‘You slur over work of the utmost finesse and delicacy, in order to dwell upon sensational details which may excite, but cannot possibly instruct …’
Sherlock Holmes, ‘The Adventure of the Abbey Grange’
From the southernmost tip of Cecil’s native Isle of Wight to the most northerly point of Scotland, there could scarcely have been anyone in late 1893 who did not have a theory as to what had happened in the woods at Ardlamont. For some, the fascination would prove lethal. Take, for example, the curious case of Henry Card, who lost his life in early September while out walking with his local pub landlord near Lymington in the New Forest. He had, it seemed, been attempting to prove how Cecil’s injuries might have been self-inflicted. Taking a gun, he placed it behind his back with one hand and then pulled the trigger with his other. The weapon happened to be loaded and the unfortunate Card blew off the top of his skull by this demonstration. He left a widow and nine children – yet more victims of the Ardlamont tragedy.
For Monson and those closest to him, the full extent of their predicament became obvious from the end of August. On the 31st of the month, Monson was taken before the Sheriff-Substitute of Argyllshire (in effect, a local judge) and formally charged with Cecil’s murder. Under caution that anything he said may be used in evidence against him, Monson responded, ‘I have to say that I am not guilty of the charge brought against me; nor was I with Mr Hambrough, or within sight of him, when the accident happened. Therefore, I cannot explain how it happened. Under the advice of my law agent, I decline to make any further declaration at present. All of which I declare to be the truth.’
He was then returned to jail in Inveraray before a transfer to Greenock Prison a week later. Such was his notoriety by then that great efforts were made to squirrel him from one jail to the other with as little fuss as possible. He was handcuffed to a plain-clothes police officer and taken to the ferry – the same one, Lord of the Isles, that had carried Monson and Scott on their journey to Ardlamont a month earlier and which had carried Scott away from the scene on the day of Cecil’s death – prior to any other passengers. Once on board, he and his guard holed up in the captain’s cabin out of sight, yet still there was a crowd to greet their arrival in Greenock later that day, and again at the jail to which he was conveyed by cab. The tension and excitement among those who hoped to catch a glimpse of the suspected killer hung heavy in the air.
Littlejohn played his part in ratcheting up the sense of drama, giving a brief interview to a journalist as he returned to Edinburgh from the Isle of Wight. What did the doctor make of it all? the pressman wanted to know. While conceding that it was far too early to deliver a fully formed opinion, Littlejohn nonetheless spoke candidly. In his personal estimation, he said, the young victim had not met his death by his own carelessness. Yet almost immediately, he seemed to backtrack, adding that there was a great deal to be said in favour of the idea that the gun may have gone off by accident. Perhaps he felt he had spoken too openly at first, but his second statement seemed strangely at odds with his first. There was nothing to suggest Cecil’s gun had gone off because of a malfunction, so surely any accidental firing must to some degree have resulted from the carelessness of he who was holding it? Littlejohn went on to say that he expected the case to be fraught with difficulty in relation to the medical evidence. To anyone prepared to read even a little between the lines, it sounded like Littlejohn was confirming that Cecil’s death was anything but an unfortunate tragedy. Within a few weeks, he would not hold back in making that argument but even now his attempts to temper his words were half-hearted at best.
The Monsons, meanwhile, were readying themselves for the trial as best they could. Aware of the large sums they would need to mount a robust defence, they set about using their family connections to bolster their fighting fund. Their first port of call was, naturally enough, Monson’s mother, Isabella. But while she was comfortably off in the normal scheme of things, her means were far from limitless. Despite providing him with vital finances to fund his defence, she was not willing to offer her son the blank cheque he wanted. She therefore urged Monson to approach his cousin and her nephew, George Monckton-Arundell, 7th Viscount Galway, along with William Monson, 1st Viscount Oxenbridge (Monson’s first cousin once removed). Both were genuinely big-hitters within late Victorian society. Galway, a former Conservative MP for the constituency of Nottinghamshire North, was a noted courtier who had become a viscount in 1876 and went on to variously serve as aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria, Edward VII and George V. Oxenbridge was, by contrast, a high-flying Liberal, who had served as MP for Reigate before entering the House of Lords in 1862. He held an assortment of posts in the governments of William Gladstone and as of 1893 was Master of the Horse, a prestigious – if largely ceremonial – role within the royal household.
