SOURCE: Jones, Leonidas M. “Reynolds and Rice in Defence of Patmore.” Keats-Shelley Memorial Bulletin 21 (1970): 12-20.

[In the following essay, Jones relates the details of a legal case that illuminates both Reynolds's career as an attorney and the intense rivalries among the periodicals for which Reynolds often wrote.]

Charles Brown wrote to Keats on 21 December 1820: ‘I know you don't like John Scott, but he is doing a thing that tickles me to the heart's core, and you will like to hear of it, if you have any revenge in your composition. By some means (crooked enough I dare say) he has got possession of one of Blackwood's gang, who has turned King's evidence, and month after month he belabours them with the most damning facts that can be conceived;—if they are indeed facts, I know not how the rogues can stand up against them’.¹

Brown's guesses were shrewd. Scott had in effect secured ‘possession of one of Blackwood's’ former regular contributors, Peter George Patmore, though there was nothing ‘crooked’ in engaging him. After a succession of protests in letters to Blackwood's against its scandalous abuse, Patmore had shifted his allegiance to the London Magazine and had grown so close to Scott that he planned to become assistant editor. Brown was also astute in anticipating that an editor of Blackwood's could not endure Scott's attacks. John Gibson Lockhart challenged Scott to a duel; Scott declined to fight when Lockhart refused to disavow his editorship of Blackwood's; Lockhart's second, Jonathan Henry Christie, insulted Scott in a letter; Scott challenged Christie; and Christie wounded Scott mortally.

In an earlier article I have described the indirect involvement of John Hamilton Reynolds in the quarrel.² As an old and trusted friend since 1815 when Reynolds served on the staff of Scott's Champion, Scott turned to him for assistance to set his affairs in order in case of his death. He requested Reynolds to deliver his final letters to his widow and brother-in-law; to write an account of the dispute to his ally against Blackwood's in Edinburgh, John R. McCulloch; and to provide temporary directions for the principal contributors to the London Magazine.

Another link between Reynolds and the fatal controversy, which has hitherto gone unrecognized because of the anonymity of Reynolds' early contributions to the London, is that Scott had thought at first that Reynolds should have written the chastising attacks on Blackwood's. At the beginning of the November article, Scott announced that he intended to give the matter much more serious treatment than jocular sparring between two magazines: ‘Our principal quarry is a higher one than the New Monthly, or the Old Monthly, or the European, or the Gentleman's—or Blackwood's, which is not the Gentleman's’.³ In a footnote Scott added, ‘This is borrowing an arrow from the quiver of another—a dead shot—who ought to have saved us this trouble, and then we shouldn't have pilfered from him. As it is, we hope he will excuse our making free with what he can so well spare’. The ‘dead shot’ Reynolds' article, from which Scott pilfered, was ‘The Jewels of the Book’, printed in the London two months earlier, where Reynolds protested banteringly against objections to his writing pugilistic articles for the London simply because Blackwood's had published pugilistic essays earlier. If absolute originality were required, Reynolds had concluded, ‘who would commence a magazine now (for in this particular, there are about fourteen …)—or who would ever have commenced one after the Gentleman's’.⁴ Probably Scott thought that Reynolds should have written the frontal assault because he was so certain of Reynolds' strong antipathy to Blackwood's, a certainty which he had expressed in ‘Lion's Head’ of August.⁵ And perhaps Reynolds had reported to Scott, as he had to Benjamin Bailey, that ‘poor Keats attributed his approaching end to the poisonous pen of Lockhart’.⁶

But once resolved to assume the task which Reynolds had not performed, Scott entered into the unpleasant duty so energetically that he sacrificed his life as a result. After Scott's death, the law firm of Reynolds and Rice participated in the ensuing litigation to an extent which is of considerable interest to students of the Keats circle since it is the only example we have of the successful exercise of their legal abilities in an important case. Scott's second, Peter George Patmore, engaged the law firm to defend him in the legal proceedings. Having been acquainted in all probability since 1816 when Reynolds wrote for Scott's Champion, Patmore and Reynolds undoubtedly encountered each other often during the year that both contributed actively to the London, and, as we have seen, both were close to Scott during the days immediately preceding the duel. There is no evidence that Patmore had met James Rice before, though it would not be unlikely since both were very sociable.

The first step by Reynolds and Rice was to spare Patmore from arrest by sending him to Calais, where he remained for several weeks under the name of P. G. Pitt. Reynolds, Rice, and a third young lawyer, who was a friend of Scott but not retained in the case (probably Thomas Noon Talfourd), attended the inquest held at Chalk Farm Tavern from 5.30 p.m. until 12.30 a.m. on 1 March before the coroner, Thomas Sterling of Middlesex, and his jury. When a member of the jury challenged their presence, Reynolds identified himself as a friend of Scott and a solicitor for a person involved, while Rice explained that he too was a legal representative.⁷ When a member of the jury suggested that the names of the suspected participants be mentioned to refresh the memory of a witness, they objected and succeeded in preventing it.

The first day began safely enough for Patmore, as well as for Christie and his second, James Traill. The carpenter Thomas Smith and the hostler James Ryan, who had helped to carry Scott to the Chalk Farm Tavern where they had been employed, testified very minutely as to details, but they pretended to a laughable ignorance of names. They identified men only by apparel—the man in the white coat, the man in the blue coat, the man in the red coat, but no, I believe it was plaid—in such a confusing way as to endanger no one. But later the landlord, Hugh Watson, while posing no threat to Christie or Traill, implicated Patmore by name repeatedly. He recognized Patmore in the tavern after the duel because he had known him before; indeed he had known Patmore's father for twenty years. He reported that a pistol brought in after the duel was Patmore's and that Peter Patmore, Sr. had offered a reward for the recovery of the pistols. All this was dangerous enough, but the real bombshell came when Dr. Darling read the following memorandum, reporting Scott's account to him on the day after the duel:

‘This ought not to have taken place: I suspect some great mismanagement: there was no occasion for a second fire’. After a short pause, he proceeded—‘All I required from Mr. Christie was, a declaration that he meant no reflection on my character: this he refused, and the meeting became inevitable. On the field Mr. Christie behaved well, and when all was ready for the first fire he called out—“Mr. Scott, you must not stand there; I see your head above the horizon; you give me an advantage”: I believe he could have hit me then if he liked. After the pistols were re-loaded and every thing ready for a second fire, Mr. Trail called out—“Now, Mr. Christie, take your aim, and do not throw away your advantage as you did last time”. I called out immediately, “What! did not Mr. Christie fire at me”? I was answered by Mr. Patmore, “You must not speak: 'tis now of no use to talk; you have now nothing for it but firing”. The signal was immediately given; we fired; and I fell’.⁸

Not having understood a word of Traill's statement except Christie's name, Patmore had guessed mistakenly that Traill was blaming Scott for firing too soon, and that Scott was on the verge of a bitter argument: ‘What! did not Mr. Christie fire at me’ [at the same time I fired at him]. The duel had been fought in foggy moonlight, Christie had levelled his pistol in the general direction of Scott, and Patmore had had no way of knowing that Christie had missed intentionally. Patmore had therefore stopped what he misunderstood as heated argument to avoid making pacification more difficult in case one of the duellists should be slightly wounded in a later fire. But on the first day of the coroner's inquest, Dr. Darling's memorandum thrust the whole weight of the blame for the second, fatal fire upon Patmore, and public sentiment against him raged unabated for several weeks.

The second day of the inquest, which began at 5.30 p.m. on 2 March, went somewhat better for Patmore. To be sure, the surgeon Thomas J. Pettigrew revealed that Patmore had engaged him, and he placed Patmore on the field during the duel, but he also presented Patmore's case in the misunderstanding about the first fire. He described the altercation between the seconds after Scott was wounded when Patmore had insisted angrily to Traill that he knew nothing of Christie's firing wide on the first exchange. And he testified that Patmore had visited him several days after the duel to reaffirm his complete ignorance after the first fire that Christie had missed intentionally. Nevertheless at 12.30 a.m. the jury delivered its verdict: ‘Wilful murder against Christie, Patmore, and Trail[l]’.⁹

Seeking to temper the effect of Dr. Darling's testimony on public sentiment, Rice inserted an advertisement in the Morning Chronicle, urging that people not be misled by partial evidence but that they wait for further developments to clear Patmore.¹⁰ Reynolds pressed his desire to protect Patmore by quieting public feeling rather too far when he attempted to postpone a notice in the London Magazine soliciting funds for Scott's family with the argument that it would be inflammatory, but fortunately for Caroline and the Scott children Robert Baldwin printed the notice despite Reynolds' objection.

