The Maul and the Pear Tree

by P. D. James

  The Prime Minister was followed by another Opposition speaker, Abercromby, who supported Romilly’s argument that the growth of crime had shown the police to be totally inadequate to its object. He accordingly moved an amendment to the motion to add the words, ‘And also of the state of the police of the Metropolis’. Then came a touch of Panglossian optimism. Sir Francis Burdett, the wealthy, spirited radical and hero of the masses, a sort of latter-day Wilkes, declared himself convinced that if the system of nightly watch were improved there would be no need for any police whatever. The country should revive a law of Edward I, by which every householder was compelled in his turn to watch for the protection of others. The respectable part of the population would in this way be accustomed to the use of arms, so they would be available for national defence in the event of an invasion, or to repress riots.

  The Prime Minister, unimpressed by this logic, accepted the proposal to widen the inquiry; and then, late in the debate, Sheridan rose to his feet to deliver a scathing attack on the Government’s complacent and timid reaction to the emergency, and on the whole conduct of the magistrates’ investigation of the Ratcliffe Highway murders.

  Sheridan began with an all-out political attack on the Home Secretary, and Ryder’s myopic view of what needed to be done.

  After the alarms of the recent atrocities had spread throughout every part of the Metropolis; after the general and feverish anxiety of the public for redress and protection, down came the Right Hon. Gentleman to the House, and in order to remove at once, and effectually all alarm and anxiety whatever, solemnly proposed that a Committee should be appointed to inquire into the state of the condition of the nightly watch! This would have been at any time the meekest of all meek propositions; and at the present crisis it was not only the meekest, but he must beg the Right Hon. Secretary’s pardon, if he added, the silliest proposition which could possibly have been made.… Why not go further and move for an inquiry into the state of the parish nurseries? (a laugh). The Right Hon. Secretary came before them brimful of information; he told them that the Act required able-bodied watchmen; and then he told them that the men employed were not ablebodied, because, forsooth, they were weak, old, and decrepit – very satisfactory reasons certainly why they could not be very active, young and vigilant! And then the Right Hon. Gentleman told them further that these sort of men were unfit for the situations, that the service, in short, wanted recruits; and that as at present, there was no watch to protect the city at night, that, therefore, they ought to proceed, with all due deliberation, to inquire into the state and condition of the nightly watch. To be called upon gravely to all this was bad enough; but to be called upon, with all the characteristic gravity of the Right Hon. Secretary, was scarcely supportable. The Right Hon. Gentleman knew the importance his manner could give to trifles – he was in the habit of throwing such an inflexible air of grave solemnity round all he had to offer to the House, that there was really sometimes danger lest they should attach to the matter what belonged to the manner merely.

  Having thus put Ryder in his place, Sheridan went on to hit out at English xenophobia, a subject about which, as an Irishman, he held strong views.

  When those horrible atrocities were first committed in the neighbourhood of Shadwell, they all remembered how eager vulgar prejudice was to fasten upon a foreigner – people grew all of a sudden thoroughly persuaded that there was evidence upon the face of those murders to show that they were perpetrated by a Portuguese, and by none but Portuguese: ‘Oh, who would do it but Portuguese?’ was the general cry. Prejudice, however, did not long stand still upon the Portuguese. The next tribe of foreigners arraigned and convicted were the Irish (a laugh) and it was nothing but an Irish murder and could have been done only by Irishmen! Beastly as this prejudice was, the Shadwell magistrates were not ashamed to act up to it in all the meanness and bigotry of its indignant spirit, viewing the murder in no less a light than that of a Popish plot. They commenced an indiscriminate hunt after the Irish people; and when they had them, in order to come at once to the plot, they began with the deep leader of ‘Are you a Papist?’ or, ‘If you deny that you are, show that you don’t know how to cross yourself’. Amidst this general suspicion of aliens and Irishmen, he wished to know whether the Right Hon. Gentleman had consulted with the head of the Alien Office? Had he consulted with the proper officers of the district? Had he consulted with the police magistrates of any of the divisions? Had he consulted with anyone likely to give him information upon the subject? If he had not, and he believed he had not, then was it to be the less wondered at that the Right Hon. Secretary for the Home Department had thought it sufficient, upon such an occasion, to be delivered of his solemn proposition for inquiring into the state and condition of the nightly watch!

  Finally Sheridan poured scorn on the metropolitan magistrates, repeating openly what plenty of people had been saying privately for weeks.

  Was there no jobbing in their appointment of some of those police magistrates? … Were not many persons tempted into these situations who were totally unfit to discharge the duties attached to them? … For some of the police magistrates he entertained the highest respect, and he mentioned with pleasure the name of Mr Aaron Graham, who had rendered the public considerable services in his conduct in the superintendence of the hulks. He thought, too, that the magistrates of Bow Street Office had been uniformly active and vigilant, but what should he say of the magistrates of Shadwell? How should he attempt to describe a conduct, in which folly and rashness were constantly endeavouring to make amends for the grossest neglect of duty? At one time we saw them mixing in the indiscriminate cry of the mob, and greedily indulging in the prodigality of seizing upon every man with a torn coat and a dirty shirt; and at another, leaving Williams with all the means necessary to commit self-murder. Let one fact speak more strongly than words could do to their general conduct. It was now very well-known that Williams was not an Irishman, that not only no one circumstance came out to justify that suspicion, but all that did come out proved him not to have been an Irishman. However, the prejudice of the hour would have him an Irishman, and as it was once bruited about, it was generally believed. In the midst of the operation of this prejudice seven unfortunate Irishmen were taken up on the strong suspicion of foul linen! They were examined, and after having been made to cross themselves, they were confined together in a close room below. The next evening, some noise being heard, and perhaps no very moderate one, the magistrates inquired into the cause of this uproar, and they were told ‘Oh! it is nothing but those horrid Irish, who can never be quiet.’ It turned out, however, that in this instance, at least, those Irishmen had no great cause to be contented, for they had been confined in this hole of a room for twenty-two hours without a bed to lie upon, or a morsel of bread, or a drop of water to refresh them! And what did the magistrates? They recollected luckily the circumstance, and told their officers, ‘Do for God’s sake give those fellows some bread and cheese, and then bring them before us, and we will apologise for the trouble we have given them, and discharge them!’

  This, he supposed, was what the Right Hon. Secretary would call vigour. But, giving them all due credit for such vigour, where was the vigour, the justice, the moral, or the decency, in that abominable spectacle with which they fed the worst appetites of the mob in the unseemly exhibition of the dead body to the multitude! Did they want to teach the people to prey upon carcases? Could it add to the sanctity of justice to make the passions of the mob hurry to riot upon a senseless carcase? Was there that certainty upon which alone justice ought to act to make such a spectacle fit? Should the people deal out the vengeance of the law by witnessing the formal procession of mangled limbs and putrid carcases? but what other was the true motive of this parade of the carcase and the maul and the chisel – what but a poor artifice to cover their own scandalous neglect? Why did they suffer that man to be alone? Why did they suffer him to be three days alone, though they knew that there was a bar across the top of his dun
geon, and that he wore handkerchiefs and garters? The wonder really was that they did not give general orders to furnish the prisoner with a nightly supply of razors and pistols. But what could be said too extravagantly of their neglect and remissness, when it should be known that this wretch was suffered to possess himself with the sharp piece of iron, which was found in his pocket the morning after he hanged himself? Someone had said that all the watchmen of Shadwell had been discharged; and why, in the name of justice, not discharge all the magistrates too? He was himself pretty conversant with police affairs, and recommended a treatise, written in the year 1750 by Mr Henry Fielding, a police magistrate, on the late alarming increase of crimes. He had hoped that the Right Hon. Gentleman would not think worse of the author for having been a poet and a dramatic writer. But to sum up his account of the vigilance of the Shadwell magistracy, he had merely to state they never once thought of searching the room of Williams till nearly two months after the murder, where they found the bloody trousers and the ivory hafted knife. He had formerly thought much upon the subject of the police, [Sheridan concluded] and as the Right Hon. Secretary had shown tonight that he had not as yet thought at all upon the subject, he begged that the Right Hon. Gentleman would begin to think of it with all possible dispatch, at least before he came again down to the House to move with great solemnity for an inquiry into the state and condition of the nightly watch.

  A Committee of the House of Commons was duly appointed, with both Ryder and Sheridan as members; but one man, at least, had a better idea how the Members might spend their time. ‘W’ wrote to the editor of The Examiner recommending the appointment of a Corps of Honourable Members as the nightly watch. The Right Hon. C. Yorke should be ‘transferred from the Board of Admiralty to a watch-box in Shadwell; for I remember, when a boy, that in his speeches to his constituents, wherein danger appeared his delight, he discoursed most heroically of wading through blood to defend his King and country.’ As for the City Members, ‘after having been stewed up for hours at a grand feast, consider the refreshing influence of a long round of watch; and how the duty will counteract the deadly effects of the dinner.’ The West End should be patrolled by men of fashion, who would take the early watch and dine afterwards. ‘Their presence will not be required at the House, except on a division; and those who speak early in debate may slip from their laurels … as the lights grow dim, Old Sherry, lighted up with claret, may sally forth, and put to flight the sons of darkness and disorder, by the illumination of his own lantern.’ The Prime Minister, admittedly, could not be in more than five places at once, but next time he introduced a Bill he might ‘add, as a Ryder, that the Secretary for the Home Department be instructed to know something of his duty.’

  A few weeks later the committee published a report which is as uninteresting to posterity as it was agree able to contemporary opinion. Predictably, it made some suggestions to improve the state of the parish watch and promote better co-ordination between the magistrates. Once more, however, Harriott – who died five years later after ‘sufferings’, the Gentleman’s Magazine reported, ‘of the most dreadful description, which even to his strong mind seem to have been beyond endurance’ – deserves credit for a brave, forlorn attempt to persuade the Committee to think big. To him, the whole idea of the nightly watch was now thoroughly discredited. He urged that each of the Public Offices should have a strength of fifty policemen under the command of a chief constable. A waiting list of perhaps twice that number should be compiled as a police reserve. The Thames and Bow Street Offices would muster 200 more. The whole force should be made available wherever it was wanted in an emergency, and it should be directed by firm-minded magistrates – ‘for firm and courageous, too, they ought to be, or they are not fit for police situations’.

  Nobody listened. Harriott might just as well have flaunted the literary pretensions of the poetical Pye, Moser and Gifford for all anyone cared. A Bill based largely on the Committee’s proposals was brought into Parliament soon afterwards. But by now the panic induced by the murders was dying down. And then, on 11 May, another murderer struck, reassuring the lower classes that it was not only they who were exposed to danger. John Bellingham, irritated that his letters kept being passed from one department of Whitehall to another with no more than an acknowledgement, carried a loaded revolver into the lobby of the House of Commons and shot the Prime Minister dead on the spot. Perhaps in his dying moments Perceval had time to recall his assertion, three months earlier, that ‘no state of nightly watch, however excellent, could have prevented such a crime’.

  It only remained to kill the Bill. In July, the House debated a petition from the Metropolitan parishes pleading that it was wholly inadequate, and would cost them an additional £74,000 in direct taxation. Ryder was no longer Home Secretary, and the Bill was without friends. The young Henry Brougham, afterwards a famous Lord Chancellor, delivered the obsequies. It was, after all, a dangerous little Bill, drawn up ‘on sudden and temporary impulses and passions’, that would have given police officers a power of an ‘alarming description’ under the authority of magistrates in the Public Offices who were no more than a motley collection of bankrupts, failed lawyers and – ‘of poets in particular – yes, poets – not one of them that has not its poet’. The Offices ‘were infinitely better stocked with poets than even the Treasury’. No more was heard of the Bill after that, but a great deal was heard by three more Parliamentary Committees (in 1816, 1818 and 1822) about the dangers to English liberty of a system of police; and when eventually Peel set up the Metropolitan Police in 1829, there came a second great outcry from the Churchwardens, Overseers and Trustees of the parish of St George’s-in-the-East.

  John Williams’s bones had been lying under the paving stones at the crossroads of New Cannon Road for eighteen years, and the stories about him had taken on an aura of myth and legend. Time had softened the sordid reality, and De Quincey had not yet immortalised Williams in print. A new generation of Churchwardens, Overseers and Trustees discovered that they were, after all, well content with their parish watchmen. What they expected of Peel’s new ‘Bobbies’ we do not know; but early in 1830 the vestry resolved that their expectations had been ‘altogether disappointed, inasmuch as the system is of too arbitrary a nature … from the laxity of its operation, offences have generally increased within the parish; burglaries have also become more frequent, the streets are in an intolerable state of riot and disorder at night, and so little confidence is felt by the inhabitants that private watchmen are employed at the exclusive charge of individuals; that the men attached to the police have frequently been seen drunk upon duty, and openly to associate and frequent public houses with prostitutes and other suspicious characters’. The vestry concluded by resolving that ‘the present system is unconstitutional, and tends only to sap the foundations of our liberties’.

  A contribution of £1,800 a year towards the cost of the Metropolitan Police was evidently too high a premium, eighteen years afterwards, to insure against the risk of a second John Williams.

  ELEVEN

  The Eighth Victim?

  The confident verdict which early nineteenth-century justice pronounced on John Williams is a verdict on itself. But it is a little unjust to criticise the magistrates too harshly for their conduct of the case. As a force they were untrained, uncoordinated and undermanned, and the men they had were totally inadequate for the job in hand. Yet even accepting the defects of the system, certain of their deficiencies and negligences seem incomprehensible. They neglected to make that thorough scrutiny of the maul which must have revealed the punched initials and which, by focusing their early attention on the Pear Tree, could have prevented the murder of the Williamsons. They took little account of the chisel found on Marr’s premises, although they advertised for its owner and must have realised that it was almost certainly brought into the shop by the murderer. They did not search the Pear Tree until ten days after their chief suspect was dead. They wasted time and effort in the fruitless cr
oss-examination of persons brought before them on totally inadequate evidence. They neglected to set up any organisation, however temporary and rudimentary, for the prompt exchange of information, and for the co-ordination of their separate activities. They wasted their own time and that of their officers by keeping suspects in prison unnecessarily because of a timid reluctance to let even the most unlikely suspect go once he had been brought before them. More seriously, once the identity of the maul had been established, they were so impressed by the fact that one of their suspects in custody had lodged with the Vermilloes and, therefore, had had access to the weapon, that they bent all their energies towards proving him guilty and failed to appreciate the wider significance of the identification. The immediate thorough searching of the Pear Tree public house; the cross-examination of every person who lived there or had access to John Peterson’s chest of tools; the examination of their clothes and razors; inquiries as to their movements on the nights of the murders: all these things should have been done. None of them were. Worst of all, the magistrates accepted Williams’s apparent suicide as proof of his guilt, and in their eagerness to propitiate the mob, exposed the body of a man who had neither been committed for trial nor pleaded before a jury, to the ignominy reserved for a condemned murderer.