John Brewer - Sentimental Murder - Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century

Blackstone, like most judges at the time, was strongly opposed to pleas of temporary insanity, and he made it clear that such a plea had no legal status (English law does not recognize anything like crime passionnelle ) and that insanity pleas in general were admissible only if strong evidence of the defendant’s history of madness were presented. But no one seems to have thought that Hackman would be acquitted. Commentators as diverse as Horace Walpole and Sir John Fielding concurred in Hackman’s inevitable fate. There was little interest in the trial’s outcome, in the possibility of a surprise verdict of innocent. What mattered was Hackman’s performance in justifying his actions and contemplating his fate.

This is clear from responses to the trial. For Lady Ossory, Hackman’s conduct in court ‘was wonderfully touching 138 ’. The news reports agreed. ‘The prisoner by 139 his defence drew tears from all parts of the Court; so decently and properly he conducted himself.’ ‘The behaviour of this unfortunate criminal’, ran another item, ‘was in every respect descriptive of his feelings. When the evidence related the fatal act, his soul seemed to burst within him. His defence was intermixed with many sighs and groans, and the trickling tear bespoke penitence … and remorse. The letter to his brother melted the most obdurate heart, and whilst the horror of the deed shocked the understanding of the audience, there was not a spectator who denied his pity 140 .’ ‘However, we may 141 detest the crime ,’ wrote the London Evening Post , ‘a tear of pity will fall from every humane eye on the fate of the unhappy criminal .’ Witnesses, or – as it was more usually said – the audience was preoccupied with Hackman’s performance. Boswell was pleased that the killer never tried to palliate his crime: ‘He might have pleaded that he shot Miss Ray by accident, but he fairly told the truth: that in a moment of frenzy he did intend it.’ When Boswell left the courtroom to tell Frederick Booth of the verdict, the first question Booth asked him was about his brother-in-law’s behaviour. ‘As well, Sir,’ responded Boswell, ‘as you or any of his friends could wish: with decency, propriety, and in such a manner as to interest every one present.’ ‘Well,’ said Booth, ‘I would rather have him found guilty with truth and honour than escape by a mean evasion.’ Boswell thought Booth’s reply ‘a sentiment truly noble, bursting from a heart rent with anguish! 142 ’

Three days later, when Hackman went to the gallows, Lady Ossory described his conduct as ‘glorious 143 ’. One paper commented, ‘He behaved with a most astonishing composure, with the greatest fortitude, and most perfect resignation 144 .’ In the chapel in Newgate prison his conduct reduced spectators to tears. In his last hours, ‘he collected his fortitude, he employed every moment of life to the worship of the Almighty, and prepared himself to meet the awful Judge of the World by prayers, and the overflowings of a contrite heart 145 ’. He died, remarked several commentators, as he should have done. The Gazetteer wrote, ‘He behaved as a man should in such a situation 146 .’

In the eyes of most observers Hackman’s conduct was redemptive. His spontaneous grief affirmed the authenticity of his love for Martha Ray. The press invariably interpreted his lachrymose conduct as being prompted by her death and not by thoughts of his impending execution. He wept not for himself but, more nobly, for his dead lover.

Hackman’s stoicism before the law and on the gallows showed him to be a person in command of his faculties. Nearly all the papers characterized his conduct in the same way: it showed his contrition and grief about what he had done, and re-established a sense of himself as a sane man. ‘He repeated that affecting acknowledgement of his guilt … and seemed in a state of composure, unruffled with the idea of punishment … His whole behaviour was manly, but not bold; his mind seemed to be quite calm, from a firm belief in the mercies of his Saviour 147 .’ Commentators spoke of Hackman’s manliness, which they contrasted with his behaviour in killing Ray when, as they saw it, he suffered ‘a momentary frenzy’ that ‘overpowered’ him. The rhetoric was one in which Hackman lost his masculine identity in committing the murder, but recovered it through his stoic conduct during the trial and at the execution. The murderer was now himself cast as a victim, constantly referred to as ‘the unfortunate’ Mr Hackman. Though Hackman’s lawyers had failed to persuade Blackstone and his fellow judge of the defence’s case, their client’s speech and conduct were readily accommodated within a sentimental story in which the life of an otherwise virtuous young man was destroyed by a love affair that had gone catastrophically wrong. Ray’s story ended with her murder, but Hackman’s spectacle of suffering continued to the gallows.

