Some men wish evil and accomplish it,
But most men, when they work in that machine,
Just let it happen somewhere in the wheels.
The fault is no decisive, villainous knife
But the dull saw that is the routine mind.
Stephen Vincent Benét, 1928
On 7 August 1889 a withered misogynist with animal hair on his head told Florence Maybrick that the state was going to take her from this place and break her neck. The place was a courtroom buried in St George’s Hall in Liverpool, where for the previous eight days she had listened to a confection of invention and treacheries that were now to take away her life.
The man with the morbid tidings, Judge Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, was a sixty-year-old Queen’s Bencher who was himself to die four years later in a lunatic asylum. Symptoms of his ‘fatal affliction’ developed after a fuse-out at the Derby Assizes in April 1885. The stroke – if that’s what it was – had blown away the intellect but left a lot of the nasty stuff. Already suffering from the uglier accesses of hag-worship, he was a virulent monarchist whose conservatism was off the scale. ‘It is highly desirable that criminals should be hated,’ he wrote, ‘that the punishment inflicted upon them should be so contrived to give an expression to that hatred.’1
To that end, and irrespective of any accompanying prison sentence, he was vociferously in favour of ‘the increased use of physical pain by flogging, as a form of secondary punishment, with an enhanced degree of severity. At present,’ he grumbled, ‘it is little, if at all, more serious than a birching at a public school.’2
He had gone to Eton with Salisbury,3 and if they didn’t share such views as schoolboy contemporaries, they certainly did now. Both were into hanging, Fitzjames Stephen in terms of moral retribution, and the Prime Minister wherever death was expedient to the survival of his Queen and his class.
To Fitzjames Stephen, capital punishment was ‘the keystone of all moral and penological principles’, a novel attitude that his bigotry somehow conflated with the teachings of Jesus. ‘Christianity has two sides,’ he pronounced: ‘a gentle side up to a certain point, a terrific side beyond that point.’ In other words, the rope: ‘No other way of disposing of criminals is equally effectual, appropriate and cheap. When a man (or woman) is hung, there is an end of our relations with him. There are many people, with respect to whom, it is a great advantage to society to take this course.’4
Law, wrote Fitzjames Stephen, was ‘the organ of the moral indignation of mankind’. But not if the indignation came off the pen of Charles Dickens or Tom Paine. He published a tirade against Dickens’s novels, his stupid invective reading like ‘an indictment of a man guilty of sedition’. Oliver Twist was just another parasite on the take, better off in a pauper’s grave. But his abhorrence of Dickens was as nothing compared to the violence of opinion he reserved for the revolutionary politics of Paine. The author of The Rights of Man brought him to boiling point: ‘the wretched, uneducated plebeian’, he raved, who ‘dared to attack the Church and State’.5
The Church and state was what Sir James Fitzjames Stephen was all about. He was their Avenger, and together with his holiness Sir Robert Anderson, an exemplar of their religious propriety. As the great American poet Kenneth Patchen later described such crawling hypocrites, ‘Behold, one of several little Christs.’
According to his brother and biographer Sir Leslie Stephen, Fitzjames Stephen was recognised amongst his peers by a ‘spontaneous freemasonry’ which apparently ‘forms the higher intellectual stratum of London society’.6 This presumably included that notable intellect the Duke of Clarence, whom Stephen’s homosexual son tutored and probably buggered from time to time.7 Such indulgences attracted severe penalty in Victorian courts, and his dad must have turned a blind eye. (It was after all, royal arse.) I don’t know if Stephen was a practising Mason, but what’s for certain is that, like his schoolboy chum in Downing Street, ‘he was one of the most mordant and persistent critics of democracy’. This gallstone-sucker believed Liberalism would ‘surely increase the power of the “popular voice”’, threatening everything greed held dear, ‘including the preservation of the British Empire’.8
This meant Ireland, but most of all India, a nation otherwise dismissed by Fitzjames Stephen as a place ‘where we can work and make money [his emphasis], but for which no Englishman ever did, or ever will, feel one tender or genial feeling’.
It was doubtless in India, where (as a member of the Colonial Council in the early 1870s) he wrote his white law for the recalcitrant darkies, that he developed his taste for opium. At the time of Florence Maybrick’s ‘trial’ he wrote to Lord Lytton, ‘I do still now and then smoke an opium pipe, as my nose requires one occasionally, and is comforted by it.’9 He must therefore be the only individual in pharmacological history who smoked dope to get his nose high. It’s possible that this unique organ was intoxicated when he ladled out his unremitting hatred to those in the dock.
Apart from the class he represented, it’s hard to work out who Fitzjames Stephen didn’t hate. He had an organic antipathy towards the common man. ‘The average level of the great mass,’ as he perceived and expressed it, ‘would fix the position and career of the nation at the level of a lowland, stagnant river.’10
A dozen of these stagnations constituted Florence Maybrick’s jury. They were empanelled and respectively sworn as Thomas Wainwright, a plumber – who was foreman – and the rest (one of whom couldn’t read or write): a farmer, a grocer, a baker, and others of similar trade. Considering the case turned on the esoterica of forensics, the Crown had itself a perfect jury.
I’ve tarried over the prejudices of this judge, and now come to the most egregious of them. Sir James Fitzjames Stephen had a bit of a problem with women – particularly young women – who had sex for any reason other than Christian procreation. If a woman should fornicate outside marriage, whore herself in that vilest of female sins, adultery, then you’re looking at Ezekiel in a wig. Stephen told the jury, ‘It is easy enough to conceive how a horrible woman, in so terrible a position, might be assailed by some fearful and terrible temptation.’11
James Maybrick wasn’t murdered by adultery, wasn’t murdered by arsenic either, but in the mire of this bigot’s disintegrating cognisance, they were conflated as one. Florence Maybrick’s night with Alfred Brierley at Flatman’s Hotel became central to the Crown’s case.
Fitzjames Stephen told the jury that she had acquired ‘flypapers’, and had soaked them in a bowl of water to extract the arsenic, referring to this domestic commonplace as a ‘suspicious circumstance’. ‘These papers,’ he said, ‘which nobody can have a proper occasion to use except it be to kill flies, were found soaking in water, and that water would become impregnated with arsenic, and might have been used for poisonous purposes.’
It ‘might have been’ if you were the umpire of a totally got-up judicial perversion, but arsenic was in fact one of the constituents of a mundane facewash. Together with benzoin, elderflower and other ingredients, such infusions containing a minuscule amount of arsenic were widely used by gentlewomen of a certain class, and like Florence, none of them were going to seek arsenic in a chemist’s shop by proclaiming their acne. Like her, they’d say it was for flies.
Arsenic was widely present in the manufactured commodities of Victorian England – found in soaps, dyes, medicines – and not infrequently used by ladies to enhance their complexion. Fitzjames Stephen was either too ignorant to know, or so embroiled in the forthcoming deceit that it was beyond his reduced grasp to understand, that there was nothing ‘suspicious’ about a woman soaking flypapers. Florence had acquired them quite openly at a local pharmacy, around the corner from her home at ‘Wokes & Co.’, subsequently leaving these tools of homicide on a table in the hall of Battlecrease House, where they were picked up in passing by her foredoomed husband, who showed scant interest, if any at all.
Florence had studied in Germany, where she’d learned the secrets of soaking flypapers as a pimple-killer from her student contemporaries.12 They were soaking now in preparation for a night out to which the Maybricks had been invited. But with James too ill to attend, Florence had asked if his younger brother Edwin could escort her.13 No problem with that, and aspiring to be la belle de la nuit, she went into haute couture mode, writing to her mother: ‘We are invited to a Bal Masque which being given in Liverpool and the people provincials, I hardly think likely to be a success. A certain amount of “diablerie”, wit and life is always required at an entertainment of this sort; and it will be quite a novel innovation, people will hardly know what is expected of them.’14
James Maybrick knew what the flypapers were for, even if Fitzjames Stephen didn’t, and it’s part of an almost unbelievable fraudulence that nobody told him. It was all the Crown had, but this flypaper bullshit was nothing less than absurd. To accuse Florence Maybrick of murdering her husband with arsenic was like accusing her of trying to murder an alcoholic with a teaspoon of gin. Had flypapers been an efficient and accessible source of arsenic, there would have been a weekly wholesale delivery of a dozen gross to the back door of Battlecrease House.
Maybrick’s unrelenting addiction to various poisons was well established; a legion of family friends and associates could have testified to this as fact. Such evidence, of course, would have immediately destroyed the Crown’s case, so no such witnesses were called. Vital depositions were suppressed, both by the prosecution and the treacherous ‘defence’, which colluded to present James Maybrick as a paragon of physical virtue who barely took anything beyond an occasional stomach sedative.
Had the jury heard the truth, Florence would have walked free. But the function of this ‘trial’ was to shut her up, and keep her shut up in perpetuity. Had not the whole base affair been bone-marrow corrupt, she would have walked within fifteen minutes. Instead, she was sentenced to death, later commuted to life imprisonment, which she was to suffer for fifteen years.
The tragedy of Florence Maybrick is mind-blowing. How could this perfectly innocent mother of two little children be snatched from her life and told she was going to die? The charges against her were fake – like those against an equally innocent Bradford milkman – with no explanation other than the wickedness of a System that would do anything to ensure its own survival. We have it from the Prime Minister’s own mouth that he had no scruple about executing the odd innocent Irishman, so what problem presented itself stringing up this Yankee whore?
When Florence heard that she was to be ‘hanged by the neck until you are dead’, it was out of the mouth of a System well summarised in the quote at the beginning of this chapter. She was within the wheels of a machine, serviced by ‘routine minds’ whose only business was the protection of the machine itself.
It’s why their judicial contingency wore daft wigs, symbols of insult to a failed republicanism and to such counteractive voices as that of Tom Paine. Oliver Cromwell’s Protestant thugs – the ‘Roundheads’ – cropped their hair short, while the King’s men and his boys – the ‘Cavaliers’ – wore their locks long. When the Royalists hauled Cromwell from his grave to re-kill his rotten corpse, Charles II was back on the honeypot, sporting horsehair to disguise his billiard ball. Thus the wig represented royalty, the resurgent royalist state; and Sir James Fitzjames Stephen was but one of its walking-backwards mouths.
How stultified were these widow’s men. Florence Maybrick had the unavoidable misfortune to be represented by one of their best, the famous ‘silk’ Sir Charles Russell QC.
The case was a pushover – any fledgling solicitor could have won it. So how was it that ‘the greatest advocate of his age’ lost it? The answer depends on who you think Sir Charles was working for. Apologists claim he failed to secure the freedom of his client through exhaustion engendered at the recent Parnell Commission. Fatigue had debilitated him, they say. I say, to the contrary, that in the framing of Florence Maybrick he displayed an energetic courtroom wizardry that has fooled the record for 130 years.15
Soon to be ennobled as Lord Russell of Killowen and promoted to Lord Chief Justice of England, this Belfast Judas was at the top of his game. He lost because it was predetermined that Florence Maybrick should go to the grave with her supposed secret, born from the hideous calumnies of Michael Maybrick.
Like Sir Charles Warren, Sir Charles Russell was an oft-time visitor to the glutton’s palace at Sandringham, a personal friend of the monarch to be, and we need waste no time considering where his loyalties lay.16 Russell had turned into a kind of Warren in a wig, prostrating his infinitely more sophisticated treacheries on behalf of the Crown. The buffoon Commissioner was required to pretend he was hunting the Ripper, while Russell was entrusted to put up a show of ‘defending’ Florence Maybrick. He was in fact fully committed to the prosecution, generous in the use of his skills to keep it on track. Russell had repeated opportunities to win this case, but either ignored them or turned them to Florence’s disadvantage. Time after time he interceded on the Crown’s behalf, dominating the courtroom and watching the bewigged back of ‘Fat Jack’, the Crown’s inept prosecutor.
John Addison QC MP was an archetypical huckster of Victorian values, a barge of stale silk, able to lie with alacrity but as prone to blunder as that indentured chump Bro Wynne Baxter. On behalf of Addison’s frequent errors, Russell was ever alert to intercede, correct, steer and suppress. He could see the mistake coming before Addison made it, and wasn’t going to let his Honourable Friend botch the frame-up by default. Bro Russell was as much in the ‘loop’ as Bro Charlie Warren, or for that matter Bro Michael Maybrick himself. Bro Jack had initiated much corruption in a variety of courts. But this was the big one. When Sir James Fitzjames Stephen slung a bit of black rag on top of his wig, it was the triumph of the Ripper’s career. The state was now going to do his killing for him. These men were going to murder Florence Maybrick.
The previously mentioned barrister Alexander Macdougall described the intrigue against Mrs Maybrick as ‘the Spirit of Evil’.17 The British public must ‘feel shame’ he wrote, ‘as long as a guiltless woman is passing a living death in our midst’.18 Although in ignorance of the Crown’s subplot, cooked up on behalf of a psychopath, Macdougall went on to demand ‘the removal from office of all those who can be shown by their unconstitutional conduct to have been responsible for the miscarriage of justice that has taken place’. And further, ‘the bringing to justice of any person who can be shown to have recklessly and maliciously put the charge of murdering her husband, upon Mrs Florence Maybrick’.19 In other words, icons of the legal engine of Queen Victoria’s Masonic state. A contemporary of Macdougall’s possessing a similar independence of legal mind, the barrister J.H. Levy, wrote: ‘A blush of shame ought to come to the cheek of every Englishman. The case is, in my opinion, one of the most extraordinary miscarriages of justice in modern times.’20
Neither Levy nor Macdougall knew about the fly in the gravy, thus both were mistaken. A ‘miscarriage of justice’ implies that justice was intended, but that some error had been made. But this wasn’t an error, it was a predetermined conspiracy to keep the little flags waving, and protect those they were waved at.
Sir Charles Russell himself was later to describe the Maybrick trial as ‘rotten’, and of all people, he should know. ‘The foundation on which the whole case for the Crown rested was rotten,’ he wrote in 1896, ‘for there was in fact no murder’21 (his emphasis). If he knew it was ‘rotten’ in 1896, he knew it was ‘rotten’ in 1889 when he and his pals orchestrated it. While the word ‘justice’ exists in the lexicon of human exchange, these sons of bitches can never be forgiven.