Reynolds and Rice worried about the influence of public opinion on the jury, but they were even more concerned about the legal status of Darling's memorandum. It had been admitted at the inquest because of the rather flexible rules for evidence at the preliminary hearing, but it might be possible to bar it from the trial. The law held that the statement of a dying man was admissible only if he knew at the time he made it that death was imminent, the reason being that the knowledge of approaching death substituted for an oath to insure veracity. Reynolds succeeded admirably in developing this aspect of the case. He secured Caroline Scott's report that her husband had thought he would recover at the time he spoke to Dr. Darling. He won the same admission from Dr. Darling after telling him straightforwardly that Patmore's life was at stake. And he received corroboration from Dr. Guthrie, who had been most optimistic in the first few days after the wound.

Caroline Scott presented a serious problem. At first she refused to see Rice, who was a stranger to her, but Reynolds managed to see her readily since she had known him a long time as a friend of her husband. Reynolds also made tactful and effective use of their mutual friend, Mrs. Basil Montague, to persuade her to co-operate fully. The problem was not that she was reluctant to shield Patmore; her friendship remained very warm, and she wished him to emerge from the affair with his reputation unblemished. She discounted Dr. Darling's testimony strongly; Scott could not have said it, or, if he had, he was delirious. She blamed Traill bitterly for not stopping the duel after the first fire, and she resented the great reputation which Christie had won. She was more than willing to testify in order to clear Patmore and blast Traill, but the problem for Patmore's attorneys was whether to have her testify.

At a conference of legal authorities retained for counsel on 21 March, John Adolphus and a Mr. Curwood advised Reynolds and Rice not to call Caroline Scott as a witness because of the emotional effect her appearance might have on the jury. The appearance of the widow on the stand might press the jury to convict all the defendants as an example against the evil of duelling. We can infer the strategy adopted by Reynolds and Rice from Reynolds' and Caroline Scott's letters to Patmore and from the newspaper accounts of the trials. They would concentrate on barring Dr. Darling's evidence from the trial; in this they could hope for co-operation from Christie's and Traill's attorneys. Although the Darling memorandum represented Christie and Traill favourably, it also placed them on the field and described their participation in a duel. Admitting it virtually guaranteed as a minimum a verdict of manslaughter for all three defendants. On the other hand, if there were no clear identification of Christie and Traill, they might be acquitted. Reynolds and Rice evidently decided to hold Caroline Scott in reserve: not to use her if Darling's evidence were barred, but to call her to counter the Darling evidence if it should be admitted.

Reynolds and Rice worked thoroughly for Patmore's welfare. Rice attended to most of the practical details: arranging to send him a passport, referring him to an influential French friend at Calais in case of need, visiting his parents and his uncle, and effecting the assignment of his £10,000 estate to prevent forfeiture in case of a conviction for manslaughter or worse. Reynolds tried unsuccessfully to negotiate an agreement with Mr. Minshull, magistrate at Bow Street, so that the police would not seek to arrest Patmore on his return if he agreed to surrender for trial. Reynolds succeeded, however, in negotiating with Mr. Brown, the keeper of Newgate prison who knew Rice well from earlier dealing, to insure that Patmore's confinement would be as agreeable as possible if it were necessary. The lawyers explained the danger frankly and left the final decision to Patmore on whether to risk return for trial.

Early in April Patmore returned secretly to London, communicating with Caroline Scott and conferring with his attorneys.¹¹ At this time he wrote a carefully argued apologia intended for publication.¹² At first Caroline Scott concurred with Patmore in thinking that he ought to make it public, but she soon bowed to other advisers who persuaded him to withhold it. As a whole, it was an enlightening document which would have cleared away some misunderstanding about Patmore's conduct. Why was it not published? Patmore clung doggedly to the conviction that until after the second fire Scott had not ‘the most distant suspicion’ that Christie had fired wide the first time. Publication would certainly have caused heated controversy with Dr. Darling and his friends and with Christie, Traill, and their friends. Bitter public argument would have weakened the chances of all three defendants in court.

As the trial approached on 13 April, Reynolds and Rice and their learned consultants, Adolphus and Curwood, faced a decision. They wanted to make whatever arrangements would guarantee Patmore the best chance of acquittal or light sentence, and they were not faced with hostility from any quarter. Scott's family had instigated the legal investigation leading to the trial,¹³ and Caroline Scott was extremely sympathetic toward Patmore. Reynolds had determined ‘that the feeling of the prosecutors is known to be … favourable’.¹⁴ In the light of subsequent events, it seems probable that Reynolds and Rice conferred with Christie's and Traill's attorneys to reach an agreement whereby Christie's and Traill's lawyers would not press for admission of the Darling memorandum in exchange for a guarantee that Reynolds and Rice would prevent Patmore from surrendering for the first trial. Christie's and Traill's attorneys could elicit from the surgeon Pettigrew all the evidence they needed: Christie's firing wide the first time, his remorse, his humane concern for the wounded Scott, and Scott's judgment that all had been fair and honorable. Pettigrew's testimony insured that Christie and Traill would receive no more than a verdict of manslaughter, and the exclusion of Darling's memorandum might make possible an acquittal, for Pettigrew could not after the foggy night view identify either Christie or Traill. But Pettigrew must identify his old acquaintance Patmore as a participant on the field, and a conviction of Patmore would pose some danger to Christie and Traill, since a jury might wish to avoid the appearance of partisanship. The sensible solution would be an agreement by all parties to drop Darling's evidence and to have Patmore refrain from surrendering, while Christie and Traill were tried.

The degree to which the first trial was arranged in advance must remain speculative, but Patmore's reason for not surrendering is fact. An advertisement in the Times informed the public that Patmore refrained from surrendering, on the advice of counsel, to avoid the risk of endangering Christie and Traill.¹⁵ Before the trial, Patmore moved from London to Witney, Oxfordshire, where he remained in hiding under the name of P. G. Preston.¹⁶

The first trial went off like clock-work on Friday, 13 April, at 10.00 a.m. before the Lord Chief Justice Abbott and Justice Park. The court was crowded with ‘persons of distinction’, as Mr. Walfourd presented the case for the prosecution and Mr. Gurney the case for the defence. It would be impossible to find a more sympathetic prosecutor than Mr. Walfourd, who glowed with emotion for Christie and Traill:

… it was difficult for him to find adequate language to convey any idea of the painful feelings with which he rose to state the evidence which he had to adduce in support of the indictment against the gentlemen at the bar. It was impossible for him, when he recollected the rank in society in which these gentlemen moved, and when he reflected upon the fatal consequences which might come to them upon this trial—it was, he repeated, impossible for him to behold their situation without emotion. The man who, standing there, could do so, must have firmer nerves than he possessed.¹⁷

This was the prosecutor. The mild case he presented was exactly what one would expect after that maudlin preamble. He drew from Pettigrew all the evidence favourable to Christie including Christie's statement that he had fired wide, except that Pettigrew unfortunately forgot to add what he had reported at the coroner's inquest—that Christie had been forced to shoot Scott in self-defence. But the alert defence attorney, Mr. Gurney, immediately prodded his memory, and that too went into the record. The prosecutor then called Pettigrew's assistant Morris, Hugh Watson, and James Ryan to establish the order of events on the fatal night. None of them could identify Christie or Traill as participants on the field. Lawyers and spectators alike were doubtless startled when Thomas Smith departed from the script to say, ‘The prisoner Traill was one of the gentlemen in the field’. But the real climax came when Dr. Darling testified. After he and Dr. Guthrie explained that Scott had not believed he was dying when he made the statement, the judges conferred for a few minutes at the bench and then pronounced the evidence inadmissible.

