Middlesex, 1847
Twenty-nine-year-old file cutter and grinder Robert Henry Blake was legally married to a woman named Esther, who he had left in Birmingham after meeting thirty-eight-year-old Harriet Parker. Blake persuaded Harriet to desert her husband and move to London with him, where they lived as man and wife. Harriet’s husband was a retired soldier, who was considerably older than his wife and died roughly eighteen months after she left him.
Although Blake was no longer living with Esther, two of the couple’s children lived with him and Harriet in Cupid’s Court, St Luke’s in Middlesex. On 31 December 1847, Blake arrived home from work and told Harriet to hurry up with his tea and to boil some water so that he could wash and shave, as he had made plans to go to the theatre. Harriet wanted to go too but Blake told her that he had already made arrangements to go with a friend, Stephen Hewlett.
Having eaten his tea, Blake put seven-year-old Amina and her five-year-old brother Robert Henry junior to bed, before setting off for the theatre. Harriet was furious at being excluded from his plans and also highly suspicious that he might be meeting another woman and so decided to follow him. She trotted along behind him and, when he protested, she told him that she intended to stay with him all night, so he had better get used to her being there. ‘You shall find a complete devil in me,’ she told Blake ominously.
Blake actually intended to spend the night with a prostitute, Jane Jones, who lived in Goswell Street. Anxious to escape Harriet’s clutches, when he met Hewlett at The Duke of Bedford public house in Golden Lane, he asked his friend if he would take Harriet to the theatre. When Hewlett refused, Blake suggested that they went for a walk and the two men set off towards Goswell Street, with Harriet trailing behind them. Hewlett sneaked a quick backwards glance over his shoulder at her and told Blake that she appeared to be carrying something heavy tied up in a handkerchief. Blake, who was an inveterate womaniser, bemoaned the fact that Harriet was exceedingly jealous. ‘If I was to kiss that post she would be jealous of it,’ he joked. The two men eventually returned to The Duke of Bedford, where Blake managed to give Harriet the slip and went straight to Jane’s house, where he stayed until the next morning.
Meanwhile, Harriet was enraged to find that Blake had evaded her and immediately rushed out of the pub to look for him. She returned five minutes later having been unable to find him, appearing very animated and threatening that Blake would rue the day he left her. ‘I will do something that he shall repent and will die in Newgate,’ she told Hewlett, adding, ‘I have something very black in mind and I’ll stop it before long. You will hear of me before you see me.’
Harriet seems to have continued searching for her errant partner for some time, as a witness saw her early on New Year’s Day 1848, at which time she was walking the streets with Amina, asking people if they had seen Blake. Then nothing was heard of her until 4 a.m., when she knocked frantically on her neighbour’s door.
When Jane Moore opened her bedroom window and leaned out, she found Harriet on her doorstep looking anxious and agitated.
‘Oh, Mrs Moore, I have done it,’ Harriet told her and when her neighbour asked what she had done, Harriet launched into a rambling explanation.
‘I went out with Blake last night intending to go to the play, when he met a little strumpet and took hold of her arm and immediately left me.’
Mrs Moore failed to grasp the significance of what Harriet was saying and asked what all that had to do with her and why Harriet had woken her in the early hours of the morning to tell her about it. ‘Has Mr Blake not come home?’ she asked Harriet, somewhat perplexed.
‘No, he has not and a pretty spectacle there is for him when he does come home. I shall go and deliver myself up to a policeman,’ Harriet continued and when Mrs Moore asked her why she felt the need to do that, Harriet told her, ‘I have murdered the two children.’
While Jane’s husband John Moore went in search of a policeman, Harriet herself walked around until she met PC George Fowler. ‘I give myself up,’ she told Fowler and insisted that he arrest her, although she wouldn’t initially tell the constable what she had done and only admitted to killing the children on the way to the police station, when she told Fowler, ‘I have murdered the children to revenge their father. They were innocent – through my vindictiveness I have done the deed.’ Fowler cautioned Harriet to say nothing but she told him, ‘I worshipped the ground he [Blake] walked on and he knew it. I was not like a person who was drunk. I was quite sober. I knew what I was about.’
Back at Cupid’s Court, Mr Moore had returned with two policemen, who climbed into Blake’s house through the parlour window. They found the two children lying together on a bed, wearing just shifts and stockings. Both Amina and Robert junior were still warm and the only marks of violence on their bodies were scratches and bruises on their throats and faces. Surgeon Francis Wright was called to the scene and estimated that both children had died at around 3 a.m. on 1 January. Wright believed that the marks on the children were caused by someone grasping their throats very tightly with their fingers, although he believed that the cause of death was probably suffocation and that someone had pressed their hand hard over their faces and held it in place until the children stopped breathing. Post-mortem examinations conducted on both children by Wright and another surgeon, James Courtenay, indicated that Wright’s conclusions were correct. It was obvious that the children had struggled desperately for their lives and, indeed, Jeremiah Donoghue later came forward to say that he had heard Amina shouting ‘Murder!’ between 1 and 2 a.m. and got out of bed to listen at his window but had heard nothing further out of the ordinary.
Coroner Mr Baker opened an inquest at The William the Fourth public house on Golden Lane. The inquest was adjourned several times, before concluding with a verdict of wilful murder against Harriet Parker. Magistrates at Clerkenwell Police Court were in full agreement and she was committed for trial at the next assizes.
Harriet appeared at the Middlesex Assizes, held in the Central Criminal Court on 31 January 1848, where she seemed completely unruffled as she pleaded not guilty to the two charges of wilful murder against her. (It had been her intention to plead guilty and forego her trial but she was persuaded against doing so by Under-Sherriff Mr France.) Described as ‘a woman of below the middle stature, of dark swarthy complexion and a most repugnant cast of countenance’, Harriet was nevertheless smartly dressed in a plum-coloured dress with bright steel buttons, coupled with a dark shawl and a dark cap. ‘She seems to have attired herself to as much advantage as she could’, commented a contemporary newspaper. The trial took place before two judges, Mr Baron Alderson and Mr Justice Williams, with Mr Bodkin and Mr Clerk handling the prosecution and Mr Clarkson acting in Harriet’s defence.
The first witness for the prosecution was the father of the victims, Robert Blake senior, who described the way in which Harriet persisted in following him on the night of 31 December, even though he asked her several times to go home. Blake stated that he had not intended to meet prostitute Jane Jones but claimed to have met her ‘spontaneously’. Although he admitted to spending several days before the murder drinking and bragged in court that his relationship with Harriet had never stopped him from seducing other women, he categorically denied taunting Harriet or trying to make her jealous on the night of the murders.
Blake’s evidence differed from a statement made by Harriet after her arrest, in which she claimed that he had told her to hurry up with his meal as he had made plans to take another woman to the theatre. ‘You must get her to make your tea then as I won’t,’ Harriet told him, insisting that she only followed Blake to get a look at her rival. (Harriet also disputed Donoghue’s claim that Amina had cried ‘Murder!’ in her statement, saying, ‘The poor little thing wouldn’t have had the chance.’)
Once the prosecution had called John and Jane Moore, Jane Jones, surgeon Frederick Wright and the police officers and a female searcher who had dealt with Harriet in the aftermath of the murders, they rested their case and it was left to Mr Clarkson to attempt to defend her. Clarkson began by admitting that he could hardly deny that his client had committed the dreadful crimes alleged against her. However, Clarkson told the court that, at the time of the murders, she was not a ‘responsible agent’. He reminded the jury that Blake had behaved in such a base and unmanly way that it was more than probable that his cruel conduct towards her had driven the prisoner into a state of frenzy and that the dreadful deed was committed in the heat of passion, while her mind was in that condition.
Mr Baron Alderson recapitulated the evidence for the jury, saying that it was for them to decide on Harriet’s state of mind at the time of the offence, adding that, as far as he could see, there was little doubt that she committed the acts with which she was charged. It took the jury just ten minutes to deliberate, returning with a guilty verdict but accompanying it with a strong recommendation for mercy on the grounds of the unparalleled provocation the prisoner had received.
‘The children gave her no provocation at all,’ protested Alderson, before both judges put on their black caps and he proceeded to pass sentence on Harriet Parker.
He promised to forward the jury’s recommendation to the proper quarters but advised Harriet not to hold out any hope that it would be heeded. ‘From a feeling of revenge towards another person, you have taken the lives of two unoffending children,’ Alderson told Harriet, reminding her that she had committed the act while her victims were ‘in a sweet, innocent sleep.’ Blake had unquestionably behaved very ill towards her, concluded the judge before questioning what ground was that for her to wreak her revenge upon his children, who had given her no offence?
