Shooting Victoria (34 page)

On the second of February, McNaughtan was brought to the bar of the Old Bailey to enter his plea. His counsel pleaded for more time to set up an insanity defense: McNaughten's attorneys planned to call witnesses from Scotland, and perhaps France. The Attorney General did not object—the government did not want another Bellingham on its hands, found guilty and executed before witnesses to his insanity could be brought forward. The judge, Baron Abinger, gave the defense a month to prepare. Moreover, he
granted counsel's request that McNaughtan be allowed access to his bank account: £750 to fund his defense. And if McNaughtan's trial was to prove nothing else, it certainly proved that in 1843, £750 could buy a defense nothing short of magnificent.

It bought the services of Alexander Cockburn, Q.C., for one thing—a highly paid, high-profile attorney (and later Lord Chief Justice). Cockburn was assisted by three other attorneys, including William Clarkson, who had defended Francis, and William Henry Bodkin, who assisted in Oxford's defense. Moreover, McNaughtan's money bought the expertise of no fewer than five medical experts, including Edward Monro, Principal Physician at Bethlem, and two doctors brought down from Glasgow. The three London doctors examined McNaughtan several times in company with two doctors retained by the prosecution. When those last two doctors concluded with the others that McNaughtan was indeed insane, the government knew that their case was in trouble before it began.

At 10:00 on 3 March 1843, an excited Daniel McNaughtan was again brought to the bar of the Old Bailey, before Chief Justice Tindal, Justice Williams, and Justice Coleridge. He pleaded not guilty; a chair was brought for him, and he instantly seemed to doze off, ignoring Solicitor General Follett's opening. (He would perk up when the witnesses testified.) The Solicitor General rather than Attorney General Pollock led the prosecution because Pollock was on this day in Lancaster, conducting the government's case against Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor and fifty-eight others for their roles in the Plug Plot Riots. Follett was assisted by the same attorneys who had prosecuted Francis and Bean. They faced the unenviable task of fighting an insanity acquittal while offering nothing to counter the overwhelming evidence that McNaughtan was delusive. Their strategy was to set the legal bar for an insanity acquittal as high as possible, arguing that while McNaughtan might be partially mad, he was still morally aware and thus criminally responsible.

In his opening, therefore, Follett freely admitted that McNaughtan might be suffering from a “morbid affection of the
mind.” That should not in itself earn him an acquittal, however: public safety required that “this defense should not be too readily listened to.” More than this, few crimes—and certainly few crimes as horrendous as this one—are committed by persons
not
laboring under some sort of morbid affection. Follett ignored the most recent and British examples of would-be assassins—Oxford, Francis, and Bean—and pointed instead to Louis-Philippe's. “What motive had they? We know of none but that of an ill-regulated mind, worked upon by morbid political feeling.” The great seventeenth-century jurist Matthew Hale—the hallowed setter of precedent in the English insanity defense—had noted the connection between criminality and partial insanity, and held that such “melancholy distempers” cannot absolve a man of criminal responsibility. To be acquitted on the grounds of insanity, that insanity must be total, negating any sense of moral awareness. “If there be thought and design,” Follett proclaimed, citing a 1760 formulation of Hale's ideas, “a faculty to distinguish the nature of actions, to discern the difference between moral good and evil; then, upon the fact of the offence proved, the judgment of the law must take place.” Two hundred years of precedent (which Follett diligently cited) established moral understanding as the key test of criminal responsibility. And everything about Daniel McNaughtan—his conduct, his habits, and his careful management of his financial affairs—suggested rationality: social and moral awareness. The witnesses called by the prosecution, therefore, both established that McNaughtan indeed shot Drummond down, and testified to his overall possession of reason. “I never thought him unsettled in his mind,” claimed his London landlady. “I did not have any idea that his mind was disordered,” said an acquaintance who knew him both in Glasgow and in London. Several others said much the same, and several documented his financial acumen, his studious reading habits, and his frequent attendance at the Glasgow Mechanics' Institution. With that, the prosecution rested, and the trial was adjourned for the night, the jurors sequestered in a local coffee house.

