Free Broadmoor Revealed: Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum by Mark Stevens Page A

the
court had drifted away from her. When the jury was asked to deliver
their verdict, they found Christiana Edmunds guilty of murder, and
did not recommend mercy.
    The defendant
remained in the dock to hear her fate. Neatly dressed, she was
still wearing her black velvet cloak with its fur trim. She had
added a pair of black gloves to her courtroom attire, and her hair
was now arranged ‘coquettishly’. Before sentence was passed, she
asked to be tried on the original charge too, of attempting to
murder Emily Beard, so that she might be able to describe the
nature of her relationship with Dr Beard. If she was to go down,
she surmised, then he would go down beside her. It was, of course,
too late for that.
    Edmunds faced
the gallows alone. Her immediate response was fittingly dramatic:
she claimed that she was pregnant. It was a legal tradition that a
pregnant woman could not be hanged until after she had given birth.
A great murmur erupted around the court: so the business of
sentencing was not done yet. Immediately, the court officials began
to cry out for women of a certain age to make themselves known to
them. A jury of matrons was duly empanelled from amongst the
spectators in the room, and retired to examine Edmunds in an ante
room. A doctor was summoned. The court adjourned until an hour
later, when both Edmunds and this latest jury returned to the room.
Asked for their verdict, they declared that Edmunds was not
pregnant. The law would take its course.
    She was
returned to Lewes Prison to suffer the extreme penalty of the
English legal system. But the medical evidence presented at her
trial had not gone unnoticed, and there was popular sentiment
locally towards sparing Edmunds’s life. On 23rd January 1872, Dr
William Orange, by now Broadmoor’s Medical Superintendent, visited
her together with Sir William Gull from Guy’s Hospital at the Home
Office’s request. Their report summarised her case as follows:
‘This woman appears to have had a tranquil, easy and indifferent
childhood and womanhood up to a period of about three years ago…The
acts were the fruit of a weak and disordered intellect with
confused and perverted feelings of a most marked insane
character…The crime of murder she seems incapable of realising as
having been committed by her though she fully admits the purchasing
and distributing the poisons as set forth in the several counts
against her. On the contrary she even justifies her conduct’. They
declared her to be insane, and after some consideration the Home
Secretary, Henry Bruce, respited her sentence to one of Her
Majesty’s Pleasure.
    This was quite
an unusual decision, overturning as it did the verdict of a jury.
It was not uncommon to have the death sentence commuted to life
imprisonment, and there were other Broadmoor murderers who had been
transferred with such a tariff. Their guilt, however, remained.
Christiana had been absolved from hers by two professionals,
contrary to the result in the courtroom. The Times bemoaned this
unsatisfactory situation in a leader piece on 25th January, even if
it did agree that the outcome had been the right one. It wondered
aloud on the wisdom of politicians permitting a jury to give ‘a
solemn verdict which they know will be afterwards reversed’. The
decision was unpopular back in Brighton too: the Home Secretary had
effectively saddled the ratepayers with Christiana’s upkeep from
now on, creating another large bill to pay. Certainly her case had
been a big ticket item, making full use of venues, discourse and
precedent. Perhaps the attention was thrilling, though the fact
that a verdict could be legally correct yet medically unsound was a
conclusion of little importance to Christiana. She had achieved a
more basic ambition. Gull and Orange had given her back her life,
and she was therefore transferred to Broadmoor as a pleasure
patient on 5th July 1872.
    On her arrival
at the Asylum, she was forty-three years-old. She was wearing make
up on