WHEN EMMANUEL BARTHÈLEMY visited George Moore for the last time, he was not in a good mood. Perhaps few of us would be: it was a dank, freezing cold, wet night. Barthélemy was footsore and weary, and he had plenty on his mind. In his pocket a ticket for travel to the Continent: his plan, to assassinate the Emperor of the French.
Tying up loose ends in London was proving to be a complex business and Barthélemy had decided to work off his frustration by practising his pistol-shooting at the ‘Gun Tavern’ at Westminster, near Buckingham Palace. But on his way he met with a mysterious woman and between them they concocted a plan to visit George Moore, Barthélemy’s former employer.
When they arrived at Warren Street it was just gone eight in the evening. The overture was playing at Her Majesty’s Theatre in the Haymarket and the elegant audience there, ‘glorious with beauties and with riches’, was settling in for the evening’s opera performance. At the same time, in the teeming slum streets, workers emerging from a day’s labour were crowding round shabby stalls and shops. Under the three golden balls identifying the pawnbroker’s establishment they presented their scanty possessions and in return ‘the capitalist’1 lent them housekeeping money. This is how the rich lived and the poor survived. It was the bustling, energetic, often desperate face of London.
The date was 8 December 1854. England, in alliance with France, had been at war with Russia since March. Florence Nightingale was nursing the diseased British expeditionary force at Scutari on the Crimean peninsula. British public opinion had scorned Napoleon III, ruler of France, as a despotic upstart. But now they celebrated him as a stout and faithful ally. Crude portraits of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and his Empress, Eugénie, were on display all over London. For a revolutionary like Barthélemy, vehemently opposed to the Bonapartist dictatorship, this vexed him almost to wildness. Never had he felt more of a foreigner in England.
Only a few years earlier, in 1848, revolution had swept the Continent, and Barthélemy’s dreams had appeared to be on the brink of fulfilment. But now ‘reaction’ was inexorably rolling back the radical wave. Cities across Europe had risen in revolt against their monarchs in 1848, only to be suppressed by armies based on peasant recruitment. Now, in its aftermath, the religious, the conservative, and the revolutionary contended for the ear of the people. As a revolutionary, Barthélemy knew that the influence of his party was diminishing.
Barthélemy stopped at 73 Warren Street, a large townhouse and workplace near the juncture with Tottenham Court Road. He was in Fitzrovia, close to the centre of radical London. Barthélemy knew the area well.
Barthélemy was a familiar figure in London’s radical community, both natives and exiles from European countries. But he was little known outside its ranks. For London was not just a centre of political agitation or a bolthole for revolutionaries. It was, primarily, the beating heart of the most extraordinary economic transformation to date. Only three years earlier the Great Exhibition had showcased Britain’s world-beating industrial might. London’s docks were crowded with commercial shipping and fragranced by cotton, preserved fruits, spices, dyes, spirits, perfumes and drugs, all piled high in warehouses or, if unsold, burnt in a huge furnace known as the ‘Queen’s Pipe’. The railways had tied together the country. In 1829 the first railway passenger service opened between Liverpool and Manchester. By the middle of the century railways criss-crossed the United Kingdom. For The Economist newspaper this was a transformation putting London at the centre of national life as never before:
In the days of Adam2 the average speed of travel, if Adam ever did such things, was four miles an hour … in the year 1828, or 4000 years afterwards, it was still only 10 miles … in 1850, it is habitually forty miles an hour, and seventy for those who like …. The railroad is the Magna Carta of … motive freedom. How few among the last generation ever stirred beyond their own village? How few among the present will die without visiting London?
In the middle of the nineteenth century, London was expanding at a dizzying rate, and new comfortable middle-class houses were springing up. The house of George Moore on Warren Street was in many respects typical of the prosperous middle-class merchant. These were large houses, though as land in London was expensive they were also narrow, with rooms arranged one on top of the other. Steps brought the visitor up to a front door which opened into a hallway. Below this level were the servants’ quarters, where could be found the kitchens, pantries, larders and perhaps a cramped sitting room. The front room was typically a dining room, behind this a study or occasional room. Upstairs on the first floor was a large fine drawing room, the best in the house. Up another flight of stairs was the ‘front bedroom’, occupied by the master and mistress, and another bedroom. The one or two floors above this were shared by children and servants. ‘Pure undiluted gentility3 did not rise above the second floor.’ It was the acme of the ‘class-consciousness house’.
