Murder by Candlelight (25 page)

This was the first moment any idea of the sort entered into my head. I went into the dining room and took a knife from the side-board. I do not remember whether it was a carving knife or not. I then went up stairs. I opened his bedroom door and heard him snoring in his sleep; there was a rushlight in his room burning at this time. I went near the bed by the side of the window, and then I murdered him; he just moved his arm a little; he never spoke a word. I took a towel which was on the back
of the chair, and wiped my hand and the knife . . . the towel I put over his face. . . .

This confession provoked much skepticism. Would Lord William really have taken no precautions for his safety after having discovered a man whom he had only recently taken into his service in the act of pillaging his house? Would he really have returned to his bedroom and gone peaceably to sleep after he had not only fired the man, but rendered him desperate by saying that he would acquaint others with his conduct?

Courvoisier himself seems to have recognized that the confession was not credible, and he soon offered another version of events. He now blamed the murder, not on a quarrel with his master which culminated in violence, but on the deleterious effects of strong drink on a young man unused to wine; the intoxicating fumes, he said, betrayed him into madness. Yet since his imprisonment a great change had come over him: he had rediscovered God and been regenerated in Christ. The confession culminates in his edifying realization that Jesus “is his friend.” The skeptical reader, however, may perhaps be forgiven for wondering whether Courvoisier's account of his redemption was not calculated to appeal to the sympathies of a pious and Evangelical age, and contrived with the ulterior motive of obtaining the commutation of an appalling sentence.

As the day of his death drew nearer and hopes of a reprieve grew fainter, Courvoisier made another, more believable confession, in which he traced the history of his life from boyhood and described how, as he grew to man's estate, his moral and religious scruples gradually fell away. On his entry into Lord William's service, he says, his morals, though far from perfect, were still comparatively pure; he would have shuddered at the thought of committing a
really base or bloody act. The occasion of his downfall, he says, was the journey during which he attended Lord William to Richmond. In that fashionable gathering place he found himself much in the company of other servants, many of whom had seen a good deal more of the world than he had. Their talk of the beauty of “different scenes (towns, villages, country houses)” opened for him a new and enchanting prospect; and seduced by wanderlust, he resolved to exchange his tedious employment in Norfolk Street for the agreeable indolence of the aimless traveler.

But travel costs money, and Courvoisier was short of funds. And so he began, in his words, “to premeditate the seizure” of Lord William's gold and banknotes. He knew, of course, that if he stooped to robbery, he would be professedly a villain; but he had been reading a “history of thieves and murderers” which convinced him that crime was not only an amusing but, in its own way, an honorable occupation. “I read the book with pleasure,” he said, and by a dexterous casuistry he persuaded himself that it would not “be a great sin to place” himself among the lawbreakers. “On the contrary,” he said, “I admired their skill and their valour. I was particularly struck with the history of a young man who was born of very respectable parents, and who had spent his property in gaming and debauchery, and afterwards went from place to place stealing all he could. I admired his cunning, instead of feeling horrified at it. . . .”
^*

At first, he said, he intended only to rob Lord William. But he afterwards determined that, if he were to cover his traces, he must kill him. The robbery would thereby “be better concealed,” and “I should have done with him all at once, and be ready for my journey.” The decision taken, he made up the package of pilfered
plate and carried it one evening to the Hotel Dieppe, where he confided it into the hands of Mme. Piolaine. The next step, however, was infinitely harder, and Courvoisier hesitated to take it. He had, he said, “an evil thought of putting my hand to the work” on Monday, the fourth of May, but a “remnant of conscience” restrained him. The next day was Tuesday, the fifth. He and Lord William “had some altercation” over the unsent carriage, but the quarrel, he said, was a trifling one, “not worth the while to speak of.” Nevertheless, he was resolved: Lord William must die. After warming his master's bed that night, he went downstairs, and when all was quiet he opened various drawers and cupboards to make it look as though the house had been ransacked. (Novices who contrive to make it appear as though a robbery has taken place are apt to exaggerate the element of anarchic wildness in such crimes; the experienced housebreaker is, as a rule, precise and methodical.)

Courvoisier then fetched a knife in the dining room and mounted the staircase to Lord William's bedroom. “When I opened the door I heard him asleep, and stopped for a while, thinking of what I was about to do; but the evil disposition of my heart did not allow me to repent. I turned up my coat and shirtsleeve, and came near to the bed on the side of the window. There I heard a cry of my conscience, telling me, ‘Thou art doing wrong'; but I hardened myself against this voice, and threw myself on my victim, and murdered him with the knife I was holding in my right hand. I wiped my hand and the knife with a towel, which I placed on the face of Lord William.”

