Constance stood utterly still for a moment, then pulled down her veil. She was led out of the courtroom by a female prison warder, whose face was wet with tears. The trial had lasted twenty minutes.
Constance's cry 'Not jealousy!' was the only spontaneous statement she made in public over the months of her confession and trial. She would admit to anger, she would admit to murder, but she refused to agree that she had experienced envy. Perhaps she protested too much: if she had killed Saville out of anger, she could imagine herself as a heroic avenger of her natural mother and of William; but if out of jealousy, she was self-centred, childish, vulnerable. If she was jealous, she did not merely rage against her stepmother and her father; she wanted their love.
As soon as the death sentence was passed, 'broadside' ballads about the Road Hill murder were produced. These were formulaic, single-sheet accounts of crimes, published quickly and cheaply in large quantities, then sung and sold by street vendors. Their role had been largely usurped by the newspapers, which now reported crime just as cheaply and more fully, to an increasingly literate population. Most broadside ballads were written in the first person, in the form of a confession and lament:
His little throat I cut from ear to ear,
Wrapped him in a blanket and away did steer
To the water-closet, which soon I found,
In the dirty soil then I pushed him down.
For all Constance's denials, the balladeers were clear about her motive:
My father married a second wife,
Which filled my bosom with spleen & strife.
In the words of another, she was 'jealous of her mother-in-law'. More than one balladeer described Constance as haunted by Saville's ghost: 'Not night nor day no rest I get, in my dreams my brother see.' Some conveyed a lascivious excitement at the surrender that she was expected to make on the gallows:
I see the hangman before me stand,
Ready to seize me by the law's command. . .
Oh, what a sight it will be to see,
A maiden die on the fatal tree.
But the broadside publishers were jumping the gun – the public was clamouring for Constance Kent to be spared the death sentence. A Devonshire magistrate came forward to testify to the madness of the first Mrs Kent, claiming that he and other neighbours of the Kents had witnessed her outbreaks of lunacy in the 1840s. On the Sunday after Constance's conviction, the Reverend Charles Spurgeon, the most popular preacher of his time, delivered a sermon to more than four thousand people at the Metropolitan Tabernacle, Elephant & Castle, which compared Constance Kent's crime to that of Dr Edward Pritchard of Glasgow, another murderer convicted that month. Pritchard was arrested when traces of poison were found in the bodies of his wife and her mother, who had both died soon after discovering his liais on with a fifteen-year-old servant girl. He did not confess. Even when he was found guilty of murder, he tried to blame the killings on others: 'I feel now as though I had been living in a species of madness since my connection with Mary McLeod.' Constance, by contrast, had made a voluntary admission of guilt in order to lift suspicion from those close to her. The Reverend Spurgeon argued that she should be shown mercy. Rowland Rodway, Dr Bucknill, and the Reverend Wagner joined in pleading with the Home Secretary not to execute her, as did Justice Willes.* The newspapers were in overwhelming agreement. For a cold-blooded child-murderer, Constance had aroused an extraordinary level of sympathy. Within days Sir George Grey recommended to the Queen that her sentence be commuted to one of penal servitude for life, which was usually a twenty-year term.
On the morning of Thursday, 27 July, Victoria agreed to spare the young woman. The governor of Fisherton gaol hurried to Constance's cell to give her the news, which she received with her customary calm: 'She did not show the slightest emotion.'
That week, Joseph Stapleton wrote a letter to The Time, inviting the newspaper's readers to contribute to a fund he had set up for Elizabeth Gough at the North Wilts Bank, Trowbridge. For 'five long years', he said, she 'has been shut out from profitable domestic employment' because of the suspicions that attached to her at Road. He attested to 'the uniform modesty and purity of her character, her fidelity to her master and his family, her unwavering courage and simple truthfulness in her time of trial and peril'. Stapleton also drew attention to the plight of William Kent. 'This young man, now nearly 21 years of age, is a good son, a devoted brother, amiable and talented beyond the ordinary endowment of such qualities; but the thick dark cloud of this enduring family sorrow rests on him and bars his entrance into life. Will no one bring William Kent under the notice of the Government? Would the Government resist an appeal on his behalf for employment suitable to his education and habits?'
Because Constance pleaded guilty, Wagner's refusal to disclose all that she had told him was never challenged in court (in fact, Willes had decided that he would defend Wagner's right to silence on this issue – he told Coleridge afterwards that he had satisfied himself that there was 'a legal privilege in a priest to withhold what had passed in confession'). The clergyman remained loyal to Constance. He and Katharine Gream paid her regular visits in prison.
In August, an effigy of Constance Kent was modelled by the waxworkers of Madame Tussaud's to put on display in the museum's Chamber of Horrors, alongside newly made figures of two other murderers – Dr Pritchard, the poisoner, and John Wilkes Booth. Wilkes Booth had assassinated Abraham Lincoln in the week that Constance made her confession to Wagner; on the day that she was imprisoned at Devizes he was hunted down and shot dead in a barn in Virginia.*
On 4 August the Wiltshire magistrates wrote to Sir Richard Mayne to suggest that Whicher and Williamson be given the £100 reward that the government had offered in 1860 for evidence that led to the conviction of the Road Hill murderer. This would serve, they wrote, as 'a slight acknowledgement of the great skill and sagacity displayed by them in their difficult task'. The suggestion was ignored.
Just before she left Brighton for Bow Street magistrates' court in April, Constance had written a letter to Sir John Eardley Wilmot, the baronet who in 1860 had taken such an interest in helping the Kents to clear their names. A part of this letter, in which she gave her fullest account of what drove her to murder, was forwarded in July to Peter Edlin, who helped prepare the case for the defence. Since no defence was presented, the letter remained private. The surviving section ran as follows:
The murder I committed to avenge my mother whose place had been usurped by my stepmother. The latter had been living in the family ever since my birth. She treated me with all the kindness and affection of a mother (for my own mother never loved or cared for me) and I loved her as though she had been.