Between nine and ten o’clock on the night of the 6th of October, 1769, a woman accosted Giuseppe Baretti in the Haymarket and solicited him for a glass of wine. According to Elizabeth Ward, the woman laid hold of him in an indecent manner. Baretti walked on, then turned upon his heel and struck Ward across the face. Ward cried out. Three men ran up and demanded how he dared strike a woman. They jostled him from the pavement. The scene, which had begun as a common street altercation, was destined to become a trial wherein every witness would recall differently the exact moment a blade had appeared.
Thomas Patman had spent the evening in company with John Clark and Evan Morgan. He saw Baretti strike a woman whose person was unknown to him. Morgan and Clark, so he swore, thrust him toward Baretti; the latter dealt him a blow in the left side. Blood ran down into his shoe. Patman shouted that he was wounded. Baretti fell back. Morgan pursued him about halfway down Panton Street; it was there, before Patman’s eyes, that Baretti inflicted upon Morgan the wound that brought him to the ground.
Ward had heard the men raise the hue and cry, shouting that he had drawn a knife and must be stopped. She believed that Morgan had been stabbed at that precise juncture. Clark corroborated a portion of this testimony, yet his cross-examination cast the chronology into confusion. He admitted having told the coroner that Morgan had seized Baretti before he himself knew Patman to be hurt. A woman, he added, had called out for a patten to be dashed against the prisoner’s head. The thoroughfare had dissolved into a hue and cry, yet the witnesses could not agree on who had struck the first blow, nor upon the instant when Patman had perceived his wound.
The press of people surged toward Panton Street. Baretti took refuge in a grocer’s shop. A constable, Mr. Lambert, found him there holding a knife in one hand, with a silver sheath fitted over the bloodied blade. Patman stood at the threshold, blood soaking his shirt, declaring that a gentleman within the shop had stabbed him. Lambert summoned Baretti to surrender. The Italian complied, and the officer conducted him straightway before the magistrate.
Morgan was conveyed to the Middlesex Hospital. A fellow patient later testified to having heard the wounded man say he had seen Baretti set upon two women. He had intervened without intention to offend, he said; Baretti had struck him twice, and then a third time, which last thrust proved the most grievous. Mr. Wyatt, the surgeon, confirmed that Morgan had sustained three wounds. That which had penetrated the abdomen caused his death. The issue at bar, therefore, concerned not merely the terror experienced in the open street; it had culminated in the death of a man drawn into the fray, according to the hearsay reported from the infirmary, solely to part a quarrel.
At the Old Bailey, that autumn, Baretti stood indicted for murder. He read his defence in his own voice. He recounted how he had been labouring at home upon his Italian and English dictionary, then in the press for a second edition, before venturing abroad toward the Royal Academy Club in Soho. He had waited for his acquaintances, called at the Orange Coffee House for his letters, and resumed his path toward the club. In the Haymarket, he said, a woman had suddenly grasped him in an obscene fashion. He struck her upon the hand; she reviled him upon hearing his foreign accent.
Baretti stated that a man then struck him in the face, asking how he dared beat a woman. Others joined the assailant and pushed him into the kennel. He feared, so he explained, that he would be cast into the puddle of mud at the corner of Panton Street and trampled beneath the feet of the mob. He shouted “Murder!” and endeavoured to flee. His infirm sight compounded his terror: he dreaded dashing his foot against the stones of the way. His pursuers gained upon him, some striving to lay hold of his hair; he believed himself utterly lost should they succeed in pinioning him thus. He knew not precisely where he had struck in his defence, but remembered striking a man who had just snatched his hat from his head. When he paused in Oxendon Street, he perceived an open shop and threw himself inside, exhausted.
Following his examination, Sir John Fielding committed him to the Tothill Fields Bridewell. The journey itself proved disorderly: Baretti related how the coachman lost his way, compelling them to alight amidst the mud and the dark to find their bearings. He urged upon the court that he had made no attempt to escape when the occasion offered. This conduct following the affray, together with his own bruises and his submission to custody, weighed heavily in the defence he submitted to the jury.
He admitted carrying the knife, but affirmed he kept it to pare fruit and sweetmeats. He explained that he had delivered up his weapon and demanded to be taken before Sir John Fielding. He had chosen to waive his privilege as an alien—the right to a jury half-foreign—and to be tried by an English jury, he maintained, lest his honour seem to depend upon an indulgence. “I am sorry for the man,” he declared, while maintaining that Morgan had brought on his own end through his impetuosity. His defence did not seek to deny the wounds; it invited the jury to weigh the peril and panic of a pursuit rather than behold a man who had sought out a brawl.
The contusions upon his own person were tendered in support of his narrative. Lambert confirmed that he had received a blow, lost his hat, and that his face was swollen. Molini, who visited him on the morrow, observed a swelling upon his cheek and bruises across his back and shoulder. Low counted six or seven such marks. These injuries could not, by themselves, establish who had commenced the affray, yet they matched the violent tumult Baretti had depicted.
Other witnesses testified that women accompanied by bullies had previously accosted them in an indecent manner in the Haymarket. The defence likewise called forth gentlemen who knew the prisoner well. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Dr. Samuel Johnson, William Fitzherbert, and Edmund Burke described him as benevolent, temperate, modest, and learned. Topham Beauclerk, David Garrick, and Molini confirmed his character and attested that foreign travellers customarily carried such pocket-knives. The eminence of these character witnesses did not directly resolve what had transpired with Morgan; nevertheless, it offered the jury a portrait of the man before them, far removed from the obscure violence of the Haymarket.
The published account thus sets these various movements side by side without reconciling them: Ward swore that Baretti struck her after the stranger’s intervention; Patman asserted that he saw him strike an unknown woman before being wounded himself, placing Morgan’s stabbing in the subsequent street; Clark conceded that his earlier depositions regarding the sequence had varied; at the hospital, the words attributed to Morgan showed him stepping in merely to succour the women. Baretti, for his part, described a concerted assault and a desperate flight. Each relation places the knife at the very centre of the pursuit, yet none resolves the street into a lucid tableau where every action had been perceived alike.
Having weighed the evidence, the jury threw out the charge of murder as well as the lesser count of manslaughter, returning a verdict of self-defence. The verdict did not restore Evan Morgan to life.