Guilty Thing (46 page)

Having brushed Hazlitt's accusation aside, De Quincey broached the subject that had long been on his mind. It came through his reflections on
Macbeth.

‘From my boyish days,' he began, ‘I had always felt a great perplexity on one point of
Macbeth
: it was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan.' ‘On the Knocking at the Gate in
Macbeth
', as this next paper was called, focused on Act 2, Scene 3, where, hungover, the porter grumpily responds to the early morning arrival of Macduff:

[knocking within]

PORTER: Here's a knocking, indeed! If a man were Porter of Hell Gate, he should have old turning the key. [knocking] Knock, knock, knock. Who's there, i'th' name of Beelzebub?

Readers of the
London
would be all too familiar with the scene, which has come down to us as the first ‘knock, knock' joke: while productions of
King Lear
had been cancelled because of King George III's madness,
Macbeth
, warning of the dangers of regicide, had been a staple of the war years. The knocking, De Quincey went on, ‘
reflected back to the murder a peculiar awfulness
and a depth of solemnity: yet, however obstinately I endeavoured with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see
why
it should produce such an effect'. It was only when John Williams ‘executed those unparalleled murders which have procured for him such a brilliant and undying reputation' that De Quincey at last understood his childhood perplexity. Eleven years had passed since Williams ‘made his
debut
on the stage of Ratcliffe Highway', and De Quincey reminded his readers that preceding the servant girl's discovery of the bodies of the Marr household, this ‘same incident (of a knocking at the door soon after the work of extermination was complete) did actually occur'. Through the coincidence of Coleridge's lectures, the Ratcliffe Highway murders had, for De Quincey, segued from the very start into scenes from Shakespeare, and so it was perhaps inevitable that he would blend the figure of John Williams into that of Macbeth.

Shakespeare needed to create a device, De Quincey suggested, by which the familiar, work-a-day human world disappeared for a moment to allow for the appearance of a ‘fiendish' world in which Lady Macbeth was unsexed and Macbeth forgot that he was born of woman: ‘
The murderers, and the murder, must be insulated
 – cut off by an immeasurable gulph from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs – locked up and sequestered in some deep recess: we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested – laid asleep – tranced – racked into a dead armistice: time must be annihilated; relation to things abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion.'

With the knocking, the ‘pulses of life' begin to ‘beat again' as ‘the world of darkness' passes away ‘like
a pageantry in the clouds
' and we are made ‘profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis' which has taken place. This parenthesis had allowed us to access the mind of the murderer. It is Macbeth rather than Duncan with whom the audience is asked to sympathise – ‘of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into [Macbeth's] feelings, and are made to understand them – not a sympathy of pity or approbation'. And to encourage our sympathy, the murderer must have an interior existence. There must be ‘some great storm of passion, – jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred, – which will create
a hell within him
'.

A certain ‘amateur' on the subject of sudden death, De Quincey went on, had recently commented on the current absence of any good murders, ‘but this is wrong: for it is unreasonable to expect all men to be great artists, and born with the
genius of Mr Williams
'. De Quincey's sympathy had always been with Williams. He spared no pity for the Marrs and their young apprentice, or the Williamsons and their ageing servant, all of whom were figures without faces. His reverence for Williams was presented as ironic but his irony tapped into a truth, the full force of which would be realised later in the century in the distinction accorded to
Jack the Ripper
, whose own debut took place not far from the Ratcliffe Highway.

The Opium-Eater, Charles Lamb conceded when he finished reading ‘On Knocking', had ‘written a better thing about
Macbeth
than anything I could write; – no – not better than anything I could write, but I could not write anything better.'

‘On the Knocking at the Gate in
Macbeth
' appeared in the October 1823 edition of the
London Magazine
, and one week later a very good murder indeed took place in the Hertfordshire town of Radlett. Few murders, in fact, would create a greater sensation. The Ratcliffe Highway murders had generated panic because the killer remained at large, but the response to the Radlett murder, whose perpetrators were instantly apprehended, was undisguised pleasure in sensation. For three months the newspapers indulged in the story with such abandon that, for the first time in legal history, it was feared that a jury would be swayed by the media.

John Thurtell, the son of a Norwich alderman, was a failed cloth merchant turned prize-fighter and gambler. Tall and athletic, he had pockmarked skin and feline eyes. William Weare was a well-known cardsharp who reputedly carried a sum of £2,000 on his person. Thurtell, who believed himself cheated of £300 by Weare, invited him to Radlett for a weekend of shooting and gaming; they were to be the guests of a friend of Thurtell's, called William Probert, who was renting a cottage called Gill's Hill.

On the night of Friday 24 October, Thurtell and Weare set off together from London in a hired gig. The plan was for Thurtell to meet Probert and a third party called Joseph Hunt at the cottage, where they would murder Weare: like
Macbeth
, this was a tale of lethal hospitality. But before the two men had reached their destination, Thurtell took out his pistol and shot Weare in the face. The bullet only grazed the cheekbone; jumping from the gig, Weare ran screaming down the lane. Thurtell finished the job by dashing his gun through his victim's skull until his brains stuck to the nozzle, and slitting his throat in two places. Dumping the body and the murder weapons in a field, he continued his journey to Gill's Hill Cottage where he boasted to Probert and Hunt that the deed was done. The three men then removed Weare's corpse from its present position, stripped it of clothes and valuables (the £2,000 turned out to be only £15), tied it in a sack, dragged it to the cottage garden and threw it in the pond where it refused to sink until being weighed down by stones. Thurtell presented the blushing Mrs Probert with a gold chain taken from the corpse, after which the party enjoyed a supper of pork chops followed by a sing-song and a round of cards. The next day they thought better of leaving their quarry so close to home, and so Weare was fished out of the pond and carted to another pond, this time on the road to Elstree.

