theft, whom the frequenters of executions cannot bring themselves to
consider as a very desperate felon, and a monster who is most justly
hanged for one execrable murder, when there are fifteen behind as
abominable. The sentiments and opinions of the mob cannot be the same
in the one case, as in the other; they cannot enter into nice legal
distinctions--if indeed legal distinctions would blame them; but they
see one man suffer for stealing a few shillings, and they pity him,
and another for murdering sixteen individuals, and they execrate him.
There is nothing extraordinary in all this, though it is unusual,
almost unprecedented, that an opportunity should occur to call it
forth. To show any thing else than an implacable aversion to such great
moral turpitude, would have been to manifest a slight perception of
evil, and we suspect that those who blame the shouters, were themselves
actuated by equally honourable feelings, though they would not permit
them to operate in the same way.
We will concede to them, that people of very refined feelings and
cultivated minds would not triumph over the last moments of the most
depraved man who ever lived, and that Burke was that man, perhaps with
the exception of Hare, there can be no question; but then we must
recollect that those who jostled each other upon the High Street of
Edinburgh on the morning of the execution, make no pretensions to such
high refinement. We must also bear in mind, that many of the populace
were of the same rank in life as the massacred victims, and that they
naturally felt more deeply on the subject than those whose station
and habits removed them from the risk of being butchered. Also, that
a notion had gone abroad among these people that their bodies were
mangled for behoof of a science which is to benefit more peculiarly the
rich, and that those obnoxious individuals who exercise the inhuman
trade of resurrectionists, are screened by them from the punishment
they merit. They believed also that there was a desire to deal too
leniently towards this ruthless gang, and that although one of them had
been sacrificed, others of the delinquents had been snatched from a
deserved fate, because their blood was little accounted of. It had been
even imagined that a disposition was cherished of saving the life of
Burke, and that he was unwillingly consigned to his fate; now all this
is very erroneous, and some of it very absurd, but still these opinions
were conscientiously held by numbers, and would be as operative in
dictating an expression of their feelings, as more rational ideas could
have been.
It is not wonderful, then, that when they witnessed the preparations
for the ceremony, they should indulge in expressions of satisfaction;
and that when the culprit himself was exhibited before them, an
uncontrollable and simultaneous shout of triumphant exultation should
burst forth, and that execration for his enormous guilt should have led
the vast multitude, without concert or premeditation, to repeat again
and again their acclamations.
The law in such cases justly and wisely, but relentlessly, consigns
the perpetrators to death, and the public voice also relentlessly adds
to it obloquy and reproach. Nay more, the Lord Justice Clerk, before
passing sentence, mentioned that he was prevented only by a sense
“that the public eye would be offended by so dismal a spectacle,”
from ordering also, “that to satisfy the violated laws of his country
and the voice of public indignation, his body should be exhibited in
chains, to bleach in the winds, in order to deter others from the
commission of similar offences.” His Lordship, so far from having any
aversion to posthumous vengeance, adds, “I trust, that if it is ever
customary to preserve skeletons, yours will be preserved, in order
that posterity may keep in remembrance your atrocious crimes.” And he
could scarcely have used other terms in animadverting upon what he
justly characterized in the following words: “A crime more atrocious, a
more cold-blooded, deliberate, and systematic preparation for murder,
and the motive so paltry, was really unexampled in the annals of this
country.” His Lordship’s colleagues also expressed themselves in
similar terms, and still the people are blamed for acting in unison
with their declared sentiments.
Even the hangman seemed to share in the general feeling. His
instructions to the porter who assisted him were conveyed in the
following petty sentence, “Hold him till I get the rope adjusted, and
then let the ---- kick.” When fastening the rope about his neck, he did
give it an unmerciful tug, so as nearly to strangle him.
