‘Nothing would please me more,’ said the instigator of her tragedy, ‘than to hear that the Home Secretary’s decision is that Mrs Maybrick shall go free.’65
Ha ha.
Macdougall’s British endeavour was replicated in the United States, coordinated there by a stringent activist by the name of Helen Densmore, an academic and writer with some distinguished connections which she would relentlessly exploit, all the way up to the President himself.
Meanwhile, she and Macdougall and their allies were beset with the same urgency to save Mrs Maybrick’s life. The decision to hang or not to hang fell upon that most notable of inadequacies, and guardian of Her Majesty’s ever-clogged judicial latrine, Home Secretary Henry Matthews.
After the uproar following Mrs Maybrick’s conviction, and in an effort to discredit her by association with ‘hooting Irish supporters’, Matthews caught it square in his Right Honourable neck during an exchange on the affair in Parliament. A Liverpool newspaper reported: ‘When the Home Secretary stated that the prisoner was cheered, the jury who found her guilty hissed, and Her Majesty’s Judge mobbed and hooted, Mr O’Connor (Home Rule) arose to remark that such scenes often occur in Ireland, and when they do the mob is made to suffer. “Had the Honourable Gentleman heard,” asked Mr O’Connor, “whether on this occasion the police on duty had either batoned, or bayoneted, or shot any of the crowd?” Mr Matthews,’ continued the Lancashire Advertiser, ‘made no reply, but sat down hurriedly.’
Matthews had made his discredited name with obfuscation over the Ripper, the pen of the journalist George Sims summing the worthless lackey up: ‘He is probably the most exasperating person who ever reigned at the Home Office. In the art of rubbing up the people in the wrong way he never had an equal.’
And here he is again, featuring in one of the most remarkable illustrations yet of Her Majesty’s legal pantomime. Matthews is presented as if in some sort of dilemma. On the left, wielding his blade, is Jack, wanting the ‘wanton’ hanged, and on the right the blindfolded damsel with the sword, known as ‘Justice’.
The caption reads: ‘ATTEMPTED MURDER OF FLORENCE MAYBRICK – “SAVE HER” MR MATTHEWS’. This picture is a graphic representation of what Alexander Macdougall called ‘the Spirit of Evil’. To me it is the apogee of what Thatcher called ‘Victorian values’. ‘The mystery of Jack the Ripper’ and ‘the Maybrick Mystery’ were one and the same – the one protected, the other persecuted, and for the same reason – and by some extraordinary intuition this forgotten artist seemed to be aware of it.
In reality there was no deliberation worth the word. Mrs Maybrick was innocent, and the zombies knew it, and if they didn’t, they were about to find out. Matthews’ senior civil servant at the Home Office, an aristocrat called Hamilton John Agmondesham Cuffe, had written to William Swift, Clerk to the Justices at Liverpool, requesting a copy of the ‘Blucher’ letter. It arrived on Matthews’ desk on 20 August 1889, one week before Mrs Maybrick’s scheduled murder at Walton Prison on 27 August.66
Cuffe’s request poses one or two questions, does it not – not least of which is, how did he even know about the letter? Russell had caused its suppression at the ‘trial’, to the fatal detriment of his client. Following the secret conclave with Michael Maybrick, it was not admitted as evidence, and there is not the slightest mention of it in any of the transcripts. Yet in the present shenanigans it has apparently acquired a relevance? The Home Office’s interest in this document found its way into the press, and once again it was cynically manipulated to Mrs Maybrick’s disadvantage. The crucial phrase ‘Doctor Fuller had poisoned me’ was of course expunged, and the rest presented as a potent ingredient of Henry Matthews’ quandary: ‘A most important piece of testimony for the prosecution was kept back at the trial, simply because there was some doubt as to whether it would technically rank as evidence … this was a letter written by Mr Maybrick to his brother just before he died, in which he said, “I am being poisoned … When I am dead you must open my body.”’67
‘Blucher’ was in fact a most important piece of testimony for Mrs Maybrick’s defence, but it was twisted here to represent a reason for the tormented Home Secretary to have her executed. The above report is from the Manchester Courier on 22 August, and its theme was picked up by the New York Herald on the same day. Confirming that the ‘Blucher’ letter was in Addison’s brief, it wrote: ‘but it could not be produced on trial because there was a technical objection to it as evidence’.68
What technical objection was that? Alexander Macdougall described the withholding of this letter as a ‘criminal conspiracy’, and it was a conspiracy still in progress. Although ‘Blucher’ was leaked to the newspapers, the Home Office minute referring to it was not, and it demonstrates the criminality underpinning this Victorian charade.
