The Great Train Robbery (36 page)

The Times
complained that this fascination with a criminal was “unseemly, even decadent,” and went so far as to suggest that the behavior of the public reflected “some fatal flaw in the character of the English mind.”

Thus, it is one of the odd coincidences of history that by the time Pierce began his testimony, on May 29th, the public and the press had turned their attention elsewhere. For, quite unexpectedly, England was facing a new trial of national proportions: a shocking and bloody uprising in India.

*  *  *

The growing British Empire—some called it the Brutish Empire—had suffered two major setbacks in recent decades. The first was in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1842, where 16,500 British soldiers, women, and children died in six days. The second setback was the Crimean War, now concluded, with demands for army reform. That sentiment was so strong that Lord Cardigan, previously a national hero, was in disrepute; he was even accused (unfairly) of not being present for the charge of the Light Brigade, and his marriage to the notorious equestrienne Adeline Horsey de Horsey had further tarnished his standing.

Now the Indian Mutiny arose as a third affront to English world supremacy, and another blow to English self-confidence. That the English were confident in India is evident from the fact that they had only 34,000 European troops in that country, commanding a quarter of a million native soldiers, called sepoys, who were not excessively loyal to their English leaders.

Since the 1840s, England had been increasingly highhanded in India. The new evangelical fervor of righteousness at home had led to ruthless religious reform abroad; thuggee and suttee had been stamped out, and the Indians were not altogether pleased to see foreigners changing their ancient religious patterns.

When the English introduced the new Enfield rifle in 1857, the cartridges for the rifle came from the factory liberally coated with grease. It was necessary to bite the cartridges to release the powder. Among the sepoy regiments there was a rumor that the grease was made from pigs and cows, and thus these cartridges were a trick to defile the sepoys and make them break caste.

English authorities acted quickly.

In January, 1857, it was ordered that factory-greased cartridges were to be issued only to European troops; the sepoys could grease their own with vegetable oil. This sensible edict came too late to halt the bad feeling,
however. By March, the first English officers were shot by sepoys in sporadic incidents. And in May a genuine uprising broke out.

The most famous episode of the Indian Mutiny occurred at Cawnpore, a town of 150,000 on the banks of the Ganges. From a modern perspective, the siege of Cawnpore seems a kind of crystallization of all that was noble and foolish about Victorian England. A thousand British citizens, including three hundred women and children, were under fire for eighteen days. Living conditions “violated all the decencies and proprieties of life, and shocked the modesty of … womanly nature.” Yet in the early days of the siege, life went on with extraordinary normalness. Soldiers drank champagne and dined on tinned herring. Children played around the guns. Several babies were born, and a wedding took place, despite the constant rain of rifle and artillery fire, day and night.

Later, everyone was rationed to a single meal a day, and soon they were eating horsemeat, “though some ladies could not reconcile themselves to this unaccustomed fare.” The women gave up their undergarments for wadding for the guns: “The gentlewomen of Cawnpore gave up perhaps the most cherished components of their feminine attire to improve the ordnance.…”

The situation became increasingly desperate. There was no water, except from a well outside the encampment; soldiers trying to get water were shot in the attempt. The daytime temperatures reached 138 degrees Fahrenheit. Several men died of sunstroke. A dry well inside the compound was used as a grave for corpses.

On June 12th, one of the two buildings caught fire and burned to the ground. All medical supplies were destroyed. Yet the English still held out, beating back every attack.

On June 25th, the sepoys called a truce, and offered
the English safe passage by ship to Allahabad, a city a hundred miles downstream. The English accepted.

The evacuation began at dawn on June 27th. The English moved onto forty riverboats, under the watchful eye of armed sepoys all around them. As soon as the last Englishman was aboard the boats, the native boatmen jumped into the water. The sepoys opened fire on the ships, still tied up to the shore. Soon most of the boats were aflame, and the river was littered with corpses and drowning bodies. Indian cavalrymen splashed through the shallows, cutting down survivors with sabers. Every man was killed.

The women and children were taken to a mud building along the shore and held there in suffocating heat for some days. Then on July 15th, several men, including a number of butchers by trade, entered the house with sabers and knives and slaughtered everyone present. The dismembered bodies, including “some not altogether lifeless,” were dumped into a nearby well, and were said to have filled it.

The English at home, expressing their “muscular Christianity,” screamed for bloody revenge. Even
The Times
, swept along in the fury of the moment, demanded that “every tree and gable-end in the place should have its burden in the shape of a mutineer’s carcass.” Lord Palmerston announced that the Indian rebels had acted as “demons sallying forth from the lowest depths of hell.”

At such a moment, the appearance of a criminal in the dock of Old Bailey, for a crime committed two years past, was of very minor interest. But there were some reports on the inside pages of the dailies, and they are fascinating for what they reveal about Edward Pierce.

He was brought before the bar for the first time on July 29th: “handsome, charming, composed, elegant
and roguish.” He gave his testimony in an even, utterly calm tone of voice, but his statements were inflammatory enough. He referred to Mr. Fowler as “a syphilitic fool” and Mr. Trent as “an elderly nincompoop.” These comments led the prosecutor to inquire of Pierce’s views on Mr. Harranby, the man who had apprehended him. “A puffed-up dandy with the brains of a schoolboy,” Pierce announced, drawing a gasp from the court, for Mr. Harranby was in the gallery as an observer. Mr. Harranby was seen to color deeply, and the veins stood out on his forehead.

Even more astounding than Mr. Pierce’s words was his general demeanor, for “he carried himself extremely well, and proudly, and gave no hint of contrition, nor any trace of moral remorse for his black deeds.” Quite the opposite, he seemed to demonstrate an enthusiasm for his own cleverness as he recounted the various steps in the plan.

