Murder by Candlelight

by Michael Knox Beran

  It was, Carlyle said, characteristic of his generation that it should crave romance, yet fail to see that romance was all around them. Even in an age of prose and political economy, there were romantic passions great enough to “suspend men from bed-posts” and “from improved-drops at the west end of Newgate” prison. A passion that “explosively shivers asunder the Life it took rise in,” he wrote, “ought to be regarded as considerable; no more passion, in the highest heyday of Romance, yet did. The passions, by grace of the Supernal and also of the Infernal Powers (for both have a hand in it), can never fail us.” Yet Carlyle’s own passional architecture was warped. His words and thoughts were as iron, but his manhood was soft, flaccid—limp. As he lay amid the doleful shades of Kinnaird House, he was courting, through the post, Jane Baillie Welsh, whom he was later to marry. The marriage would never be consummated, and the passion that found no healthy outlet became muckish and unclean, like the waters of a standing pond. Ever thrifty, Carlyle converted his thwarted passion into the prose with which he made his name and reputation. Time has since tarnished his fame as an Eminent Victorian; but for the historian of murder he will always have his value. The morose star-voyaging philosopher, angrily condemning the “dim millions mostly blockhead” whom he simultaneously sought to enlighten, was able to cut to the core of a lowly, flesh-and-blood crime more readily than those who, as Lord Byron said of himself, had no “poetical humbug” in them and piqued themselves on their practicality. There was “endless mystery,” Carlyle said, in even the crudest fact, a “Sentence printed if not by God, then at least by the Devil,” a “hieroglyphic page” in which one could “read on forever, find new meaning forever.” Of all those who were soon to interest themselves in the facts of Jack Thurtell’s murderous career, few would see farther into their significance than Thomas Carlyle.

  In the middle of October, Thurtell went again to Rexworthy’s and spoke affably to Weare. Rexworthy afterwards heard from Weare himself an account of the conversation and supposed that the two men were reconciled. So far from nursing a grudge against his old antagonist, Thurtell had invited him to come down to Hertfordshire with him for few days’ shooting. Weare had accepted the invitation.

  Not long afterwards, Thurtell came across Hunt in the Coach and Horses. “Hunt,” he said, “I wish you would take a walk with me.”

  It was a brisk fall day, the mercury reaching fifty-six. The two men, the one tall and commanding, the other short and sullen-faced, went up to Oxford Street together and crossed into Marylebone, where they stopped before the window of a jeweler’s shop. Thurtell was intrigued by a pair of pistols on display. They went in, and Thurtell told the shop-man he wanted to kill some cats. He purchased both guns.

  When Thurtell and Hunt returned to the Coach and Horses, Probert was there. He chided Thurtell for his failure to “book” Major Woods. “You made a bad business of that, Jack,” he said, adding that he doubted whether an air gun could kill a man “on the spot.”

  Thurtell brandished his newly acquired pistols. “I know that as well as you, Bill, or what the hell should I buy these pops for? I was a bloody fool to go all the way to my friend Harper, at Norwich, to borrow the air gun.”

  They melted the lead to make the balls and cast four bullets.

  Probert said he doubted whether the balls were large enough to kill a man “on the spot.”

  “You would be damned sorry to have one of them through your head, small as they are,” Thurtell replied.

  The pistols were loaded, and Hunt greased the hammers and the triggers.

  “Bill,” he said to Probert, “will you be in it?”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Lyon’s Inn

  But I full of thoughts and trouble touching the issue of this day; and to comfort myself did go to the Dog and drink half-a-pint of mulled sack. . . .

  —Samuel Pepys

  Turning out of the Strand, you went down Holywell Street past crooked houses with weirdly carven gables and book-venders who did a brisk trade in disreputable literature. The shops of Holywell Street were notorious for the variety of publications on offer, but respectable material was also to be had. If you happened to be browsing in October 1823, your eye might perhaps have fallen on the most recent issue of the London Magazine, just come from the press. The lead article, “Notes from the Pocket-Book of a Late Opium-Eater,” was by Thomas De Quincey and contained the first of his published meditations on murder, “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth.”

