by P. D. James
6 A correct likeness of John Williams
On Tuesday morning, at nine o’clock, the High Constable with his attendants arrived at the Watch House. They were accompanied by a cart that had been fitted up for the purpose of giving the greatest possible degree of exposure to the face and body of the supposed murderer. On the cart a platform had been erected, made of wooden boards which extended from one end to the other, forming an inclined plane. On this the body rested, its feet supported on a crossbar and the torso retained in an extended position by a cord which passed beneath the arms, and was fastened underneath the board. All the contemporary accounts agree that the countenance was fresh and ruddy and perfectly free from discolouration. The hair, of a remarkable sandy colour, curled round the face. The body was clothed in a pair of blue cloth pantaloons and a white-frilled shirt open at the neck, with the sleeves tucked up to the elbows. It wore neither coat nor waistcoat. On both hands were some livid spots, and The Times reported that the arms from the elbows downwards were almost black.
The cart was suitably decorated. On the left of the head was fixed perpendicularly the blood-stained maul. On the right, also in a perpendicular position, was fixed the ripping chisel. Above the head the iron crow found beside Williamson’s body was laid in a transverse direction, and parallel to it a stake sharpened at one end. About half past ten the procession moved off from the watch house. The Times ceremonially sets out the order of the parade:
Mr Machin, Constable of Shadwell
Mr Harrison, Collector of King’s Taxes
Mr Lloyd, baker
Mr Strickland, coal-merchant
Mr Burford, stationer and
Mr Gale, Superintendent of Lascars in the East India Company’s service – all mounted on grey horses.
Next came:
The Constables, Headboroughs, and Patrols of the Parish, with drawn cutlasses,
The Beadle of St George’s, in his official dress
Mr Robinson, the High Constable of St George’s,
The Cart with the BODY; followed by
A large body of constables.
The procession moved off in an impressive and unnatural silence. The Home Secretary’s fear that the enraged mob might seize and wreak vengeance on the corpse proved unfounded. All contemporary records mention the strange and unexpected calm. The frail body was guarded as if it might suddenly leap to life and fall upon its persecutors. But the drawn cutlasses, the phalanx of watchmen, were not required. No one sought to lay violent hands on Williams. There were no howls of execration, no screams of abuse. Why, one wonders, this unnatural restraint? It can hardly have been pity for the dead man. Few, if any, present had any doubt that here was the murderer of the Marrs and Williamsons. Few, if any, would have been repelled at this public display of his corpse, or indignant at the dishonour in store for it. Was it perhaps awe that kept them silent? Did they share the emotion which Coleridge confided to De Quincey some few months after the murder: ‘For his part, though at the time resident in London, he had not shared in the prevailing panic; him the murders only affected as a philosopher and threw him into a profound reverie upon the tremendous power which is laid open in a moment to any man who can reconcile himself to the abjuration of all conscientious restraints if at the same time thoroughly without fear’. Was the silence one of speechless amazement that this frail body could have achieved so much horror? Or was the mob stunned into silence by wonder that the monster who had added self-murder to his heinous crimes, could wear such a human face?
7 The body of John Williams outside Marr’s shop
The cavalcade passed slowly down Ratcliffe Highway to Marr’s shop, and here it stopped. As the cart shook to a halt, Williams’s head flopped to one side, as if he could not bear to look at the scene of the holocaust. One of the escorts climbed on to the cart and firmly placed the body so that the dead eyes seemed to be gazing into the house at the uneasy ghosts of his victims. After about ten minutes the driver urged the horse forward, and the parade started off again. Of all the processions which London has known in its long and often dark history there can be few as bizarre and macabre as this parade on New Year’s Eve, 1811, of a corpse dead four days, through the drab streets of riverside Wapping. The body, dressed in its tawdry and prison-stained finery with the left leg still ironed, the crude cart with the hastily constructed platform, the one lumbering horse; all were in ghastly contrast to the ranks of pretentious authority with which this solitary corpse was escorted to its ignoble grave.
