Went the Day Well?

by David Crane

  From the moment that the Congress of Vienna declared Bonaparte an outlaw the powers had always insisted that the war was against an individual and not a country and that now left them with a problem. On the day of Waterloo, Louis XVIII had been a brother sovereign in exile and France an ally by secret treaty of both Britain and Austria, and if that was the case – as that wily old negotiator and survivor of ancien régime, Revolution, Terror, Empire and Restoration, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Prince de Bénévent and erstwhile bishop demanded – what right had they now to punish an ally and effectively doom a legitimate king who was equally the victim of Napoleonic ambition?

  There was an unanswerable logic to the objection, and both Wellington and Castlereagh, a decent, talented and honourable man, clearly recognised the political folly of associating the restored monarchy with national humiliation, but all it did was expose the claim that it was only Bonaparte they had fought for the sham it was. A year earlier the allies had been happy enough to reward Bonaparte’s fifteen years of aggression and conquest with the island of Elba, but in 1815, France had welcomed Hazlitt’s ‘child and champion of the revolution’ – Victor Hugo’s ‘Robespierre on horseback’ – with open arms, and the French people, the same incorrigible nation that had carried the ideas of the Revolution across Europe and smashed up the old legitimist world – were going to be made to pay.

  The real enemy was, and always had been, those forces unleashed in 1789, the real danger, as Austria’s Count Metternich recognised, not conquerors – they come and go – but ideas, and if there was any doubt about that the next few years would brutally dispel them. It is often claimed that the Congress of Vienna represented a major step forward in the development of international relations, and yet for all its talk of slavery or the Jews or the theory of ‘consent’, or rules of navigation, or even peace, the truth is that the ambition and imagination of the Congress and its various diplomatic offspring never soared higher than the preservation of the existing order and the crushing – wherever they saw it, whether in Spain or Poland or Naples or Greece – of any popular movement or constitutional change tainted by liberalism and the ideas of 1789.

  The only true legitimacy that emerged from the Congress was the legitimacy of power – the right of the ‘director’ states to dispose of peoples as if, as Hazlitt protested, they were merely cattle, to police Europe and their own populations as they saw fit, to interfere in the internal arrangements of a sovereign country, to suppress change whenever it came from below – and if Britain rapidly found itself at odds with its partners, it has its share of responsibility for the direction post-war Europe took. As early as 1820, Castlereagh would be protesting against Russian and Austrian plans for military intervention in Spain, but a government that had insisted on creating a buffer state out of Protestant Holland and Catholic Belgium, that had vacillated feebly over the question of Saxony and Poland and would condemn the outbreak of the Greek war of independence against Ottoman oppression, was in no position to take the high moral ground when the system of international policing it had done so much to forge became the tool of European reaction.

  For the plain John Bull Englishman, events in Spain or Poland might scarcely so much as register – ‘Damn all foreign countries,’ one working man would famously tell Gladstone; ‘what has old England to do with foreign countries?’ – but he would have been wise to have paid more attention. It is a sobering thought, in fact, that public opinion in 1815 was on the side of the Prussians rather than Castlereagh or Wellington in its lust for revenge, but it would not be long before the country discovered that what was good enough for Europe was good enough for Lord Liverpool’s Britain and that the same principles that dictated the government’s foreign policy could just as easily be turned against its own people.

  Britain might have fought the war against Napoleonic hegemony for the same strategic reasons it had historically fought its European wars, but like its allies it would fight the peace against the ideas that had brought Bonaparte to power. During the war there might have been some excuse for the repressive measures that Pitt and his successors took, but fear and necessity had become so much a matter of habit with those in power that the Britain that would finally emerge out of the political mini-ice age of these post-war years would not do so without leaving a long casualty list behind it.

