Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century

On the same day an article appeared in the opposition newspaper, the General Advertiser and Morning Post, blaming Rear-Admiral Sir Hugh Palliser, a member of the Admiralty Board and a close ally of Sandwich’s, for failing to follow an order of the fleet’s leader, Admiral August Keppel, a political ally of the Foxite opposition, to engage the French more closely. The article provoked a huge row, which turned officers against one another and divided the navy into bitter factions (contemporaries talked of the Montagus and Capulets). Keppel and Palliser, both MPs, squabbled on the floor of the House of Commons; both were eventually court martialled. Throughout the winter and early spring of 1779 the Foxite opposition kept up the pressure on the government, proposing motion after motion attacking its policy in general and Sandwich in particular. In February it looked as if, for Sandwich at least, the game was up. King George III and Lord North decided to remove him from the Admiralty as a way of appeasing government critics. Only the failure of negotiations for a replacement kept him in office. On 11 February a court martial acquitted Keppel and dismissed Palliser’s charges against the admiral as ‘malicious and unfounded’. That evening a crowd of opposition supporters smashed the windows of Sandwich’s lodgings, frightening his mistress, Martha Ray, who was staying there. The crowd tore off the Admiralty gates, looted Palliser’s house in Pall Mall and attacked the homes of other Admiralty officials.

The government was losing its grip. Lord North sank into a depression that made business difficult to transact – on one occasion Sandwich was sent by the king to cajole him out of bed – while government supporters, thinking the administration doomed, began to absent themselves from important debates in parliament. In April the opposition’s demand for an inquiry into the state of the British and French navies and into the Admiralty’s preparedness for war placed an additional burden on Sandwich’s officials, who had to assemble documents and statistics to be used in his defence. In the following week a debate was scheduled in the House of Lords in which Lord Bristol, a leading spokesman of the opposition, was expected to call for Sandwich’s dismissal. On the afternoon of 6 April Sandwich met with the king to discuss the government’s strategy.

While Sandwich laboured in the Admiralty Board room, struggling to salvage his career, other events that were to have a profound effect on his future were unfolding in another part of London. How much he knew of their background is difficult to tell, though he certainly did not know about the events that took place that day while he was at work.

Some time after the Admiralty gates had opened, a handsome young man knocked at the door of Signor Galli, in Jarvis Street, off London’s Haymarket. The Reverend James Hackman, a tall, thin figure with a high forehead and fine, almost effeminate features, had only a week before been ordained as a priest in the Church of England and given the living of Wiveton, in Norfolk. But that morning he was not bent on clerical business. He demanded to see a letter that Galli had first shown him two days earlier. But the Italian turned him away, telling him that it ‘was out of his power. The letter being no longer in his possession9.’ The letter had been written by Martha Ray, the thirty-five-year-old mistress of the Earl of Sandwich, and in it she pleaded with Hackman to ‘desist from his pursuit’ of her, refused to see him and told him she wished to cease all connection with him. Hackman left disappointed, unable to confirm what he did not wish to believe.

Martha Ray had been the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich for more than sixteen years and had borne him nine children, of whom five were living: Robert, born in 1763; Augusta, whose date of birth goes unrecorded; Basil, born in 1770; and two other brothers, William and John, whose birth dates were 1772 and 1773. With such a family it was obvious that Sandwich’s relationship with Ray was no casual affair. She was effectively his common law wife and was known as his public consort. A contemporary described Ray as ‘not what we would call elegant, but which would pass under the denomination of pretty; her height was about five feet five inches; she was fresh-coloured, and had a perpetual smile on her countenance, which rendered her agreeable to every beholder’. Others, especially those who heard her sing, were more impressed. The young clergyman Richard Dennison Cumberland, who listened to Ray’s performances at Hinchingbrooke, spoke of her ‘personal accomplishments and engaging Manner’, describing her as ‘a second Cleopatra10 – a Woman of thousands, and capable of producing those effects on the Heart which the Poets talk so much of and which we are apt to think Chimerical’. Her surviving portraits bear out this description showing a prepossessed and elegantly dressed woman with bright eyes, a slight smile and an expression that betrays considerable strength of character. Certainly James Hackman, who had met her at Hinchingbrooke, had been smitten with her since their first acquaintance in 1775. Nor did it seem likely, despite Ray’s pleas, that the young man would desist in his pursuit of her.

