“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.

“Selwyn, whose constant flow of exquisite wit made him generally acceptable”

As described yesterday, on Christmas Eve in 1769 the brothers Patrick and Matthew Kennedy got drunk and stomped around the neighborhood of Westminter Bridge in London, clubbing people.

One of those people died: watchman George Bigby.

Within weeks, the Kennedys were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. Matthew was about to step on the cart that would take him to the gallows when a reprieve arrived.

The brothers had a sister, Catherine or Kitty, who was one of London’s leading courtesans. (Many discussions of this case amalgamate Kitty Kennedy with another courtesan named Polly Kennedy, née Jones. There are some nice pictures of that woman, but I’m convinced by the historian Horace Bleackley that I shouldn’t use them because they show a different person.)

Kitty Kennedy’s closest gentleman friends were Lord Robert Spencer, brother of the Duke of Marlborough, and the Hon. John St. John, brother of Viscount Bolingbroke. Both men were members of Parliament. St. John, a barrister, actually testified at the brothers’ trial, claiming a prosecution witness had offered not to testify in exchange for £10; by implication, all the witnesses were dubious.

But Kitty had some prominent ex-lovers as well. And even more men who were won over by entreaties from her and her admirers. Among the aristocrats who publicly supported leniency for the Kennedys were the Duke of Manchester, until recently lord of the bedchamber to George III; the Earl of Carlisle; Viscount Palmerston; the Earl of Fife, who was in the British House of Commons because his peerage was Irish; and Sir George Savile, M.P.

But the Kennedy family’s most active champion was George Selwyn (1719–1791, shown above), yet another member of Parliament. Not because Selwyn was enamoured of Kitty Kennedy—he was gay. And not because he was against hanging—Selwyn was notorious for his fetish for watching people die. Rather, Kitty Kennedy’s admirers seem to have convinced Selwyn that her brothers were not the sort of young men who should be hanged.

There was an obvious class prejudice behind the campaign to keep the Kennedys from being executed. They weren’t street thugs, people said; they worked in an auction house, and had a sister who was a social celebrity. And hadn’t Matthew suffered enough in thinking he was about to be hanged?

Of course, other people thought the Kennedys had been drunk, cruel, and violent, and under the law of the day deserved their death sentence, even if only one could have struck the fatal blow.

Horace Walpole was among those who helped push for leniency while reveling in the insider nature of the campaign. For instance, sometime in 1770 Walpole wrote to Selwyn:

After you was gone last night, I heard it whispered about the room that a bad representation had been made at the Queen’s house against the unhappy young man. Do not mention this, as it might do hurt; but try privately, without talking of it, if you cannot get some of the ladies to mention the cruelty of the case; or what do you think of a hint by the German women [i.e., certain ladies in waiting], if you can get at them?

In his memoirs Walpole later described the case this way:

Two Kennedys, young Irishmen, had been charged with, and one of them had been condemned for, the murder of a watchman in a drunken riot. They had a handsome sister, who was kept by two young men of quality.

Out of friendship to them, Mr. George Selwyn had prevailed on six or seven of the jury to make an affidavit that, if some circumstances, which had really been neglected by the counsel for the prisoners, had appeared on the trial, they would not have brought in their verdict murder.

Mr. Selwyn applied for mercy, and the young convict was reprieved; but when the report was made in Council, Lord Mansfield prevailed to have him ordered for execution.

Mr. Selwyn, whose constant flow of exquisite wit made him generally acceptable, applied in person to the King, and represented that Lord Rochford, the Secretary of State, had under his hand assured the pardon; that such an act had always been deemed pardon, and that the prisoner had been made acquainted with it. The King immediately renewed his promise, the criminal was ordered for transportation…

That commutation was made on 17 April. Matthew Kennedy was put on a ship bound for America.

TOMORROW: Shipboard conditions.