Both Dickens and Thackeray were sickened by the scene. Dickens saw the only the lowest form of humanity: “nothing but ribaldry, debauchery, levity, drunkenness, and flaunting vice in fifty other shapes. I should have deemed it impossible that I could have ever felt any large assemblage of my fellow-creatures to be so odious.” Thackeray couldn’t watch. For weeks after the hanging, however, he suffered, and he wrote eloquently upon the human degradation effected by public hanging, not the degradation of the masses, as Dickens saw it, but the degradation of himself:
I fully confess that I came away down Snow Hill that morning with a disgust for murder, but it was for the murder I saw done.… I feel myself ashamed and degraded at the brutal curiosity which took me to that brutal sight; and I pray to Almighty God to cause this disgraceful sin to pass from among us, and to cleanse our land of blood.
After hanging for an hour, Courvoisier’s body was placed in the coffin, and brought back into the prison. A medical officer examined the body and proclaimed it lifeless. A death mask was taken of his face. One cast from that mask remained at the Governor’s office; another was exhibited at Madame Tussaud’s: a hauntingly angelic-looking 23-year-old, displayed until well into the twentieth century.
In the afternoon, Courvoisier’s body was buried in a passageway to the Old Bailey.
Of Courvoisier, Gould, and Oxford, only Oxford remained, and in the relative silence of his condemned cell he must, on this day, have given some thought to his own possible fate: a guilty verdict for High Treason entailed hanging, decapitation, and quartering. If there was any vainglory left in the boy, after his committal to Newgate, the events of this day must have eradicated it.
Not long before his trial, Oxford was visited by an Italian artist from Manchester; he had come to take a plaster cast of his head and face. The operation was conducted as quietly as possible; Governor Cope later denied knowing about it, as did the aldermen, who found the situation disgraceful. Nor was his family consulted: Hannah, on learning of this visit, became hysterical. Knowing that Newgate made and kept plaster casts of condemned felons like Courvoisier after their deaths, she assumed that the Home Secretary had ordered the cast of her son, and that his execution was thus inevitable.
It was not Normanby’s power at work here, but Madame Tussaud’s, and by September she was able to advertise proudly in the newspapers:
The LUNATIC EDWARD OXFORD.—Madame TUSSAUD and SONS respectfully announce that they have added a full-length model of OXFORD (taken from life) to their Exhibition, representing him in the act of attempting the life of Her Majesty Queen Victoria. Likewise the Models of Gould and Courvoisier.
Madame Tussaud was not the only one fascinated by Oxford’s head. At one o’clock the afternoon before the trial, James Fernandez Clarke and two of his hand-picked team of medical experts—Chowne and Conolly, accompanied by Oxford’s solicitor, Pelham—took a carriage to Newgate with an order from the Home Secretary in hand, to examine Oxford and decide whether he was insane. Actually, they all had for the most part made up their minds. From their later testimony, it is clear that the newspaper reports had convinced them that his motiveless act, his inviting capture, and his statements after the fact all pointed to insanity. When Clarke went to Hanwell to speak with Conolly, Conolly said “I cannot believe that the prisoner is responsible for his actions. There is an entire want of motive, and, from what I have heard of his conduct since his committal, I feel convinced that a plea of insanity can be maintained.” “Of course,” he added, “I can only satisfy myself on this point by seeing and carefully examining him.” Conolly came to Newgate to reinforce his conclusion, not to draw one.
At the prison, Governor Cope, still taking his position of gatekeeper very seriously, at first refused the doctors admittance. George Maule,* who as Solicitor of the Treasury was responsible for putting together the prosecution’s case in the trial, was with Cope when the doctors arrived, and it was likely Maule who ordered Cope not to admit the medical experts for the defense unless they were accompanied by the prosecution’s expert. That expert, Charles Aston Key, a highly reputed surgeon at Guy’s Hospital, was not called as a witness at Oxford’s trial, but he attended, and advised the prosecution in cross-examining the defense’s expert witnesses. Cope immediately sent a messenger to Key’s house, but he was out, and no one knew when he would return. After nearly two hours in the governor’s office, Clarke pointed out the obvious to Cope: the doctors had a government order to see Oxford; the trial was the next day; if Cope continued to deny them access, he would be denying Oxford a fair trial. Cope and Maule relented, Maule accompanying the doctors in Key’s place.
