Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century

(#litres_trial_promo).’ Onlookers were moved by his distraught behaviour, the papers noted: ‘His manifest

(#litres_trial_promo) agitation, contrition, and poignant grief, too sensibly affected all present, to wish to add to such heart-felt misery by judicial interrogations during such keen distress of mind.’ An unexpected delay in proceedings made him worse, and it took him a while to recover his composure and display ‘the utmost steadiness’. During Fielding’s questioning Hackman ‘wept very much and was entirely convulsed each time the name of the deceased was mentioned. He did not palliate his offence, and said he eagerly wished to die.’ The London Evening Post recorded that when Fielding presented him with evidence of the shooting, ‘he sank into a grief which is impossible for the power of words to paint

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The General Advertiser of 13 April drew a general moral lesson from this piece of sentimental theatre: ‘The very humane behaviour of Sir John Fielding on a late melancholy occasion, and the tender constructions of a pitying audience on the conduct of the unhappy subject, does infinite honour to the laws of our country, and displays the humanity of our nature in the most beautiful and lively colours.’ People may have been shocked by the crime, ‘but who will say that the author of the shocking tragedy of Wednesday last is not amply punished? Who can picture to himself the misery that must penetrate and fill the deepest recesses of his mind, who has suffered himself to commit the horrid crime of murder, through the dire excess of a passion the most admirable that can fill the heart, while within the pale of reason?

(#litres_trial_promo)’ As another press item concluded, ‘the tear of

(#litres_trial_promo) compassion should not be withheld from him in the moment that Justice demands an exemplary expiation of the deed’.

A similarly powerful sympathetic response dominates the press accounts of Hackman’s trial, which contrast strongly with the formal record of the court proceedings which was remarkably prosaic. Most of the proceedings were taken up with establishing the facts of the case, calling successive witnesses to satisfy the law by confirming what everyone already knew. Hackman’s counsel did not dispute the facts, and asked witnesses very few questions. What would have been of most interest to modern legal scholars – Davenport’s speech at the end of the trial arguing that Hackman was innocent on the grounds of temporary insanity, or ‘irresistible impulse’ – was not even recorded by the shorthand writer. Given that one of the perquisites of the recorder’s job included the profits from the publication and sale of the trial’s transcript, it would seem that there was very little interest in the legal deliberations of the trial.

Blackstone, like most judges at the time, was strongly opposed to pleas of temporary insanity, and he made it clear that such a plea had no legal status (English law does not recognize anything like crime passionnelle) and that insanity pleas in general were admissible only if strong evidence of the defendant’s history of madness were presented. But no one seems to have thought that Hackman would be acquitted. Commentators as diverse as Horace Walpole and Sir John Fielding concurred in Hackman’s inevitable fate. There was little interest in the trial’s outcome, in the possibility of a surprise verdict of innocent. What mattered was Hackman’s performance in justifying his actions and contemplating his fate.

This is clear from responses to the trial. For Lady Ossory, Hackman’s conduct in court ‘was wonderfully touching

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(#litres_trial_promo) his defence drew tears from all parts of the Court; so decently and properly he conducted himself.’ ‘The behaviour of this unfortunate criminal’, ran another item, ‘was in every respect descriptive of his feelings. When the evidence related the fatal act, his soul seemed to burst within him. His defence was intermixed with many sighs and groans, and the trickling tear bespoke penitence … and remorse. The letter to his brother melted the most obdurate heart, and whilst the horror of the deed shocked the understanding of the audience, there was not a spectator who denied his pity

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(#litres_trial_promo) detest the crime,’ wrote the London Evening Post, ‘a tear of pity will fall from every humane eye on the fate of the unhappy criminal.’ Witnesses, or – as it was more usually said – the audience was preoccupied with Hackman’s performance. Boswell was pleased that the killer never tried to palliate his crime: ‘He might have pleaded that he shot Miss Ray by accident, but he fairly told the truth: that in a moment of frenzy he did intend it.’ When Boswell left the courtroom to tell Frederick Booth of the verdict, the first question Booth asked him was about his brother-in-law’s behaviour. ‘As well, Sir,’ responded Boswell, ‘as you or any of his friends could wish: with decency, propriety, and in such a manner as to interest every one present.’ ‘Well,’ said Booth, ‘I would rather have him found guilty with truth and honour than escape by a mean evasion.’ Boswell thought Booth’s reply ‘a sentiment truly noble, bursting from a heart rent with anguish!

