Florence Maybrick was an American woman in her mid-twenties, living in the Liverpool suburb of Aigburth, when she was tried for murder in the summer of 1889. Her husband, the cotton broker James Maybrick, had died on May 11 of that year. Within days she was in custody. A coroner's jury named her, she was committed for trial, and at the Liverpool Assizes, sitting in St George's Hall, a jury of men returned a verdict of guilty after less than forty minutes. She was sentenced to death.
She was not executed. Within three weeks the Home Secretary had advised the Queen to commute the sentence to penal servitude for life, and on that footing she spent the next fifteen years in English prisons. Through the whole of that time the conviction stood, and the government turned aside every demand to reopen it: from members of Parliament, from the barrister who had led her defense and who had since become Lord Chief Justice, and from the government of the United States. She was released on license in 1904, returned to America, and died in rural Connecticut in 1941, still carrying the conviction an English jury had returned against her.
She was born Florence Elizabeth Chandler in Mobile, Alabama, during the Civil War, and spent much of her girlhood in Europe. On a crossing of the Atlantic she met an English cotton broker from Liverpool who was twenty-four years older than she was. They married in London in 1881, when she was eighteen. To marry him she gave up her American citizenship, which she would spend years trying to recover.
The couple lived for about two years in the United States before settling in Aigburth, on the south side of Liverpool. By the second half of the decade the marriage was in difficulty and the cotton business was failing. In 1887 she learned that her husband kept other women. She began a relationship of her own with another man, and the couple quarreled over it. That relationship would become, at her trial, the motive the judge laid before the jury.
Her husband died at Aigburth on May 11, 1889. Suspicion within the household had already fallen on his wife, and it did not lift after the death. For several days she was kept confined to her room without any charge being laid against her. Three days after the death, police took her into custody and removed her to a Liverpool prison.
The coroner's inquest sat at Garston. Its jury returned a verdict that named her as the person responsible for the death, and she was committed for trial at the next Liverpool Assizes. She denied the charge.
The trial was held in St George's Hall, the civic hall in which the Liverpool Assizes sat, before a High Court judge, and it ran for seven days. Her defense was led by one of the leading advocates of his generation, a barrister who within a few years would become Lord Chief Justice of England.
The defense case rested above all on the cause of death, which it argued had never been established: the medical evidence, the defense said, left it uncertain what the dead man had died of, and so could not prove that any act of his wife had killed him. Against that, the prosecution set the suspicions of the household and the medical evidence, and the judge's summing up tied the relationship outside the marriage to the motive for murder.
Before the jury retired, she spoke to the court. She admitted the relationship and denied the crime: she had been guilty of intimacy with another man, she said, but she was not guilty of the murder of her husband.
The jury was out for less than forty minutes. It returned a verdict of guilty, and she was sentenced to death. The trial had ended in the first week of August 1889, and the Home Office later dated her sentence from those days: in July 1899 the Home Secretary told the Commons that she would complete ten years on August 6.
The verdict was badly received. Many doctors and many newspapers insisted that she was innocent, and from that week until her release there was hardly a season in which her case was not being pressed on the Home Office from one direction or another.
There was no appeal from the verdict of an assize jury in 1889. The only road left open was a petition to the Home Secretary, who could advise the Crown to exercise the prerogative of mercy. While he considered the case, unofficial reports of a reprieve were already running in the newspapers.
On August 22, 1889, a member asked the Home Secretary in the House of Commons whether he could give the House any information on the case. The question was met with loud cries of "No," and when another member asked when the decision would be made known to the public and to the condemned woman, the Home Secretary answered that the advice he thought it his duty to give the Queen was not a matter for question in the House. The decision reached Liverpool that night. The sentence of death was commuted to penal servitude for life, and a Queen's messenger carrying the written reprieve arrived at the prison at midnight.
The ground of the reprieve shaped every argument about the case for the next fifteen years. The Home Secretary spared her because he found reasonable doubt whether the death had in fact been caused in the way the Crown alleged. He did not, however, disturb the verdict. The conviction for murder was left standing while the sentence for murder was set aside, and that divided position became the target of almost every later petition.
The handling of the news became a grievance in its own right. On August 27 a member asked why the first word of the reprieve had reached Liverpool by an unofficial telegram, and why the prison had received nothing official until the early hours of the Friday morning. The Home Secretary replied that the newspaper telegram had not been of official origin, that notice of a reprieve went first to the government, and that he preferred a written document carried by a Queen's messenger to a telegram.
The campaign that followed was fought largely on the floor of the House of Commons, where members returned to the case again and again.
In May 1892 a member put it to the Home Office that four counsel, among them the barrister who had led her defense at Liverpool, had considered a written statement of her case prepared by her solicitors and had found in it many matters that appeared to be new facts. He asked whether the Home Secretary would consider a statement of them. The Under Secretary answered that no such opinion and no such document had reached the Home Office, and that the Secretary of State would consider any new material facts that could be shown to exist, in her case as in any other.
By 1895 there was a new Home Secretary, and a new round of pressure. In September of that year a member asked whether he would order a public inquiry, presided over by a High Court judge and following judicial procedure. The Home Secretary replied that he was about to give full and impartial consideration to her case, but that he had no power to order an inquiry of the kind proposed.
In 1896 the case came up in the Commons four times. In May a member asked whether the Lord Chief Justice had told the Home Secretary that she should be released, and whether a commission of inquiry would follow. The Home Secretary confirmed that he had received a communication from the Lord Chief Justice and had weighed it carefully, but said that the decision was his alone, that he would not appoint a commission and that he had no power to do so.
In June another member went to the legal footing of her imprisonment. Was she held for murder, he asked, or only for the lesser offense of attempting a death with intent to murder, as the reasoning of 1889 seemed to imply? The Home Secretary answered that she was detained on a conviction for murder, for which she had been sentenced to death; that the capital sentence had been commuted for reasons his predecessor had stated; and that, like his predecessor, he saw no ground to recommend any further exercise of clemency.
At the end of July members pressed for the Lord Chief Justice's letter to be laid before the House. The Home Secretary refused, saying it would be unusual and undesirable to table representations made on behalf of a convict. He added that the Lord Chief Justice had written not in his official capacity but as a person who had been concerned in the trial, and that many representations, that one among them, had come in during the previous autumn. In August a member asked outright whether the Lord Chief Justice had written that she ought to be immediately released. The Home Secretary declined to add anything to his earlier answers, saying that the objections that kept the letter off the table of the House also kept him from describing what it said.
The pressure from across the Atlantic was just as persistent. In July 1899 a member asked how long she had served and whether, in view of her good conduct in prison since her conviction, the Home Secretary would recommend the Queen's clemency. The answer was that she would have served ten years on August 6, and that no hope of exceptional treatment could be held out. Asked whether he knew of the wide sympathy for her in America, the Home Secretary replied that he had heard of no reasons that would justify exceptional treatment. A week later the same member asked whether the United States Government had acted on her behalf. The Home Secretary confirmed that the American Government had made representations in her favor through its ambassador, and that numerous applications had come from private individuals, but refused to lay the papers before the House, since it would be contrary to practice to present papers relating to the exercise of the prerogative of mercy.
She served those years as a woman under a life sentence in the English convict system, part of the time in solitary confinement.
Her release was never announced. It was confirmed in answer to a question. On February 4, 1904, a member asked whether she had been released from penal servitude and on what terms. The Home Secretary answered that she had been granted a license under the Penal Servitude Acts, that she was for the present in an institution which she would be allowed to leave toward the end of the summer, and that at the wish of its authorities and at her own request no further details of time or place would be published. A week later the license itself was laid before the House of Lords as a license granted by the King to Florence Elizabeth Maybrick, carrying a condition beyond those set out in the schedule of the Penal Servitude Act of 1864.
On February 18 a member asked whether her release followed a general rule for women convicts in her position and, if not, on what grounds it had been made. The Home Secretary replied that the circumstances of women serving life sentences varied so widely that there could be no general rule applicable to all, that each case was taken on its merits, and that it would be contrary to practice to state the grounds on which the prerogative of mercy had been exercised. He added that no woman convict then in custody had been confined longer than she had, while insisting that this established no rule on the longest term a woman might serve.
She had served fifteen years.
She returned to the United States in 1904 and recovered her American citizenship. She published her own account of the case and of her imprisonment, and for about four years she lectured across the country.
The public life did not last. In 1919 she moved to rural Connecticut and lived there under her maiden name, Chandler, in a small cottage near South Kent. The neighbors knew her only as Mrs. Chandler, and few of them knew who she had been. She died there in the autumn of 1941, at the age of seventy-nine, more than half a century after the verdict in Liverpool.
The conviction has been contested since the week it was returned. The central question has always been the one the Home Secretary himself raised in August 1889: whether the death had been proved to result from any act of hers at all. The government that commuted the sentence found reasonable doubt on the cause of death, yet left a murder conviction standing, and no later Home Secretary moved from that position in either direction.
The trial itself has been criticized for a summing up that gave great weight to the relationship outside the marriage, and for a verdict returned in under forty minutes after seven days of evidence. In 1896 an MP's question in the Commons rested on the claim that the Lord Chief Justice, who had defended her, had written that she ought to be released at once. The Home Secretary confirmed that a letter existed, but its contents were never disclosed to Parliament.
She maintained her innocence. No court ever set the conviction aside.
1881: She marries an English cotton broker in London, at eighteen.
1887: She learns that her husband keeps other women; the marriage deteriorates.
May 11, 1889: Her husband dies at Aigburth, Liverpool.
May 1889: Three days after the death, she is taken into custody.
1889: A coroner's jury at Garston names her; she is committed for trial at the Liverpool Assizes.
First week of August 1889: A seven-day trial at St George's Hall, Liverpool, ends in a guilty verdict after less than forty minutes; she is sentenced to death.
August 22, 1889: The Home Secretary declines to answer questions in the Commons; that night the sentence is commuted to penal servitude for life.
August 27, 1889: The Home Secretary answers questions in the Commons on how the reprieve was delivered.
May 24, 1892: The Home Office says it has received no counsel's opinion setting out new facts.
September 3, 1895: The Home Secretary says he will consider the case afresh but has no power to order a public inquiry.
May to August 1896: Four Commons exchanges; the Home Secretary refuses further clemency and refuses to disclose the Lord Chief Justice's letter.
July 24 and 31, 1899: The Home Secretary refuses exceptional treatment and confirms representations from the United States Government.
February 4, 1904: The Commons is told she has been granted a license under the Penal Servitude Acts.
February 11, 1904: The license is laid before the House of Lords.
February 18, 1904: The Home Secretary says no woman convict then in custody had been held longer.
1904: She returns to the United States and regains her citizenship.
1919: She settles in rural Connecticut under her maiden name.
1941: She dies near South Kent, Connecticut.