An umbrella was a pitifully feeble shield against a sentence of death. Yet Capel Lofft had brought one. On that twenty-third day of April 1800, rain and wind accompanied Sarah Lloyd as she emerged from the gaol; nearly a mile still lay between the prison gates and the place of execution. The young woman’s arms were pinioned. She accepted the umbrella and carried it herself. The man walking beside her had attended her trial, wielded his pen on her behalf, and sustained every measure taken to save her. Now, he could do no more than offer her shelter from the storm.
A few days earlier, newspaper readers had been taught to see in Sarah an altogether monstrous figure. It was said that an unnatural servant had set fire to her benefactress’s house intending that she perish in the flames. In the extract reproduced by George Borrow, The Times of 11 April even furnished the architecture of the crime: four separate seats of fire, combustible matter heaped beneath the staircase, and a mistress trapped on the upper floor, preserved only by the timely intervention of the neighbourhood. The scene was laid with minute precision. It laboured under a single, formidable defect: neither the arson nor the felonious intent had ever been tried.
The mistress was named Mrs Syer and resided at Hadleigh. Sarah had stood accused of admitting into the house an accomplice who allegedly robbed the dwelling before setting it alight. Two indictments were found against the maid: one for burglary, the other for arson. At the Bury Assizes that April, the petty jury threw out the charge of burglary, finding her guilty solely of the larceny, to the value of forty shillings. The second bill was never submitted to their verdict. A capital conviction nonetheless stood; under the statute invoked at the trial, that alone sufficed to send Sarah to the gallows.
Lofft’s knowledge of this distinction was not drawn from hearsay. He had sat upon the grand jury that found the true bills, and had subsequently attended the proceedings in court. The crush of the crowd had then concealed the prisoner from his view. He did not truly behold her until after her condemnation, when he began to visit her within the gaol. In the letters preserved by Borrow, his indignation against the printed accounts blends with his recollection of those prison interviews. He depicts a young woman who answered without evasion, endowed with a gentle voice and a modest demeanour. He had become her advocate; the terms of this portrait are those of a man entirely devoted to her deliverance.
At the bar, Sarah had enjoyed none of the favorable testimonies that were now multiplying. Her former masters could have spoken to her character, but she had not summoned them during her confinement. When asked who might bear witness on her behalf, she could name none other than Mrs Syer. It was thus to the very woman prosecuting her that she turned to attest to what she had been before the theft. Lofft remarks upon this circumstance in his correspondence: the jurors had not heard the numerous witnesses whose attestations arrived only after the verdict had been returned.
The other prisoner remained equally remote from the judicial demonstration. According to Lofft, no evidence had been brought against the man under conditions that would have allowed the jury to weigh their respective degrees of guilt. Sarah’s advocate regarded him as the principal actor, the one who had made an instrument of her. He did not pretend, however, to expunge the theft affirmed by the verdict. His argument was more urgent: a strictly circumscribed guilt had been legally established, a tale of murder was abroad, and mercy might yet find its place between the two.
Signatures were gathered. Sarah’s former masters joined in the petition; the committing magistrate who had sent her for trial, the foreman, and several members of the grand jury added their names. Mrs Syer herself was numbered among those who prayed that her life be spared. Thus the prosecutrix and the condemned girl’s champions met at the foot of the very same petition. They did not necessarily solicit the reversal of the judgment, but a respite, a commutation—some measure that might stay the execution.
On 21 April, writing from Troston, Lofft addressed the Monthly Magazine. A mere two days remained to him. His letter besought its readers to suspend their judgment, and the editors to append his observations to the accusations already broadcast to the public. Above all, he dreaded that the petition might not reach the King while Sarah yet lived. This was no trivial matter of correspondence: the parchment bore a prayer for royal clemency, and men might still be debating its conveyance when the condemned girl was dead.
The hoped-for respite never arrived. Borrow relates that the Duke of Portland, deeming the compassion of the petitioners ill-advised, dispatched a King’s messenger bearing the order for execution. Had the petition ever been laid before the Sovereign? Lofft retained the suspicion that it had not. His letters do not convert that suspicion into an administrative certainty. They reveal, however, the desperate and unequal race between a parchment crowded with signatures and a death warrant that reached its destination without fail.
On the morning of the twenty-third, Sarah said that she had slept poorly during the early part of the night, but more peacefully toward its close. She took leave of her fellow prisoners; according to Lofft, she imparted courage to them rather than seeking it for herself. He believed her to be somewhat under nineteen years of age. Nearly seven months of imprisonment had paled her countenance. She walked beneath the umbrella to the place of execution, unassisted and unsupported. Lofft had never witnessed a hanging. He had made it his duty to attend this one.
There was no proper scaffold. The executioner appeared ill at ease, and the preparations dragged on, as the eyewitness account observes. Sarah herself put back her hair and assisted in adjusting the cord about her neck. Then she gave the signal. In the letter he penned thereafter, Lofft sought once more to describe her composure and the gestures he had witnessed; his admiration for her runs through every line. Yet none of these observations could now sustain a prayer for a reprieve.
On 19 May, however, he took up his pen once more. He defended the distinction drawn by the jury, reiterating his belief that their verdict had been intended to save Sarah’s life. He no longer asked that their determination be altered. He demanded only that men cease to attach to the dead girl an arson and an intended murder that no court of justice had established. The petition had failed to stay the execution. There remained only this letter to be delivered to the living.