ON an evening in April, 1779, the play, “Love in a Village” was being performed at Covent Garden Theatre before a large audience. In the front row of the boxes sat two ladies, one of them young and handsome, the other not so young and not so beautiful—a dark-faced, dark-eyed woman whom no one could mistake for any nationality except Italian. Three gentlemen who sat behind them were plainly of their party—elegant gentlemen of fashion, one of them an Irish peer. Every person of quality in the theatre and a good many others without such a claim to distinction, were aware of the fact that the most attractive member of the group was Miss Reay, a lady whose name had been for several years closely associated—very closely indeed—with that of Lord Sandwich, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and one of the most unpopular men in England. She had driven to the theatre in his lordship's carriage, and two of the gentlemen with whom she conversed freely in the box were high officials of the department over which his lordship presided.
Almost from the moment of her arrival, Miss Reay and her friends were watched eagerly by a hollow-eyed, morose gentleman in black. He looked as if he had not slept for many nights; and no one observing him could have failed to perceive that he had come to the theatre not for the sake of the play which was being performed, but to watch the lady. He kept his fierce eyes fixed upon her, and he frowned every time that she turned to make a remark to one of her friends; his eyes blazed every time that one of her friends smiled over her shoulder, and his hands clenched if she smiled in return. Several times it seemed as if he found it impossible to remain in his place in the upper side box, where his seat was, for he started up and hurried out to the great lobby, walking to and fro in great agitation. More than once he strode away from the lobby into the Bedford Coffee House just outside the theatre, and there partook of brandy and water, returning after brief intervals to stare at Miss Reay and her companions in the front row of the boxes.
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At the conclusion of the play, he went hastily into the vestibule, standing to one side, not far from the exit from the boxes; but if he intended to be close to Miss Reay while she walked to the main exit, his object was defeated by reason of the crush of people congregating in the vestibule, the people of quality waiting for their carriages to be announced, the others waiting for the satisfaction of being in such close proximity to people of quality.
Among the crowd there was a lady who had recently become the wife of a curious gentleman named Lewis, who some years later wrote a grisly book entitled The Monk, bringing him such great fame as cancelled for posterity the names of Matthew Gregory, given to him by his parents, and caused him to be identified by the name of his book only. This lady made a remark to her neighbour in respect of a lovely rose which Miss Reay was wearing when she left the box exit and stood in the vestibule—a beautiful rose early in the month of April might have excited remark in those days; at any rate, Mrs. Lewis has left the record that at the very moment of her speaking, the rose fell to the floor, and Miss Reay appeared to be profoundly affected by this trifling incident, and said in a faltering voice, “I trust that I am not to consider this as an evil omen!” So Mrs. Lewis stated.
A few moments later Lord Sandwich's carriage was announced, and Miss Reay and her companion made a move in the direction of the door. The gentlemen of the party seem to have left earlier, for on the ladies being impeded by the crush in the vestibule, a stranger, named Mr. Macnamara, of Lincoln's Inn, proffered his services to help them to get to the carriage. Miss Reay thanked him, took his arm, and the crowd opened for them in some measure. It quickly opened wider under a more acute persuasion a few seconds later, when the morose gentleman in black pushed his way among the people until he was within a few feet of the lady and her escort. Only for a second did he pause—certainly he spoke no word to Miss Reay or any one else—before he pulled a pistol from his pocket and fired almost point-blank at her before any one could knock up his hand. Immediately afterwards he turned a second pistol against his own forehead and pulled the trigger, and fell to the ground.
The scene that followed can easily be imagined. Every woman present shrieked, except Miss Reay, who was supported by Mr. Macnamara. The ghastly effects of the bullet were apparent not only upon the forehead of the lady where it lodged, but upon the bespattered garments of every one about the door, and upon the columns of the hall. Above the shrieks of the terror-stricken people were heard the yells of the murderer, who lay on the ground, hammering at his head with the butt end of his weapon, and crying, “Kill me! Kill me!”
