The Courvoisier Case
Courvoisier's
crime was one of the most famous in the period. A swiss valet, Courvoisier murdered his employer Lord William
Russell in 1840. Forty thousand people turned
out for the hanging and over a million and a half broadsides about the murder
and execution were sold (for a penny each).
Such figures were not unheard of at the time. Two and a half million broadsides were sold on the executions of
the Mannings nine years later; cheap railway transportation enabled even larger
crowds to watch some later executions.
The murder of a well connected aristocrat like Russell by a foreign
servant was bound to attract attention in a society as preoccupied with social
hierarchy and national identity as early Victorian England. But interest in violent crime was great even
when the protagonists were ordinary citizens.
Both
Dickens and Thackeray went to Courvoisier's execution and later wrote attacks
on capital punishment based on the experience.
Their personal reactions to the hanging were intense and longlasting;
afterwards, they worried about whether the kind of publicity such cases
generated might spread, rather than discourage, violent behavior. Russell's murder, like many other
contemporary crimes, generated an enormous outpouring of written, visual and
dramatic material--a level of cultural production which almost inevitably
forced writers like Thackeray and Dickens to situate their own--and each
other's--writing in relation to it.
Thackeray attacked Dickens, for example, for romanticizing crime (like
Ainsworth) and dealing with a subject writers for Lloyd and Catnach knew better
(because they were closer to it than any middle class writer could be). In return, Dickens sought to differentiate
his own works from the popular literature of crime and reclaim the moral high
ground. Their discussions helped shape
the boundaries of what was considered respectable literature by opposing the
novel to forms like criminal biography and the execution broadside.
Aside
from the sheer numbers involved, the case had political and literary
consequences far beyond what we might expect given the presence of only one
victim. Today, when serial killings are
commonplace, it is hard to imagine a single murder having the influence that
Courvoisier's did. Anxieties generated
by the case contributed to the defeat of a bill to restrict the scope of
capital punishment; Courvoisier's claim that his inspiration came from his
reading increased anxiety about the effects of crime literature. These effects were partially a function of
timing: the murder occurred just when
debates over writing about and punishing crime were heating up and limits to
what was acceptable were being reassessed.
Public executions were not abolished until 1868, but so fierce did the
arguments become over the suitability of violent crime as a subject for
literature that many Victorian novelists stopped writing about it until the
vogue for sensation fiction in the 1860s.
As a result, for almost twenty years, the field was left to journalists,
slum publishers like Edward Lloyd--and Dickens. According to John Sutherland, one of the chief effects of the
Newgate controversy (the controversy over the moral status of crime writing)
was to frighten away middle class novelists from the subject of crime.[1]
To
understand the complex ramifications of capital crimes like Courvoisier's in Victorian
society and literature we must begin with the details of the case. Lord William Russell, 73 years old and a
member of a prominent family (his nephew was a future Prime Minister and
prominent reformer) lived alone except for his servants. Declining health had led to his withdrawal
from active engagement with the world, but family connections and wide reading,
kept him in contact with contemporary affairs and the arts. Ironically, the victim--related to one of
the chief proponents of restricting the scope of capital punishment at the time
(John Russell)--was reading a book about another reformer (Romilly) the night
he was murdered.[2]
Early
on the mourning of May 6, 1840 a housemaid found Russell in bed, a gash in his
throat so severe that his head was almost severed from his body. There were signs the house had been broken
into and burglarized--the downstairs was ransacked, valuables had been gathered
together and left as if an intruder had fled, fearing apprehension. But the burglary seemed so unprofessional,
the murder so well planned, that the police decided the robbery had been staged
to cover up the fact that the crime was an inside job. While marks on the pantry door at first
seemed to indicate a forcible entry, careful examination revealed that the door
had been forced from the inside. The
police noticed a number of similar anomalies and focused their attention on
Russell's servants, especially Courvoisier (as well as a friend of the valet's
who had visited the house the day of the murder). Courvoisier quickly became the prime suspect, although gaps in
the evidence against him meant that for a long time the police remained
undecided about whether he had an accomplice.[3] Because of Lord Russell's position and
family connections, pressure to solve the case was intense; the police were
inadequately prepared for the challenge.
In
spite of their suspicions, the police delayed searching Courvoisier. As a result, a number of personal articles
stolen from Russell's bedroom were found in the pantry (where someone else
could have hidden them), rather than on Courvosier himself (which would have
decisively established his guilt).
