The Damnation of John Donellan (17 page)

It was his great chance at reprieve, and he acted with the absolute conviction of an innocent man. Unless, of course, he was so utterly in command of the situation that he had worked out how to throw the blame on to Anna Maria at the very moment of her death. It is conceivable that his letter to Theodosia and the request to bring Sir William Wheler to Lawford Hall were part of a coldly calculating smokescreen – a double bluff.

However, Anna Maria Boughton did not die. She was very ill, but it is not known whether this was as a result of an unsuccessful poisoning, an unsuccessful suicide attempt or an unsuccessful murder attempt by someone at the Hall. Indeed, it is not even known whether she ingested poison. Poison, illness, fever – whatever the cause of her illness, Anna Maria survived.

The family lawyer, Caldecott, who was fond of adding a paragraph of gossip as a postscript to his business letters to the Shukburgh branch of the family, wrote to Edward Boughton on 22 December 1780 that Lady Boughton had had a fever and been ‘considerably ill' for several days. He added cryptically: ‘The loss of her would have been a fortunate circumstance for Donellan as it would probably prevent his conviction.'
⁶

But Caldecott's brief note gives another piece of news which is utterly revealing about the situation between mother and daughter: ‘Mrs Donellan is gone to live in Northampton.' Theodosia had evidently believed everything Donellan had told her, and obeyed his instructions. Despite her mother's dangerous illness, and although she had two small children to look after, Theodosia had moved out of Lawford Hall.

Soon after her recovery, Anna Maria made her will on 10 February 1781. It is an astonishing document, seething with bitterness towards her daughter.

‘I, Dame Anna Maria Boughton of Lawford Hall,' it begins, ‘seriously contemplating the frailty and uncertainty of human life …'

Her bequests were as follows.

To her ‘cousin Hannah King of Northampton', and to the daughters of two local vicars, she left £100 (£6,200 in today's money). To the churchwardens and minister of Newbold church she left £60 (£3,770) for the poorest inhabitants of the parish ‘on St Thomas Day annually and forever'. She also left £40 (£2,500) to the poor of Adstone in Northamptonshire ‘annually and forever'. To Hannah Rye (her brother's daughter) she left £648 (£41,000) – the only part of her estate inherited from her mother, and part of her
‘jointure' which she was free to dispose of. Hannah was also left all of Anna Maria's furniture, jewellery, porcelain, books, paintings, clothes and household linens, and indeed ‘all my goods, chattels, effects and Personal Effects whatsoever'. By contrast, Theodosia received ‘the sum of one shilling only' and her two children, Anna Maria's own grandchildren, nothing at all.

At some point in the future – the alteration is undated – Anna Maria thought better of this vengeful and humiliating document. Without recourse to a solicitor, in private, she wrote across the bottom next to her original signature:

‘This will I canceld myself, Anna Boughton.'

But she did not destroy it. She kept a copy; and in due course the will, in all its latent fury, passed into the Boughton archives.
⁷

The date of the trial was set for 30 March.

But Donellan was not always calm and reasonable during the remainder of his imprisonment. The
Northampton Mercury
of 9 April 1781 reported that he had become drunk on several occasions, and when the gaoler had tried to take him back to his room, Donellan had told him, ‘In fifteen months I will be High Sheriff of the County, and then I will turn you out of office.' In the same article, the gaoler (not named, but presumably Roe) had also maintained that Donellan was so convinced that he would be found innocent that he had made an arrangement to meet a friend in London the day after his trial.

One other very telling incident was reported only years later, in 1883, by James Fitzjames Stephen, in an article he wrote about his grandfather James Stephen, one of the leading members of the Anti-Slavery Society, who as a young man of twenty-two had written a very lengthy article condemning the unfairness of Donellan's trial and the way in which it had been conducted. We will return to James Stephen's account later; but his grandson wrote:

My grandfather was introduced to Donellan's attorney, who professed to Donellan to retain Mr Dunning; he referred the attorney to Mrs Donellan for authority to incur the necessary
expense. Mrs Donellan said she thought it needless to pay so high a fee. When the attorney reported this to Donellan, he burst into a rage and cried passionately, ‘And who got it for her!' Then, seeing that he had committed himself, he suddenly stopped … the story itself is hearsay and more than a hundred years old.

