Majesty’s representative, the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen’s Bench,
had held a solemn Court in the parlour of the ‘Elephant and
Tooth-pick,’ the reader would rightly conceive that the Crown and
dignity of our Sovereign Lady had suffered some derogation. Yet an
equal abasement daily takes place without exciting especial wonder.
The subordinates of the Lord Chief Justice of the Queen’s Bench (who
is, by an old law, the Premier Coroner of all England) habitually
preside at houses of public entertainment; yet they are no less
delegates of Royalty—as the name of their office implies[4]—than the
ermined dignitary himself, when surrounded with all the pomp and
circumstance of the law’s majesty at Westminster. This is quite
characteristic of our thoroughly commercial nation. An action about a
money-debt is tried in an imposing manner in a spacious edifice, and
with only too great an excess of formality; but for an inquest into
the sacrifice of a mere human life, ‘the worst inn’s worst room’ is
deemed good enough. In order rightly to determine whether Jones owes
Smith five pounds ten, the Goddess of Justice is surrounded with the
most imposing insignia, and worshipped in an appropriate temple: but
when she is invoked to decide why a human spirit,
Footnote 4:
It is derived from _a coronâ_ (from the crown), because the coroner,
says Coke, “hath conusance in some pleas which are called _placita
coronæ_.”
‘Unhousel’d, disappointed, unanel’d,
No reckoning made, is sent to its account
With all its imperfections on its head;’
she is thrust into the ‘Hole in the Wall,’ the ‘Bag o’ Nails,’ or the
parlour of the ‘Two Spies.’
Desirous of having aural and ocular demonstration of the curious
manner in which the office of Coroner is now fulfilled, we were
attracted, a few weeks since, to the Old Drury Tavern, in Vinegar
Yard, Drury Lane. Having made our way to a small parlour, we perceived
the Majesty of England, as personated on this occasion, enveloped in
an ordinary surtout, sitting at the head of a table, and surrounded by
a knot of good-humoured faces, who might, if judged from mere
appearances, have rallied round their president for some social
purpose—only that the cigars and spirits and water had not yet come
in. There was nothing official to be seen but a few pens, a sheet or
two of paper, an inkstand, and a parish beadle.
When we entered, the Coroner was holding a friendly conversation with
some of the jury, the beadle, and the gentlemen of the press,
respecting the inferiority of the accommodation; and, considering the
number of persons present, and the accessions expected from more
jurymen, parochial officers, and witnesses, the subject was suggested
naturally enough: for the private apartment of the landlord was of
exceedingly moderate dimensions; and that had been appropriated as the
temporary Court.
Here then, to a back parlour of the Old Drury Tavern, Vinegar Yard,
Drury Lane, London, the Queen’s representative was consigned—by no
fault of his own, but from that of a system of which he is rather a
victim than a promoter—to institute one of the most important
inquiries which the law of England prescribes. A human being had been
prematurely sent into eternity, and the coroner was called upon—amidst
several implements of conviviality, the odour of gin and the smell of
tobacco-smoke—‘to inquire in this manner: that is, to wit, if they
[the witnesses] know where the person was slain, whether it were in
any house, field, bed, tavern, or company, and who were there; who are
culpable, either of the act, or of the force; and who were present,
either men or women, and of what age soever they be, if they can speak
or have any discretion; and how many soever be found culpable they
shall be taken and delivered to the sheriff, and shall be committed to
the gaol.’ So runs the clause of the act of parliament, still in force
by which the coroner and jury were now assembled. It is the second
statute of the fourth year of Edward I., and is the identical law
which is discussed by the grave-diggers in Hamlet.
The pleasant colloquy about the size of the room ended in a resolution
to adjourn the Court to the ‘Two Spies,’ in a neighbouring alley. Time
appeared, throughout the proceedings, to be as valuable as space, and
the rest of the jurors having dropped in, the coroner—with a bible
supplied from the bar,—at once delivered the oath to the foreman. The
other jurors were rapidly sworn in batches, upon the Old Drury Bible,
under an abridged dispensation administered, if our memory be correct,
by the beadle.
