'Ten Handy Ways to Poison your Spouse - Part 3' by Karen Maitland

Poisoning of Queen Bona of Poland (1528-1572)

Artist: Jan Matejko (1838-1893)

The queen was murdered by her trusted officer

on the orders of King Philip II of Spain.

We are now in the Dog-days of summer, when the dog-star, Sirius, rises with the sun and was once thought to increase the sun’s heat “making dogs mad, women wanton and men commit foul crimes.” So, this seems a good month to add another Top Ten to my list of ‘Ways to Poison your Spouse.’ (8 June 2016). This month we look the bizarre means by which murderers in history have attempted to introduce the poison to their victims.

Poisoning your victim’s food or drink is most obvious method, but you have to have access to the food intended for the victim, which is not easy if you are attempting regicide. And what if the victim can’t be relied upon to eat that cake you sent them, without offering a first slice to someone else?

1) Poisoned Chalice – Rather than poison the food or drink, why not make the goblet or trencher itself poisonous, so that any innocuous food or liquid served in it becomes lethal. That was the goal of François Belot, a member of the French King’s bodyguard in the 17th century. He claimed to have devised a method that would make a silver vessel permanently lethal so that no matter how many times it was washed or how many victims drank from it, it would still kill. His method involved stuffing arsenic into a live toad, then crushing the toad in the vessel, while reciting spells. Unlikely as it seems, he was believed and acquired a great reputation for procuring the means of murder. Even the Commissioners of the Chambre Ardent or Chamber of Poisons, thought him guilty, and in 1679, sentenced him to be executed by being broken on the wheel. Though by then Belot was protesting he’d merely done it as a means of obtaining silver cups and trenchers.

2) Poisoned Flower – This was a medieval fiction, which in later centuries was not thought possible, except that there have been two cases which might make it seem more credible. In 1909 in Austria, suspicions were aroused when a ‘pious’ prisoner kept demanding flowers to put on an altar he’d made in his cell. It transpired that he had instructed his wife to obtain atropine or hyoscyamine, put it in a quill and insert the quill into the calyx of a carnation, binding it with thread as a florist would do. The poison did reach him by this method.

In the 1930’s, a London lavender seller was found to be hallucinating and taken to hospital where he died. His pocket contained a bottle of oil of mirbane (nitrobenzene) which he had sprinkled on the lavender he was selling to increase the perfume. It was thought that he’d inhaled the toxic vapours given off and poisoned himself.

Catherine of Medici (1519-1589)

Artist: Workshop of Frances Clouet (1510-1572)

Musee Carnavalet

3) Poisoned Dagger – Obviously the simplest method is simply to coat the blade in poison, thereby ensuring that even a flesh wound is fatal. But more subtle were the knives made in the late 16th and 17th century, designed to murder the user of the knife. The knives had a mechanism concealed inside the handle. When pressure was exerted on the cutting edge, three sharp spikes sprang out of the handle and pricked the hand or fingers of the person holding the knife. The moment the pressure was relaxed or the knife dropped, the spikes vanished. If the murderer was lucky, the spikes might even inject the poison straight into a vein.

4) Poisoned Bed – In 1908, Mary Kelliher went on trial in Boston, charged with the murder by poison of her husband, three children, sister and sister-in-law over a period of three years. After the death of her daughter, all the other family members were exhumed and found to have died of arsenic poisoning. No one knew how it had been administered until the bed was examined in which all the victims had at some time slept. The mattress was found stuffed with hair impregnated with arsenic which, the prosecution claimed, had been deliberately put there by Mary, so that her victims would absorb it while they slept. But the jury weren’t convinced and Mary was acquitted, though only after she been held for 15 long months.

Hercules poisoned by the Shirt of Nessus

Painting 1413-1415

5) Poisoned Marriage – According to an Indian legend, the Queen of Ganore murdered Rajah Bukht by impregnating his marriage robes with poison, which, when he sweated in the intense heat, caused severe and fatal burns. There are many legends of poisoned robe murders in India, which are probably more allegorical than literal, similar to the classical tale of Hercules and the shirt of Nessus. Nevertheless, forensic researchers in India have shown than impregnating cloth with cantharidin, which in India is extracted from the telini fly, can cause severe blistering, excruciating pain and necrosis resulting in death from shock.

