NOTABLE EXECUTIONS
Reasons for legal punishments—Early forms—Capital punishment
universal—Methods of inflicting death—Awful cruelties—The
English custom—Pressing to death—Abolition of this punishment
—Decapitation and strangulation—The guillotine and gallows—
Smithfield, St. Giles, Tower Hill, Tyburn—Derivation of Tyburn
—An execution in 1662—Fashionable folk attend—George Selwyn
—Breakfast party at Newgate—Ribald conduct of the mob at
executions—Demeanour of condemned: effrontery, or abject
terror—Improper customs long retained—St. Giles's Bowl—
Saddler of Bawtry—Smoking at Tyburn—Richard Dove's bequest—
The hangman and his office—Resuscitation—Sir William Petty's
operation—Tyburn procession continues—Supported by Doctor
Johnson—The front of Newgate substituted as the scene of
execution.
The universal instinct of self-preservation underlies the whole theory
of legal punishments. Society, from the earliest beginnings, has
claimed through its rulers to inflict penalties upon those who have
broken the laws framed for the protection of all. These penalties have
varied greatly in all ages and in all times. They have been based on
different principles. Many, especially in ruder and earlier times, have
been conceived in a vindictive spirit; others, notably those of Mosaic
law, were retaliatory, or aimed at restitution. All, more or less, were
intended to deter from crime. The criminal had generally to pay in his
person or his goods. He was either subjected to physical pain applied
in degrading, often ferociously cruel ways, and endured mutilation, or
was branded, tortured, put to death; he was mulcted in fines, deprived
of liberty, or adjudged as a slave to indemnify by manual labour those
whom he had wronged. Imprisonment as practised in modern times has
followed from the last-named class of punishments. Although affecting
the individual, and in many of its phases with brutal and reckless
disregard for human suffering, it can hardly be styled a purely
personal punishment, as will be shown from a closer examination of the
various methods of corporeal punishment.
In sharp contrast with the privations and terrible discomforts of the
poorer sort was the wild revelry of the aristocratic prisoners of the
press-yard. They had every luxury to be bought with money, freedom
alone excepted, and that was often to be compassed by bribing dishonest
officials to suffer them to escape.
Taking first the punishments which fell short of death, those most
common in England, until comparatively recent times, were branding,
mutilation, dismemberment, whipping, and degrading public exposure.
Branding was often carried out with circumstances of atrocious
barbarity. Vagabonds were marked with the letter V, idlers and
masterless men with the letter S, betokening a condemnation to slavery;
any church brawler lost his ears, and for a second offence might be
branded with the letter F, as a "fraymaker" and fighter. Sometimes
the penalty was to bore a hole of the compass of an inch through the
gristle of the right ear. Branding was the commutation of a capital
sentence on clerk convicts, or persons allowed benefit of clergy, and
it was inflicted upon the brawn of the left thumb, the letter M being
used in murder cases, the letter T in others. In the reign of William
and Mary, when the privilege of benefit of clergy was found to be
greatly abused, an act was passed, by which the culprit was branded or
"burnt in the most visible part of the left cheek nearest the nose."
Mutilation was an ancient Saxon punishment, no doubt perpetuating the
Mosaic law of retaliation which claimed an eye for an eye, a tooth
for a tooth, a limb for a limb. William the Conqueror adopted it in
his penal code. It was long put in force against those who broke the
forestry laws, coiners, thieves, and such as failed to prove their
innocence by ordeal. Although almost abandoned by the end of the
sixteenth century, the penalty of mutilation, extending to the loss
of the right hand, still continued to be punishment for murder and
bloodshed within the limits of a royal residence. The most elaborate
ceremonial was observed. All the hierarchy of court officials attended;
there was the sergeant of the wood-yard, the master cook to hand the
dressing-knife, the sergeant of the poultry, the yeoman of the scullery
with a fire of coals, the sergeant farrier, who heated and delivered
the searing irons, which were applied by the chief surgeon after the
dismemberment had been effected. Vinegar, basin, and cloths were handed
to the operator by the groom of the salcery, the sergeant of the ewry,
and the yeoman of the chandrey. "After the hand had been struck off and
the stump seared, the sergeant of the pantry offered bread, and the
sergeant of the cellar a pot of red wine, of which the sufferer was to
partake with what appetite he might." Readers of Sir Walter Scott will
remember how Nigel Olifaunt, in the "Fortunes of Nigel," was threatened
with the loss of his hand for having committed a breach of privilege
in the palace of Greenwich and its precincts. Pistols are found on his
person when he accidentally meets and accosts James I. For the offence
he may be prosecuted, so Sir Mungo Malagrowther complacently informs
him, _usque ad mutilationem_, "even to dismemberation."
