Authors: Brian Bailey
Lord Cockburn (as he became) committed to print, many years later, a curious opinion of Burke:
Except that he murdered, Burke was a sensible, and what might be called a respectable, man; not at all ferocious in his general manner, sober, correct in all his other habits, and kind to his relations.
6
‘Sensible’ and ‘respectable’? On this analogy, we might declare that Jack the Ripper was a gentleman! ‘Sober’? Burke was a habitual drinker of spirits from early morning onward and had drunken squabbles with Hare both in public and in private. Heavy drinking accompanied each murder and gave him Dutch courage in going through with them. Indeed, Burke’s mindless stupidity on the night of the Hallowe’en revels and the morning after (inviting the Grays in with a corpse lying on the floor, splashing whisky about and ordering people to keep away from the bed) can only lead to the conclusion that he was so drunk that he scarcely knew what he was doing, and the chances are that he was not only an alcoholic but was totally oblivious to reason and the consequences of his actions. ‘Kind to his relations’? He had deserted his wife and children in Ireland, selected a relative of Nelly’s as one of his victims, and must have been thought by Maggie Laird to be capable of murdering Nelly herself! What can have led Cockburn to make such an extraordinary judgement? Was it merely the effects of old age on his memory? Or did it have something to do with Burke’s Irish charm and gift of the gab which enabled him to gain the trust of old women, teenage girls, gullible anatomists, police officers and, apparently, some lawyers?
It appears that Burke’s mind in prison was subject to extreme mood swings. One day he might seem piously devoted to making his peace with God; another, he would rage against Hare’s treachery. He is said to have complained one day that Dr Knox still owed him £5 for the body of Mrs Docherty, and that if he had it he could buy a decent coat and waistcoat for his final public appearance.
J.B. Atlay, among others, related the curious tale of Burke’s embarrassing wound. ‘When in the condemned cell Burke was treated surgically for a very severe wound, from which it was doubtful if he would ever have recovered. He told the minister of the Tolbooth Church, who was attending on him, that it arose from a bite given by “Daft Jamie” when he was being done to death.’
7
According to the ‘Echo of Surgeons’ Square’, however, Burke had become a patient of Dr Knox as well as a supplier of subjects, ‘and came to the Lecture Room to have his wound dressed’, long before the murder of Daft Jamie.
8
This cannot have been earlier than December 1827, for if Burke had known Knox, he and Hare would not have had to make nervous enquiries for Dr Monro on the penultimate day of November when they wanted to sell old Donald’s body. But it was before the murder of Mary Paterson in April, to judge from the pamphlet’s wording. What appears to be the truth is that Burke was suffering from testicular cancer. It may well be that he was reluctant to admit this to a minister of religion, especially if it was associated with syphilis. Some writers appear to have felt (even in this gruesome litany of death and despoliation) that Burke’s testicles were a taboo subject. But those – professional historians and amateur criminologists alike – who have referred to his scirrhous testicle, have been blissfully unanimous in misspelling the word as ‘schirrous’. This disease might soon have killed him if the hangman had not got him first. The ‘Echo’ goes on to say that when Burke returned to Edinburgh after the harvest that summer, he ‘called at the rooms to have the Doctor’s opinion respecting his wound, which had assumed a dangerous appearance’.
9
His mental state must have been affected by this condition, and may even have helped him to become resigned to his fate, since he remained notably calm during the trial and in prison afterwards. It may also have contributed to his mode of careless abandon during the latter murders. But it also raises the question whether Burke was better known to Knox than anyone was prepared to admit. Did Knox really provide medical treatment to a man he assumed to be a body-snatcher and of whom he knew nothing except that he went by the name of ‘John’?
One of the clergymen who visited Burke in Calton jail apparently told him that ‘a dying man, covered with guilt, and without hope except in the infinite mercy of Almighty God . . . must prepare himself to seek it by forgiving from his heart all who had done him wrong’, and advised him to speak the truth, and nothing but the truth, ‘without any attempt to palliate his own iniquities, or to implicate Hare more deeply than the facts warranted’. He then asked the Irish labourer, ‘By what means were these fearful atrocities perpetrated?’
