Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century

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 world63.

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 Pillory64.

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 and65 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 he66 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 explanation67’, it concluded.

The Gazetteer then shifted from speculation to titillating gossip. ‘Besides many other68 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 promised69’. Even if this were untrue, the paper concluded, Sandwich had gone to great lengths to find out Hackman’s motives: ‘it is certain70, 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 opinion71.’

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 into72 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 question73’. 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 Galli74’ – and it stood to prevent Sandwich being ridiculed as an old roué cuckolded by a younger man.

With the help of Sandwich and Hackman’s friends, the papers gradually sketched in a story about the three protagonists, with both plot and characters. They told a tale of two attractive young people – a dashing young army officer and an aristocrat’s mistress of great accomplishment – who meet by chance. The mistress has a keeper who is almost twice her age and with whom she has had five children. The young man falls in love, asks for the mistress’s hand in marriage, but is forced to leave his loved one and join his regiment in Ireland. Eager to return to the object of his affections, he leaves the army, takes holy orders, and asks Ray once again for her hand in marriage. Rejected by her, he is driven first to plan suicide and then to commit murder.

This story opened with richly detailed (though sometimes contradictory) accounts of Hackman and Ray’s first meeting. Several papers portrayed the two on romantic rides in the Huntingdonshire countryside: ‘It was Miss Ray’s custom, at that time, for the benefit of air and exercise, to ride out on horseback behind her servant. Undeniable it is, that Mr Hackman took frequent opportunities of riding out at the same time; and being a good horseman, and dexterous at a leap, was sure to afford no small diversion to the lady75.’ Others spoke of Hackman as ‘being of a facetious, agreeable turn of conversation’ which secured him a place at Sandwich’s table and a place close to Martha Ray. Joseph Cradock later76 recalled the first time that Hackman appeared at Hinchingbrooke, when he was asked to dinner and ended the evening unpacking a telescope, newly arrived from London, to look at the stars.

Sandwich’s house parties in Huntingdonshire were jolly and roistering, attended by musicians and naval explorers, Admiralty officials and minor literati, as well as other aristocrats and rakes. John Cooke, Sandwich’s chaplain, recalled that

The earl of Sandwich was one of the few noblemen, who spend a considerable portion of their time at their country-seats; where he usually resided whenever he could gain a vacation from the duties of his office, and attendance on parliament. His house was at all times open for the reception of his friends and neighbours; and distinguished for the generous, truly hospitable, and liberal entertainment which it afforded77.

Another of Sandwich’s friends put it more pithily: ‘Few houses were more pleasant or instructive than his lordship’s: it was filled with rank, beauty and talent, and every one was at ease78.’ Charles Burney79, the music scholar and father of the novelist Frances Burney, found the parties so boisterous that they gave him a headache. There must have been many witnesses who noticed the handsome young man who paid Martha Ray such attention. The beginnings of Hackman and Ray’s relationship were neither unknown nor obscure, for it had not been difficult for paragraph writers frequenting the fashionable coffee-houses of St James’s to pick up details from former guests at Sandwich’s country house.

Thereafter the story became more shadowy and suppositious. Attempts to find out what had occurred between Hackman’s departure from Hinchingbrooke and his presence on the steps of the Covent Garden Theatre four years later were met with silence and prevarication. ‘The lady’s [Ray’s] friends do not know that there has been any intercourse whatever since80’, reported the opposition General Evening Post. Lord Sandwich, as we have seen, took a similar line. The papers all agreed that Hackman had gone to Ireland, had exchanged his red coat for a clerical habit, and returned to London in the hope of persuading Ray to marry him. Many papers believed that Hackman’s clerical preferment to the living of Wiveton in Norfolk was obtained with the help of Sandwich, probably because of Ray’s solicitation for her friend. All of the press suggested a sudden change in Ray’s attitude towards Hackman, whom she pointedly refused to see.

The papers were perplexed by the nature of Hackman and Ray’s relationship – were they friends or lovers? Was their affection mutual or was Hackman enamoured of a woman who did not care for him? How often did they meet, and how intimate were they with one another? The General Advertiser, after reporting that ‘Lord Sandwich says he does not know there has been any intercourse’ since Hackman’s visit to Hinchingbrooke, confidently asserted, ‘We however hear that he [Hackman] renewed his addresses to her some time ago now at Huntingdon, and received some hopes, which her future conduct had entirely disappointed81.’ The General Evening Post, though it shifted the venue of the intrigue to London, was also sure that Ray had continued to meet Hackman: ‘his visits became frequent to the Admiralty … The Tables, however, afterwards turned in his disfavour; for, from whatever cause, he was certainly forbidden the house82.’ Whatever the papers said, they all agreed that the story ended tragically: Hackman was rejected and his final actions were prompted by terrible feelings of unrequited love.

In these versions of the drama, the characters were all portrayed sympathetically. Hackman was always an accomplished, handsome and admirable young man. On the day of his trial, he was described in the General Advertiser as ‘The unfortunate Mr83 Hackman’, who ‘was esteemed one of the most amiable of men. When in the army, his company was courted by all who knew him; his readiness to oblige, by every act of kindness in his power, endeared him to every body.’ The General Evening Post, the London Evening Post and the Gazetteer each printed a report describing him as ‘descended from a very reputable family; he is a person of a lively disposition, and was esteemed by his numerous acquaintance, and his character was never impeached until the unhappy catastrophe on Wednesday night84’. Hackman’s respectable origins and his station in the middle ranks of society made his crime more extraordinary and his fate more sympathetic.

