“I believe absolutely that he is totally deranged”

One goal of the attorneys defending John Frith against the charge of treason, as yesterday’s recap showed, was to let him express his own delusional ideas in the courtroom. To give him enough rope to not hang himself, as it were.

The other was to expose members of the jury to respectable people saying they believed Frith was insane. To that end they called:

• Rev. John Villette, ordinary of Newgate Prison: “The first time I saw him I really thought from the appearance he had, that he was deranged in his mind.”
• Sheriff William Newman: “I believe absolutely that he is totally deranged, and not in the use of his senses for ten minutes together; every day I saw him he was so, and of that there is not a doubt.”
• Mr. Fuller, who spent Christmas Eve two years before listening to Frith: “I thought that the speech of a madman.”

The defense counsel also asked Frith about his thoughts on the auctioneer David Burnsall, apparently a family friend who had helped the defendant obtain his army commissions. Frith replied:

he took an extraordinary liberty in putting into the Public Advertiser, the third of February, a letter, dated the first, declaring me insane, a most extraordinary liberty; I thought it prudent to keep a copy: I have made memorandums, but they have been taken from me by Colonel [Jeffery] Amherst, the same as Mr. [John] Wilkes’s papers were seized, a kind of alteration of the laws of the land, a kind of scheme to make a man appear insane, to totally disguise, to undo the liberty of the British subject; in fact it is such a concealed evil that I do not know where it will end.

[Counsel:] Had Mr. Burnsell any ill will to you?

None at all; he was only employed to hide the mutiny that those applauses of the clergymen had occasioned; he went to a person that lives with Mrs. Dowdswell, in Upper Brook-street; he had a letter, and was perhaps see’d; the clergyman declared me as a God, the body of the people as a man insane; myself applying to the King merely to get my birth [berth] again; when I went to my friend Mr. Burnsell, I spoke of no powers of God or Christ.

That exchange had the effect of putting Burnsall’s opinion on the record along with those of the witnesses in court.

With all that evidence, the jury’s decision is no surprise, though Frith continued to try to waylay the process:

Court. Gentlemen of the Jury,…the question the Court proposes to you now, is, Whether he is at this time in a sane or an insane state of mind?

Prisoner. Permit me to speak, the physician is the most principal person, who has visited me as a friend, he can tell more than from any other private person’s declarations what ever; I appeal as a British subject.

Jury. My Lord, we are all of opinion that the prisoner is quite insane.

Court. He must be remanded for the present.

Prisoner. Then I must call on that physician, who said, on the 19th, I was perfectly in my senses.

The prisoner was then removed from the bar.

John Frith’s trial at Newgate had involved Britain’s lord chief justice, two other judges, the attorney general, the solicitor general, and half a dozen more London lawyers. In contrast, after Rebecca O’Hara and Margaret Nicholson lunged at King George III in 1778 and 1786, respectively, the authorities quickly deemed them insane without trials and clapped them inside Bethlem Hospital (shown above).

I think the major difference is that John Frith, for all of his obviously delusional talk, was a gentleman—raised in wealth, well connected, a former army officer. O’Hara and Nicholson were not only women but working-class. The legal system put a lot of resources into respecting Frith’s rights as an Englishman.

According to Joanne Major and Sarah Murden’s All Things Georgian, Frith continued to benefit from his genteel status. The judges sent him from Newgate to Bethlem, but on 17 December “he was released to his friends and disappeared from view except for his inclusion in the army lists as a half-pay officer up and including the 1806 list after which, presumably, his death occurred.”

COMING UP: The political side.