A Mr. Mahon, of Russell Street, who was said to be an apothecary, was the first to lay a hand upon the wretched man. He wrested the pistol from his grasp and prevented him from doing further mischief to himself. He was quickly handed over to the police, and, with his unfortunate victim, was removed to the Shakespeare Tavern, a surgeon named Bond being in prompt attendance. It did not take long to find that Miss Reay had never breathed after the shot had been fired at her; the bullet had smashed the skull and passed through the brain. The man remained for some time unconscious, but even before he recovered he was identified as James Hackman, a gentleman who had been an officer in the army, and on retiring had taken Orders, being admitted a priest of the Church of England scarcely a month before his crime. There were rumours respecting his infatuation for Miss Reay, and in a surprisingly short space of time, owing most likely to the exertions of Signora Galli, the Italian whom Lord Sandwich had hired to be her companion, the greater part of the romantic story of the wretched man's life, as far as it related to Miss Reay, was revealed.
It formed a nine days' wonder during the spring of the same year (1779). The grief displayed by Lord Sandwich on being made acquainted with the circumstances of the murder was freely commented on, and the sympathy which was felt for him may have diminished in some measure from his unpopularity. The story told by Croker of the reception of the news by Lord Sandwich is certainly not deficient in detail. “He stood as it were petrified,” we are told, “till suddenly, seizing a candle, he ran upstairs and threw himself on the bed, and in agony exclaimed, 'Leave me for a while to myself, I could have borne anything but this!' The attendants remained for a considerable time at the top of the staircase, till his lordship rang the bell and ordered that they should all go to bed.”
Before his lordship left the scene of his grief in the morning Sir John Fielding, the Bow Street magistrate, had arrived at the Shakespeare Tavern from his house at Brompton, and, after a brief inquiry, ordered Hackman to be taken to Tothill Fields Prison. In due course he was committed to Newgate, and on April 16th his trial took place before Blackstone, the Recorder. The facts of the tragedy were deposed to by several witnesses, and the cause of the lady's death was certified by Mr. Bond, the surgeon. The prisoner was then called on for his defence. He made a brief speech, explaining that he would have pleaded guilty at once had he not felt that doing so “would give an indication of contemning death, not suitable to my present condition, and would in some measure make me accessory to a second peril of my life. And I likewise thought,” he added, “that the justice of my country ought to be satisfied by suffering my offence to be proved, and the fact to be established by evidence.”
This curious affectation of a finer perception of the balance of justice than is possessed by most men was quite characteristic of this man, as was also his subsequent expression of his willingness to submit to the sentence of the court. His counsel endeavoured to show that he had been insane from the moment of his purchasing his pistols until he had committed the deed for which he was being tried—he did not say anything about “a wave of insanity,” however, though that picturesque phrase would have aptly described the nature of his plea. He argued that a letter which was found in the prisoner's pocket, and in which suicide only was threatened, should be accepted as proof that he had no intention of killing Miss Reay when he went to the theatre.
The Recorder, of course, made short work of such a plea. He explained to the jury that “for a plea of insanity to be successful it must be shown not merely that it was a matter of fits and starts, but that it was a definite thing—a total loss of reason and incapability of reason.” Referring to the letter, he said that it seemed to him to argue a coolness and premeditation incompatible with such insanity as he described.
The result was, as might have been anticipated, the jury, without leaving the box, found Hackman guilty, and he was sentenced to be hanged.
Mr. Boswell, who was nearly as fond of hearing death-sentences pronounced as he was of seeing them carried out, was present in the court during the trial, and to him Mr. Booth, the brother-in-law of the prisoner, applied—he himself had been too greatly agitated to be able to remain in the court—for information as to how Hackman had deported himself, and Boswell was able to assure him that he had behaved “as well, sir, as you or any of his friends could wish; with decency, propriety, and in such a manner as to interest every one present. He might have pleaded that he shot Miss Reay by accident, but he fairly told the truth that in a moment of frenzy he did intend it.”
While he was in the condemned cell at Newgate he received a message from Lord Sandwich to the effect that if he wished for his life, he (Lord Sandwich) had influence with the King, and might succeed in obtaining a commutation of his sentence. Hackman replied that he had no wish to live, but he implored his lordship to give him such assurance that those whom Miss Reay had left behind her would be carefully looked after, as would, on meeting her in another world, enable him to make this pleasing communication to her.
He spent the few days that remained to him in writing fervid letters to his friends and in penning moralisings, in a style which was just the smallest degree more pronounced than that which was fashionable at his period—the style of the sentimental hero of Richardson and his inferior followers.
His execution at Tyburn attracted the most enormous crowds ever seen upon such an occasion. The carriage in which the wretched man was conveyed to the gibbet could only proceed at a walking pace; but still, the vehicle which followed it, containing the Earl of Carlisle and James Boswell, arrived in good time for the final scene of this singular tragedy, which for weeks, as the Countess of Ossory wrote to George Selwyn, was the sole topic of conversation.
And, as a matter of course, Horace Walpole had something to communicate to one of his carefully-selected correspondents. Oddly enough it was to a parson he wrote to express the opinion that he was still uncertain “whether our clergy are growing Mahometans or not”; adding sagely, “they certainly are not what they profess themselves; but as you and I should not agree, perhaps, in assigning the same defects to them, I will not enter on a subject which I have promised you to drop, all I allude to now is the shocking murder of Miss Reay by a divine. In my own opinion we are growing more fit for Bedlam than for Mahomet's paradise. The poor criminal, I am persuaded, is mad, and the misfortune is the law does not know how to define the shades of madness; and thus there are twenty out-pensioners of Bedlam for one that is confined.”
Most persons will come to the conclusion that the judge who tried Hackman made a most successful attempt to expound to the jury exactly where the law drew a line in differentiating between the man who should be sent to Bedlam and the man who should be sent to Tyburn, and will agree with the justice of the law that condemned to the gallows this divine of three weeks' standing for committing an atrocious crime, even though the chances are that Hackman spoke the truth when he affirmed that he had brought his pistols down to the theatre with no more felonious intent than to blow out his own brains in the presence of the lady and to fall dead at her feet. At the same time one is not precluded from agreeing with Walpole's opinion that the people of his period were growing more fit for Bedlam than for Eblis.
The truth is that an extraordinary wave of what was called “sensibility” was passing over England at that time. It was a wave of sentimentality—that maudlin sentimentality which was the exquisite characteristic of the hero and heroine of almost every novel that attained to any degree of success. To people who have formed their ideas of the latter half of the eighteenth century from studying Boswell's Life of Johnson, every page of which shows a healthy common sense; or from the plates of Hogarth—robust even to a point of vulgarity—it would seem incredible that there should exist in England at practically the same time a cult of the maudlin and the lachrymose. Such a cult had, however, obtained so great a hold on a large section of society that all the satire of Smollett, Sterne, and Goldsmith, was unable to ridicule it out of existence.
And the worst of the matter was that the types of these weeping sentimentalists were not unreal. They began by being unreal, but in the course of a short time they became real, the fact being that people in all directions began to frame their conduct and their conversation upon these flaccid creatures of the unhealthy fancy of third-rate novelists and fourth-rate poetasters. More than once, it may be remarked, even in our own time “movements” have had their origin in the fancy of a painter—in one case of a subtle caricaturist. An artist possessed of a distorted sense of what is beautiful in woman has been able to set a certain fashion in the unreal, until people were well-nigh persuaded that it was the painter who had taken the figures in his pictures from the persons who had simply sought a cheap notoriety by adopting the pose and the dress of the scraggy posturantes for whose anatomy he was responsible.
So it was that, when certain novel-writers in the eighteenth century, having no experience of the life which they attempted to depict, brought forth creatures out of their own unhealthy imaginations, and placed them before their readers as types of heroes and heroines, the public never failed to include quite a number of readers who were ready to live up to all those essentials that constituted the personages of the fiction.
And not alone over England had the sighs of a perpetually sighing hero and heroine sent a lachrymose flood; France and Germany, if not actually inundated, were at least rendered humid by its influence. The Sorrows of Werther was only one of the many books which helped on the cult of the sentimental, and it was as widely read in England as in Germany. Gessner's Death of Abel had an enormous vogue in its English translation. The boarding-school version of the tale of Abelard and Heloise was also much wept over both in France and Germany; and the true story of James Hackman and Martha Reay, as recorded by the correspondence of the pair, published shortly after the last scene in the tragedy had been enacted, and reissued with connecting notes some twelve years ago, might pass only as a somewhat crude attempt to surpass these masterpieces of fancy-woven woes. James and Martha might have been as happy as thousands of other Jameses and Marthas have been, but they chose to believe that the Fates were bothering themselves with this particular case of James and Martha—they chose to feel that they were doomed to a life of sorrowful love—at any rate, this was Martha's notion—and they kept on exchanging emotional sentiments until James's poor head gave way, and he sought to end up their romance in accordance with the mode of the best models, stretching himself a pallid corpse at the feet of his Martha; but then it was that Fate put out a meddlesome finger, and so caused the scene of the last chapter to take place at Tyburn.
The romance of Mr. Hackman and Miss Reay would never have taken place, if Lord Sandwich had been as exemplary a husband as George III or Dr. Johnson or Edmund Burke—the only exemplary husbands of the eighteenth century that one can recall at a moment's notice. Unhappily his lordship was one of the many examples of the unexemplary husband of that period. If the Earl of Chesterfield advanced the ill-treatment of a wife to one of the fine arts, it may be said that the Earl of Sandwich made it one of the coarse. He was brutal in his treatment of the Countess, and never more so than when he purchased the pretty child that Miss Reay must have been at the age of thirteen, and had her educated to suit his tastes. He went about the transaction with the same deliberation as a gourmand might display in ordering his dinner. He was extremely fond of music, so he had the child's education in this direction carefully attended to. His place at Hinchinbrook had been the scene of the performance of several oratorios, his lordship taking his place in the orchestra at the kettledrums; and he hoped that by the time he should have his purchase sent home, her voice would be equal to the demands put upon it by the most exacting of the sacred soprano music of Handel or Gluck.
As it turned out he was not disappointed. Martha Reay, when she went to live at Hinchinbrook at the age of eighteen, showed herself to be a most accomplished young lady, as she certainly was a very charming one. She was found to possess a lovely voice, and was quite fitted to take her place, not merely in his lordship's music-room, but also in his drawing-room to which he advanced her. To say that she was treated as one of his lordship's family would be to convey a wrong impression, considering how he treated the principal member of his family, but certainly he introduced her to his guests, and she took her place at his table at dinner parties. He even put her next to the wife of a bishop upon one occasion, feeling sure that she would captivate that lady, and as it turned out, his anticipations were fully realised; only the bishop's lady, on making inquiries later on, protested that she was scandalised by being placed in such a position as permitted of her yielding to the fascinations of a young person occupying a somewhat equivocal position in the household.
It was when she was at Hinchinbrook, in October, 1775, that Miss Reay met the man who was to play so important a part in her life—and death. Cradock, the “country gentleman,” tells in his Memoirs the story of the first meeting of the two. Lord Sandwich was anxious that a friend of his own should be elected to a professorship at Cambridge, and Cradock, having a vote, was invited to use it on behalf of his lordship's candidate, and to stay for a night at Hinchinbrook on his way back to London. He travelled in Lord Sandwich's coach, and when in the act of driving through the gateway at Hinchinbrook, it overtook a certain Major Reynolds and another officer who was stationed on recruiting duty in the neighbourhood. Lord Sandwich, being acquainted with Reynolds, dismounted and invited him and his friend to a family dinner at his lordship's place that evening. Major Reynolds expressed his appreciation of this act of courtesy, and introduced his friend as Captain Hackman. The party was a simple aff............