‘The Crown must have believed it had a completely watertight case. Motive? Howard not only had almost got through the money his wife had brought to him on their marriage but he had taken out two years previously a fifty-thousand pounds’ policy on Mrs Howard’s life. Opportunity? The Crown could show that, in India, Howard had experimented with hashish and other drugs. Indeed, Howard admitted to having a small supply of such drugs at Ardvreck House. As curios. Of course he kept them locked up. But his wife knew where they were kept. But was it likely that Mrs Howard would have taken that way out? She could have simply taken an overdose of laudanum or drowned herself if she wanted to commit suicide.

‘The trial was held in the High Court of Justiciary in Edinburgh, opening on Tuesday, first December eighteen-ninety-one. The proceedings lasted a fortnight or so. Howard had a capable defence, not only in his counsel’s first-rate brain and wide experience of the law but in his histrionic ability and consummate knowledge of human nature. The Solicitor General, who led the prosecution, was no mean advocate himself but was outclassed.

‘From the beginning defence counsel worked to cast into the minds of the jurymen that shadow of reasonable doubt that would prevent them from arriving at a verdict of guilty! William Roughead, genius of crime reporters, wrote of how defence counsel proceeded, “contesting each foot of the ground, plausible, persuasive, with an explanation for anything suspicious, enveloping the plainest facts in an atmosphere of fog – a great performance”. The witnesses for the defence, the secretary George Adams, the manservant William Metcalfe and the dead woman’s personal maid, Mary Elizabeth Rolfe, were unshakable in their assertions regarding the state of Mrs Howard’s mind and her declarations that she wanted to quit this plane of existence.

‘As for Howard himself, he bore himself steadfastly throughout the trial. A photograph of him shows a tall, well-groomed man with clean-cut aquiline features and a seemingly sensitive mouth. He was aged thirty-five at the time of the trial and always appeared composed yet – it goes without saying – interested in all that transpired. When anything amusing was said, which, of course, can happen in real life in the most dramatic and deadly circumstances as well as in black comedy, he would be seen to smile, not broadly but rather sadly, as if the irony of the incident had not escaped him even in his tragic circumstances. The truest picture of Howard’s mentality, however, comes from the memoirs of the man who attended the trial in the capacity of correspondent of the Scotsman newspaper. He wrote: