The Damnation of John Donellan (31 page)

John Donellan.

This little booklet was priced at sixpence. The version written with Inge was priced at 3s. 6d. The first was printed by Wenmans in Fleet Street; the second by John Bell.

There seems to have been some competition between the two lawyers; Webb's booklet is the only one to bear Donellan's seal of approval, and Donellan's script hints that he was dissatisfied
with the behaviour of Inge. It is not surprising that the two men whose task it had been to represent Donellan subsequently fought over who had done the better job, once the newspapers began publicly to criticise them. (Inge was listed as coroner and town clerk of Warwick in 1791, so perhaps he moved on to higher things in recognition that he had won this particular contest for public approval.)

Donellan laboured all Sunday to complete his case for his
Defence
, unaware of how his own solicitors would fight over the text once he was dead.

On the afternoon of Sunday 1 April, the gaoler came to tell Donellan what had been arranged for the following morning. On hearing that his body would be taken down after the hanging and put into a rough ‘shell' and brought back to the gaol, Donellan asked him to arrange immediately for a black coffin with black nails.

Perhaps Donellan was waiting for an eleventh-hour reprieve during this long, lonely day.

It was, after all, common for a defendant to be convicted and then pardoned even after a sentence had been pronounced. Between 1660 and 1800, only about 30 per cent of those convicted of capital offences were actually executed. Some were transported; others were pardoned as a result of character witnesses; sometimes, evidence that the perpetrator was totally repentant and unlikely to commit further crimes, or a rumour that the jury had been prejudiced, were enough to overturn the sentence. A prominent judge like Buller had it entirely in his power to offer a pardon if he disagreed with the jury's verdict, the pardon usually being conditional on transportation. Perhaps Donellan was even waiting for a confession from Anna Maria, or the news that his young wife had successfully pleaded on his behalf, presented new evidence of some kind and begged for the return of the father of her two small children?

But Theodosia made no such plea. Anna Maria Boughton did not make a confession. And Donellan sat down that evening to write his bitter, angry goodbye to his wife.

As the evening drew on, the gaoler observed Donellan praying ‘with great apparent fervency'. When he had finished he seemed
composed, and asked after several of his friends. ‘I suppose,' he added, ‘there will be a vast throng of people to see me executed.'

At seven o'clock on the morning of Monday 2 April, Donellan emerged from Warwick Gaol dressed in deep mourning, and stepped into a coach to be transported to the scaffold.

His last reported words inside the gaol were to the Reverend Musson, chaplain to the prisoners. The revelation, given almost as an aside, is breathtaking.

Donellan told Musson, perhaps at a prompting from the cleric to finally confess, that he had indeed distilled laurel water in the still at Lawford Hall. Who knows why he kept this secret through the long months since September? Perhaps because he knew it would be seized upon as incontrovertible proof of his having poisoned Theodosius – although he maintained now that it had only been to make a lotion to bathe his feet. A friend had given him a book,
Flora
by a Dr Mortimer, he said, and he admitted now to tearing a page from it, but only to refer to while he was making the mixture. Lady Boughton, he added, had used it, too, and found it effective. That Anna Maria Boughton had been given a mixture of laurel water by Donellan had never been mentioned in court.

Although there was a gallows close to the gaol, the use of a coach suggests that Donellan was taken further afield, perhaps to Gibbet Hill, on the road to Rugby. This is a strong possibility, as the hangman would have had other executions to perform that day in other towns in the area and he may have had to leave quickly.

Donellan's coach was followed by a hearse, and the sheriff's officers all dressed in mourning black. The
Nottinghamshire Gazette
reported that on the way to the execution Donellan kept putting his head out of the coach and protesting to the following crowds that he was innocent. He was, he told them, a victim of his mother-in-law's ‘diabolical artifice'. Several times along the road, Donellan seems to have lost control of himself in his pleas to the crowds, begging them to join in prayer with him. The newspaper article recorded that there was a ‘wildness in his manner that bore the marks of insanity'.