Russell was candid about the rottenness, but bashful with the truth about James Maybrick’s demise. Unequivocally Maybrick was murdered, done to death by cruel poisoning – but it was never Florence Maybrick who administered it.
At about half past eight on the morning of Friday, 26 April 1889, the parlourmaid at Battlecrease House, Mary Cadwallader, took in a delivery from the postman. Postmarked London, it was a pasteboard box, which she correctly assumed contained a bottle. It was addressed to James Maybrick, who told her he’d been ‘expecting the medicine for a day or two’.22 This was six days after his visit to his brother’s physician in London, Dr Fuller, and day one of Michael Maybrick’s first homicidal move.
On the following day, Saturday the 27th, a date of dark import, James hauled out the cork. Within minutes he was heading for the bathroom to get his head in a sink. When the vomiting was over he came downstairs to tell Florence and Cadwallader that his legs had gone stiff as a pair of pokers, and that he couldn’t feel his hands. This isn’t surprising, because he’d just swallowed a savage dose of an alkaline toxin whose fearsome calling card he recognised at once. To crease Maybrick it must have been inordinately potent.
Whatever else may be said about this mysterious ‘London Medicine’, one thing is for certain, and that is that it had nothing whatsoever to do with Dr Fuller. Fuller’s prescription had been made up at a nearby pharmacy, Clay & Abrahams, on 24 April.23 There were three medicines in all. One was a harmless aperient (containing an unweighable trace of arsenic), and the second was a tonic (with a homeopathic-quantity dash of nux vomica, or strychnine). The third was a patent medicine called Plummer’s Pills, whose main ingredient was antimony. Following the instructions, a ten-year-old could have safely swallowed the lot.
By mid-morning James had somewhat recovered, and despite continuing ‘numbness in the legs’ he got on his horse and left the house at about 10.30 to ride over to the Wirral races. Florence watched his departure with her usual trepidation, telling the ever-observant nanny Alice Yapp, ‘Master has taken an overdose of medicine. It is strychnine and is very dangerous.’24
Meanwhile it was April in Liverpool, sky like a dustbin lid with intermittent heavy rain. By the time Maybrick arrived at the racecourse he was wet through to his boots. The umbrellas were up, and under one of them he ran into a friend from the Cotton Exchange, a Mr Morden Rigg, and his wife. Mrs Rigg picked up the concern where Florence had left it. She only had to look at the mauled face to know that James was sick. He told her quite openly that he’d taken an overdose of strychnine, information he shared with another associate from the Exchange, a Mr Thompson.25 Maybrick must indeed have looked peculiar, judging by the way he was looking at them. Twenty-four hours later he told his local doctor, ‘It was a peculiar feeling, although he knew they were still there, they appeared to be a long way off.’26
That night Maybrick dined with friends on the ‘Cheshire Side’, that is on the opposite bank of the River Mersey. At the table he could barely control his wine glass because of tremors, and he was worried his hosts might think him drunk. It was past midnight before he arrived back at Battlecrease, leaving his saturated clothes to the care of the kitchen staff.
Despite the ravages of the previous day, next morning James took another hit of ‘the London Medicine’. To consume more of it was clearly crazy, but he was a junkie, and addiction is a kind of insanity. Predictably, the servants’ bells were soon clattering. Florence didn’t wait for anyone to answer, but ran downstairs, dispatching Mary Cadwallader to fetch the nearest doctor.
‘Without waiting for him to arrive, she told Alice Yapp to be with her master, while she went downstairs and told the cook, Humphreys, to make up immediately some mustard and water, as the master had taken another dose of that “Horrid Medicine”. She would not wait even for the cook to make it, or for a spoon, but stirred up some herself with her fingers, and rushed back into the bedroom with it,’ and as Yapp is her witness, said, ‘Drink this mustard and water in order to make you sick.’ Until assistance arrived Florence could do little more, except confiscate what was left of the ‘Horrid Medicine’ and throw it down the sink. She later told the cook that if James had swallowed even another drop ‘he would have been a dead man’.27
The above account is Alexander Macdougall’s, gleaned from various transcripts. He makes it clear that Maybrick’s reaction to the strychnine on Sunday morning was infinitely more severe than to the Saturday dose. In order to get an idea of what all or any of these reactions might have been, I quote from Husband’s Forensic Medicine: ‘The effects of the poison come on suddenly. The earliest symptoms are a feeling of suffocation and great difficulty in breathing. Twitching of the muscles rapidly passing into tetanic convulsions. The head after several jerks becomes stiffened, the neck rigid; the body curved forward, quite stiff and resting on the back of the head and heels.’28
All this is accompanied by staring eyes and an expression of ‘intense anxiety’. It must have been shared by everyone in the room, who could only look on in alarm as Maybrick’s spine rose in an approximation of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. ‘During the intervals of the paroxysms,’ continues Husband, ‘the intellect is usually clear, and the patient appears conscious of his danger, frequently exclaiming, “I shall die!”’29
James Maybrick had probably swallowed enough strychnine to kill the entire household, horse thrown in, but it’s testament to his elephantine tolerance that it didn’t kill him. Although the stuff had all but murdered him and Florence had probably saved his life, the reality of this ‘London Medicine’ was to be distorted under the charlatan eyes of the Irish Judas, to her fatal disadvantage.
Russell was well aware of the strychnine incident, but conspired with no less a personage than Michael Maybrick to conceal it. Keen attention must be paid to Dr Fuller’s so-called medicine. It was to become one of the principal ingredients in Russell’s betrayal, confirming beyond doubt that he was treacherously active on behalf of Florence’s prosecution.
By the time the doctor arrived Maybrick was on top of it, chronically poisoned but with the immediate crisis past. Dr Humphreys (no relation to the cook) arrived at Battlecrease House just after 11 a.m. He was hurried upstairs, where he ‘found Mrs Maybrick at the bedside’. James was in it, looking like he was halfway to hell. Humphreys probably knew less about medicines than his patient. He certainly knew less about strychnine, and Maybrick didn’t tell him he’d taken it.
‘Mr Maybrick,’ said Humphreys at the inquest, ‘complained about some great fear and anxiety in consequence of a pain in the region of his left side, the region of his heart, and said he was frightened of dying. He further said he was afraid of paralysis coming on. I asked him when these symptoms began; he told me after breakfast, and he put it down to a strong cup of tea he had taken.’30
Whether Humphreys laughed out loud or not isn’t known, but this rubbish was repeated in court without laughter, and puts the prosecution into perspective. Any problems with the flypapers, and they would have nailed Florence for a teabag.
‘He showed me Dr Fuller’s prescription,’ said Humphreys, ‘and had an idea the stiffness in his limbs was due to that. He was a man who prided himself on his knowledge of medicine. He said, “Dr Humphreys, I think I know a great deal of medicine.”’31
‘He deceived Humphreys,’ wrote Macdougall, ‘by attributing it to Doctor Fuller’s tonic-medicine. He knew perfectly well what was the matter with him and that his illness was not due to that, but to an overdose of strychnine.’32 (Macdougall’s emphasis.)
Attributing Maybrick’s symptoms to a tea attack, with associated indigestion, ‘distress and palpitations of the heart’, Humphreys told him to lay off the London brew, prescribing dilute prussic acid in its place. With a recommendation of bed rest for a day or two, the physician then bade him good morning.
Dr Humphreys had been in attendance at Battlecrease House once before, though not for James Maybrick, but for whooping cough in the kids. He could therefore have no idea of the maniac he was dealing with – or rather, he wasn’t astute enough to put two and two together. On that occasion in early March, Florence had told him of her anxieties over her husband’s surreptitious use of ‘white powders’. ‘She was alarmed about it,’ he said, ‘and didn’t know what it was. She thought that possibly it was strychnine.’ He clearly didn’t take her too seriously, actually making a somewhat inopportune joke of it. ‘Well, if he should die suddenly,’ he said, ‘call me, and I can say you have had some conversation with me about it.’33
I’m relieved this quack wasn’t treating me. She had called him, reiterating her apprehension about the ‘white powders’, and with a prospective corpse upstairs, it’s astonishing that strychnine poisoning didn’t cross Humphreys’ mind. The witless physician later claimed that he’d questioned James Maybrick on the topic, apparently eliciting a strong denial. ‘I cannot stand strychnine,’ was the answer, from which Humphreys ‘drew the conclusion that he wasn’t in the habit of taking it’.34
If Florence got nowhere with the doctor, she naturally fared no better with the psycho in London. In that same month she’d written to James’s brother Michael expressing the anxieties she’d shared with Humphreys over ‘white powders’. Considering it was Michael who was engineering the murder of James and the utter destruction of Florence herself, it was a wasted stamp, and the letter must have brought a smile to the bastard’s face as he crumpled it.
How terrible were to be the coming weeks. How pathetic was this woman’s fate. As Macdougall was to write of her accusers, who charged that it was on 27 April that she administered the first of a cumulative and ultimately fatal dose of arsenic: ‘I cannot conceive how the conduct of Mrs Maybrick on that day leads to any other conclusion than innocence and anxious solicitude for her husband. A woman engaged in poisoning her husband with “arsenic” would not have rushed to give him an emetic to throw it up, or told Doctor Humphreys and Alice Yapp and the cook that it was dangerous medicine [“the London Medicine”] he was taking which had made him so ill on those two days, the 27th and 28th April.’35
James remained in bed, with two more visits from Humphreys. The first was that same night, Florence recalling him at about ten o’clock. In acute discomfort, Maybrick complained of ‘stiffness in the lower limbs’, which not everyone might interpret as an obvious symptom of dyspepsia. The bewildered doctor rubbed James’s legs, bent them at the knee and changed the prescription, believing ‘papine irridan’ might hit the spot that prussic acid had evidently missed. He also prescribed a diet of coffee and bacon for breakfast, ‘for luncheon he was to take some beef-tea with Arabica Revalenta (Du Barry’s Food), and for dinner, on alternate days, a little chicken and fish’.
Next day James was well enough to sit up in bed and write a letter to his brother Michael. At least, that’s what Michael was to tell Fitzjames Stephen and his conspirant wigs in secret conference. Dated 29 April 1889, it was addressed to ‘My Dear Blucher’:
Liverpool April 29th 1889
My Dear Blucher
I have been very seedy indeed. On Saturday morning I found my legs getting stiff and useless, but by sheer strength of will shook off the feeling and went down on horseback to Wirral Races and dined with the Hobsons. Yesterday morning I felt more like dying than living so much so that Florry called in another Doctor who said it was an acute attack of indigestion and gave me something to relieve the alarming symptoms, so all went well until about 8 o’clock I went to bed and had lain there an hour by myself and was reading on my back.
Many times I felt a twitching but took little notice of it thinking it would pass away. But instead of doing so I got worse and worse and in trying to move round to ring the bell I found I could not do so but finally managed it, but by the time Florry and Edwin could get upstairs, was stiff and for five mortal hours my legs were like bars of tin stretched out to the fullest extent, but as rigid as steel. The Doctor came finally again but could not make it indigestion this time and the conclusion he came to was the Nuxvomica [strychnine] I had been taking. Doctor Fuller had poisoned me as all the symptoms warranted such a conclusion. I know I am today sore from head to foot and layed out completely.
What is the matter with me none of the Doctors so far can make out and I suppose never will, until I am stretched out and cold and then future generations may profit by it if they hold a postmortem which I am quite willing they should do.
I don’t think I shall come up to London this week as I don’t feel much like travelling and cannot go on with Fuller’s physic yet a while but I shall come up and see him again shortly. Edwin does not join you just yet but he will write you himself. I suppose you go to your country quarters on Wednesday.
With love,
Your affectionate Brother Jim.36
This letter has much to say for itself, and what it says reeks of deceit. Taken literally, it could have set Florence Maybrick free. Here we have James Maybrick accusing not his wife, but Dr Fuller in London, as his poisoner – ‘Doctor Fuller had poisoned me as all the symptoms had warranted such a conclusion.’ Whether James believed ‘the London Medicine’ had come from Fuller or not, it is beyond conjecture that he and everybody else in the house (including Alice Yapp) knew it was a hotshot of strychnine. He swallowed it on 27 April 1889, the very day the Crown accused Florence of administering the first dose of arsenic. It was an absurd and wicked accusation. The revelation of this text, purported to have been written by the victim himself, would have constituted all Sir Charles Russell needed to secure the liberty of his client. Everyone in that rotten little cesspit of a court – Fitzjames Stephen, ‘Fat Jack’ Addison, and the Irish Judas himself – was only too aware of this letter, and it is a criminal obscenity that both prosecution and defence suppressed it.
Notwithstanding the state’s filthy little secret, we’re supposed to believe that a roaring hypochondriac in constant terror of the Reaper, who had told Dr Humphreys he was ‘frightened of dying’, should announce twenty-four hours later that he was perfectly gung-ho for a stretch on the slab, and only too delighted to be hacked to bits for the profit of ‘future generations’.
James Maybrick suffered from a maniacal fear of death, and in my view is an unlikely advocate of his own posthumous butchery. Ripping up bodies was more in his brother’s line. The last thing James wanted was his dick flopped out in a mortuary, and no way did he write this letter. It was faked by a man with ‘many pens’ who was proficient in various schools of handwriting. Michael Maybrick had been systematically poisoning James with pills he claimed were from Dr Fuller, but which in fact had no more to do with him than the postal hotshot of strychnine. The so-called ‘Blucher’ letter was composed to validate a variety of intentions. In the first place, it’s probable that Michael thought his mystery brew might actually kill James, and this letter would then serve as his alibi; and second, had ‘the London Medicine’ done the trick, the letter would have vanished, and Florence would have been accused of murdering her husband with strychnine.
