“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.

“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.

“Twill be damn’d hard to die for an old watchman!”

What did the 24 May 1773 the Boston Gazette mean by lumping Ebenezer Richardson’s pardon together with “Kennedys”?

Again, this required some digging in British sources.

Matthew and Patrick Kennedy were brothers convicted of murder in 1770, like Richardson. Unlike Richardson and unlike Edward McQuirk and Laurence Balfe, discussed yesterday, they hadn’t been part of a political brawl. But their case became politicized.

On 24 Dec 1769, the Kennedy brothers, who worked at a London auction house, and three friends went out drinking. The tavern keeper George Mallard testified: “They had two half pints of brandy, a pot of beer, a paper of tobacco, and four half-crown bowls of punch.”

The drinking buddies started wrestling. Mallard tried to break them up. The men attacked the publican, plus two more men who tried to help him. Then they left, carrying away one of the tavern’s iron pokers.

Out on the street, the Kennedy group struck several other people at random. One was a brickyard worker named George Bigby who “served that night as a watchman in the room of one Goodchild.” One witness identified Matthew Kennedy as hitting Bigby on the head, but others were unclear on which man in the bunch did it.

More Westminster Bridge watchmen, a constable, and citizens seized Patrick Kennedy. But as the constable was leading him away to the guardhouse, his friends attacked in a “rescue.” Patrick “got away, but was taken again in Channel-Row.”

Two hours after being struck, George Bigby died. As in the McQuirk and Balfe case, the blind magistrate Sir John Fielding presided over the murder investigation, collecting the poker. Bigby’s brother tracked down one of the Kennedy brothers’ companions. A constable arrested the other.

The four men went on trial at the Old Bailey on 21 February. Patrick claimed that he and his brother had actually been the victims of an attack. The two friends mainly insisted that they themselves hadn’t hit anyone with weapons and otherwise mostly confirmed what prosecution witnesses described. Matthew Kennedy’s testimony was, in total: “I know nothing at all about it.”

In the end, the Kennedys’ two friends were acquitted, but the brothers were both convicted of murder and sentenced “to be executed on the Monday following, and their bodies to be dissected and anatomized.”

In the morning at Newgate, Matthew Kennedy stepped into a cart to take his last ride to the gallows. Then a “respite” from the Crown arrived. The executions were put off for one week, then another.

It seems the Kennedy brothers had a sister, called Kitty Kennedy. She was one of the leading courtesans of the day, with wealthy and politically connected patrons. The picture above, from the opposition Freeholder’s Magazine, depicts Kitty Kennedy meeting with the brothers in the King’s Bench Prison. (Also at the table is Sir Richard Perrott, a baronet of low reputation and an anti-Wilkesite, otherwise unconnected to the case.)

TOMORROW: The personal becomes political.