The Damnation of John Donellan (24 page)

On cutting through the skin the fat in the cellular membrane was seeming fluid – when the cavity of the abdomen was laid open its contents appeared generally inflamed and distended with air. The stomach lay quite flat. It was impossible to examine the contents of the stomach and bowels
as the importance
of the enquiry deserved
owing to the extreme offensiveness of the excrements … when the lungs were raised up, a considerable quantity of blood quite fluid, not less than a pint in the cavity of the thorax … not a single coagulum of blood … the heart was in its natural state and did not partake in the general inflammation that surrounded it.

Rattray was then asked in court to describe various animal experiments he had performed on the effects of laurel water poisoning. He recounted them with enthusiasm.

A: Our first experiment was with a middle-sized dog; I held his mouth open and nearly two ounces of laurel water poured down his throat … in half a minute he dropped dead to the ground. The next animal was an aged mare; we [he and Wilmer] gave about a pint and a half of laurel water; in about two minutes she was precipitated to the ground with her head under her, and tumbled on her back, kicking violently; seemed convulsed with her eyes rolling about, rearing up her head as if in agonies, gulping at her stomach … heaving in the flanks in the most extraordinary manner; and at the end of fifteen minutes, she expired.

He went on, again in some detail, to describe the death throes of another horse ‘violently convulsed, groaning, his tongue lolling out of his mouth'.

Q: In your judgement, is the quantity that one of these bottles contains [he had been shown a bottle of the same size as the one Powell had given Theodosius] of laurel water sufficient to take away life from any human creature?

A: In my opinion, it is.

This was misleading on the prosecution's part. Their own brief showed that, even if laurel water had been in the phial, because – according to Anna Maria – a part of the rhubarb and jalop was still
in it, the amount of laurel water would not have been ‘the quantity that one of these bottles contains'.

There could have been no one in the court who, on hearing the distressing details of Rattray's ‘experiments', and immediately afterwards seeing the bottle, would not have remembered the autopsy description of the blackened tongue and imagined Theodosius ‘violently convulsed, groaning, his tongue lolling out of his mouth.'

Newnham took up the cross-examination. Rattray admitted that his inspection of Theodosius's body had taken place some eleven days after his death, and that the effects of laurel water on the animals were seen with the benefit of an immediate – not an eleven-days-later – autopsy. He went on to describe Theodosius's face ‘with a maggot crawling over its surface' when he was called to Lawford Hall, and that there was a ‘violent stench'. He confirmed that Donellan asked him if he would tell Sir William Wheler of their visit and added that he told Donellan he doubted he would see Sir William because of engagements the following day and evening.

Q: Was anything said to Mr Wilmer in your presence?

A: Not that I know, or at present recollect.

Rattray went on to say that the next time he saw Sir William – in other words, the first time he had a chance to tell him face to face that the body had not been opened – was 6 September. He had had a letter from Donellan that morning ‘desiring either me or Mr Wilmer, or both of us, to go to Sir William Wheler and inform him of the circumstances that happened at Lawford on the night of the 4th', so he had gone to meet Sir William ‘at the Black Dog'. In other words, Donellan was trying to get both men to tell Sir William what they had done – or not done – on the night of 4 September. Neither had written to Sir William to enlighten him.

Sir William had been visited by the Reverend Newsam on 3 September with a message from the Earl of Denbigh urging Wheler to investigate the cause of death; on 4 September he had written to Donellan to say he was sending Rattray and Wilmer over to do an autopsy; on 5 September Donellan had replied saying, ‘I wish you
would hear from them the state they found the body in.' However, in his evidence, Rattray does not say if he told Sir William that they had not opened the body as instructed.