  If the worst still lay ahead in 1815 – the years of massive unemployment and vagrancy, of economic depression from which Altrincham’s mills would be no more immune than the kelp beds of Harris, of wretched harvests and emigration, of mass political rallies and political oppression – the government wasted no time in putting down its marker. Over the next five years the Peterloo Massacre and the Cato Street Conspiracy to murder Lord Liverpool and his government would relegate it to nothing more than a footnote in legal and radical history, but for two months during the summer of 1815 the condemned cell in a Newgate gaol of a young servant girl was the battleground for the first trial of strength in the war between the forces of reaction and reform.

  It is difficult to put one’s finger on the moment Eliza Fenning became a ‘cause’ or precisely how or why it happened – she had, after all, no connections or influence, the poisoning itself was a one-week wonder – and if it certainly had something to do with the fact that she was young and pretty that was only part of it. In the history of the nineteenth century, gallows writers from Dickens to Hardy would offer their queasy testimony to the erotic appeal of its female victims, but the men who championed Eliza Fenning – men like the curmudgeonly Samuel Parr, the great reformer Samuel Romilly, the Hunt brothers, and radical journalist William Hone, the Benthamite child of murder Basil Montagu, and a score of dissenting ministers, chemists and lawyers – did not do so because they had seen her but out of a deep and worried sense that something was rotten in the state of Denmark.

  At the heart of this concern was an instinct for justice and fairness that twenty years of oppressive wartime government had not stifled. In the weeks before and immediately after Waterloo the government could afford to ignore any opposition, but in Eliza Fenning all those forces of reform and change that were impotent to effect Britain’s foreign policy – all those elements in national life, that, as the Whig lawyer Cockburn said, had ‘swallowed’ the abuses of power in the interests of some wider patriotism – had found the cause they needed.

  It is just possible that had she not become a cause célèbre of London radicalism, her appeal might yet have turned out differently, but in a world not tolerant of dissent she was too dangerous to ignore. The official papers of her case disappeared sometime in the nineteenth century, but the government-paid newspapers from this summer survive, and in the shameful campaign that turned a Sunday school-trained Methodist into a lewd, crypto-Catholic, serial poisoner who could not, even in her death cell, keep her thoughts off the child-rapist Oldfield, it is easy enough to see how the appeal might have gone.

  It is clear from her behaviour that she still clung on to the irrational hope of a repeal, but there was something woefully forlorn about hopes grounded in a system that allowed the same ‘Black Jack’ Silvester who was now warning the Turners against signing a petition on her behalf to take her case for clemency to the Prince Regent. ‘Pray come soon,’ a distraught Eliza Fenning wrote on 19 July to her parents, more than three months after sentencing, when the confirmation of sentence was at last sent down. ‘The report is come for me to be executed on Wednesday next.’

  ‘Dear Parents,’ she wrote again on the 22nd, her language characteristically veering between conventional religiosity and a bitterness that in her is always more convincing than the pieties, ‘I do solemnly declare, were I never to enter the heavenly mansion of heavenly rest, I am murdered! … I will be happy in heaven, with my dear sisters and brothers, and will meet you by and by … those who swore my life will never enter with me into rest.’

  With the confirmation of her sentence and a date of execution – 26 July – the rhythm and scope of
Eliza Fenning’s life took on their final ghastly shape. From the moment she had been committed to Newgate her existence had been a series of little ‘deaths’, with each phase of the judicial process marked by a further isolation, an ever deeper burial within the massive walls and troglodyte passageways of the gaol, and now she had reached the bottom.

  It was a strange twilight place, the world of the condemned felon, cut off by that vast gulf that separated Newgate’s living from its walking dead, and yet at the same time she was now more than ever public property. In the weeks since the trial there had been ‘unprecedented’ interest in her case, and as the Newgate bell tolled ten on the morning of her last Sunday ‘an immense concourse’ was already waiting in the prison chapel to enjoy a spectacle that in Georgian London’s theatre of the grotesque ranked only second to the gallows. ‘The congregation having arranged themselves in a decorous manner,’ the Morning Advertiser reported the grim ritual – the condemned sermon, the open coffin – that preceded every execution, ‘the prisoners under sentence of death, to the number of twenty-one, were brought in by their respective gaolers and turnkeys, and placed on the left of the pulpit. Every eye now fixed upon the black pew in the centre of the chapel, the place set apart for those doomed to undergo the awful sentence of the law: silence pervaded every quarter – it was soon broken by the sighs of the auditory at seeing the unfortunate young girl, Elizabeth Fenning, enter the chapel, attended by those other unhappy victims in floods of tears.’

