‘… we balance probabilities and choose the most likely. It is the scientific use of the imagination …’
Sherlock Holmes, The Hound of the Baskervilles
The judge, Lord Kingsburgh – an old school friend of Joseph Bell’s, as it happened – presented his summing-up to the jury on the afternoon of Friday 22 December. It had been, he told them, a ‘long and anxious trial’ and there was no doubt he was relieved it was coming to an end. Of all the cases in which he had served as judge since being appointed to the bench in 1888, this was the one that placed most strain upon him. At its midway point he took the highly unusual step of addressing the general public. ‘Before the trial resumes,’ he had announced at the start of the fifth day, ‘I wish to say that since the trial began I have received several letters, some signed and some anonymous, with reference to this case. I do not read such letters, and I wish it to be publicly known that the writing of such letters to a judge in this court, when trying a case, is not only reprehensible, but might subject the person doing it to severe punishment for contempt of court.’ It would later be revealed that among the piles of unwanted mail was a postcard sent from Liverpool to the effect that if Monson was acquitted, the missive’s author would take it upon himself to shoot him. It was signed ‘Scott’. There was no pretending that this was like other cases.
Yet, despite the intense pressure under which he found himself, Kingsburgh laid out his thoughts on the case in a typically lucid and sober manner. To many ears, however, he showed a distinct leaning towards the defence. This was perhaps no surprise. Although he had served in the two most senior prosecuting roles in the Scottish judicial system (Solicitor-General and Lord Advocate) and had even led the prosecution at the Eugene Chantrelle trial, the early and larger part of his career was spent as a defence counsel. As Kingsburgh would note in his memoirs: ‘Down to the last year when I was free to take up the defence, before I became Lord Advocate, I never had a client convicted of murder, except the one who was insane, and was proved to be insane after the trial. In all my other cases there was either an acquittal or a verdict of culpable homicide. But this was too much of a success to last out one’s time. On two occasions in my last year or eighteen months of defence, I was called on to act for first one pair of poachers, and then another pair, for the murder of gamekeepers. There was not a vestige of a defence, and the whole four died on the gallows. The spell of success was broken, and very shortly after my career on the left side of the table came to an end.’ It was clearly a badge of pride that he had so consistently ensured verdicts of innocence for his clients, and was suggestive of a feeling that defender was somehow a nobler role than prosecutor. Was it possible that he harboured at least a slight unconscious prejudice?
His summing-up was certainly generous to Monson’s team in several respects. Early on, he characterized the case as ‘one purely of circumstantial evidence. It is not a case in which there is any direct evidence.’ Although their evidence may have been disputed, it is unlikely that Littlejohn, Bell or Heron Watson agreed with him on that point. While acknowledging an unavoidable element of conjecture, they were to a man convinced that their experiments and analysis provided just the direct evidence the judge was now discounting. Nor would they have appreciated the way Kingsburgh questioned the credibility of what he called ‘the theoretical evidence of the case – that is to say, the evidence of persons of skill, drawing inferences from their skill for the purpose of aiding you in your decision’. While recognizing the importance of the evidence of ‘gunmakers, the evidence of persons skilled in the use and carrying of guns, the evidence of doctors skilled in wounds and their effects’, Kingsburgh stated that it was a misfortune of the prosecution that their investigations were only able to start several weeks after the incident itself. This was absolutely not the fault of the prisoner, he said, and ‘in so far as the case of the prosecution is weakened by their being of late date, so far the prosecution has to suffer in the consideration of that evidence’. It was a bitter blow for the prosecution to have the forensic strand of its attack called into question at such a fundamental level.
Nor can the Crown have been much keener on Kingsburgh’s treatment of their argument for motive – the insurance policies. After a generally balanced summary of the evidence on this particular aspect, Kingsburgh suddenly launched another torpedo in the prosecution’s direction: ‘If it is clear and certain that a crime has been committed, it is not an essential part of the public prosecutor’s case to prove that there was motive for the crime. If he can prove the case without any motive, he is entitled to a verdict. But, then, another thing. Where the evidence is circumstantial only, and the guilt of a prisoner is only inferential and is not proved as a matter of fact by the evidence of witnesses who saw the crime, then the question of motive becomes of vital importance. If there is motive clearly and distinctly proved, then it is of enormous importance to the prosecution. If motive is displaced, or even made reasonably doubtful, it is enormously in favour of the prisoner.’
