Mr. Carttar’s Inquest: A Study of the Inquest Into the Death of Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, 1822

By James Paterson

Among the most well-known ‘facts’ in British history is that Lord Castlereagh, the foreign secretary, committed suicide on August 12, 1822, by severing his carotid artery with a pen knife at his country residence, North Cray Cottage, near London.

The following day, an inquest was held into Castlereagh’s death. Presided over by Mr. Joseph Carttar, Coroner for the Western Division of the County of Kent, the inquest deposed only two witnesses and sent the rest away unexamined. The court’s chief finding was that Castlereagh must have killed himself because no one else could have.

This book, the first that has ever been written about Mr. Carttar’s inquest, challenges the idea that Castlereagh committed suicide, showing that from start to finish the inquest was an exercise in manipulation and deceit. Its purpose was to obfuscate the true circumstances of Castlereagh’s death.

The author, James Paterson, Ph.D., lives in Sydney, Australia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Apr 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9780244180454

Book preview

Mr. Carttar’s Inquest: A Study of the Inquest Into the Death of Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, 1822

Mr. Carttar’s Inquest: A Study of the Inquest into the Death of Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, 1822

by James Paterson, Ph. D.

First published in 2019 by the author.

Copyright James Paterson, 2019.

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-244-18045-4

This book contains a modified version of Volume 1 of my three-volume work in progress, ‘Foxed’: The Assassination of Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh. If you would like to be notified when Volume 2, The Conspiracy, goes on sale, please contact me on the following email address: [e-mail]

This book is respectfully dedicated to Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, on the 150th anniversary of his birth.

All dates are 1822 unless otherwise indicated.

Below: This is an engraving that encapsulates, with very serious inaccuracies, the version of Lord Castlereagh’s death laid down at the inquest held August 13, 1822. The major problem with it is that this is not the position in which Dr. Bankhead says he found Castlereagh. From left to right, it shows Mrs. Anne Bailey Robinson (not Lady Castlereagh, as was stated in a recent book), Dr. Charles Bankhead, and Castlereagh. It was published in T. P. Fitzgerald, The Political and Private Life of the Marquess of Londonderry, Dublin, A. O’Neil, 1822.

Table of contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Timeline

Chapter 1: Preliminary observations

Chapter 2: The inquest begins

Chapter 3: Mrs. Anne Robinson’s deposition

A note on Mrs. Robinson

Chapter 4: Dr. Bankhead’s deposition

Chapter 5: The Robinson scenario

Chapter 6: Summary

Chapter 7: Message in a bottle?

Documents

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Deputy Keeper of Records, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, for permission to publish passages from MSS. D4137/B/3 (letter from Sir John Stewart to Alick R. Stewart, August 13, 1822) and the Norfolk Records Office for permission to publish passages from MSS. MC 3/293 (letter from Dr. Charles Bankhead to Emilia Anne, Marchioness of Londonderry, December 4, 1823).

I would also like to thank the following institutions for providing images of a great many relevant documents: William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Austin, Texas, the University of Southampton, Wellington Papers Database, and the Swedish National Archives. Special thanks are due to Richard B. Watson of the Harry Ransom Center, who made available to me scans of numerous letters that Castlereagh’s friends and relatives wrote in August/September 1822, letters that were used by M. Montgomery Hyde in the preparation of his book, The Strange Death of Lord Castlereagh (1959).

Thanks are due to Caroline Rance, who was kind enough to answer questions about medicines and poisons, Dr. Katherine D. Watson, Reader in History, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, who provided detailed answers to a perhaps excessive number of queries about 19th-century English coronial procedure, and Robin Walsh, Curator of the Macquarie Room at Macquarie University Library, who answered questions about Lachlan Macquarie. Finally, thanks are due to Christine Reynolds, Assistant Keeper of Muniments, The Library, Westminster Abbey, who answered questions regarding the location of Lady Castlereagh’s grave in the Abbey. I was pleased to learn that, as a result of our correspondence, information about Lady Castlereagh’s burial place was added to the Abbey’s website.

