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