Donellan's
Defence
makes a pertinent point here. Throughout Rattray's account of his visit to Lawford Hall, he claims not to have known that there was a suspicion that Theodosius had been poisoned. However, the apothecary Powell had been with Sir William when he had written to Donellan asking for Wilmer and Rattray to perform the autopsy, when he had been anxious to prove that it was not his physic that had poisoned Theodosius (‘Mr Powell is now with me, and from his account it does not appear that his medicine could be the cause of death'). He had also been present when two doctors had arrived at the Hall that evening – according to Rattray's own testimony: ‘When I came into the hall … Mr Powell, the apothecary, stood by a great table reading a letter …' Yet the court was now being asked to believe that Powell did not at any point tell either Wilmer or Rattray that Sir William had said: ‘[I]t is reported all over the country that he was killed either by medicine or by poison. The country will never be convinced to the contrary unless the body is opened …'

Even accounting for the fact that doctors and surgeons considered themselves of a higher order than apothecaries, and did not normally discuss their work with them, still the omission – when all the ‘country' was talking of poison – is astonishing, especially given that Wilmer and Rattray sat down to supper with Donellan and Powell before they went upstairs. Unless, of course, both Wilmer and Rattray thought that Powell
had
prepared poison, in which case they would have kept judiciously silent.

By 6 September, the day that Rattray met Wheler in the Black Dog, Bucknill had reported to Sir William that he had been refused access to Theodosius's body. Rattray told Wheler that an autopsy had not been safe – Wheler's letter to Donellan of 6 September reporting their conversation says: ‘I … find that they found the body in so putrid a state that they thought it not safe to open it …'

It is plain from this that Wheler had thought an autopsy had been carried out, and that it was not until Rattray told him that it
had not that Wheler wrote again to Donellan. This omission was not Donellan's fault. He had felt it proper that the two medical men should tell Wheler what they had found and done, not him; he tried to ensure that they contacted Wheler. Once the real facts became clear on 6 September, Donellan sent servants looking for Snow and Bucknill – or so he maintained.

There is one more question that neither the prosecuting counsel nor the defence asked Rattray. Why, if he met Sir William in the Black Dog on the day of the funeral, did he not offer to go to Lawford to help Bucknill? The answer becomes blindingly clear under Newnham's further questioning. Rattray claimed that he had other business on the day of the funeral – but in truth he was not qualified on the effects of poisons on the human body; nor was he qualified to speak on the subject of anatomy.

Newnham began by bringing up the subject of Rattray's deposition to the coroner's court. In it, Rattray had said that Powell's mixture could not have caused death but that, after examination of the body in the churchyard, he had concluded that, once he had heard the deposition of Lady Boughton, ‘it seemed to him from such account, and the symptoms of the deceased after taking the medicine, that the same was probably the cause of death.'

Rattray began his answers with confidence:

Q: I understand you have set your name to a description of certain appearances when you examined the body?

A: I have, undoubtedly.

Q: You set your name to that examination?

A: I did not set my name to anything but my own examination.

Q: Wherein the appearances are described?

A: They are not particularly described; there is something about the stomach and bowels.

In fact, Rattray had described the stomach, bowels, kidneys, lungs, outward surface of the body, face and genitals (briefly) to the coroner. His confidence was now beginning to falter.

Q: For what purpose did you attend there?

A: I did not know that it was necessary before a Coroner's jury to enter into particulars; I was quite novice in the business.

Q: Do you mean a novice in the mode of dissection?

A: No, in the business before a Coroner.

Q: Did the account set your name to contain a true description of the appearances that met your eye upon that occasion?

A: So far as they went, they did.

Q: Did you ever hear or know of any poison whatever occasioning any immediate external appearance on the human body?

A: No … they have not fallen under my own knowledge.

Q: I do not mean to give offence, but I beg leave to ask whether you have been much used to anatomical dissection?

A: I have been as far as persons not particularly intended for anatomical pursuits. I am not a professor of anatomy.

Q: Did you ever attend the dissection of a human body that was poisoned, or that was supposed to have been poisoned?

A: Never.

Rattray could not, therefore, reliably ascribe any significance to what he had witnessed at the autopsy because he was not professionally qualified to do so. All he could do was, as a doctor rather than a surgeon, apply generalised observations without being able to draw any conclusion that he could back up with independently verifiable proof.

