Lord William Russell (20 August 1767 – 5 May 1840) was a British aristocrat, a member of the prominent Russell family, and a longtime Member of Parliament. He served as a Whig politician and held junior ministerial office, but is best known for being murdered in his sleep by his valet in 1840, a case that became a celebrated Victorian sensation.
Life
Russell was the posthumous child of Francis Russell, Marquess of Tavistock, the eldest son of John Russell, 4th Duke of Bedford. He was the younger brother of Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford, and John Russell, 6th Duke of Bedford, and uncle of Francis Russell, 7th Duke of Bedford. He married Lady Charlotte Villiers, eldest daughter of George Bussy Villiers, 4th Earl of Jersey, on 11 July 1789; they had seven children. Lady Charlotte died in 1808.
Political Career
Russell represented the county of Surrey in the House of Commons from 1789 until his defeat in the 1807 election. He held junior ministerial office in the Ministry of All the Talents, serving as a Lord of the Admiralty from 1806 until the ministry fell in 1807. He subsequently sat for the Russell family pocket borough of Tavistock from 1807 to 1819, and again from 1826 until his retirement from Parliament in 1831. He continued to support the Whig Party after leaving the legislature.
Murder and Investigation
On the morning of 6 May 1840, Russell was discovered dead in his bed at his London house in Norfolk Street (now Dunraven Street), his throat cut. The household's initial suspicion of a robbery was soon determined by police to have been staged. The valet, François Benjamin Courvoisier, a Swiss national, was arrested and tried for the murder.
During the trial, Courvoisier confessed to his barrister, Charles Phillips, that he had committed both the thefts and the murder. Russell had discovered Courvoisier's theft of silverware and ordered him to resign; Courvoisier decided to kill Russell rather than lose his position. The lack of blood on Courvoisier's clothes was explained by the fact that he had committed the crime while naked. Despite the confession, Courvoisier insisted on maintaining a not-guilty plea, creating a significant legal controversy over the duties of defence counsel who knows his client is guilty.
Courvoisier was publicly hanged outside Newgate Prison on 6 July 1840 before an estimated crowd of 40,000, which included Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray. Thackeray subsequently wrote an anti-capital punishment essay, On Going to See a Man Hanged, expressing his disgust at the spectacle.
