TOM POOLEY'S TRIAL.

“O Christain judge Coldridge what ‘as T Pooley Done?   ’as He Called man And woman to Live in those filthy Dens, those Brothels?  No!  ’as He Called man And woman to Live in Hordom, vice, Gamon and Blasphemy?   No!  Have I Called man And woman to Live a Drunken And a Blackguard Life?   No!  Have I Called man And woman to Live that Disgraceful Life to Bring Children into the wourld And then Starve or murder them?   No!  Have I Called man or woman to Robb the Rich or the Rich to Robb the Poor?  No!  Have I called man to war or Strife wich is the Blackest Sin in the Sight of man And the Laws of the one Allmighty, for man can’t distroy or give Life?  No!   If T. Pooley had upholded those filthy Laws judge Coldridge and ‘is Son with the Christain Clergey And jurey of Cornwall would Have aquited Him But as I Doe not uphold those Laws I was found Guiltey with one year And nine months in the Christain’s Dungeon to Rome.”  T. Pooley,

Mr Justice Coleridge did not arrive at the Judges’ Lodging at Bodmin until ten in the evening on Tuesday 28th July 1857.    He had been delayed in the courts at Exeter and consequently missed the usual ceremonies of a County Assize.   Mr Justice Crompton, who was also to judge at the Assize. was there before him and had been met by the High Sheriff, the Under Sheriff, the County Clerk and numerous other dignitaries and had processed to the Assize Hall flanked by Bodmin pikemen.   Afterwards Judge Crompton had attended Divine Service at St. Petrock’s Church together with the Mayor and Council.  The text for the sermon was Jeremiah xxxii, 19: ‘For thine eyes are open upon all the ways of the sons of men, to give every one according to his ways and according to the fruits of his doing.’ 

The Crown Court was opened at eleven o’clock on the Wednesday, at which time Sir John Coleridge addressed his jury.  There were many present, some meriting having their names in the paper.   The Reverend James Glencross, who had signed the warrant for Pooley’s arrest, was one of these.   Of his persecutors, as Tom saw them, at least three were in the Courtroom that day:  Mr Grylls the attorney, the Reverend James Glencross and the Reverend Paul Bush, The jurors were necessarily there, all, as a matter of course, men.  A grand jury demanded grand men. These were worthies of Bodmin and the country around, all at least worthy enough to be subscribed as Esquires.   Sir John addressed them at length.   In the course of his address he said:  

“The next case on which I have to remark as worthy of observation is No. 11. - a charge against a man named Thomas Pooley.   It is a very unusual charge.  I do not know that in my experience of more than twenty years on the bench I have ever found a case of the kind on any calendar.  The charge is that the prisoner had composed, written and published libellous and blasphemous matter against the Holy Scriptures and the Christian religion.   I am sure I need not say to you, and especially to some of you whom I have the pleasure of seeing as hearers, that the writing and publishing libellous and blasphemous matter against the Holy Scriptures or the Christian religion, is by the common law of England a punishable misdemeanour. The charge against the prisoner is that he, who appears to be employed in carrying handbills and advertisements about the country, chooses, on a gate which belongs to the clergyman of the parish, the gate being painted black on which, white letters would be easily legible, to chalk up something that was blasphemous on the Scripture and the Christian religion.  If this comes before you without any further circumstances I think you will be bound to find a bill.”

From this it follows that Sir John was not unacquainted with some of the twelve jurors some of whom were fellow hearers, hearers that is of the Gospel.   There was nothing unusual in a judge being acquainted with members of his Grand Jury.  He also already clearly thought he knew all the detail of the case, the colour of the Duloe gate and the legibility of Tom’s message, and had already concluded that Pooley would be dealt with according to the fruits of his doing.   The jury had been told what was expected of them.

 Pooley’s case came up on the Thursday.  That morning Pooley’s eighteen year old daughter, Mary, came to Bodmin.   If, as seems likely, she walked from Liskeard to Bodmin that was a walk of some fourteen miles.  Hers would be, for Tom, the only friendly, familiar face in the courtroom. 

During the morning Sir John tidied up several cases from the previous day. Then he tried three cases, one of theft and two cases, in one of  which the prosecuting counsel  was John Duke,  of young women accused of child murder.     He instructed that the thieves might be found guilty and the young women not guilty.  The jury brought in the verdicts expected of them.  Then, at about six in the evening, Sir John Taylor Coleridge and his beloved son came together to try Tom Pooley for blasphemy.

