Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 68, No. 421, November 1850

"Glasgow, 23d May 1842.

"Sir, – I hereby intimate to you, that I will require the money, ten days from this date, which I deposited in the London Joint-Stock Bank through you. The account is for £745. The account is dated August 28th 1841, but is not numbered! As it would put me to some inconvenience to give personal intimation, and then remain in London till the eleven days' notice agreed upon has expired, I trust this will be considered sufficient.

"Yours &c.,"Daniel M'Naughten."

Two months afterwards – viz., in July – he purchased the fatal pistols of a gunsmith near Glasgow, giving him very precise directions as to their make; and on the 19th of July replied to the following advertisement, which appeared in the Spectator newspaper of the 16th of July: —

Optional Partnership. – "Any gentleman having £1000 may invest them, on the most advantageous terms, in a very genteel business in London, attended with no risk, with the option, within a given period, of becoming a partner, and of ultimately succeeding to the whole business. In the mean time, security and liberal interest will be given for the money. Apply by letter to B. B., Mr Hilton's, Bookseller, Penton Street, Pentonville."22

M'Naughten's answer, which here follows, cannot be too closely scrutinised, and its general tone and tendency too anxiously weighed, by a dispassionate judicial mind, regard being had to the evidence hereafter to be adverted to, with reference to the alleged condition of the writer's mind, long previously to, at, and after the date of the letter.

"Glasgow, 19th July 1842.

"Sir, – My attention has been attracted to your advertisement in the Spectator newspaper, and as I am unemployed at present, and very anxious to obtain some, I have been induced to write, requesting you to state some particulars regarding the nature of the business in which you are engaged. If immediate employment can be given or otherwise, what sort of security will be given for the money, and how much interest? I may mention that I have been engaged in business on my own account for a few years, am under thirty years of age, and of very active and sober habits.

"The capital which I possess has been acquired by the most vigilant industry, but, unfortunately, does not amount to the exact sum specified in your advertisement. If nothing less will do, I will be sorry for it, but cannot help it; if otherwise, have the goodness to write to me at your earliest convenience, and address, D. M. N., 90, Clyde Street, Anderton's front land, top flat."23

He went to London during the same month; appears to have gone for about a fortnight to France, returning to Glasgow; went a second time to London in September, and resided there, in the lodgings which he had formerly occupied, down to the day on which he shot Mr Drummond. His landlady accurately described his habits, and stated that "she never thought him unsettled in his mind;" and, on the very morning of the fatal day, "did not observe anything about his manner." Such was the tenor of all the evidence offered for the prosecution – some of it stretching back to the years 1840, 1841, when he attended anatomical lectures in Glasgow. A Writer to the Signet, who also attended them, and the physician who lectured, expressly declaring that they had never seen anything in him to indicate "disordered mind," or that "he was not in his right senses."

The following was the statement which he made and signed, when examined on the charge at Bow Street. This document, like the preceding, is worthy of great consideration.

"The Tories in my native city have compelled me to do this. They follow and persecute me wherever I go, and have entirely destroyed my peace of mind. They followed me into France, into Scotland, and all over England: in fact, they follow me wherever I go. I cannot get no rest for them night or day. I cannot sleep at night, in consequence of the course they pursue towards me. I believe they have driven me into a consumption. I am sure I shall never be the man I formerly was. I used to have good health and strength, but I have not now. They have accused me of crimes of which I am not guilty; they do everything in their power to harass and persecute me; in fact, they wish to murder me. It can be proved by evidence. That's all I have to say."24

On Thursday the 2d February – that is to say, exactly a fortnight after the murder – M'Naughten was arraigned at the Old Bailey. When called upon, in the usual manner, to say whether he was Guilty or Not Guilty, he remained silent, with his eyes directed steadily towards the bench. At length, on being authoritatively required to answer, he said, after some hesitation, "I was driven to desperation by persecution." On being told that he must answer, "Guilty," or "Not Guilty," he replied that he was guilty of firing. On this Lord Abinger interposed, "By that, do you mean to say you are not guilty of the remainder of the charge – that is, of intending to murder Mr Drummond?" The prisoner at once said, "Yes;" on which Lord Abinger ordered a plea of Not Guilty to be recorded. It appears to us that there is great significance in what passed on this occasion.