It is admitted by those who complain of the violation of decency and
good taste, that he was a cold-hearted miscreant, towards whom a spark
of sympathy could not be extended, and his atrocities are denounced
in eloquent and indignant terms, and yet it appears to have been
anticipated that the public, on the only occasion they had of publicly
manifesting their sentiments, should have met him with a semblance
of pity and forgiveness. They could not have done so without doing
violence to every feeling that agitated them, and it would have been
an unaccountable piece of hypocrisy to have attempted it. Public
detestation unequivocally expressed, is always an important, and
sometimes the most important auxiliary of punishment, and the scorn
and contumely that is heaped upon a guilty head may be the best ally
of the repressors of immorality, and if there was in that assemblage
one individual whose sordid soul, could contemplate the commission
of enormities which might outrage humanity, and bring on him similar
manifestations of disgust, it must have acted as a solemn warning
when he made the terrible discovery, that “when it goeth well with
the righteous the city rejoiceth, and when the wicked perish there is
shouting.”
Our sentiments concerning the character of the unhappy wretch, and
his crimes, has been explicitly stated in the foregoing part of this
narrative, but it may not be unacceptable to our readers that a brief
view of the opinions of others should be furnished. We subjoin,
therefore, the following observations, the merit of which may well
justify their insertion.
* * * * *
The atrocious murderer, Burke, whose hands were more deeply dyed
in innocent blood than those of any other homicide recorded in the
calendar of crimes, has undergone the sentence of the law; and from the
narrative of the concomitants of the tragedy, it will be seen that the
circumstances attending his exit were as extraordinary as his guilt was
transcendant and unprecedented. Essentially and in his real character
an ignoble, base, mean-spirited wretch, this wholesale assassin, by the
mere extinction or obliteration of every moral principle and feeling of
his nature, and by a consequent abandonment of the faculties bestowed
upon him to the commission of crime, has succeeded in obtaining “a bad
pre-eminence,” even among those who had prostituted and degraded far
higher endowments to the ways of iniquity; and a name which ought never
to have been heard of beyond the precincts of the lowest and meanest
compartment of society, is now damned to immortal infamy, and stands
out in strong relief from the long and black catalogue of those who
have most signalised themselves by their daring violation of the laws
both of God and of man. In fact, it was reserved for this incredible
monster and his associate fiends to reduce murder to a system, and to
establish a regular traffic in the bodies of their victims. Ordinary
homicides slay from passion or revenge; the murders they commit are
the product of an ungovernable and overmastering impulse, which hurls
reason from her seat, and, in the wild conflict of guilty passion,
precipitates them into the commission of acts which are no sooner done
than they would perhaps give the universe were they undone. But Burke
and his crew possess the horrid and anomalous distinction of having,
without the palliation of passion, or of any other motive which a
just view of human infirmity can admit in extenuation, and from a
base and sordid love of gain, and of acquiring the means of rioting
in profligacy and iniquity of every sort, established a traffic in
blood upon principles of cool calculation, and an utter recklessness
of either God or man, which would have done no discredit to Mammon
himself. Hence it is, that Burke is perhaps the only criminal who has
died, not only without exciting an emotion of pity in a human bosom,
but amidst the curses, both loud and deep, of the assembled thousands
who witnessed the ignominious termination of his guilty career. The
wild shouts of exultation which saluted him upon his appearance on the
scaffold, and which rung in his ears with still fiercer acclamations
when the world was closing on him for ever, must have appalled even the
heart of ice within his worthless bosom, and sounded as the knell of a
judgment to come, where the spirits of the slain would rise up before
him to demand a just retribution. Yet at that awful moment, when his
deeds of blood must have arisen before him, and when the unknown future
must have presented itself to his mind as the past was about to close,
the wretch seemed almost calm, and looked defiance, nay, scorn at those
who, yielding to their overpowering sense of his crimes, blasted his
last moments with their shouts of wild triumph and exultation.
