Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [16]
L——the Pandor of thy Judgment Seat
Has neither Manners, Honesty nor Wit,
Instead of which, he’s plenteously supplied
With nonsense, noise, impertinence and Pride . . .
But always serves the hand who pays him well;
He trades in justice and the souls of men
And prostitutes them equally to gain.
Law, by now just twenty-three, was an opportunist with an idealistic streak who had not, as far as we know, come before the judiciary before. With all the naïveté, stubbornness, and recklessness of youth, he refused to doubt the system, having never previously experienced it. Now, faced with Lovell’s mercenary brand of justice, he was disillusioned.
Lovell instructed the jury that everything rested on whether the two men had prearranged their duel: “If they found that Mr. Lawe and Mr. Wilson did make an agreement to fight, though Wilson drew first, and Mr. Lawe killed him, he was [by construction of the law] guilty of murder.” Legal procedure of the time meant that as defendant in a Crown case, Law was not entitled to a legal representative, or to testify or to call witnesses. His solitary means of defense was an unsworn statement that was read out in court. In it he claimed that the meeting in Bloomsbury “was an accidental thing, Mr. Wilson drawing his sword upon him first, upon which he was forced to stand in his own defence.” Therefore, he argued, “the misfortune did arise only from a sudden heat of passion, and not from any propense malice.” Numerous character witnesses “of good quality” testified at length to Law’s unquarrelsome nature and general good character.
But nothing could detract from the judge’s damning influence: “This was a continual quarrel, carried on betwixt them for some time before, therefore must be accounted a malicious Quarrel, and a design of murder in the person that killed the other,” he said, in summing up the case. Law’s friends claimed later that both judge and jury had been bought off by Wilson’s powerful and vengeful relatives, which seems highly probable, bearing in mind Lovell’s reputation. In any event Law’s case was lost. After having considered the verdict very seriously, the jury declared that he was indeed guilty of murder as charged.
A total of twenty-eight defendants were convicted during the three-day hearing. Of these, twenty-one, mostly burglars and thieves, were to be punished by branding—or “burnt in the hand,” as it was termed. One was to be transported to a penal colony. The remaining five were sentenced to death by hanging. Three were forgers and clippers of coins. The fourth was the rapist. The fifth was the twenty-three-year-old winner of a duel, John Law.
5
ESCAPE
Mr. Laws knows best how he made his escape. Many odd storys were then told, particularly that he took the sleeping of the sentinel for some hours at his door to be a trick and that he bought an underkeeper.
James Johnston,
Earl of Warriston (1719)
AFTER THE TRAUMAS OF THE DUEL, THE TRIAL, AND HISmurder conviction, Law could do little but wait for events to unfold. His mood was surprisingly sanguine. A seventeenth-century man of privilege expected justice to be pliant and merciful, particularly if his crime was widely regarded as honorable.
In the privileged world of both Law and Wilson, dueling was one of the unwritten rules of membership—a nobleman’s way of settling a dispute and thus, in some deep-rooted sense, a ritualistic badge of rank. It was expected that a gentleman would issue a challenge if his honor was in any way impugned. If he didn’t, or if his opponent resisted such a challenge, it would be tantamount to an admission that he was not a gentleman—which the dashing John Law would never