In support of his contention that Cook’s death could be fairly attributed to ordinary convulsions, the learned Serjeant gave the following graphic sketch of the state of his mind at the period of Shrewsbury races, and from then to his death:—
“He went there in the imminent peril of returning from them a ruined man. His stepfather assured Palmer that there would not be 4000 shillings for those who had claims on his estate. From the necessity he was under of raising money at an enormous discount we may easily infer that he was in desperate difficulties, and that unless some sudden success on the turf should retrieve his fortunes, they were hopeless. His health was shattered, his mind distracted; he had long been cherishing hopes that Polestar would win, and so put him in possession of something like a thousand guineas. The mare, it was true, was hardly his own, for she had been mortgaged; and if she should lose, she would become the property of another person. Picture to yourselves what must have been the condition, mental and bodily, of that young man when he rose from his bed on the morning of the races. It is scarcely possible, as he went down to breakfast, that this thought must not have crossed his mind, ‘My fate is trembling in the balance; this is the crisis of my destiny. Unless my horse shall win, to-night I am a beggar.’ With these feelings he repairs to the course. Another race is run before Polestar is brought out. His impatience is extreme. He looks on in a state of agonising excitement. Will the minutes never fly? At last arrives the decisive moment; the time has come for his race. The flag is dropped; the horses start; his mare wins easily, and he, her master, has won a thousand guineas! For three minutes he is not able to speak, so intense is his emotion. Slowly he recovers his utterance, and then how rapturous is his joy! He is saved, he is saved! Another chance to retrieve his position—one chance more to recover his character! As yet, at all events, he will not be a disgrace to his family and his friends. Conceive him to be, with all his faults, an honourable young man, and you may easily imagine what his ecstasy must have been. He loves the memory of his dead mother—he still reverences the name of his father—he is jealous of his sister’s honour, and it may be that he cherishes silently in his heart the thought of some other being dearer still than all to whom the story of his ruin would bring bitter anguish. But he is not ruined; he will meet his engagements like an honourable man. There is now no danger of his being an outcast, an adventurer, a black-leg. He will live to redeem his position, and to give joy to those who love him. With such thoughts in his heart, he returns to his inn in a state of indescribable elation, and with a revulsion from despair that must have convulsed—though not in the sense of illness—every fibre of his frame. His first idea is to entertain his friends, and he does so. The evidence does not prove that he drank to excess, but he gave a champagne dinner; and we all know that is a luxurious entertainment, at which there is no stint and not much self-respect. That evening he did not spend in the society of Palmer; indeed, it is not clear in whose company he spent it. But we find him on the evening of Wednesday at the ‘Unicorn’ with Saunders, his trainer, and a lady. On Thursday he walks upon the course, and Herring remonstrates with him for doing so, as the day is damp and misty, and the ground wet. That night he is seized with illness, and he continues ailing until his death at Rugeley. Arrived at Rugeley, it is but natural to suppose that a reaction of feeling may have set in. Then the dark side of the picture may have presented itself to his imagination. The chilling thought may have come upon him that his winnings were already forestalled and would scarcely suffice to save him from destruction. It is when suffering from a weakened body, and an irritated and excited mind, that he is attacked by a sickness which clings to his system, leaves him without any rest, incapacitates him from taking food, distracts his nerves, and places him in imminent danger of falling a victim to any sudden attack of convulsions to which he may have a predisposition. He relished no society so much as that of Palmer, whose residence