As with the unfortunate Bradford milkman William Barrit, malign articles began to appear in the press – the Liverpool Post of 15 May, by way of example: ‘It is not impossible that some very startling revelations will be made. The suspicion of the police and of the medical gentlemen being that the deceased succumbed to poisoning by strychnine.’ This calumny was enhanced by the Liverpool Weekly News: ‘An extraordinary rumour prevailed yesterday to the effect that Mrs Maybrick has not lately been accountable for her actions, and that she is really suffering from some mania.’ As far as certain sections of the Liverpool press were concerned, murdering husbands was a family trait. Florie’s mother was forced into broadcasting a public disclaimer following accusations that she had disposed of not one but two of her previous spouses. ‘These malicious rumours,’ reported the Liverpool Review, ‘without a particle of feasible evidence to support them, have been freely circulated in Liverpool, and have found their way into print in London.’
But it is the malicious journey of the ‘Blucher’ letter that takes precedence. Artfully abbreviated, it was to reappear, surfacing when it could do maximum damage to Florence, and then disappear when it could easily have proved her innocence.
On the day after he was supposed to have written it, James was feeling recovered, and returned to his business affairs in the city. That evening Dr Humphreys called at the house, and found him much improved. James told the doctor not to trouble himself further. If necessary, he would call on him.
It was a misguided forecast. The following day, on 1 May, James having forgotten to take his lunch to work, Edwin graciously volunteered to make the train journey to his brother’s offices in the Knowsley Buildings with a ceramic jugful of the prescribed Revalenta. James ate it, complaining of the sherry in it, and was ill that evening. He was well enough to go in to his office the next morning, and again took a dose of Revalenta for lunch. Once again he complained of feeling ill that evening. At ten o’clock next morning Dr Humphreys was listening to tales of fresh gastric woe.37
‘He said that he had not been well since eating lunch the day before,’ recounted the doctor, who not knowing his diagnostic arse from his elbow, suggested a Turkish bath might tone James up. It didn’t. At midnight the same day, Humphreys got another urgent summons. His patient had been vomiting – ‘green bile’ was mentioned – and suffering a ‘gnawing pain that extended from the hips to the joints of his legs’. A morphine suppository went up, and Maybrick was back in bed. He would not get out of it until his corpse was carried away a week later in a coffin.
It was the Revalenta Edwin had brought to the office that had kicked off this new bout of illness. There’s no doubt that somebody was poisoning James, and apparently no doubt who that somebody was. Mrs Maybrick had prepared the jugful that travelled to her husband’s office that day. She had personally concocted it. James had eaten it. Ergo, she had poisoned him. This neat syllogism was presented by her prosecutors, ignoring one glaring ingredient: the jug of lunch on 1 May was carried from the kitchen of his home to the Knowsley Buildings by Edwin Maybrick.
Michael Maybrick was over two hundred miles away, but was fully in control of the evolving wickedness at Battlecrease House. He had his rats on leashes, and one of them was Edwin. It was Edwin, jilted by Florence in favour of Alfred Brierley,38 who I believe put a little top-up into the jug on Michael’s behalf. Like everyone else, he was totally subservient to Michael’s will. Edwin’s daughter Amy Maine was to write that her father ‘couldn’t buy a pair of shoes without referring the matter to Michael’. But this story isn’t about shoes and boots (be they tight or not). It’s about murder, and I’d be the last person to bring footwear into the equation as any credible explanation for the activities of Jack the Ripper.
On some midnight in late spring 1889, certainly after Edwin Maybrick had returned from America on 25 April, a twenty-year-old man was lurking about the shadows of downtown Liverpool. His name was Robert Edward Reeves, and it was his practice to lurk. He was a small-time felon, a deserter from Her Majesty’s Liverpool Regiment, and perpetually on the lookout for an easy quid. Reeves had been in and out of jail since the age of fifteen, for theft in general, and this night he was sniffing around the columns of the Royal Exchange, looking for an unlocked door. He heard voices in the darkness, urgent whispers, and silent as the little thief he was, stopped to listen.
What he heard was Michael and Edwin Maybrick discussing the forthcoming murder of their brother James. ‘They could not see me as I was behind a pillar,’ said Reeves. ‘I drew near as I could to hear what they were talking. One said to the other, “How will you manage this?” The other said, “I will manage that alright with the servant. I will get her to put a bottle of laudanum in Mrs Maybrick’s drawers and leave one on the table just as if it had been used and we can get Mr Maybrick to go and have some drink with us tomorrow and you can engage him in talking about the business and I will slip a strong dose in the drink that will settle him by tonight.”’39
Reeves’s statement totally contradicts contemporary perceptions of Florence Maybrick’s supposed infamy, and in that it is starkly correct. Michael murdered James with Edwin as his besotted assistant.
‘Blame will fall on our sister,’ said one of the two men. ‘The other said, “What do that matter, you know she don’t like Mr Maybrick and she is in keeping with that other fellow that she seems to like best. She will be glad to get him out of the way, you know that they can’t prove it was her poisoned him, if they do send her away the whole business will fall to us you know and we shall be two lucky fellows, then it don’t matter about getting rid of one or two out of this world, will you agree with me about it?”’40 Edwin agreed: ‘“Yes, you will see that that will manage this business alright.” Then the other said, “It is settled.” They then left their hiding place and went as far as the Merchant Tavern close by. I followed them. I could not go in as I had no money with me at the time, I was a deserter at the time, else I should have gone to Dale Street Police Court. I was afraid of getting taken back to my Regiment. I belonged to the Eight of King’s Liverpool Regiment, my regimental number was 2955, at the depot at Warrington.’41
The absentee soldier went home ‘to my young girls house, number 5 Vaughn Street, Toxteth Park, and told her brother John Crane, all I had heard them two young men say. He said, “Don’t you have anything to do with it, you might get caught and taken back to your regiment.” So I said nothing about it. Soon after I was taken by Detective Wilson in Manchester Street one night so soon after I heard how Mrs Maybrick poisoned her husband and was sent for trial. I didn’t think it worthwhile to say anything about it, but it has been on my mind ever since, I even think of it at night when I lay awake, that such a thing could be done against a lady that is innocent.’42
Reeves was lying awake in a prison cell. He’d been slammed up for ‘warehouse breaking’ at Sussex Assizes and sentenced to five years’ hard. He was guilty, but not as guilty as the insects who jailed Florence Maybrick. Reeves insisted on making his statement, but the venal crew suppressed it. It was to remain classified as a secret Home Office file for the next hundred years.43
Reeves’s statement was smothered by the authorities as ‘absurd’. But had he not heard what he claimed to have heard, how could he even remotely have known the secret of James Maybrick’s murder? It’s taken rather a while to uncover the truth about Bro Michael Maybrick, and by any objective view it is beyond incredible for a near-illiterate like Robert Reeves to have dreamed up so complementary a narrative, ad hoc, in a prison cell. Everything Reeves said is substantiated in its entirety by fact. Moreover, it is borne out by realities that were then unknown.
Before, during and after the ‘trial’, the press had saturated the public mind with sensation about arsenic. Mrs Maybrick was an ‘arsenic poisoner’. That’s what the judge said, and that is what was said in every newspaper from Liverpool to London. Yet Reeves dismisses this, and doesn’t talk about arsenic at all. He says James Maybrick was murdered with laudanum (liquid morphia). If he was making it all up, why risk his credibility with unnecessary invention? A man telling an absurd tale would have surely kept within the ‘known facts’.
Reeves’s statement annihilates the rubbish underpinning Florence Maybrick’s conviction. Had Alexander Macdougall been aware of it, I think it would have caused friction enough to ignite his pen. He didn’t know about Reeves, but in his subsequent treatise of 1891 he set out his suspicions concerning laudanum. An empty bottle of it had been ‘discovered’ by Alice Yapp in a chocolate box inside one of Mrs Maybrick’s trunks. It had clearly been secreted there to incriminate her, as is consistent with Reeves’s statement: ‘“How will you manage this?” The other said, “I will manage that alright with the servant. I will get her to put a bottle of laudanum in Mrs Maybrick’s drawers.”’
Macdougall wanted to know where this bottle had come from, and why it was ignored by the police. ‘There ought to have been no difficulty in the way of the police finding out whether she had been buying a bottle of a solution of morphia. And then again, why was the label, “Solution of Morphia”, left on, and the name of the druggist scratched off? Solution of Morphia is a white liquid, which looks like water. If a person was engaged in crime, I can understand their taking off the words, “Solution of Morphia”, but they were left on, and the chemist’s name erased!’44
I suggest it was because the laudanum had been obtained in London, and its source erased precisely to prevent the cops from tracing it – not that they gave a toss for detection. Nobody apart from his murderers knew that James Maybrick had been dispatched with a hotshot of morphia – except this easy-to-dismiss convict Robert Reeves.
We come now to the last and most important of the soldier’s revelations, a subterfuge not even Macdougall was ever cognisant of, and that is the theft of James Maybrick’s business: ‘the whole business will fall to us you know and we shall be two lucky fellows’.
James Maybrick’s will, dated 25 April 1889, makes absolutely no mention of Edwin. He doesn’t get a paperclip. James bequeathed ‘all my worldly possessions, including life-insurances, cash, shares, property – in fact everything I possess – in trust with my brothers Michael & Thomas Maybrick for my two children, James Chandler Maybrick & Gladys Evelyn Maybrick’ (my emphasis).
It was a trust that wasn’t honoured. On 14 October 1889, Michael handed over all shares in James’s business to Edwin: ‘Transfer of shares from James Maybrick (decd) to Edwin Maybrick.’45 It was undoubtedly as reward for services rendered, but that isn’t the immediate point. Unless Robert Reeves had somehow accessed the records of the Liverpool Cotton Brokers Association (while simultaneously serving five years in prison), there is no conceivable way he could have known what a ‘lucky fellow’ Edwin was to become other than in the way he described. Reeves was telling the truth about these toxic gentlemen, proving that it’s not entirely beyond the realms of imagination for a Freemason like Michael Maybrick to indulge in a sideline of murder.
This might be a convenient point at which to note that while the Whitechapel Fiend was concentrating his attentions on a forthcoming homicide in Liverpool, his fan base of travelling ‘hoaxers’ were somehow aware of the interlude, and ceased to mail their letters. For some arcane reason, the team of provincial Jack the Rippers had fallen into group silence? Ha ha.
But let us return to the real thing. In hindsight the events unfolding at Battlecrease are as clear as day, but for those in that woeful house, most especially Florence, it must have seemed like the inexplicable progress of a blighted dream.
Dr Humphreys was in and out like he was paying rent. He was just one of many in attendance. Most frequently present were James’s eternal friend George Davidson and another pal from the Cotton Exchange, Charles Ratcliffe, who he’d known since the Virginia days. They sat and listened, and were as baffled as the bedridden wreck himself. He complained incessantly of a phantom ‘hair in the throat’ that caused him to ‘hawk’. Plus, he had a tongue like garbage. Humphreys stuck to his ‘dyspepsia’ theory, but clearly didn’t have a clue. His patient had gone from sick to sicker, alternating the vomiting with bouts of diarrhoea. The consistently ineffectual physician decided the best way to stop both was to allow nothing in. Apart from an increasing variety of prescribed medicines, Maybrick was denied any liquids whatsoever, including even water. He could chew on a wet towel and suck an occasional ice cube, and that was about it.
His thirst became an ancillary torture. He begged the cook for some lemonade, which came up from the kitchen and was promptly confiscated by Florence.46 Although she was only trying to follow the doctor’s strict instructions, this prohibition was publicly used against her as an example of her heartlessness. Subsequent to her conviction, an anonymous letter signed ‘Antifiction’ appeared in the Liverpool Courier. It serves as an example of the malignancy directed at this woman, its author as sour with spite as he or she was well-informed: ‘… this confiding innocent wife could snatch from the hand of the nurse the lemonade that was to quench the parching thirst of her “darling” husband while in the agonies of death’.47
Such venom might well have spilled from what Charles Ratcliffe described as the ‘Female Serpants’48 in daily commute through Battlecrease House. Alice Yapp and Matilda Briggs, by way of example. Another bedside regular was of course Edwin, but there was no such press condemnation for him. Despite Humphreys’ stringent ban on liquids, on 5 May Edwin pitched up in the sickroom bearing James a brandy and soda. We needn’t speculate what was buried within it. The ricochet came within half an hour as Edwin was attempting to ply him with ‘a dose of physic’. Because no one suspected him, Edwin proffered this information himself at the ‘trial’.49
‘I don’t question the brother’s actions at all,’ said the Irish Judas, and no one did, except Alexander Macdougall. He wrote a blistering assault on Edwin’s interference. ‘It was an outrageous piece of presumption on his part, and might have caused his brother’s death!’50 Had he been aware of Reeves’s statement, he would have known that such presumptions ultimately did.
On the following day, Humphreys pulled another bottle from his bag. What the hell, he’d tried everything else – this was good old Fowler’s Solution, whose active ingredient was arsenic. A minute amount of arsenic, one tenth of a grain, was finally discovered in Maybrick’s viscera, and this was probably its source. Whether it was or wasn’t (he could handle fifty times more), the only certainty is that he wasn’t getting dosed with arsenic by his wife, and she would never have been accused of it without the irredeemable wickedness of Briggs and Yapp. This pair shared a trade in whispers, knew everything, and what they didn’t know they invented. ‘The most pathetic part about it,’ wrote Florence Aunspaugh, ‘was that Mrs Maybrick did not have the brain to realise their attitude towards her. Had she sensed their enmity and been more cautious, conditions would have been very different, and much better for her.’51
They were about to get very much worse.
Florence Maybrick wasn’t stupid, but she wasn’t particularly clever either. Even had she been the ace in the pack, I think it’s unlikely she, or anyone else, could have been aware of the degree of raw evil about to be unleashed against her. It was driven by a psychopath whose métier was control. By stealth and force of personality he had assembled a formidable team, each with their individual motives for animosity towards Florence, that by his nature he was able to exploit. He chose Yapp for her spite, Briggs for her jealousy, and Edwin for his greed. Michael Maybrick himself constituted the binding ingredient, which was non-negotiable HATE.
He had further potent allies under his spell, not least the London and Liverpool police, including their coroners and courts. This was a state as sick as anything in Gulliver’s Travels, its people, wrote Swift of his barely disguised kingdom of ‘Tribnia’ (Britain), made up of ‘Discoverers, Witnesses, Informers, Accusers, Prosecutors, Evidencers, Swearers, together with their several subservient and subaltern Instruments’, and ‘all under the colours, the conduct, and pay of ministers of state’.