The murder of William Weare opened the door to an underworld of fallen privilege, thuggery and gaming. Between the discovery of his corpse and the conviction of his killers, no other news story was worth following. While Probert and Hunt were described in the papers as possessing only ‘
the lineaments of human beings
', Thurtell was granted the glamour of a vampire. His thirst for blood was seen as insatiable; he was implicated by the press in the deaths of any number of women, clergymen and business associates. The body count grew by the day as Thurtell-mania took over the country. The son of the journalist William Cobbett learned to read by following the news on Thurtell; for those who could not afford a paper, Weare's murder was vividly recorded in broadsides such as
The Hertfordshire Tragedy; or, the Fatal Effects of Gambling
:

The hapless man sprung from the gig,

And strove the road to gain,

But Thurtell pounc'd on him, and dashed

His pistol through his brains.

Then pulling out his murderous knife,

As over him he stood,

He cut his throat, and, tiger-like,

Did drink his reeking blood.

For Londoners, a documentary drama called
The Gamblers
, which re-enacted the events, opened on 17 November. It included, in Act 2, the appearance of ‘THE IDENTICAL HORSE AND GIG
Alluded to by the Daily Press
'; after Thurtell's trial, the props extended to the ‘TABLE AT WHICH THE PARTY SUPPED, the SOFA as DESCRIBED to having been SLEPT on, with the Other Household Furniture'. In the play's final scene, when Thurtell and his accomplices were depositing the body in the pond, the audience watched as Weare, not quite dead, rose out of the water to condemn his killer.

The gloomy cottage itself became a tourist site
, despite the fact that the murder took place elsewhere. A pilgrimage, which took in the various locations in which Weare's body had been dumped and the grave in which it now lay, attracted further crowds. Kitchen utensils and other household goods were sold by the Gill's Hill landlord as souvenirs; murder tourists could also purchase maps, books, pottery figures of Thurtell and Weare, plates and mugs illustrating Weare's death, and scraps of the sack in which his corpse had been stuffed. Those unable to afford such relics took home twigs from the cottage shrubbery.

The trial took place on 4 and 5 January 1824, and Thurtell took the stand in a plum-coloured frock coat. Blaming the murder on Hunt and Probert, he defended himself with what the
London Magazine
described as ‘theatrical' eloquence. ‘
I have been presented by the Press
,' Thurtell began, having learned his speech by heart,

– as a man more depraved, more gratuitously and habitually profligate and cruel, than has ever appeared in modern times. I have been held up to the world as the perpetrator of a murder, under circumstances of greater aggravation, or more cruel and premeditated atrocity, than it ever fell to the lot of man to have seen or heard of. I have been held forth to the world as a depraved, heartless, remorseless, prayer-less villain, who had seduced my friend into a sequestered path, merely in order to dispatch him with the greater security – as a snake who has crept into his bosom only to strike a sure blow – as a monster, who, after the perpetration of a deed from which the hardest heart recoils with horror, and at which humanity stands aghast, washed away the remembrance of my guilt in the midst of riot and debauchery.

Thurtell went on to tell the courtroom, now warming to his presence much as they had warmed to that of John Bellingham, the story of his life: how he came from a respectable and God-fearing family; how he shed blood for his country in the war; how he was incapable of an ignoble act. It was, said Charles Dickens, ‘a capital speech'. He had, in the words of the
London Magazine
's reporter Edward Herbert, ‘
worked himself up into a great actor
. . . such a performance, for a studied performance it assuredly was, has seldom been seen
on
the stage, and certainly never
off
'. Thurtell was commonly understood to be an artist possessed of a certain genius. The previous year, De Quincey had noted in his ‘Letters to A Young Man Whose Education has been Neglected', that no man speaks better than when he is on the scaffold because, like the journalist, his faculties are sharpened by the advancing deadline.

Thus the serpentine Thurtell was metamorphosed into the strong, desperate, heroic Thurtell. The analogy between the noble Othello and the ham-fisted killer of Gill's Hill cottage was noted by a number of writers, including Edward Herbert himself. When the jury reluctantly sentenced Thurtell to death, the condemned man drew gasps of admiration by taking a pinch of snuff.

During Thurtell's trial, the
Morning Chronicle
had extended its pages from four to eight. After the verdict, the
Observer
and
Bell's Illustrated London Life
each ran an ‘execution' double bill. Fifteen thousand people turned out to see Thurtell's neck broken, some of whom went on to the theatre afterwards for a performance of
The Gamblers
. He appeared on the scaffold dressed in a great brown coat with a velvet collar, light breeches and gaiters, and a waistcoat glistening with gilt buttons. Before the noose was put around his neck, Thurtell ‘looked at the crowd, and made a slight bow; instantly every head was uncovered, and many muttered “
what a Gentleman
”'. His appearance at that moment, reported Edward Herbert, was ‘affecting beyond description'. The nation mourned for the murderer. ‘Thurtell being hanged last week,' wrote Carlyle, ‘we grew duller than ever.'