The prosecution’s witnesses both placed Oxford at the scene and testified that his pistols were loaded. The defense conceded the first point, but argued that his guns were not loaded at all. That Oxford often shot live ammunition at targets before the attempt hardly proved the pistols were loaded on the day of the shooting. Oxford’s own claims after his arrest that his pistols were loaded, given his manifestly vainglorious attempt to promote himself as an adherent of Young England, were dubious. The testimony by two witnesses that bullets had made marks on the wall of the Palace gardens was undercut by the Attorney General’s opinion that Oxford’s bullets had carried over that wall. And the two witnesses who swore that they heard the whizzing of a bullet seemed quite confused in their testimony. The defense, in cross-examination, let pass the fact that it would be virtually impossible to hear the whizzing of a ball immediately after a gun’s violent explosion. There was hardly any need to bring this up: both witnesses seemed hopelessly confused about the difference between seeing and hearing a shot. Thus Samuel Perks’s (or Parkes’s) testimony: “the report of the pistol attracted my attention, and I had a distinct whizzing or buzzing before my eyes, between my face and the carriage.” The other witness to the shot, Elizabeth Stockeley, was even more confused about what she saw and what she heard:
… it was the second flash which appeared to come over the Queen’s head, and it came close past me; the flash did—it seemed something that whizzed past my ear, as I stood; it seemed like something quick passing my ear, but what I could not say …
Q. What do you mean by the flash? A. The light and the smoke—I cannot explain what it was that whizzed by my ear—it was my right ear.
As for testimony that Oxford was sane at the time of the shooting, the prosecution refrained from presenting a single witness to counter the many witnesses the defense planned to call to demonstrate Oxford’s insanity. They had such a witness available to them: Charles Aston Key, the surgeon who had declined to examine Oxford with the defense’s medical witnesses, was present and offering advice to the prosecution. But the prosecution had no intention of having anyone testify to Oxford’s sanity. They certainly preferred to prove the boy guilty of High Treason: the formidable prosecutorial team demonstrated that. Executing Oxford would have a highly desirable value in deterring future would-be Oxfords from threatening the Queen. But they surely knew that their evidence that Oxford’s pistols were loaded was weak, and thus they could lose the case. Moreover, asking the jury to convict him of a capital crime—one for which the penalty was hanging, drawing, and quartering—was always a risky proposition. The public’s perception of Oxford by the time of the trial had shifted: while he was once the desperate and malevolent bravo, he had become a rather pathetic boy who craved attention. The jury might acquit Oxford just to save him from the excessive punishment of an excruciating death.
Oxford’s insanity defense offered the government a third option. While each defense strategy—proving unloaded guns, or proving insanity—would result in Oxford’s acquittal, the consequence of acquittal for unloaded guns differed dramatically from the consequence of an acquittal for insanity. If Taylor and Bodkin succeeded in proving that Oxford had no balls in his pistols, he would walk from the Old Bailey a free man. If, on the other hand, he was acquitted on the ground of insanity, he would be subject to confinement at the Queen’s pleasure—confinement that could last for decades, if not a lifetime, as happened in the case of James Hadfield.
The prosecution recognized that Oxford’s defense attorneys could be too successful: they could earn Oxford an acquittal and see him in effect confined for life. That fact shaped Oxford’s prosecution. Campbell, Wilde, and the other prosecutors promoted, as energetically as they could, the case that the pistols were loaded. But they offered next to nothing to prove that he was sane. Indeed, they actually helped promote the notion that he might be insane. In his opening, Campbell read Oxford’s Young England papers to the jury in full: all the rules and regulations, as well as Oxford’s three letters. Moreover, during testimony the prosecution asked Samuel Hughes, the policeman who discovered and broke open Oxford’s box of secrets, to read all of the documents in full a second time. Campbell offered no explanation for these documents. He had no intention of suggesting that Young England was real; both prosecution and defense agreed that the organization was a figment of Oxford’s imagination. The prosecution, in other words, introduced the very evidence that Oxford’s defense would claim to make the strongest case for his insanity.
