The Damnation of William Burke
BURKE … v. 1829. [f. Burke, a criminal executed at Edinburgh in 1829.] 1. To kill secretly by suffocation or strangulation, or in order to sell the victim’s body for dissection, as Burke did. 2. fig. To smother, hush up 1840.
1. As soon as the executioner proceeded to his duty, the cries of ‘B. him, B. him – give him no rope’ … were vociferated Times 2 Feb. 1829. Hence BURKER. BURKISM.
—The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary
THE Watergate scandal in the United States in the early 1970s revealed, with a wealth of documentation, how thin can be the divide between investigation and cover-up when the government finds its political interests confronted by its judicial investigations. The Lord Advocate in 1828–29 was as forcibly confronted by the conflict of interest and truth, and if personally his motives were more altruistic than those Richard Nixon would have, his response was the same – fear of any dissemination of information to the press, the people and to other potential protagonists. In much of his efforts he failed: the Burke and Hare case won universal and eternal infamy, his own legal activities were publicly denounced and in part defeated, mob scenes were aroused and at times on huge scales, class hostility smouldered in Edinburgh for the next few years particularly against the doctors. But he did dictate posterity’s version of the story, partly because, and partly in spite of his own efforts.
Rae kept his own counsel so well that Whitehall knew nothing of what had happened until Burke and Hare had been under arrest for a month, and then learned of it in the most casual fashion. Professor Alexander Monro needed his subjects for dissection as fully as did Dr Robert Knox, and was much enraged when a cargo of cadavers from Dublin was seized by the police and customs at Greenock: it was an understanding that Government wink at the trade. So Monro protested to Rae, with the support of Principal George Baird of the University, and Rae forwarded their letters to Home Secretary Robert Peel remarking that he was privately reminding Customs of the gentlemanly understanding and that he had been present at part of a sheriff’s inquiry revealing at least twelve murders to furnish dissection subjects. So naturally restraint on the cross-channel cadaver trade was to be deplored, inviting as it did more private enterprise in the domestic market.
In the same letter, of 27 November, 1828, Rae also assured Peel
one individual, an Irishman, who has been engaged in all these acts, will be immediately brought to trial, and will to a certainty be convicted; but the charge of Murder, as against him, will be confined to two instances, as we are most anxious to conceal from the public the extent to which such crimes have been carried, and of which fortunately little idea is at present entertained.
Understandably, Peel saw more in this than the need for him to restrain the zeal of the customs. “Is it possible”, he demanded on December 6
that the information you have received as to the perpetration of 12 murders in so short a space of time for such an object can be well founded? If it be well founded it exceeds any thing in horror of which I ever heard.
But where to Rae, legatee of eighteenth-century Scottish corruption, it called for squaring the customs to prevent – in a very nasty sense – the rocking of the boat, to Peel, harbinger of nineteenth-century English reform, it demanded legislative action. An Anatomy Act must be brought in to take the whole business from government legerdemain, grave desecration and wholesale murder alike. And that meant that the revelations of the Burke and Hare scandal had to enter the public domain, if only to alert the House of Commons to what had now emerged as the inevitable consequence of the body trade.
Either to meet Peel’s demands, or to confront him with the need for suppression, the Lord Advocate sent down the precognitions or depositions of the witnesses, including, of course, the Hares. If he thought that this would reinforce the case for silence, he met with little sympathy. On New Year’s Day, 1829, Peel was advocating
the most sifting investigation into every thing deposed by Hare.
Now that the Trial has taken place – I doubt whether uncertainty as to the extent & history of these murders – is not as great an evil as any exposure of facts can be.
But he made it very clear that what was needed was a thorough examination of the Knox medical school and beyond it to the Edinburgh medical fraternity in general.
He did not get it. And the disappearance of the depositions, especially those of the Hares, from his own archives and those of the Lord Advocate raises its questions. It is true that archivists have long noted and deplored the vanishing of such documents from official records before Scotland had obtained a satisfactory system for the preservation of official records; the Burke and Hare case might be expected to attract wanton pillagers among souvenir-hunters. Given the dissemination of pieces of Burke’s skin after dissection it was hardly likely that the curious might evince more delicacy over the acquisition of public records. Yet what invites deeper suspicion is that Hare’s confession after the trial seems omnipresent. The Caledonian Mercury seems to have had a sight of it, to judge by its issue of 29 December, although it made attempts to conform with the practice of not directly citing what was disclosed with prohibition of attribution. Sir Walter Scott certainly saw it, and also discussed the case with its judges and counsel. Was this Rae’s method of continuing a cover-up once press publicity had shattered his initial hopes of relative silence? If so, his freedom with the document among a charmed circle raises the question of a similar freedom with respect to a decision for its ultimate suppression. It was at least bound to raise the question of whether the confession would prove perjury on Hare’s part, over which the Crown had stood. Rae would shortly see Peel when he came down for the sittings of the House and for Government discussions. Peel had with the greatest difficulty disposed of the Catholic Emancipation crisis in Ireland: he would doubtless have been obliged to listen to assurances that unwise disclosures could bring his political enemies in Scotland around the Government’s ears. Rae was no Henry Dundas, but he could rely on the Tory tradition of leaving Scotland to the Lord Advocate. The issue disappears from the Peel papers, to be succeeded by discussions about giving a judgeship to Moncreiff.
But if Peel was forced to acquiesce in the aborting of investigation, he did successfully counter Rae’s principles on publicity. Rae’s desire to conceal the number of murders was so unsuccessful that by 20 November the Caledonian Mercury was “satisfied” that Burke and Hare had many active counterparts. Rae had only himself to thank for his policy of suppression of truth inviting proliferation of falsehood or unverifiable rumour. But such speculations helped Peel’s hopes for an Anatomy Act, which indeed the Mercury demanded in the midst of its horror-mongering. Agitation had previously been allowed to die down; now Burke and Hare revived it. The Westminster Review for January 1829 saw the murders as the inevitable consequence of the cadaver famine and the suppression of straightforward body smuggling. The philosophic radical Henry Warburton moved a bill for the provision of dissection subjects in the Commons on 12 March. Peel supported it and on 20 May during the debate on the third reading actually took the same line as the Mercury had done exactly six months before. But the measure was lost in the Lords and not until Bishop and Williams proved Peel a true prophet by bringing burking to London was an Anatomy Act passed, in 1832.
However much good publicity may have done the cause of an Anatomy Bill, it did only limited service to that of truth. Rae’s policy of news control and partial blackout simply resulted in the invention of material broadcast. The public was avid for news of Burke and Hare, not merely for sensationalism, but also from a horrified realisation that nobody was safe with such a murder business in operation. Newspapers beheld their sales rise to hitherto undreamed of figures. The result paralleled Burke’s and Hare’s moving into any vacuum induced by official clampdown on the corpse trade. Bogus confessions, bogus crimes, bogus interviews, bogus adornments jammed the columns of the greedy journalists. January, in particular, left a great hiatus between Burke’s trial and execution; the confessions which he made in prison to the Edinburgh Courant and to the civic authorities were not to be made available until Hare was out of the jurisdiction. The fifteen-part series Ireland was bringing out suffered particularly from this situation. It could not afford to lose its momentum and hence the way was open to invention. In most instances Ireland may simply have hurled in journalistic myths manufactured for other prints, regardless of their conflicts with one another, but in some cases he did his own work. The first avowedly fictional treatment of the case, The Murderers of the Close, has its preface dated 28 February 1829 – but it differed from many predecessors only in its honesty. Incidentally, it seems to have risen to a challenge from Meadowbank’s “The very announcement of such a system is sufficient to raise ideas of horror, which it would be in vain for words adequately to express” and certainly went to remarkable heights in its efforts to express them, giving Mary Docherty as last words “God abandoned! and thou, hideous carrion, your time is at hand – the wrath of Heaven, even now, is ready to fall on your heads – I – I – shall be the last”.
Edinburgh may have sniggered over this London artefact’s version of the speech of an Irish-Scots wifie; its own fictions were, unfortunately, much more credible. The frontier between fiction and fact was most effectively crossed by the ballad-makers, as well also that between appeal to justice and to lynch law. Significantly, being presumably man-made, they demanded the harshest treatment for women.
Now Hare should follow after, if right it does take place,
For these women they should be burnt alive for such a murdering case.
