Part 40

With what regret I have written this letter I need not say. My own avocations are mercy, peace, and charity, but there is a time when duty compels a man to lay aside his garb of peacefulness, and to assume the weapon of the world. I feel I should have been a traitor to the truth, to my family, yea, even to the country, if I had feared, from any selfish motives, to abate one word that I have here written. Against yourself personally I feel no anger; but, indeed, I am sorry for you, and I tremble. My lord, you are in a fearful condition. If your mind is so tainted that you decide all other cases as you decided this, you will have a most dreadful account to render to a most just God. Before Him how contemptible is human nature in its pride, and robes, and silken vanity, and self-worship; before Him what a wretched insect is the judge who makes others tremble, and flings about his sentences of death, and dabbles in blood as if it were water. You are now exulting in your station, but in a few short weeks, or months (for you can scarcely hope for years) you will be no more; nothing but a noisome corpse from which all will flee--loathsome and abominable, dust and ashes, a shadow and a name. You will be shut up in a box, and put away into the earth, to form food for worms and to deal with abomination; and all your state, and all your bowing, sycophantic train will fear to look upon you, and will fly to others, and you will have left nothing but perishable mercy and a vain name, and your life will have been like smoke. But there is within you a part that liveth, and will have to answer for the past, and to render up an account of the things done in the body, before a Lord and Judge who makes the heavens tremble and before whom the mountains are but as grains of dust. Answer me, and say how will you face that fearful tribunal if you leave one stone unturned in the present case to discover the whole truth, or if you oppose the application that will be made for a respite until science has made clear either guilt or innocence! All human testimony is fallible; most dangerous it is to destroy life upon a train of circumstances depending on the veracity of such persons as Mills, and Taylor, and Wyatt, and Newton. But the conclusions of science are certain, and this fact, the first chemists of the day aver, can be made as clear as light, that if strychnia were administered to Cook in his lifetime, it is now in his body, and can be detected by means that are infallible. If, then, it is undoubted that my brother poisoned Cook, what objection can there be to exhume the body, and convince the whole world of the fact? but if it be not certain, what a frightful crime are we then plunging into, to hang a man about whose guilt there still remains a tremendous body of doubt? or what reparation shall you make to his orphan boy, to his mother and sister, who love and have faith in him, if a few short weeks shall demonstrate, as in the rapid advance of science they may do, that William Palmer has been murdered on a scientific theory invented for the purpose of blood, and scouted by men of the greatest eminence in chemical analysis? Even while these pages pass through the press I read in the papers a letter which utterly destroys Taylor’s new hypothesis, and annihilates for ever the foundations on which he rested. It is published also in a morning journal, the _Times_, which cries aloud for my brother’s blood and fixes his guilt, not upon the fact proved at the trial, for the editors of that able paper knew that these facts are but as cobwebs, but upon what he is supposed to have done when he was taken to Stafford prison, upon his threat, if he used the threat, to destroy his life. Weak and miserable must be the case for the prosecution when their advocates are compelled to resort to this flimsy _ad captandum_ argument for the vulgar. Who is there so hardy as to be able to answer for himself that, under similar accusations, he would not resort to suicide, or who but the most uncharitable would regard that suicide as proof conclusive of the guilt of poisoning? He was overwhelmed with debts which he had no means of paying, he had violated the civil law, and had forged his mother’s name to the extent of thousands; he was accused of fourteen or fifteen hideous and dreadful murders. He was prostrated in mind and body by sickness, by weakness, by anxiety, by a thousand conflicting passions of grief, despair, remorse, and indignation at the fearful torrents of calumny against him; and because the human mind gave way under this awful load of calamities, and he declared that he would willingly die--who is the man that can fairly say he is therefore guilty of a murder? The editor of the _Times_ has indeed said so; and many influential persons will, perhaps, blame him, but I, for one, consider that his conduct, though censurable, was natural, and what might have been expected, and I draw no such conclusion from the circumstances as the _Times_ has done. But however this may be, it is not to the _Times_, but to you and the Home Secretary I look, and in your hands is the life of William Palmer. I have not flattered you in aught, but I have spoken as I felt. I ask you not to respite him for my sake, for the sake of his family, nor even for public justice and humanity. These appeals would probably be lost on you. But I, as a minister of the Gospel, ask you to respite him for your own sake--for you will have the guilt of his blood and the infamy of his death if he is wrongly executed; and if his innocence should be hereafter demonstrated, his memory will cling upon your soul; it will be like a mountain of lead upon your heart; it will stifle your cries to God, and drag you down with that darkness of hell which is prepared for those who violate the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.”

THOMAS PALMER.

APPENDIX II.

SHORT ACCOUNT OF THE JUDGES AND COUNSEL ENGAGED IN THE CASE.

