Lord Fountainhall, a contempory of Standsfield, and Sir Walter Scott, both Scots lawyers of high official position, thought the evidence of Standsfield’s guilt not altogether conclusive, and believed something might be urged for the alternative theory of suicide. Whilst venturing to differ, I note the opinion of such eminent authorities with all respect.
Standsfield maintained his innocence to the last. Three servants of his father’s—two men and a woman—were seized and tortured with the thumbikins. They confessed nothing. Now, torture was frequently used in old Scots criminal procedure, but if you did not confess you were almost held to have proved your innocence.
I cannot discover the after fate of these servants, and probably they were banished—a favourite method with the Scots authorities for getting rid of objectionable characters whose guilt was not sufficiently proved.
The second case, not so romantic albeit a love-story is woven through its tangled threads, is that of Mary Blandy, spinster, tried at Oxford in 1752, before two of the Barons of the Exchequer, for the murder of her father, Francis Blandy, attorney, and town clerk of Henley-on-Thames. Prosecuting counsel described her as “genteel, agreeable, sprightly, sensible.” She was an only child. Her sire being well off she seemed an eligible match, and yet wooers tarried. Some years before the murder, the villain of the piece, William Henry Cranstoun, a younger son of the Scots Lord Cranstoun and an officer recruiting at Henley for the army, comes on the scene. Contemporary gossip paints him the blackest colour. “His shape no ways genteel, his legs clumsy, he has nothing in the least elegant in his manner.” He was remarkable for his dulness; he was dissipated and poverty-stricken. More fatal than all he had a wife and child in Scotland, though he brazenly declared the marriage invalid spite the judgment of the Scots courts in its favour. Our respectable attorney, upon discovering these facts, gave the Captain, as he was called, the cold shoulder. The prospect of a match with a Lord’s son was too much for Miss Blandy, now over thirty, and she was ready to believe any ridiculous yarn he spun about his northern entanglements. Fired by an exaggerated idea of old Blandy’s riches, he planned his death, and found in the daughter an agent and, as the prosecution averred, an accomplice.
The way was prepared by a cunning use of popular superstitions. Mysterious sounds of music were heard about; at least Cranstoun said so; indeed, it was afterwards alleged he “hired a band to play under the windows.” If any one asked “What then?” he whispered “that a wise woman, one Mrs. Morgan, in Scotland,” had assured him that such was a sign of death to the head of the house within twelve months. The Captain further alleged that he held the gift of second sight and had seen the worthy attorney’s ghost; all which, being carefully reported to the servants by Miss Blandy raised a pleasing horror in the kitchen. Cranstoun, from necessity or prudence, left Henley before the diabolical work began in earnest, but he supplied Mary with arsenic in powder, which she administered to her father for many months. The doses were so immoderate that the unfortunate man’s teeth dropped whole from their sockets, whereat the undutiful daughter “damn’d him for a toothless old rogue and wished him to hell.” Cranstoun, under the guise of a present of Scotch pebbles, sent her some more arsenic, nominally to rub them with. In the accompanying letter, July 18, 1751, he glowingly touched on the beauties of Scotland as an inducement to her, it was supposed, to make haste. Rather zealous than discreet, she near poisoned Anne Emmett, the charwoman, by misadventure, but brought her round again with great quantities of sack whey and thin mutton broth, sovereign remedies against arsenic.
Her father gradually became desperately ill. Susannah Gunnell, maidservant perceiving a white powder at the bottom of a dish she was cleaning had it preserved. It proved to be arsenic, and was produced at the trial. Susannah actually told Mr. Blandy he was being poisoned; but he only remarked, “Poor lovesick girl! what will not a woman do for the man she loves?” Both master and maid fixed the chief, perhaps the whole, guilt on Cranstoun, the father confining himself to dropping some strong hints to his daughter, which made her throw Cranstoun’s letters and the remainder of the poison on the fire, wherefrom the drug was in secret rescued and preserved by the servants.
Mr. Blandy was now hopelessly ill, and though experienced doctors were at length called in, he expired on Wednesday, August 14, 1751. The sordid tragedy gets its most pathetic and highest touch from the attempts made by the dying man to shield his daughter and to hinder her from incriminating admissions which under excitement and (one hopes) remorse she began to make. And in his last hours he spoke to her words of pardon and solace. That night and again on Thursday morning the daughter made some distracted efforts to escape. “I ran out of the house and over the bridge, and had nothing on but a half-sack and petticoat without a hoop—my petticoats hanging about me.” But now all Henley was crowded round the dwelling to watch the development of events. The mob pressed after the distracted girl, who took refuge at the sign of the Angel, a small inn just across the bridge. “They were going to open her father,” she said, and “she could not bear the house.” She was taken home and presently committed to Oxford Gaol to await her trial. Here she was visited by the high sheriff, who “told me by order of the higher powers he must put an iron on me. I submitted as I always do to the higher powers” (she had little choice). Spite her terrible position and these indignities she behaved with calmness and courage.
The trial, which lasted twelve hours, took place on February 29, 1752, in the Divinity School of the University. The prisoner was “sedate and composed without levity or dejection.” Accused of felony, she had properly counsel only for points of law, but at her request they were allowed to examine and cross-examine the witnesses. Herself spoke a defence possibly prepared by her advisers, for though the style be artless, the reasoning is exceeding ingenious. She admitted she was passionate and thus accounted for some hasty expressions; the malevolence of servants had exaggerated these. Betty Binfield, one of the maids, was credibly reported to have said of her, “she should be glad to see the black bitch go up the ladder to be hanged.” But the powder? Impossible to deny she had administered that. “I gave it to procure his love.” Cranstoun, she affirmed, had sent it from Scotland, assuring her that it would so work, and Scotland, one notes, seemed to everybody “the shores of old romance,” the home of magic incantations and mysterious charms. It was powerfully objected that Francis Blandy had never failed in love to his daughter, but she replied that the drug was given to reconcile her father to Cranstoun. She granted he meant to kill the old man in hopes to get his money, and she was the agent, but (she asserted) the innocent agent, of his wicked purpose. This theory though the best available was beset with difficulties. She had made many incriminating statements, there was the long time over which the doses had been spread, there was her knowledge of its effects on Anne Emmett the charwoman, there was the destruction of Cranstoun’s letters, the production of which would have conclusively shown the exact measure in which guilty knowledge was shared. Finally, there was the attempt to destroy the powder. Bathurst, leading counsel for the Crown, delivered two highly rhetorical speeches, “drawing floods of tears from the most learned audience that perhaps ever attended an English Provincial Tribunal.” The jury after some five minutes’ consultation in the box returned a verdict of “guilty,” which the prisoner received with perfect composure. All she asked was a little time “till I can settle my affairs and make my peace with God,” and this was readily granted. She was left in prison five weeks.
The case continued to excite enormous interest, increased by an account which she issued from prison of her father’s death and her relations with Cranstoun. She was constant in her professions of innocence, “nor did anything during the whole course of her confinement so extremely shock her as the charge of infidelity which some uncharitable persons a little before her death brought against her.” Some were convinced and denied her guilt, “as if,” said Horace Walpole, “a woman who would not stick at parricide would scruple a lie.” Others said she had hopes of pardon “from the Honour she had formerly had of dancing for several nights with the late P——e of W——s, and being personally known to the most sweet-tempered P—ess in the world.” The press swarmed with pamphlets. The Cranstoun correspondence, alleged not destroyed, was published—a very palpable Grub Street forgery! and a tragedy, The Fair Parricide, dismal in every sense, was inflicted on the world. The last scene of all was on April 6, 1752. “Miss Blandy suffered in a black bombazine short sack and petticoat, with a clean white handkerchief drawn over her face. Her hands were tied together with a strong black riband, and her feet at her own request almost touched the ground” (“Gentlemen, don’t hang me high for the sake of decency,” an illustration of British prudery which has escaped the notice of French critics). She mounted the ladder with some hesitation. “I am afraid I shall fall.” For the last time she declared her innocence, and soon all was over. “The number of people attending her execution was computed at about 5000, many of whom, and particularly several gentlemen of the university, were observed to shed tears” (tender-hearted “gentlemen of the university”!) “In about half an hour the body was cut down and carried through the crowd upon the shoulders of a man with her legs exposed very indecently.” Late the same night she was laid beside her father and mother in Henley Church.
Cranstoun fled from justice and was outlawed. In December that same year he died in Flanders.