MINUTES
Mr Maybrick’s letter in no ways implies his belief that he was being poisoned by his wife.69 [Home Office emphasis.]
That’s what Russell, Michael Maybrick, Fitzjames Stephen and Addison knew, and shared in whispers on the opening day of the ‘trial’. Coupled with the expert testimony of Tidy and Macnamara, it blows the prosecution to pieces. The Crown’s case was that Mrs Maybrick began her poisoning campaign with arsenic on 27 April, and here is her supposed victim, two days later on 29 April, accusing Michael Maybrick’s doctor of poisoning him, and stating that the offending agent is strychnine.
There was nothing for Matthews to fret over. Florence Maybrick was innocent as daylight. It was Bro Michael who was poisoning her husband with his ‘London Medicine’ and phoney pills, and Mr Muckley couldn’t have been the only one who knew it. Following the conviction a torrent of depositions materialised that Russell could and should easily have accessed before anyone ever thought of accusing Florence. Russell was good with letters, and during the Parnell frame-up he had busted the squalid forger Richard Pigott with one of them. If ‘Blucher’ could save Mrs Maybrick’s life after conviction, why not before it? If it added resonance to calls for her reprieve, why wasn’t it used as a reason not to prosecute her in the first place?
By now, thanks to the efforts of her ostracised mother, the New York prescription for the facewash had turned up, accompanied by a report from Liverpool’s City Analyst, Mr Davies, who had ransacked James Maybrick’s intestines for any indication not of arsenic, but for microscopic fibres of the flypapers it was imagined to have come from. There was no trace of them whatsoever.70
An ancillary report commissioned by Alexander Macdougall from two of the nation’s foremost analytical chemists (Coats and Clayton) confirmed Mr Davies’ findings, or rather the lack of them. ‘It is, I believe, a fact beyond contradiction,’ wrote Dr Coats, ‘that in the Maybrick case fly-papers could not have been used. It is almost impossible for anyone not skilled in analysis to have got rid of the woollen fibres.’71 This judgement was reiterated by Mr Godwin Clayton:
It is next to impossible [his emphasis] for any person without opportunities for, and knowledge of, chemical manipulation, to make or procure an aqueous infusion of the fly-papers without signs of the addition being evident on microscopical examination, in the shape of characteristically coloured fibres and hairs derived from the fly-papers. The only method by which it is possible, even in the chemical laboratory, to obtain an infusion of these papers free from coloured fibres of cotton and woollen hairs, is filtration through filter paper of good quality. I consider it in the highest degree unlikely that an ordinary individual would think of employing such a process, or would even contemplate attempting to eliminate the fibres from the infusion.72
Curious it is that the redoubtable Inspector Bryning overlooked Mrs Maybrick’s ‘laboratory’ when he and his pals searched her house. If Charles Russell QC had been an honest broker he would have hired these chemists on day one, perhaps wedging their deposition between those of Dalgleish and Baroness von Roques.
But Russell wasn’t an honest broker, and neither was Matthews. He was joined in his deliberations by a v
ariety of gents under horsehair whose inclination was to travel up carpets in reverse. James Fitzjames Stephen was reanimated for consultation, abetted by the Dionysus of Cleveland Street’s upmarket buggers and the kingdom’s most senior officer of the law, Bro Lord Halsbury.
According to a contemporary effusion, the Bro Lord Chancellor was responsible for ‘the efficient and harmonious working of the entire judicial system of Great Britain. As the First Great Officer of State, he takes rank immediately after the Monarch Herself. His designation of “Keeper of The Royal Conscience”73 is in itself a testimony of the great influence which has always attended the position.’ ‘Keeping the Royal Conscience’ was a medieval euphemism for keeping the peasants in awe of it. The Lord Chancellor was the law, and by holding his own laws in contempt Halsbury was to be the last grotesque turn in the Jack the Ripper Show.
