Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century

Yet, within a year, Sandwich had a new mistress, Nelly Gordon, who was to remain his consort until his death in 1792, and who also bore him children. (In his will he arranged an annuity of £100 a year for life for her – in addition to another he had given her in her lifetime for the same sum – and a further £25 a year for life for her child.) Nor was he a recluse. The end of the American war and his active political career enabled him to indulge his passion for music, and he was the key figure behind the enormously popular concerts held to celebrate Handel’s Centenary in 1784.

Apart from Ray’s children – young Basil was soon in all kinds of trouble at school – Ray’s companion Caterina Galli suffered the consequences of her murder more than anyone else. Deprived of her position in Sandwich’s household, she was ostracized from polite society, and could no longer make a living by teaching rich young girls to sing. The Duchess of Bedford wrote to her that she was ‘sorry to inform Signor Galli that she made a determination, at the time the unfortunate affair happened in which she was concerned, never to take notice more of her in any way

(#litres_trial_promo)’. The Duchess did so because she was sure that ‘whatever appearances being against her if she was blameless her good protector would never let her want a proper maintenance without applying to the public

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Galli wrote a succession of letters to Sandwich in her native Italian complaining of her plight. A month after the murder she told Sandwich, ‘I am ill and afflicted to see myself exposed in a book and in the papers so unjustly wronged as well as my character ruined that I don’t know how I can live in the world

(#litres_trial_promo).’ Nine months later her situation was even worse:

I cannot assist myself in my profession, being badly liked by everyone who believe me to be guilty; I have lost my reputation in the face of my protectors being sufficient to madden any person … Where can I look for assistance? They all tell me I should defend myself against the charges and that my silence makes me more culpable and that they will know that your excellency does not admit me and that you dislike me. Lord I believe I have given you sufficient proofs of my innocence at not having taken any part of deceit, I have taken in due time my oath. I have been by orders of your excellency to the court, did not hide myself or otherwise flee. I have always been prepared to go before any judge and prove my innocence. I have lost both my health and reputation as well as money through me not defending myself and punishing the culpables, and all this I did through the certainty that your excellency will be my protector as you sent me information both by word and letter that you would always help me

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Impoverished, Galli was forced to return to the stage, though her voice had gone. She made a number of concert appearances in the 1790s, when she was deemed to cut a pathetic figure, and was given money by the Royal Society of Musicians. We know Sandwich donated twenty guineas to her and may have given her more. But she remained in sad circumstances, and when her husband died she had to borrow the money to bury him. As a result of Martha Ray’s murder she had lost her employment and could no longer work in the job she knew best and loved.

These, as far as I can tell, are the ‘facts’ of the murder by James Hackman of Martha Ray. They make up the story that almost all commentators, both at the time and subsequently, agree on. But they leave much unanswered. No one doubted that Hackman killed Ray, that he was the black figure who came out of the crowd and shot her to death before a shocked public. But what lay behind the murder? Why did he kill her? What was their relationship like? Was Hackman demented, or did he have understandable reasons to shoot her? Such a brutal killing, like any act that temporarily tears the social fabric apart, called out for explanation. But the facts alone could not provide an answer. Evidence about motive was hard to come by, not least because, as we shall see, there were interested parties concerned to keep the case under wraps. The vacuum created by a lack of information was, however, quickly filled by supposition, speculation and interpretation. For plenty of people, for many different reasons, wanted to publicize their own versions of the lives of Hackman, Ray and Sandwich.

The murder was, of course, a personal tragedy, but it was also a public event. Public, not only because it involved one of the most prominent households in the land and one of the nation’s most important political figures, but because it received so much publicity. In the 1770s London boasted a thriving press with five daily and eight or nine triweekly papers that were widely circulated in London and in many provincial towns. By the time of Ray’s death newspaper proprietors were paying the government an annual stamp duty for more than 12.5 million papers. The provinces also had their own papers – nearly forty by the 1770s – that shamelessly plundered news and information from the London press, adding vignettes of their own. Within days of Hackman’s crime accounts of the murder, commentary on its significance and speculation about why it had happened flowed out from the newspaper printers’ offices in the vicinity of St Paul’s Cathedral and spread across the nation, as news and stories were duplicated in local papers, then in magazines and periodicals. Readers of the Public Advertiser, the Gazetteer, the St James’s Chronicle, Lloyd’s Evening Post, the London Evening Post, the Norwich Mercury, and the Newcastle Chronicle – in fact of every London paper and most of those in the provinces – were regaled with the unfolding story of Hackman’s crime. The flow of information

(#litres_trial_promo) explains why in his Norfolk parish Parson Woodforde broke off his usual culinary catalogue – no diarist has devoted so much space to the joys of the table – to bewail the fate of Hackman, a fellow man of the cloth, while at Salisbury the gentleman musician and young lawyer John Marsh tut-tutted in his journal about the fate of a young man he had known at school.