Sir Charles Russell QC was one such citizen, who suppressed vital evidence to the gross detriment of his client. A document that would have exonerated her never saw the light of day. Conversely, he sanctioned focus on a letter that by any equity should have been struck out as inadmissible. It was from Florence to Brierley, of counterfeit date but claimed to have been written on Wednesday, 8 May 1889. The prosecution rode in on the back of it. Written in pencil, it was spore for the ugly brain of Fitzjames Stephen, wherein it served to ferment his wild misogynies. I’ll be taking a closer look at this letter, but for the moment restrict myself to its opening lines.
Wednesday
Dearest
Your letter under cover to John K— came to hand just after I had written to you on Monday …
‘John K’ was Florence’s London friend John Baillie Knight, who in March was acting as an intermediary for her illicit mail to Alfred Brierley. While she was under sentence of death in Walton Jail, Brierley swore an affidavit on Florence’s behalf. It was destined for the Home Secretary in expectation of a reprieve, and he was very frank: ‘I never was improperly intimate with her until our meeting in London on 22nd March last. We parted abruptly at the Hotel in Henrietta Street on Sunday, the 24th March. When we so parted on the 24th March it was distinctly understood that we would not meet again except in public, and I for my part had finally resolved that I would not again be tempted into a similar position.’
Among other things pertaining to their defunct affair, which was over on 24 March 1889, Brierley wrote: ‘If Mrs Maybrick wrote to me on Monday the 6th May, I never received it, and am informed and believe that the word “you” on the second line is a mistake for “him”.’
In other words, he believes her letter originally read: ‘Your letter under cover to John K— came to hand just after I had written to him on Monday.’52
Brierley was quite right, except that it wasn’t a ‘mistake’. Florence’s letter to him of Wednesday, 8 May (which he didn’t receive either) had been tampered with by an unfriendly hand. Somebody was trying to pretend that Florence was still embroiled in an adulterous relationship with Brierley. Before arriving at who this snake might be, we need to make a brief detour a few weeks hence, to an article in the Liverpool Daily Post of 3 June. Published under a bold headline, while Florence was being held in isolation on remand, it’s a sniff of the rot to come. It’s also the reason (were he not at the core of it) why Russell should have had all such correspondence struck out as inadmissible. ‘It was bruited about in the course of Saturday,’ reported the Post (one of Liverpool’s most prestigious newspapers),
that the police have resorted to an extraordinary stratagem, in order to procure evidence of a peculiar character, which they require in the case. The story goes that at their instigation a lady was employed to write a letter to a person well known in Liverpool, purporting to come from Mrs Maybrick. It is alleged that the writing so closely resembled that of the prisoner as to have deceived the person to whom it was addressed, and to have brought from him a response. This remarkable proceeding, we are informed, took place immediately prior to Mr Maybrick’s death.53
If this were true – and it was true – it tells us all we need to know about the confederacy of gangsters operating out of Liverpool while disguised as policemen. ‘It was a direct imputation of FORGERY against the Police,’ charged Macdougall, ‘engaged in getting up this case against Mrs Maybrick!!’ That it was, and the police made no denial. ‘Do the people of this country intend to allow criminal trials to be got up in such a way?’ I’m afraid the answer was yes. Yes, when they all but hanged William Barrit; yes, when they bullied the waiter Alfred Schweisso into perjury; yes, when they were snooping about in the bushes outside Flatman’s Hotel. The police in Victorian England were simply the thug-end of Victorian ‘law’. They were accountable to no one but the System they serviced, and it was as corrupt as they were. A cartoon from the New Statesman of many years ago hits the nail on its head, and saves me writing a paragraph.54
So who was it who was messing around with Florence Maybrick’s correspondence? Who owned the deceitful pencil, and how could he/she have had such a familiarity with Florence’s handwriting?
According to Florence Aunspaugh, Mrs Matilda Briggs had her snout into everything. When the Maybricks were out, Briggs was in, snooping into every corner and drawer of the residence. For one so minded, getting a sample of Florence’s handwriting would be simple as a smile. ‘She was supposed to be Mr and Mrs Maybrick’s guest,’ wrote Aunspaugh, ‘yet she was on far more intimate terms with Yapp than she was with Mrs Maybrick.’55
In his account of the ‘mystery’, Trevor Christie writes: ‘It is undoubtedly true, that an amorphous, loosely organised cabal was operating at Battlecrease House to snare Florrie in some misdeed that would break up her marriage and deprive her of her children; but, whatever its objective, it was certainly not to hound her to the gallows.’56
I agree with Christie vis à vis the domestic wipe-out, but I take a less sanguine view in respect of the noose. Michael Maybrick exploited Yapp and Briggs, offering certain base satisfactions. But they didn’t know what was intended on his side of the deal. His hatred for Florence Maybrick was of a different order, and on Wednesday, 8 May 1889 he made his opening move.
On the previous day Briggs claimed he’d sent her a telegram, ‘informing me that his brother was very ill and requesting me to go and see him’.57 The next morning, she and her equally unsavoury sister, Mrs Hughes, turned up at Battlecrease House. Before they made it through the door, Yapp beckoned to them from across the lawn. ‘Thank God, Mrs Briggs, you have come,’ she said, ‘for the mistress is poisoning the master.’ Mrs Hughes was naturally taken aback, and asked what reason she had for making so dreadful an accusation. ‘She then told us about the flypapers,’ said Briggs, ‘and how the food intended for Mr Maybrick had been tampered with by his wife. We were so shocked by what she said that we went up at once to his bedroom. Mrs Maybrick followed us immediately and was apparently angry, telling us we had no right to be there, but that if we would go downstairs she would let us know all about his symptoms.’58 Briggs doesn’t say whether she let Florence know about Yapp’s accusation concerning the ‘flypapers’.
Yapp’s monstrous lie was to become one of the reasons Mrs Maybrick would spend the next fifteen years of her life in a prison cell. By what possible contagion of mind could Yapp have conceived such a charge? She doesn’t even have herself as an alibi. Under cross-examination by Fat Jack for the prosecution, she was asked:
ADDISON: Did you suspect your mistress?
YAPP: No, sir.
ADDISON: When you saw the fly-papers, did you suspect her?
YAPP: No, sir.
ADDISON: When you did see them, what then?
YAPP: I did not think anything of them.59
So what the fuck are you talking about, Alice Yapp? These flypapers arrived at Battlecrease House on or about 24 April, and were seen soaking quite openly in Mrs Maybrick’s dressing room. They were, as everyone in the house knew, a cosmetic preparation for the forthcoming bal masqué to which Florence would be escorted by Edwin on Tuesday, 30 April.
If Yapp thought nothing of the flypapers in April, why is she suddenly converting them into weapons of murder in May? She was in the house when the so-called ‘London Medicine’ that had practically coffined James arrived. When he was blasted with strychnine on 27 April, she assisted when Florence administered a mustard emetic to save her husband’s life. Why did she not run round in circles then, yelling ‘Poison!’ at Mrs Briggs – ‘Thank God you’ve come, Mrs Briggs, someone in London is poisoning the Master!’
How is it conceivable that she should tell Briggs that Florence was murdering James with flypapers, long since thrown away, when she had been a witness to the near-fatal effects of ‘the London Medicine’? At a pre-trial hearing Alice Yapp’s deposition was as near to the truth as she was ever going to get : ‘I remember Mr Maybrick going to the Wirral Races, and after he had gone, Mrs Maybrick came to me and said: “Master has been taking an overdose of medicine. It is strychnine and is very dangerous. He is very ill.”’60
Such evidence isn’t what the Crown or the cops wanted to hear, and it would never be heard again. This so-called ‘magisterial hearing’ was a dry run for the rottenness that came after, giving the authorities a chance to rehearse and to correct any possible mistakes. Yapp’s recollection was duly corrected. By the time of her appearance in the witness box at St George’s Hall, she’d quite forgotten about the panicking bells and running up and down stairs in crisis, quite forgotten the strychnine James had taken, which had mysteriously transformed itself into brandy.
ADDISON: Do you remember the next day, Sunday the 28th of April? Did you on that day hear the bedroom bell ring?
YAPP: Yes, sir.
ADDISON: What was the next thing you saw?
YAPP: I was coming downstairs and saw Mrs Maybrick on the landing. She came to the night-nursery door and asked if I would stay with the master. He was lying on the bed with his dressing gown on. My mistress came into the bedroom a few minutes after with a cup in her hand. She said to her husband, ‘Do take this mustard and water; it will remove the brandy, and make you sick again if nothing else.’61
And that was that for the strychnine. Under further examination, Yapp revealed her benevolence towards the dying man, interspersed with spiteful jibes towards his wife, who ‘went shopping’ while Yapp sat at the bedside, ‘rubbing his hands’.62 The angel Yapp announced that it was she who had advised Mrs Maybrick to call in another doctor, which attracted the rebuke ‘All doctors are fools.’ She described how she’d seen her mistress ‘apparently pouring something out of one bottle into another’. What sort of bottles were they? ‘Medicine bottles.’63
Further questioning brought her to the fateful afternoon of Wednesday, 8 May. Having accused their mother of murder that morning (of which she said nothing in court), she said she had been outside playing with the Maybricks’ children. Yapp spent a lot of time in the garden that day. I don’t say I believe a word of it, but this is how the story of that afternoon continues.
Alice Yapp was on the lawn with the children, and Dr Humphreys was upstairs with James. On the previous day he’d been joined by another physician, Dr William Carter, together with a professional nurse. Their presence tells the tale of James’s continuing decline. It was somewhere during this traffic of bedpans and pails that Florence found a breather in which to write to Brierley. What she did next, if she did it, bears out Aunspaugh’s assessment of her intellectual shortcomings, plus some. She took the letter into the garden and gave it to Yapp to post.
Barring Michael Maybrick himself, Yapp was the last person on earth to be entrusted with such a task. As soon as Florence’s back was turned, Yapp opened the envelope. Apart from a few words that could be adjusted, it was what they were all waiting for.
Wednesday
Dearest
Your letter under cover to John K— came to hand just after I had written to you on Monday. I did not expect to hear from you so soon, and had delayed in giving him the necessary instructions. Since my return I have been nursing M— day and night. He is sick unto death! The doctors held a consultation yesterday, and now all depends upon how long his strength will hold out! Both my brothers-in-law are here, and we are terribly anxious. I cannot answer your letter fully today, my darling, but relieve your mind of all fear of discovery now and for the future. M— has been delirious since Sunday, and I know that he is perfectly ignorant of everything, even as to the name of the street and also that he has not been making any inquiries whatsoever. The tale he told me was pure fabrication, and only intended to frighten the truth out of me. In fact, he believes my statement, although he will not admit it. You need not, therefore, go abroad on this account, dearest, but in any case please don’t leave England until I have seen you once again. You must feel that those two letters of mine were written under circumstances which must ever excuse their injustice in your eyes. Do you suppose I should act as I am doing, if I really felt and meant what I inferred there? If you wish to write to me about anything do so now, as the letters pass through my hands at present. Excuse my scrawl, my own darling, but I dare not leave the room for a moment, and I do not know when I shall be able to write to you again. In haste, Yours ever, Florie.
It is not unreasonable to describe this letter as toxic, both in provenance and content, and in how it arrived in the hands of Michael Maybrick ‘that same night’. It was claimed under oath by Yapp that it was given to her at about three o’clock that Wednesday afternoon, in time to catch the 3.45 post. This is contradicted by the letter itself, and everything after is a Yapp invention. She said she gave it to the Maybricks’ young daughter Gladys to carry, but that she dropped it in the mud. A fresh envelope was required, she said, but instead of asking for one in the post office, readdressing it and mailing the original in that, she opened Florence’s letter.
In fact Yapp was nowhere near the post office, and the child had not dropped the letter. She opened it because she was a conniving little sneak, and everyone including Sir Charles Russell knew this ‘mud’ story was rubbish.64 Nevertheless, it gave the Irish Judas an opportunity of showboating, which at the ‘trial’ served its purpose of looking like something to do with Florie’s defence.
RUSSELL: Why did you open that letter?
YAPP: To put it in a clean envelope.
RUSSELL: Why didn’t you put it in a clean envelope without opening it?
(No answer.)
He then demanded to know whether it was a wet or a dry day.65 Again, no answer. He pressed her, and again received no answer. The Brierley envelope was produced, the address quite clear despite a water stain, and with no running of the ink.
RUSSELL: Can you suggest how there can be any damp or wet in connection with it without causing some running of the ink?
YAPP: I cannot.
RUSSELL: On your oath, girl, did you not manufacture that stain as an excuse for opening your mistress’s letter?66
Yapp denied it, but the envelope didn’t. That the ink hadn’t run is a small but notable point whose subtext was missed by Russell. The letter was written in pencil, ‘in haste’ – so, in such haste, why bother to seek out a pen and ink for the address? In respect of ‘adjustments’ that were later made to the text, it crosses my mind that this wasn’t the genuine envelope at all, but that it was part of an overall fabrication.
When Florence’s mother, the Baroness, arrived at Battlecrease House from Paris on 17 May, to discover her daughter prostrate in a filthy bed and detained under police guard, she laid into Edwin Maybrick, demanding an explanation. According to her, he had a rather different story to tell regarding the letter’s provenance:
Oh, I have been very fond of Florie. I would never have believed anything wrong of her. I would have stood by her, and did until a letter to a man was found. I said, ‘Letter to a man! Do Edwin, tell me a straight story!’ ‘Why, to the man Brierley. She wrote him a letter and it was found.’ I said, ‘Who found it – you?’ He said, ‘Nurse.’ I asked, ‘Where?’ He replied: ‘She found it on the floor; it fell from her dress when she fainted and I carried her into the spare bedroom.’ ‘But,’ I said, ‘how did you know it was to Brierley?’ He replied: ‘It was directed to him, it was written in pencil; and it fell to the floor.’67
We can take our pick, Yapp or Edwin. Both are lying, but at least Edwin confirms that the address was written in pencil.68
As Russell charged, the mud-stained envelope was faked, a ruse to disguise the prying. From where they acquired this letter in truth remains unknown. So much sinister baggage is attached to it, it’s tiresome to work out where to begin. Florence admitted to her mother that she had indeed written to Brierley, but because she never saw or was able to comment on the version of the letter that was used in evidence against her, she couldn’t know what letter it was, or what the text actually said.69 Looking at it from the point of view of Yapp’s evidence (that it had been given to her in the garden at 3 p.m.) raises the first egregious inconsistency. Were this true, the line ‘Both my brothers-in-law are here’ is in want of explanation. At three o’clock only Edwin was there. Michael didn’t arrive from London until about 8.30 that evening.