Introduction

History tells us that Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, one of the most important statesmen in British history, committed suicide on the morning of August 12, 1822, at his country estate (Cray Farm) at North Cray, Kent, some twelve miles southeast of London, England. Nearly everything we think we know about this event derives from evidence given at the coronial inquest that began there at about three on the afternoon of the 13th. The location was the ‘long dining-room,’ a large room located just downstairs from that in which the body lay. Presided over by Mr. Joseph Carttar of Deptford (1771-1832), Coroner for the Western Division of the County of Kent, the inquest’s key finding was that Castlereagh must have killed himself because no one else could have. 

Strangely, no official account of the inquest exists nor appears ever to have existed. For our knowledge of the proceedings, we are almost entirely dependent on the accounts published in contemporary London newspapers the following day. The account published in the evening paper, The Courier, enjoyed, on account of its semi-official standing, the widest circulation of these and so was republished or summarised in a great many provincial and foreign newspapers. A distinctly different account - indeed, the only distinctly different one - appeared in The Morning Post; not only is the wording different throughout, it preserves precious nuggets of information missing from all other versions.

In preparing this work, I have perused as many inquest reports as I have been able to get my hands on; this has been necessary because nearly every such report contains at least one potentially significant detail or variation in wording. Aside from the newspaper accounts, there is practically nothing of any value. I have been unable to find a single reference to the event in any contemporary private letters or journals, with the exception of two short, uninformative references that appear in letters written by people who were staying at Cray Farm at the time.

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Although usually thought of as Britain’s foreign secretary, Castlereagh, who was born in Dublin in 1769, was a good deal more than that. As the leader of the government in the House of Commons, he was regarded by many as the de facto prime minister of Great Britain and, by mid-1821, the man most likely to succeed the notoriously indolent incumbent, Robert Jenkins (1770-1827), Lord Liverpool, as the actual prime minister. By the end of that year, Castlereagh - who had in March inherited his father’s title of Marquis of Londonderry - had reached the zenith of his public career. Although, at the inquest, he was referred to as Lord Londonderry (or the Marquis), we will refer to him throughout as simply Castlereagh.

Castlereagh had been married for twenty-eight years to Emily Anne nee Hobart, who, after March 1821, was known as Lady Londonderry. She was referred to as such at the inquest (or as the Marchioness), but is generally referred to in this book simply as Lady Cas. Castlereagh’s marriage was known to be an extremely happy one, although, during the course of 1822, the bitter enmity to Lady Cas. of the king’s mistress, Elizabeth, Lady Conyngham (1769-1861), who was affiliated with the opposition (Whig party), made Castlereagh’s relations with the king increasingly awkward. This led to much bickering between the previously well-contented pair.

Lady Cas. was one of the leading socialites of the age and was, along with Lady Conyngham, one of the five chief patronesses of the most exclusive social club in London, Almack’s. (The other three were Lady Cowper, Lady Jersey, and Countess Lieven, the wife of the Russian ambassador.) She was also famous for the large menagerie she kept at Cray, which included a kangaroo, a tiger given to her by the Duke of Wellington, and a number of ostriches which supplied the feathers which she wore in her grand headdress at the coronation of George IV in 1821. Lady Cas. never spoke on record about her husband’s death and died, apparently of deep vein thrombosis, in February of 1829. Like her husband, Lady Cas. was buried at Westminster Abbey; her grave lies about a hundred feet away from his.

The pair had no children, but Castlereagh maintained a paternal relationship with Richard Meade (1795-1879), 3rd Earl of Clanwilliam. Clanwilliam moved to England from Vienna after his father died there in 1805. He was educated under Rev. Daniel Sandford, Bishop of Edinburgh from 1806 to 1830, and at Eton. After he left Eton, Castlereagh took him on as a kind of protege, so that, in 1815, the 19-year-old (then known as Lord Gillford) accompanied him to Paris as his private secretary during the diplomatic negotiations that concluded the Napoleonic wars.

Clanwilliam seems to have worked closely with Castlereagh at the Foreign Office in the years between 1815 and 1822 and was his private secretary on two further occasions. He lived much of the time at Cray, although, at the time of the catastrophe, he was at his London town house recovering from what I suspect was a case of food poisoning.