When Sydney Taylor rose to address the jury, he had good reason to be confident in his client’s acquittal, given the weakness of the government’s claim that the guns were loaded. If Taylor had simply reviewed the evidence and rested the defense’s case, it is more than likely that the jury could not conclude beyond a reasonable doubt that Oxford shot at the Queen, and Oxford would be free. Oxford, however, had without question disturbed the Queen’s peace, and a jury might just convict him, bullets or no bullets. Taylor and Bodkin, then, hoping for absolute acquittal, but wishing in any case to save Oxford’s life, divided the defense into two completely distinct parts: first, he had not committed High Treason at all—but second, only if the jury decided that the act was High Treason, then Oxford was insane and not responsible for that act. And in his opening, Taylor carefully instructed the jury to keep their decisions separate: if they found that Oxford had never shot bullets at the Queen, then the question of his sanity or insanity was not relevant to the case at all.
Taylor then reviewed the weaknesses of the government’s case. The evidence, he claimed, actually worked to prove that the guns were not loaded: “the suggestion of the ball having passed over the wall was negatived by the witnesses; but the evidence which tended to show that it had struck against the walls was perfectly inconclusive.” Oxford’s alleged boast after his arrest that his pistols were loaded counted for little—simply an extension of the vainglory he exhibited in foolishly but harmlessly pointed a bullet-less pistol at the Queen. And in asking whether the Queen was hurt, Oxford might have been wondering whether he had caused her mental alarm. Taylor then turned to the evidence for Oxford’s insanity, and questioned the Attorney General’s conception that insanity must be total, without motive, premeditation, or plan, in order to acquit. All of George III’s assailants, he argued, were deemed to be insane and yet showed some signs of rational thought. Margaret Nicholson, who in 1786 attempted to stab the King when he reached out to take a petition from her, showed premeditation in drawing up a blank petition for the King and inscribing it in the accepted form. Moreover, she was able to speak coherently at her examination.* A second, seemingly coherent assailant who threw a stone at the King’s carriage was similarly committed. And Had-field most certainly had motivation for his shooting: he was deeply dissatisfied to be discharged from the army on the pension of 4d. a day. Moreover, he showed “premeditation and contrivance” in concealing his weapon upon entering the Drury Lane Theatre.
Oxford, Taylor pointed out, was born into a family with a long history of mental illness; his grandfather, John Oxford, was once restrained in a strait-waistcoat, and died in a lunatic asylum. And if his father was not confined for his bizarre acts—well, he should have been. Oxford was of an age, Taylor claimed, when latent mental illness generally manifested itself, and it certainly had done so in Oxford’s case: the Young England papers, written in Oxford’s hand, and the “creations of his own foolish fancy,” “furnished the strongest evidence against the prisoner in proof of his insanity.” He showed, moreover, no rational motive in shooting at the Queen, and, having shot at her, he made no attempt whatsoever to flee. Obviously he was mad. The jury would delight the Queen by finding him so: “the mind of Her Majesty would be relieved from the unpleasant impression that any one of her subjects could be found guilty of imagining and compassing her death.”
Having thus demolished the image of bravado that Oxford had so carefully constructed for himself, Taylor and Bodkin called to the stand
twenty-eight witnesses, twenty-six of whom provided evidence as to the derangement of three generations of Oxfords. Notable among these witnesses were several long-suffering Oxford women: his grandmother and her cousin, his mother, sister, and two aunts spoke of enduring the abuse of Oxford men for more than forty years. Uncles Edward and Charles (the latter a Birmingham publican), landlords and a landlady, teachers, employers, workmates, and Inspector Tedman, all confirmed these women’s claims, and contributed a host of their own. Witnesses testified that Oxford’s grandfather often thought he was St. Paul or the Pope, and testified to his capacity for “indecent behavior” and his proclivity to violent rages when he would smash everything in sight, and which resulted in episodes of restraint and confinement: with cords, in a strait-waistcoat, at Petworth Bridewell. Oxford’s father, they testified, inherited his father’s manic propensity to destroy. The jury learned of his inappropriate behavior—burning money, riding horses in the parlor—and learned of his horrible abuse, most of it directed at his wife Hannah. Hannah Oxford, testifying during the evening of the first day of the trial, offered up a particularly lengthy litany of sorrows imposed upon her first by her husband, and then by her son. Oxford’s father “delighted in annoying and teasing me,” she claimed, and told of his bullying her into marriage, his starving her, and his relentlessly beating her: kicking her, once fracturing her skull and nearly killing her, and at another time, when she was pregnant with Edward, smashing a quart-pot over her head, and after he was born, plunging a file into her breast while he was suckling. He abandoned her, only to return and further abuse her. He dramatically threatened suicide before her, and at least twice made the attempt. And through it all, he was utterly indifferent to her and to her suffering.
