Guilty Thing

by Frances Wilson

  The subject of Coleridge’s lecture on the evening of Thursday 19 December was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That night, Mr and Mrs Williamson, who held the licence of the King’s Arms at 81 New Gravel Lane, a narrow street which ran at a right angle to the Ratcliffe Highway in the direction of the docks, were closing the tavern. John Williamson was fifty-six, his wife, Elizabeth, was sixty; they shared their home with a lodger, John Turner, their granddaughter, Kitty Stillwell, aged fourteen, and their fifty-year-old servant, Bridget Harrington. One house in eight on New Gravel Lane was an inn, but the King’s Arms was more respectable than the rest. The Williamsons had been the proprietors for fifteen years; they kept the noise down, shut before midnight, and served a regular and reputable clientele. At eleven o’clock, Mr Anderson, who lived next door but one, left the taproom with a pot of beer and Williamson put up the shutters; twenty minutes later, having finished his beer, Anderson returned for a quick second pot, but found the tavern in a state of commotion.

  Hanging from a second-floor window on two torn sheets which had been knotted together, was the half-naked figure of John Turner. ‘Murder, Murder!’ Turner cried, before dropping eight feet into the arms of the night watchman. A crowd had gathered around the scene; they knocked at the Williamsons’ front door but there was no answer. Several men then began to beat down the entrance while others prised open the cellar window on the front pavement. It was on the cellar stairs that they found Williamson, his head crushed by an iron bar and his throat cut. Mrs Williamson and Bridget Harrington were both in the tap room, their skulls shattered and throats slashed to the neck bone. At the back of the house was an open window through which the murderer had made his escape onto the sloping clay wasteland which ran down to the docks.

  John Turner, who had lodged with the Williamsons for eight months, gave his account to the coroners of what had taken place. He returned home that night, having eaten supper with his brother, at twenty to eleven. Mrs Williamson was at the front door, Mr Williamson was by the fire in his great chair, the servant was in the back room; Kitty Stillwell was asleep in bed. He joined his landlord, who was told by a customer that a stout man wearing a very large coat had been peering through the inner glass door in the passage. Williamson, a burly man himself, lifted the candlestick and went to look. He returned saying that ‘he could not see him, but if he did see him, he would send him where he ought or would not like to go’. Mr Anderson then went home with his first pot of beer and John Turner went upstairs to bed. Five minutes later, Turner

  heard the front door being banged: very hard. Immediately afterwards I heard the servant exclaim ‘we are all murdered’ or ‘shall be murdered’ two or three times. . . I heard two or three blows, but with what weapon I cannot say. Shortly afterwards I heard Mr Williamson cry out, ‘I’m a dead man.’ I was in bed still. After two minutes I got out of bed, and listened at the door, but could hear nothing. I went down to the first floor, and from below I heard the sound of three heavy sighs. I heard some person walk across the middle of the room on the ground very lightly. I was then half way down the last pair of stairs, and naked. I went to the bottom of the stairs, and the door stood a little on the jar. I passed through the opening, and by the light of a candle which was burning in the room, I saw a man, apparently near six feet in height, in a large rough Fleming coat, of a dark colour, which came down to his heels. He was standing with his back to me, apparently leaning over some person, as if in the act of rifling their pockets, as I heard some silver rattle, and saw him rise and open his coat with his left hand and put his right hand to his breast, as if to put something in his pocket. I did not see his face, and I only saw that one person.

  Turner leapt back up the stairs in his bare feet. When he reached his bedroom he pushed the bed against the door, stripped off the sheets, tied them together and attached them to the bedpost. He then opened the window, threw out the sheets and lowered himself down. Tucked up in bed next door, young Kitty Stillwell lay fast asleep. In his haste, John Turner had forgotten all about her.

  The murderer’s second set of victims were another married couple and those who lived with them. Again, the target was not an individual but a household, the house had been both a home and a place of work and the intruder had apparently walked in through an open door and locked it behind him. Again, nothing of significance had been stolen and there was no clear motive for the killings; again, the exterminations had been achieved in a matter of moments and the killer, interrupted by a pounding on the front door, had escaped through the back of the building. Again there was a terrified survivor unrelated to the victims who could be seen on the immediate outside: Margaret Jewell on the outside of the door, John Turner suspended in mid-air from the bedroom window.