If reported correctly – and the writer admits that the account is unsubstantiated – was this simply a petulant outburst that Donellan had been denied the best? (Dunning was the best that money could buy.) Or did this speak of something more?

Donellan had ‘got it for her' – in other words, he got the fortune for his wife. But by accident, design, or on command?

Before the trial began, John Donellan wrote a very detailed and lengthy account of his relationship with the Boughton family for his solicitors, Inge and Webb, for the use of his defending team in court. It was published in April 1781 at Donellan's request, together with additions he had made the day after the trial. In its published form it was entitled
A Defence and Substance of the Trial of John Donellan, Esq. … Founded on the case solemnly attested by the Sufferer after his Conviction
. In it he also covered events prior to Theodosius's death, the morning of the death, and what happened in the following days and while he was in prison.

The information which he provided, if true, was to a large extent ignored by his counsels. The explanation they gave after the trial for doing this was that Donellan's witnesses – servants and tradesmen – were not reliable or impressive enough to bring to court.

The counsels' blatant misuse or lack of use of pertinent information, however – especially where it contradicted Anna Maria's version of events – is extraordinary.

There is some evidence that, to his friends, Donellan was more pessimistic about the local people, although still hoping for a positive outcome to the trial. Captain Murphy's
Life of Captain Donellan
printed a letter supposedly from Donellan to a friend, dated Saturday 24 March. It reads:

I expected you down here yesterday as you promised; but not seeing you I have been very uneasy. Let nothing prevent you from setting off immediately, if this letter reaches you in London, and pray bring — with you. The people here are as violent as ever: their cruelty to me is not to be accounted for, as I never injured a single person in the country since I first came into it. However, their malice will be of no avail. As soon as the trial is over, I will open your eyes on the whole of the unhappy business, and which will satisfy you on the particular matter you mentioned in your last.

Assuredly yours,

John Donellan.

The day before the trial, Edward Boughton returned to Warwick and wrote to his brother Charles:

Donellan's trial comes on tomorrow and tis general opinion that he will be found guilty. The Grand Jury found the bill on hearing but a small part of the evidence, and the Judge in his Charge express'd himself concerning circumstantial evidence in a manner which was thought unfavourable to Donellan … I really think that the whole forms such a mass of evidence as leaves in my mind little doubt of his conviction.

He then went on to reveal some compelling new evidence:

Some additional discoveries have of late been made and one in particular of great importance which has hitherto been kept secret to prevent Donellan getting intelligence of it. Lady Boughton's description of the Dose that it smelt like the Taste of Bitter Almonds suggested to the Surgeon that it must have been prepared from a Distillation of Laurel.
⁸

He went on to describe a still which had been found in John Donellan's bedroom; its discovery would play a telling role in the hours to come.

Although not revealed at the trial itself, a further report on Donellan's interest in the poison distilled from laurel leaves would surface some time later. In
The Lives of Twelve Eminent Judges
(1846) William Townsend reported that ‘In Donnellan's [
sic
] library there happened to be a single number of “Philosophical Transaction” and of this single number the leaves had been cut in only one place, and this place happened to contain an account of the making of laurel water by distillation.'

However, all this lay in the future.

As Donellan prepared himself for the trial the next day his mood and confidence were, reported the gaoler, buoyant. He was, after all, planning to go to London the day after the trial. Spectators would say how calm he was in court. As far as he was concerned, of course, he had given a complete refutation of Anna Maria's evidence in his prepared notes for counsel; he would have expected that they would use them to rapidly secure his release.

Donellan knew of various rumours that he had tried to kill Theodosius before – the
Nottinghamshire Gazette
of 14 April confirmed that it was ‘publicly said in the very week of the trial that Captain Donellan had made repeated attempts on Sir Theodosius's life'; and that ‘the popular odium was excited against him to an unprecedented degree'.
⁹
But he also knew that there was nothing concrete to support the accusation held against him. Every piece of evidence was circumstantial.

