Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century

JOHN BREWER

SENTIMENTAL MURDER

Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Prologue

Preface

1. Spring 1779

2. The Press: A Case of Sentimental Murder

3. The Killer as Victim: James Hackman

4. Missing Stories: Lord Sandwich and the Making of a Libertine

5. Missing Stories: Martha Ray and the Life of the Mistress

6. Love and Madness, A Story too True

7. Wordsworth and the Doctors

8. The Nineteenth Century

9. The Twentieth Century

10. History and Telling Stories

Index

Notes

Copyright

About the Publisher

PROLOGUE

Sentimental Murder began life as part of a review I wrote of G. J. Barker-Benfield’s The Culture of Sensibility and has gone through several transformations before it found its present form. It started out as a more conventional historical account of James Hackman’s murder of Martha Ray, the mistress of the 4th earl of Sandwich but, in large part because of questions raised in seminars and after lectures, I began to rethink how to tell the story. I’m especially grateful to Julie Peters for the remarks she made at a talk at Columbia University that brought out starkly (at least to me) the problems about how to handle this particular narrative. Thanks also to others at Harvard, Columbia, CalTech and Yale, for their help in shaping the book. I owe a special debt to my former colleagues at the University of Chicago, notably Jim Chandler, Katie Trumpener, Paul Hunter and Sandra Macpherson, all of whom probably heard the story more times than they cared to. Thanks to Donna Andrew, Claire L’Enfant, Max Novak, Roger Lonsdale, Peter Mandler, Helen Small, Kathleen Wilson, Angela Rosenthal, Martin Levy, Luisa Passerini, John Sutherland, John Wyner and Simon Schama for help, comments and support. Holger Hoock and Clare Griffith both provided invaluable research assistance, setting a high standard for me to follow.

The present Earl of Sandwich and Lady Sandwich generously afforded me access to the 4th Earl’s private papers, gave me lunch and even allowed me briefly to exhibit my more than rusty cricketing skills. I have also to acknowledge the help of the librarian at Dove Cottage, and the kind permission of the Wordsworth Trust to quote from the papers about Basil Montagu in their collections at Dove Cottage, Grasmere. The staff at the Bodleian and Huntingdon libraries, so far apart yet so close in the high quality of their service, have made the research for this book a pleasure. I was fortunate in having a Moore fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, which gave me time to complete the book. Gill Coleridge, my agent, Arabella Pike at HarperCollins and Elisabeth Sifton at Farrar, Straus and Giroux have helped make this a better book by their constant critical support and vigorous editing. Special thanks to Stella, Grace and Lori for their constant support, love and forbearance.

This book is dedicated to the memory of Roy Porter, friend and colleague, who died in 2002. My first conversation with Roy took place in 1967 in the gate-house of Christ’s College Cambridge. (We talked about seventeenth-century religion, sleep and his efforts to be a soccer goalkeeper.) Over the next thirty years or more our paths crossed in Cambridge, California and London. When I began this book I naturally turned to him – no one writing about love and madness in the eighteenth century would not have wanted to consult Roy Porter. No man knew more about love and libertinage in both the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Characteristically, he plied me with references and information, quite a lot of it from his own work. Little did I know, when I began the project, that one of its incarnations would be the first Roy Porter lecture, established to commemorate him. Roy’s absence has made me realize just how important he was to so many of us, not just as an endless source of gossip – no conversation was complete without a Porter anecdote – but as someone whose dedication and single-mindedness, expansive commitment to open-minded intellectual inquiry and to the best eighteenth-century values was (a sometimes intimidating) example and inspiration. He is sorely missed.

