Authors: Sarah Wise
* * *
James May,
the former legal clerk with beautiful handwriting, had expressed himself in verse:
James May is doomed to die,
And is condemned most innocently.
The Lord above, he knows the same,
And will send a mitigation for his pain.
He had written these lines on some sheets of paper on which he was revealing the secrets of the London resurrection world.
9
When the vicar of Hendon came calling at May’s cell and urged him to unburden his soul, May told him, “I’ve been guilty of many offences, but I never committed murder.” Even as he faced execution, May was proving unable to supply information on any part of the story before the encounter at the Fortune of War on the morning of Friday, 4 November. He told Dr. Williams everything he had ever known about both Bishop and Williams, but none of it was new or remarkable. And it wasn’t as if May was above snitching: Superintendent Thomas had been among the Newgate visitors on that busy Saturday morning. The superintendent and others had compiled a list of all the London resurrectionists they had ever come across or heard talk of; it numbered fifty men. Thomas placed the list in front of May and asked him to make a pen mark against the name of any whom he considered to be capable of burking. When he handed the list back, May had marked six names.
* * *
Bishop had some surprise visitors too.
Magistrates from the Lambeth Street police court applied to him to see if he could help in the case of Caroline Walsh, the supposed victim of Eliza Ross, who was being held on suspicion of murder. No hospital dissecting-room porter had been able to assist with this case, though John Appleton of Grainger’s school had been keen to impress the magistrates by coming forward with a dissecting-room book detailing all the bodies that had passed through his theater (the book must have been a recent addition; it never put in an appearance during the Fanny Pigburn inquiry). The magistrates wondered if Bishop knew anything about Eliza Ross and Edward Cook, her common-law husband. The result of the interview is not known.
A Mr. Evans, the owner of a toy shop in Newgate Street, called to ask governor John Wontner to find out if Bishop knew anything about the disappearance of his nephew. The boy had gone for a walk in Hampstead in July and had not been seen again. Bishop told Wontner the boy’s disappearance had nothing to do with him.
* * *
At nine o’clock
on Saturday evening, the statements of all three prisoners, and May’s list and poem, were taken to the London home of Sir Nicholas Conyngham Tindal by Wontner, Cotton, Dr. Williams (whose presence was now being tolerated), James Corder of St. Paul’s, Covent Garden, and two City of London undersheriffs. The meeting was to establish whether May had a good case to present to the home secretary, Lord Melbourne, for a pardon or at least a “mitigation” while the possibility of a new trial was considered, with the charge reduced to being an accessory after the fact of murder, not a principal. The other two trial judges, Sir John Vaughan and Sir Joseph Littledale, were summoned too, to give their opinion.
There was no court of appeal (that was seventy-six years away) and pardons were obtained by personal intervention to the home secretary’s department in Downing Street—one reason the judges’ support would have been helpful. The more prestigious the pleader, the more likely a reprieve. “All their proceedings are conducted in the dark,” wrote one law reformer of the Home Office and the Privy Council. “[They] now affect to take every pain in coming to a right decision; but what they do is of an occult nature, and unsatisfactory.”
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Historian Albany Fontblanque thought so too: “In this mysterious supreme court no parties appear for or against the prisoner; no witnesses are called; the convicts have no opportunity of protecting themselves against malicious or erroneous representations.”
11
There were four hours of discussion about May’s case—none of which will ever be known since it was “in the dark.” But while Sir Nicholas and Sir John were in favor of granting May a reprieve, Sir Joseph was not so minded. The warrants for three executions on Monday morning were written out in Downing Street.
* * *
Sunday arrived.
May was still protesting his innocence; and Bishop and Williams told Dr. Williams, Dr. Cotton, John Wontner, and anyone else who asked them that May had had nothing to do with any killings—that they were not a gang, that Thomas Williams had barely known May, and that when May had come on Friday, 4 November, to extract the dead boy’s teeth, it was the first time he had ever been to Nova Scotia Gardens.