The case crucially, and tenuously, rested on Anna Maria Boughton's account; in fact, as S. M. Phillips wrote nearly a century later in
Famous Cases of Circumstantial Evidence
: ‘the argument turned upon the breath, the smell of a woman, distracted at that moment with the loss of her son, and ready to ascribe that evil to the first thing that came her way.'
¹⁰

‘I do not care to speak ill of any man behind his back; but I believe the gentleman was an attorney.'

Dr Johnson

30
MARCH
1781, the date of John Donellan's trial at Warwick Assizes, was exactly seven months to the day after Theodosius Boughton had died. The accused was brought the few yards from the gaol into one of the two imposing courtrooms that still stand today: octagonal rooms that had been completed just thirteen years before, in 1758.
¹

One of Donellan's friends from London, William Walsh, accompanied him into the court and proceeded to advise him on court procedure. Not that Donellan would have welcomed it. Walsh, who had begun life as a valet to Philip Stanhope, the illegitimate son of Lord Chesterfield, and finished it as a commissioner in the Custom House, was described by the publisher Henry Colburn in 1828 as ‘a ready-made joke'. However, Colburn went on to comment: ‘Walsh had been well acquainted with Donellan and attended him with great kindness from the gaol to the Court House.' Once in the court, however, Walsh's kindness wore thin; he pointed out the jurors, the lawyers and the crowds, and finished with the judge,
adding jauntily, ‘The judge will put on a black cap and sentence you to be hanged.' The story of Walsh's cheerful tactlessness was to be told in his dining club for years afterwards.

Most criminal prosecutions at this time were by jury trial. Jurymen were just that – men; no women were allowed. Ownership of property was considered a good qualification for a juror, although members of the aristocracy were never chosen. Farmers, artisans and tradesmen were typical jurors, their register compiled annually by the county under the supervision of the Justices of the Peace. Not that owning property in itself automatically entitled a man to be a juror; in neighbouring Northamptonshire in the 1770s, only about ten people per thousand head of population were eligible to be jurors. Three-quarters of adult males were deemed too poor to qualify, whether they owned land or not.

Consequently, John Donellan would have faced a jury of local men who had made a considerable amount of money from their own land, tenant farms or businesses. As the Boughtons and their friends owned much of the local land on which the tenant farmers flourished, and as local tradesmen were to an extent dependent on aristocratic patronage, it is likely that most of the jurors either had the Boughtons and their contacts as landlords, or were at least anxious not to offend them (despite any protests to the contrary).
²

It was also well known that the selection of jurors could be tampered with by neglecting to keep up a current list of freeholders; judges like Baptist Nunn in the 1720s regularly scrutinised and altered lists of jurors with the connivance of the under-sheriffs. The seven-month gap between Theodosius's death and Donellan's trial allowed ample time for the jurors selected to be approved by local JPs. The Justices of the Peace were also landed gentlemen; from 1732 JPs had to have an estate of £100 (£8,500) a year.

Standing in the dock, Donellan would also have been uncomfortably aware of the punitive nature of English law; despite the reforming politician William Eden arguing for fewer capital crimes in his
Principles of Penal Punishment
in 1771, no less than 240 offences carried the death penalty. This had been enforced by the Waltham Black Act of 1723, which had added fifty new capital offences; and
in 1781 a man, woman or child could be hanged for offences ranging from murder and highway robbery to the seemingly absurd ‘being in the company of gypsies for more than a month', writing a threatening letter, or, in the cases of children aged seven to fourteen, simply having ‘evidence of malice'.

Not all death sentences, however, were carried out – less than 30 per cent – yet being condemned to the pillory could be equally bad. Less than a week after Donellan's trial, it was reported in the
Morning Chronicle
and
London Advertiser
that 20,000 people attacked two men put in the pillory for homosexual acts.
³
It was only a year since branding had been abolished; it would be another ten before the execution of women by burning would be outlawed, and not until 1817 was the public flogging of women stopped. The court at Warwick did not flinch from imposing the severest penalties. In the 1780s, those hanged there included ‘Elizabeth Green, for stealing 2 guineas, aged 24', ‘Sam Smith for house-breaking, aged 17' and ‘Sam Packwood, for shop-lifting'.