In the last week of July 1842, as two condemned men sat in the Hobart Gaol waiting to learn whether the gallows would claim them, the colonial administration found itself debating a question that had nothing to do with guilt or innocence, and everything to do with what a dying man was entitled to believe.
The Executive Council minutes for that week record a letter from the Chief Police Magistrate, passing on a complaint from the Reverend William Bedford. Two convicts, William Langham (per Mangles, 1835) and Thomas Shaw (per Neptune 1838), both recently brought up from Port Arthur on capital charges, had told the gaol clerk on arrival that they were Roman Catholic. This was a problem, because both men were already recorded in the government’s books as Protestants, and had been ever since they stepped on to their transport ships. Nothing in their history suggested any Catholic upbringing or belief. The conversion had happened, as far as anyone could tell, somewhere between the dock at Port Arthur and the gates of the Hobart Gaol: and it had happened only after each man knew he was likely to hang.
Governor Sir John Franklin did not think this was a coincidence, and said so to his Executive Council members. Convicts, he observed, were questioned carefully on arrival about their religion, with every effort made to ensure the answer was given sincerely. The question now was whether a man who had made that declaration years earlier should, once in the condemned cell and for reasons “evidently unconnected with any conscientious or religious motives,” be allowed to send for a minister of an entirely different faith. Franklin went further, noting what he understood to be common knowledge among the convict population: that Catholic priests would keep whatever was confided to them in the strictest secrecy, while Church of England clergymen would not. It was this belief, he suggested, that was driving condemned men to discover a Catholic conscience only once the rope was in sight.
It’s worth sitting with what was actually at stake here for Langham and Shaw. A minister who might repeat what he heard to the authorities was of no use to a man weighing up a last confession, an appeal, or simply a final reckoning he wanted kept private. A priest bound by the seal of confession was a different proposition altogether: someone to whom you could say anything without it finding its way back to the Colonial Secretary’s office. Whether or not the sacramental seal was really as impermeable as convict folklore held, the belief alone was enough to make a sudden discovery of Catholicism a rational, if cynical, move for a man with days or weeks left to live.
The Council was split on what to do about it. The Colonial Secretary took the sympathetic view: many convicts sent to the colony had no real religion at all, had probably never given the matter serious thought until they found themselves in “the awful predicament now contemplated,” and ought to be allowed spiritual support from whatever minister they chose when under threat of a death sentence being passed. It was, in his reading, better to let a man face death with whatever comfort he could find than to hold him to a label recorded years before under very different circumstances.
The Chief Police Magistrate, Matthew Forster, disagreed, and disagreed firmly. Since the greatest care was already taken to establish each convict’s religion on arrival, he argued, the government had fully discharged its duty by providing instruction according to that original declaration. To allow a switch now would be to permit exactly the kind of interference Bedford was complaining about — ministers of one denomination reaching into the pastoral territory of another, on the say-so of a man under sentence of death.
The Colonial Treasurer, Adam Turnbull, concurred, adding a pointed practical objection: prisoners under sentence, or awaiting trial, sometimes had reasons for wanting a different minister that had nothing to do with religion at all. Allowing convicts to change their professed faith so easily, he warned, simply exposed them to solicitation by priests eager to make converts of the condemned. The Senior Officer sided with the stricter view, and the minute ends there — Franklin’s Council divided down the middle on whether a man facing the gallows should be allowed to choose, at the very end, who he confided in.
The bureaucratic dryness of the minute gives no hint of just how urgent this question was for the two men actually named in it. Both had, in fact, just been tried at the Supreme Court sessions that same fortnight, and their stories explain exactly why each might have wanted a confessor he could trust.
Thomas Shaw, transported at twenty-one and by 1842 a labourer in the Port Arthur brickmakers’ gang, went on trial on 19 July 1842 for the wilful murder of Richard Pickley, an overseer found dead in his hut with a cut to the head and a neckerchief knotted twice around his throat. The case against Shaw was circumstantial but pointed: he had absconded the night Pickley was killed, was found the next evening wearing the dead man’s shirt and trousers and carrying his razor and looking-glass, and had reportedly told a constable, when asked about a spot on the razor, “it is not blood; I did not use that- I used a stick.” The Attorney-General openly criticised the police for extracting a confession improperly from the accused, and the presiding judge repeatedly cautioned constables in the box over how they had questioned Shaw. After deliberating from four in the afternoon until eight at night, the jury returned a verdict that startled the courtroom: not guilty. Shaw was returned to the custody of the Sheriff as a prisoner of the Crown, his life spared by a verdict the reporter noted was “contrary to the expectation of the spectators.” He would live another sixteen years, dying under sentence on 22 January 1858.
William Langham had no such reprieve waiting for him. Tried the very next day, 20 July, for stabbing and cutting the Assistant Colonial Surgeon Dr Brownell at Port Arthur with intent to murder, Langham was accused of lunging at the doctor with a crudely made prison knife while feigning a complaint about his eyes, catching him across the jaw before being wrestled down by a constable.
The jury convicted him only on the lesser count of cutting with intent to cause grievous bodily harm. It was not enough to save him. The following day, Langham was brought back before the court on a second, far graver indictment: stabbing a boy named Thomas Cook in his cell at Port Arthur on 14 May, holding him by the neck as though about to embrace him before driving a knife into his throat two or three times. Cook survived only because a constable answered his cries for help before Langham could finish what he’d started; Dr Brownell later testified that a slightly more forward stab would have killed him instantly.
Constable Dickenson told the court that when he pulled Langham off the boy, the prisoner’s only regret was that his knife had broken, otherwise, he said, “he would have cut his b—-y windpipe out.” The jury took five minutes to convict him. On Saturday 23 July 1842, William Langham was formally sentenced to death.
Read against that timeline, the Executive Council’s minute takes on a sharper edge. This was not an abstract policy question about religious liberty in the colony. It was Franklin’s government trying to work out, in real time, what to do about a man under sentence of death who had suddenly become Catholic in the days surrounding his own capital trial, and whether Bedford, as the Anglican minister whose claim on Langham had just been quietly discarded, had grounds to complain that the change was tactical rather than spiritual. Shaw’s case is murkier, since he walked free from his own trial and had less obvious need of a confessor immune from official ears, but he too had spent that same fortnight in the cells at the Hobart Gaol awaiting a verdict that could easily have gone the other way, and his conversion was lodged with the authorities before that verdict came in.
Whatever the Council eventually settled on in practice, the exchange preserved in the minutes of this meeting is a small, sharp window into the emotional and institutional pressure of a capital sentence in convict Van Diemen’s Land: a system that recorded a man’s soul on arrival like an item of kit, and then had to decide, years later, whether that record still held once the gallows came into view.
Sources
- Executive Council, Van Diemen’s Land, Minutes 27 July 1842 – 16 June 1843, page 24
- Thomas Shaw, conduct record CON31-1-41
- Thomas Shaw, record of death under sentence, 22 January 1858: CON63-1-2, Libraries Tasmania
- Supreme Court trial file, Rex v. Thomas Shaw (murder of Richard Pickley): SC32-1-4, Libraries Tasmania
- “Supreme Court,” Colonial Times, 26 July 1842
