“Pursued by Devils or Tories”

Early in The Lunatic and the Lords, Richard Schneider shocks his readers at least a little bit when he suggests that in bygone times when officialdom killed or tortured people for their words or actions, the intention was not punishment but cure. After referring to a 15th-century papal bull about witchcraft he writes this: “Regardless of how the symptomatology was interpreted, we must also realize that the so-called remedies of the day—even burning at the stake, drowning, and torture—were not seen as punishment but were performed to rid the host of the devil. In other words, for the most part these procedures were carried out by well-meaning ‘practitioners’.” Although some readers may find Schneider’s view of history too charitable, his main point is that the interplay between official justice and the mentally ill (many of those unfortunate subjects would now be diagnosed as mentally ill) has always been a challenge and not always well handled. What is interesting, he goes on to say, is the fact that “the phenomena captured by use of the term ‘mental disorder’ have not changed significantly over time—what has evolved is our interpretation of the phenomena and the resulting label.”

Schneider has a deep interest in both the history and the current practices of how persons with mental illness are treated by the law. He is a judge of the Ontario Court of Justice presiding at the Mental Health Court in Toronto. He is also a clinical psychologist, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto and a lecturer in the Faculty of Law there. In The Lunatic and the Lords, he examines the case of Daniel M’Naughten, a landmark on the long journey to develop the precedents and general rules of approach that still hold today. The judgement in that case provides for courts in Britain, Canada and the United States what have been known ever since as the M’Naughten Rules.

In a nutshell, these rules first presume the sanity of an accused until proven otherwise. From there, they provide guidelines for the proper questions to be submitted to the jury when a person is alleged to be afflicted with insane delusion, the care that must be taken to let a jury make up its own mind as to the prisoner’s state of mind at the time the crime was committed and how to accept the evidence of medical specialists who were not present when the crime was committed but who have examined the subject afterward.

The story is this: In the late afternoon of January 20, 1843, a 30-year-old Scot from Glasgow, a woodturner by trade named Daniel M’Naughten, waited in the shadows of a London road not far from 10 Downing Street and, when a man happened by, pulled a pistol from his coat and shot him. The victim turned out to be Edward Drummond, member of a highly placed banking family and secretary to the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel. Drummond appeared to be only wounded and was carted away for care while M’Naughten was immediately apprehended by a nearby policeman.

Two days later, Drummond died from his wound (one might properly ask whether it was the doctors as much as the shooter who killed him; an inflammation, probably an infection, developed around the wound and the medical response typical of the day was to bleed him profusely) and the charge of assault got upped to murder.

Schneider has done an extraordinary job of not just writing but assembling this book. Like a scrapbook maker, he has taken every bit of recorded and published data on the M’Naughten case—and a great deal there was—from the reportage of the Times and other newspapers and from the records of the court sessions—and sewn it together into a narrative. Warning: some of the reportage goes on and on and on; it is astonishing how differently stories are presented in our newspapers today from the way they were in the Times or the Glasgow Herald or the London Standard more than a century and a half ago. In tiny typeface, jammed together on the pages, they truly told you everything, every word that was said, every gesture made. But while the arcane style might drive some readers mad, the other side of this coin, as I have garnered from years of reading P.D. James mysteries for pleasure, is that the real meat of a mystery is not the mechanics of the solution of the crime by itself, but the rich presentation of the atmospherics of the time and the place. What do the insides of the rooms look like? Which pictures hang on the walls? What is the weather like? How do the characters dress? What do they eat? When the Times tells us—and Schneider relays it—that the prisoner locked in his cell expressed a wish to have some dinner “and he was accordingly supplied with a plate of beef, some bread, and potatoes, of which he made a hearty meal,” we are given some sense of what an 1843 London jail cell was truly like. A little later, “between five and six o’clock he expressed a wish to have his tea, and he was supplied with a pint of coffee and a penny loaf and some butter, the whole of which he ate.”

Because of the high profile of the victim and because of the tantalizing possibility that it was Prime Minister Peel himself who was M’Naughten’s true quarry (often suggested, never proven or admitted), the newspapers paid avid attention to the case. The newspapers were also the first, well ahead of any court presentations, to raise the possibility of the killer’s insanity. Reporters got themselves up to Glasgow, interviewed associates and family, learned that M’Naughten had for years complained—even to local lawmen—about being “pursued by devils or Tories” (inf­luenced perhaps by the anti–Corn Law activists of the day), and chronicled that the young man had gone to such lengths as to f­lee to France for a time in hope of escaping these tormentors. This was strung together first by the papers and then by the defendant’s counsel with medical testimony to paint a picture of a man truly tormented by delusions. The court in Old Bailey (also richly described as a place of “greasy squalor, crime of every description, in a cold, bleak-looking prison, with an awful little iron door, three feet or so from the ground”) took two days to acquit him because of insanity, or what they called monomania and partial delusion.

The outcome of the trial meant M’Naughten was sent not to the gallows but to an asylum where he died some 20 years later. Not everyone was sympathetic or even appeared to understand the statement the verdict had made. The reaction of the young Queen Victoria was: “How could he have been found not guilty? He did it, didn’t he?” This was followed by: “What did the jury mean by saying he was not guilty! I will never believe that anyone could be ‘not guilty’ who wanted to murder a Conservative Prime Minister!”

But the import of the case endures, cementing—certainly in law but no less in culture and what would become the media—the divide between those whose minds are in charge of their actions and those who do not have such control. Almost 170 years later, the important principles established continue to guide not only our courts but also the ways most lay people conceive of notions of criminal responsibility.