Deadlier Than the Male

by Douglas Skelton

  Contents

  Title page

  Introduction

  1 Dead of Winter

  Queen Joan, 1437

  2 Killer Queen

  Mary, Queen of Scots, 1566–7

  Off with their Heads

  3 Death and the Maiden

  Lady Jean Warriston and Janet Murdo, 1600

  4 Corpse and Robbers

  Helen Torrence and Jean Waldie, 1751–2

  5 History Wrapped in an Enigma

  Katharine Nairn, 1765

  6 Distaff of Legend

  Helen McDougall and Maggie Laird, 1828

  7 Tipping the Doctor

  Catherine Stuart, 1828

  8 Life and Death on the Farm

  Christina Gilmour, 1842–3

  Mothers’ Ruin

  9 King's Evidence

  Jessie King, 1887–9

  Platform Parties

  10 The Last Drop

  Susan Newell, 1923

  11 Sackcloth and Ashes

  Jeannie Donald, 1934

  Bibliography

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Let's make one thing quite clear from the beginning. Men commit the majority of murders. It is an uncomfortable notion, especially if you are a male, but true nonetheless. But, before the sisterhood gets too cocky – if that's a word that can be used when dealing with women – let's also make it clear that a number of those murders are committed on their behalf, at their instigation or simply to impress them. And that doesn't even begin to take into account the number of Norman Bates-alikes out there whose mothers have something to answer for.

  Then there are those females who have had a little more hands-on involvement in matters murderous.

  There is no doubt about it. Even though women are more often than not victims, the gentler sex does have a brutal side. Wives can murder husbands, lovers and even children. Daughters can kill parents, siblings and friends. They are capable of homicide — both the premeditated type and ones committed on the spur of the moment. You will find examples of them all in these pages.

  My trusty edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary tells me that a wicked person is sinful, iniquitous, vicious and given to immorality. Although most of the women, about whom you're going to read, fit that description perfectly, wickedness is a question of perspective. Queen Joan may have had good reason to do what she did to her husband's murderers and the brutality of her revenge was in keeping with the styles of the day. However, the men who assassinated James I really believed they were doing away with a tyrant, whose wife had supported him throughout his reign. From their perspective, especially while they were undergoing hours of horrific torture, she was wicked.

  The same could be said for Mary Stuart. She has cut a romantic figure through the ages but if you were to time-warp back to Edinburgh around 1567 and ask someone in the street what they thought, you would receive a different picture. It was strongly believed she had conspired with the man she would later marry to murder her husband, Lord Darnley. So, to many of her contemporaries, Mary, Queen of Scots was a wicked woman.

  Jeannie Donald and Susan Newell both killed young children but the question of why they did so remains unanswered. Jean Livingston felt forced to kill her abusive husband. Christina Gilmour may have turned to poison to extricate herself from a match she had never wanted in the first place. The acts were wicked – the people were not. They were confused – some perhaps deranged – but not evil although, understandably, the relatives of the victims saw it somewhat differently.

  Other cases detailed here are more clear cut. Maggie Laird and Helen McDougall – spouses of William Hare and William Burke respectively – were up to their necks in the horrors of Edinburgh in the late 1820s. Jessie King knowingly slaughtered at least three babies in 1888. Katharine Nairn first lured her husband's brother into an affair and then used him to help commit murder. Catherine Stuart helped her husband to poison an uncertain number of men in order to plunder their wallets. These are all, without a shadow of a doubt, wicked women.

  However, there is one famous Scottish case you will not find here, although it is mentioned once or twice, and that is the Madeleine Smith story. The case of the well-to-do Glasgow girl who very probably poisoned her French lover because his attentions were becoming inconvenient has been well documented by the likes of William Roughead, the doyen of Scottish true crime writers, and Jack House. Although you cannot go anywhere in Scottish murder lore up until the early part of the twentieth century without finding Roughead's fingerprints all over the paperwork, Jack House's account of the Smith case cannot be bettered.

  So, what follows is a blood-spattered trawl through Scottish criminal history. Here is torture, stabbing, hanging, poisoning, bludgeoning, strangling, smothering and shooting. Gentle it ain't.

  Happy reading.

  Douglas Skelton

  1

  DEAD OF WINTER

  Queen Joan, 1437

  The old woman stood before them, her head covered in a shawl, cold fingers of wind reaching out from the choppy waters of the Forth and tugging at her threadbare clothes. Normally, the king and his beautiful queen would not have given the crone a second glance but her words had stopped them before they boarded the boat to ferry them across the river to the north bank. Those words carried a warning, a dire prophecy of impending doom if they chose to spend Christmas 1436 in the Blackfriars Monastery at St Johnstoun, as Perth was known then. A claw-like hand appeared from beneath the long shawl and a gnarled finger pointed at the king, urging him to turn back, to celebrate the Yuletide elsewhere.

  The woman amused James I but he ignored the warning. Such predictions were not unusual in medieval Scotland and, if he paid attention to every presentiment of death, he would never go anywhere. So he proceeded to Blackfriars Monastery as planned. Later, the speywife arrived at the gates of the monastery, as if to see how things turned out.

