Murder by Candlelight

by Michael Knox Beran

Schopenhauer believed that it was just this indifference to religious orthodoxy that proved Greenacre’s words to be the image of his chastened soul. He spoke not under the “fanatical delusion” of received opinion and conventional wisdom, but from “individual immediate knowledge.” His words were those of a man standing in the “presence of a violent and certain death,” and the very horribleness of his position was for Schopenhauer the guarantor of his candor.

  Undoubtedly, Greenacre spoke the words to which Schopenhauer attached such significance from the depths of a pit. His last hours were upon him. The only question is whether, in the brief interval of life that remained to him, he was quite so entirely liberated from the world as the philosopher supposed.

  * In Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Prince Myshkin argues that the death penalty “is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands. Anyone murdered by brigands, whose throat is cut at night in a wood, or something of that sort, must surely hope to escape till the very last minute. . . . But in the other case all that last hope, which makes dying ten times as easy, is taken away for certain. There is the sentence, and the whole awful torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world more terrible.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Gallows

  Not merely philosophy but also the arts work at bottom towards the solution of the problem of existence: “What is life?”

  —Schopenhauer

  On the eve of his death, Greenacre slept soundly. When, at four o’clock on the morning of May 2, he rose from his bed, workmen were already engaged in assembling, in front of the Debtors’ Door, the scaffold on which he was in a few hours to die.

  He dressed, wrote several letters, and breakfasted; afterwards he was seen to weep. At a quarter to eight, the tenor bell in the bell-tower of St. Sepulchre-without-Newgate began to toll; he was by this time visibly agitated.

  The mild morning was full of the promise of the spring, of the renewal of the earth; but the immense crowd that was by this time gathered outside the prison was transfixed by the thought not of life but of death. Some of the spectators had come as early as the night before and had slept under the stars; not a few were in a “state of beastly intoxication, laughing, singing, dancing, fighting.” A young Glasgow merchant in London on business was appalled by the sight of the “smoking, drinking, laughing vagabonds,” revels not unlike those with which primitive peoples propitiated their vegetation gods.

  Greenacre, in his double character as an atavistic scapegoat and a symbol of the rational retribution of the law, submitted without complaint to having his hands tied and his arms pinioned with leather straps.* Afterwards, a horrible howling was heard; it betokened the appearance, on the scaffold, of the hangman, Calcraft. The sight of this man fingering the tools of his trade drove the crowd to a new height of delirious ecstasy.

  The procession to the gallows commenced. The constables, sheriffs, and other responsible officers passed through the Debtors’ Door to a covered platform. The sheriffs took their places beside the two flights of steps that led to the scaffold: the other dignitaries proceeded to the viewing galleries that had been arranged about three of the scaffold’s sides.

  The death of a man on the gallows is a rare public edition of a fact which, like the other great biological acts of birth and copulation, is generally hid under so many decent veils. We have innumerable accounts of natural deaths in private rooms; but as a rule they have been sanitized, and in reading them one feels a little in the dark as to what actually happened. The dying person, in these deathbed scenes, is apt to be suspiciously calm, wise, and even epigrammatic; he says something profound, like the dying Goethe (“Mehr Licht!”) or witty, like the dying Voltaire, who, when asked whether he rejected Satan and all his works, replied, “This is no time to be making enemies.”

  A public execution is a very different kettle of fish; there is no question of an hygienic suppression of grotesquerie; indeed, the more nauseating the detail, the more eagerly it is seized upon and treasured up. A dozen witnesses punctiliously record every word that drops from the soon-to-be-dead man’s lips; and after his fall, there is no twitch or shudder of his dangling body that is not scrupulously set down for the edification of posterity.

