Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Cockburn’s opening statement set a standard of debate and knowledge about mental illness and the insanity defence that had never before been seen in an English court. Amongst much else, it showed the growing sophistication of the medical literature on madness that had come into the public arena over the last decade. Cockburn, a Scotsman and an intellectual, drew on the authorities: ‘Science is ever on the advance; and, no doubt, science of this kind, like every other, is in the advance of the generality of mankind ... We who have the ordinary duties of our several stations and the business of our respective avocations to occupy our full attention, cannot be so well informed upon it as those who have scientifically pursued the study and treatment of the disease [of madness].’

  Cockburn then turned to the ‘doctrines of matured science’ and quoted from Dr James Pritchard’s On the Different Forms of Insanity in Relation to Jurisprudence, published the preceding year. He drew on the American expert in the field Dr Isaac Ray, and his Treatise on the Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity (1838). Both criticized the verdicts in the Arnold and Bellingham trials, while Ray also took issue with Justice Hale, who had been blind to the power of ‘those nice shades of the disease in which the mind, without being wholly driven from its propriety, pertinaciously clings to some absurd delusion ... Could Lord Hale have contemplated the scenes presented by the lunatic asylums of our own times, we should undoubtedly have received from him a very different doctrine for the regulations of the decisions of after generations’ Cockburn even cited the French authority Charles Chrétien Henri Marc, physician for twenty-three years to Louis-Philippe, who in 1840 had published De la Folie dans ses rapports avec les questions médico-legales.

  Marc’s main emphasis was that insanity was no simply understood disorder of thought, or ‘cognition’ as we would say today; but a condition in which the will was perverted and the self couldn’t be mastered, functioning as it did not so much without reason, but against the reasoning self. These distortions of passion and volition, after Esquirol, would ever be a primary part of the language of the French mind doctors, though the English legal system was loath to allow into the courts any defence on the grounds of ‘irresistible impulse’ or toppling of volition.

  Cockburn even called on David Hume’s Commentaries on the Law of Scotland to dispute that, to be acknowledged by a court, madness must needs expect of the accused that he ‘must have lost all knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong’. For Hume, this was a delicate question. The accused might say it was wrong to kill a neighbour and ‘yet is so absolutely mad as to have lost all true observation of facts, all understanding of the good or bad intention of those who are around him, or even the knowledge of their persons’. Every judgement in the matter of right and wrong, Hume wrote, and Cockburn argued, ‘supposes a case, or state of facts, to which it applies’. And though the accused may have the vestige of reason which enables him to answer in the general that murder is a crime, yet ‘if he cannot distinguish his friend from his enemy, or a benefit from an injury, but conceive everything about him to be the reverse of what it really is, and mistake the illusions of his fancy realities in respect of his own condition and that of others, those remains of intellect are of no use to him towards the government of his actions, nor in enabling him to form a judgment on any particular situation or conjunction of what is right or wrong with regard to it’.

  If the great Hume didn’t suffice to make the case, Cockburn then proceeded to call on medical experts to prove that M’Naghten’s delusions had left him in a state where he was no longer a ‘reasonable and responsible being’. Dr Forbes Winslow was one of the medics to argue that these delusions had robbed M’Naghten of all restraint over his actions. Everyone was swayed by Cockburn’s eloquence. Without leaving the box, the jury gave a hurried verdict of ‘not guilty on the ground of insanity’. M’Naghten was discharged and moved to Bethlem Hospital under an order from the Home Secretary. He remained there until 1864, a quiet, methodical inmate but increasingly ‘imbecilic’, and was then transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum where he died a year later.

  But M’Naghten’s name, in any variety of spellings, echoes through the courts into our own day.

  The public outcry over his not-guilty verdict was similar to the explosions of moral outrage seen in our own time when an accused deemed to be ‘schizophrenic’ or diagnosed with a ‘dangerous personality disorder’ seems literally to be getting away with murder. In 1843, the unease amongst jurists and the profession about the status of insanity in criminal trials, and the question of how to decide on responsibility, prompted an immediate response from the House of Lords. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Lyndhurst, convened a debate thus:

  The circumstances connected with that trial have created a deep sensation amongst your Lordships, and also in the public mind. I am not surprised at this. A gentleman in the prime of life, of a most amiable character, incapable of giving offence or of injuring any individual, was murdered in the streets of this metropolis in open day. The assassin was secured; he was committed for trial; that trial has taken place, and he has escaped with impunity. Your Lordships will not be surprised that these circumstances should have created a deep feeling in the public mind, and that many persons should, upon the first impression, be disposed to think that there is some great defect in the laws of the country with reference to this subject w hich calls for a revision of those laws, in order that a repetition of such outrages may be prevented.

