by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)
The traditional view of the crime of suicide – ‘felo de se’ (felon of the self) – would mean that the person killing themselves would forfeit their property to the Crown and lose the right to be buried in consecrated ground. A busy crossroads, where traffic might drown out the activities of restless souls, was preferred. Burials had to take place at night. Often a stake would be put through the heart, which was as messy as it sounds.
Georgian inquests were quite ready to give a verdict of felo de se and then the coroner would order this humiliating form of internment. However, on occasions there would be a judgement of lunacy instead, when derangement, preferably over a long period of time, could be proved with examples. This would avoid the humiliating penalties.
The following cases were adjudged criminal acts in 1810, and there is a clearly discernible pattern. Esther Chapman of Chatteris took just enough arsenic to kill herself; she lingered in agony for twenty-four hours. Later in the same year an unnamed servant girl of Mr G. Uppleby took laudanum and expired after eight hours. She had been distressed by rumours about her reputation in the town. In May of the same year, a soldier who had recently deserted went to the White Hart public house near Clare Market and partly cut his head off with a penknife. Jan Fesh, another soldier proved that he was not insane when he destroyed himself by loading his musket with metal buttons from his tunic and used a string attached to the trigger to allow him to put the weapon into his mouth.
At Canterbury, in June 1810, a servant, James Lawman, shot himself in the head due to disappointment in love, ‘the object of his affection having refused his advances’, and lived just long enough to acknowledge that it was a rash act. Also in June 1810, Mrs Wraight of Chatham, the wife of a blacksmith, swallowed arsenic. No reason was given in the press, but it was noted that she was buried at a roadside just outside the town. In July, a Mr J. Widman hanged himself after being caught stealing boots from a shop in Fleet Street. In August, an unnamed carter in Islington hanged himself; he had two girlfriends, one of them was pregnant and he did not know what to do. John Thornton, aged 70, hanged himself using his garters in his room in October. He was declared perfectly sane as he had spent the day concluding some financial affairs and locking up his money securely. However, in the act of being so efficient with his cash, he denied it to his relatives.
All of these unfortunates were buried at the local crossroads. Another similarity was the low social class of most of the victims – they were mostly servants, soldiers and wives of the lower classes. They also showed the various methods of ‘dispatching yourself into eternity’, as the papers delicately put it. Hangings and shootings were used by men, and dangerous but easily available poisons were used by women. Drowning was also popular; another unnamed woman in 1810 was found sane when she drowned herself after calmly walking out of the marital home and telling her husband that she would never return.
The law did not regard all such deaths as a punishable offence. They were able to accept that individuals were not in their right mind. Another poor woman in 1810, this time from Portsmouth, killed herself with laudanum. However, she was known to have had periods of melancholia in the past and had tried to poison herself on other occasions – she was granted the verdict of lunacy. It seemed to some that one successful suicide made you a criminal, but a couple of failures followed by a success made you merely insane. Juries were of local composition, and if the locals knew the person and could put the suicide into context, there was more chance of it being viewed sympathetically.
Melancholia was an accepted reason for suicide, as was immaturity or mental derangement caused by domestic problems. Children were rarely adjudged felo de se. In February 1816 a 12-year-old girl from Smithfield tied lead weights to her feet and hanged herself after a disagreement with parents – it was a ‘rash act’ and a ‘melancholy incident’, but not suicide, despite the obvious planning. William Dumbell, a labourer, had twelve pots of beer and then hanged himself in a privy in Newhaven. He had been ‘melancholy’. On the other end of the social spectrum, Edward Hussey, a magistrate in Lamberhurst, Sussex, had blown out his brains with a blunderbuss with exactly the same reason given. All were adjudged as being the result of lunacy. The law was democratic on this occasion, although that does not always seem to be the case.
The extremely religious and respectable often escaped a humiliating judgement by an odd logic. Mr G Lecke, a former soldier, hanged himself in May 1816. No reason could be found – ‘he was a very religious man and it would have been thought of him one of the last men in the world who would have committed suicide had he been in senses.’ Therefore, due to Mr Lecke’s conviction that suicide was a mortal sin, by killing himself this proved that he was not in his right mind.
