She Stands Accused
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Victor MacClure >> She Stands Accused
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[23] One Bridgewater.
``I looked through, and saw Will Gibbs come in. Says he, `Who is
there to swear against you?' I told him my two masters would be
the chief witnesses. `And what can they charge you with?' says
he. I told him the tankard was the only thing, for there was
nothing else that I thought could hurt me. `Never fear, then,'
says he; `we'll do well enough. We will get them that will rap
the tankard was your grandmother's, and that you was in
Shoreditch the night the act was committed; and we'll have two
men that shall shoot your masters. But,' said he, `one of the
witnesses is a woman, and she won't swear under four guineas; but
the men will swear for two guineas apiece,' and he brought a
woman and three men. I gave them ten guineas, and they promised
to wait for me at the Bull Head in Broad Street. But when I
called for them, when I was going before Sir Richard Brocas, they
were not there. Then I found I should be sent to Newgate, and I
was full of anxious thoughts; but a young man told me I had
better go to the Whit than to the Compter.
``When I came to Newgate I had but eighteenpence in silver,
besides the money in my hair, and I gave eighteenpence for my
garnish. I was ordered to a high place in the gaol. Buck, as I
said before, having seen my hair loose, told Johnson of it, and
Johnson asked me if I had got any cole planted there. He
searched and found the bag, and there was in it thirty-six
moidores, eighteen guineas, five crown pieces, two half-crowns,
two broad pieces of twenty-five shillings, four of twenty-three
shillings, and one half-broad piece. He told me I must be
cunning, and not to be seen to be flush of money. Says I, `What
would you advise me to do with it?' `Why,' says he, `you might
have thrown it down the sink, or have burnt it, but give it to
me, and I'll take care of it.' And so I gave it to him. Mr
Alstone then brought me to the condemned hold and examined me. I
denied all till I found he had heard of the money, and then I
knew my life was gone. And therefore I confessed all that I
knew. I gave him the same account of the robbers as I have given
you. I told him I heard my masters were to be shot, and I
desired him to send them word. I described Tracey and the two
Alexanders, and when they were first taken they denied that they
knew Mr Oakes, whom they and I had agreed to rob.
``All that I have now declared is fact, and I have no occasion to
murder three persons on a false accusation; for I know I am a
condemned woman. I know I must suffer an ignominious death which
my crimes deserve, and I shall suffer willingly. I thank God He
has given me time to repent, when I might have been snatched off
in the midst of my crimes, and without having an opportunity of
preparing myself for another world.'' There is a glibness and
an occasional turn of phrase in this confession which suggests
some touching up from the pen of a pamphleteer, but one may take
it that it is, in substance, a fairly accurate report. In spite
of the pleading which threads it that she should be regarded as
accessory only in the robbery, the jury took something less than
a quarter of an hour to come back with their verdict of ``Guilty
of murder.'' Sarah Malcolm was sentenced to death in due form.
% V
Having regard to the period in which this confession was made,
and considering the not too savoury reputations of Mary Tracey
and the brothers Alexander, we can believe that those three may
well have thought themselves lucky to escape from the mesh of
lies Sarah tried to weave about them.[24] It was not to be
doubted on all the evidence that she alone committed that cruel
triple murder, and that she alone stole the money which was found
hidden in her hair. The bulk of the stolen clothing was found in
her possession, bloodstained. A white-handled case-knife,
presumably that used to cut Nanny Price's throat, was seen on a
table by the three women who, with Sarah herself, were first on
the scene of the murder. It disappeared later, and it is to be
surmised that Sarah Malcolm managed to get it out of the room
unseen. But to the last moment possible Sarah tried to get her
three friends involved with her. Say, which is not at all
unlikely, that Tracey and the Alexanders may have first suggested
the robbery to her, and her vindictive maneouvring may be
understood.
[24] On more than one hand the crime is ascribed to Sarah's
desire to secure one of the Alexanders in marriage.
It is said that when she heard that Tracey and the Alexanders had
been taken she was highly pleased. She smiled, and said that she
could now die happy, since the real murderers had been seized.
Even when the three were brought face to face with her for
identification she did not lack brazenness. ``Ay,'' she said,
``these are the persons who committed the murder.'' ``You know
this to be true,'' she said to Tracey. ``See, Mary, what you
have brought me to. It is through you and the two Alexanders
that I am brought to this shame, and must die for it. You all
promised me you would do no murder, but, to my great surprise, I
found the contrary.''
She was, you will perceive, a determined liar. Condemned, she
behaved with no fortitude. ``I am a dead woman!'' she cried,
when brought back to Newgate. She wept and prayed, lied still
more, pretended illness, and had fits of hysteria. They put her
in the old condemned hold with a constant guard over her, for
fear that she would attempt suicide
The idlers of the town crowded to the prison to see her, for in
the time of his Blessed Majesty King George II Newgate, with the
condemned hold and its content, composed one of the fashionable
spectacles. Young Mr Hogarth, the painter, was one of those who
found occasion to visit Newgate to view the notorious murderess.
He even painted her portrait. It is said that Sarah dressed
specially for him in a red dress, but that copy--one which
belonged to Horace Walpole--which is now in the National Gallery
of Scotland, Edinburgh, shows her in a grey gown, with a white
cap and apron. Seated to the left, she leans her folded hands on
a table on which a rosary and a crucifix lie. Behind her is a
dark grey wall, with a heavy grating over a dark door to the
right. There are varied mezzotints of this picture by Hogarth
himself still extant, and there is a pen-and-wash drawing of
Sarah by Samuel Wale in the British Museum.
The stories regarding the last days in life of Sarah Malcolm
would occupy more pages than this book can afford to spend on
them. To the last she hoped for a reprieve. After the ``dead
warrant'' had arrived, to account for a paroxysm of terror that
seized her, she said that it was from shame at the idea that,
instead of going to Tyburn, she was to be hanged in Fleet Street
among all the people that knew her, she having just heard the
news in chapel. This too was one of her lies. She had heard the
news hours before. A turnkey, pointing out the lie to her, urged
her to confess for the easing of her mind.
One account I have of the Tanfield Court murders speaks of the
custom there was at this time of the bellman of St Sepulchre's
appearing outside the gratings of the condemned hold just after
midnight on the morning of executions.[25] This performance was
provided for by bequest from one Robert Dove, or Dow, a merchant-
tailor. Having rung his bell to draw the attention of the
condemned (who, it may be gathered, were not supposed to be at
all in want of sleep), the bellman recited these verses:
All you that in the condemned hold do lie,
Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die.
Watch all and pray; the hour is drawing near
That you before th' Almighty must appear.
Examine well yourselves, in time repent,
That you may not t'eternal flames be sent:
And when St 'Pulchre's bell to-morrow tolls,
The Lord above have mercy on your souls!
Past twelve o'clock![26]
[25] It was once done by the parish priest. (Stowe's Survey of
London, p. 195, fourth edition, 1618.)
[26] The bequest of Dove appears to have provided for a further
pious admonition to the condemned while on the way to execution.
It was delivered by the sexton of St Sepulchre's from the steps
of that church, a halt being made by the procession for the
purpose. This admonition, however, was in fair prose.
A fellow-prisoner or a keeper bade Sarah Malcolm heed what the
bellman said, urging her to take it to heart. Sarah said she
did, and threw the bellman down a shilling with which to buy
himself a pint of wine.
Sarah, as we have seen, was denied the honour of procession to
Tyburn. Her sentence was that she was to be hanged in Fleet
Street, opposite the Mitre Court, on the 7th of March, 1733. And
hanged she was accordingly. She fainted in the tumbril, and took
some time to recover. Her last words were exemplary in their
piety, but in the face of her vindictive lying, unretracted to
the last, it were hardly exemplary to repeat them.
She was buried in the churchyard of St Sepulchre's.
V: ALMOST A LADY[27]
[27] Thanks to my friend Billy Bennett, of music-hall fame, for
his hint for the chapter title.
Born (probably illegitimately) in a fisherman's cottage, reared
in a workhouse, employed in a brothel, won at cards by a royal
duke, mistress of that duke, married to a baron, received at
Court by three kings (though not much in the way of kings),
accused of cozenage and tacitly of murder, died full of piety,
`cutting up' for close on L150,000--there, as it were in a
nutshell, you have the life of Sophie Dawes, Baronne de
Feucheres.
In the introduction to her exhaustive and accomplished biography
of Sophie Dawes,[28] from which a part of the matter for this
resume is drawn, Mme Violette Montagu, speaking of the period in
which Sophie lived, says that ``Paris, with its fabulous wealth
and luxury, seems to have been looked upon as a sort of Mecca by
handsome Englishwomen with ambition and, what is absolutely
necessary if they wish to be really successful, plenty of
brains.''
[28] Sophie Dawes, Queen of Chantilly (John Lane, 1912).
It is because Sophie had plenty of brains of a sort, besides the
attributes of good looks, health, and by much a disproportionate
share of determination, and because, with all that she attained
to, she died quite ostracized by the people with whom it had been
her life's ambition to mix, and was thus in a sense a failure--it
is because of these things that it is worth while going into
details of her career, expanding the precis with which this
chapter begins.
Among the women selected as subjects for this book Sophie Dawes
as a personality wins `hands down.' Whether she was a criminal
or not is a question even now in dispute. Unscrupulous she
certainly was, and a good deal of a rogue. That modern American
product the `gold-digger' is what she herself would call a
`piker' compared with the subject of this chapter. The blonde
bombshell, with her `sugar daddy,' her alimony `racket,' and the
hundred hard-boiled dodges wherewith she chisels money and goods
from her prey, is, again in her own crude phraseology, `knocked
for a row of ash-cans' by Sophie Dawes. As, I think, you will
presently see.
Sophie was born at St Helens, Isle of Wight--according to herself
in 1792. There is controversy on the matter. Mme Montagu in her
book says that some of Sophie's biographers put the date at 1790,
or even 1785. But Mme Montagu herself reproduces the list of
wearing apparel with which Sophie was furnished when she left the
`house of industry' (the workhouse). It is dated 1805. In those
days children were not maintained in poor institutions to the
mature ages of fifteen or twenty. They were supposed to be armed
against life's troubles at twelve or even younger. Sophie, then,
could hardly have been born before 1792, but is quite likely to
have been born later.
The name of Sophie's father is given as ``Daw.'' Like many
another celebrity, as, for example, Walter Raleigh and
Shakespeare, Sophie spelled her name variously, though ultimately
she fixed on ``Dawes.'' Richard, or Dickey, Daw was a fisherman
for appearance sake and a smuggler for preference. The question
of Sophie's legitimacy anses from the fact that her mother, Jane
Callaway, was registered at death as ``a spinster.'' Sophie was
one of ten children. Dickey Daw drank his family into the
poorhouse, an institution which sent Sophie to fend for herself
in 1805, procuring her a place as servant at a farm on the
island.
Service on a farm does not appear to have appealed to Sophie.
She escaped to Portsmouth, where she found a job as hotel
chambermaid. Tiring of that, she went to London and became a
milliner's assistant. A little affair we hear, in which a mere
water-carrier was an equal participant, lost Sophie her place.
We next have word of her imitating Nell Gwynn, both in selling
oranges to playgoers and in becoming an actress--not, however, at
Old Drury, but at the other patent theatre, Covent Garden. Save
that as a comedian she never took London by storm, and that she
lacked Nell's unfailing good humour, Sophie in her career matches
Nell in more than superficial particulars. Between selling
oranges and appearing on the stage Sophie seems to have touched
bottom for a time in poverty. But her charms as an actress
captivated an officer by and by, and she was established as his
mistress in a house at Turnham Green. Tiring of her after a
time--Sophie, it is probable, became exigeant with increased
comfort--her protector left her with an annuity of L50.
The annuity does not appear to have done Sophie much good. We
next hear of her as servant-maid in a Piccadilly brothel, a
lupanar much patronized by wealthy emigres from France, among
whom was Louis-Henri-Joseph, Duc de Bourbon and later Prince de
Conde, a man at that time of about fifty-four.
The Duc's attention was directed to the good looks of Sophie by a
manservant of his. Mme Montagu says of Sophie at this time that
``her face had already lost the first bloom of youth and
innocence.'' Now, one wonders if that really was so, or if Mme
Montagu is making a shot at a hazard. She describes Sophie a
little earlier than this as having
developed into a fine young woman, not exactly pretty or
handsome, but she held her head gracefully, and her regular
features were illumined by a pair of remarkably bright and
intelligent eyes. She was tall and squarely built, with legs and
arms which might have served as models for a statue of Hercules.
Her muscular force was extraordinary. Her lips were rather thin,
and she had an ugly habit of contracting them when she was angry.
Her intelligence was above the average, and she had a good share
of wit.
