The Damnation of John Donellan (3 page)

‘Tell him to go and get Powell!' was Lady Boughton's reply. She ran back upstairs to Theodosius's room, Catharine Amos and Sarah Blundell following her. The boy was rigid, panting, his eyes rolling. Catharine at once knelt by the bed and tried to wipe the froth from Theo's face. But she was not there long. After a moment or two, she left the room and went back down to the kitchen.

In a few minutes, John Donellan was at the bedroom door, having met William Frost in the stable yard and, on hearing that Frost had been sent to get Powell, given him his horse. ‘What do you want?' he asked Lady Boughton. At the threshold Donellan stopped, on seeing Sarah Blundell by the bed, the prone boy and the expression on his mother-in-law's face.

‘Good God!' Anna Maria gasped. ‘What medicine can Mr Powell have sent?' She lowered her voice. ‘I am certain it would have killed a dog if he had swallowed it.'

Donellan looked from Theo to his mother, and around the room. ‘Why the devil did Powell send such a medicine?' he demanded. ‘Where is the bottle?'

Anna Maria simply pointed to where she had replaced it on the shelf. Donellan walked over to the chimneypiece, glanced through the bottles and held up the one she had used. ‘Is this it?'

She nodded. Donellan poured water into the empty bottle and shook the liquid into a basin of dirty water nearby.

‘You should not do that,' Anna Maria objected.

He took another bottle from the shelf and did the same.

‘What are you doing?' Anna Maria asked. ‘Let everything remain the same until Mr Powell arrives. Don't touch the bottle.'

Donellan turned to Sarah Blundell and, thrusting the bottles into her hands, told her ‘with some warmth' to take them away.

Anna Maria moved forwards. ‘Let things alone,' she told the frightened girl, snatching the bottles back again and putting them on the table.

‘The room should be cleaned,' Donellan insisted. ‘Put the dirty clothes into the inner room.'

Anna Maria walked past the bed where Theodosius lay immo
bile. The boy had not said a single word since swallowing the second draught of medicine. A seemingly erroneous report published in 1781 claimed that Theodosius now said, ‘Who gave me this draught?' but this is not corroborated by any witness.
²
While Anna Maria had her back turned opening the door to the inner room, Donellan gave the bottles to Sarah and motioned her to leave the room. Then he went after her; in the passageway downstairs that led to the kitchen, he met Catharine Amos, the cook, who was hurrying between the kitchen and the hall.

‘Sir Theodosius was out very late overnight fishing,' Donellan said, unprompted. ‘It was very silly of him, because he has been taking physic again as he had taken previously.'

Catharine Amos seems to have taken this as evidence that the young master was not as ill as she had assumed. She did not go upstairs.

Next Donellan went out into the garden, evidently searching for something. On seeing the gardener Francis Amos, he walked over to him. ‘Gardener,' he said, ‘you must go and take a couple of pigeons directly.'

The gardener was perplexed. ‘They are not fit to eat, sir.'

‘It will make no odds if they are not,' Donellan replied. ‘They are for Sir Theodosius; we must have them ready against the doctor comes.'

Amos hesitated. Putting dead birds at the feet of an invalid was an old wives' remedy; it was meant to draw the bad vapours from the body. But it was an almost comical last resort. ‘Is Sir Theodosius ill?' he asked.

‘The poor fellow has a damned nasty distemper,' Donellan told him.

It was almost an hour later before the panic-stricken apothecary, Powell, arrived in the stable yard. Beside him was William Frost, the coachman sent to get him, still on Donellan's horse. Frost had not been able to give Powell any details of what had happened; only that Lady Boughton had demanded that he come immediately.

John Donellan was waiting in the yard.

A curious atmosphere had descended on the house. Powell
could hear no familiar sounds as he dismounted: no clattering from the kitchens, no sweeping out of the passageways. The last time that he had been here, the previous day, Theodosius had complained that his medicine had made him vomit. Powell had made up a new draught, even though the boy seemed to him to be in pretty fine fettle, and Samuel had collected it the afternoon before. It was made up of fifteen grains each of jalop and rhubarb and twenty drops of lavender water mixed with two drams each of syrup and of nutmeg water and an ounce and a half of plain water. It ought to have been drinkable, and effective. It would have had the boy rushing to the chamber pot, but nothing more dramatic.

