Part 22

Do you recollect anything further that passed at that time?—The surgeon and linguist were both there at the time.

Do you recollect whether any sentence was pronounced?—There was.

What was said?—Captain Lacy told him he was to receive eight hundred lashes by the linguist; he was then tied up and received them; the surgeon was there present the whole time.

In confutation of the last assertion, the surgeon had already stated that he was not present the whole time. The other witnesses for Wall, one of whom was proved not credible on oath, did not carry his case any further. A few respectable witnesses gave him a character for humanity, but their testimony was feeble; and one of them, on cross-examination, would not go so far as to state Wall bore a general reputation of being humane.[19]

One glaring contradiction to Wall’s line of defence was his own letter to Government on his return from Goree, in which (it was read at the trial) he makes no allusion to any mutiny or riot having occurred. There also remained unanswered the facts that Armstrong had not the shadow of a trial, and that he was punished in a monstrous way, with an unusual instrument and with an excessive number of blows. Upon all this the learned Chief Baron pointedly commented in his lucid summing up, from which I give the following introductory remarks, as most apt and explanatory on the subject of suppressing military and naval mutiny, and on corporal correction in general.

“This case,” said the Chief Baron, “will, gentlemen of the jury, for many reasons, in my apprehension, require your closest and best attention. In the first place, the charge against the prisoner at the bar is the heaviest which our law knows; his life is at stake; and that of itself would, I am sure, be sufficient to excite every degree of care and attention in you; but in other respects it seems to me to be of peculiar importance, for on the one hand, as the Attorney-General has most liberally and most sensibly said, when a well-intentioned officer is at a great distance from his native country, having charge of a member of that country, and it shall so happen that circumstances may arise which may alarm and disturb the strongest mind, it were not proper that strictness and rigour in forms and in matters of that sort should be required, where you find a real, true, and genuine intention of acting for the best for the sake of the public. You see they are in a situation distant from assistance and from advice; in these circumstances, if a man should be so much thrown off the balance of his understanding as not to conduct himself with the same care and attention that any one in the county of Middlesex would be required to do, and does not exceed greatly the just and proper line of his duty, allowances for such circumstances ought unquestionably to be given to him.

“But, on the other hand, it is of consequence, that where a commander is so circumstanced—that is, at a distance from his native country—at a distance from inspection—at a distance from immediate control—and not many British subjects being there—if he shall, by reason of that distance, wanton with his authority and his command, it will certainly be the duty of the law to control that, and to keep it within proper bounds. The protection, therefore, of subjects who are serving their country at that distance, on the one hand, is one of the objects you are to have in view to-day. The protection of a well-intentioned officer—if such he be—who does not by his conduct disclose a malevolent mind, but may disclose human infirmity to a certain extent, who, being in trepidation and alarm of mind, overlooks some things he ought otherwise to have regarded;—such a man’s case is, on the other hand, deserving of great attention....

“I would also mention to you, that in all cases of corporal punishment, as I conceive, where there is lodged a discretion, regard is to be had to the extent of that punishment and to the means of inflicting it; because legitimate punishment may be inflicted in such a manner as to show that the infliction of the punishment was made the ground of wilfully carrying it to an extent and excess that would be attended with the destruction of him who is the object of it. I conceive, for example, that a regimental court-martial, although it is to act by discretion, and is not strictly meted and bounded in the degree of punishment by act of Parliament—nor are many subordinate punishments which are discretionary in other courts—that such tribunals cannot go to any excess that they please, either in the extent of that punishment or in the mode of administering it. I conceive that a regimental court-martial, and those who are to see its sentence put into execution, are bound by the rules which good sense, experience, and humanity point out, as not being so excessive as upon the very face of them to be possibly the means of executing a sentence they could not pronounce, namely, a sentence of death.

