Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century

Whether James had been told the news by Caterina Galli or another messenger is not clear – ‘all was confusion and astonishment

(#litres_trial_promo)’. Galli had fainted

(#litres_trial_promo) in the coach when Ray was killed and could not recall what happened thereafter, although we know she returned to the Admiralty in Sandwich’s coach. Sandwich had enough presence of mind to dispatch a servant to the Shakespeare Tavern to watch over Ray’s body and exclude prurient visitors. At seven the following morning he scribbled a hasty note to his friend Robert Boyle Walsingham, an aristocratic young naval officer, ‘For gods sake come to me immediately, in this moment I have much want of the comfort of a real friend; poor Miss Ray was inhumanly murthered last night as she was stepping into her coach at the playhouse door … The murtherer is taken and sent to prison.’

Two hours later, Hackman was brought before Sir John Fielding at Bow Street. Fielding led Hackman to a private room ‘in order to prevent, as much as possible, the unhappy prisoner from being exposed to the view of wanton, idle curiosity

(#litres_trial_promo)’, and had the witnesses’ testimony sworn before him. Hackman was no longer calm but visibly agitated: ‘From the agonizing pangs which entirely discomposed and externally convulsed him, it was some time before the Magistrate could proceed

(#litres_trial_promo).’ Asked if he had anything to say Hackman replied that ‘he wished for nothing but death; that nothing could be more welcome; that the sooner it came the better, for that alone would relieve him of the extreme Misery he laboured under

(#litres_trial_promo)’. Fielding committed him to Newgate, where he asked that he be granted his own room, a request that Fielding accepted on condition that he did not stay alone, as the court feared that he might again seek to take his own life. He was scheduled to be tried at the next sessions at the Old Bailey, set for 16 April.

That same afternoon

(#litres_trial_promo) the coroner’s jury met at the Shakespeare Tavern in the room where Sandwich’s servant still guarded Ray’s body. The corpse was examined by two surgeons, Mr O’Brien and Mr Jarvis, who showed that the bullet had entered Ray’s forehead on the right side, causing massive damage, and then exited near the left ear. Hackman who, at five foot nine, was several inches taller than Ray, must have been pointing his pistol downwards when he fired; this would also explain why Macnamara believed that the blow he felt to his arm was caused not by Ray’s fall but by the spent bullet that had killed her. During the inquest, against the advice of Mr O’Brien and much to the distress of Sandwich, it was decided to open Ray’s skull in order to trace the trajectory of the wound. The doctors ‘owned that they never saw

(#litres_trial_promo) so dismal and ghastly a fracture’; the inquest brought in a verdict of wilful murder.

That day all

(#litres_trial_promo) of Lord Sandwich’s servants ‘out of livery’ changed into mourning clothes. In the evening Sandwich had Ray’s body removed to an undertaker’s near Leicester Fields. One paper reported that she was wrapped in a sheet or shroud and that she would be buried wearing the valuable clothes and jewels she wore at the moment of her murder, ‘so that property

(#litres_trial_promo) to the amount of near £2000 will be deposited in her coffin’. On 14 April, Ray was interred in a vault in Elstree church, where her mother, who had died three years previously, was also buried.

Sandwich’s grief did not stop him taking decisive action in the days after Martha Ray’s murder. He employed Walsingham and two lawyers, Mr Balding and Mr William Chetham, to take depositions and informations from Signor Galli, his wife Caterina and Macnamara; they also questioned Hackman and discussed the case with Sir John Fielding. Sandwich himself questioned Signor Galli on the day after Ray’s death. He learnt that Hackman had contacted Ray about a week earlier. (A scribbled note from Ray to Caterina Galli of 30 March – ‘My Dear Galli

(#litres_trial_promo) I am in open distress I beg you come immediately to me’ – possibly refers to the contact.) Ray gave the Gallis her letter to Hackman asking to be left alone, and they read it to Hackman on the evening of 5 April. Galli assured Sandwich that there had been no assignation or meeting between Ray and Hackman at his house, and that, though he had seen Hackman walking in St James’s Park, he had avoided him.

