watchman's lantern or the candle glimmering across the narrow alley,
or some occasional lamp swinging across the street; for it was by
such a lamp that a girl looked into the hackney coach and saw the
face of a man who had sent for Dr. Clench ostensibly to visit a
patient, but really in order to strangle the poor doctor on the way.
These are strange illuminations on the margin of the pompous page of
official history; and the incidental details give form and colour to
the incidents in Pepys' 'Journals' or Grammont's 'Memoirs.' We have
kept at a distance from the more dignified records of the famous
constitutional struggles which fill the greatest number of pages. Yet
those pages are not barren for the lover of the picturesque. And here
I must put in a word for one much reviled character. If ever I were to
try my hand at the historical amusement of whitewashing, I should be
tempted to take for my hero the infamous Jeffreys. He was, I dare say,
as bad as he is painted; so perhaps were Nero and Richard III., and
other much-abused persons; but no miscreant of them all could be more
amusing. Wherever the name of Jeffreys appears we may be certain of
good sport. With all his inexpressible brutality, his buffoonery, his
baseness, we can see that he was a man of remarkable talent. We think
of him generally as he appeared when bullying Baxter; when 'he snorted
and squeaked, blew his nose and clenched his hands, and lifted up his
eyes, mimicking their (the Nonconformists') manner, and running on
furiously, as he said they used to pray;' and we may regard him as his
victims must have regarded him, as a kind of demoniacal baboon placed
on the bench in robes and wig, in hideous caricature of justice. But
the vigour and skill of the man when he has to worry the truth out of
a stubborn witness is also amazing. When a knavish witness produced a
forged deed in support of the claim of a certain Lady Ity to a great
part of Shadwell, Jeffreys is in his element. He is perhaps a little
too exuberant. 'Ask him what questions you will,' he breaks out, 'but
if he should swear as long as Sir John Falstaff fought' (the Chief
Justice can quote Shakespeare), 'I would never believe a word he
says.' His lordship may be too violent, but he is substantially doing
justice; and shows himself a dead hand at unmasking a cheat. The most
striking proof of Jeffreys' power is in the dramatic trial of Lady
Lisle. The poor lady was accused of harbouring one Hicks, a Dissenting
preacher, after Sedgemoor. It was clear that a certain James Dunne
had guided Hicks to Lady Lisle's house. The difficulty was to prove
that Lady Lisle knew Hicks to be a traitor. Dunne had talked to her in
presence of another witness, and it was suggested that he had given
her the fatal information. But Dunne tried hard in telling his story
to sink this vital fact. The effort of Jeffreys to twist it out of
poor Dunne, and Dunne's futile and prolonged wriggling to escape the
confession, are reported at full, and form one of the most striking
passages in the 'State Trials.' Jeffreys shouts at him; dilates in
most edifying terms upon the bottomless lake of fire and brimstone
which awaits all perjurers; snatches at any slip; pins the witness
down; fastens inconsistencies upon him through page after page; but
poor Dunne desperately clutches the secret in spite of the tremendous
strain. He almost seems to have escaped, when the other witness
establishes the fact that some conversation took place. Armed with
this new thumbscrew, Jeffreys leaps upon poor Dunne again. The storm
of objurgations, appeals, confutations, bursts forth with increased
force; poor Dunne slips into a fatal admission; he has admitted some
talk, but cannot explain what it was. He tries dogged silence. The
torture of Jeffreys' tongue urges him to fresh blundering. A candle
is held up to his nose that the court 'may see his brazen face.' At
last he exclaims, the candle 'still nearer to his nose,' and feeling
himself the very focus of all attention, 'I am quite cluttered out of
my senses; I do not know what I say.' The wretched creature is allowed
to reflect for a time, and then at last declares that he will tell
the truth. He tells enough in fact for the purpose, though he feebly
tries to keep back the most damning words. Enough has been wrenched
out of him to send poor Lady Lisle to the scaffold. The figure of
the poor old lady falling asleep, as it is said, while Jeffreys'
thunder and lightning was raging in this terrific fashion round the
feeble defence of Dunne's reticence, is so pathetic, and her fate so
piteous and disgraceful, that we have little sense for anything but
Jeffreys' brutality. But if the power of worming the truth out of a
grudging witness were the sole test of a judge's excellence, we must
admit the amazing efficiency of Jeffreys' method. He is the ideal
cross-examiner, and we may overlook the cruelty to victims who have so
long ceased to suffer.