Oxford exhibited to his guests the same clear and straightforward method of answering questions he had shown to the police when he was captured. While this manner had then impressed the police with a firm sense of his sanity, the doctors drew the opposite conclusion. To them, Oxford’s demonstration of cool, rational behavior, when he was caught apparently red-handed, imprisoned for High Treason, and faced a possible death sentence, was in itself a sure sign of the deepest insanity. Showing no agitation whatsoever convinced at least Dr. Chowne that the boy was missing normal brain function: was, in a word, an imbecile.
John Conolly was a true believer in what was, at the time, considered by many to be the reputable study of phrenology—the sub-science which held to the oversimple premise that brain size and brain shape determined human behavior, and that the skull, conforming to the size and shape of the brain, could thus be examined to provide clues to an individual’s psychological makeup. After Clarke introduced Conolly to Oxford, then, he was soon probing the boy’s skull and, not surprisingly, he quickly found the evidence he needed to support his diagnosis: a sunken spot at the upper part of Oxford’s forehead that suggested to him a missing part of the brain: a sure sign of idiocy. “This youth,” Conolly told Clarke, “cannot with such a configuration be entirely right.”
While Oxford seemed eager to answer the doctors’ questions, Conolly and the others found his answers unsound in more than one respect. For one thing, Oxford consistently demonstrated a lack of affect. When they reminded him that his family would suffer if he were convicted, he seemed not to care. When told he had committed a great crime, in shooting at the Queen, he seemed not to understand, replying “that he might as well shoot her as any one else.” Moreover, in some of his answers he demonstrated illogic. It is hard, though, not to get a sense that he was trying too hard to appear insane with some of his replies. For instance, when Chowne, obviously hoping for an agitated reaction, reminded Oxford that he’d be decapitated if found guilty, Oxford, perhaps with Courvoisier’s execution fresh in his mind, and certainly remembering the Italian artist from Manchester, replied calmly that “he had been decapitated in fact a week before, for he had a cast taken of his head.” The doctors, concerned that Oxford might be faking madness, sought evidence besides his speech for insanity. For Conolly, it was the abnormal shape of his skull. For Chowne, it was his walk: “I told him to get up and walk about the room, and the brisk manner in which he walked proved to me he was not acting a part, for I think if he had been he would not have walked so much at his ease.”
One question that Oxford did answer clearly directly demonstrates that he was aware of what his defense was to be, and that he fully intended to cooperate: there had been no bullets in his pistols, he stubbornly maintained, even when the doctors suggested to him that there had been.
The doctors walked away resolved to testify that he was insane. “We held a consultation after the interview,” Clarke states, “and we all felt convinced that we could justly uphold the plea of insanity, notwithstanding the opposition we contemplated from the Government.” They expected a fight.
They got one.
* It was a promise that Edward Marklew apparently reneged upon; in January 1841, Jabez Pelham appeared in court as an insolvent debtor, citing, among other debts owed him, £510 due from Hannah Oxford for the defense of her son (Times 29 Jan.
1841, 7).
* Oxford, Courvoisier, Gould, and Bailey formed such a notorious quartet at Newgate that a request was made to Sir Peter Laurie, alderman and official of the prison, to take plaster casts of the heads of the four. He refused, arguing that this sort of thing was done only after criminals were tried and found guilty (Morning Chronicle 17 June 1840, 3).
* Later, when news of Courvoisier’s confession came out, Phillips was savaged in the press for defending a man he knew to be guilty, especially by attempting to place blame for the murder on others. He was forced to defend himself from this charge for years after the trial (Costigan 324).
