violently to censure Serjeant Shee whenever he said anything against the
witnesses for the Crown, but not one syllable did you say against the
Attorney-General for his attack on the medical witnesses for my brother.
Thus you say here (report, p. 313)--“The learned counsel in the
discharge of his duty did, as he was perfectly justified in doing, make
very violent attacks upon the character and conduct of Mr. Stevens. It
rests with you to say whether that attack was well founded.” But had you
not said that he was justified in doing so, and did not this imply that
Stevens deserved it? And if it “rested with the jury,” what right had
you to add, “I own I can see nothing in Mr. Stevens in the slightest
degree calling for it”? Thus you first say Serjeant Shee was
“justified,” then you say it “rests with the jury,” and then, lest they
may jointly agree with the serjeant, you volunteer your own opinion,
that Serjeant Shee was not justified. Conduct like this requires no
comment, but if my brother is hanged upon such a charge, who is guilty
of his blood?
The next witness was Mary Keeling. She gave important evidence as to the
condition of the body. Mills and one or two other of the witnesses had
endeavoured to show that the body was “bent like a bow,” to use the
imaginative language of that man Taylor, and this was pressed in to
support your view of the case that “the death was consistent with
strychnia.” Now, Mary Keeling proved the exact reverse of this, but you
did not either take it in your notes or read it to the jury. Serjeant
Shee was obliged to interrupt you. I copy from the report, p. 313--
“Mr. Serjeant Shee--I am not quite sure whether your lordship read
that the witness said that the body was lying straight on the back
on the bed?
“Lord Campbell--I have read all that I have taken down. Is it in
the cross-examination?
“Mr. Serjeant Shee--No, in the examination in chief. ‘How was the
body lying?--On the back, straight down on the bed.’
“Mr. James--Where do you read that from?
“Mr. Serjeant Shee--It is in two reports; one in the _Times_ and
one from the shorthand writer’s notes.
“Lord Campbell--Bamford says it was lying straight on the bed.
“Mr. Serjeant Shee--I did not allude to Bamford’s examination. This
witness says so too.”
And there the matter ended, and though it was admitted that it had been
said, and though it corroborated Dr. Bamford and Dr. Jones, and entirely
refuted the “opisthotonos” theory of Taylor and Mills, and thus got rid
of one of the most remarkable symptoms “consistent with poisoning by
strychnia,” yet not one word of comment did you offer upon it; but, as
you said, it was not upon your notes--where it ought to have been--you
left the jury unadvised upon this essential contradiction, which, taken
with the evidence of the two medical men, entirely demolished Mills and
her congenial companion Taylor, and took out of the mouth of Sir
Benjamin Brodie and the other medical witnesses one of those vital
symptoms on which they founded their diagnosis of the causes of death.
For, if there was no opisthotonos, or bent bow-like shape, then Cook did
not die of strychnia; and this being proved not to have been so by these
three witnesses, or, at all events, left in deep doubt, my brother was
entitled to the benefit of that doubt, and should have been acquitted.
The same wish of omission was manifest in your notes when you read out
the evidence of Devonshire to the jury; you forgot to tell the jury that
Cook’s left lung was diseased, which was important, as his death arose
from natural causes. Serjeant Shee was again obliged to interfere
(report, p. 314)--
“Mr. Serjeant Shee--I think the witness said there were traces of
emphysema in the left lung?
“Mr. Baron Alderson--Yes.”
But not one word of comment did you make.
Myatt, the postboy, whose testimony was wholly incredible, you bolstered
up with this remark, “Now, there seems no reason to doubt the evidence
of this poor boy.” As if you could fathom the secret motives of man.
Upon the letter which my brother addressed to the coroner you say--“This
letter is a most improper letter, addressed by the prisoner to Mr. Ward,
the coroner, who is, of course, a judge. It so happens that I myself am
the chief coroner of England, but all the coroners are judges as much as
I am, and ought, with equal integrity and indifference, to administer
the law of the country.” This self praise, my lord, is of that species
which is said to stink. It would have been better if you had not
eulogised your conduct upon this trial, but allowed others to do so. You
did the same thing when you were sentencing my brother, for you prefaced
your “hanging speech” by these words--“William Palmer, after a fair and
impartial trial,” &c., &c. You then go on, and suggest to the jury that
my brother was guilty because he wrote that letter. “You will say
whether this is consistent with innocence; it is clear tampering with
the judge.” Yet the conduct of the gentleman mentioned by Sir Matthew
Hale, or the French gentleman who offered to surrender his wife’s will,
was just as suspicious, though the first was hanged innocently, and the
last, fortunately for himself, not tried by you.
When Cheshire was cross-examined by Serjeant Shee he asked him, “Did he
not say I knew they would not, for I am as innocent as a baby?” You
immediately interrupted, in a most angry tone, saying, “He has already
said that,” whereas in truth he had not done so, but the phrase was
likely to have an influence on the jury.
Again, when Herring was examined, and Mr. Welsby proposed to give some
evidence from the pages of the lost betting book, about whose
disappearance one of the greatest points was made against William,
Serjeant Shee said, “We cannot have the contents.”
“Lord Campbell--The last account we have got is that it was in Mr.
Palmer’s possession.
“Mr. Serjeant Shee--I do not think there is any proof of its ever
having been in Mr. Palmer’s possession.
“Mr. Attorney-General--We show that it was in the dead man’s room
on the Tuesday night before his death, and Mr. Palmer is afterwards
seen looking about; we have no one else, my lord, that we can
resort to.” ... (This was utterly false, for the last person who
saw it, or swore she saw it, was Mills, and that was on Monday
night.)