PREFACE

Sentimental Murder investigates an eighteenth-century killing and attempted suicide. By tracing their changing interpretation over more than two hundred years, I want to explore the relations between history and fiction, storytelling and fact, past and present. I have adopted – and want to connect – two very different perspectives. On the one hand I examine in minute detail the events of a few crucial moments – it cannot have been more than a few seconds – between 11.30 p.m. and midnight on 7 April 1779, when, on the steps of the Covent Garden Theatre in London, a young clergyman, James Hackman, shot Martha Ray, the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, and then tried to kill himself. On the other I consider a broad panorama that ranges over more than two centuries and is populated by journalists, doctors, novelists, poets, memoir writers, biographers, and historians who have tried to make sense (and sometimes art) out of the killing. My focus then is not just on what happened in 1779 but on the stories told about this event – who told them, how they were told, and what their tellers were up to in telling them.

Perhaps I have chosen this bifocal approach because, although I first came across the story of Hackman, Ray, and Sandwich when I was investigating the cultural life of eighteenth-century London, I learned about it from nineteenth-century sources: brief entries in the section on Covent Garden in histories of London, wedged between tales of great actors and lives of notorious whores; snippets in neatly arranged scrapbooks of newspaper cuttings about the theatre and music, crime and low life in the previous century collected by Victorian ladies and gentlemen; and anecdotes in popular histories based on eighteenth-century memoirs which first appeared in print in the mid-nineteenth century.

At first I ignored Martha Ray’s story because I saw it through Victorian eyes as a simple moral tale. Covent Garden, with its theatres, wholesale grocery and sex trade, and the brutal crime of passion committed in its main square offered a snapshot of an earlier age, clinching evidence that the Georgians were sexier but less civilized, more glamorous but much less moral than their Victorian heirs. The incident seemed high on sensation but low on historical content – just a graphic anecdote about the seamier side of Georgian night life. But the peculiar insistence of the Victorian version of the story, the repeated stress on the moral distance between the crime of 1779 and the probity of the 1840s – the Victorian commentators worried over the story like a dog over a bone – made me curious to find out more. Eventually I was led back to the newspaper reports, trial and bits of surviving evidence at the time of the crime.

These revealed a different story – not a tale governed by moral distance and high-minded censoriousness but an account of a crime whose perpetrator and victim were obvious, but whose meaning was obscure. Of course Hackman killed Ray – a crowd of onlookers had seen him pull the trigger – but why? And who or what had led him to his crime? These were not just my questions; they were asked by many of Hackman’s contemporaries.

Then, as now, crimes of passion, especially those committed by men against women, were not rare. But this particular killing attracted enormous attention and comment. No doubt this was because of the status and nature of the protagonists. A similar crime of passion committed by a drunken labourer who killed an impoverished girlfriend – the London courts handled many such cases – would have merited only a line or two, if that, in the London newspapers. But Hackman was a minister in the Church of England (albeit only recently ordained), and Martha Ray shared the bed of one of the most powerful and unpopular politicians of the day. Such a crime on the edges of high society was inevitably a good newspaper story, and a source of gossip and potential scandal, not least because the circumstances surrounding the murder were so obscure.

Few members of the public doubted that Hackman and Ray had become acquainted at Hinchingbrooke, Lord Sandwich’s Huntingdonshire country seat, in 1775; no one doubted the killing (though some claimed it was not murder) four years later. But in the years between these two events almost nothing was known about Ray and Hackman’s relations. Stories hate a hiatus. Unless it was filled, the tale of Hackman’s crime would never be complete, much less understood. Into the empty space rushed all sorts of speculation: were they meeting secretly? Did they have an affair? Did they want to get married? Did Hackman press his attentions on an unwilling Ray? Were they intriguing together against the Earl of Sandwich? With the exception of Wordsworth’s account of Martha Ray (discussed in chapter 7), which deliberately places her out of the context of her death, almost every version of the events of 1779 written over the next two hundred years, whether newspaper story, poem, novel or biography, offers answers to these questions. And they all took the form of particular types of story – sentimental tales of suffering, romantic stories of heightened male sensibility, scurrilous stories of libertine desire and female manipulation, tales of criminal turpitude, medical tales of love’s madness, stories of female romance, tales for moral reflection on the dilemmas of women or speculation on the nature of history.