‘Now, then, gentlemen,’ said the coroner, ‘we’ll view the body.’
Not without alacrity the entire company left their confined quarters
to breathe such air as is vouchsafed in Vinegar Yard. The subject of
inquiry lay at a baker’s shop, ‘a few doors round the corner,’—to use
the topographical formula of the parish functionary—and thither he
ushered us. A few of the window shutters of the shop were up, but in
all other respects there was as little to indicate a house of death as
there was to show it to be a house of mourning. If the journeyman had
not been standing at the end of the counter in his holiday coat, it
would have seemed as if business was going on as usual. There was the
same tempting display of tarts, the same heaps of biscuits, the same
supply of loaves, the same ranges of flour in paper bags as is to be
observed in ordinary bakers’ shops on ordinary occasions. Yet the
mistress of this particular baker’s shop lay dead only a few paces
within, and its master was in gaol on suspicion of having murdered
her.
Through a parlour and a sort of passage with a bed and a sink in
it,the jury were shown into a confined kitchen. Here, on a mahogany
dining-table, lay the remains covered with a dirty sheet. To describe
the spectacle which presented itself when the beadle, with
business-like immobility turned down the covering, does not happily
fall within our present object. It is, however, necessary to say that
it presented evidences of continued ill-usage from blows and kicks,
not to be beheld without strong indignation. Yet this was not all.
‘The cause of death,’ said the beadle—_his_ mind was quite made up—‘is
on the back; it’s covered with bruises: but I suppose you won’t want
to see that, gentlemen.’
By no means. Everybody had seen enough; for they were surrounded by
whatever could increase distress and engender disgust. The apartment
was so small, that the table left only room for the jurors to edge
round it one by one; and it was hardly possible to do this, without
actual contact with the head or feet of the corpse. A gridiron and
other black utensils were hanging against the wall, and could only be
escaped by the exercise on the part of the spectators of great
ingenuity of motion. This and the bed-place (bed-_room_ is no word for
it) indicated squalid poverty; but the scene was changed in the
parlour. There, appearances were at least kept up. It was filled with
decent furniture—even elegancies; including a pianoforte and a couple
of portraits.
These strange evidences of refinement only brought out the squalor,
smallness, and unfitness for any part of a judicial inquiry of the
inner apartments, into more glaring relief. Surely so important a
function as that of a coroner and his jury should not be conducted
amidst such a scene! Besides other obvious objections, the danger of
keeping corpses in confined apartments, and in close neighbourhoods,
was here strongly exemplified. The smell was so ‘close’ and
insanitary, that the first man who entered the den where the body lay,
caused the window to be opened. Two children, the offspring of the
victim and the accused, lived in these apartments; and above stairs
the house was crowded with lodgers, to all of whom any sort of
infection would have proved the more disastrous from living next door,
as it were, to Death. It is terrible to reflect that every decease
happening among the myriads of the population a little lower in
circumstances than this baker, deals around it its proportion of
destruction to the living, from the same causes. True, that had it
been impossible to retain the body where death occurred—as chances
when several persons live in the same room—it would have been removed.
But where.—The coroner and jury would have had to view it in the
tap-room of a public-house.
There is another objection—all-powerful in the eyes of a lawyer. He
recognises as a first necessity that the jurors should have no
opportunity of communicating with witnesses, except when before the
Court. But here the melancholy honours of the baker’s shop and parlour
were performed by the two persons from whose evidence the cause of
death was to be chiefly elicited;—the journeyman and a female relative
of the deceased, who were in the house when the last blows were dealt,
and when the woman died. They received the fifteen jurymen who were
presently to judge of their testimony; and there was nothing but the
strong sense of propriety which actuated these gentlemen on the
present occasion, to prevent the witnesses from telling their own
story privately in their own way, to any one or half dozen of the
inquest, and thus to give a premature bent to opinions, the materials
for forming which, ought to be strictly reserved for the public Court.