“Now, gentlemen, to make this extremely familiar. It is perfectly clear that many persons have authority to correct in a certain degree. A master has to correct his servant. A parent has not only the power, but it is his duty to correct his child; but let me suppose that instead of inflicting five or six strokes with a few birch twigs upon that child, you inflict five or six hundred; although the instrument may be a legal instrument, and cannot be quarrelled with, yet the extreme excess of the quantity may denote an intent to do mischief, not bridled by that which ought to bridle human actions. I will put it likewise that the instrument itself is improper. Suppose, instead of five or six strokes with a rod, you give five or six blows with a cudgel, you would say that was an instrument likely to kill the child, and would be an excess with respect to the instrument itself. So also, I conceive, it is not to go abroad to the world that a court-martial is to inflict an over-great number of strokes with an instrument likely to do much more mischief than the ordinary instrument. It may be that a hundred strokes with a particular instrument may do more mischief than a thousand with the instrument ordinarily used. I take it they are bound to inflict that measure of punishment which has been known ordinarily to be inflicted and borne; and it may be a question whether the quantity be inordinate in proportion to the instrument, that may not be evidence of such malice as may constitute that which would otherwise be justifiable, a murder according to the definition of the law of England.”

The Judge then went elaborately through the evidence; and after he had concluded, the jury went out for some time, and returned with a verdict of “Guilty.”

The Recorder proceeded to pass sentence of death upon Wall, that he should be executed the following morning, and that his body should be afterwards delivered to be anatomised according to the statute.

Mr. Wall seemed sensibly affected by the sentence, but said nothing more than requesting the court would allow him a little time to prepare himself for death.

On the 21st of January a respite was sent from Lord Pelham’s office, deferring his execution until the 25th. On the 24th he was farther respited till the 28th. His wife lived with him for the last fortnight prior to his conviction. He, before trial, although allowed two hours a day, from twelve till two, to walk in the yard, did not once embrace this indulgence; and during his confinement never went out of his room, except into the lobby to consult his counsel. He lived well, and was sometimes in good spirits. He was easy in his manners and pleasant in conversation; but during the night he frequently sat up in his bed and sung psalms, being overheard by his fellow-prisoners. He had not many visitors; his only attendant was a prisoner, who was appointed for that purpose by the turnkey.

After trial he did not return to his old apartment, but was conducted to a cell; he was so far favoured as not to have irons put on, but a person was employed as a guard to watch him during the night, to prevent him doing violence to himself. His bed was brought to him in the cell, on which he threw himself in an agony of mind, saying it was his intention not to rise until they called him on the fatal morning; and he kept his word.

The sheriffs were particularly pointed and precise in their orders with respect to confining him to the usual diet of bread and water preparatory to the awful event. This order was scrupulously fulfilled. The prisoner during a part of the night after sentence slept, owing to fatigue and perturbation of mind. The next morning his wife applied, but was refused admittance without an order from one of the sheriffs. She applied to Mr. Sheriff Cox, who thereupon himself attended her to the prison.

From the time of the first respite until twelve o’clock on Wednesday night, Wall did not cease to entertain hopes of his safety. The interest made to save him was very great. The whole of Wednesday occupied the great law officers; the judges met at the Lord Chancellor’s in the afternoon. The conference lasted upwards of three hours, but ended unfavourably to Wall.

The prisoner had an affecting interview with his wife, the Hon. Mrs. Wall, the night before his death, from whom he was painfully separated about eleven o’clock. This disconsolate and affectionate lady, unremitting in her solicitude, caused Wall to write a note to Mr. Kirby, the jailor, about nine o’clock, requesting that she might be permitted to remain in the cell until eleven, thus cordially manifesting her fond but delusive hopes to the very latest moment. Mr. Kirby, with a feeling of humanity, readily complied with this request. But no tidings of mercy arrived, and at eleven o’clock she saw the end of all her earthly joys. After many tender embraces, the wife reluctantly departed, overwhelmed with grief and bathed in tears, while the unfortunate husband declared that he could now, with Christian fortitude, submit to his unhappy fate. During the greater part of the night he slept but little.

