‘Falsehoods of the most flagrant kind have induced a jury to take
my life … ruined by those who ought to have been my friends.’
John Donellan, the day before his execution, 1 April 1781
AFTER THE SENTENCING, John Donellan was taken back to Warwick Gaol, just a few yards’ walk from the court house. It was the law that those convicted of a capital offence had to be executed within two days of sentencing, and his hanging was fixed for early on Monday morning.
The Hibernian of May 1781 reported that ‘whatever he might have committed before his condemnation, he afterwards behaved with the most exemplary propriety’. As Donellan was returned to his cell, he asked the gaoler for a glass of wine and, raising it to his lips, was heard to murmur, ‘The Lord forgive them.’
He then sat down and was silent for some minutes, staring pensively ahead of him; and then ‘talked a great deal about Mrs Donellan and the children’.
Over the weekend, he was asked if he would like to see his wife. Two different newspapers reported his reply in two different ways. The Nottinghamshire Gazette of 4 April, keeping up its hitherto fine tradition of baiting Donellan at every turn, wrote that, although he had been ‘tender and affectionate’ to Theodosia in previous months, he now would not hear her name mentioned. The Nottingham Mercury, however, on 9 April, had a kinder slant, reporting him to have said, ‘I do beseech you, let me not hear of this. If she does not come, I shall die more composed.’
However, in Captain Murphy’s Life of Captain Donellan, published on 1 May 1781, a very bleak and contrasting picture is painted of their relationship through the publication of a letter which was supposed to have been sent by Donellan to Theodosia the day before his execution. Murphy’s account is the only source that we have for this letter.
It read:
My Once Esteemed Wife,
Do not think that I am about to reproach you for declining your visits to me in my present ignominious situation. I am better satisfied that you did not even attempt it … It would be a mockery of feeling to affect a concern for our separation …
To argue with you on the score of those dark arts which have undone me would be fruitless, because I know your conjugal has ever been subservient to your filial affection.
As to your – mother – ; but I will suppress my indignation, if however you should know my dying sentiments of her, ask our friend W—son, the mournful bearer of this, and he will not hesitate to impart them to you …
Were I to advise your immediate separation from her, it would have no weight, for my little influence over you has long been at an end!
Mrs H— you well know, has for a series of years treated me with a tender and disinterested regard, let it not surprise you then to learn that I have bequeathed her my gold watch and miniature picture, as the last and strongest token I can give her of my gratitude.
As to our two poor children, if you deem them pledges of our love, cherish them as such, but try to conceal from them their father’s unhappy fate. I have been long cogitating unnumbered wishes that pressed me to clasp them in my fond arms, and bid them a last adieu! Thank God, however, I have at length subdued them – the whole world, except my offspring, are welcome to become the spectators of my ignominious though unmerited exit!
If I have omitted any thing that I should have said to you – your own heart, I trust, will urge it for me, when I shall be no more.
Farewell, John.
This is a dreadful letter, a terrible goodbye.
Donellan thinks Theodosia has sided with her mother, the woman of ‘dark arts’ on which he thinks Theodosia is still to be convinced; he insults her by sending ‘the last and strongest token’ he can give to his former mistress; and he suggests that any visit of hers would have simply been ‘affecting a concern’.
But there are flashes of real feeling, of wounded rejection. Ask the friend who delivers this letter what the truth is, he urges, while then going on to talk of his children with genuine grief.
This is a vengeful letter in more ways then one. Donellan’s fury with Anna Maria leaps off the page. How could Theodosia let her ‘filial’ regard outweigh her respect and love for her husband? he demands. He talks as if Theodosia had not separated from her mother, as Caldecott claimed. Did Donellan realise that Theodosia was living in Northampton? Someone surely must have told him so. And yet perhaps he is talking here of Theodosia’s lingering regard for her mother which all his accusations could not really wash away. Or perhaps Theodosia had indeed returned to Lawford for a while, at least until the execution was over.
The sentence about Mrs H—’s ‘tender and disinterested regard’ comes directly afterwards. ‘Here is a woman,’ he seems to be saying, ‘whose opinion of me could not be coloured by anyone else.’ This makes one wonder if John Donellan had maintained his physical relationship with Mrs H all the time he was married to Theodosia; he certainly appears to have kept her as a close friend.
