Madeleine Smith

In the summer of 1857 the whole of Britain followed the trial of a young Glasgow woman accused of poisoning her lover with arsenic. Madeleine Smith was 22, the daughter of a prosperous architect, and lived in one of the most fashionable squares in the city. The man who died, Pierre Emile L’Angelier, was a poorly paid clerk from the Channel Islands. Between them lay a secret love affair, a bundle of passionate letters and a quantity of arsenic. The jury’s verdict, not proven, has made the case an argument ever since.

It is the earliest of the four cases that the writer Jack House gathered in his 1961 book Square Mile of Murder, all of them committed within a short walk of each other between Blythswood Hill and Charing Cross. The others, the Sandyford Place murder, the crimes of Dr Edward Pritchard and the killing that led to the conviction of Oscar Slater, have their own pages in this section.

A daughter of Blythswood

Madeleine Hamilton Smith was born on 29 March 1835, the eldest of five children. Her father, James Smith, was a successful Glasgow architect, and her mother, Elizabeth, was the daughter of David Hamilton, the leading neo-classical architect of the city. The family belonged to the comfortable upper middle class of the Victorian city, with a town house and a country villa, Rowaleyn, at Rhu near Helensburgh.

In 1855 the Smiths moved from India Street to 7 Blythswood Square, at the crown of the grid of handsome terraces laid out on Blythswood Hill in the development associated with William Harley. Madeleine had been educated at a boarding school in London and returned home with the accomplishments expected of a young woman of her class. What was expected next was a suitable marriage.

The secret affair

Early in 1855 she met Pierre Emile L’Angelier, a Jersey man about ten years her senior who worked as a packing clerk in a Glasgow warehouse. He had no money and no position, and her parents would never have accepted him. The two began a clandestine relationship, meeting rarely and briefly, often at her bedroom window, and writing to each other constantly. Her letters were frank about her feelings and, in time, about their physical relationship. In Victorian Glasgow such letters from an unmarried woman of good family were explosive, and L’Angelier kept them.

She promised to marry him. By 1857, however, her parents had found her an acceptable husband, William Harper Minnoch, a wealthy merchant who lived in the same building, and Madeleine accepted him. In February 1857 she tried to end the affair with L’Angelier and asked for her letters back. He refused, and made it clear that he might show them to her father.

The letters

The letters are the reason the case has never been forgotten. Madeleine wrote to L’Angelier hundreds of times, often several times a week, in a flowing hand that filled every corner of the paper. In them she called him her husband and signed herself his wife. She wrote of her love, her impatience with her family, her plans for their future and, in a way that stunned the Victorian public, of the physical side of their relationship. To readers who believed that a young woman of good family should know nothing of such things, the letters were as shocking as the accusation of murder.

They were also central to the legal argument. The Crown used them to show the passion of the affair, her growing desperation to end it and the danger L’Angelier posed to her engagement. The defence used them to show her as a young woman carried away by romance rather than a calculating poisoner. Because many were undated and had been stuffed back into the wrong envelopes after L’Angelier’s death, their order was itself a matter of fierce dispute in court.

Arsenic

In the weeks that followed Madeleine Smith bought arsenic from Glasgow druggists on several occasions, signing the poisons register as the law required. She later said she had used it on her complexion. During the same weeks L’Angelier suffered bouts of violent sickness. In the early hours of 23 March 1857 he returned to his lodgings desperately ill and died later that morning. A post-mortem examination found a very large quantity of arsenic in his body.

His friends knew of the affair, and the letters found among his possessions led straight to Blythswood Square. Madeleine fled to the family’s country house and was brought back. She was taken into custody on 31 March 1857 and charged with murder. L’Angelier was buried in the Ramshorn churchyard on Ingram Street.

The trial of the century

The trial took place before the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh from 30 June to 9 July 1857. She faced three charges: administering poison to L’Angelier on two occasions in February and a third time in March, the last of them the charge of murder. Crowds queued for seats, the newspapers printed the evidence at enormous length, and the reading of her letters in open court scandalised and fascinated the country.

Her defence was led by John Inglis, later Lord Glencorse and Lord President of the Court of Session, and his speech is still regarded as one of the finest in Scottish legal history. He did not need to prove her innocent. He needed to show that the Crown had not proved her guilty, and the gaps were real. The Crown could not prove that the two had met in the weeks before his death, and therefore could not prove how she might have given him the poison. Both druggists testified that the arsenic they sold was mixed with soot or indigo to prevent accidents, yet no such colouring was reported in the dead man’s body. Witnesses spoke of L’Angelier’s moods, and there was evidence that he had talked of suicide. Many of the letters were undated, and their order depended on postmarks and envelopes that had been handled carelessly after his death.

The jury found her not guilty on the first charge and returned verdicts of not proven on the second and on the charge of murder. Madeleine Smith walked free.

Not proven

The not proven verdict, unique to Scotland, has exactly the same legal effect as not guilty: the accused is acquitted and cannot be tried again. In popular understanding, however, it has always carried a sting, a sense that the jury suspected guilt but could not be sure. The Smith case became the most famous illustration of that ambiguity, and for more than a century and a half lawyers and reformers cited it in debates about the verdict. The argument ended only recently. The Victims, Witnesses, and Justice Reform (Scotland) Act 2025 abolished the not proven verdict, and from 1 January 2026 it has not been available in new criminal trials.

A long life after the verdict

The scandal drove the Smith family out of Glasgow. They left Blythswood Square and Rowaleyn and moved to Bridge of Allan and then to Polmont, where her father died in 1863. Madeleine went to London. On 4 July 1861 she married George Wardle, an artist who later became the business manager of William Morris’s decorative arts firm, and the couple had a son and a daughter. Known by her married name, she moved in the circle of Morris and the early socialists and became involved with the Fabian Society. Few of her new acquaintances seem to have known who she was.

The Wardles separated in 1889, and Madeleine eventually emigrated to the United States. In New York, in her eighties, she married William Sheehy. She died there on 12 April 1928, aged 93, and was buried under the name Lena Sheehy in a cemetery at Hastings-on-Hudson.

Did she do it?

Most modern historians who have examined the evidence believe that she did. She had a motive, she bought the poison, and L’Angelier’s illnesses followed her purchases closely. What saved her was the absence of proof that they met in the final weeks, and a defence that made the most of every uncertainty. Others still argue for suicide, or for an accident, and point out that a jury that heard all the evidence would not convict.

The case has been retold again and again: in Wilkie Collins’s novel The Law and the Lady of 1875, in David Lean’s film Madeleine of 1950, and in a long line of plays, television dramas and radio programmes. The National Records of Scotland hold the trial papers and many of the productions, including the bottle of poison and a piece of the cocoa that may have carried it, and Glasgow’s libraries hold a collection of her letters. The building on Blythswood Square still stands, a short walk from the city centre, its elegant front giving nothing away.

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