William, the Palmer of this trial, was the second son in a family of five sons and two daughters. Of these, William, his brother Walter, and a sister lived badly and died miserably. Walter would have died from drink if his brother William had not hurried him away by poison for his insurance money. Other members of the family were reputable citizens.
William Palmer was first apprenticed to a firm of wholesale druggists in Liverpool. After a time considerable amounts of money sent through the post by customers to the firm were lost, and, after much inquiry, Palmer confessed he had stolen them, and his indentures were cancelled. His mother then for the first time began to cover up her son’s misdeeds by advances of money. This story runs throughout the trial, and Palmer fleeced his mother without compunction.
At the age of eighteen he was next apprenticed to Mr. Tylecote, a surgeon, near Rugeley. In consequence of discreditable conduct with women, and in money matters, Palmer left, and Mr. Tylecote refused to take him back. He was then admitted into the Stafford Infirmary as “a walking pupil.” Four years after, in 1846, he was back at Rugeley, and there, at an inquest held on a man named Abley, it was proved that Palmer had incited the man to drink large quantities of brandy. There was talk of Palmer’s connection with Abley’s wife, and a suspicion that the affair was something more than a “lark.”
In this year Palmer went to London and joined Bartholomew’s Hospital. He obtained his diploma of surgeon in August, and returned to Rugeley as a medical practitioner. A year after he married Annie Brookes, a ward in Chancery, the illegitimate daughter of a Colonel Brookes, of the Indian Army, who had settled in Stafford, and had as housekeeper Mary Thornton, Annie Brookes’s mother. By his will Colonel Brookes left Annie Brookes (or Thornton) considerable property in money and houses, but his estate was administered in Chancery. The guardians were opposed to the marriage, but it took place in 1847 by order of the Court. One of the love-letters written by Palmer and read by Serjeant Shee during the trial appears elsewhere.
Whether Palmer intended or not at first to settle down to his profession, he was almost without practice in two or three years after his marriage. Horses and racing occupied him in place of medicine. He had means without practice, and, as Rugeley is a great horse-dealing centre, he was always familiar with men connected with horses and racing, and they were his chosen company. In 1853 he was in pecuniary difficulties due to his racing transactions, and was raising money on bills with moneylenders.
Withal he kept up an appearance of great outward respectability. Church-going sixty years ago was more than now one of its marks. In the diary, some extracts from which will be found in the Appendices, there are references in the year when he poisoned Cook to attendances at the Sacrament. It is not necessary to read into this church-going anything more specific than the radical falsity of Palmer’s character. Great formalism and profession of rigid theological dogma were the usual mental furniture of the middle classes of Palmer’s day. After all the disclosures of the trial Palmer used the customary pietistic phrases, and it was characteristic of the times that, after his conviction, his counsel, Serjeant Shee, sent him a beautifully bound copy of the Bible. The profession of religion, indeed, as a cloak to evil seems to have been purposeless, as he was notorious for seductions, as well as of bad odour in other details of his life.
One intrigue of illicit gallantry, which began probably in the lifetime of Mrs. Palmer, and was certainly going on at the time of Walter Palmer’s death, has a sinister connection with the death of Cook. It is not mentioned in any account published of Palmer. Jane Burgess, a young woman of respectable position living in Stafford in 1855, left, at the house where she resided, a bundle of thirty-four letters written to her by Palmer. They show that a practitioner in Stafford, chosen by Palmer, and described by him as one “who would be silent as death,” had performed an illegal operation. On the 13th of November the day notable in the trial, when “Polestar,” Cook’s racehorse, won at Shrewsbury, there is a letter to her from Palmer, which shows that she had made a demand for money as a condition of returning his letters. He was surprised, he wrote, to learn that she had never burned one of his letters. He says, “I cannot do what you ask; I should not mind giving £30 for the whole of them, though I am hard up at present.” Another letter is dated the 19th November, the day on which Palmer was accused of administering strychnia for the first time to Cook. He offers £40 “to split the difference.” On the 21st, the day on which, in the early morning, Cook had died, he sends the halves of eight £5 notes, and on the 24th the remainder. The letters were probably never returned, because the trouble threatened about Cook’s death became common talk in Rugeley and Stafford.
Shortly after his marriage began a series of suspicious deaths which were attributed to Palmer after investigation started into the circumstances attending the death of Cook. An illegitimate child he had by a Rugeley woman died after it had visited him. Mrs. Thornton, his mother-in-law, was persuaded to live at his house, and she died within a fortnight. Palmer acquired property from her by her death. In 1850 a Mr. Bladon, a racing man, stayed for several days with Palmer, who owed him £800 for bets. Bladon died in circumstances very like those attending Cook’s death, and Palmer buried him with the haste he attempted in the case of Cook, and he narrowly escaped a similar accusation.
In 1854 Palmer effected insurances to the amount of £13,000 on his wife’s life. Within six months she died much as Bladon had died, and as Cook was to die. Dr. Bamford, a medical man of eighty-two, whom Palmer seems to have hoodwinked into serving his purposes, certified the death of Mrs. Palmer, as he had done the death of Bladon, and as he was to certify a year later that of Cook. Palmer drew the insurance money from the offices concerned. They were influenced by the popular suspicions and rumours in Rugeley and in the sporting circles Palmer frequented, but they paid after some hesitation and suggestion of inquiry, and Palmer was freed from the most pressing of his liabilities. His diary contains this entry—“Sept. 29th (1854), Friday—My poor, dear Annie expired at 10 past 1.” Nine days after this—“Oct. 8th, Sunday—At church, Sacrament.” Nine months after his maidservant, Eliza Tharm, bore an illegitimate child to him. Within three months of his wife’s death Palmer, with the assistance of Pratt, the moneylender, whose claims had been met by the insurance on Mrs. Palmer’s life, was making proposals to various offices, amounting to £82,000, on the life of his brother Walter. Ultimately an insurance for £13,000 was effected, and the policy was lodged with Pratt to secure advances. After this the rest of Palmer’s life-history is directly connected with the story of the trial. The account we have given will suggest the, perhaps unprecedented, interest with which the trial was anticipated throughout the Midlands, and afterwards with what absorbed attention it was followed by all England as well as on the Continent.
I conclude this sketch by quoting a characteristic description by Sir James Stephen, who knew Palmer, had studied the criminal type, and himself presided at one of the most famous trials for poisoning. He says of Palmer—“His career supplied one of the proofs of a fact which many kind-hearted people seem to doubt, namely, the fact that such a thing as atrocious wickedness is consistent with good education, perfect sanity, and everything, in a word, which deprives men of all excuse for crime. Palmer was respectably brought up; apart from his extravagance and vice, he might have lived comfortably enough. He was a model of physical health and strength, and was courageous, determined, and energetic. No one ever suggested that there was even a disposition towards madness in him; yet he was as cruel, as treacherous, as greedy of money and pleasure, as brutally hard-hearted and sensual a wretch as it is possible even to imagine. If he had been the lowest and most ignorant ruffian that ever sprang from a long line of criminal ancestors, he could not have been worse than he was. He was by no means unlike Rush, Thurtell, and many other persons whom I have known. The fact that the world contains an appreciable number of wretches, who ought to be exterminated without mercy when an opportunity occurs, is not quite so generally understood as it ought to be—many common ways of thinking and feeling virtually deny it.”