By the time this was written Helen MacDougal had already been found not proven. Male chauvinism also emerges at many other points in mob and other reactions. The few women who mingled with the throng of 25,000 men to see the dissected Burke’s corpse lying in state on the anatomy slab at Old College, are said to have been handled roughly and to have had their clothes torn. Even Moncreiff’s speech drew a distinction between the respectable and dissolute witnesses, Janet Law and Nancy Conway falling into the latter category because of their unseasonable hours for accepting drink, while Hugh Alston, despite his very late hour of return home, was accepted by all parties as respectable. When Ireland reported on the dwellings of Burke and Hare, Alston alone remained. The West Port crowd that turned on Helen MacDougal when she so foolishly went back there after the trial may have had its word to say about Nancy Conway’s evening hospitality with her neighbours, or about Janet Law’s and Nancy’s acceptance of those neighbours’ early morning drams. Even without personal violence against the women, it must have been hard for them to find new accommodation having been driven from the old. And they indeed were innocent enough of anything save trying to lighten grinding and squalid lives by a little drink and merriment.
The ballads, lampoons, cartoons, caricatures and broadsheets ran riot and fabricated their material as it suited them. Two collections, whose lithographs are worth a glance, are “Wretch’s Illustrations of Shakespeare” and “Noxiana”; the former makes somewhat laboured connections between the case and Shakespearean passages of criminological interest, e.g. Knox and Richard III (had the doctor the hardihood to prosecute the publisher of both sets, R. H. Nimmo of Hanover Street, for what was undoubted libel he would have been confronted by the unctuous assurance that the profits of the publication were going to the relatives of “the late most innocent, inoffensive, well-known, and well-liked, Daft Jamie”: he could hardly have offset the effect of this by offering them £10). Bogus confessions of both Burke and Hare travelled far and wide, including the reprint of the so-called Burke statement published in the Caledonian Mercury on 5 January 1829, rapidly incorporated in Ireland’s pages and demolished in chapter six above (“the case of the broken back”). After Hare’s disappearance broadsheets were on sale describing his hanging by a mob in Londonderry, and in more formal circumstances in New York. And Daft Jamie was, as stated, omnipresent whether in iconograph, in poetic fantasy, in reported haunting of his relations and in biographical effusion. The effect was enormously to heighten emotion. Initially, it was all straightforward contempt of court. Burke’s guilt was being assumed in the public press before Hare had even confessed. The press, conscious of its market, had apparently not the slightest qualms of whipping up public hysteria, although it shared the prevalent social attitudes about the dangers of mob rule. The Caledonian Mercury, for instance, was as guilty as any in the manufacture and deployment of inflammatory fictions masquerading as news, yet on 1 December 1828 it could speak of the horrors of mob electoral power as represented by Andrew Jackson: “the mere mob of America, the most brutal and degraded on the face of the earth, are naturally attached to a man who shares their savage instincts, and occasionally exemplifies their cowardly ferocity”. Christopher North’s politics were high Tory, but he saw sublime virtue in the yells of the twenty or thirty thousand who saw Burke turned off. In fact, although the last century had seen in the Wilkeite, Stamp Act, Boston, Gordon and French food riots the precursors of revolution or near-revolution, and though mass popular pressure had been used on the side of radicalism by Daniel O’Connell within the last decade, the moment was arising when Tories would turn to the mob in their turn – to Orangeism in the 1830s, for example. It was a natural temptation, given the mob hysteria that traditionally attended anti-Catholicism at its most vocal.
