toleration, insomuch as there is generally several winkers to one actor,
and the former are of various kinds, while the latter is limited in his
passion. Some are cowardly accorders, who favour the crime which they have
not courage to commit; others are selfish, and expect benefit from their
convenient nictation; and some there are who would be injured by the
virtue of others having its own reward. So it is that the world,
notwithstanding grave faces and simpering moralities, contains within its
circumference only a trifle fewer rogues than inhabitants, the residue
being God's own--stern beings who have fought the devil at his own weapons
and conquered. These have a certain price in another place, where the
golden streets are happily not liable to be coined; but here they are of
small account, where money is the measure of a man's worth. We have
already seen that even such men as Burke and Hare had their sympathisers
and secret-keepers; but these were low, and therefore liable to be
tempted; and it may be said that we have different men to judge when we go
to the halls of science and seek for the winking tolerators of wholesale
murder.
So far we admit, and we would be sorry indeed to do these men and youths
injustice. We know that great authorities, such as _Blackwood_, and
smaller ones, such as Colonel Cloud, accused them of art-and-partship as
resetters, and that the public at large did not hesitate even to
vociferate anathemas before a regular trial--with the devil's advocate to
plead for them--qualified them for excommunication by book, bell, and
candle. All this goes for nothing with us at a time when it was said the
fire of passion would be allayed, and sober reason exert her
authority.[12]
It is fair, and even necessary, to assume as a fact, which, indeed, we
have seen established by the practice of "Merry-Andrew" and the "Spune,"
that the disinterring craft were in the habit of purchasing dead bodies
from poor lodging-keepers or relatives, in all which cases the bodies
would be very different in appearance from those procured in the ordinary
way. We suspect, from the nature of the Scotch character, with its
sympathies and friendships, that those examples were not at any time many;
and the best evidence of this is, that under such an easy system, the
resurrection trade, always difficult and precarious, would not, especially
after the indictment of Dr Pattison of Glasgow in 1814, have been so
assiduously prosecuted. Such a system, too, depending upon the character
of a people and the feelings of individuals, must be supposed to have been
under the regulation of those natural, or, if you like, unnatural, laws to
which all organic beings are subjected. If, during a period of a decade,
examples of such purchase and sale were only one or two in a year, even
increasing _paulatim et gradatim_ to three or four, we would not be
prepared for a sudden increase starting up all at once in one year to from
sixteen to twenty; and there were many people who calculated the number in
our "Court of Cacus" at thirty. We may insist here a little upon this
view, because, amidst all the outcry against Knox and his assistants, it
was never taken into account.
Nor could this sudden rise have appeared the less startling to any mind
below that of an idiot, that this new trade was not spread over a great
number of persons--and nothing less than a _very_ great number could have
sufficed for watching, ferreting, persuading, bribing--overcoming all the
prejudices arrayed against an act of sale--but was altogether engrossed by
two poor squalid Irishmen, who had come into the trade by a leap, and all
but superseded the old experienced hands. If we were to make the
supposition, that now, or at any other period in the history of Scotland,
two Irishmen had taken it into their heads to set up a trade of this kind
in the city of Edinburgh, we would soon come to an estimate of their
success, if the doubt would not rather be, that if they got one body in
the course of a whole year, it would be no less a wonder than a shame. Nor
was there any reasons which might have led the recipients in the Square to
suspect that these two solitary individuals were merely the agents or
hands of a "dead-body company," or a joint-stock affair, with one of the
crack names, "Association for the purpose of purchasing dead bodies, for
the benefit of science and the human race," a supposition which alone
could have reconciled men with eyes in their heads, and brains in those
heads, to the anomaly before them.
