The Man Who Was Jekyll and Hyde (21 page)

Braxfield then pronounced sentence of death, requiring:

The prisoners William Brodie and George Smith to be carried from the bar back to the Tolbooth of Edinburgh, therein to be detained till Wednesday, the first day of October next, and upon that day to be taken furth of the said Tolbooth to the place fixed upon by the magistrates of Edinburgh as a common place of execution, and then and there, betwixt the hours of two and four o’clock afternoon to be hanged by the necks, by the hands of the Common Executioner, upon a gibbet, until they be dead; and ordain all their moveable goods and gear to be escheat and inbrought to His Majesty’s use: which is pronounced for doom.

How did they take it? A contemporary account said: ‘Mr Brodie discovered some inclination to address himself to the court, but when restrained by his counsel contented himself with bowing to the bench.’ Aeneas Morrison, the agent for Smith, reported:

The prisoners behaved in a manner different from each other, Smith appearing to be much dejected, especially at receiving his dreadful sentence …

Mr Brodie, on the other hand, affected coolness and determination in his behaviour. When the sentence of death was pronounced he put one hand in his breast and the other in his side and looked full around him. It is said that he accused his companion of pusillanimity, and even kicked him as they were leaving the court. Thus ended a trial which had excited the public curiosity to an extraordinary degree, and in which their expectations were not disappointed. During the space of twenty-one hours – the time it lasted – circumstances continually followed each other to render it highly interesting, and more particularly to the gentlemen of the law, on account of the great variety and importance of the legal topics which were discussed and decided.

When the court rose and the prisoners were removed to the Tolbooth, escorted by the City Guard amid a huge crowd of spectators, William Brodie was seen to have a strange smirk on his face.

What did he now have up his lacy-cuffed sleeve?

‘Fare ye well, Bailie! You needn’t be surprised if ye see me among ye yet, to take my share of the deid-chack!’

The ‘deid-chack’ was a meal enjoyed by the provost and council after an execution, and this valedictory (or not) message was spoken out by a surprisingly optimistic Deacon Brodie as he prepared to meet his maker (or not).

The truths, half-truths and outright fabrications that persist today regarding Deacon Brodie’s dramatic demise had begun to take root even before he stepped up to the gallows on the first day of October 1788. He was already a less-than-admired legend in his lifetime, though that life was about to be cut short at the age of 47. Or was it? Feeding the many stories about the end, or not, of this diminutive but larger-than-life character was his strangely relaxed and almost arrogant attitude towards the final curtain. A huge crowd of around 40,000 had gathered to witness the spectacle before his jailhouse, the dilapidated fourteenth-century Old Tolbooth, a stone’s throw from his Lawnmarket workshop and home; to many of them something about his easy demeanour suggested he did not believe the curtain was really going to fall. Perhaps it was just his final defence mechanism, a what-the-hell denial in the face of such a momentous prospect or – more likely – there was something more complex and cunning going on inside the scheming brain of this man, who had always believed he was one of life’s survivors.

Was he one of death’s survivors too? Could he really cheat the hangman’s rope? The most common scandalous tale that has lived on was that he engaged a surgeon to fashion a steel tube to fit inside or – more likely – around his throat and protect it from the squeezing of the rope during the ‘fatal’ drop … and that the executioner had been bribed not to notice the odd bulge around his neck. Indeed, the Deacon was seen to converse with the hangman several times at the scaffold while having the rope’s length adjusted, this apparently with a professional eye, as the skilled cabinet-maker was said to have been instrumental in the previous year’s redesign of the awful apparatus, whose old-school ladders had been replaced by a clever mechanism – irony of ironies, if true!

Probably not true, however. The neck-protection theory was itself hanged over time, though the idea of some collusion with the executioner was never quite written off. But Brodie’s part in the death-dealing redesign, a tale probably generated by irony-loving romantics, was later relegated to ‘probably minimal’ by less gullible and more serious academic types such as William Roughhead, the Scottish lawyer, editor and essayist on ‘matters criminous’. He wrote in his
Classic Crimes
that, after considerable research, he was sure that although the Deacon may have had some hand in the design, the new concept ‘was certainly not of his construction, nor was he the first to benefit by its ingenuity’.

