Trials of Passion (15 page)

In a shrewd piece of argument, Ballantine first praised the medical experts. Then, using a ploy still common today, he made light of and undermined their expertise, in particular its peculiar and obscure language. He did not deny, he stated, that the matter of ‘hereditary taint' was one that might be fairly raised in matters of lunacy, but it could not on its own prove that an individual was insane. While ‘a more noble profession than that of medicine, as it was constituted in this country never had existed', he couldn't help thinking that in this case the doctors had gone into the witness box confident in their own powers of verbiage but failing to convey any clear idea of Christiana's condition. In other words, the expert witnesses had dressed up opinion as science through the medium of obfuscating language.

Ballantine went on to finish with a flourish reminiscent of Erskine's defence of Hatfield (Hadfield), all the while out-doctoring the medics in his play on delusion's legal history. In the case of Hatfield, Ballantine argued, there had been an admitted delusion, as there had also been in the case of M'Naghten. Where there was an admitted delusion and where the act done was the necessary consequence of such delusion, then the person was not responsible for his actions. Lockhart Robertson had said the prisoner's intellect was clear and free from delusion. Insanity essentially consisted in delusions, and without delusions there might be mania, but there could be no insanity.

The fact that Christiana's doctors had opted for an insistence on hereditary madness, the time's fashionable medical theory about insanity, and had never attributed a fully delusional state to her, meant that they were out of sync with current legal emphases. But then, focusing on Christiana's ‘delusion' would have meant teasing out the whole romantic and psychosexual ramifications of her passionate infatuation with Dr Charles Beard, and that would have been as morally slippery as putting erotic love on trial, not to mention their own profession. They had steered clear of that option, but had veered into a catch-22. The law tried individuals, not families, and though out of the courtroom, judges and lawyers may have bought into the period's hereditarian arguments about madness, inside the
Old Bailey individual knowledge of right and wrong at the time of the criminal act was what prevailed.

Baron (Samuel) Martin (1801–83) summed up the case for the jury. He was a senior judge and a respected member of his profession. He had been called to the Bar in 1830 at a time when the medical specialists in madness were only just beginning their explorations of the mind. He had served as a Liberal MP, worked for many years in the Court of Exchequer, had been knighted in 1850, and was known as a judge of ‘unusual strength', one who didn't mind imposing heavy sentences. He was also kindly and often found mitigating circumstances. By the time of Christiana's trial, he was already very deaf, a fact that would lead him to retire just two years later.

There were two principal questions for the jury to consider, Baron Martin contended. The first was whether they believed the boy who had testified to buying chocolate creams at Mr Maynard's at the request of the prisoner; whether they also believed that Christiana had contrived to substitute these with poisoned chocolates that went back into the shop to be purchased by Sidney Albert Barker's uncle. The second question was whether the prisoner ‘was in such a state of mind as to be responsible for her actions'. Baron Martin reviewed the evidence to do with Christiana's procurement of considerable quantities of strychnine, the manner in which she had given sweets to children in the street and left them in shops, and the illnesses those who had eaten them had suffered. He referred to her voluntary appearance before the coroner.

Next, he addressed the more difficult question of Miss Edmunds's insanity. It was evidently not a plea he found altogether satisfactory. In the courts, he pointed out, ‘a poor person was rarely afflicted with insanity', though it was a common enough defence when people of means were charged with the commission of a crime. He had ‘heard a doctor say that all mankind were mad more or less'. But this, he agreed, was an aside.