Many examples can be supplied in illustration of this evil. We select
one:—Some years ago, an old woman in the most wretched part of
Westminster, was found dead in her bed—strangled. When the Coroner and
jury went to view the body, they were ushered by a young female—a
relative—who lived with the deceased. She explained there and then all
about the death. When the Court re-assembled, she was—chiefly, it was
understood, in consequence of what had previously passed—examined as
first and principal witness, and upon her evidence, the verdict
arrived at, was ‘Temporary insanity.’ The case, however, subsequently
passed through more formal judicial ordeals, and the result was, that
the coroner’s prime witness was hanged for the _murder_ of the old
woman. We must have it distinctly understood that not the faintest
shade of parallel exists between the two cases. We bring them together
solely to illustrate the evils of a system.
On passing into the baker’s parlour, dumb witnesses presented
themselves, which—properly or improperly—must have had their effect on
the promoters of the inquiry. The piano indicated hours formerly
spent, and thoughts once indulged, which, when imagined by minds fresh
from the appalling reality in the squalid kitchen, must have excited
new throes of indignation and pity. One portrait was that of the
bruised and crushed corpse when living and young. Then she must have
been comely; now no feature could be recognised as ever having been
human. Then, she was cleanly and neatly dressed, and, if the pictured
smile might be trusted, happy; now, she lay amidst dirt, the victim of
long, long ill-usage and lingering misery, ended in premature death.
The other, was a likeness of her husband. Had words of love ever
passed between the originals of those painted effigies? Had they ever
courted? It seemed that one of the jurors was inwardly asking some
such question while gazing at the portraits, for he was visibly
affected.
We all at length made our way to the ‘Two Spies’ in Whitehart Yard,
Brydges Street. The accommodation afforded was a little more spacious
than those of the Old Drury; but the delegated Majesty of the Crown
had no dignity imparted to it from the coroner’s figure being brought
out in relief by a clothes-horse and table cloth which were, during
the inquiry, placed behind him to serve as a fire-screen. Neither did
the case of stuffed birds, the sampler of Moses in the bulrushes, the
picture of the licensed victuallers’ school, or the portraits of the
rubicund host and of his ‘good lady,’ tend to impress the minds of
jury, witnesses, or spectators, with that awe for the supremacy of the
Law which a court of justice is expected to inspire.
The circumstances as detailed by the witnesses are already familiar to
the readers of newspapers; but from the insecutive manner in which the
evidence was produced, it is difficult to frame a coherent narrative.
It all tended to prove that the husband had for several years
exercised great harshness towards his wife. That boxing her ears and
kicking her were among his ‘habits.’ On the Friday previous to her
decease, the journeyman had been, as usual, ‘bolted down’ in the
bake-house for the night, (such, he said, being the custom in the
trade) and from eleven o’clock till three in the morning he heard a
great noise overhead as of two persons quarrelling, and of one person
dragging the other across the room. There were cries of distress from
the deceased woman. Another witness—a second cousin of the wife—called
on Saturday afternoon. She found the wife in a pitiable state from
ill-usage and want of rest. Her left ear and all that part of the head
was much bruised. There were cuts, and the hair was matted with
congealed blood. The husband was told how much she was injured, but he
did not appear to take any notice of it. A trait of the dread in which
the woman lived of the man was here mentioned; she asked the witness
to ask her husband to allow her to lie down. She dared not prefer so
reasonable a request herself; although she had been up all the
previous night being beaten. He refused. The cousin sat down to dinner
with the wretched pair; only for the purpose of being between them to
prevent further violence, for she had dined. She remained until
half-past three o’clock, and during that interval the husband
frequently boxed his wife’s ears as hard as he could; and once kicked
her with great force. Her usual remonstrance was, ‘Man alive, don’t
touch me.’ The visitor returned in the evening, and she, with the
journeyman, saw another brutal attack, some minutes after which the
victim fell as if in a fit. She was assisted into an inner room, sank
down and never rose again. She lay till the following Sunday morning
in a state of insensibility, and no attempt had been made to procure
surgical assistance. A practitioner at last was summoned, gave no
hope, and the poor creature died on Monday morning. The post mortem
examination, described by the surgeon, revealed the cause of death in
the blows at the side of the head, which he said was like ‘beefsteaks
when beaten by cooks.’ No trace of habitual drunkenness appeared. The
deceased had been, in the course of the inquiry, charged with that.