In an 1823 letter, Castlereagh’s successor, George Canning, referred to Clanwilliam as Castlereagh’s ‘adopted child.’ Although there is no evidence that Castlereagh had adopted Clanwilliam in a legal sense, it is clear that he did so in a sentimental sense: Clanwilliam was the son he never had or something very close to it. Like Lady Cas., Clanwilliam appears never to have spoken about the catastrophe on the record.

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This book represents the first study of the coronial inquest into Castlereagh’s death that has ever been written. The aim of a coronial inquest is to publicly clarify the cause of and circumstances surrounding a death that took place in unusual or unnatural circumstances. This book shows that Mr. Carttar’s inquest was a sham, a travesty of the very idea of an inquest. It was conducted with the aim of obfuscating the true cause and circumstances of Castlereagh’s death. In order to do this, Mr. Carttar turned a man who can legitimately be suspected of having been sent to Cray Farm to harm Castlereagh - Dr. Charles Bankhead, one of the king’s physicians-extraordinary - into the chief witness for Castlereagh’s alleged suicide. Indeed, the traditional narrative of Castlereagh’s suicide stands or falls on the value of Dr. Bankhead’s evidence. We will show in this book that it falls.

In Chapter 1, we show that nothing is known about the inquest apart from what was reported by the contemporary newspaper press. If there are no references to the event in private letters or journals, it is probably because no one who was not at Cray Farm at two o’clock on the 13th – when Mr. Carttar suddenly appeared with the news that an inquest was to be held - could have known about it in time to attend it. The only members of the public who attended it were a group of people unhelpfully identified in the newspaper reports as ‘strangers.’

In Chapter 2, we present an overview of the inquest, with the emphasis falling on the unorthodox manner in which Mr. Carttar conducted it. Perhaps our most disconcerting finding is that only two persons were deposed, while a good many who were waiting to be called on were sent away unexamined. Instead of asking live witnesses to give evidence, Mr. Carttar read aloud to the court a letter he insisted was in the handwriting of the Duke of Wellington, but which was almost certainly not genuine. Even this letter was not entered as evidence, for the thirteen jurors had already signed their names to the verdict before it was read.

In Chapter 3, we review the deposition of Lady Cas.’s maidservant, Mrs. Anne Bailey Robinson. Mrs. Robinson’s evidence is far more valuable than that of the other witness, Dr. Charles Bankhead, for the reason that her acount of the events that transpired in the period of about half an hour before Castlereagh’s death is the only one we have. Although Mrs. Robinson said a great many things of potentially great significance, Mr. Carttar passed over them in silence. Not the least problematic aspect of her evidence that Mr. Carttar chose to ignore was the fact that she identified as the knife that Castlereagh had allegedly used to kill himself a knife that had ‘no appearance of blood’ on it.

In Chapter 4, we examine Dr. Bankhead’s deposition, comparing it with Mrs. Robinson’s in some detail. We find that there are many contradictions between his assertions and hers and only a couple of minor points of agreement. Mr. Carttar ignored the contradictions. An example is the knife; although Mr. Carttar (wisely!) did not ask him to identify it, Dr. Bankhead told the court that it had been covered in blood. Mr. Carttar made no reponse to this statement, even though a great many people present in the room must have recalled the fact that the knife shown to Mrs. Robinson shortly before had been completely spotless. 

Also in Chapter 4, we address the ‘elephant in the courtroom’ – the possibility that Dr. Bankhead himself killed Castlereagh. A number of Mrs. Robinson’s statements were worded in such a strangely precise manner that it almost seems as if she intended to incite this very suspicion. Although we feel that we can prove that Dr. Bankhead was sent to Cray to do his patient harm, it is not clear that he resorted to violence on Monday morning in order to do so – not least because Mr. Carttar took Dr. Bankhead’s self-serving statements at face value.

