Trials of Passion

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Christiana was not to have the luxury of either public self-justification or revenge, or even of speaking her love out loud. This fact may only just have become clear to her. She had, it would seem, been waiting for far more. Baron Martin says hastily that he is inclined to believe her statement. The unhappy circumstances in which she placed herself towards the end of 1870 had indeed led to the position that she was now in; but the truth of that only confirmed the propriety of the verdict. In order to have her case fairly tried, he himself had wished to keep out the whole business with Beard. The more he thought of that matter, the clearer it was to him that to bring it in was only calculated to make her position worse.

  Baron Martin is suggesting in publicly tactful terms that if Christiana’s immorality, her sin against Victorian womanhood and the state of marriage, against all those respectable women now crowded in the courtroom, had been spelled out, it would so radically have affected her trial, so surely have turned the jury against her – as not only a criminal, but also as a sexually desiring and immoral, monstrous woman – that its fairness, from his point of view, would have been compromised. When you’ve been condemned to death, fairness hardly seems to be a problem, Christiana might well have thought. Her desire is to tell, to sing her passion, to prove that it hasn’t been imaginary, but provoked. Her one prior utterance to the court, after all, was to protest that she wasn’t mad!

  But Baron Martin is still speaking. He is saying that he was quite satisfied that it was the unhappy circumstances under which she had become acquainted with Dr and Mrs Beard that had led to her bouts of poisoning. He, however, had only one duty to perform. He concurs with the jury’s verdict in rejecting the defence of insanity: it was the right conclusion. The real question was not whether she was a person of weak mind, but whether her mind was in a state to distinguish right from wrong. Given her letters, it was clear that she could do that, and it was difficult for the jury to arrive at any other conclusion but that she was guilty.

  From today’s vantage point, it could seem Baron Martin is suggesting that distinguishing between right and wrong is not only a legal definition of sanity, but a moral distinction that brings female respectability in its train. Christiana knew that her love for Dr Beard was wrong, and while it isn’t admissible to speak of it in the courtroom, it is better that she and they all recognize its ‘wrongness’. Sorry as he is for her, she is guilty of a death, as well as of failing to recognize the immorality that led to it.

  Baron Martin then embarked on the ritual form of words. The law imposed on him the duty to pass the sentence of death upon her. It would be carried out in the county of Sussex where the crime was committed. With much fervency, he prayed that the Lord would have mercy on her soul.

  Standing in front of him at the supreme moment, Christiana’s bearing was ‘singularly firm’, both ‘respectful and becoming’. Her face was slightly flushed, and her eyes beamed with an unwonted expression, yet she betrayed no visible emotion. She heard her sentence with fortitude. But Christiana was not simply the noble heroine of Victorian rectitude who accepted her many-faceted guilt with the submission and stoicism The Times wished for and described. She was inevitably more complicated than that.

  In the ‘mercy and justice of the English Law’, as Reynold's News pointed out coyly, using French to racy effect, ‘a woman condemned to death, who is enceinte, is respited until after the birth of her child. It is usual, therefore, to interrogate the convict upon the point at the time of the sentence and before the date is fixed for execution.’ When the clerk of arraigns put the customary question to Christiana, she whispered to the female warder, who whispered to the jailer, who said aloud, ‘She says she is, my Lord.’

  The court heaved with audible excitement. This was the very stuff of sensational fiction. ‘Let the sheriff empanel a jury of matrons forthwith,’ the judge ordered.

  It had been over fifteen years since this ancient tradition had been invoked in the Central Criminal Court. Christiana could not have expressed more clearly her passion for Dr Beard and what had, according to her, transpired within it. And now ‘under-sheriffs, with swords, cocked hats, and frills’, sallied into the body of the court and galleries in quest of ‘matrons’ who would put Christiana’s announcement of pregnancy to the physical test.

