Читать книгу Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century - John Brewer - Страница 6

JOHN MONTAGU, 4th Earl of Sandwich, was a tall gangling man with ‘strong legs and arms’ and a ruddy appearance that led the novelist Frances Burney, when she first met him in 1775, to compare him with a rough-hewn Jack Tar: ‘he is a tall, stout man & looks weather-proof as any sailor in the navy¹’. Portraits by Gainsborough and Zoffany reveal a large, hooked nose, thin, sensual lips and a long torso that makes his head seem unaccountably small. They also fail to conceal the clumsiness that led Sandwich’s French dancing master to ask that ‘your Lordship would never tell any one of whom you learned to dance²’. ‘Awkward’ and ‘shambling’ were how his friends described him, one remarking to another as they spotted him from a distance ‘I am sure it is Lord Sandwich; for, if you observe, he is walking down both sides of the street at once³’.

Sandwich had energy that more than compensated for his clumsiness. Despite his lack of polish, he had a reputation as a ladies’ man. One anonymous female correspondent confided in him, ‘you have it in your power to gain the affections of almost any woman that you study to please’. Women found him charming, and he pursued them relentlessly from his youth into middle age. In his sixties he admitted, ‘I have never⁴ pretended to be free from indiscretion, and those who know me have been … long accustomed to forgive my weaknesses, when they do not interfere with my conduct as a public man.’

For a peer, Sandwich was not wealthy, and from 1739, when he took his seat in the House of Lords at the age of twenty-one, he sought political office to increase his income. During a long career in government he served as Secretary of State, Postmaster General and as a diplomat, but the post that he saw as his own and for which he is best remembered was First Lord of the Admiralty, an office he held between 1747 and 1751 and again after his appointment by Lord North in 1770.

Waking on the morning of 7 April 1779 in the ample apartments in the Admiralty building that were one of the perquisites of his post, Sandwich faced a busy day of government business. The Admiralty gates in the Robert Adam screen that separated the offices from the street opened at 9 a.m., when four of the office clerks arrived to receive their instructions, began transcribing documents to captains and admirals, suppliers and politicians, and made neat copperplate copies in official letter books and ledgers. The eleven-hour day was one of the longest in any government office: all the clerks were in attendance between eleven in the morning and four in the afternoon, but a part of the staff kept the Admiralty open between nine and eleven, and between six and ten in the evening.

Though Sandwich had many political enemies, he was generally acknowledged to be a conscientious and industrious official. He was, as one contemporary put it, ‘Universally admitted to possess eminent talents, great application to the duties of his office, and thorough acquaintance with public business … In all his official functions he displayed perspicuity as well as dispatch⁵.’ Normally his working day began even before the Admiralty opened: ‘he rose at an early hour, and generally wrote all his letters before breakfast⁶’, and he frequently had no respite before taking a late evening meal. On one occasion he complained, ‘I am fatigued to death having been with my pen in my hand [for]…thirteen hours⁷.’ The snack that bears Sandwich’s name, and that was first made by slipping a slice of naval salt beef between two pieces of bread, was made to allow not, as legend has it, for longer hours at the gaming table, but more time at the office.

Admiralty business, of course, was not always so onerous, and the First Lord left much of the detailed work to his reliable and experienced Secretary, Philip Stephens, an official with more than twenty-five years’ service for the Admiralty Board. But when the nation was at war and when parliament was in session, as it was in the spring of 1779, the office required constant attention. The nation was embroiled with its American subjects; France and Spain had just joined the rebellious colonists. Because of the weight of business the Admiralty had hired four additional clerks in the last year. The most recent appointment, Mr Hollinworth, had begun work the previous morning.

Yet there were additional reasons why the Admiralty was so frenetic on this warm spring day. For the Admiralty Board and especially Lord Sandwich were at the centre of a huge political row about the conduct of the American war. The parliamentary opposition, led by Charles James Fox in the Commons and the Duke of Richmond in the Lords, was determined to lay the blame for Britain’s military failures at the door of the Admiralty, and had launched a determined attempt to drive Sandwich from office, if not to overthrow the government itself.

The squall had blown up more than a year earlier, when the war had been going particularly badly. Forced to maintain supply lines to Boston, New York and the Chesapeake, the navy was overstretched and undermanned. Encouraged by Britain’s plight, and eager to revenge their previous defeats, France had pledged support to the Americans in the summer of 1778. One of Sandwich’s spies, John Walker, had been sending him alarming reports for several years of a major French naval build-up. Despite Sandwich’s warnings to his colleagues, too little was done too late. Better equipped, the French battle fleet threatened to outnumber the British and to make possible a French landing on the south coast of England.

Sandwich and his colleagues had been bitterly attacked for their conduct of the war and their lack of preparedness for its escalation. Their hopes (like those of most Britons) had been pinned on an early and decisive naval victory against France that would have seen off the threat to Britain’s supply lines and trade, and dispelled the threat of invasion. But when the two fleets met off Ushant on 27 July 1778, the French repelled the English attack and inflicted great damage before retreating to Brest. The threat of French superiority remained, and was soon compounded by the prospect of Spain’s entry into the war on the colonists’ side. On 15 October Sandwich wrote to the prime minister, Lord North, ‘The situation of our affairs is at this time so critical and alarming that my mind will not rest, without I collect my thoughts and put on paper the ideas I have of the danger we are in, and what exertions we can use to guard against the storm that is hanging over us⁸.’