Later that same afternoon Hackman dined with his sister, her husband, the attorney Frederick Booth, and a cousin at the Booths’ house in Craven Street, off the Strand, a few doors down from Benjamin Franklin’s lodgings; he left after eating, promising to return to the family for supper. Striding up Craven Street, he turned left into the Strand, walked through Charing Cross and down Whitehall towards the Admiralty, where Ray and Sandwich had their lodgings. When he arrived he saw the Earl’s coach at the Admiralty’s door. He guessed (rightly, as it turned out) that Martha Ray was going out, and he walked the short distance back towards Craven Street, and stationed himself at the Cannon Coffee House at Charing Cross, so that he could watch the passing traffic. His wait was not in vain. Shortly before six o’clock, Sandwich’s coach swept by, carrying Ray and her companion, Signora Caterina Galli, up the Strand and past its many fine shops, with their first-floor displays of luxuries, cloth and jewels, before turning north into Covent Garden. Hackman followed hastily on foot, watching the two women enter the Covent Garden Theatre at about a quarter past six.

On that Wednesday the theatre was crowded. The star attraction was Margaret Kennedy, a statuesque if somewhat clumsy actress with a fine voice, famed for ‘breeches’ roles in which she played male parts. The evening’s receipts were to go to her benefit, and she was to sing the part of Colin in Rose and Colin, a short comic opera by Charles Dibdin, and the male lead – Meadows – in Thomas Arne’s extremely popular opera, Love in a Village.

Caterina Galli and Martha Ray were more than casual theatre-goers. They might have chosen that evening to go to Drury Lane to see a much-acclaimed production of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, but they preferred comic opera and Mrs Kennedy because of their love of music. Caterina Galli was herself a famous singer and music teacher. A pupil of Handel, she had starred in his operas and oratorios in the 1740s and 1750s, usually singing male roles. After a spell back in her native Italy, she returned to London for two seasons before retiring in 1776. Martha Ray, though she had never performed professionally, was also a singer of great accomplishment, with a passion, shared by Sandwich, for Handel. Ray had been tutored by a number of musicians at Sandwich’s expense, and Galli, as well as being Ray’s companion, had sung with her at private concerts arranged by the Earl. It seems likely11 that Sandwich hoped to attend the performance at Covent Garden that evening – he had earlier cancelled a dinner with friends at the Admiralty – but was prevented from enjoying himself because of the press of Admiralty business.

Mrs Kennedy and Love in a Village were apt objects of Martha Ray’s attention. Mrs Kennedy, like Martha Ray, had achieved success through the attentions of a male admirer: she had been spotted by Thomas Arne, singing songs in a pub near St Giles, one of the least salubrious parts of London. Ray, who had been a milliner’s apprentice, owed her present station to the attentions of Lord Sandwich. And Isaac Bickerstaff’s story, set to Arne’s music, was about the perils of love and marriage, especially among social unequals, a topic that much concerned Ray, with her five illegitimate children by Sandwich.

Like most story-lines in comedy, the plot of Love in a Village enjoys a simplicity and happy resolution altogether unlike the unresolved complexities of relationships such as that between Ray and Sandwich. A young gentleman and -woman, Meadows and Rosetta, separately flee from marriage partners chosen by their parents but whom they have never seen. Disguised as a gardener and female servant, working in the same house, they soon fall hopelessly in love.

The couple try to resist their feelings, thinking that marriage – the proper consequence of true love – will be impossible. How could they marry someone whom they believed to be their social inferior? But, by an improbable contrivance typical of such comedies, they prove to be the very people their parents wished them to marry. Freed of their disguise, Rosetta and Meadows are united – duty and desire are neatly reconciled. The barriers of class and wealth are neither circumvented nor confronted but expelled through a twist in the plot.

Ray and Galli watched the performance from seats close to the royal box, where they not only had one of the best views of the stage but were easily seen by the rest of the audience. Accounts differ about who else joined them in the box. One, by a friend of Sandwich, speaks of their being accompanied by three young men belonging to Sandwich’s circle of naval protégés; another singles out Lord Coleraine, a notorious libertine, who had been the keeper of the famous courtesan Kitty Fisher and of Sophia Baddeley, a stage beauty and singer. Whoever their companions were, Ray and Galli clearly enjoyed the evening, exchanging pleasantries with male friends and admirers when not engaged in watching the performance. James Hackman, who had entered the theatre, watched the two women across the pit.

