When Isabella Bankes expired, the attending physicians had by no means arrived at an agreement concerning the origin of her sufferings. One already spoke openly of an irritant poison; another, keeping vigil at her bedside, had watched remedies fail without being able to account for their miscarriage; and the man who nursed her, Dr. Thomas Smethurst, was at once her husband by an irregular rite and the practitioners’ primary informant. At the bar, these disparate roles would become inextricably entangled with questions of fortune, pregnancy, and chemistry. The verdict was death. Yet the science that had procured it spoke with no single voice.
Isabella was of respectable extraction, possessed of personal property as well as a life interest in a more considerable sum, according to the narrative of the prosecution preserved in the Edinburgh Medical Journal. In the autumn of 1858, she had met Smethurst at Rifle Terrace, where he resided with his lawful wife. The landlady, taking exception to an excess of familiarity between them, requested her departure, and Isabella removed to another lodging. On the 9th of December, she and Smethurst went through a ceremony of marriage at Battersea, subsequently establishing their household at Richmond. He was already wedded; this second union was later to sustain an indictment for bigamy, yet it afforded no proof of murder. At the trial, the defense conceded the illegality and censured Smethurst’s conduct, while insisting that the young lady had been fully apprised of his condition.
Their cohabitation proceeded at first without public incident. Isabella addressed letters to her sister Louisa in January, and again in February 1859. Toward the close of March, she fell ill. Smethurst summoned Dr. Julius, who believed himself initially called upon to treat an ordinary diarrhea and bilious fever. He prescribed diverse preparations; his partner, Dr. Bird, attended in his turn. The patient’s condition deteriorated. Both practitioners subsequently declared that their remedies failed to produce the anticipated relief, leading them to suspect that some irritant substance was thwarting their treatment. Yet they had not communicated their misgivings to one another at the outset.
To this initial hesitation was added the matter of access to the sufferer. The physicians testified that they were seldom permitted to examine her unattended; Louisa, summoned to Richmond on the 19th of April by an urgent missive from Smethurst, found her sister in an alarming state of prostration. Isabella cautioned her to disclose nothing: all would be well once she was restored, she added, turning toward Smethurst, who signified his assent. Louisa proposed introducing Dr. Lane, a kinsman of theirs; Smethurst demurred, affirming that Isabella had no desire for his services. The sister departed without ever learning that the two residents of Richmond had united in marriage. These particulars were adduced by the prosecution as deliberate impediments to proper succor; the defense urged that they merely reflected a domestic retirement which, it argued, Isabella had embraced of her own free will.
On the 28th of April, Dr. Todd was brought to the bedside. He declared himself struck by the rigidity of the abdomen and by a countenance marked with what he termed terror. He requested an alvine evacuation for analysis, and prescribed, among other agents, a pill of sulphate of copper and opium. In the interim, various samples had been secured and delivered into the hands of the eminent toxicologist Alfred Swaine Taylor. On the 1st of May, Taylor believed he had detected arsenic in one of the evacuations. Alarm spread among the medical attendants; Smethurst was apprehended on the morrow for administering poison, though he was liberated upon an undertaking that he might attend Isabella’s bedside. She died during the ensuing night, and the charge was enlarged to willful murder.
The post-mortem examination yielded grave discoveries, yet no consensus of opinion. Mr. Barwell, the surgeon, described extensive inflammation and ulceration of the mucous membrane in the lower portion of the intestinal canal. He likewise discovered that Isabella was pregnant of some five to seven weeks—a fact entirely unknown to her physicians throughout the course of her illness. The medical witnesses called on behalf of the Crown opined that neither the symptoms nor the morbid appearances could be reconciled with any natural malady within their experience; several attributed the fatal issue to an irritant, suggesting arsenic or antimony. Conversely, the witnesses for the prisoner maintained that severe dysentery, exacerbated by early pregnancy, was fully capable of producing identical symptoms and structural lesions. The gestation was no secondary detail appended after the event: it fundamentally altered the interpretation of the protracted vomiting, the diarrhea, and the efficacy of the remedies administered.