The occasion serves the garrulous knight to refer to a recent
performance, "a pretty pageant when Stubbs, the Puritan, was sentenced
to mutilation for writing and publishing a seditious pamphlet against
Elizabeth. With Stubbs, Page, the publisher, also suffered. They lost
their right hands," the wrist being divided by a cleaver driven through
the joint by the force of a mallet.
"I remember," says the historian Camden, "being then present, that
Stubbs, when his right hand was cut off, plucked off his hat with his
left, and said with a loud voice, 'God save the queen.' The multitude
standing about was deeply silent, either out of horror of this new
and unwonted kind of punishment, or out of commiseration towards the
man. . . ." The process of mutilation was at times left to the agonized
action of the culprit: as in the brutal case of one Penedo, who in
1570, for counterfeiting the seal of the Court of Queen's Bench, was
twice put in the pillory on market-day in Cheapside. The first day
one of his ears was to be nailed to the pillory in such a manner that
he should be compelled "by his own proper motion" to tear it away;
and on the second day he was to lose his other ear in the same cruel
fashion. William Prynne, it will be remembered, also lost his ears on
the pillory, but at the hands of the executioner. The Earl of Dorset,
in giving the sentence of the Star Chamber Court, asked his fellow
judges "whether he should burn him in the forehead, or slit him in
the nose? . . . I should be loth he should escape with his ears; . . .
therefore I would have him branded in the forehead, slit in the nose,
and his ears cropt too." Having suffered all this on the pillory, he
was again punished three years later, when he lost the remainder of his
ears, and was branded with the letters S. L. (seditious libeller) on
each cheek. Doctor Bastwick and others were similarly treated. Doctor
Bastwick's daughter, Mrs. Poe, after his ears were cut off, called for
them, put them in a clean handkerchief, and carried them away with her.
Prynne was a voluminous writer, and is said to have produced some two
hundred volumes in all. A contemporary, who saw him in the pillory at
Cheapside, says that they burned his huge volumes under his nose, which
almost suffocated him.
Although mutilations and floggings were frequently carried out at the
pillory, that well-known machine was primarily intended as a means of
painful and degrading exposure, and not for the infliction of physical
torture. The pillory is said to have existed in England before the
Norman Conquest, and it probably dates from times much more remote.
The ετηλη of the Greeks, the pillar on which offenders were publicly
exhibited, seems to have been akin to the pillory, just as the κυφων,
or wooden collar, was the prototype of the French _carcan_ or iron
circlet which was riveted around the culprit's neck, and attached by a
chain to the post or pillory. In England the pillory or "stretch neck"
was at first applied only to fraudulent traders, perjurers, forgers,
and so forth; but as years passed it came to be more exclusively the
punishment of those guilty of infamous crimes, amongst whom were long
included rash writers who dared to express their opinions too freely
before the days of freedom of the press. Besides Prynne, Leighton,
Burton, Warton, and Bastwick, intrepid John Lilburne also suffered,
under the Star Chamber decree, which prohibited the printing of any
book without a license from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Bishop
of London, or the authorities of the two universities. Daniel Defoe,
again, was pilloried in 1703 for his pamphlet, "The Shortest Way
with the Dissenters." Defoe gave himself up, and was pilloried first
in Cheapside, and afterwards in the Temple. The mob so completely
sympathized with him, that they covered him with flowers, drank his
health, and sang his "Ode to the Pillory" in chorus. Doctor Shebbeare
was pilloried in 1759, for his "Letters to the People of England." But
he found a friend in the under-sheriff, Mr. Beardmore, who took him to
the place of penitence, in a stage-coach, and allowed a footman in rich
livery to hold an umbrella over the doctor's head, as he stood in the
pillory. Beardmore was afterwards arraigned for neglect of duty, found
guilty, and sentenced to fine and imprisonment.