A lawyer would have felt especially fidgetty, while these facts were
being elicited. The questions were put in an undecided rambling
manner, and were so interrupted by half-made remarks from the jurors
and other parties in the room, that it was a wonder how the report of
the proceedings, which appeared in the morning newspapers, could have
been so cleverly cleared as it was of the chaff from which it was
winnowed. One or two circumstances occurred during this time which
tended to throw over the whole affair the air of an ill-played farce.
At an interesting point of the evidence, the door was opened, and a
scream from a female voice announced ‘Please sir, the beadle’s
wanted!’ There were four gentlemen sitting on a horse-hair sofa close
behind some of the jury, with whom more than once they entered into
conversation, doubtless about the case in hand. The way in which the
coroner took notice of this breach of every judisprudential rule, was
extremely characteristic: he said, in effect, that there was, perhaps,
no actual harm in it, but it _might_ be objected to—the parties
conversing might be relatives of the accused. In fact, he mildly
insinuated that such unprivileged communications might warp the
jurymen’s judgments—that’s all!
After the coroner had summed up, the jury returned a verdict of
manslaughter against the husband. The Queen’s representative then
retired, and so did the jury and the beadle; a little extra business
was done at the bar of the ‘Two Spies,’ and, to use a reporter’s pet
phrase, ‘the proceedings terminated.’
It is far from our desire, in describing this particular inquest, in
any way to disparage—supposing anything we have said can be construed
into disparagement—any person or persons concerned in it directly or
remotely. Our wish is to point out the exceeding looseness,
informality, and difficulty of ensuring sound judgment, which the
system occasions. Indeed we were told by a competent authority that
the proceedings at the Old Drury and ‘Two Spies’ taverns, formed an
orderly and superior specimen of their class.
There is a mischief of some gravity, which we have yet to notice. The
essential check upon all judicial or private dereliction is publicity,
and publicity gained through the press in _all_ cases which require
it; but the existing system gives the coroner the power of excluding
reporters. He can, if he pleases, make a Star Chamber of his court,
hold it in a private house, and conduct it in secret. Instances—though
very rare ones—can be adduced of this having been actually done. Here
opens a door to another abuse;—it is known that a certain few among
newspaper hangers-on—persons only connected with the press by the
precarious and slender tenure of ‘a penny-a-line’—find it profitable
to attend inquests—not for legitimate purposes—for their ‘copy’ is
seldom inserted by editors—but to obtain money from relatives and
parties interested in the deceased for what they are pleased to call
‘suppressing’ their reports. This generally happens in cases which
from their having no public interest whatever would not, under any
circumstances, be admitted into the crowded columns of the journals;
for we can with confidence say that any case in which the public
interests are likely to be staked, once before the editors of any
London Journal, and supplied by a gentleman of their own
establishment, no power on earth could suppress it. It has happened
again occasionally that, from the suddenness with which the coroner is
summoned, and the slovenly manner in which his office is performed, an
inquest that ought to have been made public has wholly escaped the
knowledge of newspaper conductors and their accredited reporters, and
has thus passed over in silence.
Let us here put up another guard against misconception. No imputation
_can_ rest upon any accredited member of the press; the high state
dignities which some men who have been reporters now so well support,
are a guarantee against that. Neither do we wish to undervalue the
important services sometimes performed by occasional or ‘penny-a-line’
reporters; among whom there are honourable and clever men. We only
point out a small body of exceptional characters who are no more than
what we have described—‘hangers-on’ of the press.
We now proceed to suggest a remedy for the inherent vices of
‘Crowner’s quests.’