In the post-revolutionary period the world becomes more merciful
and duller. Lawyers speak at greater length; and even the victims
of '45, the strange Lord Lovat himself, give little sport at the
respectable bar of the House of Lords. But the domestic trials
become perhaps more interesting, if only by way of commentary upon
'Tom Jones' or 'Roderick Random.' Novelists indeed have occasionally
sought to turn these records to account. The great Annesley case
has been used by Mr. Charles Reade, and Scott took some hints from
it in one of the very best of his performances, the inimitable 'Guy
Mannering.' Scott's adaptation should, indeed, be rather a warning
than a precedent; for the surpassing merit of his great novel consists
in the display of character, in Meg Merrilies and Dandie Dinmont and
Counsellor Pleydell, and certainly not in the rather childish plot
with the long-lost heir business. He falls into the common error of
supposing that the actual occurrence of events must be a sufficient
guarantee for employing them in fiction. The Annesley case is almost
the only one in the collection in which facts descend to the level of
romance. The claimant's case was clearly established up to a certain
point. There was no doubt that he had passed for Lord Annesley's son
in his childhood; that he had for that reason been spirited away
by his uncle, and sold as a slave in America; and, further, that,
when he returned to make his claim and killed a man by accident (an
incident used by Scott)—his uncle did his best to have him convicted
for murder. The more difficult point was to prove that he was the
legitimate son of the deceased lord by his wife, who was also dead.
A servant of the supposed mother gave evidence which, if true,
conclusively disproved this assumption; and though young Annesley
won his first trial, he afterwards failed to convict this witness of
perjury. The case may therefore be still doubtful, though the weight
of evidence seems decidedly against the claimant. The case—the
'longest ever known' at that time—lasted fifteen days, and gives
some queer illustrations of the domestic life of a disreputable Irish
nobleman of the period. Perhaps, however, the most curious piece of
evidence is given by the attorney who was employed to prosecute the
claimant for a murder of which he was clearly innocent. 'What was
the intention of the prosecution?' he is asked. 'To put this man out
of the way that he (Lord Anglesea, the uncle) might enjoy the estate
easy and quiet.' 'You understood, then, that Lord Anglesea would
give 10,000_l._ to get the plaintiff hanged!' 'I did.' 'Did you not
apprehend that to be a most wicked crime?' 'I did.' 'If so, how could
you engage in that project, without making any objection to it?' 'I
may as well ask you,' is the reply, 'how you came to be engaged in
this suit.' He is afterwards asked whether any honest man would do
such an action. 'Yes, I believe they would, or else I would not have
carried it on.' This is one of the prettiest instances on record of
that ingenious adaptation of the conscience, which allows a man to
think himself thoroughly honest for committing a most wicked crime in
his professional capacity. The novelist who wishes rather to display
character than to amuse us with intricacies of plot, will find more
matter in less ambitious narratives. A most pathetic romance, which
may remind us of more famous fictions, underlies the great murder
case in which Cowper, the poet's grandfather, was defendant. Sarah
Stout, the daughter of a Quaker at Hertford, fell desperately in
love with Cowper, who was a barrister, and sometimes lodged at her
father's house when on circuit. She wrote passionate letters to him
of the 'Eloisa to Abelard' kind, which Cowper was ultimately forced
to produce in evidence. He therefore had a final interview with her,
explained to her the folly of her passion, there being already a
Mrs. Cowper, and left her late in the evening to go to his lodgings
elsewhere. Poor Sarah Stout rushed out in despair and threw herself
into the Priory river. There she was found dead next morning, when the
miller came to pull up his sluices. All the gossips of Hertford came
immediately to look at the body and make moral or judicial reflections
upon the facts. Wiseacres suggested that Cowper was the last man seen
in her company, and it came out that two or three other men attending
the assizes had gossiped about her on the previous evening, and one
of them had, strange to relate, left a cord close by his trunk. These
facts, transfigured by the Hertford imagination, became the nucleus
of a theory, set forth in delicious legal verbosity, that the said
Cowper, John Masson, and others 'a certain rope of no value about the
neck of the said Sarah, then and there feloniously, voluntarily, and
of malice aforethought did put, place, fix, and bind; and the neck and
throat of the said Sarah, then and there with the hands of you, the
said Cowper, Masson, Stephens, and Rogers, feloniously, voluntarily,
and of your malice aforethought, did hold, squeeze, and gripe.' By
the said squeezing and griping, to abbreviate a little, Sarah Stout
was choked and strangled; and being choked and strangled instantly
died, and was then secretly and maliciously put and cast into the
river. The evidence, it is plain, required a little straining, but
then Cowper belonged to the great Whig family of the town, and Sarah
Stout was a Quaker. Tories thought it would be well to get a Cowper
hanged, and Quakers wished to escape the imputation that one of their
sect had committed suicide. The trial lasted so long that the poor
judge became faint and confessed that he could not sum up properly.
