The Fatal Cup

John Price Williams

Description

Thomas Griffiths Wainewright, a talented writer, mixed with the leading figures of the literary scene in Georgian London; as an artist he exhibited at the Royal Academy, but he was also a profligate dandy and swindler. For 150 years he has also been damned as a murderer who poisoned three of his relations to pay his debts. New research has uncovered quite a different story about his extraordinary life.

Sujets

• Biography
• Autobiography

Informations

• Publié par: Markosia Enterprises Ltd
• Date de parution: 26 mars 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911243717
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

THE FATAL CUP
THOMAS GRIFFITHS WAINEWRIGHT AND THE STRANGE DEATHS OF HIS RELATIONS
John Price Williams




The Fatal Cup © 2018 John Price Williams & Markosia Enterprises, Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction of any part of this work by any means without the written permission of the publisher is expressly forbidden. Published by Markosia Enterprises, PO BOX 3477, Barnet, Hertfordshire, EN5 9HN. FIRST PRINTING, March 2018.
Harry Markos, Director.
Paperback: ISBN 978-1-911243-70-0
Hardback: ISBN 978-1-911243-69-4
eBook: ISBN 978-1-911243-71-7
Book design by: Ian Sharman
FRONT COVER PICTURE:
Wainewright’s ironic self-portrait, drawn in crayon on the back of a medical form while he was working at the hospital in Hobart. It is the only likeness of him known to exist. This and other Wainewright portraits in the book appear by kind permission of the Nuttall family.
www.markosia.com
First Edition



PROLOGUE
Van Diemen’s Land, November 1837
Slowly and carefully the weathered barque Susan nudged her way up the dangerous strait between the South East Cape and Tasman Head.
Even more cautiously she passed the underwater rock that had ripped the bottom out of another ship George III two years before, leading to the loss of 120 lives.
Up she came though the d’Entrecasteaux Channel, up the Derwent River until the pilot brought her finally into Sullivan’s Cove.
As the anchor of the Susan rattled down, a red flag was hoisted on the shore. It meant “Convicts from England”.
It had been a relatively quick passage for a convict ship – 109 days after clearing the Isle of Wight to sail to the other end of the world, to Hobartown, Van Diemen’s Land, later to be renamed Tasmania.
The first part had been easy, with light winds and agreeable time spent on the open deck, but after rounding the Cape into the Roaring Forties, there had been a month of westerly gales and raging seas, according to the account of one who sailed in her.
Hatches had been battened down for weeks on end, and the noisome prison deck below was frequently flooded, and the water swilled to and fro as the Susan pitched and rolled violently night and day.
Cooped up in this sodden, filthy world were nearly


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300 men, another cargo of criminality exported from England to be dumped out of sight and mind in “this dust-hole of Empire”, as Colonial Secretary, Lord Stanley called it. An island penal colony the British did not even want, but had occupied only to prevent the French acquiring it.
Among those below, crippled by the fever of rheumatism, lay Convict 2325 Thomas Griffiths Wainewright. Age: 43. Occupation: there were many; dandy, painter, essayist. Swindler. Murderer?
How had it come to this? The perfumed and jewelled exquisite who affected a quizzing glass and lemon yellow gloves in the literary and artistic salons of fashionable London reduced to wretchedness and a sentence of Transportation to Parts beyond the Seas.
The essayists Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt and the poet John Clare had been his friends and he had contributed to London’s leading literary magazine. The lions of literary and artistic London came to dine with the elegant Wainewright at his lavish London apartment and the fine country house at Turnham Green in Chiswick.
Had he not been praised as an artist by William Blake, exhibited at the Royal Academy in London, had claimed the academy’s President, the famous portraitist Sir Thomas Lawrence, as a childhood friend, and the academy’s Keeper, Henry Fuseli, the Gothic fantasist as “the god of his worship”?
Had he not followed Fuseli’s lead-lined coffin to St Paul’s in the funeral procession? Did the crowds not marvel as they saw the dandy as he rode in an open coach behind a hearse which was drawn by six black horses, accompanied by pages bearing