An application was then made to postpone the trial, on affidavits stating that, by the next session, matured evidence could be adduced to show the insanity of the prisoner when he shot Mr Drummond. The Attorney-general (Sir Frederick Pollock) at once humanely assented to the application, and it was granted; as also ample funds out of the £764 found on the prisoner, to prepare effectively for the defence. Let us here pause for a moment, to contrast the treatment which M'Naughten – whose undisputed act had filled the whole country with horror and indignation – received on this occasion, with that experienced by his predecessor Bellingham, thirty years before, whose case very closely resembled that of M'Naughten in some fearful points. We can with difficulty record calmly that Bellingham's counsel, fortified by strong affidavits of the prisoner's insanity, and that witnesses knowing the fact could be brought from Liverpool and elsewhere, applied in vain for a postponement of the trial, the Attorney-general of that day barbarously, and even offensively, opposing the application, which was consequently at once overruled. Within seven days' time Bellingham shot Mr Percival, was committed, tried– if it be not a mockery to use the word – convicted, and executed. On Monday, the 11th May 1811, Bellingham shot his unfortunate victim, and on that day week (Monday, the 18th May 1811) the assassin's dead body lay on the dissecting-table! This vindictive precipitancy affords an awful contrast to the noble temper in which M'Naughten's application was entertained by the Attorney-general, the judge, and the justly-excited country at large. It supplied the eloquent advocate, (the present Solicitor-general, Sir Alexander Cockburn) who was subsequently retained by the prisoner, with a potent weapon of defence, of which he failed not to make effective use. It is not too much to say, that all who can concur in the acquittal of M'Naughten must regard Bellingham as judicially murdered. We concur heartily with M'Naughten's advocate in the remark, that "few will read the report of Bellingham's trial without being forced to the conclusion that he was either really mad, or, at the very least, the little evidence which alone he was permitted to adduce, relative to the state of his mind, was strong enough to have entitled him to a deliberate and thorough investigation of his case."25

On Friday, March 3d, M'Naughten took his trial before the late Chief-justice Tindal, the late Mr Justice Williams, and Mr Justice Coleridge. The prosecution was conducted by the late Sir William Follett, then Solicitor-general, and the prisoner defended by the present Solicitor-general, then Mr Cockburn, Q. C. Nothing could exceed the temperate and luminous opening statement of Sir William Follett, who, in our judgment, laid down the rules of English law, applicable to the difficult and delicate subject with which he had to deal, with rigorous propriety.

"If you believe," said he, "that the prisoner at the bar, at the time he committed this act, was not a responsible agent – that, when he fired the pistol, he was incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong – that he was under the influence and control of some disease of the mind which prevented him from being conscious that he was committing a crime – that he did not know he was violating the law both of God and man – then, undoubtedly, he is entitled to your acquittal. But it is my duty to tell you that nothing short of that will excuse him, upon the principles of the English law. To excuse him, it will not be sufficient that he laboured under partial insanity upon some subjects – that he had a morbid delusion of mind upon some subjects, which could not exist in a wholly sane person; that is not enough, if he had that degree of intellect which enabled him to know and distinguish between right and wrong – if he knew what would be the effects of his crime, and consciously committed it; and if, with that consciousness, he wilfully committed it."