On the same day an article appeared in the opposition newspaper, the General Advertiser and Morning Post, blaming Rear-Admiral Sir Hugh Palliser, a member of the Admiralty Board and a close ally of Sandwich’s, for failing to follow an order of the fleet’s leader, Admiral August Keppel, a political ally of the Foxite opposition, to engage the French more closely. The article provoked a huge row, which turned officers against one another and divided the navy into bitter factions (contemporaries talked of the Montagus and Capulets). Keppel and Palliser, both MPs, squabbled on the floor of the House of Commons; both were eventually court martialled. Throughout the winter and early spring of 1779 the Foxite opposition kept up the pressure on the government, proposing motion after motion attacking its policy in general and Sandwich in particular. In February it looked as if, for Sandwich at least, the game was up. King George III and Lord North decided to remove him from the Admiralty as a way of appeasing government critics. Only the failure of negotiations for a replacement kept him in office. On 11 February a court martial acquitted Keppel and dismissed Palliser’s charges against the admiral as ‘malicious and unfounded’. That evening a crowd of opposition supporters smashed the windows of Sandwich’s lodgings, frightening his mistress, Martha Ray, who was staying there. The crowd tore off the Admiralty gates, looted Palliser’s house in Pall Mall and attacked the homes of other Admiralty officials.

The government was losing its grip. Lord North sank into a depression that made business difficult to transact – on one occasion Sandwich was sent by the king to cajole him out of bed – while government supporters, thinking the administration doomed, began to absent themselves from important debates in parliament. In April the opposition’s demand for an inquiry into the state of the British and French navies and into the Admiralty’s preparedness for war placed an additional burden on Sandwich’s officials, who had to assemble documents and statistics to be used in his defence. In the following week a debate was scheduled in the House of Lords in which Lord Bristol, a leading spokesman of the opposition, was expected to call for Sandwich’s dismissal. On the afternoon of 6 April Sandwich met with the king to discuss the government’s strategy.

While Sandwich laboured in the Admiralty Board room, struggling to salvage his career, other events that were to have a profound effect on his future were unfolding in another part of London. How much he knew of their background is difficult to tell, though he certainly did not know about the events that took place that day while he was at work.

Some time after the Admiralty gates had opened, a handsome young man knocked at the door of Signor Galli, in Jarvis Street, off London’s Haymarket. The Reverend James Hackman, a tall, thin figure with a high forehead and fine, almost effeminate features, had only a week before been ordained as a priest in the Church of England and given the living of Wiveton, in Norfolk. But that morning he was not bent on clerical business. He demanded to see a letter that Galli had first shown him two days earlier. But the Italian turned him away, telling him that it ‘was out of his power. The letter being no longer in his possession⁹.’ The letter had been written by Martha Ray, the thirty-five-year-old mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, and in it she pleaded with Hackman to ‘desist from his pursuit’ of her, refused to see him and told him she wished to cease all connection with him. Hackman left disappointed, unable to confirm what he did not wish to believe.

Martha Ray had been the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich for more than sixteen years and had borne him nine children, of whom five were living: Robert, born in 1763; Augusta, whose date of birth goes unrecorded; Basil, born in 1770; and two other brothers, William and John, whose birth dates were 1772 and 1773. With such a family it was obvious that Sandwich’s relationship with Ray was no casual affair. She was effectively his common law wife and was known as his public consort. A contemporary described Ray as ‘not what we would call elegant, but which would pass under the denomination of pretty; her height was about five feet five inches; she was fresh-coloured, and had a perpetual smile on her countenance, which rendered her agreeable to every beholder’. Others, especially those who heard her sing, were more impressed. The young clergyman Richard Dennison Cumberland, who listened to Ray’s performances at Hinchingbrooke, spoke of her ‘personal accomplishments and engaging Manner’, describing her as ‘a second Cleopatra¹⁰ – a Woman of thousands, and capable of producing those effects on the Heart which the Poets talk so much of and which we are apt to think Chimerical’. Her surviving portraits bear out this description showing a prepossessed and elegantly dressed woman with bright eyes, a slight smile and an expression that betrays considerable strength of character. Certainly James Hackman, who had met her at Hinchingbrooke, had been smitten with her since their first acquaintance in 1775. Nor did it seem likely, despite Ray’s pleas, that the young man would desist in his pursuit of her.

Later that same afternoon Hackman dined with his sister, her husband, the attorney Frederick Booth, and a cousin at the Booths’ house in Craven Street, off the Strand, a few doors down from Benjamin Franklin’s lodgings; he left after eating, promising to return to the family for supper. Striding up Craven Street, he turned left into the Strand, walked through Charing Cross and down Whitehall towards the Admiralty, where Ray and Sandwich had their lodgings. When he arrived he saw the Earl’s coach at the Admiralty’s door. He guessed (rightly, as it turned out) that Martha Ray was going out, and he walked the short distance back towards Craven Street, and stationed himself at the Cannon Coffee House at Charing Cross, so that he could watch the passing traffic. His wait was not in vain. Shortly before six o’clock, Sandwich’s coach swept by, carrying Ray and her companion, Signora Caterina Galli, up the Strand and past its many fine shops, with their first-floor displays of luxuries, cloth and jewels, before turning north into Covent Garden. Hackman followed hastily on foot, watching the two women enter the Covent Garden Theatre at about a quarter past six.

On that Wednesday the theatre was crowded. The star attraction was Margaret Kennedy, a statuesque if somewhat clumsy actress with a fine voice, famed for ‘breeches’ roles in which she played male parts. The evening’s receipts were to go to her benefit, and she was to sing the part of Colin in Rose and Colin, a short comic opera by Charles Dibdin, and the male lead – Meadows – in Thomas Arne’s extremely popular opera, Love in a Village.

Caterina Galli and Martha Ray were more than casual theatre-goers. They might have chosen that evening to go to Drury Lane to see a much-acclaimed production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but they preferred comic opera and Mrs Kennedy because of their love of music. Caterina Galli was herself a famous singer and music teacher. A pupil of Handel, she had starred in his operas and oratorios in the 1740s and 1750s, usually singing male roles. After a spell back in her native Italy, she returned to London for two seasons before retiring in 1776. Martha Ray, though she had never performed professionally, was also a singer of great accomplishment, with a passion, shared by Sandwich, for Handel. Ray had been tutored by a number of musicians at Sandwich’s expense, and Galli, as well as being Ray’s companion, had sung with her at private concerts arranged by the Earl. It seems likely¹¹ that Sandwich hoped to attend the performance at Covent Garden that evening – he had earlier cancelled a dinner with friends at the Admiralty – but was prevented from enjoying himself because of the press of Admiralty business.

Mrs Kennedy and Love in a Village were apt objects of Martha Ray’s attention. Mrs Kennedy, like Martha Ray, had achieved success through the attentions of a male admirer: she had been spotted by Thomas Arne, singing songs in a pub near St Giles, one of the least salubrious parts of London. Ray, who had been a milliner’s apprentice, owed her present station to the attentions of Lord Sandwich. And Isaac Bickerstaff’s story, set to Arne’s music, was about the perils of love and marriage, especially among social unequals, a topic that much concerned Ray, with her five illegitimate children by Sandwich.

Like most story-lines in comedy, the plot of Love in a Village enjoys a simplicity and happy resolution altogether unlike the unresolved complexities of relationships such as that between Ray and Sandwich. A young gentleman and -woman, Meadows and Rosetta, separately flee from marriage partners chosen by their parents but whom they have never seen. Disguised as a gardener and female servant, working in the same house, they soon fall hopelessly in love.

The couple try to resist their feelings, thinking that marriage – the proper consequence of true love – will be impossible. How could they marry someone whom they believed to be their social inferior? But, by an improbable contrivance typical of such comedies, they prove to be the very people their parents wished them to marry. Freed of their disguise, Rosetta and Meadows are united – duty and desire are neatly reconciled. The barriers of class and wealth are neither circumvented nor confronted but expelled through a twist in the plot.

Ray and Galli watched the performance from seats close to the royal box, where they not only had one of the best views of the stage but were easily seen by the rest of the audience. Accounts differ about who else joined them in the box. One, by a friend of Sandwich, speaks of their being accompanied by three young men belonging to Sandwich’s circle of naval protégés; another singles out Lord Coleraine, a notorious libertine, who had been the keeper of the famous courtesan Kitty Fisher and of Sophia Baddeley, a stage beauty and singer. Whoever their companions were, Ray and Galli clearly enjoyed the evening, exchanging pleasantries with male friends and admirers when not engaged in watching the performance. James Hackman, who had entered the theatre, watched the two women across the pit.

Hastening to his lodgings in Duke’s Court, St Martin’s Lane, Hackman loaded two pistols, and wrote a suicide note to his brother-in-law:

My Dear Frederick12

When this reaches you I shall be no more, but do not let my unhappy fate distress you too much. I have strove against it as long as possible, but it now overpowers me. You know where my affections were placed; my having by some means or other lost hers, (an idea which I could not support) has driven me to madness. The world will condemn me, but your good heart will pity me. God bless you, my dear Fred, would I had a sum to leave you, to convince you of my great regard. You was my only friend … May heaven protect my beloved woman, and forgive this act which alone could relieve me from a world of misery I have long endured. Oh! if it should be in your power to do her any act of friendship, remember your faithful friend.

Stuffing the note in one pocket together with one of the pistols, he put another letter in his other pocket with the second weapon. This letter, which Hackman had sent to Martha Ray but which she had returned unopened, offered to marry her and take her youngest child, John, off to a life of rural felicity in his country parish. The note concluded: ‘O! thou dearer to me¹³ than life, because that life is thine! think of me and pity me. I have long been devoted to you; and your’s, as I am, I hope either to die, or soon to be your’s in marriage. For God’s sake²⁶, let me hear from you; and, as you love me, keep me no longer in suspense, since nothing can relieve me but death or you. – Adieu!’

His pockets full of sentiment and violence, Hackman returned to the Covent Garden Theatre. He seems to¹⁴ have entered the theatre several times during the evening (a full night’s entertainment lasted nearly five hours), retreating to the Bedford Coffee-house to strengthen his resolve with glasses of brandy and water. His friends claimed that he then tried to shoot himself on two occasions, first in the lobby – where he was prevented by the crowd from getting close enough to Ray to be sure that she would witness his death – and then on the steps of the theatre, where he was pushed by one of the Irish chairmen who carried the sedan chairs of the theatre’s wealthy patrons.

At about a quarter past eleven Ray and Galli came out of the theatre, but the large crowd jostled them and prevented them from reaching their waiting carriage. John Macnamara, a young Irish attorney, saw the two women, ‘who seemed somewhat distressed by the croud, whereupon he offered his service to conduct them to their carriage, which was accepted, and Miss Ray took hold of his arm¹⁵’. Threading their way through the swirl of parting spectators and down the steps of the theatre, Galli entered the carriage first. Ray followed, putting her foot on the carriage step as Macnamara held her hand. At that moment a figure in black dashed forward and pulled Ray by the sleeve; she turned to find herself face to face with Hackman. Before she could utter a word, he pulled the two pistols from his pockets, shot Ray with the one in his right hand, and shot himself with the other.

As the crowd shrank back, Macnamara, unsure of what had happened, lifted Ray from the ground, and found himself drenched in blood. For years afterwards he would recall (somewhat hyperbolically) ‘the sudden assault of the assassin, the instantaneous death of the victim, and the spattering of the poor girls brains over his own face¹⁶’. According to Horace Walpole, Hackman ‘came round behind her [Ray], pulled her by the gown, and on her turning round, clapped the pistol to her forehead and shot her through the head. With another pistol he then attempted to shoot himself, but the ball grazing his brow, he tried to dash out his own brains with the pistol, and is more wounded by those blows than by the ball¹⁷.’ Martha Ray died instantly, leaving Hackman on the ground, ‘beating himself about the head … crying, “o! kill me!¹⁸ … for God’s sake kill me!”’

With the help of a link-boy, Macnamara, shocked but with great composure, carried Ray’s bloody body across the Square and into the nearby Shakespeare Tavern, where the corpse was laid on a table in one of the rooms usually hired for private supper parties. (The tavern was a notorious place of sexual assignation: in 1763 James Boswell took ‘two very pretty girls’¹⁹ there and ‘found them good subjects of amorous play’.) Hackman was arrested by Richard Blandy, a constable who had heard the shots as he was walking between the Drury Lane and Covent Garden playhouses: ‘he came up and took Mr Hackman, who delivered two pistols to him … he was taking him away, when somebody called out to bring his Prisoner back; and then he took him to the Shakespeare Tavern, where he saw he was all bloody … he searched Mr Hackman’s pockets, and found two sealed letters, which he gave to Mr Campbell, the Master of the Tavern²⁰’.

In the Shakespeare Macnamara angrily confronted Hackman, asking him, ‘What devil could induce you to commit such a deed?’ Hackman, ‘with great composure’, responded, ‘This is not a proper place to ask such a question’, and when asked what his name was and who knew him replied ‘that his name was Hackman, and that he was known to Mr Booth in Craven Street whom he had sent for²¹’.

Sir John Fielding, the blind magistrate and brother of the novelist Henry Fielding, was summoned and arrived at the Shakespeare at three o’clock in the morning. He examined the witnesses in the tavern and committed Hackman to the Tothills Bridewell, a gaol where prisoners were often held overnight. Before he was taken away Hackman asked to see Ray’s body and commented, ‘What a change has a few hours made in me – had her friends done as I wished them to do, this would never have happened.’ One report described him as gazing ‘upon the miserable²² object with the most deep attention and calm composure, instead of that violent agitation of spirits which every beholder expected, and exclaiming, that he now was happy!’ In the Bridewell, and much to the surprise of many commentators, he fell into a deep and untroubled sleep.

Sandwich knew nothing of these events until some time around midnight. He had waited at the Admiralty, expecting Martha Ray to return for supper after the theatre. As she was late and he was tired, he went to bed at about half past eleven, only to be woken by his black servant James, who told him that Ray had been shot. A distraught James described the scene to Sandwich’s friend, Joseph Cradock, the following day. At first Sandwich did not understand or believe what had happened. He thought James was referring to one of the many scurrilous ballads sung under the windows of the Admiralty. ‘You know that I forbade²³ you to plague me any more about those ballads, let them sing or say whatever they please about me!’ ‘Indeed, my Lord,’ replied James, ‘I am not speaking of any ballads; it is all too true.’ Other members of the household then came in; ‘all was a scene of the utmost horror and distress’. Sandwich ‘stood, as it were, petrified; till suddenly seizing a candle, he ran upstairs, threw himself on the bed, and in agony exclaimed, “Leave me a while to myself – I could have borne anything but this”.’

Whether James had been told the news by Caterina Galli or another messenger is not clear – ‘all was confusion and astonishment²⁴’. Galli had fainted²⁵ in the coach when Ray was killed and could not recall what happened thereafter, although we know she returned to the Admiralty in Sandwich’s coach. Sandwich had enough presence of mind to dispatch a servant to the Shakespeare Tavern to watch over Ray’s body and exclude prurient visitors. At seven the following morning he scribbled a hasty note to his friend Robert Boyle Walsingham, an aristocratic young naval officer, ‘For gods sake come to me immediately, in this moment I have much want of the comfort of a real friend; poor Miss Ray was inhumanly murthered last night as she was stepping into her coach at the playhouse door … The murtherer is taken and sent to prison.’

