‘Is it possible that you succeeded in climbing out of that awful abyss?’
Dr Watson, ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’
Although some emerged from the experience better than others, the Ardlamont affair imprinted itself upon the lives of all those who played a prominent part within it. Even for those who could count the most extraordinary achievements in their careers, involvement with the case would forever feature in broad-brush summaries of their lives. For the less fortunate (and less deserving), those few months at the end of 1893 would define their entire lives.
His 1898 trial for fraud was for many confirmation that Monson had got away with murder five years earlier. At the very least, it condemned his character forever in the eyes of but a small few. In the generally measured words of the Scotsman: ‘It is inevitable that public opinion at least should be influenced in forming a view of the man’s character and conduct by the revelations made before the High Court of Justiciary, and other appearances in Court which Monson has since made. Whatever may not have been proved, it was proved to the hilt that Alfred John Monson was absolutely without scruple or conscience, and was capable of going to any depth of baseness for gain.’
Yet despite the wretched state of his reputation, Monson was remarkably not without his defenders. In 1909, the prestigious literary journal the Academy reviewed a recently published transcript of his trial, which came with an introductory essay by John W. More. The Academy’s review included a coruscating attack upon the system that had called Monson to account: ‘the verdict in the Monson case was a disgrace to Scotland, a disgrace to Scottish justice and fair play, and a disgrace to humanity … let this article serve as a tardy reparation offered to the memory of one of the most piteous victims of man’s inhumanity to man who ever turned a face brave, undaunted and debonair to the pack of howling dogs that hounded him down.’
It is widely believed that the author of the piece was none other than Lord Alfred Douglas – better known as Bosie, poet and then editor of the magazine, not to mention the lover of Oscar Wilde, whose father, the Marquess of Queensberry, was so instrumental in Wilde’s downfall. Whether Bosie truly believed in Monson’s innocence or simply distrusted the British systems of justice that had brought low his former paramour, we will never know. It is difficult to see what claim Monson could have had upon his sympathy, though. Could Monson really claim to have been ‘hounded’, let alone portray himself as a victim of ‘man’s inhumanity’?
Having been moved to Parkhurst Prison on the Isle of Wight to serve his sentence, Monson was released early on licence (either in 1901 or 1902) and was last heard of back in Africa. In 1902, he wrote to Lord Galway from the Cape Colony, where he had assumed a new identity and was after money so that he might set up business as a horse breeder. What became of him afterwards is anybody’s guess, although it is difficult to imagine he saw out whatever remained of his life living quietly or entirely honestly. Agnes, meanwhile, struggled on with life in England. At the census of 1901, she was living in Leeds as Agnes Wyvill, and a decade later went by the same name in Brighton. She died in September 1941 in Bournemouth, having resumed use of the tainted Monson name.
As for Cecil’s parents, they never recovered from the nightmarish events in which they found themselves caught up. Marion Hambrough died in 1900, with the Major following eight years later. Having failed to recover his former properties, he left an estate valued at less than £100. Every year on the anniversary of Cecil’s death, the Hambroughs placed a notice in the major newspapers that echoed the words of the defence counsel at Monson’s trial: ‘In loving memory of our dear son, Windsor Dudley Cecil Hambrough, found shot dead in a wood at Ardlamont, Argyllshire, August 10, 1893, in his twenty-first year. “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”’
And what of Tot and Sweeney? The former was last heard of in 1901, when he made an appearance in the London bankruptcy courts, explaining his losses as in part the result of financial advances he had made to the Hambroughs and the Monsons. It would be fair to say that few wept for his predicament. Sweeney, meanwhile, quickly faded from public view after briefly trying to milk his notoriety – teaming up, as Monson had done, with the showman Mr Morritt in 1894. He appeared in ‘a bewildering illusion’ at Piccadilly’s ‘theatre of varieties’, the London Pavilion, entitled The Missing Man. Strapped into a chair, he was lifted into the air as stage lights flickered around him before the chair tumbled back to earth, sans Sweeney. It was perhaps sobering for the young man that he succeeded Arthur Orton in the role. Orton, better known as the Tichborne Claimant, was a butcher’s son from the East End of London who in the 1870s had received a fourteen-year sentence after he returned from years in Australia claiming to be the legitimate heir to the Tichborne baronetcy. Weighing in at some twenty stone, Orton’s was quite a form to disappear but audiences soon tired of the novelty of seeing (and, indeed, not seeing) him. A similar fate quickly befell Sweeney, who was last spotted in 1895 testifying at a trial in which a solicitor from Lincoln’s Inn Fields was attempting to sue Morritt for twenty-five guineas for unpaid fees in relation to introducing Morritt and the former outlaw in the first place.
For the head of Monson’s defence team, John Comrie Thomson, the Ardlamont case proved the last great criminal trial of his life. He died suddenly in August 1898 having slipped and fallen on deck while on a cruise. He was attended in his final days by none other than Joseph Bell. Comrie Thomson’s opposite number, Alexander Asher, also never featured in such a high-profile courtroom shoot-out again, resigning his position as Solicitor-General in 1894. According to The Times, his decision was ‘largely owing to the very inadequate remuneration then paid’ for holding the post. One suspects the Monson trial did little to persuade him that the job was worth the trouble. A Liberal Member of Parliament for the Elgin Burghs since 1881, Asher fell ill when leaving an evening session at the House of Commons in July 1905 and died the following month.