Hastening to his lodgings in Duke’s Court, St Martin’s Lane, Hackman loaded two pistols, and wrote a suicide note to his brother-in-law:

My Dear Frederick12

When this reaches you I shall be no more, but do not let my unhappy fate distress you too much. I have strove against it as long as possible, but it now overpowers me. You know where my affections were placed; my having by some means or other lost hers, (an idea which I could not support) has driven me to madness. The world will condemn me, but your good heart will pity me. God bless you, my dear Fred, would I had a sum to leave you, to convince you of my great regard. You was my only friend … May heaven protect my beloved woman, and forgive this act which alone could relieve me from a world of misery I have long endured. Oh! if it should be in your power to do her any act of friendship, remember your faithful friend.

Stuffing the note in one pocket together with one of the pistols, he put another letter in his other pocket with the second weapon. This letter, which Hackman had sent to Martha Ray but which she had returned unopened, offered to marry her and take her youngest child, John, off to a life of rural felicity in his country parish. The note concluded: ‘O! thou dearer to me13 than life, because that life is thine! think of me and pity me. I have long been devoted to you; and your’s, as I am, I hope either to die, or soon to be your’s in marriage. For God’s sake26, let me hear from you; and, as you love me, keep me no longer in suspense, since nothing can relieve me but death or you. – Adieu!’

His pockets full of sentiment and violence, Hackman returned to the Covent Garden Theatre. He seems to14 have entered the theatre several times during the evening (a full night’s entertainment lasted nearly five hours), retreating to the Bedford Coffee-house to strengthen his resolve with glasses of brandy and water. His friends claimed that he then tried to shoot himself on two occasions, first in the lobby – where he was prevented by the crowd from getting close enough to Ray to be sure that she would witness his death – and then on the steps of the theatre, where he was pushed by one of the Irish chairmen who carried the sedan chairs of the theatre’s wealthy patrons.

At about a quarter past eleven Ray and Galli came out of the theatre, but the large crowd jostled them and prevented them from reaching their waiting carriage. John Macnamara, a young Irish attorney, saw the two women, ‘who seemed somewhat distressed by the croud, whereupon he offered his service to conduct them to their carriage, which was accepted, and Miss Ray took hold of his arm15’. Threading their way through the swirl of parting spectators and down the steps of the theatre, Galli entered the carriage first. Ray followed, putting her foot on the carriage step as Macnamara held her hand. At that moment a figure in black dashed forward and pulled Ray by the sleeve; she turned to find herself face to face with Hackman. Before she could utter a word, he pulled the two pistols from his pockets, shot Ray with the one in his right hand, and shot himself with the other.

As the crowd shrank back, Macnamara, unsure of what had happened, lifted Ray from the ground, and found himself drenched in blood. For years afterwards he would recall (somewhat hyperbolically) ‘the sudden assault of the assassin, the instantaneous death of the victim, and the spattering of the poor girls brains over his own face16’. According to Horace Walpole, Hackman ‘came round behind her [Ray], pulled her by the gown, and on her turning round, clapped the pistol to her forehead and shot her through the head. With another pistol he then attempted to shoot himself, but the ball grazing his brow, he tried to dash out his own brains with the pistol, and is more wounded by those blows than by the ball17.’ Martha Ray died instantly, leaving Hackman on the ground, ‘beating himself about the head … crying, “o! kill me!18 … for God’s sake kill me!”’

With the help of a link-boy, Macnamara, shocked but with great composure, carried Ray’s bloody body across the Square and into the nearby Shakespeare Tavern, where the corpse was laid on a table in one of the rooms usually hired for private supper parties. (The tavern was a notorious place of sexual assignation: in 1763 James Boswell took ‘two very pretty girls’19 there and ‘found them good subjects of amorous play’.) Hackman was arrested by Richard Blandy, a constable who had heard the shots as he was walking between the Drury Lane and Covent Garden playhouses: ‘he came up and took Mr Hackman, who delivered two pistols to him … he was taking him away, when somebody called out to bring his Prisoner back; and then he took him to the Shakespeare Tavern, where he saw he was all bloody … he searched Mr Hackman’s pockets, and found two sealed letters, which he gave to Mr Campbell, the Master of the Tavern20’.

In the Shakespeare Macnamara angrily confronted Hackman, asking him, ‘What devil could induce you to commit such a deed?’ Hackman, ‘with great composure’, responded, ‘This is not a proper place to ask such a question’, and when asked what his name was and who knew him replied ‘that his name was Hackman, and that he was known to Mr Booth in Craven Street whom he had sent for21’.