Pooley was brought to the bar flanked by two constables.  The charge was read out.  Pooley was charged with unlawfully writing and publishing a blasphemous and profane libel concerning the Holy Scriptures and the Christian religion and with uttering and speaking blasphemous words.  He pleaded Not Guilty.  The reporter from the ‘West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser’ was in court.   He, from the start, had no doubts as to the villainous nature of Pooley’s crimes.  He described Pooley as “a dirty-looking, excitable man, with a long grisly beard.”   Tom, who had been committed to Bodmin Gaol since 1st July, was no doubt not looking his best. 

Six years previously Sir John Coleridge had been mildly criticised in some quarters for expressing from the bench sentiments more befitting the pulpit.    The occasion had been the celebrated Achilli libel case brought against Henry Newman, who, in 1845, had shocked the Anglican community by converting from the English Church where he had been a priest to become a leading member of the Roman Catholic church in England.   Giovanni Giacinto Achilli had come to England from his native Italy by way of Corfu.  He had been a Roman Catholic priest and he had been, and continued to be until his suicide, a seducer of young women.  His work in England was to whip up ‘No Popery’ sentiment by touring the country delivering popular lectures on the subject of the decadence of the Roman Catholic Church.    At the same time, the newly converted Henry Newman was lecturing in English cities trying to promote Catholicism and to further the interests of English Catholics.  In the course of his lectures Newman referred to Achilli and accused him of having violated women and of living a profligate and immoral life.   Achilli responded by suing Newman for libel.    Although Newman in his ‘libel’ undoubtedly had truth on his side he was, for want of sound witnesses, unable to prove his case and when the time came for the Court to sentence him the task fell to Sir John Coleridge.   Sir John agonised about his sentencing but in the event he fined his old acquaintance, one hundred pounds and then proceeded to give him a most horrible ‘jobation’.  Sir John told Newman, “As a member of the Church of England, in which I have lived and in which I hope to die, I feel nothing so powerful as to my mind as seeing you in that position.”  In handing down the sentence the judge, true to form,  lectured Newman on his apostasy.  Most of Protestant England applauded Sir John but some commentators at the time found his sermonising highly inappropriate and the judge himself wrote in his journal  “I came home very much tired and dejected, as I am now,”   He felt that he had been somewhat carried away by his enthusiasm.

Now, years later, the appearance of Pooley, dirty, excitable and with his long, draggletailed beard was another occasion likely to impassion Sir John and overstimulate his enthusiasm.  It was another opportunity for him to demonstrate his lifelong commitment to the Anglican religion, an opportunity which he seemed to relish.    Later commentators, without evidence, were to hint that he had detailed prior knowledge of this case, which may well have been true, and it was even rumoured that he had taken deliberate steps to become Pooley’s judge.  Others, again without evidence, hinted that it was no coincidence that two Coleridges came together to try this ‘blasphemer’.   

Certainly, in his opening remarks to the Court, the pious judge must have sounded as much like a man of God as a man of Law:   “It is not often,”  said Sir John,  “that a criminal court is occupied with the investigation of the guilt or innocence of a prisoner for the publication of a blasphemous libel.   It is the law of the land that blaspheming God or turning the doctrines of the Christian religion into contempt or ridicule, are considered as offences tending to subvert religion and morality, and they are punishable by the temporal courts with fine and imprisonment.  It is not for holding or maintaining any opinion, if it is maintained decently, with due consideration for the feelings of other people,  and due respect towards the laws and religion of the land, that a prosecution like this would be instituted, or could be sustained:  for this, certainly  is not a time when the laws or the people of this country could be justly accused of a want of toleration.  But it is essential that the foundation of religion and the feelings of the well disposed body of society should be respected and if persons are found not merely respectfully and decently maintaining opinions contrary to our common Christianity but determinedly and deliberately outraging our feelings by contumelious expressions, reviling our blessed Lord, and holding up the Holy Scriptures to contempt and ridicule in foul and opprobrious language, I think the jury will agree with me that such offences ought to be visited with punishment and put down.”

