‘All that belongs to human understanding, in this deep ignorance
and obscurity, is to be sceptical, or at least cautious; and not to
admit to any hypothesis, whatsoever …’
‘A wise man proportions his belief to the evidence.’
David Hume, An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (1748)
CATHARINE AMOS, the cook–maid at Lawford, was called to the stand directly after Anna Maria Boughton. She confirmed Theodosius’s symptoms on the morning of his death but only after laboured prompting did she admit to Donellan owning a still:
Q: Did Mr Donellan bring anything to you at or about the time of Sir Theodosius’s death?
A: No.
Q: At any time before his death?
A: No.
Q: Was anything brought to you by Mr Donellan within a fortnight or three weeks before the death of Sir Theodosius Boughton?
A: No.
Q: You said you was cook–maid?
Q: Was the oven under your direction?
A: Yes.
Q: Was anything brought to you at that time?
A: Yes, a still.
Q: Who brought it?
A: Mr Donellan …. he desired me to put it into the oven to dry it.
The rumour that Donellan was distilling laurel leaves for poison was rife locally. (‘It has also been propagated about the country that Mr Donellan made use of a still and that he distilled poisons in it,’ noted his Defence.) The fact that he brought the still down to the kitchen to dry it out after Theodosius died was never disputed by Donellan. His case was, however, that he had used it to distil roses and lavender for his wife. It was never proved that laurel leaves had been used in the still, only that laurel grew in Lawford Hall’s garden (the gardener was called at the trial to confirm this, and this alone). No one had ever seen Donellan picking laurel leaves; nor seen him take any kind of vessel or phial for holding laurel water; nor seen laurel leaves in the still; nor seen a container of laurel water anywhere in the house. (However, it did much later transpire that Donellan had used a laurel-water foot lotion.) The servants who cleaned his rooms never spoke of or testified to the bitter almond smell described by Anna Maria anywhere about the rooms or in his clothing or on his hands – a smell that Rattray maintained in his evidence was so strong that when he tried it out on animals it ‘made his gums bleed’.
Donellan wrote in his Defence that he had brought the still to the kitchen because he had put lime water in it to destroy fleas in his children’s rooms. (Donellan used to wash the bedsteads with lime water ‘as the women servants can testify’ and he claimed that he had filled the still with that simply because it was the first thing to hand; popular commentaries of the time say that this was a completely ineffectual remedy.) Donellan further made the point that, if the purpose of the lime water was to obliterate the smell of laurel water, then the lime should have been in both parts of the still, whereas it was only in the lower.
The part of his Defence prepared before the trial reads as if Donellan took it for granted that the servants would be called to verify this. But they were not. Nor was the gardener cross-examined; ‘Counsel were instructed to cross-examine the gardener but did not do it,’ his solicitors remark in their footnotes.
Prosecuting counsel Digby next called the Reverend Newsam, the vicar of Great Harborough.
Newsam confirmed that he had seen Theodosius at Lawford Hall on the Saturday before his death and that Donellan had told him that Theodosius:
… had never got rid of the disorder that he had brought with him from Eaton, but rather, in his opinion, had been adding to it; that he had made such frequent use of mercury, inwardly and outwardly, that his blood was a mass of mercury and corruption; that he had a violent swelling in his groin … that he had frequent swellings in his throat, and his breath was so offensive that they could hardly sit at table to eat with him. My answer was, ‘If that was the case, I did not think that his life was worth two years’ purchase.’ He replied, ‘Not one.’
Q: Perhaps you can tell, from the appearance of Sir Theodosius Boughton, what was the actual state of his health at that time, and for some time before?
A: He looked like a man to all appearance in health.
While Newsam’s description of Theodosius’s infection is the most lurid yet, he was not prepared to venture an opinion as to whether Theodosius’s life was as short as Donellan predicted. Under cross-examination by Mr Green, he admitted that Theodosius had been under the care of William Kerr, a respected local surgeon and the founder of Northampton Hospital. Kerr was called to the stand to substantiate this. But he was not asked about the extent of Theodosius’s illness or the effects on the body of prolonged treatment with mercury.
A note in Donellan’s Defence reads:
Mr Newnham did not think it prudent or necessary to ask for the bills of the different Surgeons, or to cross-examine Mr Powell at all; therefore the court remained ignorant of Sir Theodosius having had any other venereal complaint than the last infection, or of his ever having taken or used mercury at all.
