Shooting Victoria (7 page)

Hadfield was tried a month later. He was charged with High Treason, and by the law of the time that meant that he was entitled
to the best counsel in the land, at the expense of the state. And he got just that in Thomas Erskine. Erskine mounted an insanity defense, in the face of the contemporary legal concept of that defense which held insanity to be complete derangement, and an insane man thus unable to plan a criminal act or understand its consequences. Hadfield had planned his attempt carefully—buying the gun, manufacturing his own slugs, choosing a seat at the theatre with an ideal vantage from which to shoot the King. And he arguably knew very well the consequences of his action; he hoped he could cause enough of an uproar in order to bring about his own death. Erskine argued that a man suffering from a powerful delusion might appear sane in most ways, and yet still commit an insane act. He brought forth a number of witnesses to testify to the eccentricity of Hadfield's behavior—behavior that included an attempt to kill his infant son days before the attempt on the King. And he brought forth medical witnesses to testify both to the severity of Hadfield's head wounds, and to the obvious insanity he demonstrated in his behavior. Chief Justice Kenyon, long before Erskine called all of his witnesses, stopped the trial, persuaded the Attorney-General, John Mitford, to agree that Hadfield was obviously deranged, and directed the jury to return a verdict of not guilty on the grounds of insanity, which they dutifully did.

Hadfield, however, was not free. The Chief Justice, the Attorney General, and Hadfield's own counsel agreed that Hadfield must be further confined, Erskine stating “most undoubtedly the safety of the community, and of all mankind, requires that this unfortunate man should be taken care of.” He was returned to Newgate. Four days after his trial, Mitford introduced a bill in Parliament to deal with Hadfield and those like him. The Safe Custody of Insane Persons Charged with Offences Bill empowered courts to detain those acquitted of a crime on the grounds of insanity at the pleasure of the monarch. The act was retroactive; Hadfield's legal acquittal resulted in a lifetime of mental confinement. He was conveyed to Bethlem Hospital, which in 1800 was located not in Southwark,
but in Moorfields, north of the river. He escaped in 1802, but was quickly caught in Dover, attempting to flee to France, and sent not back to Bethlem but to Newgate Prison for fourteen years. When arrangements were being made to move Bethlem from Moorfields to Southwark, the government requested that Bethlem establish special sections for female and male criminal lunatics; the governors of the Hospital agreed, and Hadfield was one of the first sent to the new building, in 1816. There he grew old, “grumbling and discontented,” clearly chafing under a lifetime of imprisonment, and petitioning repeatedly for release. He had renewed hopes for his freedom when Victoria came to the throne, and he asked her to recognize his sanity and his service to the nation and make him a Chelsea Pensioner. But it was Victoria's pleasure, as it had been her grandfather's and her uncles', to detain him.

By the time, then, that Oxford was disturbing the neighborhood and the lunatics, both criminal and non-criminal, with his pistol-shots, Hadfield was old, hopeless, and ill of tuberculosis, having “no desire to again mix with the world.”

Within weeks, Oxford would meet the old man.

For more than a month after buying his pistols, Oxford invariably spent the early part of his days at home, leaving the house in mid- or late afternoons, returning in the evening. His first destination was usually Lovett's coffee shop on the London Road, two blocks away from West Square, between the obelisk at St. George's Circus and the snarl of streets leading from Elephant and Castle. At Lovett's, Oxford had access to London's newspapers. He scanned the employment columns of the
Morning Advertiser
, apparently having not given up the possibility of seeking employment in yet another public house. He could follow the movements of the Queen, set out in the Court Circular, published in a number of newspapers. He also was able to follow the latest news, and therefore, with the rest of the nation, he must have been captivated by the breaking news of one of the most sensational murders to occur during Victoria's reign.