  Even so, there is a barrier. The gallows is a stage, and those who tread it are conscious of playing a part. They will not, of course, live to read the critics’ appraisals of their performances; but whether from pride, vanity, or the decorous shyness that shrinks from making a scene (even though it be the scene of one’s death), the gallows-goer is as a rule careful to observe the proper forms. Miss Blandy, sentenced to die at Oxford for having poisoned her father, went up the black-draped ladder with a wonderful propriety and, what was still more meritorious, a consciousness of what was due to her feminine dignity. “Gentlemen,” she said to those who were about to kill her, “pray do not for the sake of decency hang me too high.” Jack Sheppard, the notorious burglar, was praised for having behaved “very gravely”† in his last moments, while the robber John Waistcott was admired for the coolness of the self-possession he showed at the end of his tether: “The dog died game,” the dandy George “Gilly” Williams told his friend George Selwyn.‡ Jack Thurtell himself, who for a time had been universally reviled as a swine in human form, bore himself so beautifully at his trial and on the gibbet that his crime, in the popular imagination, lost half its grossness, and he became something of a folk hero.

  For the condemned man who courted public favor, there was an established ritual to be enacted on the day of his dying. He was the hero of a tragedy in comic form; he was expected to make his way to the fatal tree with a superb nonchalance. His progress from Newgate to Tyburn, where until 1783 London’s capital convicts were hanged, had a carnival air. He was showered with nosegays, and at an alehouse near St. Giles was presented with a flagon of ale, the “Giles Bowl,” which he dutifully drank down.

  It was a grave breach of etiquette if the bravo let the comic mask slip, even for a moment, to reveal the soul that cowered beneath.§ As his death-day drew nigh, the highwayman Paul Lewis found himself unable to sustain the pose of bluster and swagger he had previously exhibited before the world: he “became as abject as before he appeared hardened,” and was generally regarded as a disgrace to his profession. Yet it is perhaps only in cases like Lewis’s, when the nerves fail, that we gain some faint insight into what the last moments must really be like. This is why the unconcealed terror of Madame du Barry, the former mistress of Louis XV who was guillotined in 1793, is so much more revealing than the decorous and theatrical exits. Her eyes were “bathed in tears”; she uttered piteous shrieks; the words she spoke to Sanson, the executioner, before the blade fell were long to haunt Dostoevsky. “Encore un moment, Monsieur le Bourreau, un petit moment.” “Just a moment, Mr. Executioner, just a small moment.”

  * It was the indignity of the binding of the hands that is said to have particularly disconcerted Louis XVI on the day of his death. His confessor, it is said, implored him to submit to this last humiliation in the manner of his divine model, and afterwards exhorted him with the famous words “Fils de saint Louis, montez au ciel” (“Son of St. Louis, ascend to heaven”).

  † No pun, I think, was intended. See Select Trials at the Sessions-House of the Old-Bailey, for Murder, Robberies, Rapes, Sodomy, Coining, Frauds, Bigamy, and Other Offences (London: J. Applebee, 1742), II, 146.

  ‡ It is to be regretted that Selwyn never wrote a study of men under sentence of death. He was, his friend “Horry” Walpole said, one of those “whose passion it is to see coffins and corpses, and executions.” When a prior engagement obliged Selwyn to miss a hanging, he relied on friends to supply him with the lurid details. “So eager,” it is said, “was he to miss no sight worth seeing, that he went purposely to Paris to witness the torture of the unhappy Damiens,” who had made an attempt on Louis XV. “On the day of t
he execution, he mingled with the crowd in a plain undress suit and bob wig; when a French nobleman, observing the deep interest he took in the scene, and imagining from the plainness of his attire that he must be a person in the humbler ranks of life, resolved that he must infallibly be a hangman.” “Eh bien, monsieur,” he said to Selwyn. “You have come to see the spectacle?” “Oui, monsieur.” “You are bourreau [executioner]?” “Non, monsieur, I have not that honour; I am but an amateur.”

  § It is not an easy thing to conceal the soul in such circumstances. A visitor who saw Joseph Wall, the former governor of Gorée, in Newgate on the morning of his execution said that he “was death’s counterfeit, tall, shrivelled, and pale; and his soul shot out so piercingly through the portholes of his head, that the first glance of him nearly petrified me.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The Mercy of Gravity

  We was havin a kevarten wen Bill he says, says he,

  “Tomorrow is the hanging-match; let us go and see.”