A week or so before his execution, Burke made the statement known as the ‘
Courant
confession’, which was more detailed than the one he had made to the Sheriff and the Procurator-Fiscal on 3 January. He completely ignored the advice of his spiritual adviser by implicating the Hares as deeply as he could. The emphasis on Hare’s part in the murders is greater in the
Courant
confession than in the official one, although we should not be misled by the frequent references to ‘Hare and Burke’ into thinking that Burke was deliberately accentuating or exaggerating Hare’s part or implying that Hare’s was the leading role. We have become so accustomed to the familiar phrase ‘Burke and Hare’ that seeing the names the other way round is as strange as ‘Spencer and Marks’ or ‘Hardy and Laurel’. But it was not a calculated ploy by Burke – merely the clerk’s interpretation of his words.
It is not known who gained access to Burke in prison to obtain this statement. Several applications to see the prisoner had been refused, including one, apparently, from an Edinburgh solicitor calling himself ‘J. Smith’, who even wrote to the Home Office but, not surprisingly perhaps, without success. The new confession, made on the understanding that it would not be published until three months after Burke’s death, came into the hands of the Edinburgh
Evening Courant.
Some of the details it contained were soon leaked, and for the first time the public got some intimation of the extent of the West Port murders. When the
Courant
announced that it would publish the full confession the day after Burke’s execution, Hare’s counsel, Duncan McNeill, immediately applied for an injunction, or interdict, which was granted.
Meanwhile, Burke asked to see the Sheriff again as he wished to make a further statement, and on 22 January, in the presence of the Sheriff-substitute, Procurator-Fiscal, Assistant Sheriff-clerk and Father Reid, Burke clarified his former ‘official’ confession, though giving no further details, and declared that neither he nor Hare, as far as he knew, had supplied any subjects for dissection except those he had mentioned, and had never done so by raising dead bodies from the grave. He said they ‘never allowed Dr Knox or any of his assistants, to know exactly where their houses were, but Paterson, Dr Knox’s porter or door-keeper, knew. And this he declares to be the truth.’
The
Courant
confession, which Burke signed the day before this official supplement, contained a few general remarks in addition to the details we have already noted about the murders. But he said of the Docherty murder that ‘Hare laid hold of her mouth and nose’, and ‘was not sitting on a chair at the time, as he said in the Court’. When he said that he ‘did not know the days nor the months the different murders were committed’, he added that ‘he thinks Dr Knox will know by the dates of paying him the money for them’. Burke also declared that:
It was God’s providence that put a stop to their murdering career, or he does not know how far they might have gone with it, even to attack people on the streets, as they were so successful, and always met with a ready market, that when they delivered a body they were always told to get more.
He was never a resurrection man, he said, but they ‘went under the name of resurrection men in the West Port’. Helen McDougal and Hare’s wife were not present when the murders were committed, ‘they might have a suspicion of what was doing, but did not see them done’. Later in the statement, he said that Hare’s wife often helped them to pack the murdered bodies into the boxes. ‘Helen McDougal never did, nor saw them done; Burke never durst let her know; he used to smuggle in drink, and get better victuals unknown to her; he told her he bought dead bodies, and sold them to the doctors, and that was the way they got the name of resurrection-men.’
Burke made some canting remarks for public consumption. Hare, he said, ‘could sleep well at night after committing a murder’. But he himself ‘repented often of the crime, and could not sleep without a bottle of whisky by his bedside, and a twopenny candle to burn all night beside him; when he awoke he would take a draught of the bottle – sometimes half a bottle at a draught – and that would make him sleep’. This does not appear consistent with his subsequent remark that if a stop had not been put to their murdering career, ‘he does not know how far they might have gone with it . . .’ Burke then wrote a final statement in his own hand:
Burk deaclares that docter knox Never incoureged him Nither taught [word ‘taught’ written again and crossed out] or incoregd him to murder any person Neither any of his asistents that worthy gentleman Mr. fergeson was the only man that ever mentioned any thing about the bodies He inquired where we got that yong woman paterson
Sined William Burk prisoner
So, on consecutive days, a week before his execution, Burke made statements exculpating Knox (whom he thought still owed him £5) from any suspicion of actually encouraging the murders. Clearly he had been got at in prison by someone with Dr Knox’s interests at heart. In a letter Knox wrote to the
Caledonian Mercury
(see Appendix III), he mentioned that a Mr Ellis had been engaged by his (Knox’s) friends to conduct a ‘rigid and unsparing examination’ of the facts. This was before a committee was set up around 7 February, and must have been before Burke’s execution. It seems likely that Mr Ellis, among others perhaps, was allowed by the authorities to interview Burke in prison, and it may well have been as a result of this that Burke made his handwritten acquittal of Knox of any direct part in the murders.