In 1765, Williams, the publisher, who reprinted Wilkes's _North
Briton_, stood in the pillory in Palace Yard for an hour. For the
moment he became popular. He arrived in a hackney-coach numbered
45,[162:1] attended by a vast crowd. He was cheered vociferously
as he mounted the pillory with a sprig of laurel in each hand; and
a gentleman present made a collection of two hundred guineas for
him in a purple purse adorned with orange ribbons. In front of the
pillory the mob erected a gallows, and hung on it a boot, with other
emblems, intended to gibbet the unpopular minister Lord Bute. Williams
was conducted from the pillory amid renewed acclamations, and the
excitement lasted for some days. Lampoons and caricatures were widely
circulated. Several street ballads were also composed, one of which
began:
"Ye sons of Wilkes and Liberty,
Who hate despotic sway,
The glorious Forty-Five now crowns
This memorable day.
And to New Palace Yard let us go, let us go."
Lord Dundonald in 1814 was actually sentenced to the pillory, but the
Government shrank from inflicting the punishment upon that much wronged
naval hero. The pillory ceased to be a punishment, except for perjury,
in 1815, but was not finally abolished until 1837, and as late as 1830
one Doctor Bossy suffered on it for perjury.
The earliest form of pillory was simply a post erected in a cross-road
by the lord of the manor, as a mark of his seigneury.[164:1] It bore
his arms, and on it was a collar, the _carcan_ already mentioned, by
which culprits were secured. This was in course of time developed,
and the pillory became a cross-piece of wood fixed like a sign-board
at the top of a pole, and placed upon an elevated platform. In this
cross were three holes, one for the head, the other two for the wrists.
The cross-piece was in two halves, the upper turning on a hinge to
admit the culprit's head and hands, and closed with a padlock when the
operation of insertion was completed. A more elaborate affair, capable
of accommodating a number of persons, is figured in mediæval woodcuts,
but this sort of pillory does not appear to have been very generally
used. The curious observer may still see specimens in England of this
well-known instrument of penal discipline: one is preserved in the
parish church of Rye, Sussex, another is in the museum at Brighton.
The stocks served like the pillory to hold up offenders to public
infamy. The first authentic mention of them is in a statute of Edward
III, by which they were to be applied to unruly labourers. Soon after
this they were established by law in every village, often near the
parish church. They were the punishment for brawling, drunkenness,
vagrancy, and all disorderly conduct. Wood-stealers or "hedge-tearers"
were set in the stocks, about the year 1584, for a couple of days with
the stolen wood in front of them.
The story goes that Cardinal Wolsey, when a young parish priest,
was put in the stocks at Lymington by Sir Amyas Poulett, for having
"exceeded" at a village feast. The old "Chap" books contain numerous
references to the stocks of course. Welch Taffy, "the unfortunate
traveller," was put into the stocks for calling a justice of the peace
a "boobie;" and "Simple Simon," when he interfered in a butter-woman's
quarrel, was adjudged to be drunk and put into the stocks between the
two viragoes, who scolded him all the time. The story of Lord Camden
is probably well known. When a young barrister he had a desire to try
the stocks, and was left in them by an absent-minded friend, for the
greater part of the day. The last stocks in London were those of St.
Clement's Dane's in Portugal Street, which were removed in 1826, to
make way for local improvements. As late as 1860 one John Gambles of
Stanningly was sentenced to sit in the stocks for six hours for Sunday
gambling, and actually endured his punishment.[165:1] Stocks were last
to be seen at Heath near Wakefield, Painswick in Gloucestershire, and
other places. In all cases the physical discomfort of the stocks, no
less than that of the pillory, was generally aggravated by the rude
horse-play of a jeering and actively offensive mob. A reference to
the inconvenient attentions of the bystanders at such an exhibition
will be found in an old "Chap" book, entitled "The True Trial of the
Understanding," in which among other riddles the following is given:
"Promotion lately was bestowed
Upon a person mean and small:
Then many persons to him flowed,
Yet he returned no thanks at all.
But yet their hands were ready still
To help him with their kind good-will."
The answer is, a man pelted in the pillory.