But above all, that which had so much the appearance of justifying the
public rage, was the state in which the contents of these bags, boxes,
and chests were presented to the purchasers. One example may serve for the
whole. There was no reason for supposing that more violence was expended
upon Mrs Docherty than upon the others, if we are not rather to suppose
that the younger and stronger cases required more vigour, as presenting
more resistance. Even in the weakest cases, the _præsidia vitæ_ upon which
nature has expended so much labour are not to be overcome by external
force weakly exerted, and without leaving marks easily detected, even by
the unlettered in anatomy; but we have only to mention the case of Daft
Jamie, who fought manfully to the end, as an example of the necessity of
leaving upon the body even greater signs of violence than those presented
to the eyes of Dr Christison. Taking the little old woman as a fair medium
between the young and the old, the weak and the strong--you may remember
the examination report: contusions and bruises everywhere, extravasation
of blood, blotches of the same crying evidence, and finally the Lydian
test of the abraded skin of the throat,--while less or more of these marks
must have appeared in every one of the sixteen known cases, we cannot even
suppose a solitary example of one where they could have been altogether
wanting; and this led many to wonder at the time how the men preferred
violence, with so many chances of detection, to the soffana death-drops of
some subtle poison, the effects of which were far less likely to be
discovered by mere anatomists, curious about structure only, and so far
removed from the duty of a _post-mortem_ examination. With no pathological
views in their minds, they never would have dreamt of smelling for prussic
acid, or searching for the ravages of green vitriol or arsenic, any more
than they thought of drawing up their noses under the effluvia of
whisky--an evidence which was never absent, and could not be mistaken, and
must have led to the curious conclusion that all the bodies sold by
friends were those of drunkards, and drunkards alone.
These contusions, and the invariable thumb-mark on the throat, were,
according to the gentle supposition, to be overlooked by men all on the
alert to see the cloth taken off--curious investigators into the arcana of
nature--most zealous inquirers into the structure of the human body--among
whom anything abnormal, or departing from ordinary laws or appearances,
produced a speculation, fraught not only with the ardour of science, but
the contentious conceit of young aspirants. Nay, these sharp professional
eyes were not the first examiners, for they came after the decision of the
mercantile, which scanned the value to fix the price. We are aware that
there never was an enunciation, not excepting the famous _what is is_,
without the condition of being liable to argumentation, and we are far
from wishing to deprive these men of their defence; but that they should
have treated as they did the imputation cast upon them, of, we do not say
winking toleration, but something like pretty wide-awake suspicion, as an
Argive calumny, pointed with venom and shot by passion, was going to the
other extreme. Offended innocence is not always the meek thing represented
by poets, yet it seldom takes on the form of a man at a window[13]
threatening to shoot the officials of the law if they dared to question
for the ends of justice so innocuous and ill-used a victim of public
prejudice.
In all we have said we have assumed that these suspicions were to cast up
their shadows in the magic-lantern of minds, quite free from any
recollections or surmises of any body having ever been offered, in the
Square or neighbourhood, which could be said to have come to a violent
death. The assumption which was set forth at the time was not true, for it
turned out to have been pretty well known--and what professional scandal
is unknown to students?--that some six months only before, and when the
Irishmen were in full feather, the body of a female was offered for sale
by some ill-looking men--we do not say, as was said, of Burke's gang--to
the assistant of another teacher of anatomy in the city. The men were not
known to him as regular "Spunes," but as a subject was required, he
consented to accept of it, after being satisfied that it suited him. They
said that they had it now, and would bring it to the rooms in the evening,
between nine and ten o'clock, and at the appointed hour they made their
appearance, with a porter bearing the sack. The burden was taken in and
turned out of the bag, when it proved to be the body of a woman of the
town, in her clothes, with her shoes and stockings on. The startled
assistant proceeded at once to an examination, when he found a fracture on
the back part of the head, as by a blow from a blunt instrument. "You
d----d villains," cried this honest doctor, "where and how did you get
this body?" Whereto one, with much self-possession, replied, "It is the
body of a w----e, who has been _popt_ in a row in Halkerston's Wynd; and
if you don't take it, another will." The assistant then proposed, with the
intention of having them apprehended, that they should wait till he sent
for his principal; but the men, taking alarm, made off with their cargo,
and soon found a less scrupulous customer. This statement, which was given
on authority, was accompanied by an assurance that equally suspicious
cases were by no means rare.