And the gift certainly reached her. Captain Murphy’s pamphlet is ‘embellished with the head of the unfortunate sufferer engraved from his miniature picture now in the possession of Mrs H’.
How Theodosia received this letter, or who the mysterious ‘W—son’ was who delivered it, is not recorded.
On the Saturday before his execution, according to Murphy’s Life and the Coventry newspapers, Donellan had received a visit from ‘a Divine’ (whether it was the Reverend Newsam or not is unknown) and a similarly unnamed ‘particular friend’. They told him that any further denials of his guilt would be looked on by the world as a ‘mean prevarication’ and would induce people to add insult to his memory.
Donellan surprised them both by answering: ‘I cannot help any man’s conclusions; I know my own heart; and with my last breath I will assert my innocence. Falsehoods of the most flagrant kind have induced a jury to take my life; but time will do me justice, and prove me an injured man, ruined by those who ought to have been my friends.’
On the Sunday, Donellan spent all day writing his Defence, having asked his solicitors, Inge and Webb, to publish his account as soon after his death as they could, also using the notes he had prepared for them before the trial.
Donellan now added various details to that account such as the fact that he paid Wilmer, Powell and Rattray five guineas each on the night of the abortive autopsy, forced to do so because Lady Boughton claimed she had no money. He also said that, on the day of the funeral, the plumber and carpenter had complained that every time they soldered and unsoldered the coffin, the lead became so hot that they could not touch it without burning themselves, and that this was one of the reasons why Bernard Snow had decided not to open it again. Snow was also paid six guineas by Donellan. One wonders what went through Donellan’s mind as he recalled the fees (£1,400 in today’s money) that he had paid to the men who later helped to incriminate him.
Then he went through the events of the afternoon of 29 August almost minute by minute, accounting for all his time in an effort to prove that he never went to Theodosius’s room. He wrote that Sarah Blundell, Susannah Sparrow and Catharine Amos had all been busy with a household wash in the kitchen when he came in at about five o’clock asking for a ladder to pick fruit on the higher branches of the trees. He records, somewhat poignantly, that Sarah Blundell could have verified his account that Dand and Matthews called to see him, as it was she who announced their visit.
He wrote about the Reverend Newsam, saying that Newsam had agreed with him about the state of Theodosius’s health on the Saturday prior to his death, remarking that the boy was ‘much altered’ and that he had ‘ruined his constitution’. To corroborate this, Donellan added that the large amount of mercury that Theodosius had used made him drool uncontrollably, so much so that ‘a quantity of water was always running from his mouth and he was obliged to keep a handkerchief continually at his mouth’.
One of Donellan’s solicitors, Thomas Webb, published his own account of Donellan’s last words in addition to the version he published with his business partner Inge. This one was prefaced with a statement by Donellan which read:
Sunday April 1st, 1781.
This Case has been read over to me this day, being the last day of my life: and it contains nothing but real facts, as far as my knowledge goes, and I solemnly request, and firmly desire, that it may be published as a firm vindication of my honour and character to the world. I also desire that Mr Webb [original italics] one of my solicitors, may be the whole and sole publisher of it, as a clear testimony of my being perfectly satisfied with his conduct.
John Donellan.
This little booklet was priced at sixpence. The version written with Inge was priced at 3s. 6d. The first was printed by Wenmans in Fleet Street; the second by John Bell.
There seems to have been some competition between the two lawyers; Webb’s booklet is the only one to bear Donellan’s seal of approval, and Donellan’s script hints that he was dissatisfied with the behaviour of Inge. It is not surprising that the two men whose task it had been to represent Donellan subsequently fought over who had done the better job, once the newspapers began publicly to criticise them. (Inge was listed as coroner and town clerk of Warwick in 1791, so perhaps he moved on to higher things in recognition that he had won this particular contest for public approval.)
Donellan laboured all Sunday to complete his case for his Defence, unaware of how his own solicitors would fight over the text once he was dead.
On the afternoon of Sunday 1 April, the gaoler came to tell Donellan what had been arranged for the following morning. On hearing that his body would be taken down after the hanging and put into a rough ‘shell’ and brought back to the gaol, Donellan asked him to arrange immediately for a black coffin with black nails.