  James should have listened to the woman for things turned out very badly – not only for him but also, thanks to his English queen, for the men who plotted his death. For, after her husband's brutal assassination at the hands of a group of Scottish nobles, this unforgiving and single-minded woman supervised a bloody revenge that is unparalleled in the turbulent history of Scotland.

  Joan Beaufort had caught the eye of the young James while he was languishing, albeit comfortably, in prison in England. The second son of King Robert III, James became the heir to the Scottish throne following the death of his eldest brother, David, Duke of Rothesay. It was said that David had been starved to death in Falkland Castle by his uncle, the devious and rapacious Robert, Duke of Albany. The Duke desired the return of the Governorship of Scotland which had been taken from him when Robert succeeded to the throne. Robert III, never a strong ruler, had no desire to see his surviving offspring succumb to the ambition of his ruthless brother so he resolved to send young James to the safety of France. However, an ill wind blew the bonnie boat carrying the lad who was born to be king into the path of an English ship at Flamborough Head and he was taken hostage.

  He spent eighteen years in the captivity of two English rulers, Henry IV and his successor Henry V. During his time in the south, his father died, they say, from the shock and grief of hearing about his son's capture. Robert had been a good man – if somewhat weak – and he is best summed up by the epitaph he gave himself, ‘Here lies the worst of kings and the most miserable of men’. With the old king dead and the young monarch in the hands of the English, Albany seized the regency of Scotland. He proved a strong ruler – far stronger than his father and brother had ever been – but his talent for intrigue and double-dealing saw him enter uneasy alliances with Scottish nobles who believed the land and people were th
eirs to do with as they wished. This would prove to be their undoing in years to come.

  Albany resolutely refused to pay any ransom for the young king's return and the English constantly used the boy as a threat to keep in check any plans the regent had for incursions south. Travelling in the main with the royal court across England, James was also taken to France in 1420 and again in 1421 in a bid to convince Scots fighting for the French army that they were on the wrong side.

  Meanwhile, young James was growing into manhood. He was an active lad but his exposure to the English court and long periods of enforced solitude generated in him a love of poetry. He wrote his own verses, including one dedicated to a young girl he had seen from the window of his prison, either while in the Tower of London or, which is more likely, during a term at Windsor Castle. She was, he wrote,

  The fairest or the freshest young flower

  That ever I saw, me thought, before that hour.

  The young girl may well have been Joan Beaufort, daughter of the Earl of Somerset. Her grandfather, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, was one of the most powerful nobles in England. Henry IV was John of Gaunt's son from his first marriage. However, it was his open liaison with his mistress, Katherine Swynford, which resulted in the Beaufort line and ultimately, after a few swings on the family tree, the establishment of the House of Tudor.

  The idea of a match between the two young people appealed to both the English king and Joan's family, who were never slow to recognise an opportunity to amass either power or wealth. With one part of the family – even if it were spawned on the other side of a royal blanket – seated on the English throne and another within grasping distance of the Scottish crown, their influence would be considerable. Henry V, no doubt, saw a way to neutralise those troublesome Caledonians for, with a strong Englishwoman at their king's side, they would be less likely to wage war. Being an English king, he did not as much seek an ally of the Scots but loyal subjects to his authority.

  James and Joan were married on 2 February 1423 in the Priory Church, St Mary Overy, now Southwark Cathedral. Soon the young king was released to return to his homeland, on the promise of the payment of a 60,000-merk ransom. The sum, ostensibly to pay for James's board and education during his eighteen years of captivity, was to be paid in six annual instalments. And, just to ensure the Scots coughed up, some twenty-one of their nobles were taken as collateral.

  In April, the thirty-year-old king travelled north with his bride. And he returned to find his country at odds with itself. Albany died in 1420, aged eighty-three, and he was succeeded by his son, Murdoch, who, like James, had spent a considerable time in English hands. Albany had managed to free him in 1415 but had somehow failed to engineer the release of his king. Not that he would have wanted to because he was having far too rich a time ruling in James's stead.

  Murdoch, though, proved to be far from a chip off the old block. The Scottish barons – no longer beaten, bullied or bought by Albany's strong tactics – felt free to rampage across the land, robbing, ravaging and raping where they pleased.

  James also proved to be nothing like his father. A poet he may have been but he was also athletic and a good man with a sword and bow. After being crowned in Scotland's ancient capital at Scone, he was determined to bring the rebellious barons to heel and would do so with a mixture of his uncle's ruthlessness and his father's love of justice. His queen, the fierce blood of the House of Lancaster flowing through her veins, supported him at every turn and she even managed to feather her own nest along the way. Of course, James was a Stewart and the royal purse was ever much on his mind, so a great many of the moves against the nobles were carried out with an eye on boosting his own treasury. Lack of funds, or the pursuit of them, dogged the Stewarts throughout their dynasty and, indeed, one of the men who would wield a dagger against the king was someone to whom James owed money.