Two hours later, Hackman was brought before Sir John Fielding at Bow Street. Fielding led Hackman to a private room ‘in order to prevent, as much as possible, the unhappy prisoner from being exposed to the view of wanton, idle curiosity²⁷’, and had the witnesses’ testimony sworn before him. Hackman was no longer calm but visibly agitated: ‘From the agonizing pangs which entirely discomposed and externally convulsed him, it was some time before the Magistrate could proceed²⁸.’ Asked if he had anything to say Hackman replied that ‘he wished for nothing but death; that nothing could be more welcome; that the sooner it came the better, for that alone would relieve him of the extreme Misery he laboured under²⁹’. Fielding committed him to Newgate, where he asked that he be granted his own room, a request that Fielding accepted on condition that he did not stay alone, as the court feared that he might again seek to take his own life. He was scheduled to be tried at the next sessions at the Old Bailey, set for 16 April.

That same afternoon³⁰ the coroner’s jury met at the Shakespeare Tavern in the room where Sandwich’s servant still guarded Ray’s body. The corpse was examined by two surgeons, Mr O’Brien and Mr Jarvis, who showed that the bullet had entered Ray’s forehead on the right side, causing massive damage, and then exited near the left ear. Hackman who, at five foot nine, was several inches taller than Ray, must have been pointing his pistol downwards when he fired; this would also explain why Macnamara believed that the blow he felt to his arm was caused not by Ray’s fall but by the spent bullet that had killed her. During the inquest, against the advice of Mr O’Brien and much to the distress of Sandwich, it was decided to open Ray’s skull in order to trace the trajectory of the wound. The doctors ‘owned that they never saw³¹ so dismal and ghastly a fracture’; the inquest brought in a verdict of wilful murder.

That day all³² of Lord Sandwich’s servants ‘out of livery’ changed into mourning clothes. In the evening Sandwich had Ray’s body removed to an undertaker’s near Leicester Fields. One paper reported that she was wrapped in a sheet or shroud and that she would be buried wearing the valuable clothes and jewels she wore at the moment of her murder, ‘so that property³³ to the amount of near £2000 will be deposited in her coffin’. On 14 April, Ray was interred in a vault in Elstree church, where her mother, who had died three years previously, was also buried.

Sandwich’s grief did not stop him taking decisive action in the days after Martha Ray’s murder. He employed Walsingham and two lawyers, Mr Balding and Mr William Chetham, to take depositions and informations from Signor Galli, his wife Caterina and Macnamara; they also questioned Hackman and discussed the case with Sir John Fielding. Sandwich himself questioned Signor Galli on the day after Ray’s death. He learnt that Hackman had contacted Ray about a week earlier. (A scribbled note from Ray to Caterina Galli of 30 March – ‘My Dear Galli³⁴ I am in open distress I beg you come immediately to me’ – possibly refers to the contact.) Ray gave the Gallis her letter to Hackman asking to be left alone, and they read it to Hackman on the evening of 5 April. Galli assured Sandwich that there had been no assignation or meeting between Ray and Hackman at his house, and that, though he had seen Hackman walking in St James’s Park, he had avoided him.

The same day Sandwich sent a message via Walsingham to Hackman telling the murderer of his forgiveness, though the press reported that the Earl also claimed that Hackman ‘has disturbed his peace of mind for ever³⁵’. Hackman, on his part, told Walsingham ‘upon his word³⁶ as a dying man, that he has never spoken to Miss Ray since the beginning of the year 1776, at which time he had proposed marriage and was rejected’. The murderer was pleased to be assured that his victim had no other special admirer: ‘poor Miss Ray was innocent. He lays the whole on Galli’ – and expressed his determination to die. ‘He is desirous to dye by the hand of the law … he wishes not to live himself, he told me today,’ wrote Walsingham to Sandwich, ‘he hoped to suffer as soon as possible³⁷.’

The agreement between Sandwich and Hackman that Martha Ray was innocent of any wrongdoing placed Caterina Galli in a difficult position. A day after the murder a story was already circulating that Hackman’s decision to kill Ray, and not merely to end his own life, was explained by a stratagem of Galli’s: to get Hackman to leave Ray alone, she had told Hackman that Ray had tired of him and had a new secret lover. Seeing Ray with male companions at the play, he had been driven into a frenzy of jealousy.

The papers reported that Sandwich offered to secure a pardon for Hackman if he were convicted. (As a member of the cabinet, which determined such matters, Sandwich would certainly have been able to exert great influence on Hackman’s behalf, and he clearly did not relish the role of sitting in judgment on a person’s life. Years earlier, commenting on this cabinet function, he had written to a friend, ‘you can’t think how it distresses me to be put to a momentary decision where a man’s life is concerned³⁸’.) But as early as two days after the murder Hackman seems to have rejected the Earl’s aid, an act that was rightly interpreted as a determination on his part to die. For, as Fielding explained in a letter to Sandwich on 10 April, Hackman’s conviction seemed inevitable:

I am clearly of opinion³⁹ that the evidence against Hackman is full and compleat to the last degree and that he can make no defense that would not aggravate his guilt and tend to his conviction; but will not neglect any hint your Lordship gives. As to Insanity it cannot be offered as an excuse as it appeared and can be proved that he was rational and sensible of his Wickedness at 4 in the morning, when I examined him, and has been so ever since.