But if Brodie were not so familiar with the new gallows as suspected by some who believed he knew how to manipulate its workings to his advantage, and if the metal windpipe theory was too incredible, what would explain the condemned man’s quiet confidence in the face of his impending doom? What was going on?

Another, largely true local story might have had a significant bearing on his bearing, as it were. Some sixty years earlier, fish-hawker Maggie Dickson had been publicly hanged in the Grassmarket for killing her unwanted baby whose father was not her absent husband – but despite being pronounced dead on her parting from the noose, she survived due to a combination of circumstances. These were her relatively youthful health, those earlier not-so efficient gallows and a rough cart ride part of the six-mile way to Musselburgh, during which, to her friends’ astonishment, she started banging, shouting and knocking from inside her wooden coffin. Seen to be very much alive on the lifting of the lid, she then enjoyed unusual leniency from the law – which, believing her survival to be God’s will, declared her officially free.

Some cynics said she had used her feminine wiles to have the ropemaker weaken the noose – and used them also to win over the forgiveness of the law officers, though it was clear that luck had been very much on her side. Not to mention the shrugged shoulders of fate, for in some enlightened cultures it was held by common consent, though never actually by law, that it was permissible to remove a hanged person from the foot of the gallows and attempt to revive them; so that if they survived they were morally entitled to go free. Such attempts sometimes succeeded, but they were often thwarted by the density and interference of the thronging crowds.

In any case, ‘Half Hangit Maggie’, as Miss Dickson then became half-affectionately called by the locals, became something of a community character as she had two more children – by her husband – and lived on for another forty years, moving awkwardly around the city with her head permanently locked over to one side.

Brodie was doubtless only too familiar with the saga of her salvation and he surely took heart from it as he contemplated his fate. Could he too pull that one off? One persistent story was that he had made an arrangement with an Edinburgh-resident French doctor, Pierre Degravers (who claimed to have been ‘Professor of Anatomy and Physiology in the Royal Academy of Science’ in Paris) – the same man perhaps who didn’t stick his neck out to save Brodie’s with a metal throat-tube? – after a ‘consultation’ with him in his Old Tollbooth cell on a day close to his date with destiny. And if Brodie’s life prospects were looking pretty grim, his living conditions were even grimmer; so it would have surprised few if intolerance of his rat-infested existence had moved him to a last request for treatment for depression.

But in the thirty-four days between his trial beginning in late August 1788 and his early October rendezvous with the scaffold, he somehow managed to keep up his spirits by dressing well despite being in chains, singing extracts from
The Beggars’ Opera
and playing draughts with himself and any interested visitors – after cutting out a rough draughtboard on the stone floor of his dungeon.

That craftwork was said to have been still in place when the crumbling old building was demolished – along with the adjoining block of shops and residential tenement buildings known as ‘the Luckenbooths’ – in 1817. And not before time. In an era that had no concern for conservation of historic architecture, their destruction had been desired by the populace for literally centuries. Why? Since coming into being, the buildings were considered an ‘ugly encumbrance and deformity to the High Street’, causing an unwanted obstruction and inhibiting flow of people, horses, carts and sedan chairs in the centre of the High Street to a narrow passage only 14ft wide in places. But that was only one of its negative points.

Although it can look medievally handsome today in old prints, the Old Tollbooth had long been a little-loved edifice among Brodie’s fellow Edinburghers and their forebears and – by any technical assessment – should have been knocked down long before its fourth century, when Brodie was forced to regard it as his second home on the High Street. Today its one-time existence is marked by a heart shape made of cobbles – ‘the heart of Midlothian’ – and the locals’ tourist-shocking modern habit of spitting on it is probably more than the good-luck gesture they believe it to be; it no doubt dates back to the time when the building was held in total disdain for several reasons.

