The hanging of Walter Lynch

There is a kind of office that asks of its holder, once in a generation, the thing he cannot give. It does not arrive in audience or by writ. It arrives at his own door, in the shape of his own household, and waits there for him to choose between the bench he sits at and the blood he carries. The man who keeps the bench loses the blood. The man who keeps the blood loses the bench, and with it the small commonwealth that has trusted him to be impartial. Galway, in the last decade of the fifteenth century, set such a question to its chief magistrate, and he answered it from an upper window on Lombard Street.

THE TRIBES AND THE TRADE

James Lynch FitzStephen was head of one of the fourteen merchant families who governed the walled town of Galway under charter, a city that turned its back on Connacht and faced the sea. The Lynches, Frenches, Burkes, Bodkins, Joyces and the rest kept their own bench, their own customs, their own Latin and Norman-French registers, and a long line of carracks running between the Claddagh and the quays of Cádiz, Bilbao and Lisbon. Wine in, hides and salted fish out. The trade lived on the word of the Mayor: a Spanish factor who shipped a tun of sack into Galway harbour had to know that the man who sat at the head of the corporation would weigh him on the same scales as a Burke or a Bodkin. Without that, the trade went to Bristol and the town starved inside its own walls.

James was forty-eight, a merchant with three bottoms and a warehouse on the long quay. His son Walter was nineteen, well-formed, well-liked, betrothed in the slow Galway way to a girl called Margaret. Into that household, in the spring of 1493, the father took as guest the son of a Cádiz wine-house with which he had traded for twenty years, a young man named Gomez. It was an ordinary courtesy of the trade. The boy was lodged in the house on Lombard Street and walked the quays in Walter's company, and in the small lanes behind the Fish Market he made his courtesies to Margaret as well.

THE KILLING IN THE LANE

The thing happened on a night in May, near the docks, in a lane too narrow for two men to pass without touching shoulders. Walter went out from the house with a knife under his coat. He did not come back with Gomez. The Spaniard was found at first light against the wall of a cooper's yard, his purse untouched, the wound clean and upward under the ribs. There was no question of robbery. Walter presented himself at his father's house before the city sergeants came for him and laid the knife on the table in the front parlour. He had loved Margaret since he was fifteen. He had not been able to bear the sight of the guest's hand at her elbow in the market.

The Spanish family in Cádiz, when the news reached them by the next ship, asked for a blood-payment in the old custom of the trade. The corporation would have accepted it. The town would have accepted it. Walter would have walked, with a price on his name and a year's exile to Lisbon, and the wine would have kept coming. James Lynch FitzStephen, sitting as chief magistrate at the bench in the Tholsel, refused the composition. He heard the case under the common law that the charter of Galway had bound itself to, and by his own mouth he sentenced his son to hang.

THE THIRD SATURDAY OF JUNE

The morning of the execution was the third Saturday of June. The Atlantic light came up grey over the bay and the wind off Galway hill smelt of salt and turf-smoke. By six o'clock the crowd was in Lombard Street between the Collegiate Church of St Nicholas and the market cross, four hundred of them at the least, and rising. They were not a mob in any common sense. They were the populace of a small chartered town who had decided, in the night, that this hanging would not happen. They had driven off the city's hangman with stones at the corner of Quay Street before the bells of the church had rung Prime. No second man could be found in Galway who would take the rope. The Fish Market gallows stood empty. The sergeants stood at the doors of the Tholsel and did nothing.

James Lynch put on his Mayor's robe of red wool over a shirt of fine Galway linen. He went up the stair of his own house to the upper room at the front, the room with the iron staple set into the stone of the wall above the window, where in older custom the corporation's lamp had been hung on feast days. He had the rope already, the four-year rope from the Fish Market gallows, and he had the wrist of his son.

