In the small hours of the morning, an armed man stood at the bedside of Grizel Murray. Arthur Gray held a naked sword and a pistol. He declared that he meant to ravish her, and would kill her should she resist. She demanded what business brought him to her chamber; he answered that the disparity of fortune between them would forever bar him from obtaining his desire save by force. Gray laid the sword upon the bolster and began to draw down the bedclothes. Mrs. Murray entreated him to pause that she might speak further with him. He refused: the entire household slept, he said, and such an occasion would not present itself again. She thrust him against the wall, wrested the pistol from his grasp, and with her other hand pulled the bell. She then pursued him to the threshold, crying out that murder was being done.
The scene unfolded within the mansion of George Baillie, wherein Mrs. Murray resided with her husband Alexander and her kin. Gray served Lord Binning. The contemporary narrative explains neither how Gray gained access to the house nor the prior relations between himself and Mrs. Murray. It records, however, the words she attributed to him: that he had long harboured a violent passion, yet had abandoned all hope of a consensual suit by reason of their unequal estates. To her mind, the menace was neither a simple attempt at theft nor a mere nocturnal trespass; Gray had framed a design and supported it with two weapons.
At the bar, the prosecutor expounded the rule of law upon which the charge of burglary rested: to enter a dwelling-house by night with the felonious intent to commit a crime therein sufficed, even were that crime never consummated. The act indicted was a forcible entry into Baillie’s house, with the intent to ravish Mrs. Murray. The absence of a completed assault did not, therefore, defeat the indictment. It fell to the jury to pronounce upon the entry and upon the design revealed by Gray’s words and actions.
The date itself cannot be determined with equal certainty. The title of the proceedings bears the date of December 1721; the indictment fixes the intrusion upon the 1st of October, whilst the prosecutor opened his case upon the 14th of October. The witnesses spoke of four of the clock in the morning. The printed account leaves these discrepancies unresolved. They pertain to the calendar of the event, not to the sequence of the alarm which several voices concurrently described.
During the examination, a single enquiry laid bare the gravity of what the prosecution had compressed into a few gestures: how long had Gray lingered in the chamber? About three quarters of an hour, answered Mrs. Murray. When her parents hurried forward at her cries, it was near five o’clock. The young woman had not merely surprised an intruder; she had been forced to endure his threats, to draw him into speech, to watch for an occasion to act. Gray had asserted that none would hear her. At the close of this protracted ordeal, her father and mother ascended the stair. Lady Grizel Baillie informed Parks that Arthur had attempted to ravish her daughter; Mrs. Murray pointed out the direction taken by the fugitive.
The household was roused in utter confusion. Parks went down at first, supposing that thieves had broken in, then mounted the stairs again and met the two women at the landing. Thomas Hughes likewise heard the commotion and caught up a blunderbuss before setting out in search of the intruders. These reactions did not constitute him a witness to the assault: he arrived after the flight and had no recollection of hearing Gray confess to an intent of rape. Parks, on the other hand, testified that he came upon Gray upon Mr. Hays’s bed, without hat or shoes. Questioned as to his presence in the chamber, Gray confessed that he had entered it; Parks asked him wherefore, and deposed that the prisoner replied: “The Devil possessed me.”
The chamber door furnished the defence with its weightiest material argument. Mrs. Murray stated that it was ever kept shut, though not always locked. Elizabeth Trimnel had attended her to bed near one o’clock and had closed it; passing by again near three, she found it standing open, shut it once more, and believed the latch had engaged. The door had no key: it fastened by means of a brass spring and a knob. Trimnel acknowledged that the spring was defective, apt not to hold, and liable to open of its own accord. Gray pressed this infirmity. Had the door swung open without force on his part, he argued, the Crown could not establish the “breaking” requisite for burglary.
His cross-examination of the prosecutrix likewise turned upon his past visits. He asked her whether he had ever entered her chamber whilst the family lay asleep; Mrs. Murray answered in the negative. The court reminded him to put his questions through the bench, deeming the query improper. Gray subsequently asserted that he had returned home intoxicated after drinking with fellow servants, that he thought he heard someone within the room, and had thereupon fetched a sword and pistol to search behind the bed. To the testimony of Parks, Gray answered that he could not say he was drunk; yet in his formal defence, he maintained that he returned “very much disordered by liquor.” The narrative preserves these two assertions without reconciling them. His account also ran counter to the written confession read at the trial: before Mr. Justice Blagney, Gray had acknowledged having opened and entered the chamber with the intent to ravish Mrs. Murray, and having taken up the arms to intimidate and compel her. A letter to Lady Binning likewise admitted that he had offended the mistress of the house and implored her forgiveness.
The depositions did not entirely agree. Hughes remembered that Gray expressed contrition for having entered the room, yet could not recall his confessing an intent to commit rape; Parks testified more directly concerning the exchange by Hays’s bed. The confession taken before Blagney, produced in writing, laid before the jury a narrative distinct from these recollections. The defence then called witnesses who depicted Gray as a civil and modest young man. Their estimate of his character did not meet the precise question raised by the indictment: wherefore had he armed himself, and what did he intend to accomplish within the chamber?
After an absence of about an hour, the jury returned a verdict of guilty against Gray. The judge pronounced sentence of death; Borrow adds that through powerful intercession made in his favour, he subsequently obtained a reprieve, though without specifying the measures undertaken or the ultimate disposition of the penalty. Several ballads and verses appeared in the wake of the trial; one, whether falsely or truly ascribed by tradition to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, turned the episode to satire. This aftermath serves to remind us that an actual trial swiftly transforms into a public tale, wherein humour and rhyme may divert the gazer from the woman in peril to the reputation of the youthful culprit.
The song subjoined to the trial in the anthology turns menaces into mere badinage, attributing to the victim sentiments never found within her deposition. This was a second dispossession, wrought this time through mockery. Grizel’s testimony tells a vastly different tale: three quarters of an hour spent holding an armed man at bay, until the moment she finally succeeded in tearing the pistol from his hand.