They All Love Jack

by Bruce Robinson

  This would have been music to the ears of any honest advocate, but Russell wasn’t an honest advocate; he was a shyster, playing off the downside of his rented tongue, ‘overbearing in his manner, and to his clients contemptuous, even offensive’. Russell was in ‘one of his moods, and treated the scientist’s view with the utmost contempt’. He ‘scarcely listened to him, in fact would listen to no one but Sir Charles Russell’.36

  What Tidy didn’t know was who Russell was defending. They would have hanged this woman a dozen times to protect their East End psychopath, or rather to protect themselves.

  With arsenic back on the slate, this mockery progressed towards its foregone conclusion. At times Russell’s deceit was all but overt, particularly in respect of who was and who wasn’t the toxicological expert around here. Marginalising Professors Macnamara and Tidy, he championed Humphreys. ‘Of course,’ he told the jury, ‘the most valuable witness on that head is Dr Humphreys, because he was in charge of the case from the 28th April, at its beginning, until it closed with the death of James Maybrick.’37 Such a distortion would have been ludicrous out of Addison’s mouth, let alone that of the counsel for the defence.

  Although in the matter of arsenical poisoning, Russell seems to have forgotten his own cross-examination, it’s worth revisiting to gauge the breadth of Dr Humphreys’ expertise. Russell asked: ‘Did it in any way occur to you that there were symptoms present during life of arsenical poisoning?’ There is no recorded answer to this. Russell continued:

  RUSSELL: When was it that the idea was first suggested to you?

  DR HUMPHREYS: I think on Thursday, or on the Wednesday night, when Michael Maybrick came to see me.

  RUSSELL: From a communication made to you by Mr Michael Maybrick?

  DR HUMPHREYS: Yes.38

  And that’s how much of an expert Humphreys was. The expert was Michael Maybrick. Or in other words, it was Michael Maybrick who had diagnosed arsenic. Thus, via Humphreys, Russell was sidelining Professors Tidy and Macnamara in favour of the Crown’s chief accuser. Quite an achievement for a man purporting to be counsel for the defence. He was investing a pea-shooter with the hitting power of a Sherman tank, and it laid pipe for the mad old bigot on the bench. Fitzjames Stephen went for it like a red rag.

  ‘I venture to say,’ wrote Alexander Macdougall, ‘that the records of criminal trials would be searched in vain for a parallel example of a judge thus interfering with the functions of a jury, or attempting to obtain a verdict for the prosecution. He had got it into his own head that Mrs Maybrick’s story of a mislaid prescription for an arsenical facewash was a lie, and he was determined that the jury should not be left to their own conclusions about it, but driven to adopt his own.’39

  ‘About the fly-papers,’ hawked Fitzjames Stephen, ‘there is some kind of evidence, though I must say it is very insufficient, about some of these things being used for cosmetic purposes … it is a singular thing that, if this is a fact she has stated, there should be no witnesses to prove it … why are there no witnesses here to prove it? If she knew her young friends were in the habit of using things of this kind, why was it more difficult, or why could it take more time or money to get witnesses from Germany?’40

  By any objective analysis he was right. Sir Charles had managed to track down a ‘niggra’ from the Virginia sticks, but he couldn’t get a girl on a train from Berlin: ‘This is a thing which might have been done, but it has never been done.’41

  It wasn’t done because it would have gone a long way to substantiating Florence Maybrick’s innocence. Russell could have brought these friends from Germany and accessed copies of prescriptions with ease. Instead he crammed such attestations in at the end of the trial, when any value in them was spent: ‘She was in the habit of using a face-wash prescribed by Dr Briggs of Brooklyn, which prescription she says she lost.’42

  ‘Why is there no evidence?’ continued Fitzjames Stephen. ‘Why is the matter brought forward at the last moment in this way, when it is no longer possible to test it in any other way? Where is her mother? Why is her mother not called if she knew this? If she knew that Mrs Maybrick had been in the habit for many years of using an arsenical cosmetic? It is certainly very strange that there is no evidence of this matter in the defence.’43

  It’s my emphasis but Stephen’s invective, and once again he was right. Russell was the smartest bastard in the business, so ‘strange’ isn’t the right word – rather it was treachery.