According to Edwin’s more plausible version of the provenance, the letter didn’t come into their possession until Florence had ‘fainted’ on Saturday, 11 May, the day on which James died, by which time both her brothers-in-law were there, and James truly was ‘sick unto death’. This brings the date of Wednesday, 8 May into obvious question. Macdougall thinks the letter was forged, and so do I. ‘I have my suspicions,’ he writes,
Nay! my doubts about the genuineness of some parts of that letter!! I do not doubt that the great bulk of it is genuine, but assuming it to have been written on Wednesday the 8th of May, I doubt the genuineness of some parts of it. I must recall one or two dates. Mrs Maybrick returned from her visit to London on the 28th of March. On the 29th of March Mr James Maybrick attended the Grand National and among his party were Florence and Brierley. Under such circumstances I think it inconceivable that the words, ‘Since my return I have been nursing him day and night,’ can be the genuine words which Mrs Maybrick would have written to Brierley on the 8th of May!!
Macdougall’s argument is sound. Moreover, in his sworn affidavit Brierley states, ‘I only met her once again after the Grand National races on 29th March, viz: on or about the 6th of April, when I met her in Liverpool.’ This was a clandestine encounter of which the forger was ignorant, exposing the sentence ‘since my return’ in the letter as the counterfeit it was.
‘It’s written,’ continues Macdougall, ‘on the first piece of paper that came to hand, bearing the monogram of her mother, the Baroness von Roques. It purports to be dated, “Wednesday”, and I call attention to the flourish under that word and invite my readers to compare it with the flourish under the signature “Florie”. I appeal to my readers to share my doubt whether the same hand made that flourish under “Wednesday” as under “Florie”.’
Unquestionably it’s an iffy-looking ‘Wednesday’, but with or without it the text stands no scrutiny. It goes far beyond Brierley’s point about ‘you’ for ‘him’, underpinning the certainty that whatever is genuine in this ‘May 8th’ letter had to have been written in March. John Baillie Knight was not forwarding letters ‘under cover’ to Florence in May. As Brierley had written, the affair was all over by 24 March. The question therefore is, to whom did this meddling hand belong? Could it be the same one the police had commandeered to cook up a letter from Florence, as reported without denial, in the Liverpool newspapers of 3 June?
The New York Herald wrote of Mrs Briggs that she ‘constituted herself as a public prosecutor before Maybrick’s death, and to that end was a most skilled traitress to Mrs Maybrick during all the time preceding’. I second that, and Macdougall seconds me in believing the Brierley text was amended by Briggs.
You don’t have to be a conspiracy theorist to see the conspiracy here. Here was Briggs swapping telegrams with Michael Maybrick: ‘Come quickly,’ she wired. ‘Strange things going on.’ He claimed he received four telegrams from Briggs before she rushed round to Battlecrease House, barging into James’s bedroom in a pantomime of neighbourly concern. Here was Yapp, whispering ‘poison’ in the morning – and it was pretty damned convenient that the incriminating ‘love letter’ should fall into her hands that same afternoon. And here comes Michael; having created the scene he now walked into it, all on that same Wednesday, 8 May. Macdougall says the ‘accusing three’, Yapp, Edwin and Michael, kept the letter secret for three days, but in my view this is incorrect. I don’t think they kept it a secret because I don’t think they had it yet. I don’t think it was found until James was dead and Florence unconscious, and these three, abetted by Briggs and Hughes, ransacked the house.
Meanwhile, on his arrival at Battlecrease, Michael Maybrick had just put his bag down in the hall. No time was wasted with pleasantries. Within minutes he owned this place and everyone in it. He met Florence on the landing, and the pair of them went into James’s sickroom. ‘I was much shocked at my brother’s condition,’ Michael said in evidence at the ‘trial’. ‘Afterwards, downstairs, I told Mrs Maybrick I had very strong suspicions about the case. She asked me what I meant. I said my suspicions were that he had not been properly attended to, and that he ought to have had a professional nurse and a second doctor earlier. She said she had nursed him alone up to that point, and who had a greater right to nurse him than his own wife, or words to that effect. I then said I was not satisfied with the case, and that I would see Doctor Humphreys at once, which I did.’70
While he was popping round the corner, Edwin kept ‘suspicions’ on the boil: forbidding ‘any intervention by Mrs Maybrick in the nursing or administration of medicine or food, I gave orders on Wednesday night to Nurse Gore, and repeated them on Thursday morning. I never mentioned Mrs Maybrick’s name in the matter, but I told the nurses I should hold them responsible for all foods and medicines given to him, and that no one was to attend to him at all except the nurses, but I did not mention any names.’71
He admitted under cross-examination that he said nothing to Mrs Maybrick about any of this, but the infection was now abroad. Thereafter lies were dancing in the air like gnats.
Humphreys’ doorbell rang at about 10.30 that Wednesday night. He could have had no idea of the wickedness motivating his visitor. In the bastard went, and the doctor listened while the most notorious killer in England aired his suspicions about the flypapers Mrs Maybrick had procured in some quantity before James’s illness. Apparently they were a source of arsenic. It must have been heart-rending for Michael, so sensitive was the matter, but James was his much-loved brother, and he felt he had a duty to speak. Humphreys’ reaction was far from what was hoped for. The quack was so shocked he went to bed.
Back at Battlecrease, Edwin’s orders had been converted into whispers. Anyone who doubts a conspiracy was in progress might ask themselves how, that same Wednesday, Yapp and Michael came to the same conclusion about arsenic? Yapp told the court she didn’t think anything of the flypapers, so how was it that Michael Maybrick was thinking of them 250 miles away? Who told him there were flypapers soaking in a bowl? Who told her they were ‘suspicious’?
In March Florence had written to Michael expressing her concerns over the ‘white powders’ James was taking. He acknowledged receipt of her letter, but ignored it. ‘I destroyed it,’ he said. A month later, in the so-called ‘Blucher’ letter, James supposedly wrote to Michael about his overdose of strychnine and his desire to be cut up after death, and Michael ignored that too.
Thus ‘strychnine’ from his brother, and ‘white powders’ from his sister-in-law, were apparently of no consequence? Yet one whisper of ‘flypapers’ in a neighbour’s ear, and he was running to Liverpool in perfect synchronicity with Alice Yapp? What did Yapp know that James Maybrick’s relatives didn’t? James was an expert on arsenic, and he said nothing of it. How is it credible that a servant girl knew more about arsenic than he did?
James had three days to live. On the first of them, 9 May, Michael made another move on the medical contingent, including Nurse Gore. If Dr Humphreys didn’t want to hear it, Dr Carter was going to get it in no uncertain terms. He was considered one of the most distinguished physicians in Liverpool, a widely held misconception shared by Carter himself.
At about 4.30 that afternoon he arrived at Battlecrease, called in response to a telegram from Florence. Edwin, Yapp and Briggs all claimed to have been instigators of the visit, but this was a spiteful fabrication. Michael came immediately to the point, bearing down on Carter in his usual commanding manner. I leave it to the physician to describe the ensuing conversation in his own words:
‘Now what is the matter with my brother, Dr Carter?’ was a question put to me very abruptly in the presence of Dr Humphreys, before we had any opportunity for further conversation. I therefore simply repeated the opinion we had informed [on 7 May] and expressed then [acute dyspepsia]. ‘But what is the cause of it?’ demanded Michael, to which Carter replied, ‘It was by no means clear. It could have been caused by many things.’
The conclusion the doctors had formed was that James ‘must have committed a grave error of diet, by taking some irritant food or drink, so to have set up inflammation.’ But Michael didn’t want to know about diet.
Turning then sharply to Dr Humphreys, Michael Maybrick asked him, if he had informed me of the subject of their last night’s conversation? Humphreys simply replied that he had informed me of nothing. All this was a matter of great surprise to me. I did not know until that moment that any conversation had taken place, and as I had had no communication directly or indirectly with Doctor Humphreys since the time it was said to have been held, I looked at the speaker wondering what would come next.
What came next was a reiteration of the previous night’s accusations. Michael was talking flypapers and he was talking arsenic, and once again he spoke under the strain of cosmetic rectitude:
It was made under the influence of great excitement, the speaker’s mind evidently struggling under a conflicting sense of what was due to his brother on the one hand, and possible injustice to his brother’s wife on the other. ‘God forbid that I should unjustly suspect anyone,’ he said, in reply to an observation made by myself, ‘but do you not think I have serious grounds for fearing that all may not be right, that it is my duty to say so to you.’
The doctors concurred, agreeing it was quite right that he had told them. But what he told them betrays what he was really thinking. It was all accusation, and no cure. Any sincere actor would have put the patient first, or at least included him. If James was dying of arsenic, where was the antidote? At no time during his protracted journey to the grave did Michael raise the question of an antidote, and none was ever given.
‘We heard all there was to say,’ wrote Carter, ‘that only so late as the middle of April the patient had been able to eat ordinary food at his [Michael’s] house; that he had soon been subject to sick attacks after returning home; that this contrast between the condition of health while at and away from home, had been the subject of remark, and had been noticed before; that there had been a most serious estrangement between husband and wife; that the wife was known to have been unfaithful, and that just before the commencement of his illness, she was known to have procured many fly papers.’72
Not a word about ‘the London Medicine’, the ‘Blucher’ letter or the ‘white powders’ that had caused Florence to write to Michael in March. The bastard was laying his pipe. I think this deceitful conference affords an accurate template for something similar in respect of James. I don’t know what words were whispered in London, any more than I know what was whispered between Michael and Yapp; but I know that similar covert accusations were made against James into equally receptive ears. Michael must have believed he was some sort of criminal genius. His plan had become the authorities’ plan, and that was to shut Florence Maybrick up – he for his reasons, they for theirs: HATE and fear respectively. To be told (as he was forced to reveal with an unbearable sense of duty) that James was Jack, and that she knew, was all that was necessary.
The Whitechapel side of this scenario was of course kept secret at Battlecrease House, while the other was robustly promoted. Every move Florence made was watched by unfriendly eyes, and those so predisposed could see what Michael had told them to see. Even walking into another room had acquired connotations. As soon as you begin to spy on anyone they will begin to fulfil your expectations. If there’s nothing to see, you will think you have missed it, and as with any paranoid state beguiled by its own propaganda, broaden your surveillance to spy more intently. Michael was whispering ‘arsenic’ into every ear but the most important of them all. To his beloved brother he said nothing. No way could he infect that ear with rubbish about flypapers, because if James had had the strength he would have laughed in his face. Such idiocy was left to the physicians to discount, and that’s precisely what Dr Carter did. On the evening of 9 May he returned to his surgery with samples of James’s excrement and urine. Both were subjected to scrutiny by means of a process known as the ‘Marsh test’.
For those who knew how, it was simple and 100 per cent accurate. Had the slightest trace of metallic poison been present in either sample, a residual trace would have shown up on a piece of copper foil. Carter ran the test twice, and both times the results were negative. There was no arsenic in James’s body, so the only certainty is that Florence wasn’t killing him with incremental doses of it. Had this conclusive evidence – most vital to the proof of her innocence – been promoted in her defence, there would have been no case for the Crown to cook up. But evidence was incidental to the trial’s nefarious intention, and most unfortunately Michael had made Florence the poisonous star of the so-called ‘Maybrick Mystery’.
It was either the Irish Judas or Carter himself who caused this testimony to be suppressed at the ‘trial’. Somebody must have treated Carter to a whisper. Writing of him seventy years later, the historian Nigel Morland pre-empts my suspicion: ‘Nothing is quite so peculiar in the Maybrick case as the behaviour of Dr Carter.’73 He questioned why the physician kept his trap shut over the negative results of the excrement test, yet opened it wide in court over a positive show of arsenic in a bottle of meat juice. The bottle in question came out of Michael Maybrick’s pocket, and it is interesting that both he and Mrs Hughes (Matilda Briggs’s sister) knew it had been adulterated with arsenic before Carter or anyone else had even put it to the test.
ADDISON: Do you recollect that arsenic was traced and had been found in a bottle of Valentine’s meat juice?
HUGHES: Yes.
ADDISON: When did you learn about the Valentine’s meat juice? Was it from Doctor Carter you heard it?
HUGHES: No.
ADDISON: From whom?
HUGHES: Mr Michael Maybrick.74
Sir Charles Russell let this pass, but not so Alexander Macdougall. ‘Now,’ he asked, ‘how came Michael Maybrick to know that arsenic had been found in the meat juice on Saturday? Doctor Carter had certainly not told him so. He had taken the bottle back with him on Saturday to test. He could not have told Michael Maybrick arsenic had been found in the meat juice because he didn’t know it himself.’ In reality, it wasn’t until fourteen days later that the City Analyst confirmed it.75
So how did Michael Maybrick know there was arsenic in the meat juice? It’s either a handy adjunct to the ‘mystery’, or the more cynical amongst us might think he put it in there himself. He and Edwin were constantly in and out of the sickroom, with as much opportunity to poison James as anyone else. The only difference is that they weren’t suspected, and Florence Maybrick was. On Friday, 10 May, Michael walked into James’s room and converted a perfectly blameless activity into a melodrama of the murderess caught in the act. Nurse Gore had been relieved by Nurse Callery, and had asked Florence to pour medicine from one bottle into another so it might be shaken. ‘Florie!’ Michael roared, doubtless barging in to snatch it, ‘how dare you tamper with the medicine!’76 Much was made of this incident at the ‘trial’, although her defence neglected to mention that Callery had asked Florence to do it to rid the bottle of sediment.77
Florence was utterly crushed, and downstairs in the kitchen she wept, her wretchedness compounded with the exhaustion of nursing James. ‘I am blamed for all of this,’ she said, in an agony to understand why. Comfort came from the cook, Mrs Humphreys, one of the few she could rely on for a sympathetic ear. ‘She said her position was not worth anything in the house,’ said Humphreys in evidence, ‘that she was not even allowed to go into the master’s bedroom to give him his medicine.’