The next day, Cockburn demolished the prosecution, eloquently dismissing two hundred years of legal precedence as so much superstitious hogwash. What could be more absurd, he argued, than relying on seventeenth-century jurists' pronouncements on insanity, when modern science alone has succeeded in penetrating the mysteries of madness? “It is but as yesterday,” he claimed, “that darkness and solitude—cut off from the rest of mankind like the lepers of old—the dismal cell, the bed of straw, the iron chain, and the inhuman scourge, were the fearful lot of those who were best entitled to human pity and to human sympathy, as being the victims of the most dreadful of all mortal calamities.” No one could come to rational conclusions about madness when the mad were rendered raving lunatics by horrendous, unenlightened treatment. True insight into madness lies not in the past, but in the present: to contemporary specialists in the science of the mind. To these, and not to Hale, “the greatest deference should be paid.” Modern science completely debunked Solicitor General Follett's claim that total insanity was necessary for an acquittal. Any one of a human being's mental faculties—”the perception, the judgment, the reason, the sentiments, the affections, the propensities, the passions”—might become diseased, and render a man a “victim of the most fearful delusions, the slave of uncontrollable impulses”: a state lacking “self-control and dominion, without which the knowledge of right and wrong would become vague and useless.” Cockburn essentially posited two grounds for acquittal because of insanity. First, if one, at the moment of committing an act, cannot understand the rightness or wrongness of that act, one cannot be criminally responsible for it. This is not the same as Follett's claim of abstract moral awareness: according to Cockburn, one could understand the difference between right and wrong and still not be aware of the morality of one's own action. The question, Cockburn argued, quoting the “profound and scientific” Scottish jurist, Baron Hume, is not whether one understands evil, but “did he at that moment understand the evil of what he did?” Second, one who is impelled
to act by an impulse beyond human control cannot be held responsible for that act; in such a case moral knowledge becomes “vague and useless.” The defense would suggest that McNaughtan was not liable in both of these ways.

Cockburn then laid out McNaughtan's history, portraying a man whose delusions had grown a frightening degree over the past two years, until he was indeed their slave—in the words of the French doctor Charles Chrétien Henry Marc, a victim of “homicidal monomania.” And the defense spent much of McNaughtan's £750 in backing up that claim—transporting a host of witnesses from Glasgow to London to illustrate his derangement. McNaughtan's father, as well as all of the Glasgow officials who for years could not help him, now took the stand to establish that he was a man in serious need of help.

After these witnesses, the defense called an astounding nine medical specialists to the stand—and apparently had more in reserve. The unmistakable effect of their testimony was to suggest that the medical community was unanimous in holding the man in the dock to be hopelessly insane. And, unlike the medical experts in Edward Oxford's trial, their testimony was remarkably uniform. Edward Thomas Monro, the chief physician at Bethlem, had no doubt: there existed in McNaughtan “the presence of insanity sufficient to deprive the prisoner of all self-control.” The four other doctors hired by the defense agreed, William Hutcheson, of the Glasgow Royal Lunatic Asylum, holding that “the delusion was so strong that nothing but a physical impediment could have prevented him from committing the act.” All of them were rendering judgments about McNaughtan's state of mind, and, remarkably, not once did any judge or any attorney for the prosecution question their right to do that. The tension between science and the law, so palpable during Edward Oxford's trial, did not exist in this trial.

After these five hired specialists testified, Cockburn called to the stand doctors whom the defense had not retained, neutral observers whose testimony dovetailed perfectly. The first of these had
examined McNaughtan before the trial, but the last two had not, basing their testimony entirely upon their reading of depositions and hearing the testimony in this trial. Astoundingly, the judges and the prosecution let them testify. When a ninth specialist—B. Philips of Westminster Hospital—took the stand, Judge Tindal stopped the trial and turned to the Solicitor General.

Mr. Solicitor General, are you prepared … with any evidence to combat this testimony?

No, my Lord.

