At the York Assizes, Joseph Brown did not deny that he had surrendered himself to justice of his own free will. He denied what he was recorded as having spoken. Four years after the death of Elizabeth Fletcher, the man who had presented himself to the authorities on the Isle of Wight bearing a confession now recanted it from the dock. Between these two irreconcilable accounts, the prosecution rested upon a draught shared at supper, a purchase of laudanum made on the preceding day, and the detail, related in his admission, of a guinea and a half stolen from a chest. The compilation by Camden Pelham, in the consulted edition of 1887, chronicles the affair and reproduces the judge’s address; it does not preserve the original record of the proceedings.
Elizabeth Fletcher lodged Brown and Joseph Hazlegrove in her cottage at Hensall, near Ferrybridge. On Sunday evening, the 21st of October 1804, between eight and nine o’clock, the two men sat at supper with her and her sister, Sarah. Hazlegrove went forth to fetch ale. Upon his return, according to the depositions summarized by Pelham, Brown added sugar to the liquor and handed the mug to the two women. They drank the whole of its contents. The men declined this draught, drinking instead from another vessel.
By morning, Fletcher lay dead; Sarah was suffering grievously from the effects of laudanum. Pelham takes the cause of death as settled. While he offers no account of the post-mortem examination, he marshals the actions of the preceding night: the mug reserved solely for the sisters, the separate vessel chosen by the men, and their departure under cover of darkness. The cottage was reputed to conceal a sum of money, and Brown had let fall his desire to possess it. In the sequence of the narrative, these circumstances lead from the presumed motive to the purchased drug, and thence to the meal where only the sisters drank from the mug. On the following morning, the death of the one and the grave illness of the other lent an accusing weight to these particulars. Pelham recounts neither the physical discovery of the poison nor an immediate confrontation with the lodgers: he passes straightway from the night to their flight and long absence. These are the elements which the chapter brings to the fore before recounting the reappearance of the accused.
On the eve of that supper, Brown had purchased sixpence worth of laudanum from one Perkins, a surgeon of Snaith, representing that the drug was intended for his father, who was afflicted with sleeplessness. The purchase, the pretext offered to the practitioner, and the supper of the following night assumed a darker significance following Fletcher’s decease. Yet, within the confession attributed to Brown, the division of roles was altered: he stated that he had procured the laudanum and delivered it to Hazlegrove, who in turn had mixed it with the sweetened ale and presented it to the two women. The deposition concerning the supper cast Brown as the man who added the sugar and handed the vessel; the confession assigned the preparation and serving to Hazlegrove. Pelham preserves both relations without attempting to reconcile them into a single, indisputable scene.
In the recorded confession, the two lodgers had been acquainted for upwards of six years. Taking up their abode with Fletcher in October 1804, they were alleged to have resolved to poison her in order to seize upon her property. The confession detailed the plan, the purchase from Perkins, and the robbery perpetrated in the early hours: they were said to have forced the chest and carried off a guinea and a half, having looked for a far greater treasure. Following the crime, Brown was prosecuted for another offence, after which he enlisted in an infantry regiment. Pelham notes that he remained a soldier when he was brought to the bar at York.
On the 3rd of August 1808, upon the Isle of Wight, Brown gave himself up to the authorities. He declared at the time, according to the compilation, that he took this step because the memory of his crime inflicted upon him an insupportable anguish. This expression of remorse was to occupy a capital place in the trial, yet the prisoner challenged its very truth. He maintained that he had fabricated the confession merely to compel an open trial and disperse the suspicions hanging over his name, not to acknowledge the murder.
His defence unfolded a tale of a wholly different character. Brown asserted that his intimacy with Hazlegrove had begun far earlier than he had previously stated, and had continued without interruption. A lady of high rank and fortune, he alleged, had conceived a passion for Hazlegrove, and Brown had acted as an intermediary to facilitate their clandestine meetings. This secrecy, he added, had cast an air of mystery over their movements, inflaming the malice of enemies who thereafter imputed to them every outrage committed in the neighbourhood. He suggested that Fletcher had perished of a fit, and protested his innocence. Pelham treats this line of defence with marked contempt; the prisoner called no witnesses to substantiate his account.
The jury returned a verdict of guilty. Pelham then reproduces the sentencing address of the judge, which assigns a precise weight to the confession: it was deemed to have supplied the missing link of proof, binding the circumstantial evidence fast to the prisoner. The magistrate represented the conviction as the consummation of Providential justice, rather than a determination arising solely from the prisoner’s repentance. Yet he accounted for this belated return by the “agonies” of a guilty conscience—a phrase that remained an interpretive construction, given that Brown had denounced his admission as false.
In his allocution, the judge reviewed the alleged acts, ordering them according to the design he imputed to Brown: coveting Fletcher’s hoard, purchasing poison under the pretence of easing his father’s sleeplessness, and presenting the draught to the women under the guise of friendship. The reported spoil—a guinea and a half—appeared to him wretchedly inadequate compared to the anticipated fortune. He contrasted the money earned through the victim’s honest industry with the expectations of the condemned man, describing the memory of the deed as a torment more destructive than the lethal cup itself. The address does not permit Brown to speak again, nor does it resolve the discrepancy between the depositions regarding the supper and the confession regarding the preparation of the drink. It demonstrates solely how the bench employed the confession to interpret the entire case.
The magistrate finally exhorted Brown to pray for divine mercy, drawing from the proceedings a public warning for those assembled: a crime perpetrated in darkness, he declared, would inevitably be proclaimed in the light of day. This conclusion converted a private tragedy into a solemn moral lesson. It forms an integral part of the judicial rhetoric preserved by Pelham, even while Brown had denied his guilt and asserted that his confession was an invention.
The sentence of death was passed at York in March 1809. Brown was executed on the 20th of March. Pelham adds that no account of his final moments had reached him. The chapter thus concludes precisely where many contemporary chronicles expand upon the gathering crowd, the scaffold, and the dying speech of the condemned: it records a date, and then confesses its own silence.