Inside this particular address was its master, George Moore; the maid, Charlotte Bennett; and innocently sleeping upstairs, Moore’s grandson aged eight. At 8.30 p.m., Charlotte heard an impatient knocking and ringing at the door. She hurried to answer. The hallway had no lighting and she carried a tallow candle in a passageway otherwise illuminated only by the glow of street lamps coming through the glass fanlight over the front door. By the dim radiance of the flickering wick she peered at her visitors. Barthélemy was certainly a handsome man, standing five foot seven inches, of lithe and muscular build, with jet-black curling hair over a well-proportioned face. He had high cheekbones, a firm chin, a straight nose, defined lips, and striking, penetrating eyes. Charlotte had met him on previous occasions, when Barthélemy had come to the house to do mechanical work at the factory in the rear, but he had shaved off his large black moustache, and she did not recognise him. A hat, perhaps the common top hat or the recently invented bowler sported by working men, was pulled low over his face.
Barthélemy was accompanied by a woman who Charlotte did not know. She later described the mysterious lady as about thirty years of age, rather shorter than herself, dressed in dark clothing, and upon her head a straw bonnet. Covering her face was a ‘fall’, or a thick veil, and she wore a cloak of dark brown merino cloth, trimmed with black satin ribbon and small black satin buttons. Barthélemy was dressed in a rough blue overcoat with large bell sleeves. Sewn into the lining of his undercoat was a dagger. Also hidden were two pistols, and in his pocket twenty-four cartridges, a quantity of loose firing-caps, and that ticket for the boat to Hamburg.
Barthélemy asked Charlotte if Mr Moore was at home. Charlotte said he was. She walked the visitors down the long hallway to the back parlour. Here George Moore appeared, a large, stout and confident figure, the very model of a successful businessman. He had made a good living by the manufacture of fizzy drinks4, for which there was a healthy market. Moore welcomed the visitors as friends, but he brought them into his second-best room. Her duty done, Charlotte left them to it, going through the kitchen and downstairs to her basement quarters.
Barthélemy and the woman followed Moore into the well-appointed parlour of tables, chairs and sideboard: a crowding together of walnut, rosewood and mahogany all richly decorated with carvings; plush curtains, thick carpet, rugs and Staffordshire figurines – the proud furnishings typical of a prosperous early to mid-Victorian gentleman. ‘Hideous solidity was the characteristic,’ as Charles Dickens wrote of such ‘Podsnappery’. ‘Everything was made to look as heavy as it could5, and to take up as much room as possible.’ Amid this self-congratulatory display of comfortable living, George Moore and his guests remained together for about twenty minutes.
At first the meeting went well. Moore was proud of his manufactory and his wares were displayed on the sideboard. He took down bottles of carbonated waters, drew chairs around the table and showed off an item of his trade: a kind of mallet used for tapping corks into pressurised bottles. With a corkscrew, Moore opened three bottles. Soda water and lemonade were provided for his guests. Barthélemy and his lady companion sipped at their drinks. Moore poured himself a ginger beer in a third tumbler, drained it, and started on another. He felt himself very much the gregarious patron.
From this congenial beginning, however, the meeting turned sour. The woman took a letter out of her pocket and began to read from it. She had reached nearly the bottom of the first page when Moore rose from his chair in a fury and lunged to snatch the letter out of her hand. Barthélemy jumped from his chair and flung Moore back with his arm. Caught off guard, Moore stumbled and partly fell. Barthélemy snatched up the weighty mallet, and in a fury smashed at a heavy mahogany chair with such force that both mallet and chair disintegrated. He did not, however, draw the dagger he was carrying.
Barthélemy swung at Moore with the mallet handle, dealing him a glancing blow to the head, which whipped back and cracked sharply off the wall. Moore’s blood splashed on the wallpaper, the sofa cushions and the corkscrew. From her room downstairs6, the maid heard a voice cry, ‘Murder!’ Moore was a big man, injured but outraged, and in fear for his life. He advanced on his now unwelcome guests, striking at Barthélemy and pushing him towards the door. Behind him he trailed blood through the room.
Charlotte heard the scuffle in the parlour from her servants’ quarters. As she listened, the racket grew in volume and finally she summoned her courage and crept upstairs. Coming in view of the back parlour she saw her master and Barthélemy tumble out of its door, engaged in what appeared to be a deadly struggle in the passage. The mysterious woman followed closely behind. All was confusion and shadows as Charlotte’s small tallow candle, the only light source illuminating the scene, danced and flickered.