Hackman’s repeated enactment of his exquisite sensibility, the legibility of his feelings as they manifested themselves in his conduct, fashioned bonds of sympathy, despite the crime he had perpetrated. As Boswell had written in The Hypochondriack , a year before Hackman’s execution, ‘the curiosity which impels people to be present at such affecting scenes, is certainly a proof of sensibility not of callousness 148 ’. Or as Adam Smith explained it in The Theory of Moral Sentiments , published in 1759, ‘We all desire … to feel how each other is affected, to penetrate into each other’s bosoms, and to observe the sentiments and affections which really subsist there. The man who indulges us in this natural passion, who invites us into his heart, who, as it were, sets open the gates of his breast to us, seems to exercise a species of hospitality more delightful than any other … How weak and imperfect soever the views of the open-hearted, we take pleasure to enter them.’ Smith, in fact, had specifically cited a murderer as a person with whom one could not establish bonds of sympathy, whose actions could not be understood sympathetically. But Hackman was thought to be no ordinary killer. He was a man who slayed his lover and was himself destroyed not by his wickedness but by his overwhelming affection for Martha Ray. His conduct after Ray’s death redeemed him. Like Martha Ray, he became a sacrifice to love.

The horror provoked by Hackman’s crime combined with the sympathy excited by his obvious infatuation and contrition made him an object of public fascination. Many in libertine circles concurred with James Boswell’s view – ‘Natural to destroy what one cannot have 149 ’ or, as he later put it in conversation with the notorious roué Lord Pembroke, ‘Natural to t mistress’. Such views were unsurprising among the young bloods of St James’s and the Strand, but even women like Lady Ossory, who had more sympathy for Martha Ray, were moved by Hackman’s intensity of feeling. Though there was some talk of Hackman being insane in the first few days after the murder, it soon dwindled away. True, his action was frenzied, his mind temporarily disordered by jealousy, but it seemed understandable in a young man hopelessly infatuated with an unattainable woman. And the source of his crime was not malevolence or depravity but the positive impulse of love.

The Hackman case was used, particularly by young men like James Boswell and the anonymous author of The Case and Memoirs of James Hackman , to explore their own feelings about romantic love and its perils, hazards that were understood not as a threat to women but as a challenge to a man’s ability to govern his feelings. This was more than sympathy for Hackman; it was a positive identification with him. Boswell was particularly explicit about this. In a letter published in the Public Advertiser he wrote, ‘Let those whose passions are keen and impetuous consider, with awful fear, the fate of Mr Hackman. How often have they infringed the laws of morality by indulgence! He , upon one check, was suddenly hurried to commit a dreadful act.’ He elaborated on this theme in another letter, printed in the St James’s Chronicle . ‘Hackman’s case’, Boswell maintained, ‘is by no means unnatural.’ Citing an earlier essay he had written in The Hypochondriack , he pointed to the selfishness of romantic love; ‘there is no mixture of disinterested kindness for the person who is the object of it’. ‘The natural effect of disappointed love’, he concluded, ‘is to excite the most horrid resentment against its object, at least to make us prefer the destruction of our mistress to seeing her possessed by a rival.’ Adopting a biblical tone, Boswell drew a moral from Hackman’s story based on his close identification of all young men of feeling with the killer: ‘Think ye that this unfortunate gentleman’s general character is, in the eye of Heaven or of generous men in their private feelings, worse than yours? No it is not. And unless ye are upon your guard, ye may all likewise be in his melancholy situation 150 .’ Hackman had shown that he was capable of manly composure, but it had come too late.