Shooting Victoria

by Paul Thomas Murphy

  Phillips’s first instinct was to drop the case altogether. He consulted, however, with the associate judge for the trial, who recommended that he continue to defend Courvoisier, “and to use all fair arguments arising on the evidence.” Phillips’s plan to throw suspicion on the other servants, then, was now off limits; he would have to limit his defense to throwing doubt on the evidence implicating his client: in particular, he questioned Inspector Tedman’s finding of a pair of bloody gloves in a trunk the police had thoroughly examined days before, finding nothing. He also attempted to discredit Mme. Piolaine’s evidence by suggesting that her hotel was nothing but a sordid gaming-den. In the end, the circumstantial evidence was too strong.* Courvoisier was found guilty and sentenced to hang on the 6th of July, outside Newgate’s debtor’s door, and then to be buried within the precincts of the prison. He was removed from the courtroom by a passageway to the prison and placed in the condemned cell neighboring Oxford’s. There, he immediately attempted to kill himself by forcing a towel down his throat.

  For Edward Oxford, whose level of happiness correlated exactly with the amount of attention he received, the morning of 22 June was a time of pure joy, as he and a more doleful Richard Gould stood in the dock of the Old Bailey, in the place that Courvoisier had been sentenced to death two days before. Oxford could hardly contain himself, and grinned “and with difficulty restrained his propensity to laughter” to see a courtroom packed full with an audience eager to witness his and Gould’s trials. Gould chose to act as his own counsel; he pleaded not guilty and sat to await his trial. Oxford pled not guilty, and sat with his solicitor, Pelham, while his barrister, Sydney Taylor, presented an affidavit from Pelham and Hannah Oxford requesting a delay until the next sessions. They gave a number of reasons for their request—a delay would give the public time to cool down, for one thing, and would allow the defense reasonable time to formulate their response to prosecution witnesses. Their primary need for delay, however, was to allow Hannah to complete her mission and subpoena witnesses to Oxford and his forebears’ insanity. The Attorney General, Sir John Campbell, who would lead the prosecution, attacked every point in the affidavit save one—the most important one: he would agree to a delay so that Oxford’s defense could adequately prepare a case for insanity. Campbell “should be extremely sorry, when the case came before the jury, that it should be charged against the Attorney-General of the day by any future historian that he had followed the example of a former Attorney-General, who had hurried on the trial of Bellingham for shooting Mr. Perceval, although it was stated on affidavit that evidence would be brought forward to prove that he was insane.”

  Campbell was referring to the only assassination of a British prime minister in history. On 11 May 1812, John Bellingham, who some years before had suffered abysmal treatment in Russian prisons for crimes he was certain he did not commit, and who had been repeatedly denied help or redress from the British government during and after his time in Russia, decided that his only recourse was to kill the head of government, Spencer Perceval. He obtained a pair of pocket pistols and had a tailor alter his coat lining so that he could conceal them. He waited for Perceval to appear in the lobby of the House of Commons and shot him through the heart. Perceval died within minutes. Bellingham was tried for murder four days later. His attorney pleaded energetically for a delay; he could, given time, offer testimony from several persons outside of London that Bellingham had been insane for years. The application was denied outright.

  Bellingham in his defense gave a touching narrative of his travails in Russia, and a convincing account of the insensitivity of his own government toward him. And his attorney brought up three witnesses from London who testified to his eccentricities, though all agreed, on cross-examination, that he had never been to their knowledge restrained for insanity, and that he was always in command of his business affairs. The judge, in summing up, pointed out that no personal injury could warrant taking the law into one’s own hands. Bellingham was found guilty and hanged on the next Monday morning—a week to the day after he shot Spencer Perceval.

  Lord Chief Justice Tindal agreed to avoid such an appearance of undue haste in Oxford’s case, and set his trial for the next sessions, on 9 July. The hearing was brief, but for as long as it lasted Oxford had the time of his life. He exclaimed to Pelham, “did you see how I was noticed!—what a noise my case seems to make.” Pelham attempted to distract him from reveling in his celebrity, but to no avail; Oxford insisted that his solicitor identify all of the “lords and gentlemen” who had come to see him. He asked in particular about a gentleman with black whiskers who was watching him: it was, Pelham told him, the Duke of Brunswick, who, deposed in a public uprising and exiled, had plenty of time on his hands to view British criminal trials. “What, a Duke come to see me?” said Oxford. “I am glad of that. Will there be any more dukes present at the trial?” (Pelham predicted that it would not be likely.) Oxford also nodded to Fox Maule as to a friend. “He was very anxious to know if he was ‘cried out’ in the streets; if his likeness was taken, and what was said of him by the French newspapers… he frequently rubbed his hands and exclaimed, with great self-satisfaction, ‘nothing else will be talked of but me for a long time. What a great character I shall be!’”

  Many of his supposed friends the aldermen were in court as well, but it was just as well for them that his trial was delayed, for later the same day, they proceeded with pomp and solemnity, in the company of over 150 London officials, to Buckingham Palace and to Ingestre House, to present their addresses of congratulations to the Queen and Prince, and then to the Duchess of Kent.

  Oxford would have been disappointed to know that the Duke of Brunswick might have been more interested in Richard Gould’s impending trial than Oxford’s, having attended Gould’s earlier examination for burglary. But Gould was likely much less impressed by his august presence; he was focused instead upon mounting his own defense. His attorney in his previous trial—for murder, and not for burglary, the charge in this trial—had done an excellent job of attacking the credibility of many of the witnesses and much of the evidence against his client. Gould endeavored this time to do the same thing, without success: his attempts only earned the laughter of the court. The prosecution refrained from introducing the tainted confession Sergeant Otway had elicited from Gould, but Gould introduced it anyway, hoping to elicit sympathy from the jury that a policeman would thus entrap a drunken man into falsely implicating others. The prosecution did, however, introduce as compelling evidence the fruit of that confession—the bull’s-eye lantern, fished out of the pond behind the house where Gould was staying. The couple with whom Gould was living both identified the lantern as having been taken from them, and connected Gould with its disappearance. The two also established that Gould, impoverished before the burglary, was now flush with cash: he had used some to buy new shoes, and the bulk of the money was found bound up in one of Gould’s stockings.

  The jury returned after fifteen minutes and pronounced Gould guilty of burglary. Baron James Parke, the presiding judge, noted his and the Lord Chief Justice’s full agreement with the verdict, and told Gould that no one was fooled by his earlier acquittal: he was a murderer as well as a burglar. Parke threw the book at Gould: transportation for life to a penal colony, “there to pass the remainder of his existence in hopeless slavery, poverty and misery of the worst description.” Delighted spectators applauded the verdict as Gould, emotionless, was led from the courtroom. Two weeks later, Gould was, in a sense, back where he had started before Sergeant Otway entrapped him: on a ship bound for Sydney, New South Wales. Now, though, he sat in chains on the convict ship Eden and faced a far different future.

  As Oxford awaited his trial, Courvoisier in the neighboring condemned cell offered him ample opportunity for diversion. Courvoisier had developed, since his condemnation, a pressing need to confess, and he did so repeatedly and fervently, apparently to anyone who would listen to him or would act as witness to his written stat
ements. He wrote at least four confessions. The first of these, written on the same day Oxford and Gould appeared in court, set out in very specific detail events surrounding the murder. Courvoisier’s attorney and Governor Cope witnessed the confession, and sent it on to the Home Office (from where it soon found its way into the newspapers). Very many of the details of this confession, it quickly became clear, were false; Courvoisier lied, for one thing, in claiming that Lord William Russell had surprised him in his burglary of the house, and that was what convinced him on the spur of the moment to murder the old man. The evidence of the case made it clear that his murder was premeditated, not impulsive. Why did he lie? He could have done so to reduce his culpability. Courvoisier was most certainly aware that the overwhelming majority of death sentences—over 95% of them—were commuted to lesser sentences in his day; a well-publicized confession that somehow mitigated his guilt might do the trick.

  In later confessions, he continued to provide careful (and sometimes contradictory) details, all suggest a variety of mitigating factors. In his third confession—a spiritual biography of sorts, written in French—he claimed that he had been influenced to the deed by bad reading:

  I read a book containing the history of thieves and murderers, being under the dominion of Satan I read it with pleasure, I did not think that it would be a great sin to place myself among them. On the contrary, I admired their skill and their valour. I was particularly struck with the history of a young man who was born of very respectable parents, and who had spent his property in gaming and debauchery, and afterwards went from place to place stealing all he could. I admired his cunning, instead of feeling horrified at it; and now I reap but too well the fruit of those papers and books which I had too long suffered to supplant devotional works.

  Courvoisier’s suggestion that low literature can create thieves and murderers was the popular theory at the heart of the criticism of the Newgate novel, and indeed, the story got about that Ains-worth’s Jack Sheppard had turned Courvoisier evil, compelling Ainsworth to write to the newspapers contradicting “this false and injurious statement.” The connection between Courvoisier and the Newgate novel and the resulting furor, was enough to kill the subgenre.

  There was another culprit in this confession—Satan, whose hold on Courvoisier became even stronger in his fourth confession, in which Courvoisier represented the murder of Russell as a cosmic battle. As he stood above the sleeping man:

  … the evil disposition of my heart did not allow me to repent. I turned up my coat and shirt-sleeve, and came near to the bed on the side of the window. There I heard a cry of my conscience, telling me, “Thou art doing wrong”; but I hardened myself against this voice, and threw myself on my victim, and murdered him with the knife I was holding in my right hand.

  If Courvoisier expected his sentence to be commuted by the Queen’s government, however, he was disappointed: a servant slaughtering his master in such a cold-blooded manner was beyond their ability to forgive. (The fact that he was a foreigner killing a member of one of the best-known aristocratic families in England certainly didn’t help.) Courvoisier’s zealous religiosity during his last days, however, had all the signs of a genuine religious conversion, and the genuine hope that faith would save him in the next life, if not in this one. Courvoisier spent most of his last days in fervent prayer, often in the company of James Carver, Newgate’s chaplain, and M. Baup, the Swiss minister of a nearby French church.

  In the sermon traditionally spoken before a condemned man, given the day before Courvoisier’s execution, Reverend Carver promised him the “pardon and peace” that God offered to every repentant sinner. The chapel at Newgate was filled to overflowing. The sheriffs, besieged by applications, gave out tickets and opened a gallery that had been closed for the past fifteen years. Courvoisier—his coffin placed in front of him—attended to the sermon with “sorrow and contrition,” and demonstrated great agitation at every reference to his crime. Edward Oxford sat directly behind him, flanked by two jailers. He, too, appeared to enter into the solemnity of the occasion, showing a “decent seriousness.” But, just for a moment, his vainglory got the better of him. When the chaplain offered up a prayer for the Queen, Oxford couldn’t help it: he looked up, and around the chapel, with a foolish grin on his face.

  Though resigned to die, Courvoisier had not completely resigned himself to strangle on a rope before the eyes of thousands, and plotted to take his own life by binding up an arm with a strip of cloth and cutting a vein with a sharpened fragment of wood that he had secreted in his mattress. His plan was discovered and foiled when he was forced to strip completely before going to sleep.

  He was to be hanged at the customary time of 8:00 the next day. He was woken at four the next morning, as he had requested, and for two hours he quietly wrote final letters to his family. At six, the ritual of execution began, as Courvoisier was joined by a sheriff, by Carver, and by his Swiss minister Baup; they prayed until 7:30, and Courvoisier “fervently” took the sacrament of communion.