At the start of September, Agnes wrote an impassioned note to Lord Galway asking for his help in persuading Isabella to loosen the purse strings. Agnes assured him that Monson was ‘perfectly innocent of the charges brought against him’ but Galway was nonetheless reticent to commit himself to the cause, telling Agnes that she overestimated the influence he had over Isabella and detailing his reluctance to intervene over the head of his aunt’s own legal advisors. Quite what he made of finding himself caught up in such an undignified scandal is uncertain but there was a distinct tone of detachment as he offered Agnes little more than platitudes. ‘I need hardly say how shocked and horrified I am at the terrible position in which your husband has been placed,’ he wrote, ‘and I can assure you that we all feel most acutely for you in this most terrible and trying time and sincerely trust that in a very short time his innocence will be conclusively demonstrated.’
Isabella was herself in regular correspondence with Galway at this time, briefing him on developments and sharing a little of the turmoil that she felt. The sudden drain on her income concerned her deeply, and she wrote to him on 20 September that she had been forced to make a payment of £800 or risk Monson’s lawyers walking out on the case. She believed she had no option but to keep finding the money since ‘I feel it is a matter of life and death. People shall never say his mother left him undefended so the worst happened … I feel it is my duty.’ In the meantime, Galway made independent efforts to gauge which way the wind was blowing in relation to the case. He called upon his friend, Sir Digby Wentworth Bayard Willoughby, 9th Baron Middleton – a man of significant power and influence in Yorkshire – to sound out attitudes to the Monsons in the county where they had until recently lived. ‘My dear George,’ Middleton wrote on 10 September, ‘I have been trying to pick up what I can since I saw you about your Monson’s case, and find that opinions are divided. Of course, some think there is a very strong case against him and others that it looks so fishy that that man Scott has bolted … I do so feel for the mother and you, and other relations.’ The truth was, no one had a clear idea which way the trial was likely to go.
In the middle of September, Major Hambrough decided to leave Glasgow and return to London with his wife amid concerns that events in Scotland were taking their toll on her health. Agnes Monson, on the other hand, resolutely remained on the scene, staying at Ardlamont and at the Western Temperance Hotel in Greenock even as her movements were tracked by an eager press corps. On 18 September, for instance, it was reported by an eyewitness who had seen her on the steamer taking her back to Tighnabruaich from visiting Monson in Greenock, that she was ‘bearing her trials with a fine show of pluckiness’. She was alleged to have spent the entire journey walking up and down the deck, chatting with officers and fellow passengers. Happy to discuss her husband’s predicament, she told her audience that he was bravely keeping up his spirits. ‘No gentleman who knew my husband,’ she told one man, ‘would believe for a moment that he committed the crimes with which he is charged, because he is utterly incapable of doing such a thing.’ She was also said to have remarked that Cecil was notoriously careless with his gun.
Agnes became a figure of intense fascination, not least because she was something of an enigma. Her habit of appearing in public wearing a thick veil that obscured her features created the sense that she was somehow unknowable (much to the chagrin of newspaper editors wanting a sketch or even a photograph of her). With her brunette curls, pale complexion and dark eyes, she was most commonly described as ‘prepossessing’. Whenever she was mentioned in the papers, there was an accompanying subtext of sexual allure – Agnes as the loyal beauty to Monson the maybe-murderer.
