“The price of her husband’s blood”

In April 1770, Matthew and Patrick Kennedy were hauled back to London to answer for killing watchman George Bigby the previous Christmas Eve.

This time the prosecutor wasn’t the Crown. Rather, as stated yesterday, Bigby’s widow Ann was suing them under an old and little-used English law that allowed murder victims’ families that privilege.

The Kennedy brothers had already been tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang in criminal court, but then reprieved by the Crown. They were about to be transported to America.

Activists opposed to British government corruption seized on this murder case because rich friends of the Kennedys’ sister Kitty, a popular courtesan, had obviously intervened on her brothers’ behalf.

In a public letter dated 28 May, the political writer Junius complained about “the mercy of a chaste and pious Prince extended chearfully to a wilful murderer because that murderer is the brother of a common prostitute.”

The Rev. John Horne and others in the Society of Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights encouraged Ann Bigby to sue. And if she won, the death penalty was back on.

So in May the Kennedy brothers were once again in a courtroom. Most of that first proceeding was filled with legalistic arguments of whether the procedure was even valid. The brothers were sent back to jail to await the next hearing. Their supporters complained that, too, was unjust (though other people were in the same jails for far less).

In August 1770, the American press started to run stories about the Kennedy brothers, catching their readers up with articles from London newspapers in March and May. Richard Draper devoted almost the entire fourth page of the 9 August Boston News-Letter to the case.

At the next court session in November, Ann Bigby “allowed herself to be non-suited.” Accounts offer different details, but they all agree that Kitty Kennedy’s friends paid off the widow.

One London publication said:

When she went to receive the money (£350) she wept bitterly, and at first refused to touch the money that was to be the price of her husband’s blood; but, being told that nobody else could receive it for her, she held up her apron, and bid the attorney, who was to pay it, sweep it into her lap.

Decades later, John A. Graham wrote in his Memoirs of John Horne Tooke:

this gentleman [attorney Arthur Murphy, shown above] stepped in between them [the Kennedys] and the laws. The widow Bigby, the nominal prosecutor, was tempted by him, with a sum of money, to desist; and, after some hesitation between duty and avarice, actually accepted of three hundred pounds, which had been offered her in paper, on condition, that, to prevent the risk of forgery, the bank notes were converted into gold!

Still, it took until the spring of 1771 for the murder case to be formally resolved. Then the criminal sentence and the commutation were both confirmed. As the 10 June Pennsylvania Chronicle told American readers, Matthew would be coming to America for life, Patrick for at least fourteen years—“which they accepted of.”

Drew D. Gray’s Prosecuting Homicide in Eighteenth-Century Law and Practice states that the Kennedy brothers arrived in Virginia before the end of the year. Like Elizabeth Canning, they seem to have shed their British notoriety and disappeared into colonial society—helped by having fairly common names.

(Or did they? In 1909 Horace Bleackley wrote in Ladies Fair and Frail that Matthew Kennedy was “seen in gaol at Calais, a prisoner for debt,” in 1775—but he offered no source for that statement.)

As for Kitty Kennedy, in August 1773 she married Robert Stratford Byron or Byram and retired from celebrity life. However, a few years later, she was back with the Hon. John St. John, one of her main lovers and helpers during her brothers’ court case. She died in late 1781 of consumption.

TOMORROW: This is supposed to be a story about Ebenezer Richardson.

“The Bill of Rights people that have spirited her up”

In April 1770, as recounted yesterday, the convicted murderers Matthew and Patrick Kennedy escaped hanging through the intervention of their sister Kitty’s upper-class friends.

The brothers’ death sentence was changed to transportation to the American colonies. Matthew, convicted of fatally striking a watchman named George Bigby, was to stay out of Britain for life; Patrick for fourteen years.

One of the members of Parliament who championed the Kennedys’ cause, the Earl of Fife, wrote to another, George Selwyn, on 28 April:

Just after I wrote to you this morning, I went to Mr. Stuart, on Tower Hill. I settled the free passage for Kennedy, for which I gave him fifteen guineas, and I got a letter of credit for ten, in order that the poor fellow might have something in his pocket; I also got a letter of recommendation to a person in Maryland, who will be vastly good to him.

Mr. Stuart told me he believed the ship was sailed; however, I resolved to spare no pains to relieve the poor man, and therefore directly set out for Blackwall, and very luckily found the ship not gone.

I went on board, and, to be sure, all the states of horror I ever had an idea of are much short of what I saw this poor man in; chained to a board, in a hole not above sixteen feet long; more than fifty with him; a collar and padlock about his neck, and chained to five of the most dreadful creatures I ever looked on.

What pleasure I had to see all the irons taken off, and to put him under the care of a very humane captain, one Macdougal, who luckily is my countryman, and connected with people I have done some little service to! He will be of great service to Kennedy; in short, I left this poor creature who has suffered so much, in a perfect state of happiness.

Presumably the other four “dreadful creatures” remained chained together. Neither they nor the fifty-plus other people in that hold had a sister who was a popular courtesan. Only for Kitty Kennedy would Fife have bribed John Stewart, the Contractors of Transports, to obtain special treatment.

Some people in London didn’t like that. They viewed the commutation of the Kennedys’ sentences when so many other people were being hanged for lesser crimes than murder as an example of government corruption.

In 1770 the Londoners most concerned with government corruption were the Bill of Rights Society, radical activists gathered (at least for a few more months) around John Wilkes.

Prominent among those men was the Rev. John Horne (shown above). He was also active in the case of McQuirk and Balfe, the printers’ case, and even a state trial turning on who fired first at the Battle of Lexington and Concord.

Those radicals found an unusual way to restore the possibility of executing the Kennedys. As Horace Walpole later wrote:

Horne, the clergyman, and other discontented persons complained of the pardon, and not only complained of it to blacken the King, but, horrible spirit of faction! instigated the watchman’s widow to appeal against it, which, if sentence should again follow, would bar all pardon; nor could the King do more than reprieve from time to time. The woman did prosecute; and the young man was again remanded to his gaol and terrors, a second punishment, unjustly inflicted; for, though probably guilty, he had satisfied the law.

The Hon. John St. John, one of the lovers and patrons of the Kennedys’ sister Kitty, told Selwyn about the widow Ann Bigby: “It is certainly the Bill of Rights people that have spirited her up.” According to the author Horace Bleackley, the recorder of London didn’t want to issue this writ for the widow, but the Wilkesite lord mayor, Sir William Beckford, insisted he do so.

This dispute reverses stances we might normally expect. Radicals interested in limiting government and guarding personal liberties were demanding the death penalty be applied without mercy. Aristocrats who wouldn’t have intervened to help any other young Irishmen convicted of a drunken murder were bending all the rules they could to preserve Kitty Kennedy’s brothers.

TOMORROW: The resolution of the case.