The first of the medical men who had been called to examine Theodosius after his death, and who witnessed the autopsy, now gave evidence: David Rattray. Mr Balguy, named by Sarah Blundell (according to Donellan) as the man who tormented her for proof of Donellan’s guilt on her deathbed, asked the questions.
Rattray first testified that he received ‘an anonymous note’ on 4 September asking him to go to Lawford Hall ‘in order to open the body of Sir Theodosius Boughton’ and to bring Mr Wilmer with him. However, as Wilmer was out of town that afternoon, it was late in the evening, and dark, by the time the two men arrived at Lawford.
Donellan’s account of Rattray’s description of ‘an anonymous note’ is especially critical. ‘Some men in the world exult at other men’s distress,’ his Defence concludes, after drawing attention to Rattray’s lack of objectivity. ‘This gentleman gave evident marks of partiality when he opened his evidence. The letter … being wrote in a hurry … did not put his name to it and called Mr Wilmer “Dr Wilmot”. This advantage over the unfortunate prisoner pleased Dr Rattray …’
Rattray told how Donellan was waiting for them in the hallway when they arrived; how he said that he expected Sir William Wheler might come; and that they ate supper while they waited for the coffin to be unsoldered. Then he was shown a letter from Sir William Wheler, taken out of Powell’s hands in the hallway, which said that Wheler would not be coming because he thought it improper. Donellan searched his waistcoat for another letter, but Rattray admitted impatience; he wanted, he said, ‘to get over such little matters as these’.
Rattray testified that he and Wilmer went upstairs and saw the body alone but Wilmer thought it would ‘answer no purpose to open the body at that time’. Then they went downstairs and asked Donellan what was the reason for an autopsy, to which Donellan replied, ‘For the satisfaction of the family.’
Q: Did he at any time intimate to you the suspicion of poison?
A: No, nothing of the sort.
Donellan’s Defence weighs in heavily against Rattray’s evidence. Rattray’s attitude throughout, Donellan predicted accurately in his notes, ‘will give as unfavourable account of this business as he can … being very much connected with Sir William Wheler and from hopes thereby of pleasing him, or from a wish … to gain popularity … or from what other motive is not at present known.’
Rattray was then asked about the autopsy on 9 September. Again he claimed to have been contacted in ‘some strange roundabout way’ but he went to Newbold-on-Avon churchyard and watched the disinterment.
Q: What were the material appearances that struck you at that time?
A: The body appeared distended a good deal; the face, of a round figured, extremely black, the teeth black … the tongue protruding beyond the fore teeth and turning upwards towards the nose; the blackness descended upon the throat … there was another circumstance which, for decency, I have omitted, but, if called upon, I am ready to mention.
Q: That circumstance is not at all material …
A: We proceeded to open the body … the bowels in the lower belly seemed to put on an appearance of inflammation … the heart appeared to be in a natural state … the lungs appeared what I call suffused with blood … the kidneys appeared as black as tinder and the liver in much the same state …
Q: … independent of appearances … what was, in your judgement, the occasion of Sir Theodosius’s death?
A: I am of the opinion that the swallowing of the draught … was poison, and the immediate cause of his death.
The prosecution brief had the full statement from Rattray on the state of the body at the autopsy; it emphasised ‘gangrene’ – or putrefaction – a little more than Rattray was allowed on the witness stand, and made clear how impossible it was to detect poison at all. It also detailed the ‘circumstance’ which had ‘been omitted for decency’:
On 9th September at Newbold, the whole body was very much swollen with universal gangrene, the face appeared greatly enlarged, putrid, extremely black; the lips were so much retracted particularly the upper lip as to show the teeth and gums of the upper jaw distinctly. The tongue protruded a considerable way beyond the teeth appearing much inflated, the point bearing upwards towards the nose. The gums were much swelled, the nose small in proportion and apparently in a decaying state on the outer side of the right nostril.
The breast and throat were of a purple colour deepening as it reached the head. The belly afforded proof of it being in a gangrenous state. No swellings in the groin could be discovered either by the eye or by the finger. The genitals were an extraordinary object; the scrotum was much increased in bulk and the penis was in strong erection. The skin around the anus was very black but the inner part of the rectum seemed a bright red.