Worse sometimes happened, and in several cases death ensued from
ill-usage in the pillory. Thus when John Waller, _alias_ Trevor, was
pilloried in 1732, in Seven Dials, for falsely accusing innocent men,
so as to obtain the reward given on the conviction of highwaymen, so
great was the indignation of the populace that they pelted him to
death. The coroner's inquest returned a verdict of wilful murder, but
against persons unknown. In 1763 a man who stood in the pillory at Bow,
for an unnatural crime, was killed by the mob. Ann Marrow, who had been
guilty of the strange offence of disguising herself as a man, and as
such marrying three different women, was sentenced to three months'
imprisonment, and exposure on the pillory, at Charing Cross. So great
was the resentment of the populace, principally those of the female
sex, that they pelted her till they put out both her eyes.[167:1]
No account of the minor physical punishments formerly inflicted
would be complete without reference to the methods of coercing
ill-conditioned females. These were mostly of the same character as the
pillory and stocks. Chief among them was the ducking or cucking-stool,
a scourge for scolds, and once as common in every parish as the
stocks. Other varieties of it were known under the names of tumbrel,
the gumstole, the triback, the trebucket, and the reive. It may be
described briefly as consisting of a chair or seat fixed at the end of
a long plank, which revolved on a pivot, and by some simple application
of leverage upset the occupant of the chair into a pond or stream. Mr.
Cole, 1782, describes one which was hung to a beam in the middle of a
bridge. The Leominster stool, which is still preserved, is a plank upon
a low substantial framework, having the seat at one end, and working
like an ordinary seesaw: that at Wooton Basset was of the tumbrel
order, and was a framework on a pair of wheels, with shafts at one end,
the stool being at the other. In this, as in the Leicester "scolding
cart," and other forms of tumbrels, the culprit was paraded through
the town before immersion. The punishment was primarily intended for
scolds, shrews, and "curst queens," but it was also applied to female
brewers and bakers who brewed bad ale, and sold bad bread. It was
inflicted pursuant to sentence in open court, but in some parts the
bailiffs had the power within their own jurisdictions, and the right
of gallows, tumbrel, and pillory was often claimed by lords of the
manor. The greatest antiquity is claimed for this sort of punishment.
Bowine declares that it was used by the Saxons, by whom it was called
"Cathedra in qua rixosæ mulieres sedentes aquæ demergebantur." No doubt
the ducking was often roughly and cruelly carried out. We have in the
frontispiece of an old "Chap" book, which relates how "an old woman
was drowned in Ratcliffe highway," a pictorial representation of the
ceremony of ducking, and it is stated that she met her death by being
dipped too often or too long. That the instrument was in general use
through the kingdom is proved by numerous entries in ancient records.
Thus Lysons, in his "Environs of London," states that at a court of the
Manor of Edgware in 1552 the inhabitants were presented for not having
a tumbrel and a ducking-stool as laid down by law. In the Leominster
town records the bailiff and chamberlains are repeatedly brought up and
fined either for not providing "gumstoles" or not properly repairing
them, while in the same and other records are numerous statements of
bills paid to carpenters for making or mending these instruments. The
use of them, moreover, was continued to very recent times. A woman
was ducked under Kingston Bridge in 1745 for scolding. At Manchester,
Liverpool, and other Lancashire towns the stool was in use till the
commencement of this century. So it was at Scarborough, where the
offender was dipped into the water from the end of the old pier. But
the latest inflictions seemingly were at Leominster, where in 1809 a
woman named Jenny Pipes was paraded and ducked near Kerwater Bridge,
while another, Sarah Leeke, was wheeled round the town in 1817, but not
ducked, the water being too low.
The ducking-stool was not always an effectual punishment. It appears
from the records of the King's Bench that in the year 1681 Mrs.
Finch, a notorious scold, who had been thrice ducked for scolding,
was a fourth time sentenced for the same offence, and sentenced to be
fined and imprisoned. Other measures were occasionally taken which
were deemed safer, but which were hardly less cruel. The "branks,"
or bridle, for gossips and scolds, was often preferred to the
ducking-stool, which endangered the health, and, moreover, gave the
culprit's tongue free play between each dip.
The branks was a species of iron mask, with a gag so contrived as to
enter the mouth and forcibly hold down the unruly member. It consisted
of a kind of crown or framework of iron, which was locked upon the
head and was armed in front with a gag,—a plate or a sharp-cutting
knife or point. Various specimens of this barbarous instrument are
still extant in local museums, that in the Ashmolean at Oxford being
especially noticeable, as well as that preserved in Doddington Park,
Lincolnshire. The branks are said to have been the invention of agents
of the Spanish Inquisition, and to have been imported into England from
the Low Countries, whither it had travelled from Spain.
