Victor MacClure

“ As a monster in mass murder against Mary Ann Cotton I will set you the Baron Gilles de Rais, with his forty flogged, outraged, obscenely mutilated and slain children in one of his castles alone—his total of over two hundred children thus foully done to death. I will set you Gilles against anything that can be brought forward as a monster in cruelty among women.
Against the hypocrisy of Helene Jegado I will set you the sanctimonious Dr Pritchard, with the nauseating entry in his diary (quoted by Mr Roughead) recording the death of the wife he so cruelly murdered:
March 1865, 18, Saturday. ”

“ Badgered, not only by her husband but by her own relatives, scared no doubt, certainly unhappy, unable for politic reasons to appeal freely to her beloved Robin, to whom might Frances turn but the helpful Turner? And to whom, having turned to pretty Anne, was she likely to be led but again to the wizard of Lambeth?
Dr Forman had a heart for beauty in distress, but dissipating the ardency of an exigent husband was a difficult matter compared with attracting that of a negligent lover. It was also much more costly. ”

“ Even in these days, when justice is so much more seasoned with mercy to women murderers, a woman in Jean's case, with such strong evidence of premeditation against her, would only narrowly escape the hangman, if she escaped him at all. But that confession of trying to pretend weeping and being unable to find tears is a revelation. I can think of nothing more indicative of terror and misery in a woman than that she should want to cry and be unable to. Your genuinely hypocritical murderer, male as well as female, can always work up self-pity easily and induce the streaming eye. ”

“ Her husband had been a well-known medical man, one George Turner, a graduate of St John's College, Cambridge. He had been a protege of Queen Elizabeth. Dying, this elderly husband of Mistress Turner had left her but little in the way of worldly goods, but that little the fair young widow had all the wit to turn to good account. There was a house in Paternoster Row and a series of notebooks. Like many another physician of his time, George Turner had been a dabbler in more arts than that of medicine, an investigator in sciences other than pathology. ”

“ It is through you and the two Alexanders that I am brought to this shame, and must die for it. You all promised me you would do no murder, but, to my great surprise, I found the contrary."
She was, you will perceive, a determined liar. Condemned, she behaved with no fortitude. "I am a dead woman!" she cried, when brought back to Newgate. She wept and prayed, lied still more, pretended illness, and had fits of hysteria. They put her in the old condemned hold with a constant guard over her, for fear that she would attempt suicide. ”

“ One can well imagine with what fierceness she would have fought her case had she thought that by doing so she could have helped the man she loved.
But Frances Howard, no less than her accomplice Anne Turner, was the victim of a gross subversion of justice. That she was guilty of a cruel and determined attempt to poison Overbury is beyond question, and, being guilty of that, she was thoroughly deserving of the fate that overcame Anne Turner, but that at the last she was allowed to escape. Her confession, however, shackled Somerset at his trial. It put her at the King's mercy. ”

“ It is hard to imagine that the dozen years or so which they were to spend together could contain anything of happiness for them—she the confessed would-be poisoner, and he haunted by the memory of that betrayal of friendship which had begun the process of their double ruin. Frances Howard died in 1632, her husband twenty-three years later. The longer lease of life could have been no blessing to the fallen favourite. ”

“ Lady Essex was rich. She was also ardent in her desire. The game was too big for Anne to play single-handed. A real expert in cozening, a master of guile, was wanted to exploit the opportunity to its limit.
It is a curious phenomenon, and one that constantly recurs in the history of cozenage, how people who live by spoof fall victims so readily to spoofery. Anne Turner had brains. There is no doubt of it. Apart from that genuine and honest talent in costume-design which made her work acceptable to such an outstanding genius as Inigo Jones, she lived by guile. ”

“ Kostolo was about thirty years of age. He was tall, distinctly good-looking in an exotic sort of way, with his dark hair, complexion, and flashing eyes. He carried himself grandly, and was elegantly clad in a frac noir. Not quite, as Army men were supposed once to say, "the clean potato," it was easy enough to see that women of a kind would be his ready victims. It was plain, in the court, that Master Nicolas thought himself the hero of the occasion.
There was none of this flamboyance about the Widow Boursier. She was dressed in complete mourning, and covered her face with a handkerchief. ”

“ Since he valued the friendship of that honest man so little as to consort in secret with his enemies, he was knave enough to have been party to the betrayal. Knave or fool—what does it matter? He was so much of both that, in dread of what Sir Thomas might say or do to thwart the nullity suit, he let his friend rot in the Tower for months on end, let him sicken and nearly die several times, without a move to free him. He did this to the man who had trusted him implicitly, a man that—to adapt Overbury's own words from his last poignant letter to Rochester—he had "more cause to love... ”

“ Does one pick up in a secondhand bookshop a pamphlet giving a verbatim report of a trial in which a woman is the central figure, and does one flatter oneself that the find is unique, and therefore providing of fresh fields, it is almost inevitable that one will discover, or rediscover, that the case has already been put to bed by Mr Roughead in his inimitable manner. What a nose the man has! What noses all these rechauffeurs of crime possess! ”

“ If Rochester had been frank with his friend, if, on the ground of their friendship, he had appealed to him to set aside his prejudice, it might well have been that the tragedy which ensued would have been averted. Enough evidence remains to this day of Overbury's kindness for Robert Carr, there is enough proof of the man's abounding resource and wit, to give warrant for belief that he would have had the will, as he certainly had the ability, to help his friend. Overbury was one of the brightest intelligences of his age. ”

