On July 26, 1705, Edward Jefferis and Robert Woodcock departed the Blue Posts, at the foot of Pall Mall, after dining together. A few hours later, Woodcock lay dead in a field near Chelsea, run through by a sword thrust. The ensuing trial was not merely to establish whose hand had wielded the blade. It fell likewise to the court to determine whether Elizabeth Forshell, who had accompanied Jefferis, had been party to the murder or had grasped its true import only after the deed was done.
The two men had parted after their meal, taken between one and two o’clock in the afternoon. Jefferis proceeded to Forshell’s lodgings in St Martin’s Lane. They were subsequently seen setting out together toward the park. Later in the afternoon, they reappeared at the Cheshire Cheese in Chelsea. The chronicle details neither the meal nor the nature of the ties that bound them to Woodcock; it confines itself to the hours, the movements, and what the witnesses claimed to have beheld. Yet between their departure from the tavern and this rendezvous at the inn, the prosecution’s version inserted a brief quarrel, followed by an irrevocable act.
A youthful witness recounted that he was playing with another lad in the fields near Chelsea, towards four o’clock. He perceived Jefferis and Woodcock walking together towards the road. The two men were quarrelling. Jefferis hurled an insult; Woodcock answered that he should not give him the lie. The boy then saw Jefferis draw his sword. Woodcock, being left-handed, had not yet been able to unsheathe his own when he received the blow. He fell upon the instant.
According to this witness, Jefferis thereupon drew Woodcock’s sword and smeared it with the blood flowing from the wound. He laid the weapon beneath the corpse, as though to counterfeit a suicide, then searched a pocket and drew forth an object. He fled running towards Chelsea. The two lads pursued him; upon the road, he broke his own sword and concealed it beneath his coat. When he turned upon them with menaces, they retraced their steps. The other lad confirmed the substance of the scene. Their account furnished the court with a precise sequence of events, yet the chronicle does not record that any article taken from the pocket was ever identified, nor that the children were able to explain what had ignited the quarrel.
Elizabeth Forshell stood, according to the boys, near the park wall. After the blow, she drew near the field toward the body, but turned away upon seeing them. The remaining witnesses placed her with Jefferis at the Cheshire Cheese inn, where they arrived around half-past four and remained until nearly six. This meeting did not in itself establish that she had taken part in the assault; for the prosecution, it was weighed alongside her presence near the field and what was discovered in her lodgings.
When she was told that the man who had accompanied her lay dead in St Martin’s churchyard, Forshell cried out: “Is it he?” Having viewed him, she begged that no stir be made. Later, when the officers arrived to take her into custody, she barred herself within her bedchamber. She opened only after they threatened to break down the door. In a drawer, the constable found a purse and three rings identified as belonging to Woodcock. The chronicle does not explain how these goods came to be there, nor whether Forshell knew to whom they belonged.
Jefferis denied the murder and maintained that he was elsewhere at the time of the deed. He called witnesses to support his alibi, but their testimony failed to agree upon the hour. The jury pronounced him guilty. Forshell was acquitted.
According to Borrow, a reprieve overtook Jefferis whilst he was already upon the road to Tyburn. The execution was deferred: he was left to await a new appointed day. This suspension granted him further time to hope, to converse with the ordinary, and to exchange words with Forshell. It did not annul the sentence: Jefferis was ultimately led to the scaffold. The September dates provided by the compiler contradict one another; they permit no certain reckoning of the interval between the trial and the execution.
Before his death, Jefferis made a biographical confession. He stated that he was about forty-one years of age, born near Devizes in Wiltshire of reputable parentage, and bred to the law in London. He confessed to having been unfaithful and unjust to his wife, and to having led a profligate life. He explained that his expenses had drawn him into sharp and unjust practices in his profession as an attorney, whilst maintaining that he had thought at the time to serve his clients’ interests, whatever their cause. This confession touched not upon the murder. At the foot of the gallows, he again denied having committed it, and declared that he died in charity with those who had injured him.
Following his execution, Forshell addressed a letter to the prison ordinary, dated October 15. Therein she related the journey toward Chelsea. They had traversed the park and the mulberry gardens; Jefferis, she wrote, had proposed passing through the house under some pretext at the bar. Nearing the fields, he told her that a friend was there and bade her walk on alone. She proceeded as far as two fields from Chelsea; Jefferis rejoined her. She observed his perturbation and inquired whether he had quarrelled with the gentleman. He replied that they had exchanged words and that he had given him “a little prick.” She said she hoped he had not hurt him. He answered that he had not.
Forshell explained that she later observed Jefferis at the inn lay his sword, his hat, and his gloves upon a table, and then quit the room. She drew the sword from its scabbard: it was, she wrote, neither bloody nor broken. This directly contradicted the lads’ testimony, but her letter was penned after the execution and had formed no part of the evidence at the trial. She recorded also subsequent conversations in the prison. Jefferis denied having used Woodcock’s sword and said he had broken no weapon. When she asked whether he had intended to do so, he made no answer. He was said to have entreated her not to reveal that he had left her upon the road, adding that such a disclosure would ruin his hopes of a reprieve.
Forshell’s letter provides no conclusive explanation of the murder. She relates that she suspected Jefferis of having taken money from Woodcock, and believed that the latter’s refusal might have provoked the quarrel. Yet she does not frame this as an explicit admission. She evokes rather Jefferis’s silences, his halting words, and the dread he voiced regarding his reprieve. At the trial, she had been acquitted; after Jefferis’s death, her letter introduced troubling details without dispelling the lingering uncertainties. Woodcock was dead, Jefferis had unceasingly denied the murder, and the account of the woman who had walked beside him could no longer be confronted with his own before a court of law.
Forshell appended a postscript. Jefferis had told her he had petitioned the Duke of Ormonde and relied upon a person who was to intercede with the Queen. She believed this to be Mrs Lambourn, the mother of one of the boys. Thus, in Forshell’s letter, the condemned man’s hope hung upon the very family of a witness. She acknowledged having withheld a portion of what she knew: to speak, she thought, would not bring Woodcock back to life, but might strip Jefferis of his final chance. She took up her pen only when that chance was forever gone.