“Considering how rarely tetanus is witnessed at all, would you think that the description of a chambermaid, and of a provincial medical man who had only seen one case of tetanus, could be relied upon by you to state what description of disease the disease observed was?—I must say I thought the description very clearly given.” (How could it be given clearly if it accorded with no known disease? Besides, the answer is an evasion of the question.)
“Mr. Serjeant Shee—On which of the two would you rely, supposing they differed—the chambermaid or the medical man?
“Lord Campbell—That is hardly a proper question” (report, p. 120).
In my judgment no question could be more proper, for if Sir Benjamin relied on Mills, then the jury would have known why he pronounced so strong an opinion, and if they disliked her, the opinion would go for nothing; but if Sir Benjamin relied on Dr. Jones, then the symptoms described by him were accordant with many known diseases, and Sir Benjamin Brodie must have said so. This ruling therefore hanged my brother!
But let me hasten to a close. I am so heartbroken, so wearied out with fatigue, and pain, and grief; I am so utterly disgusted by these enumerations that I feel I cannot go on. From the first to the last my brother had no chance. You introduced him to the jury as a forger in the following words:—“There has been evidence which certainly implicates the prisoner in transactions of a very discreditable nature. It appears that he had forged a great many bills of exchange, and that he had entered into transactions not of a reputable nature.” If all this was irrelevant why did you introduce it? In the same tone was your allusion to the “student’s book,” which even the Crown abandoned. “This book has been laid before you in evidence, and certainly I think I need hardly beg of you to pay no regard to it, because it was a book that Palmer had when he was a surgeon, and at a time when I have no doubt he would have shrunk with horror at any such crime as that with which he is charged here to-day. There is, in the title page of the book, ‘Strychnia kills by causing tetanic fixing of the respiratory muscles,’ and in another part there is a description of what nux vomica is, and how strychnia is produced from it, with these words—‘Strychnia kills by causing tetanic fixing of the respiratory muscles.’ Again I say that I think this being found in his possession ought not to weigh at all against the prisoner at the bar” (report, p. 315). If it ought not to weigh against him, why, in Heaven’s name, did you so solemnly drag it in? Why did you read and re-read it? Would it not have been fairer to put it aside altogether than to impress it on the minds of the jury, and then tell them it ought not to weigh at all? Is it possible to believe you were sincere? Is it possible the jury could have drawn any other conclusion from your dwelling on it than that you wished them to regard it as proof of guilt?
With what regret I have written this letter I need not say. My own avocations are mercy, peace, and charity, but there is a time when duty compels a man to lay aside his garb of peacefulness, and to assume the weapon of the world. I feel I should have been a traitor to the truth, to my family, yea, even to the country, if I had feared, from any selfish motives, to abate one word that I have here written. Against yourself personally I feel no anger; but, indeed, I am sorry for you, and I tremble. My lord, you are in a fearful condition. If your mind is so tainted that you decide all other cases as you decided this, you will have a most dreadful account to render to a most just God. Before Him how contemptible is human nature in its pride, and robes, and silken vanity, and self-worship; before Him what a wretched insect is the judge who makes others tremble, and flings about his sentences of death, and dabbles in blood as if it were water. You are now exulting in your station, but in a few short weeks, or months (for you can scarcely hope for years) you will be no more; nothing but a noisome corpse from which all will flee—loathsome and abominable, dust and ashes, a shadow and a name. You will be shut up in a box, and put away into the earth, to form food for worms and to deal with abomination; and all your state, and all your bowing, sycophantic train will fear to look upon you, and will fly to others, and you will have left nothing but perishable mercy and a vain name, and your life will have been like smoke. But there is within you a part that liveth, and will have to answer for the past, and to render up an account of the things done in the body, before a Lord and Judge who makes the heavens tremble and before whom the mountains are but as grains of dust. Answer me, and say how will you face that fearful tribunal if you leave one stone unturned in the present case to discover the whole truth, or if you oppose the application that will be made for a respite until science has made clear either guilt or innocence! All human testimony is fallible; most dangerous it is to destroy life upon a train of circumstances depending on the veracity of such persons as Mills, and Taylor, and Wyatt, and Newton. But the conclusions of science are certain, and this fact, the first chemists of the day aver, can be made as clear as light, that if strychnia were administered to Cook in his lifetime, it is now in his body, and can be detected by means that are infallible. If, then, it is undoubted that my brother poisoned Cook, what objection can there be to exhume the body, and convince the whole world of the fact? but if it be not certain, what a frightful crime are we then plunging into, to hang a man about whose guilt there still remains a tremendous body of doubt? or what reparation shall you make to his orphan boy, to his mother and sister, who love and have faith in him, if a few short weeks shall demonstrate, as