That the Burke and Hare affair on its own would induce mass panic would have been natural enough; and when added to this there were Rae’s censorship and press inventiveness the atmosphere was combustible in the extreme. Anti-Popery mobs had been really fighting chimeras, with long folk-myths about Papist massacres and Celtic slaughters. But Burke and Hare directly represented a clear threat to the life of every human being. Yet it remains the case that the leaders of the crowd, for whom historians have taught us to look, appear middle class when they can be identified at all. First of all, the writers themselves, the publishers, the artists, must be counted. The newspapers might appear more sober but were in fact even more deadly: their apparently factual accounts, often purely inventive, went to inflame the flyby-night hawkers’ material, and to lend weight and solemnity to what might otherwise appear incredible. The motives here are those of gain rather than riot, yet there does seem a thirst for blood in many of these effusions. The one person who we know personally to have started a riot is Erskine Douglas Sandford, junior counsel for the Wilsons, and he was certainly of strongly middle-to-upper class origin: his father was the first episcopalian bishop of Edinburgh since the Revolution of 1688–89. Sandford was under some strain when he put the match to the dry tinder at Dumfries: two of his father’s grandchildren died just about this time, and they may have been Sandford’s own infants. In politics the family was hardly typical of a Tory episcopal appointment: Sandford’s brother was to be Whig M.P. for Paisley. Sandford himself otherwise survives as a legal authority on entail. Why he, a scion of church and law, should have turned to the mob, must remain a mystery: but he would not be the first figure of orthodox background to appeal to Demos at a moment of rage, grief, frustration or despair at the normal institutions. One thing is certain: he must have known perfectly well what the consequences would be when he disclosed Hare’s identity to the coach. It would be interesting to know whether he added additional details for the curious at Dumfries: that particular mob took its time to reach boiling point and may have required judicious egging on from an authoritative source.
The mob actions against Robert Knox also suggest careful leadership. His being burnt in effigy on 12 February with the breaking of the windows of his house required some advance planning, and even more curious is the riot against him at Portobello, whose remoteness from the scene of action suggests at least one person there with a particular axe to grind. Relatives of the victims of Burke and Hare will hardly account for these actions: most of them known to us are women. What can be suggested is that some of this activity was kind remembrance from medical rivals who had been the victims of his vituperation, although any such activity probably took the form of inspiring their own students. Rivalry between the student followers of popular doctors was extreme, witness the Knox pupil who first sent Burke and Hare to his master instead of their proposed target Monro tertius. Monro himself may even have had some following, and a few sycophants might have responded to a hint from him. After all, he had had a riot outside his own theatre when he was dissecting Burke, a riot in which students anxious to gain entrance had taken the lead. Liston, Syme, Christison, Alison, all more deservedly popular, might well have dropped a remark before admiring students that Knox was getting off scot-free: they could not wish anything else, for they would suffer if he were investigated, but that would not make them love him any better, and the age was one of ready tongues.
The situation suggests a complex pattern of class interaction, but one in which class distinction was highly present, all the same. Middle class knew working class in Burke’s and Hare’s Edinburgh: they spoke the same language, Lallans (apart from those whose real language was Gaelic of the Irish or of the Scottish variety). The press and lawyers show a highly class-conscious view of the West Port, readily and somewhat sanctimoniously attributing to its inhabitants a lot of drunkenness and quarrelling, but the basis for such allusions was simple enough. Drinking and fighting was the obvious way out of the hell in which ghetto-dwellers lived during the industrial revolution on either side of the Atlantic. To say this is not to lend credence to the revolting and somewhat pornographic anecdotes about Burke beating up Helen MacDougal or standing by while Hare did, with which the newspapers filled columns deprived of harder information by Rae. From Christopher North up there is a widespread persistence among the journalistic brethren in seeking to deny any truly tender sentiment between Burke and Helen. Quite apart from this, it seems that middle-class readers were a ready market for accounts of working-class violence between sexual partners. Dickens, who may have owed much to Burke and Hare, proved this last point effectively enough in Oliver Twist a few years later. But the Scottish lawyers and journalists were at least realistic in their view of the lower class, in contrast to the English legislators. During the debate on the Anatomy Bill on 12 March, 1829, Leycester, seconding Warburton’s proposal, said that paupers would welcome being dissected after their demise in the poor-house as they would be glad to know “that they would be able, after death, in some measure, to repay the debt they owed to those who administered comfort to them in the last stage of their existence”. On this logic old Donald must have been cheering enthusiastically in the next world once he realised that the sale of his body would repay his lawful debts to William Hare, and even the actual victims of murder at least could rejoice in knowing they would help repay the costs of the alcohol which so many of them had consumed in such quantity at Burke’s and Hare’s expense. The Scottish commentators knew better than that.