Eventually, the coach arrived at the place of execution; the journey from Warwick Gaol to Gibbet Hill would have taken about half an hour. The land all around Gibbet Hill sloped away to reveal rolling farmland beyond and, somewhere in the far distance across the fields to the east, Lawford Hall. If Donellan had become frantic and panicked in the coach, he was the picture of calm now, seemingly resigned to his fate. He took just a few steps up the ladder to the scaffold. Then he abruptly stopped; but instead of trying to go back down, he began to pray.

The crowd pressed forward. Donellan's hesitation lasted some time; perhaps, as well as praying, he was steeling himself against what was to come, and willing himself not to stumble. Then he negotiated the last few rungs of the ladder. Standing on the scaffold, he listened to the address of the cleric there ‘with the greatest appearance of devotion', his head bowed and his hands clasped.

Once the priest was finished, Donellan turned to the waiting crowd, and declaimed: ‘As I am about to appear before God, I am innocent of the crime for which I am about to suffer.'

The noose was put around his neck and he was pushed from the platform. A more humane method of hanging, using a trapdoor whose drop would hopefully break the neck of the victim, was yet to be instituted: hanging in 1781 was a prolonged agony of strangulation. Often friends or relatives would rush to the scaffold and pull downwards on the victim's legs to end their suffering.

But no one came to Donellan's aid. He hung for thirty minutes before his body was cut down.

‘Title and principal part of the family estates devolve to the late
Shukburgh Boughton Esq.; the residue, to a very considerable
amount, passes in the female line to Theodosia, wife of John
Donellan.'

Gentleman's Magazine
, 30 August 1780

DONELLAN WENT TO HIS DEATH
lonely and unsupported; but in the weeks that followed, many voices were raised in his defence. Newspapers that had previously whipped up public opinion against him now published criticisms of the way that the trial had been conducted. It was the
Northampton Mercury
which devoted the most space to an account of Donellan's life, a report of the trial and, on 30 April, an article on how the defence barrister, Newnham, had failed his client. They listed four mistakes in particular: that Newnham had not cross-examined Bucknill and elicited the information that Donellan had asked him to stay on the afternoon of Theodosius's funeral ‘in the presence of upwards thirty witnesses'; that he had not called upon other people who were prepared to say that Theodosius's father had died in the same abrupt convulsions and had ‘looked the same' after his death as his son; that he had not cross-examined William Crofts, who had said that Donellan
had pulled at Anna Maria's sleeve during her deposition to the coroner; and that he did not cross-examine Anna Maria about Donellan advising Theodosius to keep his medicine unlocked on the chimney shelf in his room.

By its edition of 7 May, the
Mercury's
outrage had increased. It revealed that Donellan had made a will in August 1777 which, it claimed, prevented him from benefiting from Theodosius's estate, and castigated Newnham for not producing it. It fumed that Newnham had not cross-examined Powell, and it questioned the fact that Francis Amos, who had no real evidence against Donellan, had not made a deposition to the coroner. (This may be a case of mistaken identity: it was William Frost who was the best witness for Donellan.)

Two other publications also made a dramatic case against Donellan's convictions. The first was Donellan's own written
Defence
, published by Inge and Webb, in the introduction of which they wrote that they intended to ‘justify our conduct … since the trial it has been universally believed that the defence made for the unfortunate sufferer on the trial was a very imperfect one, and that his conviction as chiefly imputable to the neglect of his lawyers.' However, if this was a justification of themselves by the lawyers, it failed miserably, only going to prove just how much useful evidence had been ignored at the trial.

Attached to the end of Donellan's own words was an article whose vociferous, indignant tone fanned the flames of outrage even higher. Donellan's dying words had been astonishing – restrained, patient and respectful while nevertheless casting Anna Maria in a suspiciously bad light – but the accusations in the article that followed, by a ‘gentleman who has no personal motives', were sensational.

James Stephen was revealed as the author of the article by his grandson, James Fitzjames Stephen, some eighty years later. He was only twenty-two years old when he sprang to Donellan's defence; brought up in a debtors' prison because of his father's debts, he was already earning a reputation for a brilliant mind and an irascible temper. His zeal for the underdog never left him; he
was to become one of the leading members of the Anti-Slavery Society and was appointed Master of Chancery, marrying William Wilberforce's sister in 1800 and being elected as an MP eight years later. In his introduction to the article, Stephen said that he had not known Donellan at all, but, on hearing the case against him, he had been moved to write. ‘Public justice is in the interest of every man,' he said; he also hinted that Donellan had ‘fallen victim to the laws of his country' instead of being protected by them; and that it was the duty of every member of society to make amends by trying to restore Donellan's name and the honour of his family.

