Three days later, when Hackman went to the gallows, Lady Ossory described his conduct as ‘glorious143’. One paper commented, ‘He behaved with a most astonishing composure, with the greatest fortitude, and most perfect resignation144.’ In the chapel in Newgate prison his conduct reduced spectators to tears. In his last hours, ‘he collected his fortitude, he employed every moment of life to the worship of the Almighty, and prepared himself to meet the awful Judge of the World by prayers, and the overflowings of a contrite heart145’. He died, remarked several commentators, as he should have done. The Gazetteer wrote, ‘He behaved as a man should in such a situation146.’
In the eyes of most observers Hackman’s conduct was redemptive. His spontaneous grief affirmed the authenticity of his love for Martha Ray. The press invariably interpreted his lachrymose conduct as being prompted by her death and not by thoughts of his impending execution. He wept not for himself but, more nobly, for his dead lover.
Hackman’s stoicism before the law and on the gallows showed him to be a person in command of his faculties. Nearly all the papers characterized his conduct in the same way: it showed his contrition and grief about what he had done, and re-established a sense of himself as a sane man. ‘He repeated that affecting acknowledgement of his guilt … and seemed in a state of composure, unruffled with the idea of punishment … His whole behaviour was manly, but not bold; his mind seemed to be quite calm, from a firm belief in the mercies of his Saviour147.’ Commentators spoke of Hackman’s manliness, which they contrasted with his behaviour in killing Ray when, as they saw it, he suffered ‘a momentary frenzy’ that ‘overpowered’ him. The rhetoric was one in which Hackman lost his masculine identity in committing the murder, but recovered it through his stoic conduct during the trial and at the execution. The murderer was now himself cast as a victim, constantly referred to as ‘the unfortunate’ Mr Hackman. Though Hackman’s lawyers had failed to persuade Blackstone and his fellow judge of the defence’s case, their client’s speech and conduct were readily accommodated within a sentimental story in which the life of an otherwise virtuous young man was destroyed by a love affair that had gone catastrophically wrong. Ray’s story ended with her murder, but Hackman’s spectacle of suffering continued to the gallows.
Hackman’s repeated enactment of his exquisite sensibility, the legibility of his feelings as they manifested themselves in his conduct, fashioned bonds of sympathy, despite the crime he had perpetrated. As Boswell had written in The Hypochondriack, a year before Hackman’s execution, ‘the curiosity which impels people to be present at such affecting scenes, is certainly a proof of sensibility not of callousness148’. Or as Adam Smith explained it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, ‘We all desire … to feel how each other is affected, to penetrate into each other’s bosoms, and to observe the sentiments and affections which really subsist there. The man who indulges us in this natural passion, who invites us into his heart, who, as it were, sets open the gates of his breast to us, seems to exercise a species of hospitality more delightful than any other … How weak and imperfect soever the views of the open-hearted, we take pleasure to enter them.’ Smith, in fact, had specifically cited a murderer as a person with whom one could not establish bonds of sympathy, whose actions could not be understood sympathetically. But Hackman was thought to be no ordinary killer. He was a man who slayed his lover and was himself destroyed not by his wickedness but by his overwhelming affection for Martha Ray. His conduct after Ray’s death redeemed him. Like Martha Ray, he became a sacrifice to love.
The horror provoked by Hackman’s crime combined with the sympathy excited by his obvious infatuation and contrition made him an object of public fascination. Many in libertine circles concurred with James Boswell’s view – ‘Natural to destroy what one cannot have149’ or, as he later put it in conversation with the notorious roué Lord Pembroke, ‘Natural to <shoo>t mistress’. Such views were unsurprising among the young bloods of St James’s and the Strand, but even women like Lady Ossory, who had more sympathy for Martha Ray, were moved by Hackman’s intensity of feeling. Though there was some talk of Hackman being insane in the first few days after the murder, it soon dwindled away. True, his action was frenzied, his mind temporarily disordered by jealousy, but it seemed understandable in a young man hopelessly infatuated with an unattainable woman. And the source of his crime was not malevolence or depravity but the positive impulse of love.
The Hackman case was used, particularly by young men like James Boswell and the anonymous author of The Case and Memoirs of James Hackman, to explore their own feelings about romantic love and its perils, hazards that were understood not as a threat to women but as a challenge to a man’s ability to govern his feelings. This was more than sympathy for Hackman; it was a positive identification with him. Boswell was particularly explicit about this. In a letter published in the Public Advertiser he wrote, ‘Let those whose passions are keen and impetuous consider, with awful fear, the fate of Mr Hackman. How often have they infringed the laws of morality by indulgence! He, upon one check, was suddenly hurried to commit a dreadful act.’ He elaborated on this theme in another letter, printed in the St James’s Chronicle. ‘Hackman’s case’, Boswell maintained, ‘is by no means unnatural.’ Citing an earlier essay he had written in The Hypochondriack, he pointed to the selfishness of romantic love; ‘there is no mixture of disinterested kindness for the person who is the object of it’. ‘The natural effect of disappointed love’, he concluded, ‘is to excite the most horrid resentment against its object, at least to make us prefer the destruction of our mistress to seeing her possessed by a rival.’ Adopting a biblical tone, Boswell drew a moral from Hackman’s story based on his close identification of all young men of feeling with the killer: ‘Think ye that this unfortunate gentleman’s general character is, in the eye of Heaven or of generous men in their private feelings, worse than yours? No it is not. And unless ye are upon your guard, ye may all likewise be in his melancholy situation150.’ Hackman had shown that he was capable of manly composure, but it had come too late.
Hackman’s conduct after the murder reinforced his claim that he had been tricked into believing that Ray had a new lover. Surely a man who behaved with such dignity after his crime could not have been crazed, nor could he have plotted or planned to kill his lover. (Boswell never even considered the possibility that Hackman might have set out on the night of 7 April to murder Martha Ray.) Some other, outside circumstance must have pushed him over the edge. As we have seen, Hackman told Walsingham that he blamed it all on Galli, and rumours to that effect were soon in circulation, though they did not feature much in the newspapers. Hackman did not press the point and did not mention it at his trial. He had strong reasons not to antagonize Sandwich. Blaming Galli would not have helped his defence at the trial – indeed, it would have supplied a stronger motive for premeditated murder – and any vindictiveness would not have sat well with his determination to die with dignity. But once Hackman’s body had been sent to Surgeon’s Hall his supporters and critics of Sandwich were free to attack the Earl and Martha Ray’s chaperone.
Soon after Hackman’s execution most London papers ran advertisements for a new pamphlet entitled The Case and Memoirs of James Hackman written by ‘A PARTICULAR FRIEND’ and published, it was claimed, in order to prevent other ‘spurious publications’. The Case and Memoirs was an immediate success. Within two weeks of its first appearance, the publisher was announcing its fifth edition, promising a large print run so that eager readers would not be disappointed. The tenth and