The eighteenth-century press made Hackman’s crime into a ‘media event’ both because it was a sensational crime and because the events of 7 April were so obviously connected to stories that the print media in general had been telling the public for the last twenty years. These were tales of political corruption and moral depravity in high places, of male aristocratic debauchery, and of the growing power and influence of beautiful and intelligent women who used their charms for their own ends. This culture of scandal, propagated by the press, thrived on supposition, rumour, and speculation. It took ‘the facts’ and wove them into a variety of seamless narratives that opened up all sorts of possible interpretation. Such stories were designed to sell newspapers and magazines, attack the government, traduce and shame individuals, and settle personal scores.

The press of the 1770s is not therefore a place we should go in pursuit of ‘the truth’ about Hackman and Ray’s relationship, but it does show how the different versions of Hackman’s crime were shaped and fashioned. The aftermath of Ray’s death saw a struggle conducted in the press to form and even to determine how the public viewed the affair.

CHAPTER 2 The Press: A Case of Sentimental Murder (#ulink_9cc15cc9-1e7c-563c-9237-63c6f6dfcaeb)

THOUGH THERE WAS plenty of pressing news for the papers to cover in the spring of 1779 – the failing war with the American colonists and the internecine political battles in parliament – the newspapers devoted a great deal of space to the killing of the Earl of Sandwich’s mistress and the subsequent conduct and execution of her murderer. Between the night of Martha Ray’s murder and Hackman’s execution on 19 April daily items about the case appeared in many London papers. At first these were dominated by detailed accounts of the events of 7 April, reconstructions that culminated in the evidence offered at Hackman’s trial on 16 April. But there was also an obsessive interest in Hackman himself. Papers reported on his moods and comments, trying to understand what had led this handsome, respectable young man to commit a crime of such enormity. They published many tantalizing vignettes of Hackman, Ray, and Sandwich both before and after the crime. And many speculated about the circumstances that had led to the crime and offered comments on its moral import.

To the untutored eye these items can seem to be little more than the fumblings of an unsophisticated news media trying to piece together a story. But, as we shall see, the coverage of the Hackman/ Ray affair was part of a more complex plot that involved attempts on the part of the Earl of Sandwich and the friends of James Hackman to shape and control public response to the sensational killing. This was possible only because of the peculiar state of the newspaper press at the time. Since the accession of George III in 1760 the rapid expansion of the press had produced a new kind of newspaper, more opinionated than ever before, fuller of comment and criticism, yet not governed by what today we would consider the professional protocols of impartial reporting and editorial control. As the press grew, so papers changed in size and content. A loophole in the 1757 duties on paper made it cheaper for printers to make their papers larger and increase the number of their pages. They needed more copy. Newspapers had always carried many advertisements (their key source of revenue) as well as official government information, commercial news, and items gathered from coffee-houses and interested readers. Though many had a political bias – like the notoriously anti-government London Evening Post – most were primarily advertisers and purveyors of information. Opinion – on matters political, commercial, social and cultural – was found in pamphlets or weekly papers, like The Test and The Contest, that were editorial rather than informational. But with the change in the law, newspapers began to publish political commentary and essays on subjects ranging from taste to science, theatrical, music and art reviews. And, in some cases, they printed lots of gossip and scandal.

Where did this news and commentary come from? Most papers were owned by consortia of businessmen – theatrical proprietors, booksellers, and auctioneers – who considered papers chiefly as advertising vehicles. They were put together by a printer, who may have had strong opinions but was not a journalist, and the few part-time news-gatherers whom the papers employed could hardly be described as reporters. What few experienced journalists there were, were employed to cover politics, reporting parliamentary debates or such sensational events as the court martial of Admiral Keppel, whose trial ended just a few months before Ray’s murder. Henry ‘Memory’ Woodfall, whose amazing recall was vital, as note taking was prohibited during parliamentary debates, was the most celebrated of this small group of reporters. Papers therefore relied on the public for their information and commentary. Most of what appeared in the press was either unsolicited information and commentary from interested parties or news sold by peddlers for a profit. Above all, the paper relied on its correspondents, publishing huge numbers of letters submitted by its readers. The Gazetteer, one of the first papers to speculate on the causes of Hackman’s crime, received no fewer than 861 letters in one four-month period, publishing 560 of them ‘at length’ and a further 262 in abbreviated form under the heading ‘Observations of our Correspondents’. Long articles, masquerading as correspondence and signed by such figures as ‘Honestus’, ‘A Friend to the Theatre’, ‘Cato’, ‘Old Slyboots’, and, most notoriously, ‘Junius’ fanned the flames of controversy, offering views on politics, religion, taste, novels, painting, the state of nation and the nature of crime. Anonymity and pseudonyms protected the authors, who included leading politicians, playwrights, artists, magistrates and doctors as well as opinionated readers.

