The Suspicions of Mr Whicher

by Summerscale, Kate

  Yet when the eminent alienist Charles Bucknill examined Constance in gaol, she insisted that she was sane, then and now. The doctor interrogated her about her motive for killing Saville, asking why she had not attacked the real object of her anger, her stepmother. Constance replied that this would have been 'too short'. Bucknill understood her to mean that by killing Saville she intended to inflict a prolonged torture on the woman she hated, rather than a quick extinction. Later, Bucknill told the Home Secretary that he thought Constance 'had inherited a strong tendency to insanity', but that she had 'refused to let him' state his belief in public, because she wished to protect the interests of her father and brother. Rodway explained Constance's rationale in similar terms: 'A plea of insanity at the time of the deed might, it is believed, have been set up with success,' he told the Home Secretary, 'but she, fearing that such a plea might affect prejudicially her brother's chances in life, earnestly entreated that it should not be urged on her behalf.' She was determined to protect William from the taint of madness.

  After meeting Constance, Bucknill fell in with her wishes and declared her sane, but he gave the newspapers a hint of his unease. Like Whicher, he found the clue to Constance's disturbance in her stillness. The sensationalism of the murder sat strangely with the blankness of the girl. 'The only peculiarity which at all struck Bucknill,' reported the Salisbury and Winchester Journal, 'was her extreme calmness – the utter absence of any symptom of emotion.'

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  MY LOVE TURNED

  July–August 1865

  On the evening of Tuesday, 18 July Constance was transferred to the county gaol at Salisbury. Usually prisoners were moved between towns by train, but the governor of Devizes prison took Constance by post-chaise across Salisbury Plain, a journey of forty miles. She joined about forty-five men and five women at Fisherton gaol, on the outskirts of the city. That Wednesday – two days before the trial – Rowland Rodway visited her to tell her that her lawyers believed that, despite her confession, she would be acquitted if she pleaded not guilty. He urged her to make her peace with God in private: her spiritual atonement, he argued, did not depend on a public confession and conviction. Constance reiterated her intention to plead guilty; it was 'her plain duty', she told the lawyer, 'the only course which would satisfy her conscience', and the only one that would lift suspicion from others.

  Salisbury was filling with visitors. Samuel, Mary, Mary Ann and William Kent had rooms at the White Hart, a handsome Georgian hotel opposite the cathedral. Williamson was in town, as was Whicher, who may have stayed with his niece Mary Ann and her husband, William Wort, at their house in New Street. More than thirty witnesses for the prosecution were on hand in case they were required. These included Constance's schoolfriend Louisa, though Emma Moody had fallen ill and was unable to make the journey from Ireland.

  John Duke Coleridge QC, one of the most successful barristers of his generation, had been appointed to represent Constance. On Thursday he met Mary Ann and William Kent to discuss their sister's case, 'and then', he wrote in his diary, 'sat up till near three, getting up my speech'. He composed a letter to his client: 'If you plead Not Guilty then whatever I can do shall be done for your acquittal. If you plead Guilty anything I can say to set others right shall be said. But I advise you against any intermediate course.' Constance replied early in the morning of Friday, 21 July, the day of the trial: 'I am persuaded that nothing will tend to clear the innocent so completely as my conviction.'

  The Wiltshire constabulary had erected barriers outside the courthouse and drafted in constables from all over the county. About thirty reporters had turned up, and they were furious to discover that no provision had been made for them – the city authorities had failed to build the press balcony they had promised. Only fourteen places were allocated to the reporters; the others had to take their chances with the rest of the mob when the doors were opened at nine.

  The judge was Sir James Willes, a tall man with luxuriant dark hair, eyebrows and whiskers, a prominent nose and a melancholy, harsh stare. He was reserved and courteous in manner, and his voice had an Irish lilt – he was born in Cork, to Protestant parents, in 1814. Once he and the twenty-four magistrates serving as jurors had taken their seats, Constance was brought in. She wore a black worsted veil, a plain black cloak, a black bonnet adorned with glass beads, a pair of black gauntlet gloves. She spoke briefly to Rodway, at the back of the dock, then lifted her veil and came to the front. Her face, judged the Daily Telegraph reporter, was 'broad, full, uninteresting', with an 'expression of stupid dulness'. 'She has full eyes, in which at times there is a look as if she was suspicious of those surrounding her, and which may be best described as the glance of a person who is afraid of something.' The News of the World described her as 'dull and heavy, her forehead low, her eyes small and her figure tending to plumpness, and there being an entire absence of anything like vivacity in her air or countenance'.

  The clerk of the court read out the charge and asked, 'How say you, Constance Emilie Kent, are you guilty or not guilty?'

  'Guilty,' she said, in a low tone.

  Willes turned to her. 'Are you aware that you are charged with having wilfully, intentionally and with malice killed your brother?'

  'Yes.'

  The judge paused. 'And you plead guilty to that?' Constance was silent.

  After a few moments Willes pressed her: 'What is your answer?' Again she said nothing. Despite her determination to plead guilty, silence and secrecy seemed still to exert a pull on her.

