Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century. John Brewer

Lady Ossory concurred, writing to George Selwyn, ‘I found Miss Ray, or at least her unfortunate admirer, occupied everybody¹²⁷.’ But if Johnson and Thrale’s discussion was one of many that took place in the few weeks after Martha Ray’s murder, it had a rather unusual feature: it was about Martha Ray, and not about her murderer. Lady Ossory’s mid-sentence switch from the victim to her ‘unfortunate admirer’ perfectly captured the public’s changing preoccupations. Ray was dead, Sandwich had retired from the public eye first to a villa at Hampton and, ‘when every thing there brought her to his remembrance’, to a house in Blackheath. This left Hackman as the focus of public attention: the extensive newspaper reports of his interrogation by Sir John Fielding, his trial at the Old Bailey, and his execution on 19 April less than two weeks after the killing made him, as one news report put it, ‘the topic of conversation¹²⁸’.

      Naturally enough, much of this gossip took the form of speculation about Hackman’s motives for the crime. Many, like Mrs Thrale, were puzzled about the strange affair. As Horace Walpole commented to a friend, ‘Now, upon the whole … is not the story full as strange as ever it was? Miss Wray [sic] has six children, the eldest son is fifteen, and she was at least three times as much. To bear a hopeless passion for five years, and then murder one’s mistress – I don’t understand it¹²⁹.’

      This curiosity about the love of a young man for an older kept woman manifested itself in a preoccupation with Hackman’s conduct after the murder. It was as if the means of understanding him and his bloody crime lay not in a forensic investigation (which, as we have seen, Sandwich tried to stifle), but in evidence offered in the person of Hackman himself. The key to the crime lay in Hackman’s character. What he said was less important – though this mattered – than his entire bodily comportment. True feeling, in any sentimental story, was often beyond words. It could be seen in involuntary (and therefore authentic) physical expression: shudders, blushes and blanching, and, above all, spontaneous tears. Such bodily signs were clues to character and evidence of refinement and sensibility. As Samuel Richardson put it, ‘the man is to be honour’d who can weep for the distresses of others¹³⁰’. Tears told observers about the person who wept but they also excited powerful sympathetic feelings in the viewer. Indeed, the response that a character’s palpitations and weeping provoked was itself an indication of what the responder was like. Thus after the murder both press coverage and private correspondence were preoccupied with Hackman’s public conduct, and with the powerful feelings aroused among those who witnessed his trial and execution.

      All the newspapers reported that when Hackman was questioned by Sir John Fielding the day after Ray’s shooting, he found it hard to answer the questions. ‘From the agonizing pangs which entirely discomposed, and externally convulsed him,’ reported the London Chronicle, ‘it was sometime before the magistrate could proceed¹³¹.’ Onlookers were moved by his distraught behaviour, the papers noted: ‘His manifest¹³² agitation, contrition, and poignant grief, too sensibly affected all present, to wish to add to such heart-felt misery by judicial interrogations during such keen distress of mind.’ An unexpected delay in proceedings made him worse, and it took him a while to recover his composure and display ‘the utmost steadiness’. During Fielding’s questioning Hackman ‘wept very much and was entirely convulsed each time the name of the deceased was mentioned. He did not palliate his offence, and said he eagerly wished to die.’ The London Evening Post recorded that when Fielding presented him with evidence of the shooting, ‘he sank into a grief which is impossible for the power of words to paint¹³³’. But by the end of the proceedings, he had become ‘quite composed, and at present appears perfectly resigned to meet his approaching fate with a becoming fortitude¹³⁴’. ‘His sighs and tears’, the paper concluded, ‘added to his genteel appearance, made most people give way to the finest feelings of human nature¹³⁵.’

      The General Advertiser of 13 April drew a general moral lesson from this piece of sentimental theatre: ‘The very humane behaviour of Sir John Fielding on a late melancholy occasion, and the tender constructions of a pitying audience on the conduct of the unhappy subject, does infinite honour to the laws of our country, and displays the humanity of our nature in the most beautiful and lively colours.’ People may have been shocked by the crime, ‘but who will say that the author of the shocking tragedy of Wednesday last is not amply punished? Who can picture to himself the misery that must penetrate and fill the deepest recesses of his mind, who has suffered himself to commit the horrid crime of murder, through the dire excess of a passion the most admirable that can fill the heart, while within the pale of reason?¹³⁶’ As another press item concluded, ‘the tear of¹³⁷ compassion should not be withheld from him in the moment that Justice demands an exemplary expiation of the deed’.

      A similarly powerful sympathetic response dominates the press accounts of Hackman’s trial, which contrast strongly with the formal record of the court proceedings which was remarkably prosaic. Most of the proceedings were taken up with establishing the facts of the case, calling successive witnesses to satisfy the law by confirming what everyone already knew. Hackman’s counsel did not dispute the facts, and asked witnesses very few questions. What would have been of most interest to modern legal scholars – Davenport’s speech at the end of the trial arguing that Hackman was innocent on the grounds of temporary insanity, or ‘irresistible impulse’ – was not even recorded by the shorthand writer. Given that one of the perquisites of the recorder’s job included the profits from the publication and sale of the trial’s transcript, it would seem that there was very little interest in the legal deliberations of the trial.

      Blackstone, like most judges at the time, was strongly opposed to pleas of temporary insanity, and he made it clear that such a plea had no legal status (English law does not recognize anything like crime passionnelle) and that insanity pleas in general were admissible only if strong evidence of the defendant’s history of madness were presented. But no one seems to have thought that Hackman would be acquitted. Commentators as diverse as Horace Walpole and Sir John Fielding concurred in Hackman’s inevitable fate. There was little interest in the trial’s outcome, in the possibility of a surprise verdict of innocent. What mattered was Hackman’s performance in justifying his actions and contemplating his fate.

      This is clear from responses to the trial. For Lady Ossory, Hackman’s conduct in court ‘was wonderfully touching¹³⁸’. The news reports agreed. ‘The prisoner by¹³⁹ his defence drew tears from all parts of the Court; so decently and properly he conducted himself.’ ‘The behaviour of this unfortunate criminal’, ran another item, ‘was in every respect descriptive of his feelings. When the evidence related the fatal act, his soul seemed to burst within him. His defence was intermixed with many sighs and groans, and the trickling tear bespoke penitence … and remorse. The letter to his brother melted the most obdurate heart, and whilst the horror of the deed shocked the understanding of the audience, there was not a spectator who denied his pity¹⁴⁰.’ ‘However, we may¹⁴¹ detest the crime,’ wrote the London Evening Post, ‘a tear of pity will fall from every humane eye on the fate of the unhappy criminal.’ Witnesses, or – as it was more usually said – the audience was preoccupied with Hackman’s performance. Boswell was pleased that the killer never tried to palliate his crime: ‘He might have pleaded that he shot Miss Ray by accident, but he fairly told the truth: that in a moment of frenzy he did intend it.’ When Boswell left the courtroom to tell Frederick Booth of