There was little mercy given when itinerant criminals committed suicide. In November 1816, the coroner gave a verdict of felo de se on a criminal called Brock who was never favoured with a first name. He had been apprehended during a robbery of a tallow chandler named Thompson and placed in the black hole of St James Watch House. Despite being handcuffed he had managed to strangle himself with his handkerchief. He was buried at two in the morning in unconsecrated ground near Great Pulteney Street. However, this was not the end of it:
MOST DISGRACEFUL EXPOSURE – We stated yesterday that Brock, who committed suicide at St James Watch House, was buried at the end of Bride Lane…The body was deposited about two feet from the surface of the ground, and there was much murmurings amongst the inhabitants at the body being committed to the earth before their doors, and at night the body was taken up by the people and left in the street. As might be expected, the place was a scene of riot and confusion, and the body was dragged around the street in a most disgraceful manner, to the amusement of some and the disgust of others.
It was clear that the locals were not up in arms at the severity of the law, but the application of the law in their back yard; the lack of sympathy shown to Brock after his death would be the result of his criminal background, but due to this protest he was eventually reinterred at the local workhouse.
Some mob action against the law did show that different views were developing. In 1810, a young soldier called Thomas Tomlinson shot himself in the head in Leeds. Despite being a brave soldier in battle, he had confided to his comrades his fear of death, and this seemed the reason for his actions. There was an outraged reaction from his regiment when the lowly soldier was declared to be rational when he killed himself.
The corpse, in consequence, was seized by the civil power, and lodged in the prison until Monday night, when the remains of this unfortunate young man were taken at midnight… and buried in the lanes usually appropriated for this purpose. The body had scarcely been committed to its ignominious grave, when some of the military, impelled by their attachment to a brother soldier, and encouraged by the populace, jumped in the grave in the presence of the civil officials, and finding it impossible to get up the coffin entire, they lifted up the lid raised the corpse out of the grave…and carried him to the new burying ground at the parish church, where it was interred with military honours.1
It certainly did not help your chances if you were a soldier and you took your own life. However, it was a different matter if you were a foolish London gentleman, as seen in the example of Mr Charles Bradburn in February 1816. He had attended a masquerade at the Argyle Rooms in Regent Street. He met a woman of new acquaintance there and was about to take her home when two men, Wallace and Andrews, jumped into the coach. They went together to a hotel and Bradburn took up the invitation to play dice for champagne and claret that could be given to the young lady, who seemed to know the other men well. Gambling for drink turned to gambling for money; Bradburn won at first but eventually lost £2,000.
His friends rallied round and attempted to find the swindlers. His new female ‘friend’ was identified as Maria Bartram of Portland Square, a ‘woman of the town’, said the newspapers, with a meaning clear to all. Charles resisted the help of his friends, and when Wallac
e and Andrews arrived at his address a few days later, armed and noisy and demanding their money Bradburn blew his brains out. He was found insane by an inquest. His fortune and reputation were saved, although in the short term his story was repeated in dozens of newspapers all over the country to the disgrace of his family’s reputation.
Not everybody agreed with the verdict. A letter to the paper pointed out the problem. The Argyle Rooms were the well-known haunt of prostitutes. The strumpet and the gamblers were in cahoots. Why did Bradburn use somebody else’s dice? The writer went on to say that if Bradburn was mad, then he was mad at the beginning of the evening in showing his appalling judgement. He certainly had no history of melancholia to help his case; but he was a rich London gentleman, and that was enough to save his reputation.
It was clearly seen that people took their own lives from the derangement caused by economic distress. Mr Hollingsdale of Chailey, Sussex, was last seen tending to the cattle that were about to be sold to pay his rent and tithe debts. Richard Bishop of Exeter ‘put a period to his own existence’ in old age, having encouraged others to make unsuccessful investments.