As for the mystery surrounding Scott, Kingsburgh again expressed little sympathy for Asher’s arguments. ‘The Solicitor-General made a strong point of his allegation that this man Scott came there as a party to a plot for murder,’ he said. ‘Can you come to any conclusion in your own minds why he should be there as a co-conspirator for any such purpose? In regard to either of the crimes charged in the indictment, the drowning attempt or the successful shooting, I must say I have a difficulty in seeing what he was there for … It has not been shown that this man Scott had any connection with the affairs of Hambrough and Monson; and, so far as I can see, if the drowning or the shooting was to be carried out, there was no need for the presence of this stranger at all. Therefore, if there was no interest on the part of this third party, it must have been as a hired assassin to assist that he was there, if the Crown’s theory be correct; but for this view, too, there is no basis that I can see. No doubt his presence there is mysterious in many ways, but, gentlemen, it is for the Crown to solve that mystery. If there be anything to make the matter one involving a criminal charge, it is for the Crown to solve the mystery. It will not do for the Crown just to point into the dark and say, “Unless you, the prisoner, throw light into that darkness, you must be held to have been engaged in a crime.”’
He was similarly, and perhaps most justifiably, dismissive of the attempted murder charge, noting that it had not seemingly entered the minds of the authorities to add this charge to the indictment until the end of October – over two-and-a-half months after the attack had supposedly taken place. ‘In point of fact, Cecil Hambrough and Mr Monson got into the water that night,’ he began. ‘In point of fact, Cecil Hambrough and Monson got to shore; and in point of fact, it is plain it never entered Cecil’s mind that anything of the kind suggested had been done for the purpose of murdering him.’ Case closed on that charge at least, one might think.
He even urged against taking Monson’s bad character (in his memoirs he actually referred to the defendant’s ‘evil character’) as evidence of his guilt on any of the charges. ‘It is always a very dreadful thing to find out that people are liars, and possibly consistent liars,’ he said. ‘It gives one a very bad impression of their general character, and one cannot trust such people after making such discoveries in the ordinary transactions of life, and to a certain extent it shows a serious moral breakdown. There are some people to whom it has become so natural to state what is untrue that, without any object at all – as was apparent in this case; on various occasions statements were made in matters of business by the prisoner and by his wife which were not true, without any conceivable object. I would caution you not to deduce too much from that. It is a long way from being dishonest to being murderers …’
Finally, he left the jurymen in no doubt as to the onerous nature of the task that had been thrust upon them: ‘Now, gentlemen, you must consider how this case is to be disposed of. You have got a path to go on in this case in which you must see your way. You must neither walk through darkness at any point of it, nor leap over anything that you meet in it. It must be a straight path, and a path on which you have light. If you have light which takes you to the end of that path, so that you can give a verdict for the prosecution, then you must do it manfully, and you must not allow yourselves to be stopped, though Pity, with uplifted hands, stand pleading and entreating that you shall not go on. On the other hand, if there is any darkness or dimness on that path which you cannot clear away, you cannot go on to the end. If there is any obstruction on that path you have to stop there. The prisoner is entitled to that. And, lastly, if you yourselves do not see your way along that path without passing through darkness or dimness or other obstruction, you must not allow yourselves to be urged forward along that path blindly by any demon pushing you from behind, telling you that the prisoner is a bad man, a liar, and a cheat, and that, therefore, you should send him to his doom. You must keep yourselves free from that.’
At seven minutes to four, the jury was sent out to consider its verdict. Perhaps buoyed by the tone of the judge’s address, Monson seems to have been in remarkably jovial spirits as he awaited news of his fate. He even started cracking jokes with a couple of nearby journalists. ‘Why am I like a railway engine?’ he asked. Then, looking down at the hard, wooden bench upon which he had been sitting throughout the trial: ‘Because I have a tender behind.’ But what of the thoughts running through the mind of Agnes, his stalwart throughout the ordeal? She had cut a lonely figure for much of the proceedings, sitting veiled, alone or with a single companion, keeping her counsel day after day at the back of the courtroom. During the trial, she stayed in rooms in Edinburgh that she could scant afford and it was said that in her private moments she solaced her melancholy by playing the banjo. Indeed, a note in her handwriting had been passed around parts of the court showing an order with a Glasgow music-seller for popular hits including ‘The Future Mrs ’Awkins’ and ‘The Man that Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo’. It is tempting to imagine her husband humming along to the latter’s opening line: ‘And I’ve now such lots of money, I’m a gent.’
The public, meanwhile, were champing at the bit. It was indicative of the clamour surrounding the trial that on average over 150,000 words of newspaper coverage was sent by telegraph from Edinburgh’s General Post Office on each day of proceedings. Bookmakers even offered odds on the verdict – in the last few days of the trial, you could get 9–4 on an acquittal. The anticipation was palpable when the jury returned some seventy-three minutes after the judge had sent them out. ‘Gentlemen, what is your verdict?’ asked the clerk of the court. The foreman of the jury rose to his feet: ‘My Lord, the verdict of the jury is one of not proven on both charges.’