The witnesses for the prosecution established a case, if unanswered, of perfect guilt; the facts of the assassination were indisputable, and the evidence of the prisoner's sanity cogent in the extreme. Mr Cockburn addressed the jury at very great length, and in a strain of sustained eloquence and power, his object being to persuade the jury "that the prisoner was labouring, at the time of committing the act, under a morbid[?] insanity, which took away from him all power of self-control, so that he was not responsible for his acts. I do not put this case forward as one of total insanity; it is a case of delusion, and I say so from sources upon which the light of science has thrown her holy beam." Those who have read what has gone before concerning Oxford's case will appreciate this observation of Mr Cockburn, and gather from it his adoption, for the purpose of that defence, of the theory of moral insanity, which he enforced and illustrated by many striking and brilliant observations, calculated to produce a deep and strong impression on the minds of the jury, such as required the utmost exertions of Sir William Follett in reply, and finally of judicial exposition to efface, if fallacious – or modify to any extent rendered necessary by inaccuracy or exaggeration. Ten witnesses, all of them from Glasgow, were called, for the purpose of establishing the fact that the prisoner had, for some eighteen months previously to January 1843, appeared to labour, and had continually represented himself as labouring, under a persuasion that he was the victim of some such indefinite, mysterious, and incessant persecution as he spoke of in his statement before the magistrate at Bow Street. We are bound to say that the force of this testimony – coming chiefly from persons above all suspicion, and in a superior rank of life – is irresistible as to the existence of such an insane delusion down to the time of his quitting Glasgow. Not a witness, however, gave evidence of his exhibiting that tendency after his last return to London, before his shooting Mr Drummond. The only mention of Sir Robert Peel's name was by one of these ten witnesses, a former fellow-lodger of the prisoner's, who told him, in July 1842, that he had heard Sir Robert Peel speak in the House of Commons; preferred his speaking to that of Lord John Russell and Mr O'Connell; and said "he thought Sir R. Peel had arrived at what Lord Byron said of him – that 'he would be something great in the state.'" Mr Cockburn asked the witness, "Did you ever, on that or any other occasion, hear him speak at all disrespectfully of Sir Robert Peel?" Answer.– "Certainly not." One or two witnesses spoke to singularities of demeanour as early as the years 1835 and 1836. One of his landlords, in the former year, got rid of him as a lodger, "for one reason, in consequence of the infidel doctrines he maintained, and the books of such a character which he was in the habit of reading." One witness, who had succeeded him in his business, remonstrated with him, towards the end of 1842, about his notions as to being persecuted, telling him it was all imagination – that there were no such people as he supposed. He said that, "if he could once set his eyes on them, they should not be long in the land of the living," and became shortly afterwards very much excited. Sometimes he said he was "haunted by a parcel of devils following him." His landlady, seeing the brace of pistols which he had in September, just before his return to London, said – "What, in the name of God, are you doing with pistols there? He said 'he was going to shoot birds with them.' I never saw the pistols after that." He told the Commission of Police that the "persecution proceeded from the priests of the Catholic chapel in Clyde Street, who were assisted by a parcel of Jesuits." In August 1842, he told the same witness that "the police, the Jesuits, the Catholic priests, and Tories, were all leagued against him."

Mr Cockburn having thus "laid a broad foundation," says Mr Townsend, "for medical theories, upon them was built, by the nine physicians and surgeons who confirmed each other's theories, a goodly superstructure of undoubted insanity. Had the workings," continues Mr Townsend, sarcastically, "of the troubled brain been as distinctly visible to the eye, as the labours of bees seen through a glass hive, they could not have held the fact to be more demonstratively proved. Positive beyond the possibility of mistake, and infallible as theologians, they explained all that might appear without the aid of science inexplicable; and proved, as if they were stating undoubted facts, an irresponsible delusion."

One of the physicians attested his conviction, from an interview with the prisoner shortly before his trial, "as a matter of certainty, that M'Naughten was not responsible for his acts!" Well may Mr Townsend add, "By an excess of lenity, the counsel for the prosecution allowed these scientific witnesses to depart from the ordinary rules of evidence, to give their own conclusions from the facts proved, and usurp the province of the jury."26 After going through the evidence (if the word can be used with propriety under such circumstances) of the other medical gentlemen, Mr Townsend observes, "Each physician and surgeon, as he stepped into the witness-box, seemed anxious to surpass his predecessor in the tone of decision and certainty; each tried to draw the bow of – (mentioning the first physician who had been called, and who was also called in Oxford's and Pate's case, in which latter he was rebuked by Baron Alderson,27) and shoot, if possible, still farther into empty space." And this gentleman, Dr – , had asserted, under cross-examination by Sir William Follett, "his positive conviction that he could ascertain the nicest shade of insanity! that the shadowy trace of eccentricity, dissolving into madness, could be palpably distinguished!"28 The last of these confident personages then was permitted to make this extraordinary statement: "I have not the slightest hesitation in saying that the prisoner is insane, and that he committed the offence in question whilst afflicted with a delusion under which he appears to have been labouring for a considerable length of time!!!"