  'You are charged with having wilfully, intentionally and with malice killed your brother,' repeated Willes. 'Are you guilty or not guilty?'

  Finally she replied: 'Guilty.'

  'The plea must be recorded,' said Willes. The room was perfectly quiet as the clerk wrote it down.

  Coleridge rose and addressed the court on Constance's behalf. 'I desire to say two things before the sentence of the court is passed.' He was a lean man with a long face, sharp, sympathetic eyes, and a melodious voice. 'In the first place the prisoner solemnly, in the presence of Almighty God, and as a person who values her own soul, desires me to say that the guilt is hers alone, and that her father and others, who have so long suffered most unjust and cruel suspicions, are wholly and absolutely innocent. Next she desires me to say that she was not driven to act, as has been asserted, by any unkind treatment in her home. She met nothing there but tender and forbearing love, and I hope I may add not improperly that it gives me a melancholy pleasure to be made the organ of these statements, because on my honour I believe them to be true.'

  Coleridge sat down. The clerk of the court asked Constance if she could give any reason why a sentence of death should not be passed upon her. She said nothing.

  Judge Willes put on his black cap, in preparation for delivering the death sentence, and addressed Constance. 'I can entertain no doubt, after having read the evidence, and considering it in connexion with your three confessions of crime, that your plea is the plea of a guilty person. You appear to have allowed feelings of jealousy –' 'Not jealousy!' Constance burst out. The judge continued '– and anger to have worked in your breast until at last they assumed over you the influence and power of the evil one.'

  At this point Willes' voice broke. As he paused, unable to speak, Constance glanced up at him, and on seeing his distress was herself overcome. She turned away from the judge, trying to hold back her tears. Willes was now openly weeping. He went on with difficulty. 'Whether Her Majesty, with whom the prerogative of mercy rests, may be advised to exercise that prerogative in your case on account of the fact of your youth at the time when the murder was committed, the fact that you are convicted on your own confession, and the fact that that confession removes suspicion from others, is a question which it would be presumptuous in me to answer. It now well behoves you to live what is left to you of life as one about to die, and to seek a more enduring mercy by sincere and deep contrition, and by a reliance on the holy redemption.
' He passed the death sentence, finishing with the words, 'And may God have mercy on your soul.'

  Constance stood utterly still for a moment, then pulled down her veil. She was led out of the courtroom by a female prison warder, whose face was wet with tears. The trial had lasted twenty minutes.

  Constance's cry 'Not jealousy!' was the only spontaneous statement she made in public over the months of her confession and trial. She would admit to anger, she would admit to murder, but she refused to agree that she had experienced envy. Perhaps she protested too much: if she had killed Saville out of anger, she could imagine herself as a heroic avenger of her natural mother and of William; but if out of jealousy, she was self-centred, childish, vulnerable. If she was jealous, she did not merely rage against her stepmother and her father; she wanted their love.

  As soon as the death sentence was passed, 'broadside' ballads about the Road Hill murder were produced. These were formulaic, single-sheet accounts of crimes, published quickly and cheaply in large quantities, then sung and sold by street vendors. Their role had been largely usurped by the newspapers, which now reported crime just as cheaply and more fully, to an increasingly literate population. Most broadside ballads were written in the first person, in the form of a confession and lament:

  His little throat I cut from ear to ear,

  Wrapped him in a blanket and away did steer

  To the water-closet, which soon I found,

  In the dirty soil then I pushed him down.

  For all Constance's denials, the balladeers were clear about her motive:

  My father married a second wife,

  Which filled my bosom with spleen & strife.

  In the words of another, she was 'jealous of her mother-in-law'. More than one balladeer described Constance as haunted by Saville's ghost: 'Not night nor day no rest I get, in my dreams my brother see.' Some conveyed a lascivious excitement at the surrender that she was expected to make on the gallows:

  I see the hangman before me stand,

  Ready to seize me by the law's command. . .

  Oh, what a sight it will be to see,

  A maiden die on the fatal tree.

  But the broadside publishers were jumping the gun – the public was clamouring for Constance Kent to be spared the death sentence. A Devonshire magistrate came forward to testify to the madness of the first Mrs Kent, claiming that he and other neighbours of the Kents had witnessed her outbreaks of lunacy in the 1840s. On the Sunday after Constance's conviction, the Reverend Charles Spurgeon, the most popular preacher of his time, delivered a sermon to more than four thousand people at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Elephant & Castle, which compared Constance Kent's crime to that of Dr Edward Pritchard of Glasgow, another murderer convicted that month. Pritchard was arrested when traces of poison were found in the bodies of his wife and her mother, who had both died soon after discovering his liais on with a fifteen-year-old servant girl. He did not confess. Even when he was found guilty of murder, he tried to blame the killings on others: 'I feel now as though I had been living in a species of madness since my connection with Mary McLeod.' Constance, by contrast, had made a voluntary admission of guilt in order to lift suspicion from those close to her. The Reverend Spurgeon argued that she should be shown mercy. Rowland Rodway, Dr Bucknill, and the Reverend Wagner joined in pleading with the Home Secretary not to execute her, as did Justice Willes.* The newspapers were in overwhelming agreement. For a cold-blooded child-murderer, Constance had aroused an extraordinary level of sympathy. Within days Sir George Grey recommended to the Queen that her sentence be commuted to one of penal servitude for life, which was usually a twenty-year term.

