At daybreak, the body of Sarah Stout was found wedged against the mill piles. A gentlewoman who had spent the preceding evening in Hertford in the company of the barrister Spencer Cowper was drawn from the river, her head and one arm pinned between the timbers. The first spectators beheld her garments floating near the surface; others maintained that she lay almost wholly submerged beneath the water. Her mother demanded to know how her child had met her end. The town, for its part, wondered first whether Sarah had chosen to make away with herself.
On Monday, the thirteenth of March, 1699, being the day of the assizes, Cowper arrived in Hertford alongside the judges of the circuit. He alighted first at Barefoot’s, where his family was accustomed to take lodging. Later, he dined at the Stouts’. Sarah was unmarried and possessed of an independent estate. She had addressed letters of ardent affection to Cowper; the archival record does not warrant the assertion that his sentiments answered her own. Her maidservant, Sarah Walker, recalled that he promised to return for supper and to lie there that night. After nine of the clock, he returned. He called for pen and ink, wrote to his wife, took a dish of milk for his supper, and sat in company with Sarah and her mother.
At eleven o’clock, the maid went upstairs to warm his bed. She heard the street door clap to. When she came down, Cowper and Sarah were gone. The household waited for their return: mother and maid kept watch through part of the night, yet raised no alarm among the neighbors. In the morning, Sarah was discovered in the river. Her body bore dark marks near the ear and collarbone, though no distinct furrow of a cord was visible. The initial inquest concluded that she had drowned; weeks later, her kin caused the corpse to be disinterred.
The prosecution thereupon fixed its gaze upon the hours that had preceded the discovery. Cowper had been the last man seen in Sarah’s company; he had subsequently quit the town without calling to inquire after her mother. He had sent for his horse from the Stout stables, he explained, because he feared the goods of the house might be seized had the death been ruled a felo-de-se. Other witnesses recalled three gentlemen lodged at Gurrey’s, who spoke of Sarah as a former mistress of Marson. One companion was said to have remarked that a friend had “settled her business”; later, the company drank to the end of her courting days. These words, reported only after the discovery of the body, seemed to betoken foreknowledge of her death. The gentlemen insisted the words had been uttered merely in jest.
The trial opened in July. Cowper, a lawyer by profession, stood at the bar alongside John Marson, Ellis Stevens, and William Rogers. The prosecution presented the four men as confederates in a single design: to strangle Sarah and cast her corpse into the current. Yet the evidence immediately parted into two distinct inquiries. Had anyone murdered her before she entered the water? And if so, were the prisoners at the bar the authors of the deed?
The witnesses who had drawn the corpse from the river described a woman lying upon her side, close to the piles, at times half-submerged. Several swore that no stake or branch upheld her; others perceived weeds or staves beneath her body. All agreed that her shoes and stockings were cleanly, her limbs unbloated, and that froth issued from her mouth. The surgeon who examined her that same day noted settled extravasations of blood and a slight swelling about the neck, while conceding that he perceived no ring of ligature. These physical findings suggested violence, yet revealed neither its perpetrator nor its certain mechanism.
Six weeks after the burial, physicians opened the body at the mother’s behest. They found no water within the thorax or the abdomen, and concluded that Sarah had not drowned. Cowper’s counsel vigorously contested the value of this tardy inspection: the remains were already corrupted, and the exhumation had not been conducted under the warrant of a coroner. The medical men called by the Crown and those produced for the defense disagreed fundamentally as to what such observations might establish. Some held that a body entering the water alive must perforce swallow a quantity of it; others countered that a very little moisture sufficed to suffocate, and that all such traces vanished with the passage of time. The court listened to mutually irreconcilable medical certainties, pronounced over a body already long laid in the earth.
The night was thus transformed into a chart that had to be reconstructed step by step. The maidservant maintained that Cowper had walked out with Sarah. He contended that he had quitted the house before eleven o’clock, paid over the money he owed Sarah, and repaired directly to the Glove and Dolphin inn. Several servants of the inn confirmed his arrival by the stroke of the clock, affirming that he remained indoors thereafter. According to the distances measured by witnesses, more than half an hour would have been required to reach the spot where Sarah was found and return. He might therefore have been in bed before midnight without ever having gone near the river. Yet this chronology rested upon clocks, fallible recollections, and the testimony of the servant, whose reckoning differed by half an hour from the town timepieces.
Sarah’s letters further complicated the portrait. She wrote that she wished to live with Cowper and would never renounce him; one letter was dated the ninth of March, four days before her demise. The defense read these epistles as evidence of an unrequited passion, which the family had every interest in concealing. They asserted that Sarah had suffered fits of deep melancholy and had formerly spoken of casting herself from a window. Witnesses swore they had heard her express a desire to die. For her mother and the prosecution, such testimony could not establish voluntary drowning: affection, melancholy, and a death in the river did not form a complete explanation.
Cowper denied having laid hands upon her and repelled the imputation of a pecuniary motive. He explained that he had merely advised Sarah concerning a mortgage of two hundred pounds, paid off several months before her death; the six guineas found in the young woman’s pocket represented the interest he had delivered to her that very evening. He insisted he had nothing to gain from her destruction. Counsel for the defense likewise pressed the utter absence of direct evidence: no eye had witnessed the deed, no instrument was produced, and the loose words overheard at the inn had been recollected only after the fact.
The three other prisoners offered their own account of their journey to Hertford. Marson stated that he had turned aside to dispatch business in Southwark and arrived only late in the evening; Stevens and Rogers affirmed that Sarah was a stranger to them until her name was spoken at the tavern. They explained their sinister phrases as mere banter and denied the existence of the mysterious bundle of linen alleged by the Crown. In the eyes of Sarah’s kin, these fragments composed the design of a premeditated crime. For the defense, they assumed coherence only if the guilt of the accused were taken for granted.
For many hours, the trial set face to face a family that refused to suffer Sarah’s memory to be branded with the shame of suicide, and four men contending as fiercely for their honour as for their lives. The prosecution failed to demonstrate that drowning was an impossibility; the defense could banish neither the apparent flight after eleven o’clock nor the tavern talk. The jury withdrew for half an hour. They returned with a verdict pronouncing Cowper, Marson, Stevens, and Rogers not guilty. The verdict brought an end to the prosecution, but not to the enigma: the judicial record does not disclose how Sarah died, nor whether any hand brought about her end. Her final night remains suspended between letters that breathe an ardent attachment, witnesses whose memories awoke too late, and a dark river whose mill piles held fast her body.