The brutality of the stronger and governing to the weaker and subject
sex was not limited to the ducking-stool and branks. It must be
remembered with shame in this more humane age that little more than
a hundred years ago women were publicly whipped at the whipping-post
near the stocks, or at any cart's tail. The fierce statute against
vagrants of Henry VIII's and Elizabeth's reign made no distinction
of sex, and their ferocious provisions to the effect that offenders
"should be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and whipped till
the body should be bloody," long continued in force. Men with their
wives and children were flogged publicly, and sometimes by the order
of the clergyman of the parish. Girls of twelve and thirteen, aged
women of sixty, all suffered alike; women "distracted," in other words
out of their minds, were arrested and lashed; so were those that had
the smallpox, and all who walked about the country and begged. On the
first introduction of the treadwheel in the early decades of the last
century, its use was not restricted to males, and women were often
made to suffer this punishment. Whipping females was not abolished
till 1817. The constable's charge for whipping was fourpence, but the
sum was increased latterly to a shilling. The whipping-post was often
erected in combination with the stocks. A couple of iron clasps were
fixed to the upright which supported the stocks, to take the culprit's
hands and hold him securely while he was being lashed. A modification
of this plan has long been used at Newgate for the infliction of
corporal punishment, and it may still be seen in the old ward at the
back of the middle yard.
Ferocious as were most of the methods I have detailed of dealing
with offenders against the law, they generally, except by accident,
fell short of death. Yet were there innumerable cases in those
uncompromising and unenlightened ages in which death alone would be
deemed equal to the offences. Rulers might be excused, perhaps, if they
were satisfied with nothing less than a criminal's blood.
As Maine says, "The punishment of death is a necessity of society in
certain stages of the civilizing process. There is a time when an
attempt to dispense with it balks two of the great instincts which lie
at the root of all penal law. Without it the community neither feels
that it is sufficiently revenged on the criminal, nor thinks that the
example of his punishment is adequate to deter others from imitating
him." Hence all penal legislation in the past included some form of
inflicting the death sentence. These have differed in all ages and
in all climes: about some there was a brutal simplicity; others have
been marked by great inventiveness, great ingenuity, much refinement
of cruelty. Offenders have been stoned, beaten, starved to death; they
have been flayed alive, buried alive, cast headlong from heights, torn
to pieces by wild animals, broken on the wheel, crucified, impaled,
burnt, boiled, beheaded, strangled, drowned. They have been killed
outright or by inches, enduring horrible agonies;[172:1] after death
their bodies have been dismembered and disembowelled, as a mark of
degradation. Irresponsible tyrants went further than lawgivers in
devising pains. The Sultan Mechmed cut men in the middle, through the
diaphragm, thus causing them to die two deaths at once. It is told of
Crœsus that he caused a person who had offended him to be scratched
to death by a friller's carding-combs. What the Vaivod of Transylvania
did to the Polish leader, George Jechel, may be read in the pages of
Montaigne. The frightful barbarity to which he and his followers were
subjected need not be repeated here.
The tender mercies of continental nations towards criminals may be
realized by a reference to one or two of their contrivances for the
infliction of death. The Iron Coffin of Lissa, for example, wherein the
convicted person lay for days awaiting death from the fell pressure of
the heavily weighted lid, which slid down slowly, almost imperceptibly,
upon his helpless frame; or the Virgin of Baden Baden, the brazen
statue whose kiss meant death with frightful tortures, the unhappy
culprit being commanded to prostrate himself and kiss the statue, but
as he raised his lips a trap-door opened at his feet, and he fell
through on to a spiked wheel, which was set in motion by his fall.
There was the _chambre à crucer_, a short hollow chest lined with
sharp stones, in which the victim was packed and buried alive; or the
"bernicles," a mattress which clutched the sufferer tight, while his
legs were broken by heavy logs of wood; or the long lingering death in
the iron cages of Louis XI, the occupant of which could neither sit,
stand, nor lie down. Again, the devilish tortures inflicted upon the
murderers Ravaillac and Damiens caused a shudder throughout Europe.
