ARTICLE: Scot Free?

The Outrageousness of Madeleine Smith

Remember the Burke and Hare article from a while ago? It turns out that the book where I found that trial transcript was part of an old series about notable trials in Britain, and so obviously I disappeared down a rabbit hole to see what else they put out. The answer is, a lot. This week, I pulled one off the pile with my eyes shut and this is the result…

ARTICLE: Burke vs. Hare

Tuesday 30th June, 1857, was a wet, miserable day in Glasgow. (Could be any day that ends in a y up there) Despite the weather, by 8:00am a crowd had built in Parliament Square, all of them desperate to get a spot in a courtroom to see the celebrity of the day. That celebrity was a 21-year-old local socialite accused of murder.

‘No criminal cause of modern times has more deeply absorbed the interest and attention of  a whole empire; and day by day, during its nine days' progress, the public excitement, throughout Scotland in particular, was intensified, and the fate of the engaging and accomplished girl of one-and-twenty, whose life hung in the balance, formed the central if not the exclusive topic of current popular speculation.’

Madeleine Hamilton Smith was the daughter of a local architect and gentleman, and she was born into a life of privilege. The family lived in town in the winter, and decamped to a second house in the Scottish countryside during the summer. She was considered pretty, and she was an accomplished musician who had had money lavished on her education. She even spent some of her youth at a boarding school in Essex, which sounds like a punishment, but by all accounts it was money well spent, and the trial record lists her as popular, ‘affectionate, vivacious, and intelligent.’

It all started to go wrong in 1855, when she met a man ten years her senior…