The slice of cake had only just been taken from the desk when William Chetwynd struck Thomas Ricketts in the belly. The blow was delivered with the very knife that had served to cut the cake. Ricketts clapped his hand to his side, then called out to the maidservant, Hannah Humphreys: “Chetwynd has stabbed me.” Three days later, he was dead. At the trial, the circumstances of the deed appeared almost trifling: a piece of simnel, a boy laughing, another demanding it back. Yet the court was called upon to determine whether this killing was murder, manslaughter, or an aggravated felony under the statute against stabbing.
The tragedy had its origins on 26 September 1743, at Mr Clare’s academy in Soho Square. Chetwynd, a youth of some fifteen years, was a boarder there; Thomas Ricketts, about nineteen years of age, was likewise a scholar. The record portrays the two young men as friends. On the day of the stroke, other pupils were present in the room, together with Hannah Humphreys, a servant of the house. Several weeks after the occurrence, the pamphlet brings them back before the bench and a jury impanelled to answer to three separate indictments.
The title-page announces the sessions of 12, 13, 14, and 17 October. Chetwynd was arraigned for murder at common law, under a misspelt form of his name upon the statutory count, and upon the coroner’s inquisition. The report notes that he was hard of hearing; his counsel prayed that he might be permitted to stand by the inner bar, the better to follow the proceedings. The motion was granted. There is no need to attribute to him feelings not recorded in the text: this circumstance alone serves to remind us that, in a courtroom where evidence was delivered viva voce, he could not hear as other men did.
The cake itself is described with particularity. It was a simnel, a dense confection whose hardened crust made it difficult to divide. Chetwynd had brought a piece of it and was cutting it with his own knife—a common clasp-knife such as schoolboys carried, according to the narrative. Ricketts begged a piece. It was given him; he then asked for more. Chetwynd refused, and stepped out of the room for a moment with the cake beneath his arm. Ricketts followed him. When the two boys returned, Chetwynd laid a fresh slice upon his desk.
The witnesses did not all describe this sequence of events in identical terms. William Hamilton, a fellow scholar who was present, deposed that Ricketts snatched the piece and held it up to the maidservant, laughing. Chetwynd demanded it back; Ricketts made no answer. Hamilton then saw Chetwynd strike him, backhanded, with the knife. He had not observed him draw the blade, but recognized it as the one used to cut the cake. He spoke of no former quarrel nor any rancour between them. In his telling, the affair began in mere sport and turned fatal without warning.
Samuel Malcher, another scholar, confirmed that Ricketts had asked for a piece, had received it, and had then desired a second. He described Ricketts taking the slice from the desk, though he could not say whether Chetwynd perceived the act, nor whether he demanded it back. Malcher stood at the far end of the room and heard no words of provocation. He placed the stroke exceedingly close upon Ricketts’s taking of the slice, unable to affirm whether a whole minute had elapsed. This uncertainty does not transform the encounter into a scuffle: Malcher swore he did not see Ricketts push Chetwynd.
Hannah Humphreys was standing by the window, engaged with her needlework. Hearing a noise, she had entered the dining room. She saw Ricketts with the cake in his hand, and understood he had taken a piece. She did not see the blow struck. Ricketts turned toward her and cried out that he had been stabbed; she took it at first for a jest. When he drew his hand from his side, she saw a little blood. Chetwynd, she testified, said he was sorry if he had hurt him. The gulf between what she witnessed with her own eyes and what she learned from others remains material: she testifies to the aftermath, not to the stroke itself.
The record of the trial also reproduces, through Mr Long, an account of what Ricketts was said to have told him. Long was not in the room when the wound was inflicted. He arrived on the evening of 26 September, having received a letter from the master of the academy informing him of an accident; on the following day, he consulted the surgeons. Ricketts told him that the dispute had begun over the cake, which he had taken to tease Chetwynd, whereupon he was struck in the belly. Long added that the young man declared he freely forgave his schoolfellow. These words come down to us through Long’s mouth; they were not taken down directly from Ricketts by the court.
The knife stood at the very core of the subsequent testimony. Ricketts himself had a clasp-knife. Before the stroke, he had opened it and offered it to Chetwynd to carve the cake. Chetwynd answered that he had one of his own; Ricketts then shut his knife and returned it to his pocket, as Malcher related. The witnesses and the agreed facts thus present a blade ready to hand for an ordinary task, followed by a blow struck while Ricketts had no weapon in his grasp. Hamilton saw the blow but not the drawing of the knife; Humphreys saw nothing of the stroke; Malcher attested to the immediacy of the gesture without professing to have caught every word.
The surgeons were called upon to explain how a wound that appeared slight at first had proved fatal to Ricketts. Peter McCulloch, surgeon to the academy, arrived shortly after one o'clock. He examined the boy and did not initially perceive that the wound had penetrated the abdominal cavity. The next day, upon probing it afresh, he judged that it had reached within; further practitioners were called in. Peter St Hill testified that the wound, situated on the right side of the belly below the navel, was the cause of death. Ricketts expired on Thursday, 29 September. The trial record adduces these opinions as medical proof of the causal chain between the blow and the demise, not as an exposition of Chetwynd’s inward intent.
Chetwynd’s counsel called no witnesses. They conceded that the facts had been fairly stated by the prosecution, but maintained that the act did not betoken a malicious heart. The two youths were friends; no grudge had been shown; Ricketts had taken the cake and withheld it, whilst Chetwynd already held the knife to carve it. The defence asked whether the sudden transport of passion provoked by that act could make the prisoner a murderer in the eye of the law. The issue was not whether the wound had been dealt, but under what legal category it must fall.
The Crown replied that the provocation was utterly frivolous when weighed against a knife-thrust to the belly. At common law, counsel argued, malice might be implied by the law itself, even absent any proof of premeditated hatred; a violent act grossly disproportionate to the offence was sufficient. The indictment framed upon the statute of James I further complicated the dispute: that enactment was directed specifically against such as should stab another who had not then any weapon drawn, nor had first stricken, carrying severe consequences regarding the benefit of clergy. Now, the agreed facts established that Ricketts had neither struck Chetwynd nor held any weapon drawn when the blow was dealt.
The arguments turned at length upon the construction of “provocation,” the circumstance of a blade already bared in the hand, and the demarcation between murder and manslaughter committed in the heat of blood. The defence cited precedents wherein an affray or a trespass upon property had mitigated the nature of the deed. The prosecution retorted that the snatching of a piece of cake could never justify violence fraught with death. The pamphlet sets forth extensive legal pleadings and ancient authorities; these must not be mistaken for an adjudication upon the case. The procedural outcome was that the two judges present deemed the point of law worthy of a more solemn determination.
In lieu of returning a general verdict, the jury brought in a “special verdict”: they set down the facts they found to be proved, and prayed the judgment of the court as to what crime they constituted in law. The finding recites the ages of the two scholars, the initial sharing of the cake, the refusal of a second portion, the slice taken from the desk, the knife in Chetwynd’s hand, the blow delivered, and the subsequent death of Ricketts. It explicitly records that no prior malice was found between them. Thereupon, the jurors resigned the matter to the judgment of the court upon the three indictments.
This instrument arrests the narrative at the precise moment when the facts appear most settled. The 1744 pamphlet preserves the trial and this special verdict; its appendix compiles authorities upon the stabbing statute and the boundary between murder and manslaughter. It records nothing of the subsequent judgment of the bench upon Chetwynd’s fate. The reader may follow the blade from the schoolroom desk to the bar of the court, but he cannot, upon the authority of this pamphlet alone, close the record with a sentence or an acquittal. That silence is the final entry in the printed cause.