  If Oxford was not awoken early that morning by the clankings of cell doors or the fervency of prayer, then his sleep would certainly have been disrupted by the growing activity outside the prison. Crowds had been assembling since the night before, to reserve the best vantage point to see Courvoisier hanged: these were a celebratory bunch, mostly rowdy youths, and the local gin shops remained open all night to cater to them. In the early hours of the morning, the scaffold was wheeled into place outside Newgate’s debtor’s door and hammered into place. The bulk of the crowd began arriving after dawn. Charles Dickens and William Makepeace Thackeray, apart from one another, were among this crowd. Both were, in 1840, staunch opponents of the death penalty, and both were to find their views strengthened considerably by what they were about to witness. Thackeray, recording his impressions of the event in his essay “Going to See a Man Hanged,” noted the great social and moral diversity of the spectators: from the immoral—the young blackguards and their prostitute girlfriends at the front of the crowd, as well as the upper-class dandies and “Mohawks” who had retained window seats above the mass and who entertained themselves by spraying those below with brandy-and-water—to the respectable: the tradesmen and tradesmen’s families, and the bulk of the working-class spectators, whom Thackeray, standing squeezed among them, deemed “extraordinarily gentle and good-humoured.” Pickpockets were at work, as were broadsheet-sellers: Courvoisier was a popular subject for these; as many as 1.6 million would be sold. The crowds, as the hour of execution approached, filled Old Bailey and Giltspur streets and overflowed to Ludgate Hill to the south and Smithfield to the north. The Times conservatively estimated 20,000 were there; Thackeray reported 40,000. Places in the windows of the houses surrounding the scaffold were going for three guineas, and for two sovereigns one could obtain treacherous places on the house-roofs: places for those “with less money to spare, but more nerve.”

  After Courvoisier had taken communion, William Calcraft entered the cell. Calcraft had been Newgate’s executioner since 1829, and was to continue in that position until 1874: a long if not illustrious career. Calcraft was well aware that this was bound to be a highly profitable day for him. For his earliest hangings he was paid a guinea per hanging; in time, he would earn £10 a body. He would also be given Courvoisier’s hanging-rope and his effects, including his clothing. He could sell the former, cut into little pieces, as souvenirs—and Courvoisier’s notoriety would guarantee a high selling price for these. He could also sell the clothes to Madame Tussaud’s waxworks; Courvoisier would soon be a star attraction in Madame’s Chamber of Horrors.

  Calcraft drew from a black bag a rope with which he pinioned Courvoisier’s arms before him. At a few minutes before eight, the procession left the condemned cell, Carver in front, reading the burial service.

  The procession stopped in Newgate’s press yard—so-called not because of any journalistic connection, but because this was the area in which, until as late as 1772, prisoners
who refused to plead were crushed with stones until they spoke or died. On this day, a number of esteemed guests had assembled in the yard; they had paid for the privilege of watching Courvoisier in his last moments, as his leg-irons were stricken off and he was led to the scaffold. (Afterwards, they would have a hearty breakfast with Governor Cope.) Among this group was the celebrated actor Charles Kean. Kean’s father Edmund, the even more celebrated actor, had come to Newgate twenty years before to witness the ultimate moments of Arthur Thistlewood and his fellow conspirators, sentenced to hanging and decapitation for plotting to assassinate the cabinet: Kean wished to broaden his education as an actor. His son, one assumes, was at Newgate on this day for the same reason.

  At 7:55, the prison bell tolled; with an “immense sway and movement,” the entire crowd uncovered their heads, and, according to Thackeray, “a great murmur arose, more awful, bizarre, and indescribable than any sound I had ever before heard.” After a suspenseful pause, Courvoisier emerged, with the sheriffs and the hangman. He showed, by all accounts, a preternatural calmness; his only agitation, beyond an imploring look around at the immense crowd, was a clasping and unclasping of his bound hands. The crowd replied in kind to him: after a few yells of execration, they remained silent. He strode to the middle of the platform, under the beam, where Calcraft quickly slipped a hood over his head, adjusted the noose, stepped back, and pulled the lever that shot back the bolt. Courvoisier dropped.

  William Calcraft was renowned as a bungler famous for his “short drops,” in which the hanged man, only dropping a few inches, would not suffer a broken neck and would thus slowly strangle to death, Calcraft often helping with this process by racing under the scaffolding and pulling on the legs of the dangling man. To be fair to Calcraft, however, the short drop was the norm in 1840. Long drops of several feet, designed to break the neck—drops which could go horribly wrong in their own way—were not a feature of Newgate hangings until the 1880s; and broken necks and quick, painless deaths were not considered by all at the time to be good hangings. According to the Times, however, Courvoisier’s death—perhaps with Calcraft’s help under the scaffolding—was relatively benign: “He died without any violent struggle. In two minutes after he had fallen, his legs were twice slightly convulsed, but no further motion was observable, excepting that his raised arms, gradually losing their vitality, sank down from their own lifeless weight.”