A  Review By  Keith Smith    

 This is a shocking tale of greed and family betrayal. In August 1780 Sir Theodosius Boughton, a dissolute Old Etonian twenty-year-old and heir to a Warwickshire fortune, died in painful convulsions after taking his medicine. The following year after an inquest and trial which became a cause celebre, his brother-in-law, Captain John ‘Diamond’ Donellan, Irish soldier of fortune and man about town, was hanged for his murder.dark and violent underside of the society of Mansfield Park.

The trial was a shambles. And was Donellan guilty? Based on extensive research and the engrossing trial transcripts, Elizabeth Cooke’s book shows the

Amazingly two books about exactly the same topic have appeared at more or less the same time, the other being ‘Death Of A Baronet’ by Anthony Harris. I shan’t read two books, so won’t be able to compare them for you. Suffice to say that both rely heavily on the transcripts of the trial, and certainly the one I read needed some diligent editing. Nevertheless it was fascinating, and frightening at the same time. Who could forget Judge Buller who had already got the sobriquet ‘Judge Thumb’ for ruling that it was permissible for a man to beat his wife providing that the stick used was no thicker than the man’s thumb. I wouldn’t have wanted him to be my trial judge! And inevitably it was his interventions and summing up that led to Donellan’s hanging, despite there being no substantive evidence at all as to his guilt.

The book is interesting for its topic obviously, but also for what it tells us about life in Warwickshire, and more particularly in a Warwickshire mansion,  at the time. Most memorable perhaps to me was the fact that Lawford Hall, despite its genteel appearance, was absolutely over-run with rats and Theodosius, he who was murdered, spent a lot of his time putting down fish for them around the house which he had laced with arsenic which he bought by the pound. So it wasn’t all romance and roses a la Jane Austen!