* * * * *
It will be long ere such a scene as this occur again, unless,
indeed, as is the devout wish of every one, a similar spectacle be
produced by the execution of Hare. There never, perhaps, was such a
signal and appalling expression of a whole populace’s indignation
as on this occasion. The nature of the feeling by which they were
actuated, indeed, could only be estimated by looking at the species of
crime, at once so novel and so aggravated, of which the wretch has
been convicted. History, even in its blackest record, the _Newgate
Calendar_, has disclosed nothing similar or equal in atrocity to the
late transactions at the West Port, if we except one or two straggling
and doubtful cases, which the progress of inquiry, stimulated by the
recent events, has since elicited. The commission of such horrors, and
the state of mind and feeling which could bend to their commission,
formed, as it were, a new era in the history of human nature and
of human crime. A proportionate impression was communicated to the
multitude, who literally stood for a season “in pitiless horror fixed.”
Found guilty of a tissue of enormities, at the very least, of which one
would require to be something more or less than human to refrain from
shuddering, the execution of this monster was anticipated by thousands
without any of those sentiments of commiseration which usually
accompany such spectacles. After all was granted that the advocates of
science could demand, still the bare _species facti_, and no sophistry
could pervert or soften that, was narrowed and nailed down to this,
that Burke had done a deed which stands highest in the code of crime,
by the laws both of God and man,--that he had done so, not from any of
these various motives or temptations which the indulgence of mankind
is often apt to admit as palliatives to guilt, but from the basest of
all considerations, the procurement of a paltry pittance,--and that he
had contracted this heavy villany, not once or twice, or from sudden or
casual impulses, but coolly and deliberately had gone about exercising
the work of murder as a trade--dealing with human creatures as a
butcher deals with cattle--shedding their blood and selling their flesh
for bread.
It is impossible, without adverting to all these facts, to form any
conception of the popular fury on this occasion. It might be possible
to imagine a case in which a criminal, although exhibiting the very
highest depravity, might yet be not improperly looked upon with the
eye rather of pity than of condemnation,--as one whom nature had given
instincts and passions such as she gives alike to man and brute, but
for whom subsequent events had done worse than nothing. In fact, such
is the strong tendency of mankind to revolt from the idea of such
unnatural enormities being committed in aught of human shape, that
when the system of traffic which had been practised by Burke and his
associates first flashed in a full disclosure on men’s understandings,
not a few were inclined to search, in some extenuating circumstances
of this kind, for a cause of palliation of this unparalleled felon’s
iniquity. It was at least not an impossible supposition, that the
wretched man might have been labouring under a total insensibility of
moral and even of intellectual feeling, arising from an entire want of
education--from a mind dull and inert in its perceptions originally,
and not only in after life allowed to lie waste, but rendered still
more callous and impassive every day by a constant contact with scenes
of infamy. Could we indeed imagine that Burke had been left to have his
character formed under an accumulation of influences fatal and awful
to contemplate as these are--that his life had been always spent in
profligate habits and profligate haunts--that he had been born with a
ferocious and indocile nature, and bred in situations which barred all
progressive movements to good--that, in short, he had never had ideas
poured into his intellect, or any humane feelings generated in his
bosom--then perhaps it might furnish matter of curious investigation
to the metaphysicians, whether he was not, after all, a case which
called for deep sympathy. But enough has transpired of the history
of this extraordinary man, to show that he at least was placed in no
such deplorable predicament. His education and rank in life, instead
of having been by any means of the lowest order, were such as, in
the judgment of the world, and on the authority of experience, are
held of necessity to humanize and inform the mind, and to communicate
perfectly just conceptions of moral distinctions. In addition to this,
many people hold it to have been made out that Burke was a man of
strong mind, of an understanding much superior to his condition. When,
therefore, he stood convicted before his country as one who, for his
livelihood, had been a wholesale dealer in human slaughter, he stood
without the benefit of one single mitigating circumstance, to weaken
the profound sense of horror and indignation which pervaded all hearts.
He had known the full measure and enormity of the guilt which he was
perpetrating, and the whole practical amount of human suffering which
he was inflicting day by day on bereaved families and friends; and,
appearing in this light, every one felt that it was idle to talk of
mercy, and the most charitable were disposed to say, Let the law take
its course.