He then set out to review the law on madness. The state of mind that excused crime was well fixed in English law. There was the idiot who
was born without any mind whatsoever; there was the man who was raging mad, and if he had what was called a ‘homicidal tendency' he would have no more criminal responsibility than a tiger. The most numerous cases were persons said to be subject to delusions, who believed in a state of things which did not exist and acted on that state of things. To weigh the law dealing with ‘delusion' as an insanity defence, Baron Martin read great chunks of the responses given to the Lords by the judges asked to clarify the state of the law after the M'Naghten ruling. In particular he read out the response of Justice Maule, the one judge to stand out against all the others and defiantly refuse any new medical knowledge or more lenient interpretation of criminal responsibility for the insane. Maule was a conservative for whom Hale was good enough. Those suffering from delusions, the partially insane, were responsible for their crimes. Only absolute unsoundness of mind provided an exemption, as far as he was concerned. Baron Martin submitted that on the high authority of these historic judges, every man must be responsible for his acts until it was shown to the contrary. Nonetheless, if the jury judged that the prisoner did not know right from wrong at the time she committed the crime, if she did commit it, they should acquit her on the grounds of insanity.

After that lecture, the jury didn't take long. They were back in exactly an hour and spoke their verdict to a court that was now densely crowded: Christiana Edmunds was pronounced ‘Guilty'.

Now the drama of the day's proceedings leapt towards an unexpected climax. Asked by the clerk in the usual manner if she had anything to say as to why the court should not give her judgement to die, Christiana sprang up and replied that she ‘wished she had been tried on the other charge which had been brought against her, namely her so-called improper intimacy with Dr Beard. That was the subject she wished to be examined on.'

A leap of the imagination into Christiana's position in the dock shows us a woman who has patiently waited, all the while making notes and following proceedings, for what to her is the crucial part of
the trial. After all, if there is any delusion on her part, it is that passionate delusion of having done everything in the name of love, a love that she saw as returned. And now this passion, whatever its exaggerated or delusive aspect, is not to be weighed, explained, confessed, witnessed, acknowledged in court. There is to be no mutual ceremony, no public recognition of its potential two-sidedness. No letters are to be read. Her lover, real or imaginary, is not to be interrogated. And nor is she. But the one act of real violence she has committed was that sudden, impulsive and irresistible act of thrusting a poisoned chocolate cream into Emily Beard's mouth – an eruption out of love and hatred, out of an attempt to legitimize her relations (real or desired or utterly fantasized) with Charles.

This whole sexual-romantic-passionate matter has not been tried, and now won't be. Baron Martin has already donned the black cap which sits atop his long, wavy white wig. He looks down at her through his spectacles, his porcine face unsmiling yet gentle. He explains to her that it does not ‘rest with him to have her tried on that charge, but with the prosecution who had not brought it'.

But, Miss Edmunds pleads – with what
The Times
calls ‘modesty and propriety' – ‘it is owing to my having been a patient of his, and the treatment I received in going to him, that I have been brought into this dreadful business. I wish the jury had known the intimacy, his affection for me, and the way I have been treated.'

Christiana was not to have the luxury of either public self-justification or revenge, or even of speaking her love out loud. This fact may only just have become clear to her. She had, it would seem, been waiting for far more. Baron Martin says hastily that he is inclined to believe her statement. The unhappy circumstances in which she placed herself towards the end of 1870 had indeed led to the position that she was now in; but the truth of that only confirmed the propriety of the verdict. In order to have her case fairly tried, he himself had wished to keep out the whole business with Beard. The more he thought of that matter, the clearer it was to him that to bring it in was only calculated to make her position worse.

Baron Martin is suggesting in publicly tactful terms that if Christiana's immorality, her sin against Victorian womanhood and the state of marriage, against all those respectable women now crowded in the courtroom, had been spelled out, it would so radically have affected her trial, so surely have turned the jury against her – as not only a criminal, but also as a sexually desiring and immoral, monstrous woman – that its fairness, from his point of view, would have been compromised. When you've been condemned to death, fairness hardly seems to be a problem, Christiana might well have thought. Her desire is to tell, to sing her passion, to prove that it hasn't been imaginary, but provoked. Her one prior utterance to the court, after all, was to protest that she wasn't mad!

