for the prosecution, but absolutely put it out of the power of the prisoner to call him for the defence by sending him away into the country at the last moment, when they had all along left the counsel for the defence under the idea that it was intended to examine Saunders as a witness on behalf of the prosecution. A more scandalous trick than this, I believe, was never committed, and I do not envy the feelings of the parties who perpetrated it.

It may be asked, why did not Mr. Smith, an able, indefatigable, and skilful lawyer, get Cockayne and Saunders put into the box as witnesses for the prisoner? My lord, the answer is already given. They were the witnesses for the Crown; they were kept in London, in the custody of the Crown, until after the case for the prosecution had terminated; they were then sent out of London, into a distant part of England not so easily accessible as was needed by the prisoner; and if we are to take your lordship’s manifest and angry impatience at the ten minutes’ delay in calling witnesses for the defence, which occurred on the morning of Saturday, the tenth day of the trial, as indicative of your feelings, we may be very certain that if you so chafed at that brief interval, repeatedly during those few minutes asking Serjeant Shee if he could not go on—if, I say, we are to consider that angry haste significant of anything, we may very well conclude that you would not have waited until Saunders and Cockayne were brought up from the centre of England, if, indeed, it was possible for the prisoner at all to discover their exact lodgings at the time. I have myself heard, on many occasions, in Courts of justice where judges themselves called witnesses whose names were in the indictment and order them to give their evidence for the Crown. But this was where the judges were not biassed against the accused—where they had no desire to become the objects of public praise or to prostitute their high places to the low desire of popularity acquired by pandering to a cry for blood. Why your lordship did not follow the well-known precedents of law in my brother’s case is best known to yourself. Yet there are many of the public also who can form a pretty accurate guess as to your real motives. Let me revert, however, to the subject, from which this is a digression, and pursue the confession made by Dr. Taylor of the general inaccuracy of medical men when they are retained to carry out a theory by the prosecution. These, which I have quoted, are not the only instances in which mistakes have been made for want of proper caution. Taylor (p. 63) mentions the case of M. Pralet, where “several medical witnesses deposed that the deceased had died from prussic acid, administered to him by M. L’Heritier, the accused. Orfila was requested to examine the medical evidence, and found it extremely defective. The inferences drawn from the application of the medical tests were highly improper, and the results were extremely negative. Had it not been for the interference of Orfila, it is most probable that the accused would have been convicted, more from the strong medical opinions against him than from the medical facts of the case. The witnesses appear to have acted on the principle that the whole of their duty consisted in rendering the charge of poisoning probable, whereas we shall hereafter see that no person can be convicted of this crime on mere probability. The fact of poisoning must be made reasonably certain either by medical or moral evidence, or by both combined.” He cites also (p. 110) a case reported by Anglada, in which there were circumstances of grave suspicion, though the party suspected was wholly innocent. “A lady, in perfect health, while supping with her husband and family, complained, after having taken two or three mouthfuls, of severe pain in the region of her heart. She fell back in her chair and died instantly. The parties not having lived on the best of terms, the husband was openly accused of having been accessory to the poisoning of his wife—a circumstance which was rendered still more probable in the opinion of his neighbours by the fact that the wife had lately made a holograph will in his favour. One of his servants, with whom he was said to live in adultery, was arrested, and a paper containing a white powder was found in her possession. The husband endeavoured to compromise the affair by offering to give up the will. Here, then, were strong moral presumptions of death from poisoning. Three surgeons (experts!) were appointed to examine the body. They opened the abdomen, and, observing some green spots in the stomach, produced (as it afterwards appeared, by imbibition from the gall bladder), pronounced an opinion that the organ was in a gangrenous state from the effects of some corrosive poison. Some doubt arising on the correctness of this view, four other surgeons were directed to re-examine the body. They found that the stomach had not even been opened, and that its mucous membrane, as well as that of the intestines, was perfectly healthy. It contained a small quantity of undigested food, which was free from any trace of poison. The deceased had died from natural causes. The white powder found in the possession of the servant was nothing more than white sugar!” Nor does he omit the case of Hunter (p. 144), whose trial at Liverpool Assizes somewhat resembles that of my poor brother, but who was fortunate enough to be tried by an honest judge and an impartial jury. “A woman was charged with having poisoned her husband by arsenic. The medical evidence rested chiefly on the symptoms and post-mortem appearances, for no arsenic was discovered in the body. The mucous membrane of the stomach and intestines was found throughout its whole extent exceedingly inflamed and softened. The medical witnesses for the prosecution referred (as they always do) this condition to the action of arsenic; those for the defence considered that it might be owing to idiopathic gastroenteritis, independently of the exhibition of any irritant. The circumstances of the case were very suspicious, but the prisoner was acquitted, not merely on account of the variance in the medical evidence, but from the absence of positive proof of poison, i.e., its detection by chemical analysis.” This generally weighs much with a Court of law. Yet your lordship so contrived that it did not weigh one hair in my brother’s case. The principles of law being thus clear, and the mistakes of medical science being also equally admitted, let me follow them up by a further quotation from the gentleman out of whose powerful letter I have already extracted a passage—“Is there clear, and distinct, and unimpeachable proof that beyond all reasonable doubt Mr. Cook died a violent death? Let us see how that question is answered. For the prosecution a number of medical men of eminence state that the symptoms in his case were such as they would expect to have resulted from the administration of strychnia, and were irreconcilable with death from any other cause. Upon the part of the prisoner a number of equally eminent medical men state that they can account for the death of the deceased without being compelled to resort to the hypothesis of strychnia, and that in many important particulars the symptoms were different from those which that poison invariably produces. Each set of witnesses, upon cross-examination, qualified their statements in some degree, but in the result such is the substance of their respective experience.

“Then comes Professor Taylor, who analysed the contents of the stomach, &c., and who states that he found no strychnia nor any poison which could account for the death of Mr. Cook. As Lord Campbell said with a sneer, ‘Of course, upon this the whole defence rests.’ It strikes me as being a very feasible defence indeed, but more of that presently. However, Dr. Taylor states that you must not draw the conclusion that because no strychnia was found, therefore none was administered, because he had known cases (though of very rare occurrence) where he had himself administered that drug to animals, and afterwards tested for and failed to discover it; and from the symptoms he is convinced that Mr. Cook must have died from strychnia. Dr. Rees is of a similar opinion. Now, the result of this evidence is to destroy the practical utility of analysis for strychnia altogether; for although if strychnia be detected, it is proof that it has been administered, yet if it be not detected, that is no proof that it has not been administered.

“Then let us look at the other side. Mr. Herepath, who is confessedly one of the greatest analytical chemists of the present day, states that if the minutest particle of strychnia were present in the body, he would guarantee to find it, and in that statement he is corroborated by a series of eminent toxicologists. It is suggested, in answer to this evidence, that Professor Taylor did not apply the proper tests. Surely, if he did not, it did not lie in the mouth of the prosecution to urge that argument. He was their witness; he was employed by them to make the analysis, and they trusted to his capacity to do so; and when he states that he found no strychnia, the fair and logical deduction is, not that he did not use the proper tests, but that there was no strychnia to be found. Notwithstanding this, Lord Campbell put it very strongly—and, as I conceive, very unjustifiably and illegally, to the jury—that Professor Taylor might not have used the proper tests, and that it was for them to consider whether, if the proper tests had been applied, strychnia might not have been discovered. But, however, Mr. Herepath, whose testimony is borne out by other chemical witnesses for the defence, states that he will guarantee to find strychnia in all cases where it is present, however infinitesimal the quantity; that he never found his tests to fail, and that the only conclusion he could draw from the fact of strychnia not being found is that none was administered. Upon the one hand, therefore, you have the positive opinions of fallible medical men, founded upon a second-hand knowledge of the symptoms, as to the impossibility of their resulting from any other cause than strychnia. Upon the other hand you have the equally positive opinions of medical men similarly situated as to the effect of those symptoms being reconcilable with natural causes. Cast into the scales the unerring inspirations of chemical science, add that the life of a fellow-creature is at stake, and which way lies the balance of evidence?”