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Three days later, when Hackman went to the gallows, Lady Ossory described his conduct as ‘glorious

(#litres_trial_promo)’. One paper commented, ‘He behaved with a most astonishing composure, with the greatest fortitude, and most perfect resignation

(#litres_trial_promo).’ In the chapel in Newgate prison his conduct reduced spectators to tears. In his last hours, ‘he collected his fortitude, he employed every moment of life to the worship of the Almighty, and prepared himself to meet the awful Judge of the World by prayers, and the overflowings of a contrite heart

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In the eyes of most observers Hackman’s conduct was redemptive. His spontaneous grief affirmed the authenticity of his love for Martha Ray. The press invariably interpreted his lachrymose conduct as being prompted by her death and not by thoughts of his impending execution. He wept not for himself but, more nobly, for his dead lover.

Hackman’s stoicism before the law and on the gallows showed him to be a person in command of his faculties. Nearly all the papers characterized his conduct in the same way: it showed his contrition and grief about what he had done, and re-established a sense of himself as a sane man. ‘He repeated that affecting acknowledgement of his guilt … and seemed in a state of composure, unruffled with the idea of punishment … His whole behaviour was manly, but not bold; his mind seemed to be quite calm, from a firm belief in the mercies of his Saviour

(#litres_trial_promo).’ Commentators spoke of Hackman’s manliness, which they contrasted with his behaviour in killing Ray when, as they saw it, he suffered ‘a momentary frenzy’ that ‘overpowered’ him. The rhetoric was one in which Hackman lost his masculine identity in committing the murder, but recovered it through his stoic conduct during the trial and at the execution. The murderer was now himself cast as a victim, constantly referred to as ‘the unfortunate’ Mr Hackman. Though Hackman’s lawyers had failed to persuade Blackstone and his fellow judge of the defence’s case, their client’s speech and conduct were readily accommodated within a sentimental story in which the life of an otherwise virtuous young man was destroyed by a love affair that had gone catastrophically wrong. Ray’s story ended with her murder, but Hackman’s spectacle of suffering continued to the gallows.

Hackman’s repeated enactment of his exquisite sensibility, the legibility of his feelings as they manifested themselves in his conduct, fashioned bonds of sympathy, despite the crime he had perpetrated. As Boswell had written in The Hypochondriack, a year before Hackman’s execution, ‘the curiosity which impels people to be present at such affecting scenes, is certainly a proof of sensibility not of callousness

(#litres_trial_promo)’. Or as Adam Smith explained it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, ‘We all desire … to feel how each other is affected, to penetrate into each other’s bosoms, and to observe the sentiments and affections which really subsist there. The man who indulges us in this natural passion, who invites us into his heart, who, as it were, sets open the gates of his breast to us, seems to exercise a species of hospitality more delightful than any other … How weak and imperfect soever the views of the open-hearted, we take pleasure to enter them.’ Smith, in fact, had specifically cited a murderer as a person with whom one could not establish bonds of sympathy, whose actions could not be understood sympathetically. But Hackman was thought to be no ordinary killer. He was a man who slayed his lover and was himself destroyed not by his wickedness but by his overwhelming affection for Martha Ray. His conduct after Ray’s death redeemed him. Like Martha Ray, he became a sacrifice to love.

The horror provoked by Hackman’s crime combined with the sympathy excited by his obvious infatuation and contrition made him an object of public fascination. Many in libertine circles concurred with James Boswell’s view – ‘Natural to destroy what one cannot have

(#litres_trial_promo)’ or, as he later put it in conversation with the notorious roué Lord Pembroke, ‘Natural to <shoo>t mistress’. Such views were unsurprising among the young bloods of St James’s and the Strand, but even women like Lady Ossory, who had more sympathy for Martha Ray, were moved by Hackman’s intensity of feeling. Though there was some talk of Hackman being insane in the first few days after the murder, it soon dwindled away. True, his action was frenzied, his mind temporarily disordered by jealousy, but it seemed understandable in a young man hopelessly infatuated with an unattainable woman. And the source of his crime was not malevolence or depravity but the positive impulse of love.

The Hackman case was used, particularly by young men like James Boswell and the anonymous author of The Case and Memoirs of James Hackman, to explore their own feelings about romantic love and its perils, hazards that were understood not as a threat to women but as a challenge to a man’s ability to govern his feelings. This was more than sympathy for Hackman; it was a positive identification with him. Boswell was particularly explicit about this. In a letter published in the Public Advertiser he wrote, ‘Let those whose passions are keen and impetuous consider, with awful fear, the fate of Mr Hackman. How often have they infringed the laws of morality by indulgence! He, upon one check, was suddenly hurried to commit a dreadful act.’ He elaborated on this theme in another letter, printed in the St James’s Chronicle. ‘Hackman’s case’, Boswell maintained, ‘is by no means unnatural.’ Citing an earlier essay he had written in The Hypochondriack, he pointed to the selfishness of romantic love; ‘there is no mixture of disinterested kindness for the person who is the object of it’. ‘The natural effect of disappointed love’, he concluded, ‘is to excite the most horrid resentment against its object, at least to make us prefer the destruction of our mistress to seeing her possessed by a rival.’ Adopting a biblical tone, Boswell drew a moral from Hackman’s story based on his close identification of all young men of feeling with the killer: ‘Think ye that this unfortunate gentleman’s general character is, in the eye of Heaven or of generous men in their private feelings, worse than yours? No it is not. And unless ye are upon your guard, ye may all likewise be in his melancholy situation

(#litres_trial_promo).’ Hackman had shown that he was capable of manly composure, but it had come too late.

Hackman’s conduct after the murder reinforced his claim that he had been tricked into believing that Ray had a new lover. Surely a man who behaved with such dignity after his crime could not have been crazed, nor could he have plotted or planned to kill his lover. (Boswell never even considered the possibility that Hackman might have set out on the night of 7 April to murder Martha Ray.) Some other, outside circumstance must have pushed him over the edge. As we have seen, Hackman told Walsingham that he blamed it all on Galli, and rumours to that effect were soon in circulation, though they did not feature much in the newspapers. Hackman did not press the point and did not mention it at his trial. He had strong reasons not to antagonize Sandwich. Blaming Galli would not have helped his defence at the trial – indeed, it would have supplied a stronger motive for premeditated murder – and any vindictiveness would not have sat well with his determination to die with dignity. But once Hackman’s body had been sent to Surgeon’s Hall his supporters and critics of Sandwich were free to attack the Earl and Martha Ray’s chaperone.

Soon after Hackman’s execution most London papers ran advertisements for a new pamphlet entitled The Case and Memoirs of James Hackman written by ‘A PARTICULAR FRIEND’ and published, it was claimed, in order to prevent other ‘spurious publications’. The Case and Memoirs was an immediate success. Within two weeks of its first appearance, the publisher was announcing its fifth edition, promising a large print run so that eager readers would not be disappointed. The tenth and

(#litres_trial_promo) final edition appeared in early June.

The Case and Memoirs was certainly the most eloquent defence of James Hackman, an apology that used the sympathy that Hackman had excited during his trial and execution to place his conduct in the most favourable light. In many ways it trod familiar ground. It emphasized Hackman’s ‘manly and collected behaviour’ and how ‘his deportment was noble, and gained him the admiration of his judge and jury in the course of his trial’. It framed the entire story as one of Hackman’s heroic, eventually successful struggle to tame his passions. It was a saga about how a man was able to recover from a momentary act of madness.

But the publication of The Case and Memoirs also marked the breakdown of the consensual view of the murder that had been shaped and shared by the friends of Hackman and Sandwich. The author of The Case and Memoirs, confronted by public scepticism of his interpretation of events, grew progressively more outspoken and altered the fourth edition in early May to make his picture of Hackman even more sympathetic. Eventually, in the seventh edition, he placed the blame for her death squarely on the shoulders of Martha Ray. He even tried to blackmail Caterina Galli into implicating the Earl of Sandwich, offering to absolve her from blame in the affair, if she would pin the blame on Ray’s keeper.

The Case and Memoirs was published by George Kearsley, the former publisher of John Wilkes’s North Briton, one of the men who had been arrested in 1763 when the government had tried to put a stop to Wilkes’s acerbic and very popular periodical. Kearsley, threatened with prosecution by the Secretary of State’s office, had reluctantly – and much to the disgust of Wilkes – revealed all he knew about the North Briton and its author’s publishing activities. In 1764, possibly as a result of his difficulties during the Wilkes affair, he was declared bankrupt, though he was soon back in business. Embarrassed and humiliated, Kearsley was full of resentment against members of the government, including Lord Sandwich who had played a major part in his prosecution.