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.’
A great pity, then, that Rattray did not think to ask Powell, who was with them at Lawford Hall. And a great surprise that Powell, having just seen Sir William Wheler, who was in a flat panic over the subject of poison, did not mention the subject at all.
The next four witnesses to be called were all ‘gentlemen of the Faculty’: Wilmer and Bucknill, who had examined Theodosius’s body; and two ‘experts’, Dr Ashe, a physician who lived in Birmingham, and Dr Parsons, a professor of anatomy at Oxford University.
Wilmer confirmed that the subject of poison was not mentioned on the evening of 4 September – ‘I never heard a word of poison.’
Q: Supposing it had been communicated to you that Sir Theodosius Boughton had died by poison, should you have been satisfied without opening it?
A: I should have then opened the body at all events.
Wilmer was also asked about Rattray’s animal experiments, and confirmed them all in detail, reading from notes that he had taken at the time. He stated that the experiments were attended by Sir William Wheler, but he did not explain why the three men were particularly interested in the effects of laurel water, or why Wheler, who was not medically qualified, should be interested in witnessing them. An explanation, however, does appear in an article published after the trial, in the Hibernian Magazine (‘Compendium of Entertaining Knowledge’) for May 1781.
The article explains that the idea of experimenting on animals with laurel water had been the idea of Bradford Wilmer. Anna Maria had told Mr Wilmer that the draught smelled like bitter almonds; Wilmer had then researched the subject of poisons and found that ‘laurel water was a poison having the peculiar flavour and smell of apricot kernels, and bitter almonds’.
Having asked ‘an ingenious chemist in London’ to prepare a mixture of the same, he told Sir William, who then consulted the family solicitor Caldecott. Caldecott made it his business to visit Lawford Hall, and found that ‘three days after the death’ John Donellan had asked a servant to clean out a still which he had been using. We know from Edward Boughton’s letters just before the trial that the discovery of Donellan’s possession of the still had been ‘kept secret to prevent Donellan getting intelligence of it’; nevertheless Donellan did address the issue in his Defence.
Wilmer then proposed trying the laurel water on a horse, to see its effects; and this was the reason why, in March, just a matter of days before the trial, Wheler, Rattray and Wilmer had gathered to see the deadly consequences of the draught.
It must be noted that the experiments, the secrecy, Caldecott’s investigation at Lawford Hall and the research by Wilmer all sprang from a single source – Anna Maria Boughton saying that the draught ‘smelt like bitter almonds’; a smell not detected in the bedroom after Theodosius’s death, or by the servants, or when the body was viewed on 4 September, or at the autopsy except by Rattray.
Wilmer’s evidence to the prosecuting counsel ended on a rather significant point: he confirmed that he knew nothing about the effects of laurel water on the human body – ‘I do not know it of my own knowledge, but from my reading.’
Mr Green, acting for Donellan, conducted the cross-examination of Wilmer.
His questions centred upon the effects of apoplexy and epilepsy in human beings; Wilmer confirmed that epileptics foam at the mouth, and that sometimes their tongues are blackened. Asked about loss of blood, he stated that ‘the loss of blood will evidently occasion convulsions’ and confirmed also that two pints of blood (or what he thought was blood) were in Theodosius’s chest cavity. His evidence here contradicted that of Rattray, who had said that ‘if a blood vessel of that magnitude had been ruptured, he must have died immediately without convulsions.’
Next Wilmer was asked about Donellan’s requests after he and Rattray had seen Theodosius’s body on the evening of 4 September, and here again he directly contradicted Rattray’s testimony. Wilmer claimed that he had not himself been asked to tell Sir William Wheler about their decision not to open the body that night, but said, ‘I believe he [Donellan] asked Dr Rattray whether he should see Sir William Wheler. I think Dr Rattray said he believed he should, and would give him an account of the business.’
So, although Rattray disclaimed any responsibility in not advising Sir William, his own colleague – much the senior and more respected man – said this was not true.
If Wilmer was correct, why did Rattray lie about this? Why did he tell Donellan that he would inform Wheler that the body had not been opened, and then not do so? Or did he actually tell Sir William on 5 September, and Wheler did not act on it until the next day, 6 September, when they met at the Black Dog?