The same day Sandwich sent a message via Walsingham to Hackman telling the murderer of his forgiveness, though the press reported that the Earl also claimed that Hackman ‘has disturbed his peace of mind for ever

(#litres_trial_promo)’. Hackman, on his part, told Walsingham ‘upon his word

(#litres_trial_promo) as a dying man, that he has never spoken to Miss Ray since the beginning of the year 1776, at which time he had proposed marriage and was rejected’. The murderer was pleased to be assured that his victim had no other special admirer: ‘poor Miss Ray was innocent. He lays the whole on Galli’ – and expressed his determination to die. ‘He is desirous to dye by the hand of the law … he wishes not to live himself, he told me today,’ wrote Walsingham to Sandwich, ‘he hoped to suffer as soon as possible

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The agreement between Sandwich and Hackman that Martha Ray was innocent of any wrongdoing placed Caterina Galli in a difficult position. A day after the murder a story was already circulating that Hackman’s decision to kill Ray, and not merely to end his own life, was explained by a stratagem of Galli’s: to get Hackman to leave Ray alone, she had told Hackman that Ray had tired of him and had a new secret lover. Seeing Ray with male companions at the play, he had been driven into a frenzy of jealousy.

The papers reported that Sandwich offered to secure a pardon for Hackman if he were convicted. (As a member of the cabinet, which determined such matters, Sandwich would certainly have been able to exert great influence on Hackman’s behalf, and he clearly did not relish the role of sitting in judgment on a person’s life. Years earlier, commenting on this cabinet function, he had written to a friend, ‘you can’t think how it distresses me to be put to a momentary decision where a man’s life is concerned

(#litres_trial_promo)’.) But as early as two days after the murder Hackman seems to have rejected the Earl’s aid, an act that was rightly interpreted as a determination on his part to die. For, as Fielding explained in a letter to Sandwich on 10 April, Hackman’s conviction seemed inevitable:

I am clearly of opinion

(#litres_trial_promo) that the evidence against Hackman is full and compleat to the last degree and that he can make no defense that would not aggravate his guilt and tend to his conviction; but will not neglect any hint your Lordship gives. As to Insanity it cannot be offered as an excuse as it appeared and can be proved that he was rational and sensible of his Wickedness at 4 in the morning, when I examined him, and has been so ever since.

At first Hackman said that he would plead guilty as charged of Ray’s murder. But in the days after the crime, his sister, his brother-in-law, Booth, and the lawyer who was acting on his behalf, Manasseh Dawes, persuaded him ‘to avail himself of the plausible plea of temporary insanity

(#litres_trial_promo)’. The trial came on at 9.30 on the morning of 16 April. Hackman was defended by Davenport and Silvester, the prosecution conducted by Henry Howarth and Sir John Fielding. The courtroom was packed with fashionable society, the same sort of people who had witnessed the murder the week before. James Boswell, who had visited Hackman’s brother-in-law on a number of occasions and seen Hackman himself in prison, was sitting at the table of defending counsel. John Wilkes, the radical libertine who was one of Sandwich’s most bitter political enemies, was also present, as were a number of famous aristocratic beauties. (Boswell was shocked when Wilkes passed him a note during the trial that said, ‘I always know where the greatest beauty in any place is when Mr Boswell is there, for he contrives to be near her, but does not admire the first grace more than Mr Wilkes does

(#litres_trial_promo).’) Frederick Booth, who had worked so hard to help his brother-in-law, felt unable to watch the proceedings and awaited the verdict outside the court.