The whole strength of the case, however, such as it was, depended
upon an ingenious theory set up by the prosecution, to the effect that
the bodies of the drowned always sink, whereas Miss Stout was found
floating, and must therefore have been dead before she was put in the
river. The chief witness was a sailor, who swore that this doctrine
as to sinking and swimming was universal in the navy. He had seen the
shipwreck of the 'Coronation' in 1691. 'We saw the ship sink down,'
he says, 'and they swam up and down like a shoal of fish one over
another, and I see them hover one upon another, and see them drop away
by scores at a time;' some nine escaped, 'but there were no more saved
out of the ship's complement, which was between 500 and 600, and the
rest I saw sinking downright, twenty at a time.' He has a clinching
argument, though a less graphic instance, to prove that men already
dead do not sink. 'Otherwise, why should Government be at that vast
charge to allow threescore or fourscore weight of iron to sink every
man, but only that their swimming about should not be a discouragement
to others?' Cowper's scientific witnesses, some of the medical bigwigs
of the day, had very little trouble in confuting this evidence; but
the letters which he at last produced, and the evidence that poor Miss
Stout had been talking of suicide, should have made the whole story
clear even to the bemuddled judges. The novelist would throw into
the background this crowd of gossiping and malicious _quidnuncs_ of
Hertford; but we must be content to catch glimpses of her previous
history from these absurdly irrelevant twaddlings, as in actual life
we catch sight of tragedies below the surface of social small-talk.
Sarah Stout was clearly a Maggie Tulliver, a potential heroine, unable
to be happy amidst the broad-brimmed, drab-coated respectabilities of
quiet little Hertford. Her rebellion was rasher than Maggie's, but
perhaps in a more characteristic fashion. The case suggests the wish
that Mr. Stephen Guest might have been hanged on some such suspicion
as was nearly fatal to Cowper.
Half a century later our ancestors were in a state of intense
excitement about another tragedy of a darker kind. Mary Blandy,
the only daughter of a gentleman at Henley, made acquaintance with
a Captain Cranstoun, who was recruiting in the town. The father
objected to a marriage from a suspicion, apparently well founded,
that Cranstoun was already married in Scotland. Thereupon Mary Blandy
administered to her father certain powders sent to her by Cranstoun.
According to her own account, she intended them as a kind of charm
to act upon her father's affections. As they were, in fact, composed
of arsenic, they soon put an end to her father altogether, and it
is too clear that she really knew what she was doing. It was sworn
that she used brutal and unfeeling language about the poor old man's
sufferings, for the poison was given at intervals during some months.
But the pathetic touch which moved the sympathies of contemporaries
was the behaviour of the father. In the last day or two of his life,
he was told that his daughter had been the cause of his fatal illness.