My lord, what answer can you make to this argument? You will say, perhaps, that you have convinced yourself that my brother is guilty. This, indeed, may satisfy a man of weak or of no conscience; but how will it fall upon the great body of the enlightened British public, who have been wound up, it is true, to the most awful excitement against this unhappy man, but who will assuredly awaken from that excitement and demand in tones of thunder how it came to pass that you, who should have stood between the prisoner and prejudice, ministered to that prejudice, and were found to be his accuser rather than his judge!

And here, my lord, before I proceed further, let me exonerate you from all the blame of this sham trial. You had a brother judge by your side who shares with you all the responsibility of prejudice against my brother, who made no secret, but rather an indecent display of that prejudice in a manner which astonished the whole auditory, and who ought also to be recorded with you to all time coming as having participated in the laurels of blood with which you should be crowned—I allude to Mr. Baron Alderson. That learned functionary, who inaugurated the first day’s proceedings by falling asleep and nearly tumbling over his desk during the Attorney-General’s opening speech, amused himself during the progress of the trial by suggesting questions to Mr. James, the counsel for the prosecution, by lifting up his hands in apparent astonishment when anything favourable to the prisoner was elicited on cross-examination, by looking at the jury with every mark of incredulity and contempt when Serjeant Shee suggested any matter beneficial to my brother, and by joining with your lordship in overruling every legal objection which was raised by the counsel for the defence. Once also, when Serjeant Shee asked one of the witnesses, “Where are the pathionic glands?” Baron Alderson started up with every mark of anger and exclaimed, “Humbug!” And on another occasion, when your lordship, or Mr. Justice Cresswell, addressed the serjeant as “Brother Shee,” Baron Alderson impatiently cried out, “Oh, bother Shee!” I can feel no surprise, therefore, when I find your lordship, while pronouncing sentence on my brother, declaring that Baron Alderson concurred with the finding of the jury, though, unless he concurred with you before the verdict was pronounced, he certainly did not do so in Court, as no communication passed between you and either of the judges after that fatal word. But of Mr. Justice Cresswell I feel bound to declare the feeling of my brother, of all my family, and, unanimously, as I am told, that of my brother’s counsel, that his conduct was in accordance with all that we hear or know of the purity of the bench; that his demeanour was dignified, noble, impartial, and most honourable; and that, but for his interference, visible, as was remarked on many important occasions, your lordship would have admitted evidence illegally against my brother, or excluded testimony which his advisers hoped would operate favourably for him on the minds of his jury. Never shall the memory of his conduct be erased from our hearts; we all have felt, and we shall always continue to feel it; nor shall any sunset close on me for the remainder of my days that shall not witness my earnest prayer for him who did all that a judge should do to maintain the character of our country and its criminal jurisprudence; and who probably would have exerted himself still more strenuously but for the feeling that upon your lordship, as chief judge, the great responsibility of this case rested, and that he himself was but an appendage rather than a ministering officer at the trial.

My lord, the remarks which I have up to this time made may be considered preliminary to my investigations of your charge, but they seem to me of consequence to a right understanding of the language in which you thought it proper to address them, and to a due appreciation of the kind of way in which the guilt has been fastened upon my brother’s shoulders. A writer in a daily paper says—“However horrible it may be that a systematic poisoner should escape the penalty of his crimes by an effort of legal chicanery, there is something even more repugnant to the principles of British law, and that is, that a man should be found guilty upon insufficient evidence; and there is something still more revolting, both to the constitution of the country and to human nature, namely, that a man should be hanged for a murder which there is no satisfactory proof had ever been committed.”

Yet, my lord, there is something still more dreadful, and it is this, that the time-renowned prestige of British trial by jury should be abrogated, as abrogated it will be, if your lordship’s precedent is to be followed by present or future judges. Did your lordship really leave any question to the jury upon which to exercise an impartial reason? Did you throw upon them the whole responsibility of the verdict, as by the theory of the law you ought to have done? Did you merely lay down the legal principles governing the case, or did you not step out of the way to comment (like an advocate) on the evidence? To get up this witness and to knock down that one, to praise those who supported Dr. Taylor’s theory and to censure those who were independent of such nonsense? Did not your lordship convey, as clearly to the jury, by meaning looks, by thumping the desk with peculiar energy, by laying emphasis on certain parts of the evidence, and then pausing and gazing intently upon the jurymen, by shaking your head, as if your thoughts of my brother’s guilt were too dreadful for utterance; by repeating over and over again those parts which told heaviest against him; by running on the evidence for the prisoner so that it was impossible for the jury to understand it; by charging against him, for a whole day and on the morning of the second, recapitulating with fearful emphasis and solemnity all your arguments of the preceding night, condensing them and summing them into one argumentative whole, from which it was almost impossible for the jury to draw any other conclusion than that you wished them to find a verdict of guilty? And when you had done all this you devoted the rest of the day—about two hours and a half—to the prisoner’s evidence, having given upwards of eleven hours to the evidence for the prosecution. If you think this consistent with your duty and with trial by jury, I can only say you stand alone; for if any faith is to be placed in the public Press, in the tone of general conversation, in the loudly-expressed voice of all independent persons, you have struck a blow at trial by jury from which it never will recover, unless the great mass of the community now protest against such a course in language that cannot be mistaken. If persons are thus persuaded into giving verdicts by judges in high station there is an end to the liberties of Englishmen. Trial by jury becomes, in the language of Lord Denman, “a mockery, a delusion, and a snare,” and the most glorious privilege which we have inherited from our ancestors degenerates into an engine of tyranny, cruelty, and falsehood, to entrap and destroy those who regard it as their dearest birthright. My lord, if there be no sympathy for my brother, let there be at least a feeling for our own rights when they are invaded, and let the public meditate in time that it is by little and little the grandest rights of states and empires are insidiously sapped until they perish.

I am not about to recapitulate the arguments of Serjeant Shee, which prove that this charge of murder is one of the most improbable in the annals of criminal jurisprudence. These arguments failed with the jury because they were not permitted to exercise a calm judgment upon them. But I may call attention to the gross fallacy on which the whole prosecution was founded—that of starting with the positive theory of a murder and then endeavouring by all means to fix that murder upon my brother.