But Baron Martin is still speaking. He is saying that he was quite satisfied that it was the unhappy circumstances under which she had become acquainted with Dr and Mrs Beard that had led to her bouts of poisoning. He, however, had only one duty to perform. He concurs with the jury's verdict in rejecting the defence of insanity: it was the right conclusion. The real question was not whether she was a person of weak mind, but whether her mind was in a state to distinguish right from wrong. Given her letters, it was clear that she could do that, and it was difficult for the jury to arrive at any other conclusion but that she was guilty.

From today's vantage point, it could seem Baron Martin is suggesting that distinguishing between right and wrong is not only a legal definition of sanity, but a moral distinction that brings female respectability in its train. Christiana knew that her love for Dr Beard was wrong, and while it isn't admissible to speak of it in the courtroom, it is better that she and they all recognize its ‘wrongness'. Sorry as he is for her, she is guilty of a death, as well as of failing to recognize the immorality that led to it.

Baron Martin then embarked on the ritual form of words. The law imposed on him the duty to pass the sentence of death upon her. It would be carried out in the county of Sussex where the crime was committed. With much fervency, he prayed that the Lord would have mercy on her soul.

Standing in front of him at the supreme moment, Christiana's bearing was ‘singularly firm', both ‘respectful and becoming'. Her face was slightly flushed, and her eyes beamed with an unwonted expression, yet she betrayed no visible emotion. She heard her sentence with fortitude. But Christiana was not simply the noble heroine of Victorian rectitude who accepted her many-faceted guilt with the submission and stoicism
The Times
wished for and described. She was inevitably more complicated than that.

In the ‘mercy and justice of the English Law', as
Reynold's News
pointed out coyly, using French to racy effect, ‘a woman condemned to death, who is
enceinte
, is respited until after the birth of her child. It is usual, therefore, to interrogate the convict upon the point at the time of the sentence and before the date is fixed for execution.' When the clerk of arraigns put the customary question to Christiana, she whispered to the female warder, who whispered to the jailer, who said aloud, ‘She says she is, my Lord.'

The court heaved with audible excitement. This was the very stuff of sensational fiction. ‘Let the sheriff empanel a jury of matrons forthwith,' the judge ordered.

It had been over fifteen years since this ancient tradition had been invoked in the Central Criminal Court. Christiana could not have expressed more clearly her passion for Dr Beard and what had, according to her, transpired within it. And now ‘under-sheriffs, with swords, cocked hats, and frills', sallied into the body of the court and galleries in quest of ‘matrons' who would put Christiana's announcement of pregnancy to the physical test.

In some twenty minutes, a dozen ‘well-to-do and respectably dressed women' were found, and directed to enter the witness box. One of them, Mrs Adelaide Whittaw, was sworn separately as a forewoman, the others all together, and it was arranged that they would examine the prisoner in the sheriff's parlour. Christiana joined them there. Half an hour later a messenger came into the court and whispered to the judge, who passed his question on to the court. Was there an ‘accoucheur' in the room? – in other words an obstetrician-gynaecologist.
A doctor was duly found and directed to join the women. After another half-hour the messenger returned to the courtroom, this time in search of a stethoscope for the doctor. The rumour went round, injecting a little comedy into the tense drama, that a policeman had earlier been sent out and mistakenly brought back a telescope. After a further suspense-filled delay, the prisoner and the matrons took up their places in the courtroom once more. The forewoman pronounced a single word – ‘Not.'

Reynold's News
was highly contemptuous of this jury of upstanding, middle-aged women, this scandalous anachronism that reeks of witchcraft and ancient times and should ‘be consigned to the limbo of historical curiosities' in favour of ‘a proper scientific investigation by competent medical men'. The medical doctor recruited from the public in the courtroom felt the same way. Dr Beresford Ryley, surgeon of the Metropolitan Police, Woolwich District, described the experience to the
British Medical Journal. Reynold's News
, as well as
The Times,
reprinted it as a ‘plea for Christiana Edmunds'. Here was sensation and science all in one.