Theodosius had not been the easiest or most biddable of patients; he complained a lot and resisted treatment. The boy admitted that he often forgot to take his purges, and that Captain Donellan had encouraged him to keep them in his bedroom so that he would see them and remember. Despite all that Captain Donellan had done to help him, though – including rescuing him from a few scrapes in local taverns – the boy was a force of nature, a true Boughton. Above all, he would not leave the women alone who kept reinfecting him.

At the same time, Lady Boughton was both an overbearing mother and a powerful woman. One word that she disagreed with Powell's treatments, or that they had made her poor boy persistently sick, could cost him the rest of his patients – his whole livelihood.

As Powell dismounted from his horse, Donellan walked across to him. He looked expectantly in John Donellan's face for confirmation that he still had both a career and a patient.

‘Sir Theodosius is dead,' the captain told him.

‘The doctor is often to be more feared than the disease.'

French proverb

ACCORDING TO POWELL'S LATER TESTIMONY
,
¹
he was taken by John Donellan straight to Theodosius's room, where he reported vaguely that ‘some servant' was present, though he could not say who.

He inspected the body but saw ‘no distortion' and, more astonishingly, ‘nothing in particular'. He noted that Theodosius had been dead ‘near an hour'. When asked how the young man had died, Donellan replied, ‘In convulsions.' Powell later said that John Donellan also tried to persuade him that Theodosius had caught cold the night before, but he could not recall his exact words.

At some unspecified time later that same morning, Powell saw Lady Boughton, who told him that Theodosius ‘was convulsed soon after he took the medicine'. But there is no mention at all by anyone else in the house, when under oath later, of Powell having been questioned about what he had put in the prescription or why Theodosius had reacted as he did. No hint of blame, confusion or anger from anyone who spoke to him that day, in the family or beyond.

It was after Powell's visit that John Donellan sat down to write to Theodosius's guardian, Sir William Wheler (Anna Maria had appointed him to this role some years earlier). Like Theo's father, Wheler was a baronet; his Leamington Hastings estate lay about six miles from Lawford Hall across rolling, open country. Leamington Hastings had been described in 1629 as an extensive estate of ‘forty messuages' (defined by law as dwelling houses with adjacent buildings and land), ‘forty gardens, two dovehouses, one thousand acres of land, two hundred acres of meadow and fifty acres of pasture', and it had been added to since then.

Donellan wrote:

Dear Sir,

I am sorry to be the communicator of Sir Theodosius's death to you, which happened this morning; he has been for some time past under the care of Mr Powell of Rugby, for a similar complaint to that which he had at Eton. Lady Boughton and my wife are inconsolable. They join me in best respects to Lady Wheler, yourself, and Mr & Mrs Sitwell.

I am, dear sir, with the greatest esteem, your most obedient servant, J.D.

Lawford Hall, August 30th, 1780.

At the time, Wheler and his wife were staying with their friends the Sitwells, who had been recently bereaved, at Leamington (now Royal Leamington Spa). No mention had been made of how Theodosius had died. No reply was received that day.

‘Some time afterwards', according to Lady Boughton, Donellan, Theodosia and herself were in the downstairs parlour. Donellan raised the subject of the medicine bottles.

Anna Maria later testified that ‘Donellan in her presence had said to his wife that her mother [meaning herself] had been pleased to take notice of his washing the bottles out; and that he did not know what he should have done if he had not thought of saying
he put the water into it to put his finger to it to taste'. Donellan's words and actions – if Anna Maria's version is accurate – smack of self-defence. Anna Maria testified later that she could not trust herself to reply; she turned away from him to the window. In the face of his mother-in-law's rebuff, Donellan repeated what he had just said. Still getting no reply from her, he asked Theodosia to call a servant, who was asked to go and fetch William Frost.

Now came one of the major – but by no means only – divergences between Donellan's account and Anna Maria's later testimony. In her deposition to the coroner on 14 September, Anna Maria made no mention whatsoever of having seen Donellan in the house prior to his entering Theodosius's bedroom at approximately half past seven. Donellan's version was quite different.

