Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the Eighteenth Century

Above all, reports of Sandwich’s suffering at the news of Ray’s death made the man who was regularly depicted in the opposition press as a political monster appear altogether more vulnerable and human. He was ‘inconsolable’…‘he wrung his hands and cried, exclaiming – “I could have borne anything but this; but this unmans me102”.’ The General Advertiser suggested that Sandwich was so stricken that his servants feared that he might kill himself, while the Gazetteer depicted his situation as ‘deplorable’ and portrayed him as withdrawn and wounded, seeing ‘no one but his dearest friends103’. The St James’s Chronicle, no special admirer of Sandwich as a politician, summarized the prevailing sentiment:

From [Ray’s] having lived so long with his Lordship, there is no Doubt but his feelings on this Occasion must be such as the most lively Grief can inspire. Indeed, we are told, that his Lordship’s Sensations expressed the greatest Agonies; and that whatever may be his sentiments on political Matters, in this affair he has shown a Tenderness which does the highest Credit to his Heart, and the warmth of his Friendship104.

Thus all three of the main parties were victims, united in their common suffering. Ray and Hackman excited the most sympathy, because they both lost their lives, but even Sandwich was given his share. The press portrayed them all as suffering from forces beyond their control and for which they bore little or no responsibility. Hackman was driven to his crime by feelings that overpowered him; Ray was unable to escape his unwanted attentions; and Sandwich was suddenly and unexpectedly deprived of the woman he loved deeply. So the early newspaper reporting, strongly informed by the friends of Sandwich and Hackman, was remarkably free from acrimony and blame; it invited readers to sympathize with the victims, to understand their plight and, more generally, to interpret the sad events as a consequence of natural desires and feelings, ‘the common passions of Humanity105’. As PHILANTHROPIST put it in the St James’s Chronicle, ‘let us endeavor therefore to trace this rash and desperate Action, from some cause in human Nature equal to the Phaenomenon106’.

Though the majority of newspaper reports encouraged readers’ sympathy, a few were overtly censorious. Several news commentators (as well as writers of unpublished, anonymous letters to Sandwich) interpreted Ray’s death as the result of the Earl’s profligate and immoral life, and urged him to see the error of his ways and to reform. In the days just before Hackman’s trial the London Evening Post101 – an old enemy of Sandwich’s – published a number of items attacking the Earl. These included a long letter upbraiding the public for extending too much sympathy to Ray, Hackman and Sandwich and blaming the murder on the moral failings of all three of them. ‘The public’, it began, ‘at present give way to a strange kind of sympathy, whilst they shed tears of condolence with one of the vilest of men, to alleviate his distresses for the loss of his mistress107.’ What about the victims of the American war, it asked its readers, people who had suffered because of the benighted political policies of Sandwich and his colleagues? Should we not be more concerned about ‘the many thousand widows and orphans, who rend the continent of America with piercing lamentations for the loss of their husbands and fathers who were murdered in cold blood, or slaughtered in the field by the emissaries of despotism108’? After damning Sandwich as a ‘man who, by his voice and counsel, had drenched whole provinces with murdered blood109’, the author turned to Martha Ray. Unfortunate as she was, ‘we should not forget what she was; we should not lament her as a spotless, or amiable character, but as a deluded woman cut off in the midst of her days, without any previous warning110’. Her fate should not obscure the moral lesson of her life: ‘We should rather point out the impropriety and wickedness of such connections as she formed, which, through a variety of complicated circumstances, laid the foundation of her untimely death, and which frequently, almost always, in one way or another, terminate fatally.’ ‘Had Miss R – been virtuous’, the writer concluded, ‘she had not fallen as she did111.’ Similarly, Hackman’s fate was explained by his moral failings: ‘had the wretched assassin cultivated that delicacy of sentiment which abhors impurity, and suffered no criminal passions to influence his conduct, he would never have found himself within the walls of Newgate, and might have attained an honourable old age, and gone down to the grave in peace112’.

But, on the whole, it was unusual for the three protagonists to be portrayed as so morally reprobate. Hackman was repeatedly characterized as ‘unfortunate113’ and as having ‘delicacy of sentiment114’, a quality he shared with Ray; even Sandwich was complimented for his tenderness. The press reporting of the case was designed to elicit sympathy not censoriousness. No doubt, as I have explained, this was partly because Sandwich’s and Hackman’s friends worked hard to shape the newspapers’ response to the case. But it is worth asking why this was possible, and why there was so little attempt to offer an alternative version of the events of the spring of 1779. Why, to put it in modern terms, was Sandwich and Hackman’s spin on the murder and its aftermath so successful?

The love triangle of Ray, Hackman and Sandwich was shaped as a sentimental story, designed to reveal the feelings of the protagonists and to excite the feelings of readers. Reporting and commentary were less concerned with what had happened, though trying to establish the facts of the case was important, than about a mystery of the human heart, an effort to understand the motives and feelings of those involved. Did Ray really love Hackman? Was Hackman justified in feeling that Ray had led him on with false promises, or was he suffering from a sort of delusion, what contemporaries called ‘love’s madness’? Similarly, the aftermath of the crime was described indirectly through the feelings of Lord Sandwich, of Hackman and, perhaps most prominently, of the public. The responses to the bloody murder, affecting trial and the murderer’s execution were covered as extensively as the crime itself. The newspapers pulled readers into a wide circle of sympathy. The press largely avoided the blood-and-gore variety of crime reporting, which had hitherto been common. Its accounts were neither sensational nor melodramatic. Readers were made to understand events through the emotive responses of participants by a form of indirect narration. They were invited to share in the distresses of the victims, to express their sympathy, to establish an emotional closeness rather than a moral distance.

This sort of complicity has to be understood in the light of prevailing ideas about human sympathy and sensibility. Eighteenth-century human sciences, which embraced physiology, psychology, sociability and morality, had created a new way of looking at, depicting and judging human conduct which was less concerned with its strict conformity to a universal moral law than with its social and psychological complexity. We cannot understand the story of Hackman and Ray unless we take some time to explore the values and ways of seeing that informed how contemporaries understood those events.

Eighteenth-century sentimentalism, the understanding that people were first and foremost creatures of feeling, considered sympathy as the key human quality. As the philosopher David Hume put it, ‘No quality of human nature is more remarkable, both in itself and its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own115.’ Sympathy was the means by which sentiments were communicated; it was the psychological and emotive transaction that placed them at the heart of social life. Sensibility, in turn, was the ability to feel and exert sympathy; it was, according to The Monthly Magazine, ‘that peculiar structure, or habitude of mind, which disposes a man to be easily moved, and powerfully affected, by surrounding objects and passing events116’.

But sensibility, though seen as a psychological phenomenon, was also viewed as an ethical response. Sentimental feeling, the exercise of sympathy, was a form of moral reflection, for which some people had a greater capacity than others. To be able to express sympathy was to be a better moral being. The key physical sign of sensibility – a spontaneous tearfulness – also became a sign of humanity. As Man: a Paper for Ennobling the Species (1755) commented: ‘it may be117 questioned whether those are properly men, who never wept upon any occasion … What can be more nobly human than to have a tender sentimental feeling of our own and others’ misfortunes?’

The periodical essayists, critics, doctors and natural philosophers who examined sensibility believed it was a general feature of man, and one that was especially encouraged by the conditions of modern life. As the physician Thomas Trotter put it, ‘The nervous system118, that organ of sensation, amidst the untutored and illiterate inhabitants of a forest, could receive none of those fine impressions, which, however they may polish the mind and enlarge its capacities, never fail to induce delicacy of feeling, that disposes alike to more acute pain, as to more exquisite pleasure.’ Acute sensibility was the result of modern commerce, urban life and the manners they promoted – Montesquieu’s doux commerce – which created new, peaceful forms of mutual dependence among strangers, led to the better treatment of and greater regard for women, and encouraged the arts of politeness and refinement. Commercial society, the argument went, encouraged greater sympathy and sensibility; this distinguished modern societies from both the ancients and the primitives. As Sandwich’s friend and memorialist Joseph Cradock put it, ‘How much soever119 the ancients might abound in elegance of expression – their works are thinly spread with sentiment.’