At first Hackman said that he would plead guilty as charged of Ray’s murder. But in the days after the crime, his sister, his brother-in-law, Booth, and the lawyer who was acting on his behalf, Manasseh Dawes, persuaded him ‘to avail himself of the plausible plea of temporary insanity⁴⁰’. The trial came on at 9.30 on the morning of 16 April. Hackman was defended by Davenport and Silvester, the prosecution conducted by Henry Howarth and Sir John Fielding. The courtroom was packed with fashionable society, the same sort of people who had witnessed the murder the week before. James Boswell, who had visited Hackman’s brother-in-law on a number of occasions and seen Hackman himself in prison, was sitting at the table of defending counsel. John Wilkes, the radical libertine who was one of Sandwich’s most bitter political enemies, was also present, as were a number of famous aristocratic beauties. (Boswell was shocked when Wilkes passed him a note during the trial that said, ‘I always know where the greatest beauty in any place is when Mr Boswell is there, for he contrives to be near her, but does not admire the first grace more than Mr Wilkes does⁴¹.’) Frederick Booth, who had worked so hard to help his brother-in-law, felt unable to watch the proceedings and awaited the verdict outside the court.

The trial opened with the prosecution, which called witnesses to prove the facts of the case. Macnamara’s was the chief testimony. He was followed by ‘Mary Anderson, a fruit girl’ who had also seen the killing, and by an apothecary, Mr Mahon, who had seized one of the pistols from Hackman and helped the constable Blandy make his arrest. The final witness was Mr O’Brien, one of the surgeons who had given evidence at Ray’s inquest. None of the facts were contested by the defence. Sir William Blackstone, who chaired the bench, invited Hackman to offer anything material in his defence. Reading from a prepared statement, the young man admitted the crime, professed himself ready to die, but explained his act as a brief moment of madness: ‘I protest, with that regard for truth which becomes my situation, that the will to destroy her who was ever dearer to me than life, was never mine, until a momentary phrenzy overcame me, and induced me to commit the deed I deplore.’ Hackman’s counsel, Davenport, one of the most famous lawyers of the day, argued the case for insanity, maintaining that Hackman’s suicide note, in which he had asked Booth to take care of Ray after his death, showed that he had not originally intended to kill her.

But the court was not persuaded of the defendant’s case. Blackstone argued that the presence of two pistols showed felonious intent. He added that ‘the prisoner has rested his defense upon a sudden phrenzy of mind; but the judge said, that it was not every fit, or start of tumultuous passion, that would justify the killing of another; but it must be the total loss of reason in every part of life’. The jury was instructed to convict the accused, and Hackman was condemned to death. Boswell hurried from the courtroom to tell Booth, who received the news with ‘mains serrees’⁴² (clenched fists).

Eighteenth-century justice was swift. Three days later Hackman woke a little after five in the morning, and spent two hours in private prayer, before taking communion in the chapel in Newgate prison. At nine ‘he came into the press-yard, where a great croud of persons assembled to satisfy their curiosity, at the expense of one shilling each. That all might have an equal share of the sight, a lane was formed by the multitude on each side, through which Mr Hackman passed, dressed in black, leaning on the arm of his friend the Rev. Mr Porter, whose hand he squeezed as he muttered the solemn invocation to Heaven, not to forsake a sinner of so enormous a degree, in the trying hour of death⁴³.’ Haltered with the rope with which he would be hanged, Hackman was reported as exclaiming, ‘Oh! the sight of this shocks me more than the thought of its intended operation.’ Driven in his mourning coach to Tyburn, jeered and cheered by a group of building workers in Holborn, he spent his final minutes praying for Martha Ray, the Earl of Sandwich and their children, before being ‘launched into Eternity’ at about ten minutes past eleven. James Boswell, who witnessed the hanging, and asked the executioner if he had heard Hackman’s last words (‘No. I thought it a point of ill manners to listen on such occasions’), ended the day drunk: ‘Claret h<urt>. Very ill⁴⁴.’

Hackman’s body, like that of all murderers, was then sent to Surgeon’s Hall for dissection. On the day after the execution the nineteen-year-old fencing master Henry Angelo went with a friend to Surgeon’s Hall to view the corpse. ‘Having been placed on a large table, an incision had been made on his stomach, and the flesh was spread over on each side⁴⁵.’ Angelo’s next stop was Dolly’s Chop House, but the memory of Hackman’s flesh was too much. He was unable to eat his pork chops and never touched the dish again.

