Episode 10- 'I declare before my God'- The wrongful execution of Brian Seery-1846

In the summer of 1846, the town of Mullingar became the stage for a tragedy that should never have happened. A young man named Brian Seery was accused, condemned, and executed—swiftly, publicly, and, as many would later argue, wrongfully. His death was meant to bring closure to a frightened community. Instead, it left behind a legacy of doubt, injustice, and unanswered questions.

In this episode, we return to that moment in Irish history—examining the evidence, the panic, and the power structures that shaped Seery’s fate, and asking how an innocent man could be led to the gallows in the heart of Westmeath.

Transcript

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Welcome to Murder Under Gaslight. Your guide to Victorian Air Island's most gruesome crimes. Your host is Don Mortel.

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This episode is a departure from our usual format. We are not investigating a murder. We are investigating what happened when the justice system itself became the instrument of an irreversible wrong. The execution of Brian Seary on the thirteenth of february eighteen forty six outside Mullingar Jail, County Westmeath, is one of the most troubling miscarriages of justice in nineteenth century Irish history. Everything in this script is drawn from verified historical sources, parliamentary records, contemporary newspaper editorials, the National Folklore Collection, and the written and spoken declarations of Brian Seary himself. On the morning of Friday the thirteenth of february, eighteen forty six, a man was led out of Mullingar jail to be hanged. His name was Brian Seary. He was a farm laborer. He lived on the edge of Loch Orle, Lynn Lake, the locals called it, in County Westmeath. He had a wife, he had five children. The youngest was an infant. He had been convicted of the attempted murder of his former landlord, Sir Francis Hopkins, of Tudham Park. The conviction rested almost entirely on the testimony of one man, the victim himself. The first jury, kept without food or rest for thirty six hours, could not agree a verdict and was discharged. The second jury convicted him within hours. Sir Francis Hopkins had by this point signed a petition calling for Brian Seary's sentence to be commuted. The Lord Lieutenant refused to intervene. The sentence stood. Before he died, Brian Seary put his declaration into writing. Standing on the gallows, he raised his crucifix. He spoke in a calm, loud and steady tone, with what one witness described as an emphasis of awful and terrible solemnity. He said I declare before my God that I had neither act, hand, part, or knowledge in the crime for which I am going to die here. He was telling the truth. My name is Don Mortel. This is Murder Under Gaslight. True stories of crime and justice, indeed injustice, from the Victorian age, when the world was lit by flame and shadows were long and full of secrets. Tonight's episode is different. Tonight there is no murderer to profile, no web of conspiracy to untangle, no cold blooded calculation to reconstruct. Tonight, the man who died was almost certainly innocent. And the system that killed him, the juries, the judges, the Lord Lieutenant, the landlord class of Westmeath knew enough to have paused and did not pause. Tonight we talk about Brian Seary, a man the state of Ireland hanged and history nearly forgot. Brian Seary was a farm labourer who lived on the shore of Loch Hull, just outside Wolmullingar. The lake the local community knew as Lynn Lake, a broad stretch of fresh water that has sat at the heart of County Westmead's landscape since before recorded history. It was and is a place of quiet beauty. A place whose unhurried rhythms shaped the lives of the people around it in ways both practical and profound. We do not know Brian Seary's exact age. We do not know what year he was born or where he grew up, or how he came to be a tenant of Sir Francis Hopkins on the Tudenham Parker States. What we know is that by eighteen forty five he was a man with a wife, Mary, and five children, working the land on the edge of that lake. We know that he fell behind on his rent, and we know that Sir Francis Hopkins evicted him. The Tudham Park estate was and remains a substantial property north of Mullingar, a handsome house, in considerable grounds, the seat of the Hopkins family, members of the Protestant ascendancy who had held land in Westmeath for generations. Sir Francis Hopkins was a baronet. He was a magistrate. He was, in the hierarchy of Mid Victorian Ireland, as close to untouchable as a man could be. Brian Seary was a labourer with five children and arrears he could not pay. In the hierarchy of Midvictorian Ireland, he was as close to invisible as a man could be. This distance, this vast, almost unimaginable social distance between the two men, is the context in which everything that follows must be understood. The eviction appears to have been handled with some degree of personal engagement between the two men. The Freeman's Journal, the most important nationalist newspaper in Ireland at the time, would later observe with considerable significance that Brian Seary and Sir Francis Hopkins had been in constant and recent communication with one another. Their intercourse, the paper noted, was much increased by the circumstances of the removal from the estate. Seary had met with Hopkins repeatedly in the aftermath of the eviction. Their communication, the journal observed, was marked by generosity on