It is, therefore, clear that in this case a great, and what would have proved in any other an insurmountable difficulty meets one at the threshold—that in order to obtain a conviction one must reverse the legal and customary order of proceeding. Instead of proving a murder first and discovering the murderer afterwards, you first prove the murderer and thence deduce a murder. That is the course which the necessities of the case compelled the Attorney-General to pursue, and it was your duty to have exploded that theory in your summing up. But you did no such thing. On the contrary, you went into all the antecedents of the prisoner, and put them to the jury as an element in the consideration of whether a murder had or had not been committed. And having thus prepared the minds of the jury by the antimony of motives, suspicious circumstances, &c., you then administer to them the strychnia of a murder. You descanted more especially upon the purchase of strychnia by the prisoner just before Cook’s death as strong evidence that Cook was poisoned. That circumstance, coming after proof of Cook’s death by strychnia, would reduce the case to one of almost geometrical accuracy; but by itself, in the absence of such proof—nay, in presence of scientific proof to the contrary—of what value is it? Besides, it is quite incompatible with the case for the prosecution. The prosecution suggests that my brother had a deliberate intention to murder Cook, and had for ten days been adopting preliminary measures to carry that intention into effect; that when the time for the completion of his infernal purpose approached (which was on the Sunday), he wrote for Mr. Jones, of Lutterworth, a surgeon, and a personal friend of the deceased, to come over and be present at his last moments, in order that his presence there might stave off suspicion. Now, if that were so, is it not reasonable to suppose that he would have had the poison ready to be administered, and not trust to the doctrine of chances to procure it at a village like Rugeley when wanted for immediate use? Surely the professional poisoner might naturally be expected to keep a good stock-in-trade? Nothing of the sort. On the Monday night (if the case for the prosecution is to be believed) he gets from Newton three grains of strychnia, which he gives almost immediately afterwards to Cook. Cook is attacked with strychnia-tetanus, but recovers, and is nearly quite well the next day. The prisoner, finding Cook not dead, gets six grains from Roberts on the Tuesday, which he also gives to Cook, and this time he succeeds in his purpose. Now, is not this—the blackest part of the case against my brother—very improbable? Would the poisoner of fourteen people do his work in such a clumsy fashion? But, then, the possession or destination of those six grains is not attempted to be accounted for. That certainly is a most inculpatory circumstance. But we must remember this, that until it was known that the prisoner had had this strychnia, it was never suspected that Cook died from strychnia. It was that circumstance which originated the train of ideas as to my brother’s guilt; and when charged with murder he may naturally have thought that the strychnia, if found in his possession, would be evidence of his guilt, and so may have destroyed it; whereas, if he had preserved it, it would have been the strongest proof of his innocence. Then, if he did destroy it, he could give no proof of the fact, for, of course, it would be done without the privity of any one else. Now, if he had been in France he himself would have been subjected to a strict examination upon all the points of the case, and his own statement upon that point, whether for or against him, would have been in evidence. Moreover, how does this part of the case reconcile with the medical evidence? It is admitted on all hands that half a grain is sufficient to destroy life; but a grain, or two, or three, no man could survive that. Still, the inference unquestionably is that that quantity was administered on Monday night but did not kill, and the next day the dose was doubled! Nine grains in all! And of these nine grains of strychnia, which unquestionably were administered if Cook died from that poison, no trace whatever can be discovered in the body!

I will not further dwell upon this subject, but come to your lordship’s conduct and charge, which are the more immediate objects of this letter.

The first thing which appeared to me unfair was the order which your lordship made that the medical witnesses for the Crown should be accommodated with seats in the most convenient part of the Court, while the greater number of witnesses for the defence were obliged to stand during the greater part of the trial—no slight mode of exhausting them mentally as well as physically. And so rigidly was this carried out that none of the medical witnesses for the defence were admitted into Court until all the witnesses for the prosecution had taken their seats, and fully preoccupied all the vacant space. This may appear a slight thing, but I know how greatly it affected some of the older medical witnesses for my brother, and how much it weakened them for the violent attacks which the Attorney-General made upon them. There are few men, however vigorous, who will not be worn out by standing for eight or nine days in the crowded atmosphere of such a Court as the Old Bailey.

The next thing which appeared to me unfair was your permitting the Attorney-General to open to the jury all the facts connected with Bates’s insurance, and this you did after Serjeant Shee objected. It is true that evidence of this negotiation was afterwards excluded as being irrelevant, but why did you not exclude the statement which you must have known beforehand would prejudice the jury against my brother? The simple fact of that affair was that my brother wanted to raise money for Bates, whom he pitied; that this device was resorted to for that purpose, and I am told that not on the turf alone, but in commercial circles, it is a common thing to raise loans upon the deposit of insurance policies. Your lordship, however, allowed the jury to infer that my brother and Cook wanted to insure Bates’s life in order that they might afterwards murder him!

It is a principle of the law that nothing which is said in the absence of a prisoner can be given in evidence against him. But you permitted a conversation between Cook and Fisher to be proved when my brother was not present, and when he could, consequently, have had no means of contradicting Cook’s drunken folly about the “dosing.” In this, I am told by a most accomplished member of the bar, you violated one of the leading rules of evidence—one adapted for the protection of all men, as it is obvious that if private slander be once permitted to be detailed before a jury, the most innocent man living may be hanged on statements made behind his back. In your charge to the jury you seemed conscious of the impropriety you had committed, and you did not read that portion of the evidence to them, but it had already produced a fatal influence on their minds. Yet you would have read it, as I could plainly see, only that Judge Cresswell interposed just as you came to it. What renders this more indefensible is that Serjeant Shee objected to it, but you overruled his objection. (See verbatim report of trial, p. 26.) And the Attorney-General himself refrained from stating it in his opening address, because he said it was not evidence (report, p. 9). Upon its manifest falsehood I need not say a word. It is incredible that Cook should say to Fisher my brother poisoned him, and yet afterwards go to Rugeley with him, dine with him, send for him every hour in the day, entrust him with all his moneys, make no mention of “dosing” to his oldest friend, Dr. Jones, and retain his affectionate faith in William to the last. Yet, not one word of these obvious reflections did you put before the jury to weaken the force of the illegal evidence you allowed to go before them. You only said that it was “mysterious,” whereas, in truth, it was incredible; and you added that “Cook was under the influence of Palmer to a very great degree,” as if he would have continued so after an attempt to kill him. It was very soon apparent that your lordship was resolved not only to admit illegal evidence, but also to allow the prosecuting counsel great liberties in their mode of examination. Serjeant Shee repeatedly called your attention to Mr. James putting “leading questions” to the witnesses, but you overruled him, until he told Mr. Smith that it was quite useless to object any further. I am told that every member of the bar in Court was of opinion that the questions were irregular in the leading shape in which they were put.

In his opening speech the Attorney-General made the following statement to the jury:—“The next morning, at an early hour, Palmer was with him, and from that time, during the whole of Saturday and Sunday, he was constantly in attendance on him. He ordered him some coffee. Coffee was brought up by the chambermaid, Elizabeth Mills. It was taken into the room, given to the prisoner, and she left. Palmer, having received the coffee, gave it to the man, who was in bed, and had, therefore, an opportunity of dealing with it” (report, p. 12). Elizabeth Mills was called to prove this statement. So far from proving that it was given to Palmer, she distinctly swore that she “placed it in Cook’s hands,” so that Palmer had no opportunity of tampering with it (report, p. 33). Yet your lordship, whose duty it was to see that none of these misstatements should be unobserved upon to the jury, did not point out this remarkable discrepancy, nor did you think it incumbent on you to set them right upon a point of such material import to my brother. You allowed them to believe that he had poisoned that coffee when the evidence negatived his dealing with it at all.