Kearsley was a general bookseller who had first started publishing books, pamphlets and papers in the late 1750s in Ludgate Street, moving to new premises in Fleet Street, opposite Fetter Lane, in 1773. Though he had no particular speciality, throughout the 1770s he published pamphlets and poems attacking the moral depravity of the aristocracy, as well as political tracts attacking the government and supporting the American colonists. He had close connections with John Almon, Wilkes’s publisher and friend, who had been behind the attack on Sandwich and Martha Ray for corruption in 1773, and he was connected to the group of booksellers who took a consistently critical line on the government throughout the 1770s. He had no love for the Earl of Sandwich. So he was an obvious figure for an author to approach if he were bent on publishing a defence of Hackman. But even if Kearsley had not had reasons to dislike Sandwich and Ray, he would have jumped at the chance of printing the life of such a notorious and controversial figure.

The anonymous author of The Case and Memoirs was in fact a young barrister of the Inner Temple, Manasseh Dawes, who had assisted in Hackman’s defence. Though he occasionally makes a brief appearance in the press reports of 1779, very little is known about him apart from his fame for legal erudition and what can be gleaned from his published work. His preoccupations in print are revealing. His first books – Miscellanies and Fugitive Essays both of which Kearsley published in 1776 – mixed poems and stories of the trials of love with short political essays supporting the opposition, political reform and the American colonists. His subsequent writings tackled such issues as libel, crime and punishment, the extent of the supreme power, and the nature of political representation. His position, though sometimes eccentric, followed a consistently reformist line.

If we read Dawes’s first writings – his poems and stories of romantic love – autobiographically, then it is not hard to see why he took up Hackman’s cause. His verses are full of the irrational power of love. Love is a source of woe, a wound, a form of possession that takes hold of its victim: ‘What tho’ I once resolv’d and strove/To quell and spurn the force of love,/I then could not my mind controul,/ While such fond pangs were in my soul

(#litres_trial_promo)’. In his stories Dawes was much exercised by the tension between sexual passion and proper conduct, especially among young men. He seems to have accepted that sexual desire (and its fulfilment) was natural outside wedlock, but to have worried about how illicit sexual practice, the guilt and perplexity it produced, affected relationships. His first publications are full of youthful ardor and confusion, as well as a passionate adherence to political probity and the reform of the law.

Dawes claimed to

(#litres_trial_promo) know Hackman and his brother-in-law Frederick Booth well, but in the controversy that blew up about the authenticity of his pamphlet he was forced to concede in the press that he had known neither of them before the notorious case. So Dawes chose to intrude himself into the story – to offer Hackman legal advice, to explain his turbulent feelings, and to act as his public apologist. Certainly he was Hackman’s visible supporter. The St James’s Chronicle reported that ‘Mr Hackman was attended into and out of court by his friend, Mr Dawes, a Gentleman of the Bar, who has kindly attended him in his Confinement, and endeavoured to give him all the Counsel and Satisfaction in his power

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Dawes went to great lengths to give his pamphlet the authority of being Hackman’s version of why Ray had died. The advertisements for The Case and Memoirs claimed its swift publication was intended to pre-empt less reliable accounts that might place Hackman in an unfavourable light. And in the pamphlet’s dedication to the Earl of Sandwich Dawes makes the claim to be acting as Hackman’s spokesman clear: ‘the following pages … are authentic, because they are taken from the mouth of Mr Hackman while in confinement, and reduced to writing by a person who … knew him, and respected his very amiable and fair character

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But from the outset there were doubts about the authority of Dawes’s apologia. The day before The Case and Memoirs was published Frederick Booth printed a notice in the newspapers reminding readers that only he had the documents to produce an authentic ‘case’: ‘I think it necessary to be known, that no Materials for such a Publication are or can be in any Hands but my own; and that if ever it should seem to me proper to give any Account to the Public, it will be signed with my own name.’ Later apologists for Martha Ray claimed that Booth denounced Dawes’s writing as a self-interested fraud, but Booth may just have wanted to make clear that he was not, as many might suppose, the author of The Case.

Even though – or perhaps because – The Case and Memoirs was such an extraordinary success, Dawes was forced on the defensive. When the fifth edition was published in early May, he inserted a notice in the papers indignantly asserting his probity and veracity:

There being some doubts with the public of the truth of this publication, the Author of it declares, on his honour and veracity, (which he hopes are unimpeachable) that the facts contained in it are genuine, he having presented it to the public for the purpose expressed in the dedication, and no other, which he is ready to testify, if necessary, on an application to him at Mr Kearsly’s, who knows and believes him incapable of the mean artifice of obtruding on the public any thing with a view to catch the penny of curiosity

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In June, a verse appeared in the Public Advertiser mocking Dawes and identifying him as the author of The Case: