in the spring of 1792. When at school, he was distinguished as an apt
scholar, and was, besides, cleanly and active in his habits. Though bred a
Catholic, he was taken when very young into the service of a Presbyterian
minister, a circumstance which may explain the religious tendencies he
subsequently exhibited; but even at this early period, he began to shew
signs of that versatility of purpose which, leading sometimes to success,
more often ends in vagabondism. Having left the minister to try the trade
of a baker, he renounced that for the occupation of a weaver; and from
that he enlisted in the Donegal militia. Yet in the midst of these changes
he observed so much moral regularity that he was selected by one of the
officers as his servant. While thus employed he married a young woman in
Ballinha; and after seven years he returned to live with her, on the
disbanding of the regiment. Still with a fair character, he then became
the servant to a neighbouring gentleman, with whom he lived three years.
Meanwhile he had a family by his wife; and having taken it into his head
that he would be able to maintain them by getting a sub-lease of a piece
of ground from his father-in-law, who was himself a tenant, he insisted
for this right, which was refused, and the quarrel which ensued sent him
to Scotland. Still, however, even in his advanced manhood, without any
other stain than an imputed infidelity to his wife, we are assured, at
least, that as yet he had shewn no indications of what may be termed
cruelty even by the fastidious, if it was not that he bore the reputation
of mildness approaching to softness.
Yet he came to Scotland with this blot on his soul, and it was soon
deepened, when, having gone to work as a labourer on the Union Canal, he
fell in, at Meddiston, with Helen M'Dougal, a comely, if not good-looking,
young widow, then residing there after the death of her husband. It has
been always said that this was an affair of love, at least it ended in a
connexion so close that they resolved to live together.
It would appear that the connexion thus formed having been communicated to
his priest, he was admonished, and recommended to return to his wife; and
a consequence of his refusal was the ordinary excommunication. Yet he
continued to have religious fits, during the continuance of which he
avoided the chapel, from the terrors of the anathema. We trace him
afterwards, as he returned with his paramour to Edinburgh, where he fell,
as the consequence of his continued versatility, into peripatetic pedlery,
buying and vending old clothes, skins of animals, human hair, and other
small articles and wares. Nor did he stick by this, soon betaking himself
to cobbling, for which, in a rude way, he discovered that he had a turn,
though he had never been taught the craft; and by purchasing old shoes and
boots, to which he applied his art, and getting M'Dougal to hawk them, he
contrived to realise fifteen or twenty shillings a-week. At this time he
was a lodger in "_The Beggars' Hotel_," kept by the well-known Mikey
Culzean,--an establishment which had a famous termination, when, being
one day burned to the ground, there came forth, driven by the flames, such
a swarm of beggars, halt and blind, that their congregation seemed as
difficult to account for as the assemblage of a colony of rats. Among them
appeared Burke and M'Dougal; but there were left behind in the fire the
library of the cobbler, consisting of Ambrose's "Looking unto Jesus,"
Boston's "Fourfold State," "The Pilgrim's Progress," and Booth's "Reign of
Grace." Once more he became a lodger with Mikey, who took up a new hotel
in Brown's Close, Grassmarket.
That the man, originally neither cruel nor profane, was not yet, like
Balaam, left to his idol, would appear from his continued religious
exercises. The grace of the Lord tracks the devil in his darkest caves. In
the next house the candle of salvation burned, and even cast its light
into the thick atmosphere of the surrounding dens. Thither Burke repaired,
and joined, with apparent seriousness, in the exercise of devotion; nor
did he fail to tax the incurable Mikey with profanity, when that notorious
lover of a joke, even at the expense of divine things, thrust his head
through the papered partition, and cried out, to the dismay of the
devotees, "The performance is just going to begin." In all this there
seemed to be no hypocrisy, because there was no use to which he tried to
turn it; and then his conversations on the subject of the service, which,
after the company dispersed, he had with the man in whose house the
meetings were held, seemed to be too secret for the displays of the mere
dissembler.