The father had addressed the jury and it was now the turn of the son.  John Duke Coleridge rose to earn his guineas by convincing judge and jury of Pooley’s guilt.  John Duke always looked impressive in the courtroom.  Tall, lean and handsome, splendid in wig and gown and with a snow-white necktie, he prosecuted his case with his usual energy.  Pooley later said that Coleridge had bullied him. In fact John Duke was later in life to be celebrated for the gentleness with which he treated witnesses and accused persons in Court but there is no reason to believe he was gentle towards Pooley, This was still the age of dramatic courtroom harangue and insinuating rhetoric of the kind that poor Pickwick suffered from Serjeant Buzfuz.  Buzfuz, it is widely accepted, was suggested to Dickens by the real life Serjeant Charles Carpenter Bompas, a contemporary whom the Coleridges, father and son, had often met with in the courts.  

John Duke was famous for his clear, melodious voice which no doubt rose and fell to grand effect.   In his own guarded subsequent account of the trial there is no evidence of great passion but before the Bodmin Grand Jury he would perhaps have used more fiery language and perhaps language  like that he later used  writing about the case when he described the “awfully depraved malignity of the terms which Pooley employed with reference to that Blessed Person Whom Christians of every shade of opinion agree in regarding as most holy… the words ‘monster,’ ‘villain,’ ‘blackguard,’ ‘theft’ and ‘whoredom’ with other words as bad, were associated by Pooley with our Saviour’s name…. It was hatred of Our Lord Himself, rather than hatred of Christianity, which the words, both written and spoken, expressed.”  To this last comment the objection might be raised that Tom had always made it quite clear that his malignity and hatred was equally vehement whether for Christ or Christians or Christian Clerics.  We cannot know whether Tom, like Pickwick, was called a ‘serpent’ by the prosecuting counsel but it is probable that, without anyone to defend him, he would have come in for some elegant tongue-lashing.

Also in league against Tom Pooley was Mr Humphrey Grylls, the attorney at Liskeard whose firm, ‘Messrs Pedley and Grylls’ of Bodmin, had placed the advertisement in the ‘Cornish Times’ seeking information about a ‘man writing blasphemous sentences on gates’.  He had also acted as clerk to the magistrates who had committed Tom at the public house at Trecan Gate and now he was in Court acting as attorney for the prosecution. 

 Grylls, much later,  in a letter to John Duke Coleridge, maintained that Pooley had been annoying his neighbours for fifteen years by writing blasphemous and disgusting sentences on walls and gates,  that the perpetrator was widely known to be Pooley because of his conversation and well known habits of thought, that children read and inquired about Pooley’s writings and that the advertisement was put in the papers warning the person who had been for some time committing these offences that proceedings would be instituted against him if the commission of them was persevered in.   Most of this account is very credible but this last point is surely a prevarication, for the advertisement of April 25th,  and there seems to be no other,  was clearly an attempt to produce evidence against the ‘blasphemer’  not to warn him.  If Pooley was ‘widely known’ to be the man who blasphemed there would have been easier and surer and more Christian ways to warn him.  None of Mr Grylls’s points, all of which served to exculpate the Coleridges and to damn Tom Pooley, came to light until almost a year after the trial.

John Duke first listed for the jury the four counts on which Pooley was arraigned.   In June 1859, John Duke Coleridge wrote remembering his contribution to the trial.  He wrote the following, allegedly from the notes he made at the time: “I knew it was a troublesome and disagreeable matter to conduct,  and I took pains to open the case in a tone of studied moderation.   I carefully explained to the jury that the prosecution was not a prosecution of opinion in any sense.  I mentioned the names of Mr Newman, of Mr Carlyle and Miss Martineau as persons who maintained what I and others might think erroneous opinions, but who maintained them gravely, with serious argument and with a sense of responsibility ,and whom no-one would dream of interfering with.  I said that the time was long gone by for persecution, which I though was as foolish as it was wicked;  but that as liberty of opinion was to be protected,  so was society to be protected from outrage and indecency;  that if persons went about using language that offended decency  and was extremely  offensive to the feelings of the public,  the law would still prevent such persons from abusing their liberty and would treat them as criminals.  I concluded with reading a passage from Mr Starkie’s book on libel, which I said I believed stated the law as it was and certainly expressed my own opinion of what it ought to be.  ‘No author or preacher,’ says Mr Starkie, ‘who fairly and conscientiously promulgates the opinion with whose truth he is impressed, for the benefit of others, is for so doing amenable as a criminal;  but a malicious and mischievous intention is in such case the broad boundary between right and wrong; and if it can be collected from the offensive levity with which so serious a subject is treated, or from other circumstances, that the act of the party was malicious,  then, since the law has no means of distinguishing between different degrees of evil tendency,  if the matter published contain any such tendency, the publisher becomes amenable to justice.’ ‘This was what I said.”