The chemical analysis, which had promised to resolve the dilemma, became itself the center of fierce contention. Taylor explained to the court that the arsenic he had purportedly identified in a draught of medicine was, in truth, derived from the copper gauze employed in Reinsch’s test, which had been dissolved by the action of chlorate of potash. He thus acknowledged a conspicuous error of manipulation. Nonetheless, he persisted in asserting that the evacuation itself contained arsenic, and affirmed that he had discovered traces of antimony in certain tissues and organs. Smethurst’s counsel seized upon the acknowledged blunder to shake the jury’s reliance upon the remaining tests. Toxicologists summoned by the defense observed that bismuth and certain officinal preparations were known to contain minute impurities of arsenic or antimony; they challenged the significance of these traces and drew attention to the total absence of poison in several vital organs. Other experts, appearing for the Crown, upheld the validity of the analysis and affirmed a toxic cause to be the more probable. The proceedings thus laid bare the hazards of experiment, the imperfections of analytical methods, and the precarious authority reposed in the man who directed them.
The trial had already miscarried in July owing to the sudden illness of a juror. It was resumed on the 15th of August before the Lord Chief Baron at the Old Bailey. Over several arduous days, the witnesses were examined upon prescriptions, medicine phials, sealed jars, and the declarations of the prisoner. The defense insisted that the Crown lay under the obligation to demonstrate not merely that death had ensued from poison, but that such poison had been administered by the accused. Counsel contested the inferences drawn from his domestic nursing, from Isabella’s expressed wishes, from the letter to Louisa, and from the will executed during her mortal sickness. The Crown, for its part, marshaled the clandestine nuptials, the expectation of property, and the seclusion of the dying woman as proof of a calculated design. The court was not convened to pass judgment upon a scandalous life, the judge reminded the jury: it fell to them solely to determine whether the crime of murder had been proved.
The conflict was not reducible to two immaculately divided camps. Taylor had conceded his mistake regarding the draught, yet he declined to retract his findings touching the other specimens. The defense had shown that a renowned expert could stumble, and that metallic impurities might attend lawful medicine; yet the Crown preserved other distinct analyses and the morbid changes noted at the dissection. The testimonies concerning dysentery and gestation remained equally balanced and equally contested. The frailty of the prosecution lay not in any silence on the part of science, but in the circumstance that its authorities, all clad in professional eminence, extracted diametrically opposed conclusions from the selfsame facts. To the jury, however, fell the unyielding duty of a verdict.
On Friday the 19th of August, at the close of the sessions commenced on Monday the 15th, following the arguments of counsel and a rigorous summing-up from the bench, the jury returned with a verdict of guilty. Smethurst was sentenced to death. The contemporary medical report of 1859 dissembles nothing of the uneasy aftermath: it records that the conviction provoked widespread controversy, and that the prisoner was shortly respited during Her Majesty’s pleasure. In January 1860, on the floor of the House of Commons, Edwin James recalled that the Crown had granted him a free pardon. He read the opinion transmitted to the Home Secretary by Sir Benjamin Brodie: the circumstances warranted profound suspicion, yet failed to afford absolute proof of guilt. A verdict and an act of grace remain fundamentally distinct; the second did not transform into a judicial acquittal the solemn finding of the jury.
The selfsame parliamentary debate lamented that the medical reports submitted to the Home Department had not been made public, leaving the nation unable to scrutinize the precise grounds for the Minister’s intervention. Smethurst had been condemned following an open trial; he was set at liberty by virtue of an executive prerogative founded upon advisory opinions that had never been tested before a second jury. The case therefore decided neither the true medical cause of death nor the hand responsible for a hypothetical poisoning; it exposed, rather, the constitutional discomfort of a system wherein sovereign clemency could undo the practical consequences of a capital sentence without ever pronouncing a fresh judicial judgment.
The charge of bigamy, however, was not merely an insinuation advanced at the bar of the murder trial. Following the royal pardon, a contemporary report of the proceedings at Southwark records that Smethurst was committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court for having married Isabella whilst his lawful union of 1828 with Mary Durham still subsisted. The parish registers were produced in court; Isabella’s sister identified her deceased sibling’s signature upon the Battersea entry. This record establishes his committal, though not the ultimate disposition of the indictment. The two proceedings must remain scrupulously distinguished: the capital sentence was remitted by pardon, whereas the charge of bigamy gave rise to a separate indictment; neither, taken alone, resolves the mystery of Isabella’s death. Thus the Smethurst affair endures, suspended between the silent lesions of a corpse, the disputed experiments of a laboratory, and a sentence of death that the Crown chose never to execute.