When, the following Thursday morning, Wall ascended the scaffold, accompanied by the Rev. Ordinary, there arose three successive shouts from an innumerable populace, the brutal but determined effusion of one common sentiment, for the public indignation had never been so high since the hanging of Mrs. Brownrigg, who had whipped her apprentices to death.

The wretched Wall bowed his head under this extreme pressure of ignominy, and almost immediately afterwards was, without signal, launched into eternity. After hanging a full hour his body was cut down, put into a cart, and immediately conveyed to a building in Cowcross Street to be dissected. Wall was dressed in a mixed-coloured loose coat, with a black collar, swandown waistcoat, blue pantaloons, and white silk stockings. He appeared a miserable and emaciated object, never having quitted the bed of his cell from the day of condemnation till the morning of his execution.

The body of the unfortunate governor was not exposed to public view as usual in such cases. Mr. Belfour, Secretary to the Surgeons’ Company, applied to Lord Kenyon, Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench, to know whether such exposure was necessary; and finding that the forms of dissection only were required, the body, after those forms had passed, was consigned to the relations of the unhappy man upon their paying fifty guineas to the Philanthropic Society. The remains were interred in the churchyard of St. Pancras.

The “Gentleman’s Magazine” of 1802 thus refers to the execution of Governor Wall:—

“Thursday, Jan. 28, 1802.—This day Joseph Wall, Governor of the island of Goree, after a trial at the Old Bailey, which occupied the time of the court from nine in the morning till near eleven at night, was, for the wilful murder of Benjamin Armstrong, a sergeant in an African corps, executed pursuant to his sentence. The gallows-hunters behaved with great indecorum, hissing, groaning, and shouting, even to his very last moments. Mr. Wall was six feet four inches high, and of a genteel appearance. He behaved with great steadiness and composure during his long and painful trial, which lasted fourteen hours. He was sixty-five years of age, but did not look so old. He was respectably connected with several families of distinction in Ireland. His brother, Counsellor Wall, was a literary gentleman, who excited great notice in his day, and was the author of several literary productions; but what was most remarkable was, that he was the first person who presumed to publish Parliamentary Reports with the real names of the speakers prefixed. Dr. Johnson (in our Magazine) dressed them in Roman characters; others gave them as Orators in the Senate of Liliput. Mr. Wall laid the foundation of a practice which, we trust, for the sake of Parliament and of the nation, will never be abandoned.”

It is quite clear, from the periodicals and from the squibs and verses about it at the time, that Wall’s execution was approved of by the public, and was looked on as a praiseworthy act of retributive justice.

THE TRIAL OF COLONEL DESPARD.

Towards the close of the year 1802 the feeble Peace of Amiens was evidently on the eve of ending, and Europe was in feverish excitement. The first Consul, Napoleon Bonaparte, fast approached the zenith of his power: already had the “gloom of his glory” arisen “and o’ershadowed the earth with his fame.” Unlike his illustrious nephew, Napoleon III., he could not understand England, nor England him, and so the war between them was about to be revived more deadly and determined than before. England feared not (when did England ever fear?), but the British people were everywhere in a state of uncertainty and anxiety, natural upon the momentous preparations for the renewed struggle. Continual alarms of internal treachery magnified into giant cases of treason, and exaggerated demonstrations of loyalty were the order of the day. This political condition must be fully understood to make us now-a-days comprehend the extraordinary sensation caused by the following criminal attempt of a half-crazy officer and a parcel of pauper miscreants, truly one of the most miserable affairs that perhaps ever occupied a Royal Commission sitting on a trial for high treason. The chief conspirator, Despard, who had been a thorough gentleman and a soldier, and who had Nelson himself to give him a character, must, from what he supposed was the neglect, but what was no more probably than the procrastination of Government, have lost his wits and have become a dangerous lunatic, more fit for a madhouse than the gallows.

