Читать книгу Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century - John Brewer - Страница 7

THOUGH THERE WAS plenty of pressing news for the papers to cover in the spring of 1779 – the failing war with the American colonists and the internecine political battles in parliament – the newspapers devoted a great deal of space to the killing of the Earl of Sandwich’s mistress and the subsequent conduct and execution of her murderer. Between the night of Martha Ray’s murder and Hackman’s execution on 19 April daily items about the case appeared in many London papers. At first these were dominated by detailed accounts of the events of 7 April, reconstructions that culminated in the evidence offered at Hackman’s trial on 16 April. But there was also an obsessive interest in Hackman himself. Papers reported on his moods and comments, trying to understand what had led this handsome, respectable young man to commit a crime of such enormity. They published many tantalizing vignettes of Hackman, Ray, and Sandwich both before and after the crime. And many speculated about the circumstances that had led to the crime and offered comments on its moral import.

To the untutored eye these items can seem to be little more than the fumblings of an unsophisticated news media trying to piece together a story. But, as we shall see, the coverage of the Hackman/ Ray affair was part of a more complex plot that involved attempts on the part of the Earl of Sandwich and the friends of James Hackman to shape and control public response to the sensational killing. This was possible only because of the peculiar state of the newspaper press at the time. Since the accession of George III in 1760 the rapid expansion of the press had produced a new kind of newspaper, more opinionated than ever before, fuller of comment and criticism, yet not governed by what today we would consider the professional protocols of impartial reporting and editorial control. As the press grew, so papers changed in size and content. A loophole in the 1757 duties on paper made it cheaper for printers to make their papers larger and increase the number of their pages. They needed more copy. Newspapers had always carried many advertisements (their key source of revenue) as well as official government information, commercial news, and items gathered from coffee-houses and interested readers. Though many had a political bias – like the notoriously anti-government London Evening Post – most were primarily advertisers and purveyors of information. Opinion – on matters political, commercial, social and cultural – was found in pamphlets or weekly papers, like The Test and The Contest, that were editorial rather than informational. But with the change in the law, newspapers began to publish political commentary and essays on subjects ranging from taste to science, theatrical, music and art reviews. And, in some cases, they printed lots of gossip and scandal.

Where did this news and commentary come from? Most papers were owned by consortia of businessmen – theatrical proprietors, booksellers, and auctioneers – who considered papers chiefly as advertising vehicles. They were put together by a printer, who may have had strong opinions but was not a journalist, and the few part-time news-gatherers whom the papers employed could hardly be described as reporters. What few experienced journalists there were, were employed to cover politics, reporting parliamentary debates or such sensational events as the court martial of Admiral Keppel, whose trial ended just a few months before Ray’s murder. Henry ‘Memory’ Woodfall, whose amazing recall was vital, as note taking was prohibited during parliamentary debates, was the most celebrated of this small group of reporters. Papers therefore relied on the public for their information and commentary. Most of what appeared in the press was either unsolicited information and commentary from interested parties or news sold by peddlers for a profit. Above all, the paper relied on its correspondents, publishing huge numbers of letters submitted by its readers. The Gazetteer, one of the first papers to speculate on the causes of Hackman’s crime, received no fewer than 861 letters in one four-month period, publishing 560 of them ‘at length’ and a further 262 in abbreviated form under the heading ‘Observations of our Correspondents’. Long articles, masquerading as correspondence and signed by such figures as ‘Honestus’, ‘A Friend to the Theatre’, ‘Cato’, ‘Old Slyboots’, and, most notoriously, ‘Junius’ fanned the flames of controversy, offering views on politics, religion, taste, novels, painting, the state of nation and the nature of crime. Anonymity and pseudonyms protected the authors, who included leading politicians, playwrights, artists, magistrates and doctors as well as opinionated readers.

James Boswell, who found his métier and his fame with his Life of Samuel Johnson published in 1791, was for much of his London life a typical newspaper correspondent. He wrote to the papers to puff his works, denigrate rivals, and comment on the issues of the day. On the afternoon of Hackman’s trial on 16 April, for instance, he strolled into the office of Henry Woodfall, the publisher of the Daily Advertiser, offering him an account of the trial, only to discover that ‘A blackguard being was writing a well-expressed account of the trial⁵⁹’. Nothing daunted he went on to the managers of the St James’s Chronicle, who inserted his anonymous piece in the paper of the following day. This essay contained a long quotation and a puff for an essay in The Hypochondriack on the nature of love that Boswell himself had written and published earlier. Boswell then wrote a highly personal account, which Woodfall printed in the Public Advertiser for 19 April, of Frederick Booth’s reaction to his brother-in-law’s conviction – ‘“Well”, said Mr Booth, “I would rather have him found guilty with truth and honour than escape by a mean evasion”.’ ‘A sentiment’, Boswell commented, ‘truly noble, bursting from a heart rent with anguish!⁶⁰’ When a false⁶¹ report appeared in Lloyd’s Evening Post that Boswell was in the coach that had taken Hackman to his death at Tyburn Tree, he rushed off to the offices of the St James’s Chronicle, and the Public Advertiser, as well as Lloyd’s Evening Post to get them to insert a paragraph to correct the story.