  In some twenty minutes, a dozen ‘well-to-do and respectably dressed women’ were found, and directed to enter the witness box. One of them, Mrs Adelaide Whittaw, was sworn separately as a forewoman, the others all together, and it was arranged that they would examine the prisoner in the sheriff’s parlour. Christiana joined them there. Half an hour later a messenger came into the court and whispered to the judge, who passed his question on to the court. Was there an ‘accoucheur’ in the room? – in other words an obstetrician-gynaecologist. A doctor was duly found and directed to join the women. After another half-hour the messenger returned to the courtroom, this time in search of a stethoscope for the doctor. The rumour went round, injecting a little comedy into the tense drama, that a policeman had earlier been sent out and mistakenly brought back a telescope. After a further suspense-filled delay, the prisoner and the matrons took up their places in the courtroom once more. The forewoman pronounced a single word – ‘Not.’

  Reynold's News was highly contemptuous of this jury of upstanding, middle-aged women, this scandalous anachronism that reeks of witchcraft and ancient times and should ‘be consigned to the limbo of historical curiosities’ in favour of ‘a proper scientific investigation by competent medical men’. The medical doctor recruited from the public in the courtroom felt the same way. Dr Beresford Ryley, surgeon of the Metropolitan Police, Woolwich District, described the experience to the British Medical Journal. Reynold’s News, as well as The Times, reprinted it as a ‘plea for Christiana Edmunds’. Here was sensation and science all in one.

  Beresford Ryley was one of the doctors Christiana’s solicitors had asked to visit her in Newgate, with the possibility of certifying her insane before her trial. He had been unable to obtain access when he had visited, but he subsequently attended her trial and had ended up on the matrons’ panel which, he stated, treated their responsibility ‘with feelings of no ordinary gravity and seriousness’. Ryley found that a very superficial examination of the ‘unfortunate lady convinced me that the hope of reprieve from her dreadful doom that she had inspired within us all was utterly delusive. I aked her to save herself and me the distress of a more minute scrutiny by retracting the statement she had made, should it be false, but as she still persisted therein, I was obliged to make the usual stethoscopic examination.’ Only after this did the ‘full peril of her situation dawn upon her for the first time.’

  The awful aspect of her despair was terrible to behold,’ he writes. The poor ladies – ‘of good social position and unusual intelligence’ – who were her unwilling judges wept around her, while she, unhappy creature, ‘looked from one to the other in mute, unspeakable woe’. Sadly, Ryley doesn’t reveal the full conversation that he and Christiana had, since it would not be becoming. He does say that she asked ‘with a weary agony in her voice, “Oh how shall I sleep tonight?”’ He recommends that she ask the prison surgeon for a draught of chloral hydrate, which may serve as a ‘tender and compassionate physician to her poor aching mind’. It was, he says, one of the most solemn and pitiful scenes in which he has ever been an actor.

  Ryley then moves on to science and law. He specifies that the panel’s duty was not merely to find out whether Miss Edmunds was pregnant, but whether she was ‘quick with child’, and the ‘absurd and obsolete custom of empanelling twelve matrons to try’ such an issue was ridiculous, since they could have no reliable ground on which to come to a decision. Given that Christiana had been in custody for five months before her trial, and hadn’t quickened, that conclusively proved she wasn’t pregnant. It also proved that there had been no reasonable ground for her statement. Ryley is clear that Christiana’s claim to pregnancy in conjunction with her ‘heedless aspe
ct throughout the trial’, plus the facts about heredity there presented, constitute prima facie evidence of insanity. There is now a strong case on which ‘to memorialize’, in other words to petition the Home Secretary for a reprieve.

  It may well be that for Christiana, the public announcement of her pregnancy was not unlike the gesture of forcing a poisoned chocolate into Emily Beard’s mouth. It was an eruption of her inner delusional scenario (which may or may not have been triggered by actions performed by Beard on that cusp where the medical and the seductive meet, perhaps even by some form of vaginal penetration, real or mechanical). It was a way of telling the world that her secret love existed and could no longer be secretly contained. Having acted in a masculine fashion in her first poisoning attempt, Christiana is now asserting herself feminine. Her pregnancy is the expression of an inner anxiety about gender and an unconscious wish. And if she wasn’t pregnant in the flesh, Dr Beard had certainly impregnated her mind and her imagination. In a French court, there is no question but that her crime would have been understood as a derailment by erotic passion.