As Barthélemy reached the front door, pursued by Moore, he attempted to stop Charlotte calling for help by clamping his hand over her mouth. Charlotte dropped her candle and it guttered out on the floor. Moore was still pushing at Barthélemy. As the two men grappled, Barthélemy swivelled round. Moore had his hand up and fixed on Barthélemy. ‘I do not know7 whether he was pushing him or whether he was holding him back – he had his hand upon him, and he was doing either one or the other,’ said Charlotte later. As the two men locked eyes, Barthélemy raised his pistol breast-high and tilted it at Moore’s head. He pulled the trigger and the dark hallway was suddenly lit by a flash. Moore was hit full in the face.
Mr Richard Slaughter Carter, a surgeon who was called to the crime scene later, ‘found a man lying in the passage on his back, quite dead’. With that lack of squeamishness characteristic of Victorian newspapers, the press quoted his report.
A large quantity of blood8 was around about his head as he lay on the floor. I first saw a wound just above the eyebrow, about half an inch from the root of the nose. I found that the wound reached into the brain, and some brain was oozing out of the wound. On further examination I discovered two jagged wounds on the top of the head, penetrating to the skull bone. There was likewise a wound at the back of the head, exactly opposite.
The post-mortem examination showed that the bullet had entered the orbit of the eye, completely traversed the brain, and fractured the occipital bone at the back of the skull, from where it had rebounded. It had ended up lodged in the centre of the cerebellum. Death had been instantaneous.
Terrified by the flash and bang of gunfire and by the sight of her collapsed master, Charlotte tore open the front door, calling out in alarm to those gathering out on the pavement. Curious as to the noise, three people had already stopped by the house. Barthélemy and the maid stumbled out together, but Charlotte fell against the iron wicket-gate at the front of the steps, preventing Barthélemy making a quick getaway on to the street. He ran back into the house, slamming and bolting the door behind him. Charlotte was now locked outside.
Barthélemy rushed down the hallway, past the parlour, to the back door. He wrestled down the bar that went across it, and quickly hustled his female companion outside. In the back yard, she collapsed, distraught over Moore’s death, and begged Barthélemy to shoot her too. ‘I had not the heart to do so,’9 said Barthélemy later. ‘I was anxious she should escape.’ From the deep pocket of his overcoat he removed his purse, containing a gold sovereign and some silver coins, and pressed it into her hand. The woman had brought with her another cloak and hat. She donned these as a disguise and Barthélemy hoisted her over the wall into the neighbouring back yard, from whence she disappeared into the night. After she was clear, Barthélemy took a different route to draw off any pursuers. With a gun clamped in one hand he climbed up the high back gate and fell into the New Road – the artery renamed the Euston Road a few years later.
At the front of the house10, meanwhile, someone shouted, ‘Break open the door!’ Charlotte, who had been unable to speak for a few moments, now found her voice and loudly urged the crowd: ‘Go round into the New Road, or he will get out that way.’ Hearing the noise, Charles Collard, a greengrocer aged thirty-six, emerged from his premises at 74 Warren Street. Collard had formerly been a soldier in the service of the East India Company, and then for two or three years a constable in the E (Holborn) Division of the police. He was still well known to the force, having a contract to supply a number of police stations with vegetables. With a passing house painter, William Moseley, bringing up the rear, Collard dashed to the back of the Moore residence. The two men came round the other side to see Barthélemy falling from railings some six foot high. Collard was also joined by William Beetleson, a waterman at the hackney coach stand on the New Road. Beetleson had been alerted, he recalled, by ‘a person [coming] towards me crying “Police!” and “Murder!”’ He saw Barthélemy ‘falling from the palings’ as ‘his hat fell off and bounded on the pavement’.