*
It is often said that the book in question was the Newgate novel
Jack Sheppard
by W. Harrison Ainsworth; but it was more likely one of the innumerable
Newgate Calendars
then in circulation, books which are to heroic crime what Plutarch's
Lives
are to heroic statesmanship and make the same, simultaneous appeal both to some of the basest and some of the loftiest human passions.

CHAPTER TEN

“There It Stands, Black and Ready”

Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the cart, between Newgate, and Tyburn? between the prison, and the place of execution, does any man sleep?

—
John Donne

C
ourvoisier's newly awakened Christian piety did not prevent him, as the day of his doom approached, from longing for a pagan death. With considerable cunning he managed to secrete, in the depths of the mattress in his cell, a piece of wood sharp enough to open a vein. But the intuition of Mr. Cope, the governor of Newgate, frustrated his desire for the dignity of a Roman end. On the eve of the execution, Cope ordered a search of Courvoisier's cell and person to be made; and he could afterwards flatter himself that, as a result of this charitable vigilance, the condemned man, though he would suffer the last agony of the scaffold, would be mercifully spared a self-induced death which might have exposed his soul to a hotter hellfire.

The fatal day came—Monday, July 6, 1840. Courvoisier rose at four o'clock that morning and busied himself in writing letters. Around seven, the Swiss Minister in London came in, followed by a party of noblemen and members of Parliament eager to observe the behavior of a man who is about to be hanged. At half past seven, Courvoisier received Holy Communion, and he afterwards gave away, to those who had shown him kindness in prison, his little collection of books. “O God!” he cried at one point, “how could I have committed so dreadful a crime? It was madness! When I think of it I cannot believe it.”

Calcraft, the executioner, made his appearance. From a black bag he drew a piece of rope, and with it he pinioned the arms and wrists of the prisoner. The prison chaplain, the Rev. Mr. Carver, asked Courvoisier “whether he was fully penitent for the crime he had committed, and whether he believed in the atonement of the Saviour.” Courvoisier replied, in “barely audible whispers,” that he was and did. Yet his face, it is said, showed “but too plainly” the “deep anguish of his soul.”

Outside Newgate, the customary carnival atmosphere prevailed. Yet there were those in the crowd who were far from sharing in the general jubilation. Among these was William Makepeace Thackeray, who at the time was writing for
Fraser's Magazine
and contributing book reviews to
The Times
; the novels with which he was to make his reputation were yet to be written. The sight of the gallows struck him, he said, with the force of an electric shock. “There it stands,” he wrote, “black and ready, jutting out from a little door in the prison.”

His qualms bore witness to the great revulsion in public feeling that was then taking place. During the previous decade, the number of executions in England had fallen off sharply, and juries were now reluctant to send their fellow creatures to the gallows for any crime
short of murder. In 1829, twenty-four people had been hanged in London for crimes
other
than murder; but between 1832 and 1844 not a single person was hanged
except
for murder. Yet the rarer the public hangings grew, the more intense the disgust they excited in those who opposed them. When, in the eighteenth century, the “Bloody Code” was in effect, scarcely anyone batted an eye as whole cartloads of human beings, male and female, were taken to Tyburn to suffer the last penalty of the law. Respectable opinion, indeed, held that such spectacles had a salutary influence on the lower orders. The seventeenth-century landowner and traveler Sir Henry Blount “was wont to say that he did not care to have his servants goe to church, for there servants infected one another to goe to the alehouse and learn debauchery; but he did bid them goe to see the executions at Tyburne, which worke more upon them than all the oratory in the sermons.” But times had changed, and the outrage expressed by Thackeray was to culminate, a quarter of a century later, in the abolition of public hangings in Britain.
^*

Courvoisier had, in his latest confession, disburdened himself of all but the very last mystery that shrouded his crime—a secret he might have taken with him to the grave had not Evans, one of the under-sheriffs, put the question to him that morning. How, Evans asked, was it “possible he could cut the throat of his unfortunate master without leaving a trace of blood” on his clothes? When, previously, Courvoisier had been asked this question, he had replied
that he had turned up the sleeves of his coat and his shirt. Now, having reached the sea mark of his life's utmost sail, he told the truth. “His answer,” Evans said, “was that he had no clothes on: he committed the crime in a complete state of nudity, and he only had to wash himself at the sink on coming down.”
^†