  Though the justice system in Britain didn’t recognize crimes of passion (or any form of madness that had no primary cognitive base), or openly tolerate any leniency towards them, it’s quite clear that Christiana’s final act in court affected Baron Martin as well as the public and the doctor who examined her. Perhaps for all her seeming sanity, according to the legal weighing of evidence, Christiana did suffer from a delusion that had robbed her of her reason.

  On 18 January, the trial barely over, and having just had time to consult some fellow judges, Samuel Baron Martin wrote to the Home Secretary, Henry Austin Bruce, to draw his attention to the case of Christiana Edmunds, convicted of murder before him. Although the ‘defence of insanity failed in evidence’ during the trial and the verdict was correct in point of law, Baron Martin does not think Miss Edmunds a proper subject for execution. He then details the family’s insanity and her own history of early derangement, as well as her mother’s fear that Christiana would be once again affected at menopause and at the same age as her father. The Home Secretary can see the medical men’s evidence as well as the report of the trial in the press, he adds.

  ‘My belief is that she is insane to a considerable extent,’ Baron Martin writes; and although she is capable of ‘knowing right from wrong she is affected by an hereditary taint of insanity’. Furthermore, the ‘improper attachment’ she formed for Dr Beard (he spells it Baird) ‘caused or increased a morbid state of mind which led to the poisoning of the chocolate creams and also to an endeavour to cast the blame’ upon others. He, as well as a majority of the judges he has consulted, think it would be a ‘public scandal’ if a person ‘commonly deemed mad or insane should be put to violent death’. He suggests that her state of mind should be investigated by some competent and disinterested medical men and then it will be up to the Secretary of State to determine whether she is a proper subject for execution.

  Baron Martin was not the only judge to have second thoughts about crimes where passion had arguably toppled over into madness, or something very like. It is said that just after Ruth Ellis, who had murdered her lover David Blakely (and who was examined by two psychiatrists and pronounced sane), was condemned to death in 1955, her judge Mr Justice Havers wrote to the then Home Secretary, asserting that this was a crime passionnel and recommending a reprieve. The Conservative Home Secretary refused, despite petitions numbering some fifty thousand. But Ellis was the last woman to be executed in England.

  11. Murder, Gender and Shifting Public Attitudes

  Judicial murder – particularly of women and other middle-class criminals like Reverend Watson, whose trial and sentencing just preceded Christiana’s – had begun to weigh heavily on Victorian liberals. Already back in 1836 an Act had been passed allowing fourteen to twenty-seven days between a murder conviction and execution, thereby giving the Home Office time for consideration of often numerous appeals.

  Since the start of the century the number of capital offences in England had been sharply reduced: from 222 at its turn to sixteen by 1837. This was in part due to a rebalancing of the law and of society’s emphasis from protection of property to protection of the person. In the eighteenth century, a petty theft was crime enough to get the perpetrator hanged. Robert Peel’s period as Home Secretary and the resulting 1828 Offences Against the Person Act marked a turning point. Violence against individuals now became an enforceable crime, and in the course of the century tolerance for violent acts, whether as crime or punishment, diminished radically.

  After 1837, when the death penalty was eliminated for most property offences and the second Offences Against the Person Act was passed, only five people had been executed for a crime other than murder. By 1861 only three crimes outside murder were punishable by death; in the 1957 Homicide Act, murder itself was subdivided, so that manslaughter became a non-capital offence and a plea of ‘diminished responsibility’ was allowed – in effect, at last permitting an ‘irresistible impulse’ element to enter the legal definition of madness. In November 1965 the death penalty was suspended, finally to be abolished in 1969. Public hanging – that morbid display of judicial murder that had for centuries drawn riotous crowds – had been stopped back in 1868; though the last execution by hanging within the walls of a prison only occurred almost a hundred years later, on 13 August 1964.

