There are trials that do not end with the verdict. The jury answers the question put to it by the law; but when the condemned man is marked for death, the prison becomes in turn a place of examination, and physicians, magistrates, and the minister ponder whether the man they have judged can still be regarded as master of his actions. The case of George Victor Townley, tried at Derby in December 1863, was not merely that of a murder committed by the roadside. It became a public dispute over the frontiers dividing crime, disease, and the royal prerogative of mercy.
Townley had known Elizabeth Goodwin for several years. According to the retrospective account published in 1864 by the editors of the Journal of Mental Science, they had been engaged for over three years, though his straitened circumstances and the lack of steady employment postponed their marriage. On the 14th of August, Elizabeth wrote to him requesting that their engagement be broken off. The pamphlet asserts that she had formed an attachment to a clergyman who had stayed at Wigwell Grange, the home of her grandfather, Captain Goodwin; it notes, however, that in her letter she pleaded instead the old gentleman’s opposition. These details reach us from writers championing a controversial medical thesis: they are not the voice of Elizabeth, whose letters—entrusted to the captain and subsequently destroyed unread—can no longer be consulted.
Townley sought a final interview. After an initial consent, Elizabeth is said to have written bidding him not to come, explaining that she was to leave the house for an indefinite period. On the 20th of August, he travelled to Derby and passed the night at an inn. The following day, he reached the neighbouring village of Whatstandwell and thence walked toward the house. On the way, he called upon the Reverend Harris, a family friend. According to the 1864 account, Townley spoke of the rupture dispassionately, adding that he had no desire to stand in Elizabeth’s way. Harris counselled him to proceed to Wigwell Grange. Townley arrived there about twenty minutes to six, asked to see the young woman, and walked out with her into the garden.
They returned separately to the house, and presently went out again. Between eight and nine o’clock, a labourer heard moans along Wigwell Lane. Elizabeth was making her way forward, leaning against the wall, her face and the front of her gown soaked with blood. She cried that a man had murdered her and begged to be carried home. Townley came up to the labourer and confessed that he had stabbed her. He helped support her, called her “poor Bessie,” and said she ought not to have been unfaithful to him. When they were forced to lay her down, he sought to stanch the bleeding; then, believing her gone, he bent down to kiss her. She was dead. At the gate, before Captain Goodwin, he again acknowledged the deed and declared, according to the pamphlet, that a woman who deceived him deserved to die.
The material facts were not disputed at the trial. The defence did not deny the act; it maintained that Townley was not legally responsible by reason of his mental condition. An aunt spoke of derangement in a distant branch of the family. His mother described the agitation into which the letter had plunged her son. The decisive question rested upon the medical testimony; yet Dr. Forbes Winslow had examined Townley only three months after the murder, and again on the eve of the trial. He interpreted the prisoner’s notions regarding his ownership of Elizabeth, and his belief in a conspiracy directed against him, as indications of disease.
On the 11th and 12th of December, Townley was tried at Derby for wilful murder. The judge, Baron Martin, instructed the jurors that they must determine whether the prisoner knew the nature and consequences of his act, and whether he knew that he was committing a crime. The jury deliberated for five minutes and returned a verdict of guilty. The judge concurred in the verdict and pronounced sentence of death. A week later, The Spectator described Dr. Winslow’s cross-examination as the most striking feature of the trial, deeming it scarcely credible that a belief in a conspiracy, manifested only after several months, could establish insanity at the moment of the murder. This was the opinion of a journal, not an impartial clinical finding.
The day following the verdict, Baron Martin wrote to the Home Secretary, Sir George Grey. He stated that he held the conviction to be just, but pointed out that Dr. Winslow and the gaol surgeon, James Gisborne, had described Townley as presently suffering from severe mental alienation. When Grey asked whether he himself considered the man insane, Martin replied that he had formed no settled opinion; the prisoner’s demeanour, sitting with bowed head and speaking little, had afforded no basis for a conclusion. He believed, however, that further inquiry was indispensable. This distinction was to govern all that followed: Martin did not withdraw his assent to the verdict; he asked that the condemned man’s present condition be examined before carrying out the execution.
Grey consulted the Commissioners in Lunacy. Their report, dated the 28th of December, stated both that Townley had been justly convicted under the legal test applied at the trial, and that his extraordinary views, his perverted moral sense, and the alleged family history precluded regarding him as sane. The Commissioners found no well-defined delusion: the supposed “conspiracy” appeared to them an exaggerated view of genuine opposition to his engagement. Meanwhile, three magistrates and two medical men had signed a certificate pronouncing the prisoner insane. A second certificate, procured with county magistrates, followed. The Home Secretary received these instruments as the date of execution drew near, and granted a reprieve; he later maintained that the statute then in force compelled him to remove Townley to a lunatic asylum. The sentence had not yet been commuted.
This respite did nothing to allay public feeling. Forty Derbyshire magistrates protested against the proceedings, asserting that the initial examination had been instigated by Townley’s attorney rather than by the prison authorities. The medical pamphlet of 1864 recounts this indignation and the ensuing controversy; it takes a firm stand against Dr. Winslow’s testimony and against admitting moral insanity upon the behaviour described. Its authors devote pages to demonstrating that the jury was right and the alienists mistaken. Their work sheds light upon the facts they record, but equally upon the scientific and forensic interests they were defending.
Townley was removed to Bethlem Hospital on the 11th of January. Sir George Grey then directed four medical men to examine the prisoner. Following two interviews, they unanimously concluded, on the 28th of January, that he was of sound mind. They considered in particular that he knew the law punished murder, and that his contention of having slain Elizabeth to “recover her as his property” was an afterthought concocted to justify the act. This commission was not retrying the case: it was answering the question of his mental state at Bethlem, several weeks later.
On the 8th of February, Grey laid the chronology before the House of Commons. He recalled the conviction and the death sentence, recounted the judge’s application, the certificates, the reprieve, the removal, and the subsequent report of the four physicians. The government decided to commute the sentence to penal servitude for life and to transfer Townley to Pentonville Prison. The members agreed neither upon the scope of insanity, nor upon the meaning of the law, nor upon the equal distribution of resources before justice. Some deemed the commutation wholly unwarranted once his sanity had been affirmed; others defended the minister, invoked medical uncertainty, or opposed capital punishment altogether.
Thus, none of these documents records an absolution of Townley. The jury found him guilty; the judge maintained that the conviction was just; two sets of experts differed as to his mental state; the Home Secretary ultimately resolved not to carry out the sentence. As for the young woman, she could no longer answer the words imputed to her, nor clarify the reasons for the rupture. There remains the judgment, the testimony filtered through conflicting accounts, and the arguments of men disputing the definition of madness. A case sometimes becomes famous because the law knows how to conclude; this one became so because, after the verdict, it never ceased questioning what it had concluded.