Much was made of the honourable nature of Hackman’s obsession. A correspondent who called himself ‘PHILANTHROPIST’ in the St James’s Chronicle of 10 April pointed out that ‘Mr Hackman, so far from being an abandoned and insensible profligate, was rather distinguished for taste and Delicacy of Sentiment85’, while James Boswell wrote in the same paper a few days later:

As his manners were uncommonly amiable, his Mind and Heart seem to have been uncommonly pure and virtuous; for he never once attempted to have a licentious connection with Miss Ray. It may seem strange at first; but I can very well suppose, that had he been less virtuous, he would not have been so criminal. But his Passion was not to be diverted by inferior Gratifications. He loved Miss Ray with all his soul, and nothing could make him happy but having her all his own86.

Writers thought it important to establish that Hackman was no sexual predator – a rake or libertine – who lashed out in anger because of thwarted desire, but merely a young man hopelessly in love.

Martha Ray, ‘the lovely victim87’ as she was described in the London Chronicle, was given a similarly good press. The PHILANTHROPIST who praised Hackman described her as ‘irreproachable in her conduct, any otherwise than what perhaps was not well in her power to prevent, that she was unprotected by the legal Marriage ceremony88’. A poor girl who became a rich man’s mistress was hardly culpable. The General Evening Post assured its readers that ‘the memory of Miss Ray, with respect to Mr Hackman, stands clear, at present, of every imputation89’. He may have loved her, but she remained true to her keeper. The St James’s Chronicle saw her as a female paragon. It glossed over the potentially sordid origins of Ray’s relationship with Sandwich, alluding only to her being ‘under the protection of the noble Peer90’. It lauded her looks and accomplishments: ‘Her person was very fine, her face agreeable, and she had every Accomplishment that could adorn a woman, particularly those of Singing, and Playing most exquisitely on the Harpsichord91.’ And it placed her in the bosom of the family: ‘She was also highly respected by all those who knew her, especially all the Servants, and her death is most sincerely regretted in the Family92.’

Several papers dwelt on Ray’s virtues as a companion and parent. Her fidelity to Sandwich, the General Evening Post reported, ‘was never suspected’. In return for his ‘protection’ Ray gave Sandwich a ‘life of gratitude and strict fidelity93’. Her five surviving children were raised, according to the London Chronicle, with the ‘strictness of motherly attention94’. Several papers reported on her concern for the financial well being of her much-loved but illegitimate children. ‘Miss Ray made it a rule, on the birth of every child,’ they wrote, ‘to solicit her noble admirer for an immediate provision for it, which was invariably acquiesced in.’ Her children were therefore provided for after her death: ‘the issue of this lady will have nothing to lament from her sad fate … but the circumstance of having lost a tender mother95’.

In the eighteenth century charity came high among the concerns of virtuous women, and Ray was seen as no exception. She was ‘liberal in a high degree, and the bounty of her noble Lover enabled her to indulge benevolence, in becoming the patroness of the poor’. One of the objects of her charity, it was said, was her elderly and poor parents who lived in Elstree. She could not refuse them aid though, in line with her reputation for moral scrupulousness, she refused to see her father because of the way he had encouraged her to become a mistress or a courtesan.

Ray’s most remarked upon quality was her having mastered the skills of an elegant lady. Sandwich, the papers said, had spent lavishly to refashion a milliner’s apprentice as a lady. The London Chronicle waxed lyrical on her accomplishments:

There was scarce any polite art in which she was not adept, nor any part of female literature with which she was not conversant. All the world are acquainted with the unrivalled sweetness of her vocal powers, but it was the peculiar pleasure of a few only to know that her conversation, her feelings, and indeed her general deportment, all participated of an unparalleled delicacy, which had characterized her through life96.

No doubt the shocking manner of Martha Ray’s death prompted a surge of sympathy for her. The General Advertiser commented on how ‘all ranks of people drop the tear of pity on her bier, while the sharp tooth of slander seems for a time to have lost its edge97’. Even the author of one of the most vicious attacks on Ray, a mock opera published in 1776 that had portrayed her as an unfaithful greedy harridan who twists a besotted but impotent Sandwich round her finger, was heard ‘to describe in the most pathetic terms, the amiable qualifications of her head and heart98’. Sympathy for Ray stemmed equally from admiration for a poor, fallen woman who had successfully transformed herself not into a flamboyant courtesan, but into a respectable mother who could pass for a lady.

Sandwich was the least likely of the three victims of Hackman’s crime to be treated kindly in the press, but even he was accorded an unusually sympathetic reception. Naturally enough the government-subsidized Morning Post pleaded his case:

Is there any one so obdurate, however party may have warped or blunted his affections, as not to feel some little concern for a man, who, in the course of one month, has had a personal accusation adduced against his honesty as a man – several vague imputations, and the measure of a direct charge against his character, as a Minister – a daughter dead [his daughter-in-law had just died], and a beloved friend most bloodily assassinated?99

But even the opposition papers were willing to acknowledge Sandwich’s dignity in his suffering. Several articles emphasized his benevolence towards Martha Ray – his willingness to pay for her education and to provide for their offspring. His performance as a good father and spouse matched the domestic virtues of his murdered lover. Others praised his remarkable action in being willing to forgive James Hackman for his terrible crime. ‘We are assured from respectable authority, that a noble Lord, much interested in the death of the late unfortunate Miss Ray, pitying the fate of the unhappy Hackman, sent a message to him after condemnation by the Honourable Captain W––– [Walsingham], informing him, “that he would endeavour to get him a pardon;” but that unhappy man replied, “he wished not to live, but to expatiate his offence, if possible, by his death100”.’