Pooley’s unusual case had attracted an audience to the courtroom and both audience and jury were impressed by the seriousness and the dignity of John Duke Coleridge.  No doubt many a Bodmin head nodded as the wonder grew that one small head could carry so much law.  He, and Mr Starkie, probably impressed Tom Pooley too.  This barrister, after all, was destined one day to be Lord Chief Justice for England.

The first newspaper account of the trial says that “The learned counsel then repeated the words which the prisoner was accused of writing and uttering.”  This unequivocal report contrasts strangely with John Duke Coleridge’s published statement, a year later, when he was claiming the words spoken were too vicious for him to put them into print, that: “In declining to quote them now I am acting exactly as I acted when prosecuting Pooley.   I did not quote them in my speech to the jury who heard the words once and once only from the lips of the witnesses themselves.”

John Duke Coleridge now went on conscientiously to ‘prove’ the writings and the utterances of Pooley.    The first of four counts on which Tom was charged was that had chalked blasphemous words on a field gate belonging to the Reverend Paul Bush, Rector of the parish of Duloe.  This charge both barrister and jury found to be proved although the evidence was confused and contradictory.

The first witness to be called was Mary Bowden who lived in Duloe village and who was servant to the Rector.   She told the Court that on that day, the 22nd May, she was working ‘half way’ into a four-acre field   belonging to the Reverend Paul Bush, when she saw a man come to the gate and write something on it.  She went towards the gate and the man left off writing and went along the road.   He was wearing fustian clothes and was carrying a tin can such as bill stickers use.  She could not read the writing on the gate but it had not been there a quarter of an hour before.    Then Mr Michell came up and she showed him the writing.   Mr Bush came a few minutes after Mr Michell left.  She believed the prisoner to be the man she had seen but she did not want to swear to it.  

Tom Pooley, according to John Duke Coleridge when a year later he was seeking to make the case that Tom was not a madman,  ‘cross-examined several of the witnesses who proved his writing with a good deal of skill and intelligence,  as to his identity,  as to their means of observing him,  and their recollection of his person.  His speech was not at all the speech of a madman.’   Alas!  Hardly anything that Tom said in his own defence was recorded.  Whatever, if anything,  he had to say in cross-examination of Mary Bowden is lost. 

Next came the Prosecution’s star witness, the thirty-four year old Reverend Paul Bush,  Rector of Duloe. a tall person with sandy whiskers, light curly hair  and of somewhat imperious manners.   Paul Bush swore how on the 22nd May he read the words, “Duloe stinks with the monster Christ’s Bible - Blasphemy - T Pooley.” on his black-painted five-bar gate.   No one else read these words and the Rector sent to have it rubbed out the same day.  Tom Pooley seems not to have cross-examined this witness, perhaps he was not invited to, but the words are very much what Tom might have written except for the word ‘blasphemy’ at the end.   Tom used the word ‘blasphemy’ often enough but he had his own unique understanding of the word: “For there is no religion in a Christian.  So a Christian is a mocker and a blasphemer in the sight and laws of the One Almighty.”   Blasphemy for Tom was always Christian disregard for the laws of his own unique Great and Grand Creator. “The Christian Bible was but a book of blasphemies in the sight and laws of that one Almighty Being that brought this Globe into being.”   It might seem that the Reverend Paul Bush misremembered what he read on his gate in such a way that the case against Tom seemed incontrovertible. 

