The English Monster

by Lloyd Shepherd

  There is an uncomfortable silence. Neither of them is armed with a quip to fill it. Eventually, Graham speaks.

  “I am to convey the gratitude of the PRS for your co-operation.”

  And, for some reason, that finally sets Harriott off.

  “Given the seriousness of his imposition on my office, I would have thought a personal conveyance of such gratitude would have been appropriate.”

  “Now, Harriott, that was never . . .”

  “Has the man any conception of what he has asked and what has been done? Or does he prefer to hold court in Soho Square in magnificent scholarly indifference, while we send men to skulk around in strange harbors for murky reason of political expedience? By God, Graham, we have sent a good man to undertake a demonic task.”

  “Horton is safe, Harriott.”

  “He is damaged, Graham. We have damaged him. We have resurrected a past from which he was trying to escape.”

  “He would not have undertaken what was needed without incentive.”

  “My God, Graham, you speak as if you were in Parliament. We are not in Parliament. We are in the River Police Office, and you are with an old friend. I pray you, do not speak as if I were an elector. You do me a great disservice. Not as great as that done to poor Horton, but nevertheless.”

  “Harriott, your constable will recover. I have a proposal for him.”

  “A proposal?”

  “Yes. He has been working for you in a semi-official capacity.”

  “He has. So much I told you when we began the secondary investigation into the Wapping murders. I did not expect then that this would lead to furtive assassinations on the Kent coast.”

  “My proposal is that he keeps working in this capacity. With you as his magistrate.”

  “Keeps working? For what? The case is closed, though in a brazenly clandestine fashion.”

  “There will be other cases.”

  “No doubt. Cases which Horton can investigate in his official capacity.”

  “Not these cases.”

  “Graham, what in God’s name are you talking about?”

  “Old friend, I have not been honest with you.”

  Graham has not once looked up from the fire during this little exchange, but he does now, and Harriott can see, really see, how terribly careworn this West End dandy now appears.

  “It is late, Graham. Perhaps in the morning . . .”

  “No, John. Now. Yes, the hour is late, but darkness is appropriate for the tale I must tell. It is true that the President of the Royal Society himself demanded the cessation of the existence of William Ablass, but not for the mercantile reasons I gave to you and to Horton. That was a fabrication, one which weighs heavy on me but one which I will now try to correct. The PRS knows I am here, and knows of my insistence that you, at least, be told the whole truth. He also knows of my proposal for you and for Horton. We will come to that. But for now, John, sit in that old chair and rest your lame leg. My story is long, dark, and fantastic. Neither of us will sleep tonight once it is told.”

  And with that, Graham begins.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  There are stories, and there are histories. It goes without saying that this is a story, and what’s more a story that takes some liberties with reputations, biographies, and events.

  That said, I did give myself the task of cleaving as close as possible to the true facts when telling the story of the Ratcliffe Highway murders (as they became known). The dates given within are the real dates; the Marr and Williamson families were really exterminated in the manner described; John Williams really did kill himself in Coldbath Fields; and he really was thrown into a nongrave just north of the Highway. His bones were dug up, legend has it, by a gang of workmen laying a water main in the early years of the twentieth century, and for many years afterward a skull was on display in a local pub which was allegedly that of the so-called Irish Monster.

  The story of the terrible murders and the tragically amateurish investigation into them is told in the magisterial The Maul and the Pear Tree, by P. D. James and T. A. Critchley (Faber & Faber). Written forty years ago, it describes London’s emerging and chaotic police infrastructure in 1811 (Robert Peel is still some years away), and the attempts by John Harriott, in particular, to give some sort of energy to the investigation. Harriott’s impetuous handbill and his clashes with the Shadwell magistrates and the Home Secretary himself are described as they actually happened. There really was a Billy Ablass in and around Wapping at the time of the murders, and he was mentioned in the House of Commons (the extract from Hansard within is real, but edited). Of course, it should go without saying that the history I have given Ablass is entirely my own invention; there is no suggestion in the historical record that he was, well, enduring.

  Waterman-Constable Charles Horton, like Ablass, was a real man who did work for the River Police Office but whose historical background is unknown (at least to me). All I have is an address and a name—the character of Charles Horton is an invention, and so is his wife Abigail. The character of Aaron Graham is also a biographical liberty on my part, although Graham really was magistrate at the historic office of Bow Street who took a keen interest in the murders and was asked in January 1812 to undertake his own investigations into the murders, as described within.