Newnham persisted with the subject of inflammation, and the contents of the stomach: ‘a spoonful and a half of a slimy reddish liquor, which I rubbed between my finger and thumb, and it contained no gritty substance that I could perceive', according to Rattray. Although, on being pressed about the red or inflamed stomach he admitted, ‘I perhaps don't know the cause
of inflammation,' adding lamely, ‘the veins being full of blood put on a red appearance.'

Newnham's next questions centred on why the bowels were not fully examined at the open-air autopsy; Rattray answered that ‘the smell was so offensive, I did not choose to enter into that matter … I did not think it in the power of anyone to examine the contents of the bowels, their contents being so strong and disagreeable …'

‘Are not the bowels the seat of poison?' asked Newnham.

‘When it passes there, it no doubt affects the bowels,' Rattray conceded.

Newnham turned next to the subject of arsenic.

Donellan's
Defence
commented: ‘He [Rattray] has been absurd enough to say that Sir Theodosius was poison'd with arsenick, but he found it would not produce the symptoms which are said to have been the consequence of the medicine taken by Sir Theodosius. Indeed it is well known to the faculty that arsenick never operates in less than six or seven hours.'

Q: Whether many reasons have occurred … to induce you to form your judgement he died of arsenic?

Rattray now needed to backpedal at a furious rate.

A: At that time I did think he died of arsenic, but now I am clear that I was then mistaken … Every man is mistaken now and then in his opinion, and that was my case; I am not ashamed to own a mistake.

It is to be remembered that the offence for which Donellan was being tried was poisoning by arsenic.

However, the prosecution was confident that this distinction did not matter. As Judge Buller said in his statement to the jury at the beginning of the assizes, whatever poison had been used did not matter: ‘If the indictment should state that the deceased died by any particular poison, and it should appear upon enquiry that
he died of another sort of poison, the difference is immaterial with respect to the law …'
¹

The learned judge had seen the error coming, and headed it off at the pass.

Newnham then turned to the crucial point that the chest cavity had been found to be filled with two pints of blood.

Q: Would not the rupture of a blood vessel occasion death?

A: The rupture of a blood vessel would have undoubtedly occasioned death …

Q: Might not a blood vessel, in an effort to reach [i.e. vomit] be broken?

A: I should conceive that, if, in an effort to reach, a blood vessel of that magnitude had been ruptured, he must have died immediately without convulsions.

The final issue to be dealt with was the ‘offensive smell' which Rattray said he noticed when he was experimenting with the animals. He was asked if Theodosius's stomach had the same offensive smell; he said that it did. However, he did not mention this when he was questioned earlier about the substance from Theodosius's stomach that he had rubbed between his thumb and finger – he was able to do that without the ‘particular taste in my mouth, a kind of biting acrimony upon my tongue … I complained to Mr Wilmer, “I have a very odd taste in my mouth.”' But he did add that, at the time, he had attributed the smell to the ‘volatile salts' leaving the body: the normal smells, in other words, of putrefaction.

Neither Wilmer nor Bucknill commented on this strange smell or taste. Nor did Rattray mention them in the original description of the body he had given when the prosecution brief was prepared.

Rattray went on to describe laurel water as having the power to drive blood ‘from the part of the body where it should be' and to ‘empty the arteries' and ‘push blood into the veins', but concluded, ‘that is my opinion at present, as far as I have gone into the matter.'

His was an opinion based on limited research and inconclusive
experiments. Yet it stood unchallenged, leaving the impression, unsubstantiated by any other medical source, that laurel water – if laurel water had indeed been used on Theodosius – had the ability to ‘empty the arteries' and (in another lurid word picture associated with the autopsy) that the chest cavity apparently filled with blood.

The prosecuting team, in the form of Mr Balguy, resurfaced in the final moments of Rattray's testimony to drive home the point that, when asking Rattray and Wilmer to attend Lawford Hall, Donellan had never mentioned poison, and that Rattray did not know the ‘tendency of the inquiry'. If he had, Rattray answered, ‘I should have sat there a month, rather than have left the body unopened.'