Sir John Fielding, the blind magistrate and brother of the novelist Henry Fielding, was summoned and arrived at the Shakespeare at three o’clock in the morning. He examined the witnesses in the tavern and committed Hackman to the Tothills Bridewell, a gaol where prisoners were often held overnight. Before he was taken away Hackman asked to see Ray’s body and commented, ‘What a change has a few hours made in me – had her friends done as I wished them to do, this would never have happened.’ One report described him as gazing ‘upon the miserable22 object with the most deep attention and calm composure, instead of that violent agitation of spirits which every beholder expected, and exclaiming, that he now was happy!’ In the Bridewell, and much to the surprise of many commentators, he fell into a deep and untroubled sleep.

Sandwich knew nothing of these events until some time around midnight. He had waited at the Admiralty, expecting Martha Ray to return for supper after the theatre. As she was late and he was tired, he went to bed at about half past eleven, only to be woken by his black servant James, who told him that Ray had been shot. A distraught James described the scene to Sandwich’s friend, Joseph Cradock, the following day. At first Sandwich did not understand or believe what had happened. He thought James was referring to one of the many scurrilous ballads sung under the windows of the Admiralty. ‘You know that I forbade23 you to plague me any more about those ballads, let them sing or say whatever they please about me!’ ‘Indeed, my Lord,’ replied James, ‘I am not speaking of any ballads; it is all too true.’ Other members of the household then came in; ‘all was a scene of the utmost horror and distress’. Sandwich ‘stood, as it were, petrified; till suddenly seizing a candle, he ran upstairs, threw himself on the bed, and in agony exclaimed, “Leave me a while to myself – I could have borne anything but this”.’

Whether James had been told the news by Caterina Galli or another messenger is not clear – ‘all was confusion and astonishment24’. Galli had fainted25 in the coach when Ray was killed and could not recall what happened thereafter, although we know she returned to the Admiralty in Sandwich’s coach. Sandwich had enough presence of mind to dispatch a servant to the Shakespeare Tavern to watch over Ray’s body and exclude prurient visitors. At seven the following morning he scribbled a hasty note to his friend Robert Boyle Walsingham, an aristocratic young naval officer, ‘For gods sake come to me immediately, in this moment I have much want of the comfort of a real friend; poor Miss Ray was inhumanly murthered last night as she was stepping into her coach at the playhouse door … The murtherer is taken and sent to prison.’

Two hours later, Hackman was brought before Sir John Fielding at Bow Street. Fielding led Hackman to a private room ‘in order to prevent, as much as possible, the unhappy prisoner from being exposed to the view of wanton, idle curiosity27’, and had the witnesses’ testimony sworn before him. Hackman was no longer calm but visibly agitated: ‘From the agonizing pangs which entirely discomposed and externally convulsed him, it was some time before the Magistrate could proceed28.’ Asked if he had anything to say Hackman replied that ‘he wished for nothing but death; that nothing could be more welcome; that the sooner it came the better, for that alone would relieve him of the extreme Misery he laboured under29’. Fielding committed him to Newgate, where he asked that he be granted his own room, a request that Fielding accepted on condition that he did not stay alone, as the court feared that he might again seek to take his own life. He was scheduled to be tried at the next sessions at the Old Bailey, set for 16 April.

That same afternoon30 the coroner’s jury met at the Shakespeare Tavern in the room where Sandwich’s servant still guarded Ray’s body. The corpse was examined by two surgeons, Mr O’Brien and Mr Jarvis, who showed that the bullet had entered Ray’s forehead on the right side, causing massive damage, and then exited near the left ear. Hackman who, at five foot nine, was several inches taller than Ray, must have been pointing his pistol downwards when he fired; this would also explain why Macnamara believed that the blow he felt to his arm was caused not by Ray’s fall but by the spent bullet that had killed her. During the inquest, against the advice of Mr O’Brien and much to the distress of Sandwich, it was decided to open Ray’s skull in order to trace the trajectory of the wound. The doctors ‘owned that they never saw31 so dismal and ghastly a fracture’; the inquest brought in a verdict of wilful murder.

That day all32 of Lord Sandwich’s servants ‘out of livery’ changed into mourning clothes. In the evening Sandwich had Ray’s body removed to an undertaker’s near Leicester Fields. One paper reported that she was wrapped in a sheet or shroud and that she would be buried wearing the valuable clothes and jewels she wore at the moment of her murder, ‘so that property33 to the amount of near £2000 will be deposited in her coffin’. On 14 April, Ray was interred in a vault in Elstree church, where her mother, who had died three years previously, was also buried.

