As obedient Britons, the jury did not hesitate in following the guidance of a Social Superior. As a man, the three plumbers, the two farmers, the milliner, the wood-turner, the grocer, the iron-monger, the house-painter and the baker brought in a verdict of guilty. Judge Stephen — with a certain rather lunatic satisfaction, perhaps? — donned the black cap and pronounced that Florence Maybrick should be hanged by the neck until she was dead.
A short time later he was himself pronounced insane.
The verdict, coming after a trial in which nothing seemed to have been proved one way or the other, staggered England. It staggered the world. In a few weeks hundreds of thousands of people had signed petitions for Mrs. Maybrick’s reprieve. Public opinion, in the face of what seemed like gross injustice, swung round to her side. Florence was popular at last.
For two or three weeks she lived (to use her own ill phrase) “in the shadow of the gallows.” Finally, a little intimidated perhaps by the general clamor, Mr. Matthews, the Home Secretary — for there was no Supreme Court of Criminal Appeal at that time — retired the case in camera and commuted Mrs. Maybrick’s sentence to one of penal servitude for life. His reasons for this clemency were that:
“inasmuch as, although the evidence leads to the conclusion that the prisoner administered and attempted to administer arsenic to her husband with intent to murder him, yet it does not wholly exclude a reasonable doubt whether his (James Maybrick’s) death was in fact caused by the administration of arsenic.”
In other words, Mr. Matthews was of the opinion that Mrs. Maybrick had been guilty of attempting to kill her husband with arsenic although it wasn’t certain that he had died from arsenical poisoning. This charge was something Mrs. Maybrick had not even been tried for during a court procedure at which nothing had been proved beyond the fact that James was dead — a sad eventuality which had been common knowledge before ever the slow-moving wheels of the law had got under way. If that wasn’t bad luck — what is?
Whether or not Mrs. Maybrick was guilty, and how much, is no longer calculable. That she was grievously wronged is beyond doubt. The English bench has never been noted for its chivalry or its leniency toward women accused of murder, particularly where there is also a whiff of adultery. Mrs. Thompson, of the haunting love letters, and other sisters in misfortune reached the gallows as adulteresses rather than murderesses. Mrs. Rattenbury alone, that poor darling with her fatal attachment to the boy chauffeur, had a fair deal in this respect. But prudish public opinion soon snuffed her out as efficiently as the hangman’s rope.
If Mrs. Maybrick learned one thing from her dismal experience, it was that virtue pays dividends when a lady happens to get mixed up in an English murder trial.
That London hotel bedroom turned out to be very expensive.
Mrs. Maybrick proceeded from one squalid penal institution to another, suffering all the hardships of an habitual and vicious criminal. But though her memory had been rinsed off the disdainful hands of British justice, she was not forgotten. Soon a tornado broke from the other side of the Atlantic. American Woman was just beginning to realize herself as a Cosmic Force in 1890. And American public opinion was beginning to mean something.
Petitions thick as fleas started to pester various, successive Home Secretaries. In England, Lord Russell himself was active on her behalf, stalwartly proclaiming her innocence. From his side, Presidents, ambassadors and their wives, notables in all walks of life signed formidable statements, one of which, penned by no less a figure than the Honorable James G. Blaine, is worthy of quotation since, with magnificent daring, it snatches the garland of “snobisme” from its traditional resting place on the coroneted British head and hurls it back like a boomerang across the Atlantic. Mrs. Maybrick, writes James G. Blaine, was guilty of no crime other than that
“she may have been influenced by the foolish ambition of too many American girls for a foreign marriage, and have descended from her own rank to that of her husband’s family, which seems to have been somewhat vulgar...”
This blast at the Maybricks’ social position was paralleled in the North American Review by the famous American newspaperwoman “Gail Hamilton” who addressed an open letter to Queen Victoria protesting Mrs. Maybrick’s innocence, inveighing against her unfair treatment and begging for her release. But Gail Hamilton and the Honorable James G. Blaine received like treatment. The Queen was neither amused nor interested. Finally, however, one Home Secretary, Lord Salisbury, goaded beyond endurance by these transatlantic stabs at British justice, parried with a nettled and emphatic statement which might have been penned by the Queen herself. It read in part:
“Taking the most lenient view... the case of this convict was that of an adulteress attempting to poison her husband under the most cruel circumstances while she was pretending to be nursing him on his sickbed. The Secretary of State regrets that he has been unable to find any grounds for recommending to the Queen any further act of clemency towards the prisoner...”
The women of America continued their losing battle with the stubborn little women who ruled England. Mrs. Maybrick’s mother, the Baroness de Roques, is reputed to have spent a fortune in an attempt to have her daughter freed.
All to no purpose, however, Florence served out her sentence, penal servitude for life usually being taken to mean twenty years with three months off a year for good behavior.
She was finally released in July, 1904. On August 23, shaking the dust of England off her skirts forever, she arrived in New York.
Life held little for her. Both her children, whom she had not seen since the day of her husband’s death, had died themselves. Her mother died penniless shortly afterwards. In sore need of money Florence Maybrick wrote a book, Mrs. Maybricks Own Story, published by Funk and Wagnalls in 1905. In this she sang a dismal ballad of atrocities in English gaols and amassed formidable evidence of her own innocence. It is a lugubrious work, filled with lamentable clichés and poignantly trying to arouse interest in something which once had been a headache but was now only a bore. People read it for its possible sensationalism. They were no longer interested in Mrs. Maybrick’s misfortunes per se. For a while she tried to lecture, largely about conditions in English prisons, but it did not go so well. After a while she began to realize (as Lizzie Borden, settled with her squirrels at “Maplecroft,” had already realized for many years) that people do not take kindly to women who have faced a capital charge, even if they have been shockingly wronged.
Poor Florence. They were back not liking her again.
For several years, in Florida and Highland Park, Illinois, she stubbornly retained her married and now infamous name. But about twenty years before her death, she gave up an unequal struggle. Destroying all records of her past and reverting to her maiden name of Florence Chandler, she withdrew to a life of virtual solitude in the tiny three-room shack she had built for herself in the Berkshire foothills.
There, unknown to her neighbors, she lived on, accepted by the community and, with the years, acquiring from successive generations of South Kent boys the harmless nicknames of “Lady Florence” and “The Cat Woman.”