On 20 May 1833, after several days of hearings, the coroner’s jury inquiring into the death of Robert Cully returned a verdict of justifiable homicide. The jurors censured the government for failing either to prevent the meeting or to warn the populace to disperse; they characterized the conduct of the police as “ferocious, brutal, and unprovoked.” Camden Pelham’s chronicle records that both the courtroom and the adjacent streets greeted the determination with deafening cheers. Ten days later, the Court of King’s Bench quashed the inquisition. The very same death had thus elicited two institutional determinations, yet neither had identified the hand that struck the fatal blow.
The affair originated with placards. A public meeting had been convened upon the Calthorpe estate, behind the Coldbath Fields prison, with a view to adopting preparatory measures for a National Convention. The government issued a proclamation declaring the assembly illegal and admonishing all inhabitants against attending. According to Pelham, this cautionary notice merely lent the proceeding a notoriety it might otherwise have lacked: the inquisitive flocked to the ground to witness what would transpire, while battalions of police converged upon the parish.
By Monday, 13 May, hundreds of persons had already assembled well before the appointed hour. By one o'clock, Pelham reckoned their numbers at between six and seven hundred; the concourse continued to swell until three. Women and children mingled among the throngs of men. At three o'clock, a youth named Lee mounted a hackney carriage intended to serve as a hustings; the driver, seized with alarm, drove off almost immediately. Lee was compelled to scale a palisade, where he proposed Mr. Mee to take the chair. Mee consented, inquiring of the assembly whether they ought to proceed in the face of the day's “disadvantages.” He reminded them that he had a family to maintain, and that a man fallen in the struggle could not leave his dependents destitute. The multitude clamored that they must go on.
The procession of the National Union of the Working Classes arrived shortly thereafter, mustering some one hundred and fifty individuals beneath eight banners. Its committee had previously convened at a neighboring public house to settle the day's order. The procession advanced in good order; nor did it, in Pelham's narrative, resemble a mob bent upon an assault. One ensign bore the words “Liberty or Death,” accompanied by a skull and crossbones; others demanded equal rights and equal justice. The column moved steadily toward Calthorpe Street. At that juncture, a division of police marched in, truncheons in hand. Shouts redoubled. The crowd parted at first before the officers; yet near the hustings they encountered resistance, and an affray erupted.
What transpired in the moments that followed was never uniformly established. Robert Cully, a constable of the C Division, received a mortal wound from a dagger and expired on the spot. Sergeant Brooks and Constable Redwood were likewise wounded by a weapon answering a similar description. Pelham records that the testimony diverged sharply regarding the onset of the fray, the blows struck by the officers, and the actions of the populace. His narrative does not permit Cully’s assailant to be named with any certainty; one must not, therefore, confound this fatality with the subsequent trial of George Fursey, who was arraigned solely for wounding the other two policemen.
Arrests were effected throughout the afternoon. That very evening, at Bow Street, Robert Tilly was detained upon suspicion of Cully’s murder. Fursey was held on the charge of feloniously stabbing Brooks and Redwood; other participants were bound over to answer for riot and assaults upon the peace officers. The source expressly notes that the suspicion against Tilly proved altogether groundless. This initial judicial divergence was of paramount consequence: presence during the affray, suspicion of murder, and the specific charge of wounding two constables constituted entirely distinct matters. Following Fursey’s acquittal, Tilly was discharged on bail, the accusation against him having been abandoned.
The coroner’s inquest upon Cully commenced on 15 May and extended over several days. Witnesses testified to seeing policemen striking individuals who took no part in the harangues, including women; others asserted that the demonstrators were armed with weighted bludgeons and iron-shod flagstaffs. The chronicle sets forth two further circumstances that complicated any moral judgment: neither the Riot Act nor the government proclamation had been read upon the ground, and one witness declared that Cully had struck the man who subsequently stabbed him, whereas another maintained that the constable was peaceably speaking to a woman when the assailant sprang upon him. The narrative leaves this contradiction unresolved.
On 20 May, the coroner's jury resolved to return a verdict of justifiable homicide. Their accompanying presentment laid the blame upon the government’s dispositions and the conduct of the police, which they censured as violent and unprovoked. The coroner urged them to reconsider their finding; the jurors stood by their verdict. The populace hailed the pronouncement with exultation, according to Pelham. Yet an inquest jury could not, of its own motion, return a criminal conviction against any identified officer: the chronicle records neither the name of the perpetrator of the fatal thrust nor any trial that fixed that guilt.
On 30 May, upon an application by the Attorney General before the Court of King’s Bench, the inquisition was quashed, the law officers of the Crown having submitted that it was contrary to law and against the weight of the evidence. This judicial intervention did not efface the wounds, the depositions, or the bitter disagreements concerning the fray. It merely stripped the coroner’s verdict of its legal validity. Public controversy thereupon shifted to the trial of Fursey.
On 4 July, Fursey stood in the dock at the Old Bailey. The indictment charged him with participating in a riotous assembly of five hundred persons, and with stabbing Brooks and Redwood with intent to murder. Both constables swore that they recognized him as the man who had stabbed them. Constable Hayles deposed that following the arrest of Fursey and Tilly, a short blade, resembling a broken foil ground to a point, had been discovered in the straw where the prisoners had lain; both wounded officers affirmed its likeness to the instrument employed against them. Witnesses for the defense, on the contrary, depicted a brutal onslaught by the police and blows dealt without provocation. The issue before the court was not to adjudicate afresh who had killed Cully, but to determine whether Fursey had assaulted Brooks and Redwood with murderous intent.
The trial dragged on until two o’clock in the morning. After the arguments of counsel and the summing-up of the judge, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty. The courtroom erupted in applause; the officers of the court struggled to suppress the uproar. The acquittal applied strictly to those specific indictments. Pelham does not present it as a determination identifying the author of Cully's fatal wound, and within the bounds of his narrative, the question remains unanswered.
A final action arose from the manner in which the Morning Chronicle had reported the proceedings. Fursey obtained forty pounds in damages in a libel suit against the proprietor, the journal having erroneously branded him the murderer of Cully. Thus did three separate judgments succeed one another: a coroner’s jury declared the killing of a constable justifiable without naming the slayer; the Court of King’s Bench quashed that inquisition; and a petty jury acquitted Fursey of stabbing two other officers. Pelham’s retrospective account sets them side by side, yet never confounds them. In this affair, the rigorous disentanglement of indictments and verdicts remains the sole means of preventing a judicial ruling from asserting what it never resolved.