  Continuing down Holywell Street, you were soon before the Old Dog Tavern, where Samuel Pepys used now and again to have his “liquor up.” Nearby was a passage that led to Lyon’s Inn. Passing through the portal, you found yourself in a gloomy court. “A more silent, haunted-looking inn was never known,” an old lawyer remembered. “Even by daylight, strange shadows flitted about the dwarfish doorways, and fled up the spiral staircases into the low-pitched upper stories.”

  In the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Sir Edward Coke held the office of Reader here, astonishing or more likely boring his auditors with his intricate expositions of the common and the statutory law. But in the autumn of 1823, Lyon’s Inn was the most disreputable of the Inns of Chancery, those ancient seminaries of English equity practice. It was now inhabited by doubtful characters, mountebanks and fraudsters, as well as by unsavory attorneys, the “vermin of the law”—an ironic reversal, in light of the tradition that those who seek “equity must come with clean hands.” Lyon’s Inn reeked of decay; yet on this particular afternoon, William Weare, in his chambers in the southeast corner, was in high spirits. He was looking forward to a few days’ shooting in Hertfordshire, and to practicing the still more agreeable sport of “flat-catching” there. He was, no doubt, pleased that Jack Thurtell had come round, and was eager to cooperate with him in the netting of an unsuspecting naïf. Just the other day, Thurtell had come over to Rexworthy’s to let him know that he had recently become acquainted with a young gentleman who had come into a large property in Hertfordshire. Thurtell particularly mentioned that the young man had a passion for gaming yet refused to play for small stakes. What was more, the opulent youth had invited him to come down to his country house for some shooting, and had no objection to his bringing a friend.

  Thurtell had evidently learned his lesson: he spoke of introducing “cards, hazard, or backgammon” after dinner in Hertfordshire, and of making a “famous thing of it.” Weare was himself enchanted by the prospect and perhaps thought it to Thurtell’s credit that, eager as the novice was to “decoy a flat,” he yet had sense enough to turn to a master player to show him how the thing was done.

  Miss Malone, the laundress, came in and laid out Weare’s clothes and linen. Weare himself took out a carpetbag and began to pack it. Five shirts, six pairs of stockings, a shooting jacket, leggings, breeches, a pair of laced boots, and a pair of Wellingtons were put in, together with a razor and strop, a tortoiseshell comb and hairbrush, a backgammon board, a pair of loaded dice, and two or three packs of false cards.

  Weare told Miss Malone not to bother about his supper; he was going out of town that afternoon and would not return until Tuesday. About three o’clock, he asked her to fetch a coach for him. She went over to the Spotted Dog in the Strand, and a short time later the coach rolled around to Lyon’s Inn. Weare came down, slight of figure in an olive-colored coat; a gold watch hung from a chain around his neck. He put his gun into the coach before getting in himself; the girl put the carpetbag in and watched him drive off.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Young Men from the Provinces

  Fixity of tradition, of custom, of language is perhaps a prerequisite to complete harmony in life and mind. Variety in these matters is a lesson to the philosopher and drives him into the cold arms of reason; but it confuses the poet and the saint, and embitters society.

  —Santayana

  Have you got every thing you want, Jack?” Probert asked.

  It was past three o’clock, and Thurtell and his chums were
dining together in the Coach and Horses.*

  “No,” Thurtell said, “we must send Joe for a six-bushel sack, a hank of cord, and the horse and chaise.” He then turned to Hunt, and told him to fetch, too, his red shawl from the Cock, where he had inadvertently left it. He took out his pocketbook and gave Hunt some money, saying that he was specially to remember to tell the hostler that he needed the gig on account of a visit he was making to Dartford.

  The coach came round to Charing Cross. Weare instructed the coachman to wait while he went over to Rexworthy’s. He found Rexworthy there and told him that he was on his way to meet Thurtell at Cumberland Gate, whence they were to start together for Hertfordshire.

  Just before five o’clock, Hunt drove up Conduit Street in the rented gig. It was dark-green in color; a roan-gray horse stood in the harness. The horse’s cheeks were very white.

  Hunt showed his mates the sack.

  “I am sure this is not a six-bushel sack,” Probert said. “This will not be large enough for him, Jack.”