The judge, Lord Kingsburgh, outlived both the prosecution and defence counsels, only passing away in 1919, but his career never entirely escaped the shadow of 1893. As the Dundee Evening Telegraph noted in a tribute to him:
With a record of twenty-seven years’ service as Lord Justice Clerk it fell to the lot of the late Lord Kingsburgh – Sir John Hay Athole Macdonald – to play a prominent part in a larger proportion of the famous Scottish trials of the last half century than any other judge at the Scottish bar … Of all the late Lord Justice Clerk’s cases, however, the extended trial in what was, and still is, the Ardlamont mystery, was undoubtedly the outstanding case. No trial in the annals of the Scottish Law Courts has created greater interest at the time or has been more talked of since.
As for the Edinburgh University triumvirate – Littlejohn, Bell and Heron Watson – the irksome nature of the trial’s denouement never entirely diminished. Nonetheless, their failure to ensure a guilty verdict did little to diminish the esteem in which they were held. If Sherlock Holmes was, as Dr Watson famously once described him, ‘a brain without a heart, as deficient in human sympathy as he was preeminent in intelligence’, Littlejohn, Bell and Heron Watson overflowed with compassion just as much as they delighted in intellectualism. While the Monson verdict was a crushing blow and an affront to their shared faith in rationalism, the affair as a whole highlighted the overriding humanity that had informed their careers over many decades. The jury’s verdict hurt because they cared so much – not about simply solving the case but about securing justice for Cecil and his family. Even as the Ardlamont case must count as a professional defeat, they each emerged perhaps even greater in stature than when they had embarked upon their investigations into the events at Ardlamont.
Heron Watson would go on to serve as surgeon to both Queen Victoria and then Edward VII, received a knighthood in 1903 and was elected for a second stint as president of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 1905. He died just before Christmas of 1907, a few weeks short of his seventy-sixth birthday. Littlejohn had to wait only until 1895 for his knighthood, then two years later was appointed Edinburgh University’s first chair of medical jurisprudence – a position he ceded to his son, Harvey, in 1906. It was not until 1908 that Henry Littlejohn resigned as the city’s medical officer for health, a full forty years after assuming the role. In 1907 one of his former students, Dr William Smith, went some way to isolating the unique position he held in Scottish society, saying, ‘Littlejohn has the brain of a lawyer as well as that of a doctor, his work has been midway between the two professions, he is a master of both.’ However, following his death in 1914, barely a soul suggested his influence upon the work of Arthur Conan Doyle, with only the Liverpool Daily Post heading its obituary: ‘The Original Sherlock Holmes’.
That was a title far more regularly bestowed upon Joseph Bell. Bell slowly began to lessen his workload in the years after Ardlamont, allowing himself a little spare time to indulge his many passions, which included the natural world, long walks and, latterly, motoring (in 1907 he became one of Edinburgh’s first car owners). Despite having relatively little to do with Doyle after the turn of the century, in 1900 he assisted the now world-famous author and public figure in his bid for a seat in parliament. Doyle was standing as the Liberal Unionist candidate in the Edinburgh Central constituency when he was publicly attacked as a ‘papist’. Bell, incensed by such baiting, leapt to his defence and accompanied him on the campaign trail. Appearing alongside him at the Edinburgh Literary Institute, he urged a lively crowd to vote for ‘my former dresser’, adding, ‘if Conan Doyle does half as well in Parliament as he did in the Royal Edinburgh Infirmary, he will make an unforgettable impression on English politics’. Alas, his intervention was not enough to swing the election in Doyle’s favour.
Bell was still seeing patients until just a few months before his death in 1911. The Edinburgh Academy Chronicle declared that his passing had left ‘his native city appreciably smaller’, while The Times found space to acknowledge his role not only as a medical man but as an expert witness, too. He was, his obituary said, ideal for the job, being ‘cool, collected, accurate, and concise … there were few cases, whether criminal or civil, in which his expert knowledge was not called for either by the Crown or the opposite side.’ Doyle in turn revealed, ‘I always thought what a fine brain like his could have done in detecting crime.’
Yet the fame of none of these figures came close to that enjoyed by Sherlock Holmes – news of whose death as revealed at the moment when Monson faced trial for Cecil Hambrough’s murder proved much exaggerated. Doyle was offered such riches to resurrect him that he did just that in 1901, when he published the most famous Holmes story of them all, The Hound of the Baskervilles. In 1903, there followed a short story – ‘The Adventure of the Empty House’ – in which Holmes’s apparent death at the Reichenbach Falls was explained away. A further twenty-nine short stories and a novel were to come before Doyle at last finished with the character in 1927. Speaking a year later, and just two before his own death, Doyle reflected: ‘I’ve written a good deal more about him than I ever intended to do but my hand has been forced by kind friends who continually wanted to know more, and so it is that this monstrous growth has come out of what was really a comparatively small seed.’
The author never truly comprehended the hold his detective had upon the reading public. In part, Holmes’s allure was that he tapped into a fundamental desire within us, a wish to confront – perhaps even revel in – man’s darkest instincts and then to master them. That is, too, what was occurring in Edinburgh’s High Court of Justiciary in December 1893, even as Holmes was plunging over his Swiss waterfall. Bell and Littlejohn – Holmes made living flesh – sought to make sense of unexplained, brutal death by imposing cool, calm reason upon it. In A Study in Scarlet, Holmes reflected: ‘There’s the scarlet thread of murder running through the colourless skein of life, and our duty is to unravel it, and isolate it, and expose every inch of it.’ Littlejohn and Bell, his spiritual forefathers, would surely have said amen to that.