by Q. Patrick
In defense of the hundreds of thousands of citizens who vented their righteous fury on Mrs. Thompson, it must be remembered that few of them believed she was in actual danger of hanging. The law, it is true, still demantled the death penalty for women as well as for men, but no woman had been hanged in England for fifteen years, and the general assumption was that the legal killing of women was a thing of the past. In a sense, therefore, the vindictive rage that Mrs. Thompson had aroused against her was as make-believe as her own dream house. When the most virulent of the lynchers cried, “Hang her!” all they really thought they were saying was a vague “Down with adulterous vampires,” and the orgy could continue at a fever pitch with the comfortable feeling that when the fun was over, there would, after all, have been no real damage done.
But there was, of course, damage done. Irresponsibility had turned Mrs. Thompson into The Monster, and this made any fair assessment of her innocence or guilt virtually impossible. In theory, she still had two more chances. The case was to be reviewed before the Court of Criminal Appeals, and, should this appeal fail, there was, as the last resort, a direct plea for mercy to the Home Secretary. But the few people who had kept their heads and had been disturbed by the verdict against Mrs. Thompson were afraid that prejudice had gained such ground that it might have crept into the higher courts themselves.
They were right. Four days before Christmas, Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett and Cecil Whiteley were called to the Court of Criminal Appeals to state whatever they might have to say against the handling of the trial by Mr. Justice Shearman. Presiding as the court was a trio of the most exalted judges in England—Mr. Justice Darling, Mr. Justice Salter, and the newly appointed Lord Chief Justice, Lord Hewart.
It is hard to believe that impeccable justice was not to be found at this high a level. But Edith Thompson’s black magic had done its work here too. All three of the learned judges seemed just as injudiciously overexcited as Mr. Justice Shearman by the thought of The Monster. Not only did they uphold the legal correctness of Sir Montague’s decision with regard to separate trials and the admissibility of the letters; they also exculpated his summing up from any taint of bias. And, before dismissing the appeals, the Lord Chief Justice felt compelled to make a sanctimonious utterance outdoing Sir Montague’ himself, in which he denounced Edith’s love as a “passionate and wicked affection” and branded the whole matter as a “squalid and rather indecent case of lust and adultery.”
The news of the lost appeals had a sobering effect on England’s great lynching junket. Suddenly it began to dawn on people that the good clean fun had got out of control. Maybe Edith Thompson was both innocent and in real danger of hanging after all. At the core of the British temperament is a deep-seated horror of justice miscarried, and on the day after the appeals were dismissed the feeling of guilt that has haunted the country ever since began to take active form. Sober citizens started a mass petition to the Home Secretary for Edith Thompson’s pardon. Soon all the not so sober citizens, the anti-capital-punishment bloc, the feminists, the sentimentalists, the very same people that had screamed the loudest for Edith’s blood, rushed to join her defense. Almost before anyone realized it, logic was once again swept away and a new kind of prejudice triumphantly took its place. Now there were swarms of irrational Edith fans. And, inevitably, a petition was started for Freddie too. Since Freddie had always been the most popular of the two, and since real innocence and real guilt were no longer the principles behind the petitions, Freddie’s petition soon became far larger than Edith’s, with over 800,000 signatures. England’s air was cacophonous with warring cries of “Save Edith, hang Freddie,” “Save Freddie, hang Edith,” “Save them both.” Further to confuse the issue, there was still the traditionalist group and the diehard defenders of morality who cried, “Hang them both.”
As all these varied petitions were hurled into the Home Office, like rocks through the window, the Home Secretary, Mr. W. C. Bridgeman, was confronted with the difficult and anxious task of handling the official plea for mercy itself. Like Mr. Inskip and Lord Hewart, Mr. Bridgeman had only recently been appointed, and the Thompson-Bywaters contretemps was by far the most ticklish job he had had to face. Mr. Bridgeman was an able and fair-minded enough public servant, but he, like his peers, seemed to succumb to the strange moral apathy that anything involving Edith Thompson inevitably induced. For days he put off his decision while wild rumors ran around the country that he had shirked the issue and was referring the matter to the Cabinet itself.
As day followed day with no word from the Home Office and the official execution date came closer and closer, Freddie Bywaters and Edith Thompson were living in that terrible no man’s land which is neither life nor death. All contact between them was, of course, impossible. By this time, at any rate, the total difference in their temperaments, brought out by danger, had permanently and hopelessly separated them. To borrow Mr. John Laxton’s phrase, it might be said that in their steady descent Freddie and Edith were taking very different lifts.