In commenting upon the evidence of this woman, Elizabeth Mills, you said that Serjeant Shee had made “a most foul charge against her and Stevens,” representing that she had been bribed, but that you did “not see the smallest pretence for such a suggestion.” I wonder that, after your three score and ten years in this wicked world, you could have been so exceedingly innocent and simple. You come from a country where the inhabitants are keen-sighted enough, yet you thrust yourself forward as the defender of Eliza Mills, a woman upon whose countenance her character was written, and whose whole demeanour flashed conviction to every mind of the sort of person she was. This woman was brought away from Rugeley by Stevens, she was lodged by him at Dolly’s, where she saw him “always” in the sitting-room, that gentleman having called “merely to see how I liked London, and whether I was well in health, and all that, to see whether I liked the place,” though she afterwards added that he called about “sometimes one thing, sometimes another,” and “many more things which I cannot remember. I do not keep things in my head for weeks or months together. I do not pretend to keep in my head what the conversation was,” yet “there were many more things talked about that I do not wish to mention. Perhaps my thoughts were occupied about something else.” And when the same woman is asked to give some account of herself, and her visit to the man Dutton at Hitchingley, and asked to name “who are your friends?” she answers, “I have some friends there.” “Who are they?” says Serjeant Shee, to which Mills answered, “Friends are friends, I suppose,” and then she gave an account that she slept with the mother, and was “engaged to the son,” though what she meant by this she did not venture to explain. Your lordship, however, “saw not the smallest pretence,” &c.

Again, when the deposition of the same woman was read, in which there was no mention of the “twitchings and jerkings,” and all those other horrors which she imparted into her narrative, and which she enforced by so much pantomimic action; and when in the deposition she proved that the “broth was very good,” while in the evidence at the trial she swore that “it poisoned her,” you coolly told the jury that it was “an important omission; but you will say whether that which is stated is not substantially the same as the evidence which she gave on oath when examined before you.” Whereas you ought to have said that they were substantially opposite, the two statements being reconcilable by no manner of even Scotch chicanery. In fact, the manner in which you supported this woman was exactly opposite to that which judges usually do when persons of that description come before them; and I have heard of judges telling juries to place no reliance on witnesses whose conduct and demeanour were every way superior to that of Mills. I can conceive no greater blow to public trial than the support given by a judge to a witness like Mills, but “a fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind,” and you adopted her with all the fervour of a champion of romance. When it was proposed to contradict this woman by Dr. Collier, who was in Court, Judge Alderson said, with unrestrained anger, “It is better Dr. Collier should be absent from the Court. If he is to be examined as to facts, he ought not to be here at all; he is here under the false pretence of being a doctor,” forgetting that Taylor, Rees, and Monkton, who were also to be examined as to facts on behalf of the Crown, were then present, though not, of course, “under the false pretence of being doctors!” The jury very soon saw what the judges thought of the case. Mr. Gardner, the lawyer of Rugeley, was then called to prove that the coroner had not asked several questions of Mills, and that the jurymen had expostulated with him for not doing so. This illegal course you permitted, assigning the following strange reason for it:—“What was said there is part of the transaction of taking the evidence. It cannot be evidence against the prisoner, but it may explain the manner in which the depositions are taken.” It requires no lawyer to tell me that “if it cannot be evidence against the prisoner, then it has no right to go upon your notes, or to be stated in the presence of the jury at all, whom it cannot fail to affect, although they are sworn to decide according to the evidence.” Yet all this you permitted, allowing the Attorney-General to damage the character of the coroner in every way he could; and there is no knowing what you could not have got Gardner to say had not Judge Cresswell interposed and terminated the scene. He said “the depositions which had been put in did not show that any questions had been put by the jurymen. If they had contained such questions they would have shown the motive of the jury in putting them. But the Court was left totally in the dark as to whether questions had been put by the coroner or any other person. For anything that appeared to the contrary, the witnesses might have made a voluntary statement without any questions at all being put to them. No foundation was, therefore, laid for the Attorney-General’s inquiries.” Every one in Court saw how chagrined you were at this interposition of Judge Cresswell, but you were obliged to submit, as Alderson concurred with him. One word with reference to Ward, the coroner. He is a very able lawyer. The jury wanted to put questions as to various rumours about my brother William poisoning Lord George Bentinck, Bladen the brewer, and twenty other people; and as the coroner overruled all such folly, the sapient jurymen did expostulate with him, and this was Gardner’s mare’s nest!

The next witness examined was Mrs. Brooks, and though she gave evidence of the most valuable kind to the prisoner, yet not one syllable of it did you comment upon to the jury. The main evidence against my brother, connected with Shrewsbury, related to the sickness with which Cook was seized. If, therefore, other persons in various parts of the town were similarly affected, it could not fail to benefit William, for he could not be said to have poisoned or “dosed” all the others, especially as he was not at Shrewsbury at all when they were sick, but was at home at Rugeley. Serjeant Shee asked Mrs. Brooks (report, p. 54), “Do you know whether other racing men were taken ill on the Wednesday at Shrewsbury?—There were a great number; one of my company was dreadfully ill, and there was a wonder what could cause it. We made an observation. We thought the water might have been poisoned at Shrewsbury. We were all afflicted in some way by sickness—sick and purged.” After twelve days the jury can be scarcely expected to have remembered this most important admission. It was your incumbent duty to have recalled their attention to it, for it was strongly in my brother’s favour; but, if they recollected it at all, you took care that they should pay no attention to it, for, after reading to them all that she said in her direct examination, you remarked, “This ends the affair about Mr. Cook’s illness at Shrewsbury, and, taken by itself, it really amounts to very little, but, you observe, it is connected with what follows when he returned to Rugeley” (report, p. 311). You then passed on, not saying a word about the incident just mentioned, and, associating in the minds of the jury with subsequent transactions at Rugeley that part of Mrs. Brooks’ evidence which was brought forward for the prosecution, you kept back the most valuable portion of her testimony to my brother, and entirely ignored its existence in the case.

Dr. Jones, of Lutterworth, the friend of Cook, to whom my brother writes, gave evidence of the most valuable kind, showing Cook’s broken constitution, his sores, his syphilis, his secondary symptoms, his unbounded confidence in William, and William’s brotherly kindness to him, yet not one word of comment did you offer to the jury upon these matters. The only remark you made was one highly damaging to my brother, and was as follows:—“At first sight it would appear very much to be in his favour that he sends for a medical man, who is a friend of Cook’s, and who took a lively interest in him, and wished him well. But, at the same time, there are circumstances in this case that may enable you to draw a different conclusion, but I will not suggest” (report, p. 312). No, you did not suggest in words, but, pausing here, you looked at the jury and shook your head at them for half a minute in the most mysterious manner, so that they must have been the dullest of all mankind if they had not perfectly well known what you meant. I have heard more than one person remark upon the Scotch subtlety of this mode of proceeding. Your lordship is a sort of biographer of the Chief Justices of England, though I am told that the unfortunate Dr. Giles, whom you had the pleasure of sentencing at Oxford to twelve months’ imprisonment, is the real author of that production; and I suppose you hope to figure one day in the literary gallery with those whom you have commemorated. It would be impossible, perhaps, for a future historian who merely read your proceedings in my brother’s trial, to form an accurate notion of your demeanour; but, with the light which this letter will throw upon the transaction, such an annalist—if ever you should be thought worthy of notice—will be able to inform future times how you managed to convince a jury without leaving any trace behind of the means by which you did it.