  I was game for anything: off we set that night;

  Ha! the jolly time we spent until the morning light.

  ’Neath the timbers whereupon the convict was to die,—

  (And ugly black the gallows looked atween us and the sky)—

  More than thirty thousand of us shouted, yelled, and sung,

  Chaffin about murder, and going to be hung.

  —Punch (1849)

  Sometime after eight o’clock, Greenacre came through the Debtors’ Door. The crowd had worked itself up into a pitch of hatred such as few mortals could encounter without fear. One witness says that Greenacre “was totally unmanned” by the animosity directed against him and “was obliged to be supported, or he would have fallen.” Another, on the contrary, claims that he showed “great self-possession and strength of nerve.” At all events, it is generally agreed that he confessed his apprehension to the tipstaves who attended him: “Don’t leave me too long in the concourse and make the rope tight.” Some contend that these were the last words he uttered; others say that after he spoke them he requested that his spectacles be given to Sarah Gale. Whether, as Schopenhauer thought, he had by this time lost the will to live is not certain. He may indeed have hoped that the gallows would be a passport to paradise, but not, in all likelihood, with quite as much confidence as he had once hoped to get his hands on three or four hundred pounds through the convenient death of an unloved wife. Still, there can be little doubt that in his last moments Greenacre thought extinction on the scaffold a good deal preferable to falling into the clutches of the mob. A special mercy, in its way, the vituperative savagery of the “raff”: it seems to have reconciled Greenacre to the impartiality of the rope. The Crown’s ultimate executioner, after all, was not Calcraft but gravity, and unlike mobs, gravity does its work dispassionately, is, in the language of Scripture, “no respecter of persons.”

  Greenacre crossed the platform and mounted the scaffold. What temper was he in? It is not easy to say. What temper was Louis XVI in when he stepped from his carriage in the Place de la Révolution? “Ten different witnesses will give ten different accounts of it,” says Carlyle. “He is in the collision of all tempers; arrived now at the black Mahlstrom and descent of Death: in sorrow, in indignation, in resignation struggling to be resigned.” As good a guess as any. As for Greenacre, the historian can only confess his ignorance and surmise that, whatever the nature of his experience, it was beyond words.

  When he reached the top of the scaffold, he found a large platform in the middle of which stood a kind of dais, ten feet long by eight feet wide. This was the trap; above it was the gibbet, and the noose. He went at once to the trap and put himself in the hands of the executioner. Calcraft arranged the noose round his neck and pulled it tight; he then removed Greenacre’s spectacles and drew the hood over his head.* The Rev. Dr. Cotton began to read the first verse of the Order for the Burial of the Dead.

  I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that

  believeth in me, though he were dead, yet. . . .

  Calcraft withdrew the bolts that held the trap.

  * The hood served two purposes. It prevented the condemned man from seeing the hangman draw the bolts, so that he could not easily jump, at the last moment, from the falling trap to the stationary platform. At the same time, the hood prevented the spectators from seeing those grotesque distortions of the condemned man’s face which are the invariable consequence of being hanged.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Sphynxes’ Puzzles

  Remember always that the deepest truth, the truest of all, is actually “unspeakable,” and cannot be argued of, dwells far below the region of articulate demonstration; it must be felt by trial and indubitable direct experience; then it is known once and forever.

  —Thomas Carlyle

  It was claimed by one observer that the force of the drop liberated one of Greenacre’s pinioned arms, and that he instinctively reached for the rope as it tightened round his neck. Another witness made no mention of a grasping hand but dwelt instead with distinct pleasure on the spectacle of the suspended body “quivering in mortal agonies.”

  What, finally, brought the man to so unfortunate a pass? “The question of motive in such cases,” says an acute scholar of crime, the Scottish solicitor William Roughead, “is generally a puzzling one, and in the commission of many murders the end to be gained, always inadequate, often remains obscure.” It seems likely that Greenacre’s original plan was to marry Mrs. Brown, get hold of her money, and use it to sail to America, where he hoped to start a new life in the company of Sarah Gale. That he meditated such a plan would explain why he spoke so distinctly to Hannah Brown’s friends of the imaginary farm at Hudson’s Bay (of all places), to which he was to return—so he made a point of telling Evan Davis—after Christmas. When, as a consequence of this plan, Hannah came no more to be seen in London, her friends (Greenacre reasoned) would assume that she had, as it were, bought the farm.

  The plan was doomed from the start; Hannah Brown was virtually penniless and unable to command the “three or four hundred pounds” Greenacre thought necessary if he were to finance a transatlantic voyage and a new life across the ocean. He was, to say the least, disappointed when he discovered that he had engaged himself to take on the bother of a wife without having secured the blessings of a fortune. And so he hit his prospective bride in the eye with the rolling pin. That the blow was struck in mere unreflecting anger we can, I think, deduce from the fact that, while he had no compunction about consigning Hannah Brown to oblivion, it was not at all convenient for him that she should have reached it on Christmas Eve, 1836. Her removal at that hour was, indeed, peculiarly awkward for him. He could not rely on Hannah’s friends to fall for his carefully prepared story that she had gone to America, when he himself was manifestly still in London; and he could not himself get out of London precisely because he lacked the cash he had looked to Hannah’s dower-money to supply.*

  There was a second difficulty. His marriage to Hannah Brown was to have taken place on Christmas Day (the day after he killed her). Her friends, the Davises, were to be present at the marriage, and were in fact to give the wedding luncheon. A nuisance, indeed, for Greenacre to have to go round to the Davises on Christmas Eve with a made-up story as to why the wedding was broken off—a fiction that might easily have aroused the Davises’ suspicions, though in fact it did not.

  There is another mystery that has never been properly cleared up. Was the blow Hannah Brown received from the rolling pin fatal, or likely to have proven fatal? If it was immediately fatal, Greenacre’s subsequent conduct is easily explained. More likely, it was not immediately fatal; if it had been, Greenacre would not have needed to undertake the messy business of cutting Mrs. Brown’s throat, as the medical evidence and his own confession to the sheriffs make clear that he did. Yet if, in fact, the blow was not fatal, why did he proceed from hurting Mrs. Brown to killing her?

  The answer is obvious if one consi
ders his predicament. If Hannah Brown had survived and recovered from the blow, Greenacre himself would in all likelihood have been tried, convicted of battery, and transported to New South Wales. Even if he escaped the wrath of the law, he would still have had to undergo the ordeal of trial by gossip. Three wives had died on his watch, and now he had struck a fourth woman, his fiancée, with a rolling pin. Should Mrs. Brown have survived, her friends would soon have known all about his blackguardism. Scandal is sometimes a more effective agent of retribution than statutes; and word would have gotten round that James Greenacre was a gold-digger. We know, from his advertisement in The Times in January, that he was still in contemplation of marriage to a rich wife; but with each new revelation of his villainy, his odds of doing so would have grown longer.

  It should also be borne in mind that, had Hannah had survived Christmas Eve, Greenacre would still have been troth-plight to her. He would, of course, have had no desire to join himself to a woman whose sole attractiveness, in his eyes, lay in a fortune she did not possess; but should he have broken off the engagement, his jilted fiancée would have had standing to bring an action against him for breach of promise, a common enough proceeding in those days. If she prevailed, she would have been entitled to damages she had sustained as a result of her reliance on his promise to marry her.† Greenacre, bankrupt as he was, would have found even a trifling award to be an unpleasant burden.

  Such, perhaps, were the thoughts by which Greenacre was actuated on the night he committed the murder. But a certain obscurity remains. If we look back on the most momentous decisions we have made in our own lives, we are likely to be struck by how many of them were made instinctively, unconsciously—were, we might almost say, made for us. A kind of fatality hangs over our choices; this I suppose is why the great stage tragedies seem to us so true in their account of human chances and human destinies. A small, sordid character like Greenacre’s is but a petty thing in comparison to such a work of tragic art as Othello or Oedipus; yet, studied closely, it discloses the same Sphinx’s puzzle of madness and unreason, the same horrors, darknesses, inscrutabilities.