We feel the evidence, especially that of the last two medical gentlemen who have been examined, and who are strangers to both sides and only observers of the case, to be very strong, and sufficient to induce my learned brothers and myself to stop the case.

With that, Follett surrendered. He apologized to the jury for bringing the case before them, citing the need for public safety. But he would not now press for a verdict against the prisoner.

Tindal then gave the case to the jury, but in effect directed their verdict: “I cannot help remarking, in common with my learned brethren, that the whole of the medical evidence is on one side, and that there is no part of it which leaves any doubt on the mind.”

The jury immediately pronounced McNaughtan not guilty on the ground of insanity.

McNaughtan was returned to Newgate, to await Home Secretary Graham's order for his removal to Bethlem. It was some time in coming. Nine days later, on 13 March, McNaughtan followed Oxford's path from Newgate to Southwark in a cab with Governor Cope. He would walk the criminal wing with Oxford until 1864, when that wing was razed to the ground and both men were transferred to Broadmoor; there, the next year, he died and was buried in an unmarked grave. McNaughtan thus had twenty-two agitated years to consider his utter defeat and the triumph of his enemies.
The tormenting man with the straw had been right: McNaughtan spent the rest of his life in asylums.

The public, already convinced that Oxford's verdict had been a travesty, and certain that the McNaughtan decision offered any degenerate the means to kill with impunity, responded to McNaughtan's acquittal with alarm, outrage—and derision. One bitter wit, writing to the
Times
, captured all these feelings:

Sir,—I have in contemplation the accomplishment of a certain pet project, which unfortunately involves some degree of violence in its attainment; I mean, however, to retain beforehand some of the most eminent medical men of the day as witnesses in proof of my monomaniacal possession, and in the mean time I hope, through the assistance of your journal, to ascertain when the public (who I understand considers itself rather outraged by the acquittal of my friend Mr. M'Naughten) are sufficiently tranquillized to render it safe and expedient for a British court of justice and a British jury to reward my perseverance with a comfortable and permanent abode in Bethlehem Hospital at the expense of the nation. I confess this latter consideration has much weight with me, as I am at present out of work, and have the much more disagreeable alternative of a union workhouse staring me in the face.

I have the honour to remain,

Your very insane servant (pro hac vice [for the occasion]),

KILLING NO MURDER.

The royal family were in residence at Claremont, Uncle Leopold's Surrey estate, on the day of the verdict. Robert Peel sent
Victoria the news with a letter expressing his own disappointment. The three judges in the case, he told her, were certain that the evidence of insanity was too strong to allow anything but an acquittal. Peel had his doubts, however, that anyone who showed as much premeditation as McNaughtan had could be that insane: “It is a lamentable reflection,” he wrote her, “that a man may be at the same time so insane as to be reckless of his own life and the lives of others, and to be pronounced free from moral responsibility, and yet capable of preparing for the commission of murder with the utmost caution and deliberation, and of taking every step which shall enable him to commit it with certainty.”

Victoria had no doubts whatsoever about the matter: McNaughtan was as guilty as sin, and his verdict was botched. She believed it before the trial, and she believed it now: premeditation signified reason, which proved guilt. The recent trials whose results defied this simple logic were flawed, and Victoria blamed the judges, and their propensity for unorthodox instructions to their juries. “The law may be perfect,” she wrote to Peel a week later, but how is that whenever a case for its application arises, it proves to be of no avail? We have seen the trials of Oxford and MacNaghten conducted by the ablest lawyers of the day—Lord Denman, Chief Justice Tindal, and Sir Wm. Follett,—and
they allow
and
advise
the Jury to pronounce the verdict of
Not Guilty
on account of
Insanity
,—whilst
everybody
is morally
convinced
that both malefactors were perfectly conscious and aware of what they did! It appears from this, that the force of the law is entirely put into the Judge's hands, and that it depends merely upon his charge whether the law is to be applied or not. Could not the Legislature lay down that rule which the Lord Chancellor does in his paper, and which Chief Justice Mansfield did in the case of Bellingham; and why could
not the Judges be
bound
to interpret the law in
this
and
no other
sense in their charges to the Juries?