James Boswell, who found his métier and his fame with his Life of Samuel Johnson published in 1791, was for much of his London life a typical newspaper correspondent. He wrote to the papers to puff his works, denigrate rivals, and comment on the issues of the day. On the afternoon of Hackman’s trial on 16 April, for instance, he strolled into the office of Henry Woodfall, the publisher of the Daily Advertiser, offering him an account of the trial, only to discover that ‘A blackguard being was writing a well-expressed account of the trial

(#litres_trial_promo)’. Nothing daunted he went on to the managers of the St James’sChronicle, who inserted his anonymous piece in the paper of the following day. This essay contained a long quotation and a puff for an essay in The Hypochondriack on the nature of love that Boswell himself had written and published earlier. Boswell then wrote a highly personal account, which Woodfall printed in the Public Advertiser for 19 April, of Frederick Booth’s reaction to his brother-in-law’s conviction – ‘“Well”, said Mr Booth, “I would rather have him found guilty with truth and honour than escape by a mean evasion”.’ ‘A sentiment’, Boswell commented, ‘truly noble, bursting from a heart rent with anguish!

(#litres_trial_promo)’ When a false

(#litres_trial_promo) report appeared in Lloyd’s Evening Post that Boswell was in the coach that had taken Hackman to his death at Tyburn Tree, he rushed off to the offices of the St James’s Chronicle, and the Public Advertiser, as well as Lloyd’s Evening Post to get them to insert a paragraph to correct the story.

Boswell did not expect to be paid for his letters and paragraphs, but many who dealt with newspaper proprietors were in it for the money. A German visitor to London was surprised by the ‘prodigious multitude of persons’ engaged in collecting news. ‘Among these’, he wrote, ‘may be reckoned the paragraph writers, who go to coffee houses and public places to pick up anecdotes and the news of the day, which they reduce to short sentences, and are paid in proportion to their number and authenticity

(#litres_trial_promo).’ Some papers had receiving stations for contributions. The Gazetteer, for instance, used J. Marks, a bookseller in St Martin’s Lane, paying him sixpence ‘for every letter or article of intelligence transmitted to the paper’.

This informal process of news-gathering supposed a very different relationship between the press and its readers than the print media have today. Those who read the papers – a broadly based group that extended well beyond the aristocracy, even if it did not include a great many of the poor – were also those who wrote them. The newspaper was not an authoritative organ, written by professionals to offer objective information to the public, but a place where public rumour, news, and intelligence could circulate as if it were printed conversation. Freedom of the press in this period meant not only freedom from government control but freedom of access – not just to information, but to the pages of the press itself in order to transmute opinions into news. The producer of a paper was not so much an editor, shaping its opinions, as a technician, making available a new means of transmitting the disparate opinions of the public at large. The press was thus very open to manipulation.

Many commentators believed that the enormous growth in news, fuelled by the business interests of the newspaper proprietors and lacking any check on its veracity, created a climate of scandal and sensation. Collecting so-called news, which newspapers quickly took up, copied and stole from one another, was often indiscriminate. Paragraph writers created press stories that played fast and loose with the facts and were frequently embellished. As one critic complained:

The general run of readers have not seen the paragraphical drudges, hurrying over the town for malicious materials, and eves-dropping at every door of intelligence; while another tribe of slaves, sit aloof, at the task of improvement and invention … nor are they perhaps aware that other inferior agents are constantly employed in picking up invidious anecdotes of domestic misfortune; and private imprudence. These hint-catchers have no sooner filled the budget to the brim, than their labours are delivered to the embellisher, by whom they are finished and arranged, and sent into the world

