The Damnation of John Donellan (36 page)

Guilty, said the
Dublin University Magazine
in 1869, although ‘The prisoner was found guilty upon a species of evidence the most dangerous, fallacious and inconclusive.'

Guilty, said William Bentham in 1801 in
The Baronetage of England
: ‘little doubt has been entertained of his actual guilt'.

‘The public have long since acquiesced in the justice of Donellan's sentence,' agreed the Cornish clergyman Richard Polwhele in 1831, reviewing the life of Justice Buller.

Although still a young man when he died, John Donellan had lived several lives, in each of which ran a thread of contradiction or duality. He was an ‘almost man', coming close to success in all he attempted, but each time failing dramatically.

His military career was sponsored by his father even though Donellan was illegitimate; bastard sons could, and did, rise to greatness in the Georgian world. But there would never be that sense of absolute belonging, of a rightful place. The boy might flourish by his own talents, but he would never be a true family member.

Donellan's army career was steady, but his posting to the East India Company put him in a curious position, poised between serving the Crown and rampant commercialism. Britain was involved in the noble cause of securing the vast wealth of India for itself, and its fighting men did the same. A proportion of the spoils was considered payment, and a blind eye was turned; Donellan's mistake was in stepping out from the shadows, boasting of having been some kind of secret agent and sporting a diamond ring that earned him the nickname ‘Diamond Donellan'. He drew a picture of himself as a wounded hero in every sense of the word; but, having offended his commanding officer, his dismissal was inevitable. A good soldier but a poor team player, Donellan's contradictions cost him his job.

In London as Master of Ceremonies at the Pantheon, Donellan
inhabited two worlds but was not wholly in either of them. He was supposedly in charge of it; but he failed to stop women like Sophia Baddeley entering and causing a scandal. He was, by all accounts, handsome, although he was small and slight. He dressed well and gambled frequently, but he was also short of money.

In his relationship with Theodosia Boughton the contradictions continue. He seemed to have genuine feeling for her and their children, but his last letter from Warwick suggests that he had kept contact with his London mistress. He moved into Lawford Hall at the request of Anna Maria Boughton and ran the household effectively, but he was not its true master, and never would be while Theodosius was alive.

He lived under the same roof as his mother-in-law, and outwardly at least she was influenced by him and followed his suggestions; but their seemingly good relationship was a lie. Donellan made no bones about his disgust for Anna Maria and she in return was prepared to testify against him. Was the final contradiction – the prospect of living at Lawford, but bowing and scraping to a selfish boy – too much to bear for John Donellan? Did he see a way out of yet another position of insecurity? Perhaps the prospect of finally and incontrovertibly being master of all he surveyed was just too much of a temptation.

However, despite the strains of his various occupations in life, Donellan had never betrayed a truly vicious streak. He had lost his temper apparently more than once with Theodosius, and he was – according to Anna Maria – a bully around the house. But she never accused him of being physically violent or cruel. He was kind and affectionate to his children, and spent time with them. There had been no stories in London of his brawling or threatening anyone: rather the reverse, as it was his good nature and easy way with people that had landed him the job as Master of Ceremonies at the Pantheon.

If he lost his temper now and again with a spoiled womaniser like Theodosius and ‘not a very intellectual woman' like Anna Maria, it was not really surprising. He had been deceitful in the past perhaps; a storyteller, a romancer. He had taken advantage
of Theodosia. But nothing in his
Defence
document smacks of arrogance or aggression, let alone contempt for human life. It reads well; it sounds measured, intelligent and convincing. But then perhaps that above all was Donellan's one real skill: to tell a good story.

In his dealings with the Armenian merchants in India, it could be imagined how a more cunning and aggressive man could have stolen more while retaining both his reputation and a good relationship with his seniors. His rise further through the ranks was prevented because he lacked a true killer instinct. He complained publicly at being mistreated instead of playing the system; he grovelled to the very man, Colonel Forde, whom he had insulted, and then told the sordid story all over London when he found himself dismissed.