  On the morning of Thursday, 27 July, Victoria agreed to spare the young woman. The governor of Fisherton gaol hurried to Constance's cell to give her the news, which she received with her customary calm: 'She did not show the slightest emotion.'

  That week, Joseph Stapleton wrote a letter to The Time, inviting the newspaper's readers to contribute to a fund he had set up for Elizabeth Gough at the North Wilts Bank, Trowbridge. For 'five long years', he said, she 'has been shut out from profitable domestic employment' because of the suspicions that attached to her at Road. He attested to 'the uniform modesty and purity of her character, her fidelity to her master and his family, her unwavering courage and simple truthfulness in her time of trial and peril'. Stapleton also drew attention to the plight of William Kent. 'This young man, now nearly 21 years of age, is a good son, a devoted brother, amiable and talented beyond the ordinary endowment of such qualities; but the thick dark cloud of this enduring family sorrow rests on him and bars his entrance into life. Will no one bring William Kent under the notice of the Government? Would the Government resist an appeal on his behalf for employment suitable to his education and habits?'

  Because Constance pleaded guilty, Wagner's refusal to disclose all that she had told him was never challenged in court (in fact, Willes had decided that he would defend Wagner's right to silence on this issue – he told Coleridge afterwards that he had satisfied himself that there was 'a legal privilege in a priest to withhold what had passed in confession'). The clergyman remained loyal to Constance. He and Katharine Gream paid her regular visits in prison.

  In August, an effigy of Constance Kent was modelled by the waxworkers of Madame Tussaud's to put on display in the museum's Chamber of Horrors, alongside newly made figures of two other murderers – Dr Pritchard, the poisoner, and John Wilkes Booth. Wilkes Booth had assassinated Abraham Lincoln in the week that Constance made her confession to Wagner; on the day that she was imprisoned at Devizes he was hunted down and shot dead in a barn in Virginia.*

  On 4 August the Wiltshire magistrates wrote to Sir Richard Mayne to suggest that Whicher and Williamson be given the £100 reward that the government had offered in 1860 for evidence that led to the conviction of the Road Hill murderer. This would serve, they wrote, as 'a slight acknowledgement of the great skill and sagacity displayed by them in their difficult task'. The suggestion was ignored.

  Just before she left Brighton for Bow Street magistrates' court in April, Constance had written a letter to Sir John Eardley Wilmot, the baronet who in 1860 had taken such an interest in helping the Kents to clear their names. A part of this letter, in which she gave her fullest account of what drove her to murder, was forwarded in July to Peter Edlin, who helped prepare the case for the defence. Since no defence was presented, the letter remained private. The surviving section ran as follows:

  The murder I committed to avenge my mother whose place had been usurped by my stepmother. The latter had been living in the family ever since my birth. She treated me with all the kindness and affection of a mother (for my own mother never loved or cared for me) and I loved her as though she had been.

  When no more than three years old I began to observe that my mother held quite a secondary place both as a wife and as mistress of the house. She it was who really ruled. Many conversations on the subject, which I was considered too young to understand, I heard and remembered in after years. At that time I always took part against my mother, whom being spoken of with contempt I too despised. As I grew older and understood that my father loved her and treated my mother with indifference my opinion began to alter. I felt a secret dislike to her when she spoke scornfully or disparagingly of my mother.

  Mamma died. From that time my love turned to the most bitter hatred. Even after her death she continued to speak of her with scorn. At such times my hate grew so intense that I could not remain in the room. I vowed a deadly vengeance, renounced all belief in religion and devoted myself body and soul to the Evil Spirit, invoking his aid in my scheme of revenge. At first I thought of murdering her but that seemed to me too short a pang. I would have her feel my revenge. She had robbed my mother of the affection which was her due, so I would rob her of what she most loved. From that time I became a demon always seeking to do evil and to lead others into it, ever trying to find an occasion to accomplish my evil design. I found it.


  Nearly five years have since passed away during which time I have either been in a wild feverish state of mind only happy in doing evil, or else so very wretched that I often could have put an end to myself had means been near at the moment. I felt hatred towards everyone, and a wish to make them as wretched as myself.

  At last a change came. My conscience tormented me with remorse. Miserable, wretched, suspicious, I felt as though Hell were in me. Then I resolved to confess.

  I am now ready to make what restitution is in my power. A life for a life is all that I can give, as the Evil done can never be repaired.

  I had no mercy, let none ask it for me, though indeed all must regard me with too much horror.

  Forgiveness from those I have so deeply injured I dared not ask. I hated, so is their hatred my just retribution.

  It was a beautifully composed atonement. Constance's explanation of why she killed Saville – that she wished to inflict on her bad mother the exact pain that had been inflicted on her good one – was breathtaking, at once crazy and logical, just as the killing itself had been both methodical and impassioned. There was an uncanny control to the narrative: her furious attack on a child was rendered as an abstraction; she sought an opportunity to do evil, and 'I found it.'