Murder revisited: the guilt of Florence Maybrick

Of all the arsenic murders, the Maybrick case is the most intriguing. On 7 August 1889 Florence Maybrick was found guilty of murdering her husband James and sentenced to death, only to be reprieved two weeks later and her sentence commuted to life imprisonment. There are those who believe she should have been acquitted because she was innocent. There are those who believe that even if she was guilty she did the world a service in that the man she killed was really Jack-the-Ripper. That somewhat dubious claim was made in the 1990s with the publication of an old diary supposedly written by James Maybrick. In the furore which followed the trial, Florence was seen as a martyr by two groups: the supporters of the Women’s Rights Movement, and those who campaigned for a Court of Appeal. The first of these saw her as a victim of a male-dominated legal system, and the second saw her as a prime example of injustice which the British legal system as it then stood was unable to rectify. The Women’s International Maybrick Society even enlisted the support of three US Presidents, but to no avail because, unbeknown to them, Queen Victoria had taken an interest in the case and believed Florence to be guilty. Until the Queen died, there was no possibility of her release from prison, although she was set free soon afterwards. Legal problems raised by the Maybrick trial centred on the summing-up of the Judge, Mr Justice Fitzjames Stephens. In its latter stages this became little more than a tirade of moralizing generalizations that dwelt on Florence’s admitted adultery, implying that a woman capable of committing such a sin was indeed capable of murder. (Nothing was said at the trial about her husband’s mistress and the five children that she had borne him.) The summing-up was flawed in other ways; for example the judge introduced material that was not produced during the trial and he read accounts of what witnesses had said from newspaper cuttings of their evidence because his own notes were in such a poor state.