Boswell did not expect to be paid for his letters and paragraphs, but many who dealt with newspaper proprietors were in it for the money. A German visitor to London was surprised by the ‘prodigious multitude of persons’ engaged in collecting news. ‘Among these’, he wrote, ‘may be reckoned the paragraph writers, who go to coffee houses and public places to pick up anecdotes and the news of the day, which they reduce to short sentences, and are paid in proportion to their number and authenticity⁶².’ Some papers had receiving stations for contributions. The Gazetteer, for instance, used J. Marks, a bookseller in St Martin’s Lane, paying him sixpence ‘for every letter or article of intelligence transmitted to the paper’.

This informal process of news-gathering supposed a very different relationship between the press and its readers than the print media have today. Those who read the papers – a broadly based group that extended well beyond the aristocracy, even if it did not include a great many of the poor – were also those who wrote them. The newspaper was not an authoritative organ, written by professionals to offer objective information to the public, but a place where public rumour, news, and intelligence could circulate as if it were printed conversation. Freedom of the press in this period meant not only freedom from government control but freedom of access – not just to information, but to the pages of the press itself in order to transmute opinions into news. The producer of a paper was not so much an editor, shaping its opinions, as a technician, making available a new means of transmitting the disparate opinions of the public at large. The press was thus very open to manipulation.

Many commentators believed that the enormous growth in news, fuelled by the business interests of the newspaper proprietors and lacking any check on its veracity, created a climate of scandal and sensation. Collecting so-called news, which newspapers quickly took up, copied and stole from one another, was often indiscriminate. Paragraph writers created press stories that played fast and loose with the facts and were frequently embellished. As one critic complained:

The general run of readers have not seen the paragraphical drudges, hurrying over the town for malicious materials, and eves-dropping at every door of intelligence; while another tribe of slaves, sit aloof, at the task of improvement and invention … nor are they perhaps aware that other inferior agents are constantly employed in picking up invidious anecdotes of domestic misfortune; and private imprudence. These hint-catchers have no sooner filled the budget to the brim, than their labours are delivered to the embellisher, by whom they are finished and arranged, and sent into the world⁶³.

Commentators were especially concerned at how personal matters and private lives had become a staple of the press. Some blamed this new fashion on the political journalism of the 1760s, first perfected by John Wilkes in his weekly paper The North Briton, which combined political criticism with highly personal attacks on such figures as the Princess Dowager, George III’s mother, and the king’s favourite, Lord Bute, who was accused of being the Princess’s lover. Wilkes mixed sexual scandal with government policy. This was a familiar tactic in the histories of royal courts where women were often said to have had excessive influence because of their hold over male rulers. But Wilkes and his followers extended this tactic by attacking ministers and leading aristocrats for their private moral conduct, maintaining that this made them unfit for public office. This led to unprecedented exposure of the private lives of public figures. One critic of the ‘new journalism’ complained to the Morning Post:

The Political Controversy at the beginning of the Present reign, taught printers to feel their Power: we then first find Personal Abuse, unrestrained, stalk abroad, and boldly attack by Name the most respectable Characters. Your brethren were not idle in taking the hint: from that Period we find a material change in the stile of every News-Paper; every Public Man became an object of their attention; and many a sixpence has a Patriot earned, by Paragraphs, which a few years before, would have brought the Printer unpitied to the Pillory⁶⁴.

The advent of the newspaper editor in the 1770s led to little change. The first major editor, the Reverend Henry Bate, used his Morning Post simply to perfect existing journalistic practices. He extended the coverage of his paper to include boxing and cricket as well as theatrical and art reviews; most notoriously, he made a part of the paper into a satirical scandal sheet, attacking individual men and women of fashion, hectoring his theatrical opponents (Bate was a minor playwright), and peddling the latest gossip. He was one of the models for Snake, the purveyor of poisonous rumour who inserts anonymous paragraphs in the newspaper in the opening scene of The School for Scandal (1777), Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s pointed satire of a society obsessed with ‘inventing, adding and⁶⁵ misrepresenting everything they hear, or their rage, folly, malice or prolific brains can suggest’. Bate deliberately cultivated notoriety, and fought a number of duels with readers who believed themselves maligned or libelled by his publication. Eventually he was imprisoned for accusing the Duke of Richmond of consorting with the enemy during the American war. Bate was said to take fees for publishing some paragraphs and agreeing to suppress others. He was also a client of the government. He had a pension of £200 a year from the secret service funds in return for keeping his ‘Newspaper open for all writings in favour of Government’. In 1781 he⁶⁶ was finally paid off with a gift of £3,250, so that he could purchase a handsome clerical living for himself.

