Mr Briggs' Hat: The True Story of a Victorian Railway Murder (36 page)

Details of the contents of the Memorial had already been sent to the press when it was presented to the Home Office at two o’clock on the afternoon of Thursday 10 November, less than four days before Müller was due to hang. Expecting the deputation, Sir George told his secretary that he would
decline to meet them
since
I feel little confidence in the accuracy of any report they might choose to make
. Instead, Grey retreated to his estate in Northumberland until Saturday. Waiting for his return, the GLPS and Thomas Beard faced two days of keen suspense. In case new evidence should come to light, they advertised in the papers that they would sit
en permanence
at Seyd’s Hotel in the City until Grey’s ruling was announced.

*

The second week of Müller’s confinement in the condemned cell drew to a close and he still refused to make the confession the country craved. Both the Blyths and John Hoffa had been allowed to visit him and
his warders were now almost certain
that he had wind of the efforts being made on his behalf. Confusion reigned:
it is surely
worthy of most serious consideration
whether a regard to the character of English justice does not demand further inquiry … before a human being is launched into eternity
, wrote the
Evening Star
on 10 November.
It would be criminal to refuse the indulgence of time to establish the truth
. A certain amount of sympathy was developing even in circles where the certainty of Müller’s guilt had been most obstinately believed. Perhaps, after all, there was as much circumstantial evidence in his favour as against it. The London correspondent for the
New York Times
thought that
though there is a general and determined conviction of his guilt, there are too many doubts for the quiet of the public conscience …
[and]
the dissentient minority is rapidly increasing.

Desperate to set eyes on the condemned man, some of the middle classes
obtained permission to visit Newgate
and, with the judicious offer of a shilling, were allowed to peep through the observation hole in the door of his cell. In the minds of several religious ministers allowed to visit officially, conviction of Müller’s innocence was also settling. The Reverend Mr Battiscombe, minister at the German Chapel in Blackheath and a clergyman for thirty years, assured the Home Secretary that
no one has more strongly felt
than I did – at first – that Franz Müller was guilty
. He described two long meetings with Müller during which he pressed the prisoner to confess. Müller’s refusal, he believed, sprang from the German’s fervent belief that
God had permitted that to occur which had befallen him … in consequence of the … gay, prayerless and sinful life he had led.
Battiscombe believed in Müller’s deepening religious belief and that he expected to enter Paradise with no stain on his conscience. The churchman’s letter (also sent to and reprinted widely in the daily press) asserted that Battiscombe had
never … seen a person of whose sincerity I have felt more affirmed
.

On the afternoon of Friday 11 November workmen began to erect hoardings in front of the Old Bailey and barriers along the approach roads in expectation of huge crowds at the planned execution on Monday morning. Throughout the day the men divided the open space in front of the gaol into pens designed to prevent the crowd boiling over. They blocked up the doors leading to the courts and Sessions House and set planks along the roofs to prevent anyone climbing up for a better view. They boxed in the railings in front of the church of St Sepulchre and constructed timber barricades that stretched out from Newgate Street and the Old Bailey down Giltspur Street towards Smithfield and Ludgate Hill.
The Times
recorded that well-dressed sightseers milled about on the rain-greasy pavements, the sound of hammers echoing round them. Shops, it wrote,
were being boarded up and places at the windows of surrounding buildings were already being
sold for up to four pounds.

*

The day following Müller’s trial, on Sunday 30 October,
a treaty of peace
between Prussia and Denmark was concluded in Vienna. The Danish concession of lands along its frontier marked the first success in Prussia’s goal to unify the German states, an ambition that would – within seven years – fundamentally change the balance of power in Europe. Despite the promise of peace marked by the Viennese treaty, British suspicion about Germany’s aggressive intentions and concern at her growing economic prosperity was unlikely to abate. For the first time in her industrialised history, Britain faced
a Continental rival.

There was widespread English antagonism towards Germany, yet three enormous bundles containing hundreds of signatures from the people of Frankfurt on behalf of Müller were delivered to Sir George Grey at the Home Office during the weekend.
Opinion was growing in Germany
that Müller had been made a scapegoat and that his trial had been unfairly conducted by a pro-Danish nation too eager to fasten its prejudices upon a German. Feelings were running high. Brushing aside the pressures of international politics, Grey sought instead the opinion of the judges for a second time. Then he sat at his desk scribbling for several hours as he responded to each one of Thomas Beard’s contentions, weighing in the balance the opposing dictates of retribution and deterrence against mercy and understanding.

Towards midday on Saturday 12 November, Sir George Grey’s secretary copied out his official response to the Memorial. In his office in Basinghall Street, Thomas Beard anxiously anticipated this final judgement.

CHAPTER 32

City of Devils

With two days to go before the execution the possibility that an ignominious public death would be inflicted on an innocent man stirred the public’s disquiet and Franz Müller waited. On Friday 11 November he had spent an hour with his friend John Hoffa, repeating over and over again that he had been convicted on false statements. He wrote letters. The governor of the prison and the undersheriffs and aldermen all visited. Sheriff Dakin was disturbed: he, too, was beginning to believe in Müller’s innocence and had gone to the unusual extreme of seeking a meeting with Mr Henry at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court on the matter. This was so unprecedented that the magistrate wrote to Sir George Grey, urging upon the Home Secretary the expediency of giving time for the sifting of new evidence.

Müller prayed regularly and fervently with both the prison Ordinary Dr Davis, the Reverend Battiscombe and Dr Louis Cappel, the Lutheran minister of the East End German Georgenkirche in Alie Street, Goodman’s Fields. Cappel’s initial certainty of Müller’s guilt was also wavering.