It was a narrative that served well the purpose of editors intent on hooking their readers into what promised to be a long-running saga full of twists and turns. Nor were the papers, needless to say, shy of engaging in extravagant speculation. Rumour and tittle-tattle were routinely regurgitated, with only the merest nod to journalistic integrity. ‘For a day or two past … local gossip has been busy,’ reported the Aberdeen Weekly Journal of 19 September 1893, ‘with certain relations of a rather peculiar nature supposed to have existed between the late Lieutenant Hambrough and the Monson family.’ What could this gossip relate to? It scarcely mattered – the reader was free to let their imagination run riot. Only now did the newspaper feel the need to insert a significant caveat: ‘About these alleged relations strange rumours are in circulation, which, however, cannot be traced to any trustworthy source.’
Among other unfounded or unprovable suggestions was the claim that a brother of Monson had been residing in Bedlam – London’s notorious psychiatric institution – since the early part of the year suffering from religious mania (there was no mention of the admission of a Monson in the hospital’s registers for that year). Another story claimed that Cecil’s shooting had been witnessed by a poacher unseen by either Monson or Scott. It was said that this new man had been collecting grouse to sell at market on the Glorious Twelfth and was hidden among brushwood as the three principal players in the drama entered the wood. He had kept his silence for several days, so the report went, fearing bringing trouble upon himself for his poaching activities. A few days later, a follow-up piece told how the police did not believe reports of this pivotal key witness to be credible.
Surely the most impressive climbdown – the sort to give an editor palpitations – belonged to the Aberdeen Weekly Journal, which on 15 September published the following general retraction:
We are informed that there is no foundation for the statement made yesterday by a Dunoon correspondent that Major Hambrough was for some time tenant in the Craighlaw shootings in Wigtownshire. [The newspaper had reported the previous day that ‘It was while residing here [near Wigtownshire] some six years ago that Major Hambrough’s groom accidentally shot the nurse while pointing a gun at her in fun, never dreaming that it was loaded.’] In other respects the report sent from Dunoon appears to be entirely wrong. One of the passages it contained was as follows: ‘It was about the time of Major Hambrough’s bankruptcy that his father willed this money to his grandson, who some time previous had gone in for army tuition under Mr Monson, and out of consideration for the difficulties into which Major Hambrough had been launched through his financial affairs, the old gentleman appointed Monson, in whom he is said to have reposed unfailing confidences, as guardian of the young lad.’ Referring to this point Major Hambrough has said to an interviewer: ‘Now, my father died in 1862, and Cecil was not born till 1873, so that you see how utterly ridiculous the story is, more especially as at the time of my father’s death Mr Monson must have been an infant. It was my grandfather’s settlement which created the entail.’ As to the reference to bankruptcy, Major Hambrough added: ‘That is also untrue. My affairs were in an embarrassed condition, but I never was a bankrupt.’ With regard to the statement that Major Hambrough had rented the Wigtownshire shootings [an estate suitable for shooting and hunting] up till the year 1880, the Major said: ‘I never was in Scotland until I came here in connection with my son’s death, consequently I never rented a shooting estate in Wigtownshire, and there never was a shooting accident. That these statements should go forth under such sad circumstances has naturally caused me much pain and annoyance.’
If the press had stuck only to reporting the solid facts of the case, there would have been more than enough to keep their columns filled – both dramatic shifts in the main plot and intriguing sideshows. The embarrassed state of the Monsons’ finances was particularly fertile ground for subplots. On 29 September, for instance, it was reported that an earlier statement that the couple’s outstanding financial obligations to local tradesmen and businesses were to be paid by their friends was not, after all, true. Instead, a number of their creditors clubbed together in order to hire an agent to initiate proceedings at the debt recovery court at Inveraray. A test case was launched against Agnes Monson by a certain Mr Durrant, a ladies’ tailor from Glasgow, for payment of £18 18s in respect of monies owed for clothing supplied. In the event, the judge found for Agnes, who successfully argued that being a married woman, she was not personally liable for the debt, but that her husband was instead.
