Murder by Candlelight (11 page)

The interest of a romance, Scott said, “turns upon marvelous or uncommon incidents.” The trick lay in making what is marvelous and uncommon credible to the reader. Scott's closeness to the sources of his material gave his tales of the marvelous a plausibility unrivaled by the other romancers of the age and made him famous. For it was an age hungry for credible romance. Life was everywhere becoming less musical and more mechanical, and Scott's fantasies filled the vacuum of
ennui
that opened up, in respectable English households, between dinner and tea-time.

He supplied, too, just the right touch of erotic horror in his books. His picture of Lucy Ashton, in
The Bride of Lammermoor
, crouching, on her wedding night, in torn and bloody night-clothes, anticipates the gore and lewdness of the Hollywood horror movie; but in deference to the taste of the age, Scott was less explicit, in carnal and country matters, than the artists of our own unlaced days are apt to be.
The Bride of Lammermoor
is probably Scott's most effective Gothic romance; but like all his work, it is prosey and artificially heightened. His image of Lucy as an “exulting demoniac,” gibbering in a “wild paroxysm of insanity,” paints not half so lurid a picture in the mind as the loin of pork in Probert's cottage.

Scott himself was never satisfied with his romances, and he sought a more substantial simulacrum of the Gothic in Abbotsford itself. To a friend, he called the house “a sort of romance in architecture” and quoted a line from Coleridge's
Christabel
:

A sight to dream of, not to tell!

“I never saw anything handsomer,” he said, “than the grouping of towers, chimneys, etc. upon the roof, when seen at a proper distance.” And yet it did not signify; the skulls, the suits of armor, the oaken chairs, were they not, finally, so much Gothic gimcrackery? Still Scott did not give up: the master romancer persisted in his search for an authentic Gothicism. And curiously enough, he was soon to find it—in the low-witted deviltry of Jack Thurtell.

On Tuesday, Mr. Nicholls of Battlers Green went to Watford to see the magistrates. He brought with him the knife and pistol John Harrington had found in Gill's Hill Lane, and showed the officer what he had discovered when he put a long nail into the barrel of the pistol—something like brains. A short time later, the authorities took Probert into custody. He gave them the names of his weekend house guests, and on Wednesday morning, George Ruthven, one of the last of the Bow Street Runners, went over to Conduit Street.

“Is that you, Jack?” he asked as he came into Thurtell's room in the Coach and Horses. “John, my boy, I want you.”

“What for, George?”

“Never mind; I'll tell you presently.”

Thurtell was taken into custody without incident. Later in the day, Ruthven apprehended Joe Hunt in his lodgings in King Street, Golden Square.

After undergoing examination in Bow Street, Thurtell and Hunt were conveyed to Watford. Hunt, in an effort to save himself, told the magistrates that he knew where the body of the murdered man lay, and led them to the brook near Hill Slough.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

The Last Days of Thurtell

The guerdon of their murder they had got.

—
Keats

I
n December, the General Session of Our Lord the King of Oyer and Terminer in and for the County of Hertford—better known as the Hertford Assizes—was convened in the town of Hertford. The judges were conducted by the High Sheriff to the courthouse, and the court was opened. Afterwards, the judges repaired to church to hear divine service. At noon the court met again, with Mr. Justice Park
^*
presiding, and the grand jurors were sworn. The foreman was the Right Honorable William Lamb, Member of Parliament for Peterborough, who had ridden over that
morning from his country seat, Brocket Hall (now a golf club). He was the husband of Lady Caroline, the pretty exhibitionist whom Byron had briefly loved or coveted: a decade hence, he would be Prime Minister. Like Mr. Lamb, the other jurors were, in the words of Mr. Justice Park, “gentlemen of the first dignity, rank, and respectability” in the county. Satisfied of the truth of the indictments preferred against the accused, the jurors found “a true bill,” and the three men were committed for trial.

The trial took place in January. Probert, who had turned Crown's evidence in exchange for a promise to be let off, testified against Thurtell and Hunt. Only once was the solemnity of the proceeding momentarily softened into humor. Susan the cook testified that, on the night the murder was committed, she had been ordered to prepare supper. Mr. Broderick, junior counsel for the Crown, asked her whether the supper was “postponed.”

