Guilty Thing (37 page)

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 the 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'.

The pamphlet, which contained a detailed account of the murder investigation, built up a case against John Murphy/Williams/Williamson. Would he have been convicted had he lived to face trial? ‘Of his real guilt, there can, we think, be no doubt; but that there was sufficient
legal proof
of it, is not so easy to determine.' The night before he took his life, Williams had asked for a pen and ink, ‘and it is much to be regretted, that the request should have been denied him, as in the state he then was, his conscience might have prompted him to make a full confession of his guilt: whether or not he had any
accomplices remains to be discovered
'.

The fourth pamphlet bought by De Quincey – his future essays suggest that he knew it well – was called ‘The Substance of the Horrid
Murders
in Ratcliffe Highway and Gravel Lane', and contained the transcript of a sermon given on Sunday 29 December 1811 at the chapel of the influential Reverend Rowland Hill. The reverend made no attempt to disguise his ghoulish pleasure in the horrid murders: the sainted Marrs, he boomed from the pulpit, had been ‘butchered like so many brute beasts!. . . Robbery and Rapine stalk abroad at noon-day! Murder, cold-blooded Murder, seeks us in our very dwellings; and, to use the emphatic language of the Coroner, “Our houses are no longer our castles; we are no longer safe in our beds!”' He railed against the slanderous suggestion that the government might be responsible for the lawless state of the country: ‘how could Government have prevented the commission of these dreadful deeds? What mere mortal preoccupations could possibly have guarded against them?. . . Maniacs and Murderers, as they are out of the pale of common humanity, are also out of the reach of human prevention. . . my beloved Brethren, I repeat it again and again, the best system of Police in the world could not have prevented the late dreadful occurrences.' As for the killer himself,

Here we see a wretch, going coolly and deliberately into the house of a man with whom he had been intimate, and butchering him, his wife, his servant and a child; not as it should appear, from any blood-thirsty spirit of revenge, but purely and solely, that he might be enabled to rob and plunder, in greater security! Having failed in this his first attempt, the universal horror excited by the event is not subsided, before he, with equal coolness and deliberation, commits three more murders, whose diabolical atrocity is only equalled by the former!

The preacher's fantasy of the murders as accomplished with ‘coolness and deliberation' whetted De Quincey's appetite. So too did his invitation to imagine the murderer's last night alive: ‘Alone, in the dark, left a prey to his own dreadful thoughts, and suffering the intolerable stings of a guilty conscience. . . He has escaped the gallows, it is true, but how will he escape God? He has fled from the Judges of the world, but where can he flee from the Judge of Heaven and Earth?' His cell resounded as loudly as the Whispering Gallery of St Paul's. As for the worry over whether the murderer had any ‘accomplices in his hellish work' we can only hope, the reverend concluded, that ‘no other heart could conceive, no other hand execute, the dreadful scheme!'

In May 1812, Wordsworth arrived in London with what he called a ‘
determination
to confront Coleridge and Montagu upon this vile business'. (He felt no such
determination to confront
the vile business with De Quincey.) Crabb Robinson acted as go-between and Wordsworth signed a document swearing that he had not ‘commissioned' Montagu to tell Coleridge he was a hellish houseguest or a ‘rotten drunkard'. Coleridge was pacified, but it was a plaster over an infected wound. He later told Thomas Poole that his former love for Wordsworth could never return. The damage to their friendship was irreparable, and one of the tragedies of his life.