Unable to control or soothe her, Spencer gently divided the clasp of her hands, and having freed himself from her embrace, hastened from the room and abruptly left the house. He slept at his lodgings; and the next morning he was horror-struck on hearing that Sarah Stout's body had been found drowned in the mill-stream behind her old home. That catastrophe had actually occurred. Scarcely had the young barrister reached the Market Place, when the miserable girl threw herself into the stream from which her lifeless body was picked on the following morning. At the coroner's inquest which ensued, Spencer Cowper gave his evidence with extreme caution, withholding every fact that could be injurious to Sarah's reputation; and the jury returned a verdict that the deceased gentlewoman had killed herself whilst in a state of insanity.
In deep dejection Spencer Cowper continued the journey of the circuit.
But the excitement of the public was not allayed by the inquest and subsequent funeral. It was rumored that it was no case of self-murder, but a case of murder by the barrister, who had strangled his dishonored victim, and had then thrown her into the river. Anxious to save their sect from the stigma of suicide the Quakers concurred with the Tories in charging the young man with a hideous complication of crimes. The case against Spencer was laid before Chief Justice Holt, who at first dismissed the accusation as absurd, but was afterwards induced to commit the suspected man for trial; and in the July of 1699 the charge actually came before a jury at the Hertford Assizes. Four prisoners—Spencer Cowper, two attorneys, and a law-writer—were placed in the dock on the charge of murdering Sarah Stout.
On the present occasion there is no need to recapitulate the ridiculous evidence and absurd misconduct of the prosecution in this trial; though criminal lawyers who wish to know what unfairness and irregularities were permitted in such inquiries in the seventeenth century cannot do better than to peruse the full report of the proceedings, which may be found in every comprehensive legal library. In this place it is enough to say that though the accusation was not sustained by a shadow of legal testimony, the prejudice against the prisoners, both on the part of a certain section of the Hertford residents and the presiding judge, Mr. Baron Hatsel, was such that the verdict for acquittal was a disappointment to many who heard it proclaimed by the foreman of the jury. Narcissus Luttrell, indeed, says that the verdict was "to the satisfaction of the auditors;" but in this statement the diarist was unquestionably wrong, so far as the promoters of the prosecution were concerned. Instead of accepting the decision without demur, they attempted to put the prisoners again on their trial by the obsolete process of "appeal of murder;" but this endeavor proving abortive, the case was disposed of, and the prisoners' minds set at rest.
The barrister who was thus tried on a capital charge, and narrowly escaped a sentence that would have consigned him to an ignominious death, resumed his practice in the law courts, sat in the House of Commons and rose to be a judge in the Court of Common Pleas. It is said that he "presided on many trials for murder; ever cautious and mercifully inclined—remembering the great peril which he himself had undergone."
The same writer who aspersed Somers with her unchaste thoughts, and reiterated the charge of bigamy against Lord Chancellor Cowper, did not omit to give a false and malicious version to the incidents which had acutely wounded the fine sensibilities of the younger Cowper. But enough notice has been taken of the 'New Atalantis' in this chapter. To that repulsive book we refer those readers who may wish to peruse Mrs. Manley's account of Sarah Stout's death.
A distorted tradition of Sarah Stout's tragic end, and of Lord Cowper's imputed bigamy, was contributed to an early number of the 'European' by a clerical authority—the Rev. J. Hinton, Rector of Alderton, in Northamptonshire. "Mrs. Sarah Stout," says the writer, "whose death was charged upon Spencer Cowper, was strangled accidentally by drawing the steenkirk too tight upon her neck, as she, with four or five young persons, were at a game of romp upon the staircase; but it was not done by Mr. Cowper, though one of the company. Mrs. Clavering, Lord Chancellor Cowper's second wife, whom he married during the life of his first, was there too; they were so confounded with the accident, that they foolishly resolved to throw her into the water, thinking it would pass that she had drowned herself." This charming paragraph illustrates the vitality of scandal, and at the same time shows how ludicrously rumor and tradition mistell stories in the face of evidence.
Spencer Cowper's second son, the Rev. John Cowper, D.D., was the father of William Cowper, the poet.