The Madeleine Smith Trial

The case

When the police searched Pierre Emile L'Angelier's lodgings in Glasgow after his death on 23 March 1857, they found a great many letters, most of them from the same correspondent, Madeleine Hamilton Smith, the 22-year-old eldest daughter of the architect James Smith, and many were written in a frankness that Victorian readers found almost impossible to credit. A post-mortem had already found a large quantity of arsenic in L'Angelier's stomach. Eight days after he died, she was arrested.

The two had met in 1855. He was a clerk in a seed merchant's warehouse, about ten years older than her, born in the Channel Islands to French parents and without money or connections. She lived with her family at 7 Blythswood Square, in the most respectable part of the city. Her parents knew nothing of him. The couple met at her basement bedroom window and wrote to each other constantly, and by 1856 they were lovers and talked of marriage.

Late that year her parents found her a suitable match, a prosperous merchant named William Harper Minnoch who lived in the same building. Early in 1857 she accepted him and tried to end the affair with L'Angelier, asking him to give back her letters. He refused, and made clear that he would show them to her father rather than let her go. Her next letters turned warm again.

L'Angelier was taken violently ill on the night of 19 February and again on 22 February, and recovered both times. Madeleine Smith bought arsenic from Glasgow druggists on 21 February, 6 March and 18 March, signing the poison register in her own name and saying it was for rats. On the evening of 22 March, L'Angelier came back early from a holiday at Bridge of Allan, telling his landlady he had received a letter calling him back, and went out late. A letter from her asking him to come was later found in his waistcoat pocket. He came home after two in the morning in agony and died some hours later.

Her trial at the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh ran from 30 June to 9 July 1857 and became the sensation of the year. The Lord Advocate, James Moncreiff, prosecuted in person. Her counsel, John Inglis, built the defence on a gap in the evidence: no witness could place the two together on any of the nights he fell ill, and nobody could show that she had seen him on 22 March at all. He suggested that L'Angelier, who had talked of suicide before, might have taken the poison himself, and pointed out that the arsenic she bought had been coloured with soot or indigo, as the law required, while none was seen in the dead man's stomach.

The Lord Justice-Clerk, Lord Hope, summed up in terms many thought leaned towards her. The jury was out for about half an hour. She was found not guilty on the charge connected with L'Angelier's first illness, which had come two days before her first recorded purchase of arsenic, and the murder charge was found not proven, the verdict Scots law allows when a jury is unconvinced of either guilt or innocence. She was released the same day.

Madeleine Smith left Scotland. In London in 1861 she married George Wardle, a designer who later managed William Morris's firm, and moved in artistic and socialist circles. The couple separated in 1889. She later went to the United States, married again and died in New York in April 1928, at the age of 93.