  Twelve judges of the Court of Common Pleas were duly convened and asked to consider five questions put to them by the Lords, many of them themselves lawyers. All the questions dealt in some way with the effect on law of alleging that a prisoner was suffering from delusion or partial madness. The Lords were not interested in the complexities of mental illness. Their concern was the proper working of the law and a firm definition of what constituted criminal responsibility in this area. On 19 June, the judges attended the Lords in order to provide their answers. Their one major clarification on previous law was to take on Hume’s point and relate insanity not to any abstract or general knowledge of right and wrong, but to a knowledge of right and wrong with respect to their particular crime. The basic addition to the law that the much cited M’Naghten rules specify reads:

  The jury ought to be told in all cases that every man is to be presumed to be sane, and to possess a sufficient degree of reason to be responsible for his crimes, until the contrary can be proved to their satisfaction; and that, to establish a defence on the ground of insanity, it must be clearly proved, that, at the time of the committing of the act, the party accused was labouring under such a defect of reason, from disease of the mind, as not to know the nature and quality of the act he was doing, or, if he did know it, that he did not know that what he was doing was wrong.

  The judges also introduced a clarification that would lead to further decades of confusion and argument in Anglo-American and Commonwealth courtrooms. The Lords had asked them to consider the question: if a person under an insane delusion as to existing facts commits an offence in consequence thereof, is he thereby excused?

  ‘Not altogether,’ came the answer – itself a perfect model of misunderstanding, since it seemed to demand of the deluded person the same degree of ‘reason, judgment and controlling mental power’ as it did of one in sound mental health, an American judge later noted. The M’Naghten judges would have it that if the person labours under a partial delusion ‘and is not in other respects insane’, he should be considered in the same way as a sane person. Tor example, if under the influence of his delusion, he supposes another man to be in the act of attempting to take away his life, and he kills that man, as he supposes, in self-defence, he would be exempt from punishment. If his delusion was that the deceased had inflicted a serious injury to his character and fortune, and he killed him in revenge for such supposed injury, he would be liable to punishment.’

  In the practice of everyday justice, all this led to muddle: insanity r
ulings had little consistency. Twenty-nine years after M’Naghten, when Christiana Edmunds came to trial, nothing much had changed, except that the numbers of mental specialists had grown. So had the population of asylum inhabitants.

  10. ‘Enceinte! She Says She Is, My Lord’

  In the summary remarks of Sergeants at Law Ballantine and Parry and in Judge Baron Martin’s final address to the jury in R. v Edmunds, the legal definition of insanity and its tangled history in English courts played a major part.

  Parry began by arguing that the crime for which Christiana was being charged had no motive. She had no direct reason to murder the boy, Sidney Barker. Parry then moved on to the terrain of insanity, his main defence. He drew on the case of Hadfield, pointing out that even within his delusion he knew he had attempted murder, yet no one had questioned his insanity nor the propriety of a verdict that had named him mad. In Christiana’s case the family record of insanity was greater than he, in his wide experience, had ever witnessed. All the experts as well as the Reverend at Lewes jail agreed that she was insane. Would this case end up being a contest between the law and medical science? The men who had made ‘mental disease their particular study were benefactors of the human race’ and were entitled to respect. They deemed Christiana to be of ‘unsound mind’ and incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong, which was the ultimate test of insanity.

  Ballantine responded with a rather different review of the case. His step-by-step description of Christiana’s doings showed her to be ‘a woman exhibiting powers of great contrivance and considerable cunning’. It was clear that Dr Beard’s imputation of a crime against his wife had set her on the path of folly. The primary motive of the prisoner, he submitted, was to absolve herself from blame in a family with which she had been intimate and ‘to fix on anybody else the culpability that would otherwise attach to herself’. This is what had resulted in the death of Sidney Barker.

  In a shrewd piece of argument, Ballantine first praised the medical experts. Then, using a ploy still common today, he made light of and undermined their expertise, in particular its peculiar and obscure language. He did not deny, he stated, that the matter of ‘hereditary taint’ was one that might be fairly raised in matters of lunacy, but it could not on its own prove that an individual was insane. While ‘a more noble profession than that of medicine, as it was constituted in this country never had existed’, he couldn’t help thinking that in this case the doctors had gone into the witness box confident in their own powers of verbiage but failing to convey any clear idea of Christiana’s condition. In other words, the expert witnesses had dressed up opinion as science through the medium of obfuscating language.

  Ballantine went on to finish with a flourish reminiscent of Erskine’s defence of Hatfield (Hadfield), all the while out-doctoring the medics in his play on delusion’s legal history. In the case of Hatfield, Ballantine argued, there had been an admitted delusion, as there had also been in the case of M’Naghten. Where there was an admitted delusion and where the act done was the necessary consequence of such delusion, then the person was not responsible for his actions. Lockhart Robertson had said the prisoner’s intellect was clear and free from delusion. Insanity essentially consisted in delusions, and without delusions there might be mania, but there could be no insanity.

  The fact that Christiana’s doctors had opted for an insistence on hereditary madness, the time’s fashionable medical theory about insanity, and had never attributed a fully delusional state to her, meant that they were out of sync with current legal emphases. But then, focusing on Christiana’s ‘delusion’ would have meant teasing out the whole romantic and psychosexual ramifications of her passionate infatuation with Dr Charles Beard, and that would have been as morally slippery as putting erotic love on trial, not to mention their own profession. They had steered clear of that option, but had veered into a catch-22. The law tried individuals, not families, and though out of the courtroom, judges and lawyers may have bought into the period’s hereditarian arguments about madness, inside the Old Bailey individual knowledge of right and wrong at the time of the criminal act was what prevailed.

