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.
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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”,