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Commentators were especially concerned at how personal matters and private lives had become a staple of the press. Some blamed this new fashion on the political journalism of the 1760s, first perfected by John Wilkes in his weekly paper The North Briton, which combined political criticism with highly personal attacks on such figures as the Princess Dowager, George III’s mother, and the king’s favourite, Lord Bute, who was accused of being the Princess’s lover. Wilkes mixed sexual scandal with government policy. This was a familiar tactic in the histories of royal courts where women were often said to have had excessive influence because of their hold over male rulers. But Wilkes and his followers extended this tactic by attacking ministers and leading aristocrats for their private moral conduct, maintaining that this made them unfit for public office. This led to unprecedented exposure of the private lives of public figures. One critic of the ‘new journalism’ complained to the Morning Post:

The Political Controversy at the beginning of the Present reign, taught printers to feel their Power: we then first find Personal Abuse, unrestrained, stalk abroad, and boldly attack by Name the most respectable Characters. Your brethren were not idle in taking the hint: from that Period we find a material change in the stile of every News-Paper; every Public Man became an object of their attention; and many a sixpence has a Patriot earned, by Paragraphs, which a few years before, would have brought the Printer unpitied to the Pillory

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The advent of the newspaper editor in the 1770s led to little change. The first major editor, the Reverend Henry Bate, used his Morning Post simply to perfect existing journalistic practices. He extended the coverage of his paper to include boxing and cricket as well as theatrical and art reviews; most notoriously, he made a part of the paper into a satirical scandal sheet, attacking individual men and women of fashion, hectoring his theatrical opponents (Bate was a minor playwright), and peddling the latest gossip. He was one of the models for Snake, the purveyor of poisonous rumour who inserts anonymous paragraphs in the newspaper in the opening scene of The School for Scandal (1777), Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s pointed satire of a society obsessed with ‘inventing, adding and

(#litres_trial_promo) misrepresenting everything they hear, or their rage, folly, malice or prolific brains can suggest’. Bate deliberately cultivated notoriety, and fought a number of duels with readers who believed themselves maligned or libelled by his publication. Eventually he was imprisoned for accusing the Duke of Richmond of consorting with the enemy during the American war. Bate was said to take fees for publishing some paragraphs and agreeing to suppress others. He was also a client of the government. He had a pension of £200 a year from the secret service funds in return for keeping his ‘Newspaper open for all writings in favour of Government’. In 1781 he

(#litres_trial_promo) was finally paid off with a gift of £3,250, so that he could purchase a handsome clerical living for himself.

Bate made little attempt to conceal the Morning Post’s connection with Lord North’s administration, frequently beginning reports, ‘As well as our government can judge’, or ‘the government says’ or ‘we are authorized to say’. Bate knew Sandwich and seems to have dealt with him directly on a number of occasions. Lord Bristol, who led the attack on Sandwich in the House of Lords on 23 April, wrote on the following day to an opposition publisher, John Almon, asking him to insert his version of the debate in a number of newspapers ‘with[ou]t saying you had it from me’, to counter the influence of what he described as ‘Ld. SANDWICH’S Morning Post’. It is not surprising that the most sympathetic portrayal of Sandwich in the aftermath of the murder came from the pages of Bate’s paper. Conversely, the accounts of Hackman’s crime in the Gazetteer, the London Evening Post and the London Chronicle – all papers with which John Almon was connected and all associated with the parliamentary opposition – were markedly less sympathetic to Ray and Sandwich.

All the political parties tried to influence the press. Sandwich had been doing so for many years. In the 1760s he employed his chaplain, Dr James Scott, to write newspaper letters under the pseudonyms ‘Anti-Sejanus’ and ‘Old Slyboots’, that were some of the most successful political polemics of the decade. And he was not averse to planting paragraphs of news (as opposed to pieces of political commentary) in the newspapers, not as pieces of information but as ways of influencing opinion. Newspapers in the 1770s were halls of mirrors in which partial views and tendentious opinions were refracted so as to appear as transparent ‘facts’. As we enter them, we have to remember that nothing was quite what it seemed.