At the time when the Duc de Bourbon came upon her in the
Piccadilly stew the girl was probably no more than eighteen. If
one may judge her character from the events of her subsequent
career there was an outstanding resiliency and a resoluteness as
main ingredients of her make-up, qualities which would go a long
way to obviating any marks that might otherwise have been left on
her by the ups and downs of a mere five years in the world. If,
moreover, Mme Montagu's description of her is a true one it is
clear that Sophie's good looks were not of the sort to make an
all-round appeal. The ways in which attractiveness goes, both in
men and in women, are infinite in their variety. The reader may
recall, in this respect, what was said in the introductory
chapter about Kate Webster and the instance of the bewhiskered
'Fina of the Spanish tavern. And since a look of innocence and
the bloom of youth may, and very often do, appear on the faces of
individuals who are far from being innocent or even young, it may
well be that Sophie in 1810, servant-maid in a brothel though she
was, still kept a look of country freshness and health, unjaded
enough to whet the dulled appetence of a bagnio-haunting old rip.
The odds are, at all events, that Sophie was much less artificial
in her charms than the practised ladies of complacency upon whom
she attended. With her odd good looks she very likely had just
that subacid leaven for which, in the alchemy of attraction, the
Duc was in search.
The Duc, however, was not the only one to whom Sophie looked
desirable. Two English peers had an eye on her--the Earl of
Winchilsea and the Duke of Kent. This is where the card affair
comes in. The Duc either played whist with the two noblemen for
sole rights in Sophie or, what is more likely, cut cards with
them during a game. The Duc won. Whether his win may be
regarded as lucky or not can be reckoned, according to the taste
and fancy of the reader, from the sequelae of some twenty years.
% II
With the placing of Sophie dans ses meubles by the Duc de Bourbon
there began one of the most remarkable turns in her career. In
1811 he took a house for her in Gloucester Street, Queen's
Square, with her mother as duenna, and arranged for the
completion of her education.
As a light on her character hardly too much can be made of this
stage in her development. It is more than likely that the
teaching was begun at Sophie's own demand, and by the use she
made of the opportunities given her you may measure the strength
of her ambition. Here was no rich man's doxy lazily seeking a
veneer of culture, enough to gloss the rough patches of speech
and idea betraying humble origin. This fisherman's child,
workhouse girl, ancilla of the bordels, with the thin smattering
of the three R's she had acquired in the poor institution, set
herself, with a wholehearted concentration which a Newnham `swot'
might envy, to master modern languages, with Greek, Latin, and
music. At the end of three years she was a good linguist, could
play and sing well enough to entertain and not bore the most
intelligent in the company the Duc kept, and to pass in that
company --the French emigre set in London--as a person of equal
education. If, as it is said, Sophie, while she could read and
write French faultlessly, never could speak it without an English
accent, it is to be remembered that the flexibility of tongue and
mind needed for native-sounding speech in French (or any other
language) is so exceptional as to be practically non-existent
among her compatriots to this day. The fault scarcely belittles
her achievement. As well blame a one-legged man for hopping when
trying to run. Consider the life Sophie had led, the sort of
people with whom she had associated, and that temptation towards
laissez-faire which conquers all but the rarest woman in the mode
of life in which she was existing, and judge of the constancy of
purpose that kept that little nose so steadfastly in Plutarch and
Xenophon.
If in the year 1812 the Duc began to allow his little Sophie
about L800 a year in francs as pin-money he was no more generous
than Sophie deserved. The Duc was very rich, despite the fact
that his father, the old Prince de Conde, was still alive, and
so, of course, was enjoying the income from the family estates.
There is no room here to follow more than the barest outline of
the Duc de Bourbon's history. Fully stated, it would be the
history of France. He was a son of the Prince de Conde who
collected that futile army beyond the borders of France in the
royalist cause in the Revolution. Louis-Henri was wounded in the
left arm while serving there, so badly wounded that the hand was
practically useless. He came to England, where he lived until
1814, when he went back to France to make his unsuccessful
attempt to raise the Vendee. Then he went to Spain.
At this time he intended breaking with Sophie, but when he got
back to Paris in 1815 he found the lady waiting for him. It took
Sophie some eighteen months to bring his Highness up to scratch
again. During this time the Duc had another English fancy, a
Miss Harris, whose reign in favour, however, did not withstand
the manoeuvring of Sophie.
