A young lad was brought into Newgate among the prisoners, bid to point out the man who had given him money. He singled out Lewis Houssart. According to his deposition, the man had sent him to fetch the mother of Anne Rondeau, instructing him to conduct her to a place where a gentleman purportedly awaited her. The mother had gone thither; no one had inquired for her. Upon her return, she found her daughter dead. This child, whose tender years astonished the chroniclers, was to become a cardinal piece in the trial for a murder that had already earned Houssart a previous acquittal.
Lewis Houssart was born at Sedan, in Champagne. The printed account describes him as a barber of slender means in London, who occasionally let blood for his customers. Yet, in the paper he delivered before his death, he drew a very different likeness of himself: he claimed to have been trained in surgery, admitted upon examination by a college in Amsterdam, and hindered from serving as a naval surgeon only because his constitution could ill endure the sea. He placed his father and brother at Maastricht, his two sisters in France, and stated that he had resided some seven or eight years in London. These particulars were of his own giving; it was thus he desired to be known.
He professed to have loved Anne Rondeau, born like himself in the same village. The account presents her as his first wife. Houssart contracted a second marriage while she was still living. In his written testament, he related that after he had estranged himself from her, Anne revealed a secret to him: she had not lived chastely, and this frailty had borne its consequence. He affirmed that he had rendered her assistance and hoped, after her death, that her soul might find happiness. The chronicler suggests, for his part, that Anne’s murder took place during Houssart’s brief absence on the night of his nuptials with his second bride; he records that a razor was used to sever the first wife’s throat.
Houssart was first apprehended and tried at the Old Bailey for this murder, but the jury acquitted him for want of sufficient evidence. Shortly thereafter, he was indicted for bigamy: he offered scarce any defence, was found guilty, and declared he had been indifferent to preserving his reputation in that regard. He maintained there was no shame where there was no guilt, invoking the religion of his first wife—whom he termed a Socinian—to argue that he owed her none of the customary obligations. Such were his own words and reasoning, recorded by a chronicle that judged these tenets with unsparing severity.
Solomon Rondeau, brother and heir to Anne, thereupon brought a private suit, styled by the source an “appeal.” An initial proceeding was quashed as defective; another was subsequently lodged against Houssart, and six points were debated at the Old Bailey. The chronicler relates that the following circumstances were disclosed at the trial. During the repast given at the house of his second wife, Houssart started and appeared terrified. A little boy deposed that the prisoner had given him money to fetch Anne’s mother, making him believe a gentleman would ask for her. Having returned from the appointed place without meeting anyone, the mother had entered her daughter’s lodging and discovered her murdered.
The mother had at first been vexed that the lad had sent her so far upon an errand of no purpose; the discovery of Anne’s death soon caused this irritation to give way. The boy, still very young, was led among the prisoners in Newgate. He recognized Houssart as the sole man who had given him money for that errand. The chronicle mentions likewise several proofs which it terms corroborative, without setting them all forth in detail. Upon this body of evidence, the jury found him guilty of murder. Houssart protested against the justice of the court, maintaining that he might be punished without thereby being made guilty, and made little further effort to defend his cause.
At the beginning of his confinement, Houssart read, prayed, and meditated, according to the author, with the appearance of great concern. After his conviction, the chronicler notes a marked change in his demeanour: he spoke with anger of the court, and, in the condemned hold, expressed regret that he had not more vehemently denounced British justice. His companions heard him jesting with John Shepherd when the sparks rose from the coal fire; he wished they might be as many cannon-balls capable of battering down the prison walls, that he might die like Samson.
The accounts of his final days are contradictory. At times, he rejected the doctrines of a bodily resurrection and of eternal punishment, raising objections regarding the dissolution of the body after death. At others, he spoke of Providence, acknowledged himself guilty of manifold misdeeds, and sought the prayers of a divine. The chronicle treats these utterances as moral inconstancy; they show, at the very least, that those about him received alternately his refusal to believe and words of religious submission.
His brother, who had come from Holland upon learning of his condemnation, visited him to offer solace. The author asserts that Houssart met this gesture with coldness, speaking of Anne’s death and of his own fate with such levity that his brother departed, wounded by such conduct. Later, Houssart was moved at the thought of the sorrow the execution would inflict upon his father, then nearly ninety years of age; witnesses observed him weep. Yet these tears did not lead him to confess to the murder.
As he was a Frenchman and possessed an imperfect command of English, a minister of the French Reformed Church was summoned to his side. Houssart received him with tolerable civility and readily consented to his praying, but fell into a passion whenever a confession of his guilt was demanded of him. On the eve of the execution, he attended attentively to a sermon delivered upon the subject of the crime, yet still refused to acknowledge the deed. In the evening, he assured the minister that he believed in God and in the resurrection; when the men spoke to him of repentance, he entreated them to confine themselves to prayer and torment him no more touching his innocence.
He had inquired where he might sue for a reprieve, and had learned that the decision rested with his wife’s kinsmen—the very ones who had pursued the appeal against him. On the morning of the execution, he was aggrieved at being denied the Holy Sacrament without prior confession, a condition reported by the minister as a strict requirement of the canon. He persisted: he would die without the sacrament rather than acknowledge a crime of which he claimed to know nothing. In the cart that bore him to the place of execution, his protestations of innocence mingled at intervals with brief prayers imploring forgiveness for his many sins.
At the end of this journey, he turned pale and swooned. The ministers refused to pray beside him unless he confessed the murder; he answered that he would not utter what he knew not, and begged them to cease tormenting him. He delivered, however, to the Ordinary of Newgate a paper wherein he gave his age as forty years, recalled Sedan, Amsterdam, and Maastricht, and recounted his meeting with Anne. Therein he made no admission of the murder. He stated that she had entrusted him with her secret and that he had succoured her; he desired that her soul might rest in peace.
Thus died Houssart, maintaining his innocence in the cause that had brought him to the scaffold, having earlier been acquitted for want of evidence and convicted of bigamy. The prosecution had relied upon the child who identified him, the errand imposed upon Anne’s mother, and the other circumstances laid before the jury; the condemned man, for his part, delivered to the minister an account of his life that dwelt upon his love and assistance to his first wife. The sentence was unalterable. Houssart’s final written words did not elucidate it: they challenged its very foundation.