  Christmas was coming and the killer was still at large; the Ratcliffe Highway and surrounding streets were being manned by a night beadle and a team of elderly night watchmen. The woeful inadequacy of the system of policing was creating a national outcry. Even in Grasmere, De Quincey later wrote, panic had set in. A widowed neighbour of his ‘never rested until she placed eighteen doors, each secured by ponderous bolts, and bars, and chains, between her own bedroom and any intruder of human build’. The occupants of smaller houses with fewer doors ‘more than once died upon the spot, from the shock attending some suspicious attempts at intrusion upon the part of vagrants’. While these reports are evidently fantasies, Southey told a friend that: ‘No circumstances which did not concern me ever disturbed me so much. I. . . never had mingled such a feeling of horror, indignation, and astonishment with a sense of insecurity too.’ Also at Greta Hall that winter was Percy Bysshe Shelley, who had run away with his child bride, Fanny. For Southey and Shelley, the murders reflected the state of a nation which hovered on the edge of revolution; but for De Quincey they revealed the state of one man’s soul.

  Meanwhile the Wordsworths, no longer speaking to De Quincey, had not realised that Coleridge was no longer speaking to them. Wordsworth, aware of Montagu’s indiscretion but not of its impact, had offered Coleridge neither an explanation for his comments nor an apology for the hurt caused. It is unlikely that De Quincey knew anything about the lull in the Coleridge–Wordsworth relations, but we can imagine him taking advantage of the lull in his own relations with the Wordsworths to increase his laudanum intake and follow the reports of the Williamson murders: shortly after the slaughters two men had been seen running up the lane towards the Ratcliffe Highway, the shorter of whom appeared to be lame.

  Every man in Wapping, it seemed, was presumed guilty and forty false arrests had been made. Then on Sunday 22 December, a twenty-seven-year-old sailor called John Williams was apprehended in his lodgings, a public house called the Pear Tree, close to the river in Old Wapping. Described by The Times as ‘about 5 feet 9 inches in height’ and ‘of an insinuating manner’, John Williams was by all accounts over-familiar and intrusive; he had, for example, been seen to lean over the bar of a tavern and laughingly remove money from the till. Nothing was known about his family; on land he lived at the Pear Tree where he shared a room with two other men and drank away his wages. He belonged to Wapping’s fluid community of wanderers.

  The evidence against Williams was thin. He had been seen at the King’s Head at seven o’clock on the night of the Williamson murders, and on his return to the Pear Tree – at around midnight – he had asked one of his fellow lodgers, a German sailor called John Frederick Richter, to put out the candle. Added to which his clothes were stained, and he had in his pocket fourteen shillings, a pound note and two pawn tickets. Further evidence, about to appear, was that the bloodstained maul had been traced back to the Pear Tree. It belonged to a ship’s carpenter called John Peterson, currently at sea, who was storing his tools at the house. In his defence, John Williams explained that he was a friend of the Williamsons, that his pocketful of cash was due to having pawned his shoes, and that after leaving the King’s Arms he had visited a doctor about a cure for his leg, which had been giving him pro
blems as a result of an old wound (Williams walked with a limp). He had told Richter to put out the candle not because he didn’t want to draw attention to the house, but to prevent a fire.

  Witnesses described seeing a large figure in a long coat in the vicinity of both murders. A man of this description had been seen staring in through the front window of 29 Ratcliffe Highway on the night of 7 December, and through the glass inner door of the King’s Head on the night of 19 December. A similar figure, accompanied by two other men, had been seen on the Ratcliffe Highway soon after the murders, and also on New Gravel Lane, with a companion who was lame. Turner had seen a large man in a long coat by the corpse of Mrs Williamson, pocketing some change. John Williams, of medium height and without an ankle-length coat, bore no relation to this ‘lusty fellow’ but may have been one of his companions. In which case, where was his accomplice? From lodgers in the Pear Tree it transpired that the Marrs’ carpenter, Cornelius Hart, was one of William’s drinking friends. Hart at first denied knowing him, but then admitted to dispatching his wife to the Pear Tree to have it confirmed that Williams had indeed been arrested.

