Murder by Candlelight

by Michael Knox Beran

  Beside the slyness and duplicity of Greenacre, Jack Thurtell, with his naïve ingenuous strength, seems almost noble in his savagery, a Bronze Age brigand. Thurtell’s crime—the prosecution of private revenge—has, for the greater part of human history, been held to be perfectly compatible with the strictest honor; and until the day before yesterday the morality of la vendetta prevailed in the wilder regions of Europe, and indeed still survives in the gangs of the American city. But the most hardened bandit would not dream of striking a woman, let alone a woman whom he had engaged himself to marry. Greenacre violated this unwritten law. And yet, ignoble though he was, he was not without gallantries of his own; and it is but just to record that he never wavered in his effort to exculpate Sarah Gale of complicity in the death of Mrs. Brown.

  Of all the phantoms in Greenacre’s little inferno, Sarah Gale is the most obscure. Little is known of her early history, other than that her maiden name was Farr, and that she came from Dorset. On coming up to London, she joined a theatrical troupe, performing under the stage name of Sarah Wiston; but her career as an actress did not prosper, and she fell into prostitution. A man connected with the legal profession kept her for a time; he, however, left her, and she stooped to marry a coachman named Gale, whose child she bore. When the coachman, too, abandoned her, she took Greenacre for a lover.

  As the gravity of her position became clearer, she grew more alarmed. “I have nothing to say,” she told the magistrates when they asked her about the death of Hannah Brown. “I know nothing about it.” There was, however, a good deal of circumstantial evidence to suggest that she knew more about it than she was willing to admit. On the day after Christmas, she had been seen, by the neighbors, at 6 Carpenter’s Place “employed with a bucket and mop, as if she were hard at work” cleaning up a mess. A week later, when Greenacre moved his belongings out of Carpenter’s Place, she made what in retrospect was a damning remark. The boxes and trunks had been placed on the cart when Greenacre, who up to that moment had been tremulously anxious, breathed a sigh of relief: “all,” he said, was “right,” as he should soon be off to America. Unfortunately he said this in the hearing of the man whom he had hired to help him move, an indiscretion which moved Sarah Gale to exclaim, “Ah, now you have done for yourself.” A short time later, she pawned two veils belonging to Mrs. Brown in a shop in Walworth.

  Greenacre exerted himself to save her. “This female,” he told the magistrates, “I perfectly exonerate from having any more knowledge of it than any other person, as she was away from the house. . . . That’s all I have to say.” He paused for a moment. “Mrs. Brown had eleven sovereigns by her, and a few shillings in silver, and that’s a true statement.”*

  * In crime as in other departments of life, the age of chivalry has passed away; Greenacre’s steadfast refusal to incriminate his mistress stands in contrast to the conduct of a villain convicted in a more recent case of murder and dismemberment in London. The “jigsaw” killer Stephen Marshall contended that it was not he but his girlfriend Sarah Bush who murdered Jeffrey Howe in March 2009. But the evidence produced by the Crown was overwhelming, and in the midst of his trial in St. Albans Crown Court he withdrew his plea and confessed his guilt.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Newgate

  In my warm blood and canicular days I perceive I do anticipate the vices of the age; the world to me is but a dream or mock-shadow, and we are all therein but pantalones and antics, to my severer contemplations.

  —Sir Thomas Browne

  So great was the fury of the crowds that gathered each day outside the Marylebone Police Office that the magistrates deemed it prudent to remove the prisoners to safer places of confinement. Greenacre was taken to the New Prison in London’s Clerkenwell parish, Mrs. Gale to Tothill Fields in Westminster, where the Cathedral now stands. At their final examination in the New Prison, both prisoners trembled violently. The magistrates ordered their committal for trial and remanded them to Newgate, there to await, in its gloomy recesses, their judgment at law.

  Monday April 10, 1837, was the day fixed for the trial. It was a bleak, cold day; Greenacre, dressed in a blue coat and dark waistcoat, was led from his cell to the Sessions House, better known as the Old Bailey, the seat of the Central Criminal Court. He went by way of the narrow passage known as Birdcage Walk, so called because it was roofed with an iron grate. Beneath its flagstones, the corpses of executed felons moldered in quicklime; their initials were carved on its walls.

