Last Letters

If you knew you were at death's door -- facing assassination or execution or some other involuntary end of life -- and had in your possession a single sheet of paper on which to write your final thoughts, what would you write, and to whom would you write it?

The last letters of many famous people have found their way to publication and even to television. Mary, Queen of Scots, informed mere hours beforehand that she would be executed, chose to write a mournful letter to her brother. Anne Boelyn pleaded her innocence and begged her husband for a fair trial. Rasputin wrote to his liege:

Tsar of the land of Russia, if you hear the sound of the bell which will tell you that [I have] been killed, you must know this: if it was your relations who have wrought my death then no one of your family, that is to say, none of your children or relations will remain alive for more than two years. They will be killed by the Russian people....

Rasputin's predictions were correct in all particulars.

The day before he was gunned down in a barroom, Wild Bill Hickok, hired gunman, professional gambler, and Army scout under Custer, also had a premonition of his own death. In a last, one-sentence letter to his wife, all the more poignant because of its brevity, Hickok wrote:

Agnes Darling

If such should be we never meet again, while firing my last shot, I will gently breathe the name of my wife -- Agnes -- and with wishes even for my enemies I will make the plunge and try to swim to the other shore.

J.B. Hickok

That letter became a feature in the plot of HBO's Deadwood (a show that mines contemporary sources for dialogue true to the era and needless to say I am one big fan).

But the most remarkable last letter I have ever seen was penned by a now obscure convicted murderess writing to her lover on the eve of her hanging at the Old Bailey in London in 1848. The letter was printed in Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press by Judith Knelman. The letter-writer, Harriet Parker, had stolen the husband of another woman, Esther Blake, but that gentleman, Robert Blake, true to his nature, was untrue to Harriet as well. Harriet was so enraged that she committed what is undoubtedly the worst -- the absolutely most awful -- crime that anyone could ever commit: she suffocated his two children, ages four and six, solely to get back at their father.

Harriet Parker's stunning last remarks to Robert Blake, penned while she waited in Newgate for the executioner, were these:

Dear Robert -- This is the last time you will ever receive advice from me. My days are numbered: this day fortnight I shall be silent in the grave. Take therefore these few lines into consideration: never again trifle with a woman as you have with me. Promise to forsake all others, and cling once again to her who ought to hold the only place in your heart -- the wife of your bosom. This, Robert, I sincerely wish. I have deeply injured her, and so have you. Let her then, after this, have your best and purest affections.

And thus, after telling him what to do, the child murderess cast the blame on him:

Oh, Robert, had we parted long since, as I requested, my life, and that of those who were so near and dear to you would have been spared.... oh! may we yet meet in that land in which sorrow and misery will flee away. I only ask that you will sometimes shed the tear of pity and forgiveness over my unfortunate lot.

Just when one is prepared to conclude the lady a shockingly self-centered psychopath, she writes:

I wish you to pay some little debts for me, and I shall die much happier if you will. I owe the milk-woman 8d. Bridget did one half-day's work for me; and likewise Mrs. Washington a trifle; and the green-grocer, for coals, I think about 2s. 6d. ... Now, Robert, I must conclude; and that God in mercy may forgive, bless, and prosper you and yours, is the sincere prayer of the heart that dictates these lines. From the unfortunate

"Harriet Parker."

That letter, more than her acts alone and her confession and guilty plea, reveals a deeply disturbed woman. It is hard to argue that her public, shameful death was unwarranted.

May no one ever again have to write such a letter. May no one again receive one.

Comments

[Lennie Briscoe]

Any you never watched Ian McShane in Love Joy (as the shifty antiques dealer)?

Killing the children, she must of known the consequences and accepted her fate to be able to commit that unspeakable act...