Her son, she claimed, shared his father’s “fractious” nature, and showed the same violent rages, and showed, as well, a disturbing habit from infancy of maniacal motiveless laughter, mixed in with inconsolable crying—behavior she had tried to control with beatings, with locking Edward in the cellar—but which she could not control, behavior that lost her customers, ruined her businesses, and forced her to send him away. Hannah then brought the abuse up to date, telling the jury of his rages at West Place two months before, culminating in his punching her violently in the face and bloodying her nose the day before she left for Birmingham.
Hannah finished her testimony at eight o’clock in the evening, and when Taylor called another witness, Campbell interrupted: did they intend to call many more witnesses? Taylor and Bodkin said that they were. The Chief Justice then adjourned the trial for the night; Oxford was removed from the bar and brought back to his cell, and the jurors sequestered.
The trial resumed promptly at nine the next morning, with a multitude of witnesses to bolster the insanity defense. Every oddity, it seemed, of Oxford’s life was presented to the jury: his assaults on strangers and schoolfellows; his scrapes with the police as he harassed a woman in her carriage, or as he assaulted a neighbor; his frightening the customers in his aunt Clarinda’s public house by shutting off the gas—and his pleasure in the suffering of others. At times, witnesses seemed to stretch to find anything that would support the notion that Oxford was, in the word nearly all of them used, “unsound.” Thus Emily Chittenden, a nursemaid who worked with Oxford at the Hog in the Pound, and for whom he obviously had some sort of affection, testified about a letter that Oxford sent her at the end of May. The contents she apparently considered unimportant, but the address she thought “extraordinary”:
Fly, postman, with this letter bound,
To a place they call the Pig in the Pound;
To Miss Chittenden there convey it,
And with “speedility” obey it.
Remember, my blade,
The postage is paid.
And if bad verse could be offered as a sign of insanity, so could bad reading: and as the controversy about the Newgate novel reached its zenith outside the courtroom, Oxford’s sister Susannah connected him with that apparently degrading literature, revealing that he had recently read, among other books, Oliver Twist and—worse—Jack Sheppard. Oxford’s eerie lifelong habit of uncontrollable laughing ran through almost all of the eyewitness accounts: hilarity often leading to fits of sobbing, all generally without discernible motive.
Oxford was thus for hours enlightened as to how all who knew him viewed him. No one saw him as gallant Oxonian, a bravo, or even as a respectable barman: to all—family, friends, Emily Chittenden—he was unsound, annoying, ill. Confronting this horror was enough to shake him from his silly smile, and when he heard his last employer, Newman Robinson, speak of his laughing uncontrollably—to the point where his customers were offended, to the point that Robinson had to give Oxford notice—Oxford broke, bursting into tears and weeping bitterly.
To pull together the mass of anecdotal evidence with an expert diagnosis of insanity, Taylor and Bodkin brought forward the three doctors who had examined Oxford two days before, as well as three more. The very notion of an expert medical witness at the time was highly controversial. Passing judgment on the moral aberration of a defendant was, in the minds of most legal authorities of the time, the province of the jury, not of any witness: judging good or evil behavior was a legal and not a medical issue. To be sure, several medical witnesses had testified in Hadfield’s case forty years before, leading to a directed verdict of not guilty on the ground of insanity. But Hadfield had a discernible head injury, while Oxford did not: the doctors in Hadfield’s case offered physiological testimony, while the doctors in Oxford’s case offered abstract psychological judgments. Taylor had attempted in his opening statement to justify the need for such expert judgments: there was such a thing as a partial insanity, he pointed out, something that could be at times invisible to the world (and to a jury), but could be clear to the trained mind of the physician. In seeking the professional opinion of six doctors, only one of whom had known Oxford for some time, the defense was challenging legal precedent—and the judges would not let new precedent be established without a struggle.