Donellan always seems to have been the man standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had tenacity and courage and a charm that won over women – a charm so much more attractive than the low-life brawling behaviour of Theodosius Boughton; but he never seemed to be able to follow through. He won friends, but he did not influence them; he occupied positions of authority but found himself flouted in them; he married an heiress, but was never accepted into the aristocracy.

More than anything else, Donellan's story is that of a man looking in on a world that he could never really enter. His testimonies both before the Board of Trustees of the East India Company and at his own murder trial smack of a man thwarted and misrepresented. Something in his character attracted criticism – jealousy, perhaps. And when he drew opposition, he drew it in a big way.

That the aristocratic ranks of rural Warwickshire closed against Donellan is certain. Privilege, rank and history were the bedrock upon which that society rested; the rise of the common man and the idea of a socialist society were far in the future. An ordinary person might become rich, but they would always be ‘of the lower orders'. The nobility owned the land, ran society, ran government. Even criminals in the upper ranks of society could claim ‘the privilege of rank' in appealing against sentences against them.

It is impossible to know if John Donellan killed Theodosius
Boughton. But what it is possible to say is that his conviction for the crime was thoroughly unsound.

In time, Donellan's passionate last pleas of innocence faded into obscurity; the details of the case, in all its faults, were forgotten. When the history books were written, Donellan was forever represented as the man who poisoned his brother-in-law.

His wife Theodosia became the matriarch of a long and distinguished line, but Donellan's children vanished. Their deaths are especially poignant. Whatever dreams John Donellan might have had for them, whatever he might have done to secure their future, they both died young – John as a lowly young curate in rented rooms and Maria as a spinster in a spa town, separated from her family. It is not known if either death was a suicide; it seems more likely that both were due to that massive killer of the young in the nineteenth century, tuberculosis.

Most forgotten of all is the young man around whom the whole drama circulated. Theodosius Boughton also had an unrealised future. He might have matured into a man like William Boughton, ‘greater in worth than pedigree', a man of ‘steady and untainted principle'. With the failings of his youth behind him, he too might have become a Member of Parliament like William, and the county's representative of the monarch as High Sheriff. He might have transcended the reputation of his grandfather and outshone his father; he might have shaken off the recent family histories of mistresses and drunkenness and taken the Boughtons back to the glory days of influence at Court.

But as it is, Theodosius remains forever pinned in place as a kind of laboratory specimen: dissected in public in almost every way possible. The impression of Theodosius we are left with is not the thoughtful-looking, even insipid boy peering out of the engraving which is the only known portrait of him, but of an aggressive, selfish wastrel. The imagined picture of him, teeth clenched and helplessly foaming at the mouth, cannot be eradicated: the details of the autopsy, of his blackened and putrefying body, remain. That is the true tragedy at the heart of this story.

Perhaps, then, the rumour which existed in the nineteenth century is true. On some August nights, it was said, the spectre of Theodosius Boughton, driving an open carriage pulled by two black horses, rose from the River Avon when it was in flood. The carriage and horses rolled dangerously in the current and, standing in the driving seat, Theodosius would be seen using his whip in an effort to spur the horses to the safety of the fields where once Lawford Hall had stood.

But the carriage was always engulfed again by the water; and Theodosius, despite all his desperate efforts, vanished.

Prologue

1
. The
Gentleman's Magazine
, vol. 50 (September 1780), p. 448.

1 Poison

1
. The opening address of the prosecution counsel, Howarth, on 30 March 1781.

2
.
The Life of Captain Donellan
(London: J. Wenman, 1781), almost certainly by a Captain Murphy. Murphy published his account priced ‘only one shilling', claiming that he had been in service with Donellan in India and had ‘occasionally associated with him ever since … and has been furnished with the only Authentic Materials of that unfortunate Gentleman'.

2 The Following Days

1
. Trial testimony, evidence to the prosecution, 30 April 1781.