  During these last days in prison a lay preacher had been ministering to Eliza, but the Reverend Horace Cotton had no intention now of ducking his hour in the limelight. Her crime had been one of revenge, he told the congregation, and Satan, having persuaded her ‘that revenge was sweet, that he would protect her’, – ‘Here the unfortunate girl again fainted, and did not recover for a long time’ – abandoned her to her fate and ‘the penetrating eye of Providence’ that ‘discovered every secret act of man’.

  It is hard to know which is more baleful – the spiritual smugness, the psychological stupidity or the abject surrender to injustice of all those, Anglican or Dissenters, who fought for the soul of Eliza Fenning during these last days – but perhaps they simply knew that the next world was the only one to which she now belonged. Outside the walls of Newgate desperate efforts were still being made to gain at least a stay of sentence, but while the ever-present Lord Ellenborough felt under enough pressure from the press and private representations to hold two last-minute reviews, the Recorder remained as implacable as ever. Corby Lloyd, the Quaker banker, was told by Silvester that he was only interested in Fenning ‘because she was pretty’. New evidence would not make a bit of difference. ‘He felt so perfectly satisfied of her guilt, (there never being a clearer case),’ he continued, ‘that he knew no possible reason for delaying the execution.’

  Even after this there was time for one more review of the trial and Newgate itself seemed to hold its breath. On the night before an execution even the ‘scum of society’ were not immune to the horror of morning, but while it was a ‘disturbed’ night through the prison within the condemned cell, Eliza Fenning seems to have already given up. She had signed her ‘Selection of Psalms and Hymns’ and sent it to the congregation of the Percy Chapel, Charlotte Street, and on the Tuesday taken a ‘heart-rending’ farewell from her mother and thrown a last letter to her old cellmate Mary Ann Clark through the window bars. ‘Dearest Friend,’ she wrote, ‘don’t grieve, dear girl, my time is but short in this troublesome world, and I soon shall be in eternal rest … God bless you! And may God send you liberty soon. Here is a lock of hair for you, and another for Young.’

  Her courage, inevitably, ebbed and flowed. The next morning – her last – her new spiritual advisor, a Mr Wansbrough, was with her by six, and found her seated on a bench under the eye of a woman keeper, ‘elbow leaning on the table next to her … her head resting on her hands’, and ‘so dejected that she could not speak’. ‘I read to her some parts of Job, that I considered applicable,’ he wrote. ‘A little before seven o’clock she said that she was bewildered, and that it all appeared like a dream to her. I prayed that God would be pleased to remove her doubts, and confirm her faith, for the tempter was now very busy with her.’

  What the tempter put in her head, he does not say, but if it was rage against an unjust fate it perhaps buttressed her courage in ways that Job could not. In a strange way, too, that is recognisable from the annals of the Newgate Calendar, the very theatricality of it all seems to have given her a new strength. From the first day she had been committed for trial she had visualised this moment and she was not now going to fail. ‘Pray tell my dear parents not to put a bit of black about me,’ she had written the night before, the familiar symbolism of the gallows and a young woman’s self-consciousness melding strangely together, ‘as it will be a token of innocence. A very few leave this world a pure virgin, and when led to the gallows, I shall be led as a shepherd leadeth a lamb to the slaughter, or as a bride to her Heavenly Bridegroom.’