His comment was: 'Poor love-sick girl! What will not a woman do for
the man she loves!' When she came to his room his only thought was
apparently to comfort her. His most reproachful phrase was: 'Thee
should have considered better than to have attempted anything against
thy father.' The daughter went down on her knees and begged him not
to curse her. 'I curse thee!' he exclaimed. 'My dear, how couldst
thou think I should curse thee? No, I bless thee, and hope God will
bless thee and amend thy life.' And then he added, 'Do, my dear, go
out of the room and say no more, lest thou shouldst say anything to
thy prejudice; go to thy uncle Stevens, take him for thy friend; poor
man, I am sorry for him.' The tragedy behind these homely words is
almost too pathetic and painful for dramatic purposes; and it is not
strange that our ancestors were affected. The sympathy, however, took
the queer illogical twist which perhaps, who can tell? it might do
at the present day. Miss Blandy became a sort of _quasi_ saint, the
tenderness due to the murdered man extended itself to his murderer,
and her penitence profoundly edified all observers. Crowds of people
flocked to see her in chapel, and she accepted the homage gracefully.
She was extremely shocked, we are told, by one insinuation made by
uncharitable persons; namely, that her intimacy with Cranstoun, who
was supposed to be a freethinker, might justify doubts upon her
orthodoxy. She declared that he had always talked to her 'perfectly
in the style of a Christian,' and she had read the works of some of
our most celebrated divines. In spite of her moving conduct, however,
the 'prejudices she had to struggle with had taken too deep root in
some men's minds' to allow of her getting a pardon. And so, 5,000
people saw poor Miss Blandy mount the ladder in 'a black bombazine,
short sack and petticoat,' on an April morning at Oxford, and many,
'particularly several gentlemen of the University,' were observed to
shed tears. She left a declaration of innocence which, in spite of its
solemnity, must have been a lie; and which contained an allusion from
which it appears that Miss Blandy, like other prisoners, was suspected
of previous crimes.
'It is shocking to think,' says Horace Walpole, in noticing Miss
Blandy's case, 'what a shambles this country has become. Seventeen
were executed this morning, after having murdered the turnkey on
Friday night, and almost forced open Newgate.' Another woman was
hanged in the same year for murdering her uncle at Walthamstow;
and the public could talk about nothing but the marriage of the
Miss Gunnings and the hanging of two murderesses. Fielding, then
approaching the end of his career, was moved by this and other
atrocities to publish a queer collection of instances of the
providential punishment of murderers. Another famous author of the
day was commonly said to have turned a famous murder to account in
a different fashion. Foote, it is said, was introduced at a club in
the words, 'This is the nephew of the gentleman who was lately hung
in chains for murdering his brother;' and it is added that Foote's
first pamphlet was an account of this disagreeable domestic incident.
A more serious author might have found in it materials for a striking
narrative. Captain Goodere commanded his Majesty's ship 'Ruby,' lying
in the King's Road off Bristol. He had a quarrel with his brother
Sir John Goodere, about a certain estate. The family solicitor
arranged a meeting in his house, where the two brothers appeared to
be reconciled. But Sir John had scarcely left the house, when he was
seized in broad daylight by a set of sailors who had been drinking
in a public-house, and carried down forcibly to the Captain's barge.
The Captain himself followed and rowed off with his brother to the
ship. There Sir John was confined in a cabin, a suggestion being
thrown out to the crew that he was a madman. A few hours later, one
Mahony, who played the part of 'hairy-faced Dick' to Hamilton Tighe,
strangled the unfortunate man, with an accomplice called White.
Attention had been aroused amongst the crew by ominous sounds, groans,
and scufflings heard in the dead of the night, and next morning,
the lieutenant, after a talk with the surgeon, resolved to seize
their captain for murder. A more outrageous and reckless proceeding,
indeed, could scarcely have been imagined, even in the days when a
pressgang was a familiar sight, and the captain of a ship at sea was
as absolute as an Eastern despot. Every detail seemed to be arranged
with an express view to publicity. One piece of evidence, however, was
required to bring the matter home to the captain; and it is of ghastly
picturesqueness. The ship's cooper and his wife were sleeping in the
cabin next to the scene of the murder. The cooper had heard the poor
man exclaim that he was going to be murdered, and praying that the
murder might come to light. This, however, seemed to be the wandering
of a madman, and the cooper went to sleep. Presently his wife called
him up: 'I believe they are murdering the gentleman.' He heard broken
words and saw a light glimmering through a crevice in the partition.