  Baron (Samuel) Martin (1801–83) summed up the case for the jury. He was a senior judge and a respected member of his profession. He had been called to the Bar in 1830 at a time when the medical specialists in madness were only just beginning their explorations of the mind. He had served as a Liberal MP, worked for many years in the Court of Exchequer, had been knighted in 1850, and was known as a judge of ‘unusual strength’, one who didn’t mind imposing heavy sentences. He was also kindly and often found mitigating circumstances. By the time of Christiana’s trial, he was already very deaf, a fact that would lead him to retire just two years later.

  There were two principal questions for the jury to consider, Baron Martin contended. The first was whether they believed the boy who had testified to buying chocolate creams at Mr Maynard’s at the request of the prisoner; whether they also believed that Christiana had contrived to substitute these with poisoned chocolates that went back into the shop to be purchased by Sidney Albert Barker’s uncle. The second question was whether the prisoner ‘was in such a state of mind as to be responsible for her actions’. Baron Martin reviewed the evidence to do with Christiana’s procurement of considerable quantities of strychnine, the manner in which she had given sweets to children in the street and left them in shops, and the illnesses those who had eaten them had suffered. He referred to her voluntary appearance before the coroner.

  Next, he addressed the more difficult question of Miss Edmunds’s insanity. It was evidently not a plea he found altogether satisfactory. In the courts, he pointed out, ‘a poor person was rarely afflicted with insanity’, though it was a common enough defence when people of means were charged with the commission of a crime. He had ‘heard a doctor say that all mankind were mad more or less’. But this, he agreed, was an aside.

  He then set out to review the law on madness. The state of mind that excused crime was well fixed in English law. There was the idiot who was born without any mind whatsoever; there was the man who was raging mad, and if he had what was called a ‘homicidal tendency’ he would have no more criminal responsibility than a tiger. The most numerous cases were persons said to be subject to delusions, who believed in a state of things which did not exist and acted on that state of things. To weigh the law dealing with ‘delusion’ as an insanity defence, Baron Martin read great chunks of the responses given to the Lords by the judges asked to clarify the state of the law after the M’Naghten ruling. In particular he read out the response of Justice Maule, the one judge to stand out against all the others and defiantly refuse any new medical knowledge or more lenient interpretation of criminal responsibility for the insane. Maule was a conservative for whom Hale was good enough. Those suffering from delusions, the partially insane, were responsible for their crimes. Only absolute unsoundness of mind provided an exemption, as far as he was concerned. Baron Martin submitted that on the high authority of these historic judges, every man must be responsible for his acts until it was shown to the contrary. Nonetheless, if the jury judged that the prisoner did not know right from wrong at the time she committed the crime, if she did commit it, they should acquit her on the grounds of insanity.

  After that lecture, the jury didn’t take long. They were back in exactly an hour and spoke their verdict to a court that was now densely crowded: Christiana Edmunds was pronounced ‘Guilty’.

  Now the drama of the day’s proceedings leapt towards an unexpected climax. Asked by the clerk in the usual manner if she had anything to say as to why the court should not give her judgement to die, Christiana sprang up and replied that she ‘wished she had been tried on the other charge which had been brought against her, namely her so-called improper intimacy with Dr Beard. That was the subject she wished to be examined on.’

  A leap of the imagination into Christiana’s position in the dock shows us a woman who has patiently waited, all
the while making notes and following proceedings, for what to her is the crucial part of the trial. After all, if there is any delusion on her part, it is that passionate delusion of having done everything in the name of love, a love that she saw as returned. And now this passion, whatever its exaggerated or delusive aspect, is not to be weighed, explained, confessed, witnessed, acknowledged in court. There is to be no mutual ceremony, no public recognition of its potential two-sidedness. No letters are to be read. Her lover, real or imaginary, is not to be interrogated. And nor is she. But the one act of real violence she has committed was that sudden, impulsive and irresistible act of thrusting a poisoned chocolate cream into Emily Beard’s mouth – an eruption out of love and hatred, out of an attempt to legitimize her relations (real or desired or utterly fantasized) with Charles.

  This whole sexual-romantic-passionate matter has not been tried, and now won’t be. Baron Martin has already donned the black cap which sits atop his long, wavy white wig. He looks down at her through his spectacles, his porcine face unsmiling yet gentle. He explains to her that it does not ‘rest with him to have her tried on that charge, but with the prosecution who had not brought it’.

  But, Miss Edmunds pleads – with what The Times calls ‘modesty and propriety’ – ‘it is owing to my having been a patient of his, and the treatment I received in going to him, that I have been brought into this dreadful business. I wish the jury had known the intimacy, his affection for me, and the way I have been treated.’