JOHN CAMPBELL, Baron Campbell, Lord Chief Justice of the Queen’s Bench. Lord Campbell had been Lord Chief Justice six years when he presided at the trial. He was seventy-seven years of age. Three years after he resigned the Chief Justiceship, and became Lord Chancellor at eighty, a greater age than any of his predecessors on the Woolsack had reached on being appointed. He held his office for two years longer, and died at eighty-two, an age which none of his successors reached while holding it. On the day of his death, in 1861, he had sat in Court and attended a Cabinet Council. Lord Campbell’s life as Chancellor and politician, and as the writer of the celebrated lives of the Lord Chancellors and the Chief Justices, forms too considerable a part of general history and literature to be detailed here. As a lawyer and judge his name stands high. His contemporaries never denied his abilities; but they considered his personal character and ambitions were selfish and by no means magnanimous. He is said by Sir John Macdonnell in the Dictionary of National Biography to have shown on the bench somewhat too openly an unworthy love of applause; and a tradition still lingers amongst lawyers of an ostentatious kind of politeness assumed by him when he intended anything deadly. The Usher of the Court at the Palmer trial is credited with saying that he knew the Chief meant to hang Palmer; he was so polite in requesting him to be seated. The tone of the letter we print from Palmer’s brother expresses much of a prevalent feeling against Campbell. But, in Sir John Macdonnell’s words, whatever difference of opinion there may be as to the spirit in which he served his country, there is none as to the value of the services themselves.

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MR. BARON ALDERSON. Sir Edward Hall Alderson was in 1856 a Baron of the Court of Exchequer, where he was transferred in 1834, his original appointment as judge having been in 1830 to the Court of Common Pleas. He was born in 1787, so that he was now sixty-nine years of age. He was of Norfolk, and his father was Recorder of Yarmouth, Norwich, and Ipswich. His career at Cambridge was remarkable. In the year 1809, when he took his degree, he was Senior Wrangler and first Smith’s prizeman, besides being first Chancellor’s medallist, which was the highest honour then for classics. From 1817 to 1822 he was joint editor of the well-known Barnewall and Alderson’s Reports of those years in the Court of King’s Bench; and whilst so reporting he was, unlike reporters of these days, rapidly acquiring a practice, though he never took silk. He made no particular mark on the bench during his twenty-seven years of occupancy, and he died in 1857, the year after the trial. It is rather curious, in view of the attack made on him for prejudice in the letter to Lord Campbell, that he should have been known as a humane judge, with a desire to restrict capital punishment.

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MR. JUSTICE CRESSWELL. Sir Cresswell Cresswell was the junior judge on the bench. His age was sixty-two, and he had been on the bench in the Court of Common Pleas since 1842, where he had established a reputation as a learned and strong judge. At the bar he had a large practice, and his legal name, apart from his judicial career, would have lived as one of the editors of the Barnewall and Cresswell’s Reports in the King’s Bench from 1822 to 1830. But his most abiding fame rests on his having been the first appointed judge of the new Probate and Divorce Court which was established in 1858. He became for the new principles and practice of divorce what Mansfield had been for commercial law--their creator and expounder. He sat in this Court, achieving a distinction which falls to the lot of few judges, until 1863. In July of this year he was knocked down in Constitution Hill by runaway horses belonging to Lord Aveland, which had been frightened by the breakdown of the carriage, and he died from the shock. On being made judge of the Probate and Divorce Court he was offered a peerage, but declined it, probably, as he was a bachelor, being sufficiently content with the ancestral name of Cresswell of Cresswell, near Morpeth. Though as a judge he was considered overbearing, it is noticeable that he did not intervene very much in the trial; the letter to Lord Campbell makes a point of contrasting his opinions on admission of evidence, and in other respects, as being in favour of the prisoner, while those of Lord Campbell and Mr. Baron Alderson were asserted to show bias and even strong and unfair prejudice.

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SIR ALEXANDER JAMES EDMUND COCKBURN was appointed Solicitor-General in July, 1850, and early next year, in succession to Sir John Romilly, was made Attorney-General. He had up to the former year been obtaining considerable reputation as an advocate, had been appointed Q.C. in 1841, and especially had attracted attention by his defence of M’Naughten, who shot Mr. Drummond, Sir Robert Peel’s secretary. He obtained his acquittal on the ground of insanity; a defence less credible and easy in 1843 than it subsequently became. But he first obtained real public distinction, and proved his qualifications to be of the highest class, in 1850 by speeches in Parliament,

