‘The Baron Huddleston is a man of mature years, but his age has neither blunted his ambition nor improved his temper. He also has a complaint of a delicate nature. They say Judge Jefferies was suffering cruelly from the same complaint when he conducted the Bloody Assizes at Monmouth. It is to be hoped Mr Baron Huddleston is rather less dyspeptic when he takes his seat on the bench this morning.’ He gave a brief smile, which Tom did not return.
Just before ten thirty Tom and Stephens were led up the staircase into the dock. Local sympathy for the defendants was as strong in Exeter as it had been in Falmouth. The courtroom was packed and the murmurs of conversation swelled into applause as they came into view. Tom stood at the rail of the dock, where he was to remain throughout the trial, since his injuries still prevented him from sitting.
The morning sunlight streamed through the iron latticework covering the windows, forming diamond patterns of light and shade on the floor. Directly in front of and below the dock, in the well of the court, was a large square lawyer’s table, smothered in papers and parchment rolls.
Arthur Collins and the other members of the defence team sat on Tom’s right. Collins’s junior was Henry Clark, the recorder of Tiverton and a member of the Royal Western Yacht Club at Plymouth. The prosecution faced them across the table, led by Arthur Charles, QC, with Charles Matthews as his junior. The stature of the leading counsel for the Crown and the number of other lawyers — no less than fourteen sat around three sides of the table, leaving the other for the clerks of the court — showed the importance the Home Office attached to the case.
The double-banked seats of the jury box stood at the right of the court. The jurors, twelve men dressed in their Sunday-best suits, stared back at Tom, curiosity written on their faces.
Facing the dock was the judge’s bench, an ornately carved mahogany chair upholstered in blood-red velvet. The witness box lay to its left and on the other side was a seat, like a box at the theatre, where a lady — of some refinement, judging from her dress — was sitting.
The rest of the well of the court was crowded with country gentlemen, officers in full military uniform and clerics. Most of the seats were allocated by ticket only, doubtless to people of the best figure of the county, but a few, plus the standing areas, were reserved for the general public. Those spaces had been filled as soon as the doors were open, and the benches behind Tom were jammed. Through the open door he could see policemen still battling to repel those who had gathered in the corridors and were determined to force their way in.
After a few minutes the heavy oak doors banged shut. There was a brief silence, then the door behind the judge’s bench opened. Flanked by his usher, the Baron Huddleston strode in and sat down, resplendent in the crimson robes of a judge at assize. He glanced to his right and smiled at the woman seated in the wings. She raised her hand in acknowledgement. ‘That’s his wife,’ the turnkey whispered to Tom. ‘She always comes to watch his big cases. He passed sentence of death on a poor devil yesterday and she had to put her hand to her mouth to hide a smile.’ He smiled himself, showing a mouthful of rotten teeth.
Tom turned his head away. The man’s breath stank of tobacco and sour ale, but he also did not want to hear any more of his confidences.
The judge banged his gavel to silence the buzz of conversation. Tom studied him as the clerk of the court began to read the indictment. Huddleston’s hair was obscured by his wig, but his long sideburns were grey and he looked to be at least sixty years old. His eyebrows were darker and drawn together in a permanent frown, accentuated by the downturned corners of his mouth.
He was running to fat and his jowls quivered as he leaned forward to speak. His smiles seemed to be reserved for his own wit and for the remarks he addressed to the jury. His manner was impatient, his speech clipped and precise, but every now and again a flat vowel or a mispronunciation betrayed his humble origins.
Eleven of the twelve jurors had already sat through seven previous cases during that week’s assizes, including the conviction of a thirty-four-year-old man, Edward Bath Edwards, for murder. As the turnkey had said, Huddleston had sentenced him to death the previous day for slitting the throats of his two children.
The clerk laid down the indictment, and faced Tom and Stephens. ‘How do you plead?’
‘Not guilty,’ they said in turn.
Arthur Charles removed the gold pince-nez through which he had been studying documents, and got to his feet to open the prosecution, hooking his thumbs into the pockets of his waistcoat. Like Huddleston, he peppered his remarks with Latin quotations, which, from their expressions, were as incomprehensible to the jurors as they were to Tom.
‘May it please Your Lordship, gentlemen of the jury, on the part of the prosecution it now becomes my duty to lay the facts of this extraordinary and painful case before you and to submit, I regret to say without doubt or hesitation, that the prisoners at the bar are guilty by the law of this country of the murder of Richard Parker.
‘Gentlemen, you must all feel the deepest compassion and sympathy for them in their appalling suffering but that does not free you from the grave responsibility of finding a verdict in this case, according to the law and the evidence which will be laid before you.
‘Sympathy and compassion for the shocking and terrible sufferings which these prisoners have undoubtedly undergone may well be urged as a most powerful plea for the remission in this case of the extreme penalty of the law, but it cannot be considered by you in coming to a conclusion as to whether, by the law of England, these men are guilty of the crime of which they stand charged.
‘Now comes a question of great importance and of deep interest in this case, and as far as I know, it can only be answered in one way. These men are charged with murder. What is murder? As I understand it, murder is the unlawful killing of anybody by a man of sound mind with malice aforethought.
‘Anybody who deliberately or intentionally kills another is undoubtedly guilty of what the law calls malice aforethought. Here we have evidence of the utmost deliberation. You have the statement of Dudley that “Something must be done”, the agreement between Dudley and Stephens that unless a sail appeared on the horizon on the morning of the nineteenth day, Parker must be killed. And you have the fact that Dudley killed the boy with his own hand and that Stephens, who had agreed to the act, was within three feet of the boy and therefore in a position to have joined in it, had the boy struggled for his life.
‘The facts of the case are practically beyond dispute; I doubt whether the defence will endeavour to dispute them. There can be no doubt that the act was deliberate and was done by persons of sound mind.
‘If the prisoners could be held to be of unsound mind, your duty would be a comparatively simple one. Under the Act of Parliament passed last session it would simply be your duty to say they were guilty of the act but at the time they committed it they were of unsound mind.
‘You will find that Dudley and Stephens appeared perfectly clear in their mind at the time they did the act. Dudley knew the nature of the act he was doing and he knew it to be wrong, for before he did it, he offered up a prayer for the poor boy and for the rash act he was about to commit.’
It was hardly necessary for Charles to dismiss this line of possible defence. Given the deservedly terrible reputation of the Victorian asylums, even a man facing the gallows would have thought hard before pleading insanity, though Collins could certainly have entered a plea of temporary insanity and might well have found the jurors sympathetic to the idea.