Trials of Passion (11 page)

On top of all this, in an attempt to win back her married lover together with her reputation (that term that carries the all-important Victorian slippage between status and virtue), she had planned and plotted and behaved in such a way as to divert suspicion from herself as the poisoner of Emily Beard. With no man's help, she had allegedly purchased her sweetmeats, injected them with the strychnine and arsenic obtained through a variety of ruses, distributed her chocolate creams and publicly testified at an inquest. She had even confronted police Inspector Gibbs with the taunt that he would ‘never find it out'. The risk in all this was enormous, and at the end it had landed her here, at the Old Bailey. Christiana was definitely bad. Where that badness might shade into madness now became a matter for general conjecture.

There were several models available, in both press reports and popular literature, for Christiana and the public to draw on and elaborate.

Uncanny echoes of her trajectory exist in the ‘sensational' novels of her own day. The femmes fatales here are often represented as seductively fatal to men, but in the end seem to be fatal mostly to themselves. In Mary Elizabeth Braddon's bestselling novel
Lady Audley's Secret
(1862), Lady Audley uses her outstanding beauty and her native cunning to escape poverty. Her path from first love to bigamy, and finally to a ‘murder' which isn't quite one, is certainly bad. Yet her noble husband and nephew prefer to think such badness, when it resides in so lovely a receptacle of femininity, must be madness:
otherwise, the social order would be destroyed. As the mad doctor called in to diagnose Lady Audley states: ‘You would wish to prove that this lady is mad, and therefore irresponsible for her actions.' Our hero Robert Audley, who can find no other way to comprehend such extreme behaviour, responds: ‘Yes ... I would rather, if possible, think her mad.'

Wilkie Collins's Lydia Gwilt in his novel
Armadale
of 1866 – like Christiana and Lady Audley, a woman who can barely afford the middle-class trappings she both wants and feels she is owed – is brazen both in her desires and in her class rage. Beautiful, she takes her freedom and strides the streets of London and foreign capitals, only to end her days a suicide at the quack Dr Downward's clinic for the mad. Fascinating it may be, but sexualized female badness slides into madness in the blink of a male eye that would prefer such excess to be utterly aberrant. Like these fictional creations, Christiana Edmunds, in that daring that had tragic repercussions, both attracted and repelled; and her much reported trial – headlined a 'sensation' trial by some papers – filled the unoccupied hours and the imaginations of a leisured class.

The ‘Mean Places' of the Law

‘Verily we administer justice in mean places,' the
Daily News
reporter opined as he navigated his way into the Old Bailey through a ‘hurry of ladies' and robed men, through aldermen and sheriffs wearing unwieldy court swords, then through a Scylla and Charybdis of policemen. At last reached, the courtroom was a space so dingy that a surgeon would be ashamed to cut off a leg in it or a reputable professor deliver a lecture. ‘It is a square well with a lid on the top.' To the west, the jury sits beneath a row of dirty windows. To the north is the bench, a long elevated platform, thinly upholstered. A wooden canopy and an antique sword, presumably of justice, mark the centre of the room; and next to these on either side sit the judge and the
officials of the court. The room's east side is for the privileged spectators and the press. To the south, a large wooden pen makes up the dock, glass-panelled on both sides but open in the front. The gallery is above it, and here the public are squashed in. Finally, in the well of the court sit the barristers.

As the clock strikes two, the jury file into their box and the usher calls for silence. Ermine, gold chains and frills fill the empty bench. The judge Mr Baron Martin takes his seat, followed by the sheriffs, aldermen and under-sheriffs. This gaudy entrance almost blots out the arrival of a demure, quiet-eyed woman in black velvet trimmed with fur, who is followed by a hard-faced female warder and a male jailer. The indictment is read out. Christiana Edmunds is accused of ‘wilful murder' in having caused the death by poisoning of the boy Sidney Albert Barker.

‘Not guilty,' she says in a firm, low voice. This pronouncement was ‘followed by a momentary aversion of the face'. The jury are sworn in and she challenges none of them. Then Serjeant Ballantine, presenting the case for the prosecution, begins his address in a ‘studiously modulated voice of low pitch, and with a total absence of gesticulation'.

