Tales of natives feasting on human flesh in remote and exotic parts of the globe brought a vicarious thrill to Victorian drawing rooms, but both the tattooed skin and the professed flesh-eating culture of the cannibals displayed by the showmen were regarded as clear evidence of the degenerate, primitive and backward nature of societies so alien to the Victorian ideals of decency, morality and duty.
British seamen — white Anglo-Saxons — showing the same stigmata of the tattooing needle, and the same willingness to consume human flesh in extremity, were an uncomfortable reminder that the distance between primitive peoples and English civilization might not be as great as the Victorian upper classes liked to think.
This, even more than the steady encroachment of government regulation over the shipping trade, was the driving force in attempts to outlaw the most abhorrent of all the seafaring practices: the custom of the sea.
Chapter 18
The judge chosen to hear the case of Regina versus Dudley and Stephens at the Exeter Assizes was the Baron Huddleston, a haughty and flamboyant character who suited the colour of his gloves to the case before him — white for routine thefts and felonies, lavender for breach-of-promise suits and black for murder cases.
He had acquired a well-deserved reputation for browbeating jurors into verdicts that tallied with his own conclusions and also had some knowledge of the seafaring world from a spell as Judge Advocate of the Fleet and Counsel to the Admiralty. Although, according to his obituary in The Times, ‘He knew less of the lines of a ship than of the points of the horse, he yet managed to hold his own against the skilled mercantile lawyers of his day.’
As the paper also noted, ‘The judge, whose charm of manner and skill in conversation made him afterwards particularly acceptable in distinguished society, began his ascent in not the most fashionable or promising surroundings.’
Born in 1817, the son of a merchant captain, Huddleston grew up in the West Country, but when his father retired from the sea he returned to his native Ireland. The future judge matriculated at, but never graduated from, Trinity College, Dublin.
He began his legal career as an usher but was admitted as a student at Gray’s Inn on 18 April 1836, and called to the bar in the summer of 1839, becoming a barrister of the Central Criminal Court and,
a diligent attendant at the Old Bailey. A friendly turnkey went up and down the corridors of Newgate touting for dock briefs on behalf of Mr Huddleston. He was admirable in the conduct of a cause, dangerous in cross-examination, and above all things, skilful in presenting his points to the jury.
Huddleston showed an early fondness for good living and the pleasures of society and, as The Times acidly noted,
It will be a surprise to many to learn that in this early period in his career his speciality lay in the argument of Poor Law cases. Society indeed played a large part in his later life and did not leave him that leisure for study which a judge who is satisfactorily to dispose of legal arguments requires. He was fond of exercising the remarkable powers of genial and fascinating address which he undoubtedly possessed, whether or not at heart he was more amiable or less selfish than the majority of successful men.
He was able to make use of the full range of his talents as a counsel in the divorce court, ‘repeatedly impressing upon a common jury the precise significance of French words of endearment, pronounced probably on purpose, with the most English of accents’.
Huddleston took silk in 1857, and featured in many great criminal cases at the Old Bailey, conducting a series of memorable defences including that at the murder trial of Edward Pook. Huddleston, ‘annihilated the evidence of one important witness on cross-examination, pointed out the weaknesses of the prosecution and then attacked the Police as severely as if his instructions had been similar to the time-honoured: No case; abuse the opposing attorney.’
He also defended Cuffy, one of the Chartists, prosecuted the Countess of Derwentwater, secured the release of Mercy Catherine Newton on her third trial for matricide, was junior to Sir Alexander Cockburn in the prosecution of Dr Palmer for ‘wholesale poisoning at Rugeley, and vindicated the character of Mrs Firebrace in the court for matrimonial cases’.
Huddleston also harboured political ambitions, and stood as a Conservative candidate — unsuccessfully at Worcester, Shrewsbury and twice at Kidderminster, before finally winning a seat at Canterbury in 1865. He lost it at the general election of 1868, and made a further unsuccessful attempt on Norwich in 1870.
He succeeded there by forty-seven votes in 1874, greatly helped by his recent marriage to Lady Diana de Vere Beauclerk, sister of the Duke of St Albans. His new wife was well known in Norwich and she and her mother, the Duchess of St Albans, campaigned hard on his behalf.
They had been married at All Saints, Knightsbridge, by Bishop Wilberforce, a notorious snob who characteristically forgot to include in his diary the name of the low-born bridegroom: ‘December 18th, to All Saints, Knightsbridge, to marry Lady Di. Back into centre, Bar Committee.’
In February of the following year Huddleston gave up his political ambitions to become a judge in the Court of Common Pleas and was knighted that May. He was transferred to the Court of Exchequer on the death of Mr Baron Pigott, automatically receiving the honorific Baron of the Exchequer, a title that went back to a period before the days of professional judges when the barons of the realm heard cases in the Court of the King. Huddleston was the last to be created before the Court of Exchequer was abolished and delighted in calling himself ‘the Last of the Barons’.
He always insisted on having his courtroom, ‘heated and protected from currents of air until the atmosphere was oppressive to the verge of endurance, and proved what is called a strong judge, taking a view of his own and almost invariably leading the jury to the same opinion’.
Age and success had not blunted the edge of Huddleston’s ambition and, though some of his peers regarded him as insufficiently dedicated to the law to merit consideration as a future Lord Chief Justice, the chance to preside over a great leading case offered him an opportunity to advance his claims.
His first task was to persuade the grand jury in Exeter to arraign Tom and Stephens for trial. Grand jurymen were not the twelve good men and true who heard criminal trials. They were gentlemen ‘of the best figure in the county’, and their meetings were as much social as judicial occasions, with luncheons and even a ball punctuating their deliberations.
They rarely resisted the recommendations of the judge at the assizes but Huddleston was anxious to remove even that possibility. After all, the grand jury in the US versus Holmes case in Philadelphia had thrown out an indictment of murder and replaced it with one of manslaughter. If the Exeter grand jury had rejected the indictment or substituted the lesser charge of manslaughter, the chance to establish a leading case, and with it Huddleston’s hopes of further advancement, would have been lost.
When the grand jury convened on Monday, 3 November, Huddleston first led them through the indictments for the other trials to be heard that week. Following his advice, they rejected an indictment in a case of rape and one of manslaughter, but defied him by also rejecting an indictment against the mother of two murdered children. The father was to be convicted and sentenced to death on the day before Tom and Stephens stood trial.
When he turned to the case of the Mignonette, Huddleston did not allow either the prosecution or defence counsel to address the grand jury. Instead he gave a magisterial lecture outlining the ‘facts’ of the case. These included the assertion that Brooks had not only taken no part in the killing but had ‘sternly dissented from it’.