The Reverend Dr. Theodore Williams convened a meeting of Tindal, Vaughan, and Littledale in the private apartments above the Old Bailey Sessions House; Wontner, Cotton, and various sheriffs and undersheriffs were present too. Though Littledale would still not budge, a new request, with copies of the further statements that had been made by Bishop and Williams, was forwarded to Lord Melbourne, at his private residence. At half past four in the afternoon, the home secretary returned his final decision.
Cotton and Wontner went without delay to the press room, where all three prisoners were found with their warders. Cotton opened the dispatches from the home secretary and read first to Bishop, then to Williams, the official decision that they would be hanged by the neck on Monday morning. He addressed May next, telling him “that the execution of the sentence upon James May shall be respited during His Majesty’s most gracious pleasure.” May dropped to the floor as though he had been shot; then his body began to twist and jerk, his arms flailing. Four officers attempted to sit him up and bring him to his senses, but it took a quarter of an hour before May was able to speak. (Bishop and Williams looked on unconcerned, as though the room were empty.) At first he spoke meaningless syllables, then he laughed, then he cried, then he tried to pray but he was shaking too much. Wontner and Cotton had never seen anything like it in all their Newgate years; they told him to calm down, they knew what he meant to say, it was all right. Everything would be all right. May gibbered out his thanks to God, to Wontner, to Cotton, to Dr. Williams. When he calmed down further he said that when Cotton had turned to him to read out his warrant, he had been so earnestly expecting to hear the same words that had been delivered to Bishop and Williams that when he heard the word “respite,” despair had suddenly changed to elation—so suddenly that he lost consciousness. He described it as feeling like his heart had burst in his chest. He had never killed anyone, he said; he knew he had not been a good man, but he had never killed anyone.
* * *
At some point
after the final pronouncements had been made, Bishop and Williams were allowed to say farewell to Sarah and Rhoda. No report of the meeting has emerged; but the newspapers pointed out that none of Bishop’s children had been permitted to visit Newgate.
* * *
Later that night,
another squabble erupted in the jail. While Dr. Williams appears to have been allowed to stay on at the prison to be with Bishop, Thomas Williams had requested the presence of one of his former confidantes, the Reverend Dr. Whitworth Russell, chaplain of Millbank Penitentiary. Dr. Russell had already established a reputation as a dogmatic campaigner for prison reform, and an intense, one-to-one relationship with his charges—in which he urged rehabilitation through repentance and religiosity—was one of his radical measures. Whitworth Russell would soon become Britain’s joint first inspector of prisons and would seek to create a uniform, systematic approach to penal care. Yet Thomas Williams had gone into Millbank a petty thief and emerged a killer.
Thomas Williams had several private conversations with the Reverend Dr. Whitworth Russell in his cell, despite the objections of Dr. Cotton, who was supposed to be the only shepherd of Church of England souls at the jail. Catholics, Jews, and Dissenters could do as they pleased and import their own holy men into Newgate; but Anglicans were to be given succor only by the ordinary. Cotton thought Whitworth Russell’s and Theodore Williams’s approaches to religion were unorthodox and not “useful” to condemned men (though Cotton himself had been criticized for his “condemned” sermons, preached with a coffin placed at the center of Newgate’s chapel, which were said to unduly frighten those who were to be executed). Yet it seemed that only Whitworth Russell had any rapport with Thomas Williams; he had the killer praying fervently at times. Bishop, by contrast, had sunk back into his unresponsive stupor: in Cotton’s words, “he seems to be of a reserved and sullen temper. It was difficult to lead him into conversation, so as to learn anything of his state of mind.”
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One of the guards asked Bishop if he wanted to be read to from the tracts that Cotton had left in the cell, and Bishop said, “Don’t bother me—I was teazed quite enough by the parsons with religious talk during the day and I’ll have none of it tonight. I can say no more than I have said.”