Sandwich’s grief did not stop him taking decisive action in the days after Martha Ray’s murder. He employed Walsingham and two lawyers, Mr Balding and Mr William Chetham, to take depositions and informations from Signor Galli, his wife Caterina and Macnamara; they also questioned Hackman and discussed the case with Sir John Fielding. Sandwich himself questioned Signor Galli on the day after Ray’s death. He learnt that Hackman had contacted Ray about a week earlier. (A scribbled note from Ray to Caterina Galli of 30 March – ‘My Dear Galli34 I am in open distress I beg you come immediately to me’ – possibly refers to the contact.) Ray gave the Gallis her letter to Hackman asking to be left alone, and they read it to Hackman on the evening of 5 April. Galli assured Sandwich that there had been no assignation or meeting between Ray and Hackman at his house, and that, though he had seen Hackman walking in St James’s Park, he had avoided him.

The same day Sandwich sent a message via Walsingham to Hackman telling the murderer of his forgiveness, though the press reported that the Earl also claimed that Hackman ‘has disturbed his peace of mind for ever35’. Hackman, on his part, told Walsingham ‘upon his word36 as a dying man, that he has never spoken to Miss Ray since the beginning of the year 1776, at which time he had proposed marriage and was rejected’. The murderer was pleased to be assured that his victim had no other special admirer: ‘poor Miss Ray was innocent. He lays the whole on Galli’ – and expressed his determination to die. ‘He is desirous to dye by the hand of the law … he wishes not to live himself, he told me today,’ wrote Walsingham to Sandwich, ‘he hoped to suffer as soon as possible37.’

The agreement between Sandwich and Hackman that Martha Ray was innocent of any wrongdoing placed Caterina Galli in a difficult position. A day after the murder a story was already circulating that Hackman’s decision to kill Ray, and not merely to end his own life, was explained by a stratagem of Galli’s: to get Hackman to leave Ray alone, she had told Hackman that Ray had tired of him and had a new secret lover. Seeing Ray with male companions at the play, he had been driven into a frenzy of jealousy.

The papers reported that Sandwich offered to secure a pardon for Hackman if he were convicted. (As a member of the cabinet, which determined such matters, Sandwich would certainly have been able to exert great influence on Hackman’s behalf, and he clearly did not relish the role of sitting in judgment on a person’s life. Years earlier, commenting on this cabinet function, he had written to a friend, ‘you can’t think how it distresses me to be put to a momentary decision where a man’s life is concerned38’.) But as early as two days after the murder Hackman seems to have rejected the Earl’s aid, an act that was rightly interpreted as a determination on his part to die. For, as Fielding explained in a letter to Sandwich on 10 April, Hackman’s conviction seemed inevitable:

I am clearly of opinion39 that the evidence against Hackman is full and compleat to the last degree and that he can make no defense that would not aggravate his guilt and tend to his conviction; but will not neglect any hint your Lordship gives. As to Insanity it cannot be offered as an excuse as it appeared and can be proved that he was rational and sensible of his Wickedness at 4 in the morning, when I examined him, and has been so ever since.

At first Hackman said that he would plead guilty as charged of Ray’s murder. But in the days after the crime, his sister, his brother-in-law, Booth, and the lawyer who was acting on his behalf, Manasseh Dawes, persuaded him ‘to avail himself of the plausible plea of temporary insanity40’. The trial came on at 9.30 on the morning of 16 April. Hackman was defended by Davenport and Silvester, the prosecution conducted by Henry Howarth and Sir John Fielding. The courtroom was packed with fashionable society, the same sort of people who had witnessed the murder the week before. James Boswell, who had visited Hackman’s brother-in-law on a number of occasions and seen Hackman himself in prison, was sitting at the table of defending counsel. John Wilkes, the radical libertine who was one of Sandwich’s most bitter political enemies, was also present, as were a number of famous aristocratic beauties. (Boswell was shocked when Wilkes passed him a note during the trial that said, ‘I always know where the greatest beauty in any place is when Mr Boswell is there, for he contrives to be near her, but does not admire the first grace more than Mr Wilkes does41.’) Frederick Booth, who had worked so hard to help his brother-in-law, felt unable to watch the proceedings and awaited the verdict outside the court.