They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  To that end, and irrespective of any accompanying prison sentence, he was vociferously in favour of ‘the increased use of physical pain by flogging, as a form of secondary punishment, with an enhanced degree of severity. At present,’ he grumbled, ‘it is little, if at all, more serious than a birching at a public school.’2

  He had gone to Eton with Salisbury,3 and if they didn’t share such views as schoolboy contemporaries, they certainly did now. Both were into hanging, Fitzjames Stephen in terms of moral retribution, and the Prime Minister wherever death was expedient to the survival of his Queen and his class.

  To Fitzjames Stephen, capital punishment was ‘the keystone of all moral and penological principles’, a novel attitude that his bigotry somehow conflated with the teachings of Jesus. ‘Christianity has two sides,’ he pronounced: ‘a gentle side up to a certain point, a terrific side beyond that point.’ In other words, the rope: ‘No other way of disposing of criminals is equally effectual, appropriate and cheap. When a man (or woman) is hung, there is an end of our relations with him. There are many people, with respect to whom, it is a great advantage to society to take this course.’4

  Law, wrote Fitzjames Stephen, was ‘the organ of the moral indignation of mankind’. But not if the indignation came off the pen of Charles Dickens or Tom Paine. He published a tirade against Dickens’s novels, his stupid invective reading like ‘an indictment of a man guilty of sedition’. Oliver Twist was just another parasite on the take, better off in a pauper’s grave. But his abhorrence of Dickens was as nothing compared to the violence of opinion he reserved for the revolutionary politics of Paine. The author of The Rights of Man brought him to boiling point: ‘the wretched, uneducated plebeian’, he raved, who ‘dared to attack the Church and State’.5

  The Church and state was what Sir James Fitzjames Stephen was all about. He was their Avenger, and together with his holiness Sir Robert Anderson, an exemplar of their religious propriety. As the great American poet Kenneth Patchen later described such crawling hypocrites, ‘Behold, one of several little Christs.’

  According to his brother and biographer Sir Leslie Stephen, Fitzjames Stephen was recognised amongst his peers by a ‘spontaneous freemasonry’ which apparently ‘forms the higher intellectual stratum of London society’.6 This presumably included that notable intellect the Duke of Clarence, whom Stephen’s homosexual son tutored and probably buggered from time to time.7 Such indulgences attracted severe penalty in Victorian courts, and his dad must have turned a blind eye. (It was after all, royal arse.) I don’t know if Stephen was a practising Mason, but what’s for certain is that, like his schoolboy chum in Downing Street, ‘he was one of the most mordant and persistent critics of democracy’. This gallstone-sucker believed Liberalism would ‘surely increase the power of the “popular voice”’, threatening everything greed held dear, ‘including the preservation of the British Empire’.8

  This meant Ireland, but most of all India, a nation otherwise dismissed by Fitzjames Stephen as a place ‘where we can work and make money [his emphasis], but for which no Englishman ever did, or ever will, feel one tender or genial feeling’.

  It was doubtless in India, where (as a member of the Colonial Council in the early 1870s) he wrote his white law for the recalcitrant darkies, that he developed his taste for opium. At the time of Florence Maybrick’s ‘trial’ he wrote to Lord Lytton, ‘I do still now and then smoke an opium pipe, as my nose requires one occasionally, and is comforted by it.’9 He must therefore be the only individual in pharmacological history who smoked dope to get his nose high. It’s possible that this unique organ was intoxicated when he ladled out his unremitting hatred to those in the dock.

  Apart from the class he represented, it’s hard to work out who Fitzjames Stephen didn’t hate. He had an organic antipathy towards the common man. ‘The average level of the great mass,’ as he perceived and expressed it, ‘would fix the position and career of the nation at the level of a lowland, stagnant river.’10

  A dozen of these stagnations constituted Florence Maybrick’s jury. They were empanelled and respectively sworn as Thomas Wainwright, a plumber – who was foreman – and the rest (one of whom couldn’t read or write): a farmer, a grocer, a baker, and others of similar trade. Considering the case turned on the esoterica of forensics, the Crown had itself a perfect jury.