* * *
“I shall now go to bed
for the last time,” said Thomas Williams to his warders at half past midnight on Sunday. He knelt and prayed aloud, then undressed, and took to his mat and horse rugs. Nevertheless, he stayed up talking with the guards for a further hour and wrote the following note for the chaplain of Millbank: “Mr Russell, If you will be kind enough to let my brother prisoners know the awful death which I shall have suffered when you read this, it will, through your expostulations, prevent them from increasing their crimes when they may be liberated; and tell them bad company and drinking and blasphemy is the foundation of all evil. Give my brotherly love to them, and tell them never to deviate from the paths of religion, and have a firm belief in the blessed Saviour. Give my love to John Edwards, John Justin and John Dingle, and receive the prayers of the unfortunate and guilty Thomas Head.”
THIRTEEN
I, John Bishop …
… do hereby declare and confess that the boy supposed to be the Italian boy was a Lincolnshire boy. I and Williams took him to my house about half-past ten o’clock on the Thursday night, the 3rd of November, from the Bell, in Smithfield. He walked home with us. Williams promised to give him some work. Williams went with him from the Bell to the Old Bailey watering-house, whilst I went to the Fortune of War. Williams came from the Old Bailey watering-house to the Fortune of War for me, leaving the boy standing at the corner of the court by the watering-house in the Old Bailey. I went directly with Williams to the boy, and we walked then all three to Nova Scotia Gardens, taking a pint of stout at a public house near Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, on our way, of which we gave the boy a part; we only stayed just to drink it, and walked on to my house, where we arrived at about eleven o’clock. My wife and children and Mrs Williams were not gone to bed, so we put him in the privy, and told him to wait there for us. Williams went in and told them to go to bed, and I stayed in the garden. Williams came out directly, and we both walked out of the garden a little way to give time for the family getting to bed; we returned in about ten minutes or a quarter of an hour, and listened outside at the window to ascertain whether the family were gone to bed. All was quiet, and we then went to the boy in the privy, and took him into the house; we lighted a candle, and gave the boy some bread and cheese, and after he had eaten, we gave him a cup full of rum, with about half a small phial of laudanum in it. I had bought the rum the same evening at the Three Tuns, in Smithfield, and the laudanum also in small quantities at different shops. There was no water or other liquid put in the cup with the rum and laudanum. The boy drank the contents of the cup directly in two draughts, and afterwards a little beer. In about ten minutes he fell asleep on the chair on which he sat, and I removed him from the chair to the floor, and laid him on his side. We then went out and left him there. We had a quartern of gin and a pint of beer at the Feathers, near Shoreditch Church, and then went home again, having been away from the boy about twenty minutes. We found him asleep as we had left him. We took him directly, asleep and insensible, into the garden, and tied a cord to his feet to enable us to pull him up by, and I then took him in my arms, and let him slide from them headlong into the well in the garden, whilst Williams held the cord to prevent the body going altogether too low in the well. He was nearly wholly in the water of the well—his feet just above the surface. Williams fastened the other end of the cord round the paling, to prevent the body getting beyond our reach. The boy struggled a little with his arms and legs in the water, and the water bubbled for a minute. We waited till these symptoms were past, and then went in doors, and afterwards I think we went out, and walked down Shoreditch to occupy the time, and in about three-quarters of an hour we returned and took him out of the well by pulling him by the cord attached to his feet; we undressed him in the paved yard, rolled his clothes up, and buried them where they were found by the witness who produced them. We carried the boy into the wash-house, laid him on the floor, and covered him over with a bag. We left him there, and went and had some coffee in Old Street Road, and then (a little before two in the morning of Friday) went back to my house. We immediately doubled the body up, and put it into a box, which we corded, so that nobody might open it to see what was in it, and then went again, and had some more coffee in the same place in Old Street Road, where we stayed a little while, and then went home to bed—both in the same house, and to our own beds, as usual.
“I declare that this statement is all true, and contains all the facts as far as I can recollect. May knew nothing of the murder, and I do not believe he suspected that I had got the body except in the usual way, and after the death of it. I always told him that I got it from the ground, and he never knew to the contrary until I confessed since the trial. I have known May as a body-snatcher four or five years, but I do not believe he ever obtained a body except in the common course of men in that calling, by stealing from the graves.