Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century
Three days later, when Hackman went to the gallows, Lady Ossory described his conduct as ‘glorious143’. One paper commented, ‘He behaved with a most astonishing composure, with the greatest fortitude, and most perfect resignation144.’ 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 heart145’. He died, remarked several commentators, as he should have done. The Gazetteer wrote, ‘He behaved as a man should in such a situation146.’
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 Saviour147.’ 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 callousness148’. 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 have149’ or, as he later put it in conversation with the notorious roué Lord Pembroke, ‘Natural to
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 situation150.’ 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 and151 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 soul152’. 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 to153 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 power154’. (It is worth bearing in mind, however, that Dawes probably got this item inserted into the paper.)
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 character155’.
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 curiosity156.
In June, a verse appeared in the Public Advertiser mocking Dawes and identifying him as the author of The Case:
The Rope, the penalty of broken Laws,
Is not more shocking than the pen of D-ws.
Both to deserve no Crime can be so great;
Yet both to suffer was poor Hackman’s fate157.
What made Dawes’s account so controversial? First and foremost he categorically asserted that Hackman and Ray had been not only friends but lovers. From the outset he described the two as ‘revelling in all its [loves] rites by stealth’, and enjoying ‘stolen bliss158’. Because of ‘the indulgencies she had … with him’, Ray and Hackman had ‘unlimited (though illicit) gratification159’. This contradicted everything the press had been told before Hackman’s death. He also claimed that Sandwich had learned of the affair and confronted Ray, who had promised to end her relationship with Hackman. But, he claimed, her passion for him was too great and she even agreed to marry her young lover. Only his departure to Ireland delayed the ceremony, and while they were apart, ‘they corresponded in the most affectionate manner by every post160’. So Dawes depicted Hackman and Ray as being bound by mutual love and destined for conjugal felicity. Hackman’s expectations of Ray were portrayed not as delusional but as eminently reasonable.
What, then, had gone wrong? In his dedication to Lord Sandwich and in the main body of his narrative Dawes placed the blame on Galli and Sandwich. Galli, according to him, had taken money from Hackman so that the couple could continue to meet without Sandwich’s knowledge. But, after a while, Galli ‘(whether under the management and direction of his Lordship, who wished to break off the connexion at all events, or otherwise, we do not know) informed Mr Hackman that all future visits from Miss Reay would be dispensed with, for that Lord S––– was too well acquainted with their amour to bear with it longer161’. She is also reported as adding, ‘That Miss Reay had tired of him, and had resolved to quit him for the sake of another gentleman, who was much more dear to her162’. Here was the full-blown version of Galli’s betrayal.
In the early editions of The Case and Memoirs Dawes says nothing about Ray’s own view of the matter. The reader is left to assume that she still loved Hackman, even when temporarily unable to see him. Perfidy perhaps lay with Sandwich and certainly blackened the character of Galli. But no matter where responsibility was placed, the act of warning off Hackman was the turning point in the plot. It triggered ‘his despair and grief’, transforming his character: ‘he was an altered man … he was agreeable, sprightly and affable; but on a sudden he changed himself to a pensive and grave deportment’. He grew increasingly subject to a melancholy ‘originated on that occasion, which, by continually brooding over, encreased and inflamed his wretched mind163’.
Dawes included in his account a letter from Hackman to Ray which, ‘with one other, (a copy whereof is in the hands of his brother-in-law) is the only one he did not cancel164’. In it Hackman pleaded with Ray to relieve him of ‘his pleasing pain’. He mentions their meeting secretly ‘at Marylebone, and other places’. He calls on her to honour her promise of marriage, urging her to bring her youngest child with her to live a life of rural felicity as a cleric’s wife. ‘I know165 you are not fond of the follies and vanities of the town. How tranquil and agreeably, and with what uninterrupted felicity, unlike to anything we have yet enjoyed, shall we then wear our time away together on my living.’ Full of despair, he threatens Ray with the prospect that if she does not marry him he will die: ‘For God’s sake let me hear from you; and as you love me, keep me no longer in suspense, since nothing can relieve me but death or you166.’
The deception of others, continued Dawes, plunged Hackman into this melancholia, but only when he saw Martha Ray with another man in the playhouse on the night of the murder did he decide on suicide. ‘Gloomy, melancholy, and outrageous, at the injuries he had conceived, which exceeded all human knowledge to explain’, he determined to shoot himself ‘in the presence of a woman, whose supposed infidelity had brought him to a misery and despair not to be described by words167’. And only when he looked into Ray’s face as she tried to enter her coach did he think of killing her – ‘he concluded it would be best for both to die together168’. This was no premeditated crime but an act of ‘momentary phrenzy [sic]169’.
The lawyer in Dawes wanted to acquit Hackman of murder, though he could not, of course, deny the killing. In his long ‘Commentary on his Conviction’, Dawes absolved Hackman of any felonious intent to kill Martha Ray. Murder, he reminded the reader, is distinguished as a crime by proof of prior intention and malice: ‘It is the wickedness and malignity of the heart which raises the crime of murder, and not simply the act that kills170.’ Yet Hackman’s suicide note, with its request to his brother-in-law that he care for Ray after Hackman’s suicide, showed ‘that he did not kill her with an express or previous intention, but from a momentary phrenzy, which overpowered him, after he had resolved to destroy himself only171’. His intent to do away with himself, Dawes conceded, was ‘a felonious action and disposition of mind172’ and it was on these grounds that Blackstone in his summary of the case pressed for Hackman’s conviction. But Dawes argued that ‘as he was found guilty of murder by malice implied and not expressed, he deserves not to be classed among common assassins and murderers173’. He also pointed out that if Hackman had succeeded in killing himself, he would have been condemned for an act of lunacy. If he tried to kill himself in such a state, did not this condition apply as much to his killing of Ray, which was thus not a responsible act, and therefore not murder? In his conclusion, Dawes blamed the whole affair on Hackman’s passion: what began as a virtue ‘hurried him, when born down by disappointment, ingratitude and inconstancy, to the vice that concluded his unconquerable misery, while either himself or Miss Reay were living174’. Only after the crime was he able to recuperate, struggling successfully to control his feelings and face his fate.
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