one side and good feeling upon both. This is a crucial detail. It means Sir Francis Hopkins knew Brian Seary, knew his face, knew his manner, had spoken with him, apparently without rancor, on multiple occasions in the period immediately before the attack. This was not a fleeting acquaintance. This was a man who had every reason and every opportunity to know the face of his former tenant. Keep that in mind. The precise date of the attack on Sir Francis Hopkins at Tudonham Park is not recorded with consistency across the sources. What is recorded in local folklore, in court testimony and in newspaper accounts is what happened. Sir Francis Hopkins was approached in the grounds of his own estate by an attacker or attackers, according to the account preserved in the National Folklore Collection, gathered from an eighty-six-year-old local man, Tom Fagan, who had inherited the story through community memory. Hopkins was assaulted at his own house. Hopkins caught the man by the collar of his coat. In the struggle that followed, the man managed to stoop down and break free, leaving the coat in Hopkins' hand. A gun had been fired. Hopkins was unhurt or not seriously injured, though some accounts suggest he was grazed. He told police who arrived at Toodon Park after the attack that he believed the man was Brian Seary. He believed. He thought. He was not in his first statement. Certain. After Seary's arrest, Hopkins made a second statement. In this second statement the language hardened. He now stated that he had been attacked by Brian Seary and another assailant. The word believed had gone. In its place Certainty. The coat was taken as evidence. Police went to find Brian Seary. Brian Seary was arrested. He denied any involvement. He continued to deny it. He would go on denying it, in the cells, in the courtroom, in his written declaration. And with his last breath on the gallows for the remaining weeks of his life. What was the evidence against him beyond the identification made by Sir Francis Hopkins? The coat. The coat that Hopkins had caught and held as the attacker escaped. If the coat could be shown to belong to Seary, to have been his coat worn by him on the night of the attack, that would corroborate Hopkins' identification significantly. The Freeman's Journal, in a detailed editorial published in the days before Seary's execution, examined this evidence with forensic care. The question the paper posed was stark. Was the coat really Sear's? And the answer the paper arrived at on the basis of the evidence actually presented at trial was far from proven. Brian Seary was tried twice. The first trial took place at the Winter Assizes. The jury deliberated. They were kept without food or rest. This was standard Victorian practice, designed to concentrate the minds of jurors and encourage agreement. They were held for thirty six hours. They could not agree. At the end of the assizes, the judge discharged the jury, eleven to one, one holdout. The same arithmetic, the same human expression of reasonable doubt that had saved Matthew Phibbs from the first Ballymote jury. Except that in Phibbs' case, the evidence was overwhelming, and the holdout was probably wrong. In Seary's case, the evidence was thin, and the holdout was very possibly the only person in the room thinking clearly. The first jury's inability to convict was a signal, or it should have been. Instead, a second jury was impaneled, at the very same ascises. This is the point at which the legal proceedings in the case of Bryant Seary become, in a word, the Freeman's journal itself used, extraordinary. In the normal course of Victorian law, a defendant whose jury was discharged at one ascises would be held over and tried again at the next ascises. A fresh court, months later, with time for evidence to be gathered, for the case to be reconsidered. What happened to Brian Seary was different. A second jury was impanelled immediately, at the same ascises in the same court, in the same sitting. The same evidence. The same atmosphere, the same winter ascises of eighteen forty five, with the same landlord class watching from the gallery. Daniel O'Connell, the great Irish nationalist MP, the Liberator, the man who had won Catholic emancipation, raised this very point in the House of Commons, ten days after Seary's execution. He asked the Secretary of State directly, was there any instance in England in the last century of any person being tried for a capital felony by a second jury after the first was discharged at the same assizes, convicted and executed? The answer the Secretary of State gave was, by his own admission, a troubled one. He could find precedent, but the precedents were distinguishable. In one English case, a juror had been taken ill. In another, the jury had simply been unable to agree, but the prisoner was ultimately acquitted at the second trial. In Seary's case, the first jury had not been unable to agree due to any procedural accident. They had heard the evidence. They had considered it for thirty six hours, and eleven of them had been prepared to convict, but one was not. That one dissent was legally sufficient to prevent conviction. That legal protection was in effect bypassed by the decision to try Seary again immediately at the same sizes. The second jury convicted Brian Seary in hours. They had heard the same evidence. They reached a different conclusion. He was sentenced to death. The Freeman's Journal, in its editorial on the case, was careful not to impugn the integrity of Hopkins' testimony. The paper stated explicitly that