* Not to be confused with the Undersecretary for the Home Department, Fox Maule.
six
GUILTY, HE BEING AT THE TIME INSANE
The courtroom was packed on the first day of Oxford’s trial. The sheriffs, however, had just had good practice with handling the crowds at the Courvoisier trial, and they adopted the same procedure with this one: they gave out a limited number of tickets and restricted access to all avenues leading to the courtroom.
At a quarter to ten, Oxford was called to appear, and every eye in the courtroom turned to the dock. He emerged after a few seconds, at first dejected: but he looked out over a sea of bewigged magistrates and barristers, and at the roomful of notables, and was heartened. His solicitor Jabez Pelham’s prediction to him at his arraignment turned out to be true: there were no more Dukes present than there had been then. But the Duke of Brunswick was again a spectator, as were the Earls of Errol, Colchester, and Uxbridge, as well as a Baron and a Count, and a scattering of Lords and Honorables. The Lady Mayoress of London and a retinue of “elegantly-dressed ladies” occupied a box usually reserved for the county magistracy. Undersecretary Fox Maule, Oxford’s seeming friend, and his wife were among the first to arrive. Oxford’s expression of dejection changed to a silly-looking smile of bafflement, excitement, and curiosity. He would for most of the trial exhibit a nonchalance that, for many, confirmed his lack of reason. Rather than pay attention to the proceedings, he was captivated much more by the herbs strewn before him, “picking, rubbing, and smelling” them for the next two days. These herbs, particularly malodorous rue, had been placed before the dock at every Old Bailey session for ninety years, ever since a prisoner suffering from gaol-fever—the various contagions consequent to the seriously overcrowded prison—had infected and killed a judge, an alderman, and a number of jurymen and witnesses. They had been strewn thereafter not simply to mask the stink of prisoners, but in an attempt to sanitize the noxious miasma that inmates at Newgate were considered to be emitting. Oxford likely had no idea that the herbs stigmatized him. But they did provide him with a welcome distraction.
To defend Oxford, Pelham had engaged John Sydney Taylor and William Bodkin, both highly respectable advocates and philanthropists, both strongly committed to a number of reformist causes. Taylor, who led the defense, was a founding member of the Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment, and fought passionately for that cause in the columns of the Morning Herald. At the time of this trial, however, Taylor’s poor health seriously undermined his energetic advocacy; he had for some time been battling against a mysterious and malignant disease. At age forty-four he was dying, and would be dead in a year.
In terms of legal reputation, however, Bodkin and Taylor could not hold a candle to their opposition. Leading the prosecution were the attorney general, John Campbell, and the solicitor general, Thomas Wilde. Campbell, who would handle opening arguments, had a reputation for aggressive advocacy in his writing, his politics, and in the courtroom. His assertiveness and ambition had made him a number of enemies, including, as it happened, the presiding judge in this case, Lord Denman. His superb analytical mind, however, was obvious to all. Thomas Wilde, who would handle the prosecution’s closing, had admitted liabilities in his presentation of a case—he had a flat voice and a monotonous delivery—but he made up for these with an astute command of legal niceties and tactics. Both Campbell and Wilde would one day sit on the woolsack as Lords Chancellor. The two had four attorneys assisting them. Foremost among these was Sir Frederick Pollock, the conservative predecessor to Campbell as attorney general, whose presence on the prosecution made clear that Whig government and Tory opposition were united in desiring a guilty verdict.
There were three judges presiding over the case. At their head was Baron Denman, who, as Lord Chief Justice of the Queen’s Bench, was the second-ranking judge in the country, after the Lord Chancellor. Denman was thought not to have one of the greatest legal minds of his day, but was renowned for his impartiality and courtesy—as the “personification of judicial dignity.” Joining him on the bench were Sir Edward Hall Alderson and Sir John Patteson. The trial was to raise a number of puzzling legal questions, and—as Denman himself was to make clear—was to create a number of important precedents. These three judges would show themselves very much aware of the important issues, if not always clear on how to deal with them.