“Lord Campbell--I do not think we can receive this evidence”
(report, p. 41).
Thus you were about to admit the contents of that book on the plea that
my brother possessed it, a plea entirely untrue, and not only not
supported, but even negatived by the evidence. My lord, if you do these
things in matters of life and death, who among us is safe?
When Bates was called, it was proposed to give in evidence the facts of
the insurance, and you permitted a discussion to arise which put the
jury in possession of all the facts. You then said, “On the
Attorney-General’s opening I doubted whether this would be relevant and
proper evidence to be received at this trial” (yet you permitted him to
open it!), “and upon consideration my brothers agree with me it is too
remote to be admissible.” But all the evil had then been done, the jury
having been prejudiced by the statement and discussion. And not one word
did you say to them in your charge about disabusing their minds of the
false impression which it might have made.
When you commented on the medical evidence you told the jury that my
brother had an opportunity of substituting for Bamford’s pills others
made by himself. What right had you to do that? Was it not leading their
minds to an inference that he did so, and that the substituted pills
contained poison? (report, p. 315).
You introduced Sir Benjamin Brodie with great praises; in fact, you
praised all the medical witnesses for the Crown, and confined your
applause to only one of those for the prisoner, who slightly coincided
with Taylor’s notions. You said of Sir Benjamin--“You will take into
consideration the solemn opinion of this distinguished medical man, that
he never knew a case in which the symptoms that he heard described arose
from any disease. He has seen and known the various diseases that
afflict the human frame in all their multiplicity, and he knows of no
natural disease such as will answer the symptoms which he heard
described in the case of Cook; and if it did not arise from natural
disease, then the inference is that it arose from other causes” (report,
p. 316). Now, Sir Benjamin formed his opinion upon two inconsistent
statements made by Mills and Dr. Jones. If what Mills swore was all
true, then, perhaps, Sir Benjamin Brodie would have been justified in
saying that no disease that he had seen accorded with that description;
but if what Mills swore was all false, and it was entirely inconsistent
with what Dr. Jones proved, then also it would not be consistent with
natural disease, or with anything in Nature, and yet my brother be
innocent of this crime. If Mills invented a number of symptoms which no
medical man had ever seen, and it is what an ignorant chambermaid who
was disposed to perjure herself might be supposed to do, then what Sir
Benjamin Brodie proved would have been correct, and he could not assign
to any natural disease that which was, in truth, but a fictitious
narrative; but it would not necessarily follow from that that Cook died
of poison, as you told the jury it would, but it would as logically
follow that the whole of the symptoms not being in accordance with any
known disease were invented by an unskilful person, and unskilfully put
together for the occasion. I think you saw in its full force the effect
of this, for it will be seen by the report that you prevented Serjeant
Shee from discovering on which of these two witnesses Sir Benjamin
relied in premising his opinion.
“Considering how rarely tetanus is witnessed at all, would you
think that the description of a chambermaid, and of a provincial
medical man who had only seen one case of tetanus, could be relied
upon by you to state what description of disease the disease
observed was?--I must say I thought the description very clearly
given.” (How could it be given clearly if it accorded with no known
disease? Besides, the answer is an evasion of the question.)
“Mr. Serjeant Shee--On which of the two would you rely, supposing
they differed--the chambermaid or the medical man?
“Lord Campbell--That is hardly a proper question” (report, p. 120).
In my judgment no question could be more proper, for if Sir
Benjamin relied on Mills, then the jury would have known why he
pronounced so strong an opinion, and if they disliked her, the
opinion would go for nothing; but if Sir Benjamin relied on Dr.
Jones, then the symptoms described by him were accordant with many
known diseases, and Sir Benjamin Brodie must have said so. This
ruling therefore hanged my brother!
But let me hasten to a close. I am so heartbroken, so wearied out
with fatigue, and pain, and grief; I am so utterly disgusted by
these enumerations that I feel I cannot go on. From the first to
the last my brother had no chance. You introduced him to the jury
as a forger in the following words:--“There has been evidence which
certainly implicates the prisoner in transactions of a very
discreditable nature. It appears that he had forged a great many
bills of exchange, and that he had entered into transactions not of
a reputable nature.” If all this was irrelevant why did you
introduce it? In the same tone was your allusion to the “student’s
book,” which even the Crown abandoned. “This book has been laid
before you in evidence, and certainly I think I need hardly beg of
you to pay no regard to it, because it was a book that Palmer had
when he was a surgeon, and at a time when I have no doubt he would
have shrunk with horror at any such crime as that with which he is
charged here to-day. There is, in the title page of the book,
‘Strychnia kills by causing tetanic fixing of the respiratory
muscles,’ and in another part there is a description of what nux
vomica is, and how strychnia is produced from it, with these
words--‘Strychnia kills by causing tetanic fixing of the
respiratory muscles.’ Again I say that I think this being found in
his possession ought not to weigh at all against the prisoner at
the bar” (report, p. 315). If it ought not to weigh against him,
why, in Heaven’s name, did you so solemnly drag it in? Why did you
read and re-read it? Would it not have been fairer to put it aside
altogether than to impress it on the minds of the jury, and then
tell them it ought not to weigh at all? Is it possible to believe
you were sincere? Is it possible the jury could have drawn any
other conclusion from your dwelling on it than that you wished them
to regard it as proof of guilt?
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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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.
* * * * *
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,
[Illustration: Mr. Baron Alderson.]