To say this is not to argue that the journalists, who raced in and out of the West Port to scribble down facts, half-facts, rumours, alcoholic ramblings, vague recollections and straightforward invention from anyone they could find, had any particular respect for the workers and nomads from whom they leeched their material. The very fact that they themselves were writing in English, in contrast to the Lallans they spoke, increased the artificiality of their expressed attitudes, and apparently led them to take English condescension to be a part of English syntax. The unnatural character of writing in a different tongue from speaking enhanced the tendency to caricature. The working class might show individual personalities as three-dimensional as their material betters when both expressed themselves in the same tongue; literary formality cut away the third dimension as middle class looked at lower class. It is partly because of this that the portraits of Burke, Hare and the women have been frozen in demonic postures ever since 1829. Burke and Hare preyed on their own class, and indeed acquired some middle-class entrepreneur status by so doing, but the denial of their humanity was simply a vivid part of the denial of the humanity of those whom they devoured. It may well have been that Burke and Hare established a formidable literary convention in this respect. Dickens granted Fagin and Bill Sikes no more virtue than posterity has accorded to Burke and Hare, even if he did show more decency in the portrait of Sikes’s woman. It was left for Anthony Trollope, in The Three Clerks, to ask what choice Sikes ever had, a question that may also be legitimate about Hare. As Sir Walter Scott pointed out in writing to Mrs Hughes on 29 January 1829, Burke’s having been “rather educated above the common class” made his case “more extraordinary”. There is more obvious choice in his case. But that makes him no less human.
It might be argued that one conspicuous commentator who wrote partly in Lallans, Christopher North, supplied the most demonic of all views of Burke, Hare and the women, and, in his obvious contempt for them, the most degraded vision of the victims. And it is true that the Calvinist assumptions of predestination, especially on questions of eternal damnation, invited dehumanisation in its own form. Ironically the colleague with whom North asserted himself to be speaking in Noctes Ambrosianae, James Hogg (who was by no means always ready to acknowledge the remarks North chose to ascribe to him), had made the great literary protest of the decade against this mentality in his Confessions of a Justified Sinner. On the other hand North seems to have been haunted by the thought that Burke was human and might even be saved, to judge by the violence with which he sought to expel it:
Burke, it appears, was told to give the signal with the name of his Saviour on his lips! But the congregation, though ignorant of that profanation, knew that the demon, on the scaffold, endured neither remorse nor penitence; and therefore natural, and just, and proper shouts of human vengeance assailed the savage coward, and excommunicated him from our common lot by yells of abhorrence that delivered his body over to the hangman, and his soul to Satan.
Scott, a witness to the execution, could at least give the lie to North on Burke’s alleged cowardice. “He died with firmness,” he told Mrs Hughes, “though overwhelmed with the hooting cursing and execrations of an immense mob which they hardly suspended during the prayer and psalm which in all other instances in my memory have passed undisturbed, Governor Wall’s being a solitary exception.”
The Wall case alluded to an Irish-born lieutenant-governor of Senegal whose savagery resulted in a soldier, Paterson, being flogged so brutally on the voyage out that he died of the effects, and who answered a deputation from his troops complaining of short pay by having its leader, Sergeant Armstrong, given 800 lashes without a court-martial with resultant death. He fled from trial in Britain in 1784 but returned in 1801 presumably thinking himself safe, but was found guilty and hanged, despite earnest efforts by the Duke of Norfolk (into whose family he had married) to have him saved by the Privy Council. In the end it was fear of the mob which seems to have settled Wall’s fate. Sailors were at that very season being executed for the mutinies at Spithead; it would be concluded that there was another law for officers found guilty of cruelty to their soldiers. In his case, and in that of Mrs Elizabeth Brownrigg, executed in 1767 for her homicidal cruelty to her female apprentices in the parish workhouse, the mob reacted with rage even throughout the final moments of devotions; the reasons were similar to the rage against Burke. All three – workhouse official, military officer, doctors’ agent – represented the forces of authority and were a reminder of the limits to which authorities in their contempt for the lower classes might feel themselves entitled to go. In this sense the mob at Burke’s execution, which called for the blood of Knox, as well as of Burke and Hare, was screaming against an establishment figure, like Wall, thinking himself entitled to use his authority at the expense of the lower classes’ lives. The mob in its individual components also knew how hideously close it came to being placed in the hands of a Brownrigg, a Wall or a Burke; to be in a workhouse, an army or a pub was all too likely and from there the fate of the victims of all three moved with the speed and inevitability of a remorseless machine. It was a class cry that assailed Burke’s last moments – the protest of a people who, as they saw it, were considered not only useful for nothing but spending lives in ugly squalor and grinding labour, but worthy of casual selection for death in order to enable a doctor find cures which would benefit the better classes. Dr Robert Morris found the same mentality alive and angry during the cholera crisis of 1832, as the people rioted against the doctors, whom the Burke and Hare case had seemed to show them, thought of them only as expendable in the cause of science and research into cures for the ailments of the wealthy.