Ravaillac was burnt piecemeal, flesh was torn from him by red-hot
pincers, scalding oil and molten lead were poured upon his bleeding
wounds, he was drawn and dismembered by horses while still alive, and
only received his _coup de grace_ from the sticks and knives of the
hellish bystanders, who rushed in to finish more savagely what the
executioner had been unable to complete. As for Damiens, the process
followed was identical, but the details preserved of an event nearer
our own time are more precise and revolting. He was fastened down
upon a platform by iron gyves, one across his breast, the other just
above his thighs; his right hand was then burnt with brimstone, he
was pinched with red-hot pincers, after which boiling oil, molten
wax, rosin, and lead were poured upon his wounds. His limbs were next
tightly tied with cords, a long and protracted operation, during which
he must have suffered renewed and exquisite torture; four stout, young,
and vigorous horses were attached to the cords, and an attempt made
to tear his limbs asunder, but only with the result of "extending his
joints to a prodigious length," and it was necessary to second the
efforts of the horses by cutting the principal sinews of the sufferer.
Soon after this the victim expired. Then his body was burnt and the
ashes scattered to the winds.
In this country the simpler forms of executions have generally
obtained. The stake was no doubt in frequent use at certain periods
for particular offences, but the axe and the rope were long the most
common instruments of despatch. Death was otherwise inflicted, however.
Drowning is mentioned by Stowe as the fate of pirates, and a horrible
method of carrying out capital punishment remained in force until 1772.
Pressing to death, or the _peine forte et dure_, was a development
of the ancient prison _forte et dure_, the punishment of those who
refused "to stand to the law;" in other words, stood mute, and refused
to plead to a charge. Until the reign of Henry IV such persons were
condemned to penance and perpetual imprisonment, but the penance meant
confinement in a narrow cell and absolute starvation. Some evaded
the dread consequences, and therefore a more awful form of torture
was introduced with the object of compelling the silent to speak. An
accused person who persistently stood mute was solemnly warned three
times of the penalty that waited on his obstinacy, and given a few
hours for consideration. If the prisoner continued contumacious, the
following sentence was passed upon him, or her:
"That you be taken back to the prison whence you came to a low dungeon,
into which no light can enter; that you be laid on your back on the
bare floor with a cloth round your loins, but elsewhere naked; that
there be set upon your body a weight of iron as great as you can
bear—and greater; that you have no sustenance, save on the first day
three morsels of the coarsest bread, on the second day three draughts
of stagnant water from the pool nearest the prison door, on the third
day again three morsels of bread as before, and such bread and such
water alternately from day to day till you die."
The press was a form of torture with this difference that, when once
applied, there was seldom any escape from it. The practice of tying the
thumbs with whipcord was another form of torture inflicted to oblige
an accused person to plead, and in force as late as the reign of Queen
Anne.
Regarding the _peine forte et dure_ Holinshed says, that when accused
felons stood mute of malice on arraignment they were pressed to death
"by heavy weights laid upon a board that lieth over their breasts and
a sharp stone under their backs, and these commonly hold their peace
thereby to save their goods unto their wives and children, which if
they were condemned should be confiscated to the prince." There are
continual references to the _peine forte et dure_ in the legal records
throughout the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. In 1605 Walter
Calverly, Esq., of Calverly in Yorkshire, who was arraigned for the
murder of his wife and two children, stood mute, and was pressed to
death in York Castle. Another notable instance of the application of
this fearful punishment was in the case of Major Strangways, who was
arraigned in February, 1657-58, for the murder of his brother-in-law
Mr. Fussell. He refused to plead unless he was assured that if
condemned he might be shot as his brother-in-law had been. In addition
he said that he wished to preserve his estate from confiscation. Chief
Justice Glyn reasoned with him at length, but could not alter his
decision, and he was duly sentenced to the _peine forte et dure_. The
sentence ran that he was to be put into a mean room where no light
could enter, and where he was to be laid upon his back with his body
bare; his legs and arms were to be stretched out with cords, and then
iron and stone were to be laid upon him "as much as he could bear—and
more;" his food the first day was to be three morsels of barley bread,
and on the second day he was "to drink thrice of water in the channel
next to the prison, but no spring or fountain water—and this shall be
his punishment till he dies."
Strangways suffered in Newgate. He was attended to the last by five
pious divines, and spent much of his time in prayer. On the day of
execution he appeared all in white "waistcoat, stockings, drawers, and
cap, over which was cast a long mourning-cloak," and so was "guarded
down to a dungeon in the press-yard, the dismal place of execution."