Whatever the answer, it lay between Wilmer, Rattray and Wheler. If there was an attempt to obscure the lack of an autopsy on 4 September, it was not Donellan’s doing.
Dr Ashe was the next witness called by the prosecution.
On being asked the cause of Theodosius’s death, he answered that ‘he died in consequence of taking that draught’. He also claimed that Theodosius’s appearance at the autopsy was similar to that of animals which had died by poison.
Ashe was only on the stand for a matter of minutes, and was not cross-examined, but in those few minutes he was asked nine questions, of which three were on how Theodosius died, and two of those asked him to confirm that poison was the cause.
It is strange that Ashe was called to the stand at all; he had not been involved in the case. It is possible that he was asked to give testimony because he was well respected locally (he founded the Birmingham General Hospital and was its first physician). He was also a passionate amateur botanist, and therefore it could have been felt that his repeated statements about poison bore some additional weight – although his knowledge of botany was never referred to in court.
The next medical witness was Dr Parsons, professor of anatomy at Oxford University. The prosecution, in the person of Howarth, got straight to the point:
Q: What, in your judgement, occasioned the death of Sir Theodosius Boughton?
A: From the description of his health … and from the violent nervous symptoms that immediately followed … he died in consequence of taking the second dose, which proved to contain a poison … her ladyship said it smelt like the taste of bitter almonds which particularly characterises the smell of laurel water …
This is an extraordinary statement. The dose had not been ‘proved to contain a poison’, unless Anna Maria’s sense of smell was proof.
Parsons was then asked to distinguish between epilepsy and apoplexy. (Apoplexy is what nowadays would be referred to as a stroke.)
A: Epilepsy is distinguished by a total absence of sense but an increase in motion of several of the muscles so that the patient will appear convulsed … apoplexy is a sudden privation of all the powers of sense and voluntary motion, the person affected seeming to be in a profound sleep … as a part of Sir Theodosius’s symptoms, the state in which he lay seems to have been more of the apoplectic kind than the epileptic.
Q: Was the heaving of the stomach the effect of apoplexy or epilepsy or of this draught?
A: No doubt, I think, that the draught was the cause …
Q: And from your knowledge of the effects produced by laurel water, your opinion is that laurel water was the poison thus administered to Sir Theodosius Boughton?
A: It is.
The cross-examination by Newnham continued on the theme of apoplexy versus epilepsy. Parsons conceded that apoplexy could result in the sudden bursting of a blood vessel; he also said that there could be no doubt that apoplexy was a possible cause of Theodosius’s attack.
It was reported in the magazine The Mirror of Literature, Amusement and Instruction in 1833 that ‘Donellan said Sir Theodosius had been subject to epileptic fits since infancy’, but this is the only reference; it was not said at the trial even by Donellan, and though – if true – would be of vast significance, unfortunately the source is unreliable.
In his next reply, Parsons immediately dismissed apoplexy as a probable cause because ‘there is no reason to go so far for a cause … when this medication, as all the world knows, will effect it’.
Q: That is assuming, as a fact, that he took two ounces of laurel water?
A: A much less quantity would be sufficient for the purpose.
The answer is almost comic. Parsons was not being asked necessarily about the quantity. He was being asked about his assumption that laurel water was the cause, and converting this assumption into fact. But Newnham let it pass. He concluded the cross-examination with all the ‘assumptions’ of the medical witnesses:
Q: You ground your opinion upon the description of its smell by Lady Boughton?
A: Yes; we can ground our opinions upon nothing else but that.
No record remains of the reason why Dr Parsons was called, but a good guess would be that a professor of anatomy from Oxford University would be thought to be an impressive, well-respected medical man whose distance from Warwickshire provided at least some degree of objectivity. As such he fulfilled the same criteria as John Hunter, the anatomist who would be brought for the defence.
The experience and competence of the two men, however, was not comparable. John Hunter was nationally famous; he had conducted over 30,000 dissections in his career; his study and collection of anatomical specimens was second to none. Parsons, in contrast, did not enjoy such a good reputation.