  Greenacre was conducted up a narrow staircase to the Old Court, a dingy, oak-paneled chamber adorned with Doric pilasters. Through the windows, Newgate’s windowless south wall was visible, soot-blackened and megalithic. Greenacre was put into the dock; so also was Sarah Gale.

  At ten o’clock, the judges came in. The most senior of them was Sir Nicholas Conyngham Tindal, Lord Chief Justice of Common Pleas, one of the two principal common-law courts in the Kingdom, the other being the King’s Bench. He was followed by Mr. Justice Coltman, a “truly right-minded judge” and “the perfection of good sense.” The most junior of the three judges, Mr. Justice Coleridge, was a nephew of the poet.

  The jury was sworn, and the prisoners, having been arraigned on the indictment, were placed at the bar to answer the charges against them. Both pleaded not guilty.

  John Adolphus opened the case for the Crown.* He was, at sixty-eight, among the foremost trial lawyers in England, the “father of the Old Bailey bar.” He had the voice of a great advocate, “clear, mellow, and flexible,” but not the pride of vocation which makes a barrister not merely successful but happy in his work. The incessant labor of eliciting the truth of the squalid acts committed by the more vicious reprobates of the metropolis had worn away the finer edges of his temper and character; and it seemed to some, seemed perhaps even to himself, that he had failed to live up to the promise he had shown, many years before, as a rising young lawyer, author, and politician. It was the tragedy of John Adolphus to have been, in the words of a contemporary, “nearly a great man.”

  As Greenacre himself did not deny that he had killed Hannah Brown—he contended that her death was an accident—the principal task of the Crown lawyers was to persuade the jury to convict him of capital murder, which was punishable by hanging, and not the lesser crime of aggravated manslaughter, which would spare him the gallows. The testimony of Dr. Girdwood proved decisive. The fact that Mrs. Brown had sustained “an extraordinary black eye,” he testified, together with the fact that the skin around the eye showed a discoloration associated with an ecchymosis, or forcing out of the blood, could only mean that the blow she received had been “inflicted during life.” Also, such an injury to the front of the face was quite obviously inconsistent with Greenacre’s account of Mrs. Brown falling backwards in her chair and hitting the back of her head against a clump of wood; nor could the wound, being not a postmortem one, have been caused by the grappling hook which was used to fish the head out of the canal. Moreover, Mrs. Brown’s throat had been cut, and the “bloodless state of the arteries” of her head proved that this injury, too, had occurred while she was still alive, or only very shortly after her death.

  The jurors deliberated for less than a quarter of an hour before finding Greenacre guilty of felony murder and Mrs. Gale guilty of being an accessory after the fact. Greenacre, from pride, vanity, or a secret sense of the real justice of the verdict, displayed no emotion. His expression, one observer said, remained unaltered, and he leaned back in his chair as though he were “perfectly indifferent” to the decision. Mrs. Gale seemed as one in a trance or a stupor and appeared “almost unconscious of what was passing around her.”

  A moment later, loud cheers were heard: the crowd in the street had learned of the verdicts. The next day, the Recorder of the City, Charles Ewan Law,† pronounced sentence upon the prisoners: death on the gallows for Greenacre, “transportation beyond the sea” for Mrs. Gale, which in effect meant that she would spend the rest of her days in New South Wales in Australia.


  * Born in 1768; admitted to the Inner Temple in 1807 and called to the Bar in the same year; died in 1845.

  † Born in 1792, second son of Lord Ellenborough; St. John’s College, Cambridge; called to the Bar in 1817; took silk in Michaelmas Term 1829; Recorder of the City from 1833; Tory M.P. for Cambridge from 1835; died in Eaton Place in 1850.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Philosophical Murderer

  One thing only do I teach, O monks,

  sorrow, and the uprooting of sorrow.