The trial opened with the prosecution, which called witnesses to prove the facts of the case. Macnamara’s was the chief testimony. He was followed by ‘Mary Anderson, a fruit girl’ who had also seen the killing, and by an apothecary, Mr Mahon, who had seized one of the pistols from Hackman and helped the constable Blandy make his arrest. The final witness was Mr O’Brien, one of the surgeons who had given evidence at Ray’s inquest. None of the facts were contested by the defence. Sir William Blackstone, who chaired the bench, invited Hackman to offer anything material in his defence. Reading from a prepared statement, the young man admitted the crime, professed himself ready to die, but explained his act as a brief moment of madness: ‘I protest, with that regard for truth which becomes my situation, that the will to destroy her who was ever dearer to me than life, was never mine, until a momentary phrenzy overcame me, and induced me to commit the deed I deplore.’ Hackman’s counsel, Davenport, one of the most famous lawyers of the day, argued the case for insanity, maintaining that Hackman’s suicide note, in which he had asked Booth to take care of Ray after his death, showed that he had not originally intended to kill her.

But the court was not persuaded of the defendant’s case. Blackstone argued that the presence of two pistols showed felonious intent. He added that ‘the prisoner has rested his defense upon a sudden phrenzy of mind; but the judge said, that it was not every fit, or start of tumultuous passion, that would justify the killing of another; but it must be the total loss of reason in every part of life’. The jury was instructed to convict the accused, and Hackman was condemned to death. Boswell hurried from the courtroom to tell Booth, who received the news with ‘mains serrees’

(#litres_trial_promo) (clenched fists).

Eighteenth-century justice was swift. Three days later Hackman woke a little after five in the morning, and spent two hours in private prayer, before taking communion in the chapel in Newgate prison. At nine ‘he came into the press-yard, where a great croud of persons assembled to satisfy their curiosity, at the expense of one shilling each. That all might have an equal share of the sight, a lane was formed by the multitude on each side, through which Mr Hackman passed, dressed in black, leaning on the arm of his friend the Rev. Mr Porter, whose hand he squeezed as he muttered the solemn invocation to Heaven, not to forsake a sinner of so enormous a degree, in the trying hour of death

(#litres_trial_promo).’ Haltered with the rope with which he would be hanged, Hackman was reported as exclaiming, ‘Oh! the sight of this shocks me more than the thought of its intended operation.’ Driven in his mourning coach to Tyburn, jeered and cheered by a group of building workers in Holborn, he spent his final minutes praying for Martha Ray, the Earl of Sandwich and their children, before being ‘launched into Eternity’ at about ten minutes past eleven. James Boswell, who witnessed the hanging, and asked the executioner if he had heard Hackman’s last words (‘No. I thought it a point of ill manners to listen on such occasions’), ended the day drunk: ‘Claret h<urt>. Very ill

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Hackman’s body, like that of all murderers, was then sent to Surgeon’s Hall for dissection. On the day after the execution the nineteen-year-old fencing master Henry Angelo went with a friend to Surgeon’s Hall to view the corpse. ‘Having been placed on a large table, an incision had been made on his stomach, and the flesh was spread over on each side

(#litres_trial_promo).’ Angelo’s next stop was Dolly’s Chop House, but the memory of Hackman’s flesh was too much. He was unable to eat his pork chops and never touched the dish again.

The press reckoned that Hackman’s execution attracted the largest crowd since the hanging of another clergyman, William Dodd, for forgery three years earlier. (Such was the press that two members of the crowd died, trampled after they fell.) But Dodd had been a public figure: the chaplain of the Magdalen Hospital for penitent prostitutes, author of a successful Shakespeare anthology, the friend of literati like Dr Johnson, and the client of a number of prominent aristocrats. Hackman was a nobody before he murdered Ray. Now he was an object of public fascination. When he had dropped his handkerchief to signal he was ready to die, the hangman got down from the cart and pocketed it; the souvenir was very valuable. On the day after his execution, a crowd pressed into the Surgeon’s Hall to see the body: ‘Soon after the doors

(#litres_trial_promo) were opened, so great a crowd was assembled that no genteel person attempted to gain admittance, as it was observed that caps, cardinals, gowns, wigs and hats, &c. were destroyed, without regard to age, sex or distinction.’ In death, as in life, Hackman was able to cause mayhem.

After the first few days of frenzied activity that followed the murder, Sandwich left the Admiralty office and retreated to a friend’s house in Richmond. From there he wrote an importunate note to Lord Bristol, asking him to postpone the opposition’s motion in the House of Lords for his removal as First Lord of the Admiralty:

It is understood

(#litres_trial_promo) that navy matters are to be discussed in the House of Lords on Thursday or Friday next. I am at present totally unfit for business of any kind and unable to collect any materials to support the side of the question that I must espouse. I perceive impropriety in putting off the business by a motion from anyone with whom I am politically connected; I have therefore recourse to your humanity, to request that you would contrive that this point is not brought on till after this day sevennight, by which time I hope to be fit for public business as I ever shall be.

Bristol promised to ask for a postponement, using the excuse that he was suffering from gout, and he ended his reply, ‘No-one can be more concerned than I am for any interruption to your domestic felicity

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Sandwich received many letters of advice and condolence. Aristocratic friends like Lord Hardwicke praised Martha Ray and reassured the Earl of their faith in her virtue: ‘From what I have heard

(#litres_trial_promo) of her Conduct I never doubted but it had been entirely irreproachable.’ Even the prudish George III, who had once argued that Sandwich should not hold political office because of his notorious private life, offered the Earl his sympathy, using a stilted formula that ensured that he did not have to mention Ray’s name: ‘I am sorry

(#litres_trial_promo) Lord Sandwich has met with any severe blow of a private nature. I flatter myself this world scarcely contains a man so void of feeling as not to compassionate your situation.’ One of his colleagues urged on Sandwich the stoicism he had shown in political adversity: ‘You have suffered much and the utmost exertion of your fortitude is now required. Show yourself in this my Lord, as you have done in most other things equal if not superior to the rest of mankind

(#litres_trial_promo).’ Others took a less sympathetic view. As George Duke Taylor remarked, ‘Enemies more inveterate than the rest make no scruple to affirm that they look upon these things are come down upon you as judgments, for your private and public conduct during these ten or twelve years past, which in their language have been both wicked and arbitrary.’ Over the next few years Sandwich’s opponents would occasionally refer to Martha Ray’s murder, but on the whole they respected his privacy.

It did not take long for Sandwich’s life to return to its old routines. He was back in the Admiralty office in the week after Hackman’s execution. He managed to survive the attempt to remove him from office, and was soon deeply involved in plans to thwart the French invasion and keep the government in power. He remained a key political figure until the British surrender at Yorktown effectively ended the American war and brought down Lord North’s government; even after he left the Admiralty, he had a small group of followers in the House of Commons and took an active interest in politics.

Ray’s death was clearly a great loss for Sandwich. His friend Joseph Cradock recalled the period after her murder in his Memoirs. He tells the story of his embarrassment when he first visited Sandwich after Ray’s death. Entering the Earl’s study ‘where the portrait

(#litres_trial_promo) of Miss Ray, a most exact resemblance, still remained over the chimney-piece’, Cradock rather clumsily ‘started on seeing it’. Sandwich ‘instantly endeavored to speak of some unconnected subject; but he looked so ill, and I felt so much embarrassed, that as soon as I possibly could, I most respectfully took my leave’. A similar incident occurred some time later when Sandwich was invited to dine with a few friends at the house of ‘our open-hearted friend Admiral Walsingham’. The evening went well, and Sandwich seemed to regain his spirits, until one of the guests put Sandwich in mind of Ray: ‘one of the company requested that Mrs Bates would favour them with “Shepherds, I have lost my Love”. This was unfortunately the very air that had been introduced by Miss Ray at Hinchingbrooke, and had been always called for by Lord Sandwich. Mr Bates immediately endeavored to prevent its being sung, and by his anxiety increased the distress; but it was too late to pause.’ Sandwich was mortified. He struggled to overcome his feelings, ‘but they were so apparent, that at last he went up to Mrs Walsingham, and in a very confused manner said, he hoped she would excuse him not staying longer at that time, but that he had just recollected some pressing business which required his return to the Admiralty; and bowing to all the company, rather hastily left the room

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