was immediately opposite the ‘Talbot Arms’ Inn, where he was lying on his sick bed. For two days he had been taking opiate pills prescribed by Dr. Bamford. On Sunday night, at twelve o’clock, he started as from a dream in a state of the utmost excitement and alarm. He admitted afterwards that for two minutes he was mad, but he could not ascribe it to anything unless to his having been awakened by a squabble in the street. But do no such things happen to people of sound constitutions and regular habits? Do no such people awaken in agony and delirium because there is a noise under their windows? No; these are the afflictions of the dissipated and anxious, whose bodies are shattered and whose minds are distracted. Next day, Monday, he was pretty well, but not so well as to mount his horse or to take a walk in the fields. He could converse with his trainer and jockey, but he could take no substantial food, and drank not a drop of brandy-and-water. You will bear in mind that Palmer was not with him that day. In the middle of the night he was seized with an attack similar in character to that of the night preceding, but manifestly much milder, for he retained his consciousness throughout it, and was not mad for a moment. The evidence of Elizabeth Mills is conclusive on the point. At three o’clock on the following day (Tuesday) Mr. Jones, the surgeon of Lutterworth, arrived, and spent a considerable time—probably from three to seven o’clock—in his company. They had abundant opportunity for conversing confidentially, and they were likely to have done so, for they were very intimate, and Jones appears to have been on more familiar terms with Cook than was any other person, not even excepting Mr. Stevens. Nothing occurred in the entire and unbounded confidence which must have existed between Mr. Cook and Mr. Jones, to raise any suspicions in the mind of Mr. Jones; and at the consultation, which took place between seven and eight o’clock on Tuesday evening between Jones, Palmer, and Bamford, as to what the medicine for that evening should be, the fit of the Monday night was not mentioned. That is a remarkable fact. The Crown may say that it is remarkable, inasmuch as Palmer knew it, and said not a word about it; but I think that it shows that the fit was so little serious in the opinion of Cook that he did not think it worth mentioning to his intimate friend.”
In dealing with the “moral evidence,” counsel first attacked the motive imputed by the prosecution, and sought to show from the correspondence, as well as from the conduct of the parties, that at the moment when Palmer was charged with killing Cook, he was his best and indeed the only friend whom he could look to to assist him in his severe financial troubles.
“Was it,” he said, “to his interest that in the second week in November Cook should be killed, say by a railway accident? For some time they had been mixed up together in racing transactions, had made heavy losses during the late sporting season, and Cook at least—and most probably Palmer, as associated with him—was looking forward to the success of Polestar to save them from ruin. At that time Pratt, the bill discounter, was pressing for an extra £200 to stave off legal proceedings on the £2000 bill, to which his mother’s name had been forged. To whom does Palmer apply? To Cook, who at once writes to his betting agent Fisher to advance and pay that to Pratt on the Saturday before the Monday’s settlement at Tattersall’s of the Shrewsbury winnings. Fisher having done this, was it not probable that Cook arranged with Palmer, that in order to get the use of this £200 for a few days, Herring, and not Fisher, should be authorised to collect the winnings and secure a sufficient payment to Pratt to stave off the action?” [Cook’s letter of the 19th of November was accordingly cited as a proof of his anxiety to assist Palmer.] “Again, there was in Herring’s hands a bill of Palmer’s for £500, bearing his mother’s forged acceptance. Was it likely that with this danger staring him in the face, Palmer would kill the only man from whom he could look for money? The transaction as to the bill for £500, secured on Cook’s racehorses, discounted by Pratt, for which, as Pratt wrote him at once, Palmer would have to provide, was another reason for not killing his only friend.”