which led immediately to his appointment as Solicitor and Attorney-General as above mentioned. In the Don Pacifico debate Lord Palmerston had made the great speech of his life; and the law had been prepared for him by Cockburn. On the fourth night of the debate Mr. Cockburn replied to a long speech made by Mr. Gladstone against Palmerston’s policy. At the end of his reply, according to a description by Sir Robert Peel, “one half of the Treasury benches were left empty, while honourable members ran one after another, tumbling over each other in their haste to shake hands with the honourable and learned member.” He remained Attorney-General in Palmerston’s Government until November, 1856; and thus it fell to him to conduct the Palmer prosecution. It is worth mentioning that Cockburn’s reply at the end of the case was made without a single note. Palmer had therefore against him the greatest figure at the bar, and one of the most accomplished orators of his generation. It was in November, 1856, that Cockburn gave up his enormous income, and his Parliamentary position, to become Chief Justice of the Common Pleas; and the rest of his distinguished career, until his death in 1880, was spent in that office, or in that of Lord Chief Justice of England, which under the Judicature Acts superseded the two ancient Chief Justiceships. Sir Alexander Cockburn was of an ancient Scottish family; he was several times offered a peerage, but declined; he was never married, and his baronetcy expired with him.

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JOHN EDWIN JAMES was forty-four years of age in 1856. “With the appearance of a prize fighter,” he failed when he went on the stage as a young man and played “George Barnwell.” His father, being a solicitor and an officer of the city of London it was natural for him to turn to the bar, and he was called at the Inner Temple in 1836, when he was twenty-four. By 1856 he was a noted advocate, had been made a Queen’s Counsel, was Recorder of Brighton, and had a professional income of £7000 a year. He was member of Parliament for Marylebone in 1859; but in 1861 his retirement was announced. He was overwhelmed with pecuniary difficulties, and owed £100,000. An inquiry by his Inn in 1861 showed that he had in 1857 and 1860 inveigled a young man, a son of Lord Yarborough, into debts of £35,000; had obtained, three years before the trial, £20,000 from a solicitor by false misrepresentations; and in a case in which he was acting for the plaintiff had borrowed £1250 from defendant, promising to let him off easily in cross-examination. He was disbarred; went to America in 1861; was admitted to the bar there and practised; but in 1865 was playing at the Winter Garden Theatre, New York. He returned to England in 1873, and failed in persuading the judges to reconsider his case. He had married in 1861, but his wife divorced him in 1863. After his failure to return to the bar he was articled as a solicitor, but was not admitted; and he even offered himself again as candidate for Marylebone. He practised as an expert in American and English law, but sank into very poor circumstances, and a subscription was being made for him when he died in 1882.

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SIR WILLIAM HENRY BODKIN. Three years after the trial Mr. Bodkin was appointed assistant judge of the Middlesex Sessions, and in 1867 was knighted. He held his office until a few weeks of his death, in 1874, at the age of eighty-three. At the time of the trial he was sixty-five, and was the most distinguished of the practitioners in specialised criminal business. In 1832 he had been appointed Recorder of Dover, after being only six years at the bar. He acquired a large practice on the Home Circuit and at the Middlesex, Westminster, and Kentish Sessions; he was counsel to the Treasury at the Central Criminal Court in 1856, and was _ex officio_ of the counsel for the Crown in prosecutions in that Court. He retained this appointment until he was made a judge. As an expert on the practice of the poor law and secretary of the Mendicity Society he took great interest in poor law questions. In 1841 he had been returned to Parliament as a Conservative member for Rochester, but lost his seat at the election in 1847 for having supported Sir Robert Peel’s Corn Law Bill. While he sat in Parliament he brought forward and passed an important measure of reform as to the chargeability of irremovable poor, which has become a permanent feature of our poor law system. Sir William held several distinguished and important offices. He was President of the Society of Arts, a Deputy-Lieutenant of Middlesex, and chairman of the Metropolitan Assessment Sessions. By his marriage in 1812 to Sarah Sophia, daughter of Peter Raymond Poland of Winchester Hall, Highgate, he became connected with the family of the distinguished lawyer, Sir Harry Bodkin Poland, whose own professional career has followed so closely that of his uncle. Sir Harry Bodkin Poland succeeded him in his Recordership of Dover and his office at the Central Criminal Court. This family and legal connection alike suggested the dedication of this book to Sir Harry Bodkin Poland. None of those who actually took part in the trial are now living.

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WILLIAM NEWLAND WELSBY had been called to the bar in 1826, was made Recorder of Chester in 1841, and eventually became the leader on the North Wales Circuit. When Sir John Jervis, who became Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, was made Attorney-General in 1846, Welsby was appointed by him junior counsel to the Treasury; in other words, junior counsel with the Attorney-General in all his legal duties, thence known in English legal professional slang as the Attorney-General’s “devil,” a very important and lucrative post, which generally leads to a judgeship. It was probably his experience of criminal law in this office, and his general reputation for knowledge of criminal law, founded on his editing numerous law books as well as on his practice at the bar, that led to his being associated with the Attorney-General at the trial. He had enormous industry, and besides editing a large number of legal books was an editor of one of the most celebrated series of Reports, the seventeen volumes of “Meeson and Welsby,” the product of their reports for years in the Court of Exchequer in the earlier part of Welsby’s career. He died eight years after the trial, at sixty-one, without having reached the bench, broken down, it was believed, by his excessive labours.