Bate made little attempt to conceal the Morning Post’s connection with Lord North’s administration, frequently beginning reports, ‘As well as our government can judge’, or ‘the government says’ or ‘we are authorized to say’. Bate knew Sandwich and seems to have dealt with him directly on a number of occasions. Lord Bristol, who led the attack on Sandwich in the House of Lords on 23 April, wrote on the following day to an opposition publisher, John Almon, asking him to insert his version of the debate in a number of newspapers ‘with[ou]t saying you had it from me’, to counter the influence of what he described as ‘Ld. SANDWICH’S Morning Post’. It is not surprising that the most sympathetic portrayal of Sandwich in the aftermath of the murder came from the pages of Bate’s paper. Conversely, the accounts of Hackman’s crime in the Gazetteer, the London Evening Post and the London Chronicle – all papers with which John Almon was connected and all associated with the parliamentary opposition – were markedly less sympathetic to Ray and Sandwich.

All the political parties tried to influence the press. Sandwich had been doing so for many years. In the 1760s he employed his chaplain, Dr James Scott, to write newspaper letters under the pseudonyms ‘Anti-Sejanus’ and ‘Old Slyboots’, that were some of the most successful political polemics of the decade. And he was not averse to planting paragraphs of news (as opposed to pieces of political commentary) in the newspapers, not as pieces of information but as ways of influencing opinion. Newspapers in the 1770s were halls of mirrors in which partial views and tendentious opinions were refracted so as to appear as transparent ‘facts’. As we enter them, we have to remember that nothing was quite what it seemed.

On 20 April 1779 the Gazetteer interrupted its report on Hackman’s final hours and execution to speculate on the nature of and motives for his crime. The author of this mélange of reporting and reflection was probably a Mr Newman of Guiltspur Street, who was paid occasional fees for items about trials and executions. ‘There is evidently a something’, he mused, ‘hangs suspended in doubt, and remains unrevealed’ about the case. Hackman’s suicide note to his brother-in-law Booth, he remarked, ‘pours the Blessings of heaven on the murdered lady, and avows an intention of the murderer to kill himself only’. Why, then, did he change his mind? ‘Love could not be the impulse – that passion might have led him to act the hero before his mistress; but the fondness, which dictated the affectionate sentence in his letter, and breathed preservation to the lady, can never be supposed to turn into resentment without a cause, and operate to her destruction.’ Perhaps the sight of Ray on Mr Macnamara’s arm drove him into a jealous rage. ‘But if so,’ the article asked, ‘why did he not confess it?’ The evidence of the two pistols was ambiguous, since the unreliability of firearms meant that many suicides armed themselves with more than one weapon. ‘There is certainly a part in his defense that requires explanation⁶⁷’, it concluded.

The Gazetteer then shifted from speculation to titillating gossip. ‘Besides many other⁶⁸ cogent reasons, which it may not be proper to disclose, the talkative part of mankind say, that a certain noble lord had his doubts of the true motives that actuated the perpetrator in this extraordinary transaction.’ Perhaps, the paper surmised, Martha Ray had had enough of Sandwich and really wanted to leave him. The rumour was ‘That Miss Ray was satiated with the vicious enjoyment of splendour, and desirous to enter the Temple of Hymen with a man who had given every proof of affection; but that there was some barrier started to prevent the union, and she absolutely refused to marry him, though in the hour of reciprocal tenderness she had promised⁶⁹’. Even if this were untrue, the paper concluded, Sandwich had gone to great lengths to find out Hackman’s motives: ‘it is certain⁷⁰, that the Noble Lord himself, or one of his friends, questioned Mr Hackman in prison when the solemnity of the sentence was fresh on his mind, as to the inducement for committing the crime’. Yet much remained obscure. ‘In short’, the article ended, ‘there is so much to be said on both sides of the question that arises on a review of the circumstances, that it might seem premature, as it is certainly difficult to form an opinion⁷¹.’

Such difficulties certainly did not inhibit the press from reporting details of the murder, the interrogation, trial and execution of Hackman, or from speculating about the love triangle. As early as the following day the St James’s Chronicle sketched in the background to the affair:

Upon Enquiry into⁷² the Cause of this desperate Action, we learn that it was occasioned by an unhappy Passion which the Prisoner had entertained for the Deceased. This Gentleman, whose name is Hackman, was formerly an Officer in the Army, and being upon a Recruiting Party at Huntingdon, in the summer of 1775, saw Miss Ray first at H————ke, to which he had been invited by his Lordship. After that he saw her several Times both in Town and Country, in one of which Visits, it is said, he proposed Marriage to her, which she very genteelly declined; and to prevent any disagreeable Consequences, never after admitted him to her Presence. This, it is supposed, driving him to Distraction, induced him to commit the bloody Act above-mentioned, which he meant also to have been fatal to himself.

Over the following weeks more and more detail was published about Hackman and his victim.

We can be sure that most of the items appearing in the press were planted either by Sandwich and his supporters or by the friends of James Hackman, notably his brother-in-law and the young lawyer Manasseh Dawes who took it upon himself to be the chief apologist in the press for the murderer. Many readers were aware that what they were reading was parti pris; indeed, the Gazetteer recognized this when it wrote of ‘both sides of the question⁷³’. The difficulty for readers was how to interpret the different accounts.

The Gazetteer had been right about the questioning of Hackman: Walsingham, acting on Sandwich’s behalf, had spoken at length with him the day after the crime. But the fragments that survive make the two men’s conversation appear more like an attempt to agree on a story than an effort to investigate the truth of the matter. Both sides seem to have been seeking common ground, searching for a version of events they could agree upon. Their first concern was to establish Martha Ray’s innocence. Hackman, wrote Walsingham, ‘is desirous to dye by the hand of the law and says he is happy to know that Miss Ray was innocent … Her innocence being cleared up and your forgiveness as a Christian is all he wishes for.’ But Hackman and Sandwich differed over what Ray’s innocence consisted of. For Hackman it was that she had not taken a new lover, as he claimed Caterina Galli had told him; for Sandwich it was that she had not been carrying on an illicit affair with Hackman. Thus the Earl was relieved to report to his lawyer that ‘Mr H has since declared to Captain Walsingham upon the word of 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’ and he told at least one newspaper, the General Advertiser, that he was sure that Hackman and Ray had not been with one another since their earlier meetings at Hinchingbrooke. Quite apart from their undoubted affection for Martha Ray, both men had strong reasons to assert her innocence. It meant that Hackman could place the blame for his actions on Galli – ‘he lays the whole on Galli⁷⁴’ – and it stood to prevent Sandwich being ridiculed as an old roué cuckolded by a younger man.

With the help of Sandwich and Hackman’s friends, the papers gradually sketched in a story about the three protagonists, with both plot and characters. They told a tale of two attractive young people – a dashing young army officer and an aristocrat’s mistress of great accomplishment – who meet by chance. The mistress has a keeper who is almost twice her age and with whom she has had five children. The young man falls in love, asks for the mistress’s hand in marriage, but is forced to leave his loved one and join his regiment in Ireland. Eager to return to the object of his affections, he leaves the army, takes holy orders, and asks Ray once again for her hand in marriage. Rejected by her, he is driven first to plan suicide and then to commit murder.

This story opened with richly detailed (though sometimes contradictory) accounts of Hackman and Ray’s first meeting. Several papers portrayed the two on romantic rides in the Huntingdonshire countryside: ‘It was Miss Ray’s custom, at that time, for the benefit of air and exercise, to ride out on horseback behind her servant. Undeniable it is, that Mr Hackman took frequent opportunities of riding out at the same time; and being a good horseman, and dexterous at a leap, was sure to afford no small diversion to the lady⁷⁵.’ Others spoke of Hackman as ‘being of a facetious, agreeable turn of conversation’ which secured him a place at Sandwich’s table and a place close to Martha Ray. Joseph Cradock later⁷⁶ recalled the first time that Hackman appeared at Hinchingbrooke, when he was asked to dinner and ended the evening unpacking a telescope, newly arrived from London, to look at the stars.

Sandwich’s house parties in Huntingdonshire were jolly and roistering, attended by musicians and naval explorers, Admiralty officials and minor literati, as well as other aristocrats and rakes. John Cooke, Sandwich’s chaplain, recalled that

The earl of Sandwich was one of the few noblemen, who spend a considerable portion of their time at their country-seats; where he usually resided whenever he could gain a vacation from the duties of his office, and attendance on parliament. His house was at all times open for the reception of his friends and neighbours; and distinguished for the generous, truly hospitable, and liberal entertainment which it afforded⁷⁷.

Another of Sandwich’s friends put it more pithily: ‘Few houses were more pleasant or instructive than his lordship’s: it was filled with rank, beauty and talent, and every one was at ease⁷⁸.’ Charles Burney⁷⁹, the music scholar and father of the novelist Frances Burney, found the parties so boisterous that they gave him a headache. There must have been many witnesses who noticed the handsome young man who paid Martha Ray such attention. The beginnings of Hackman and Ray’s relationship were neither unknown nor obscure, for it had not been difficult for paragraph writers frequenting the fashionable coffee-houses of St James’s to pick up details from former guests at Sandwich’s country house.

Thereafter the story became more shadowy and suppositious. Attempts to find out what had occurred between Hackman’s departure from Hinchingbrooke and his presence on the steps of the Covent Garden Theatre four years later were met with silence and prevarication. ‘The lady’s [Ray’s] friends do not know that there has been any intercourse whatever since⁸⁰’, reported the opposition General Evening Post. Lord Sandwich, as we have seen, took a similar line. The papers all agreed that Hackman had gone to Ireland, had exchanged his red coat for a clerical habit, and returned to London in the hope of persuading Ray to marry him. Many papers believed that Hackman’s clerical preferment to the living of Wiveton in Norfolk was obtained with the help of Sandwich, probably because of Ray’s solicitation for her friend. All of the press suggested a sudden change in Ray’s attitude towards Hackman, whom she pointedly refused to see.

The papers were perplexed by the nature of Hackman and Ray’s relationship – were they friends or lovers? Was their affection mutual or was Hackman enamoured of a woman who did not care for him? How often did they meet, and how intimate were they with one another? The General Advertiser, after reporting that ‘Lord Sandwich says he does not know there has been any intercourse’ since Hackman’s visit to Hinchingbrooke, confidently asserted, ‘We however hear that he [Hackman] renewed his addresses to her some time ago now at Huntingdon, and received some hopes, which her future conduct had entirely disappointed⁸¹.’ The General Evening Post, though it shifted the venue of the intrigue to London, was also sure that Ray had continued to meet Hackman: ‘his visits became frequent to the Admiralty … The Tables, however, afterwards turned in his disfavour; for, from whatever cause, he was certainly forbidden the house⁸².’ Whatever the papers said, they all agreed that the story ended tragically: Hackman was rejected and his final actions were prompted by terrible feelings of unrequited love.

In these versions of the drama, the characters were all portrayed sympathetically. Hackman was always an accomplished, handsome and admirable young man. On the day of his trial, he was described in the General Advertiser as ‘The unfortunate Mr⁸³ Hackman’, who ‘was esteemed one of the most amiable of men. When in the army, his company was courted by all who knew him; his readiness to oblige, by every act of kindness in his power, endeared him to every body.’ The General Evening Post, the London Evening Post and the Gazetteer each printed a report describing him as ‘descended from a very reputable family; he is a person of a lively disposition, and was esteemed by his numerous acquaintance, and his character was never impeached until the unhappy catastrophe on Wednesday night⁸⁴’. Hackman’s respectable origins and his station in the middle ranks of society made his crime more extraordinary and his fate more sympathetic.

Much was made of the honourable nature of Hackman’s obsession. A correspondent who called himself ‘PHILANTHROPIST’ in the St James’s Chronicle of 10 April pointed out that ‘Mr Hackman, so far from being an abandoned and insensible profligate, was rather distinguished for taste and Delicacy of Sentiment⁸⁵’, while James Boswell wrote in the same paper a few days later:

As his manners were uncommonly amiable, his Mind and Heart seem to have been uncommonly pure and virtuous; for he never once attempted to have a licentious connection with Miss Ray. It may seem strange at first; but I can very well suppose, that had he been less virtuous, he would not have been so criminal. But his Passion was not to be diverted by inferior Gratifications. He loved Miss Ray with all his soul, and nothing could make him happy but having her all his own⁸⁶.

Writers thought it important to establish that Hackman was no sexual predator – a rake or libertine – who lashed out in anger because of thwarted desire, but merely a young man hopelessly in love.

Martha Ray, ‘the lovely victim⁸⁷’ as she was described in the London Chronicle, was given a similarly good press. The PHILANTHROPIST who praised Hackman described her as ‘irreproachable in her conduct, any otherwise than what perhaps was not well in her power to prevent, that she was unprotected by the legal Marriage ceremony⁸⁸’. A poor girl who became a rich man’s mistress was hardly culpable. The General Evening Post assured its readers that ‘the memory of Miss Ray, with respect to Mr Hackman, stands clear, at present, of every imputation⁸⁹’. He may have loved her, but she remained true to her keeper. The St James’s Chronicle saw her as a female paragon. It glossed over the potentially sordid origins of Ray’s relationship with Sandwich, alluding only to her being ‘under the protection of the noble Peer⁹⁰’. It lauded her looks and accomplishments: ‘Her person was very fine, her face agreeable, and she had every Accomplishment that could adorn a woman, particularly those of Singing, and Playing most exquisitely on the Harpsichord⁹¹.’ And it placed her in the bosom of the family: ‘She was also highly respected by all those who knew her, especially all the Servants, and her death is most sincerely regretted in the Family⁹².’

Several papers dwelt on Ray’s virtues as a companion and parent. Her fidelity to Sandwich, the General Evening Post reported, ‘was never suspected’. In return for his ‘protection’ Ray gave Sandwich a ‘life of gratitude and strict fidelity⁹³’. Her five surviving children were raised, according to the London Chronicle, with the ‘strictness of motherly attention⁹⁴’. Several papers reported on her concern for the financial well being of her much-loved but illegitimate children. ‘Miss Ray made it a rule, on the birth of every child,’ they wrote, ‘to solicit her noble admirer for an immediate provision for it, which was invariably acquiesced in.’ Her children were therefore provided for after her death: ‘the issue of this lady will have nothing to lament from her sad fate … but the circumstance of having lost a tender mother⁹⁵’.

In the eighteenth century charity came high among the concerns of virtuous women, and Ray was seen as no exception. She was ‘liberal in a high degree, and the bounty of her noble Lover enabled her to indulge benevolence, in becoming the patroness of the poor’. One of the objects of her charity, it was said, was her elderly and poor parents who lived in Elstree. She could not refuse them aid though, in line with her reputation for moral scrupulousness, she refused to see her father because of the way he had encouraged her to become a mistress or a courtesan.

Ray’s most remarked upon quality was her having mastered the skills of an elegant lady. Sandwich, the papers said, had spent lavishly to refashion a milliner’s apprentice as a lady. The London Chronicle waxed lyrical on her accomplishments:

There was scarce any polite art in which she was not adept, nor any part of female literature with which she was not conversant. All the world are acquainted with the unrivalled sweetness of her vocal powers, but it was the peculiar pleasure of a few only to know that her conversation, her feelings, and indeed her general deportment, all participated of an unparalleled delicacy, which had characterized her through life⁹⁶.

No doubt the shocking manner of Martha Ray’s death prompted a surge of sympathy for her. The General Advertiser commented on how ‘all ranks of people drop the tear of pity on her bier, while the sharp tooth of slander seems for a time to have lost its edge⁹⁷’. Even the author of one of the most vicious attacks on Ray, a mock opera published in 1776 that had portrayed her as an unfaithful greedy harridan who twists a besotted but impotent Sandwich round her finger, was heard ‘to describe in the most pathetic terms, the amiable qualifications of her head and heart⁹⁸’. Sympathy for Ray stemmed equally from admiration for a poor, fallen woman who had successfully transformed herself not into a flamboyant courtesan, but into a respectable mother who could pass for a lady.

Sandwich was the least likely of the three victims of Hackman’s crime to be treated kindly in the press, but even he was accorded an unusually sympathetic reception. Naturally enough the government-subsidized Morning Post pleaded his case:

Is there any one so obdurate, however party may have warped or blunted his affections, as not to feel some little concern for a man, who, in the course of one month, has had a personal accusation adduced against his honesty as a man – several vague imputations, and the measure of a direct charge against his character, as a Minister – a daughter dead [his daughter-in-law had just died], and a beloved friend most bloodily assassinated?⁹⁹

But even the opposition papers were willing to acknowledge Sandwich’s dignity in his suffering. Several articles emphasized his benevolence towards Martha Ray – his willingness to pay for her education and to provide for their offspring. His performance as a good father and spouse matched the domestic virtues of his murdered lover. Others praised his remarkable action in being willing to forgive James Hackman for his terrible crime. ‘We are assured from respectable authority, that a noble Lord, much interested in the death of the late unfortunate Miss Ray, pitying the fate of the unhappy Hackman, sent a message to him after condemnation by the Honourable Captain W––– [Walsingham], informing him, “that he would endeavour to get him a pardon;” but that unhappy man replied, “he wished not to live, but to expatiate his offence, if possible, by his death¹⁰⁰”.’

Above all, reports of Sandwich’s suffering at the news of Ray’s death made the man who was regularly depicted in the opposition press as a political monster appear altogether more vulnerable and human. He was ‘inconsolable’…‘he wrung his hands and cried, exclaiming – “I could have borne anything but this; but this unmans me¹⁰²”.’ The General Advertiser suggested that Sandwich was so stricken that his servants feared that he might kill himself, while the Gazetteer depicted his situation as ‘deplorable’ and portrayed him as withdrawn and wounded, seeing ‘no one but his dearest friends¹⁰³’. The St James’s Chronicle, no special admirer of Sandwich as a politician, summarized the prevailing sentiment:

From [Ray’s] having lived so long with his Lordship, there is no Doubt but his feelings on this Occasion must be such as the most lively Grief can inspire. Indeed, we are told, that his Lordship’s Sensations expressed the greatest Agonies; and that whatever may be his sentiments on political Matters, in this affair he has shown a Tenderness which does the highest Credit to his Heart, and the warmth of his Friendship¹⁰⁴.

Thus all three of the main parties were victims, united in their common suffering. Ray and Hackman excited the most sympathy, because they both lost their lives, but even Sandwich was given his share. The press portrayed them all as suffering from forces beyond their control and for which they bore little or no responsibility. Hackman was driven to his crime by feelings that overpowered him; Ray was unable to escape his unwanted attentions; and Sandwich was suddenly and unexpectedly deprived of the woman he loved deeply. So the early newspaper reporting, strongly informed by the friends of Sandwich and Hackman, was remarkably free from acrimony and blame; it invited readers to sympathize with the victims, to understand their plight and, more generally, to interpret the sad events as a consequence of natural desires and feelings, ‘the common passions of Humanity¹⁰⁵’. As PHILANTHROPIST put it in the St James’s Chronicle, ‘let us endeavor therefore to trace this rash and desperate Action, from some cause in human Nature equal to the Phaenomenon¹⁰⁶’.

Though the majority of newspaper reports encouraged readers’ sympathy, a few were overtly censorious. Several news commentators (as well as writers of unpublished, anonymous letters to Sandwich) interpreted Ray’s death as the result of the Earl’s profligate and immoral life, and urged him to see the error of his ways and to reform. In the days just before Hackman’s trial the London Evening Post¹⁰¹ – an old enemy of Sandwich’s – published a number of items attacking the Earl. These included a long letter upbraiding the public for extending too much sympathy to Ray, Hackman and Sandwich and blaming the murder on the moral failings of all three of them. ‘The public’, it began, ‘at present give way to a strange kind of sympathy, whilst they shed tears of condolence with one of the vilest of men, to alleviate his distresses for the loss of his mistress¹⁰⁷.’ What about the victims of the American war, it asked its readers, people who had suffered because of the benighted political policies of Sandwich and his colleagues? Should we not be more concerned about ‘the many thousand widows and orphans, who rend the continent of America with piercing lamentations for the loss of their husbands and fathers who were murdered in cold blood, or slaughtered in the field by the emissaries of despotism¹⁰⁸’? After damning Sandwich as a ‘man who, by his voice and counsel, had drenched whole provinces with murdered blood¹⁰⁹’, the author turned to Martha Ray. Unfortunate as she was, ‘we should not forget what she was; we should not lament her as a spotless, or amiable character, but as a deluded woman cut off in the midst of her days, without any previous warning¹¹⁰’. Her fate should not obscure the moral lesson of her life: ‘We should rather point out the impropriety and wickedness of such connections as she formed, which, through a variety of complicated circumstances, laid the foundation of her untimely death, and which frequently, almost always, in one way or another, terminate fatally.’ ‘Had Miss R – been virtuous’, the writer concluded, ‘she had not fallen as she did¹¹¹.’ Similarly, Hackman’s fate was explained by his moral failings: ‘had the wretched assassin cultivated that delicacy of sentiment which abhors impurity, and suffered no criminal passions to influence his conduct, he would never have found himself within the walls of Newgate, and might have attained an honourable old age, and gone down to the grave in peace¹¹²’.

But, on the whole, it was unusual for the three protagonists to be portrayed as so morally reprobate. Hackman was repeatedly characterized as ‘unfortunate¹¹³’ and as having ‘delicacy of sentiment¹¹⁴’, a quality he shared with Ray; even Sandwich was complimented for his tenderness. The press reporting of the case was designed to elicit sympathy not censoriousness. No doubt, as I have explained, this was partly because Sandwich’s and Hackman’s friends worked hard to shape the newspapers’ response to the case. But it is worth asking why this was possible, and why there was so little attempt to offer an alternative version of the events of the spring of 1779. Why, to put it in modern terms, was Sandwich and Hackman’s spin on the murder and its aftermath so successful?

The love triangle of Ray, Hackman and Sandwich was shaped as a sentimental story, designed to reveal the feelings of the protagonists and to excite the feelings of readers. Reporting and commentary were less concerned with what had happened, though trying to establish the facts of the case was important, than about a mystery of the human heart, an effort to understand the motives and feelings of those involved. Did Ray really love Hackman? Was Hackman justified in feeling that Ray had led him on with false promises, or was he suffering from a sort of delusion, what contemporaries called ‘love’s madness’? Similarly, the aftermath of the crime was described indirectly through the feelings of Lord Sandwich, of Hackman and, perhaps most prominently, of the public. The responses to the bloody murder, affecting trial and the murderer’s execution were covered as extensively as the crime itself. The newspapers pulled readers into a wide circle of sympathy. The press largely avoided the blood-and-gore variety of crime reporting, which had hitherto been common. Its accounts were neither sensational nor melodramatic. Readers were made to understand events through the emotive responses of participants by a form of indirect narration. They were invited to share in the distresses of the victims, to express their sympathy, to establish an emotional closeness rather than a moral distance.

This sort of complicity has to be understood in the light of prevailing ideas about human sympathy and sensibility. Eighteenth-century human sciences, which embraced physiology, psychology, sociability and morality, had created a new way of looking at, depicting and judging human conduct which was less concerned with its strict conformity to a universal moral law than with its social and psychological complexity. We cannot understand the story of Hackman and Ray unless we take some time to explore the values and ways of seeing that informed how contemporaries understood those events.

Eighteenth-century sentimentalism, the understanding that people were first and foremost creatures of feeling, considered sympathy as the key human quality. As the philosopher David Hume put it, ‘No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own¹¹⁵.’ Sympathy was the means by which sentiments were communicated; it was the psychological and emotive transaction that placed them at the heart of social life. Sensibility, in turn, was the ability to feel and exert sympathy; it was, according to The Monthly Magazine, ‘that peculiar structure, or habitude of mind, which disposes a man to be easily moved, and powerfully affected, by surrounding objects and passing events¹¹⁶’.

But sensibility, though seen as a psychological phenomenon, was also viewed as an ethical response. Sentimental feeling, the exercise of sympathy, was a form of moral reflection, for which some people had a greater capacity than others. To be able to express sympathy was to be a better moral being. The key physical sign of sensibility – a spontaneous tearfulness – also became a sign of humanity. As Man: a Paper for Ennobling the Species (1755) commented: ‘it may be¹¹⁷ questioned whether those are properly men, who never wept upon any occasion … What can be more nobly human than to have a tender sentimental feeling of our own and others’ misfortunes?’

The periodical essayists, critics, doctors and natural philosophers who examined sensibility believed it was a general feature of man, and one that was especially encouraged by the conditions of modern life. As the physician Thomas Trotter put it, ‘The nervous system¹¹⁸, that organ of sensation, amidst the untutored and illiterate inhabitants of a forest, could receive none of those fine impressions, which, however they may polish the mind and enlarge its capacities, never fail to induce delicacy of feeling, that disposes alike to more acute pain, as to more exquisite pleasure.’ Acute sensibility was the result of modern commerce, urban life and the manners they promoted – Montesquieu’s doux commerce – which created new, peaceful forms of mutual dependence among strangers, led to the better treatment of and greater regard for women, and encouraged the arts of politeness and refinement. Commercial society, the argument went, encouraged greater sympathy and sensibility; this distinguished modern societies from both the ancients and the primitives. As Sandwich’s friend and memorialist Joseph Cradock put it, ‘How much soever¹¹⁹ the ancients might abound in elegance of expression – their works are thinly spread with sentiment.’