In Chapter 5, we return to Mrs. Robinson’s deposition in an attempt to construct on the basis of her evidence a plausible scenario for the events that led to Castlereagh’s death. Although there are reasons to be sceptical about the value of much of her testimony, it will be shown that Mrs. Robinson offered a more or less coherent picture of what happened that morning. The theory that I have developed on the basis of a careful study of her evidence points towards the view that Castlereagh was attacked by two assailants, one of whom probably made use of a stiletto, the favourite instrument of European assassins for several hundred years.

In Chapter 6, we present, by way of a summary of everything we have been able to learn about Mr. Carttar’s inquest, a list of 30 strange facts that would justify us dismissing the proceedings as a travesty. In the final chapter, Chapter 7, we seek to provide a solution to a number of problems raised by the inquest that cannot be resolved satisfactorily in terms of the narrative it put into place. We find reason to question whether Castlereagh even died at Cray.

Our suspicion that he was probably abducted at Cray and taken elsewhere to be killed seems buttressed by a quite remarkable piece of evidence that appears in a book published in 1901 by a man whose father was head of the Foreign Office archives at the time that Castlereagh was foreign secretary. The Castlereagh affair is riddled with inconsistencies: almost every piece of information relevant to the case – no matter how minor - seems to exist in two or more contradictory versions. But if we are correct in regarding this evidence as intentional – and not a mere printing error - we may be looking at the one fact about Castlereagh’s death that can be known with certainty.

Map of south-east London in 1821, showing North Cray in bottom right corner, taken from John Cary’s New Itinerary (9th edition, 1821). Other places shown on the map that are mentioned in this book are Foot’s Cray, Eltham, Woolwich, and Dartford.

Timeline

C. = Castlereagh [Lord Londonderry]

Lady Cas. = Lady Castlereagh [Lady Londonderry]

Lord Stewart [Castlereagh’s half-brother and heir]

Note: The following entries supply the basic ‘facts’ of the case. That said, some of the events listed here may not have happened and may simply have been made up afterwards. Most times given here are my estimates, as they are not known for more than a handful of these events. When times are given in the sources, they are stated here to be ‘exact times,’ although this was probably not often the case.

August 9, 1822 (Friday)

Morning: C. watched a game of cricket at Foot’s Cray, about a mile from North Cray. (Public Ledger, August 14, 1822, p. 1)

1 pm: C. arrived at Carlton Palace directly from Cray. (Lieven, Private Letters, p. 189) The time is known from a passage in Mrs. Arbuthnot’s Journal. (I, p. 179)

1 pm-3 pm: C.’s interview with King George IV, generally said to have lasted two hours. C. was taking leave of the king prior to his scheduled departure for Vienna on Thursday. This was the last opportunity for the pair to meet, as the king was sailing for Scotland the next day. According to Lady Conyngham, the king’s mistress, the meeting took place in the king’s study and the two men were alone. According to Henry Hobhouse, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, C. ‘expressly declared to the King a belief that his colleagues were engaged in a conspiracy against him.’ (Diary, p. 89) That this is what happened seems confirmed by Lady Cowper, who wrote to her brother, Frederick Lamb, that on August 15 Lady Conyngham had told her that C. had begun talking to the king about conspiracies and how he feared for his life. The king advised C. to feel his pulse and told him that he was mad and needed to see Dr. Bankhead.

3.15 pm: C. returned to his house in St. James’s Square. Around the same time, the king had a meeting with the Duke of Wellington.

3.30 pm (exact time): Time of a letter from the king to C. urging him to see Dr. Bankhead ‘before you return into the Country. Or if you cannot meet with him, pray send, I conjure of you, for my friend, Sir William Knighton.’

3.30-5 pm: C. had meetings with ‘three or four of the Foreign Ministers.’ (Letter from Sir John Stewart to A. R. Stewart, August 13, 1822, p. 3.) According to Countess Lieven, after seeing the king, C. saw her husband, Count Lieven, the Russian ambassador, and then M. de Werther, the Prussian minister. C. told them both that he had a headache (‘je sens mon cerveau ebranle’). (Lieven, Private Letters, p. 194) Next, he had an interview with Baron Gustav Stierneld, the Swedish ambassador, that lasted about an hour.

4-5 pm: C.’s meeting with Sweden’s Baron Stierneld. Stierneld later reported that in the days preceding his