William Burke and the Edinburgh murders

There are crimes that belong to the age in which they happen, and crimes that the age has been waiting for. Edinburgh in 1828 was a city of two storeys: the New Town of stone terraces and lecture halls above, the West Port of lodging-houses and unrecorded poor below. Between them ran a trade in bodies that the medical school needed and the law had never quite found language for. It took two Ulster labourers, a back-room above a stable, and the morning fog off the Forth, to give the language a verb.

THE LODGER FROM ORRERY

William Burke was born at Orrery in County Cork in 1792, the son of small tenants, and left for the north as a young man in the way that thousands of Munster Catholics left for the north in those years, by foot and by report of work. He served as an officer's servant in the Donegal militia, married a woman in Ballina whom he later left, and crossed to Scotland in 1818 to dig the Union Canal at Linlithgow. When the canal works closed he drifted into Edinburgh and into the West Port, the warren of closes running west off the Grassmarket where an Irish labourer could find a bed for threepence and no questions about his Sunday. He was thirty-five when he met William Hare at a lodging-house in Tanner's Close in 1827, and thirty-six when, in November of that year, an old soldier called Donald died in one of Hare's rooms owing four pounds in rent. They filled the coffin with bark, carried the body to Surgeons' Square, and were paid seven pounds ten shillings by the porter of Dr Robert Knox. The arrangement, once made, did not require a second discussion.

THE WEST PORT IN ITS TWELFTH MONTH

Through the winter of 1827 and the spring, summer and autumn of 1828, sixteen people went into the back-rooms of Tanner's Close and Log's lodging-house and did not come out. They were chosen for the absence of anyone who would ask after them: an old Englishwoman, a cinder-gatherer called Effie, a grandmother and her deaf-mute grandson, an idiot boy called Daft Jamie whom half the city knew by sight, a prostitute called Mary Paterson who was eighteen and had been seen the night before by medical students who recognised her on the slab the next morning and said nothing. The method was a hand over the mouth and the weight of a man on the chest, and it left no mark that an anatomist had reason to look for. The bodies went up the Cowgate to 10 Surgeons' Square on a tea-chest or in a herring-barrel, and were paid for at the back door at between seven and ten pounds, the price varying by season and freshness. Knox asked no questions. His class of five hundred students was the largest in Europe and required subjects. The Murder Act of 1752 gave the schools the bodies of hanged murderers and nothing else, and there were never enough hanged murderers. The trade had a name in the city, the resurrection trade, and it had been worked by the spade for a generation. Burke and Hare were the first to work it with their hands.

THE MORNING OF THE SECOND OF NOVEMBER

It is twenty past eight on the morning of the second of November 1828, in a back-room above a stable on Tanner's Close, off the West Port, with a fog off the Forth coming up the close from the Grassmarket and the candle on the table at the head of the bed half burnt. On the bed, under a heap of dirty straw and three sacks of flour, is the body of an Irishwoman called Margaret Docherty who came to the front door yesterday morning asking for hospitality from a fellow countrywoman, and who by midnight was dead. The body has been there about ten hours. The arrangement with Hare is that they will move it to Surgeons' Square in the late afternoon when the foot-traffic on the West Port has thinned. James and Ann Gray, a labourer and his wife who have been lodging in the front parlour this week, came into the back-room ten minutes ago looking for stockings Mrs Gray had left somewhere. James Gray pulled back the straw to look on the bed. He has, by his own deposition, found the body. He has gone out of the room and downstairs and at this moment is on West Port walking to the Edinburgh police office at the head of the High Street.