To compound the ghastliness of the sky-high house of horrors, its exterior had provided the blood-curdling stage for judicial torture and executions. The gallows were attached to the west gable on a protruding platform high enough to give rubber-necking spectators the most open view of the gory proceedings. And on the upper reaches of the jail’s walls rusty old spikes were fixed into the mossy stone to facilitate display of the various body parts of those punished with the heaviest penalties. Such as the head of the Charles I loyalist hero James Graham, 1st Marquis of Montrose, which was exhibited there for over ten years from 1650 to 1661, after he was deserted by Charles II and hanged at the Mercat Cross.

Having grown out of its various earlier purposes – as a toll collection booth, a centre where the city’s trading regulations would be sorted out by merchants, a meeting place of the town councillors and the grudging venue for the white-wigged grumblers of the Court of Session – it was eventually rejected by all its users in favour of what had become its primary purpose: the incarceration and brutal treatment of thieves, rogues and murderers in unimaginably squalid conditions. They would be chained by one leg to an iron bar, along which they could minimally walk (though Brodie was allowed a longer chain than was regular, as well as pen and ink, and occasional visits from friends).

Many such prisoners would be held here before being executed or, if lucky, transported off to work on the American plantations. And by the time Brodie was keen to get away, to anywhere at all that was not the scaffold, the now independent Americans had closed the door – while a new one had opened at Australia’s Botany Bay, discovered nearly two decades before by Captain Cook. With that escape route in mind, the Deacon had another couple of cards up his sleeve. But time was tight. With only two weeks left to live, he wrote appealingly to a pair of very important persons in the vain hope that their influence could, even at this late stage, change the course of his court-decided fate. Datelined the Tolbooth, 10 September 1788, the first letter was to the Right Hon Henry Dundas (Viscount Melville) and it read:

Right Honble, Sir

You are no doubt acquainted with my misfortunes. Extracts of the proceedings against me are sent to London by my friends to endeavour to procure a Remission or an Alteration of my Sentence. But I believe little respect is paid to such Aplications unless supported by respectable Personages. With which view I now most humbly beseech your interposition and interest in support of this application making in London in my behalf and if possible prevent me from suffering an Ignomnious Death to the disgrace of my numerous conections, even if it were to end my days at Bottony Bay.

As the time appointed for my Disolution approaches fast, I most earnestly intreat no time may be lost in writing to London on my behalf.

I now most humbly Beg that you will pardon this Presumption in one of the most unfortunate of the Human Race and whatever may be the result of this Aplication, I shall ever pray for your welfare and happiness.

I am with the greatest respect Right Honble Sir

Your most obdt and huble Sert but most unfortunate

Will Brodie

The second letter, with the same dateline, was to Her Grace the Duchess of Buccleuch, and read:

Madam,

Lett me beseech your Ladyship to pardon My Boldness in making the present address.

The wretched can only fly to the Humane and the powerfull for Relief. As my triall is printed, it would ill suit me to make any reflections on the unfortunate Issue; and this much I am convinced of, that the Current of Popular prejudice is so strong against me, that it will be well with me if I can Rescue my Life on any terms; and though my friends are making aplication above, I have little hopes of the success, unless some Respectable Characters who have had an opportunity of knowing something of those I have come of, and of my former life, Interest themselves in my behalf.

With all the fortitude of a man, I must confess to you, Madam, that I feel the Natural horror at Death, and particularly a violent Ignominious Death, and would willingly avoid it even on the condition of spending my Future years at Bottony Bay.

In that Infant Collony I might be usefull, from my knowledge in several Mechanical branches beside my own particular Profession; and if your Ladyship and your most Respectable friend The Right Honble Henry Dundas, would Deign to Patronise my Suit, I would have little Reason to Doubt the Success. Capt John Hamilton too I think would be ready to assist in any measure Sanctified by your Ladyship.