“I don't know,” she replied, “it was pork.”

Thurtell's bearing and conduct, in his last extremity, won all hearts, even those of his jailers, and when he was called to speak in his own defense, his words—prepared, for the most part, by others, but committed by him to memory—very nearly persuaded the jury to acquit him. Dressed, a writer for
The London Magazine
observed, in a “plum-colored frock-coat, with a drab waistcoat and gilt buttons,” he cut an impressive figure “in frame, face, eye, and daring,” and in his peroration he “clung to every separate word with an earnestness which we cannot describe, as though every syllable had the power to buoy up his sinking life.” “Cut me not off,” he beseeched the jurors, “in the very summer of my life. . . . I stand before you as before my God, overwhelmed with misfortunes, but unconscious of crime; and while you decide on my future destiny, I earnestly entreat you to remember my last solemn declaration; I am innocent, so help me God!”

The poet Keats's friend, John Hamilton Reynolds, who was present in the courtroom, came away with the image of a “strong desperate man playing the hero of the tragic trial, as at a play.” But the actor's performance, though stirring, was not convincing; and the jury, after deliberating for half an hour, found Thurtell guilty of having “feloniously, and with malice aforethought,” murdered Weare.

It “cannot but give great compunction to every feeling mind,” Mr. Justice Park said from the bench, “that a person who, from his conduct this day, has shewn that he was born with capacity for better things” should nevertheless have been “guilty of so foul and detestable a crime.” He then put the black cap upon his head and addressed the prisoner at the bar. “The sentence of law which I have to pronounce upon you, John Thurtell, according to the statute, is this—that you, John Thurtell, be taken to the place from whence you came, and from thence that you be taken on Friday, the ninth instant, to a place of execution, and that you be hanged by the neck till you be dead. . . .”

Far away, in Scotland, Sir Walter Scott was absorbed in the case of Thurtell. In “all Sir Walter's many readings in murder literature,” Carlyle's friend David Mather Masson wrote, he seems never “to have come upon any murder that more fascinated him.” He assiduously collected newspaper articles, pamphlets, and chapbooks relating to the crime, and had them bound together in a variorum volume. In moments of funk, he turned to the collection for relief; and after the collapse of his fortunes, when two publishing firms in which he was a silent partner failed for more than a quarter of a million pounds, the variorum became not only a diversion but a consolation. “Very unsatisfactory to-day,” he wrote in his journal in July 1826. “Sleepy, stupid, indolent—finished arranging the books, and after that was totally useless, unless it can be called
study that I slumbered for three or four hours over a variorum edition of the Gill's-Hill tragedy.
^†
Admirable recipe for low spirits.”

His fascination with a crime that revealed so much of the skull beneath the skin of human life did not abate, and in May 1828 he visited the scene of the crime. He marveled at the “strange intricate combination of narrow roads” he found in Hertfordshire, “winding and turning among oaks and other large timber, just like pathways cut through a forest. They wind and turn in so singular a manner, and resemble each other so much, that a stranger would have difficulty to make way amongst them.”

Scott rode through the labyrinth of lanes to the cottage itself. “The dirt of the present habitation equaled its wretched desolation,” he wrote, “and a truculent-looking hag, who showed us the place, and received a half-crown, looked not unlike the natural intimate of such a mansion. She indicated as much herself, saying the landlord dismantled the place because no respectable person would live there.”

The garden was overgrown, the pond a mere green swamp. Scott remembered Wordsworth's lines:

A merry spot, 'tis said, in days of yore,

But something ails it now—the place is curs'd.

“Indeed the whole history of the murder, and the scenes which ensued,” Scott concluded, “are strange pictures of desperate and short-sighted wickedness. The feasting—the singing—the murderer with his hands still bloody round the neck of one of the females—the watch-chain of the murdered man, argue the utmost apathy.”

In his collection of the printed reports of the trial, Scott “took care always,” his son-in-law, John Gibson Lockhart, wrote, “to have the contemporary ballads and prints bound up with them. He admired particularly this verse of Mr. Hook's broadside—

They cut his throat from ear to ear,

His brains they battered in;

His name was Mr. William Weare.

He dwelt in Lyon's Inn.