We feel constrained to say that this appears to us, in every way, monstrous.

"Nine medical witnesses," significantly observes Mr Townsend, "had now spoken, with a wonderful unanimity of opinion, and the court surrendered at discretion."29

If such a course is to be allowed again in a court of justice, what security have any of us for life, liberty, or property?

Chief Justice Tindal here interposed, to ask Sir William Follett whether he was prepared with evidence on the part of the Crown to combat that of the medical witnesses, —

"Because, if you have not," said the Chief Justice, "we think we are under the necessity of stopping the case. Is there any medical evidence on the other side?"

Sir William Follett.– "No, my Lord."30

Chief-Justice Tindal.– "We feel the evidence, especially that of the last two medical gentlemen who have been examined, and who are strangers to both sides, and only observers of the case, to be very strong, and sufficient to induce my learned brothers and myself to stop the case."31

After this authoritative intimation from the court, in a capital case, in favour of the prisoner, it would have been obviously to the last degree inexpedient for the Solicitor-general, in his position of peculiar and great public responsibility, to "press for a verdict against the prisoner."32 After, therefore, intimating distinctly and respectfully to the jury, that, "after the intimation he had received from the bench, he felt that he should not be properly discharging his duty to the Crown and the public, if he asked them for a verdict against the prisoner," he withdrew, in deference to "the very strong opinion entertained by the Lord Chief-Justice, and the other learned Judges present," that the evidence, especially the medical evidence, sufficed to show that the prisoner, when he shot Mr Drummond, was labouring under insanity. "If he were so," added Sir William Follett, with a pointed reservation of his own opinion, "he would be entitled to his acquittal." He intimated, however, distinctly, that he adhered to "the doctrines and authorities" on which he had relied in opening the case, "as being correct law; our object being to ascertain whether the prisoner, at the time when he committed the crime, was —at that time– to be regarded as a responsible agent, or whether all control over himself was taken away. The learned judge, I understand, means to submit that question to you. I cannot press for a verdict against the prisoner, and it will be for you to come to your decision."

The Chief-Justice then briefly addressed the jury, offering to go through the whole evidence, if the jury deemed it necessary, which he "thought to be almost unnecessary;" adding —

"I am in your hands; but if, in balancing the evidence in your minds, you think that the prisoner was, at the time of committing the act, capable of distinguishing between right and wrong, then he was a responsible agent, and liable to all the penalties which the law enforces. If not so – and if, in your judgment, the subject should appear involved in very great difficulty – then you will probably not take upon yourselves to find the prisoner guilty. If that is your opinion, then you will acquit the prisoner. If you think you ought to hear the evidence more fully, in that case I will state it to you, and leave the case in your hands. Probably, however, sufficient has now been laid before you, and you will say whether you want any further information."

Foreman of the Jury.– "We require no more, my Lord."

Chief-Justice Tindal.– "If you find the prisoner not guilty, say on the ground of insanity; in which case proper care will be taken of him."

Foreman.– "We find the prisoner not guilty, on the ground of insanity."

We repeat emphatically our deep respect for the late Chief-Justice Tindal, and for his brethren who sate beside him on this momentous occasion; and we also acknowledge the weight due to the observation of Mr Townsend, that "none can form so correct an estimate of the facts proved, and their illustration by science, as those who actually saw what was going on; and the three able Judges who presided seem to have been fully impressed with the conviction that the prisoner ought not to be considered amenable to punishment for his act, being insensible, at the time he committed it, that he was violating the law of God and man."

And, again, "It is far more just and merciful to take care alike of the accused and of society, by confining in secure custody the doubtfully conscious shedder of blood, than to incur the fearful hazard of putting to death an irresponsible agent."33 Nevertheless, we concur in the unanimous opinion of the five law lords, expressed in their places in Parliament – the Lord Chancellor, Lord Brougham, Lord Cottenham, Lord Denman, Lord Campbell – that it would have been better to let the trial proceed regularly to its conclusion. The whole facts of the case demanded, not less than the theories of the medical witnesses, that thorough sifting, and the application of that masterly and luminous practical logic, which both the Solicitor-general and the Chief-Justice were so pre-eminently capable of bestowing. If, after such a dealing with the case, an acquittal on the ground of insanity should have ensued, who could have gainsaid it? At present, see what a candid and scientific writer on medical jurisprudence – as we have several times observed, a strong favourer of the notion of moral insanity – has felt himself compelled to place permanently on record,34 with reference to the acquittal of M'Naughten.

"When we find a man lurking for many days together in a particular locality, having about him loaded weapons – watching a particular individual who frequents that locality – a man who does not face the individual and shoot him, but who coolly waits until he has an opportunity of discharging the weapon unobserved by his victim or others – the circumstances appear to show such a perfect adaptation of means to ends, and such a power of controlling his actions, that one is quite at a loss to understand why a plea of irresponsibility should be admitted, except upon the fallacious ground that no motive could be discovered for the act – a ground, however, which was not allowed to prevail in the case of Courvoisier, Francis, and the perpetrators of other atrocious crimes. Observe the lively sense of his danger, and of his rights and interests, as an accused person, exhibited by M'Naughten almost immediately after committing the act – when, fearful lest an inadvertent admission should be given in evidence against him, he said to the officer35– 'But you won't use this against me?' Note the matter-of-fact astuteness with which he attended to his pecuniary interests in May and July; the total absence of any evidence of the existence of his delusions during his last sojourn in London; the presence of such proof of careful, deliberate, and too successful perpetration, as to time, opportunity, and means; his expression in November towards Sir Robert Peel – 'D – n him!' But, above all, is to be noted the time when he first gives utterance to anything directly and cogently favouring the notion on which his life depended – his insane delusion with regard to Sir Robert Peel – viz., after he had been for some time incarcerated in Newgate, and when he knew that he was being examined by a physician, in order to ascertain what had been his state of mind at the time in question! Dr Munro has there recorded it.36 He said – 'Mr Salmond, the Procurator-Fiscal, Mr Sheriff Bell, Mr Sheriff Alison, and Sir Robert Peel, might have put a stop to this system of persecution if they would!' … 'We were afraid of going out after dark for fear of assassination: that individuals were made to appear before him like them he had seen in Glasgow.' … 'That he imagined the person at whom he fired at Charing Cross to be one of the crew – a part of the system that was destroying his health. He observed, that, when he saw the person at Charing Cross at whom he fired, every feeling of suffering which he had endured for months and years rose up at once in his mind, and that he conceived that he should obtain peace by killing him.'"

Surely it would have conduced – especially in the painful excitement of the public mind on the subject at the time – to the satisfactory administration of justice, if it had been allowed Sir William Follett – without his being placed in the insidious position of appearing to press unduly against a prisoner being tried for his life – to combine and contrast these various circumstances, as he, of almost all men, could have best combined and contrasted them. The jury should have had their minds solemnly and authoritatively directed to the question, for instance, whether this last observation of M'Naughten made to Dr Munro was a spontaneous, genuine indication of utterly subverted mental faculties, continuing from the moment of his shooting Mr Drummond; or an effort of anxious astuteness to give effect to the suggestion which he may have believed would save his life. And, moreover, this and other circumstances should have been accompanied by a direction to the jury, in accordance with that of Lord Denman in Oxford's case,37 and with the following canon, subsequently laid down by the Judges in their answer to the first question proposed by the Lord Chancellor38– viz., "That notwithstanding the party did the act with a view, under insane delusion, of redressing or revenging some supposed grievance or injury, he is nevertheless punishable, if he knew at the time that he was acting contrary to the law of the land." Could M'Naughten be again tried on this charge, this is the precise question which would be left to the jury. Mr Alison, in his Principles of the Criminal Law of Scotland,39 thus lays down the rule applicable to such cases, in commenting on that of Bellingham: —