Oxford University in the eighteenth century was not the centre of excellence that it is today. It awarded very few medical degrees and, prior to its reforms of 1833, it was bound by outdated ceremonies and traditions. In 1770, Parsons had become the first professor in the Chair of Clinical Medicine, but the weekly lectures that he was required to give at the Radcliffe Infirmary were not well attended ‘on account of the paucity of the students, and the indifference of the Professor’, according to the nineteenth-century chronicler of the Royal College of Physicians Arnold Chaplin. Chaplin noted that both professors and students found the lectures and disputations ‘irksome’, and, although Parsons also held the first Lee Readership in Anatomy from 1767, ‘it cannot be said that a single professor contributed to the subject of medicine anything particularly worthy’.
The final medical witness to be called was Samuel Bucknill, who was described as ‘professing surgery’. He confirmed that he went to Lawford Hall on 5 September of his own accord and offered to ‘take out the stomach’, but that Donellan refused to allow him to do so because it would ‘not be fair in him or us to do anything after men so eminent in their profession had declined it’.
Bucknill then described the following day, the day of the funeral. He had received a verbal message from Sir William Wheler that he was to meet Mr Snow at Lawford Hall and together they were to perform the autopsy. When he arrived, Donellan told him he was waiting for more orders from Sir William. Donellan’s action here is mystifying, in that he already had a letter telling him to let Bucknill proceed. Donellan’s hesitation might have been because Mr Snow was not there; but Wheler’s postscript to his letter of 6 September says quite plainly: ‘If Snow is from home, I do not see any impropriety in Bucknill doing it, if he is willing.’ Nevertheless, Donellan was adamant that both men had to be present.
Bucknill described the frantic to-ing and fro-ing around Lawford that day; of his leaving the Hall because he had an urgent case to attend to; of a servant catching up with him to say that Snow had arrived at the Hall; of his own response that he would be back in an hour.
Q: Did you come back in an hour?
A: I came back, I believe, in the hour.
Q: What passed then; was Mr Snow there?
A: I asked Captain Donellan if Mr Snow was gone. He said, ‘he was, and he had given them orders what to do, and they were proceeding according to those orders’ but, says he, ‘I am sorry you should have given yourself all this unnecessary trouble.’ I took my horse, and rode away as fast as I could.
There was one witness missing: Sir William’s apothecary, Bernard Geary Snow. From 1702, the defence could call witnesses but, unlike the prosecution, could not compel witnesses to attend. Snow, according to Donellan, had given orders that the funeral should go ahead. But why did Donellan take orders from a lowly apothecary and not wait for Bucknill to return to carry out the autopsy? On what authority could Snow give those orders? Donellan protested in his statement to the court that ‘the body was buried that evening, but not by my directions or desire’.
Donellan’s statement tried to explain the matter by saying that Snow had waited a ‘considerable time’ for Bucknill, and that when he did not arrive, he had called ‘the plumber and others’ (the plumber meaning the man who had soldered and re-soldered the coffin) into the parlour. ‘After examining them as to the putridity of the body, declared he would not be concerned in opening it for Sir Theodosius’s estate; and recommending it to the family to have the same buried that afternoon, immediately left Lawford before Mr Bucknill’s return.’
Recommendations are not orders, so why did Donellan tell Bucknill that Snow had ‘given them orders what to do’? Was it that Donellan was relieved that an opportunity had at last arisen to bury a body that might reveal his own guilt; or was it simply a case of not wanting to keep a house full of mourners waiting any longer in the oppressive heat? Theodosius’s body was laid out on the great hall table all the while; it could only have been a source of distress to his mother and sister. Was Donellan acting out of relief and compassion, or relief and guilt?
Donellan’s counsel could not compel Snow to come to the stand and the prosecuting counsel did not call him. In his summing up, even Francis Buller was astonished at the omission. He commented:
Those, the prisoner says, were his orders. But Mr Snow is not called. You have had no evidence of any thing that passed between the prisoner and Snow. You are told by the prisoner, in his defence, that Snow advised him instantly to bury the body; and if that were the advice given, why in such a case should not the prisoner call Snow to prove what passed between them, and what information he gave to Snow? Or why did he not communicate to Bucknill the reasons given by Snow?
A lawyer examining the case after the end of the trial, James Stephen, decided that Snow ‘as agent of Sir William Wheler authorised the funeral’; but the issue of whether Donellan did in fact call Snow to the stand but he refused to come, or whether Donellan did not call Snow at all, is not resolved.
Four vital questions were missed in the examination of the ‘Faculty’.
The first was whether Theodosius’s venereal infection or his treatment by mercury could have brought about, or contributed to, his death. Despite Donellan’s protestations that Theodosius’s illness dated back five years, and in that time he had been treated repeatedly with mercury, the court only considered the boy’s current infection and treatment. This was partly due to a lack of insistence on the defending counsel’s part to pursue closer questioning of Anna Maria; partly their failure to produce the bills of the various apothecaries and surgeons. But in greater part it was a general failure, due to medical ignorance at the time, to ascribe lasting damage to either the illness or its treatment.
The second was the history of apoplexy (strokes) in Theodosius’s family. Parsons was asked whether apoplexy could be caused by a ruptured blood vessel, and answered yes; but the fact that Theodosius’s father, Edward, had died of this condition at the age of fifty-three was not mentioned until Newnham cross-examined Sir William Wheler later in the day. Even then, the prosecution interrupted, enabling Wheler to point out that Edward had been ‘short and thick set’ whereas Theodosius was ‘very thin, and taller than his father’.
It was probably considered that to draw any stronger parallels between father and son would lead nowhere; but if Theodosius’s circulatory system had been affected by syphilis and the mercury, then the apoplexy – a circulatory disorder – that caused his father’s death becomes more pertinent. No one thought it relevant to take this connection a little further and point out that Theodosius’s grandfather had died exceptionally early at only thirty-three; probably because the exact cause of death – whether an apoplexy or not – was unknown. But taking the three deaths together, they do suggest that the Boughton men were prone to either a stroke or early demise; this again casts a shadow over the picture of ‘good health’ painted by the prosecution.
The third question concerned the use of laurel in most eighteenth-century homes and kitchens, and the use of laurel water itself, in minute quantities, in apothecaries’ medicines. Dried laurel leaves, even of the poisonous cherry laurel, were used in flavouring, as were leaves from its sister tree the bay. Laurel water in medicine was prescribed to stop morning sickness and the spasmodic cough of whooping cough. It could also be used to produce increased salivation, as noted by Charles Phillips in his Materia Medica and Therapeutics of 1879. Why was the apothecary Powell not asked if he had put laurel water into Theodosius’s draught either to increase salivation (which was thought to expel venereal infection) or to inhibit the nausea that he had experienced when taking the first dose the previous Saturday? Had Powell inadvertently added too strong a mixture, or confused its strength?
The fourth issue was the very first deposition that had been put before the coroner in September 1780, that of the miller Thomas Hewitt. Hewitt had testified that he had bought one ounce of ‘Occuli Indicus Berries’ from Samuel Bucknill and delivered them to ‘the deceased, who put them into his pocket’. Why had Bucknill not been questioned about this? Similarly, why was Anna Maria not questioned in greater detail about the pound of arsenic that she knew Theodosius had in his room for trapping rats? How much of the arsenic was left? Had any of it gone missing? Additionally, what had happened to all the other medicines that Theodosius had been taking? There were various bottles on the chimney shelf; he had confessed to Donellan also to using mercurial ointment. Were any of the other quack remedies that Theodosius was so fond of taking subsequently found and analysed?
The prosecution brief did make a note about the poison supplied to Theodosius by Hewitt: ‘It seems Donellan means to prove that the bottle of coculus indicus [sic] which the miller made for Sir Theodosius to kill fish with is not to be found, and therefore he will presume that Lady Boughton gave that to Sir Theodosius by mistake, whereas we have the bottle to produce.’
This is fascinating stuff. Aside from the bizarre explanation that the mixture was used to ‘kill fish’ (why, when Theodosius already had arsenic to put in the dead fish to kill rats?), if the prosecution had Hewitt’s bottle, what did that prove exactly? It certainly did not prove, as the brief suggested, that it could not have been used to poison Theodosius; only that the bottle was not disposed of. One wonders, too, where the prosecution had found the bottle. Hewitt had already said that he had not seen it since delivering the potion to Theodosius. That presumably meant that it was retrieved from Lawford or its grounds. But where exactly? It could certainly have been in Theodosius’s bedroom.
Perhaps the prosecution saw the weaknesses in this argument, for Hewitt’s bottle was never mentioned nor produced in court.
If Theodosius was poisoned – and it was certainly the prosecution case that he was – then there was a responsibility to account for several other deadly toxins, and not just laurel water, at Lawford Hall.