So died Burke, execrated by his fellows with justice as a murderous traitor to their class and their human right to live. Yet the Burke under observation during that last month following conviction tells another story. Much of what we know emerges from the highly suspect columns of the journalists, ready to supply copy from any who saw the convicted murderer in jail whether they could interview them or not. We may readily accept the story that his first comment on being placed in the condemned cell in the Calton Jail was “This is a bloody cold place you have brought me till!”. And it seems equally reasonable that he should have been quoted as praying for Helen MacDougal, who to her bitter regret was not allowed to see him, though we may question the newspaper implication that he sought to have her “atone by a life of quietness, piety and honest industry”. In any event she was to get little of it, being mobbed from Edinburgh to Stirling and thence beyond the English borders.
Boyle, in passing the statutory sentence, after a lurid statutary instruction from Meadowbank, had performed the usual task of requesting Burke to “call instantly to your aid the ministers of religion, of whatever profession you are”. But Burke’s response was unusual. When the prison authorities sought to know whether the usual chaplains (Presbyterian) or those of his own faith should be furnished, Burke is quoted as remarking that he never had been a bigot, and that he would like to have them all. He went on to say that in soldiering days he attended Roman Catholic Masses and also accompanied Protestant friends to the services of their churches. Contemporary newspaper reports, allegedly based on prison officials’ comments, declared him to be “perfectly conversant” with the Presbyterian, Episcopalian and Methodist “peculiar tenets”. The point is so unusual as to raise doubts as to its lack of authenticity, apart from some exaggeration. The reality is that as a soldier Burke was gregarious, if he resembled his future self, and sought acceptance from his comrades by readiness to accompany them to services, subsequently enjoying fairly crude comparative analysis of religious differences. The pre-famine Irish were a good deal more enquiring on this sort of thing than their more severely administered pious descendants, as Carleton’s case reminds us. What gives a final support to the story is the presence of two Catholic and two Presbyterian chaplains at his execution, although it is clear that his final and most private acts of prayer and repentance took place with a Catholic priest with the usual privacy of Confession and last Communion.
But he did go to considerable lengths also to make public confession, and his doing so in the presence of a priest makes clear that what was involved for him, primarily, was some attempt to make recompense to society by disclosing all. He would, apparently, have liked to see that Helen MacDougal got money by one of his confessions but in this he was almost certainly unsuccessful. He also seems to have taken his Christian duty to forgive his enemies with the seriousness of a penitent, as well as with the reservations of a soldier. Knox he went to great length to exculpate several times, although at one point he put it a little infelicitously: “Dr Knox approved of its being so fresh, but did not ask any questions”. Helen’s innocence he asserted again and again. He would not even have her be thought to have accepted to status of an accessory of grave-robbery, let alone murder; he had told her the bodies were bought by him. Only against Hare, and to a lesser extent, Hare’s wife, was his animus evident. Hare had informed against him, an unforgivable crime among the Irish Catholic peasantry, in the army, or within criminal circles, and of those three worlds of William Burke probably the first held it in the greatest contempt. Hare, he insisted, had drawn him into the thing, although he did not hold himself less guilty, nor question the justice of his sentence. But settling accounts with Hare does not seem from either his “official” confession, or from that to the Courant under official auspices, to have been his primary motive: it is much more the work of a man under spiritual direction as to the only steps left to him to make some recompense for what he had done.