It was estimated that over ten thousand people witnessed the spectacle. Every window was patterned with faces, every pavement crowded, every doorway crammed. The cart rumbled on in the grey half-light down streets where Williams had walked in life, past the pubs where he had roistered, flirted with barmaids, danced and quarrelled. From Marr’s shop it was led down Old Gravel Lane, by the London Dock wall to Cinnamon Street, and from there on to Pear Tree Alley, where it stopped for some time close to the Vermilloes’ public house, where Williams had lodged. It then proceeded into Sir William Warren’s Square for the purpose of turning round, since there was no passage for a cart into Wapping. The procession re-entered Cinnamon Street, proceeded through King Edward Street, along Wapping and up New Gravel Lane. Here it again halted for ten minutes outside the King’s Arms. It was afterwards recalled that the dreadful silence which fell when the cart creaked to a stop was broken by one sharp and terrible sound. A hackney coachman who had halted his coach near the top of the lane uncurled his whip, bent down from his seat, and with an oath delivered across the dead face three short-arm lashes.
8 The procession to interment of John Williams
From the King’s Arms the procession made its slow way along Ratcliffe Highway and up Cannon Street to the turnpike gates at which four roads met, the new road north to Whitechapel, Back Lane (also known as Cable Street) running from Well Close Square east to Sun Tavern Fields and Cannon Street. Here a hole about four feet deep, three feet long and two feet wide, had been dug ready. The hole was too small for the body, deliberately so. There was no intention that these ignoble limbs should lie in the semblance of innocent sleep, or be decently disposed as if laid out for Christian burial. Williams’s body was seized, tumbled roughly out of the cart, and forced into the hole. Immediately one of the escorts jumped down beside it and began to drive the stake through the heart. As the blood-stained maul thudded on the stake the silence of the crowd was at last broken and the air became hideous with shouts and execrations. A quantity of unslaked lime was cast into the hole; it was then filled with earth, and the paving stones were immediately replaced and hammered down. The Times ends its report:
The parties forming the procession then dispersed and those persons who had not had an opportunity of witnessing the awful ceremony advanced, and while regarding the grave of one who had proved himself such a disgrace to humanity, they seemed to entertain no other feeling than horror for his crimes and regret that he had not lived to receive at the hands of justice that ignominious punishment which the laws of his country prescribed, but which when compared with his guilt seemed an inadequate compensation to the enraged feelings of his fellow subjects.
9 View of the body of John Williams at Cannon Street Turnpike
But, however subdued their behaviour, the mob were still the mob, and the usual thieves and pickpockets were about their business. Humphrey, one of the Bow Street Runners, was not so enthralled by the parade of a corpse, however notorious, that he could not keep his eyes on the living. He detected two of his old acquaintances in the act of robbing a gentleman, George Bignall, an accomplice of Scott, a notorious pickpocket, and Robert Barry, one of Bill Soames’s gang. He arrested them both, and they were committed for want of bail until the next sessions.
After Williams’s burial the newspapers reported that there had been found in one of his pockets after his death a piece of iron hoop ‘sufficiently sharp to wound him mortally’. At first it excited surprise how he had come by it, since it had not
been on him when he was first taken into custody, nor when he was put into the lock-up house. The officers at length discovered that it formed part of the iron fastening which secured the walls of the temporary lock-up in the Lebeck Head opposite the Shadwell Office. They compared the piece of iron hoop with the broken part of the fastening, and concluded that, during his very short confinement in the public house before he was removed to Coldbath Fields Prison, Williams had wrenched away part of the iron hoop and reserved it for his purpose.
And so darkness fell over Shadwell and Wapping. The little groups standing around the grave melted away; the lamplighter made his round; the Watch prepared to call the hours. People came out of their houses less fearfully, a great terror lifted from their minds. No one who had really studied the evidence could imagine that the story had come to its end. But to the ignorant, the frightened and the defenceless, the day’s business had brought comfort and reassurance. Whatever further discoveries about the crimes might be made, had not the demon of Ratcliffe Highway amply demonstrated his guilt and been laid at last? For a week or two they would tread warily around the place where the slightly uneven paving stones marked the wretch’s grave. Children, greatly daring, would leap upon the stones, then rush for cover, fearful equally of their mothers’ wrath and the contamination of those awful bones. For months there would hang about these crossroads the tenebrous ambiance of superstitious awe. But it was a busy street, and was to become busier. The hurrying feet, the wheels, the clattering hooves of nineteenth-century London would pass in a never ending stream over the dreadful grave until, in time, no one could be quite certain where the corpse of Williams lay.
On the following Sunday there could have been few sermons preached in East London which did not deal with the abominable murders and with the murderer’s dreadful end. One, printed in Fairburn’s 1811 pamphlet, probably to replace the condemned sermon or the murderer’s confession, either of which would have more appropriately ended the book, is typical of its kind in its evangelical fervour, its exoneration of authority and particularly of the Government, from any blame, and its reliance on the sanction of hell fire and damnation to frighten the unrighteous into virtue and respectability. The text was taken from the nineteenth chapter of St Matthew’s Gospel at the eighteenth verse, ‘Thou shalt do no murder’. The opening passages are typical of the whole:
O my beloved Brethren! with what tongue, in what language, shall I address you, on the recent alarming and aweful events? Robbery and Rapine stalk abroad at noonday; Murder, cold-blooded Murder, seeks us in our very dwellings; and, to use the emphatic language of the Coroner, ‘Our houses are no longer our castles; we are no longer safe in our beds!’ What words of mine, my beloved Brethren! can paint the universal consternation? Cries and lamentations fill our streets, terror and dismay appear on every countenance!
To reflect that, in the short space of ten days, seven of our fellow creatures, who were enjoying health and spirits like ourselves, and dreaming of no danger, should all have been barbarously massacred, at their own firesides, by the hands of the midnight assassin, is surely enough to appal the stoutest heart, to shock the most hardened criminal!
Some persons have made these melancholy transactions the groundwork of complaint against the Government, but I cannot see with what justice. How, let me ask such persons, how could the Government have prevented the commission of these dreadful deeds? What human sagacity could foresee them? What mere mortal precaution could possibly have guarded against them? If Government really possessed the power of preventing such enormities, is it not natural to believe that such power would be more particularly exerted to shield the sacred Head of the State, to preserve the Lord’s anointed? And yet we all know that our beloved and revered King himself (whose sore affliction we now so bitterly bewail) has, in the course of his reign, had no less than three direct attacks on his sacred person! And to what was his safety owing? Not to the vigilance of his Government, not to the precautions of his Ministers, but, solely and wholly, to the superintending care of a gracious Providence! Maniacs and Murderers, as they are out of the pale of common humanity, are also out of the reach of human prevention. I know not what precautions could have saved the poor families, whose awful fate now fills us with sorrow and amazement. That our system of Police is very defective, and that its negligence must be very great, is certainly proved by the daily depredations of pick-pockets and housebreakers. But, my beloved Brethren, I repeat it again and again, the best system of Police in the world could not have prevented the late dreadful occurrences. No, my beloved, it is not to office runners, it is not to staff or to the man, that we must look for the prevention of such atrocities. It is to the all-seeing providence of GOD, – it is to the all-searching influence of his Holy Spirit, – it is to these, and to these alone, that every soul of us can look for security from similar horrors!
NINE
The French Knife
The confident verdict of the Shadwell Bench, that Williams was the sole murderer of both families, could have deceived no one for long, possibly not even Capper and his colleagues. It left too many questions unanswered. Who was the tall man seen bending over Mrs Williamson’s body? Whose the two sets of footprints in the Marrs’ yard? Whose the noisy exit, made by more than one pair of feet, through the empty house in Pennington Street? Nor, despite what they had said in their letter to Ryder, did the Shadwell Bench entirely relax their efforts. They and the other magistrates began searching for the second murderer. They were no doubt able to comfort themselves with the belief that, if the killing were the work of a gang, Williams was its organiser and its head. With the head severed, the body, however malignant, could do little further harm. The panic was subsiding. It was now a question of justice rather than public safety that Williams’s accomplices, if any, should be brought to trial.
Reports of new evidence, fresh clues, further arrests, continued throughout January. On Monday, 6 January, The Times reported that Cornelius Hart had been taken into custody for the sixth time by the Whitechapel officers. One of them had overheard Mrs Vermilloe say that ‘if Hart had been examined as closely as she had, something more would have come out’. However, the carpenter gave the same account of himself at Shadwell as he had on the five other occasions when he had been brought up before the magistrates, and The Times reports that, ‘as his story was confirmed by the enquiries of the officers’, he was again discharged.
Then, during the first week of January, the assiduous John Harrison, prime favourite in the stakes for prize money, came up with another clue. Although his story was uncorroborated it was considered to be worth half a column in The Times of 6 January. It related to the missing weapon – the sharp knife or razor, with which the throats of the victims had been slit. If this weapon could be discovered and linked with John Williams, it would provide positive proof of his guilt; and Harrison’s story was accordingly received with gratifying interest. He reported that about three weeks earlier he had asked Williams to return a borrowed pocket handkerchief of his. Williams had told him to go to the pocket of his jacket and get it for himself. Harrison had put his hand into Williams’s pocket and had drawn out a new French knife, about six inches in length, with an ivory handle. He had asked Williams where he had got it and Williams had replied that he had bought it a day or two before. Harrison now recalled the incident and told the magistrates that he had never seen the knife since, although he had searched Williams’s sea chest and every part of the Pear Tree in the hope of discovering it. The Times commented:
At the Coroner’s inquest on the bodies of the unfortunate persons murdered in New Gravel Lane, it was suggested by the surgeon that the throats of Mr and Mrs Williamson and the servant maid must have been cut with a razor, from the incized appearance of the wounds. It is now, however, pretty clear that these sanguinary deeds were perpetrated with the knife in question, especially when it is known that Williams never had a razor of his own, and always applied to the barber to be shaved; and moreover that no razor ha
d been missing from the house where he lodged.
This important piece of information respecting the knife never occurred to the witness during his numerous examinations, as necessary to be communicated to the magistrates.
Meanwhile, inquiries were being made into Williams’s past. The magistrates believed, and with reason, that a man who could sever the throats of five human beings, one a baby, with the casual expertise with which he might butcher an animal, was unlikely to have had a peaceable or uneventful history. The worst character defect so far alleged against Williams was a tendency to make free with other men’s tills, and, by implication, with their women. Surely some more heinous crime than insinuating manners and over-familiarity could be laid to his charge? People recalled Richter’s evidence that the captain of the Roxburgh Castle had prophesied that, if Williams lived to go on shore, he would be hanged. This was a promising lead, and the evidence for the remarkable prognostication was accordingly sought.
The sea captain’s story, given to an enterprising Times reporter and told in the issue of New Year’s Day 1812, is important for the light it throws on the past of men other than Williams, and for the close connection it reveals between some of the protagonists in the case.
The accounts given of Williams and his connections, on the authority of the Captain of the Roxburgh Castle shew that this desperado, and one at least of his companions, were known, previous to the recent horrid murders, to be men of very bad character; and the discharge of Ablass (the particular associate of Williams) out of custody, on the deposition of a woman so directly interested in his fate, is to be regretted. It is but justice, however, to state, as our belief, that this fact did not appear before the magistrates at the time of his examination.
