On the night of the 6th to the 7th of February, 1879, two men broke into the vicarage at Edlingham, near Alnwick. The aged vicar, the Reverend Mr. Buckle, descended the stairs armed with an antique sword upon hearing an uncommon stir. His daughter followed close behind. The intruders were bearing a firearm; a shot was discharged, wounding both father and daughter in the shoulder. Miss Buckle, herself wounded, seized one of the men by the hair. The two marauders fled through a window, bearing away a trifling sum of money and a gold watch with its chain and seal. The young lady at once raised the alarm, dispatching a mounted messenger to alert the constabulary.
The earliest inquiries directed the officers toward Charles Richardson, a day-labourer, and George Edgell, an under-gardener. Both men were known to the law, yet both were found abed, their boots dry. The constables thereupon repaired to the dwellings of Michael Brannagan and Peter Murphy, two notorious poachers who had not yet returned to their hearths. When they reappeared towards seven o’clock that morning, their garments and footwear were soaked through. They readily admitted to having been out poaching, but stoutly denied the break-in. The police took them into custody.
The identification of the men at the vicarage remained uncertain. The vicar and his daughter had caught sight of the intruders in the dimmest light, first by moonbeams and then by the flicker of a candle. They could not swear to their countenances. They nevertheless described the man who had levelled the gun: broad-shouldered, powerfully built, with dark hair and a martial carriage. This figure recalled Brannagan to their minds, though neither would venture to swear under oath that he was indeed the man.
The investigation brought forward physical exhibits to bolster this imperfect likeness. Footprints found in the garden were cast in plaster and said to match Brannagan’s boots and Murphy’s wooden clogs. A chisel discovered at the parsonage was identified by John Redpath, Murphy’s landlord. A scrap of newspaper left behind in the garden was found to correspond with a leaf discovered in the lining of a seized coat. Lastly, a shred of cloth picked up near the window resembled Brannagan’s trousers. This last exhibit had already been called into question at the trial: the button attached to it did not match the other buttons on the trousers, and a tailor testified that the strip of fustian had been cut away, not torn.
The Buckles were conveyed by night to Edlingham to view the suspects clad in their garments. They confirmed a general resemblance in stature and attire, but could not attest to their features. The jury then heard the material evidence, together with the contradictory accounts Brannagan and Murphy offered regarding their nocturnal sporting. On the 23rd of April, 1879, after three hours of deliberation, the panel returned a verdict of guilty for burglary and attempted murder. The prisoners were condemned to penal servitude for life and removed to various gaols, from Morpeth to Portsmouth.
Nearly ten years later, two men already familiar to the Alnwick police, Edgell and Richardson, presented themselves to the authorities and avowed that they alone had committed the break-in. Edgell declared that his conscience and the earnest exhortations of his clergyman had induced him to speak out, that he might liberate men he knew to be innocent. The disclosure provoked general indignation across the nation. On the 15th of November, 1888, Brannagan and Murphy were released under the royal prerogative of mercy. At Alnwick, a great concourse of people bore them in triumph from the railway station amidst brass bands and cheering. Her Majesty’s Government granted each man an indemnity of eight hundred pounds.
Their former accusers were not simply replaced by the new confessors. A petition bearing the signatures of several thousand inhabitants of Alnwick accompanied Edgell and Richardson to the bar of justice. It prayed the bench to have regard to their voluntary surrender and pleaded for clemency. Counsel for the defence opened with the very question exercising the public mind: could two men lawfully be tried for a burglary for which two others had already suffered condemnation? The presiding judge replied that the court must hear the indictment; the petition, he observed, was addressed to the Crown’s prerogative of mercy, not to his judicial office. Edgell and Richardson were arraigned at Newcastle. They confessed to the burglary and larceny, but denied any intention of taking the lives of the vicar and his daughter. Richardson maintained that the gun had discharged by misadventure. The Crown withdrew the capital count of attempted murder, proceeding only upon the admitted facts. The judge sentenced each man to five years’ penal servitude. Their deposition accounted for several perplexing traces—notably the impressions of knees near the sill and feet wrapped in sacking—yet it revealed discrepancies as to who had first proposed the venture and who had first crossed the threshold.
Suspicion now turned in a new direction. Three police officers—Thomas Harrison, Isaac Gair, and Robert Sprot—were indicted for having conspired with their late superintendent, George Harkes, since deceased, to fabricate false evidence against Brannagan and Murphy. The prosecution maintained, amongst other points, that the plaster casts had been made directly from the prisoners’ footwear and subsequently presented as garden impressions; that the chisel had been surreptitiously introduced amongst Redpath’s tools to obtain his identification; and that the fragment of newsprint and the patch of cloth had been planted to fortify an otherwise fragile case.
The trial of February 1889, however, was not a rehearing of the burglary. Its purpose was to determine whether the constables had knowingly fabricated or corrupted evidence. The confessions of Edgell and Richardson stood at the heart of the indictment, yet their true motives remained in dispute. They asserted they had believed, on the counsel of a clergyman and a solicitor, that they would suffer no punishment once other men had already been convicted of the crime. Yet they had accepted five years’ penal servitude and stood by their statements. The clergyman, the Reverend Mr. Perry, subsequently disputed in a letter to the press that he had ever promised them impunity. Thus the various recitals of the confession agreed no better than the depositions of 1879.
The material exhibits were likewise subjected to a fresh examination. Constable Chambers affirmed that the casts had indeed been taken on the morning following the crime, in the presence of Dr. Wilson. Archdeacon Hamilton recalled that Redpath had examined the chisel and described two distinctive notches before recognizing it as his own. Redpath had subsequently altered his testimony after losing his employment and facing the ostracism of his neighbours. As for the fragment of trouser-cloth, it had been questioned from the very first trial. Concerning the paper found within the coat, Dr. Wilson had discovered it during a medical examination undertaken to search for sword-cuts, well before the matter had assumed the character of a criminal proceeding against the police.
Mr. Justice Denman cautioned the jurors that it was not their province to determine whether Brannagan and Murphy, or Edgell and Richardson, had committed the burglary. That inquiry had received contradictory answers in distinct courts of law; it was not the question laid before them. They were called upon to decide whether the police officers had willfully entered into a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. An investigation marked by overzealousness, even had it led to an error of justice, did not suffice to prove willful fabrication. Nor did the use of an artifice by an officer, designed to elicit the truth from a witness, establish of itself a felonious conspiracy.
After five days’ hearing, the jury pronounced the three constables not guilty. They were discharged from custody. The verdict left the perpetrators of the 1879 burglary unnamed. The record itself falters: the later confessions appear credible, yet several links forged in the original inquiry remain unyielding; the officers acquitted in 1889 may well have acted in good faith, yet their vindication does nothing to redress the wrongful conviction of Brannagan and Murphy. English jurisprudence possessed no court of criminal appeal that might simply reopen the first trial. The royal pardon had unlocked the prison gates; it had not resolved the contradictions of the case.