One can hardly refrain from a smile on reading the following amplification of Lord Ellenborough, when passing sentence upon such poor and incapable conspirators:—“The object,” said his lordship, “of the conspiracy, in which you have borne your several very active and criminal parts, has been to overthrow and demolish the fundamental laws and established government of your country; to seize upon and destroy the sacred person of our revered and justly beloved sovereign; to murder and destroy the various members of his royal house; to extinguish and annihilate the other branches of the legislature of this realm.” Yet the learned and able judge did no more than speak the sentiments and suspicions of the period. It was, indeed, the then excitement of the public, and nowise any intrinsic importance, that has made this crime of Despard historical. I here give it somewhat fully because the interest really lies in details revealing the minuteness of the capabilities of the prisoners, and the magnitude of the proceedings against them.

The ancient and honourable family of Despard is to this day of high standing and respectability in Ireland. The first of the Despards who settled there was a commissioner sent by Queen Elizabeth for partitioning the Irish lands. This Commissioner Despard and his father had fled from France in 1572 to escape the massacre of St. Bartholomew. Their descendant, William Despard, Esq., of Cranagh, in the Queen’s County, was M.P. for Bantry. His third son, William Despard, Esq., of Killaghy, in the County of Tipperary, M.P. for Thomastown, married Frances, daughter and coheir of Daniel Green, Esq., of Killaghy Castle, County Tipperary, and was father (with other issue) of an eldest son, William, his successor, and a second son, Francis Green. The eldest son became William Despard, Esq., of Coubrane and Cartoun, Queen’s County, and Killaghy Castle, County Tipperary, and married, May, 1732, Jane, daughter of the Rev. Mr. Walsh, Rector of Blessington and had (with another who died young) six sons, viz.:—1. William, who married and left a family; 2. Philip, Captain 7th Fusiliers, who married and left a family; 3. Green, Captain R.N., who died unmarried; 4. John, a Lieut.-General in the Army, who married Harriet Anne, daughter of Thomas Hesketh, Esq., and granddaughter of Sir Robert Hesketh, Bart., and had an only child, Harriet Dorothea, wife of the late Vice-Admiral Henry Francis Greville, C.B., kinsman of the Earl of Warwick: she left, with other issue, a son, the present Major-General H. L. F. Greville, R.A.; 5. Andrew, a colonel in the army, who died in 1840, aged 90; and 6. Edward Marcus, the unfortunate subject of this trial. Edward Marcus Despard was born in 1750, and as the above genealogical account shows, was the youngest of six brothers, all of whom, except the eldest, had served their country either in the army or navy. In 1766, he entered the army as an ensign, in the 5th regiment; in the same regiment he served as a lieutenant, and passing into the 79th he was successively lieutenant, quartermaster, captain-lieutenant, and captain. From his superior officers he received many marks of approbation, particularly from General Calcraft, of the 50th, General Meadows, and the Duke of Northumberland. He had been for twenty years detached from any particular corps, and entrusted with important offices. In 1779 he was appointed chief engineer to the St. Juan expedition, and conducted himself so as to obtain distinction and official praise. He also received the thanks of the Council and Assembly of Jamaica for the construction of public works there, and was in consequence appointed by the Governor of Jamaica to be Commander-in-Chief of the Island of Rattan and its dependencies, and of the troops there, and to rank as lieutenant-colonel and field engineer; and he commanded as such on the Spanish main, in Rattan, and on the Musquito shore, and the Bay of Honduras. After this, at Cape Graciosa Dios, he put himself at the head of the inhabitants, who voluntarily solicited him to take the command, and took from the Spaniards Black River, the principal settlement of the coast. For this he received the thanks of the Governor, Council, and Assembly of Jamaica, and of the King himself. In 1783 he was promoted to the rank of colonel. In 1784 he was appointed first commissioner for settling and receiving the territory ceded to Britain, by the sixth article of the definitive