Other traits conspired to shew the nature of the man, before the
temptations of the idol changed it. Kind and serviceable, inoffensive and
playful, he was industrious as well, and seldom inclined for drink. Fond
of singing and playing on the flute, he sought, in his melancholy moods,
the solace of plaintive airs. All which qualities were combined with a
jocular and quizzical turn, which, displaying a fund of low humour, made
him a favourite. Some anecdotes are given in illustration,--as where, one
day, when he heard a salt-wife bawling out, "Wha'll buy salt?" he replied,
"Upon my word, I doun't know; but if you ask that woman gaping at the door
opposite, perhaps she may inform you;" or where, on another, when, having
been abused by a painted Jezebel on the High Street, he tried to shame her
by an accusation: "I might have passed over the painting," said he, "if it
had been properly done, but it's shameful to come to the street bedaubed
in that unskilful way,"--an objurgation which was applauded by the
bystanders.
Yet, withal, there were deductions to be made from such favourable
accounts, inducing the conviction that there is small faith due to drawn
characters, where, perhaps, the potentialities may have been asleep, only
awaiting the touch of the demon. But is not this less or more the case
with all of us? if it be not metaphysically true that every unregenerated
man has his price,--that is, every such man has a sacrifice of moral
principle to sell, if a price and a purchaser can be found to his liking.
What a million of money will not purchase, may be bought by the smile or
tear of a woman. The paradox cannot be disproved, because the
eventualities of temptation cannot be exhausted in any one man's life.
This man, though appearing to have kindly feelings, could be cruel to the
woman who, whatever her faults, had followed him in all his wanderings and
misery; but then, of course, there was _the occasion_, as where, having
roused her jealousy by attentions to a young woman who was related to her,
he, in return for her complaints, almost murdered her. The story current
at the time was, that the three having slept in the same bed, the quarrel
began between the two women, who, betaking themselves to the floor,
entered into a battle. So long as the conflict was maintained on nearly
equal terms, the man contented himself with witnessing it; but when the
elder virago was likely to master the young one, he rose out of bed, and
interfered in behalf of the latter. His interference soon turned the
scale; and he inflicted an unmerciful punishment upon his partner. Then
came the neighbours, who found M'Dougal extended upon the floor apparently
lifeless, with the man standing by, and contemplating. After some time she
exhibited signs of life, when again seizing her by the hair, he cried,
"There is life in her yet!" and dashed her head violently on the floor.
By this time the police were attracted by the noise, who, upon asking
Burke whether the woman was his wife, got the reply in a mild, if not
insinuating tone, "Yes, gentlemen, she is my wife."
We thus get to one of the secrets of this man's character. The passions
are said to occur in opposite phases--strong loves, and strong hatreds,
and so forth; but there is one which nature, in love, has reserved, pure,
solitary, and unchangeable, without counterpart to dim its lustre, or
antagonist to neutralise its effect, and that is _pity_. This man wanted
pity. If we were fanciful, we might here go with the gentle poets, who
tell us, in their way, that, like the dew-drop which falls in the evening,
and shines equally clear on the deadly nightshade and the rose, it solaces
virtue in adversity, without scorning sin in the pains of retribution. If,
in our analysis of man's character, we find not his heart, as the
fire-opal, enclosing one of nature's tears, we may throw the crucible
aside, extinguish the fire, and cast the _caput mortuum_ to the dogs; and
yet dogs have pity. We have found, even already, enough to lead us to
another clue. He possessed radical cunning, the greatest and most
insuperable of all the obstacles to moral and religious emendation. Other
evils only hang about the heart, but this, the true gift of the devil, is
the very blood of the organ. We are, then, led to suspect him of religious
hypocrisy. If we were not told there is hope for all, we might surely say
that the advent of the Spirit of grace is possible in every case but that
of hypocrisy veiled by religion; yea, the creature cursed with this vice,
Faith views in the distance as an impossibility, and flies past in
despair, to try her persuasions on the _honest_ sinner.
