Catherine Bentley was one woman who was definitely not pressing for membership of the Ballarat Reform League in mid-November. The only acceptance she needed was from a jury of her peers.
On 19 October, Catherine had been arrested after her former servant, Moody, gave evidence against her and claimed the reward of £300 for information leading to a conviction in the Scobie murder. On 1 November Catherine was transported to Melbourne, where her husband was already in jail.
By and large this made the diggers happy, but not everyone was thrilled. There were those who, like Ellen Young, believed that the Bentleys were being unduly scapegoated for wider feelings of envy, hatred and malice towards the culture of corruption: i.e. the Camp officials who were on the take, and those who were paying them off.
Certain merchants, storekeepers, diggers and residents of Ballarat and Melbourne got up petitions to proclaim James Bentley’s good character and innocence. One of the jurors at the original inquest signed a petition stating that there has been heaped on Bentley’s head a greater amount of odium than he at all deserves.
But by now the government needed a show trial to demonstrate their impartiality, and Catherine would have to play her part.
A journalist for the Argus reported with alarm that when Catherine was conveyed by steamer from Geelong Prison to Melbourne to stand her trial, she was handcuffed all the way. Her keeper, Detective Cummings, refused even to allow her to get dinner regardless of the fact that she was by now seven months pregnant with her second child.
Mrs Bentley has been moving in a respectable line of life, protested the journalist. She is not convicted of any offence, and it is not likely that she will be. The only cause to justify such harsh treatment and cowardly brutality, argued the journalist, was the supposition that it was in accordance with the public feeling to heap insults on a defenceless woman. Cummings’ behaviour was an insult to the community, especially as the public sentiment aroused by the case demonstrated not so much a virulent hatred of the alleged offenders as a mark that the people of the colony will not stand for the abuse of power and privilege by judicial authorities.
Others similarly came forward to declare that ‘the Bentley affair’ was simply another instance in a long line of disregard for the rule of law by the Ballarat authorities.
Three hundred diggers came to Melbourne for the Bentleys’ trial before Justice Redmond Barry, but it proved rather anticlimactic. The most scintillating drama occurred when Catherine was given a chair during her cross-examination in order to rest her swollen body. Dr Carr, who was there to give evidence, assessed the exhausted woman’s condition and Justice Barry called an adjournment for Catherine to have proper attention from the doctor. (No newspaper reported that she was pregnant.)
Apart from that, there were no shocks, scandals or bombshells to entertain the amassed audience. The circumstantial evidence was piled up against the Bentleys. The best John Ireland could do for the defence was to ask Mary Ann Welch whether she had any ill feeling towards Mrs Bentley that might have motivated her testimony. No, said Mary Ann.
In the end, Ireland could only argue that his clients had already suffered enough in losing all their property and being held up to public execration. And he subtly pointed out that the most guilty-looking person, according to the evidence, was Catherine Bentley, not the men. If found guilty of this most serious charge, Ireland told the jury, they must expiate this accidental calamity by death, involving too the life of a woman.
Would Catherine Bentley be the first woman to be hanged in Victoria?
Attorney-General Stawell had no problem with that. Though the reasonable man might be unwilling to believe that a woman had gone out to commit murder, Stawell thundered, the jury should lay aside all such considerations.
In summing up, Justice Barry addressed the jury for over an hour. The jury deliberated for 45 minutes. At 9pm on Saturday evening the foreman delivered the verdict. James Bentley, Farrell and Hance: guilty of manslaughter. Catherine Bentley: not guilty. (Scot free was how Carboni put it.)
On Monday, as the sun slipped behind the moon, the men were sentenced to three years’ hard labour on the roads. Catherine was released to her own version of the wilderness.
She would not hang, but in February she’d give birth to her baby Louisa alone—a mother of two with no lawful means of support. By Christmas 1855, Catherine would be brought up on charges of illegally selling alcohol from a refreshment tent in Maryborough.
What a spectacular fall: from the owner of the largest building on the most prosperous goldfield in the world to sly-grogger at an outlying diggings. The Bentley family’s brief flirtation with the world of chandeliers and champagne would never be reprised. It was all downhill from here.