In September Palmer had negotiated this bill with Pratt professedly for Cook’s benefit, and had received from Pratt a crossed cheque to Cook’s order for £385, and a wine warrant for £65, and at the same time, on his own account, £315 in cash, and the imputation by the Crown was that he forged Cook’s endorsement and took the money. The improbability of his doing this, as Cook was certain, had he done so, to have complained of it during the months that elapsed between the giving of the bill of sale on his horses and his death, was urged by Mr. Shee, who ventured to offer as an explanation the suggestion that as Cook wanted cash on that day, Palmer gave him his £315, and with his consent endorsed Cook’s name on the cheque and paid that to his own account. Again he dealt with the circumstance of Cook’s cheque for £350, the body of which was drawn by Cheshire, and, as Palmer said, taken by him on the 20th November to Cook for him to sign in his sick room. That cheque, it will be remembered, was not produced, but
“Weatherby, on whom it was drawn,” said Serjeant Shee, “was under the impression that the signature was Cook’s.[66] As it was not certain that Frail would have sent up to Weatherby the stakes against which it was drawn by the Monday, was it likely that, had Palmer meditated Cook’s death at the time, he would have risked its being returned—as it was—and passing into the hands of Cook’s executors, who would be certain to enquire into the matter, on Cook’s sudden death? From the enquiries that had been instituted as to his brother’s life policy, he knew himself to be an object of suspicion, and, if any foul play happened to Cook, all hope of recovering that would be gone. ‘Their refusal,’ wrote Pratt to him, ‘altered the whole state of affairs, and Palmer must be prepared to pay his mother’s acceptances for £4,000 due at the end of the month.’ There was the pinch; the office would not pay; the £4,000 was becoming due; the holder of the bills saw that he was without security, and, if anything occurred to increase the suspicions of the insurance office, which was very reluctant to pay, the £13,000 was lost for ever, lost beyond hope. Gentlemen, that £13,000 is sure to be paid, unless this man is convicted of murder; and that has a great deal to do with the clamour and alarm which have been excited. So sure as that man is saved, and saved I believe he will be, that £13,000 is paid. There is no defence, no pretence for a defence—the letters of the office make that plain. They took an enormous premium; knowing that the man was only 30, they took a premium for a man of 50—at least, the letters show that the premium was enormous—and I say that, as sure as this man is saved, that £13,000 is good for him, and will pay his creditors. Do not these facts show that in this October suspicions were hanging in menacing meteors about Palmer’s head, which would come down with irresistible momentum and crush him upon suspicion of a sudden death by murder? Do you believe that a man who wrote what the effects of strychnia were in his manual would risk such a scene as a death-bed by it, in the presence of the dearest and best friend of Cook—a man whom he could not influence; a medical man, who liked him and loved him well enough when he knew he was ill to sleep in the same room with him, that he might be able to attend to him in case he wanted assistance during the night? Is that common sense? Are you going to endorse such a theory as that upon the suggestion of Dr. Taylor about the effects of strychnia produced upon his five rabbits? Impossible! perfectly impossible! as I submit to you. So sure as anything happened by foul play to Cook, he had no more chance of getting the £13,000 than the £180,000 from the Prince of Wales Insurance Office—none whatever. That was the only means he had at that time of extricating himself from these encumbrances.”
Again, he tried to depreciate the evidence of Mills as to the symptoms of Cook’s attacks, on the ground—not, indeed, that she had been tampered with by the prosecution—because then, he said, he was certain that she would not have been called—but “that she had been instructed in the various symptoms by the repeated private examinations to which she had been subjected,” dwelling on the omission from her evidence before the coroner that she had been so violently sick after tasting the broth, and on the other discrepancies in, and omissions from, her description of the symptoms when there, and when in court.
“Upon all occasions,” said the learned counsel, “I am most reluctant to attack a witness who is examined on his or her oath, and particularly if he be in a humble position of life. I am very reluctant to impute perjury to such a person; and I think that a man who has been as long in the profession as I have been must be put a little to his wits’ end when he rushes upon the assumption that a person whose statements have, after a considerable lapse of time, materially varied, is, therefore, necessarily, deliberately perjured. The truth is, we know perfectly well, that if a considerable interval of time occurs between the first story and the second, and if the intelligent and respectable persons who are anxious to investigate the truth, but who have still a strong moral conviction—upon imperfect information—of the guilt of the accused person, will talk to witnesses and say, ‘Was there anything of this kind?’ or, ‘Anything of that kind?’ the witnesses at last catch hold of the phrase or term which has so often been used to them, and having in that way adopted it, they fancy they may tell it in court.”