The Maul and the Pear Tree

by P. D. James

  Q. What is your business?

  I am an old soldier, at least the remains of one.

  So it went on. A succession of broken down old men and women shuffled in and out of the court, obediently crossing themselves at the insistence of the Rev. Thirwell, and saying what they had come to say: the prisoner had been in the lodging house when the Williamsons were murdered. Nevertheless, caution prevailed to the end. ‘The magistrates committed him to the House of Correction, for further examination, with this special observation, that they considered him completely exonerated from any suspicion of being concerned in the late murders.’

  With the collapse of the case against Cahill the belief was growing, at least among the Shadwell magistrates, that John Williams had indeed been the sole murderer of both the Marrs and the Williamsons; and with this belief went a powerful realisation that so monstrous a villain, multiple murderer and self-destroyer, must provide an example that would shock the nation – not least because, at the end, he had cheated the very majesty of the law.

  EIGHT

  A Grave at the Crossroads

  Almost every condemned criminal, whether sentenced by public opinion or by a properly constituted court, who has succeeded in killing himself before the official date of execution has been described as ‘cheating the gallows’. One might suppose that the advocates of capital punishment would appreciate a man who, recognising the justice of his sentence, and accepting that only a life can compensate for a life, saves society the trouble and expense of an official ceremony, and embraces his sentence so wholeheartedly that he executes judgement on himself. But society has seldom seen it in that light. The phrase ‘cheating the gallows’ carries the clear inference that suffering the full penalty of the law means suffering as and when the law prescribes; that a public offence demands public punishment, and that the concomitants of judical execution are an essential part of retribution. It is society, not merely individuals, that has been outraged. It is society that must be appeased. The sense of frustration and fury that followed Williams’s unorthodox death was expressed in the House of Commons on 18 January 1812 by the Prime Minister, in referring to ‘the villain Williams, who has lately disappointed the just vengeance of the nation by violently withdrawing himself from the punishment which awaited him’. And this note of public vengeance unjustly cheated was echoed by almost every writer of the time who dealt with the case. The crimes had been barbaric and horrible, almost beyond belief. It was essential that the victims should be publicly avenged. Few people had any doubt that Williams was now receiving his just deserts in the next world. But the punishment of God, if sure, is invisible, and the contemplation of hell fire does little to assuage a lust for revenge. Far more effective as a deterrent is the spectacle of punishment on earth.

  It was never doubted at the time that the death penalty was the most effective of all deterrants; consequently the more people who witnessed it the greater its beneficial effect. John Williams, by his premature death, had robbed authority of its salutary example, and Londoners of one of their most dramatic entertainments. A hanging day was still virtually a public holiday, and a vast crowd would congregate to see the condemned dispatched. Few people in the early nineteenth century would have thought it justifiable to execute a man in private. The condemned had a right to a public death. How else could society guard against private vengeance, the knife in the dark, the secret executioner bringing death to the innocent in the secure privacy of a prison cell? Besides, if the populace had a right to their spectacle the condemned was entitled to his audience. Even into the late nineteenth century there were writers who could oppose private execution on the grounds that an Englishman had the inalienable right to confess his crime or profess his innocence in public.

  Some of the worst horrors of public executions had already been mitigated. It was realised by the reformers that the scenes of violence, drunkenness and ribaldry which had accompanied the slow progress of the condemned from Newgate Prison to Tyburn robbed the act of execution of its proper solemnity; nor were they conducive to respect for the awful retribution of the law, or to a religious and penitent acceptance of their fate by those to be hanged. Many of the more flamboyant criminals appeared to gain courage from their public notoriety and went to their deaths beribboned and nosegayed as if for a wedding, casting coins to the mob. Others thought it fit to make their last appearance in a shroud. This may have been an indication of repentance, but was equally likely to have been a determination that the hangman should be cheated of at least part of his perquisite – the clothes of the condemned. For both the bodies and clothes of executed criminals became the property of the hangman. Relatives or friends could purchase them if they had the means, otherwise the bodies were sold to surgeons to be dissected. The bargaining between hangman and relatives was often hard, sordid and public, and sometimes resulted in undignified scuffles, when the body was almost literally torn apart. But the cadaver and its clothes were not the only perquisites of the hangman. He could also sell the rope, and in the case of a notorious criminal this could fetch as much as a shilling an inch. The rope which had hanged John Williams would certainly have fetched at least that sum, while such a smart young man would no doubt have made his last appearance in a suit well worth bargaining over.

  Williams, however, would have been spared the three-hour torture of the ride to Tyburn. In 1783 the place of execution was transferred to Newgate, and it was on a scaffold hung with black, and especially erected for each hanging in an open space in front of the prison, that the condemned of 1812 were dispatched. John Williams himself, when home from his voyages, must often have witnessed such scenes. They were, after all, notable public events which emptied the factories and workshops, the coffee houses and taverns, and made an equal appeal to the fastidious aristocrat with a taste for the macabre or the lowest of the mob. One can picture Williams, female acquaintance on his arm, his remarkable yellow hair well combed, dapper in his blue coat and yellow and blue striped waistcoat, as he pressed forward through the throng to get a better view of the scaffold, then waited for that exhilarating moment, that upsurge of mingled terror and sensuality, when the drop fell. For executions were now more humane. They were still unscientific, still frequently botched, but the adoption of the drop as a general mode of execution in 1783 meant that the accused had at least a reasonable chance of instantaneous death. The deaths from the carts at Tyburn were seldom as merciful; the hangman or relatives often had to pull at the legs of the delinquent in the hope of ending his agony, while every convulsion of the victim’s limbs would be hailed with shrieks of execration or groans of pity.

  But if the drop was more merciful it was also more effective, and there was now virtually no hope of bringing the executed back to life. This, although uncommon, was certainly not unknown. Criminals were sentenced to be hanged by the neck until they were dead, but it was the hangman who decided when life was extinct. By tying and placing the knot in a particular way, or by cutting down the condemned sooner than was usual, it was possible to make subsequent revival a comparatively easy matter. A felon with money to bribe the hangman, friends to care, could reasonably hope for a premature resurrection in a nearby tavern where the means to resuscitation would be to hand. It was not a resurrection for which Williams could have hoped. But if executions at Newgate were more expeditious and humane, the mob that attended was the same mob who made hideous the long purgatory from Newgate to Tyburn. They would gather from early morning to gain their vantage points, rich and poor, thief and gentry, men, women and children, whiling away the time until the entertainment began with gossip and laughter, ribald jokes, petty thieving or the hawking of merchandise. There were some who came to pity, most who came out of morbid curiosity, and some because few sights were so fascinating to them as a human being in the agony of death. The removal of the scene of execution from Tyburn to Newgate Prison may well, as a chronicler of Newgate states, have made the performance shorter and diminished the area of display, but the entertai
nment was still as popular. When Holloway and Haggerty were executed in 1807 for a murder committed five years earlier 40,000 people assembled near the prison. Because of the pressure of the mob some of the spectators tried to withdraw. This only increased the confusion, and soon panic broke out in which nearly 100 people were trampled to death or injured. At an execution in 1824 no less than 100,000 people assembled at Newgate. One may be sure that the execution of John Williams would have rivalled this event in general popularity.

  Apart from the general disappointment there were others as well as the hangman who had been cheated of their pickings. The Ordinary of Newgate, to which prison Williams would have been committed, could no longer hope for a lucrative sale from the murderer’s published confession which it would have been his responsibility – and probably his pleasure – to extract. The Ordinary of Newgate at that time was the Reverend Brownlow Ford LLD. Dr Ford was probably no worse or better than the majority of Newgate parsons; indeed he later professed to Jeremy Bentham a great interest in prison reform, and, in 1805, he had submitted to the Home Secretary a long list of suggested improvements in the system of policing. But the early nineteenth century was no more successful than the twentieth would be in recruiting the right people to jobs requiring exceptional dedication, compassion and mental stamina, but rewarded with low pay and negligible public esteem. A parliamentary committee which investigated the state of prisons wrote about the Reverend Brownlow Ford that ‘beyond his attendance in chapel and on those who are sentenced to death, Dr Ford feels but few duties to be attached to his office. He knows nothing of the state of morals in the prisons; he never sees any of the prisoners in private; he never knows that any have been sick until he gets a warning to attend their funeral, and does not go to the Infirmary for it is not in his instructions.’ When a Mr J. T. Smith wished to visit one of the condemned before his execution, and went to see Dr Brownlow Ford, he found him at the public house in Hatton Garden, where he was known to reside, ‘seated most pompously in a superb masonic chair under a stately crimson canopy while the room was clouded with smoke curling to the ceiling, which gave Mr Smith a better idea of what he had heard of the Black Hole of Calcutta than any place he had seen’. But it is unlikely that Dr Ford was negligent in his attention to the more notorious of the condemned. Their situation would have been too interesting, their confessions too lucrative. Some of his charges, while enlarging in most uncharacteristic language on the Sabbath breaking, drunkenness, or moral delinquency that had led to their present unhappy state, may have been consoled, or at least gratified, by his attentions. It was probably the first time in their lives that they had been the object of such concentrated spiritual concern. Impending death makes the dullest of us interesting to our fellows, and it is not surprising that fees were charged to those wishing to view condemned prisoners. A visit to the monster of Ratcliffe Highway would have been almost obligatory for the fanciers of violent death, while John Williams’s confession, suitably amplified no doubt by Brownlow Ford, would have been a notable addition to the popular literature of the gallows. The account of the murders published in 1811 by Fairburn, must have seemed curiously incomplete without the customary confession and description of Williams’s demeanour on the scaffold.

  But if the drama could not now end in the murderer’s public ignominy at Newgate, at least some reasonable alternative could be staged whereby the mob might be appeased and society’s abhorrence of the murderer amply demonstrated. On Monday, 30 December The Times announced: ‘Mr Capper attended on the Home Secretary on Saturday for the purpose of considering with what justice the usual practice of burying the culprit of a similar description in the cross road nearest the spot where the offence of suicide is committed might be departed from in this extraordinary instance of self-murder.’ There is no record of what precisely passed between them at this meeting, but immediately after it Beckett wrote to Capper:

  I have talked with Mr Ryder of the matter you mentioned this morning. He agrees in the opinion that it might be advisable to bury Williams in Shadwell, and he sees no objection to the body being exhibited previously near the place appointed for interment, provided no risk is run of creating disturbance, if the magistrates should be of the opinion that by the help of the police officers of your office, and those who it may be desired to attend from the Thames Police Office, this danger can be prevented. You will be so good as to see the Coroner and arrange with him for the ceremony, which I understand you to say would take place on Monday.

  The letter concluded by asking Capper to consult Story and Markland about the distribution of the reward money.

  The ceremony to which Beckett referred was well recognised as a public mark of obloquy when an offender who had been condemned to death committed suicide while awaiting execution. It was usual to bury him at a dark hour at the intersection point of four roads, and to drive a stake through the body. There seems to have been no legal authority for the custom, and it probably arose from an old superstition that only by driving a stake through the body could the ghost of the dead and self-damned be prevented from returning to earth to plague the living. The significance of the crossroad may have lain in the fact that the sign of a cross implied sanctity; but the more usual belief was that the evil ghost, if he did succeed in breaking free of the impaling stake, would hesitate irresolutely at the four roads, uncertain which to take. The practice was certainly not unusual at the time, although it was even then being criticised; and the last burial of a suicide in London at a crossroad is said to have been in June 1823, when a man named Griffiths was buried in the early hours of the morning at the junction of Eton Street, Grosvenor Place and the King’s Road, but with no stake driven through the body. Sometimes the body of the convicted offender was displayed to the public. In December 1793, a Londoner, Lawrence Jones, who had been convicted of robbery in Hatton Garden and ordered for execution on 8 December, was found dead in his cell by the turnkey who entered to prepare him to hear the condemned sermon and to receive the sacrament. Jones had succeeded in strangling himself most ingeniously by winding one end of his knee strings around his neck, knotting the other end to the ring by which his chain was fastened, and bracing both feet against the wall. His clothed and fettered body, the face covered with a cloth, was extended upon a plank on top of an open cart and was then hurled into a pit at the foot of Hatton Garden with a spike driven through the heart. It may have been this case which the magistrates had in mind when considering what should be done with Williams’s body. But there was a difference. Williams had not been found guilty and condemned to death. He had not been committed for trial. He had not been given the most ancient and cherished of an Englishman’s rights, the opportunity to plead before a jury of his fellows.

  The magistrates at Shadwell were not the only people who had opinions on what should happen to Williams’s corpse. That weekend Sir John Carr wrote from his home in Rayner Place, Chelsea, a letter to the Home Secretary in which excitement seems to have had a deleterious effect on punctuation:

  Sir John Carr presents his compliments to Mr Ryder and takes the liberty of suggesting, as no doubt can now be entertained of the guilt of the wretch whose atrocities have so justly excited the public horror and indignation, whether salutary example might not be presented to the lower orders by parading the body of Williams from the Coldbath Prison to Ratcliffe Highway where it is presumed the law is to take its course; (the corpse) to be covered with a piece of red cloth and placed with the face uncovered and upwards on a large board to be fixed upon the top of a cart with the murderous instruments placed on either side of the corpse before which the common executioner might be seated; the stake with which the body is to be pinned to be borne before by a proper officer and foot constables to keep the crowd at a safe distance from the cart, to have the date shown of the procession and the names of the streets through which it is to pass announced in the papers.

  Beckett noted on the letter: ‘Mr Ryder’s compliments to Sir J. Carr, and acquaint him that
an arrangement of the sort mentioned by him has been already made.’ And so, to quote The Examiner: ‘the premature death of Williams having defeated the end of that justice with which it is probable from the very suspicious circumstances that have transpired, this wretched man would have been overtaken, the magistrates came to a resolution of giving the greatest solemnity and publicity to the ceremony of interring this suicide.’

  About ten o’clock on the night of Monday 30 December, Mr Robinson, the High Constable of St George’s parish, accompanied by Mr Machin, one of the constables, Mr Harrison, the tax collector, and Mr Robinson’s deputy, went to Coldbath Fields Prison, where the body of Williams was delivered to them. It was put into a hackney coach. The Deputy Constable joined it. The blinds were drawn, the doors firmly closed, the horses whipped into a brisk trot. The other three gentlemen thought it more seemly, as it must certainly have been more comfortable, to travel in a separate coach. It was left to the unfortunate Deputy Constable to clatter over the cobblestones to the watch house of St George’s, with the dead eyes of the demon of Ratcliffe Highway fixing his in a dead stare whenever, by some extraordinary compulsion, he found himself gazing at the suicide’s face. Knowing to what a height of hysterical and superstitious fear this single, somewhat inadequate young man had reduced London, it must be imagined that the journey was not agreeable. The Deputy Constable, with the body of John Williams clumsily rolling on the seat opposite him, must have tried not to think what might happen if a horse stumbled, the coach lurched to a stop, and he and his sinister travelling companion were exposed to the view of the mob. There was little chance that Williams’s body would survive intact, and his own might well be in jeopardy. The journey must have seemed unnaturally long, and it was with relief that he would feel the darkened coach draw to a halt at the watch house of St George’s, known by the name of ‘Roundabout’, at the bottom of Ship Alley. Here, ungentle hands were laid on the corpse, and it was cast into what is described as the ‘black hole’ to await the next day’s ceremony.