For weeks before the execution, tenants of the tall ‘lands’ around the Lawnmarket had been offering their windows for hire, and every one with a good view of the traditional site of the scaffold was taken in advance by the fashionable of Edinburgh. Sir Walter Scott’s daughter Anne wrote from Abbotsford on 28 December to Charles Kirkpatrick Sharpe saying that ‘Papa . . . is much inclined to share a window with you on the day Mr Burke is hanged.’
10
A local bookbinder, Robert Seton, wrote on 14 January from 423 Lawnmarket to Sharpe, to say that, because of the demand, he was not able to reserve a window for Mr Sharpe and Sir Walter, as requested, but would be happy to accommodate them with a share of one.
11
In the early hours of 27 January Burke, chained by the ankles, was taken by coach from Calton jail to the lock-up in Liberton’s Wynd off the Lawnmarket. During that afternoon and evening, workmen were busy erecting barriers to keep spectators at a distance from the scaffold, which was in place by midnight. By eight o’clock next morning, Wednesday, 28 January, a vast crowd had gathered, in spite of pouring rain earlier. Some estimated the number of spectators at 25,000 – the largest crowd ever to have assembled in Edinburgh’s streets. There was not a vacant window to be seen in any of the surrounding buildings, and people were even sitting on the high rooftops.
Burke had been allowed to sit by the fire in the lock-up and had been given a glass of wine, despite the mandatory diet of bread and water. Freed of his fetters, he met the executioner, Williams, and said ‘I am not just ready for you yet.’ At eight o’clock, he was led out into Liberton’s Wynd and walked the few yards to the Lawnmarket with Father Reid at his side. As he emerged into the packed square, a tumultuous noise arose from the crowd, which visibly disconcerted the condemned man. He approached the scaffold and mounted the steps almost hurriedly, as if anxious to get the business over with, while cries of execration echoed through the streets. As the executioner prepared Burke for the drop, many shouts were heard, such as ‘Burke him!’, ‘Bring out Hare!’ and ‘Hang Knox!’ The only words uttered by Burke were to the executioner. ‘The knot’s behind,’ he said, as Williams tried to loosen Burke’s neckerchief in order to adjust the rope properly. A few seconds later, in the shadow of St Giles’s Cathedral, the executioner launched Burke into eternity, as the common saying was. He died quickly, with only a couple of slight autonomic convulsions of his feet for the entertainment of the mob.
After hanging for the best part of an hour, Burke’s corpse was taken down, put in a coffin and taken back to the lock-up, while the workmen who had erected the scaffold began to dismantle it, amid some scrambling for bits of the rope, which was bought, according to Sir Walter Scott, by one Sanders, who was ‘ass enough to purchase the rope he was hanged with at half a crown an inch. Item the hangman became a sort of favourite was invited into a house and treated with liquor for having done his miserable duty on such a villain.’
12
Scott also noted in his journal:
The mob, which was immense, demanded Knox and Hare, but though greedy for more victims, received with shouts the solitary wretch who found his way to the gallows out of five or six who seem not less guilty than he. But the story begins to be stale insomuch that I believe a doggerel ballad on it would be popular, how brutal soever the wit. This is the progress of human passion. We ejaculate, exclaim, hold up to heaven our hand, like the rustic Phidele – next morning the mood changes, and we dance a jig to the tune which moved us to tears.
13
Before the morning was over, all signs of the execution had gone. But retribution for Burke’s crimes was only half done. The 1752 ‘Act for Preventing the horrid Crime of Murder’ (25 Geo II) had decreed that all executed murderers were to be either publicly dissected or hung in chains. ‘It is become necessary,’ the preamble said, ‘that some further Terror and peculiar Mark of Infamy be added to the Punishment.’ So now, on the morning of Thursday, 29 January, the naked corpse of William Burke was laid out on a slab in Professor Monro’s lecture room at the university medical school, in accordance with the judge’s sentence, and the murderer made his final contribution to medical research. Demand for admission to the lecture was so great that Dr Monro’s regular students were issued with tickets to give them priority, then others were let in until the room was filled to capacity.