There were some dissenting voices. Where, complained newspaper letter-writers, was the resignation to the will of God? Surely, it was the sin of pride that turned people to suicide? In September 1816, the Cumberland Pacquet referred to suicide as a crime that condemned the bereaved family to torment on earth and the deceased to torment in the afterlife. On 15 August, a person with the pen name ‘HUMANITAS’2 wrote to the Morning Post bemoaning the number of lunacy judgements, which were clearly designed to save people’s feelings and protect inheritance rights. Without any irony at all, HUMANITAS commented that this had all gone too far, in an era of ‘universal benevolence and philanthropy’ he believed that the re-application of the proper judgement would discourage suicides; if this was not possible, perhaps the bodies could be dissected rather than buried at the crossroads in an unmarked grave? A slightly more constructive suggestion was the banning of arsenic; HUMANITAS claimed that the use of poison was under-reported as a method of suicide, and this may well have been the case. It is interesting that a commentator who had no sympathy for the suffering of suicides was nevertheless losing patience with the humiliating burial ritual that was associated with it.
Much of the disgust about the verdict of felo de se was the variable, and often disgraceful, way the punishment burial was carried out. Lancelet and John Younghusband of Alnwick were sober, respectable, and successful farmers. In November 1818 they were seen doing business in the market on Saturday and in church on Sunday, but two days later they killed themselves by cutting their throats with a razor. Their friends tried to convince the coroner that the two were insane, but their actions to the day of their death proved otherwise. It seemed premeditated – a hairdresser had been called in on the Saturday to sharpen the razors. Hours before their death, one brother was overhead to say ‘Are you ready?’ to the other. The popular brothers were buried in the pathway just away from the consecrated ground, but the next day it was ordered that they should be dug up and buried in the humiliating place dictated by law. Lancelot’s bereaved wife and daughter were plunged into a life of grief and poverty, and some people were starting to believe that this was not morally correct.
In 1820, a Mr B Perceval hanged himself after going through some difficult situations. He suffered continued pain from an inflammation of the chest. He was in reduced circumstances and was refused relief both by the Poor Law officers and private charities. He was declared to be in a state of derangement, and it was noted that his brother had ‘put a period to his existence’ a few years ago. Attitudes were changing slowly, despite complaints in the press that the poor needed more patience and resignation to God’s will. It would have been the same argument that Mr Perceval would have heard when being denied outdoor relief.
On 12 August 1822, the most hated man in Britain, Viscount Castlereagh, carefully committed suicide by cutting his carotid artery with a penknife, having had all of the other sharp objects in his house removed by his concerned wife. He had come to believe that he was being persecuted. He knew he was hated by a large section of the community, and he was said to be particularly affected by the bag that the Thistlewood conspirators had prepared for his severed head – but this was sudden and more extreme. A few days before his death, Castlereagh’s behaviour made the king lose sleep. The famously unemotional foreign secretary was weeping, kissing the king’s hand, accusing himself of crimes, including being blackmailed for homosexuality. The king commented to Lord Liverpool ‘either I am mad or Lord Castlereagh is mad’. Lord Liverpool agreed: ‘There is greater danger in these cases from strong minds than weak ones.’
This seems to indicate a real discrimination in attitudes to suicide – it was thought that members of the establishment, by definition deep thinkers with great responsibilities, were more prone to suicide than the simple-minded lower orders. Castlereagh was declared insane, and buried with honour in Westminster Abbey to the sound of boos and hisses from the lower orders, and to the glee of the radical press.
The problem with the Castlereagh case was not the decision, which fitted in with other cases of lunacy, but the lack of condemnation of his actions in the newspapers. Others disagreed with the verdict, seeing his act as premeditated – Castlereagh’s last words were: ‘I have done for myself. I have opened my neck.’ Cobbett was clear that there was no chance at all of such an important person being buried in such a humiliating way. Byron, who produced a poem inviting people to urinate on the dead man’s grave, commented sarcastically that poor people ‘slashed their throat’, but you had to be a member of the ruling classes to ‘cut your carotid artery’:
Of the manner of his death little need be said, except that if a poor radical had cut his throat, he would have been buried in a cross-road, with the usual appurtenances of the stake and mallet.