Peeping through he could distinguish the two ruffians, standing with a
candle over the dead body and taking a watch from a pocket. And then,
through the gloom, he made out a hand upon the throat of the victim.
The owner of the hand was invisible; but it was whiter than that of
a common sailor. 'I have often seen Mahony's and White's hands,' he
added, 'and I thought the hand was whiter than either of theirs.' The
trembling cooper wanted to leave the cabin, but his wife held him
back, as, indeed, with three murderers in the dark passage outside,
it required some courage to move. So they watched trembling, till he
heard a sentinel outside, and thought himself safe at last: he roused
the doctor, peeped at the dead body through a 'scuttle' which opened
into the cabin; and then urged the lieutenant to seize the captain.
The captain was deservedly hanged, bequeathing to us that ghastly
Rembrandt-like picture of the white hand seen through the crevice by
the trembling cooper on the throat of the murdered man. There is no
touch which appeals so forcibly to the imagination in De Quincey's
famous narrative of the Mar murders.
I have made but a random selection from the long gallery of grim and
grotesque portraiture of the less reputable of our ancestry. It must
be confessed that a first impression tends to reconcile us to the
comfortable creed of progress. The eighteenth century had some little
defects which have been frequently expounded; but it can certainly
afford to show courts of justice against its predecessor. The old
judicial murder of the Popish Plot variety has become extinct; if the
judges try to strain the law of libel, for example, the prisoner has
every chance of making a good fight; for which the readers of Horne
Tooke's gallant defences, and of some of Erskine's speeches, may be
duly grateful. The ancient brag of fair play has become something of a
reality. And the character of the crimes has changed in a noticeable
way. There are hideous crimes enough. A brutal murder by smugglers
near the case of Mary Blandy surpasses in its barbarity the worst
of modern agrarian outrages; though it is not clear that in number
of horrors the present century is unable to match its predecessor.
When the wild blood of the Byrons shows itself in the last of the
old tavern brawls à la Mohun, we feel that it is a case (in modern
slang) of a 'survival.' The poet's granduncle, the wicked Lord
Byron, got into a quarrel with Mr. Chaworth about the game laws at a
dinner of country gentlemen at the Star and Garter; whereupon, in an
ambiguous affair, half-scuffle and half-duel, Byron sent his sword
through Chaworth's body, and then politely requested Mr. Chaworth to
admit that he (Byron) was as brave a man as any in the Kingdom. But
this little ebullition required Byronic impulsiveness, and was not
a recognised part of a gentleman's conduct. Lord Ferrers, a short
time before, was hanged, to the admiration of all men, like a common
felon, for shooting his own steward; whereas in our day, he would
almost certainly have escaped on the plea of insanity. Other cases
mark the advent of the meddlesome, but perhaps on the whole useful
person, the social reformer. Momentary gleams of light, for example,
are thrown upon the scandals which ruined the trade of the parsons of
the Fleet. Poor Miss Pleasant Rawlins is arrested for an imaginary
debt, carried to a sponging-house, and there persuaded (she was only
seventeen or thereabouts) that she could obtain her liberty by an
immediate marriage to an adventurer who had scraped acquaintance with
her and taken a liking to her fortune. The famous (he was once famous)
Beau Feilding falls into a trap unworthy of an experienced man of
the world. He is persuaded that a lady of fortune has fallen in love
with him on seeing him walking in her grounds at a distance. A lady,
by no means of fortune, comes to his lodgings, and passes herself
off as this susceptible person. Hereupon Feilding sends off for a
priest of one of the foreign embassies, gets himself married at his
lodgings the same evening, and discovers a few days afterwards that he
is married to the wrong person. It is exactly a comedy of the period
performed by real flesh and blood actors. The catastrophe is painful.
