In a Saffron Hill tavern, on Boxing Day of 1864, a man stood accused of murder because he was discovered bending over the body of a dying victim. His conviction appeared to bring the matter to a close. Then another man confessed to having dealt the fatal blow. Yet this second trial delivered no unvarnished truth: the self-avowed slayer was convicted of manslaughter, the first remained under sentence of death, and a third trial was convened to adjudicate a separate wound. It required prolonged public debate and an exercise of royal mercy to untangle this judicial succession. The witnesses had not all witnessed the same scene; the knives themselves told entirely different tales.
On December 26, at the Golden Anchor, a public house in Great Saffron Hill, Michael Harrington was struck down in the course of an affray involving Englishmen and Italians. Alfred Rebbeck, the potman, was likewise wounded. Retrospective sources do not entirely agree upon the number of blows struck nor upon the sequence of movements; they reveal, however, one essential circumstance: the brawl possessed multiple hearths of violence, several men held knives, and it was no simple matter to determine who had inflicted which wound.
Serafino Pelizzioni entered the indictment under a name that varied across the surviving records: Seraphini Polioni, or Pelizzioni. He was known in the neighborhood, and several witnesses pointed him out. According to the account left by the barrister Montagu Williams, the landlord, Frederick Shaw, testified that Pelizzioni had entered the public house in a state of high agitation and threatened to kill an Englishman; Rebbeck declared that he had seen him armed with a knife and observed him over Harrington. Other witnesses maintained that Pelizzioni was the sole Italian present when the victim was struck. These depositions presented the jury with a neat, coherent picture—almost too coherent for a tavern brawl.
Police Constable Thomas Potter reported a dying declaration attributed to Harrington, who had been conveyed to Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital. According to Potter, upon being warned that his death was imminent, the stricken man pointed to Pelizzioni and said: “That’s the man that did it.” The precise words that followed remained uncertain, Potter wavering between a blessing and a plea for forgiveness. This testimony proved immensely persuasive; yet it did not dispel the unresolved questions regarding the tavern floor, the relative positions of the combatants, or the presence of other participants.
At the trial, witnesses for the defense described a chaotic melée wherein Italians were striking out on every side. Some testified that Gregorio Mogni, Pelizzioni’s cousin, had brandished his knife; others considered the two men so similar in appearance as to be easily confounded. One witness asserted that Gregorio had flung his weapon into the yard. A potboy named Cowlands claimed to have found it in the urinal and handed it to Inspector Potter. When Potter produced a knife in court, the boy maintained it was not the one he had found, adding that the other weapon was “much looser”—a piece of testimony rendered singularly strange by the very object it sought to describe.
The jury found Pelizzioni guilty, and the judge sentenced him to death. Throughout the Italian quarter, this conclusion did not quell the rising doubts. Newspapers—foremost among them the Daily Telegraph, according to Williams—published arguments urging a respite. Compatriots of the condemned man solicited the intervention of the Italian ambassador and the legation. Henry Negretti, a maker of scientific instruments and a leading figure within that community, set out to track down Mogni, who, by several accounts, had vanished following the affray. On the eve of the appointed execution, Pelizzioni’s sentence was stayed.
Another trial followed. On March 2, 1865, Mogni appeared before Mr. Justice Byles to answer for the death of Harrington. He lacked counsel of his own; Williams recounts that the judge requested that he undertake the defense. The brief included the depositions gathered from the first trial, alongside new evidence. The landlady, Mrs. Shaw, who had not testified at Pelizzioni’s trial, stated that she had seen Gregorio fighting with her husband and then seize Harrington before she lost sight of him. Giovanni Mogni affirmed that his brother had struck out blindly. Another witness attributed words of confession to him, yet altered their substance under cross-examination; Williams notes that this witness had come forward only several days after the event.
Negretti subsequently recounted how he had discovered Mogni in Birmingham, in a carpenter’s workshop. Williams’s narrative relates that Mogni, upon learning that his cousin stood in peril of the gallows, consented to give himself up, declaring that he would not suffer Pelizzioni to die in his stead. According to the same account, he admitted having taken drink and joined in the brawl, but insisted that Pelizzioni was not in the room when the fighting occurred. It is necessary here to distinguish the layers of testimony: Williams relates what Negretti is said to have declared under oath; it is not a confession recorded firsthand by the author of the reminiscences.
The verdict did not allot to Mogni the fate later assigned to him in the chronicle of Arthur Griffiths. The jury found him guilty of manslaughter, with a recommendation to mercy on account of the provocation received; the judge sentenced him to five years’ penal servitude. The House of Lords publicly outlined this distinction on March 30: Mogni had been tried for the selfsame death, yet convicted not of murder, but of manslaughter. The same debate noted that Pelizzioni, still under reprieve, awaited a second trial concerning the wounding of Rebbeck. It was therefore inaccurate to assert that two men remained under sentence of death for a single murder.
The enigma remained unyielding. The Home Secretary, questioned in the Commons on March 23, explained that the judge in the first trial had regarded the evidence against Pelizzioni as direct and conclusive, whereas the judge in the second trial was not satisfied with Mogni’s conviction for manslaughter. The Crown had sought legal opinions and resolved that Pelizzioni should be put upon his trial on the lesser charge of wounding, so that the lingering doubts might be weighed by another jury. Parliament recorded the official stance; it erased neither the prior conviction nor the reality that the authorities themselves hesitated over the consequences of the second verdict.
The trial for Rebbeck’s wounding took place in April. The wounded potman maintained that Pelizzioni had struck him; further evidence regarding the knife and the witnesses was examined. At the close of three days, the jury acquitted Pelizzioni of this separate indictment. In strict law, this verdict did not constitute an acquittal for the murder of Harrington. It bore, however, immense moral weight in a case where both charges had sprung from the very same brawl and where the identifications had been so fiercely contested. A few days later, Pelizzioni received a royal pardon for the murder and was set at liberty, according to Williams’s retrospective testimony. Hansard had already confirmed the reprieve and the secondary trial; the precise date of the pardon is not established here from any official document directly consulted.
The subsequent record of the affair serves primarily to expose the limits of narratives that purport to be definitive. Griffiths, writing long after the event, portrays Mogni as having been “convicted of the crime” and speaks of two men separately sentenced for the same death; he further alleges that the police withheld a weapon already identified as Mogni’s. Contemporary accounts confirm Mogni’s verdict of guilty, but specify that it was for manslaughter, not murder. Williams describes the weapon produced at the second trial as having been brought into court by an officer who was not present when it was discovered; Potter admitted that its identification as belonging to Gregorio had been reported to him only after the fact. Such particulars warrant caution and critical discernment, but they do not, taken alone, permit the conclusion that a deliberate concealment was proven.
In the prosecution’s narrative, the condemned man’s proximity to the victim and a statement uttered upon a hospital bed had closed all room for doubt. Mogni’s trial, the vacillations of the witnesses, the dispute over the weapon, and finally the acquittal on the indictment for wounding forced that door open once more, without ever laying bare every detail of that night. Williams himself concluded by confessing that he had never been able to resolve whether Gregorio had sacrificed himself for his kinsman. Pelizzioni’s pardon did not resolve the mystery as a final, perfectly fitted piece of a puzzle might; it merely brought an end to a punishment rendered untenable by successive proceedings. Thus closed the affair of the Golden Anchor: not with a single judicial certainty, but with the belated recognition that a sentence may possess far greater certainty than the evidence brought to sustain it.