it believed Hopkins was sincerely convinced of what he swore. Sincerely convinced. But sincerely convinced, the paper argued, was not the same as certainly correct. And it raised one question about Hopkins' testimony that it considered devastatingly unresolved. If Hopkins knew Seary so well, if he had met him, spoken to him, looked at him across a table multiple times in the weeks before the attack, then why? The paper asked, did he not immediately name Seary to the servants who came running to his assistance in the immediate aftermath of the attack? Hopkins had just been in what the paper called deadly conflict with a man he recognized intimately. He said not a word, in those first frantic minutes, about the name of his attacker. A police barracks stood, the paper noted, within a few perches of the scene. Nothing. This silence, the Freeman's journal argued, was not consistent with the certainty Hopkins later claimed. After the conviction, something remarkable happened. The community around Mullingar and beyond mobilized to save Brian Seary. A petition was drawn up, calling on the Lord Lieutenant to commute the death sentence. The petition gathered significant support. Among those who signed it was the Catholic Bishop of Meath, the most Reverend Dr. Cantwell, a man of considerable influence, who corresponded directly with the Lord Lieutenant on Seary's behalf. And then there was Sir Francis Hopkins himself. The man whose testimony had convicted Brian Seary. The man who had sworn in the second trial with categorical certainty that Seary was his attacker. Sir Francis Hopkins signed the petition calling for Brian Seary's life to be spared. Sit with that for just a moment. The soul identify the soul identifying witness the man without whose sworn evidence Brian Seary would never have been convicted after the conviction, after the death sentence. Sir Francis Hopkins signed the petition asking that Seary not be hanged. The historical record does not tell us why. Hopkins left no written explanation, none that survives of why he signed. Was it a crisis of conscience? A creeping doubt about the certainty he had expressed in court? A genuine fear that his testimony had sent an innocent man to the gallows? Or simply an act of mercy by a man who believed Seary was guilty, but felt the death penalty excessive. We cannot know. What we know is that he signed, and that the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, having received the petition, having received Dr. Cantwell's correspondence, having been visited in person by a deputation of prominent Westmeath citizens, all arguing for clemency, refused. Not only refused, but refused under pressure from the opposite direction. Because simultaneously, with the petition for clemency, another deputation arrived at the Lord Lieutenant's office, this one, a group of Westmeath landowners and Protestant ascendancy figures, was there not to seek mercy, but to insist on the execution. They came to pray, in Daniel O'Connell's formal parliamentary phrasing, that the convict should not be respited, or his sentence transmuted, but that he should be executed. The Lord Lieutenant Sir William Pelham ruled in favour of the hangman. O'Connell raised this in the House of Commons on the twenty third of february eighteen forty six, ten days after the execution. He was incandescent. He described the decision to allow a pro execution deputation to lobby the Lord Lieutenant while Cyri awaited death as extraordinary, unprecedented interference. The Secretary of State, Sir James Graham, acknowledged in his response that the interference of the pro execution deputation was harsh and unusual in the extreme, but maintained that it had no bearing on the Lord Lieutenant's decision which had been made, he insisted, purely on the evidence. This is what the record shows a man convicted on the evidence of a single witness, who later signed the petition for his reprieve. A second jury, impanelled under legally controversial circumstances. A Lord Lieutenant lobbied by men who wanted a Catholic labourer hanged, and who gave the execution the go ahead. The State of Ireland killed Brian Seary and Charles Dickens, one of the most celebrated writers in the English language, a man whose ear for injustice was among the sharpest of his age, described the case publicly as one carried out on the basis of extremely questionable evidence, in defiance of the condemned man's persistent protestations of innocence. In the cell at Mullingar Jail on the morning of Friday the thirteenth of february, eighteen forty six, Brian Seary wrote down what he wanted the world to know. He did not write of bitterness, though he had every right to bitterness. He did not write of revenge. He wrote a declaration, a formal, solemn statement addressed to God and to posterity, because those were the only courts left to him that might listen. He wrote in full. He was then led out. The crowd that had gathered outside Mullingar Jail that February morning was not a hostile crowd. It was not a celebrating crowd, as the crowds in Roscommon had been, when Major Mahan was shot on his carriage, as the crowds in Roscommon had been when Major Mahan was shot on his carriage road. It was a crowd that had come because this was what crowds did. They came to witness public executions. But in this case, many of those watching knew Brian Seary, knew his wife Mary, knew his five children, the youngest of them, still an infant. Brian Seary stood on the gallows. He raised his crucifix and he spoke in a calm, loud and steady tone, with what