“ On the death of Cecil the real contenders for the vacant office of First Secretary of State—the highest office in the land—were not the wily Northampton and the relatively unintelligent Rochester, but the subtle Northampton and the quite as subtle, and perhaps more spacious-minded, Thomas Overbury. There was, it will be apprehended, a possible weakness on the Overbury side. The gemel-chain, like that of many links, is merely as strong as its weakest member. Overbury had no approach to the King save through the King's favourite. ”

“ But why should we be more shocked by the commission of a crime by a woman than by a man—even the cruellest of crimes? Take the male and female in feral creation, and there is nothing to choose between them in the matter of cruelty. The lion and the lioness both live by murder, and until gravidity makes her slow for the chase the breeding female is by all accounts the more dangerous. ”

“ Nowadays we are quite certain that our experts in medical jurisprudence know all there is to know about arsenical poisoning. What are the chances, however, in spite of our apparently well-founded faith, that some bristle-headed local chemist with a fighting chin will not spring up at an arsenic-poisoning trial and, with new facts about the substance, blow to pieces the cocksure evidence of the leading expert in pathology? It may seem impossible that such a thing can ever happen again—a mistake regarding the action of arsenic on the human body. ”

“ But I have come almost by accident on the word I need to compare Mary Ann Cotton with Jegado. The Bretonne, creeping about her native province leaving death in her track, with her piety, her hypocrisy, her enjoyment of her own cruelty, is sinister and repellent. But Mary Ann, moving from mate to mate and farrowing from each, then savaging both them and the litter, has a musty sowishness that the Bretonne misses. Both foul, yes. But we needn't, we islanders, do any Jingo business in setting Mary Ann against Helene. ”

“ It is entirely probable that in linking up with Northampton Rochester had no mind to injure his friend. The bait was the woman he loved. Without Northampton's aid the nullity suit could not be put forward, and without the annulment there could be no marriage for him with Frances Howard. But he had no sooner joined with Northampton than the very processes against which Overbury had warned him were begun. Rochester was trapped, and with him Overbury. ”

“ When, some time later, the Prince's faithful valet Manoury made mention of the fact that the Prince had wanted to put the width of the country between himself and his mistress, Sophie first tried to put the fear of Louis-Philippe into the man, then, finding he was not to be silenced that way, tried to buy him with a promise of employment.
It is beyond question that the Prince de Conde was murdered. He was murdered in a wing of the chateau in which he was hemmed in on all sides by Sophie's creatures. It is impossible that Sophie was not privy, at the least, to the deed. ”

“ I have a fancy also that in some cases of murder by poison, not only by women, the murderer has been able to dramatize herself or himself ahead as a tender, noble, and self-sacrificing attendant upon the victim. No need here, I think, to number the cases where the ministrations of murderers to their victims have aroused the almost tearful admiration of beholders. ”

“ I am conscious that in arguing against the "more deadly than the male" conception of the woman criminal I am perhaps doing my book no great service. It might work for its greater popularity if I argued the other way, making out that the subjects I have chosen were monsters of brutality, with arms up to the shoulders in blood, that they were prodigies of iniquity and cunning, without bowels, steeped in hypocrisy, facinorous to a degree never surpassed or even equalled by evil men. ”

“ But about the time when Lady Essex finally parted with her husband Cecil died, depriving England of her keenest brain and the staunchest heart in her causes. If there had been no Rochester the likeliest man in the kingdom to succeed to the power and offices of Cecil would have been the Earl of Northampton, uncle of Lord Suffolk, who was the father of Lady Essex. ”

“ And since a look of innocence and the bloom of youth may, and very often do, appear on the faces of individuals who are far from being innocent or even young, it may well be that Sophie in 1810, servant-maid in a brothel though she was, still kept a look of country freshness and health, unjaded enough to whet the dulled appetence of a bagnio-haunting old rip. ”

“ If there is no great indication of the beauty which so many poets shed ink over there is less promise of the dire determination which was to pursue a man's life with cruel poisons over several months. It is, however, a narrow little face, and there is a tight-liddedness about the eyes which in an older woman might indicate the bigot. Bigot she proved herself to be, if it be bigotry in a woman to love a man with an intensity that will not stop at murder in order to win him. That is the one thing that may be said for Frances Howard. She did love Robert Carr. ”

“ Her crime was a bad one, much more deliberate than many that, in the same age, took women of lower rank in life than Jean to the crueller end of the stake. In the several days during which she was sending for Weir, but failing to have speech with him, she had time to review her intention of having her husband murdered. If the nurse was the prime mover in the plot Jean was an unrelenting abettor. It may have been in her calculations before, as well as after, the deed itself that the interest of her father and family at Court would save her, should the deed have come to light as murder. ”

“ There is, at root, no case of murder proved and accepted as such which does not contain its points of interest for the criminological writer. There is, indeed, many a case, not only of murder but of lesser crime, that has failed to attract a lot of attention, but that yet, in affording matter for the student of crime and criminal psychology, surpasses others which, very often because there has been nothing of greater public moment at the time, were boomed by the Press into the prominence of causes celebres. ”

“ Overbury is hardly to be blamed if he came to a resolution to be revenged on his one-time friend by bringing him to utter ruin. King James had been so busy in the Essex nullity suit, had gone to such lengths to carry it through, that if it could be wrecked by the production of the true facts he would be bound to sacrifice Rochester to save his own face. ”

“ The Earl of Essex, now almost come to man's estate, arrived to take up the position which his rank entitled him to expect in the Court, and to assume the responsibilities and rights which, he fancied, belonged to him as a married man. In respect of the latter part of his intention he immediately found himself balked. His wife, perhaps all the deeper in love with Rochester for this threat to their happiness, declared that she had no mind to be held by the marriage forced on her in infancy, and begged her husband to agree to its annulment. ”