Perhaps Donellan was waiting for an eleventh-hour reprieve during this long, lonely day.
It was, after all, common for a defendant to be convicted and then pardoned even after a sentence had been pronounced. Between 1660 and 1800, only about 30 per cent of those convicted of capital offences were actually executed. Some were transported; others were pardoned as a result of character witnesses; sometimes, evidence that the perpetrator was totally repentant and unlikely to commit further crimes, or a rumour that the jury had been prejudiced, were enough to overturn the sentence. A prominent judge like Buller had it entirely in his power to offer a pardon if he disagreed with the jury’s verdict, the pardon usually being conditional on transportation. Perhaps Donellan was even waiting for a confession from Anna Maria, or the news that his young wife had successfully pleaded on his behalf, presented new evidence of some kind and begged for the return of the father of her two small children?
But Theodosia made no such plea. Anna Maria Boughton did not make a confession. And Donellan sat down that evening to write his bitter, angry goodbye to his wife.
As the evening drew on, the gaoler observed Donellan praying ‘with great apparent fervency’. When he had finished he seemed composed, and asked after several of his friends. ‘I suppose,’ he added, ‘there will be a vast throng of people to see me executed.’
At seven o’clock on the morning of Monday 2 April, Donellan emerged from Warwick Gaol dressed in deep mourning, and stepped into a coach to be transported to the scaffold.
His last reported words inside the gaol were to the Reverend Musson, chaplain to the prisoners. The revelation, given almost as an aside, is breathtaking.
Donellan told Musson, perhaps at a prompting from the cleric to finally confess, that he had indeed distilled laurel water in the still at Lawford Hall. Who knows why he kept this secret through the long months since September? Perhaps because he knew it would be seized upon as incontrovertible proof of his having poisoned Theodosius – although he maintained now that it had only been to make a lotion to bathe his feet. A friend had given him a book, Flora by a Dr Mortimer, he said, and he admitted now to tearing a page from it, but only to refer to while he was making the mixture. Lady Boughton, he added, had used it, too, and found it effective. That Anna Maria Boughton had been given a mixture of laurel water by Donellan had never been mentioned in court.
Although there was a gallows close to the gaol, the use of a coach suggests that Donellan was taken further afield, perhaps to Gibbet Hill, on the road to Rugby. This is a strong possibility, as the hangman would have had other executions to perform that day in other towns in the area and he may have had to leave quickly.
Donellan’s coach was followed by a hearse, and the sheriff’s officers all dressed in mourning black. The Nottinghamshire Gazette reported that on the way to the execution Donellan kept putting his head out of the coach and protesting to the following crowds that he was innocent. He was, he told them, a victim of his mother-in-law’s ‘diabolical artifice’. Several times along the road, Donellan seems to have lost control of himself in his pleas to the crowds, begging them to join in prayer with him. The newspaper article recorded that there was a ‘wildness in his manner that bore the marks of insanity’.
Eventually, the coach arrived at the place of execution; the journey from Warwick Gaol to Gibbet Hill would have taken about half an hour. The land all around Gibbet Hill sloped away to reveal rolling farmland beyond and, somewhere in the far distance across the fields to the east, Lawford Hall. If Donellan had become frantic and panicked in the coach, he was the picture of calm now, seemingly resigned to his fate. He took just a few steps up the ladder to the scaffold. Then he abruptly stopped; but instead of trying to go back down, he began to pray.
The crowd pressed forward. Donellan’s hesitation lasted some time; perhaps, as well as praying, he was steeling himself against what was to come, and willing himself not to stumble. Then he negotiated the last few rungs of the ladder. Standing on the scaffold, he listened to the address of the cleric there ‘with the greatest appearance of devotion’, his head bowed and his hands clasped.
Once the priest was finished, Donellan turned to the waiting crowd, and declaimed: ‘As I am about to appear before God, I am innocent of the crime for which I am about to suffer.’
The noose was put around his neck and he was pushed from the platform. A more humane method of hanging, using a trapdoor whose drop would hopefully break the neck of the victim, was yet to be instituted: hanging in 1781 was a prolonged agony of strangulation. Often friends or relatives would rush to the scaffold and pull downwards on the victim’s legs to end their suffering.
But no one came to Donellan’s aid. He hung for thirty minutes before his body was cut down.