6) Poisoned Glove Box – In 16th century France, the fear of poisoning had reached epidemic proportions. It was suspected in almost any death where the cause was not immediately obvious, and while most stories were unfounded, they do reveal that the rich and noble were almost afraid to touch anything in case it might prove fatal. For example, when Jeanne d’Albret, mother of Henry IV of France, died after a four-day illness, rumour spread that she had been murdered by Catherine de’ Medici who sent her a pair of gloves in a box with a false bottom containing belladonna, henbane, opium and a few other nasties, which not only poisoned the gloves, but released a fatal vapour while poor Jeanne slept. But an autopsy revealed Jeanne died of natural causes.

Jeanne d'Albret, Queen of Navarre (1528-1572)

Portail des collections des musees de France.

7) Poisoned Gold – Cardinal of Lorraine was another supposed poison victim of Catherine de’ Medici. He was rumoured to have sicken and died after handling gold coins on which nicotine had been smeared, though more likely he died of respiratory illness brought on by walking barefoot in a procession.

8) Poisoned Candle – Pope Clement VII is said to have been poisoned by an arsenic-impregnated torch or candle carried in front of him in the procession. This has long since been discredited, but in 1810, Michel Eugene Chevreul invented a process for making cheap composition candles. In 1835/36 these were very popular in England, until a Professor Everitt, working late one night, noticed a strong garlic odour from the candles, indicative of heated arsenic, which subsequent testing proved to one of the ingredients. Not healthy to breathe in, though amount it released probably wouldn’t kill you. But perhaps inspired by this, Edgar Allan Poe, in The Imp of the Perverse (1845) had the narrator murder his victim with the fumes from a poisoned candle.

9) Poisoned Shoe – Legend has it that John, King of Castile, died after wearing a pair of boots impregnated by poison by a Turk. This is undoubtedly pure fiction, but more recently a man did accidently poison himself with his footwear. In 1904, a young man became unconscious and died four hours after going to a dance. It was found he’d been poisoned but no knew how, until bottle of shoe blacking was discovered in his room. He had cleaned his shoes and as he danced, the blacking had soaked onto his socks and been absorbed into his skin via his feet and ankles. The blacking had contained nitrobenzene, which had passed rapidly through hot, sweaty skin.

The Wanstead or Welbeck Portrait of Elizabeth I

C.1580-1585

Artist: Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder 

10) Poisoned Saddle – Edward Squire, a scrivener from Greenwich, was persuaded by a Jesuit, Richard Walpole, to try to kill Queen Elizabeth I. Squire was instructed to take a bladder of poison concealed in his gloved hand, prick it and press it down on the pommel of the Queen’s saddle, where she would be sure to rest her hands and afterwards would transfer the poison to her mouth and nose by touching her face. He did as instructed, but the plot failed, because the queen didn’t arrive at the stables. Having inveigled his way aboard a ship with Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, Squire then smeared the rest of the poison on the wooden arms of the dinning chair used by the Earl in an attempt to murder him, only to find it had no effect. Nevertheless, he was denounced, and hanged, drawn and quartered for his attempts.

We're Going on a Witch Hunt by Catherine Hokin

Edgar Allan Poe Statue Boston

The schools having returned from their holidays, I've just been on mine - trust me the novelty of travelling during term-time will never wear off. We did an East Coast trip this year, visiting Boston and Washington, slightly on edge at the reports of Hurricane Florence although in the end we encountered only minor flooding. The architecture of the two cities shares commonalities - both retain pockets of beautiful nineteenth century clapboard houses and both have eighteenth century nods to ancient Rome and Greece although this is much more marked in Washington's neck-cracking take on empire. I've never felt more like an ant as I did on the Mall. 

Both cities are fabulous to visit, but the winner for me was Boston where the Gothic still lingers. One of Boston's most famous residents and one of my favourite authors, if not people, was Edgar Allen Poe who now has a statue at the Common. It's a wonderful thing - Poe's cloak flares all dramatic and a raven and a heart tumble from his briefcase. It is all, however, rather tongue-in-cheek. Poe is placed close by the Frog Pond which was at the base of most of the insults he threw at other writers and he is depicted as sour-faced and in the act of striding away from the city he was born in but hated. Poe described the people of Boston as having no soul (which surely should have attracted him), very dull and heartily ashamed of the fact that they were born in Boston in the first place. He was notorious for his loudly-expressed loathing of works by other Boston writers (including Emerson, Longfellow and Thoreau) and for comparing their ideas and writings to the croaking of the frogs which lived on the pond where he now resides, referring to the city's literary greats with parochial disdain as Frogpondians. It's rather a shame that the only frogs in the area now are sculptured ones: their chorus permanently tormenting the statue frozen in flight is a touch worthy of one of his own stories.