In addition to this preparation of the mind, as it may be called, to look
suspiciously on introductions coming out of the regular way, with the
admission made that they had not been exhumed, and with the inevitable
traces of violence which could not be blinked, there was the peculiarity
on which, perhaps, the greatest stress was laid, that in one of the
cases, at least, there was a recognition of the individual by one of the
students as having been seen and conversed with by him, in terms of more
than ordinary intimacy, only the night before, or at least a very short
period, countable by hours. We allude to Mary Paterson, "the study for the
artist," who, though naked, was said to have made her appearance on the
table _en papillote_--not to be believed--but who, for certain, attracted
so much observation, yea, admiration, that the recognition by the youth
could not have fallen as an idle brag. The case of Daft Jamie, the
collegians' favourite of almost every day's fun, was so much stronger,
that there seemed no mode of accounting for the pure innocence of
Surgeon's Square, except upon the supposition that all the students had,
in the course of a day, been merged in some Lethe. No great wonder that
the most zealous defenders of the craft were here contented with a simple
shaking of the head, for, to be sure, even the devil's advocate has not an
interminable tether.
These charges are very practical, and even to us, at this distant period,
who would be regulated by reason and truth, and cannot be under the
influence of passion, are hard bones. Independently of our estimate of
youths--putting Knox out of the question,--of good birth and parentage,
whose generous hearts would revolt from the thought of a guilty
cognisance,--some of these assistants who came in contact with Burke, "and
no questions asked," have risen to rank in their profession, and bear a
high character for honesty and humanity. "They ken their ain ken;" but
their negative defence leaves their friends to the slough of mere
metaphysics. We all know that mysterious attractiveness and repulsiveness
of the mind which makes such fools of even the most practical of mankind.
The man would not look through Galileo's telescope, because he knew
beforehand that there was nothing to be seen; but he did no more than
every man does every day he lives. We all know that we may look, and not
see, hear, and not understand; yea, though the image of the outer thing
may be in black and white on the back of the eye, and the words play their
intellectual tune on the drum of the ear, you may neither see the one nor
hear the other. The bird-lime of acceptance is not present, and there is
even more--an absolute recusancy in proportion to some reigning wish in
the form of what we call a prejudice. All this is alphabetic, and we might
go deeper and get lost, but there is no occasion. The truth is, that these
medical students had a strong wish for subjects. This rose out of another
wish, that for knowledge, and this again came out of one behind, a wish to
shine or make money,--the benefit to mankind being only that thing which
we all understand when we hear people getting philanthropical in
recommending their leather, as contributing to the good of the eternal
sons of God. Then the next truth is, that they _did_ suspect, and
becoming the paradoxes which so many unconsciously become, did not _know_,
in the sense of an apprehension, that they suspected. When the thought
sought entrance to the mind, always under the cogency of the repulse of
unwillingness, it was either thrown out or dissolved; to all which the
authority of their leader or lecturer contributed, and not less the
generosity of their own hearts, naturally seeking uniformity, and averse
to think so ill of human nature, as was required to be implied in an
atrocity never before heard of in the world. If the thought had ever come
so strong upon them as to have amounted to an active conviction, why, then
they must have glided into the crime of winking toleration, and to that,
we verily believe, they never came. There were only three of these young
men who took an active charge. If there had been a score, we might have
conceded that one, perhaps two, might have been found among them capable,
by the predisposition of an evil nature, to have quietly succumbed to the
force of such startling appearances; but judging of the proportions
according to what we find among men, we require a large number for the
successful selection of the devil's own. In short, they were very much in
the position of resetters, who, standing in great need of the article,
take refuge from a suspicion which would injure them in the fallacious
eloquence of the naturally selfish heart, and casting up behind them
intervening obstructions to the light--a kind of weakness into which all
mankind are less or more liable to fall, and against which they are ready
to recoil when the passion of possession decays. It requires only
superficial looking to bring us to the conclusion, that the world is a
great collection of "wee pawns," every man resetting some thought or
feeling, false in itself, and improperly come by, and wrongfully retained.