  As for women, the sex the century increasingly idealized – though largely in its middle-class version – as tender, susceptible and responsible for the time’s moral and spiritual well-being, juries and judges were loath to pass the death sentence on them, even when they had committed murder – though poisoning had a higher conviction rate than other means. Between 1800 and 1899 in England and Wales 172 women were executed as against 3365 men. (The disparity in numbers is, of course, in part due to the fact that women traditionally commit fewer capital offences than men, though until prostitution in the late 1860s ceased to be a crime, women’s crime was 40 per cent of men’s, a much greater proportion than today. Now women make up only 5 per cent of the prison population.)

  The number of women sent for execution – after having murdered brutal husbands or cheating partners who seduced and abandoned – diminished as the century went on. The Victorians did not approve of violent husbands, impulsive jealous lovers, or rakish, immoral seducers: their preferred versions of masculinity had to do with self-discipline, restraint and duty. In 1835–6, just before Victoria came to the throne, six women were hanged for murdering their husbands. Victoria’s sixty- four-year reign saw only seven more go to the gallows, of the eighteen who were found guilty of murder.

  Domestic violence was frowned upon, but all was hardly happy in the Victorian family. The championing of property rights for women increased the existing tensions. The number of spousal murders committed by men went up significantly in the latter half of the century, while those by wives fell sharply: the figures shifted from eighty-two wife murders and twenty-one husband murders in the 1840s to 158 wife murders and seven husband murders in the 1890s. Some social and legal historians, such as Martin J. Wiener, have seen in these shifting figures not an absolute escalation in violence against women, but rather a signal of a hardening of attitudes towards male violence in what was the increasingly idealized space of the home, where there was a male duty to protect and support wives and children. Past epochs had given men wide discretion on the ‘disciplining’ of wives, even to the point of death. There was now a greater readiness to charge men with murders that earlier might have gone unprosecuted or had perpetrators charged only with manslaughter.

  From the 1870s on, juries preferred to find a woman murderer insane rather than sentence her to execution. Women were twice as likely as men to be acquitted on grounds of insanity, even when the the crime committed was the same. After all, they were the ‘weaker sex’, prone to the female malady that could rob them of sound mind at any number of life’s critical junctures. Indeed, if Christiana Edmund
s had seemed more helplessly feminine and fainted in the dock rather than appearing coolly practical and thus frightening in her dissemination of poison; or if she had attempted to murder Charles Beard rather than that icon of family values, his wife, it may well be that her jury would have arrived at a far more lenient verdict.

  12. Saving (Mad) Christiana

  Baron Martin was not the only person to write to the Home Secretary on Christiana’s behalf. Over the next days and weeks memorials and petitions in substantial number, from strangers and familiars alike, made their way to his office, all asking that the capital sentence be commuted. Christiana’s mother wrote a heart-rending memorial detailing the mental illness in the family, a feat all the more poignant when the stigma attached to insanity is taken into consideration.

  Sydney Cornish Harrington, Christiana’s brother’s brother-in-law, who had stepped in to help the two manless women out both financially and humanly – though he hadn’t known them previously – submitted a lengthy memorial. Having put up security for the costs of the defence, he had had repeated interviews with Christiana both at Lewes and Newgate jails, each lasting nearly an hour. His testimonial corroborated Mrs Edmunds’s and confirmed that there was madness in the family. He added a moving first-hand layperson’s account of Christiana’s state of mind before and after her trial.

  Harrington remarks on the ‘utter impossibility of confining her to any particular subject of conversation. She would always bring in Dr Beard.’ The only time he found her at all affected by what he himself said was when he ‘told her he had heard that Dr Beard had shown her letters’. Then she burst out, ‘Now you have made me wretched indeed!!’ Harrington also notes the extraordinary appearance of Christiana’s eyes, the pupils dilated and ‘a semblance of looking into space however interested she might be in the conversation’. On 17 January, just after the trial, he saw her in the presence of the prison governor and one of the warders. Again he was shocked at the appearance of her eyes – their glare and now unnatural contraction – as well as by her remarks. Repeatedly, she chanted: ‘I am going to Brighton to see Dr Beard!! They have promised to take me to Brighton to see Dr Beard!!’ This was grimly interrupted sotto voce, The Police have sent a woman to break me and she has been following me all night’ – then a new and delighted outburst of ‘I am going to see Dr Beard. I am going to Brighton.’