  I’ve tarried over the prejudices of this judge, and now come to the most egregious of them. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen had a bit of a problem with women – particularly young women – who had sex for any reason other than Christian procreation. If a woman should fornicate outside marriage, whore herself in that vilest of female sins, adultery, then you’re looking at Ezekiel in a wig. Stephen told the jury, ‘It is easy enough to conceive how a horrible woman, in so terrible a position, might be assailed by some fearful and terrible temptation.’11

  James Maybrick wasn’t murdered by adultery, wasn’t murdered by arsenic either, but in the mire of this bigot’s disintegrating cognisance, they were conflated as one. Florence Maybrick’s night with Alfred Brierley at Flatman’s Hotel became central to the Crown’s case.

  Fitzjames Stephen told the jury that she had acquired ‘flypapers’, and had soaked them in a bowl of water to extract the arsenic, referring to this domestic commonplace as a ‘suspicious circumstance’. ‘These papers,’ he said, ‘which nobody can have a proper occasion to use except it be to kill flies, were found soaking in water, and that water would become impregnated with arsenic, and might have been used for poisonous purposes.’

  It ‘might have been’ if you were the umpire of a totally got-up judicial perversion, but arsenic was in fact one of the constituents of a mundane facewash. Together with benzoin, elderflower and other ingredients, such infusions containing a minuscule amount of arsenic were widely used by gentlewomen of a certain class, and like Florence, none of them were going to seek arsenic in a chemist’s shop by proclaiming their acne. Like her, they’d say it was for flies.

  Arsenic was widely present in the manufactured commodities of Victorian England – found in soaps, dyes, medicines – and not infrequently used by ladies to enhance their complexion. Fitzjames Stephen was either too ignorant to know, or so embroiled in the forthcoming deceit that it was beyond his reduced grasp to understand, that there was nothing ‘suspicious’ about a woman soaking flypapers. Florence had acquired them quite openly at a local pharmacy, around the corner from her home at ‘Wokes & Co.’, subsequently leaving these tools of homicide on a table in the hall of Battlecrease House, where they were picked up in passing by her foredoomed husband, who showed scant interest, if any at all.

  Florence had studied in Germany, where she’d learned the secrets of soaking flypapers as a pimple-killer from her student contemporaries.12 They were soaking now in preparation for a night out to which the Maybricks had been invited. But with James too ill to attend, Florence had asked if his younger brother Edwin could escort her.13 No problem with that, and aspiring to be la belle de la nuit, she went into haute couture mode, writing to her mother: ‘We are invited to a Bal Masque which being given in Liverpool and the people provincials, I hardly think likely to be a success. A certain amount of “diablerie”, wit and life is always required at an entertainment of this sort; and it will be quite a novel innovation, people will hardly know what is expected of them.’14

  James Maybrick knew what the flypapers were for, even if Fitzjames Stephen didn’t, and it’s part of an almost unbelievable fraudulence that nobody told him. It was all the Crown had, but this flypaper bullshit was nothing less than absurd. To accuse Florence Maybrick of murdering her husband with arsenic was like accusing her of trying to murder an alcoholic with a teaspoon of gin. Had flypapers been an efficient and accessible source of arsenic, there would have been a weekly wholesale delivery of a dozen gross to the back door of Battlecrease House.

  Maybrick’s unrelenting addiction to various poisons was well established; a legion of family friends and associates could ha
ve testified to this as fact. Such evidence, of course, would have immediately destroyed the Crown’s case, so no such witnesses were called. Vital depositions were suppressed, both by the prosecution and the treacherous ‘defence’, which colluded to present James Maybrick as a paragon of physical virtue who barely took anything beyond an occasional stomach sedative.

  Had the jury heard the truth, Florence would have walked free. But the function of this ‘trial’ was to shut her up, and keep her shut up in perpetuity. Had not the whole base affair been bone-marrow corrupt, she would have walked within fifteen minutes. Instead, she was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment, which she was to suffer for fifteen years.

  The tragedy of Florence Maybrick is mind-blowing. How could this perfectly innocent mother of two little children be snatched from her life and told she was going to die? The charges against her were fake – like those against an equally innocent Bradford milkman – with no explanation other than the wickedness of a System that would do anything to ensure its own survival. We have it from the Prime Minister’s own mouth that he had no scruple about executing the odd innocent Irishman, so what problem presented itself stringing up this Yankee whore?

