In 1922, a country solicitor from the little town of Hay-on-Wye, nestled on the border between England and Wales, was in prison awaiting execution for murdering his wife. Major Herbert Rowse Armstrong \u2013 he always insisted on the rank \u2013 had been convicted at a sensational 10-day trial of killing his wife Katharine 15 months earlier. It was said he had dosed her with arsenic<\/a> that he had bought legally in the local chemist\u2019s shop, allegedly to kill the dandelions on the couple\u2019s lawn.<\/p>\n

The case of Major Armstrong was so extraordinary that it seized not only the imagination of newspaper readers in Britain, but across North America and the rest of the English-speaking world. The twists and turns in the tale also inspired a new breed of crime novelists. It was, the Charlotte Observer<\/em> in far-away North Carolina announced, citing the notorious medieval Italian dynasty: \u201cThe greatest poison drama of the century\u2026 All England is thrilled by the trial of a modern Borgia.\u201d<\/p>\n

The story had everything, as it apparently involved far more than a private domestic tragedy, taking in petty professional rivalries and gossip; rumours that gave rise to astonishing speculation about a man who had been a pillar of the community. There were even tales of a poisoned box of chocolates and a deadly scone handed over at a tea party, allegedly with the words: \u201c\u2019Scuse fingers.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more | Arsenic: a brief history of Agatha Christie\u2019s favourite murder weapon<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Who was Herbert Rowse Armstrong?<\/h2>\n
Herbert Armstrong was a short, slight, dapper man, only eight stone in weight. He had strikingly blue eyes behind his gold-rimmed pince-nez spectacles and fashionably waxed the ends of\nhis moustache. He was the picture of respectability, prominent at both the parish church and Freemasons\u2019 lodge<\/a>, and served as clerk to the justices at three local magistrates\u2019 courts. He had been born into a middle-class family in Plymouth in 1869 and, after his father died, had been educated at Cambridge with financial support from two maiden aunts. He qualified as a solicitor in Liverpool before moving south, first to Devon, and then to take up a partnership at a legal firm in Hay.<\/p>\n
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Armstrong had married his wife Katharine in 1907. She had been a school mistress and the couple had three young children. \u201cI never knew a happier couple,\u201d wrote their former vicar. Herbert was always attentive to his wife, who \u2013 according to local gossip \u2013 was nervy, highly strung and bossy, and once interrupted a tennis match in which her husband was playing with the command that he must come along because it was his bath night.<\/p>\n
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The family lived in a large house in the hamlet of Cusop, just outside Hay, and by 1914 Herbert had taken over the solicitor\u2019s firm. He had served in the Territorial Army for 20 years, so when World War I<\/a> broke out he quickly volunteered, though he spent the conflict behind a desk, mostly in England.<\/p>\n
Read more | 6 notorious unsolved crimes from history<\/a><\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>
Sickness and suspicion<\/h3>\n
When the war ended, Armstrong returned to Hay and picked up where he had left off, though economic conditions made the job difficult. Katharine, meanwhile, seems to have been badly unbalanced by the war. She developed neuritis in her hands, which prevented her from playing the piano, and started suffering from delusions, convinced she was a bad wife and mother and had been cheating the local tradesmen. Eventually, in the summer of 1920, her husband \u2013 with the consent of her sister and the local doctor, Tom Hincks \u2013 agreed that she should be committed to the Barnwood Asylum in Gloucester.<\/p>\n
Katharine spent six months in the hospital before being released in January 1921, but her condition rapidly deteriorated. On one occasion, she apparently asked the family\u2019s housekeeper whether she would kill herself if she fell out of an upper floor window. Within a few weeks, the former school mistress was desperately sick and unable to move, and a month after coming home, she died. At the time it was believed that it had been a natural death, and Armstrong\u2019s friend Hincks signed the certificate with a diagnosis of \u201cgastritis, heart disease and inflammation of the kidneys\u201d.<\/p>\n
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