by David Crane
It perhaps says everything that needs saying about her faintly erotic blend of Methodistical piety and worldly allure – ‘highly interesting’ was the seasoned Newgate-watcher’s verdict on her – that it took her heavily pregnant new mistress in Chancery Lane less than a month to rumble the danger a young woman like that might be in her household. ‘I am the wife of Mr Robert Gregson Turner, who is a law-stationer in Chancery-lane, in partnership with his father, Mr. Orlibar Turner,’ Charlotte Turner had begun her own version of the events that within two months would turn a servant girl of blameless character into a convicted poisoner fighting for her life. There had been an ‘incident’ only weeks after she had come into service with them, she told the court, when she had seen the prisoner emerging from their apprentices’ room ‘partly undressed’ – and with hindsight Eliza Fenning’s fate was already sealed. For the next month, the young woman’s attitude had continued to displease her mistress, but then sometime near the beginning of March there had been a change and Eliza had asked if she could make some dumplings at which she said she was ‘a capital hand’. Over the next three weeks the request was repeated frequently, and on Monday 20 March, Charlotte Turner had reluctantly agreed, telling her that she might as well make some for the family the next day after she had made a meat pie for the apprentices.
The jury, if they were listening that is – the country beyond the walls of the Old Bailey certainly was – must have learned more about the making of dumplings than they can have either expected or wanted to know, but the gist of the case was clear. The apprentices ate at two in the afternoon and the family at three, Charlotte Turner explained, and she had barely had time to serve her husband, Robert, and his father, Orlibar, their dumplings and try a small piece for herself before an ‘excruciating pain’ – ‘an extreme violent pain, which increased every minute’ – followed by retching and a swelling of the tongue, head and chest, drove her upstairs where she lay prostrate in bed for the next six hours.
Robert and his father had also been taken ill, and by the time ‘Mr Marshall, the surgeon’, was called, Eliza lay similarly doubled up ‘in agonies below stairs’. The wonderfully Dickensian Orlibar Turner had spent the afternoon between the parlour and the backyard retching uncontrollably, but by the time that same evening that William Fenning turned up to see his daughter, Turner was recovered enough – and suspicious enough – to order the maid, Sarah Peer, to tell the father that Eliza was out on ‘a message for her mistress’.
The family’s first unshakeable conviction that night, was that they had been poisoned, the second that it was arsenic, the third that it was the dumplings, and the next morning Orlibar Turner went into the kitchen to inspect the remains of their Tuesday lunch. He put some water into the pan in which Eliza had mixed the dumplings, and stirring it up with a spoon ‘to form a liquid of the whole’, allowed it to settle for a moment or two before carefully tilting it to reveal at the bottom a distinct residue of ‘white powder’.
There was no doubt in his mind that it was arsenic, and none either in the mind of the surgeon, Marshall, when he returned that morning to see his patients. He had been sure enough the previous evening that their symptoms were those of arsenic poisoning, and when he repeated Orlibar’s experiment, washing the dish in warm water, allowing it to subside and then decanting off the liquid, there – in all its damning, rigorously achieved, scientific purity – was the ‘half-teaspoon of white powder’ that they had been looking for. ‘I washed it the second time,’ he later declared, and ‘decidedly found it to be arsenic. Arsenic cut with a knife will produce the appearance of blackness on the knife; I have no doubt of it. There was not a grain of arsenic in the yeast: I examined the flour-tub; there was no arsenic there.’
There was obviously genuine horror in the discovery – the thought of ‘poison’ and an unknown poisoner in their midst was an insidious fear for any household – and in the young and newly arrived Eliza Fenning, the unprotected daughter of an upholsterer and ex-soldier, family, apprentices and maid had found their perfect scapegoat. By the time that Marshall had finished with the dumpling dish Eliza was sicker than any of them, but that did not stop the Turners sending for an officer from Hatton Garden to stand guard, and the next day, Maundy Thursday – she was too ill to be moved any earlier – Eliza was taken into custody, charged and transported in an open carriage across London to the New Clerkenwell prison. ‘I now lay ill at the infirmary sick ward,’ she wrote to a man called Edward on 29 March – a man to whom she clearly considered herself engaged; ‘My mother attends me three times a day, and brings me everything I can wish for; but, Edward, I never shall be right or happy again, to think I ever was in prison.’
The shame was real enough – the shame of a girl brought up by respectable, hard-working and God-fearing parents – but it is clear that she had still not fully realised the danger she was in. On 30 March she was again brought before the magistrate, and faced with the choice of a £20 bail that she could never hope to raise or immediate committal to Newgate, chose to stand trial and clear herself at the coming sessions, due to open in just over a week.
It gave her little time to prepare a defence, especially a defence against accusers as deeply embedded in the legal world as the Turners, but with only the £5 that her parents had scratched together, time would have done her little good. For the princely sum of two guineas the Fennings had managed to secure Eliza the unenthusiastic services of a barrister called Alley, but with the rest of the money disappearing in Newgate ‘gratuities’ there remained nothing – money, interest, credibility – to stand between her and those retributive winds of ‘justice’ that howled through the cold, disease-breeding cells of England’s most infamous prison.
No one could have walked beneath the grim exterior of Nathaniel Dance’s gaol with its massive, blind, yard-thick walls, and its notorious Debtor’s Gate from which the condemned emerged for the last time, and expected any shelter for its inmates from Thomas Moore’s protective ‘thicket of the laws’. Within the prison walls there were areas that not even the governor or a turnkey would have dared to enter alone, and of all of them the women’s yard was notoriously the worst, a savage and overcrowded hell of drunkenness, filth, degradation and despair.
For a few, illusory days at the beginning of April, Eliza Fenning must at least have had the hope of public justification to keep her from slipping beneath the mire, but that can have lasted no longer than the opening of her trial on the 11th. In the first third of the nineteenth century the Old Bailey was at the best of times the bloodiest court in England, and the Recorder for London in 1815 was the loathsome Sir John Silvester – a man notorious in an age of mediocre Tory placemen for a callousness and corruption that made no scruple of demanding a wife’s favours as the price of a husband’s reprieve.
There was possibly something about Eliza Fenning – perhaps her combination of prettiness (which he certainly noticed) and unavailability – that goaded the old lecher into particular irritability, but she probably received no better or worse a trial than any of the other prisoners hauled up to learn their fates. There is nothing but the sessions reports to gather any sense of the fairness or not of the other verdicts handed down that session, and yet in the transcripts of Eliza Fenning’s trial – the official, carefully edited version on which any subsequent appeal would be based and the full script of the court shorthand writer – there survives so disturbing an insight into the battery-farm ‘justice’ handed down at the Old Bailey that it would echo down Home Office minutes and abolitionist debate for the best part of another eighty years.
Even before proceedings had opened, there was a built-in bias against the prisoner in a capital trial – and no one knew quite how many capital offences there were on the books, but certainly well over two hundred – because at that time and for another twenty years there was no summing up permitted to the defence. In the case of Eliza Fenning this might have made no difference as her two-guinea counsel had already left the court, and long
before that anyway the overt prejudice of the judge and the carefully rehearsed and choreographed evidence of the prosecution’s witnesses had made the jury’s verdict a virtual formality.
The earlier row with Charlotte Turner, the prisoner’s ‘disarranged’ dress, her brooding ‘sulkiness’, her repeated requests to make dumplings, their odd and heavy appearance, the impossibility of anyone else having touched them, her utter indifference to her employers’ suffering, her knowledge of where the rat poison was kept, her ability to read and write, and finally, the residue of white powder and Marshall’s blackened knife: one by one, family, apprentice, maid and surgeon stood up to give their damning evidence that pointed in only one direction.
There is no way of knowing with absolute certainty whether Eliza Fenning was innocent or guilty but the one unarguable fact is that there was too much doubt to convict. There may have been a superficial – even suspicious – coherence to the witnesses’ depositions, but in a case that ultimately depended on opportunity and motive even two guineas should have been enough to secure an acquittal.