  ‘I was ready and willing to be called as a witness at the trial,’ protested Baroness von Roques in her petition to Home Secretary Matthews, ‘to speak of the circumstances within my knowledge, but I was not so called, and it was not till after the said trial that I became aware that, in the opinion of the learned judge, as expressed in his summing up, the absence of my evidence was an important factor in the issue left to the jury to determine, nor was I permitted to be present during the said trial.’44

  Russell kept her out like he kept Dalgleish out, like he kept Mr and Mrs Morden Rigg out, together with a host of others whose evidence would have seen Mrs Maybrick acquitted. That Russell conspired to lose his case is perfectly evident from his suppression of the ‘Blucher’ letter, backed up by Richard Cleaver’s notes. They’d banged her up, effectively silencing her, but didn’t necessarily require her to be hanged. In a deposition after the conviction, this individual calling himself a solicitor also wrote to the Home Secretary:

  I admit that I have, perhaps wrongly, never attached great importance as to the evidence of the fly-papers, certainly at the outset very little, because I considered

  a) That the circumstances attending their purchase and subsequent soaking of them precluded the presumption of guilty use of them.

  b) That such a clumsy expedient for obtaining arsenic was inconsistent with the theory of the prosecution of knowledge by her of the arsenical contents of the house.

  c) That the use of arsenic and of solution of fly-papers as a cosmetic was notorious and that formal proof would hardly be requisite.45

  ‘Hardly be requisite’? I beg your pardon, Mr Cleaver, but flypapers were the only ‘clumsy expedient’ the Crown had upon which to hang its rotten hat? Was there ever such rottenness from the pen of a solicitor? The prosecution had nothing but flypapers? Every word exiting Fitzjames Stephen’s throat had relied on arsenic soaked out of flypapers. They were what animated that vile little creature Alice Yapp, and sent Bro Michael Maybrick scurrying with his rubbish to Dr Humphreys’ house.

  Russell had supplied everything this relic of a judge needed to pursue his harangue, and in his summing-up Fitzjames Stephen got stuck into it with relish: ‘Evidence was given with regard to the purchase of fly-papers; that although Mrs Maybrick had a bill running at each of these shops [Wokes & Co. and the chemists Hanson] she paid for the fly-papers out of her own pocket, and, of course, the suggestion would be that she had been actuated in doing so by the desire to avoid detection.’46

  No such thing had been suggested or proved. The argument was so ridiculous that even the prosecution objected, Addison stating, ‘I studiously avoided making any such suggestion.’

  Any dispassionate observer might have thought it was Sir Charles Russell’s duty to intervene, but he kept his trap shut, and the apology went to the Crown.

  FITZJAMES STEPHEN: I am quite aware of that, Mr Addison. I know perfectly well that you avoided it, and that you avoided it wisely and properly, but it was brought out in evidence, and I think you will agree with me in what I have said, because this is not a vindictive, cruel, or unfair prosecution, and I think I have seldom heard of such a thing in my life. I have instanced this to show you what a foolish argument that would be, a very unjust argument to be advanced in such a serious question as one of life or death – it is so foolish an argument that I just mentioned it – I do not say that any kind of weight attaches to it.47

  This is a classic example of paralipsis, of pretending to deny what you’re saying by saying it. It’s the oldes
t trick in the book. For example: I do not say that this voluptuous female with pert tits, high heels and a provocative mini-skirt was inviting rape, far from it, but I will say, etc. etc.

  Fitzjames Stephen continued: ‘I now come to other points. A question always gone into in matters of this nature is the question of motive. I shall say absolutely nothing upon that subject.’48 Except of course an earful about Florence’s dirty little night at Flatman’s Hotel, ‘where she did about the latter part of March, carry on an adulterous intercourse with this man Brierley’. He didn’t think it was necessary, he said, to mention the mysterious ‘second visitor to the Flatman’s Hotel, a Mr John K’ – an old friend of the Maybrick family, but here presented by Fitzjames Stephen as another customer with an urgent hard-on:49

  It is not my business to speak as a moralist, but there is one horrible and lamentable result of a connection of that sort, which renders it almost a moral necessity, it furnishes the strongest possible provocation, the strongest possible inducement, for entering upon a system of the most disgraceful intrigue and telling a great number of lies.50

  In contradiction of his previous statement he said, ‘Gentlemen, I am on the question of motive, and I point out to you a motive which I feel to be my duty not to overlook.’