William Ballantine (1812–87), Christiana's prosecutor, was a leading criminal barrister, reputed to be a subtle and searching cross-examiner. Born into the legal profession, he had long served at the Central Criminal Court; but he loved theatre and literature above all else, and on retiring wrote
Some Experiences of a Barrister's Life
(1882). As a youth he had frequented literary taverns and met Dickens and Trollope. In
Orley Farm
, the novel that was his personal favourite, Trollope had based his wily barrister Chaffanbrass on his old friend, whose reputation had grown with his performance for both defence and prosecution. In this genial satire Ballantine becomes that ‘great guardian of the innocence or rather not-guiltiness of the public', a lawyer who devotes himself ‘to the manumission of murderers or the security of the swindling world in general'.

Ballantine was elevated in 1856 to the distinguished position of Serjeant at Law. The rank, which entailed the wearing of a special coif or
wig, was abolished in the judicial reforms of 1873. He had tried some famous and also delicate cases, one of which was the notorious Mordaunt divorce trial of 1870 in which Sir Charles Mordaunt, a Conservative MP, sued his young and erring wife, who had just given birth, for divorce, threatening to name the Prince of Wales as co-respondent. The public scandal echoed the earlier Robinson divorce case. Harriet Mordaunt's father, a noble and conservative Scotsman, determined madness was more reputable than divorce and had his daughter confined. Ballantine's examination of the Prince on the witness stand was said to have been a model of tactful, prosecutorial behaviour.

Christiana's defence barrister, briefed by her Brighton lawyer Charles Lamb, was the eminent Serjeant John Humffreys Parry (1816–80). Parry, too, had literary leanings and had worked in the printed books department of the British Museum while studying law. He was called to the Bar in 1843 and developed a courtroom style that was notable for its clarity and simplicity, though it could also rise to melodramatic heights. Known for his criminal work, Parry also handled many compensation cases. His politics were those of an advanced liberal: he was one of the founders of the Complete Suffrage Association. Twice he contested a parliamentary seat and twice he lost. He and Ballantine were frequent sparring partners.

Parry had defended and Ballantine had prosecuted in the first British railway murder trial, in 1864, in which a city banker, Thomas Briggs, was beaten, robbed and then thrown out of the train compartment between London's Fenchurch and Hackney Wick, only to die after he was pulled from the tracks and taken to a Hackney pub. Public panic ensued: was this new high-speed technology of the railway not only bad for nerves and landscape, but unsafe for the respectable classes? The trail that led police to the German tailor Franz Müller began nine days later when a London cabbie came to them with suspicions. The police traced Müller to a ship bound for America and contacted police in New York. This piece of transatlantic cooperation eventually saw a small Armada awaiting Müller, together with shouts of ‘Welcome to America, murderer!' as his vessel neared New York.

Shipped back to London, Müller stood trial at the Old Bailey that November. He maintained his innocence, and Parry battled for him against Ballantine's wealth of evidence. Though much of this was circumstantial and Parry contested that the incriminating witness had only come forward because of the promise of reward, Muller was found guilty. The fact that he had left what witnesses said was his unusual hat on the train, and exchanged it for Briggs's, was perhaps what did for him, though his foreignness didn't help. Nor did his statement that he had been in a brothel at the time of the murder. Muller was sentenced to hang and even King Wilhelm of Prussia's plea for a stay of execution couldn't save him. He was executed on 18 November that year before a rowdy crowd numbering some fifty thousand, four years before public executions were banned. The Newgate chaplain attested that Muller had confessed –
‘Ich habe es geten' –
just before his death. Public outcry would eventually lead to trains being built with a connecting aisle between the separate compartments, together with alarms: the earlier remedy of a peep-hole between compartments had brought an outcry from lovers ...

Parry would go on to act for the artist James McNeill Whistler, who sued the very same Ruskin who preferred his women at home, for libel: in
Fors Clavigera
, commenting on an exhibition of his in 1876, Ruskin had written, ‘I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.' Combative but poor, Whistler was unwise to sue: he never got damages. But Parry did win the case for the talented American-born painter, whose ‘art for art's sake' Ruskin deplored.