Crying ‘very bitterly for a quarter of an hour’, Florence accused Michael of being the engine of it all: ‘This is all through Mr Michael Maybrick,’ she wept. ‘He had always had a spite against her since her marriage.’78
ADDISON: Did it seem to you that she was attending to her husband?
HUMPHREYS: She seemed very kind to him and spent all her time with him.
ADDISON: And when she told you she had been blamed, you took her part?
HUMPHREYS: Yes I did, because I thought she was doing her best under the circumstances. She was very much grieved over it, and was very sorry. She was crying.
ADDISON: You knew she was set aside by her brothers and these nurses?
HUMPHREYS: Yes, she was set aside.
Neither Humphreys nor the parlourmaid Mary Cadwallader, ‘had the slightest doubt over Florence’s innocence’, wrote Macdougall after interviewing both, ‘and do not believe and never did believe for one moment that Mrs Maybrick had a thought of compassing her husband’s death’.79
As to the flypapers, Humphreys said, ‘There had been joking in the kitchen about the fly-papers when Bessie Brierley came down and said there were some soaking in the bedroom, and joking going on between Alice Yapp and Alice Grant, the gardener’s wife, about the Flannagan case,80 but they thought nothing about it except as a joke.’
Here was the provenance, under Michael’s tutelage, for the transformation of flypapers from banter into a means of murder. It was a kitchen nonsense. ‘It was all done so openly,’ continued Humphreys, ‘and certainly no thought entered their minds of suspecting Mrs Maybrick till Michael Maybrick came to the house on the 8th of May and took control in the way he did.’81
That night Michael and Edwin went into James’s bedroom and tried to bully him into signing some papers. Although near to death, James found the air to raise a shout that was heard all over the house. ‘Oh Lord! If I am to die, why am I to be worried like this? Let me die properly.’ His protests were ‘very violent’ and ‘very loud’. Both Humphreys and Cadwallader saw Edwin come out of the room with a paper in his hand, and they said that Alice Yapp, ‘knowing and hearing everything’, told them that the brothers had been trying to get James to sign a new will.82 Maybe this is correct, but I think it more likely they were after a sign-over of the company shares. Notwithstanding that, Michael was having difficulties finding the original will. Their other brother, Thomas Maybrick, had arrived from Manchester, and he told Humphreys that the ‘Will had been left very awkward’ – awkward that is, for the murderous duo who were in the business of creating another one.
We shall be two lucky fellows ha ha.
Humphreys was not alone in balancing her dislike of Michael Maybrick with distrust. ‘Michael, the son of a bitch should have his throat cut,’ was the view of James’s friend Charles Ratcliffe. In a letter to Florence Aunspaugh’s father John, he described the evolving nightmare, conjured in raw wickedness, that was soon to swallow Florence: ‘When Michael took possession and put Mrs Briggs in charge, she [Florence] was subjected to all kinds of insults and ill-treatment by Briggs and the servants. She was not allowed to have any visits from her friends. She was cursed and given impudent answers whenever she made a request of them.’83
Florence was isolated in a house full of people. Apart from her children, her only friend whose love was unequivocal was James. ‘He wanted her with him always,’ said Cadwallader, ‘and asked for her when she was not.’ No one had nursed him with more humanity than his wife, sitting with him night after night; and though she may no longer have loved him, she brought him comfort. It was this solicitude that Michael converted into her cunning.
By now there seemed no hope of recovery. Yet another uniform had arrived from the Liverpool Institute as a relief for Callery. Susan Wilson was perfect gas-lit casting, a carbolic presence, unpleasant as she was fat. Like her predecessor she would appear for the prosecution, but she had little to contribute, and I’d hardly trouble with her were it not for her name. Wilson had a brother called Harry, whose supposed death two years later is of interest to this narrative.
Michael was in and out of the sickroom, shuffling medicines around and confiscating a bottle of brandy that he gave to Carter for testing. This suggests that brandy was still being given to James, otherwise why hand it over for analysis? I think it was brandy that Edwin used to disguise hotshots of laudanum.
Having discovered nothing untoward in James’s bedpan, it seems the physicians had satisfied themselves that Michael was mistaken, and not bothering to look for anything but arsenic, compounded their ignorance by picking up where they had left off. Between 27 April, when ‘the London Medicine’ arrived, and the expiration of their patient, the two quacks Humphreys and Carter had prescribed everything but motor oil and Vim from under the sink. In fourteen days they poured enough crap into James’s gut to kill him, with or without the intercession of Michael and Edwin Maybrick.
Here’s the menu: tincture of nux vomica (strychnine), Plummer’s Pills (antimony), cascara sagrada, hydrocyanic acid (prussic acid), bromide of potassium, tincture of henbane, Seymour’s papaine and iridan, morphia suppository, ipecacuanha (to stop sickness due to the morphia), Valentine’s meat juice, Condy’s Fluid, Fowler’s Solution (arsenic), Brand’s beef tea, Sanitas, antipyrine, tincture of jaborandi, chlorine water, bismuth, opium suppository, sulphonal, cocaine, nitro glycerine, phosphoric acid (and brandy and soda, given by Edwin).84
Handing Carter the brandy was a bit of a masterstroke. It proved to be unadulterated, so its presence was established as benign. The quacks may have missed Edwin handing out the drinks, but why didn’t they suspect any other poison, even something as obvious as strychnine? ‘White powders’ had been the focus of Florence’s anxieties, and she’d discussed them with Humphreys in March. It’s notable that he confirmed such a conversation at the magisterial hearings, but said nothing of it at the ‘trial’.
Nor was anything said of the will and James’s torment at the threshold of death, or about Florence saving his life. In court ‘the London Medicine’ was redacted in favour of strong tea. Nobody spoke on behalf of this innocent woman, accused by a psychopath and framed by Her Majesty’s men in wigs.
On the morning of Saturday, 11 May, the day on which James was to die, Florence poured her desperation into a letter to Dr Hopper. It was he who had effected the reconciliation between herself and James after the Grand National débâcle, and he was one of the few people she felt she could trust. Her text makes it clear that the physician knew everything about her and James’s marital strife, including the adulterous liaison with Brierley at Flatman’s Hotel.
Dear Doctor Hopper,
I am sure you must have heard of Jim’s dangerous illness, and no doubt feel that I ought to have called you in to see him. My misery is great and my position such a painful one that when I tell you that both my brothers-in-law are here and have taken the nursing of Jim and management of my house completely out of my hands, you will understand how powerless I am to assert myself. I am in great need of a friend! Michael, whom Jim informed of the unhappiness existing between us last month, now accuses me as being the primary cause of Jim’s present critical state, to which want of proper care from me as regards his nourishment and medical attention may be added. Michael hardly speaks to me. I am neither cheered nor told the worst. I am a mere cypher in my own house, ignored and overlooked. I am too utterly brokenhearted to struggle against myself or anyone else; all I want to do is die, too. I should like to see you – you as a medical attendant. Could you not call as a friend and ask to see me? I have not been to bed since Sunday, for although I may not nurse Jim, I will at least be near to him to see what is done. It is terrible. How shall I bear it? I have no one to turn to, and my husband’s brothers are cold hearted and brutal men. Because I have sinned once, must I be misjudged always? Yours distractedly,
F.E. Maybrick.
Although mentioned by Hopper in his deposition at the ‘trial’, this text wasn’t read into the record, and the letter itself disappeared for another forty years. It does nothing to support the veracity of Florence’s 8 May letter to Brierley that was supposedly intercepted by Yapp, but rather buries whatever putative credibility that letter ever had. How is it remotely possible for Florence to write that James had told Michael everything in April, and then to write that James ‘is perfectly ignorant of everything’ in May? ‘Because I have sinned once’ must have been old news to Hopper, and cannot refer to walking up a racecourse with Brierley, but to the night spent with him in a London hotel.
Every anomaly in the Yapp letter is here explained. I don’t believe for a second that that letter was written on 8 May, but on or about 29 March, when ‘since my return’ makes sense. Florence returned from London on 28 March, and I think she wrote the letter on 29 March, after the Grand National altercation, but that because of the reconciliation engineered by Hopper on the following day, it was never sent. Michael didn’t mention it to Humphreys on 8 May, or to Carter on 9 May, when its impact would have enhanced the ‘motive’ he was trying to sell. He clearly didn’t have it yet. I don’t think it was found until Briggs & Company searched the house on 11 May, Mrs Briggs squatting to make her incriminating amendments before Michael handed it on to the police.
The substance of this Brierley letter was a vicious compilation, designed to ensnare Mrs Maybrick. Its provenance was faked, its contents were faked, just as the accusation of intent to murder with arsenic out of flypapers was faked. These charges were put up in an English court, not to determine justice – far from it – but to counter a perceived threat to a ruling executive which included Freemasonry and its Boss Apron the Prince of Wales. It was upon these two false charges that the Crown of England sought to put Florence Maybrick to death.
She never got the visit from Hopper. Later that day she fell into a ‘mysterious swoon’, and was carried into a bedroom by Edwin. A majority of authors, whether for or against her, believe something she had eaten or drunk was spiked with chloral hydrate, and I don’t demur from that, but would add that anything in this house with the word ‘mystery’ attached is a cast-iron euphemism for ‘deceit’.
Michael wanted Florence silenced so he and the coppers could get about the task of concocting ‘evidence’. The trap had snapped, and she wouldn’t get out of it until she was forty-one years old.
I’ve stayed away from the so-called ‘Diary of Jack the Ripper’. I don’t need it to make my case, and have purposely avoided it. My view of it remains the same as set out in an earlier chapter: don’t try to prove it, see what it might prove. The last few minutes of James Maybrick’s life present an opportunity for a brief reappraisal.
The ‘Diary’ accuses James of being Jack, and reeks of hatred for his whore-wife. At its ridiculous dénouement – its third act, if you like – it claims that she ‘knows all’ of his homicidal rampage, and asks that she might find the courage to kill him. Like the ‘Blucher’ letter and the ‘Brierley’ letter, it is a forgery, and the only question worth asking is, who forged it?
James Maybrick’s death gives us a choice of Rippers. The first is a man in ruins, with a gutful of worthless chemicals, gagging at the air while his wife lies unconscious in a mysterious swoon in an adjoining room. She is innocent of poisoning him with flypapers, and ignorant of the wicked charges made against him in this document. She knows nothing of it, and never will.
And then we have a second Ripper, a commanding, handsome man, in total control of this house and everybody in it. He is my candidate, Michael Maybrick, watching his brother die with accusations of ‘murderess’ against Florence fresh on his lips.
To this we can add another voice, accusing the accuser. I concur with the absconding soldier Robert Reeves that together with his brother Edwin, Michael Maybrick is James Maybrick’s murderer. I believe I’ve presented ancillary evidence in support of the imputation. Reeves said nothing of arsenic, but accused Michael of planning to use a rather different poison. It’s an intent shared by somebody who mailed a letter to Scotland Yard claiming to have ‘particulars of the Bradford murder’, which itself shares calligraphy with that of the Liverpool Document.
My comment on it concludes with a reproduction from one of its pages in parallel with the letter in question. I know nothing of graphology, but that doesn’t invalidate a comparison. On top is handwriting from the ‘Diary’, and below it the letter referencing the murder of Johnnie Gill.
Both texts feature a spontaneous enlargement of the letter ‘S’. This might legitimately be argued away as coincidence, but in context I think it cannot. ‘I am preparing a draught that will kill & leave no marks,’ brags the letter’s author, and as far as James is concerned, it didn’t. Yapp brought the children in for him to kiss, and he died at 8.40 that evening in a room stuffy with people. His pal George Davidson held him to the last, while Charles Ratcliffe looked on. His brothers Michael, Edwin and Thomas were there, as were Mrs Briggs, Mrs Hughes, Nurse Wilson and the attendant physicians.
It seems the doctors were prepared to nominate gastroenteritis as the cause of death; but Michael wasn’t having any of that. ‘Now wouldn’t that cork you,’ wrote Ratcliffe, ‘a musical composer instructing a physician how to diagnose his case? Old Dr Humphreys made a jackass of himself. After James died he and Dr Carter expected to make out the death certificate as acute inflammation of the stomach [but] after Humphreys had a conversation with Michael, he refused to make a certificate to that effect, but said there was strong symptoms of arsenical poisoning, though Doctor Carter still insisted that it should be inflammation of the stomach.’85
RUSSELL: Had it not been for the suggestion of arsenic, were you prepared to give a certificate of death?
DR HUMPHREYS: Yes.
FITZJAMES STEPHEN: Then if nothing about poisoning had been suggested to you, you would have certified that he died of gastritis, or gastro-enteritis?
DR HUMPHREYS: Yes, my Lord.86
‘Humphreys was afraid of Michael,’ wrote Florence Aunspaugh.87
After their friend’s death, Ratcliffe and Davidson quit the property, leaving the others to their grief and mourning, which focused on the traditional frenzy of ransacking the house in an attempt to flesh out evidence against the newly-made widow while simultaneously hunting for James’s will. It’s therefore apparent that the episode with the papers that had caused him so much vocal distress had nothing to do with it.