THE UPPER WINDOW

Here time slows. The clock of the town, if Galway had owned a clock, would have measured a quarter of an hour; the man at the window measured it differently. He stood with the rope in one hand and his son's wrist in the other, and he ran the account of the city through his head, item by item, as a merchant runs an inventory before a long voyage. He thought of the bench. He thought that if he commuted the sentence by writ that night, then no Burke or Bodkin or French would ever again accept the bench's word against one of their own, and the Galway peace, which was a thin thing held together by the agreement of fourteen houses to be judged by the same measure, would dissolve before Michaelmas. He thought of the wine trade. He thought of the Cádiz house and the Bilbao house and the Lisbon house, and of the long Iberian habit of writing Galway off as a port where a Spaniard's son could be cut down in a lane for the price of a paid composition. He thought of his son. He thought that Walter had killed in jealousy and not in malice, and that the court knew it, and that the killing was nonetheless murder, and the boy was nineteen and old enough. He thought that a man who keeps his own son out of the rope he has tied for another man's son is not a magistrate but a father with a chain of office round his neck.

There is no third thing, he said to himself, in the quiet of the upper room. Either I keep the city, or I keep the boy.

He looked at his son. Walter had been looking at the floor for an hour. James said, quietly, that he would not do this if there were any other way to keep the city, and that there was no other way, and asked the boy to forgive him before God. Walter could not speak. He nodded once. His father kissed his forehead, put the rope around his neck, and threw him from the window of the upper room. The rope caught at the iron staple. The body swung against the stone wall of the house and was still within a minute. The crowd in the street did not cry out. They had come to prevent a hanging by the city; they had not reckoned on a hanging by the father, and there was no answer in them to that.

THE COLD HEARTH

He stayed at the window for the count of three and did not look down at the cobbles. He turned from the window and went back through the upper room and down the stair into the front parlour, where his wife and his daughter were sitting. He sat on the bench by the cold fireplace and did not speak. An hour later, on his standing order, the city sergeants cut the body down. The crowd in Lombard Street dispersed slowly, without speech, the way people leave a church after a long Mass for the dead.

Margaret, who had been the cause of it without willing any part of it, took the veil at the Dominican house at the Claddagh before the year was out and is recorded in the convent's book as a sister of that community until her death in 1547. The Spanish house in Cádiz sent a letter of condolence to the Mayor of Galway and continued to ship wine into the long quay for another century. The Burkes and the Bodkins and the Frenches sat at the bench under the next Mayor and accepted his judgements without quarrel.

THE CORPORATION BOOK

James Lynch FitzStephen served out the remainder of his term as Mayor of Galway and at Michaelmas resigned the chain of office to the next of the fourteen tribes in the rotation. He did not sit on the bench again. He kept the warehouse and the three ships and the long correspondence with Iberia, and walked to St Nicholas' for Mass each morning, and is recorded in the corporation book of the town under his own hand for fifteen years more, in a small clear merchant's script, signing off the accounts of the wine cellarage and the customs of the quay. He was buried in the family vault under the Collegiate Church in 1508. The vault is there still.

LOMBARD STREET

The act passed out of living memory and into the chronicle of the town. The corporation books had it by the late sixteenth century; James Hardiman set it down in print in his History of the Town and County of the Town of Galway in 1820, from the older Galway tradition, and the tour guides of the city have pointed at the upper window of the house on Lombard Street ever since. The English phrase lynch law, which the Galway story is sometimes asked to bear, almost certainly descends from one Charles Lynch, a Virginia magistrate of the seventeen-eighties, and the Galway connection is by surname only. The window does not need the etymology.

The office that asks the impossible asks it only of those who will answer. Most men, set in that upper room with that rope, would have found a third thing: a delay, a writ, a quiet ship to Lisbon in the night. The Mayor of Galway found none, and the city he kept by the act is the city that still walks past his window. Above the lintel, the small stone tablet shows a crow above a skull, and the Latin reads Memorate Mori. Remember death. The tablet has been pointed at, in the rain and the Atlantic light, for five hundred and thirty-three years.