The earliest press coverage of the killing not only gave details of Hackman’s crime but fostered public debate about its perpetrator. Within a year of Ray’s death and Hackman’s execution a Grub Street author, Herbert Croft, wrote an epistolary work, Love and Madness, which claimed to contain the correspondence of the murderer and his victim. Before the century was out, and in part because of the tremendous success of Croft’s work, Hackman passed into medical history and Martha Ray into one of William Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads. I’d already collected many fragmentary nineteenth-century accounts, but now discovered detailed discussion of the affair in such journals as the Edinburgh Review, provoked by the publication of the memoirs of two famous contemporaries of Hackman and Ray, Horace Walpole and George Selwyn. The story also lived on in the Victorian obsession with gruesome crimes, both past and present. In the second half of the nineteenth century interest in the trial seemed to peter out, but revived in the 1890s. The reprinting of a doctored version of Love and Madness put the story back in the public demesne and was the source for two twentieth-century versions of the story, Constance Hagberg Wright’s The Chaste Mistress, published in 1930 and Elizabeth Jenkins’s essay on Martha Ray in her Ten Fascinating Women, which first appeared in 1955.

I could have approached this large and growing body of material by asking the traditional question: what was the true story of what actually happened in those years between Ray and Hackman’s first and final meetings? This would have meant that I was trying to ‘see through’ subsequent versions of the story in order to recover the ‘real history’ of the event. I would have had to reject a great deal of the material I had accumulated as inaccurate, irrelevant and obfuscating. But when you treat a novel or a poem, or even a polemical tract or a biographical apologia as if its aim was to be a work of history, you certainly sell it short. You lose what is most distinctive, moving, powerful and illuminating about a work by seeing it in only one dimension. You fail to appreciate both its purposes and its effects.

I was loath to do this and so I took another tack. I set out to write a history of the accounts, narratives, stories – call them what you will – that were built around James Hackman’s killing of Martha Ray. The aim was to ask not ‘is this story true’ but ‘what does this story mean, and why did it take a particular form at a particular time?’ And, in order to answer these questions, I had to ask others: what does this story do? Or, to put it another way, what is the storyteller doing with this story?

Thus my account of the press reports of Hackman and Ray is as much about the nature of newspaper reporting as about murder and suicide; my analysis of the novel containing the so-called letters of Ray and Hackman is an investigation not of their veracity, but of the ways that fictional works played with different ideas of truth; the nineteenth-century version of Hackman and Ray is about Victorian ideas of morality and progress and their connection to a Victorian notion of real history; and the chapters on the twentieth century deal with the aims of women’s writing and conservative politics in the inter-war period. Here history is not the history of a discrete set of past events, but a history of the changing ways in which past events have been understood. In this way history becomes not an anatomizing act, lifting the sheet to reveal the corpus of a distant and separate past, but an act of accumulation, in which the last historical account is seen (inevitably) to build upon its predecessors.

I want to stress that this does not mean that my interpretation is uncritical. On the contrary, a large part of my task has been to recover the aims, assumptions and prejudices (including my own) that shaped the different versions of the story. In this way accounts of the past are not separated from the dynamics of history, to be discarded or sacrificed as the historian sees fit, but are seen as an intrinsic part of them.

Inevitably I found myself writing not just about the events of 1779 but about eighteenth-century, Romantic, Victorian and twentieth-century attitudes to the events of 1779. In any historical period there are normally several different ways of thinking about earlier epochs, but almost every account of the events of 1779, whether supposedly factual or actually fictional, was shaped by a dominant narrative that placed the eighteenth century in relation to the time of its telling. The first accounts of Hackman and Ray were fashioned according to the eighteenth century’s version of itself as a modern age of sentiment and sensibility, in which human (mis)conduct was the object of sympathy rather than censoriousness. The Victorians, by contrast, placed the incident in the context of aristocratic depravity and profound inequality that they thought modern material progress to have ended. Every era had its own ‘eighteenth century’, and each ‘eighteenth century’ shaped the way in which the story was interpreted.

