Book of the day: The Damnation of John Donellan by Elizabeth Cooke
In the fifteenth-century church in Newbold-on-Avon, Warwickshire, is a curious monument. Mounted high on the chancel wall to the right of the altar is a visored helmet, the crest of which shows a disproportionately heavy long-necked bird, marked with a double chevron and holding a struggling serpent in its mouth. The ancient armour is believed to be a relic of the Boughton family.
Through the leaded glass windows, the bird faces a Boughton vault under the yews of the churchyard; but to the south side is a much older tomb, a more probable last resting place of Theodosius Boughton, once the heir to a vast fortune and the seventh Boughton baronetcy. Theodosius was barely twenty when he died suddenly, after taking a prescribed physic, on 30 August 1780. He was buried in the tomb a week after he died; but his body was exhumed three days later when rumours began to circulate the parish that the apparently fit and healthy young man had been poisoned. His body was brought out from the tomb into the sunlight of an exhaustingly hot September day, and a belated autopsy was conducted before 500 ghoulish spectators on the grass in front of the vault.
Cover blurb
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. The trial was a shambles. And was Donellan guilty?