Their problem wasn’t whether they were going to hang Mrs Maybrick or not, but how they were going to keep her in prison if they didn’t. She had been convicted of murdering her husband by the administration of arsenic. She was either guilty of it or she was not. If guilty, the death penalty was mandatory; if innocent, she must be set free.
The latter wasn’t an option. Since Florence’s arrest in her bed at Battlecrease House the state had managed to isolate her, convinced she was in possession of a terrible secret that would have shafted them all. At all costs she must be kept incommunicado. So they came up with a compromise that was as unprecedented as it was iniquitous. Two days after receipt of the ‘Blucher’ letter, Matthews and his chums announced that there was a reasonable doubt that James Maybrick hadn’t died from arsenical poisoning, but that there was no doubt that Mrs Maybrick would have poisoned him with arsenic if she could have: ‘Although the evidence leads clearly to the conclusion that the prisoner administered and attempted to administer arsenic to her husband with intent to murder, yet it does not wholly exclude a reasonable doubt whether his death was in fact caused by the administration of arsenic.’74
In other words, James Maybrick may have died of gastro-enteritis (or indeed a hotshot of laudanum delivered by his brother). Notwithstanding the alternatives, the Keeper of the Royal Conscience concluded: ‘The Home Secretary, after fullest consideration, and after taking the best legal and medical advice that could be obtained, has advised Her Majesty to respite the capital sentence on Florence Maybrick and to commute the punishment to penal servitude for life.’75
It was as stupefyingly crooked as that. If James Maybrick had died from a plateful of contaminated oysters, his wife was to take the rap and spend the rest of her life in prison. But let me not argue against this Victorian monstrosity. I prefer to leave it to Thomas Crispe QC, a barrister and contemporary of Bro Halsbury: ‘The position in regard to the remission of the death-sentence resulted in a scandalous anomaly: the prisoner is charged with murder. It is doubtful whether murder has been committed at all – the death may have been from natural causes – therefore we will not hang her. Ergo, on that charge she is innocent. But inasmuch as there was evidence which led to a conclusion that she attempted to murder, she shall have penal servitude for life, although that charge was not preferred against her76 [his emphasis].’
Thus Florence Maybrick ‘endured punishment for a crime for which she was not charged’.77
Matthews’ judgement was greeted with as universal an uproar as had been the original death sentence itself. The consensus was that if there was ‘reasonable doubt’, there was no legal reason not to consider Mrs Maybrick as innocent. ‘If that doubt existed,’ continued Crispe, ‘it existed at the trial, and if the matter had been treated in the way it ought to have been, the jury would have given the prisoner the benefit of that doubt.’78
He was pointing a finger at Charles Russell QC. Having ensured Mrs Maybrick’s conviction, he would spend the rest of his life maintaining her innocence. ‘She is suffering imprisonment,’ he asserted, ‘on the assumption of Mr Matthews that she committed an offence for which she was never tried by the constitutional authority, and of which she has never been adjudged guilty.’79 If she wasn’t guilty, Russell sure as hell was. He knew perfectly well that she was in prison because he’d put her there.
Matthews dispatched a messenger to Liverpool with word of the commutation. He arrived at Walton Jail at about 1.30 in the morning. Those who needed to be were woken up, including the prison Governor Mr Anderson and his chaplain the Reverend Morris, who hurried together to Mrs Maybrick’s cell. ‘Mrs Maybrick was undressed and in bed,’ recounted the Religious Gent. ‘She made no sign as we entered. She merely turned her eyes and looked at us. She was very weak and had the listless air natural to her constitution.’ On hearing of her reprieve she said nothing. ‘She merely lifted her left hand and stretched it out to take that of the Governor. That was all that was said.’80 Her constitution was hardly in a fit state to accommodate good news. Escape from the hangman meant little more than a migration from Hell Central into one of its suburbs.
A few days later, dressed in a brown uniform marked with arrows and escorted by Walton’s chief warder and a female counterpart, Florence was driven by cab to Lime Street railway station. Here they boarded a specially reserved third-class carriage with the blinds pulled down. She was on her way to incarceration for life at Knaphill Prison at Woking, in the county of Surrey.