It was the first doctor to testify who bore the brunt of the judges’ attack. John Birt Davis, one of the many witnesses called to London from Birmingham, was actually called to the stand as an eyewitness, not an expert witness. He was in 1840 a leading citizen of Birmingham: magistrate and coroner, as well as a highly respected physician. In 1824, however, he was at the start of his career, and had been called to treat Edward’s father after he attempted suicide by drinking laudanum. As an eyewitness, Davis had little to offer: he claimed he did not know enough to form any opinion about Oxford’s father’s state of mind, and that he had not ever seen Edward after the boy had turned two. Bodkin therefore shifted the questioning to his professional opinion of the state of Oxford’s mind: “Assuming the facts which have been given in evidence to be true—I mean the facts with respect to insanity affecting the prisoner—looking to the manner in which the crime was committed, and the whole circumstances of the transaction, what is your opinion to the state of the prisoner’s mind?”
The Attorney General objected vociferously to this question, and the judges supported him. Lord Chief Justice Denman was adamant: judging the state of the prisoner’s mind must be left to the jury. Taylor disputed this: insanity was a medical question, and he had every right to “take the opinion of a medical man upon that evidence.” No, Denman responded: that would be like “asking the witness to pronounce a verdict for the jury.” Bodkin then altered and re-altered his question, trying to find a way to admit Davis’s opinion that Oxford was insane. The judges thwarted his every attempt. In the end, Bodkin was forced to render his question completely hypothetical:
Mr. BODKIN …—Supposing a person in the middle of the day, and without any suggested motive, was to fire a loaded pistol at Her Majesty passing along the road in a carriage, and that such person afterwards remained on the spot, declaring that he was the person who had fired—nay, even took pains to have it known, and that afterwards he entered
freely into discussion, and answered questions put to him on the subject, would you refer such conduct to a sound or unsound state of mind?
Sir F. POLLOCK asked the Court if it thought this was a medical question. He did not object.
Lord DENMAN.—It may be put …
Witness.—If I heard these facts stated, I should conclude that the party must be mad.…
Mr. BODKIN.—Supposing, if in addition to the facts and circumstances already mentioned, it was shown that immediately before the transaction, the party had written papers such as those found in the prisoner’s box, and which you heard read yesterday, would they serve to strengthen or otherwise the inference you have drawn[?]
Witness.—It would greatly strengthen it.
The doctors who followed Davis found that he had made their path easier. The second doctor to testify, William Henry Partridge, also from Birmingham, had apparently no personal knowledge of Oxford, and only testified briefly about treating his mother’s head injuries. The next doctor was Thomas Hodgkin, the Quaker social activist and specialist in morbid anatomy (and incidentally, the one who first studied the symptoms of the disease that bears his name). There is nothing in Hodgkin’s testimony that suggests he had personally known or examined Oxford before the trial. Sydney Taylor began his questioning guardedly, asking Hodgkin a hypothetical question similar to that asked Davis. Hodgkin quickly connected the hypotheticals with the boy in the dock, and proceeded to diagnose his illness: “If all the appearances described were exhibited by the prisoner, and coexisted in him, I should conclude that he was insane, because such a form of insanity has been recognized. It is called by Le Marc, a French writer, lesion de la volonté, or morbid propensity.” Such an illness would likely not be apparent to the layman, and would necessitate an expert medical witness to consider the evidence and guide the jury to an accurate conclusion about sanity or insanity. This was exactly the breach of precedent that the Judges had attacked in their curtailing of Davis’s testimony, and the Chief Justice was not going to let Hodgkin’s assumption of authority pass without question:
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