  On this last morning she was just as fastidious with her dress, vanity and seriousness touchingly at one. When she knelt on her cell floor in prayer, she took off her gown first so she would not get it dirty. Something about her, too, had eventually penetrated the defence mechanisms of the Reverend Cotton. He came to her cell in one final attempt to get her to confess but, at the last, clergyman and prison apparatchik lost out to the human being. She could have any visitors she wanted, he told her kindly. He also brought with him a smelling bottle, and sent for wine and water to help bolster her nerve.

  Sometime after seven she was moved to her final cell, and there at half-past the hour her spiritual advisor joined her. She raised her hands in a gesture of prayer, but could say nothing. ‘I cannot speak, sir,’ she told him, ‘but I pray from my heart.’ As they went down on their knees together for the last time – her face ‘tranquil’, ‘the workings of the spirit complete’ – there was a knock on the door, and with a staggering step she was led out into the press yard to be prepared for the scaffold.

  She was not to hang alone and Oldfield was already there and – the invisible ghost at the feast, unmentioned and unmentionable in almost every account of Eliza Fenning’s end – the fifty-seven-year-old sodomite, Abraham Adams. The halter was tied around her and her arms bound. Then the ‘cavalcade’ of prisoners, warders, sheriffs, chaplain, officers and the rest, ‘began to move in solemn and awful procession through the dark passage, with silent and mournful pace; the walls reverberating the words upon the ear, “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord”.’

  Waiting for her outside the Debtor’s Gate was a vast crowd, the biggest since the executions of the murderers John Holloway and Owen Haggerty had drawn 45,000 spectators and resulted in more than forty spectators being crushed to death eight years before. Before them they saw a young woman of twenty-two, dressed in a white worked muslin gown, a white worked muslin cap with a white satin ribbon, a white ribbon around her waist, and pale, lilac boots, laced at the front. She was the first to mount the scaffold. ‘Before the just and almighty God, and by the faith of the Holy Sacrament I have taken, I am innocent of the offence on which I am charged,’ she declared firmly, before obscurely adding in a low voice, ‘I hope that God will forgive me, and make manifest the transaction in the course of the day.’

  Oldfield, who had asked to be placed next to her on the scaffold – almost certainly to spare unspotted innocence the contagion of Adams’s proximity – was less restrained. ‘“O what a blessed state of immortality awaits all such who die in Christ Jesus!” he cried out mightily unto God … “O, Oldfield! You are going to heaven.”’ They were almost the last words Eliza Fenning heard. She pleaded with the hangman to spare her the dirty handkerchief over her eyes and asked Cotton to warn her before the platform fell. As in life, though, so in death. ‘My dear, it must be done,’ Cotton told her as her face was covered and, a few moments later, without warning, the platform crashed a
nd Eliza Fenning dropped to her death. ‘Thus perished, by the hands of the executioner, a female twenty-one [sic] years of age,’ wrote her spiritual advisor, ‘in the prime of her youth, who seemed qualified by nature to fill a superior station in life. Her mind was the most extraordinary I ever knew, possessing great shrewdness, and a quickness of perception which many persons nominate archness. Her temper was warm, her feelings susceptibly alive to everything around her, I have every reason to believe that she died in the faith of Christ Jesus, and is now a bright angel in heaven.’

  It is not easy to be sure where to place Eliza Fenning’s trial and death, as the defiant swansong of an old brutal world or the first skirmish of post-Waterloo politics. In the figure of Sir John Silvester – a defence lawyer at the trial of Martha Ray’s murderer – you can almost smell the concupiscence and corruption of a vanishing age, but in the array of opposition that ranked themselves against Silvester, Sidmouth and Ellenborough and took on the Tory press were those same names that over the next fifteen years would press and fight for change and reform of everything from asylums and the poor law to Catholic emancipation, religious toleration, slavery and Parliament itself.

  They had already fired one warning shot across government bows – in an improbable alliance of radicalism and evangelical morality, Lord Cochrane had left the King’s Bench to join forces with Wilberforce and defeat by a single vote the motion to increase the Duke of Cumberland’s marriage allowance – but Eliza Fenning was their first real show of force.