The subsequent notices of this man's life, up to the commencement of the
deeds which have rendered him famous, only tend to confirm these
observations. Renouncing once more his cobbling, he went, still followed
by his partner, to Peebles, where he was employed in road-making. Though
still maintaining some pretensions to religion, he now began to shew a
gradual deterioration of character, keeping suspicious hours, and making
his house the resort of profligate characters, where scenes of drunkenness
and riot were of common occurrence, especially on Saturday nights and
Sundays. Retaining the same vagrant habits, he next betook himself to
Penicuik, and after the harvest of 1827, still accompanied by M'Dougal, he
came once more to reside in Edinburgh, where the occasion offered of
getting acquainted with Hare, and becoming a lodger with him in his house
in Tanner's Close, called Log's lodgings. This house, which afforded room
for seven beds, was kept under the name of Mrs Hare's first husband, Log,
and being the resort of all kinds of loose wanderers, washed off from the
lowest bed of the conglomerates, was the scene of still greater riots
than the lodger had ever patronized in his own. That the intimacy between
him and his landlord had soon ripened into such friendship as these people
are capable of, was proved by an occurrence mentioned by a person who
called on Burke with the intention of giving him a job. He found Hare
beating without mercy his friend's paramour, who was extended on the
floor, while Burke was sitting unconcernedly at the window. When asked why
he allowed another man to beat his wife, "Oh, she deserves all she is
getting," was the reply. Yet the man still preserved more of a respectable
character than those with whom he here associated--retaining even yet much
of his disposition to serve, his quiet humour, if not a species of
politeness, all of which was perfectly reconcilable with the presence of
that potentiality of crime which lay slumbering in the heart, under the
thin veil of religion, and not to be crossed or checked, when roused to
action, by pity, no trace of which appeared to be in him. He was set aside
for his idol, and only waited the temptation to become what he became.
William Hare, the second of our quaternion, was also a native of Ireland,
having been born in the neighbourhood of Londonderry. Like so many of the
poor children of that country, he was never trained to any trade whereby
he might have been saved from that gradual descent into desultory modes of
earning a livelihood, which leading, as we have already said, to
vagabondism, is the introduction to so many temptations. After working at
country work for some time near his native place, he came over to
Scotland, where he engaged as a common labourer upon the Union Canal, and
assisted for some time in the work of unloading Mr Dawson's boats at
Port-Hopetoun. It was here that he became acquainted with Log or Logue, to
whose widow he was subsequently married, and with whom he came to lodge.
After the canal was finished, he betook himself to the occupation of a
travelling huckster, going about the country with an old horse and cart,
selling at one time fish, at another crockery, or exchanging the latter
for old iron, which he disposed of to the dealers. From the cart and the
horse he went down to the hurley, using that vehicle for much the same
purposes. Some quarrel with Log, before the latter's death, drove him to
new quarters; but not long after, and when Log had been dead and buried,
he returned to Tanner's Close, where he assumed all the rights of the
landlord of seven beds, as well as the privileges of the husband, though
Mrs Log was never called by his name.
It was now that, having tasted power in becoming a landlord with such
drawings as twopence or threepence a night, he shewed more of his
character than had previously been known. Always inclined to take drink,
wherever and whenever he could get it, he now, as a consequence of
idleness and opportunity, became drunken and dissolute--the effect of
liquor being to render him quarrelsome and always ready to fight. Nay, so
strong was this propensity in him, that he appeared always to be on the
outlook for a contest, picking a quarrel upon any opportunity, and even
trying to make one out of the simple act of looking at him. Though a sorry
pugilist, he had no fear of an opponent twice his size, and never gave in
until fairly disabled--even then endeavouring to wreak, in so far as oaths
could, a vengeance on the head of his enemy. On the failure of an opponent
without, he had no difficulty, so long as Mrs Log was there, of finding
one within; nor was she, also a drunkard, loath to encounter him upon
equal terms, so that the house was seldom free from brawls, if it did not
often exhibit a regularly-contested battle between the master and
mistress. Even vice has its traits of ludicrousness. Those of the
neighbours who were fond of sights were often enough gratified by some wag
going and reporting to the landlady that Willie Hare, as he was usually
called, was upon the street drunk, whereupon the wife, herself probably in
the same state, would issue forth in search of him, when a battle was the
issue of the rencontre. Such was the kind of life led by this couple up to
the time of Burke's entry.