In the report of the Board of Health on intramural interments, upon
which a bill now before Parliament is founded, it is proposed to erect
in convenient parts of London eight reception-houses for the dead,
previous to interment in the cemeteries to be established. This will
remove the mortal remains from that immediate and fatal contact—fatal,
morally as well as physically—which is compulsory among the poorer
classes under the existing system of sepulture. It appears that of the
deaths which take place in the metropolis, in upwards of 20,000
instances the corpse must be kept, during the interval between the
death and the interment, in the same room in which the surviving
members of the family live and sleep; while of the 8,000 deaths every
year from epidemic diseases, by far the greater part happen under the
circumstances just described.
If from these causes the necessity for dead-houses is so great when no
inquest is necessary, how much stronger is it when the services of the
coroner are requisite? The reason given for the peripatetic nature of
the office, is the assumed necessity of the jury seeing the bodies on
the spot and in the circumstances of death. But that such a necessity
is unreal was proved on the inquest we have been detailing, by the
fact of the remains having been lifted from the bed where life ceased,
to a table, and having been opened by the surgeons. Surely, removal to
a wholesome and convenient reception-house, would not disturb such
appearances as may be presumed to form evidence. As it is, the only
place among the poor in which medical men can perform the important
duty of examination by _post mortem_ dissection is a room crowded with
inmates—or the tap-room of the nearest tavern.
To preserve, then, a degree of order, dignity, and solemnity equal at
least to that which is maintained to try an action for debt, and to
prevent the possibility of any ‘private’ dealings, we would strongly
urge that a suitable Coroner’s Court-house be attached to each of the
proposed reception-houses. A clause to this effect can be easily
introduced into the new bill. With such accommodation the coroner
could perform his office in a manner worthy of a delegate of the
Crown, and no such informalities as tend to intercept and taint the
pure stream of Justice could continue to exist.
FRANCIS JEFFREY.
JEFFREY was a year younger than SCOTT, whom he outlived eighteen
years, and with whose career his own had some points of resemblance.
They came of the same middle-class stock, and had played together as
lads in the High School ‘yard’ before they met as advocates in the
Court of Session. The fathers of both were connected with that Court;
and from childhood, both were devoted to the law. But Scott’s boyish
infirmity imprisoned him in Edinburgh, while Jeffrey was let loose to
Glasgow University, and afterwards passed up to Queen’s College,
Oxford. The boys, thus separated, had no remembrance of having
previously met, when they saw each other at the Speculative Society in
1791.
The Oxford of that day suited Jeffrey ill. It suited few people well
who cared for anything but cards and claret. Southey, who came just
after him, tells us that the Greek he took there he left there, nor
ever passed such unprofitable months; and Lord Malmesbury, who had
been there but a little time before him, wonders how it was that so
many men should make their way in the world creditably, after leaving
a place that taught nothing but idleness and drunkenness. But Jeffrey
was not long exposed to its temptations. He left after the brief
residence of a single term; and what in after life he remembered most
vividly in connection with it, seems to have been the twelve days’
hard travelling between Edinburgh and London which preceded his
entrance at Queen’s. Some seventy years before, another Scotch lad, on
his way to become yet more famous in literature and law, had taken
nearly as many weeks to perform the same journey; but, between the
schooldays of Mansfield and of Jeffrey, the world had not been
resting.
It was enacting its greatest modern incident, the first French
Revolution, when the young Scotch student returned to Edinburgh and
changed his College gown for that of the advocate. Scott had the start
of him in the Court of Session by two years, and had become rather
active and distinguished in the Speculative Society before Jeffrey
joined it. When the latter, then a lad of nineteen, was introduced,
(one evening in 1791), he observed a heavy-looking young man
officiating as secretary, who sat solemnly at the bottom of the table
in a huge woollen night-cap, and who, before the business of the night
began, rose from his chair, and, with imperturbable gravity seated on
as much of his face as was discernible from the wrappings of the
‘portentous machine’ that enveloped it, apologised for having left
home with a bad toothache. This was his quondam schoolfellow Scott.
Perhaps Jeffrey was pleased with the mingled enthusiasm for the
speculative, and regard for the practical, implied in the woollen
night-cap; or perhaps he was interested by the Essay on Ballads which
the hero of the night-cap read in the course of the evening: but
before he left the meeting he sought an introduction to Mr. Walter
Scott, and they were very intimate for many years afterwards.