Though the ability to sympathize with others was a sign of modern refinement and virtue, it was also, as many verses and essays on sensibility commented, a source of distress, a sign of moral superiority but also of weakness. As a contributor to the Lady’s Magazine in 1775 exclaimed: ‘Sensibility¹²⁰ – thou source of human woes – thou aggrandiser of evils! – Had I not been possessed of thee – how calmly might my days have passed! – Yet would I not part with thee for worlds. We will abide together – both pleased and pained with each other. Thou shalt ever have a place in my heart – be the sovereign of my affections, and the friend of my virtue.’

Women, young people of both sexes, and those connected to the fine arts and literature were all believed to be especially susceptible to sensibility, prone to virtuous feeling and to excessive sentiment that made them melancholic (in the case of men) or hysteric (in the case of women). Expressions of sympathy, though praised as the great virtue of modern life, indeed as its defining social characteristic, could also be pathological and crippling.

Critics quickly recognized that sentimentalism supposed a different sort of writing and storytelling, one that in the words of the cleric and scholar Hugh Blair ‘derives its efficacy not so much from what men are taught to know, as from what they are brought to feel¹²¹’. The sympathetic moral response that sentimental literature evoked in the reader depended on particularity, a sense of intimacy that engaged the reader rather than on moral lessons or grand abstractions that appealed only to their intellect. The interior feeling of characters had to be explored and not just their external actions. Memoirs, biographies, collections of letters and verses, histories and, above all, novels portrayed the quotidian, ordinary, private and mundane because it was more likely to excite the reader’s sympathy, being close to their own experience. In Blair’s words, ‘It is from private life, from familiar, domestic, and seemingly trivial occurrences, that we most often receive light into the real character¹²².’

Sentimentalism was best staged in the intimate theatre of the home and family, and its most characteristic plots concerned the joys and misfortunes of everyday life – romantic and conjugal love, amatory disappointment, misfortunes brought on by intemperance and improvidence, the pleasures of familial companionship in a circle of virtue. A sentimental story was, in the words of the novelist William Guthrie, ‘an Epic in lower Life¹²³’, a story, in other words, exactly like that of Sandwich, Ray and Hackman.

Sentimental writing spread with astonishing swiftness in the second half of the eighteenth century. Newspaper reporting, pamphlets advocating reform and improvement such as Jonas Hanway’s A Sentimental History of Chimney-sweepers (1785); biographies and memoirs like Oliver Goldsmith’s Life of Richard {Beau} Nash (1762) or Joseph Boruwlaski’s Memoirs of the Celebrated Dwarf (1788) – ‘I not only mean to describe my size and its proportions, I would likewise follow the unfolding of my sentiments, the affections of my soul¹²⁴’; travel literature such as John Hawksworth’s account of Captain James Cook’s voyage; histories such as those of David Hume; and sermons, of which the most popular were those of Hugh Blair; literary forgeries, advice literature, plays, periodical essays, as well as a raft of sentimental novels and verses – all these used the techniques of literary sentimentalism to capture the hearts of their readers.

The cult of sensibility reached a peak in the 1770s, around the time of Ray’s murder. It was not therefore very difficult to present the tragedy of Hackman and Ray as a sentimental story and to expect that the terrible tale would provoke the sympathy of those who read about it. Sentimental literature, especially the sentimental novel, was filled with stories of virtue in distress, a description that was easily applied to all three figures in this love triangle. Hackman after all was a victim of his amatory passion, Ray was a fallen woman who had achieved some respectability only to be murdered, and Sandwich was a former rake whose domestic felicity had been shattered by Hackman’s bullet. The lovelorn youth, the fallen woman who nevertheless retained some virtue, and the reformed rake were all familiar figures in the many sentimental novels that were commissioned, published, sold and loaned by publishers like the Noble brothers, who ran ‘novel manufacturies’ and circulating libraries to distribute this extremely popular form of fiction.

A sentimental account of the affair suited Sandwich and Hackman’s followers because it depicted all three as blameless. But it fell on fertile soil because the case seemed such an obvious one of life imitating art. Readers were likely to respond as if the story was a sentimental fiction, because to do so was an obvious way to make sense of the events surrounding the crime. It gave Sandwich, Hackman’s friends and the public what they all wanted – closure, a way of making the case understandable by placing it in a familiar light. We all know the pleasures of recognizing the familiar – ‘ah! It’s one of that sort of story’. We can wrap it up and put it away and, in doing so, perhaps hide the parts of the story that are troubling or disturbing, or suppress other ways of telling it. In the spring of 1779 the protagonists’ desire to end speculation and the public’s desire for assurance were at one, but it proved rather more difficult than might at first have been supposed to keep the story under wraps.