  “Never mind, Bill, we must make a shift with it; we have no time to lose.”

  Thurtell went out to the gig and drove off. Probert and Hunt remained. Sometime before six o’clock, Probert asked Tetsall’s boy to bring round his own horse and chaise. He then excused himself.

  “Hunt,” he said when he came back into the room, “the chaise is ready.”

  The coach rolled down Cumberland Street, stopping not far from where the Marble Arch now stands and where the Tyburn gallows once stood. Weare got out and went up the street toward Tyburn Turnpike, at the western end of Oxford Street. A moment later, he returned with a tall man in a rough coat. Weare paid the fare and, having collected his gun and carpetbag, went away with the man in the rough coat. It was half past four, and some of the lamps were lighted, but others were not, for the day was not yet gone.

  Probert and Hunt were driving up Oxford Street when Probert said they must get something for supper; he was not sure whether there was anything to eat in the lodge. They stopped at a butcher’s, and Hunt bought a loin of pork. They set off again, going down Oxford Street toward Tyburn Turnpike and passing thence into the Edgware Road. Commanding a strong bay horse, they soon overtook Thurtell and Weare.

  “Here they are,” Hunt said. “Drive by and take no notice.”

  They drove on through the darkness, the road before them faintly illuminated by the glowing oil of the gig-lamps. Probert was apprehensive. What, he asked Hunt, if Jack should “well it”—take the greatest part of the money for himself? For it was universally believed, in the gaming circles of London, that Weare never carried less than £1,000 or £1,500 on his person, a sum he kept close to his skin, ready to be instantly retrieved should an opportunity present itself.

  “We know Jack is a very determined fellow,” Probert said, “and is sure to do the trick; but if he don’t do the thing that is right by giving us our share, we shall be sure to learn by the newspapers what amount he takes, and we shall know how to act hereafter.”

  Sometime before eight o’clock, they reached Elstree and stopped at the Artichoke. Mr. Field, the publican, brought them glasses of brandy-and-water, which they drank in the gig. Probert was merry and told Mr. Field that Hunt could “sing a good song.”

  “I should be glad to hear him,” Mr. Field said.

  But Hunt declined to sing.

  Each was drinking his fourth or fifth glass of brandy-and-water when, upon hearing the sound of a horse and chaise, they sped off. As they drew near to Mr. Phillimore’s lodge, about a mile from Radlett, they stopped by the side of the road.

  “You get out here,” Probert told Hunt. “I will go on to the cottage, and see if Jack is there, and if he is all right.”

  An officer of the Bow Street Horse Patrol, in a blue coat and scarlet waistcoat, was riding near the fifth milestone in the Edgware Road when he saw two men driving hard in a gig drawn by a roan-gray horse with a white face. A little later a man named Clarke, landlord of the White Lion in Edgware, was going up the road on foot when, turning round, he saw a gig bearing down on him at a furious rate. The driver shouted at him to get out of the way. Clarke recognized him; it was Jack Thurtell, a man who had often raised a glass in the White Lion.

  The roads around London had long been the scene of robbery and violence. The better to keep the King’s Peace on the frontiers of the metropolis, the mounted officers of the Patrol had been commissioned to supplement the efforts of “Mr. Fielding’s People,” the Bow Street Runners, who were on foot.† Partly as a result of the Patrol, the great age of highway robbery had come to an end. But the names of the highwaymen who once haunted the desolate heaths lived on, not least in the imaginations of young miscreants who sought to emulate such villains as Richard “Dick” Turpin and John “Sixteen-String Jack” Rann.

  Thurtell himself traded jests with Hunt about their being “Turpins” and “Turpin lads.” Like Turpin, who had been born, in 1705, near Saffron Walden in Essex, Thurtell, too, was a young man from the provinces: he had forsaken his provincial Norwich to make his fortune in London. Such transplantations were one of the great social facts of the age. With the consolidation of the nation states which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries replaced the more loosely organized kingdoms of Christendom, cities like London and Paris acquired an ever-greater importance. Provincial towns like Dijon and Prague, Aix and Salamanca, with their high proud traditions, suffered a corresponding decline. The provinces, Honoré de Balzac wrote in one of his novels, became as stale as stagnant water.

