Sarah Chesham was a laborer's wife in the Essex village of Clavering who was tried four times. In March 1847 she stood trial at Chelmsford for the deaths of her two young sons and for the illness and death of a servant's infant son. Three juries found her not guilty. In March 1851 a fourth jury found her guilty of a different charge, administering poison to her husband with intent to murder him, and she was executed at Chelmsford on March 25, 1851.
The courts never convicted her of murder. The 1847 verdicts were acquittals, and the 1851 conviction rested on a single count concerning her husband, whose death a coroner's jury had already attributed to tuberculosis. What gave the case its size was newspaper coverage: in the years around 1850 the press described a supposed system of secret crimes by women in Essex, and Chesham, the Clavering woman who had been acquitted and then charged again, became its central figure. The historian Jill Louise Ainsley, in a 2012 study at the University of Victoria, set that coverage against the evidence actually put to the courts.
Clavering is a village in the north-west of Essex. The 1841 census counted 1,170 residents. Most were agricultural laborers and craftsmen, with a smaller group of farmers, shopkeepers, bricklayers and tradespeople. Women worked as farm laborers, as a dressmaker, a charwoman, a beershop keeper and as schoolteachers. The village was, in Ainsley's words, "not a wealthy place," and more than a dozen residents were recorded as paupers. It had three places of worship, Anglican, Congregational and Methodist, two schools, and an inn. The parish poorhouse had closed in 1834.
Among the farming families was one of prosperous tenant farmers. A farmer from that family, who lived with his elderly mother, would be drawn into the case in 1846. The Cheshams were laborers. In 1846 Sarah Chesham was 35 years old and lived in Clavering with her husband, an agricultural laborer, and three surviving children aged between seven and fifteen. Her seventeen-year-old daughter had left the village, probably for work. The family sublet its cottage from that farming family, and Sarah went to the farm to pay the rent.
In January 1845 two of her sons, Joseph, then about 10, and James, about 8, died within a short time of each other. The surgeon who attended them certified the cause of death, and the deaths were not looked into again until 1846. Before the deaths, Joseph had been dismissed from work on that farm after the farmer accused him of taking two eggs. At the trials, a sister-in-law of Sarah Chesham would testify that Sarah had said of her sons that "it would be a good job." The remark was part of the case the prosecution put together in 1846 and 1847; the juries returned verdicts of not guilty.
A young woman from a neighboring village entered service at that farm in October 1844. Her son was born on December 16, 1845, at her mother's house. By June 1846 she had left the baby with her mother and taken a post elsewhere. Sarah Chesham visited the mother and child several times after the birth, and the mother later said the baby became ill during one of those visits. The baby died on September 27, 1846.
In August 1846 the servant accused Chesham of harming the infant. The accusation was heard in private by the magistrates, who sat at Newport. During the hearing the earlier deaths of the two Chesham boys were mentioned, and the magistrates passed that matter to the coroner. Chesham was arrested and committed to stand trial at the next assizes on a charge of attempted poisoning. She could not post bail, and she was held in Springfield Gaol at Chelmsford.
The local farmer was later arrested as well, on a charge of having "feloniously aided and abetted Sarah Chesham in the administration of poison to her two children." He was committed for trial and released on bail.
Two sets of inquest proceedings followed in the autumn of 1846. The Times printed the testimony in the Chesham boys' inquest on September 5, September 19 and October 2. On October 23, 1846, the coroner's jury delivered its verdict: the two boys had been "willfully murdered," and Sarah Chesham was responsible. This was a finding at an inquest and not a trial verdict; it led to the committals for trial but proved nothing in law.
The inquest on the servant's infant son, who had died on September 27, was adjourned and resumed about two weeks later. The jury's verdict was that "whether from natural causes or otherwise there was not sufficient evidence to show." Chesham was nevertheless committed to trial in connection with his death, on a charge Ainsley summarizes as "having administered poison with the intent to murder." The farmer's bail was set at £800 in sureties; he paid half himself and raised the rest from family and friends.