After the freezing temperatures of the previous fortnight it was
turning milder. The weather had broken and frost was replaced by an intermittent rain pattering through the bare trees. Fogs rose from the river, mingled with the soot from house and factory and cloaked the city in a yellowing, soapy atmosphere. It was as if, as Miller wrote in his
Picturesque Sketches of London
,
all the smoke from hundreds of chimneys ascended, rotted and then descended all at once – choking
[and]
foul tasting
. With visibility limited to a yard ahead, pedestrians groped their way gingerly along the greasy pavements, feeling their way along walls in an attempt to avoid being knocked down. Street vehicles and riverboats collided. A drawback of industrial progress, these dangerous
‘pea soupers’
were disorienting and depressing.

At three o’clock on Saturday 12 November, just as Hoffa left Müller’s cell after making an emotional farewell, Thomas Beard arrived at the gaol. He brought with him the communication from the Home Secretary.
Sir George Grey wrote that
,
after carefully considering the statements and comparing them with the report of the evidence given at the trial, and after full communication with the learned judges before whom the proceedings took place,
[I]
see no ground which would justify
[me]
in advising Her Majesty to interfere with the course of law in this case.

Beard explained that this was the end, that Grey’s refusal of either postponement or reprieve meant that his legal efforts were now exhausted and that nothing now could prevent the execution going ahead on Monday morning. Dejected but composed, Müller told his solicitor that he had not expected it to be otherwise.

I should be a very bad fellow if I had done it
, he said.

Were you aware
, asked Beard,
that efforts were being made for you?

Yes, I did think so
.

Shaking hands with the man who had failed to save his life, Müller then assured Thomas Beard that he had
made his peace with God
and then watched his solicitor depart for the last time.
Turning to sit at his table, he took up his pen and began to scratch line after line of writing on the sheets of paper made available to him. His warders presumed that he was constructing a formal confession.

In arriving at his judgement, Grey had taken his cue from the conviction of the judges presiding over Müller’s trial.
A private, draft statement
filed among the Home Office papers shows that he was suspicious of the statements given by the Blyths,
so identical in their terms
that they appeared to have been
prepared by the solicitor and subscribed by them
. He did not believe that the evidence of ownership of the Walker hat had been shaken. He questioned the respectability of Thomas Lee and the memory of Mary Anne Eldred. Dismissing the statement of ‘Baron de Camin’, he questioned why neither Jacob Weist – the docks porter – nor any of the witnesses who claimed to be able to substantiate Müller’s alibi had been subpoenaed to appear in court. Tellingly, these notes were made on the very day the Memorial was delivered to Whitehall, suggesting that he had reached his own conclusions far more swiftly than he had made out.

The Home Secretary’s judgement was coloured, too, by his belief that were he to overturn the verdict on the basis of new evidence he would set a precedent for facts to be withheld from future trials in order to form the basis of appeals. If the investigations of Müller’s defence were incomplete why, he wondered, had they failed to request a postponement of the trial? His draft statement concluded with his belief that his interference would not be in the interests of society as a whole – that
it would be dangerous and prejudicial to the due administration of the criminal law.

*

Sir George Grey was conscious that disquiet about the reality of capital punishment was growing among a section of the population who argued that it was a leftover from more brutal times,
unfit for a progressive society. Marshalling the writings of Dickens and Thackeray from the 1840s, they were increasingly vocal about their desire for abolition. Against this, the politician had to balance the strident morality of the Victorian age and its demands for retribution.

What was to be done? Successive governments had striven to impose order on the capital’s seedy alleys, its rookeries and stinking slums. Clearances and evictions had made way for the new roads and railways that sliced through the streets, for new hospitals, docks, warehouses, theatres, parks and houses. Murder, however, evaded attempts at sanitisation. The pressing difficulty was in reconciling the drunken crowds that bayed for death at the foot of the scaffold with the notion of an advanced civilisation that held itself as an example to the rest of the world.

Four years earlier, in October 1860, ex-police sergeant James Mullins had been convicted of the murder of seventy-year-old Mary Emsley, a case on which the young Richard Tanner had cut his teeth. The jury had ignored the judge’s opinion that the case against him had not fully been made and, protesting his innocence, Mullins had been executed in November before a Newgate mob of twenty thousand. It was, wrote
The Times
,
the greatest crowd assembled there at an execution for many years past
and, as
Mullins stood on the scaffold
, it
surged about in wild excitement and raised an indescribable murmur
. The ensuing outcry had forced attention back on the capital punishment issue.

The debate was finely balanced. Although the movement for total abolition had gained force in the two decades since 1840, several instances of ‘misplaced leniency’ on the part of the Home Secretary had swung public opinion back towards a rigorous prosecution of the law. During the summer of 1863 Victor Townley had been convicted of murder but was saved by his family’s ability to have him privately committed to a lunatic asylum. The argument ran that while the Townleys had the wherewithal to effect Victor’s escape, a working-class man without powerful
friends would have swung. Sir George Grey was strongly criticised for failing to take the right action and, smarting, he had grown less inclined than ever to approve applications for reprieve. In January 1864 a bricklayer, Samuel Wright, was arrested, tried, sentenced and hanged within three weeks of killing – possibly in self-defence – his notoriously violent girlfriend. Despite widespread protest and appeals for leniency, Grey had refused to interfere in the process of justice.

It was against this background that the Memorial on behalf of Franz Müller failed. But Grey’s determination not to budge was countered by those who now wondered afresh to what extent hanging demonstrated the might of the law against the wickedness of crime. How far did it qualify as an effective deterrent? The appetite for public hanging was waning.