Nor was this the only secondary court action in which the Monsons became entangled. In early December, Agnes’s mother, Annie Day, appeared at the Manchester Assizes to defend an action by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Reversionary Interest Company. The case pivoted on whether Mrs Day had lent her signature to a deed for a loan of £600 paid to her son-in-law back in 1890. The deed was purportedly signed by her in the presence of Cecil Hambrough, rendering her liable to repay £54 11s of interest built up on the loan. Agnes travelled from Edinburgh to testify that her mother was lying when she claimed that her signature had been forged. Monson provided a written statement to the same effect. Nonetheless, the jury found in Mrs Day’s favour – an implicit acceptance that Monson had faked the signature after all. It was hardly the sort of pre-publicity that a defendant in a murder trial would welcome.
For those following the case from a distance, arguably its most fascinating aspect was the involvement of the types of people rarely to be found embroiled in murder trials. Alfred Monson cut the sort of figure more regularly featured in the society pages than the crime reports. Well-bred and good-looking fellows married to fragrant wives and employed in the education of young gentlemen simply did not go around killing in cold blood. For much of the nineteenth century, the current of academic opinion had favoured the idea that criminality – and especially criminal behaviour of the most brutal kind – was the preserve of the lowest strands of society. The propensity to act contrary to the law was widely viewed as a hereditary condition, passed from generation to generation among the intellectually and morally inferior – a view that its adherents often claimed had found scientific validity in Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution and acquired characteristics.
Moreover, it was deemed by many who claimed a scientific bent that criminality manifested itself in physical attributes. In the first half of the century, this idea was encapsulated in the now debunked theory of phrenology. Based on the ideas of an Austrian physician named Franz Joseph Gall, phrenology argued that an individual’s mental faculties and moral character could be discerned by studying the shape and size of the cranium (since, so the pseudoscience suggested, the brain is divided into a number of regions each related to a specific faculty, and the cranium reflects the state of development – or under development – in these various regions). Sherlock Holmes himself would flirt with phrenology. In ‘The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’, for example, he deduced the intellect of a man from his sizable hat, noting: ‘It is a question of cubic capacity – a man with so large a brain must have something in it.’
Developing the ideas of the phrenologists, Cesare Lombroso – an Italian army doctor – established himself as the virtual inventor of modern criminology as he attempted to determine what he believed were the tell-tale signals of a criminal disposition. To this end, he undertook a vast number of physical examinations of those locked up in prisons and lunatic asylums, along with willing ‘ordinary, law-abiding’ subjects. In 1876, he published his landmark Criminal Man, which claimed to catalogue the ‘tells’ of criminals of varying type – the murderer, for instance, was often perceived to have a large, hawk-like nose and a cold stare (surely a worry for the avian Joe Bell). To the modern mind, such wild, sweeping observations are horribly problematic, but to the Victorian psyche intent on imposing order on all aspects of life, they were highly attractive. Some notes Lombroso made on the post-mortem examination of the skull of a convicted criminal are indicative of his approach: ‘At the sight of the skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal – an atavistic being who reproduces his person in the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals.’
To establish the criminal type by physical examination offered the opportunity, theoretically at least, to identify and eliminate threats to the social order. By claiming to harness science and use it for the betterment of society at large, criminology represented the realization of the highest Victorian ideals. Just as the Western mind justified empire as a means of ‘civilizing’ the non-European world, so Lombroso and his ilk gave those same Western societies the belief that they could rid themselves of their own uncivilized aspects. It was comforting to think of criminality not as the result of some fundamental social dysfunction – poverty, deprivation, inequality – but as an inherited character trait to be found among the weakest, poorest and least-educated parts of society. A trait that may ultimately perhaps even be bred out of society. As the esteemed medical journal the Lancet put it in an article of 1873:
If among any body of the community hereditary transmission of physical and moral attributes is conspicuous, it is among the population which fill our gaols. Look at its general physique. Imperfect cranial development, with its concomitant of feeble cerebration, amounting almost to a retrogression in the direction of the brutes, is apparent in the mass of its members. Intellectually and morally, they are imbeciles, intelligence being replaced by cunning and the will reduced to its elementary form of desire.