Florence was forced into brief consciousness. ‘Edwin Maybrick was leaning over me,’ she recalled many years later:
he had my arms tightly gripped and was shaking me violently. ‘I want your keys – do you hear? Where are your keys?’ I tried to form a reply, but the words choked me and once more I passed into unconsciousness. Consciousness came and went. During one of these interludes Michael Maybrick entered. ‘Nurse,’ he said, ‘I am going up to London. Mrs Maybrick is no longer mistress of this house. As one of the executors I forbid you to allow her to leave this room. I hold you responsible in my absence.’ Towards the night of the same day I said to the Nurse [Wilson], ‘I wish to see my children.’ She walked up to my bed and in a cold deliberate voice replied, ‘You cannot see Master James and Miss Gladys. Mr Michael Maybrick gave orders that they were to leave the house without seeing you.’88
She was never to see them again. And no one was allowed to see her. ‘My wife and myself called,’ wrote Ratcliffe, ‘and were told by Mrs Briggs that Mrs Maybrick was too sick to receive any company. Sutton and his wife called, Holloway and his wife, Hienes and his wife, and numerous others. They were all told the same thing. No one could see Mrs Maybrick.’89
Still in her dress, with neither food nor drink, Florence was left in her own filth. Although she could not know it, she was already serving the first of the five thousand four hundred and seventy-five days she was to remain in captivity.
On the third day she heard ‘a tramp of many feet coming upstairs’. A crowd of men entered, one of them stationing himself at the foot of the bed. He was a policeman by the name of Inspector Isaac Bryning, and he addressed her as follows:
Mrs Maybrick, I am a superintendent of the police, and I am about to say something to you. After I have said what I intend to say, if you reply be careful how you reply because whatever you say may be used in evidence against you. Mrs Maybrick, you are in custody on suspicion of causing the death of your late husband James Maybrick, on the eleventh instant.90
She was charged with causing the death of ‘Mr Maybrick’s brother’ – even this junk in subliminal subservience to Michael.
This foolish illustration appeared in the Illustrated Police News of Saturday, 1 June 1889. It depicts Nurse Wilson comforting Florence with a supportive holding of hands. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Wilson was in the league of hags, as treacherous a reptile as the Briggs sisters or Yapp.
While Mrs Maybrick was unconscious her enemies had searched the house, and the police had later searched it with them. From the moment Bryning stepped into Battlecrease House he was told who the perpetrator was, and thereafter investigation fizzled. He thought he had it nailed, and not an eyebrow was raised, nor a question asked of the squad led by the bereaved musician who were hauling arsenic out of wherever they looked and waving it in the air like a prize. Briggs, Hughes, Yapp and the Maybrick brothers (excluding Thomas, who had left) were allowed free rein by the constabulary to ‘find’ what they liked and accuse who they liked – and all accused Florence Maybrick.
This was, supposedly, a crime scene, and the coppers stood about it scratching their nuts while ‘evidence’ was planted and evidence found. Yapp had found a packet of arsenic labelled ‘Poison For Cats’, and without further ado its owner was determined as the incapacitated widow. This was most unlikely. Florence was a lover of cats, owned three, doting on one which was her constant companion. Why would she want to poison a cat? While searching for keys to the safe (which hopefully contained the will), Briggs discovered a clutch of love letters from Brierley and Edwin,91 and of course a packet of arsenic. Both became trophies.
The house was suddenly awash with arsenic. Where had it all come from? Any partially-brained copper in Liverpool could have traced it back to the corpse upstairs, and with a little effort, back to Valentine Blake and his gift in respect of ramine. They only needed to ask any one of James’s pals at the Cotton Exchange to be told he was an arsenic head. But that wasn’t the news they wanted to hear. Instead, they were operating under the instructions of a psychopath, and like a gang of animals destined to become mutton, they accepted every word out of his criminal mouth and arrested Florence.
An honourable Judge, Sir Edward Parry, a world away from the state lackey Fitzjames Stephen, later wrote: ‘A very strong point in the prisoner’s favour was that the Crown never proved that she had brought any powdered arsenic into the house. Why should she have purchased flypapers to procure an arsenic solution, either for cosmetic or for evil purposes, if she was already possessed of considerable quantities of powdered arsenic?’92
Ask Alice Yapp. Or better still, ask the Irish Judas who failed on this crucial point. Parry’s comment was written in 1929. In 1926 the then Chief Constable of London gurgled up a bit of twaddle that would seem to discredit it. At the time of the Maybrick frame-up, Sir William Nott-Bower was Boss Cop of Liverpool. He was of the Anderson ilk of police, bedecked in the same helmet and similarly indifferent to truth. The only difference between them was that rather than do his lying in The Times, Nott-Bower published his in a book.
Describing it as ‘a curious sequel to the case, not, I think hitherto known to the public’, Nott-Bower writes that soon after Mrs Maybrick’s conviction,
a highly respectable Liverpool chemist, carrying on business in the centre of town, came to the police and said he wished to make a confession on a subject which he had come to the conclusion he should make known to them.
He went on to say, that in the Spring of 1889, Mrs Maybrick drove up to his shop in a dogcart, and asked him for powdered arsenic to kill cats, and he supplied her with a considerable quantity which she took away with her.
A week or two later she drove again to his shop, and told him she had lost the arsenic she had had from him, and asked for more, and he again supplied her. He was afraid to tell the police of this, as he feared the consequences to himself.
The police subsequently compared the chemist’s handwriting with the handwriting on the label – ‘Arsenic – Poison For Cats’ – upon the box, taken from the trunk belonging to Mrs Maybrick, and found the two handwritings to be identical.
It afterwards came to my knowledge that the fact of the supply of this arsenic by the chemist was known to the defence at the time of Mrs Maybrick’s trial.93
That this goon should be in charge of anything beyond a municipal urinal is extraordinary. How could he possibly be Boss Officer of Liverpool’s police? His yarn is both fantastic and absurd, self-destructing in the first paragraph by an oxymoron he’s too dim to understand. On the one hand he needs his phantom chemist to be ‘highly respectable’, so as to give credibility to his story; and on the other he tells us the man sold the arsenic outside the law. How respectable is that? Had he actually done it he wouldn’t be respectable at all, but in prison.
Nott-Bower says the defence (his emphasis) was aware of this purchase of arsenic, which is baffling. Russell and his team falsely claimed to have had the utmost difficulty in finding anyone to attest to James Maybrick’s gargantuan arsenic addiction, yet easily discover this chemist before he’s reported himself to the police?
He says the chemist gave Florence two lots of arsenic because she had ‘lost’ the first. Where did she lose it? She’s got two young children in the house whom she adores, and she ‘loses’ a package of deadly poison? She has a husband who scours Liverpool for arsenic – ‘I find difficulty in getting it here,’ he complained to Valentine Blake – yet she arrives at a random pharmacy and instantly scores? If such an obliging chemist had existed in the middle of Liverpool, James would have discovered it years before Florence turned up ‘in a dogcart’. James was a junkie, on an eternal prowl for arsenic. In his zoo of medicine bottles the names of twenty-seven different pharmacies appear, and this idiot copper expects his readers to believe that he missed this one ‘in the centre of town’?
Nott-Bower’s tale is horseshit, every half-witted word of it, and the whole thing was later revealed as a scandalous invention. It seems a majority of the Victorian constabulary were good for nothing but lying. They were a kind of tea-brewing Cosa Nostra, as corrupt as anything in the slums of Naples. Its masters were degenerates like Charlie Warren, Robert Anderson, and that lamentable little moron running Bradford, James Withers. It was men like these, in association with a psychopath, who sacrificed Florence Maybrick’s life.
Michael Maybrick’s refusal of a death certificate led to an autopsy two days later in James’s own bedroom. Drs Carter and Humphreys performed it under the guidance of Dr Alexander Barron, a professor of pathology at the Royal Infirmary. They removed various organs for analysis, and no arsenic was found.
Despite this negative outcome further inquisition was initiated, comprising of two magisterial hearings and the sitting of a coroner’s court. ‘The enquiry was opened by Mr Samuel Brighouse, the coroner of South West Lancashire,’ reported the Liverpool Mercury, ‘yesterday morning [14 May] at the Aigburth Hotel. The only witness was Mr Michael Maybrick of London, a brother of the deceased.’
We’ve become accustomed to the expedient of lying out of the mouths of coroners, and this one doesn’t disappoint. Mr (later Sir) Samuel Brighouse and his acolytes were right off the pages of Swift. Brighouse hauled in a jury and told them: ‘The result of the post mortem examination was that poison was found in the stomach of the deceased in sufficient quantity to justify further examination.’ This was a lie, or as Macdougall put it, it is ‘a matter for strong observation that this statement was a false one’.94 No poison had been found in the stomach of the deceased.
‘The appearances of the post mortem,’ deposed Humphreys, ‘were consistent with congestion of the stomach, not necessarily caused by an irritant poison.’95 It was a prognosis supported by Carter and Barron. ‘An irritant poison might be bad food or bad wine, or an indiscreet dinner,’ said Barron; ‘it might be bad tinned meat, bad fish, mussels, or bad food of any kind.’96
What it definitely wasn’t was arsenic from flypapers. So, Robert Reeves aside, we’re left with the rest. Was Florence discovered by Michael Maybrick stuffing corned beef into a medicine bottle, or known to have marinated putrid mussels? There was no arsenic, there wasn’t even any rotten meat. A coroner’s business was to determine cause of death, and now he had it, and Florence should have been free of all accusation that very day.
But that wasn’t the business Michael and the bewigged minions were into. Following an adjournment, an extraordinary conversation ensued between Brighouse and the foreman of the jury. His name was Dalgleish, a Freemason and a close associate of James, and he had a statement to make. He said that, just prior to the Wirral races, ‘he had met James Maybrick, of whom he was a personal friend, in the train, and had seen him take a powder out of his waistcoat pocket and take it, and that he’d asked him what he was taking, and that he replied strychnine’.97 Our noble coroner didn’t want to hear anything about it, and summarily dismissed Dalgleish as foreman. It was a hooligan suppression of evidence. Had Russell known of this deposition, it would obviously have been of more than casual interest to the defence. It was another wide-open door for Florence Maybrick.
Russell did know of it, but like this whelp of a coroner, kept his trap shut. ‘Not one word about this appears on the depositions,’ writes Macdougall, ‘nor was a word said about it either before the magistrates or the jury.’98 On resumption of the inquest on 5 June, Russell’s junior, Mr (later Sir) William Pickford, had got wind of Dalgleish’s statement and interposed:
PICKFORD: I understand a communication was made to you, Mr Coroner, on the first sitting by a gentleman, originally sworn in as Foreman of the Jury, and I should like to know whether it is proposed to call him.
BRIGHOUSE: No.
PICKFORD: I understand it was something so important that the gentleman thought he ought not to sit upon the jury? But should rather appear as a witness for the defence?
BRIGHOUSE: I feel certain it is not relevant. The Foreman went to view the body, and then made a statement. I communicated it to Mr Steel, as acting for the relatives, and to Superintendent Bryning, and I said: ‘If you think this statement is useful to you, and that it is evidence, and that the Foreman ought to appear as a witness, then I will discharge him.’ They both thought it would be a better course to discharge him, and I did so.
Such incendiary evidence wasn’t ‘useful’ to them at all. As Macdougall makes clear, ‘Mr Dalgleish’s statement that the man was physicking himself with strychnine immediately before his illness was, of course, not likely to be useful to the police or to Michael Maybrick.’99
They all concluded that a man self-dosing with deadly poison in a capital case of murder by poisoning was ‘not relevant’, as Mr Brighouse so daintily put it. Needless to say, Dalgleish never appeared as a witness. Meantime, Pickford was still flapping about to try to discover what it was he’d said.
PICKFORD: I rather gathered it had been a statement favourable to my client, Mrs. Maybrick, or contrary to the theory set up against her? Do you say it was a matter which you would not allow to go before the jury?
BRIGHOUSE: I ought not to tell the jury. The gentleman [Dalgleish] called upon Mr Cleaver and gave his statement, and therefore it rests with Mr Cleaver or Mr Bryning to call him.
This was bullshit of a high order. The law required the coroner to examine ‘all witnesses without distinction’.100
Notwithstanding that, we know who Bryning was, but who’s this geezer Cleaver, and what might be his interest in hearing a statement so favourable to Mrs Maybrick? Well, actually not a lot, other than that he’d been appointed, or rather imposed, as the solicitor for her defence. When the horror bloomed, Florence had cabled her legal representatives in New York – at least she thought she had. The communication was intercepted by Michael, and held back until he could get his own man in. From the get-go it’s apparent that Arnold Cleaver was ‘in the loop’, a member of a cabal Bro William Pickford was poised to join.
PICKFORD: I understand it was a statement as to the cause of illness made to this gentleman, but whether it would be evidence as to the cause of death, I don’t know. I confess I’ve not the knowledge you have as to what is evidence at investigations of this kind.
BRIGHOUSE: I have ruled against it.
PICKFORD: I say no more about it, if you do not think it right to go before the jury.
Someone was tugging hard at Brighouse’s strings, and Pickford was in process of having his attached.101 ‘The coroner took it upon himself,’ writes Macdougall, ‘to keep this statement from the coroner’s jury, because if it had been put before them, it is a fair presumption that they would not have exposed Mrs Maybrick to the expense and to the risk of trial. This incident illustrates the way in which these proceedings were conducted, and points to the conclusion that the provisions of our Law for the protection of persons against False Accusations were not observed by Mrs Maybrick’s accusers, or by the officers of the Law, by whom these criminal proceedings were set in motion and administered.’
Brighouse took it upon himself to issue a verdict before the accused had got anywhere near a court. On 8 June he signed a death certificate for the already interred James. As in the bent certificate naming William Barrit as Johnnie Gill’s murderer, Florence Maybrick was now officially the murderer of James Maybrick. Brighouse couldn’t nominate arsenic as the offending substance, so we must suppose she offed him with a dose of meat.
Under ‘Cause of death’ this corrupt document says: ‘Irritant poison administered to him by Florence Elizabeth Maybrick. Wilful murder.’
Were it not for the compromised sanctums in which these accusers and swearers of Queen Victoria’s England grovelled for the Crown, such a monstrosity could never have got into a court.