 Providence Athenaeum

Poe's home no longer exists and Boston is far more interested in commemorating renaissance man Paul Revere than its more ungrateful son. To get closer to Poe today you need to travel the short distance to Providence in Rhode Island. The side-streets positively teem with the kind of turreted and ivy-clad houses you expect to find a TB-ridden maiden fainting in. Which may explain why Poe went wandering there. Shortly after his first wife died, Poe started courting Sarah Helen Whitman of Providence who was a poet and spiritualist. He proposed and she accepted on the condition he would remain sober until the day of the wedding. He promised, couldn't do it and she broke the relationship off, although Poe blamed Whitman's mother for that, rather than his own behaviour. Despite Poe dying in Baltimore, he is now reported to haunt Providence, in the area round Benefit Street and the Atheneaum which he used to visit with Whitman. Apparently the ghost has a rather melancholy air and vanishes if you try to chat.

 The Witch House, Salem

Having done the ghosts and the Gothic and Boston being in the grip of a heatwave (and the kind of humidity which took my hair back to the 1980s), the logical next step was a visit to Salem for some witch-hunting. Salem is famous, or notorious, for the trials which took place in the town between 1692-93 in which over 200 people were accused of witchcraft and 20 executed. To put this in context, a witchcraft craze had rippled through Europe from the 1300s to the end of the 1600s with tens of thousands (the exact figure remains disputed) of supposed witches, mostly women, being executed. The outbreak in Salem came relatively late and, although there are many theories about the causes (including ergot poisoning through contaminated bread), it is likely that the trials had their roots in a more modern and cautionary tale: war, fear of others and the failure to integrate displaced people.

In 1689, England started a war with France in their rival American colonies. This ravaged regions of upstate New York, Nova Scotia and Quebec, sending refugees into the county of Essex and, specifically, Salem Village in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. These displaced people created a strain on Salem’s resources which aggravated the existing rivalry between families with ties to the wealth of the port of Salem and those who still depended on agriculture. To add to the problems, controversy also raged over Salem Village’s first ordained minister, the Reverend Samuel Parris, who was disliked because he was perceived as rigid and greedy. The very strictly devout Puritan villagers believed all the quarreling was the work of the Devil. Add into the mix some bored and hysterical girls (Parris's daughters and their friends), an old and vulnerable woman (Sarah Osborne) and a Caribbean slave (Tituba) who liked telling the girls voodoo stories to entertain them on wet days and you have a potent brew ripe for stirring.

 The execution of Bridget Bishop, Salem

In January 1692, the Parris girls and another local girl began to have “fits” - screaming, throwing things, uttering peculiar sounds and twisting themselves into strange positions, and a local doctor blamed the supernatural. On February 29th, under pressure from magistrates, the girls blamed three women for afflicting them: Tituba, Sarah Good, a homeless beggar, and Sarah Osborne. As Jess Blumberg put it in The Smithsonian magazine, With the seed of paranoia planted, a stream of accusations followed. Good and Osborne pleaded innocent but Tituba 'confessed'. She described elaborate images of black dogs, red cats, yellow birds and a “black man” who wanted her, and several other witches in the town who wanted to destroy the Puritans, to sign his book. All three women were put in jail and the damage was done, accusations snowballed. Despite the pleas for calm by people such as the minister Cotton Mather, by May 20 people were dead - 19 by hanging and one crushed by stones. It was a period of unstoppable madness and it was short-lived. The judges confessed their error, the trials were declared illegal and, less than 10 years later in 1711, the good names of all the victims was restored. 

 One of the many

Salem today is a masterpiece of marketing, full of witch-themed shops selling hokey souvenirs and more psychics than you can shake a stick at (available at the Harry Potter shop if needed). We went prepared for that and it was a lot of fun. What we hadn't expected was the relevance with which the main museum (the Salem Witch Museum) presents its trial exhibition. For all the use of the word 'witch', the emphasis was very much on paranoia and the damage it inflicts. You exit not through the gift-shop but past a giant witch-hunt wall which contexts the Salem experience in the simple, or not so simple, maths of human ignorance. Fear + instigator = persecution. The case was made with equal weight for the appalling treatment and consequent suffering of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbour, for the thousands accused of communism during the McCarthy era and for gay people during the early days of AIDS hysteria. There was a lot of space left on the wall. As I stood in Washington the following week and watched Trump's cavalcade leave the White House, biting my lip at every 'Make America Great' again t-shirt, I could have filled that space over and over. Some holiday souvenirs stay with you the longest.