His chief attendant appears to have been the Reverend William Reid, a Banffshire priest who had held office in Edinburgh, where a handful of clerics with two churches sought to minister to 14,000 Roman Catholics. Reid was then sixty-three, and his career was in fact moving into retreat, by material standards. He had been the effective administrator under the previous Vicar-Apostolic (the Roman Catholic bishoprics would not be restored for another half-century), but the new appointee was anxious to bring in his own men and Reid would shortly be shifted back to Dumfries whence he had come and where he would die less than fifteen years later. He won particular fame during the cholera epidemic in Dumfries in 1832, when he became famous for his apparent tirelessness and fearlessness in ministering to patients mortally ill of the contagious horror. He died worth two pounds sterling, and a thousand people attended his funeral, at least one-third of whom were Protestants. Given the fact that he was Burke’s spiritual adviser in his last days, his comment when asked about his burial is interesting: “Do what you like; if my soul be well, it is of no consequence what becomes of my body.”
It was understandable that Burke would find in Reid a source of consolation. Both as an Irish Catholic and as a wholesale murderer he must have been an alien figure to his guards. Yet he seems to have won some regard from them in his last days. After all, few of their clients were particularly salubrious, and Burke seems to have been civil and courteous as a prisoner. He retained the levity which had characterised so much of his career. At one point he is quoted as remarking that Knox still owed him £5 for the corpse of Mary Docherty, and when the seizure of the body was adduced as a good reason for non-payment Burke said that that did not gainsay his lawful dues. His interlocutor – possibly Reid – seems to have entered into the spirit of the thing, and ventured that Hare had the right to half of it. Burke went on to reflect that £5 would enable him to buy a good coat and waistcoat: “since I am to appear before the public I should like to be respectable”. It was obviously a somewhat laboured little joke, the complaint about Knox (hardly the shadow of a shade of what he could have said about Knox) being the build-up to the black-humour punch-line. It hardly seems a proof of the insincerity of his religious professions, as later commentators would claim, so much as an instance of a genuinely amusing man still trying to entertain his audience and himself in the shadow of death, and giving an indication of the charm and manners and pleasantness of disposition which had facilitated his murders. It also offers an ironic reminder of the many immigrant defections from religion because of consciousness of poverty of clothing.
On Tuesday, 27 January, about 28 hours before his actual execution, Burke was removed from Calton Hill Jail to the lock-up in Libberton Wynd, near the Lawnmarket. The distance involved was less than a mile, but little hope was held of saving Burke from the mob if the journey were to take place later in the day, or on the morning of the execution itself. (Similar consideration for his dead body would prevent its removal to Old College for a day after its execution, and even then there were to be ferocious struggles between students, the public and the authorities in the struggle to be present at Professor Alexander Monro’s dissection of the brain: a fairly uncommon expression of interest in the work of that particular lecturer.) The scaffold was built during the Tuesday afternoon, and an increasing crowd watched the work oblivious of what a witness termed the “pelting of the pitiless storm”. Much as children salute the arrival of the Christmas tree as the symbolic moment in the preparation of festival decorations, the bringing of the frame of the gibbet was greeted with an enormous shout at 10.30 p.m. About 2 a.m. everything had been satisfactorily constructed, and the gathering gave “three tremendous cheers” which were thoroughly audible at the other side of Edinburgh Castle hill, on Princes Street.
Burke slept well on the night before his execution, though from time to time his sleep had given signs of frightful tension and hideous nightmares. To the end he offered his characteristic mingling of the roles of penitent and entertainer. As his fetters were removed, about 5.30 a.m., he declared, “So may all my earthly chains fall!” Father Reid saw him at 6.30 a.m., and presumably heard his final confession and administered the Holy Eucharist. According to the principles of his own religion, Burke, on the only evidence we will ever have, died with every expectation of salvation. He may well have expected some term in Purgatory for the expiation of the stains of the sins which had themselves been absolved. But if his penitence was genuine, William Burke, according to the Roman Catholic faith, will be counted among the blessed in Heaven.