If every spat between servant and mistress, as one observer noted, had ended in a poisoning no one in Georgian London would have been safe, and still no one seems to have asked how likely it was that the young woman of ‘integrity, sobriety, cheerfulness and humanity’ a string of character witnesses described could have plotted so appalling a mass murder. It might have been conceivable if the prosecution had evoked a crime of passion, but their case was that on the basis of a single, trivial scolding from Charlotte Turner back in January, she had stolen the poison from her master’s office, secreted it away for more than a fortnight in a room she shared with her fellow servant, and then systematically and ruthlessly worked on her mistress to secure herself the opportunity to settle an old score.
It was not as if she was the only one with access to poison or dumplings, or that any of the prosecution witnesses were unimpeachable – Charlotte Turner’s version of events was demonstrably inaccurate, Sarah Peer was self-confessedly no friend to the prisoner, the apprentice Gadsden who spoke against her seems to have had his advances repelled, Marshall would not have known arsenic if it came labelled in a bottle – but between Alley’s indolence and the Recorder’s hostility Eliza Fenning’s hopes slowly guttered away. It did not even seem to have troubled anyone that a young woman of her intelligence should have so thoroughly poisoned herself, but perhaps by that time an experienced Old Bailey hand like Alley could see the way the wind was blowing, and that nothing more was to be gained by coming between Sir John Silvester and his assize dinner.
Silvester had certainly already done all he could to influence the outcome – allowing or discounting evidence as it suited the prosecution case, denying Eliza the witnesses she asked for, silencing her father before he could even speak – and as the prisoner’s last hopeless plea of innocence echoed around the court room all that was left was to instruct the jury.
‘Gentleman, you have now heard the evidence given on this trial,’ Silvester concluded his heavily weighted summary: ‘And the case lies in a very narrow compass … The prisoner, when taxed with poisoning the dumplings threw the blame first on the milk, next on the yeast, and then on the sauce; but it has been proved most satisfactorily, that none of these contained it, and that it was in the dumplings alone, which no person but the prisoner had made. Gentleman, if poison had been given even to a dog, one would suppose that even common humanity would have prompted us to assist it in its agonies: here is a case of a master and mistress being both poisoned, and no assistance was offered. Gentleman, I have now stated all the facts as they have arisen, and I leave the case in your hands, being fully persuaded that, whatever your verdict may be, you will conscientiously discharge your duty both to your God and to your country.’
In the London of 1815, a nervous, combustible city stirred by undercurrents of disaffection and suspicions of Jacobinism, Sir John Silvester could afford his confidence, because as he looked at the jurymen – gentlemen, mercer, saddler, vintner, coal merchant, and one man so deaf he had heard nothing of the trial – he might have been looking at the Turners’ natural allies. There had been absolutely no proof offered that Eliza Fenning had so much as seen the poison that the Turners kept in an office drawer, or that the arsenic was in the dumplings or – for that matter – that any crime had been committed at all, but within five to ten minutes the jury were back with the inevitable verdict of guilty.
The foreman had even prefixed it with an apologetic explanation that they would have been even quicker if they had not had to go over it all with the deaf Edward Beasley, but for Eliza Fenning it came like a bolt out of the blue. In the days before the trial she had genuinely looked forward to the chance of clearing her name, but now for the first time she collapsed, and had to be ‘carried from the bar convulsed with agony, and uttering frightful screams’.
There was, though, one last public charade to go through before Silvester was done with her, and on the 15th of April, at the end of the sessions, she was brought back to court with the nine other convicted prisoners for sentencing. She would at least have recognised the women in the dock from the women’s side in Newgate, but as one by one the sentences were handed down and another forger, horse stealer, burglar, returnee, child rapist or sodomite was sentenced to the gallows, the young, particularly fastidious, twenty-two-year-old Methodist-taught servant girl must have realised for the first time just how deep the pit was into which she had sunk.
