UBC: Roughead, The Fatal Countess

[truepenny]

The Fatal Countess and Other Studies by William Roughead

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



First, this POD facsimile is truly poor quality, bad enough that I ended up taking a pen and playing a sort of combination cryptography and connect-the-dots to fill in the missing pieces of letters in every word on some pages.

That said, the collection itself is wildly erratic in quality. Some of Roughead's essays, like the one on John Galt, have not aged well, but others are excellent. I'm only going to talk about the ones I would recommend.

1. "The Fatal Countess": the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. Roughead gives a detailed play-by-play account of the schemes and connivings of Frances Howard, variously Countess of Essex and Somerset; her second husband, Robert Carr; King James the Sixth and First (for whom Roughead has no patience, which I appreciate in a person); and a diverse cast of seventeenth-century Londoners and courtiers, including the victim himself, Sir Thomas Overbury, who schemed himself straight into the Tower of London. Overbury was poisoned for months by the Countess' tools until he was finally killed with a glyster (enema) of corrosive sublimate (mercury(II) chloride), which is right up there with the murder of Edward II for most horrible way to die. Roughead's mannered prose--and he quotes extensively from primary sources--actually gives a vivid feel of the Jacobean court and its incestuous intrigues.

2. "Laurel Water: or The Wicked Brother": the murder of Sir Theodosius Boughton by his brother-in-law John Donellan in 1780. Sir Theodosius was twenty and had been in "deep salvation for the veneral disease" since he was 16. He had contracted syphilis while a student at Eton. Donellan took advantage of Sir Theodosius' ongoing treatment to poison his medicine with cyanide he had extracted from the leaves of the laurels at Lawford Hall, Sir Theodosius' estate. Donellan brought the poisoning off smoothly enough, but condemned himself by his elaborate overcompensations to exculpate himself afterwards: the lengths he went to in order to prevent anyone examining the body merely served to make everyone involved more and more suspicious. This case serves as an excellent reminder that while the people of previous centuries did not have forensic science (and had sometimes a perfectly dreadful miscomprehension of chemistry and medicine), they were not stupid.

3. "The Ambiguities of Miss Smith": a breech of promise case brought against Earl Ferrers (for some mysterious reason of British peerage, he is clearly styled "Earl Ferrers," not "the Earl of Ferrers"; his (splendid) name was Washington Sewallis Shirley) by Mary Elizabeth Smith* in 1846. As it transpired, the entirety of the evidence, including extensive correspondence from Ferrers, had been manufactured by Miss Smith, who was exceedingly enterprising for a damsel (as Roughead calls her) of nineteen. Even after she lost her suit, she continued to argue her case (a tactic which will be familiar to anyone who has been awake for the last thirty years of American politics, GOP I am looking at you), publishing a pamphlet which purports to reveal the truth and, as Roughead remarks, "follows the famous advice for such as have no case," which I think must be a reference to this adage traced by Quote Investigator, which in its 1934 version goes: "If the facts are against you, hammer the law. If the law is against you, hammer the facts. If the fact and the law are against you, hammer opposing counsel." Smith then brought a suit for libel against the Britannia for daring to declare that she was a liar. The jury awarded damages to the plaintiff of one farthing.

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*(1)Not to be confused with that other notable Smith of the mid-nineteenth century, Madeleine Hamilton Smith, who flourished a decade later.
(2)My maiden name was Smith. It's such a common name that I doubt I'm related to either Mary Elizabeth or Madeleine Hamilton of that name, but I had a great-aunt on the other side who claimed we were descended from Lucrezia Borgia, so you never know.

4. "The Secret of Ireland's Eye": This is probably my favorite essay in the collection. It deals with the murder of Sarah Maria Louisa Kirwan by her husband, William Kirwan. (FOLLOW THAT LINK: it's a blog post about the National Library of Ireland's collections of paintings by Kirwan, including a portrait of Maria: the murder victim painted by the murderer.) The case hinges on several questions of forensic investigation: given the position the body was found in, could she possibly have died of natural causes as Kirwan claimed? Watching detectives and lawyers struggle to invent a science out of common sense and observation is fascinating.

Those four essays in particular are worth looking for--not necessarily in this POD edition, which I would recommend only to the diehard Roughead fans like myself or those who are fascinated by odd corners of the history of Scotland and are willing to deal with the poor quality of the facsimile. But I would be very sorry if I hadn't found them.

































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