A strange, muffled murmur went around the court and then a ripple of applause that was soon stifled. Beyond, though, the response was less restrained. Within thirty seconds of the news breaking, the large crowd that had gathered on the square outside the courtroom gave a resounding cheer. Quite what they were celebrating was unclear. Surely Monson had not been elevated to the status of popular hero in the mould of a Robin Hood or even a Dick Turpin? Whether or not he had been responsible for the death of Cecil Hambrough, the trial had hardly shown Monson in a good light. Nor was the verdict itself particularly satisfying, leaving, as it did, lingering suspicion and unanswered questions. This was, after all, what Sir Walter Scott had memorably described as ‘the bastard verdict’. Perhaps it was simply relief that the tension was over, or appreciation for a drama well performed, that prompted the crowd’s spontaneous applause.
Monson, meanwhile, stood up in the dock on hearing the news, his smile eventually breaking into something like contained laughter. His solicitor, Mr Blair, and his junior counsel, John Wilson, came over to shake his hand. Notably, Comrie Thomson did not, instead leaving the court straightaway without so much as a glance towards his client. The freed man was then conducted downstairs from the dock, and was shortly afterwards spotted in deep conversation with the Chief Constable and his officials. They were likely discussing how best to smuggle Monson past the mass of people congregated outside. In the end, Monson simply turned up his collar, swapped his felt hat for a cap and was taken out of a side exit towards a waiting cab. It was not a ruse that fooled all of those in the crowd, and before long the police were required to hold back a throng who had rushed across the square to catch a glimpse of the man who was just then the most famous person in Edinburgh. By the time Monson got into the cab and the horses had got going, he was surrounded by a large group cheering his emancipation. A short while later, he arrived at an address in a quiet corner of the city’s West End where Agnes had been staying during the trial.
The next day he wrote a letter to Comrie Thomson. A curious note, it read as follows:
I feel anxious to express my gratitude to you for the able and powerful speech which you addressed to the jury on my behalf yesterday. I regret very much that I am unable to thank you personally before leaving Edinburgh, because I feel that I cannot properly convey my thanks in writing … I fully appreciate that the close of your address was so impressively pathetic that the jury were visibly affected to such an extent that the case for the Crown was so shaken as to render it impossible for the jury to find a verdict of Guilty.
I am leaving for Scarboro’ but expect to be in Edinburgh again soon, when I hope I may have the opportunity of thanking you in person. I remain, yours truly,
A. J. Monson
Nowhere does Monson talk of the injustice of the charges against him, instead congratulating Comrie Thomson for spiking the prosecution so that the jury had no choice but to reject a guilty verdict. If Comrie Thomson’s hasty retreat from the courtroom was indicative of a certain disquiet in his relationship with Monson, the passage of time evidently did not soften his feelings. Several years later at a dinner party, he was heard to say: ‘I don’t know whether Monson killed Hambrough, but he nearly killed me.’
Nonetheless, most of the press was in agreement that the jury had arrived at the only acceptable verdict given the evidence put before them. The Daily News neatly summarised the consensus opinion: ‘It was the verdict which most persons expected, and it was exactly the right verdict. The charges against the prisoner were rendered plausible by the evidence, but they were not proved.’ The Spectator reached the same conclusion and used a long editorial to warn of the press and the public’s proclivity towards prejudging:
The Ardlamont trial is a sharp object-lesson in the difference between violent presumption and solid evidence. We do not suppose Mr Monson’s closest friends would deny that when his trial began there was a violent presumption that he had been concerned in the death … Everyone expected that the facts would be proved by the Crown, and that being proved the Court of Session would have no hesitation in convicting and sentencing the accused … Nevertheless, the jury found a verdict of ‘Not proven’, and we do not believe that any competent person who has read the Lord Justice Clerk’s summing-up of the evidence can doubt that the verdict was correct. The testimony was all presumption, and not evidence. The facts were all correct, but there was nothing whatever except his presence on the ground to connect them with the accused … The case for the prosecution consisted in fact of more or less probable guesses, upon which the jury could hardly decide; and accordingly they brought in the verdict which means just that, – namely, ‘Not proven’. Had they been trying the case in England, they must have acquitted the accused, and in returning the verdict they did, they went to the very verge of justice … beliefs, accorded without solid evidence, constantly deflect the course of affairs, and sometimes work the irreparable kind of mischief which, but for an able Judge and a patient jury, popular presumption would have worked in the case of the man accused of the Ardlamont murder. We use the word ‘mischief’ with no intention of implying complete belief in Monson’s innocence. We have no such certainty any more than the jury had, but the point is not our certainty or the jury’s, but the evidence against the accused, and except the fact that he was on the spot when the death occurred, there was practically none.