On arrival, Florence had ‘her lustrous blonde hair hacked off by some heavy-handed harsh-voiced woman’. She was then stripped, weighed, measured and thrust into a shapeless dress, branded with the broad arrow of the convict, a red star for her classification as a first offender, and her personal identification as ‘LP29’: ‘L’ for life imprisonment, ‘P’ for the year of her conviction, and ‘29’ as the twenty-ninth prisoner of the year. She was then locked in a cell, seven feet by four, ‘containing only a hammock and three shelves’.81
‘Oh, don’t put me in there! I cannot bear it!’ she wrote a ruined life later. ‘There was nothing to sit upon but the cold floor. I sank to my knees. I felt suffocated. It seemed that the walls were drawing nearer and nearer together, and presently the life would be crushed out of me. I sprang to my feet and beat wildly with my hands. For God’s sake, let me out!’ But as regulations stipulated, this was to last for nine months, Florence and her fellow inmates stitching cotton in silence and ‘marched once a day like dumb cattle to the worship of God’.82 ‘Solitary confinement,’ she wrote, ‘is by far the most cruel feature of English penal servitude. It inflicts upon the prisoner at the commencement of her sentence, when most sensitive to the horrors which prison punishment entails, the voiceless solitude, the hopeless monotony, the long vista of tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow, stretching before her, all filled with desolation and despair.’83
Florence Maybrick spent fifteen years behind bars, first at Woking and then at Aylesbury, also in Surrey. A few months after her imprisonment a penman with an apparent interest in her predicament sent a letter to the City of London Police.
And verso:
The text is the customary fight between an ego demanding to be heard and an intellect struggling to hide itself. Its author signed himself not ‘Jack the Ripper’, nor ‘Jack the Skipper’, but referring back to a previous letter with the initials ‘J.T.S.’. On 22 June 1889 a correspondent signing himself ‘Jack the Snicker’ had written of his travels taking him to the Isle of Wight – which, by bizarre coincidence, is where Michael Maybrick had a house. In May 1890, following Mrs Maybrick’s imprisonment at Woking in Surrey, ‘Jack the Snicker’ wrote another letter, rehearsing some familiar themes: Battersea (Lily Vass), ‘the Whitehall mystery’ (‘the Scotland Yard Trunk’), an obsession with one hundred pounds, conflating them all with ‘the Lady from Surrey’ (Mrs Maybrick).
I decline to transcribe the opening claptrap, but here is where the ego takes over:
J.T.S. Alias the Lady from Surrey would come forward, but in the interests of justice, it is best for her to remain in incognito for the present – as there are other mysteryes being solved f
rom ocular demonstrations in my possession. if father Matthews had offered publickly £100 reward he would have had the Whitehall Mystery cleared up. possibly the man strung up by this time, no pay no Work is my Motto A friend of the Lady from Surrey takes in the people Sunday Edition, she will therefore look out for any communication wished for which will be forwarded in the same manner as this.
Yours Respectfully
J.T.S.84
Michael Maybrick was sailing close to the wind, but was also driven by it. He couldn’t help the teasing and the taunting, mocking with abstruse clues that were all part of the ‘Funny Little Game’.
In an earlier letter, timed to arrive on the opening day of Mrs Maybrick’s ‘trial’, he wrote an archetypical sneer to the Lord Mayor of London. Purporting to come from Washington DC, the letter was as usual bounced out of New York. Some might have thought it curious that an ‘American’ correspondent shared the same obsession with transvestism as an English murderer.
My Lord
Motto
All is possible in this world even the most incredible!
I am very sorry that I must address Your Lordship once more, but I remembered that I forgot yesterday by reason of that be in the business, (with old silk Lady sufferer, a very poor one) – a third possibility – Perhaps it may appear to your Lorship like insane, but the story of the human sex (In) show us with surprises!! For: why can that formidable brute of a beast never be surprised – by that good police of London?! ?! ! ! … – He must be sheltered by his dress, and if it is not a dress of a woman, – shouldn’t it be the uniform of an officer …
They All Love Jack Page 76