Sophie as a mistress in England was one thing, but Sophie
unattached as a mistress in France was another. One wonders why
the Duc should have been squeamish on this point. Perhaps it was
that he thought it would look vulgar to take up a former mistress
after so long. At all events, he was ready enough to resume the
old relationship with Sophie, provided she could change her name
by marriage. Sophie was nothing loth. The idea fell in with her
plans. She let it get about that she was the natural daughter of
the Duc, and soon had in tow one Adrien-Victor de Feucheres. He
was an officer of the Royal Guard. Without enlarging on the
all-round tawdriness of this contract it will suffice here to say
that Sophie and Adrien were married in London in August of 1818,
the Duc presenting the bride with a dowry of about L5600 in
francs. Next year de Feucheres became a baron, and was made
aide-de-camp to the Duc.
Incredible as it may seem, de Feucheres took four years to
realize what was the real relationship between his wife and the
Prince de Conde. The aide-de-camp and his wife had a suite of
rooms in the Prince's favourite chateau at Chantilly, and the
ambition which Sophie had foreseen would be furthered by the
marriage was realized. She was received as La Baronne de
Feucheres at the Court of Louis XVIII. She was happy--up to a
point. Some unpretty traits in her character began to develop: a
violent temper, a tendency to hysterics if crossed, and, it is
said, a leaning towards avaricious ways. At the end of four
years the Baron de Feucheres woke up to the fact that Sophie was
deceiving him. It does not appear, however, that he had seen
through her main deception, because it was Sophie herself, we are
told, who informed him he was a fool--that she was not the
Prince's daughter, but his mistress.
Having waked up thus belatedly, or having been woken up by Sophie
in her ungoverned ill-temper, de Feucheres acted with
considerable dignity. He begged to resign his position as aide
to the Prince, and returned his wife's dowry. The departure of
Sophie's hitherto complacent husband rather embarrassed the
Prince. He needed Sophie but felt he could not keep her
unattached under his roof and he sent her away--but only for a
few days. Sophie soon was back again in Chantilly.
The Prince made some attempt to get de Feucheres to return, but
without success. De Feucheres applied for a post in the Army of
Spain, an application which was granted at once. It took the
poor man seven years to secure a judicial separation from his
wife.
The scandal of this change in the menage of Chantilly --it
happened in 1822--reached the ears of the King, and the Baronne
de Feucheres was forbidden to appear at Court. All Sophie's
energies from then on were concentrated on getting the ban
removed. She explored all possible avenues of influence to this
end, and, incidentally drove her old lover nearly frantic with
her complaints giving him no peace. Even a rebuff from the
Duchesse de Berry, widow of the son of that prince who was
afterwards Charles X, did not put her off. She turned up one day
at the Tuileries, to be informed by an usher that she could not
be admitted.
This desire to be reinstated in royal favour is at the back of
all Sophie's subsequent actions--this and her intention of
feathering her own nest out of the estate of her protector. It
explains why she worked so hard to have the Prince de Conde
assume friendly relations with a family whose very name he hated:
that of the Duc d'Orleans. It is a clue to the mysterious death,
eight years later, of the Prince de Conde, last of the Condes, in
circumstances which were made to pass as suicide, but which in
unhampered inquiry would almost certainly have been found to
indicate murder.
% III
Louis-Henri-Joseph, Duc de Bourbon and Prince de Conde, seems to
have been rather a simple old man: a useless old sinner, true
enough, but relatively harmless in his sinning, relatively venial
in his uselessness. It were futile to seek for the morality of a
later age in a man of his day and rank and country, just as it
were obtuse to look for greatness in one so much at the mercy of
circumstance. As far as bravery went he had shown himself a
worthy descendant of ``the Great Conde.'' But, surrounded by the
vapid jealousies of the most useless people who had ever tried to
rule a country, he, no more than his father, had the faintest
chance to show the Conde quality in war. Adrift as a
comparatively young man, his world about his ears, with no
occupation, small wonder that in idleness he fell into the
pursuit of satisfactions for his baser appetites. He would have
been, there is good reason to believe, a happy man and a busy one
in a camp. There is this to be said for him: that alone among
the spineless crowd of royalists feebly waiting for the miracle
which would restore their privilege he attempted a blow for the
lost cause. But where in all that bed of disintegrating chalk
was the flint from which he might have evoked a spark?
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