The next witness was William Michell, the man to whom Mary Bowden had shown the writing.   Michell was a carpenter living in Duloe.  According to his evidence he had passed Pooley on the road about a quarter of a mile from the gate.   No one else had passed him.   Michell walked on to the gate where he found Mary Bowden still, it would seem, gazing at  the gate.   Michell saw the writing on the gate but did not read it.  Perhaps he could not. He, however, was able to make out the words ‘Jesus Christ’ and, on the bottom bar of the gate,  the name ‘T Pooley’.    His evidence established that Pooley was at the scene of the ‘crime’.   Pooley cross-examined Michell and pointed out that there was another road opposite the gate, a road which led to Sandplace. whereby he suggested that someone else might have come unnoticed by this road and written the offending words that bore his name. But that was an altogether desperate and unconvincing interjection. 

The second count on which Pooley was indicted was that he had published blasphemies in the writings on the slate which he had put on his son’s grave.   Tom, as we have noted, had written:  Death and the Grave the victory claims.  Bible tyrants can’t destroy its laws nor yet its powers.  The grave gives Life, the grave sends Death.   Let Bible tyrants behold the tides how grand they ebb and flow.  By the power of this globe, tyrants, be careful, for your life is not your own, for in a moment it is gone and called to the grave and receives judgment.  Thomas Pooley, July 1st. 

John Duke Coleridge told the jury that he had decided to withdraw that part of the charge.  A year later he wrote: “As to one set of words there was some little difficulty in the proof; for they had been rubbed out, and the witnesses could not perfectly recollect them,  and as the man was undefended, I preferred withdrawing, and did withdraw, that part of the charge from the jury.”    This argument limps.  The writing on the gate had also been rubbed out and the evidence of the written blasphemy was slim, that of the Reverend Bush alone.   It was not true that Pooley’s words on the slate had been rubbed out.  A later commentator was able to see them and record them.   And the Coleridges were far from making any other allowances for Tom Pooley being undefended.   What then could possibly have been the motive for withdrawing this count?  It might have been that the story of Pooley’s grief stricken visits to his son’s grave might have brought forth some measure of sympathy from that unsympathetic jury.  It might have been a concern that the Grand Jury after considering these passionate words might declare that Tom was ‘mad’ and should be sent to the Lunatic Asylum rather than the Prison.

Richard Crapp, a labourer living in Duloe, also met Pooley on that or another day.   His evidence was that towards the end of May he met Pooley in a public house at Sandplace.  He and Pooley chatted and Tom had told him that he was posting bills advertising houses to be sold in Looe.  Tom also said how fine the potato crop was looking.   Michell said that they were promising to be good crops if the disease did not get them and Tom told him that he knew how to get rid of the disease: ‘If folks would burn their bibles and take the ashes for dressing, it would get rid of the disease.’

Tom, in his own defence said that with regard to the potatoes, he had said that the Bible had taught men to be discontented with the potatoes.  God had sent them very good potatoes, but Jesus Christ had made very bad crops.”  No doubt Tom at Sandplace thought he was having, as he had done many times before, companionable refreshment at a pub.  He could not know that he was committing a crime that a learned judge would punish with a sentence of an extra six months in prison.   Now, in court, fighting for his freedom, he tried to disassociate himself from the words, tried to make Richard Crapp say he was mistaken, but Richard Crapp was strong in his evidence.

The fourth count which was considered the most serious by Judge Coleridge, had in fact been committed after Tom had been remanded in custody and therefore, it was later argued, ought not to have been considered at all.  The charge was that Pooley had spoken frightful blasphemies to Alfred Stripling and another. These were the two policemen, Tom’s “beardless boys, ”who had been with  him when he came before the magistrates at the public house at Trecan Gate.   It will be recalled that the conversation had moved to the subject of the county police and Pooley was alleged to have said:  if it had not been for the blackguard Jesus Christ when he stole the donkey, police would not be wanted.  He was the forerunner of all theft and whoredom.

A year later when John Duke was publishing his account of the trial in ‘Fraser’s Magazine’ he felt unable to publish any of those shocking blasphemies for which Pooley was sentenced but he referred to them    The words spoken to Alfred Stripling were “so shockingly blasphemous… that not even in defence of my father do I like to print them.”  Pooley had used terms that so offended him that, rather than put them before the eyes of the readership of Fraser’s, he had enclosed a copy of them to the Editor and invited him “as an honest man” to say in a note whether in his judgment John Duke’s description of the offending words was justified.  The Editor did as he was requested.  He wrote that, “if the words said to be written and spoken by Thomas Pooley, and on which he was convicted, were made use of by a man of sound mind, we could have no hesitation in pronouncing him guilty of blasphemy of the grossest kind.”   