Freddie, in Pentonville, was the model prisoner, cheerful, co-operative, affectionate with his guards. His letters to his mother were frequent and as casual as if he were off on a summer holiday. His refusal to quail before the prospect of execution may have been helped by a certain lack of imagination and by the stimulating effect that notoriety, even in its most painful aspect, can have on the young. But it is also possible that Freddie was unintimidated because he was at peace with himself. He knew he had killed Percy Thompson and he knew he had to pay for it. He knew, too, that he had never, for a single moment, ignobly tried to shift the blame onto the woman he had loved. Freddie Bywaters, it seems, was one of those rare characters who confound the tenets of conventional morality—a murderer possessed of all the virtues most admired by society.
Edith Thompson, however, was going down, down through realms of almost unspeakable horror. Unlike Freddie, she had none of the consoling knowledge of guilt and its inevitable rewards. If, in her deep state of shock, she had any intelligible thought at all about her predicament, it was the nightmare realization that she was innocent and that somehow the world had become a place of horror and blackness where innocence was meaningless. Now for Edith Thompson there was only fear. For weeks it had been slowly but surely creeping through her, and at last it was everywhere in her mind and body. She sat in Holloway Gaol for hours on end, motionless, in a profound trance of terror. Only occasionally, when her mother and sister visited her, could she make a pretense of being alive. She discussed with them the little humdrum details of their lives. She mentioned Freddie only once. When Mrs. Graydon asked her how she had come to write such letters, Edith Thompson replied, “No one knows what kind of letters he was writing to me.”
Does that imply that the dream house was a building again? Were some of those trances not trances of terror, but of daydreams? Let us hope so. Let us hope that there were times when Peidi, who had done such damage, came alive again, and now, as a consoler, started deftly to transform the laundry steward’s clumsy, inarticulate letters of love into wonderful, poetic rhapsodies.
“No one knows what kind of letters he was writing to me.”
On January sixth, three days before the execution date, the statement from the Home Secretary finally arrived. Mr. W. C. Bridgeman “found himself unable to advise any interference with the due course of the law.” As so often happens when conflicting pressures make a decision painfully complicated, the Home Secretary had taken the line of least resistance. After all, the Court of Criminal Appeals had endorsed the legality of the verdict. If the woman was in fact innocent, it was too bad, but somehow or other it seemed to be too late to do anything about it.
On the eve of the execution, the governor of Pentonville, who had grown fond of Freddie Bywaters, invited him to his room, and the two of them discussed Freddie’s various sea voyages. Edith Thompson was not mentioned until the very end of the interview, when Freddie suddenly said:
“Do you think they will h
urt her? I am always thinking of it, sir. I wish I had never done it. I must have been mad, but I loved her so much. Please see they do not hurt her. It was my fault. She is innocent. She never did anything—it was me.”
Governor Blake reassured him that they would try to save Edith as much pain as possible. Freddie’s last duty to himself had been performed. The next morning he went to his execution with a firmness and resignation that never faltered.
Edith Thompson had to be carried to the scaffold. Her hair had turned gray. At twenty-nine she was a wizened, stooped old hag. And she was screaming.
The memory of that execution has haunted the British mind and the British courts ever since. And the case of Edith Thompson should not be forgotten, for it showed, in a terrifying manner, that the machinery of the law can be dislocated by something as trivial as a housewife’s daydream.
It also stands as a reminder that “plain common sense” can be just as fallible an instrument of justice as the wildest flight of fancy.
THE END
About the Author
Patrick Quentin, Q. Patrick, and Jonathan Stagge were pen names under which Hugh Callingham Wheeler (1912–1987), Richard Wilson Webb (1901–1966), Martha Mott Kelley (1906–2005), and Mary Louise White Aswell (1902–1984) wrote detective fiction. Most of the stories were written together by Webb and Wheeler, or by Wheeler alone. Their best-known creation is amateur sleuth Peter Duluth. In 1963, the story collection The Ordeal of Mrs. Snow was given a Special Edgar Award by the Mystery Writers of America.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1954 by Q. Patrick
Cover design by Jason Gabbert
ISBN: 978-1-4976-9696-9
This 2018 edition published by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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