  Adultery then temporarily took the place of arsenic – the indulgence of one necessitating recourse to the other. In other words, it was Florence’s sexual rapaciousness, her desire for the younger man, that mutated into the decision to bump the older man off. Ergo, James Maybrick was murdered by adultery. ‘It is a sad and terrible case,’ said Stephen, ‘and I ask whether the matter I now suggest is not supported by terrible evidence.’51

  In this instance the terrible evidence was James Maybrick smacking his wife in the face. ‘A blow, a black eye, a half-leaving the house, a consultation with Dr Hopper, and then a complete reconciliation for the sake of the children? Do you believe that?’ he hawked. ‘Do you believe that a quarrel of that sort can be made up by a family doctor?’52 It was left to the ‘stagnations’ to answer for themselves.

  On and on he sawed, seasoning his prejudice with endless error, reading in a letter which had not been presented as evidence, and confusing the sequence and dates of domestic events which he sold to the jury as substantiating this ‘black eye’.

  ADDISON: May I point out to you, my Lord, in favour of the prisoner, that the Grand National was on the 29th of March, and the reconciliation took place on the 30th.

  FITZJAMES STEPHEN: You are quite right.

  ADDISON: The only assignation after that is a letter in which she says she would like to see him.

  FITZJAMES STEPHEN: You are quite right. I have made a mistake, and I am sorry I have done so in a case of this importance.53

  Is it not extraordinary that once again it was left to the prosecution to interrupt, and that it was not Sir Charles Russell who pointed out these calumnies?

  It was not until after the event that Russell spoke out. In a memorandum to Home Secretary Matthews he wrote ‘a forceful censure of Fitzjames Stephen’s conduct’, pointing out that the judge had ‘passionately invited the jury to find a verdict of guilty. He made suggestions that were untenable and had never been advanced by the prosecution, and went out of his way to make misleading references.’ (So why the silence in court?)

  It was a little late in the day to retrospectively try to rearrange the case in Mrs Maybrick’s favour, but a majority of the press agreed and took up the argument, most notably the great W.T. Stead, who poured anger into his Review of Reviews: ‘I cannot resist the criticism that the case is so scandalous an illustration of the very worst sides of the British judicial system and the British character. No Englishman can feel otherwise than ashamed of having to defend the manner in which she has been dealt with by our Courts and our Government. A sorrier exhibition of all that is worst in the blundering, wrong-headed illogical side of John Bull [England] has seldom or never given occasion for his enemies to exult and his friends to wince.’

  Fitzjames Stephen harangued the jury for twelve hours over a period of two days, and on the second day it might as well have been Bro Michael Maybrick sitting there in a wig. ‘Some malign influence seems to have possessed or obsessed him,’ wrote Stead; ‘he raged like a violent counsel for the prosecution, leaving no stone unturned to excite prejudice against the unfortunate woman in the dock. The fact is that the case was decided not in the least upon the evidence of experts, but solely upon the prejudice imported into the case by the judge on that last day of his summing up.’54

  Russell had given Fitzjames Stephen his arsenic back, and although it never killed James, it fed the judge’s senile frenzy. Error after error came out of his mouth. So egregious were his mistakes that some have ascribed them to misprints in the transcript, but the culprit was Fitzjames Stephen’s clapped-out brain. Addison joined Shuttleworth in the Land of Nod: ‘During a good portion of the time,’ reported the Liverpool Review, ‘Mr Addison fell fast asleep with his head lying on the desk before him.’55

  They were hours into it, with hours to go, and here come the flypapers and blah blah blah …

  What did it matter what Florence Maybrick had bought flypapers for? It was immaterial whether she had bought a ton of the bastards from every other pharmacy in Liverpool. Professors Tidy and Macnamara had demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that James Maybrick did not die from arsenical poisoning, and at the very minimum Florence should have been given the benefit of that doubt. But Fitzjames Stephen was giving nothing, and jawed himself into a repudiation of any such dilemma. At the end of it the jury took thirty-eight minutes to reach a verdict of guilty, and Stephen duly sentenced Florence Maybrick to death.

