The vessel lay waiting at Gravesend. Richard Gould—whom Camden Pelham also refers to under the name of Arthur Nicholson—was bound for Sydney, having received an acquittal upon the charge of murdering John Templeman. A jury’s verdict had just delivered him from that capital accusation; an offer of charitable assistance had even opened to him the prospect of voluntary exile. Yet, at the very moment the ship prepared to weigh anchor, a reward of two hundred pounds was proclaimed for the discovery of the perpetrators of the crime. Gould was taken once more into custody. He was not to be tried a second time for murder: the prosecution that brought him back before the jurors concerned the breaking and entering of the dwelling.
The old man had lived alone at Pocock’s Fields, near Barnsbury Park, in a small cottage of two rooms. He was approximately seventy years of age and drew a modest livelihood from the rents of one or two houses in Somers Town. On Monday, the 16th of March, 1840, he had gone his rounds among his tenants, gathering six pounds, principally in silver coin, with a half-sovereign completing the sum. Upon his return, he instructed Mrs. Thornton, his neighbour and charwoman, to purchase a few provisions he required, and thereafter retired about six o’clock.
Pelham advances as a motive the reputation for miserliness that Templeman was reputed to bear, together with his habit of boasting of his means. He does not, however, cite any statement in which the accused himself explained his actions by these remarks. The distinction is of consequence: the chronicler links a mode of life to the crime after the fact, whereas the sums collected that evening and the rifled money-box are particulars that the narrative connects directly to the inquest. In that quarter of modest dwellings, an income derived from rents might well appear substantial to anyone who coveted it; of itself, it cannot reconstruct the designs of an intruder whom no one had yet identified.
On the following morning, Mrs. Thornton’s daughter went to the cottage bearing the purchases. She knocked, called out to Templeman, and received no reply. Her mother then came and looked through the bedroom window. The body lay upon the floor. Instead of instantly raising the alarm with the police, Mrs. Thornton awaited the return of her son-in-law, Capriani, a night watchman at the Sadler’s Wells Theatre. He returned home at eleven o’clock and ran to inform the deceased’s grandson, a solicitor in Mortimer Street. It was only upon the latter’s arrival that the constabulary was summoned.
Pelham’s retrospective account describes a dwelling in utter disarray. The old man’s hands were pinioned before him, his eyes covered by a blood-stained stocking; the bed was saturated, the drawers forced open, and the box wherein he kept his money emptied. The wounds to his head and face bore witness to violent blows. A pane of glass in the parlour window had been shattered after the exterior shutter had been forced; a hand could thus reach through to undo the inner fastening. These findings afforded the inquiry an evident point of ingress and proof of a theft, yet they did not yet reveal who had crossed the threshold.
Capriani’s delay aroused suspicion. He was taken into custody, but the subsequent examinations cleared him of complicity, and he was discharged. John and Mary Ann Jarvis were subsequently apprehended alongside Gould. John Jarvis was speedily set at liberty; the acknowledged intimacy between Gould and Mrs. Jarvis did not suffice to warrant her detention. The narrative of the trial, like the remainder of the chronicle, mingles the facts related by witnesses with the author’s own emphatic judgments. One must therefore leave to the jurors what they in truth decided, and beware of confounding an accusation with a conviction for murder.
Gould had been employed as a pot-boy in various public houses in the East End and Islington. He lodged intermittently under the roof of a family named Allen, who lived near Templeman. At the trial on the 14th of April, witnesses attributed to him prior remarks concerning an old man possessed of money, a fifty-pound note spied within a drawer, and a sum he declared to be almost within his grasp. Others testified that he had spoken of a skeleton key and a dark lantern, fit to serve an old man in an isolated cottage. Such are the words Pelham attributes to the witnesses; the chronicle does not reproduce their depositions in full.
The Allens supplied the jury with particulars regarding the night of the crime. Gould had gone out between eight and nine o’clock without taking breakfast; he returned towards three in the morning. On the following day, he spent a full half-hour within the wash-house before venturing out, returning once more around seven in the evening. Upon hearing of the murder, he asked whether Templeman might have made away with himself. Mr. Allen observed that he wore a pair of new shoes. Gould asserted that his cousin had given them to him. The police subsequently discovered money concealed in the rafters of the wash-house, the denominations of which corresponded to the silver coin Templeman had received from his tenants.
These circumstances appeared grave indeed, yet the jury acquitted Gould. The crowd that thronged the approaches to the court gave loud vent to its displeasure. The sheriffs extended him their protection, and he remained within the Compter until the tumult had subsided. Alderman Pirie then offered to send him to Sydney aboard his own vessel. Pelham represents this offer as an act of Christian benevolence of which Gould took shameful advantage; this appraisal belongs strictly to the chronicler. What is known from his account is that Gould accepted the offer and was put aboard the Elizabeth at Gravesend.
He had not yet quitted English waters when Her Majesty’s Government offered a reward of two hundred pounds for information leading to the conviction of the murderers. Sergeant Otway was dispatched to interview him. Gould consented to speak, but demanded that a portion of the booty be secured to him to indemnify him for the loss of his passage. On the following day, a warrant placed him once more in custody, this time for having taken part in the burglary of Templeman’s house. Brought before the magistrates at Bow Street, he claimed his freedom in exchange for revelations. This was denied him. On the 11th of May, he made a formal statement accusing John and Mary Ann Jarvis.
In this deposition, Gould asserted that the plan to rob the house had been debated between them, that Jarvis had fashioned a pierced piece of wood, and that Jarvis had accompanied him into the dwelling. According to this account, it was Jarvis who had struck Templeman, bound him, and struck him again when the old man recognised his assailants. Gould claimed to have fled the scene. He went on to explain how the plunder had been concealed, how a dark lantern had been cast into a pond, and how he had purchased the boots in company with Mrs. Jarvis. The declaration added a scene of brutal violence to an already harrowing affair; yet it could by no means be taken as a simple confession, inasmuch as it sought throughout to shift the capital guilt upon the Jarvises.
Pelham affirms that the allegations against the Jarvises were instantly disproved and that the suspicions attaching to them were dismissed as groundless. Nevertheless, searches concerning the lantern and the boots confirmed, according to the narrative, specific details of Gould’s participation in the robbery. The initial indictment for murder had resulted in an acquittal; the law could not place him in jeopardy a second time for that selfsame crime. Templeman’s relatives therefore instituted a separate prosecution for burglary. The severance of these indictments carried a decisive consequence: the outcome of the second trial did not revoke the verdict returned upon the first.
On the 22nd of June, Gould appeared once more at the Central Criminal Court. The prosecution revived the evidence previously marshalled and joined to it the facts divulged in his own statement. The jury found him guilty of the breaking and entering. Baron Parke observed that there could remain no doubt as to his guilt in the murder itself, and sentenced him to transportation for the term of his natural life. This judicial opinion, recorded by Pelham, alters nothing of the legal standing of the earlier verdict: the jury had acquitted Gould of the murder, and subsequently convicted him of the burglary.
Whilst incarcerated, Gould attempted an escape in concert with a fellow prisoner; their plot was discovered. When he heard his final sentence pronounced, he lost, according to the chronicle, all his former effrontery and fell into a state of violent agitation. He was transported beyond the seas, having made yet another fruitless effort to evade his fate. There the account ceases. Templeman receives neither restoration nor narrative retribution: he remains the aged man whose door was battered down, whose money vanished, and whose murder, notwithstanding the certitudes voiced by the judge and the compiler, never secured against Gould a conviction by a jury of his peers.