eyewitnesses described as an emphasis of awful and terrible solemnity. He said, I declare before my God that I had neither act, hand, part, or knowledge in the crime for which I am going to die here. Those were his last words. He was hanged. He was thirty something years old, we do not know his exact age. He left behind Mary and five children. The youngest an infant. His body was buried. His grave was not marked in any way that history has preserved. The story of Brian Seary does not end at Mullingar Jail on the thirteenth of february eighteen forty six. It has a coda, and it is a coda of almost unbearable sadness. Brian Seary's son, James, grew up without a father. He grew up in the island. the island of the late famine and its aftermath, a landscape of devastation and diminished hope. Like so many thousands of his generation, he eventually emigrated. He went to Australia, to the gold fields of the Gipsland region of Victoria. Looking for work and a future the Ireland had not been able to offer him. He found neither in eighteen seventy James Seary was arrested in Victoria and charged with the murder and mutilation of a body found in the Gypsland Bushland. He was tried, he was convicted on evidence that his defenders considered deeply questionable. He was sentenced to death on the fourteenth of november eighteen seventy, twenty four years and nine months after his father was hanged outside Mellingor jail, James Seary was executed in Victoria, Australia. He was thirty three years old he also protested his innocence. He also, by all accounts available, went to his death telling the truth. Author and historian Jack Kiernan, a Malinga man who has made the Seary case his life's work, wrote in his two thousand nine book I declare before my God, the Bryan and James Seary story, that in his view in the Ireland or Australia of today neither case would get into court. The evidence against Bryan was the single identification of a shaken man who later signed a petition for his reprieve. The evidence against James was similarly circumstantial similarly disputed Father and son two continents twenty four years apart two ropes Mary Seary, wife and mother was left on her own to raise five children through some of the most difficult years in the history of the Irish Midlands. What became of her the record does not say The case of Brian Seary has never been formally reviewed. There has been no posthumous exoneration, no official acknowledgement by the Irish state that what happened outside Mullingar jail on the thirteenth of february eighteen forty six was wrong. His name appears in the National Folklore collection in a story told by an eighty six year old man to a schoolgirl in Mullingar, preserved there as a community memory. He appears in Hansard in the words of Daniel O'Connell, demanding answers from a Secretary of State who admitted procedural irregularities and defended the execution anyway. He appears in the Freeman's journal whose editors were so convinced of the injustice that they called Seary a murdered man. He appears in the writing of Charles Dickens he does not appear on any monument in Mullingar he does not appear on any official list of miscarriages of justice. His grave wherever it is is unmarked the elements that should have saved him were all present a first jury that could not convict, an identification witness who later signed a petition for his reprieve, a nationally prominent politician raising procedural concerns in Parliament, the Catholic Bishop of Meath in direct correspondence with the Lord Lieutenant a press corps that was openly questioning whether the man was guilty. None of it was enough because ranged against it were the men of property of County Westmeath who wanted the matter settled, who came in deputation to the Lord Lieutenant and asked that the law be allowed to take its course who lived on their estates and collected their rents from men like Brian Seary, and could not afford politically, socially psychologically to contemplate a world in which the word of a farm labourer might outweigh the word of a baronet the Lord Lieutenant gave them what they came for and Brian Seary was hanged I want to say something plainly before we close this podcast is called Murder Under Gaslight. We investigate historical cases of violence and injustice from the Victorian age. We try to be factual we try to be measured we try to let the evidence speak but there are times when the evidence speaks so clearly that measured is not the appropriate register and this is one of those times The State of Ireland executed Brian Seary on the basis of a single identification that the identifier himself subsequently sought to walk back. It did so using a legal process that was at best deeply questionable, and which Daniel O'Connell the finest legal mind in Irish public life considered irregular and possibly unprecedented. It did so over the active opposition of the Catholic bishop, the press, the petitioning community and the victim himself. It did so because in 1846 in County Westmeath a farm labourer's declaration before God was worth less than a landlord's word and a landlord's word however wavering however contradicted was enough to hang a man. Brian Seary said he was innocent.

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The balance of the available evidence suggests he was telling the truth he deserves to be remembered his name deserves to be said Murder under gaslight is a Westmeath Pocket cinema production historical advisor is Jason McKevitt. Murder under gaslight is presented by Don Mortell