  The nightmare engendered by Michael Maybrick at Battlecrease House had sustained itself into another place. Florence was taken to a gaslit cell in Walton Jail to await her execution.

  Any thoughts of cheating the gallows (which were in loud construction in the yard outside her cell56) by suicide were precluded by the presence of two female warders, who were not allowed to speak to her. Her only conversation was during a single visit from her equally tortured mother: ‘Florie was sitting in a chair with her face in her hands crying bitterly. She cried incessantly, begging in vain to see her children and was in the most agonising distress about them … if there is anybody on earth who hates my daughter I wish they could have seen her there.’57

  Bro Michael would have been only too delighted. The Masonic psycho, now temporarily decamped to the Isle of Wight, relished everything he’d achieved. What he’d wanted was revenge, and he’d got it. But it came with a backlash. Five thousand people had massed outside St George’s Hall on the day of the jury’s verdict, and most of them didn’t like what they heard. Public antipathy towards Florence was now entirely reversed, and she was cheered as the police took her away in a prison van.58 The public’s rage now fell upon those who had convicted her. Fitzjames Stephen was heckled and booed as his carriage tried to escape the attentions of an angry mob, ‘hooted in the streets by Irishmen’, according to the Solicitor General and Tory QC Bro Sir Edward Clarke.59 Those without transport had to risk it on foot, the Flatman’s Hotel waiter Alfred Schweisso copping an unwarranted punch in the chops that cost him a couple of teeth.60 Florence’s supposed friend Matilda Briggs and the nursemaid Alice Yapp were similarly unpopular, running a gauntlet for shelter at Lime Street railway station under the protection of a bunch of Her Majesty’s vilified helmets.61 ‘I do not remember any case,’ wrote Stead, ‘in which the public protested so vehemently against the decision of a court.’62

  The hostility of the crowd found expression in headlines all over the world, and the men in wigs weren’t able to hide this one behind the Micks. The verdict went down particularly ill in America. ‘If the trial had happened in the United States,’ reported one correspondent, ‘the judge would have been impeached.’

  Whether true or not, the general view of the American press was one of suspicion. ‘The curio
us facts and strange motives which underlie this case from beginning to end are something amazing,’ wrote the Washington Evening Star, ‘and the half of it has not been told.’63 You can say that again, and a variety of the US papers’ correspondents did. Both in America and England a torrent of letters filled the press, by far the majority in Mrs Maybrick’s favour. I select but one, which resonates with the outrage of many. On 15 August 1889 the Manchester Courier published a letter from a Mr R.F. Muckley, his observations preceding whatever I might write about the murderous Mr Michael Maybrick by 126 years:

  Sir – There remain yet a few circumstances in this case that have had very little airing, and which at least admit of some notice from those who have a penchant for reflection and the solution of conundrums.

  1: Who had great antipathy to Mrs Maybrick?

  2: Who had as much or more access to Mr Maybrick about the period of his violent attacks than anybody else?

  3: Who had as much chance as anyone else of adding extra ‘condiments’ to Mr Maybrick’s food or medicine? [An extraordinary point, considering the eavesdropping statement by Robert Reeves wouldn’t be made for another four years, and remained secret for another hundred.]

  4: Who, on one occasion, administered a pill to Mr Maybrick, causing him illness?

  5: Who made a mistake in stating that the pill[s] administered was ‘written upon’ by a doctor?

  6: Who administered a pill[s] that was not written upon by a doctor to Mr Maybrick, which pill[s] caused illness?

  7: Who takes charge of the bulk of the deceased’s property? Query: Why is Mrs Maybrick charged with murder any more than he whose name forms an answer to all the above questions? Why?

  R.F. Muckley. Hope Road, Sale, August 14 1889.

  The questions were never answered. Bro Maybrick threatened to sue, and Muckley backed off.64 But a disturbed and substantial tide of public opinion did not, and neither did Alexander Macdougall. He never knew, nor ever met, Florence Maybrick, but he articulated the affront to justice on her behalf, and organised it into a nationwide protest. Petitions demanding an immediate reprieve were signed by thousands up and down the kingdom. One of the first signatories was Thomas Maybrick, who travelled to London to do so, while his recalcitrant brothers kept their heads down at Michael’s holiday rental on the Isle of Wight.