The passion of violence produced by inebriation will not always, or indeed
often, afford any clue to character. It may be hardly necessary to say
that Hare was naturally cruel, yet we have seen that Burke could scarcely
be said to present that feature unless when roused by some strong motive,
so that we have no difficulty in finding at the first glance an essential
difference in the two men;--the one being, in his very nature and
constitution, vindictive and malign--the other ready to suffocate the
humanity that was in him at the beck of an impulse strong enough to move
him. Only one of them could probably have been guilty of such an action as
this: On one occasion, when a person of the name of M'Lean (the narrator)
was returning from shearing at Carnwath, he got into company with Hare,
Burke, and his wife, and the party went into a public-house at Balerno,
near Currie, to get some refreshment. When the reckoning was, as they call
it, clubbed, Hare snatched up the money from the table and pocketed it,
whereupon Burke, in the fear of a disturbance, advanced the sum. On
leaving the inn, M'Lean taxed the offender with his trick, who, in place
of being ashamed or even pocketing the affront, knocked the feet from his
companion, laid him on the ground, and kicked him with his shoe pointed
with iron plates. If we add to this inborn malignity which, in feeling,
whether expressed by words or acts, arrayed him against mankind, and
scarcely ever alleviated by those emotions of friendship which are to be
found in the most hardened breasts, that scorn of human nature, not
unaccompanied with satirical laughter, to which we have alluded, we have
that foundation of character in the man upon which was so easily reared
the towering edifice of his crimes.
Yet after all this information, which was so industriously gleaned, the
psychologist was not satisfied. He wanted to vindicate human nature from
even a possible diverging incidence of a law which could account for such
crimes, by tracing them to malignity and mammon. We would fain look with
favour on such scepticism; and it is to be admitted that all who had the
curiosity to see and converse with this man discovered a want. With a low
animal brow, he justified the phrenologist by discovering no power of
ratiocination, if, indeed, what is termed reasoning was not an
impossibility to him. His mind was entirely under the government of
external objects, among which selfishness made its selection, irrespective
of the humanities, of which he had none. We might thus term him, as he has
been called, a fool or semi-idiot, only within the limits of that
responsibility which the law is bound, for the preservation of mankind, to
push far beyond the verge where nature draws her distinctions between the
morally sane and the insane. We thus get quit of the heavy imputation
which the doings of such a man cast upon our kind; and if we are met by
the reflection, that Burke had both thought and sense to an extent which
was rather a surprise to those who conversed with him with a view to
ascertain the structure of his mind, we have the advantage of the reply,
that, naturally indolent, if not soft, he allowed himself to be ruled by
another, who, with all his defects, possessed resolution and a dominating
will. The history of mankind is full of the phenomena of "imposed
will"--the source of more divergence from the normal line than we ever
dream of.
We come now to the third of our quaternion, Helen M'Dougal, a native, as
we have said, of the small village of Meddiston, in the parish of
Muiravonside, and county of Stirling, where her early years were spent.
Her maiden name was Dougal. At no time, however early, did her character
exhibit any such diversity of oscillation between the good and the evil,
as, giving play to contending passions, creates an interest in the
inquirer into human nature. All seemed to be straight, on and down from
the beginning. At an early period she formed a connexion with a man,
M'Dougal, who resided in the same village, to whom she bore a child during
the lifetime of his wife. After the latter's death, the intercourse which
continued led to cohabitation, passing for marriage, and she bearing his
name. Afterwards coming together to Leith, where he followed his
occupation of a sawyer, she was left alone, poor and friendless, by his
death, which took place from typhus while he was confined in Queensberry
House. She now returned to her native village, where she met with Burke,
then, as we have seen, a labourer on the canal, when that intercourse
commenced, the evil auspices of which were to be so terribly verified.
Thereafter, wherever they resided, there seems never to have been much
change in the character of this woman. In Edinburgh, Leith, Peebles, or
Penicuik, she was always distinguished for loose and drunken habits; nor
were these ever relieved by any geniality of nature, the uniform
expression of her mind and countenance being a stern moroseness which
concentrated upon her universal dislike, so that it was often said that
she was unworthy even of Burke. From all this it may easily be induced
that she was not, in the crimes of which she was cognisant, or in which
she took a part, under any influence of an imposed will on the part of
Burke; the contrary being rather to be presumed, that she ruled him, and
that it was only when he was roused by her fierceness of temper or
jealousy that he repaid her domination by a cruel punishment.