  —Buddha

  Greenacre was conducted not, as was customary following capital convictions, to one of the condemned cells in Newgate, but to the cell he had previously occupied in the prison, where he could be more strictly watched lest he make another attempt on his own life. He was obliged to wear a straitjacket, an inconvenience he complained of to the Home Secretary, Lord John Russell, who, however, declined to act in the matter. The authorities were, indeed, never more zealous to keep Greenacre alive than now when he was legally dead. For the sentence of death is not only “the most terrible and highest judgment” in the English statute book, Blackstone says in the Commentaries on the Laws of England, it is a declaration that the condemned man, “by an anticipation of his punishment,” is “already dead in law.” He is called “attaint, attinctus, stained or blackened” and, being no longer “fit to live upon the earth,” is “to be exterminated as a monster and a bane to human society.”

  The Recorder of the City, meanwhile, communicated Green-acre’s sentence to the King, and upon His Majesty’s declining to exercise the royal prerogative of mercy, the death day was fixed. Greenacre was to be hanged on the second of May; he had little more than a fortnight left to live. He said that he “cared nothing for death,” but he “shuddered at the thought of quitting life with the brand upon him of a willful murderer.” Putting pen to paper, he set out, yet again, to prove that the death of Mrs. Brown was an accident. He labored for several days at the task; but none of his drafts pleased him, and in the end he consigned them to the flames.

  He did, however, confess to the sheriffs that in one respect his previous accounts of Mrs. Brown’s death were false. In the latest version, he told how, after he and Hannah had tea on Christmas Eve, she rose to wash the tea things. The sun had set; the room was lit only by candlelight. While Hannah was at the sink, she continued to discuss her property, or lack thereof, with her fiancé. He, for his part, became “enraged at the deception which she had practised on him” and, seizing a rolling pin, struck her in the eye. She fell to the ground; and he was “shocked,” he said, to find her “insensible, and apparently dead.” He also told the sheriffs that, contrary to the reports in the newspapers, he had placed the sack containing Mrs. Brown’s trunk behind the paving-stone in the Canterbury Villas in broad daylight, for “he conceived that he underwent less risk in pursuing his operations thus openly, than in endeavouring to conceal them under the shades of night.” As for the handkerchief in which he had concealed her head when he took it on the omnibus, he had burned it; the blood on the floor of his house he had wiped up with flannel cloths, which he had afterwards put down the privy.

  It is not every murderer who obtains a place in the immortal pages of philosophy. Yet by a singular chance, James Greenacre did. No less a philosopher than Arthur Schopenhauer fingered him as a man who through intense suffering had attained the highest wisdom.

  At the heart of Schopenhauer’s book The World as Will and Representation is the idea that, although we are all acquainted with misery in life, comparatively few of us perceive its real nature and extent. We are saved, or rather damned, by our egotism or what Schopenhauer calls the “will to live”—that part of our being which would have us elbow our way to the front of every line under the (quite erroneous) impression that whatever is to be found at the front of it is worth elbowing for. All the cruelty and torment of the world, Schopenhauer says, is a product of this will to live: it creates the illusions—power, riches, sex, fame—we pursue in the belief that their attainment will make us happy. A fantasy, Schopenhauer says. For the will (being insatiable, desire-mad, rapacious of gain, reeking of the “more-having” the Greeks call pleonexia) is not only incapable of lasting contentment, it is also delusional and unable to comprehend that the “pain which is essential” to life cannot be thrown off. Our “ceaseless efforts to banish suffering” accomplish “no more than to make it change its form”; and if we succeed, at last, in removing pain in one of its forms, “it immediately assumes a thousand others. . . .”

  It is at first sight curious that Schopenhauer should have numbered Greenacre among the elect who perceived the master-truth of The World as Will and Representation. Greenacre possessed a limited intelligence, precisely the kind Schopenhauer associated with fools who submit with bovine docility to the stupidities of life. Nor had Greenacre improved the weakness of his understanding through study and reflection. He had not so much as dipped into the thought of Schopenhauer’s philosophic heroes, the Indian sages, who looked with pity on those entangled in the delusions of a sensual world which is but a charlatanry of Mâyâ, a “summoned enchantment, an inconstant appearance without true being, like an optical illusion or a dream.” Nor was Greenacre better versed in the teachings of Buddha, who sorrowed to see men struggling under the grievous burdens of worldly existence when they would do better to seek Nirvana, the “negation of the world.” As for another of Schopenhauer’s favorites, the French mystic Madame de Guyon, who trod the path of “renunciation, of interior death, of self-annihilation,” it is unlikely that Greenacre had ever heard of her.