  First on James's house-cleansing list was his cousin, Murdoch of Albany, the erstwhile regent who was made to regret the payment of the ransom. He and his two sons were charged with treason and promptly beheaded on Gower Hill at Stirling. Then it was the turn of the nobles who were to learn that they were no longer a law unto themselves. In 1428, while holding court in Inverness, James had forty rebellious Highland chiefs brought before him and thrown into the dungeons to await execution. In the end, only three were hanged but the message was received and understood – here was a king who was not to be trifled with. Their wild and thieving ways would be tolerated no longer. They would toe the line or dangle at the end of it.

  He made one incursion against England, besieging the Border town of Jedburgh, which had long been in the hands of the southern invaders. However, the war was cut short by word from his queen in Edinburgh that there were nobles plotting against him. He returned north, much to the disgust of many of his own generals who thought their honour besmirched by turning tail in the face of the jeering English.

  Influenced by his time in England, James set about reforming Scots law and democracy, increasing the commoners’ rights to justice and even instituting a rudimentary form of legal aid. His sense of justice, though, did not extend to those who preached the reformation of the church. During his reign, the Scottish authorities burned its second heretic at the stake. Their victim was Paul Crawar, a doctor who preached free love and an early form of socialism. He was put to the flame in the market place at St Andrews in 1432, a brass ball bound into his mouth to prevent him from preaching any more of his dangerous notions. An X in the cobbles marks the spot of the conflagration.

  How much of this strength of will came from James's love for his wife can only be a matter of conjecture. Certainly, her family possessed more than their fair share of grit and determination. Her grandfather, John of Gaunt, had been High Steward and had shown tremendous – and murderous – abilities in taking on those who opposed the king. To James, his beloved Joan was a ‘milk-white dove’ but this dove had sharp claws and that could only have helped bolster his campaign to pacify the restless nobles. In the end, though, it was some of those restless nobles who would bring James's rule to a close at that fateful Christmas court.

  Prime mover in that regicide was Walter Stewart, the Earl of Atholl and the king's uncle. As the offspring of Robert II, the earl believed himself the rightful king and, at seventy-five years of age, his time was running out fast. His son, Sir Robert Stewart, the king's Chamberlain, was also deeply involved – his eye fixed firmly on the throne that would fall to him when his aged father shuffled off his mortal coil. These men, however, would keep in the background.

  The principal player in the bloody acts that were to follow would be their cousin, Sir Robert Graham. He had been arrested during the purge of the Albany boys and their supporters in 1425 but he was later set free. Graham held family enmity for the king and had long been a vociferous critic of his policies. At a meeting of the Three Estaites, he publicly denounced James and, striding across the floor, actually seized the royal person and demanded that he be arrested as traitor. However, on looking around the chamber, Graham realised that he was very much on his own in this endeavour and stormed out. Surprisingly, James let him go but he did take the opportunity to seize Graham's lands while he was off skulking in the Highlands. Later, a price was put on the rebel's head when it was learned that treasonous talk still tumbled from his mouth. Graham subsequently took refuge with one of his kinsman, none other than the Earl of Atholl. He had – surprisingly enough, given his own desire for the crown – been one of the nobles present and unmoving when Graham had tried to depose the king. With all of this ambition and hatred welling up in the breasts of Scots nobles, it was only a matter of time before blood would be spilled.

  James and his queen had been at Blackfriars Monastery since Christmas and, on 20 February 1437, they passed a very pleasant day there. They knew the place well for it was the custom of the ruling royals to use it as their residence during visits to the area. Joan had founded the monastery's Charterhouse in 1429. The General Counc
il had sat in the town many times and it was believed that James would have made Perth the nation's capital had an assassin's blade not got to him first.

  The day had been spent relaxing and playing chess and other games, listening to music and verse and generally having a good time. As night fell, the king was chatting with his queen who was in her bedchamber, along with her ladies-in-waiting. Meanwhile, Sir Robert Stewart, the Chamberlain, was sealing his treachery by personally opening the doors to the monastery to let Graham and seven heavily armed knights in.

  The first casualty that night was the king's page, Walter Straiton, who was slain on the stairs leading to the queen's bedchamber. The murder alerted the king to the situation. Hearing the sound of the men nearing the chamber, he knew there was trouble. Seizing a pair of tongs from the fireplace, he quickly pulled up the planking on the floor and dropped into a vault below. As Queen Joan and some of the ladies-in-waiting swiftly placed the wood back again, the assassination party arrived at the door. One lady went to bar the door against them but the Chamberlain had foreseen this happening and had had the bolts removed. According to legend, Lady Katherine Douglas thrust her arms into the brackets to hold the men off but they soon broke the wood and her arm. Although the story is little more than a legend, this brave act gave her the name Kate Barlass.

  What is true is that Queen Joan tried to face down the gang and was wounded in the process. Clearly the murder party was not just here for the king – they wanted the queen too. This would seem understandable for she was also a threat to their ambition – as was her six-year-old child. A blade was laid at her breast but, before the deed could be done, it was knocked away by Sir Thomas Graham – Robert Graham's son. He was having none of the slaying of women and he said so. In this way, the queen was allowed to live although the assassins themselves would live to regret it.