  On Christmas Eve John Williams was taken to Coldbath Fields Prison, and on Boxing Day his body was found hanging in his cell – an apparent suicide. The court proceedings continued regardless and Londoners, frantic for justice, found the dead man guilty.

  The body was removed from the prison and taken to a watchhouse at the London Docks. The following day, the last of the old year, it was dressed in blue trousers and an open-necked white, frilled shirt and placed in a cart on a specially raised and slanted platform with the maul and the ripping chisel displayed on either side of its broken neck. In an unprecedentedly bizarre piece of theatre, the cart was paraded through the parish led by a procession of grey horses on which rode, in hierarchical order, the constable, the Collector of King’s Taxes, the baker, the coal merchant and the Superintendent of Lascars in the East India Company’s service. They were followed by constables and beadles on foot. This ceremony was watched by 10,000 spectators who crowded the streets and leaned from the windows of the houses lining the route. It was, said the MP and playwright, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, ‘an unseemly exhibition’ which ‘fed the worst appetites of the mob’.

  The cart stopped outside 29 Ratcliffe Highway where Williams’s head, which had fallen to the side, was turned around so that his dead eyes could take in the sight of the now empty house, and the convoy then continued to New Gravel Lane where it halted in a similar fashion outside the King’s Arms. The body was then pulled to a crossroads above St George in the East, where it was bent in half and thrown into a hole four feet deep. Using the still bloodied maul, a stake was hammered through his heart. The residents of Ratcliffe Highway greeted the dawn of 1812 with the tense relief that follows the impact of a sudden explosion. Action had been taken, revenge was achieved.

  That night, in his last lecture of the year, Coleridge talked about Iago, later memorably described by him as a ‘motiveless malignity’. For De Quincey, John Williams was another such character.

  Coleridge’s first lecture of 1812, on 2 January, was on Hamlet. The ghost of the murdered king reveals to his son the cause of his death and ‘what is the effect. . .? Instant action and pursuit of revenge? No: endless reasoning and hesitating – constant urging and solicitation of the mind to act. . . ceaseless reproaches of himself for sloth and negligence, while the whole energy of his resolution evaporates in these reproaches.’ For Hamlet, Coleridge propounded, ‘the external world’ was ‘comparatively dim’ and of no interest in itself. It became interesting only when it was ‘reflected in the mirror of his mind’. ‘Prompted’ by ‘heaven and hell’ to avenge his father’s murder, he instead unpacked his ‘heart with words’; the prince had the ‘aversion to action which prevails among such as have a world in themselves’.

  Presenting Hamlet as a Romantic hero, Coleridge changed forever the way the play was seen while painting for his audience an enduring portrait of his own condition. He too inhabited a word-packed world within his mind, and when his lecture had ended, a member of the audience, turning to Henry Crabb Robinson, whispered ‘This is a satire on himself.’ ‘No,’ Crabb Robinson replied, ‘it is an elegy.’

  ‘How do I do?’ De Quincey asked in his Confessions. ‘Well, pretty well thank you, reader. I never was better in my life than the spring of 1812.’ His ship, however, was sailing into the iceberg. In March we find him back in London vaguely pursuing a career as a lawyer. He took up his old rooms in Great Titchfield Street and made daily visits to Coleridge, who was living with the Morgans in nearby Berners Street, Soho. It was now that he heard the grim tale of Wordsworth’s advice to Montagu – ‘as ought not’, De Quincey grandly concluded, ‘to have proceeded from the hands of a friend’. Wordsworth, he learned, was Coleridge’s ‘bitterest Calumniator’, and De Quincey had his own Wordsworth miseries to share. That he was still raging about the reaction to the moss hut is clear from an incident at a party. A guest mentioned that Mary Wordsworth had said something about ‘possession of the house’, at which point De Quincey ‘took fire. . . and retired. . . in great indignation’.