Alfred Stripling gave evidence that Pooley had used the offending words and no doubt the Grand Jury gasped in horror.  This was the sum of the evidence against Tom who now “addressed the jury in a rambling way in his own defence.”   He expressed the hope that the jury were not Christians.  He told them that he believed in one great and wise god and that he believed that the Earth was a living, thinking body and that death was created to put an end to the triumph of tyrants.  He told them he looked to the grave for justice and that if they found it in their breasts to torture him, he would give up his life’s blood but he would not endure Christian tyranny.”

Sir John Coleridge now summed up.    He repeated the mantra that in Britain it had been very pro

perly stated that decent discussion upon the different doctrines of our religion was not forbidden.  ‘It is thought to be better for the advancement of truth that such things should be discussed.  It is not to be doubted that from such free discussion truth will ultimately be the gainer.  At the same time the law requires that the discussion shall be decent, reasonable and serious.  It will not allow the feelings of mankind to be shocked, the interests of religion to be prejudiced, the foundations of all good government to be sapped by profane and contumelious and contemptuous writings and expressions with regard to our religion.’

Sir John then commented on the evidence.  If the jury believed the affirmations that had been made as to the words written on the Reverend Bush’s gate then the prisoner had clearly been brought within the reach of the law.  On the second count no evidence had been offered.   The words spoken in the third count about the potato disease were ribaldry and the counsel for the prosecution had put it to them that they might have been a jest, The words in the fourth count, the words uttered to the policeman,  were ‘impious and opprobrious blasphemy’  and if they believed the prisoner had spoken these words they must accordingly find him guilty. The jury lost no time doing just that.   The twelve good men of Liskeard ‘almost immediately returned the prisoner guilty’ on those three counts that had been prosecuted.

The report in the West Briton and Cornwall Advertiser recorded the awesome words of Sir John’s righteous judgement: “The JUDGE then passed sentence, saying it was almost unnecessary for him to point out the enormity of the prisoner’s offence.  You have expressed a hope that your jurors are not Christians; I rejoice to believe that they are Christians, and if you think it a happiness not to be so,  then yours is a most unfortunate state of mind.  I hope while you are in prison you will have the good sense not to refuse to listen to the advice given to you; you may then find that the superiority of knowledge and wisdom you may suppose you possess is a matter of the greatest blindness.   A new light may dawn upon you; and if it does you will reproach yourself and repent in bitterness of heart for the word you have uttered and written.   The sentence of the court is that on the first and third counts of this indictment you be imprisoned for the space of SIX CALENDAR MONTHS EACH, the second to commence after the first six has expired and that upon the fourth count, you be further imprisoned for NINE CALENDAR MONTHS.”  

The sentence was dramatic enough. Twenty-one months in a Victorian gaol was a stiff sentence   but there was high drama yet to come.  After Sir John finished his sermonising Tom did not bow his head in contrition.  He looked his judge in the eye and told him that he might as well put on the black cap and finish the job.   As Tom wrote later, “The duty I owed to the One Almighty and to the True Almighty Laws was to tell this Christian judge to put on the black cap and pass sentence upon me, for Christian tyranny and injustice was unbearable.”   For his next dramatic action Tom, as he was being taken down, asked Sir John if he might shake his daughter by the hand before going into prison.   Sir John, who was already a very angry man, must by now have been incandescent with fury. When his judge, unused to convicted felons making polite requests, refused, Pooley took matters into his own hands and dragged the two constables who were securing him across the courtroom and shook his Mary’s hand for what the desperate man probably thought was the last time.  “I’m that man that had three nights and three days in the Christian dark dungeon for shaking hands with my 

daughter and bread and water was my fare.  I asked first and this was me denied.  The courage in my breast did rise and bid defiance to Christians and their inhuman laws of Judge Coleridge and the Grand Jury and the Petty Jury with the Reverend Bush that found me guilty for bringing to light the laws and works of the one wise and powerful Almighty.”   Tom Pooley the rebel, Tom Pooley the martyr had suffered his trial and the courage in his breast had risen and this, no doubt, he thought, then and after, was his finest hour.