According to Charles Horne, the nocturnal ride to Annesley ended when William bid him tarry in the road; his elder brother rode on with the bag wherein lay a three-day-old babe. Decades elapsed before Charles related this scene to a jury. At the Nottingham Assizes, the case rested upon the memory of an ancient discovery and upon a far more difficult question: why was he speaking now?
The pamphlet of 1760 places the brothers at their father’s house at Butterley, in Derbyshire, and the laying down of the sack in the parish of Annesley, Nottinghamshire. Yet it opens upon a discrepancy that must remain in full view. Its title page announces a murder committed in 1724; the indictment and Charles’s testimony assign the deed to the middle of February 1724, and the bill specifies a male child aged three days. The introduction, however, recounts that in the spring of 1727 an unmarried daughter of the family was delivered of a boy who was subsequently found beneath a haystack. The tract offers no reconciliation of this divergence. The trial turned unequivocally upon the three-day-old male infant and the accusation of February 1724; the 1727 episode remains a conflicting introductory variation, not a fact to be merged into the proceedings.
When the boy was found, according to the witnesses examined in 1759, the bag lay beneath a haystack belonging to John Gellstrop. John Wootton, who was foddering the cattle, had probed the parcel with his pitchfork and pitched it over a hedge. Thomas Limb testified that the bag was carried into his house and opened, whereupon his wife drew forth a dead infant, already cold. Mary Hall remembered holding it near the fire and chafing it in an endeavour to revive it. John Weightman, who viewed the body, perceived neither mark nor contusion; he opined that cold and exposure had caused its death. These men could attest to the discovery and the apparent condition of the child; none professed to have seen who had laid the bag beneath the hay.
The answer to that question, in the printed record, proceeded from Charles. He recounted that in the middle of February 1724, whilst he was in a room of the family homestead, William came to fetch him about ten o’clock at night. His brother told him he must accompany him on horseback. William took from the kitchen chamber the three-day-old infant, and both men repaired to the stable. Charles mounted Robin; William took a little bay mare. The child was placed in a long linen sack, described at trial as a clothes bag. Charles said he held it open while William placed the infant within, and then tied its mouth.
They set out for Annesley, some five miles distant according to the reckoning given in court. As they drew near, William inquired whether the child were still alive. Charles said he put his face to the infant’s and answered that it was. William thereupon took the bag, directed Charles to wait in the road, and vanished for about a quarter of an hour. Upon his return, he is said to have declared that he had placed the child by a haycock and covered it with hay. This narrative was no deposition taken on the morrow of the death: Charles declared he had kept the secret at their father’s behest, disclosing it only long years afterward. That delay did not annul his testimony, but it became one of its central vulnerabilities.
Charles explained that their father had discovered the matter a few days after the ride, when Benjamin Jackson reported that a child had been found beneath the hay. The father, according to Charles, laid upon him a strict command never to speak of it. Yet he repeated the accusation to several persons long before any arrest was made: to John Kelsall, to acquaintances in Derby, to certain of William’s tenants, and to John White, summoned to his side during a grave illness. Several witnesses confirmed that Charles had spoken to them of the child and laid its death at his brother’s door. They thereby substantiated the long-standing existence of the charge; none, by such repetition alone, could verify what had transpired upon the highway.
The pamphlet converts this disclosure into a stroke of Providence and portrays William as a close-fisted, abhorred squire. This hostile portrait carries no judicial weight. The court proceedings show Charles speaking out after a quarrel with his brother, at the moment when relatives were seeking to secure a warrant to examine him touching the child’s death.
The defence turned precisely upon this breach. Several witnesses deposed that Charles had threatened to have William hanged, that he looked to obtain a portion of the estate, or that he had offered to withdraw his evidence for money. One swore he had heard him wish that his brother were killed; another recounted his boast that he would “swear his life away” unless William gave him wherewithal to live. Others maintained that Charles had demanded money to go abroad, or that he had denounced William out of pure malice. These utterances were themselves reported on oath at the trial, yet often as ancient hearsay, retrieved from distant recollection. They compelled the jury to weigh the accuser’s credibility without obliterating the other evidence.