That Monson did not fit the emerging stereotype of the lumbering, intellectually subnormal fiend provided spectators with another intriguing strand to the case. Meanwhile, Arthur Conan Doyle was playing with the notion of the atavistic degenerate blessed with great intellect in his story that first appeared just as Monson was about to stand trial – ‘The Final Problem’. In it, Holmes ruminates on the nature of Professor Moriarty, his greatest foe: ‘But the man had hereditary tendencies of the most diabolical kind. A criminal strain ran in his blood, which, instead of being modified, was increased and rendered infinitely more dangerous by his extraordinary mental powers.’
Amid this general acceptance that the criminal is born and not made, no wonder a figure such as Monson was so compelling. This son of a vicar and relation of powerful aristocrats who inhabited Parliament and the royal household – could it really be that his bad blood flowed through them, too? There is something delicious in finding out that those who seem to be your betters are in fact as flawed – if not more so – than yourself. The possibility that a scion of the social elite might be a common killer after a quick buck doubtless appealed to the iconoclast in every person who picked up a newspaper and read the latest details of the Ardlamont mystery in that autumn and winter of 1893.
There had been several juicy scandals involving the well-to-do and privileged in the relatively recent past. In 1891, for example, there was the Tranby Croft affair when Edward, Prince of Wales, was compelled to appear at court in a slander trial instigated by his friend, Sir William Gordon-Cumming. The episode began at a house party at Tranby Croft, the Yorkshire home of Arthur Wilson of the wealthy Wilson shipping family. He accused Gordon-Cumming, Edward’s close friend, of cheating at baccarat – a serious slur upon his character. The Prince intervened and a deal seemed to have been reached whereby Gordon-Cumming agreed not to play cards again in return for the silence of Wilson and his guests. However, after word of his gaming indiscretions slipped out, Gordon-Cumming decided to sue for slander. He was, rather predictably, unable to prove his case and left with his reputation in tatters. The Prince, meanwhile, found his popularity in the country at large at an all-time low – the great British public gleefully seized their opportunity to, in the words of the Yorkshire Gazette of 13 June 1891, ‘moralise upon … the iniquities of the higher strata of society’.
Nor was this the first time the Prince of Wales had found himself uncomfortably drawn into a notorious legal case. Back in 1870, he was subpoenaed and forced to deny any ‘improper familiarity’ with Lady Harriet Mordaunt during divorce proceedings brought by her husband, the Conservative Member of Parliament, Sir Charles Mordaunt. Amid the closing of ranks to protect the Prince, Lady Mordaunt was deemed to be of unfit mind to be able to instruct a solicitor properly – whether fairly or not remains a question much disputed. Sir Charles’s petition was duly dismissed and his wife consigned to an asylum, while the Prince’s good name was ostensibly preserved – although the whole episode proved a sensation within the many layers of British society.
There was also a royal tie-in to the Cleveland Street scandal of 1889, when assorted eminent members of high society – including, rumour had it, the Prince of Wales’s son, Prince Albert Victor – were named as clients by male prostitutes working at a London brothel raided by the police. Albert Victor’s name was kept out of the British, although not the international, press, but the affair became notorious for suspicions that powerful figures had effectively shut down the investigation into the brothel and its clientele. Nonetheless, the case once again represented an opportunity for the popular press and its readership to put their supposed social superiors under the microscope. Across the newspapers, homosexuality was characterized as a vice of the upper classes, while the young men who worked as prostitutes were depicted as innocents corrupted by men who ought to have known better.
Such was the public appetite to call the social elite to some kind of account. And while the Ardlamont mystery may have lacked quite so direct an association with the very highest echelons as these other scandals of recent vintage, it did boast the additional frisson of being concerned with that most dramatic and terrible of all crimes. To some extent, though, Monson was cocooned from the worst excesses of the media scrutiny as he dwelt in his cells – firstly at Inveraray, then Greenock and finally in Edinburgh. Indeed, it might even be considered a mercy that his demand to be supplied with an array of daily newspapers was rejected in favour of allowing him just one each day.