  When Florence heard that she was to be ‘hanged by the neck until you are dead’, it was out of the mouth of a System well summarised in the quote at the beginning of this chapter. She was within the wheels of a machine, serviced by ‘routine minds’ whose only business was the protection of the machine itself.

  It’s why their judicial contingency wore daft wigs, symbols of insult to a failed republicanism and to such counteractive voices as that of Tom Paine. Oliver Cromwell’s Protestant thugs – the ‘Roundheads’ – cropped their hair short, while the King’s men and his boys – the ‘Cavaliers’ – wore their locks long. When the Royalists hauled Cromwell from his grave to re-kill his rotten corpse, Charles II was back on the honeypot, sporting horsehair to disguise his billiard ball. Thus the wig represented royalty, the resurgent royalist state; and Sir James Fitzjames Stephen was but one of its walking-backwards mouths.

  How stultified were these widow’s men. Florence Maybrick had the unavoidable misfortune to be represented by one of their best, the famous ‘silk’ Sir Charles Russell QC.

  The case was a pushover – any fledgling solicitor could have won it. So how was it that ‘the greatest advocate of his age’ lost it? The answer depends on who you think Sir Charles was working for. Apologists claim he failed to secure the freedom of his client through exhaustion engendered at the recent Parnell Commission. Fatigue had debilitated him, they say. I say, to the contrary, that in the framing of Florence Maybrick he displayed an energetic courtroom wizardry that has fooled the record for 130 years.15

  Soon to be ennobled as Lord Russell of Killowen and promoted to Lord Chief Justice of England, this Belfast Judas was at the top of his game. He lost because it was predetermined that Florence Maybrick should go to the grave with her supposed secret, born from the hideous calumnies of Michael Maybrick.

  Like Sir Charles Warren, Sir Charles Russell was an oft-time visitor to the glutton’s palace at Sandringham, a personal friend of the monarch to be, and we need waste no time considering where his loyalties lay.16 Russell had turned into a kind of Warren in a wig, prostrating his infinitely more sophisticated treacheries on behalf of the Crown. The buffoon Commissioner was required to pretend he was hunting the Ripper, while Russell was entrusted to put up a show of ‘defending’ Florence Maybrick. He was in fact fully committed to the prosecution, generous in the use of his skills to keep it on track. Russell had repeated opportunities to win this case, but either ignored them or turned them to Florence’s disadvantage. Time after time he interceded on the Crown’s behalf, dominating the courtroom and watching the bewigged back of ‘Fat Jack’, the Crown’s inept prosecutor.

  John Addison QC MP was an archetypical huckster of Victorian values, a barge of stale silk, able to lie with alacrity but as prone to blunder as that indentured chump Bro Wynne Baxter. On behalf of Addison’s frequent errors, Russell was ever alert to intercede, correct, steer and suppress. He could see the mistake coming before Addison made it, and wasn’t going to let his Honourable Friend botch the frame-up by default. Bro Russell was as much in the ‘loop’ as Bro Charlie Warren, or for that matter Bro Michael Maybrick himself. Bro Jack had initiated much corruption in a variety of courts. But this was the big one. When Sir James Fitzjames Stephen slung a bit of black rag on top of his wig, it was the triumph of the Ripper’s career. The state was now going to do his killing for him. These men were going to murder Florence Maybrick.

  The previously mentioned barrister Alexander Macdougall described the intrigue against Mrs Maybrick as ‘the Spirit of Evil’.17 The British public must ‘feel shame’ he wrote, ‘as long as a guiltless woman is passing a living death in our midst’.18 Although in ignorance of the Crown’s subplot, cooked up on behalf of a psychopath, Macdougall went on to demand ‘the removal from office of all those who can be shown by their unconstitutional conduct to have been responsible for the miscarriage of justice that has taken place’. And further, ‘the bringing to justice of any person who can be shown to have recklessly and maliciously put the charge of murdering her husband, upon Mrs Florence Maybrick’.19 In other words, icons of the legal engine of Queen Victoria’s Masonic state. A contemporary of Macdougall’s possessing a similar independence of legal mind, the barrister J.H. Levy, wrote: ‘A blush of shame ought to come to the cheek of every Englishman. The case is, in my opinion, one of the most extraordinary miscarriages of justice in modern times.’20

  Neither Levy nor Macdougall knew about the fly in the gravy, thus both were mistaken. A ‘miscarriage of justice’ implies that justice was intended, but that some error had been made. But this wasn’t an error, it was a predetermined conspiracy to keep the little flags waving, and protect those they were waved at.

