The second case, not so romantic albeit a love-story is woven through its tangled threads, is that of Mary Blandy, spinster, tried at Oxford in 1752, before two of the Barons of the Exchequer, for the murder of her father, Francis Blandy, attorney, and town clerk of Henley-on-Thames. Prosecuting counsel described her as “genteel, agreeable, sprightly, sensible.” She was an only child. Her sire being well off she seemed an eligible match, and yet wooers tarried. Some years before the murder, the villain of the piece, William Henry Cranstoun, a younger son of the Scots Lord Cranstoun and an officer recruiting at Henley for the army, comes on the scene. Contemporary gossip paints him the blackest colour. “His shape no ways genteel, his legs clumsy, he has nothing in the least elegant in his manner.” He was remarkable for his dulness; he was dissipated and poverty-stricken. More fatal than all he had a wife and child in Scotland, though he brazenly declared the marriage invalid spite the judgment of the Scots courts in its favour. Our respectable attorney, upon discovering these facts, gave the Captain, as he was called, the cold shoulder. The prospect of a match with a Lord’s son was too much for Miss Blandy, now over thirty, and she was ready to believe any ridiculous yarn he spun about his northern entanglements. Fired by an exaggerated idea of old Blandy’s riches, he planned his death, and found in the daughter an agent and, as the prosecution averred, an accomplice. The way was prepared by a cunning use of popular superstitions. Mysterious sounds of music were heard about; at least Cranstoun said so; indeed, it was afterwards alleged he “hired a band to play under the windows.” If any one asked “What then?” he whispered “that a wise woman, one Mrs. Morgan, in Scotland,” had assured him that such was a sign of death to the head of the house within twelve months. The Captain further alleged that he held the gift of second sight and had seen the worthy attorney’s ghost; all which, being carefully reported to the servants by Miss Blandy raised a pleasing horror in the kitchen. Cranstoun, from necessity or prudence, left Henley before the diabolical work began in earnest, but he supplied Mary with arsenic in powder, which she administered to her father for many months. The doses were so immoderate that the unfortunate man’s teeth dropped whole from their sockets, whereat the undutiful daughter “damn’d him for a toothless old rogue and wished him to hell.” Cranstoun, under the guise of a present of Scotch pebbles, sent her some more arsenic, nominally to rub them with. In the accompanying letter, July 18, 1751, he glowingly touched on the beauties of Scotland as an inducement to her, it was supposed, to make haste. Rather zealous than discreet, she near poisoned Anne Emmett, the charwoman, by misadventure, but brought her round again with great quantities of sack whey and thin mutton broth, sovereign remedies against arsenic.