The press reckoned that Hackman’s execution attracted the largest crowd since the hanging of another clergyman, William Dodd, for forgery three years earlier. (Such was the press that two members of the crowd died, trampled after they fell.) But Dodd had been a public figure: the chaplain of the Magdalen Hospital for penitent prostitutes, author of a successful Shakespeare anthology, the friend of literati like Dr Johnson, and the client of a number of prominent aristocrats. Hackman was a nobody before he murdered Ray. Now he was an object of public fascination. When he had dropped his handkerchief to signal he was ready to die, the hangman got down from the cart and pocketed it; the souvenir was very valuable. On the day after his execution, a crowd pressed into the Surgeon’s Hall to see the body: ‘Soon after the doors⁴⁶ were opened, so great a crowd was assembled that no genteel person attempted to gain admittance, as it was observed that caps, cardinals, gowns, wigs and hats, &c. were destroyed, without regard to age, sex or distinction.’ In death, as in life, Hackman was able to cause mayhem.

After the first few days of frenzied activity that followed the murder, Sandwich left the Admiralty office and retreated to a friend’s house in Richmond. From there he wrote an importunate note to Lord Bristol, asking him to postpone the opposition’s motion in the House of Lords for his removal as First Lord of the Admiralty:

It is understood⁴⁷ that navy matters are to be discussed in the House of Lords on Thursday or Friday next. I am at present totally unfit for business of any kind and unable to collect any materials to support the side of the question that I must espouse. I perceive impropriety in putting off the business by a motion from anyone with whom I am politically connected; I have therefore recourse to your humanity, to request that you would contrive that this point is not brought on till after this day sevennight, by which time I hope to be fit for public business as I ever shall be.

Bristol promised to ask for a postponement, using the excuse that he was suffering from gout, and he ended his reply, ‘No-one can be more concerned than I am for any interruption to your domestic felicity⁴⁸.’

Sandwich received many letters of advice and condolence. Aristocratic friends like Lord Hardwicke praised Martha Ray and reassured the Earl of their faith in her virtue: ‘From what I have heard⁴⁹ of her Conduct I never doubted but it had been entirely irreproachable.’ Even the prudish George III, who had once argued that Sandwich should not hold political office because of his notorious private life, offered the Earl his sympathy, using a stilted formula that ensured that he did not have to mention Ray’s name: ‘I am sorry⁵⁰ Lord Sandwich has met with any severe blow of a private nature. I flatter myself this world scarcely contains a man so void of feeling as not to compassionate your situation.’ One of his colleagues urged on Sandwich the stoicism he had shown in political adversity: ‘You have suffered much and the utmost exertion of your fortitude is now required. Show yourself in this my Lord, as you have done in most other things equal if not superior to the rest of mankind⁵¹.’ Others took a less sympathetic view. As George Duke Taylor remarked, ‘Enemies more inveterate than the rest make no scruple to affirm that they look upon these things are come down upon you as judgments, for your private and public conduct during these ten or twelve years past, which in their language have been both wicked and arbitrary.’ Over the next few years Sandwich’s opponents would occasionally refer to Martha Ray’s murder, but on the whole they respected his privacy.

It did not take long for Sandwich’s life to return to its old routines. He was back in the Admiralty office in the week after Hackman’s execution. He managed to survive the attempt to remove him from office, and was soon deeply involved in plans to thwart the French invasion and keep the government in power. He remained a key political figure until the British surrender at Yorktown effectively ended the American war and brought down Lord North’s government; even after he left the Admiralty, he had a small group of followers in the House of Commons and took an active interest in politics.

Ray’s death was clearly a great loss for Sandwich. His friend Joseph Cradock recalled the period after her murder in his Memoirs. He tells the story of his embarrassment when he first visited Sandwich after Ray’s death. Entering the Earl’s study ‘where the portrait⁵² of Miss Ray, a most exact resemblance, still remained over the chimney-piece’, Cradock rather clumsily ‘started on seeing it’. Sandwich ‘instantly endeavored to speak of some unconnected subject; but he looked so ill, and I felt so much embarrassed, that as soon as I possibly could, I most respectfully took my leave’. A similar incident occurred some time later when Sandwich was invited to dine with a few friends at the house of ‘our open-hearted friend Admiral Walsingham’. The evening went well, and Sandwich seemed to regain his spirits, until one of the guests put Sandwich in mind of Ray: ‘one of the company requested that Mrs Bates would favour them with “Shepherds, I have lost my Love”. This was unfortunately the very air that had been introduced by Miss Ray at Hinchingbrooke, and had been always called for by Lord Sandwich. Mr Bates immediately endeavored to prevent its being sung, and by his anxiety increased the distress; but it was too late to pause.’ Sandwich was mortified. He struggled to overcome his feelings, ‘but they were so apparent, that at last he went up to Mrs Walsingham, and in a very confused manner said, he hoped she would excuse him not staying longer at that time, but that he had just recollected some pressing business which required his return to the Admiralty; and bowing to all the company, rather hastily left the room⁵³’.

Yet, within a year, Sandwich had a new mistress, Nelly Gordon, who was to remain his consort until his death in 1792, and who also bore him children. (In his will he arranged an annuity of £100 a year for life for her – in addition to another he had given her in her lifetime for the same sum – and a further £25 a year for life for her child.) Nor was he a recluse. The end of the American war and his active political career enabled him to indulge his passion for music, and he was the key figure behind the enormously popular concerts held to celebrate Handel’s Centenary in 1784.

Apart from Ray’s children – young Basil was soon in all kinds of trouble at school – Ray’s companion Caterina Galli suffered the consequences of her murder more than anyone else. Deprived of her position in Sandwich’s household, she was ostracized from polite society, and could no longer make a living by teaching rich young girls to sing. The Duchess of Bedford wrote to her that she was ‘sorry to inform Signor Galli that she made a determination, at the time the unfortunate affair happened in which she was concerned, never to take notice more of her in any way⁵⁴’. The Duchess did so because she was sure that ‘whatever appearances being against her if she was blameless her good protector would never let her want a proper maintenance without applying to the public⁵⁵’.

Galli wrote a succession of letters to Sandwich in her native Italian complaining of her plight. A month after the murder she told Sandwich, ‘I am ill and afflicted to see myself exposed in a book and in the papers so unjustly wronged as well as my character ruined that I don’t know how I can live in the world⁵⁶.’ Nine months later her situation was even worse:

I cannot assist myself in my profession, being badly liked by everyone who believe me to be guilty; I have lost my reputation in the face of my protectors being sufficient to madden any person … Where can I look for assistance? They all tell me I should defend myself against the charges and that my silence makes me more culpable and that they will know that your excellency does not admit me and that you dislike me. Lord I believe I have given you sufficient proofs of my innocence at not having taken any part of deceit, I have taken in due time my oath. I have been by orders of your excellency to the court, did not hide myself or otherwise flee. I have always been prepared to go before any judge and prove my innocence. I have lost both my health and reputation as well as money through me not defending myself and punishing the culpables, and all this I did through the certainty that your excellency will be my protector as you sent me information both by word and letter that you would always help me⁵⁷.

Impoverished, Galli was forced to return to the stage, though her voice had gone. She made a number of concert appearances in the 1790s, when she was deemed to cut a pathetic figure, and was given money by the Royal Society of Musicians. We know Sandwich donated twenty guineas to her and may have given her more. But she remained in sad circumstances, and when her husband died she had to borrow the money to bury him. As a result of Martha Ray’s murder she had lost her employment and could no longer work in the job she knew best and loved.

These, as far as I can tell, are the ‘facts’ of the murder by James Hackman of Martha Ray. They make up the story that almost all commentators, both at the time and subsequently, agree on. But they leave much unanswered. No one doubted that Hackman killed Ray, that he was the black figure who came out of the crowd and shot her to death before a shocked public. But what lay behind the murder? Why did he kill her? What was their relationship like? Was Hackman demented, or did he have understandable reasons to shoot her? Such a brutal killing, like any act that temporarily tears the social fabric apart, called out for explanation. But the facts alone could not provide an answer. Evidence about motive was hard to come by, not least because, as we shall see, there were interested parties concerned to keep the case under wraps. The vacuum created by a lack of information was, however, quickly filled by supposition, speculation and interpretation. For plenty of people, for many different reasons, wanted to publicize their own versions of the lives of Hackman, Ray and Sandwich.

The murder was, of course, a personal tragedy, but it was also a public event. Public, not only because it involved one of the most prominent households in the land and one of the nation’s most important political figures, but because it received so much publicity. In the 1770s London boasted a thriving press with five daily and eight or nine triweekly papers that were widely circulated in London and in many provincial towns. By the time of Ray’s death newspaper proprietors were paying the government an annual stamp duty for more than 12.5 million papers. The provinces also had their own papers – nearly forty by the 1770s – that shamelessly plundered news and information from the London press, adding vignettes of their own. Within days of Hackman’s crime accounts of the murder, commentary on its significance and speculation about why it had happened flowed out from the newspaper printers’ offices in the vicinity of St Paul’s Cathedral and spread across the nation, as news and stories were duplicated in local papers, then in magazines and periodicals. Readers of the Public Advertiser, the Gazetteer, the St James’s Chronicle, Lloyd’s Evening Post, the London Evening Post, the Norwich Mercury, and the Newcastle Chronicle – in fact of every London paper and most of those in the provinces – were regaled with the unfolding story of Hackman’s crime. The flow of information⁵⁸ explains why in his Norfolk parish Parson Woodforde broke off his usual culinary catalogue – no diarist has devoted so much space to the joys of the table – to bewail the fate of Hackman, a fellow man of the cloth, while at Salisbury the gentleman musician and young lawyer John Marsh tut-tutted in his journal about the fate of a young man he had known at school.

The eighteenth-century press made Hackman’s crime into a ‘media event’ both because it was a sensational crime and because the events of 7 April were so obviously connected to stories that the print media in general had been telling the public for the last twenty years. These were tales of political corruption and moral depravity in high places, of male aristocratic debauchery, and of the growing power and influence of beautiful and intelligent women who used their charms for their own ends. This culture of scandal, propagated by the press, thrived on supposition, rumour, and speculation. It took ‘the facts’ and wove them into a variety of seamless narratives that opened up all sorts of possible interpretation. Such stories were designed to sell newspapers and magazines, attack the government, traduce and shame individuals, and settle personal scores.

The press of the 1770s is not therefore a place we should go in pursuit of ‘the truth’ about Hackman and Ray’s relationship, but it does show how the different versions of Hackman’s crime were shaped and fashioned. The aftermath of Ray’s death saw a struggle conducted in the press to form and even to determine how the public viewed the affair.