Macnamara took it at first for a sudden fright. A shot had rung out beneath the piazzas of Covent Garden, and the lady upon his arm had slumped to the flagstones. He stooped to raise her. It was the blood upon his hands that told him this was no swoon. A moment earlier, he had been rendering Martha Ray the ordinary courtesy of a gentleman handing a woman to her coach. Now, he cradled a corpse.
The chronicle was soon to belong entirely to the man who had pulled the trigger. Men would recount his passion, his ruined prospects, his despair; they would weigh the depth of his remorse, even going so far as to forge letters wherein readers might marvel at his sensibility. Martha had been granted no leisure to fashion her final evening into an apologia. She was coming out from the playhouse. It was the 7th of April, 1779, and she was due home.
A Voice Before a Scandal
Martha Ray had long shared the domestic life of the Earl of Sandwich. Their connection, which had yielded several children, placed her in a quarter of society where her condition might easily be censured by the very persons who readily accepted the Earl’s hospitality. She possessed a refined taste for music and a singing voice that drew the notice of her contemporaries. She was by no means merely the kept woman of a powerful statesman; she possessed an art of her own, natural affections, and a household to which she belonged by rights far nobler than those of a murder report.
Let us imagine a concert at Hinchingbrooke, the Earl’s seat near Huntingdon. The final cadence lingers, a hand lets a printed programme fall to the knee, and conversation hesitates before resuming its murmur. Martha steps down from the stillness her voice has commanded, only to re-enter that colder, narrower silence in which society sits in judgment. An officer among the guests fixes his gaze upon her. This tableau is an evocation; yet the meeting of Martha and James Hackman beneath the Earl’s roof belongs to the early chronicles.
Hackman had purchased a commission in the army after an apprenticeship in trade that had proved ill-suited to his temper. Stationed at Huntingdon upon the recruiting service, he had been received at Sandwich’s table. He conceived a violent attachment to Martha and pressed her with proposals of marriage, which she declined. Concerning the true nature of their commerce, later accounts have asserted far more confidence than the legal documents warrant. The young man’s fixation is beyond dispute; it does not, of itself, disclose the inclinations of the woman he pursued.
He quitted the army, prepared himself for Holy Orders, and was ordained in February 1779. The following month, he was instituted to the living of Wiveton in Norfolk. The officer had put on the cloth; Martha’s answer remained unaltered. In London, he took lodgings in Duke’s Court, near St Martin’s Lane—perilously near the playhouses, where distance could do nothing to cool the fever of his obstinacy.
The Close of the Performance
On the 7th of April, Martha attended Covent Garden in the company of the singer Caterina Galli. The piece was Love in a Village. The title offered commentators an easy irony, yet the two ladies had come merely to hear an opera, not to prepare an allegory. The curtain fell; it became necessary to gain the street, call up the carriage, and press through that throng wherein every soul seeks his passage with the vexing assurance that his own business takes precedence over all others.
According to the testimony preserved in the sessions papers, Macnamara observed Martha in distress amid the press and offered his assistance. She took his arm. Mary Anderson, a fruit-seller, watched the company pour forth into the portico and noted a gentleman in black following close behind.
Let us pause upon this threshold between the playhouse and the street. In the scene we may picture, the coachman’s name is shouted over the heads of the crowd; the press parts slightly, then closes again, and the person one awaits never proves to be the one who steps into view. The annoyance remains slight. It is the ordinary dispersal after an entertainment, minds still full of the airs just heard. The man waiting there carries two loaded weapons. He alone brings to this scene an ending that none had sought.
Hackman fired point-blank at Martha, then turned a second pistol upon himself. She fell dead upon the spot; he survived his own attempt and beat at his head with the butt of the weapon until bystanders overpowered him. Witnesses caught glimpses of wild gestures, heard the reports, and intervened as best they could. Mahon, an apothecary, wrenched the pistol from his hands, led the wounded man to his own house to dress his hurts, and presently conducted him to the Shakespeare Tavern.
With assistance, Macnamara had Martha’s body conveyed thither as well. Hackman, bleeding, received surgical attention. The night was now divided between a frame that no mortal aid could recall to life and a man who must be watched lest he lay violent hands upon his own throat once more. He begged to look upon Martha; Macnamara refused him, ordering her to be laid in an adjoining chamber. That modest refusal restored to the dead woman a final dignity of distance, which her murderer had just torn from her.
The Letter That Answered Nothing
Found upon Hackman’s person was a letter addressed to his brother-in-law, Booth. In it, he declared his resolve to die, settled certain debts, and commended to his care the woman he professed to love. At his trial, this paper was brought forward to sustain a nice distinction: he had, it was argued, contemplated only his own destruction, whilst the murder of Martha was the sudden delirium of a frantic instant. Hackman did not deny the shooting. He asked the bench to separate the design he acknowledged from the deed he represented as unforeseen.
A letter penned before a crime carries a peculiar authority. It issues from an hour to which the judges can never return, appearing to lay before them a mind still undisturbed by blood. Yet the writer of a letter already selects what posterity shall read. This paper attested a suicidal resolution; it was by no means sufficient, of itself, to establish all that its author might or might not have harboured. The brace of pistols, his movements through the evening, and the depositions of the witnesses remained to be weighed alongside it.
Martha was laid to rest at Elstree on the 14th of April. Two days later, Hackman stood at the bar of the Old Bailey. The witnesses recounted the exit from the theatre, the fall, the weapons, the surgeon’s care. In his defence, the prisoner maintained that the design to kill Martha had seized him only at the fatal moment. The jury found him guilty of murder. The construction he sought to put upon his conduct could not undo the act whose circumstances had been laid bare.
James Boswell attended the proceedings. When he spoke of it afterwards to Samuel Johnson, the affair became the subject of a conversation that has reached us with singular sharpness of detail. Johnson discerned in the brace of pistols the plain mark of a design directed against two lives. Topham Beauclerk countered that a man resolved on self-destruction might well provide a second weapon lest the first should miss fire. The debate grew heated; the niceties of polite dining soon occupied as much room as the intention of the condemned.
The dinner and the wine continued. Yet Johnson had not forgotten Beauclerk’s retort; he returned to it some minutes later with open displeasure, and the dispute broke out anew. Boswell has preserved for us that table where the meal was interrupted far more briefly by a violent death than by a slight between gentlemen.
Beyond the Dying Speech
On the 19th of April, 1779, Hackman was executed at Tyburn. A mere twelve days separated the murder from the gallows. Within that brief space were crowded the removal of the bodies, the visits of the curious, an interment, the depositions, the trial, and the sentence; posterity was to add decades of romantic commentary. The young clergyman died, bequeathing to men of letters a figure whose cloth and penitence seemed to solicit the tenderest indulgences of romance.
By the following year, Love and Madness offered the town an alleged correspondence between the parties. It was entirely spurious. Its publication remains an enduring warning of the ease with which one may fill the silence of a victim, and then cite the words thrust into her mouth as an explanation of her destruction. We shall borrow from that correspondence no mutual passion that the record nowhere warrants.
At Covent Garden, other performances were given, other carriages were hailed. Gentlemen continued to offer their arms to ladies to pilot them through the crowd. It is in that unremarkable courtesy, before it became evidence in a capital trial, that Martha perhaps best regains her true station: a woman at the close of an evening, expecting to return home, whose morrow belonged to herself alone. Hackman had stolen that morrow from her. It belonged to no chronicler to strip it from her a second time by styling her slaughter the testament of a great passion.