At ten, the judges entered, and the clerk read the charge of High Treason against Oxford: he “did compass, imagine, and intend to bring and put our said lady the Queen to death.” And to do it, he “maliciously and traitorously did shoot off and discharge a certain pistol … being loaded with gunpowder and a certain bullet … with intent thereby and therewith maliciously and traitorously to shoot, assassinate, kill, and put to death our said lady the Queen.” In order to prove Oxford guilty, then, the prosecution had to convince a jury that there were bullets in Oxford’s pistols, even though no bullets were ever found.
Oxford pleaded not guilty to the charge, in a “distinct and firm tone.” The jury was then sworn in with no challenges on either side.
In his opening, the Attorney General anticipated and countered the defense’s two-pronged defense, first that the guns were not loaded; and second, if that didn’t work, that Oxford was insane. Oxford’s pistols were loaded, Campbell insisted, and a great deal of evidence supported that claim. Oxford had, in the days before the shooting, sought to buy bullets. He had used bullets in shooting galleries across London. He had, on the night before the shooting, showed off his loaded pistol. On the day of the shooting, eyewitnesses had heard the whizzing of bullets. And while the prosecution was to bring forward two witnesses who would testify that certain marks on the palace wall were likely caused by bullets, Campbell was less certain about the validity of that evidence: he was sure that the bullets passed over the wall, and were lost there. Moreover, Oxford’s words proved that he had fired live ammunition. When, after the shooting, one bystander, William Clayton, accused another bystander, Joshua Lowe, of shooting, Oxford stated “It was I”—admitting, according to Campbell, to the act of firing bullets. In custody, he had asked “Is the Queen hurt?”—an absurd question, if Oxford had done nothing to hurt her. And when at the station house he was asked if his guns were loaded, he had answered that they were.
As to Oxford’s supposed insanity, Campbell delved into legal precedence, citing a number of legal views on insanity and citing four previous criminal cases—including Hadfield’s—to argue for a very high bar in proving insanity. Legal minds agreed, he claimed, that in order for an insanity defense to succeed, one must establish that the defendant was wholly insane at the time; partial insanity was not enough. Only “total alienation of the mind, or total madness, excuses the guilt of felony or treason.” And legally, total madness involves a complete inability to distinguish between right and wrong: to acquit a defendant on the grounds of insanity, “it must be shown that at the very time, the particular time, when the offence charged was committed, he was not an accountable being; that he was then labouring under some delusion, that he could not distinguish right from wrong, and that he was unconscious of committing any offence.” In all of the four legal cases Campbell cited, the defendants demonstrated mental aberration; in one of them, there was a clear history of insanity in the family. But in three of the four, the defendants were found guilty because i
t could not be shown that they were totally deranged and incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong at the time of their criminal act. Only Hadfield was acquitted. But, Campbell claimed, Oxford was no Hadfield. Hadfield suffered a head wound that discernibly affected his sanity. He suffered delusions, and his behavior became increasingly irrational to the point that, soon before his attack on King George, he attempted to murder the son he loved: thus, his insanity was manifest to all at the time of the shooting.
Campbell claimed that Oxford was not manifestly deranged—not even partially insane—at the moment of the shooting. Anticipating the defense’s many witnesses, Campbell questioned their relevance: while Oxford may have exhibited bizarre behavior throughout his life—while he might be the son and grandson of unbalanced men—that evidence could not establish his total derangement on 10 June. No one ever sought his committal for madness then, or before; rather, he was a capable employee. In support of this line of argument, Campbell pointed out that Oxford was not a “potboy,” as was popularly thought, but a “publican”—rare recognition of his superior stature that must have pleased Oxford. Moreover, his signed statement after his examination before the Cabinet, coolly admitting to the shooting, demonstrated conclusively that Oxford was very much aware of what he had done.
Shooting Victoria Page 11