According to Donellan's later published
Defence
, he and Lady Boughton had made an arrangement the previous day that they would ride out together that morning to take the waters at Newnham Wells, a little way across the fields. Donellan had gone downstairs and was waiting in the yard with the horses when at some time between seven and seven fifteen he glimpsed Anna Maria through a window. He had called to her, asking if she was ready to leave; she had replied that she was about to change her clothes. When she did not appear after some minutes, Donellan had ridden out alone, returning at about ten minutes to eight.

Next, according to both Anna Maria's trial testimony and Donellan's
Defence
, William Frost was called into the parlour to verify this.

Donellan asked the coachman, ‘Will, don't you remember that I set out of these iron gates this morning about seven o'clock?'

‘Yes, sir,' Will replied.

‘You remember that, don't you?' Donellan persisted.

‘Yes, sir.'

‘And that was the first time of my going out. I have never been on the other side of the house this morning.' Donellan was careful to drive the point home, repeating, ‘You remember that I set out there at seven o'clock this morning, and asked for a horse to go to the Wells?'

‘Yes, sir.'

‘Then,' Donellan replied, ‘you are my evidence.'

‘Yes, sir,' Frost answered.

It was the first time that the word ‘evidence' – to play such a major part in the months to come – was uttered.

Nothing else is recorded of the events or the emotions of that day or of the following one, 31 August, in Anna Maria's testimony other than that she instructed that two women be sent for to lay Theodosius out.

It was the evening of the thirtieth, the day of Theo's death, that Francis Amos, the gardener, said that John Donellan came into the garden. Seeing Amos, Donellan called to him, saying, ‘Now, gardener, you shall live at your ease, and work at your ease; it shall not be as it was in Sir Theodosius's days. I wanted before to be master; but I have got master now, and shall be master.'

There were no witnesses to this remark, to which Amos testified in court; at no time did Donellan confirm it.

On Friday 1 September, Theodosius's friend Fonnereau arrived and was allowed to view Theo's body. Fonnereau himself remains a shadowy figure. It was said that he lived in Northamptonshire, and there was certainly a Claude William Fonnereau, born in 1761 to William and Anne Fonnereau in Clapton, Northamptonshire, who would have been nineteen in 1780 and so would have been a contemporary of Theodosius. His brother, Charles William, was only sixteen, but could have been a riding or sporting companion to Theo. It was later implied by the prosecuting counsel that Theodosius was interested in Fonnereau's sister, and that the possibility of marriage had been mentioned, a marriage which would have certainly – if the couple had had children – taken the inheritance away for ever from Theodosia. Charles and Claude had two sisters, Harriet and Mary-Anne, but no other mention of Fonnereau's family was ever made and Fonnereau's connection to Theodosius ended after this visit. He was not seen again; he was not called to the trial; he did not give a deposition to the coroner.

On this Friday, however, no matter how silent Lawford Hall
appeared to be, the countryside around it was not. The first of the persistent rumours began to spread. Sir William Wheler, still at Leamington, testified at the trial that ‘it was intimated to him … a suspicion of Sir Theodosius having been poisoned'.

Curiously, it was a full twenty-four hours before Sir William acted on this information. And, although a guardian to the dead boy, he did not go to Lawford Hall to see what was happening for himself or to comfort Anna Maria and Theodosia in their grief. Instead, on Saturday 2 September, he wrote his reply to Donellan's first letter telling him of Theo's death. It had taken Sir William three days to respond.

But most curious of all, considering that he had already been given a ‘suspicion' of poison, was the text itself.

Lemington, September 2nd, 1780

Dear Sir,

I received the favour of your letter the day after my return to Mr Sitwell's. The sudden and very untimely death of my poor unfortunate ward gives me great concern, and we condole with Lady Boughton, Mrs Donellan, and yourself, for his loss. I send a servant with this, to know how Lady Boughton and Mrs Donellan do after so sudden and great a shock. Please make our respects to them; at a proper time I shall make my respects to them and you in person.