I also learned that it was very difficult to distinguish fact and fiction in the work of writers who explored ‘the truth’ about Hackman, Sandwich and Ray. The first accounts of the crime purported to be factual, but they drew on the narratives and insights of popular fiction to make sense of the crime, and treated it as if it were the subject of a drama or a novel. It was only a short move for Herbert Croft in 1780 to turn the story of the crime into Love and Madness, a fiction, albeit one that claimed to be true. But the work of Croft’s imagination was treated as fact in the medical literature on love’s madness, even while Martha Ray’s story was rewritten to place her in a literary tradition of lovelorn women. In the nineteenth century Hackman’s killing of Ray became a factual anecdote, or a fictional tableau. In both cases the murder was intended to reveal a truth about an earlier age. In the 1890s, when Love and Madness was re-edited and reissued, it came to be seen not as a fiction but as a set of historical documents, a source for the historical reconstruction of a doomed love affair. As such it provided the material for two twentieth-century narratives, Wright’s novel and Jenkins’s biographical essay.

These many versions of Ray’s killing showed that no story is innocent; all narratives involve plotting. To shape a set of events into a story is to exclude other possible narratives. This may sometimes be an unintended consequence, but in the case of the earliest versions of Ray’s killing, it was deliberate. As we shall see, the Earl of Sandwich and his associates, together with the friends of James Hackman, agreed on a story about the crime that absolved the main participants of any blame. This was a whitewash, but it was also a cover-up designed to avert attention from stories about Sandwich and Ray that had been in circulation before her murder and that would have placed them in a poor light. The cover-up was never entirely successful – the repressed stories were to resurface again and again, and they re-emerge in my narrative as the two chapters on the ‘missing stories’ of 1779.

If we (including historians) are all implicated in the stories we tell, then I, too, have an obligation to explain my own narrative. What am I up to in writing about more than two centuries of stories about a crime of passion which, though terrible for those immediately involved – James Hackman, Martha Ray, the Earl of Sandwich and their children – hardly seems the stuff of ‘history’? The answer to this lies, I believe, in my response to the sometimes rather brutal debates that have taken place over the last twenty years or so between two very different notions of history: one that emphasizes that history is the recovery of what actually happened in the past; the other that history is made in the present, the plotted and imaginative construct of a modern historical narrator. I leave these questions to my epilogue in which I try – doubtless disingenuously – to put my narrative in its turn-of-the-millennium context.

CHAPTER 1 Spring 1779

JOHN MONTAGU, 4th Earl of Sandwich, was a tall gangling man with ‘strong legs and arms’ and a ruddy appearance that led the novelist Frances Burney, when she first met him in 1775, to compare him with a rough-hewn Jack Tar: ‘he is a tall, stout man & looks weather-proof as any sailor in the navy1’. Portraits by Gainsborough and Zoffany reveal a large, hooked nose, thin, sensual lips and a long torso that makes his head seem unaccountably small. They also fail to conceal the clumsiness that led Sandwich’s French dancing master to ask that ‘your Lordship would never tell any one of whom you learned to dance2’. ‘Awkward’ and ‘shambling’ were how his friends described him, one remarking to another as they spotted him from a distance ‘I am sure it is Lord Sandwich; for, if you observe, he is walking down both sides of the street at once3’.

Sandwich had energy that more than compensated for his clumsiness. Despite his lack of polish, he had a reputation as a ladies’ man. One anonymous female correspondent confided in him, ‘you have it in your power to gain the affections of almost any woman that you study to please’. Women found him charming, and he pursued them relentlessly from his youth into middle age. In his sixties he admitted, ‘I have never4 pretended to be free from indiscretion, and those who know me have been … long accustomed to forgive my weaknesses, when they do not interfere with my conduct as a public man.’