  John Harriott, now. No one would make him up, and his desperate attempts to find the perpetrators of the Ratcliffe Highway murders were heroic. His memoirs were published as My Struggles Through Life, three years before the events of The English Monster. He leaps out of the pages of those memoirs as a true archetype, British and bulldog-magnificent. His life was a vivid, monumental struggle, marked by relentless energy but punctuated by tragedy and black despair. Someone should write Harriott’s biography, and it would be the biography of Britain itself. His endless struggles with money mirror those of his country rather too closely for any modern Briton’s comfort.

  As for the remaining “contemporary” matters dealt with in the book, I should say a word about the Royal Society, whose president in 1811 was Sir Joseph Banks. It can’t be dodged—I’ve implicated both Banks and his great Society in a terrible historical cover-up in the pages of this story. Lest the present Fellows of the Society start devising methods of separating me into my component parts in scientifically interesting ways, I should of course emphasize that, to my knowledge, the Society has long been in the habit of investigating those accidents of natural history it comes across, rather than shutting them away.

  I will only add that 1811 is a peculiarly fluid time in the Society’s history, and in natural philosophy itself. A new scientific establishment will soon appear over the historical horizon, and its offspring will include Faraday’s dynamo and Darwin’s theory, but in 1811 the Society is rather more like an arm of a government at war, and its patriotic president Sir Joseph would have felt no shame in that. Read more about this amazing period in the history of science in Richard Holmes’s mesmerizing The Age of Wonder (HarperPress).

  Just as with the events of late 1811 and early 1812, I’ve tried to make the historical events which created the Monster chronologically accurate while indulging in a good deal of artistic license. John Hawkyns did lead England’s first “official” slaving trip, an accolade which should (although doesn’t, in my opinion) burn with sufficient infamy to our modern eyes to perhaps blot out his achievements in defending England from a Spanish invasion years later. His lead ship, the Jesus of Lübeck, did belong to Queen Elizabeth herself, and she knew perfectly well what he planned to fill its hold with. He sailed three times in total to Africa and New Spain, the third of these into disaster; the events portrayed in The English Monster are largely drawn from the second voyage.

  It is also a matter of historical record that Francis Drake sailed with Hawkyns on the third voyage, as a senior officer and then as a captain, so his presence on the second, though by no means unlikely, is nevertheless (another) liberty taken by me. The events of the Hawkyns voyages are covered in sch
olarly yet engrossing detail in Nick Hazlewood’s The Queen’s Slave Trader (Harper Perennial), whose title describes exactly what Hawkyns and Drake were up to.

  Some will be shocked that Francis Drake, England’s great Elizabethan hero, had dabbled in the trading of human souls. Some may even be annoyed by my bringing it up. This is understandable. The horrors, evils, and crushing inhumanity of the slave trade have been well documented but certainly not as well remembered as they should be. Anyone with a determination to face England’s guilt in this regard should read Hugh Thomas’s The Slave Trade (Phoenix), which plumbs with dispassionate clarity the full depth of England’s iniquity. To read more about the specific cruelties of slavery in the Caribbean, and how it primed the great engine of English commerce, please read Elizabeth Abbott’s Sugar: A Bittersweet History (Duckworth Overlook). All I can do here is repeat George Orwell’s remarks from “The Lion and the Unicorn.”

  England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s much-quoted message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr. Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons. It has rich relations who have to be kow-towed to and poor relations who are horribly sat upon, and there is a deep conspiracy of silence about the source of the family income.

  And with that, on to pirates. Of all the ground covered in The English Monster, that walked upon by Henry Morgan and his fellow Brethren is the most mythical, not least because many of the witnesses were not, shall we say, the most reliable. Morgan himself, though, is implausibly real and red-blooded: he did attack Portobelo (along with many other places, topped off with a ludicrously ambitious march to Panama), and he did fall into decline on Jamaica. Morgan is the flipside to John Harriott—a bulldog of a man with remorseless energy and boundless optimism, but one inflated beyond all reason by his own greed and vanity and capable of great cruelty. There were human shields used in the attack on Portobelo (women and old men, chiefly). But cruelty was the stock-in-trade of pirates, be they called buccaneers or Brethren. The episode between Morgan’s French antithesis L’Ollonais and Billy Ablass is of course invented but the viciousness of the Frenchman is not. For a swashbuckling yet unromanticized gallop through Morgan’s career, read Stephen Talty’s Empire of Blue Water (Simon & Schuster).