The defence offered only a long succession of character witnesses for the defendants, who were attired in deep mourning. Justice Abbott did Lord Chief everything he possibly could for the prisoners, at one time even indulging in a mental hand-spring with possibility: ‘It was possible, he said, that the real perpetrators of the crime might have escaped from the field before the arrival of Mr. Pettigrew, and that the prisoners at the bar might have appeared accidentally at the moment’. No one could have been much surprised when the jury returned the report, ‘Not Guilty’.

According to Caroline Scott, Reynolds was chiefly responsible for representing Patmore's interests in absentia during the first trial.¹⁸ She was present in court, but there was no occasion for her testimony since Dr. Darling's statement was barred and since Pettigrew had protected Patmore by mentioning the altercation between the seconds and by quoting Patmore's outburst, ‘Why was it not communicated to me—I knew nothing of it’.

Rice directed the defence when Patmore eventually surrendered for the second trial on 8 June before Justice Bayley. Since Pettigrew was an old acquaintance of Patmore's who had been sympathetic toward him throughout the affair, it seems certain that what happened was planned as a neat legal manœuvre. Both Pettigrew and Morris, who were the only witnesses able to identify Patmore as a participant on the field, refused to testify on the grounds that they might incriminate themselves.¹⁹ The other witnesses merely repeated their testimony from the first trial. ‘Without the slightest hesitation’, the jury reported the verdict, ‘Not Guilty’.²⁰

Caroline Scott was strongly dissatisfied with the conduct of the case by Reynolds and Rice and by her own attorney, Watkins. She had wanted them to clear Patmore's name without a shadow of a doubt and at the same time to preserve her husband's character as stainless. One can infer from her letters to Patmore that she had wished to testify herself. But surely Reynolds and Rice were wiser than she. The widow's testifying might well have influenced the jury emotionally and caused them to make an example of all three defendants. Lengthy and detailed justification of Patmore, moreover, might have required at least some disparagement of Scott, and such an attack on the dead would have also been a very dangerous risk with a jury. The acquittal for a man against whom the public had been incensed only a few weeks before was no small achievement.

Notes

1. Hyder E. Rollins, ed., The Letters of John Keats, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1958), II, 364-365.

2. ‘The Scott-Christie Duel’, Texas Studies in Language and Literature, XII (Spring, 1970).

3. London, II (November 1820), 509. The principal quarry of course was to be Sir Walter Scott's son-in-law Lockhart.

4. London, II (September 1820), 268.

5. II, 123.

6. Hyder E. Rollins, The Keats Circle, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1965), I, 232.

7. Morning Chronicle, 2 March 1821. The names of Reynolds and Rice are not given, but they fit the descriptions exactly. That the third man was Talfourd is supported by the fact that he was a barrister; Talfourd had been admitted to the bar on 10 February 1821, and Reynolds had attended his dinner to celebrate the occasion. All the subsequent information on the first day of the inquest is drawn from the Morning Chronicle, which reported the first day's proceedings more fully than The Times in a joint report of both days on 3 March.

8. Times, 3 March 1821. I quote from The Times rather than the Morning Chronicle because the latter garbled one line of the statement.

9. The Times, 3 March 1821, provides a fuller account of the second day of the inquest.

10. The facts in this paragraph and the following four paragraphs are drawn from Reynolds' letters to Patmore, Basil Champneys, The Memoirs and Correspondence of Coventry Patmore, 2 vols. (London, 1900), II, 420-425.

11. Ibid., II, 415. Caroline Scott wrote of his having been in London.

12. Ibid., II, 426-429.

13. So the prosecutor Walfourd said at the trial, The Times, 14 April 1821.

14. Champneys, II, 424.

15. The Times, 14 April 1821.

16. Derek Patmore, ‘A Literary Duel’, Princeton University Library Chronicle, XVI (Autumn 1954), 16.

17. The Times, 14 April 1821. Subsequent quotations from the first trial derive from the same source.

18. Champneys, II, 418. She writes of Reynolds being responsible ‘on the first occasion’ and of Rice's being responsible ‘in the last’.

19. That Pettigrew was in no real danger of prosecution was evident from the coroner's jury's refusal to indict him after he explained that he had merely done his duty by responding to a call for professional service.

20. Morning Chronicle, 9 June 1821.