* * * * *
During the whole of Wednesday the College was beset by numbers anxious
to catch a glimpse of the body as it was conveyed to Dr. Monro’s
Anatomical Theatre. It was resolved, however, that the removal should
not take place upon that day, but should be effected in the subsequent
night, when there was no probability of a crowd collecting. Still,
however, the people continued to stand and gaze at the building in
which they believed him to be, as if they expected the inanimate body
to appear to them.
Early on Thursday morning the corpse was removed from the Lock-up-house
to the College, and placed in one of Dr. Monro’s rooms. Several
scientific gentlemen attended at an early hour to examine the
appearances before the promiscuous entry of the students should prevent
their undisturbed examination; among others we noticed Mr. Liston, Mr.
George Combe, and his philosophical opponent Sir William Hamilton; Mr.
Joseph the eminent sculptor, was also present, and took a bust of the
criminal. Sketches were likewise taken by more than one young gentleman.
The body was that of a man you might call stout or sturdy. The neck
was one of those that are usually denominated a bull-neck. The chest
and the upper part of the arms were extremely muscular. The lower
parts were so also, but not in the same proportion. The lower part of
his body was thin, but his thighs were extremely large, the leg and
foot small. Altogether he exhibited any thing but the appearance of an
emaciated body, and every one was astonished to find it display such
plumpness and stoutness, differing very materially from the aspect
he had upon the scaffold,--but then, as we have already noticed, the
size of the clothes making them hang loosely upon him, gave a look of
feebleness and narrowness to the chest which it did not possess.
The countenance was not so much altered after death as is usually
the case, or as was generally expected. It presented the appearance
of great placidity, without the slightest thing which could indicate
that he had suffered a violent death, excepting the discoloration of
the neck where the cord had surrounded it and made a livid mark; nor
was there that fulness of the features generally attendant on those
who have suffered a similar death, owing, perhaps to his head having
been supported in a perpendicular position after being cut down. The
countenance betokened the same meanness and low wickedness which it
exhibited at the trial.
In the course of the forenoon the body was inspected by a number of
individuals, though the public were not admitted generally.
Professor Monro, in pursuance of the sentence of the Court, gave a
public dissection of the body at one o’clock to a numerous audience;
indeed the class-room was quite crowded. The learned lecturer was
received with every mark of respect, accompanied by the usual
demonstrations of welcome. We observed among the audience many highly
respectable professional gentlemen anxiously waiting to hear Dr. Monro
upon the particular subject of the day’s lecture, as it was known that
it was to be the brain, a portion of the anatomy of the human body on
which the professor has bestowed particular attention, and on which, in
consequence, his lectures are particularly valued. He has also some new
views regarding the brain, the correctness of which we are assured the
result of the lecture sufficiently proved. Previously to commencing,
the professor did every thing in his power to satisfy the curiosity of
those who wished to have a view of the features, by exposing him in the
most favourable position. In the dissection he was aided by his able
assistant, Mr. M‘Kenzie. It was commenced by first taking off the scalp
to show the muscles of the upper part of the head; these being removed,
the skull was sawn through, and the brain with its covering exposed.
The quantity of blood that gushed out was enormous, and by the time the
lecture was finished, which was not till three o’clock, the area of the
class-room had the appearance of a butcher’s slaughter-house, from its
flowing down and being trodden upon.
The anxiety to obtain a sight of the vile carcass of the murderer was
exceedingly great, particularly after the dismissal of Dr. Monro’s
class; and the Doctor, in the most obliging manner, accommodated every
one to the utmost extent the apartments would admit of. About half
past two o’clock, however, a body of young men, consisting chiefly of
students, assembled in the area, and becoming clamorous for admission
_en masse_, which of course was quite impracticable, it was found
necessary to send for a body of Police to preserve order. But this
proceeding had quite an opposite effect from that intended. Indignant
at the opposition they met with, conceiving themselves to have a
preferable title to admission, and exasperated at the display of
force in the interior of the University, where they imagined no such
interference was justifiable, the young men made several attempts, in
which they had nearly succeeded, to overpower the Police, and broke
a good deal of glass in the windows on either side of the entrance
to the Anatomical Theatre. The Police were in fact compelled to use
their batons, and several hard blows were exchanged on both sides.