In the very early morning of 6 May 1840 (two days after Oxford bought his pistols), sounds of alarm burst out in the aristocratic neighborhood of 14 Norfolk Street, tucked between Park Lane and Park Street, within sight of the northeast corner of Hyde Park. It was the home of 72-year-old Lord William Russell, great-uncle of Lord John Russell, who was at the time the Colonial Secretary in Her Majesty's government. Upon rising that morning, Lord Russell's housemaid had discovered signs of disorder throughout the house. In the drawing room, Lord William's writing desk had been smashed open. By the street door, several of his possessions were found wrapped in cloth. In the kitchen, drawers were forced open and plate was missing. The housemaid hurried to the attic to wake the cook, who, in turn, sent her to wake the valet, in the next room; she did so, oddly finding the man almost fully dressed. Housemaid and valet—a man by the name of François Benjamin Courvoisier—surveyed the kitchen, concluded that a burglary had occurred, and rushed upstairs to check upon their master. They discovered Russell's corpse, his throat slit from ear to ear: his carotid artery and jugular vein severed. Russell's right thumb, as well, was nearly cut away from the rest of his hand. Though his blood had not spurted widely, as might be expected with a wound of this kind, he had bled copiously: blood was pooled deeply around his head, and had dripped through in a puddle under the bed. The servants sent immediately for the police.

While the scene pointed at first to a botched and somehow interrupted burglary, the police quickly began to doubt that this was the case. No one had seen or heard any intruders the night before (though a neighbor did claim to hear groans emanating from Lord Williams's room, during the night). Marks on the back door suggested that it had been violently forced open. But it became clear to the police that the door had been forced from the inside, where several bolts had already been drawn. Moreover, any intruders exiting from this door would have to scale a high wall to escape the property, a wall thoroughly whitewashed, which would have shown
marks of intrusion; it did not. A careful search showed no marks of forced entry whatsoever outside the back door. It was highly unlikely that anyone had used this door for entry or escape, and much more likely that someone had doctored the door to create the appearance of a burglary. By the time of the inquest, the police had concluded that this was an inside job, with particular suspicion falling on Cour-voisier, a native of Switzerland who had only been in service with Russell for five weeks. Courvoisier's odd behavior had attracted attention: besides the fact that he was inexplicably nearly dressed upon being woken, he displayed a great deal of anxiety during the search, and continually “kept running and drinking water.” His reaction to the crime, as well, demonstrated a shocking lack of empathy for the victim. One of the police on the case, Inspector John Tedman—the same John Tedman, incidentally, who had witnessed Oxford's odd behavior at the Shepherd and Flock—was from the start suspicious of the valet, noting Courvoisier's self-centered reaction to the crime: “this is a shocking job; I shall lose my place and lose my character.” And then there was Courvoisier's suspicious wealth: he had in his room a banknote and change amounting to six sovereigns; asked where he obtained the note, he claimed he got it in making change for his master. Most damning at all, a chisel had been found among Courvoisier's possessions, and the chisel exactly fit marks left when the kitchen drawers had been forced.

The police hoped that the murderer had not yet removed the stolen items from the house. The items actually stolen were few, and were small—larger items of far greater value in Russell's room were, surprisingly, left alone. Besides the plate from which Russell had eaten the night of his death, and various items of cutlery, there were banknotes, coins, and rings taken from the fingers of the dead man. The police tore up floorboards and baseboards. On Friday, they made the discovery that led to Courvoisier's arrest: behind the skirting-board in the butler's pantry, a room that was for Courvoisier's use alone, workmen found two banknotes—for £5 and £10—and much of Russell's stolen jewelry. Courvoisier was
held in his room under close observation until Sunday, when he was conveyed to Tothill Fields prison. After repeated examination of the crime at Bow Street, he was at the end of May committed to Newgate, to be tried at the Old Bailey on the 18th of June.

This news of the murder electrified Mayfair—the
Times
reported that the carriages of the fashionable clogged the area for days. While murder and burglary were far from uncommon in London in 1840, this particular murder trumped others in terms of public fascination, playing on a host of British fears. For one thing, the crime took place in the most fashionable neighborhood in the metropolis, and the victim was an aristocrat, the brother of the fifth Duke of Bedford, and the uncle of a leading Whig politician of the day, Sir John Russell, the future prime minister. Then there was the terrifying thrill that accompanied the growing realization that Russell had been slaughtered by his own servant. The
Times
noticed the growing fear, not that the criminal could strike again—he couldn't, of course—but that this type of crime could happen again, anywhere: that all masters and mistresses were vulnerable to their servants. As the
Times
noted, “the excitement produced in high life by the dreadful event is almost unprecedented, and the feeling of apprehension for personal safety increases every hour, particularly among those of the nobility and gentry who live in comparative seclusion.” For a middle and upper class already threatened in 1840 with the specter of mass insurrection demonstrated by reports of increasingly militant activity by the working-class radicals of the Chartist movement, this reminder that the potentially dangerous working class inhabited their very homes turned an individual tragedy into general cause for alarm. More than this, the realization that the murderer was a foreigner added to the general sense of terror. Courvoisier's Swiss ethnicity and the fact that he was only five weeks in Russell's service were mentioned repeatedly in reports: both facts clearly worked against him.

On the day that Inspector Tedman arrested Courvoisier, another officer of the Metropolitan Police, Sergeant Charles Otway, was in
Gravesend, hoping to arrest another criminal, one who had captured the attention of the British public two months before. On 17 March, the body of John Templeman was discovered in his home in Islington. Templeman was an old man who made a modest living from renting a couple of properties; he was generally known to be a miser and was rumored to have hidden a large amount of money in his house. His hands and his eyes had been bound; his head had been beaten severely, and several of his teeth had been forcibly extracted. Obviously, he had been the victim of a burglary, his attacker or attackers apparently attempting to torture out of him the hiding place of his fortune. Three people were quickly under suspicion and quickly arrested for the crime: a married couple, John and Mary Ann Jarvis, who were neighbors to Templeton, and their close acquaintance, Richard Gould, who as it happens was (unlike Oxford) actually a potboy, though at that moment out of work. The Jarvises were aware that Templeton had taken in some cash soon before the crime, and Gould had boasted to others that he was about to free himself from poverty by robbing an old man who was known to wave a £50 note about. He had also asked two comrades if they could provide him with a “screw” and a “darkey”—a lock-pick and a bull's-eye lantern (one that could be covered and thus darkened). The Jarvises, who may have been complicit with Gould in other ways—Mary Ann was Richard Gould's lover—were soon cleared in this case. But Gould was caught in possession of bloody clothing, and several pounds in coin were found at his premises, secured in one of his stockings and hidden in the privy. He was brought to trial on 14 April. His attorney was able to suggest that those testifying against Gould were not credible and indeed more suspicious than he was, and he established that no physical evidence connected Gould with the crime scene. The jury very quickly returned a verdict of not guilty, and Gould was freed.

The police, however, were convinced that they had found their man. Learning in May that Gould was about to sail for Sydney, the Superintendent of A Division sent Sergeant Otway to Gravesend
with a warrant for Gould's arrest: he could not be tried again for murder, but the warrant was for burglary. Otway confronted Gould not with the warrant, but with an offer: the Home Office, he told Gould, was offering £200 to anyone who could give information on the case. Thinking that his acquittal protected him from any prosecution, Gould told Otway that he and the Jarvises committed the crime together: Mrs. Jarvis acting as a lookout, and Mr. Jarvis murdering Templeman before Gould's eyes. Quite simply, Otway entrapped Gould, and he was later censured for his action by the courts and by the police. More than this, Gould's testimony appeared to the police self-serving and inaccurate; the Jarvises had nothing to do with the murder, and had already been cleared after repeated examination. Among his lies, however, Gould revealed a number of details that the police were able to corroborate: in particular, that he had thrown the “darkey” or dark lantern that he had used in committing the crime into a pond behind the house in which he was living. The police searched the pond, and were able to find not only the lantern, but a chisel which corresponded exactly to marks made on drawers forced in Templeman's house. If, because of entrapment, his confession to Otway could not be admitted in trial, this hard evidence could: Gould was rearrested, and sent to Newgate for trial at the Old Bailey on the charge of burglary.