Though the ability to sympathize with others was a sign of modern refinement and virtue, it was also, as many verses and essays on sensibility commented, a source of distress, a sign of moral superiority but also of weakness. As a contributor to the Lady’s Magazine in 1775 exclaimed: ‘Sensibility120 – thou source of human woes – thou aggrandiser of evils! – Had I not been possessed of thee – how calmly might my days have passed! – Yet would I not part with thee for worlds. We will abide together – both pleased and pained with each other. Thou shalt ever have a place in my heart – be the sovereign of my affections, and the friend of my virtue.’

Women, young people of both sexes, and those connected to the fine arts and literature were all believed to be especially susceptible to sensibility, prone to virtuous feeling and to excessive sentiment that made them melancholic (in the case of men) or hysteric (in the case of women). Expressions of sympathy, though praised as the great virtue of modern life, indeed as its defining social characteristic, could also be pathological and crippling.

Critics quickly recognized that sentimentalism supposed a different sort of writing and storytelling, one that in the words of the cleric and scholar Hugh Blair ‘derives its efficacy not so much from what men are taught to know, as from what they are brought to feel121’. The sympathetic moral response that sentimental literature evoked in the reader depended on particularity, a sense of intimacy that engaged the reader rather than on moral lessons or grand abstractions that appealed only to their intellect. The interior feeling of characters had to be explored and not just their external actions. Memoirs, biographies, collections of letters and verses, histories and, above all, novels portrayed the quotidian, ordinary, private and mundane because it was more likely to excite the reader’s sympathy, being close to their own experience. In Blair’s words, ‘It is from private life, from familiar, domestic, and seemingly trivial occurrences, that we most often receive light into the real character122.’

Sentimentalism was best staged in the intimate theatre of the home and family, and its most characteristic plots concerned the joys and misfortunes of everyday life – romantic and conjugal love, amatory disappointment, misfortunes brought on by intemperance and improvidence, the pleasures of familial companionship in a circle of virtue. A sentimental story was, in the words of the novelist William Guthrie, ‘an Epic in lower Life123’, a story, in other words, exactly like that of Sandwich, Ray and Hackman.

Sentimental writing spread with astonishing swiftness in the second half of the eighteenth century. Newspaper reporting, pamphlets advocating reform and improvement such as Jonas Hanway’s A Sentimental History of Chimney-sweepers (1785); biographies and memoirs like Oliver Goldsmith’s Life of Richard {Beau} Nash (1762) or Joseph Boruwlaski’s Memoirs of the Celebrated Dwarf (1788) – ‘I not only mean to describe my size and its proportions, I would likewise follow the unfolding of my sentiments, the affections of my soul124’; travel literature such as John Hawksworth’s account of Captain James Cook’s voyage; histories such as those of David Hume; and sermons, of which the most popular were those of Hugh Blair; literary forgeries, advice literature, plays, periodical essays, as well as a raft of sentimental novels and verses – all these used the techniques of literary sentimentalism to capture the hearts of their readers.

The cult of sensibility reached a peak in the 1770s, around the time of Ray’s murder. It was not therefore very difficult to present the tragedy of Hackman and Ray as a sentimental story and to expect that the terrible tale would provoke the sympathy of those who read about it. Sentimental literature, especially the sentimental novel, was filled with stories of virtue in distress, a description that was easily applied to all three figures in this love triangle. Hackman after all was a victim of his amatory passion, Ray was a fallen woman who had achieved some respectability only to be murdered, and Sandwich was a former rake whose domestic felicity had been shattered by Hackman’s bullet. The lovelorn youth, the fallen woman who nevertheless retained some virtue, and the reformed rake were all familiar figures in the many sentimental novels that were commissioned, published, sold and loaned by publishers like the Noble brothers, who ran ‘novel manufacturies’ and circulating libraries to distribute this extremely popular form of fiction.

