In any case, the trial of Burgess, Agar, and Pierce was set to begin on July 12, 1857.
Chapter 51
The Trial of an Empire
The trial of the three train robbers was greeted by the public with the same sensational interest it had earlier shown in the crime itself. The prosecuting officials, mindful of the attention focused upon the event, took care to heighten the drama inherent in the proceedings. Burgess, the most minor of the players, was brought to the docket of Old Bailey first. The fact that this man knew only parts of the whole story only whetted the public appetite for further details.
Agar was interrogated next, providing still more information. But Agar, like Burgess, was a distinctly limited man, and his testimony served only to focus attention on the personality of Pierce himself, whom the press referred to as “the master criminal” and “the brilliant malignant force behind the deed.”
Pierce was still incarcerated in Coldbath Fields, and neither the public nor the press had seen him. There was plenty of freedom for eager reporters to conjure up wild and fanciful accounts of the man’s appearance, manner, and style of living. Much of what was written during the first two weeks of July, 1857, was obviously untrue: that Pierce lived with three mistresses in the same house, and was “a human dynamo”; that he had been behind the great check swindle of 1852; that he was the illegitimate son of Napoleon I; that Pierce took cocaine and laudanum; that he had previously been married to a German countess and had murdered her in 1848, in Hamburg. There is not the least evidence that any of these stories is correct, but it is certainly true that the press whipped public interest to the point of frenzy.
Even Victoria herself was not immune to the fascination with “this most bold and dastardly rogue, whom we should like to perceive at first hand.” She also expressed a desire to see his hanging; she was apparently not aware that in 1857 grand theft was no longer a capital offense in England.
For weeks, crowds had been gathering around Coldbath Fields, on the unlikely chance of getting a look at the master thief. And Pierce’s house in Mayfair was broken into on three occasions by avid souvenir hunters. One “wellborn woman”— there is no further description— was apprehended while leaving the house with a man’s handkerchief. Showing not the slightest embarrassment, she said that she merely wished to have a token of the man.
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.