“He appears,” noted the
Evening Standard
, “to take a degree of delight in his actions which is wholly inexplicable.”

This delight extended to a detailed accounting of the foibles of other witnesses, who were themselves most reluctant to testify. Mr. Trent was fumbling and nervous, and greatly embarrassed (“with ample reason,” snapped one outraged observer) at what he had to report, while Mr. Fowler recounted his own experiences in a voice so low that the prosecutor was continually obliged to ask him to speak up.

There were a few shocks in Pierce’s testimony. One was the following exchange, which occurred on the third day of his appearance in court:

“Mr. Pierce, are you acquainted with the cabby known as Barlow?”

“I am.”

“Can you tell us his whereabouts?”

“I cannot.”

“Can you tell us when you last saw him?”

“Yes, I can.”

“Please be so good to do so.”

“I saw him last six days ago, when he visited me at Coldbath Fields.”

(Here there was a buzzing of voices within the court, and the judge rapped for order.)

“Mr. Pierce, why have you not brought forth this information earlier?”

“I was not asked.”

“What was the substance of your conversation with this man Barlow?”

“We discussed my escape.”

“Then I take it, you intend with the aid of this man to make your escape?”

“I should prefer that it be a surprise,” Pierce said calmly.

The consternation of the court was great, and the newspapers were plainly outraged: “A graceless, unscrupulous, hideous fiend of a villain,” said the
Evening Standard
. There were demands that he receive the most severe possible sentence.

But Pierce’s calm manner never changed. He continued to be casually outrageous. On August 1, Pierce said in passing of Mr. Henry Fowler that “he is as big a fool as Mr. Brudenell.”

The prosecutor did not let the comment go by. Quickly he said, “Do you mean Lord Cardigan?”

“I mean Mr. James Brudenell.”

“That is, in fact, Lord Cardigan, is it not?”

“You may refer to him however you wish, but he is no more than Mr. Brudenell to me.”

“You defame a peer and the Inspector-General of the Cavalry.”

“One cannot,” Pierce said, with his usual calmness, “defame a fool.”

“Sir: you are accused of a heinous crime, may I remind you of that.”

“I have killed no one,” Pierce replied, “but had I killed five hundred Englishmen through my own rank stupidity I should be hanged immediately.”

This exchange was not widely reported in the newspapers, out of fear that Lord Cardigan would sue for libel. But there was another factor: Pierce was, by his testimony, hammering at the foundations of a social structure already perceived as under attack from many fronts. In short order, the master criminal ceased to be fascinating to anyone.

And in any case, Pierce’s trial could not compete with tales of wild-eyed “niggers,” as they were called, charging into a room full of women and children, raping and killing the females, skewering the screaming infants, and “disporting in a spectacle of blood-curdling heathen atavism.”

Pierce concluded his testimony on August 2nd. At that time, the prosecutor, aware that the public was perplexed by the master criminal’s cool demeanor and absence of guilt, turned to a final line of inquiry.

“Mr. Pierce,” said the prosecutor, rising to his full height, “Mr. Pierce, I put it to you directly: did you never feel, at any time, some sense of impropriety, some recognition of misconduct, some comprehension
of unlawful behavings, some moral misgivings, in the performance of these various criminal acts?”

“I do not comprehend the question,” Pierce said.

The prosecutor was reported to have laughed softly. “Yes, I suspect you do not; it is written all over you.”

At this point, His Lordship cleared his throat and delivered the following speech from the bench:

“Sir,” said the judge, “it is a recognized truth of jurisprudence that laws are created by men, and that civilized men, in a tradition of more than two millennia, agree to abide by these laws for the common good of society. For it is only by the rule of law that any civilization holds itself above the promiscuous squalor of barbarism. This we know from all the history of the human race, and this we pass on in our educational processes to all our citizens.

“Now, on the matter of motivation, sir, I ask you: why did you conceive, plan, and execute this dastardly and shocking crime?”

Pierce shrugged. “I wanted the money,” he said.

Following Pierce’s testimony, he was handcuffed and escorted from the courtroom by two stout guards, both armed. As Pierce left the court, he passed Mr. Harranby.

“Good day, Mr. Pierce,” Mr. Harranby said.

“Goodbye,” Pierce replied.

Pierce was taken out the back of Old Bailey to the waiting police van, which would drive him to Coldbath Fields. A sizable crowd had gathered on the steps of the court. The guards pushed away the crowd, which shouted greetings and expressions of luck to Pierce. One scabrous old whore, slipping forward, managed to kiss the culprit full on the mouth, if only for a moment, before the police pushed her aside.

It is presumed that this whore was actually the actress Miss Miriam, and that in kissing Pierce she passed him the key to the handcuffs, but that is not known for certain
What is known is that when the two van guards, coshed into insensibility, were later discovered in a gutter near Bow Street, they could not reconstruct the precise details of Pierce’s escape. The only thing they agreed upon was the appearance of the driver—a tough brute of a man, they said, with an ugly white scar across his forehead.

The police van was later recovered in a field in Hampstead. Neither Pierce nor the driver was ever apprehended. Journalistic accounts of the escape are vague, and all mention that the authorities showed reluctance to discuss it at length.

In September the British recaptured Cawnpore. They took no prisoners, and burned, hanged, and disemboweled their victims. When they found the blood-soaked house where the women and children had been slaughtered, they made the natives lick the red floor before hanging them. They went on, sweeping through India in what was called “the Devil’s Wind”—marching as much as sixty miles a day, burning whole villages and murdering every inhabitant, tying mutineers to the muzzles of cannons and blowing them to bits. The Indian Mutiny was crushed before the end of the year.