Broadmoor Revealed_ Victorian Crime and the Lunatic Asylum - Mark Stevens [25]
Her barrister set up the defence of insanity. Several well-known authorities testified on her behalf. Dr William Wood argued that she satisfied the principal MacNaughten Rule – she could not distinguish right from wrong. He had worked previously at Bethlem, and now ran private asylums in London. He was also a regular expert witness in insanity cases. Drs Charles Lockhart Robertson and Henry Maudsley, the famous psychologist, argued that Edmunds belonged to the ‘morally defective’ group of lunatics – a Victorian precursor to the later term of psychopath. Robertson was a friend of Maudsley’s, and the Superintendent of the Sussex County Asylum. He was particularly interested in women’s mental health, and had pioneered the use of Turkish baths to calm female patients. Between the three of them they offered a heavy tilt towards a verdict of not guilty, but insane.
Then Edmunds’s mother took the stand to deliver a long tale of family madness, which had eventually trapped her surviving daughter. Edmunds, for the only time in court, reacted to proceedings. Contemplating her mother laying bear the family soul, she cried out: ‘This is more than I can bear’. In the end, it was futile testimony anyway. As her counsel moved on, Christiana’s defence unravelled. There was evidence of hereditary insanity, to be sure, but there was nothing else to offer to back up the opinions of the medical men. There was nothing obviously insane about Edmunds’s own life. Any sympathy 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