The case of William Habron was brought to a close twice over: first by a sentence of death, and second by the official recognition that another man had slain Constable Nicholas Cock. Between these two determinations, a young gardener spent several years beneath the commuted sentence of penal servitude for life, whilst the man who had accused himself of the murder was himself awaiting the scaffold. The law had altered its narrative; it could not restore to the accused the years it had severed from his youth.
In 1876, Nicholas Cock was serving in the Manchester police force, within the district of Whalley Range. According to the later account of Charles Peace as related by H. B. Irving, Peace entered a garden in the course of a burglary, was surprised by constables, and discharged his weapon at Cock before taking to flight. The contemporary account in the Manchester Courier, reprinted in the Royal Cornwall Gazette, presents rather what was ascertained in the ensuing hours: Cock had spoken to a passer-by, two reports rang out, and he was subsequently discovered wounded upon the road. His colleague and other constables arrived; the weapon had not been recovered. These accounts are not of the same nature: the newspaper depicts an inquiry in progress, whereas Irving transmits a later relation attributed to Peace.
The initial trail, however, did not originate within those gardens. It fastened upon a threat uttered against Cock. Arthur Griffiths recounts that William and John Habron had appeared before the magistrates at Chorlton-cum-Hardy for drunkenness, and that William, upon quitting the court, had declared he would shoot the constable before nightfall. An error in the year crept into this passage: Griffiths writes July 1875, yet his narrative immediately places Cock’s death on that very evening, whereas Hansard situates the murder in August 1876 and Irving records the trial in November of that same year. The parliamentary question of 1879 likewise gives August as the month of conviction, which cannot be reconciled with a trial opened on the 27th of November; this month is thus noted as an error in the parliamentary debate. Irving dates the summonses and fines to July and August 1876. A collation of the two sources permits the chronology to be rectified without concealing the defect in the chronicle.
The threat was repeated before several witnesses. The contemporary journal reports that Simpson, the passer-by with whom Cock had just spoken, heard the shots and returned to the constable, who could then do no more than ask for his sergeant. The press account indicates that the police arrested three Habron brothers and, from the very first day, compared their boots with the footprints, without yet publishing the result. Superintendent Bent knew their lodgings and had them surrounded. The three brothers—William, John, and Frank—were apprehended in their beds. The newspaper report states that searches of their bedchamber and garden yielded nothing of an incriminating nature. On the following day, further clues and depositions were assembled; Griffiths summarises the footprints as tallying precisely with the boots.
These clues did not all speak with equal clarity. Cock had been unable to identify his assailant distinctly before he expired. The footprint associated the brothers with ground across which the marksman had trodden, but it supplied neither a countenance nor a certain hour. A Manchester shop furnished another circumstance: William was alleged to have inquired after the price of cartridges. Witnesses also reported the threats against Cock and asserted they had seen the two brothers in a beerhouse towards eleven o’clock, whereas the prisoners maintained they had retired to bed at nine. Their defense, Griffiths reports, broke down under cross-examination; the alibi presented by each collapsed. The press in those early days had already linked the death to the threats and announced the comparison of the footwear, even before the investigation had made public its conclusions. The association of a plausible narrative with a material trace was thus able to precede the proof of identity.
The trial opened before the Manchester Assizes on the 27th of November 1876. John was acquitted; William, alone found guilty, was sentenced to death. The representative of the Home Office later recalled in the House of Commons that the learned judge himself held that the evidence tended to show that William was certainly not the man who had fired the shot. The circumstantial evidence and certain utterances of the prisoner had nonetheless convinced the jury of his complicity. The judge pronounced the sentence, but it was respited and subsequently commuted to penal servitude for life.
The distinction between having fired the weapon and being implicated in the deed then exerted its full weight. A threat, associations, and footprints had been established; no positive identification by the dying constable had been obtained. The jury had accepted an aggregate of circumstances, where each separate element retained an element of uncertainty. The commuted sentence spared William from the scaffold without absolving him. It left him branded with the name of murderer.
Charles Peace had been present at the trial. H. B. Irving relates that following the verdict he returned to Sheffield, whilst William remained under sentence. Griffiths, for his part, asserts that Peace made a full confession to him in prison, prior to his execution at Leeds, and that an inquiry was immediately instituted. Irving attributes the detailed account to a confession made to the Reverend Littlewood, who subsequently reported Peace’s words. The two authors do not agree, therefore, upon the direct recipient of the avowal; Hansard confirms that a confession was made prior to the execution, without naming the person who received it.
The confession could not be accepted upon its own authority alone. The man who accused himself stood condemned for another murder and was doomed to die; he had attended the trial of the Habrons, was acquainted with the public details of the affair, and might well have sought to cast his final hours in a less ignominious light. The Home Secretary declared that this confession demanded the most searching examination. He consulted the judge who had presided over the trial, the Law Officers of the Crown, and an experienced counsel. Following this verification, he deemed that Peace’s statements were corroborated upon several material particulars. The judge and the legal advisers concurred in that conclusion.
On the 17th of March 1879, the Home Secretary announced to the Commons that he would recommend a royal pardon for William Habron. He recalled that the capital sentence had been respited at the trial itself, because the judge already believed Habron was not the man who had pulled the trigger. The new confession did not merely displace one verdict with another man's word: it allied itself with the reservations expressed at the time of the conviction and with an inquiry pursued after the fact. William was granted a free pardon and set at liberty.
Pecuniary reparation followed its own course. On the 25th of March, the Home Secretary explained that he had never promised the sum of two hundred and fifty pounds mentioned in the press, but that this amount was at his disposal and he was deliberating upon the manner in which the former prisoner's future might best be secured. Griffiths records an indemnity of eight hundred pounds. In 1881, in the House, a Member estimated the sum granted to Habron at one thousand pounds. These figures do not agree; the debates attest to government assistance, yet do not permit the ultimate sum to be determined here with certainty.
There remains Constable Cock, whose death set in motion this sequence of miscarriages. The sources consulted do not preserve his dying declaration with sufficient precision to derive an identification therefrom; subsequent accounts supply rather the words of the constables who accompanied him. His slayer, Charles Peace, was not unmasked until his own condemnation brought him face to face with death. In the intervening years, truthful indicators—a threat, an alleged purchase of ammunition, tracks upon the ground—had been marshalled against a man who had never fired.
Thus concluded the affair of William Habron: by a confession weighed, corroborated, and followed by a pardon; not by the restoration of the years swallowed by prison walls. A sentence may be commuted without the error being acknowledged, and an innocence may be proclaimed to the world without erasing the first narrative stamped in the public prints and graven upon the life of the condemned. The archives of this cause require us to hold separate the threat proven by witnesses, the uncertain identification, the construed footprint, the dying confession of Peace, and the parliamentary oversight that finally secured Habron’s deliverance. Only by honouring these distinctions can one measure the wrong without transforming a judicial rectification into a legend.