“CELEBRATED TRIALS” AND JOHN THURTELL
BORROW’S first book was _Faustus_, and his second was _Romantic Ballads_,
the one being published, as we have seen, in 1825, the other in 1826.
This chronology has the appearance of ignoring the _Celebrated Trials_,
but then it is scarcely possible to count _Celebrated Trials_ {67a} as
one of Borrow’s books at all. It is largely a compilation, exactly as
the _Newgate Calendar_ and Howell’s _State Trials_ are compilations. In
his preface to the work Borrow tells us that he has differentiated the
book from the _Newgate Calendar_ {67b} and the _State Trials_ {67c} by
the fact that he had made considerable compression. This was so, and in
fact in many cases he has used the blue pencil rather than the pen—at
least in the earlier volumes. But Borrow attempted something much more
comprehensive than the _Newgate Calendar_ and the _State Trials_ in his
book. In the former work the trials range from 1700 to 1802; in the
latter from the trial of Becket in 1163 to the trial of Thistlewood in
1820. Both works are concerned solely with this country. Borrow went
all over Europe, and the trials of Joan of Arc, Count Struensee, Major
André, Count Cagliostro, Queen Marie Antoinette, the Duc d’Enghien, and
Marshal Ney, are included in his volumes. Moreover, while what may be
called state trials are numerous, including many of the cases in
_Howell_, the greater number are of a domestic nature, including nearly
all that are given in the _Newgate Calendar_. In the first two volumes
he has naturally mainly state trials to record; the later volumes record
sordid everyday crimes, and here Borrow is more at home. His style when
he rewrites the trials is more vigorous, and his narrative more
interesting. It is to be hoped that the exigent publisher, who he
assures us made him buy the books for his compilation out of the £50 that
he paid for it, was able to present him with a set of the _State Trials_,
if only in one of the earlier and cheaper issues of the work than the one
that now has a place in every lawyer’s library.
The third volume of _Celebrated Trials_, although it opens with the trial
of Algernon Sidney, is made up largely of crime of the more ordinary
type, and this sordid note continues through the three final volumes. I
have said that _Faustus_ is an allegory of “man’s inhumanity to man.”
That is emphatically, in more realistic form, the distinguishing feature
of _Celebrated Trials_. Amid these records of savagery, it is a positive
relief to come across such a trial as that of poor Joseph Baretti.
Baretti, it will be remembered, was brought to trial because, when some
roughs set upon him in the street, he drew a dagger, which he usually
carried “to carve fruit and sweetmeats,” and killed his assailant. In
that age, when our law courts were a veritable shambles, how cheerful it
is to find that the jury returned a verdict of “self-defence.” But then
Sir Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke, Dr. Johnson, and David Garrick gave
evidence to character, representing Baretti as “a man of benevolence,
sobriety, modesty, and learning.” This trial is an oasis of mercy in a
desert of drastic punishment. Borrow carries on his “trials” to the very
year before the date of publication, and the last trial in the book is
that of “Henry Fauntleroy, Esquire,” for forgery. Fauntleroy was a quite
respectable banker of unimpeachable character, to whom had fallen at a
very early age the charge of a banking business that was fundamentally
unsound. It is clear that he had honestly endeavoured to put things on a
better footing, that he lived simply, and had no gambling or other vices.
At a crisis, however, he forged a document, in other words signed a
transfer of stock which he had no right to do, the “subscribing witness”
to his power of attorney being Robert Browning, a clerk in the Bank of
England, and father of the distinguished poet. Well, Fauntleroy was
sentenced to be hanged—and he was duly hanged at Newgate on 30th October,
1824, only thirteen years before Queen Victoria came to the throne!
Borrow has affirmed that from a study of the _Newgate Calendar_ and the
compilation of his _Celebrated Trials_ he first learned to write genuine
English, and it is a fact that there are some remarkably dramatic effects
in these volumes, although one here withholds from Borrow the title of
“author” because so much is “scissors and paste,” and the purple passages
are only occasional. All the same I am astonished that no one has
thought it worth while to make a volume of these dramatic episodes, which
are clearly the work of Borrow, and owe nothing to the innumerable
pamphlets and chap-books that he brought into use. Take such an episode
as that of Schening and Harlin, two young German women, one of whom
pretended to have murdered her infant in the presence of the other
because she madly supposed that this would secure them bread—and they
were starving. The trial, the scene at the execution, the confession on
the scaffold of the misguided but innocent girl, the respite, and then
the execution—these make up as thrilling a narrative as is contained in
the pages of fiction. Assuredly Borrow did not spare himself in that
race round the bookstalls of London to find the material which the
grasping Sir Richard Phillips required from him. He found, for example,
Sir Herbert Croft’s volume, _Love and Madness_, the supposed
correspondence of Parson Hackman and Martha Reay, whom he murdered. That
correspondence is now known to be an invention of Croft’s. Borrow
accepted it as genuine, and incorporated the whole of it in his story of
the Hackman trial.