The difference here lies in the fact, that we have not yet come to hold
this a crime, nor are we likely to do so till regeneration comes wrapt up
in the world-wide cloak of the millennium.
In what we have said, we refer only to those who superintended the
division of the bodies and the work of the rooms, and were those who came
in contact with Burke. As for the curator, who is still a respectable
inhabitant of Edinburgh, and upon whom the short-lived blind fury of some
newspapers of the time fell, with much surprise to himself, and much
indignation elsewhere, he was, of all the parties concerned, the most free
from blame; nor did any one but himself come forward and assist the
authorities in the prosecution. Nay, it is understood that, under a
passing reflection that the number of apparently unexhumed bodies brought
by these men required explanation, he mentioned the circumstance to his
principal, and that gentleman silenced him at once by the statement that
they had long known of the practice of sale and purchase, and so the
suspicion passed away. And, indeed, in reference to them all, it requires
to be kept in view that Dr Knox's great characteristic was his desire to
subjugate all people to his will; and every one knows the insidious power
of authority. Accordingly, in so far as regards that gentleman, left to
the active fury of a mob which he braved, and to the suspicion of more
thinking people whom he tried to conciliate, we have little to say. His
whitewashing process, consisting of the printed judgment of his conduct by
a committee of eminent men, went a considerable length in his favour, and
yet did not save him from almost general suspicion. The evidence was all
of his own selection; the world never knew what it consisted of; and
though we are bound to admit that the umpires vindicated the privilege of
searching and satisfying themselves, he behoved to be still their
director, and, if he chose, their obstructor. Perhaps those who knew the
man the best, and those who knew him the worst, were the least
satisfied,--the latter being under passion, and the former aware of a
power of conciliation and persuasion under the guidance of a self-love and
power of will not often to be met with, and all this professedly not
regulated by any sense of religion or respect for public morals. In him we
have seen already the one gut-string playing several airs, but without a
touch of pity: the soft was not indeed his forte, his preference lying in
the direction of those examples we have already given--the joke upon
Professor Jameson, the poisoned satire upon Liston, the egotism among the
Taymouth Castle guests, the adulation of the Marquis of Breadalbane. Nor
can we forget, beyond all, the admitted perspicacity of one of the best
anatomists of his time, which, if it had been called in question in an
ordinary autopsy, with the most recondite appearances of poison or
violence, would have been vindicated by a power and success, accompanied
by a bitterness not often witnessed among scientific men. In his letter of
11th January 1829, to the curator of his rooms, he said, "All such matters
as these subside in a short time." "Not so," added the editor of the
_Mercury_; "such matters cannot subside till such time as he (Dr Knox)
clears himself to the public satisfaction." Time, we fear, has shewn the
falsehood of the one statement, and the hopelessness of the other. The
same suspicion remained, yea, remains still, and we fear will go down
through all time with the record of a story destined ever to be the
greatest example of man's wickedness, when left to his idol, that has ever
appeared.
The Trial.
In November 1828, a citation was served upon William Burke and Helen
M'Dougal to appear before the High Court of Justiciary to be held at
Edinburgh, the 24th day of December, at 10 o'clock forenoon, to underlie
the law in the crime of murder, on three separate indictments. The first
comprehended the case of Mary Paterson, as having occurred in the
preceding month of April in the house of Constantine Burke; the
second--that of James Wilson, or Daft Jamie--in October of the same year
in Log's house, situated in Tanner's Close; and the third--that of Madgy,
Marjory, or Mary M'Gonegal or Duffie, or Campbell, or Docherty--in
November, in Burke's house, Portsburgh. The libel contained also a list of
a great number of articles of dress worn by the victims, and identified,
and, among others, Mrs Docherty's gown, and Daft Jamie's brass snuff-box
and spoon.