Cobbett also believed that, rather than being a deep thinker with all its attendant problems, the deceased was one the most empty-headed people in the government. His joy over Castlereagh’s suicide seems unnerving to our gentler political age, but it was an emotion shared by many. The death of Margaret Thatcher in 2013 is the only modern event that bears similarity to the reactions to the death of Castlereagh.
In June 1823, less than a year after Castlereagh’s suicide, Abel Griffiths, a 22-year-old student, was convicted of murdering his father Thomas, and then ‘hurling himself into eternity’, after an unexplained argument. Griffith’s servant, William Wade (‘a man of colour’) reported that Abel had tried unsuccessfully to see his father a number of times that day, and that he was under orders to keep the son away from him. They only met because Abel arrived first and waited for his father to return. When they met, there was a brief low-level conversation which seemed to be about money. Thomas Griffiths was a plantation owner in Barbados who had financed his son’s law education, but it was surmised by the inquest that this subsidy was being ended.
Those who knew Abel provided evidence of his escalating derangement. He had been taking mercury for an unknown, but probably socially embarrassing, illness and had been unpredictable and irritable with his friends. ‘Pinborn, I have such depression of the brain, I cannot stand the pain. Will leeches do me good?’ Witnesses attested to his unpredictable behaviour, illness, and deep derangement over the last few months of his life. The jury actually adjourned and met in private for ninety minutes – an extremely rare event at this period, where verdicts were often given while still in the chamber and after just the briefest of discussions – but the eventual verdict of felo de se astounded the audience in the court, and Griffiths was then prepared for a humiliating burial.
Crowds began to gather outside the father’s house, 4 Maddox Street, on the Wednesday evening. Abel’s friends were also there, still indignant, but the rain prevented the movement of the body. It was moved to St George’s workhouse around 10 pm and the crowd followed. It was assumed by most of the crowd that the fune
ral procession would start from the back of the workhouse and most of the crowd placed themselves there to ‘avoid disappointment’.3 At 1.30 in the morning however, he was carried from the front door by four men. He was wearing no more than stocking socks and wrapped in a blood soaked sheet. He was then wrapped in matting with a rope to secure it and was interred at the cross-roads formed by Eaton Street, Grosvenor Place and the King’s Road. He was dropped, rather than placed, into a hole about 5ft deep. Two hundred people surrounded the special constables and were largely disgusted by the spectacle (although the cynic might point out that they had taken great trouble to be so adversely affected), and because of this no stake was placed through the heart; but Abel had been buried in a unmarked hole in the ground, and there was growing feeling amongst all classes that this was inhumane, unnecessarily disruptive to society, and reeked of superstition rather than Christianity.
A few days later, persons unknown dug up the corpse at 5 am and hired a hackney carriage to transport it, which they abandoned at the end of the journey. The coach driver went to Bow Street with the body, and after a few days of wrangling about Abel’s next place of burial, he ended up back at St George’s workhouse and was finally laid to rest in their burial ground.
The law to abolish this practice had just started its passage through parliament; but it was the grotesque difference between the treatment of Castlereagh and Griffiths that gave the new humane view its impetus.
Some did not agree. In July some of the press were still trying to justify the horrid burial of Griffiths. The Sussex Advertiser published information, not available at the inquest, that Griffiths had bought, rationally and calmly, two guns from a reputed Holborn gunsmith two days before the event. They were trying to reintroduce some pre-planning into the death and justify the unpopular verdict. However, juries were more regularly giving people the benefit of the doubt. More examples appeared in the press of people carefully arranging their own death; on one occasion an unknown man bought a gun, retired to a hotel, went back twice to the gunsmith to fix the weapon, and then killed himself. He was still declared a lunatic.