  Sir Charles Russell himself was later to describe the Maybrick trial as ‘rotten’, and of all people, he should know. ‘The foundation on which the whole case for the Crown rested was rotten,’ he wrote in 1896, ‘for there was in fact no murder’21 (his emphasis). If he knew it was ‘rotten’ in 1896, he knew it was ‘rotten’ in 1889 when he and his pals orchestrated it. While the word ‘justice’ exists in the lexicon of human exchange, these sons of bitches can never be forgiven.

  Russell was candid about the rottenness, but bashful with the truth about James Maybrick’s demise. Unequivocally Maybrick was murdered, done to death by cruel poisoning – but it was never Florence Maybrick who administered it.

  At about half past eight on the morning of Friday, 26 April 1889, the parlourmaid at Battlecrease House, Mary Cadwallader, took in a delivery from the postman. Postmarked London, it was a pasteboard box, which she correctly assumed contained a bottle. It was addressed to James Maybrick, who told her he’d been ‘expecting the medicine for a day or two’.22 This was six days after his visit to his brother’s physician in London, Dr Fuller, and day one of Michael Maybrick’s first homicidal move.

  On the following day, Saturday the 27th, a date of dark import, James hauled out the cork. Within minutes he was heading for the bathroom to get his head in a sink. When the vomiting was over he came downstairs to tell Florence and Cadwallader that his legs had gone stiff as a pair of pokers, and that he couldn’t feel his hands. This isn’t surprising, because he’d just swallowed a savage dose of an alkaline toxin whose fearsome calling card he recognised at once. To crease Maybrick it must have been inordinately potent.

  Whatever else may be said about this mysterious ‘London Medicine’, one thing is for certain, and that is that it had nothing whatsoever to do with Dr Fuller. Fuller’s prescription had been made up at a nearby pharmacy, Clay & Abrahams, on 24 April.23 There were three medicines in all. One was a harmless aperient (containing an unweighable trace of arsenic), and the second was a tonic (with a homeopathic-quantity dash of nux vomica, or strychnine). The third was a patent medicine called
Plummer’s Pills, whose main ingredient was antimony. Following the instructions, a ten-year-old could have safely swallowed the lot.

  By mid-morning James had somewhat recovered, and despite continuing ‘numbness in the legs’ he got on his horse and left the house at about 10.30 to ride over to the Wirral races. Florence watched his departure with her usual trepidation, telling the ever-observant nanny Alice Yapp, ‘Master has taken an overdose of medicine. It is strychnine and is very dangerous.’24

  Meanwhile it was April in Liverpool, sky like a dustbin lid with intermittent heavy rain. By the time Maybrick arrived at the racecourse he was wet through to his boots. The umbrellas were up, and under one of them he ran into a friend from the Cotton Exchange, a Mr Morden Rigg, and his wife. Mrs Rigg picked up the concern where Florence had left it. She only had to look at the mauled face to know that James was sick. He told her quite openly that he’d taken an overdose of strychnine, information he shared with another associate from the Exchange, a Mr Thompson.25 Maybrick must indeed have looked peculiar, judging by the way he was looking at them. Twenty-four hours later he told his local doctor, ‘It was a peculiar feeling, although he knew they were still there, they appeared to be a long way off.’26

  That night Maybrick dined with friends on the ‘Cheshire Side’, that is on the opposite bank of the River Mersey. At the table he could barely control his wine glass because of tremors, and he was worried his hosts might think him drunk. It was past midnight before he arrived back at Battlecrease, leaving his saturated clothes to the care of the kitchen staff.