The trials took place at Chelmsford at the Lent Assizes of March 1847, before the Lord Chief Justice, Thomas Denman. The Crown was represented by Montague Chambers, Q.C., with Mr. Wordsworth and Mr. T. Chambers. Chesham's defense was led by Serjeant Jones, with Mr. Charnock. Three trials were held one after the other over two days. The first began on Thursday, March 11, 1847. Exact dates for the second and third are not on record.
In the first trial Chesham was tried for the murder of her son Joseph. The doctor who attended the boys in 1845 admitted that he had certified the cause of death without examining the body, and the judge told him, "But you had no right to have any unless you knew it of your own knowledge." A London analyst gave evidence for the Crown. The jury retired for under fifteen minutes and found her not guilty. The foreman added a statement that has often been quoted: "we do not see any proof of who administered it."
Montague Chambers asked for a new jury for the second trial, which concerned the death of James. Her eldest son was among the witnesses and told the court that his mother "has been a good mother to we." The evidence of a second scientific witness, Professor Graham, reached the court in a letter after an attempt to stop him by telegraph failed. The jury was out slightly longer than the first, and again returned a verdict of not guilty.
For the third trial the defense objected to many of the jurors called, and the sheriff summoned local tradesmen to fill the panel. The servant's account was challenged on her own conduct and on her son's illness. The London analyst found nothing to support the charge, and Montague Chambers told the court that the Crown could "carry the case no further." The judge agreed, and the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.
The farmer's own trial for the two boys' deaths was put off to the next assizes. Its outcome is not on record.
Chesham went home to Clavering. The family stopped renting from the farming family and no longer lived next to the neighbors who had testified against her. The household later shared a house with relatives, and Ainsley describes the family's circumstances as worse after the trials. The acquittals did not end the talk in the village. No further official action against her is on record for more than three years.
In February 1850 her husband, Richard Chesham, began a long illness. A relieving officer authorized the local surgeon to treat him, and the surgeon called several times. Richard Chesham died in the middle of May 1850. The surgeon attributed the death to tuberculosis, and because of Sarah Chesham's history the matter went to the coroner.
The inquest opened on June 7, 1850, at an inn in Clavering. The jury attributed the death to tuberculosis. The coroner observed that the magistrates could still take proceedings against her for administering poison. She was not charged with her husband's death at that stage.
On September 2, 1850, police arrested her and took her before the magistrates at Newport. The hearing was held behind closed doors over several days. It ended with an order that she stand trial at the March assizes.
Chesham was tried at the Lent Assizes in Chelmsford in March 1851, before the Lord Chief Justice, John Campbell, who had succeeded Denman. The Times of March 7, 1851, gave the charge as the "capital offence of feloniously administering to Richard Chesham, her husband, a quantity of [poison], with intent to murder him." It was not a charge of murder. Chesham had no lawyer to defend her.
The prosecution relied on witnesses from the household and the district. Richard Chesham's mother, the relieving officer and a police officer gave evidence about the husband's last days, and the Crown's scientific witness testified. A neighbor and friend said that Chesham had admitted harming the servant's infant and had threatened her husband.
Chesham made a long, rambling statement, as Ainsley describes it. She declared her innocence and said that anything harmful must have come in items other people sent to her husband while he was ill.
The jury conferred for a few minutes and returned a verdict of guilty. The Lord Chief Justice put on the black cap, in a voice that Ainsley describes as choked with emotion. He told her that she had been "most justly convicted," that she had "escaped justice" before, and that she should seek "forgiveness for the many crimes that you have committed, for there is no hope of mercy for you in this world." The 1847 charges had ended in verdicts of not guilty. The remarks were the judge's own words and not a finding of any court.
She was executed at Chelmsford on the morning of Tuesday, March 25, 1851, together with Thomas Drory, a farmer's son convicted of the murder of a young woman. Newspapers estimated the crowd at figures between 5,000 and 40,000. The press coverage that followed dwelt on her demeanor and set it against that of Drory.
Petitions for mercy did not succeed.
The case ran in parallel with a parliamentary effort to regulate the sale of dangerous substances. On April 30, 1850, in the House of Commons, John Stanford moved for a select committee to inquire whether Parliament should restrict such sales, citing a rise in cases of the kind and the ease of buying in farming districts. The Home Secretary, Sir George Grey, answered that a bill was already prepared and that the main difficulty was deciding what to put in its schedule. Stanford withdrew the motion. The debate named no individual cases.