treaty of peace with Spain, in 1783. He so well discharged his duty as a colonel that he was appointed superintendent of his Majesty’s affairs on the coast of Honduras, which office he held much to the advantage of the Crown of England, for he got from that of Spain some very important privileges. The clashing interests, however, of the inhabitants of the coast produced much discontent, and the colonel was, by a party of them, accused wrongly, as it turned out, to his Majesty’s ministers, of various misdemeanours. He therefore came home, and demanded that his conduct should be investigated; but after two years’ constant attendance on all the departments of Government, he was at last told by the ministers that there was no charge against him worthy of investigation, and that his Majesty had thought proper to abolish the office of Superintendent at Honduras, otherwise he should have been reinstated in it; but he was then, and on every occasion, assured that his services should not be forgotten, but in due time meet their reward. Well it would have been for the colonel if he had rested satisfied with this intimation and waited quietly for the promised employment; but official delay, the circumlocution of a busy time, and the apparent spurns of his merit, which he took too impatiently, seem to have somewhat turned his brains. The colonel got irritated by continual disappointments, and began to vent his indignation in a public and unguarded manner.[20] He consequently was looked on in the light of a suspicious character, and was arrested and held for some time, in harsh confinement, in Coldbath-fields gaol, under the Act the 38 George III., c. 36 (continued by subsequent acts), which empowered “His Majesty to secure and detain such persons as his Majesty shall suspect are conspiring against his person and Government.” Imprisonment increased rather than amended the rancour and restlessness of Despard’s temper, and on his liberation he was little better than a lunatic: he had become a wild revolutionist, and, what was a strong sign of his mental aberration, an infidel. He daily grew more and more malignant against Government. Thus inflamed, he endeavoured to inflame others, and at length brought upon himself, and those poor ignorant wretches who were seduced by his arguments, disgrace and death. A madder or more miserable conspiracy than his never was hatched. It was revealed to the public in the following manner:—On the 16th of November, 1802, in consequence of a search warrant, a numerous body of the police-officers went to the Oakley Arms, Oakley-street, Lambeth, where they apprehended Colonel Despard, and near forty labouring men and soldiers, many of them Irish. Next morning they were all brought up before the magistrates in the Union Hall. The result of the examination was, that Colonel Despard was committed to the county gaol, and afterwards to Newgate; twelve of his low associates (six of whom were soldiers) were sent to Tothill-fields Bridewell, and twenty to the New Prison, Clerkenwell. Ten other persons who had been found in a different room, and who appeared to have no concern with the colonel’s party, were instantly discharged.

The colonel during all the preliminary examinations was invariably silent.

The Privy Council, the more effectually to try the prisoners, issued a special commission.

On the 21st of January, 1803, the special commission was opened at the Sessions House at Newington. The judges present were:—The Right Hon. Sir Edward Law, Lord Ellenborough, Lord Chief Justice of the Court of King’s Bench; the Hon. Sir Alexander Thomson, one of the Barons of the Court of Exchequer; the Hon. Sir Simon Le Blanc, one of the Justices of the Court of King’s Bench; and the Hon. Sir Alan Chambre, one of the Justices of the Court of Common Pleas.

On the same day the Grand Jury met, among whom were Lord Leslie, foreman, Viscount Cranley, Lord William Russell, Sir Mark Parsons, and four other baronets. The names of Sir Mark Parsons and Lord William Russell awake in themselves criminal recollections, for Sir Mark’s father was hanged for felony in 1760, and Lord William was murdered by Courvoisier in 1840. This Grand Jury returned a true bill against Edward Marcus Despard, John Wood, Thomas Broughton, John Francis, Thomas Phillips, Thomas Newman, Daniel Tyndall, John Doyle, James Sedgwick Wratten, William Lander, Arthur Graham, Samuel Smith, and John Macnamara, for high treason.