After his private devotions Burke heard prayers from his Catholic spiritual advisers, in the presence of his Protestant ones. He seems to have been momentarily overcome by the adjuration to confide in the mercy of God, and hurried into an adjoining room. He probably felt himself about to cry: he would not have wanted to let himself down before his audience. The penitent might cry; but the soldier and entertainer do not. He ran into Williams, the executioner, who thought he was bolting. Burke gasped, “I am not ready for you just yet.” But Williams used the meeting to pinion his arms and Burke returned with arms bound, and upper lip stiff once more. Burke told Williams, for future reference, that his neck-kerchief was tied at the back. Then he was offered a glass of wine. The courtesy says much for the humanity of his gaolers, and also, perhaps, for their having taken a liking to him. It contravened the Lord Justice-Clerk’s official sentence that, prior to execution, he “be fed upon bread and water only”. Presumably the wine had to be administered to him, but he prefaced it by a toast “Farewell to all my friends”, and talked after it to the Protestant chaplains. The magistrates entered in their robes. Burke then made a brief speech, thanking them for their courtesy and kindness, and went out of his way to say a special word to Bailie Small in that connection. He paid tribute also to Governor Rose, to Deputy Governor Fisher, and to Mr and Mrs Christie, the responsible officials of the lock-up.
When about to walk out the door, Burke turned to Fisher – he who would later take leave of the departing Hare on the coach – and said he needed a pocket handkerchief and asked for the loan of one, adding, characteristically, that it would be returned to Fisher after the execution. Fisher handed him a handkerchief with the courtesy that characterised all we know of him in the case. The handkerchief carried in its centre a likeness of Burns, together with a quotation from “Man was Made to Mourn”, a dirge written in 1784–85 when Burns was about twenty-five. (Strangely, Burns and Burke were both to die at the age of thirty-seven.)
The poor, oppressed, honest man
Had never, sure, been born,
Had there not been some recompense
To comfort those that mourn!
“The moment the wretched man caught the last line,” asserted the Scotsman, “he smiled and bowed to Mr Fisher, and he placed the handkerchief under his knee on the scaffold when he knelt down for the last time in the world.” Another Scotland said its farewell to Burke apart from that whose vituperation was screaming before him.
The crowd was by now enormous. Estimates varied between 20,000 and 25,000 and it was universally conceded the largest ever known in Edinburgh. The fashionable congregated at windows overlooking the Lawnmarket, among them Sir Walter Scott, who was as impressed by the victim’s role as scapegoat as much other opinion had been. “The mob, which was immense,” recorded the novelist in his diary, “demanded Knox and Hare, but, though greedy for more victims, received with shouts the solitary wretch who found his way to the gallows out of five or six who seem not less guilty than he.” The first appearance of Burke had elicited a terrific yell, and the speed with which he mounted the scaffold impressed spectators with the conviction that he wanted an end fast. He looked at the screaming crowd, now adding shouts of “Hare! Hare! Bring out Hare!” “Hang Knox!” “He’s a noxious morsel!” Apart from the single stare at the crowd which an eyewitness described as one of “fierce and even desperate defiance”, Burke’s main response was to pray as best he might amid the din. A priest and he knelt together, and one of the Protestant chaplains also said a prayer. The magistrates sought to still the tumult by making signs that the victim was at prayer, but with total lack of success. Burke rose, looked at the gallows and stood on the drop. The time was now ten minutes past eight.
Williams adjusted the rope. Burke again reminded him that the knot of his neck-kerchief was behind him. “Burke him!” shrieked the crowd. The verb, newly born, meant “smother”, using the thumb under the chin and two fingers drawn in at the end of the nose, the method Burke himself had perfected. “Give him no rope!” agreed other voices. “Do the same for Hare!” “Weigh them together!” “Wash blood from the land!” The tumult was deafening, but Reid managed to make Burke hear the words “Now say your creed; and when you come to the words ‘Lord Jesus Christ’ give the signal, and die with His blessed name in your mouth.”
It may be doubted whether any more extraordinary spectacle ever graced a martyrdom of a devout saint, executed by persecuting officials in the presence of a bloodthirsty and brutish multitude. The victim said his final prayer. The crowd howled like demons from the lowest pit. The gentlefolk behind the windows gratified their appetites to the full, at the expense of miscreant and mob alike. Only the ministers of religion existed as symbols that Burke’s faith was not the occasion of his death, and they were roughly enough handled by the verbal abuse of the crowd. “Stand out of the way!” “Turn him round!” “No mercy, hangie!” and “You’ll see Daft Jamie in a minute!” The white cotton night-cap was pulled over his head.
I believe in God …
“Choke him!”
… the Father Almighty …
“Burke him!”
… Creator of Heaven and Earth …
“Hang him!” “Hang him!” “Hang him!”
… and in Jesus Christ, his only Son, Our Lord …