Michael Maybrick was well aware of what any honest lawyer in America would make of it. On 3 June the Liverpool Daily Post had this: ‘Considerable speculation was caused in the city by the telegram published from New York, to the effect that proof will be forthcoming of the deceased gentleman having been in the habit of taking arsenic in large quantities.’ This was followed shortly after by an intercession from Florence’s lawyer, Alfred Row of Manhattan. He made a statement to the press, reported in the New York Herald just before commencement of the ‘trial’: ‘We have no doubt that she will be acquitted as the evidence against her amounts to almost nothing. Maybrick had been addicted to the use of arsenic for a number of years, and the evidence on which the prosecution is based is not worth a puff.’102
Further witnesses to James Maybrick’s nasty habits came forward in the United States, including Edward Nacy, a past employee, and Archie Church, a former valet, both prepared to testify to his ravenous consumption of arsenic. It’s clear as day that many in America knew of his addiction, and curious it is that Russell couldn’t replicate such deposition in Liverpool. Neither he nor Cleaver could find anyone to attest to it, even when it came knocking on the fucking door.
If suppressing Dalgleish was an outrage, the same word might do for Morden Rigg. It will be remembered that it was he and his wife who had met James at the Wirral races, when he was deep into an O/D from ‘the London Medicine’. Rigg recognised this as a potentially important contribution to Mrs Maybrick’s defence, and like Dalgleish gave a statement to her solicitor: ‘I knew Mr James Maybrick well. My general impression of him was that he was a man with a tendency to talk about his ailments, or fancied ailments, and to take various supposed specifics for them. I saw him on the course [on 27 April]. He turned round to my wife’s carriage and told her he had taken an overdose of strychnine that morning and that his limbs were quite rigid. She is prepared to testify to this if necessary.’103
This went to Russell, and not another word was ever heard of it. Thus we have three crucial witnesses denied – Dalgleish and the Riggs – any one of whom would have seen Michael’s flypapers laughed out of Liverpool. But they were never called, and nor was anyone like them. Russell had ‘reserved the defence’, meaning everyone was ignorant of it. He proclaimed this as a strategy in his client’s favour, when in reality it was a treachery on behalf of the prosecution. He knew that to ensnare Florence he had to avoid Maybrick’s various addictions, and that if witnesses to arsenic-taking were advertised for, half of the Cotton Exchange would have been in stampede to the court.
Back at Battlecrease, Florence was allowed to speak to no one, and no one spoke to her but in insolence. Yapp was heard to say that she’d do anything to ‘prevent the mistress from having her children back’. In despair, Florence turned to Briggs, an enemy who shared a mask of friendship with the Irish Judas. As she was later to admit in court, it was ‘in sarcasm’ that she suggested Florence should write to Brierley for help:
I am writing to you to give me every assistance in your power in my present fearful trouble. I am in custody, without any of my family with me, and without money. I have cabled to my solicitor in New York to come here at once. In the meantime send some money for present needs. The truth is known about my visit to London. Your last letter is at present in the hands of the police. Appearances may be against me, but before God I swear I am innocent! Florence E. Maybrick.104
Like the cable, the letter went straight to the police. A quartet of helmets and nurses Gore and Wilson were on around-the-clock guard duty. It was into this environment that Florence’s mother Baroness von Roques was hastening. Michael had sent a telegram to Paris: ‘Florie ill and in awful trouble. Do not delay.’ It was he who had delayed, not troubling to inform her of the situation until James was under the granite. By chance the Baroness had run into Michael at Lime Street station, on his way to London. ‘Florie is very ill,’ he said. ‘Edwin will tell you every thing. It is a case of murder, and there is a man in the case.’ She’d heard from Florence by telegram that ‘James passed away on Saturday,’ but what was this of murder? Plunged into the trauma of it all, she took a cab to Battlecrease, a residence she’d never visited before.105
In the vestibule Edwin gave her a lowdown on the Brierley letter and the manufactured intrigue that came with it. ‘The police are in the house,’ he said, a presence that was already evident. Hurrying upstairs, she passed two coppers outside the bedroom door, and on entry her reception was as hard as stone. Her first instinct was to embrace her still prostrate child, but Nurse Wilson interposed. The Baroness ignored her, and spoke to her daughter in French. ‘You must speak only in English,’ commanded one of the helmets. ‘I must warn you Madam, I shall write down what you say,’ and he proffered his paper and pencil to prove it.106
Later that evening, Florence had ‘a violent fit of hysteria and crying’. Her mother rushed back into the room. ‘Four policemen and the two nurses were holding her down on the bed. The men had hold of her bared arms and legs,’ wrote the Baroness, ‘and I was outraged. I pulled the fat nurse [Wilson] away, and ordered the men out, and said, “If you will let me hold her hand and speak to her, she will be calm.”’ The fat nurse was very insolent, and said ‘she would put me out if I did not take care, she was in charge and should act as she thought best’. There was no way of having any private conversation with her daughter that night, nor the morning after: ‘The police and nurses were listening, and they all had paper and pencil, and were always rapidly taking notes of heaven knows what, and whispering together.107
Although the Baroness didn’t realise it, it was her presence that freaked the authorities out. They were paranoid that Florence should have any external communication, that she might say something or hear something that could spring her from captivity. Now James was dead they were fearful she might squawk the ‘secret’ that she knew nothing of, but that traumatised them all. Keeping her mouth shut was what the intimidation was all about, and they decided to move her from the house immediately.
I do not say of course that the nurses or helmets were aware of ‘the secret’, but there were others who certainly were. Midway through that Saturday morning, following von Roques’ arrival, thirteen men were milling about inside Battlecrease House. They included Florence’s solicitors, Richard and Arnold Cleaver, who prior to their entry had held a brisk discussion outside with a magistrate called Colonel Bidwell, his clerk Mr Swift and Superintendent Bryning. Once in agreement, the conclave tramped upstairs into Mrs Maybrick’s bedroom. It was apparent to her mother that they were going to take Florence away, and she begged Bidwell for an opportunity to say goodbye. He refused, and instead initiated an impromptu court in the bedroom.
Bryning was back at the end of the bed. ‘This person is Mrs Maybrick,’ he said, ‘wife of the late James Maybrick. She is charged with having caused his death by administering poison to him. I understand her consent is given to a remand, and therefore I need not introduce any evidence.’ What did he mean, ‘her consent’? Other than the slanders whispered by Bro Michael Maybrick, there was no ‘evidence’ against her. ‘You asked for a remand of eight days?’ enquired Bro Swift. ‘Yes, that is so,’ affirmed Superintendent Bryning.
CLEAVER: I appear for the prisoner, and consent to a remand.
BIDWELL: Very well. That is all.108
Her mother watched from an upstairs window as, too sick (or drugged) to walk, Florence was carried out of the house in a chair. Accompanied by Humphreys, Bryning and a nurse, she was put in a carriage and was on her way to prison.
The Baroness heard the twist of a key: someone had locked her in. It was probably Edwin, and the symbolism of the act was apposite. From that moment on her daughter would never again be allowed to speak openly to anyone but her jailers, her abberation of a solicitor, and the Irish Bastard betraying her.109
On the following day the Baroness was asked to leave, and a few days later Michael slammed the door on the lot of them. Retaining only Grant the gardener as caretaker, he dismissed the entire staff. Even Yapp was out, and Battlecrease was his. Over the following weeks he kept up the pressure, dissembling through magisterial hearings and manipulating the authorities to his will. His sister-in-law remained hermetically sealed in Walton Jail, represented by nothing but Russell’s silence. At the ‘trial’ he was to call her ‘this friendless lady’, and Michael aside, he was first amongst her enemies.
Florence wanted the proceedings moved to London, and it was Russell who denied this. Years later she wrote: ‘It was a mockery of justice to hold such a trial in such a place as Liverpool. The excitement ran so high that the Liverpool crowds even hissed me as I was driven through the streets.’110 She wanted her mother to speak in her defence, but Russell denied that too, refusing to allow the Baroness anywhere near the witness box, or even to sit in the court. He knew only too well that she was a major threat to the frame-up, able to confirm the soaking of flypapers as the precursor to a common cosmetic, and more dangerous still, testify to James’s habitual use of arsenic when he wasn’t out of it on strychnine.
Baroness von Roques was locked out just as her daughter was locked in. So anxious were her accusers to enforce the isolation, they descended to trickery. The whole affair became like one of those old-fashioned roller towels in a municipal toilet: it went round and round, more soiled with every hand that touched it.
Coroner Brighouse was not only adept at lying, he proved his competence in deception. On 28 May he opened his inquest at the Wellington Rooms in the Liverpool suburb of Garston. The dirty-hands were naturally concerned about press interest, so the press were tricked en masse. On 29 May the Liverpool Citizen published an enraged complaint from one of the journalists who had been subjected to it:
THE MAYBRICK SCANDAL
A Pressman’s Protest
That was a clever dodge of which the local Press representatives were the victims on Monday morning. It was a triumph of legal subtlety and police craft of which both Swift and Superintendent Bryning have every reason to be proud. From the very first discovery of the Maybrick cause celebre, all the ingenuity of the county coroner, county police, and county magistrates’ clerks has been employed to prevent the press from obtaining the slightest information of the affair. The initial enquiry before Mr Coroner Brighouse was conducted in private, and strict injunctions having been issued that under no circumstances were the newspapers to be told the result.
It was another put-up job, like Bradford. Though his report is rather lengthy, it’s worth hearing this journalist out:
The reporters had positively to organise a kind of secret detective service to fight this conspiracy of silence. The same tactics were brought into play at the County Police Court yesterday. The business of trying prisoners in this temple of ‘county justice’, always commences at eleven o’clock, and having taken their places, the reporters settled down to await the calling of Mrs Maybrick’s case. But while they were thus waiting the advent of justice, the magistrate and his swift clerk were actually on their way to Walton Jail for the purpose of remanding the accused in secret. The learned ‘beak’ and his legal advisor, together with the astute Bryning and the irreproachable [Arnold] Cleaver, stole off to the prison, leaving the hoodwinked stenographers in ignorance of this remarkable skedaddle. It will scarcely be credited that the dispensers of justice should have deliberately given the slip to the public’s representatives in this absurdly undignified and preposterously stupid manner. On learning that the trick had been played on them, one Pressman took a hansom to the jail but arrived too late. Mrs Maybrick had been tried clandestinely within the gloomy walls of the Walton Bastille, and the newspapers were again baffled by the agents of law.111
‘The principle of trying a prisoner,’ concludes the article, ‘(accused of the most terrible crime known to law), with the secrecy of the Inquisition is repugnant to modern ideas. Somehow people don’t place much confidence in justice which hides its, head, throwing a black veil over its tribunal.’112
Michael Maybrick and his friends had been busy. On the same day, Brighouse suspended his inquest so that James’s corpse could be exhumed. In my view this was just a bit of low theatre, designed to further titillate the public mind. Either way, the press made the most of whatever they could get, inventing a ‘family vault’ to fit the occasion. In reality there was no vault and no family skeletons, simply James’s parents’ names on a modest headstone.
The scene of the exhumation was one of the most ghastly that can be imagined. The body had been interred in a family vault not far from the catacombs, and covered with a large flat stone now much discoloured with age. Beneath this were two heavy flag-stones, and below the whitewashed brick vault, which contained not only the remains of the late Mr James Maybrick but also those of his mother and father.113
The account continues via ‘the sickly glow of naphtha lamps’, complemented with the steady rhythm of gravediggers’ shovels. Why midnight should have been chosen to dig him out isn’t explored, but Drs Barron, Humphreys, Hopper and Carter, plus a couple of police inspectors, were at the ready.
‘There was scarcely anyone present who did not feel an involuntary shudder as the pale worn features of the dead appeared in the flickering rays of a lamp held over the coffin by one of the medical men.’ Maybrick apparently looked rather healthy, and this was the topic of much remark. ‘As the dissecting knife of Dr Barron pursued its rapid and skilful work there was, however, whenever a slight breath of wind blew, an odour of corruption.’ Barron removed the lungs, heart, kidneys, and part of the thigh bone. ‘Coming to the head, he cut out the tongue, and, opening the skull, removed one half of the brain. Whilst the dissection was going on those present discussed the evidence given at the inquest in the earlier part of the day.’114
During the inquest the matter of the will had arisen, Brighouse acquiescing to Michael’s request to keep its contents secret. Before Florence had ever been found guilty of anything, Michael had registered the will in London. On 29 July 1889 he became master of everything she had ever owned.
While Florence was in Walton Prison, listening to the sounds of a gallows being erected, a reporter asked Michael, ‘Did you think during the trial that she would be convicted?’ ‘No I did not,’ he replied. ‘I said to my brother [Edwin] after the case was closed that I believed she would be acquitted,’115 which is presumably why he had auctioned off all her furniture and effects, and rented Battlecrease House to a man named Rogers.116
Were Messrs Cleaver and Russell worthy of their profession, they would never have allowed this. Coupled with the dramatics of the exhumation, emptying the house was psychologically disastrous in terms of the public perception of their client. If her own brother-in-law thought she was never going home, why should anyone else?
‘The truth is,’ Michael continued, ‘I thought that no one connected with the case tried very hard to have Mrs Maybrick convicted. I know I tried my best to have the physician give a death certificate that would have prevented the trial entirely, but he refused to do so, and when the trial came I assure you I was a most unwilling witness.’117
One of the more egregious talents of the psychopath is this facility to lie. But so misconstructed was Michael Maybrick’s ego, he finished with a statement that was breathtaking, even out of him: ‘As for my scheming with Mrs Briggs and Miss Yapp against her, that is all nonsense. Why, after my brother’s death, Mrs Maybrick thanked me for being so kind to her.’
She had just lost her husband, her children, her home and her liberty, and while lying incapacitated in her own shit, she looked up at the kindly Michael and ‘thanked’ him.118
By now the results from the graveyard were in. A Crown Analyst at Guy’s Hospital in London, by the name of Dr Stephenson, had found minuscule amounts of arsenic in Maybrick’s viscera. This isn’t surprising, because Humphreys was giving him Fowler’s Solution. To kill the average human at least two grains are required, and in James Maybrick’s case you could safely double that. Negligible traces were found in the intestines and liver. Although barely enough to bother a rat (and a dose Maybrick wouldn’t even have noticed), this would do nicely. They weren’t actually concerned with quantity, it was the word they were looking for, and now they had it, and the press howled ‘ARSENIC’.
Florence Maybrick was put on trial for fifteen 1,000th parts of a grain.