“No sound is dissonant which tells of life,” goes the last line of Coleridge’s great poem “This Lime-Tree Bower my Prison”, and in The Sixth Commandment, Sarah Phelps never allows us to forget it. Of course we know already that love makes a fool of us all. But while Peter Farquhar and Ann Moore-Martin probably should have known better than to let a young man called Benjamin Field into their lives – if a person 40 years your junior makes a proclamation of adoration, it’s wise to be suspicious – Phelps’s script, helped along by the immense talents of the actors who perform it, contains no inharmoniousness that I can hear. This is a series about death, and yet every moment speaks of life, and of how people long to live it to the full: a repletion that involves love, on which some of us will not ever give up.
But I’m running ahead of myself here. The Sixth Commandment is based on real events. Field inveigled his way into Farquhar’s life, convincing this celibate Christian – a Coleridge-loving former master at Stowe School – that he had at last found a partner. First, he drugged the older man. In 2015 he killed him. Soon after this, Field turned his attention to Farquhar’s Buckinghamshire neighbour, Moore-Martin, a spinster and devout Catholic. He told her he was in love with her, got her to change her will in his favour, and began drugging her, too. She was rescued by her niece in the nick of time, but died soon after, of natural causes. In 2019, Field, then 28, was convicted of Farquhar’s murder, and sentenced to life in prison. According to psychiatrists, he has a narcissistic personality disorder.
Content from our partners
