The Case and Memoirs was certainly the most eloquent defence of James Hackman, an apology that used the sympathy that Hackman had excited during his trial and execution to place his conduct in the most favourable light. In many ways it trod familiar ground. It emphasized Hackman’s ‘manly and collected behaviour’ and how ‘his deportment was noble, and gained him the admiration of his judge and jury in the course of his trial’. It framed the entire story as one of Hackman’s heroic, eventually successful struggle to tame his passions. It was a saga about how a man was able to recover from a momentary act of madness.
But the publication of The Case and Memoirs also marked the breakdown of the consensual view of the murder that had been shaped and shared by the friends of Hackman and Sandwich. The author of The Case and Memoirs, confronted by public scepticism of his interpretation of events, grew progressively more outspoken and altered the fourth edition in early May to make his picture of Hackman even more sympathetic. Eventually, in the seventh edition, he placed the blame for her death squarely on the shoulders of Martha Ray. He even tried to blackmail Caterina Galli into implicating the Earl of Sandwich, offering to absolve her from blame in the affair, if she would pin the blame on Ray’s keeper.
The Case and Memoirs was published by George Kearsley, the former publisher of John Wilkes’s North Briton, one of the men who had been arrested in 1763 when the government had tried to put a stop to Wilkes’s acerbic and very popular periodical. Kearsley, threatened with prosecution by the Secretary of State’s office, had reluctantly – and much to the disgust of Wilkes – revealed all he knew about the North Briton and its author’s publishing activities. In 1764, possibly as a result of his difficulties during the Wilkes affair, he was declared bankrupt, though he was soon back in business. Embarrassed and humiliated, Kearsley was full of resentment against members of the government, including Lord Sandwich who had played a major part in his prosecution.
Kearsley was a general bookseller who had first started publishing books, pamphlets and papers in the late 1750s in Ludgate Street, moving to new premises in Fleet Street, opposite Fetter Lane, in 1773. Though he had no particular speciality, throughout the 1770s he published pamphlets and poems attacking the moral depravity of the aristocracy, as well as political tracts attacking the government and supporting the American colonists. He had close connections with John Almon, Wilkes’s publisher and friend, who had been behind the attack on Sandwich and Martha Ray for corruption in 1773, and he was connected to the group of booksellers who took a consistently critical line on the government throughout the 1770s. He had no love for the Earl of Sandwich. So he was an obvious figure for an author to approach if he were bent on publishing a defence of Hackman. But even if Kearsley had not had reasons to dislike Sandwich and Ray, he would have jumped at the chance of printing the life of such a notorious and controversial figure.
The anonymous author of The Case and Memoirs was in fact a young barrister of the Inner Temple, Manasseh Dawes, who had assisted in Hackman’s defence. Though he occasionally makes a brief appearance in the press reports of 1779, very little is known about him apart from his fame for legal erudition and what can be gleaned from his published work. His preoccupations in print are revealing. His first books – Miscellanies and Fugitive Essays both of which Kearsley published in 1776 – mixed poems and stories of the trials of love with short political essays supporting the opposition, political reform and the American colonists. His subsequent writings tackled such issues as libel, crime and punishment, the extent of the supreme power, and the nature of political representation. His position, though sometimes eccentric, followed a consistently reformist line.
If we read Dawes’s first writings – his poems and stories of romantic love – autobiographically, then it is not hard to see why he took up Hackman’s cause. His verses are full of the irrational power of love. Love is a source of woe, a wound, a form of possession that takes hold of its victim: ‘What tho’ I once resolv’d and strove/To quell and spurn the force of love,/I then could not my mind controul,/ While such fond pangs were in my soul152’. In his stories Dawes was much exercised by the tension between sexual passion and proper conduct, especially among young men. He seems to have accepted that sexual desire (and its fulfilment) was natural outside wedlock, but to have worried about how illicit sexual practice, the guilt and perplexity it produced, affected relationships. His first publications are full of youthful ardor and confusion, as well as a passionate adherence to political probity and the reform of the law.
Dawes claimed to153 know Hackman and his brother-in-law Frederick Booth well, but in the controversy that blew up about the authenticity of his pamphlet he was forced to concede in the press that he had known neither of them before the notorious case. So Dawes chose to intrude himself into the story – to offer Hackman legal advice, to explain his turbulent feelings, and to act as his public apologist. Certainly he was Hackman’s visible supporter. The St James’s Chronicle reported that ‘Mr Hackman was attended into and out of court by his friend, Mr Dawes, a Gentleman of the Bar, who has kindly attended him in his Confinement, and endeavoured to give him all the Counsel and Satisfaction in his power154’. (It is worth bearing in mind, however, that Dawes probably got this item inserted into the paper.)
Dawes went to great lengths to give his pamphlet the authority of being Hackman’s version of why Ray had died. The advertisements for The Case and Memoirs claimed its swift publication was intended to pre-empt less reliable accounts that might place Hackman in an unfavourable light. And in the pamphlet’s dedication to the Earl of Sandwich Dawes makes the claim to be acting as Hackman’s spokesman clear: ‘the following pages … are authentic, because they are taken from the mouth of Mr Hackman while in confinement, and reduced to writing by a person who … knew him, and respected his very amiable and fair character155’.
But from the outset there were doubts about the authority of Dawes’s apologia. The day before The Case and Memoirs was published Frederick Booth printed a notice in the newspapers reminding readers that only he had the documents to produce an authentic ‘case’: ‘I think it necessary to be known, that no Materials for such a Publication are or can be in any Hands but my own; and that if ever it should seem to me proper to give any Account to the Public, it will be signed with my own name.’ Later apologists for Martha Ray claimed that Booth denounced Dawes’s writing as a self-interested fraud, but Booth may just have wanted to make clear that he was not, as many might suppose, the author of The Case.
Even though – or perhaps because – The Case and Memoirs was such an extraordinary success, Dawes was forced on the defensive. When the fifth edition was published in early May, he inserted a notice in the papers indignantly asserting his probity and veracity:
There being some doubts with the public of the truth of this publication, the Author of it declares, on his honour and veracity, (which he hopes are unimpeachable) that the facts contained in it are genuine, he having presented it to the public for the purpose expressed in the dedication, and no other, which he is ready to testify, if necessary, on an application to him at Mr Kearsly’s, who knows and believes him incapable of the mean artifice of obtruding on the public any thing with a view to catch the penny of curiosity156.
In June, a verse appeared in the Public Advertiser mocking Dawes and identifying him as the author of The Case:
The Rope, the penalty of broken Laws,
Is not more shocking than the pen of D-ws.
Both to deserve no Crime can be so great;
Yet both to suffer was poor Hackman’s fate157.
What made Dawes’s account so controversial? First and foremost he categorically asserted that Hackman and Ray had been not only friends but lovers. From the outset he described the two as ‘revelling in all its [loves] rites by stealth’, and enjoying ‘stolen bliss158’.