The presiding judge of the Court at that time was the Lord Justice-Clerk
Boyle; the other judges, Lords Pitmilly, Meadowbank, and M'Kenzie; and the
prosecutor, Sir William Rae, Lord Advocate. The leading counsel for Burke
was the Dean of Faculty, that for M'Dougal, Henry Cockburn, James Tytler
being the Crown agent. The witnesses were fifty-five in number--the two
principal, Hare and his wife, received as king's evidence in the
characters of _socii criminis_. The panels having taken their places at
the bar in the midst of a crowded court, filled long before the opening of
the doors by people who had the privilege of influence, and whose numbers
were only as a trifle in comparison of the mass outside, Mr Patrick
Robertson, one of Burke's junior counsel, made a technical objection to
the reading of the indictment, which was overruled. A defence was then
lodged for Burke, and supported by the same counsel, on the ground that it
was contrary to the law of Scotland to combine in one libel so many
charges and two separate panels. The argument, which was a long one,
involving points of law and practice, was followed up by the Dean of
Faculty, and answered by the Lord Advocate, with this result, that the
judges, with the consent of the public prosecutor, agreed to limit the
charge to the case of Docherty, and thus limited, the proceedings went on.
The various witnesses, forming, however, a very small portion of the whole
fifty-five cited, appeared in succession to give their evidence. Every
word uttered by every one was caught by ears strung to the highest pitch
of sensibility; and throughout the entire day, the deep silence, more
like that of a death-chamber than a court, was as much the expression of
curiosity as of awe--reminding one, too, of the stillness of an audience
where the feelings are claimed by oppressed virtue with the encircling
meshes in which innocence is to be involved by death getting closer and
closer as the scenes succeed. The interest lay in the gradual development,
while the heart was affected by all the different passions which, changing
from pity for the victims to hatred of the murderers, were kept in
continual agitation. Over all, there was the oppressive awe inspired by
the presence of the fearful men and women, as if they had been demons of
monstrous forms and powers placed there under restraining bonds. At
several times,--and especially when Hare described the screigh of the
little old woman which preceded that ten minutes' agony in which she lay
under the pressure of Burke--Hare being all the while, according to his
lie, sitting coolly looking on,--you might have heard deep sighs escaping
from strong hearts, in spite of resolutions to restrain them. Even then
the grateful creature, who seemed to have trusted Burke alone, and
defended him in the preceding sham fight, was only "dead a wee," and the
process was to be resumed. But even this effect was transcended, if
possible, by the very manner in which the witness stated how the victim
was presently stripped, and after being bound neck and heel, was cast,
mangled and bloody, among the straw in the angle between the bed and the
wall. The dominant idea seemed to bring into light all the surrounding
objects--the table pushed aside, the old chairs, the squalid bed marked
with the blood of prior victims, the women listening with expectation in
the long dark passage, the two men panting after the struggle, and
bringing forth on the top of their long-drawn breath ribald jokes, and
even accomplishing a laugh,--all followed by the rush in of the women, and
the resumption of the drink, the song, and the dance.
To the greater part of those assembled in the court, all this was
comparatively new, for great secrecy had been observed by the officials.
Yet the effect of the great scene did not diminish, or rather, it
increased, the interest in the particulars,--the suspicions of the
Grays--the restlessness of the murderers under the impression of impending
discovery--the lies about having turned the poor creature out because she
was too intimate with Burke--the start of Mrs Gray when she seized the arm
of the body among the straw--the lifting up of the head by her husband,
and the recognition of the features of the woman who had been dancing and
singing so short a time before--then the pressing down into the tea-chest,
and the sally forth of the whole gang to Surgeon's Square, from thence to
Newington for the price. And as in a tragedy we find collateral lights
thrown in by the scintillations of genius to increase the effect of the
stronger scenes, so here these were not wanting. How much the sympathy
for the little old woman was increased by the love and gratitude she
expressed for her benefactor, Burke, when contrasted with the savage eyes
that glared upon her as she lay under his death-grasp! Another of these
smaller traits going to the aid of the general effect, was the fact stated
by the prior witnesses, that when she met Burke, she was going about
seeking for her son; and this yearning had only given place for a little
to the new feeling of gratitude with which she strove to repay the
sympathy of him who had from the first made up his mind to slay her. It
was even whispered that that son was in the court listening to the fate of
his mother; and, whether true or not, it did not fail of its contribution.