The next witness of any consequence was Newton; and here I should have thought your lordship’s feelings as a man, if they had not entirely perished, would have exhibited some trace of natural passion. Newton, according to his own account, was an accessory to the murder, and the murderer after the fact; he knew the current gossip of Rugeley and Stafford, that Cook had been poisoned by my brother; he assisted at the post-mortem examinations for the purpose of detecting the poison which the murderer had used; he had an interview on the Sunday after Cook’s death with William, in which this skilful poisoner (whose chemical knowledge of the minimum dose of strychnia which destroys life, and of the hitherto unknown fact that antimony neutralises the discovery of strychnia, places him a hundred years in advance of all the chemists of the age), asks the ignorant shopboy of the nature and the effects of strychnia! And when the learned Newton gives him information on the matter, the poisoner snaps his fingers in joy and exclaims, “That will do”; and after that he goes with him to the post-mortem examination; and after that Newton swears against him at the inquest; and after that he keeps the deadly secret buried in his bosom from November until the middle of the month of May, just one day before the trial! And after the trial he communicates the further fact to the Attorney-General that it was he who made up the deadly pills for my brother on the Monday night. With reference to the credibility of this monstrous witness you have not one word to say, though you did not hesitate to stigmatise Mr. Nunneley and Dr. M‘Donald as persons on whom the jury could place no reliance; and in the course of their cross-examination you looked at them in a manner significant of total incredulity of their testimony. Observe the mode in which you support Newton. You say, “There is no contradiction of anything that he has said.” Why did you not tell the jury that, as he fixed no time or place when any one but the prisoner himself, whose mouth was sealed, was by, it was impossible he could be contradicted? You go on (report, p. 313)—“Well, then, you are to consider what is the probability of his inventing this wicked and most abominable lie? He had no ill-will towards the prisoner at the bar.” (Who told you that? Who proved it? What right had you to assume it? What right had you to tell it to the jury?) “He had nothing to gain by injuring him much less by saying anything to affect his life.” (I ask again who told you all this, and on what pretence did you venture to say so to the jury?) “I see no motive that Mr. Newton could have for inventing a lie to take away the life of another person.” (Are you omniscient, then, and do you profess to read that inscrutable mystery, the human heart, and have you not read in the annals of crime of innumerable murders and perjuries committed without apparent motive?) “No inducement could be held out to him by the Crown; he says himself that no inducement was held out to him, and that he at last disclosed it from a sense of justice.” (As if a man who screened a murderer for six months could have any sense of justice.) “If you believe him, certainly the evidence is very strong against the prisoner at the bar.” Not a word of caution is here given; not one Scotch hint of doubt in this witness. Your “canny” countrymen are not always so credulous; they are not at all times so easy of belief in persons of this description. Yet your milk of human kindness is so pure that you cannot for your life imagine the least reason why Newton should not be believed.

But it was on the evidence of Roberts that your lordship used observations which had the most powerful effect on the jury, and since then upon the public mind. I have already explained how it was that the prisoner, even if he were a guilty man, might have denied the purchase of the strychnia from Roberts, as he always denied its purchase from Newton, was deprived by artifice of the witness Cockayne, who could have thrown a new light upon this affair, and I have shown how Bates prevaricated with reference to the dogs and the brood mares. My brother being in this way at the mercy of Bates, and juggled out of Cockayne, in what possible way could he account for the disposal of the strychnia? Yet you, who knew all this a thousand times better than the jury, told them that “a very serious case is adduced, supposing you should come to the conclusion that the symptoms of Mr. Cook were consistent with that of poison. If you think the symptoms are accounted for by merely ordinary tetanus, of course the fact of strychnia being obtained by the prisoner at the bar is of very little weight; but, if you should come to the conclusion that the symptoms which Mr. Cook exhibited on the Monday night and Tuesday night are consistent with strychnia, then a fearful case is made out against him.” The learned counsel did not favour us with the theory which he had formed in his own mind respecting that strychnia, and how he considered it to be consistent with the view that he suggested. There is no evidence of the intention with which it was purchased. There is no evidence how it was applied, and what became of it, or what was done with it (report, p. 313). What modern judge before yourself in a case of death ever ventured to tell a jury that “a fearful crime was made out against the prisoner”? Scraggs or Belknap might have done it; Jeffreys might not have blushed to use the words, but that they should now be used in the face of an open Court, and with a pantomimic gesture and grim stare at the jury such as you gave, are facts discreditable to any law. By what right, with what face, on what authority did you venture to tell the jury that his “learned counsel” was bound to prove his innocence or to account for his possession or disposal of the strychnia? I have always understood it to be the law that every man was presumed to be innocent until he was proved to be guilty; but you have reversed this majestic, merciful principle, and intimate that every man is guilty until his counsel proves him to be innocent. A more shameful perversion of the law than this, I am told by persons in authority, has never been witnessed. Well also did you know that Serjeant Shee was not entitled to put forward to the jury “the theory which he had formed in his own mind respecting the strychnia.” Had he ventured to do so I have no doubt you would have interrupted him with unfeeling harshness, and repeated to him in even stronger language than you did that species of insult “that a witness had no more right to make himself an advocate than an advocate to make himself a witness.” And then you glaringly tell the jury that there has been no “evidence of the intention,” as if you did not well know that if such evidence were possible to be given it could only be given by my brother William himself (who, by law, could not speak); and that, even if he could speak and was about to mention his intention, you would have stopped him, and said that such evidence was illegal, facts, not intentions, being the only admissible evidence in a Court of law. Yet you gravely complain as if the thing might have been done, and the jury, who probably believed you, convicted my brother because he could not prove an impossibility.

My lord, if our present system of representation were anything but a mockery, and if the House of Commons were constituted as it was in the days of Pym, Vane, and Hampden, I verily believe you would be impeached for such a charge as this, for you stated to the jury that the prisoner was guilty because he did not do that which you absolutely knew he could not do, namely, prove his intention. But, under the present system of things, judges may do anything they please with impunity, and no one calls attention to it, because the wretches whom they hang or exile are friendless outcasts, deprived of all sympathy from the world, enemies often of society, which thus becomes their enemy; and the great body of the community not being acquainted with the law, and the only persons who are, namely, the bar, being a body of degraded, crawling, sneaking slaves and sycophants who do not venture to arraign a judge, because if they do they fear that attorneys will desert them; in this way the most frightful licentiousness of power is given to men like you, and they are as despotic as the Cadis in the remotest part of Turkey. In civil cases, indeed, there is a check upon them, because there the parties are rich, and there is an opportunity for a new trial, but in criminal cases there is no new trial, even in the most scandalous and infamous conduct of the judge; and the consequence is that a wicked man may commit almost any conceivable crime upon the bench, and gratify his love of blood to the utmost without restraint or fear, than which I can conceive no more shocking infamy to exist.

Next, as to the evidence of Mr. Stevens, you made it a rule all through violently to censure Serjeant Shee whenever he said anything against the witnesses for the Crown, but not one syllable did you say against the Attorney-General for his attack on the medical witnesses for my brother. Thus you say here (report, p. 313)—“The learned counsel in the discharge of his duty did, as he was perfectly justified in doing, make very violent attacks upon the character and conduct of Mr. Stevens. It rests with you to say whether that attack was well founded.” But had you not said that he was justified in doing so, and did not this imply that Stevens deserved it? And if it “rested with the jury,” what right had you to add, “I own I can see nothing in Mr. Stevens in the slightest degree calling for it”? Thus you first say Serjeant Shee was “justified,” then you say it “rests with the jury,” and then, lest they may jointly agree with the serjeant, you volunteer your own opinion, that Serjeant Shee was not justified. Conduct like this requires no comment, but if my brother is hanged upon such a charge, who is guilty of his blood?

The next witness was Mary Keeling. She gave important evidence as to the condition of the body. Mills and one or two other of the witnesses had endeavoured to show that the body was “bent like a bow,” to use the imaginative language of that man Taylor, and this was pressed in to support your view of the case that “the death was consistent with strychnia.” Now, Mary Keeling proved the exact reverse of this, but you did not either take it in your notes or read it to the jury. Serjeant Shee was obliged to interrupt you. I copy from the report, p. 313—

And there the matter ended, and though it was admitted that it had been said, and though it corroborated Dr. Bamford and Dr. Jones, and entirely refuted the “opisthotonos” theory of Taylor and Mills, and thus got rid of one of the most remarkable symptoms “consistent with poisoning by strychnia,” yet not one word of comment did you offer upon it; but, as you said, it was not upon your notes—where it ought to have been—you left the jury unadvised upon this essential contradiction, which, taken with the evidence of the two medical men, entirely demolished Mills and her congenial companion Taylor, and took out of the mouth of Sir Benjamin Brodie and the other medical witnesses one of those vital symptoms on which they founded their diagnosis of the causes of death. For, if there was no opisthotonos, or bent bow-like shape, then Cook did not die of strychnia; and this being proved not to have been so by these three witnesses, or, at all events, left in deep doubt, my brother was entitled to the benefit of that doubt, and should have been acquitted.

The same wish of omission was manifest in your notes when you read out the evidence of Devonshire to the jury; you forgot to tell the jury that Cook’s left lung was diseased, which was important, as his death arose from natural causes. Serjeant Shee was again obliged to interfere (report, p. 314)—

But not one word of comment did you make.

Myatt, the postboy, whose testimony was wholly incredible, you bolstered up with this remark, “Now, there seems no reason to doubt the evidence of this poor boy.” As if you could fathom the secret motives of man.

Upon the letter which my brother addressed to the coroner you say—“This letter is a most improper letter, addressed by the prisoner to Mr. Ward, the coroner, who is, of course, a judge. It so happens that I myself am the chief coroner of England, but all the coroners are judges as much as I am, and ought, with equal integrity and indifference, to administer the law of the country.” This self praise, my lord, is of that species which is said to stink. It would have been better if you had not eulogised your conduct upon this trial, but allowed others to do so. You did the same thing when you were sentencing my brother, for you prefaced your “hanging speech” by these words—“William Palmer, after a fair and impartial trial,” &c., &c. You then go on, and suggest to the jury that my brother was guilty because he wrote that letter. “You will say whether this is consistent with innocence; it is clear tampering with the judge.” Yet the conduct of the gentleman mentioned by Sir Matthew Hale, or the French gentleman who offered to surrender his wife’s will, was just as suspicious, though the first was hanged innocently, and the last, fortunately for himself, not tried by you.

When Cheshire was cross-examined by Serjeant Shee he asked him, “Did he not say I knew they would not, for I am as innocent as a baby?” You immediately interrupted, in a most angry tone, saying, “He has already said that,” whereas in truth he had not done so, but the phrase was likely to have an influence on the jury.

Again, when Herring was examined, and Mr. Welsby proposed to give some evidence from the pages of the lost betting book, about whose disappearance one of the greatest points was made against William, Serjeant Shee said, “We cannot have the contents.”

Thus you were about to admit the contents of that book on the plea that my brother possessed it, a plea entirely untrue, and not only not supported, but even negatived by the evidence. My lord, if you do these things in matters of life and death, who among us is safe?

When Bates was called, it was proposed to give in evidence the facts of the insurance, and you permitted a discussion to arise which put the jury in possession of all the facts. You then said, “On the Attorney-General’s opening I doubted whether this would be relevant and proper evidence to be received at this trial” (yet you permitted him to open it!), “and upon consideration my brothers agree with me it is too remote to be admissible.” But all the evil had then been done, the jury having been prejudiced by the statement and discussion. And not one word did you say to them in your charge about disabusing their minds of the false impression which it might have made.

When you commented on the medical evidence you told the jury that my brother had an opportunity of substituting for Bamford’s pills others made by himself. What right had you to do that? Was it not leading their minds to an inference that he did so, and that the substituted pills contained poison? (report, p. 315).

You introduced Sir Benjamin Brodie with great praises; in fact, you praised all the medical witnesses for the Crown, and confined your applause to only one of those for the prisoner, who slightly coincided with Taylor’s notions. You said of Sir Benjamin—“You will take into consideration the solemn opinion of this distinguished medical man, that he never knew a case in which the symptoms that he heard described arose from any disease. He has seen and known the various diseases that afflict the human frame in all their multiplicity, and he knows of no natural disease such as will answer the symptoms which he heard described in the case of Cook; and if it did not arise from natural disease, then the inference is that it arose from other causes” (report, p. 316). Now, Sir Benjamin formed his opinion upon two inconsistent statements made by Mills and Dr. Jones. If what Mills swore was all true, then, perhaps, Sir Benjamin Brodie would have been justified in saying that no disease that he had seen accorded with that description; but if what Mills swore was all false, and it was entirely inconsistent with what Dr. Jones proved, then also it would not be consistent with natural disease, or with anything in Nature, and yet my brother be innocent of this crime. If Mills invented a number of symptoms which no medical man had ever seen, and it is what an ignorant chambermaid who was disposed to perjure herself might be supposed to do, then what Sir Benjamin Brodie proved would have been correct, and he could not assign to any natural disease that which was, in truth, but a fictitious narrative; but it would not necessarily follow from that that Cook died of poison, as you told the jury it would, but it would as logically follow that the whole of the symptoms not being in accordance with any known disease were invented by an unskilful person, and unskilfully put together for the occasion. I think you saw in its full force the effect of this, for it will be seen by the report that you prevented Serjeant Shee from discovering on which of these two witnesses Sir Benjamin relied in premising his opinion.

APPENDIX II.
Short Account of the Judges and Counsel engaged in the Case.

John Campbell, Baron Campbell, Lord Chief Justice of the Queen’s Bench. Lord Campbell had been Lord Chief Justice six years when he presided at the trial. He was seventy-seven years of age. Three years after he resigned the Chief Justiceship, and became Lord Chancellor at eighty, a greater age than any of his predecessors on the Woolsack had reached on being appointed. He held his office for two years longer, and died at eighty-two, an age which none of his successors reached while holding it. On the day of his death, in 1861, he had sat in Court and attended a Cabinet Council. Lord Campbell’s life as Chancellor and politician, and as the writer of the celebrated lives of the Lord Chancellors and the Chief Justices, forms too considerable a part of general history and literature to be detailed here. As a lawyer and judge his name stands high. His contemporaries never denied his abilities; but they considered his personal character and ambitions were selfish and by no means magnanimous. He is said by Sir John Macdonnell in the Dictionary of National Biography to have shown on the bench somewhat too openly an unworthy love of applause; and a tradition still lingers amongst lawyers of an ostentatious kind of politeness assumed by him when he intended anything deadly. The Usher of the Court at the Palmer trial is credited with saying that he knew the Chief meant to hang Palmer; he was so polite in requesting him to be seated. The tone of the letter we print from Palmer’s brother expresses much of a prevalent feeling against Campbell. But, in Sir John Macdonnell’s words, whatever difference of opinion there may be as to the spirit in which he served his country, there is none as to the value of the services themselves.

Mr. Baron Alderson. Sir Edward Hall Alderson was in 1856 a Baron of the Court of Exchequer, where he was transferred in 1834, his original appointment as judge having been in 1830 to the Court of Common Pleas. He was born in 1787, so that he was now sixty-nine years of age. He was of Norfolk, and his father was Recorder of Yarmouth, Norwich, and Ipswich. His career at Cambridge was remarkable. In the year 1809, when he took his degree, he was Senior Wrangler and first Smith’s prizeman, besides being first Chancellor’s medallist, which was the highest honour then for classics. From 1817 to 1822 he was joint editor of the well-known Barnewall and Alderson’s Reports of those years in the Court of King’s Bench; and whilst so reporting he was, unlike reporters of these days, rapidly acquiring a practice, though he never took silk. He made no particular mark on the bench during his twenty-seven years of occupancy, and he died in 1857, the year after the trial. It is rather curious, in view of the attack made on him for prejudice in the letter to Lord Campbell, that he should have been known as a humane judge, with a desire to restrict capital punishment.

Mr. Justice Cresswell. Sir Cresswell Cresswell was the junior judge on the bench. His age was sixty-two, and he had been on the bench in the Court of Common Pleas since 1842, where he had established a reputation as a learned and strong judge. At the bar he had a large practice, and his legal name, apart from his judicial career, would have lived as one of the editors of the Barnewall and Cresswell’s Reports in the King’s Bench from 1822 to 1830. But his most abiding fame rests on his having been the first appointed judge of the new Probate and Divorce Court which was established in 1858. He became for the new principles and practice of divorce what Mansfield had been for commercial law—their creator and expounder. He sat in this Court, achieving a distinction which falls to the lot of few judges, until 1863. In July of this year he was knocked down in Constitution Hill by runaway horses belonging to Lord Aveland, which had been frightened by the breakdown of the carriage, and he died from the shock. On being made judge of the Probate and Divorce Court he was offered a peerage, but declined it, probably, as he was a bachelor, being sufficiently content with the ancestral name of Cresswell of Cresswell, near Morpeth. Though as a judge he was considered overbearing, it is noticeable that he did not intervene very much in the trial; the letter to Lord Campbell makes a point of contrasting his opinions on admission of evidence, and in other respects, as being in favour of the prisoner, while those of Lord Campbell and Mr. Baron Alderson were asserted to show bias and even strong and unfair prejudice.

Sir Alexander James Edmund Cockburn was appointed Solicitor-General in July, 1850, and early next year, in succession to Sir John Romilly, was made Attorney-General. He had up to the former year been obtaining considerable reputation as an advocate, had been appointed Q.C. in 1841, and especially had attracted attention by his defence of M’Naughten, who shot Mr. Drummond, Sir Robert Peel’s secretary. He obtained his acquittal on the ground of insanity; a defence less credible and easy in 1843 than it subsequently became. But he first obtained real public distinction, and proved his qualifications to be of the highest class, in 1850 by speeches in Parliament,

which led immediately to his appointment as Solicitor and Attorney-General as above mentioned. In the Don Pacifico debate Lord Palmerston had made the great speech of his life; and the law had been prepared for him by Cockburn. On the fourth night of the debate Mr. Cockburn replied to a long speech made by Mr. Gladstone against Palmerston’s policy. At the end of his reply, according to a description by Sir Robert Peel, “one half of the Treasury benches were left empty, while honourable members ran one after another, tumbling over each other in their haste to shake hands with the honourable and learned member.” He remained Attorney-General in Palmerston’s Government until November, 1856; and thus it fell to him to conduct the Palmer prosecution. It is worth mentioning that Cockburn’s reply at the end of the case was made without a single note. Palmer had therefore against him the greatest figure at the bar, and one of the most accomplished orators of his generation. It was in November, 1856, that Cockburn gave up his enormous income, and his Parliamentary position, to become Chief Justice of the Common Pleas; and the rest of his distinguished career, until his death in 1880, was spent in that office, or in that of Lord Chief Justice of England, which under the Judicature Acts superseded the two ancient Chief Justiceships. Sir Alexander Cockburn was of an ancient Scottish family; he was several times offered a peerage, but declined; he was never married, and his baronetcy expired with him.

John Edwin James was forty-four years of age in 1856. “With the appearance of a prize fighter,” he failed when he went on the stage as a young man and played “George Barnwell.” His father, being a solicitor and an officer of the city of London it was natural for him to turn to the bar, and he was called at the Inner Temple in 1836, when he was twenty-four. By 1856 he was a noted advocate, had been made a Queen’s Counsel, was Recorder of Brighton, and had a professional income of £7000 a year. He was member of Parliament for Marylebone in 1859; but in 1861 his retirement was announced. He was overwhelmed with pecuniary difficulties, and owed £100,000. An inquiry by his Inn in 1861 showed that he had in 1857 and 1860 inveigled a young man, a son of Lord Yarborough, into debts of £35,000; had obtained, three years before the trial, £20,000 from a solicitor by false misrepresentations; and in a case in which he was acting for the plaintiff had borrowed £1250 from defendant, promising to let him off easily in cross-examination. He was disbarred; went to America in 1861; was admitted to the bar there and practised; but in 1865 was playing at the Winter Garden Theatre, New York. He returned to England in 1873, and failed in persuading the judges to reconsider his case. He had married in 1861, but his wife divorced him in 1863. After his failure to return to the bar he was articled as a solicitor, but was not admitted; and he even offered himself again as candidate for Marylebone. He practised as an expert in American and English law, but sank into very poor circumstances, and a subscription was being made for him when he died in 1882.

Sir William Henry Bodkin. Three years after the trial Mr. Bodkin was appointed assistant judge of the Middlesex Sessions, and in 1867 was knighted. He held his office until a few weeks of his death, in 1874, at the age of eighty-three. At the time of the trial he was sixty-five, and was the most distinguished of the practitioners in specialised criminal business. In 1832 he had been appointed Recorder of Dover, after being only six years at the bar. He acquired a large practice on the Home Circuit and at the Middlesex, Westminster, and Kentish Sessions; he was counsel to the Treasury at the Central Criminal Court in 1856, and was ex officio of the counsel for the Crown in prosecutions in that Court. He retained this appointment until he was made a judge. As an expert on the practice of the poor law and secretary of the Mendicity Society he took great interest in poor law questions. In 1841 he had been returned to Parliament as a Conservative member for Rochester, but lost his seat at the election in 1847 for having supported Sir Robert Peel’s Corn Law Bill. While he sat in Parliament he brought forward and passed an important measure of reform as to the chargeability of irremovable poor, which has become a permanent feature of our poor law system. Sir William held several distinguished and important offices. He was President of the Society of Arts, a Deputy-Lieutenant of Middlesex, and chairman of the Metropolitan Assessment Sessions. By his marriage in 1812 to Sarah Sophia, daughter of Peter Raymond Poland of Winchester Hall, Highgate, he became connected with the family of the distinguished lawyer, Sir Harry Bodkin Poland, whose own professional career has followed so closely that of his uncle. Sir Harry Bodkin Poland succeeded him in his Recordership of Dover and his office at the Central Criminal Court. This family and legal connection alike suggested the dedication of this book to Sir Harry Bodkin Poland. None of those who actually took part in the trial are now living.

