In Prince’s Street, a sudden report struck the ear of George Nicol as he walked in the company of Mary Boydell. The bookseller turned upon his heel and beheld Dr. John Elliot standing close beside him, a pistol in his grasp. Nicol seized Elliot by the throat and demanded whether he was the wretch who had fired. Elliot confessed to the deed. A servant came running, the weapons either fell or were wrenched away, and Miss Boydell was hurried into a neighbouring shop. Nicol then heard the prisoner declare that he could now die in peace, having sent the young lady before him. When someone presently announced that she was not dangerously hurt, Elliot clasped his hands, asked whether she was indeed not dead, and fell to heaping curses upon her and all her kin.
On July 20, 1787—the date inscribed at the head of Borrow’s chapter—Elliot was brought to the bar under the capital provisions of the Black Act. Yet the record does not unfold an ordinary act of violence where guilt followed as an obvious matter of course. The judicial crux was far narrower and stranger: had the brace of pistols been loaded with leaden balls? The witnesses were of one accord regarding the discharge, the dreadful proximity of the muzzle, and the contusions and scorches left upon the lady’s attire. Yet the Crown was bound to establish the precise composition of what had issued from the barrels to sustain the indictment as framed.
The servant deposed that the weapons were two pistols lashed together. One was discovered half-cocked, its pan closed and a few grains of powder visible. The other appeared to have been discharged. In his estimation, both might well have gone off despite the state of the lock. He further recounted Elliot’s utterances and testified to two other pistols found in the prisoner’s pocket, which appeared loaded to the very muzzle. The words spoken in the immediate wake of the assault seemed to disclose an intention; yet they could not resolve the material question of the lead. One might well believe he had purposed to slay Mary Boydell, and still remain ignorant whether the projectile that bruised her flesh was indeed a bullet.
Nicol described a portion of her cloak burnt through and two marks upon her gown, immediately below the shoulders, which corresponded, in his judgment, to the impact of the twin barrels bound side by side. The surgeon testified to two contusions beneath the shoulder blade. Being questioned as to the effect that ball-loaded pistols must produce at point-blank range, he made no pretence of certain knowledge. He observed instead that a weapon pressed hard against a resisting body might lose much of its force for want of air to accompany the discharge. The scorched garments and handkerchief were laid before the court. These exhibits bore witness to the fury of the blast; they did not, of themselves, amount to lead extracted from the flesh.
The prior acquaintance between Elliot and the Boydell family emerges through a circumstance of an almost administrative plainness. A gardener testified that the physician had lodged beneath his roof for six months during the preceding winter, an abode which had afforded him frequent occasion to enter the house of Josiah Boydell, where Mary was wont to visit. Borrow offers no explanation of what had transpired between them, nor what Elliot imagined he might compass by his assault. This proximity proves only that he knew the threshold and the lady; it discovers no cause. It renders the gulf between the prisoner’s frantic imprecations and the chronicle’s silence regarding their past all the more striking. At the bar, the gardener proved those visits, yet could not furnish the court with the history of their hearts.
A magistrate named Hyde introduced a fresh perplexity into the proceedings. Following Nicol’s departure, a man calling himself Thomas Brown presented himself to claim the pistols, asserting that he acted on the bookseller’s authority. Hyde delivered them into his hands. He knew nothing of this Brown, nor could the man ever be found again. The magistrate affirmed, however, that he had observed lead in the two pistols which had remained in the prisoner’s pocket: the paper wadding having torn during the loading, the balls were plainly visible. Yet this recollection stood at variance with the rest of the testimony. The pistols from the pocket had thus slipped from the grasp of justice, and the one witness who might have cleared the identity of the bearer remained utterly untraceable.
The defence endeavoured to have Elliot declared insane. Dr. Symmonds relied chiefly upon a philosophical epistle wherein Elliot had advanced a singular hypothesis regarding the heat of the sun: arguing that it proceeded from the dense atmosphere encompassing the orb rather than from an intrinsic ball of fire. The bench heard an argument that was perhaps erroneous, yet methodically reasoned and sustained. The Recorder drily inquired whether such a speculation would suffice to pronounce Buffon or any other natural philosopher a lunatic. Dr. O’Donnell, who had succeeded to Elliot’s practice, had perceived marks of derangement, whilst admitting that the physician attended his patients with regular skill and propriety. Two persons with whom Elliot had lodged likewise deposed to eccentricities, while yet describing him as a quiet inmate. The archival record leaves the impression that these depositions failed to persuade. Nor do they warrant our translating these contemporary impressions into modern diagnostic terms.
The Recorder then directed the jury upon the prerequisites of their verdict. They must be satisfied beyond doubt that one or both pistols contained leaden balls; that at least one had been levelled and discharged at Miss Boydell; and that the deed was committed wilfully and maliciously. The latter two conditions appeared to the court amply supported by the bystanders, by Elliot’s own confessions, and by the contrivance of the lashed barrels. The first remained shrouded in doubt. A juror interposed, observing that nothing could be plainer than the absence of any ball. The Recorder thereupon remarked that he might spare himself the trouble of reciting the arguments of the defence.
The jury returned with a divided finding: guilty of the shooting, but without sufficient evidence that the weapons were loaded with ball. The Recorder directed them to an acquittal upon the capital indictment. For Elliot, this was no deliverance. The court refused to suffer his discharge, ordering his detention to answer a fresh charge of common assault. This decision marks the profound gulf between a prisoner against whom the precise statutory crime cannot be brought home, and one who escapes the retributive machinery of the law altogether. Elliot was subsequently convicted of the misdemeanor. Borrow characterises the punishment as vindictive—a stricture belonging to the compiler rather than a dispassionate account of the sentence.
The conclusion of the drama departs from the open courtroom to settle upon a silent, inward resolution recorded by Borrow. Elliot, a man of “extreme sensibility” according to the chronicle, steadfastly refused all sustenance. In defiance of both entreaties and force, he persisted in his fasting unto death. Borrow ascribed this miserable end to a “misplaced scruple of the law”; the phrase lays the catastrophe at the door of judicial obstinacy, yet it falls short of proving that the prosecution was the sole engine of his despair. The chronicle affords us no further light upon the prisoner’s solitary mind during his confinement.
At the close of the proceedings, Mary Boydell survived; her singed cloak and bruised shoulders had been exposed to the gaze of the jurors. Elliot stood acquitted of the capital charge framed under the Black Act, only to be retained in irons for an assault. The two pistols delivered into the hands of an unknown runner were not those whose fury had torn the lady’s mantle, but those discovered still nestled in the prisoner’s coat. Their lading could by no means determine the charge of the weapons levelled against Mary. The life of a man hung upon the distinction between two nearly identical instruments; and in that historic courtroom, it dictated all that twelve men could swear to be true.