Collard and Beetleson closed in on Barthélemy. Moseley saw confused grappling in the night and heard Collard cry out, ‘For God’s sake lay hold of him, as he has something in his hand. Take care, or he will shoot someone!’ The two men pinioned Barthélemy in a stooping position, Moseley holding his right arm and Collard his left. Suddenly Barthélemy’s pistol went off. Collard fell to the ground, crying out, ‘Good God, I am shot!’ Beetleson wrested the remains of the shattered mallet from Barthélemy’s hands, but Barthélemy used his pistol to land a blow on his head. As Beetleson reeled back, Barthélemy broke free, stumbled over a low wall and was set upon by another man attracted by the furore. William Henry Madden, a woodcarver living on Tottenham Court Road, was returning home from work and passing by the back premises of Moore’s soda-water manufactory. He spied the scuffle and chased Barthélemy for nearly a hundred yards. Barthélemy stopped running, spun round, switched his pistol from one hand to the other, and struck Madden twice on the head, knocking his hat off, cutting through his left eyelid, slicing a piece off his ear, and tearing through to the bone behind his left ear.
Having gouged Madden in the face, Barthélemy dropped his pistol behind him. Once again he broke free and ran a further twenty or thirty yards. But his furious flight was nearing its end. He was finally brought down11 by George Cope, an organ-pipe maker, who had seen a man running with a group of persons following him, and heard a cry of ‘Stop him!’ Cope was a strong and powerful young man, and as he intercepted Barthélemy he threw him violently against a garden wall. Then seizing Barthélemy, he wrestled him to the ground. Men gathered around him and pummelled his hunched body. Exhausted, Barthélemy put up no more resistance. (Madden was afterwards hailed as a hero12, and awarded £10. The unfortunate George Cope received nothing, and over the next three years peppered the press with letters of complaint.) Police Constable John Mundy13 – carrying his truncheon, lamp and rattle – presently reached the scene. Moseley said to him, ‘Take him in charge, he has shot a man further down.’ Barthélemy was now a prisoner.
Barthélemy refused to answer any questions from his captors. As he was being marched to the police station on Tottenham Court Road, he and his escort were followed by a crowd hooting the captive. Fearful that he was about to be lynched, Barthélemy asked for a transport to bring him in safety. Mundy suspected a ruse: ‘He asked me if I would let him have a cab14; I said “No, there is no cab allowed for you”.’ Once arrived at the station, Barthélemy was searched.
Collard, who had been shot in the struggle outside Moore’s house, was brought into University College Hospital at about 8.45 p.m. He was suffering great pain. The house surgeon, Mr Henry Kiallmark, found a circular wound on the wall of the belly at the left side of the navel. Collard complained of numbness in the left thigh and leg. Kiallmark concluded that his spine had been damaged. The bullet was lodged just beneath the skin, and he cut it out. He called for Mr John Erichsen, the hospital surgeon, who on his arrival expressed no hopes for Collard’s recovery. ‘My good man,’15 he told Collard, ‘you are in a dying state.’
Barthélemy was brought into Collard’s presence. The stricken man, though too weak to point at him, immediately identified Barthélemy as his killer: ‘That is the man who shot me,’ he whispered through his pain. Barthélemy made no reply and showed no emotion. The wounded Collard turned away, saying, ‘Oh, you cruel man!’16
Collard was able to make a sworn statement to Inspector Checkley of the E Division:
I, Charles Collard17, of number 74, Warren Street, say that at a quarter to nine PM this day I heard a cry of ‘Murder’ in 73, Warren Street. I went there, and found a man attempting to escape. I prevented him. He then re-entered the house, and fastened the door in Warren Street, and got out at the back. I ran into the New Road, and caught hold of him as he was getting over the garden wall, when he pulled a pistol from his pocket and shot me through, and I fell. The man ran away. Another man was standing near me at the time, who tried to hold him; but he got away. The man I now see is the man who shot me. I am certain of that. I have made this statement believing that I am dying. – (Signed) CHARLES COLLARD, his mark. Witness, RICHARD CHECKLEY, HENRY KIALLMARK.
All the time Barthélemy looked on expressionless, unmoving and seemingly unmoved.
The immediate cause of Collard’s death, which came after several hours of extreme agony, was inflammation. He left behind him two children and a pregnant widow. Barthélemy, when told of Collard’s death18, ‘wept bitterly, wrung his hands, and stated that, bearing no ill will to Collard, he never intended to do him any injury’.
What was in the letter that so enraged George Moore and led to his death? Who was the mysterious woman? What had Emmanuel Barthélemy intended to do that night? Who was this ‘cruel man’ – this murderer of Warren Street – and why was he there? Why did he plan to assassinate Napoleon III? To find out we must travel to France, and to the revolutionary Paris that shaped him.