At the close of the case for the prosecution the Lord Advocate proposed to put in certain entries in a pocket book of L’Angelier’s to support the first and second counts of the indictment, which, after argument, was refused by the Court. (See [Appendix C.], p. [359].)
THE DEFENCE.
In accordance with practice of the Scotch Courts the counsel for the prisoner had the last word; and good use did the Dean of Faculty make of his privilege. The Lord Advocate’s policy had been to depict the character of the prisoner in the vilest colours—as the seducer, rather than the seduced, or, at any rate, for a long period the willing accomplice in all his acts. The Dean dealt not less hardly with the character of L’Angelier.
“We find him,” he said, “according to the confession of all those who observed him narrowly, vain, conceited, pretentious, with a great opinion of his own personal attractions, and a very silly expectation of admiration from the other sex. That he was successful to a certain extent in conciliating such admiration may be the fact; but, at all events, his own prevailing ideas seem to have been that he was calculated to be very successful in paying attention to ladies, and that he was likely to push his fortune by such means. Accordingly, once and again we find him engaged in attempts to get married to women of some station at least in society. We heard of one disappointment which he met with in England, and another we heard a great deal of connected with a lady in Fife; and the manner in which he bore his disappointments on those two occasions is perhaps the best indication and light we have to the true character of the man. He was not a person of strong health, and it is extremely probable that this, among other things, had a depressing effect on his spirits, rendering him changeable and uncertain—now uplifted, as one of the witnesses said, and now most deeply depressed—of a mercurial temperament, as another described it, very variable and never to be depended upon. Such was the individual with whom the prisoner unfortunately became acquainted. The progress of their acquaintance is soon told. My learned friend the Lord Advocate said the correspondence must have been improper, because it was clandestine: yet the letters of the young lady at that first period breathe nothing but gentleness and propriety. The correspondence in the commencement shows that if L’Angelier had in his mind originally to corrupt and seduce the prisoner, he entered upon the attempt with considerable ingenuity and skill; for the very first letter of the series which we have contains a passage in which she says, ‘I am trying to break myself of all my bad habits: it is you I have to thank for this, which I do sincerely from my heart.’ He had been suggesting to her improvement in conduct or something else. He had thus been insinuating himself into her company. She had yielded, no doubt, too easily to the pleasures of this new acquaintance, but pleasures apparently of a most innocent kind at this period. Yet it seems to have occurred to her mind at a very early period that it was impossible to maintain this correspondence with propriety or her own welfare; for so early as April 1855 she wrote him—‘I think you will agree with me in what I intend proposing, that for the present this correspondence had better stop. I know your good feeling will not take this wrong. It was meant quite the reverse. By continuing it, harm may arise, by discontinuing, nothing can be said.’ And from then to September it did cease.”
Unfortunately the correspondence was renewed, discovered, and stopped by her father until April, 1856, when it is re-opened by a letter, of the 30th of that month, from Helensburgh, in which she writes:—“P(papa) has not been in town a night for some time; but the first night he is off I shall see you. We shall spend an hour of bliss. There shall be no risk: only C. H. (Haggart) shall know.” This letter was followed by that of the 3rd of May, inviting him on Tuesday, the 6th, to come to the garden gate, and adding, “Beloved of my soul, a fond embrace, a dear kiss till we meet! We shall have more than one, love, dearest.” Signed, “From thy ever devoted and loving wife, thine for ever, Mini.”
“Alas,” said the Dean, “the next scene is the most painful of all. In the spring of 1856, the corrupting influence of the seducer was successful, and the prisoner fell. This is recorded in a letter bearing the post-mark of the 7th of May, which you have heard read. And how corrupting that influence must have been, how vile the acts that he resorted to for accomplishing his nefarious purpose, can never be proved so well as by looking at the altered tone and language of the unhappy prisoner’s letters. She had lost not her virtue merely, but, as the Lord Advocate said, her sense of decency. Think you that without temptation, without evil teachings, a poor girl falls into such depths of degradation? No. Influence from without—most corrupting influence—can alone account for such a fact. And yet through the midst of this frightful correspondence, there breathes a spirit of devoted affection towards the man that had destroyed her—that strikes me as most remarkable.”
Then, after alluding to the precautions with which she sought to surround her interviews with L’Angelier at the Blythswood Square house; to the evident proofs that an elopement was projected, and to the strong probability that no interview took place without Haggart’s connivance, and that, therefore, the interviews at this time must be limited to the two spoken of by that witness, he urged that up to the month of February, 1857, he was entitled to say, “without a shadow of evidence to the contrary, that they were not in the habit of coming into personal contact.”
“We now,” continued the Dean, “come to a very important stage of the case. On the 28th of February Mr. Minnoch proposes, and if I understand the theory of my learned friend’s case aright, from that day the whole character of the girl’s mind and her feelings changed, and she set herself to prepare for the perpetration of what he has called one of the most foul, cool, deliberate murders that ever was committed. I will not say that such a thing is impossible, but I will venture to say it is very highly improbable. He will be a bold man to fathom the depths of human depravity, but this at least experience teaches us, that perfection even in depravity, is not rapidly attained, and it is not by such short and easy stages as the prosecutor has been able to trace in the career of Madeline Smith, that a gentle loving girl passes all at once into the savage grandeur of a Medea, or the appalling wickedness of a Borgia. Such a thing is not possible. There is a certain progress in guilt, and it is quite out of all human experience that, from the tone of the letters, there should be a sudden transition—I will not say from affection for a particular object—but to the strange desire for removing, by any means, the obstruction to her wishes and purposes that the prosecutor imputes to the prisoner. Think, in your own minds, how foul and unnatural a murder it is—the murder of one who, within a very short space, was the object of her love—an unworthy object—an unholy object; but yet while it lasted—and its endurance was not very brief—it was a deep, unselfish, absorbing, devoted passion. And the object of that passion she now conceived the purpose of murdering. Such is the theory that you are desired to believe. Now before you will believe it, will you not ask for demonstration? Will you be content with conjecture? Will you be content with suspicion, however pregnant, or will you be so unreasonable as to put it to me in this form, that the man having died of poison, the theory of the prosecution is the most probable? Oh, gentlemen, is that the manner in which a jury should treat such a case? Is that the kind of proof on which they should convict on a capital offence?”