After Alderson pronounced the death sentence, Harriet shouted out, ‘God forgive you, Blake. You have bought me to this,’ before being led from the court.
The judge was as good as his word and did indeed forward the jury’s recommendation to Home Secretary Sir George Grey. In a letter dated 12 February 1848, Grey announced that he could see no grounds for recommending the prisoner to the mercy of the Crown and that he must therefore leave the law to take its course.
Harriet Parker spent the days leading up to her execution dictating letters. She wrote to Blake, advising him to return to the ‘wife of his bosom’ and never again trifle with a woman as he had with her. Harriet also asked Blake to pay off some minor debts, but he didn’t reply to her letter and the debts were eventually settled for her by a benevolent prison visitor. Blake did write one letter to Harriet, which was delivered to the prison by one of his workmates, Mr Shotton. Blake asked if Shotton might be granted an interview with Harriet but this was not permitted, although Harriet was allowed to see her neighbour Jane Moore, who remarked on how well she looked. ‘I have received more kindness in Newgate than ever since I left my mother’s home,’ Harriet explained, telling Mrs Moore that she was quite resigned to her fate and sincerely regretted her crimes, fully acknowledging the justice of her sentence.
On 19 February 1848, Harriet wrote a final letter to Blake, in which she told him: ‘My untimely fate will, I hope, be a warning to you and I shall be the last, I trust, you will be the cause of bringing to so bitter an end’ [sic]. Harriet sent Blake a Bible, with a hymn written inside it and also a pair of cuffs she had knitted for him while she was imprisoned. ‘Pray leave off drinking so much, staying out so late at night and getting into such bad company. These things first withdrew the affections of your wife and were the cause of all our misery,’ she ended the letter.
A skilled knitter, Harriet had also fashioned ornamental cuffs for the prison chaplain and governor, which they accepted with pleasure. Harriet expressed a wish to sit up throughout the night before her execution but sleep overtook her at around 2 a.m. On the morning of 23 February 1848, she drank a cup of coffee and attended the prison chapel, where she received the sacrament and sang a hymn, ‘Be gone, unbelief; my Saviour is near, and for my relief will surely appear; by prayer let me wrestle, and he will perform; with Christ in the vessel, I smile at the storm.’
A massive crowd had assembled to watch the execution and they yelled, hissed, whistled and hooted as Harriet was led to the scaffold. Faced with such a heaving mass of humanity, her courage deserted her momentarily at the foot of the steps leading to the drop and, but for the timely assistance of executioner William Calcraft, she might have fallen. As Calcraft placed the white hood over her head and the noose around her neck, she was heard reciting the Lord’s Prayer and repeating the words, ‘Lord have mercy upon me,’ as the drop fell. ‘The sufferings the wretched creature underwent, if muscular contortions and violent motion of the hands and arms be any criterion, were truly dreadful,’ reported one contemporary newspaper, adding that this arose not from any want of skill on Calcraft’s part but simply because Harriet was such a diminutive woman.
After hanging for the customary period of one hour, Harriet’s body was cut down. Unusually, permission was not granted for a death mask to be made of her features, before her body was buried within the confines of the prison.
When Harriet was arrested, her shift was stiff with old, dried blood arising from a beating Blake had administered just days before the murders and, even in court, Blake boasted of drinking and idling for at least a week before the murders, during which time he had spent nearly £3 on drink and women. ‘She has not prevented me from seducing three young women who were in service,’ Blake bragged, bemoaning the fact that Harriet had got one of his conquests sacked from her job by telling her employers that she was associating with a married man. In her penultimate letter to Blake, Harriet wrote: ‘Awful as my fate is, I would rather die than live again the wretched life I have done for the last twelve months’ it was widely believed at the time that had Harriet Parker murdered Robert Blake rather than his innocent children, she would probably have been convicted of the lesser crime of manslaughter on the grounds of provocation and her life would have been spared.
Note: Amina Blake is alternatively named Armenia, Emma and Amelia in various newspaper accounts of the tragedy. Some sources give the trial date as 4 February 1848 and there too many discrepancies among the different newspapers in the names of several other witnesses to list individually – for example PC Fowler is alternately named as George and Robert Fowler, Towler and Towle. I have taken the most frequently used variation in each case.