Not that Monson could have too many complaints about his pretrial treatment in the prison system, especially when compared to the traumas experienced by many lower-profile prisoners accused of far less serious misdemeanours. Monson had been transferred from Greenock to Calton Jail in Edinburgh, where he would remain until his trial began the following month. The prison, a bleak castellated edifice built on the rocky inclines of Calton Hill, had earned a fearsome reputation since opening in 1817. It was known for its harsh discipline and squalid conditions, as well as acute overcrowding – unusually, the prison often had a larger population of women than men. Many of the female inmates were charged with relatively minor offences, typically related to drunkenness and prostitution, but lacked the financial wherewithal to pay the fines that would have kept them out of the cells. Often they were brought into the dank belly of the prison along with their unsuspecting children. In the words of Willie Gallacher, the trade-union activist who spent a period in Calton after being charged with sedition in the First World War, ‘It was by far the worst prison in Scotland; cold, silent and repellent.’
Monson, however, was destined to see the best of the place. His transfer was conducted in the utmost secrecy, so that he was squirrelled out of Edinburgh’s Haymarket Station into an awaiting cab and then into the prison in the company of the Governor – a Mr Napier – plus a warder in plain clothes. He was next led to his cell, a relatively large one that sat at the top of one of the blocks and boasted a table, armchair and fireplace as well as a window high up in the wall to provide natural light. The idea was that he should be kept apart from the mainstream of the prison population as much as possible. In addition, he was assigned another smaller cell with an open iron grating where he could go for fresh air and exercise under the supervision of a warder. Arrangements were also made that he should receive his meals (including a pint of beer) from one of the local hotels, and Agnes was allowed to see him for a full two hours each week. Monson was receiving a level of treatment of which most of the other inmates could only dare dream.
Yet if he was starting to feel something akin to comfortable in his Calton Jail surroundings, the judicial system had other ideas. At the end of October, he was told he was to be charged with a fresh crime – the attempted murder of Cecil, prior to the actual murder for which he was already being held. A month later, just a couple of weeks before his trial was due to start, he was smuggled out of prison and taken to the High Court of Justiciary at ten o’clock on a Saturday night to make his plea in relation to the new charge. Agnes was also in attendance, although no communication between husband and wife was possible. Dressed in a blue serge suit and dark overcoat, he looked remarkably well as he awaited the arrival of Sheriff Blair in the courtroom, using the time to converse with his counsel. When the Sheriff appeared, he read out an indictment accusing Monson and Scott of jointly attempting to murder Cecil Hambrough by means of drowning. Monson, the charge stated, had seen to it that a hole was bored into the side of the boat that he and Cecil had taken out on their fishing trip the night before the shooting. While the boat was in deep water in Ardlamont Bay, it continued, Monson had ensured the removal of the plug from this hole so that Cecil would be thrown into the sea. In a firm voice, Monson pleaded not guilty.
That a charge of attempted murder had been added to the existing charge of murder so late in the day caught Monson off guard. To the press already salivating at the prospect of the dramas to come, it offered a tantalizing new twist, yet more intrigue to rake over and dissect. It also represented something of a legal curiosity – rare was it to try charges of attempted and actual murder of the same victim in a single trial. As it would turn out, bringing together evidence for both charges at once would prove as challenging to the prosecution as the defence. The sense that this was an affair out of the ordinary – a saga more like a work of fiction than a tale from real life – was growing by the day. Again and again, the spectre of Sherlock Holmes was summoned up. As the Daily Chronicle neatly summarized it:
The tragedy in Scotland which has been sprung so suddenly on public attention possesses all the elements of a first-class sensation. As it is already before the Courts we express, of course, no opinion whatever upon the very serious problem which the criminal law has to solve. From the point of view, however, of the expert of what may be called the fiction of criminality – that of Mr Sherlock Holmes, for instance – the case is one of remarkable interest.
With the sage of Baker Street poised to take his final bow (for the time being at least), the stage was set for the most sensational capital case in years – a trial where fact and fiction were destined to crash and collide with exceptional regularity.