A classic cry for help, one might think today. But an exasperated Superintendent Williamson did nothing and told no one, beyond noting with some contempt in his log-book that Minor was clearly – and this was the first use of the word to describe the hapless American – insane.
Then came a witness who had something very curious to offer from his observations of Minor during the time the American was held in remand in the cells at Horsemonger Lane.
The witness, whose name was William Dennis, was a member of a profession that has long since receded from modern memory: he was what was called a Bethlem Watcher. Usually he was employed at the Bethlehem Hospital for the Insane – such a dreadful place that the name has given us the word bedlam today – where his duties included watching the prisoner-patients through the night, to make sure that they behaved themselves and did not cheat justice by committing suicide. He had been seconded to the Horsemonger Lane Gaol in mid-February, he said, to watch the nocturnal activities of the strange visitor. He had watched him, he testified, for twenty-four nights.
It was a most curious and disturbing experience, Mr Dennis told the jury. Each morning Minor would wake and immediately accuse him of having taken money from someone, in order specifically to molest him while he slept. Then he would spit, dozens of times, as though trying to remove something that had been put into his mouth. He would next leap from his bed and scrabble about underneath, looking for people who, he insisted, had hidden there and were planning to annoy him. Dennis told his superior, the prison surgeon, that he was quite certain Minor was mad.
From the police interrogation notes came the evidence of an imagined motive for the crime – and with them a further indication of Minor’s patent instability. Each night, Minor had told his questioners, unknown men – often lower class, often Irish – would come to his room while he was sleeping. They would maltreat him, they would violate him in ways he could not possibly describe. For months, ever since these nocturnal visitors had begun to torment him, he had taken to sleeping with his Colt service revolver, loaded with five cartridges, beneath his pillow.
On the night in question he awoke with a start, certain that a man was standing in the shadows at the foot of his bed. He reached under the pillow for his gun: the man saw him and took to his heels, running down the stairs and out of the house. Minor followed him as fast as he could, saw a man running down into Belvedere Road, was certain that this was the intruder, shouted at him, then fired four times, until he had hit him and the man lay still, unable to harm him further.
The court listened in silence. The landlady shook her head. No one could get into her house at night without a key, she said. Everyone slept very lightly. There could be no intruder.
And as final confirmation, the court then heard from the prisoner’s stepbrother, George Minor. It had been a nightmare, said George, having brother William staying in the family house in New Haven. Every morning he would accuse people of trying to break into his room the night before and try to molest him. He was being persecuted. Evil men were trying to insert metallic biscuits, coated with poison, into his mouth. They were in league with others who hid in the attic, and came down at night while he was asleep, and treated him foully. Everything was punishment, he said, for an act he had been forced to commit while in the US Army. Only by going to Europe, he said, could he escape from his demons. He would travel, and paint, and live the life of a respected gentleman of art and culture – and the persecutors might melt away into the night.
The court listened in melancholy silence, while Minor sat in the dock, morose, shamed. The lawyer whom the American Consul-General had procured for him said only that it was clear that his client was insane, and that the jury should treat him as such.
The Chief Justice nodded his agreement. It had been a brief but sorry case, the defendant an educated and cultured man, a foreigner and a patriot, a figure quite unlike those wretches who more customarily stood in the dock before him. But the law had to be applied with just precision, whatever the condition or estate of the defendant; and the decision in this affair was in a sense a foregone conclusion.
For thirty years the law in such cases had been guided by what were known as the McNaghten Rules – named for the man who, in 1843, shot dead the private secretary to Sir Robert Peel, and who was acquitted on the grounds that he was so mad he could not tell right from wrong. The Rules, which judged criminal responsibility rather than guilt, were to be applied in this case, he told the jury. If they were convinced that the prisoner was ‘of unsound mind’ and had killed George Merrett while under some delusion of the kind that they had just heard about, then they must do as juries were wont to do in this extraordinarily lenient time in British justice: they were to find William Chester Minor not guilty on grounds of insanity, and leave the judge to make such custodial sanction as he felt prudent and necessary.
And this is what the jury did, without deliberation, late on the afternoon of 6 April 1872. They found Minor legally innocent of a murder that everyone including him knew he had committed. The Lord Chief Justice then applied the only sentence that was available to him – a sentence still passed occasionally today, and that has a beguiling charm to its language, despite the swingeing awfulness of its connotations.
‘You will be detained in safe custody, Dr Minor,’ said the judge, ‘until Her Majesty’s Pleasure be known.’ It was a decision that was to have unimaginable and wholly unanticipated implications, effects that echo and ripple through the English literary world to this day.
The Home Department (more familiarly the Home Office) took brief note of the sentence, and made the further decision that Minor’s detention – which, considering the severity of his illness, was likely to occupy the rest of his natural life – would have to be suffered in the newly built showpiece of the British penal system, a sprawling set of red-brick blocks located behind high walls and spiked fences in the village of Crowthorne, in the royal county of Berkshire. Minor was to be transported as soon as was convenient from his temporary prison in Surrey to the Asylum for the Criminally Insane, Broadmoor.
Dr William C. Minor, Assistant Surgeon, United States Army, now a forlornly proud figure from one of the oldest and best-regarded families of New England, was thus to be henceforward formally designated in Britain by Broadmoor Patient Number 742, and to be held in permanent custody as a Certified Criminal Lunatic.
Chapter Two
The Man Who Taught Latin to Cattle
polymath (’polImæθ), sb. (a.) Also 7 polumathe. [ad. Gr. πoλuμαθης having learnt much, f. πoλυ- much + μαθ-, stem of μανθáνειν to learn. So F. polymathe.] a. A person of much or varied learning; one acquainted with various subjects of study.
1621 BURTON Anat. Mel. Democr. to Rdr. (1676) 4/2 To be thought and held Polumathes and Polyhistors. a 1840 MOORE Devil among Schol. 7 The Polymaths and Polyhistors, Polyglots and all their sisters. 1855 M. PATTISON Ess. I. 290 He belongs to the class which German writers… have denominated ‘Polymaths’. 1897 O. SMEATON Smollett ii. 30 One of the last of the mighty Scots polymaths.