A sentimental account of the affair suited Sandwich and Hackman’s followers because it depicted all three as blameless. But it fell on fertile soil because the case seemed such an obvious one of life imitating art. Readers were likely to respond as if the story was a sentimental fiction, because to do so was an obvious way to make sense of the events surrounding the crime. It gave Sandwich, Hackman’s friends and the public what they all wanted – closure, a way of making the case understandable by placing it in a familiar light. We all know the pleasures of recognizing the familiar – ‘ah! It’s one of that sort of story’. We can wrap it up and put it away and, in doing so, perhaps hide the parts of the story that are troubling or disturbing, or suppress other ways of telling it. In the spring of 1779 the protagonists’ desire to end speculation and the public’s desire for assurance were at one, but it proved rather more difficult than might at first have been supposed to keep the story under wraps.

CHAPTER 3 The Killer as Victim: James Hackman

IN THE SPRING OF 1779 Dr Johnson and his close friend Hester Thrale, whose own intimacy has long been a source of speculation, discussed relations between the sexes. Mrs Thrale was all for woman-power: ‘It seems to me that no Man can live his Life thro’, without being at some period of it under the Dominion of some Woman – Wife Mistress or Friend125.’ Nevertheless she found it hard to fathom Hackman’s passion for Ray. It was, she said, ‘the strangest thing that has appeared these hundred years’. Boswell had told her that his last words on the scaffold were ‘Dear Dear Miss Ray’. ‘Here was Passion for a Woman neither young nor handsome; whose eldest son was eighteen [sic] years old & a sea officer when she was shot by her Lover, & a woman not eminent as I can find for Allurements in the Eyes of any Man breathing but himself, & Lord Sandwich, who ’tis said had long been weary of her, though he knew not how to get free.’ But Dr Johnson took a very different view. ‘A woman’, he said, ‘has such power between the Ages of twenty five and forty five, that She may tye a Man to a post and whip him if she will.’

While Mrs Thrale pondered the powers of middle-aged women and Johnson surrendered to his masochistic fantasy, all over London people of fashion gossiped about the murder and its motive. In the twelve days between the killing of Martha Ray and the execution of James Hackman, the crime was on everyone’s lips. Sandwich’s colleagues from the Admiralty chatted at court with Lord Hertford about the tragedy. Ladies and gentlemen exchanged notes and items of news. ‘For the last week’, Horace Walpole wrote to his friend in Florence, Sir Horace Mann, ‘all our conversation has been engrossed by a shocking murder126.’ Lady Ossory concurred, writing to George Selwyn, ‘I found Miss Ray, or at least her unfortunate admirer, occupied everybody127.’ But if Johnson and Thrale’s discussion was one of many that took place in the few weeks after Martha Ray’s murder, it had a rather unusual feature: it was about Martha Ray, and not about her murderer. Lady Ossory’s mid-sentence switch from the victim to her ‘unfortunate admirer’ perfectly captured the public’s changing preoccupations. Ray was dead, Sandwich had retired from the public eye first to a villa at Hampton and, ‘when every thing there brought her to his remembrance’, to a house in Blackheath. This left Hackman as the focus of public attention: the extensive newspaper reports of his interrogation by Sir John Fielding, his trial at the Old Bailey, and his execution on 19 April less than two weeks after the killing made him, as one news report put it, ‘the topic of conversation128’.

Naturally enough, much of this gossip took the form of speculation about Hackman’s motives for the crime. Many, like Mrs Thrale, were puzzled about the strange affair. As Horace Walpole commented to a friend, ‘Now, upon the whole … is not the story full as strange as ever it was? Miss Wray [sic] has six children, the eldest son is fifteen, and she was at least three times as much. To bear a hopeless passion for five years, and then murder one’s mistress – I don’t understand it129.’

This curiosity about the love of a young man for an older kept woman manifested itself in a preoccupation with Hackman’s conduct after the murder. It was as if the means of understanding him and his bloody crime lay not in a forensic investigation (which, as we have seen, Sandwich tried to stifle), but in evidence offered in the person of Hackman himself. The key to the crime lay in Hackman’s character. What he said was less important – though this mattered – than his entire bodily comportment. True feeling, in any sentimental story, was often beyond words. It could be seen in involuntary (and therefore authentic) physical expression: shudders, blushes and blanching, and, above all, spontaneous tears. Such bodily signs were clues to character and evidence of refinement and sensibility. As Samuel Richardson put it, ‘the man is to be honour’d who can weep for the distresses of others130’. Tears told observers about the person who wept but they also excited powerful sympathetic feelings in the viewer. Indeed, the response that a character’s palpitations and weeping provoked was itself an indication of what the responder was like. Thus after the murder both press coverage and private correspondence were preoccupied with Hackman’s public conduct, and with the powerful feelings aroused among those who witnessed his trial and execution.

All the newspapers reported that when Hackman was questioned by Sir John Fielding the day after Ray’s shooting, he found it hard to answer the questions. ‘From the agonizing pangs which entirely discomposed, and externally convulsed him,’ reported the London Chronicle, ‘it was sometime before the magistrate could proceed131.’ Onlookers were moved by his distraught behaviour, the papers noted: ‘His manifest132 agitation, contrition, and poignant grief, too sensibly affected all present, to wish to add to such heart-felt misery by judicial interrogations during such keen distress of mind.’ An unexpected delay in proceedings made him worse, and it took him a while to recover his composure and display ‘the utmost steadiness’. During Fielding’s questioning Hackman ‘wept very much and was entirely convulsed each time the name of the deceased was mentioned. He did not palliate his offence, and said he eagerly wished to die.’ The London Evening Post recorded that when Fielding presented him with evidence of the shooting, ‘he sank into a grief which is impossible for the power of words to paint133’. But by the end of the proceedings, he had become ‘quite composed, and at present appears perfectly resigned to meet his approaching fate with a becoming fortitude134’. ‘His sighs and tears’, the paper concluded, ‘added to his genteel appearance, made most people give way to the finest feelings of human nature135.’

The General Advertiser of 13 April drew a general moral lesson from this piece of sentimental theatre: ‘The very humane behaviour of Sir John Fielding on a late melancholy occasion, and the tender constructions of a pitying audience on the conduct of the unhappy subject, does infinite honour to the laws of our country, and displays the humanity of our nature in the most beautiful and lively colours.’ People may have been shocked by the crime, ‘but who will say that the author of the shocking tragedy of Wednesday last is not amply punished? Who can picture to himself the misery that must penetrate and fill the deepest recesses of his mind, who has suffered himself to commit the horrid crime of murder, through the dire excess of a passion the most admirable that can fill the heart, while within the pale of reason?136’ As another press item concluded, ‘the tear of137 compassion should not be withheld from him in the moment that Justice demands an exemplary expiation of the deed’.

A similarly powerful sympathetic response dominates the press accounts of Hackman’s trial, which contrast strongly with the formal record of the court proceedings which was remarkably prosaic. Most of the proceedings were taken up with establishing the facts of the case, calling successive witnesses to satisfy the law by confirming what everyone already knew. Hackman’s counsel did not dispute the facts, and asked witnesses very few questions. What would have been of most interest to modern legal scholars – Davenport’s speech at the end of the trial arguing that Hackman was innocent on the grounds of temporary insanity, or ‘irresistible impulse’ – was not even recorded by the shorthand writer. Given that one of the perquisites of the recorder’s job included the profits from the publication and sale of the trial’s transcript, it would seem that there was very little interest in the legal deliberations of the trial.

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 touching138’. The news reports agreed. ‘The prisoner by139 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 pity140.’ ‘However, we may141 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’