  Schopenhauer nevertheless forgave Greenacre his stupidity and his cruelty: he was for him the idiot savant who proved that even imbeciles could be brought to discern the truth of his philosophy, that nothing can “be given as the end of our existence but the knowledge that we had better not be.”

  Schopenhauer was in his fiftieth year when Greenacre was brought to trial. The patrimony bequeathed him by his father, a Danzig merchant prince, afforded him the leisure and liberty of a philosopher, and as a young man he saw more of the great world than is commonly the case with German intellectuals. Before his departure for Italy, Goethe gave him a letter of introduction to Lord Byron, and in Venice he caught a glimpse of the poet in his gondola. But on observing how his mistress swooned at the sight of the beautiful milord, he chose not to risk an acquaintance that might end in his own cuckoldry, or so the perhaps-apocryphal story goes. He later regretted this and thought it remarkable that the three great Romantic pessimists should have been in Italy at the same moment—“Byron, Leopardi, and myself! And yet not one of us has made the acquaintance of the other.”

  Given his low opinion of the human race, Schopenhauer ought perhaps to have foreseen that it would fail to interest itself in what Nietzsche called the “cadaverous perfume” of his philosophy; but when the first edition of The World as Will and Representation fell dead-born from the press, he suffered quite as much as less philosophic authors do when their books fail. He continued, however, to cherish a paternal affection for the stillborn volume, and he was diligent in the collection of fresh proofs of the soundness of its theories. His father had made it a practice to look at the French and English newspapers as well as the German ones each day, and during much of his life Schopenhauer did the same. He was drawn especially to accounts of executions, the gallows being for him “a place of quite peculiar revelations,” a “watch-tower from which the man who even then retains his presence of mind obtains a wider, clearer outlook into eternity than most philosophers over the paragraphs of their rational psychology and theology.”

  More to the point, the gallows was a place of acute suffering. Dostoevsky, who as a young man had been about to be hanged when the Tsar’s reprieve came, spoke from experience of the terror felt by a man who knows, to a virtual certainty, that he will be dead within the hour.* What fascinated Schopenhauer about such cases was the power of this anguish to annihilate the will to live, a
nd to force even the coarsely animal soul to see life for what, in Schopenhauer’s view, it really is—a Gothic horror, and a painful mistake. As evidence of such gallows conversions, he pointed (in the second, enlarged edition of The World as Will and Representation, which appeared in 1844) to the extinction of personality which took place in one Mary Cooney, a servant girl hanged at Gallows Green, Limerick, in 1837 for the murder of an old widow lady. The newspapers reported that, as she stood on the scaffold waiting to die, she “kissed the rope which encircled her neck,” a gesture Schopenhauer interpreted as the outward sign of her inward longing for the grace of non-being.

  “Still more remarkable,” he said, were the sentiments attributed to “the well-known murderer, Greenacre.” He made much of Greenacre’s refusal to accept the suggestion of the Newgate chaplain, the Rev. Dr. Horace Cotton, that he “pray for forgiveness through the mediation of Jesus Christ.” Greenacre replied that “forgiveness through the mediation of Christ was a matter of opinion; for his part, he believed that in the sight of the highest Being, a Mohammedan was as good as a Christian and had just as much claim to salvation.” Ever since his imprisonment, he said, he had directed his attention “to theological subjects,” and he had become convinced not only of the comparative insignificance of sectarian dogmas, but of the supreme grace conferred by the halter. The gallows, he declared, was “a passport to heaven”—a proposition to which the Rev. Dr. Cotton, who was fond of expatiating on the hellfire in which his parishioners would be burnt if they rejected his ministrations, could by no means assent.