On 15 January 1872 at the Old Bailey, Mr Serjeant Ballantine laid out the case against Christiana Edmunds with a damning logic and an understated aplomb. He had long passed the age, he told the jury, when the conviction of a prisoner brought him a sense of victory. He simply wanted to elicit the truth and administer justice. The prisoner, he said, had formed an acquaintance with Dr Beard which ‘seems to
have ripened into an intimacy scarcely consistent with the strict relations that ought to exist between a medical adviser and one of his female patients'. There could be no doubt that the lady herself entertained ‘the strongest feelings towards Dr Beard, and expressed them in very strong language which indicated on her part a considerable amount of affection towards him'. All of which led her to pursue a course of conduct Ballantine described as ‘so extraordinary as to be totally unparalleled in the records of any criminal court of justice'.

Ballantine's exposition of the case against Christiana was masterly. In setting out her relations with Beard he mentions the many letters that ‘had been sent between the parties', and states that he will have no objection to them being read out in court in order to further the ends of justice, if ‘there is a desire expressed that they should be read'. In the event, the letters are not read. Having shown the passionate motive behind Christiana's extraordinary actions, neither the judge, nor the prosecution, nor the defence seem keen to enter into these murky intimate waters. This, after all, is not a trial for the attempted murder of Emily Beard, but for the wilful murder of Sidney Barker.

At the end of the proceedings, it is clear that Christiana feels her own story has hardly been touched. An unstated gentlemen's agreement, perhaps, too, a moral worry about inflaming the imaginations of the ladies present in the courtroom and the wider readership of the press, means that her ‘reality' is never heard. The ins and outs of Christiana's love affair, how much of it was in her mind, how much of it induced or even initially reciprocated by Dr Beard, would never be tested in open court. Wisely for himself, Dr Beard and his wife did not press charges, and so only Christiana's inadvertent murder of little Sidney Barker strictly concerned the court. The passion that had occasioned the crime – those matters that would have kept a French court busy and a French public enthralled – barely surfaced above the barricades of Victorian propriety.

The witnesses for the prosecution were those who had already been examined in the Brighton hearings: Garrett the chemist, the milliner,
the various boys who had served as Christiana's chocolate and strychnine messengers, Maynard the chocolatier, Sidney's father Albert Barker, the handwriting experts and Inspector Gibbs, who had grown suspicious of Christiana during the inquest. Christiana's eloquent anonymous letters to Mr Barker, urging him, as a fellow parent, to pursue Maynard after the inquest had termed little Sidney's death ‘accidental' and had failed to find Maynard guilty of purveying poison creams, were read out. Towards the very end of the day, Ballantine called Dr Beard. It was then that Christiana was jarred out of her composure, ‘her bosom heaved convulsively and her face flushed scarlet'. But Parry objected to Ballantine's line of questioning, which would have taken the court onto the terrain of Christiana's first attempted poisoning of Emily Beard. Perhaps he was worried that too much attention to these intimate matters would do his client more harm than good. Neither did judge nor prosecutor seem eager to go there. And so Dr Beard's moment on the witness stand extended only to his saying that he knew the prisoner and had seen Christiana both in her own home and his. The ‘remoteness' of that night on which Christiana had allegedly attempted to poison Mrs Beard made it unsuitable to be called as evidence, the judge determined.

The next day Serjeant Parry led Christiana's defence. His tactic, in the first instance, was to point out just how circumstantial the evidence tying the chocolate cream that four-year-old Sidney Barker had eaten to Christiana was. It was all fine and well, he argued in his opening statement, to have witnesses lined up to say that Christiana might have impregnated with poison the chocolate that had some weeks later found its way into Sidney's mouth, but there was nothing to put her at the scene of the crime or to indicate direct intent. Before convicting the prisoner, the jury must be satisfied beyond all doubt that the ‘chocolate which caused the little boy's death came to be given to him, directly or indirectly, through the agency of the prisoner'.