The Lord Provost was present for some time, but was glad to retire
with whole bones, amidst the hootings of the obstreperous youth, who
lavished opprobrious epithets on the Magistrates, particularly on
Bailie Small, the College Bailie, who displayed considerable activity,
and harangued the assemblage from time to time with apparently very
little effect. Attempts were made to convey some prisoners the Police
had made across the square, but they were speedily rescued on attaining
the open space. Those captured afterwards were lodged in one of Dr.
Monro’s rooms, but this scarcely afforded more secure custody. It
was also attempted to clear the yard with but indifferent success;
indeed the Police were overmatched, and could only stand their ground
by avoiding the open area. The disturbance lasted from half-past two
till nearly four o’clock, when an end was at once put to it by the
good sense of Professor Christison, who announced to the young men
that he had arranged for their admission in parties of about fifty at
a time, giving his own personal guarantee for their good conduct. This
was received with loud cheers, and immediately the riotous disposition
they had previously manifested disappeared. We cannot conceive why this
expedient was not thought of earlier; for if it had, there would have
been no disturbance of any kind. Several of the more violent of the
youths were taken into custody by the Police, but were very properly
liberated on their parole by the Magistrates. The whole fracas, indeed,
was a mere ebullition of boyish impatience, rendered more unruly by
their extreme curiosity to obtain a sight of the body of the murderer.
Several of the policemen were severely hurt; but _en revanche_, we
believe not a few of the young men have still reason to remember the
weight of their batons, and some severe contusions were received. South
Bridge Street, in front of the College, was kept in a continued uproar,
and almost blocked up by the populace who were denied access to the
interior, and had the approaches not been guarded fresh accessions of
rioters might have given it a more serious aspect. In fact, the body of
Police on duty were too weak for the rioters, small parties being sent
from the office as they came in from other quarters; a circumstance
which rendered it necessary for them to use harsher means than they
would otherwise have employed. On Friday, however, matters were better
arranged. An order was given to admit the public generally to view
the body of Burke, and of course many thousands availed themselves
of the opportunity thus afforded them. Indeed so long as daylight
lasted, an unceasing stream of persons continued to flow through the
College Square, who, as they arrived, were admitted by one stair to
the Anatomical Theatre, passed the table on which lay the body of the
murderer, and made their exit by another stair. By these means no
inconvenience was felt except what was occasioned by the impatience of
the crowd to get forward to the Theatre.
On that day we again paid the College a visit, and formed part of the
immense multitude who pressed on anxious to see the remains of the
wretch. Having made our way to the stairs leading to the class-room,
we moved up without much exertion of our own being required. The
progression alone of the dense body which kept continually advancing,
almost supplying the place of our usual locomotive powers. After a
sufficiency of squeezing, we found ourselves in the room, where we
tarried for awhile, that we might have sufficient time to make more
minute observations than those who were hurriedly carried past in the
continuous stream that moved along. The body was lying on the black
marble table, which is usually in the class-room, on one side of the
area, so as to allow free ingress and egress.
To give a better idea of what the countenance had been, the skull cap
which had been sawn off the preceding day was replaced, and the outer
skin brought over it, so as to retain it in the proper situation.
The face, however, was much altered. We understand that an immense
quantity of blood had flowed from the body during the night, producing
doubtless the paleness which was now its principal characteristic.
The features had entirely lost that decidedness and sharpness they
yesterday possessed. The nose was thickened, as the lips likewise were,
producing that bloated appearance usually seen in the faces of those
who have died from strangulation. It altogether no longer presented the
countenance of Burke.