in the rapid advance of science they may do, that William Palmer has been murdered on a scientific theory invented for the purpose of blood, and scouted by men of the greatest eminence in chemical analysis? Even while these pages pass through the press I read in the papers a letter which utterly destroys Taylor’s new hypothesis, and annihilates for ever the foundations on which he rested. It is published also in a morning journal, the Times, which cries aloud for my brother’s blood and fixes his guilt, not upon the fact proved at the trial, for the editors of that able paper knew that these facts are but as cobwebs, but upon what he is supposed to have done when he was taken to Stafford prison, upon his threat, if he used the threat, to destroy his life. Weak and miserable must be the case for the prosecution when their advocates are compelled to resort to this flimsy ad captandum argument for the vulgar. Who is there so hardy as to be able to answer for himself that, under similar accusations, he would not resort to suicide, or who but the most uncharitable would regard that suicide as proof conclusive of the guilt of poisoning? He was overwhelmed with debts which he had no means of paying, he had violated the civil law, and had forged his mother’s name to the extent of thousands; he was accused of fourteen or fifteen hideous and dreadful murders. He was prostrated in mind and body by sickness, by weakness, by anxiety, by a thousand conflicting passions of grief, despair, remorse, and indignation at the fearful torrents of calumny against him; and because the human mind gave way under this awful load of calamities, and he declared that he would willingly die—who is the man that can fairly say he is therefore guilty of a murder? The editor of the Times has indeed said so; and many influential persons will, perhaps, blame him, but I, for one, consider that his conduct, though censurable, was natural, and what might have been expected, and I draw no such conclusion from the circumstances as the Times has done. But however this may be, it is not to the Times, but to you and the Home Secretary I look, and in your hands is the life of William Palmer. I have not flattered you in aught, but I have spoken as I felt. I ask you not to respite him for my sake, for the sake of his family, nor even for public justice and humanity. These appeals would probably be lost on you. But I, as a minister of the Gospel, ask you to respite him for your own sake—for you will have the guilt of his blood and the infamy of his death if he is wrongly executed; and if his innocence should be hereafter demonstrated, his memory will cling upon your soul; it will be like a mountain of lead upon your heart; it will stifle your cries to God, and drag you down with that darkness of hell which is prepared for those who violate the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill.”
Thomas Palmer.
APPENDIX II.
Short Account of the Judges and Counsel engaged in the Case.
John Campbell, Baron Campbell, Lord Chief Justice of the Queen’s Bench. Lord Campbell had been Lord Chief Justice six years when he presided at the trial. He was seventy-seven years of age. Three years after he resigned the Chief Justiceship, and became Lord Chancellor at eighty, a greater age than any of his predecessors on the Woolsack had reached on being appointed. He held his office for two years longer, and died at eighty-two, an age which none of his successors reached while holding it. On the day of his death, in 1861, he had sat in Court and attended a Cabinet Council. Lord Campbell’s life as Chancellor and politician, and as the writer of the celebrated lives of the Lord Chancellors and the Chief Justices, forms too considerable a part of general history and literature to be detailed here. As a lawyer and judge his name stands high. His contemporaries never denied his abilities; but they considered his personal character and ambitions were selfish and by no means magnanimous. He is said by Sir John Macdonnell in the Dictionary of National Biography to have shown on the bench somewhat too openly an unworthy love of applause; and a tradition still lingers amongst lawyers of an ostentatious kind of politeness assumed by him when he intended anything deadly. The Usher of the Court at the Palmer trial is credited with saying that he knew the Chief meant to hang Palmer; he was so polite in requesting him to be seated. The tone of the letter we print from Palmer’s brother expresses much of a prevalent feeling against Campbell. But, in Sir John Macdonnell’s words, whatever difference of opinion there may be as to the spirit in which he served his country, there is none as to the value of the services themselves.
Mr. Baron Alderson. Sir Edward Hall Alderson was in 1856 a Baron of the Court of Exchequer, where he was transferred in 1834, his original appointment as judge having been in 1830 to the Court of Common Pleas. He was born in 1787, so that he was now sixty-nine years of age. He was of Norfolk, and his father was Recorder of Yarmouth, Norwich, and Ipswich. His career at Cambridge was remarkable. In the year 1809, when he took his degree, he was Senior Wrangler and first Smith’s prizeman, besides being first Chancellor’s medallist, which was the highest honour then for classics. From 1817 to 1822 he was joint editor of the well-known Barnewall and Alderson’s Reports of those years in the Court of King’s Bench; and whilst so reporting he was, unlike reporters of these days, rapidly acquiring a practice, though he never took silk. He made no particular mark on the bench during his twenty-seven years of occupancy, and he died in 1857, the year after the trial. It is rather curious, in view of the attack made on him for prejudice in the letter to Lord Campbell, that he should have been known as a humane judge, with a desire to restrict capital punishment.