Strong stuff. It would have infuriated Buller, not to mention the solicitors involved on both sides, whom Stephen claimed he did know. Nor could his account have endeared him to the witnesses, especially the medics. Bucknill, he said, was ‘adventurous – our modern Hippocrates'; he was ‘quite a youth, driven by foolhardiness and ambition', and his whole account against Donellan had been invented through injured pride – Donellan, Stephen said, had smiled to himself when Bucknill announced that he would not be put off by the stench of the corpse because ‘it would be a posy to him'.

Rattray's account was no better. The doctor was unnecessarily ghoulish – ‘I shall not transcribe his account as the reader may not have dined' – while his conclusions at the open-air autopsy were ludicrously lame: ‘ … after opening the stomach, thorax etc. after long deliberation [he] was able to satisfy the whole world that the body had every appearance of putrefaction having been dead eleven days in very hot weather.' The doctor's memory was treacherous, too; Rattray had forgotten to mention the blood in the chest cavity, and the conclusions he drew from his animal experiments had been ‘totally unwarrantable'. He was not so much a doctor as an ‘oracle', Stephen observed sarcastically, an ‘eternal monument to medical fame' who, when forced to admit the impossibility of his evidence, had answered, ‘Nothing is impossible under God.' And in referring to Rattray's claim that his gums had bled after smelling the corpse, Stephen dismissed him as a hypochondriac.

Stephen's real fire, however, was reserved for Anna Maria and
what he perceived the unnecessarily lenient way in which she had been treated by the court. She was ‘full of inconsistencies', he said, ‘grossly erroneous' and ‘highly improbable'. Her memory had been supplanted by the ‘chimera of suspicion' and her entire evidence was based on ‘conjectures founded on uncertainty and error'. He ended by saying that it would be charitable to claim that ‘she could remember nothing with precision'.

Sir Justice Buller did not escape Stephen's contempt either, particularly for the way that he had dismissed one of the foremost authorities in the land, John Hunter, by equating his expertise with that of lowly country doctors with no experience of dissection. It had been Buller's duty, Stephen contended, to tell the jury of the ‘great weight' that should have been attached to Hunter's observations.

Persuasive though Stephen's arguments may have been, they did not apparently convince the man who exposed his authorship of the article, his own grandson, James Fitzjames Stephen.
¹
In an essay written in 1863, having asked the reader to suppose that ‘Mrs Donellan was the criminal and [Donellan's] conduct was intended to screen her … the mere possibility ought to have been reason to suspend [the jury's] judgement', he then retracted his apparent support of his grandfather and decided that Donellan was guilty because he had motive, means and opportunity.

Stephen's grandson was not alone in thinking that Donellan was guilty. After the initial furore had died away, Donellan became forever after the man who had murdered his brother-in-law: a simple trawl of the internet today shows that to be the case. As time went on, his guilt began to be regarded as absolute fact.

But what became of Anna Maria, Theodosia and Lawford Hall after Donellan died? And what happened to his children, John and Maria?

It does not appear that Theodosia ever took her children back to live permanently with their grandmother in Lawford Hall. Anna Maria was alone there after the trial, so alone that she asked Edward Boughton, now the Eighth Baronet, if his sister Anne
would like to be her companion.
²
Edward did not think much of the idea, explaining that Anne's temper was ‘uncomfortable' – but he may well have been protecting Anne's tendency to depression from the gloomy atmosphere at the Hall.
³
Edward, in any case, was in no mood to help Anna Maria. He had just paid part of the bill for the prosecuting lawyers, complaining to his brother Charles that ‘expences of the Prosecution come very high'.
⁴
The cost of the trial had eaten up almost all of the money that he had expected to receive from Theodosius's estate, he grumbled. ‘Such is the glorious uncertainty of English law,' he went on, having found out that Theodosia was set to inherit most of the fortune and that ‘I am entitled only to Rents from the day of Theodosius's death.'