A SECOND OF TIME IN A BACK-ROOM

Burke is sitting on a stool against the wall on the far side of the room, looking at the place where the straw has been disturbed, with no expression on his face that the back of the chair has registered. Gray will be at the Stamp Office Close in twenty minutes. The body is on the bed and there is no version of the next twenty-four hours in which it is not on the dissecting-table at Surgeons' Square or in the hands of a sheriff officer; he calculates this the way he has calculated, for a year, the distance from a close to a back gate, the freshness of a corpse, the temper of the porter who pays. Hare is in the next house with Margaret his wife and the child, and Hare has, as Burke has always known he would have, the better instinct for what comes next. The first to speak walks. The other hangs. There is the gallows, in seven minutes; there is the dissecting-table after the gallows, by the same Act and the same Professor that took the bodies from his own hand last winter. He sees this and does not move from the stool. A man who has spent a year in an arrangement understands, when the arrangement ends, exactly how it ends, and the understanding is no use to him. The candle on the table is still burning at half past nine when the constable comes up the stair from the Stamp Office Close and asks if he may come into the back-room. Burke says he may. The constable looks at the bed. The constable says, William Burke, in the name of the King, you are detained.

THE HIGH COURT OF JUSTICIARY

Hare turned king's evidence within the week, as Burke had known in the back-room he would. The trial opened at the High Court of Justiciary on the twenty-fourth of December 1828 on a single count, the murder of Mary Docherty, before Lord President Hope, Lord Justice-Clerk Boyle, and Lords Pitmilly, Meadowbank and Mackenzie. It ran twenty-four hours through the day and the night, the lamps in Parliament Square burning into Christmas morning, the jury deliberating fifty minutes and returning unanimous. Burke was sentenced to be hanged at the Lawnmarket on the twenty-eighth of January and his body to be publicly dissected at the University thereafter. In the condemned cell at Calton he gave two confessions, one to the Sheriff and one to the Edinburgh Evening Courant, and in both of them he asked that Dr Knox be held no part of the matter. Dr Knox, he said in the official confession of the third of January, never encouraged him, neither taught nor incited him to murder any person, neither did he, nor any of his assistants, ever ask any questions. It was the only public charity of his life, and it was a lie that the city accepted because it was the lie that protected the medical school.

THE LAWNMARKET, TWENTY-FIVE THOUSAND

The hanging drew the largest assembly in Edinburgh's recorded history. Twenty-five thousand people stood in the Lawnmarket and along the High Street and on the roofs of the lands above, in a sleet that had begun before dawn. The drop fell at a quarter past eight. The crowd did not cheer; by every contemporary account it watched in a silence that the executioner himself afterwards remarked upon, and went home through the wynds in the same silence. Henry Cockburn, who walked back down the Mound in the dusk of the same evening, wrote that the city that night was the quietest I have ever seen it. The body went to the Anatomy Theatre of the University the next morning. Professor Alexander Monro III, third of his name in that chair, opened the chest before a public assembly of students and gentlemen, dipped a quill in the blood and wrote a line in his lecture-book; the line is preserved. The skeleton was boiled and articulated and placed in a glass case in the medical museum at Old Surgeons' Hall.

WHAT STAYED ON NICOLSON STREET

The verb to burke, meaning to murder by suffocation while leaving no mark, entered the language within months and the Oxford English Dictionary in 1850. The Anatomy Act of 1832, passed four years after the trial, opened the unclaimed dead of the workhouses to the schools and ended the resurrection trade at a stroke; the Act is, in every history of British medicine, the West Port's monument. Robert Knox was never prosecuted and never publicly accused, and was within five years driven out of Edinburgh medicine by a silence as complete as the one the Lawnmarket crowd kept. He ended his life lecturing freelance in London and died in 1862, a ruined man by every measure of his profession. William Hare walked free under the immunity agreement, crossed the border within the year, and was lost to the record; the tradition that he ended his days blinded in a Lancashire lime pit is unverified by any contemporary source. The lodging-house at Tanner's Close was pulled down in 1902. The skeleton stands in the Anatomical Museum at Old Surgeons' Hall on Nicolson Street, and the plaster death-mask, taken on the morning after the drop, hangs on the wall beside it. Every twenty years for two centuries the city has debated whether the bones should be given consecrated ground.

The great moments of a life are not always those a man chooses; sometimes they are the ones that choose him, in a back-room, with the fog coming up the close and another man already on the stair to the police office. The decision that William Burke made on his stool at half past eight that morning was the only one left to him, which is to say it was no decision at all, and a year of arrangements ended in the seven minutes the rope required. What remains in the glass case on Nicolson Street is not a moral and not a warning. It is a man, articulated, behind glass, on Wednesdays, open to the public.