We have seen the last of the miscreant whose career we have shadowed forth, and our task is all but completed.
The celebrated Peace, says a journalist, terminated his disgraceful career on Tuesday morning on the scaffold at Armley Gaol, Leeds. He seems to have kept up his pluck and his appetite to the very last, and concluded all by making a pious and edifying speech to the reporters. We should be sorry to criticise too closely a production which was given to the world under circumstances most trying to the nerves of its author. It would be obviously absurd to judge the statement of a man of Peace’s antecedents by the canons of good taste; and as for the genuineness and sincerity of them they must be ascertained by a higher tribunal than public opinion. Nevertheless there is a little too much tendency to glorify a great criminal into a great hero. Peace was well aware of this and naturally acted consciously or unconsciously, upon the assumption. Several millions of people were kept from day to day in a perfect flutter of excitement to know all that the convict was saying, doing, writing, and almost thinking. Even the composition of his breakfasts and the way in which he enjoyed them were telegraphed for the information of an expectant public. For one who was not altogether insensible to his own merits as a professional burglar and murderer, there was a strong temptation to pose before the world. He was almost as closely watched as Louis XIV., who walked, ate, slept, dressed, and, Macaulay tells us, even vomited majestically before a crowd of distinguished spectators. With the knowledge that everybody’s eyes were upon him, he may perhaps have been a little too self-conscious, and a little too solicitous not to spoil a reputation which he evidently considered splendid. His repentance may have been perfectly sincere, and his latest statements quite truthful. But it would be obviously unwise to take all his revelations for gospel verity without sifting them thoroughly. We trust that no pains will be spared in the investigation of his latest confessions, and that if they are found consistent, with known and undisputed facts, prompt reparation will be made to the man who has, or may have, suffered for his crimes. A more terrible fate than that of one who has been convicted and punished for an offence which he has not committed, on the strength of a chain of plausible circumstantial evidence, can hardly be conceived. The lawyers are, no doubt, right in their dictum that circumstantial evidence is the best of all evidence, always supposing that it is strong enough. But, after the recent statements of Peace, the public will naturally be tempted to re-open the question of the Whalley Range murder, in order to ascertain whether every link of the chain was complete; and if there is a single unsatisfied doubt, they will not remain content until the prisoner Habron receives the benefit of that doubt.
The last scene of what some exuberant journalists had delighted in calling Charles Peace’s “life-drama” was thus enacted to the mild satisfaction of everybody whose hopes had not pictured a sensation of the type furnished by Mr. Meritt’s “New Babylon.”
There was the orthodox last dying speech and confession, ready to be turned into what has now become the fashionable literature of the period; there was the moribund posturising of nice old Newgate days; and, to increase the likeness to that Saturnian period, there was a crowd close at hand whose murmurs one could hear, and which the parson’s and the patient’s voices could reach.
The “celebrity” Mrs. Thompson so coyly deprecates, and which her paramour loved with all his little heart, was worthily crowned at the end.
The unkind prudishness of the prison officials refused to admit more than four reporters to the sickening ceremony; but those four were found quite sufficient to flood every newspaper in the land with funereal “flimsy.”
The descriptions resulting from these reports were literary gems which, when he digs them up, will afford the coming New Zealander a curious insight into the niceties of contemporary taste and the peculiarities of contemporary syntax.
The most “thorough” descriptions took the convict very early indeed—in fact it might almost be alleged that they never quite let him go.
They informed us that his sleep was troubled and his supper hearty; they dwelt on the poor wretch’s feeble endeavour to emulate his betters in a silly and sickly “improving of the occasion”—which apparently is achieved by an abundant use of the second person singular, and frequent references to the Gospel of St. Chadband; they hovered about his last sleep, and peered into the cups and egg-shells of his last breakfast.
And the occasion was one of such surpassing interest, the opportunity for distinguishing oneself in the appraisement of the criminal’s linen, or the analysis of the criminal’s countenance, that at least one gentleman, intoxicated with his sublimity, fairly forgot whether the subject of his essay was hanged or not, and used “he is” and “he was” in the same sentences with perplexing impartiality.