That had been two months ago – two months since, as she told her parents, she had been numbered among the walking dead – and all she could do now was wait and pray. The blaspheming rapist William Oldfield had been told by Silvester to expect no mercy this side of the grave, but except for him and the fifty-eight-year-old sodomite Abraham Adams – the invisible, unmentionable spectre at the Recorder’s feast – all could still cling on to hope as they waited to learn whether the fount of royal mercy that flowed from the vast and improbable bulk of the Prince Regent had marked them for the gallows or for Sydney.1
It might take weeks or even months to discover whether ‘the Prince Regent in Council’ would confirm or commute a sentence – weeks of wildly fluctuating hope and terror for the condemned – and as May had turned into June and Bonaparte quitted Paris to join his army, Eliza Fenning had still been waiting to know her fate. ‘As to exercise, where can I take it?’ she asked plaintively – she would seem to have had a London accent from the one unedited letter of hers that survives: ‘excepting I am to intermix with those who are lost to every principle … I believe I had better leave this dreadful place to go to a better world, than to be sent to another country with such desperate wretches. Mary Ann Clark [under sentence of death for stealing in a dwelling house] is the person I sleep with, and she is the only one that has the least feeling, but we have not any other prisoners as yet with us. As we are the four that are under sentence, Mr Cotton does not think it proper to place any person with us.’
As the weeks passed, her relationship with the evangelical champion of property and the law, the Prison Ordinary the Reverend Cotton, had deteriorated into open hostility and her letters chart the slow, inexorable guttering of her spirits. There were still days of hope and religious resignation, but this Sunday morning she had refused communion from him and in between the exalted Methodistical outbursts ran a more bitter and authentic realisation of the system that had her in its grasp. ‘Be careful of Mr Cotton,’ she wrote desperately to the reformed rapist Oldfield, who had undergone a classic death-cell ‘conversion’, her letter bleakly headed from ‘the Bottom of Master’s side’ and addressed to ‘Oldfield, condemned cell’: ‘Some one has made evil report to him about me; and I fear it has done me much harm.’
There can have been nothing unusual in these swings of mood, the alternating days of despondency and defiance, the creeping paranoia, the fits of weeping, the self-dramatisation – these were the natural operations of fear, humiliation and alienation on human be
ings already at the furthest pitch of emotional endurance – but what is unusual is that the record of it survives. The names of those felons condemned alongside her – Beard, Cambridge, Sweetman, Elizabeth Young – had disappeared from public consciousness long before this Sunday, but in these weeks around 18 June, while Cotton harried and bullied her for a confession of guilt and she waited for the fount of royal mercy to trickle into life, something was stirring outside the walls of Newgate that would turn the conviction of Eliza Fenning into a battleground of nineteenth-century legal and political life.
In the climate of the time the battle would inevitably take on a party colouring, but beyond the influence of government newspapers the pressure to re-examine the case against Eliza Fenning was gathering momentum. There was strong professional disquiet at the brutal conduct of the trial, and as the focus shifted to the crucial evidence of the surgeon, and a chemist repeated his experiments to demonstrate that, if the prosecution were to be believed, there must have been enough arsenic in Mrs Turner’s quarter of a dumpling alone to have killed 120 people, the integrity of witnesses, process and conviction all stood arraigned in the same dock.
Never before had a criminal case been subjected to such close and critical scrutiny – not a single deposition or discrepancy in evidence, not a bullying intervention of Silvester’s or failure of Alley’s, not a lie of Mrs Turner and Sarah Peer or an ‘expert’ claim went unchallenged – and if Eliza Fenning had not done it, then, as Leigh Hunt’s Examiner asked, who had? In the early weeks in prison she had asked the same dangerous question herself, and if she was no closer to an answer this Sunday than she had ever been the terrible paradox of her position was that in the mere act of asking – in the threat it posed to the Turner household and the challenge it threw down to the authority of Silvester and his court – Eliza had transformed herself from a helpless victim of legal indifference into a nuisance that needed crushing. ‘Some one,’ as she wrote, ‘must be guilty, and I still hope it will [be] strictly inquired into.’ Perhaps, at times, she believed that herself. But after two long months in Newgate, she would have been familiar enough with the system to know that the man who would do the inquiring and take her case to the ‘Prince Regent in Council’ would be Sir John Silvester himself.