The Glasgow Herald, meanwhile, took a different line, celebrating the trial for the window it opened on to the condition of the social hierarchy:
Greater romances have been revealed in the Law Courts than that story which must perhaps for ever be known as the Ardlamont tragedy. It has none of the piquancy of ‘fashionable vice’ in the worst sense of the phrase. Yet what a revelation of the shifts that impecuniosity is put to we have in this marvellous story of financial agents and bookmakers, pawn tickets, insurances and mortgages, which has been told in Edinburgh this past fortnight! … It is proverbial, of course, that the one-half of the world does not know how the other half lives; but one wonders how many Major Hambroughs there are, getting through a respectable fortune in a few years, and then living almost entirely on wretched and precarious pittances doled out by their sons’ tutors. Does Monson stand alone, or are there many other ‘scions of the aristocracy’ who can live for years in comfort, if not luxury, on what Mr Comrie Thomson’s ‘quiet living’ Scotch folks would regard as nothing a year plus pawn tickets.
Although the members of the jury had agreed not to discuss the case with the newspapers, it was not long before several broke rank to give their take on events. As the Edinburgh Evening News put it, ‘they are so imbued with a sense of its importance and their own share in its decision that a little persuasion has induced a few of them to unburden their minds of some of their impressions’. According to one, although there had been general admiration for the closing speech of the Solicitor-General, the summing up of the judge left them little room to return any verdict other than ‘not proven’. Another claimed that initially there were one or two jurors keen to find Monson guilty but, after a short discussion, ‘not proven’ was agreed to unanimously. In fact, it was claimed, the jurymen were ready to return much sooner than they did, but delayed as they considered there ought to be a decent interval. In a revelation dripping with pathos, it was also revealed that a child of one of the jurymen had died on the evening of the trial’s penultimate day.
The fate of Monson became an ongoing subject of debate in both private and public forums. During the trial, for example, a miner called Alexander Mair got on a train at Glasgow Central station with his wife and struck up a conversation with two men in his compartment as to the probable fate of the defendant. Before long there was an altercation which developed into a fight, during which Mair was stabbed in the forehead. Fortunately, he survived. More peaceably, a vicar at an Aberdeen church chose to ruminate on the case on the Sunday after the verdict. He based his sermon around the words found in the book of Isaiah 3:11: ‘Woe unto the wicked, for the reward of his hands shall be over him.’ While denying that he had necessarily made up his mind as to Monson’s guilt, the vicar did say that the trial had revealed ‘much of the life of godlessness, wickedness, scheming, shift, falsehood, and deception’. It had, he said, ‘given an insight into the state of society in some of its circles where they would expect better things’.
During what was his first weekend of freedom since the summer, Monson offered up his own thoughts on the affair. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I am feeling pretty well on the whole; but of course I am dreadfully pulled down – the period of suspense has been so long, it is over four months now since I was first placed under arrest.’ On being asked about the result, he was reported to have smiled. ‘Of course, in one sense, I am very well pleased,’ he said, adding that ‘in another I am disappointed. I am glad that the verdict was not a conviction, as I need hardly tell you; but I think, on the other hand, that after the very strong charge of the judge, it should have been a complete acquittal, and not merely a verdict of “Not Proven”. Considering, too, that the jury were, as I am told, absolutely unanimous, I feel this all the more strongly. It is quite certain that in England after such a decided summing-up as that of Lord Kingsburgh, no jury would have returned any other verdict than “not guilty”, and thenceforth I feel that to this extent I am a sufferer by different procedure adopted in Scotland.’ He did, however, concede that the prosecution case was ‘undoubtedly a strong one’. ‘The Crown had had so long to make their preparation,’ he explained, ‘that their evidence, such as it was, was very complete … but I must say there appeared to me less desire to ascertain the actual truth in the matter than to make the facts fit in with their own preconceived theory.’
These last words echoed both Bell’s observation (made to the Pall Mall Gazette) that the police tended to make a ‘fatal mistake’ in getting ‘his theory first and then [making] the facts fit it’ and Sherlock Holmes’s admonition against theorizing ‘in advance of the facts’. But perhaps there was also something disconcerting about the language Monson used. His words sounded less like the impassioned outpourings of an innocent man exonerated of the most ghastly charges, but more like the cool appraisal of a legal commentator analysing the ebb and flow of the judicial proceedings. To some, there was the immutable suspicion that this was a man who had just spectacularly gamed the system. Others, meanwhile, maintained he was merely the victim of circumstantial evidence and unjust innuendo.