Dr. Jones, of Lutterworth, the friend of Cook, to whom my brother writes, gave evidence of the most valuable kind, showing Cook’s broken constitution, his sores, his syphilis, his secondary symptoms, his unbounded confidence in William, and William’s brotherly kindness to him, yet not one word of comment did you offer to the jury upon these matters. The only remark you made was one highly damaging to my brother, and was as follows:—“At first sight it would appear very much to be in his favour that he sends for a medical man, who is a friend of Cook’s, and who took a lively interest in him, and wished him well. But, at the same time, there are circumstances in this case that may enable you to draw a different conclusion, but I will not suggest” (report, p. 312). No, you did not suggest in words, but, pausing here, you looked at the jury and shook your head at them for half a minute in the most mysterious manner, so that they must have been the dullest of all mankind if they had not perfectly well known what you meant. I have heard more than one person remark upon the Scotch subtlety of this mode of proceeding. Your lordship is a sort of biographer of the Chief Justices of England, though I am told that the unfortunate Dr. Giles, whom you had the pleasure of sentencing at Oxford to twelve months’ imprisonment, is the real author of that production; and I suppose you hope to figure one day in the literary gallery with those whom you have commemorated. It would be impossible, perhaps, for a future historian who merely read your proceedings in my brother’s trial, to form an accurate notion of your demeanour; but, with the light which this letter will throw upon the transaction, such an annalist—if ever you should be thought worthy of notice—will be able to inform future times how you managed to convince a jury without leaving any trace behind of the means by which you did it.
The next witness of any consequence was Newton; and here I should have thought your lordship’s feelings as a man, if they had not entirely perished, would have exhibited some trace of natural passion. Newton, according to his own account, was an accessory to the murder, and the murderer after the fact; he knew the current gossip of Rugeley and Stafford, that Cook had been poisoned by my brother; he assisted at the post-mortem examinations for the purpose of detecting the poison which the murderer had used; he had an interview on the Sunday after Cook’s death with William, in which this skilful poisoner (whose chemical knowledge of the minimum dose of strychnia which destroys life, and of the hitherto unknown fact that antimony neutralises the discovery of strychnia, places him a hundred years in advance of all the chemists of the age), asks the ignorant shopboy of the nature and the effects of strychnia! And when the learned Newton gives him information on the matter, the poisoner snaps his fingers in joy and exclaims, “That will do”; and after that he goes with him to the post-mortem examination; and after that Newton swears against him at the inquest; and after that he keeps the deadly secret buried in his bosom from November until the middle of the month of May, just one day before the trial! And after the trial he communicates the further fact to the Attorney-General that it was he who made up the deadly pills for my brother on the Monday night. With reference to the credibility of this monstrous witness you have not one word to say, though you did not hesitate to stigmatise Mr. Nunneley and Dr. M‘Donald as persons on whom the jury could place no reliance; and in the course of their cross-examination you looked at them in a manner significant of total incredulity of their testimony. Observe the mode in which you support Newton. You say, “There is no contradiction of anything that he has said.” Why did you not tell the jury that, as he fixed no time or place when any one but the prisoner himself, whose mouth was sealed, was by, it was impossible he could be contradicted? You go on (report, p. 313)—“Well, then, you are to consider what is the probability of his inventing this wicked and most abominable lie? He had no ill-will towards the prisoner at the bar.” (Who told you that? Who proved it? What right had you to assume it? What right had you to tell it to the jury?) “He had nothing to gain by injuring him much less by saying anything to affect his life.” (I ask again who told you all this, and on what pretence did you venture to say so to the jury?) “I see no motive that Mr. Newton could have for inventing a lie to take away the life of another person.” (Are you omniscient, then, and do you profess to read that inscrutable mystery, the human heart, and have you not read in the annals of crime of innumerable murders and perjuries committed without apparent motive?) “No inducement could be held out to him by the Crown; he says himself that no inducement was held out to him, and that he at last disclosed it from a sense of justice.” (As if a man who screened a murderer for six months could have any sense of justice.) “If you believe him, certainly the evidence is very strong against the prisoner at the bar.” Not a word of caution is here given; not one Scotch hint of doubt in this witness. Your “canny” countrymen are not always so credulous; they are not at all times so easy of belief in persons of this description. Yet your milk of human kindness is so pure that you cannot for your life imagine the least reason why Newton should not be believed.
But it was on the evidence of Roberts that your lordship used observations which had the most powerful effect on the jury, and since then upon the public mind. I have already explained how it was that the prisoner, even if he were a guilty man, might have denied the purchase of the strychnia from Roberts, as he always denied its purchase from Newton, was deprived by artifice of the witness Cockayne, who could have thrown a new light upon this affair, and I have shown how Bates prevaricated with reference to the dogs and the brood mares. My brother being in this way at the mercy of Bates, and juggled out of Cockayne, in what possible way could he account for the disposal of the strychnia? Yet you, who knew all this a thousand times better than the jury, told them that “a very serious case is adduced, supposing you should come to the conclusion that the symptoms of Mr. Cook were consistent with that of poison. If you think the symptoms are accounted for by merely ordinary tetanus, of course the fact of strychnia being obtained by the prisoner at the bar is of very little weight; but, if you should come to the conclusion that the symptoms which Mr. Cook exhibited on the Monday night and Tuesday night are consistent with strychnia, then a fearful case is made out against him.” The learned counsel did not favour us with the theory which he had formed in his own mind respecting that strychnia, and how he considered it to be consistent with the view that he suggested. There is no evidence of the intention with which it was purchased. There is no evidence how it was applied, and what became of it, or what was done with it (report, p. 313). What modern judge before yourself in a case of death ever ventured to tell a jury that “a fearful crime was made out against the prisoner”? Scraggs or Belknap might have done it; Jeffreys might not have blushed to use the words, but that they should now be used in the face of an open Court, and with a pantomimic gesture and grim stare at the jury such as you gave, are facts discreditable to any law. By what right, with what face, on what authority did you venture to tell the jury that his “learned counsel” was bound to prove his innocence or to account for his possession or disposal of the strychnia? I have always understood it to be the law that every man was presumed to be innocent until he was proved to be guilty; but you have reversed this majestic, merciful principle, and intimate that every man is guilty until his counsel proves him to be innocent. A more shameful perversion of the law than this, I am told by persons in authority, has never been witnessed. Well also did you know that Serjeant Shee was not entitled to put forward to the jury “the theory which he had formed in his own mind respecting the strychnia.” Had he ventured to do so I have no doubt you would have interrupted him with unfeeling harshness, and repeated to him in even stronger language than you did that species of insult “that a witness had no more right to make himself an advocate than an advocate to make himself a witness.” And then you glaringly tell the jury that there has been no “evidence of the intention,” as if you did not well know that if such evidence were possible to be given it could only be given by my brother William himself (who, by law, could not speak); and that, even if he could speak and was about to mention his intention, you would have stopped him, and said that such evidence was illegal, facts, not intentions, being the only admissible evidence in a Court of law. Yet you gravely complain as if the thing might have been done, and the jury, who probably believed you, convicted my brother because he could not prove an impossibility.
My lord, if our present system of representation were anything but a mockery, and if the House of Commons were constituted as it was in the days of Pym, Vane, and Hampden, I verily believe you would be impeached for such a charge as this, for you stated to the jury that the prisoner was guilty because he did not do that which you absolutely knew he could not do, namely, prove his intention. But, under the present system of things, judges may do anything they please with impunity, and no one calls attention to it, because the wretches whom they hang or exile are friendless outcasts, deprived of all sympathy from the world, enemies often of society, which thus becomes their enemy; and the great body of the community not being acquainted with the law, and the only persons who are, namely, the bar, being a body of degraded, crawling, sneaking slaves and sycophants who do not venture to arraign a judge, because if they do they fear that attorneys will desert them; in this way the most frightful licentiousness of power is given to men like you, and they are as despotic as the Cadis in the remotest part of Turkey. In civil cases, indeed, there is a check upon them, because there the parties are rich, and there is an opportunity for a new trial, but in criminal cases there is no new trial, even in the most scandalous and infamous conduct of the judge; and the consequence is that a wicked man may commit almost any conceivable crime upon the bench, and gratify his love of blood to the utmost without restraint or fear, than which I can conceive no more shocking infamy to exist.
Next, as to the evidence of Mr. Stevens, you made it a rule all through violently to censure Serjeant Shee whenever he said anything against the witnesses for the Crown, but not one syllable did you say against the Attorney-General for his attack on the medical witnesses for my brother. Thus you say here (report, p. 313)—“The learned counsel in the discharge of his duty did, as he was perfectly justified in doing, make very violent attacks upon the character and conduct of Mr. Stevens. It rests with you to say whether that attack was well founded.” But had you not said that he was justified in doing so, and did not this imply that Stevens deserved it? And if it “rested with the jury,” what right had you to add, “I own I can see nothing in Mr. Stevens in the slightest degree calling for it”? Thus you first say Serjeant Shee was “justified,” then you say it “rests with the jury,” and then, lest they may jointly agree with the serjeant, you volunteer your own opinion, that Serjeant Shee was not justified. Conduct like this requires no comment, but if my brother is hanged upon such a charge, who is guilty of his blood?
The next witness was Mary Keeling. She gave important evidence as to the condition of the body. Mills and one or two other of the witnesses had endeavoured to show that the body was “bent like a bow,” to use the imaginative language of that man Taylor, and this was pressed in to support your view of the case that “the death was consistent with strychnia.” Now, Mary Keeling proved the exact reverse of this, but you did not either take it in your notes or read it to the jury. Serjeant Shee was obliged to interrupt you. I copy from the report, p. 313—
“Mr. Serjeant Shee—I am not quite sure whether your lordship read that the witness said that the body was lying straight on the back on the bed?
“Lord Campbell—I have read all that I have taken down. Is it in the cross-examination?
“Mr. Serjeant Shee—No, in the examination in chief. ‘How was the body lying?—On the back, straight down on the bed.’