William Newland Welsby had been called to the bar in 1826, was made Recorder of Chester in 1841, and eventually became the leader on the North Wales Circuit. When Sir John Jervis, who became Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, was made Attorney-General in 1846, Welsby was appointed by him junior counsel to the Treasury; in other words, junior counsel with the Attorney-General in all his legal duties, thence known in English legal professional slang as the Attorney-General’s “devil,” a very important and lucrative post, which generally leads to a judgeship. It was probably his experience of criminal law in this office, and his general reputation for knowledge of criminal law, founded on his editing numerous law books as well as on his practice at the bar, that led to his being associated with the Attorney-General at the trial. He had enormous industry, and besides editing a large number of legal books was an editor of one of the most celebrated series of Reports, the seventeen volumes of “Meeson and Welsby,” the product of their reports for years in the Court of Exchequer in the earlier part of Welsby’s career. He died eight years after the trial, at sixty-one, without having reached the bench, broken down, it was believed, by his excessive labours.

Sir John Walter Huddleston (Mr. Baron Huddleston). A year after the trial Mr. Huddleston was made a Q.C. From 1865 to 1875 he was Judge-Advocate of the Fleet. In the latter year he became a judge of the Common Pleas, and was afterwards transferred to the Court of Exchequer; hence the name of Mr. Baron Huddleston, by which in later years he continued to be known, even after the reconstitution of the Courts by the Judicature Acts, when all the judges took the title of Justices of the High Court. Huddleston was a remarkable man. His father was a captain in the merchant service. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, but did not take a degree, and he became usher in an English school. He was called by Gray’s Inn in 1839, when he was twenty-four years of age, so that he was forty-one at the time of the trial. He was member of Parliament for Canterbury from 1865 to 1868, and for Norwich in 1874 and until he was made a judge. He was a great advocate, but not so great a judge. His reputation increased rather on the social than the legal side. He had married in 1872 Lady Diana De Vere Beauclerk, daughter of the ninth Duke of St. Albans, and he was accounted to be ambitious most of all of social distinction. He was fitted for this, if not by family connections, by his brilliance as a conversationalist, and his gifts as a man of the world and his associations with the theatre and the turf. His accomplishments included an extensive knowledge of French literature and a facility of speaking in French which few Englishmen have. He thus represented gracefully the English bar at the funeral in 1868 of Berryer, the great French advocate, over whose grave he made a speech in French. He died in 1890, aged seventy-five.

Sir William Shee. The leading counsel for Palmer, Mr. Serjeant Shee, was in his fifty-second year; seven years afterwards he was appointed a judge of the Queen’s Bench, the first Roman Catholic judge since the Reformation. He was Irish, but educated at a French school in Somers Town, London, subsequently at St. Cuthbert’s College, near Durham, where his cousin, afterwards famous as Cardinal Wiseman, was, and then at Edinburgh University. A student of Lincoln’s Inn when nineteen, he had become a serjeant at law by 1840, and was one of the leading counsel in London and on the Home Circuit. In 1852 he became member of Parliament for Kilkenny, and represented it for five years. He had been prominent as an advocate for Catholic Emancipation very early in his career, and in Parliament he was a zealous promoter of measures connected with Irish land tenancy, and dealing with the Church endowments, measures precursory of later land legislation and the Disestablishment of the Irish Church. He lost his seat for Kilkenny in 1857, and he never sat in Parliament afterwards. In 1860, three years before he was made a judge, he refused the Chief Justiceship of Madras. Four years after his appointment, in 1868, he died of apoplexy at the age of sixty-three. It is noticeable that though Serjeant Shee had been in most of the great trials he had never defended in a murder trial until he defended Palmer. We have referred to his declaration of belief in Palmer’s innocence; and this was not the only point on which his speech was criticised at the time. The leading legal Journal characterised it in terms which will most likely be agreed with by the present-day reader, even more decisively than by the reader of half a century ago, when the taste was more for florid speaking than it is now. “The defence of Mr. Serjeant Shee was clever, ingenious, and eloquent, but wanting in judgment and taste. The peroration was a striking instance of this defect, for the allusion to the family of the prisoner, and to his supposed affection for his wife, grated sorely, and almost ludicrously, on the sense of propriety in the face of the undisguised fact, known to all his audience, that he was accused of murdering his wife, that he slept with his maid servant on the very night she died, and that he had confessed himself guilty of forgery upon his mother. Equally injudicious was the philippic against the insurance offices. In worse taste still was his solemn assertion to the jury that he was convinced by the evidence of the prisoner’s innocence.”

Sir William Robert Grove. Palmer’s second counsel, Mr. Grove, Q.C., was in one respect the most distinguished of all the persons who took part in the trial. At the time he had a European reputation, but this was due to his career as a scientific investigator, and not as a lawyer. Without mentioning more, it is sufficient to say that he had published in 1846 the great book, “The Correlation of Physical Forces,” which placed him in the front rank of European science. The book was translated into French in the year of the trial. He had been called to the bar in 1835, and was in 1856 forty-five; but he had ill-health, and he turned to science rather than to practice. He was at his call a member of the Royal Institution, and in 1844 he had become its vice-president. By 1853 his health had improved, and he was then a Q.C., having a practice chiefly in patent and scientific cases; but he had also become a leader on his Circuit. It was probably his scientific eminence that led to his brief in the Palmer case. Grove was appointed a judge in 1871, retired in 1887, and died in 1896 at eighty-five. He did not gain any special distinction as a judge nor add to his scientific reputation after he left the bench, though he published several scientific studies.

Edward Vaughan Hyde Kenealy was the junior counsel for Palmer, and was thirty-seven years old. He was a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1840, the year of his call to the Irish bar. In 1847 he was called to the English bar by Gray’s Inn, and by 1850 he was a Doctor of Laws of Trinity College, Dublin. He had published poems as translations from many Eastern and European languages, and especially in 1850 a poem which has been described as marked by genius, “Goethe, a new Pantomime.” Between the year of the trial and 1868 he had risen rapidly, and in the latter year he was made a Queen’s Counsel and a Bencher of his Inn. He was the leading counsel for the prosecution in the great Overend and Gurney case of 1869; and in 1873 came the most extraordinary period of his career, when he became chief counsel for the Tichborne claimant. His conduct of that person’s defence on the prosecution for perjury, and his editing of the wild paper called The Englishman, and his scurrilous attacks on the Chief Justice and others, led to his expulsion from the Circuit, the deprival of his legal distinctions, and finally to his disbarring. He was elected in 1875 as member for Stoke, solely as the champion of the Tichborne claimant. He sat until 1880, but was defeated then at the General Election, and in that year he died. He was an accomplished and successful advocate, and a scholar of unusual learning, but his gifts seemed of that order of genius which is allied to madness. In 1860 he published a translation of a Celtic poem, and in 1864 a volume of “Poems”; in 1878, “Prayers and Meditations,” “An Introduction to the Apocalypse,” and “Fo, the Third Messenger of God.”

John Gray. Mr. Gray was born at Aberdeen in 1807, and educated at Gordon’s Hospital. First a solicitor in London, he was called to the bar in 1838. After attaining the rank of Queen’s Counsel in 1863, seven years after the Palmer trial, he was appointed solicitor to the Treasury in 1870. It was while holding this office, in 1873, that he conducted the prosecution of Arthur Orton; so that his career and Dr. Kenealy’s touched in two points. He was the author of a number of valuable contemporary legal text books. He died in 1875, owing, it was said, to his labours in preparing and directing the Orton prosecution.

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