Courvoisier's attorney (Charles Phillips) exploited these and other
examples of police bungling to cast doubt on the government's case. For much of the trial Phillips' defense
seemed like it might succeed, in part because the police were far from popular
at the time.[4] Fears of government infringement on
traditional liberties persisted; the police force was new and many officers
were poorly trained. When the police
suddenly found bloody clothes in Courvoisier's trunk after their first search
had turned up nothing, the suspicion that he was being framed by the police for
the reward (400 pounds) grew. His
refusal to confess, and the failure of the police to locate all of Russell's
missing property, kept doubts about the government's case alive during the
trial. Even after his guilt was
established by the courts, unanswered questions remained about why blood was
never found on his clothes or person.[5]
Because the case
against him--however damning it eventually became--depended entirely on
circumstantial evidence, not everyone was satisfied with the government's
position. To understand why, we need to
remember that from the mid-18th century on, circumstantial evidence was
sufficient to convict, while popular opinion was often not fully satisfied
without more direct testimony (whether by witnesses or by the accused). Because a sense of closure and certainty
required more than "indirect evidence," judicial officials attached
great importance to securing a confession.
This need was based on more than public relations. The officials charged with carrying out
capital sentences were often uneasy about their role and used confessions, as
well as carefully staged displays of repentance, to secure pardons for the
condemned--either in this world (from the crown), or the next (from the
lord). Prison officials used the
language of religion to insure that their proceedings seemed just, both to
themselves and to the public at large.[6]
Courvoisier, however,
tried to manipulate this language to his own advantage. He behaved with becoming contrition while
awaiting execution and quickly accommodated his captors with a confession. But he then proceeded to confess three more
times (twice officially), his accounts of motive and crime varying with each
telling.[7] Despite the variation, however, each time he
confessed he used conventional moral categories to explain his crime. His first confession occurred two days after
his conviction, on June 22 1840, and was published in the Times on June
26. In it, he attributes his actions to
envy of more privledged servants and claims that he began his life of crime
inspired by a book about a young profligate who lost his possessions by
gambling and then "moved with devil-may-care abandon from place to place,
roistering, thieving and living on his wits." (Two Studies in Crime,
p. 107). Courvoisier maintained that when Russell caught him burglarizing the
house, he murdered his employer to preserve his reputation. He pictures himself as led astray by envy
and bad reading, alone in a foreign country with no friends to turn to. Clearly, a desperate bid for sympathy.[8]
Six
days later, in his second confession, he attributed his downfall to alcohol,
rather than to crime literature, but his basic strategy remained the same. Again there are mitigating circumstances,
and again he makes a bid for sympathy and forgiveness. This time wine is to blame, a drink he
claims was new to him and which led him to react violently to his master's
irritation over his forgetfulness of his duties as a servant. Throughout his life Courvoiseir had been
skilled in adapting himself to the expectations of others and charming those
around him. Now he hoped to manipulate
both prison officials and outside sympathizers by acting the part of the ideal
prisoner and attributing his crime to temptations like envy, alcohol, and low
literature--factors in the etiology of crime often mentioned in didactic
writing about crime. According to
Bridges, "Courvoisier knew that certain features of his crime still
baffled the Authorities, and that he had a number of sympathizers who included
persons of prominence. He accordingly
hoped that by attributing his downfall to an unfortunate combination of
circumstances he might induce these last to use their influence to have his
sentence commuted to transportation." (Bridges, p. 107)[9] On July 5th, the eve of his execution, his
plan to commit suicide was foiled and he wrote what he claimed was a full
confession. In this document he still
maintained that no blood was found on his clothes because he had rolled up his
sleeves. On the scaffold, however, he
whispered to Evans (the under-sheriff) that no blood had been found because he
committed the murder nude.[10]
Courvoisier's
efforts to have his sentence commuted failed and he was executed July 6th. Many factors influenced his fate, but
although class anxieties and attitudes toward foreigners played a role in what
happened, they did not do so in any simple and uniform way. Although the aristocracy was threatened by
the idea of a servant murdering his master, Courvoisier's former employers
(also upper class) testified as to his character at the trial.[11]** Similarly, English prejudices about
continental immorality also entered into the case, but not without
challenge. When the prosecution claimed
the Swiss always murdered their robbery victims, the defense--with some success--challenged
the idea. And although national solidarity did play a role in the case--a group
of foreign servants raised a subscription to support Courvoisier's defense--the
most damning evidence at the trial was provided by the wife of a Frenchman who
ran a hotel for foreigners. Her
disclosure (on the last day of the trial) that Courvosier had left articles
stolen from Russell at the Hotel Dieppe, made his conviction a virtual
certainty.[12]
[2]The
case was rich with irony and coincidence throughout. The night of his murder, Russell had been reading a life of an
early nineteenth century reformer, Samuel Romilly, a tireless (though
unsuccessful) advocate of restricting the number of crimes punishable by
capital punishment. According to one
contemporary description of the crime (Pelham's New Newgate Calendar),
the murderer had tried to make it look as if Russell had been attacked while
reading a life of Romilly.