The most concrete trial of this contest concerned William’s conduct when the search for a warrant commenced. John Turzer, constable of Annesley, described the search conducted with his assistants. They presented themselves in the evening without obtaining entrance to the house, and returned in the morning. After searching the chambers, Samuel Roe insisted upon opening a great linen chest. According to both men, William’s wife at length unlocked it, and William stepped forth. Roe related that he shook hands with him, and William observed that Charles was as guilty as himself. The pamphlet cites this scene as a token of a stricken conscience; it remains the testimony of the searchers, and no formal confession recorded by a clerk of court.
The tract adds other sayings imputed to William. Samuel Smith and Henry Coltman relate that he termed the prosecution mere spite and spoke of the “Cock-Bag,” an expression alluding to the sack described by Charles. John Walker reported a remark to the effect that they could not hang Charles without hanging himself. Elsewhere, witnesses deposed that William denied all knowledge of the matter. This bundle of spoken words lacks the firmness of an enduring material object: each passed through the memory of a witness and the printed report of the compiler. Their weight was that which the jury chose to accord them, and the pamphlet records their determination but briefly.
At the bar, William’s defence was succinct: he protested that he knew nothing of the crime and was pursued by persons who thirsted for his life and his estate. The plea was not groundless. Charles had acknowledged an active hand in conveying the infant, and his adversaries ascribed to him an interest in the patrimony. Yet these defence witnesses spoke chiefly of threats and demands for money; the pamphlet notes that none brought direct evidence touching the night of the discovery. The printed record affords us neither a verbatim shorthand transcript nor the notes of the judge. It permits no recovery of the fine shadings of counsel’s argument, preserving only the statements it chose to retain.
The trial opened on Saturday, 10 August 1759, before Lord Chief Baron Parker. The indictment set forth the acts imputed to William: placing a male child, born alive and three days old, into a linen sack, conveying it to an open field in Annesley, and there leaving, exposing, and abandoning it. Death was charged to this course of acts. William pleaded not guilty. The trial lasted nearly nine hours, according to the tract; after the judge’s summing-up, the jury withdrew for about half an hour and returned with a verdict of guilty. The source states that sentence of death was pronounced forthwith.
More than thirty years lay between the alleged crime and the verdict. Charles’s tale had circulated through the neighbourhood without leading straightway to an arraignment. According to the pamphlet, a Derbyshire magistrate hesitated before the antiquity of the facts and the hazard of ruining an entire family; the author cites no document to establish this. The matter then passed into the hands of the Nottinghamshire authorities. William was committed to gaol, moved for bail before the Court of King’s Bench, suffered a refusal, and waited for the summer assize.
Following the verdict, certain inhabitants petitioned for a respite that he might prepare for death. The judge granted first a reprieve of one month, followed by further stays. The pamphlet asserts that William consumed this time in soliciting a pardon, upbraiding him for refusing to acknowledge his guilt. Such moral reflections proceed from the anonymous editor, who denounces the condemned man as a felon and frames the history as an exemplar of divine retribution. The certain fact in his own relation is far more sober: the sentence was respited, and William was executed on 11 December 1759.
The affair thus drew to its close at the gallows, leaving the modern reader unable to hear the two brothers directly or to inspect any official record of the trial. The published account sets side by side a tardy accusation, converging testimonies upon the finding of the infant, and a defence assailing the character and worldly interest of the accuser. It preserves, moreover, a chronological rift which its author makes no attempt to resolve. It is within that space—between a midnight road recounted after five-and-thirty years, a family secret, and the verdict delivered in 1759—that the sharpest question of the case abides: not what the pamphlet would have us think of William, but why the jury found credit in the chain of testimony laid before them.