The last of the four, Margaret Laird or Hare, was, like her husband, a
native of Ireland, and accompanied her first husband, Log, to Scotland.
The latter bore the character of a decent, hard-working man, who had not
only the world out of doors to contend with, but within, the temper of a
masculine wife. Some success enabled him to become a small contractor on
the Union Canal, and for some time he worked his contract, with a
detachment of his countrymen, in the neighbourhood of Winchburgh; but we
may estimate the extent of his contract, and not less the Irish
peculiarity of both the man and his wife, when we know that the
contractor's lady worked along with the men in the character of a
labourer, with a man's coat on her back, wheeling a barrowful of rubbish
as stoutly as any of her men. At that time, they inhabited a temporary hut
on the banks of the canal, and, whatever her faults may have been, she
exhibited here nothing but economy and industry. The work being finished,
Log settled in Edinburgh, where, though honest enough, the contractor
became sunk in the huckster, and the keeper of a beggars' hotel, which was
soon to rival even Mickey Culzean's. Upon his death, the lodging and
furniture, such as it was, with any small earnings he had saved, devolved
upon the widow, and thereafter she conducted the establishment; but she
soon shewed the smallness of her gratitude and the strength of her passion
by cohabiting with one of her lodgers, described as young and
good-looking, and, thereafter, the depravity of her taste in accepting
Hare after the young lover forsook her. Yet her choice was only that which
is made by those who seek their kind. The drunkard and semi idiot had
charms for one who was herself destitute not less of virtue than of
prudence, and we are soon to see her descending into unparalleled crime,
not by the imposed will of Hare, but the ready suggestion of her own
heart.
Such are the characters of our wonderful story; and we make no apology to
sensible men for disentombing such specimens of our kind from the
dust-covered chronicles of their deeds. A salutary horror, not only of
their great crimes, but also of those lesser ones which led to these,
pervaded the people of Scotland long after the tragedy of so many acts and
scenes was performed; and thus it is, in the providence of God, that
virtue becomes brighter by the contrast with vice. It is only, as some one
has observed, when the tempest tosses the waves of the ocean into
mountains that we see into its depths. It was by the light of burning Troy
that Æneas saw the faces of the gods; and so it is through the light of
human passions that we discover the nature of the heart of man.
The Opening of the Court--The Old Woman of Gilmerton.[5]
The house which went by the name of Log's lodging-house, and which was
occupied by William Hare, as raised by the favour of the widow to the
elevation of landlord, was, as already said, situated in Tanner's
Close,--one of those narrow passages that wind from the north side of the
West Port. The entry from the street begins with a descent of a few steps,
and is dark from the superincumbent land. On proceeding downwards, you
came--for the house, which was rased for shame, is no longer to be
seen--to a smallish self-contained dwelling of one flat, and consisting of
three apartments. One passing down the close might, with an observant eye,
have seen into the front room; but this disadvantage was compensated by
the house being disjoined from other dwellings, and a ticket, "Beds to
let," as an invitation to vagrants, so many of whom were destined never to
come out alive, distinguished it still more. The outer apartment was
large, occupied all round by these structures called beds, composed of
knocked-up fir stumps, and covered with a few gray sheets and brown
blankets, among which the squalid wanderer sought rest, and the profligate
snored out his debauch under the weight of nightmare. Another room opening
from this was also comparatively large, and furnished much in the same
manner. In place of any concealment being practised, so far impossible,
indeed, in the case of a public lodging-house, the door stood generally
open, and, as we have said, the windows were overlooked by the passengers
up and down; but as the spider's net is spread open while his small keep
is a secret hole, so here there was a small apartment, or rather closet,
the window of which looked upon a pig-sty and a dead wall, and into which,
as we know, were introduced those unhappy beings destined to death. The
very character of the house, the continued scene of roused passions, saved
it from that observation which is directed towards temporary tumults, so
that no surprise could have been excited by cries of suffering issuing
from such a place, even if they could have been heard from the interior
den; and that was still more impossible, from the extraordinary mode of
extinguishing life adopted by the wary and yet unwary colleagues. In this
inner apartment Burke used to work when he did work, which, always
seldom, soon came to be rare, and eventually relinquished for other wages.