On 20 April 1779 the Gazetteer interrupted its report on Hackman’s final hours and execution to speculate on the nature of and motives for his crime. The author of this mélange of reporting and reflection was probably a Mr Newman of Guiltspur Street, who was paid occasional fees for items about trials and executions. ‘There is evidently a something’, he mused, ‘hangs suspended in doubt, and remains unrevealed’ about the case. Hackman’s suicide note to his brother-in-law Booth, he remarked, ‘pours the Blessings of heaven on the murdered lady, and avows an intention of the murderer to kill himself only’. Why, then, did he change his mind? ‘Love could not be the impulse – that passion might have led him to act the hero before his mistress; but the fondness, which dictated the affectionate sentence in his letter, and breathed preservation to the lady, can never be supposed to turn into resentment without a cause, and operate to her destruction.’ Perhaps the sight of Ray on Mr Macnamara’s arm drove him into a jealous rage. ‘But if so,’ the article asked, ‘why did he not confess it?’ The evidence of the two pistols was ambiguous, since the unreliability of firearms meant that many suicides armed themselves with more than one weapon. ‘There is certainly a part in his defense that requires explanation

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The Gazetteer then shifted from speculation to titillating gossip. ‘Besides many other

(#litres_trial_promo) cogent reasons, which it may not be proper to disclose, the talkative part of mankind say, that a certain noble lord had his doubts of the true motives that actuated the perpetrator in this extraordinary transaction.’ Perhaps, the paper surmised, Martha Ray had had enough of Sandwich and really wanted to leave him. The rumour was ‘That Miss Ray was satiated with the vicious enjoyment of splendour, and desirous to enter the Temple of Hymen with a man who had given every proof of affection; but that there was some barrier started to prevent the union, and she absolutely refused to marry him, though in the hour of reciprocal tenderness she had promised

(#litres_trial_promo)’. Even if this were untrue, the paper concluded, Sandwich had gone to great lengths to find out Hackman’s motives: ‘it is certain

(#litres_trial_promo), that the Noble Lord himself, or one of his friends, questioned Mr Hackman in prison when the solemnity of the sentence was fresh on his mind, as to the inducement for committing the crime’. Yet much remained obscure. ‘In short’, the article ended, ‘there is so much to be said on both sides of the question that arises on a review of the circumstances, that it might seem premature, as it is certainly difficult to form an opinion

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Such difficulties certainly did not inhibit the press from reporting details of the murder, the interrogation, trial and execution of Hackman, or from speculating about the love triangle. As early as the following day the St James’s Chronicle sketched in the background to the affair:

Upon Enquiry into

(#litres_trial_promo) the Cause of this desperate Action, we learn that it was occasioned by an unhappy Passion which the Prisoner had entertained for the Deceased. This Gentleman, whose name is Hackman, was formerly an Officer in the Army, and being upon a Recruiting Party at Huntingdon, in the summer of 1775, saw Miss Ray first at H————ke, to which he had been invited by his Lordship. After that he saw her several Times both in Town and Country, in one of which Visits, it is said, he proposed Marriage to her, which she very genteelly declined; and to prevent any disagreeable Consequences, never after admitted him to her Presence. This, it is supposed, driving him to Distraction, induced him to commit the bloody Act above-mentioned, which he meant also to have been fatal to himself.

Over the following weeks more and more detail was published about Hackman and his victim.

We can be sure that most of the items appearing in the press were planted either by Sandwich and his supporters or by the friends of James Hackman, notably his brother-in-law and the young lawyer Manasseh Dawes who took it upon himself to be the chief apologist in the press for the murderer. Many readers were aware that what they were reading was parti pris; indeed, the Gazetteer recognized this when it wrote of ‘both sides of the question

(#litres_trial_promo)’. The difficulty for readers was how to interpret the different accounts.

The Gazetteer had been right about the questioning of Hackman: Walsingham, acting on Sandwich’s behalf, had spoken at length with him the day after the crime. But the fragments that survive make the two men’s conversation appear more like an attempt to agree on a story than an effort to investigate the truth of the matter. Both sides seem to have been seeking common ground, searching for a version of events they could agree upon. Their first concern was to establish Martha Ray’s innocence. Hackman, wrote Walsingham, ‘is desirous to dye by the hand of the law and says he is happy to know that Miss Ray was innocent … Her innocence being cleared up and your forgiveness as a Christian is all he wishes for.’ But Hackman and Sandwich differed over what Ray’s innocence consisted of. For Hackman it was that she had not taken a new lover, as he claimed Caterina Galli had told him; for Sandwich it was that she had not been carrying on an illicit affair with Hackman. Thus the Earl was relieved to report to his lawyer that ‘Mr H has since declared to Captain Walsingham upon the word of 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’ and he told at least one newspaper, the General Advertiser, that he was sure that Hackman and Ray had not been with one another since their earlier meetings at Hinchingbrooke. Quite apart from their undoubted affection for Martha Ray, both men had strong reasons to assert her innocence. It meant that Hackman could place the blame for his actions on Galli – ‘he lays the whole on Galli