Unfortunately, it was common knowledge that the murdered man never read
in bed, so further circumstantial evidence was provided for Courvoisier's
guilt. Apart from this improbability,
however, the victim's interest in Romilly was not surprising. His nephew (John Russell), was an energetic
proponent of restricting the scope of capital punishment throughout the 1830s,
and thus followed in the footsteps of reformers like Romilly and Peel (the
first to achieve legislative success in the area).
[3]Nevertheless,
initial reports of the crime in the Times cited Courvoisier for
information on what happened, rather than as a potential suspect (London
Times, xxx),
[4]At
least two other factors helped Courvoisier's case during the trial. First, no blood was found on his clothes or
body. Second, plate was missing but
could not be found in the house, yet Courvoisier would not have had a chance to
remove it. This gap in the evidence
suggested that someone else (able to remove the plate) had participated in the
crime, either alone or with Courvoisier.
[5]Because
the first search of his trunk turned up nothing, the bloody items later found
there were a mystery, a mystery often explained as part of a police frameup.
[6]Edward
Gibbon Wakefield, incarcerated in Newgate from 18xx to 18xx, relates that the
prison officials he observed were uneasy about carrying out executions and
often sympathetic to the condemned. One
of their responsibilities was to extract confessions from the condemned, and
act which would lend legitimacy to their actions in both their own and other's
eyes. Wakefield's views on capital
punishment appear in Some Thoughts on the Punishment of Death in the
Metropolis, first published in 1831.
On the changing status of circumstantial evidence see Alexander Welsh, George
Eliot and Blackmail, chapter 5.
Welsh points out that until the mid-18th century, conviction required
what was then called "direct evidence"--that is, the testimony of
witnesses or a confession of guilt on the part of the condemned.
[7]Contrary
to reports that circulated after the trial, the accused only accepted
responsibility for theft, not murder, in conference with his attorney on the
last day of the trial (when the testimony of a former employer proved his role
in the theft of some of Russell's plate).
See Yseult Bridges, Two Studies in Crime
[8]It
is hard to believe, as Bridges points out, that Russell would have threatened
to fire his valet and ruin his reputation--and then go to return to his bedroom
and fall asleep without locking his door.
[9]The
Examiner reacted sarcastically to what it considered an acknowledged
murderer's claim that he is not guilty because "Satan is to blame,"
and "that Christ is his friend, and [has] promised him forgiveness and
admission to the Kingdom of Heaven." (quoted in Bridges, p. 110)
[10]Corroborating
evidence for this claim later surfaced in a story about a witness who did not
come forward at the time. The night of
the murder, the individual involved (whose identity was never publicly
revealed), was secretly visiting a lady who lived next door to Russell. As he was leaving the assignation, he saw a
nude man through the window in Russell's house, and soon connected the
appearance with the murder. But he did
not come forward with his evidence for fear of compromising the lady. When he consulted his lawyer, he was advised
to make the information public only if circumstantial evidence was insufficient
to convict Courvoisier and it looked as if one of the other servants might be
convicted of the crime. (Bridges, pp. 121-123)
He did not have to come forward and testify because the government was
ultimately successful in building its case with circumstantial evidence.
[11]According
to Yseult Bridges, Courvoisier was especially talented at ingratiating himself with
people, adapting to their desires and expectations, and charming them.
[12]According
to Pelham's New Newgate Calendar, "so strong a feeling had been
excited in his behalf, that a liberal subscription was raised among the foreign
servants in London" to pay for his defense. Camden Pelham, The Chronicles of Crime; or, the New Newgate
Calendar (London: T. Miles, 1891)
vol. II. p. 568. Pelham's work was
first published in 184_. For
information on the hotel see Y. Bridges, Two Studies in Crime.