3 The Major Players

1
. Document 6683/4/3232, Warwickshire County Record Office M. Bloxam (1861); from the testimony of a local man, John Wolf.

2
. Samuel Ireland,
Picturesque Views on the Upper or Warwickshire Avon
(London: R. Fouldes, 1795).

3
. On the fringes of this cold domestic set-up were cousins living in nearby Bilton Hall. William's sister, Abigail, had married her second cousin Edward: their grandfathers, William and Thomas, had been brothers. To this rather incestuous line, Catherine was fresh blood.

4
. Henry Ellis,
Original Letters, Illustrative of English History
(London: Harding, Triphook & Lepart, 1825).

5
. Although his staunch royalism had won him a baronetcy, William's behaviour in his personal life was described as ‘offensive' by his brother-in-law, William Combe, who challenged his inheritance, claiming that William had been disliked by his own father. CR 1612/492, Warwickshire County Record Office.

6
. Ireland,
Picturesque Views
.

7
. Thomas, William and Charles.

8
. CR 162/479, Warwickshire County Record Office.

9
. Mary had since married Sir Henry Houghton, but there is no record of Anne.

10
. Daughter Eliza (or ‘Meliza') disappeared from the will, presumably because by now she had married a man called Brudenall, by whom she had two sons. It follows that Katherine was still unmarried in 1715.

11
. CR 162/486, Warwickshire County Record Office, Boughton
v
. Lister.

12
. As above.

13
. Parish registers at Warwickshire County Record Office disclose the deaths as infants of four of her children: Charlotte in 1736; Barbara in 1738; John in 1741; and John in 1743.

14
. She was probably distantly related to Edward: his great-great-uncle's second wife's daughter by her second marriage. This daughter, Anne, was born in 1683. Edward, the second baronet, had been childless even though he married twice, and his title went to William, his brother. So the fact that William was a baronet at all is something of a fluke.

15
. CR 162/486, Warwickshire County Record Office.

16
. As above.

17
. The full quote reads: ‘My father was always esteemed a man of learning and good understanding but at some times when overheated with liquor would remit some indiscreet notions particularly when he lived with the late Lady Boughton his
mother-in-law [presumably this should read ‘step-mother', as Catherine had no child called Grace, and in any case it would have meant that Edward had married his half-sister] who used all possible endeavours to keep him in liquor …'

18
. When her husband died, Grace ‘possessed herself of his personal Estate' (QC's Opinion, 20 January 1739, in CR 162/486, Warwickshire County Record Office) because Edward was still a child; in 1741 the Boughtons did offer her £665 per annum for life; so, though the Listers lost the case, they were not left empty-handed.

19
.
Daily Gazetteer
, August 1735.

4 The Major Players

1
. CR 1747/1, Warwickshire County Record Office.

2
. Collection Database: European paintings: Jacopo Amigoni (1682– 1752), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, ‘Flora and Zephr', Acc. No. 1985.5.

3
. CR 1747/1, Warwickshire County Record Office.

4
. Anna Maria had inherited valuable property in Northamptonshire from her mother.

5
. CR 162/489, will of Edward Boughton, probate 22 May 1772, Warwickshire County Record Office.

6
. 6683/4/330, Rouse-Boughton family letters books, Shropshire Archives, 3 January 1770.

7
. As above.

8
. See W. H. D. Rouse,
A History of Rugby School
(London: Duckworth, 1898; reprinted 2009).

9
.
The Life and Letters of Edward Gibbon
by W. J. Day (Frederick Warne & Co, 1889).

10
. According to ‘The Little Bottle of Laurel Water', published in
All the Year Round
, the magazine edited by Charles Dickens, on 28 October 1871.

11
. Edward Allesley Boughton Ward-Boughton-Leigh to Sir Charles Henry Rouse-Boughton, 8 November 1882.

12
. Alan Saville (ed.),
Secret Comment: The Diaries of Gertrude Savile, 1731– 1757
(Kingsbridge: Kingsbridge History Society, 1997).