But after all, the trial which we read with greatest interest in these
volumes is that of John Thurtell, because Borrow had known Thurtell in
his youth, and gives us more than one glimpse of him in _Lavengro_ and
_The Romany Rye_.
Rarely in our criminal jurisprudence has a murder trial excited more
interest than that of John Thurtell for the murder of Weare—the Gill’s
Hill Murder, as it was called. Certainly no murder of modern times has
had so many indirect literary associations. Borrow, Carlyle, Hazlitt,
Walter Scott, and Thackeray are among those who have given it lasting
fame by comment of one kind or another; and the lines ascribed to
Theodore Hook are perhaps as well known as any other memory of the
tragedy:
They cut his throat from ear to ear,
His brain they battered in,
His name was Mr. William Weare,
He dwelt in Lyon’s Inn.
Carlyle’s division of human beings of the upper classes into “noblemen,
gentlemen, and gigmen,” which occurs in his essay on Richter, and a later
reference to gigmanhood which occurs in his essay on Goethe’s Works, had
their inspiration in an episode in the trial of Thurtell, when the
question being asked, “What sort of a person was Mr. Weare?” brought the
answer, “He was always a respectable person.” “What do you mean by
respectable?” the witness was asked. “He kept a gig,” was the reply,
which brought the word “gigmanity” into our language. {70}
I have said that John Thurtell and two members of his family became
subscribers for Borrow’s _Romantic Ballads_, and it is certain that
Borrow must often have met Thurtell, that is to say looked at him from a
distance, in some of the scenes of prize-fighting which both affected,
Borrow merely as a youthful spectator, Thurtell as a reckless backer of
one or other combatant. Thurtell’s father was an alderman of Norwich
living in a good house on the Ipswich Road when the son’s name rang
through England as that of a murderer. The father was born in 1765 and
died in 1846. Four years after his son John was hanged he was elected
Mayor of Norwich, in recognition of his violent ultra-Whig or blue and
white political opinions. He had been nominated as mayor both in 1818
and 1820, but it was perhaps the extraordinary “advertisement” of his
son’s shameful death that gave the citizens of Norwich the necessary
enthusiasm to elect Alderman Thurtell as mayor in 1828. It was in those
oligarchical days a not unnatural fashion to be against the Government.
The feast at the Guildhall on this occasion was attended by four hundred
and sixty guests. A year before John Thurtell was hanged, in 1823, his
father moved a violent political resolution in Norwich, but was
out-Heroded by Cobbett, who moved a much more extreme one over his head
and carried it by an immense majority. It was a brutal time, and there
cannot be a doubt that Alderman Thurtell, while busy setting the world
straight, failed to bring up his family very well. John, as we shall
see, was hanged; Thomas, another brother, was associated with him in many
disgraceful transactions; while a third brother, George, also a
subscriber, by the way, to Borrow’s _Romantic Ballads_, who was a
landscape gardener at Eaton, died in prison in 1848 under sentence for
theft. Apart from a rather riotous and bad bringing up, which may be
pleaded in extenuation, it is not possible to waste much sympathy over
John Thurtell. He had thoroughly disgraced himself in Norwich before he
removed to London. There he got further and further into difficulties,
and one of the many publications which arose out of his trial and
execution was devoted to pointing the moral of the evils of gambling. It
was bad luck at cards, and the loss of much money to William Weare, who
seems to have been an exceedingly vile person, that led to the murder.