Mr. Feilding ventures to grant himself a divorce, and to marry the
wretched old Duchess of Cleveland; and in due time the Duchess finds
it very convenient to have him tried for bigamy. It did not take more
than half a century or so of such scandals to get an improvement in
the marriage law, which implies, on the whole, a creditable rate of
progress. Another set of cases illustrates a grievance familiar to
novel-readers. In 'Amelia' the atrocities of bailiffs, sponging-houses
and debtors' prisons are drawn with startling realism. We may easily
convince ourselves that Fielding was not speaking without book. The
bailiff who has arrested Captain Booth gives a 'wipe or two with his
hanger,' as he pleasantly expresses it, to an unlucky wretch who
gives trouble, and delivers an admirable discourse upon the ethics
of killing in such cases. It might have come from the mouth of one
Tranter, a bailiff, who, a few years before, had stabbed poor Captain
Luttrell, for objecting to leave his wife in a delicate state of
health. Soon after, we find a society of philanthropists headed by
Oglethorpe of 'strong benevolence of soul,' endeavouring to expose
the horrors of the Fleet and the Marshalsea. A series of trials,
ordered by the House of Commons, had the ending too characteristic
of all such movements. Witnesses swore to atrocities enough to
make one's blood run cold—of men guilty only of impecuniosity,
half-starved, thrust naked into loathsome and pestiferous dungeons,
beaten and chained, and persecuted to death. But then arise another
set of unimpeachable witnesses, who swear with equal vigour that the
unfortunate debtors were treated with every consideration; that they
were made as comfortable as their mutinous spirit would allow; that
they were discharged in good health and died months afterwards from
entirely different causes; that the accused were not the responsible
authorities; that they had never interfered except from kindness, and
that they were the humanest and best of mankind. Nothing remained but
an acquittal; though the investigation did something towards letting
daylight into abodes of horror which Mr. Pickwick found capable of
improvement a century later.
Other cases might show how in various ways the strange power called
Public Opinion was beginning to increase its capricious and desultory
influence. The strange case of Elizabeth Canning (1753) is one of the
most picturesque in the collection. Miss Canning was a maid-servant,
who disappeared for a month, and coming home told how she had been
kidnapped by a gipsy and finally escaped. Officious neighbours
rushed in, and by judicious leading questions managed to help her to
manufacture evidence against a poor old gipsy woman, preternaturally
hideous, who sat smoking her pipe in blank wonder as the crowd of
virtuous avengers of innocence rushed into her kitchen. Mary Squires,
the gipsy, was sentenced to be hanged, and doubtless at an earlier
period she would have been turned off without delay. But in that
delicious calm in the middle of the last century, when wars, and
rebellions, and constitutional agitations were quiet for the moment,
and people had time to read their modest newspapers without spoiling
their digestions and their nerves, the case aroused the popular
interest. If the news did not flash through the country as rapidly as
that of the Lefroy murder, it slowly dribbled along the post-roads and
set people gossiping in alehouses far away in quiet country villages.
A whole host of witnesses appeared and proved an _alibi_ by giving
a diary of a gipsy's tour. We follow the party to village dances;
we hear the venerable piece of scandal about the schoolmaster who
'got fuddled' with the gipsies; and what the gipsies had for dinner
on January 1, 1753, and how they paid their bill; we have a glimpse
of the little flirtation carried on by the gipsy's daughter, and
the poor trembling little letter is produced, which she managed to
write to her lover, and which cost her sevenpence; threepence being
charged for it from Basingstoke to London, and fourpence from London
to Dorchester. After more than a week spent in overhauling this and
other evidence, proving amongst other things that the scene of the
girl's supposed confinement was really tenanted the whole time by
a man strangely and most inappropriately named Fortune Natus, the
jury decided that the accuser was guilty of perjury, but boggled
characteristically as to its being 'wilful and corrupt.' However,
Elizabeth Canning got her deserts and was transported to New England,
still sticking to the truth of her story. Her guilt is plain enough,
if anybody could care about it, but the little details of English
country life a century ago are as fresh as the doings of the rustics
in one of Mr. Hardy's novels.
It all happened a long time ago, but we cannot hope with the old lady
who made that consolatory remark about other historical narratives
that 'it ain't none of it true.' On the contrary such vivid little
pictures flash out upon us as we read that we have a difficulty in
supposing that they were not taken yesterday. Abundance of morals may
be drawn by historians and others who deal in that kind of ware; it
is enough here to have indicated, as well as we can, what pleasant
reading may be found in the dusty old volumes which are too often left
to repose undisturbed on the repulsive shelves of a lawyer's library.
FOOTNOTES: