At the trial of William Sawyer, the proceedings shifted far from the spot where the shots had been heard. The jury sat in London; the indictment laid the death of Harriet Gaskett in Lisbon, in the kingdom of Portugal. The Weekly Entertainer of 1815 places the house at Campo Major, near Lisbon; Pelham writes Campo Mayor, “at Lisbon,” and the extant judicial abstract lays the affair in Lisbon itself. The accounts diverge likewise as to the day. The judicial record preserved in the report of the case assigns 27 April 1814 and Lisbon; I retain this wording as that of the prosecution, without presuming to reconcile the discrepancies among the other texts.
Sawyer was employed in the commissariat of the British army and had been sent to Portugal. He shared a house with a colleague, Mr. Riccord, who lived with Harriet Gaskett. The chronicles relate that an attachment had grown between Sawyer and Harriet, and that Riccord had conceived jealousy therefrom. This triangle is described by compilers and by officers; the inward motives one might impute to it are not established. What followed is already disputed in the papers signed on the morrow of the event.
On 27 April, according to Pelham, the three persons sat down to dinner with several officers. Pelham states that Sawyer, Harriet, and Riccord ate scarcely anything and retired early. The weekly compilation transcribed in the Weekly Entertainer places the occurrence instead on 17 April. In the evening, those present heard three pistol shots, according to this journal; the legal report mentions two. When they reached the garden, Harriet was dead and Sawyer wounded, though alive.
Sawyer was carried into the house. While certain officers went in search of a surgeon, he seized a razor and cut his throat. The wound did not prove fatal. On the following day, his companions in arms committed the episode to paper. The declarations related in the sources state that Harriet had taken laudanum and entreated Sawyer to shoot her; that he had thereupon attempted to take his own life with the pistols, and thereafter with the razor. This is the version that the signed paper attributes to Sawyer, yet it reaches us through the medium of later reports, and Sawyer’s written defence contested its reliability.
The word “my” had, according to Pelham, been inserted into a sentence of the document wherein Sawyer attested to having shot Harriet. This material detail becomes of capital importance, for the defence was to contend that the confession was obtained while he was in agony, unable to speak, and desirous only of being left in peace. According to the gazette, the officers had not all formed the same impression of his condition: one deemed him calm and capable of understanding; another judged him so indifferent to his life that he would have signed whatever was set before him. The selfsame signatures might thus pass for a confession or for the mark of a man too impaired to grasp the import of the text.
Sawyer was brought back to England and arraigned at the Old Bailey under a special commission. The bibliographical notices speak of a hearing on 7 April 1815; the Weekly Entertainer assigns it to the 8th. His defence, drawn up in writing because the wound to his throat prevented him from speaking distinctly, denied that he had harboured any intention of harming Harriet. He stated that he retained but a confused recollection of the evening, remembering that she had voiced a desire to die, but not how matters had subsequently unfolded. He maintained that he had no memory of the admissions signed during his convalescence. He lamented the absence of Riccord, whom he regarded as the sole man privy to the whole of the circumstances and to Harriet’s suicidal resolve.
The witnesses for the defence offered no account of the scene in the garden. Several officers testified to Sawyer’s humane character. A landlady, Mrs. Nicholls, deposed that Harriet had lodged with her between June 1813 and February 1814, describing her as violent and overbearing; she added that Harriet kept a pistol in her bedchamber. These depositions might well influence the jury’s view of the persons involved, but they could not supply the place of Riccord, nor did they resolve what had transpired in the garden.
The judge summed up the evidence; after nearly two hours’ deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of guilty against Sawyer, accompanied by a recommendation to mercy. The journal dwells upon the terms of this recommendation: that there was no evidence of malice prepense. Counsel for the defence thereupon shifted their ground from the narrative of facts to the jurisdiction of the court. Their foremost argument was simple and fraught with consequence: the homicide had been committed within an independent kingdom, not in England. What authority, then, empowered a London court to try a crime committed in Portugal?
The report published in Carrington and Kirwan records this objection, followed by two others: that the indictment had failed sufficiently to aver that Sawyer and Harriet were British subjects, and that it ought to have concluded with the technical words contra formam statuti. Lord Ellenborough reserved the point for the consideration of the Twelve Judges. At that juncture, the verdict of guilty had been pronounced, but judgment had not yet been entered. The press of that week thus records a trial that remained suspended upon the scope of a sixteenth-century statute and the construction of a few phrases engrossed upon an indictment.
Pelham pursues the narrative beyond the reference to the Twelve Judges: he asserts that the objections were overruled on 12 May, that sentence of death was then passed, and places the execution on 22 May. The Weekly Entertainer and the extant legal abstract conclude, for their part, with the reservation of the point of law. The jury’s verdict is recorded in both accounts; the overruling of the objections and the execution are related solely by Pelham’s retrospective compilation.
The case was tried under a special commission, and the arguments of counsel concerned not merely Sawyer’s conduct. They raised the question whether an ancient statute warranted such a proceeding under the present circumstances. The judge had chosen to hear the evidence before ruling upon the point; the jury, for their part, were required to pronounce their verdict without waiting for the Twelve Judges to determine the validity of the commission.
The pleadings thus removed the cause from the garden to the jurisdiction of the court. The indictment had described Harriet as being “in the peace of the King” and concluded with an averment against that peace; counsel contended that these words did not sufficiently establish the allegiance of either party. The extant legal passage summarises the principle applicable under the statute of Henry VIII, whilst Pelham states that the judges overruled the objections. In the courtroom, at the moment of the verdict, that answer remained reserved. Sawyer’s journey had carried the signed instruments as far as London; it remained to be determined whether English law could take cognisance of a murder committed in Portugal.