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SIR JOHN WALTER HUDDLESTON (Mr. Baron Huddleston). A year after the trial Mr. Huddleston was made a Q.C. From 1865 to 1875 he was Judge-Advocate of the Fleet. In the latter year he became a judge of the Common Pleas, and was afterwards transferred to the Court of Exchequer; hence the name of Mr. Baron Huddleston, by which in later years he continued to be known, even after the reconstitution of the Courts by the Judicature Acts, when all the judges took the title of Justices of the High Court. Huddleston was a remarkable man. His father was a captain in the merchant service. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, but did not take a degree, and he became usher in an English school. He was called by Gray’s Inn in 1839, when he was twenty-four years of age, so that he was forty-one at the time of the trial. He was member of Parliament for Canterbury from 1865 to 1868, and for Norwich in 1874 and until he was made a judge. He was a great advocate, but not so great a judge. His reputation increased rather on the social than the legal side. He had married in 1872 Lady Diana De Vere Beauclerk, daughter of the ninth Duke of St. Albans, and he was accounted to be ambitious most of all of social distinction. He was fitted for this, if not by family connections, by his brilliance as a conversationalist, and his gifts as a man of the world and his associations with the theatre and the turf. His accomplishments included an extensive knowledge of French literature and a facility of speaking in French which few Englishmen have. He thus represented gracefully the English bar at the funeral in 1868 of Berryer, the great French advocate, over whose grave he made a speech in French. He died in 1890, aged seventy-five.

SIR WILLIAM SHEE. The leading counsel for Palmer, Mr. Serjeant Shee, was in his fifty-second year; seven years afterwards he was appointed a judge of the Queen’s Bench, the first Roman Catholic judge since the Reformation. He was Irish, but educated at a French school in Somers Town, London, subsequently at St. Cuthbert’s College, near Durham, where his cousin, afterwards famous as Cardinal Wiseman, was, and then at Edinburgh University. A student of Lincoln’s Inn when nineteen, he had become a serjeant at law by 1840, and was one of the leading counsel in London and on the Home Circuit. In 1852 he became member of Parliament for Kilkenny, and represented it for five years. He had been prominent as an advocate for Catholic Emancipation very early in his career, and in Parliament he was a zealous promoter of measures connected with Irish land tenancy, and dealing with the Church endowments, measures precursory of later land legislation and the Disestablishment of the Irish Church. He lost his seat for Kilkenny in 1857, and he never sat in Parliament afterwards. In 1860, three years before he was made a judge, he refused the Chief Justiceship of Madras. Four years after his appointment, in 1868, he died of apoplexy at the age of sixty-three. It is noticeable that though Serjeant Shee had been in most of the great trials he had never defended in a murder trial until he defended Palmer. We have referred to his declaration of belief in Palmer’s innocence; and this was not the only point on which his speech was criticised at the time. The leading legal Journal characterised it in terms which will most likely be agreed with by the present-day reader, even more decisively than by the reader of half a century ago, when the taste was more for florid speaking than it is now. “The defence of Mr. Serjeant Shee was clever, ingenious, and eloquent, but wanting in judgment and taste. The peroration was a striking instance of this defect, for the allusion to the family of the prisoner, and to his supposed affection for his wife, grated sorely, and almost ludicrously, on the sense of propriety in the face of the undisguised fact, known to all his audience, that he was accused of murdering his wife, that he slept with his maid servant on the very night she died, and that he had confessed himself guilty of forgery upon his mother. Equally injudicious was the philippic against the insurance offices. In worse taste still was his solemn assertion to the jury that he was convinced by the evidence of the prisoner’s innocence.”

SIR WILLIAM ROBERT GROVE. Palmer’s second counsel, Mr. Grove, Q.C., was in one respect the most distinguished of all the persons who took part in the trial. At the time he had a European reputation, but this was due to his career as a scientific investigator, and not as a lawyer. Without mentioning more, it is sufficient to say that he had published in 1846 the great book, “The Correlation of Physical Forces,” which placed him in the front rank of European science. The book was translated into French in the year of the trial. He had been called to the bar in 1835, and was in 1856 forty-five; but he had ill-health, and he turned to science rather than to practice. He was at his call a member of the Royal Institution, and in 1844 he had become its vice-president. By 1853 his health had improved, and he was then a Q.C., having a practice chiefly in patent and scientific cases; but he had also become a leader on his Circuit. It was probably his scientific eminence that led to his brief in the Palmer case. Grove was appointed a judge in 1871, retired in 1887, and died in 1896 at eighty-five. He did not gain any special distinction as a judge nor add to his scientific reputation after he left the bench, though he published several scientific studies.

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