  The metropolises of Europe—and none more so than London—became a magnet for young men seduced by tales of the riches that were (in theory) to be easily won there. The adventures of the most gifted of these young men have been told, not only by Balzac himself, but by Stendhal and Flaubert, Henry James and Lionel Trilling. These writers were, not unnaturally, drawn to the highest specimens of the type, which they brought to life in such characters as Hyacinth Robinson, the hero of James’s The Princess Casamassima, and Julien Sorel, the hero of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le Noir. They had no desire to chronicle the misdeeds of young provincials molded out of coarser stuff: their histories were left to the journeymen of letters, to the Grub Street hacks whose lives of the ne’er-do-wells fill the pages of the Newgate Calendar, that dark companion-volume and obverse mirror of the Lives of the Saints.

  No one would mistake Jack Thurtell for Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré or James’s Hyacinth Robinson: he had nothing of their delicate idealism, their instinct for form, or their personal beauty. And yet Thurtell was, in his own way, quite as much a provincial ingénu as either of them: and his own metropolitan pilgrimage was to come to quite as dark an end.

  A little before eight o’clock, a laborer was coming out of a field near Gill’s Hill Lane, the road beside which Probert’s cottage stood. The moon was not yet up: there was only starlight. In the dimness, he saw a gig come down the lane. There were two men in it.

  Had Jack Thurtell chanced to have been born in an earlier age, he might never have felt the lure of London. Under different stars, he might have been content to have remained a Norwich man, for the city in its prime was one of the sweetest of provincial nectaries. It is difficult for us today to form a just conception, not merely of the beauty, but of the vitality of the old provincial towns as they were in the days before the West was metropolized and all eyes became engrossed in the drama of the megalopolis. “A charming and sometimes forgotten feature of the world as it used to be,” Lytton Strachey wrote in his essay on Voltaire and the Président de Brosses, “was the provincial capital. When Edinburgh was as far from London as Vienna is today, it was natural—it was inevitable—that it should be the centre of a local civilization, which, while it remained politically and linguistically British, developed a colour and a character of its own. In France there was the same pleasant phenomenon. Bordeaux, Toulouse, Aix-en-Provence—up to the end of the eighteenth century each of these was in truth a capital, where a peculiar
culture had grown up that was at once French and idiosyncratic. An impossibility today!” Norwich, too, had once been such a provincial center, with its own distinct and creative culture; and although in Thurtell’s time it was but a pale shadow of its former self, it retained enough of its old enchantment to draw from George Borrow, in his novel Lavengro, a memorable tribute to its faded beauty. But Thurtell, who had taught young Borrow to box, was not such a sentimentalist as his pupil; he wanted action, and it was in London, not Norwich, that action was to be had.

  Balzac in his novels invariably makes the story of the young man from the provinces into a melodrama: it is obvious from the start that the ingénu will be corrupted by the metropolis whose prizes he covets. But Balzac had got hold of a real problem: the fact is that the ingénu very often was corrupted by the metropolis. The life he knew in his hometown was on a human scale: everyone knew everyone else. In Lost Illusions, Balzac describes how, in provincial Angoulême, even those who despised Lucien de Rubempré “took him for a human being.” In Paris, by contrast, the young man found that he “did not even exist” in the eyes of those among whom he was obliged to make his way. The lesson was clear, and Vautrin, the demonic figure who initiates Lucien in the corrupting arts of the capital, was quick to draw it: one must, he said, “look upon men, and women particularly, as mere tools, but without letting them realize it.” It was a lesson Thurtell himself had by this time learned all too well.

  The moon rose, and the trees and hedgerows showed white in the moonshine. A farmer named Smith was going with his wife and children to Battlers Green, the farm of his friend Mr. Nicholls. Smith himself was on foot; his wife and children were in an ass chaise. Their road ran roughly parallel to Gill’s Hill Lane, which lay a few hundred yards to the east. About a quarter past eight, Smith was startled by the report of a pistol. “I then heard groans which lasted a minute or two.” He did not, however, investigate. “I had my wife and children with me; I did not go up because my wife was alarmed.”