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funeral feathers, four porters on foot in black silk dresses and eight pages bearing truncheons?
There were other coffins he was to follow after Fuseli’s – in humbler and much stranger circumstances; those of his uncle, George Griffiths, his mother-in-law and finally his sister-in-law, Helen Phoebe Frances Abercromby.
The three had died in agony. The deaths of all of them had benefited him. He and his wife Eliza had tried, and failed, to defraud eight London insurance companies to pay off enormous debts.
But what had finally brought him to judgement was an audacious swindle on the Bank of England, for which he had narrowly escaped the hangman and was now leading to a lifetime of exile in this land he was later to call a “moral sepulchre”.
His story is one of reckless spending, of talent squandered, of privilege abused and of greed unsated.
But was he the killer that everyone has made him out to be?


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CHAPTER 1
THE MAKING OF THE DANDY
Thomas Griffiths Wainewright has been damned as a murderer from that day to this. After his transportation those who had been his friends and acquaintances were quick to pass judgement. They queued up to castigate him. John Forster, the critic and biographer of Dickens called him an “unscrupulous and unsparing murderer”.
His sister-in-law, Helen, had died of poisoning after she had swallowed from what the Attorney- general was to call a “fatal cup” and Wainewright was accused of saying that he had killed her “because her ankles were too thick”. He was said to wear among his many rings one with a secret compartment that contained the deadly poison strychnine. Victorian authors fell on the case with relish to produce spine-chillers.
Oscar Wilde was fascinated by him, describing him as “not merely a poet and a painter, an art critic, an antiquarian, and a writer of prose, an amateur of beautiful things and a dilettante of things delightful, but also a forger... and a subtle and secret poisoner almost without rival in this or any other age”. 1
As recently as the year 2000, the UK poet laureate, Andrew Motion produced what he called


1. Wilde. O. Pen Pencil and Poison. Fortnightly Review. 1889



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a “confection”, a fictional confession, purported to have been written by Wainewright in his dying days in Van Diemen’s Land. It was accompanied by copious notes and called Wainewright the Poisoner . 2
But there is no proof that Wainewright administered poison to anyone. There were suspicious deaths among those close to him and one of them at least was murder in which he was probably complicit. So who was responsible?
New research into documents not seen for nearly two centuries has cast a different light upon his extraordinary life and on the deaths of his relations. And for the first time it can be disclosed what happened to the real killer.
It is time to look at the evidence again.
Thomas Griffiths Wainewright was born into privilege in Linden House, a mansion bought by books, which lay off the Great West Road in the pleasant little village of Turnham Green, five miles south west of the centre of London, notable for one of the largest battles in the English Civil War in November 1642 when the Parliamentarians blocked King Charles’ advance on London. Linden House


2. Motion , A. Wainewright the Poisoner , Faber, 2000. After its publication a retired antiquarian bookseller, Marc Vaulbert de Chantilly, pointed out to Motion that it contained 250 factual errors. de Chantilly then produced a booklet castigating Motion’s methods and detailing every error . Wainewright the Poisoner: an example of Andrew Motion’s “high scholarship” . The Vanity Press of Bethnal Green, 2000. In the Guardian of 26 Feb. 2000, Motion congratulated de Chantilly on “like all biographers and scholars, adding to an existing store of knowledge.”



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stood in more than three acres of well-timbered ground, and was noted for its limes and for the lindens from which it took its name. 3
The balustraded wall around the nine-bedroomed house cut off the noise of hooves and jingling reins from the busy High Road in the parish of Chiswick and its occupants strolled over trim lawns and neat gravel paths
It had a 300-foot frontage, a huge library, greenhouses, coach houses, stabling for seven horses, a kitchen garden and a very large lawn and



3. Linden House was demolished in 1879. A street of houses called Linden Gardens now stands on the site.


The imposing front of Linden House, Wainewright’s childhood home in Turnham Green, London, to which he was to return after his grandfather’s death and in which his uncle George and his mother- in-law were to die suddenly.
Chiswick Public Libraries




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paddock, according to an auctioneer’s catalogue in 1832. It was a ‘capital house’, commented one observer admiringly.
To the imposing portico and the great door set in the encompassing walls came the cream of London’s literary society, for this was the home of Dr. Ralph Griffiths, bookseller,