  Amongst his book purchases that spring it is likely that he now treated himself, for sixpence each, to four rapidly produced pamphlets whose contents he studied closely. The first: ‘Fairburn’s Account of the Dreadful Murder of Mr Marr and Family, at their House in Ratcliffe Highway on Saturday Night, December 7, 1811, including the Whole Investigation before the Coroner’s Inquest, etc etc.’, contained a picture of ‘The Pen Maul, used by the Murderers’ and retold the story De Quincey knew already from The Times.

  The second, ‘Fairburn’s Account of the Inhuman Murder of Mr and Mrs Williamson and their Woman Servant at the King’s Arms, New Gravel Lane, Ratcliffe Highway, on Thursday Night, December 19, 1811’, opened with a cartoonish illustration of John Turner descending from his bedroom window, and contained the deposition of Turner, accounts of the events given by various witnesses, and the coroner’s report in which he described the Ratcliffe Highway as riddled with ‘the lower classes of the community’, ‘strangers and seamen discharged from. . . the East and West India and London Docks’ and ‘foreign sailors from all parts of the globe’.

  The third pamphlet, ‘Fairburn’s Account of the Life, Death and Interment of John Williams, the Supposed Murderer of the Families of Marr and Williamson, and Self Destroyer’, contained a plate of Williams’s body as it appeared on the platform before being thrown into the pit at the crossroads, and a cobbled-together biography. His name was not Williams at all, it transpired, but John Murphy and while he tried to pass himself off as Scottish it was supposed that he was from Banbridge, near Down Patrick in County Down. ‘The prejudice of the hour,’ a furious Richard Brinsley Sheridan informed the House of Commons, ‘would have him an Irishman.’ The reaction to the murders became entangled in anti-Irish hysteria:

  Whether he was in his native country at the time of the unhappy troubles of 1798 can only be a matter of conjecture, but it is certainly not unnatural to suppose, that a monster capable of committing the late atrocities must early in life have lost that innate horror of bloodshed, which forms so striking a feature in the moral constitution of man. In the dreadful paths of rebellion, probably it was that he was first tempted to embrue his hands in the blood of his fellow-creatures; and, amidst those terrible scenes of midnight murder, which that unhappy country then afforded, might his sinful conscience have been seared to every feeling of repentance and remorse.

  John Murphy, aka John Williams (as De Quincey continued to call him), aged around thirty, had until recently been at sea, a career he was ‘driven’ into as a result of ‘former bad conduct’. Having served on several East Indiamen, including the Henry Addington and the Nottingham, he was laid up for some time at St Thomas’s hospital with a leg injury. In April 1808 he sailed on the Dover Castle under Captain George Richardson, returning in July 1810. Employed as the captain’s personal servant on th
e same voyage was Timothy Marr.

  The conduct of the two formed, it is said, a striking contrast: Marr was sober, diligent, peaceable, and obliging; and by his services gained so greatly the esteem of his master, that on their return to England, the captain, in conjunction with another friend, supplied him with the means of taking the house in Ratcliffe Highway, and of commencing business. Williams, on the contrary, was idle, drunken, dissolute, and quarrelsome, and so continually involved in disgrace, that, on his quitting the ship, the captain is said to have prophesied that he would come to an untimely end.

  Reckless Williams was before the mast while mild Marr cleaned the captain’s clothes: they sound like rival brothers in a fairy tale. When the Dover Castle docked in Wapping, Marr married his sweetheart, Celia, and set up shop, while Williams, now going by the name of ‘John Williamson’, got himself a berth on board the Roxburgh Castle bound for the Brazils. The ship was possessed of a ‘very bad crew’, who, on reaching Surinam, mutinied. One of the three leaders of the revolt was William Ablass, known as Long Billy, a large man with a limp who had been seen drinking with Williams in the King’s Arms on the night of the Williamson murders. Ablass had already been ‘apprehended on suspicion of being concerned with Williams in the late murders; but discharged on the deposition of a woman, who, it now appears, was interested in his fate’.