For a peer, Sandwich was not wealthy, and from 1739, when he took his seat in the House of Lords at the age of twenty-one, he sought political office to increase his income. During a long career in government he served as Secretary of State, Postmaster General and as a diplomat, but the post that he saw as his own and for which he is best remembered was First Lord of the Admiralty, an office he held between 1747 and 1751 and again after his appointment by Lord North in 1770.

Waking on the morning of 7 April 1779 in the ample apartments in the Admiralty building that were one of the perquisites of his post, Sandwich faced a busy day of government business. The Admiralty gates in the Robert Adam screen that separated the offices from the street opened at 9 a.m., when four of the office clerks arrived to receive their instructions, began transcribing documents to captains and admirals, suppliers and politicians, and made neat copperplate copies in official letter books and ledgers. The eleven-hour day was one of the longest in any government office: all the clerks were in attendance between eleven in the morning and four in the afternoon, but a part of the staff kept the Admiralty open between nine and eleven, and between six and ten in the evening.

Though Sandwich had many political enemies, he was generally acknowledged to be a conscientious and industrious official. He was, as one contemporary put it, ‘Universally admitted to possess eminent talents, great application to the duties of his office, and thorough acquaintance with public business … In all his official functions he displayed perspicuity as well as dispatch5.’ Normally his working day began even before the Admiralty opened: ‘he rose at an early hour, and generally wrote all his letters before breakfast6’, and he frequently had no respite before taking a late evening meal. On one occasion he complained, ‘I am fatigued to death having been with my pen in my hand [for]…thirteen hours7.’ The snack that bears Sandwich’s name, and that was first made by slipping a slice of naval salt beef between two pieces of bread, was made to allow not, as legend has it, for longer hours at the gaming table, but more time at the office.

Admiralty business, of course, was not always so onerous, and the First Lord left much of the detailed work to his reliable and experienced Secretary, Philip Stephens, an official with more than twenty-five years’ service for the Admiralty Board. But when the nation was at war and when parliament was in session, as it was in the spring of 1779, the office required constant attention. The nation was embroiled with its American subjects; France and Spain had just joined the rebellious colonists. Because of the weight of business the Admiralty had hired four additional clerks in the last year. The most recent appointment, Mr Hollinworth, had begun work the previous morning.

Yet there were additional reasons why the Admiralty was so frenetic on this warm spring day. For the Admiralty Board and especially Lord Sandwich were at the centre of a huge political row about the conduct of the American war. The parliamentary opposition, led by Charles James Fox in the Commons and the Duke of Richmond in the Lords, was determined to lay the blame for Britain’s military failures at the door of the Admiralty, and had launched a determined attempt to drive Sandwich from office, if not to overthrow the government itself.

The squall had blown up more than a year earlier, when the war had been going particularly badly. Forced to maintain supply lines to Boston, New York and the Chesapeake, the navy was overstretched and undermanned. Encouraged by Britain’s plight, and eager to revenge their previous defeats, France had pledged support to the Americans in the summer of 1778. One of Sandwich’s spies, John Walker, had been sending him alarming reports for several years of a major French naval build-up. Despite Sandwich’s warnings to his colleagues, too little was done too late. Better equipped, the French battle fleet threatened to outnumber the British and to make possible a French landing on the south coast of England.

Sandwich and his colleagues had been bitterly attacked for their conduct of the war and their lack of preparedness for its escalation. Their hopes (like those of most Britons) had been pinned on an early and decisive naval victory against France that would have seen off the threat to Britain’s supply lines and trade, and dispelled the threat of invasion. But when the two fleets met off Ushant on 27 July 1778, the French repelled the English attack and inflicted great damage before retreating to Brest. The threat of French superiority remained, and was soon compounded by the prospect of Spain’s entry into the war on the colonists’ side. On 15 October Sandwich wrote to the prime minister, Lord North, ‘The situation of our affairs is at this time so critical and alarming that my mind will not rest, without I collect my thoughts and put on paper the ideas I have of the danger we are in, and what exertions we can use to guard against the storm that is hanging over us8.’