  The final player in the story is London itself. A walk through Wapping today is a walk through a country that rather seems to have forgotten where it came from; where once the mighty London Dock clattered with the goods of a whole world there is now only some rather average-looking housing and the ugly immensity of Rupert Murdoch’s newspaper empire. The streets are quiet and ringed with warehouses which used to hold goods but which now house City traders—which isn’t a bad image—and many of the stairs down to the river are gated off.

  But there are still walls which recall the frenzy of dock-building which came in with the nineteenth century. You can still stand on Pennington Street and put your hand on the same wall that Margaret Jewell listens against. You can’t visit Timothy Marr’s house—it’s now a car showroom. The Ratcliffe Highway is an anesthetized through road called The Highway, as if by renaming it the old poison could be drained away, but it is still watched over by St. George in the East. My recommendation: get a seat in one of the riverside pubs (the Town of Ramsgate is my favorite), look out toward the river, and try to imagine.

  Docklands today is a glass-and-steel monument to high finance and retail, and that’s perhaps an appropriate epitaph for the old mercantile machine which once existed here. What’s less appropriate is the dearth of good histories of London’s docks; too few people have tried to explain why a river which once buzzed with shipping is now virtually empty. Fiona Rule’s recent London Docklands: A History of the Lost Quarter (Ian Allan Publishing) goes a long way to putting this right (and is correctly named, in my opinion), but the richest source I found was Sir Joseph Broodbank’s History of the Port of London (Daniel O’Connor), written in 1921, when London’s docks were still the beating heart of global trade.

  It’s quite possible to get lost in the endless succession of maps which England produced from 1750 onward, as mapmakers attempted to keep up with the remorseless expansion of London and the endless renewal of its streets, particularly in the East and West Ends. My own guide to those fluid times was The A to Z of Regency London, which takes William Faden’s 1813 edition of Richard Horwood’s map of 1799 as its basis. In the fourteen years between those two editions, London’s docks appeared as if from nowhere, while England waged war in Europe and invented the modern industrial society.

  The quotations in The English Monster were found in the following places:

  “They have good ships . . .” which opens the book is from a letter from Guzmán de Silva to Philip II, from London on 4 February 1566, from Calendar of Letters and State Papers Relating to English Affairs Preserved Principally in the Archives of Simancas, vol. I, Elizabeth 1558–1603, printed for HM Stationery Office by Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1892. It is quoted in The Queen’s Slave Trader, by Nick Hazlewood (London, Harper Perennial, 2004).

  “As I was a-walking down Ratcliffe Highway . . .” which opens Book 1, is a nineteenth-century song, which I found at http://mysongbook.de/mtb/r_clarke/songs/ratcliff.htm.

  “Thus they order for the loss of a right arm . . .” which opens Book 2 is from John Esquemeling’s The Bucaniers of America, which was published in the late seventeenth century and is widely available online.

  “In the sugar-islands Negroes . . .” which opens Book 3 is from the National Archives’ excellent online exhibition “Black Presence: Asian and Black History in Britain, 1500–1850” at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/blackhistory/index.htm.

  The letter from Robert Southey which opens Book 4 is from a letter to Neville White from Keswick on 27 December 1811, from page 247 of Volume II of Selections from the Letters of Robert Southey, edited by his son-in-law John Wood Warter, B.D. (Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1856). It is quoted in The Maul and the Pear Tree, by P. D. James and T. A. Critchley (London, Faber & Faber, 1986).

  The poem at the end of the January 1812 chapter in Book 4 is originally by Coleridge and Robert Southey and was published in 1799. Coleridge slightly adapted the poem in 1835, which is the version I use here (and thus could not, of course, have been quoted by Aaron Graham in January 1812).

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My thanks go to: my agent Jim Gill; to Mike Jones and Jessica Leeke, my editors at Simon & Schuster; to Danny McLaughlin, who first showed me around Wapping and the ghostly edges of the dock; to Rob Jeffries of the Thames Police Museum (still housed in the building which John Harriott built); to Tim Wright and Andrew Grumbridge, who wandered with me down the same coast Charles Horton sailed along on Christmas Day; to the staff of the London Library; and to my own English monsters Jack and Lily. This book is dedicated to my very own Abigail, Louise.

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