Thurtell had a friend named Probert who lived in a quiet cottage in a
byway of Hertfordshire—Gill’s Hill, near Elstree. He suggested to Weare
in a friendly way that they should go for a day’s shooting at Gill’s
Hill, and that Probert would put them up for the night. Weare went home,
collected a few things in a bag, and took a hackney coach to a given
spot, where Thurtell met him with a gig. The two men drove out of London
together. The date was 24th October, 1823. On the high-road they met
and passed Probert and a companion named Joseph Hunt, who had even been
instructed by Thurtell to bring a sack with him—this was actually used to
carry away the body—and must therefore have been privy to the intended
murder. By the time the second gig containing Probert and Hunt arrived
near Probert’s cottage, Thurtell met it in the roadway, according to
their accounts, and told the two men that he had done the deed; that he
had killed Weare first by ineffectively shooting him, then by dashing out
his brains with his pistol, and finally by cutting his throat. Thurtell
further told his friends, if their evidence was to be trusted, that he
had left the body behind a hedge. In the night the three men placed the
body in a sack and carried it to a pond near Probert’s house and threw it
in. The next night they fished it out and threw it into another pond
some distance away. Thurtell meanwhile had divided the spoil—some £20,
which he said was all that he had obtained from Weare’s body—with his
companions. Hunt, it may be mentioned, afterwards declared his
conviction that Thurtell, when he first committed the murder, had removed
his victim’s principal treasure, notes to the value of three or four
hundred pounds. Suspicion was aroused, and the hue and cry raised
through the finding by a labourer of the pistol in the hedge, and the
discovery of a pool of blood on the roadway. Probert promptly turned
informer; Hunt also tried to save himself by a rambling confession, and
it was he who revealed where the body was concealed, accompanying the
officers to the pond and pointing out the exact spot where the corpse
would be found. When recovered the body was taken to the Artichoke inn
at Elstree, and here the coroner’s inquest was held. Meanwhile Thurtell
had been arrested in London and taken down to Elstree to be present at
the inquest. A verdict of murder against all three miscreants was given
by the coroner’s jury, and Weare’s body was buried in Elstree Churchyard.
In January, 1824, John Thurtell was brought to trial at Hertford Assizes,
and Hunt also. But first of all there were some interesting proceedings
in the Court of King’s Bench, before the Chief Justice and two other
judges, complaining that Thurtell had not been allowed to see his
counsel. And there were other points at issue. Thurtell’s counsel moved
for a criminal injunction against the proprietor of the Surrey Theatre in
that a performance had been held there, and was being held, which assumed
Thurtell’s guilt, the identical horse and gig being exhibited in which
Weare was supposed to have ridden to the scene of his death. Finally
this was arranged, and a _mandamus_ was granted “commanding the admission
of legal advisers to the prisoner.” At last the trial came on at
Hertford before Mr. Justice Park. It lasted two days, although the judge
wished to go on all night in order to finish in one. But the protest of
Thurtell, supported by the jury, led to an adjournment. Probert had been
set free and appeared as a witness. The jury gave a verdict of guilty,
and Thurtell and Hunt were sentenced to be hanged, but Hunt escaped with
transportation. Thurtell made his own speech for the defence, which had
a great effect upon the jury, until the judge swept most of its
sophistries away. It was, however, a very able performance. Thurtell’s
line of defence was to declare that Hunt and Probert were the murderers,
and that he was a victim of their perjuries. If hanged, he would be
hanged on circumstantial evidence only, and he gave, with great
elaboration, the details of a number of cases where men had been
wrongfully hanged upon circumstantial evidence. His lawyers had
apparently provided him with books containing these examples from the
past, and his month in prison was devoted to this defence, which showed
great ability. The trial took place on 6th January, 1824, and Thurtell
was hanged on the 9th, in front of Hertford Gaol: his body was given to
the Anatomical Museum in London. A contemporary report says that
Thurtell, on the scaffold,
fixed his eyes on a young gentleman in the crowd, whom he had
frequently seen as a spectator at the commencement of the proceedings
against him. Seeing that the individual was affected by the
circumstances, he removed them to another quarter, and in so doing
recognised an individual well known in the sporting circles, to whom
he made a slight bow.
The reader of _Lavengro_ might speculate whether that “young gentleman”
was Borrow, but Borrow was in Norwich in January, 1824, his father dying
in the following month. In his _Celebrated Trials_ Borrow tells the
story of the execution with wonderful vividness, and supplies effective
quotations from “an eyewitness.” Borrow no doubt exaggerated his
acquaintance with Thurtell, as in his _Robinson Crusoe_ romance he was
fully entitled to do for effect. He was too young at the time to have
been much noticed by a man so much his senior. The writer who accepts
Borrow’s own statement that he really gave him “some lessons in the noble
art” is too credulous, and the statement that Thurtell’s house “on the
Ipswich Road was a favourite rendezvous for the Fancy” is unsupported by
evidence. Old Alderman Thurtell owned the house in question, and we find
no evidence that he encouraged his son’s predilection for prize-fighting.