The bill reached the House of Lords in 1851. On March 13, 1851, the Earl of Carlisle moved its second reading, describing a requirement that sellers record each sale with the quantity, the stated purpose and the buyer's name and residence. A peer objected that it covered only one substance and not others. The Lords read the bill a third time on March 24, 1851, the day before Chesham was executed, after amendments that required the buyer to sign the sale record and set out rules on witnesses. As amended, the bill restricted buyers to adult men, because children and female servants had been sent to make purchases and accidents had followed. The Lords passed it and sent it to the Commons.
The Act, 1851 chapter 13, received royal assent on June 5, 1851, after the execution.
The Times wrote of a horrible system of such crimes in Essex, claimed that Chesham's supposed trade was as well known in the district as any ordinary village occupation, asked why it should flourish in the marshes of Essex rather than elsewhere, and described Essex as an "uneducated county." The Essex Standard, by contrast, carried original reporting and avoided many of The Times's errors, in Ainsley's account.
Ainsley's argument is that a wide gap separated what the press claimed about the Essex cases from the evidence actually offered in court. She argues that the press "created a myth, one with little basis in reality but with tragic consequences."
In the twenty-first century a descendant asked two barristers, Jeremy Dein and Sasha Wass, to re-investigate Richard Chesham's death. The Yorkshire Post reported that a retired judge then concluded the 1851 verdict was unsafe, and that the experts involved found the tests carried out at the time inconclusive and considered it most likely that the people she was accused of harming had died of natural causes. The findings were presented in a television documentary.
A petition on the UK Parliament website asked for a posthumous pardon, saying she had been unfairly tried without a lawyer. It was created in May 2019 and closed on November 6, 2019, with 75 signatures, below the threshold needed for a government response. Its claims are the petitioner's own.
The 1846 inquest on the two boys found that they were "willfully murdered" by Sarah Chesham. A trial jury in 1847 found her not guilty of murder in each case, and its foreman said there was no proof of who had administered anything. She was not convicted of any of those deaths, and they cannot be attributed to her as fact.
The infant's death was found at inquest to be from "mesenteric disease," with insufficient evidence of the cause. The charge arising from his illness ended in a not-guilty verdict after the Crown said it could take the case no further.
Richard Chesham's death was attributed by the coroner's jury to tuberculosis. The only conviction was for administering poison to him with intent to murder him. It followed a neighbor's testimony about remarks Chesham was said to have made, at a trial where she had no lawyer.
Accounts of a network of women in Essex committing such crimes, in which Chesham was the central figure, come from the press of the time. Ainsley argues that the evidence put to the courts did not support such a network.
Later newspaper summaries describe the 1851 conviction as one for attempted murder. The charge at the trial, as The Times reported it on March 7, 1851, was administering poison with intent to murder.
January 1845: Her sons Joseph and James die within a short time of each other.
December 16, 1845: A servant's son is born at her mother's house.
August 1846: The servant accuses Chesham; she is arrested, committed and held at Springfield Gaol, Chelmsford.
September 27, 1846: The servant's infant son dies.
October 23, 1846: The coroner's jury declares the two Chesham boys "willfully murdered" and names her.
March 11, 1847: First of three trials at the Lent Assizes, Chelmsford; verdicts of not guilty in all three.
February 1850: Richard Chesham's illness begins.
Mid-May 1850: Richard Chesham dies.
June 7, 1850: The inquest opens at Clavering; the jury attributes the death to tuberculosis.
September 2, 1850: Chesham is arrested and taken before the magistrates at Newport.
March 1851: Tried at the Lent Assizes before the Lord Chief Justice; found guilty of feloniously administering poison to her husband with intent to murder him; sentenced to death.
March 24, 1851: The House of Lords passes a bill regulating the sale of a dangerous substance on its third reading.
March 25, 1851: Executed at Chelmsford.
June 5, 1851: Royal assent to the sale regulation Act.
May 2019: A petition for a posthumous pardon is created on the UK Parliament website; it closes on November 6, 2019.