On his giving the appointed signal, "his mournful attendants performed
their dreadful task. They soon perceived that the weight they laid on
was not sufficient to put him suddenly out of pain, so several of them
added their own weight, that they might sooner release his soul." He
endured great agonies. His groans were "loud and doleful," and it was
eight or ten minutes before he died. After death his body was exposed
to view, and it was seen that an angle of the press had been purposely
placed over his heart, so that he might the sooner be deprived of life,
"though he was denied what is usual in these cases, to have a sharp
piece of timber under his back to hasten execution."
In 1721, Nathaniel Hawes, who had come to be what we should to-day
call an habitual criminal, and who had been frequently in Newgate,
took to the road. After various successful adventures, he stopped a
gentleman on Finchley Common, who was more than his match and made him
prisoner. He was conveyed to London and committed to Newgate. When
brought to the bar of the Old Bailey he refused to plead, giving as his
reason that he meant to die as he had lived, like a gentleman. When he
was seized, he said he had on a fine suit of clothes, which he intended
to have gone to the gallows in, but they had been taken from him.
"Unless they are returned, I will not plead," he went on, "for no one
shall say that I was hanged in a dirty shirt and a ragged coat." He was
warned what would be the consequences of his contempt of the law, but
he obstinately persevered, and was accordingly sentenced to the press.
He bore a weight of 250 pounds for about seven minutes, and then gave
in, being unable any longer to bear the pain. On return to court he
pleaded "Not guilty," but was convicted and sentenced to death.
Two years later, William Spiggot and Thomas Phillips, arraigned for
highway robbery, refused to plead, and were also sentenced to the
press. Phillips, on coming into the press-yard, was affrighted by the
apparatus, and begged that he might be taken back to court to plead, "a
favour that was granted him; it might have been denied him." Spiggot,
however, remained obdurate, and was put under the press, where he
continued half an hour with a weight to the amount of 350 pounds on his
body; "but, on addition of the fifty pounds more, he likewise begged to
plead." Both were then convicted and hanged in the ordinary course of
law.
[Illustration: _Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, London_
From an old engraving representing a session at the Old
Bailey, the principal criminal court in all England, which
has been the scene of many sensational and historic trials
and is connected with history of London from the earliest
times.]
Again, Edward Burnworth, the captain of a gang of murderers and robbers
which rose into notoriety on the downfall of Wild, was sentenced to
the press at Kingston in 1726, by Lord Chief Justice Raymond and Judge
Denton. He bore the weight of 1 cwt. 3 qrs. 2 lbs. on his breast for
the space of an hour and three minutes, during which time the high
sheriff who attended him used every argument to induce him to plead,
but in vain. Burnworth, all the time, was trying to kill himself by
striking his head against the floor. At last he was prevailed on to
promise to plead, was brought back to court, and duly sentenced to
death.
The last instance in which the press was inflicted was at Kilkenny in
Ireland. A man named Matthew Ryan stood mute at his trial for highway
robbery, and was adjudged by the jury to be guilty of "wilful and
affected dumbness and lunacy." He was given some days' grace, but
still remaining dumb, he was pressed to death in the public market
of Kilkenny. As the weights were put upon him the wretched man broke
silence and implored that he might be hanged, but the sheriff could not
grant his request.
In 1731 a new press was made and fixed in the press-yard, for the
punishment of a highwayman named Cook, but it was not used. At length,
in 1772, the law on this head was altered and judgment was awarded
against mutes as though convicted or they had confessed. In 1778 one
so suffered at the Old Bailey. Finally, it was provided that the court
should enter a plea of "Not guilty" when the prisoner refused to plead.
The principal forms of capital punishment, however, as the derivation
of the expression implies, have dealt with the head as the most
vulnerable part of the body. Death has been and still is most generally
inflicted by decapitation and strangulation. The former, except in
France, where it came to be universal, was the most aristocratic
method; the latter was long applied only to criminals of the baser
sort. Until the invention of the guillotine, culprits were beheaded by
sword or axe, and were often cruelly mangled by a bungling executioner.
It is asserted by the historian that the executioner pursued the
Countess of Salisbury about the scaffold, aiming repeated blows at
her, before he succeeded in striking off her head. This uncertainty in
result was only ended by the ingenious invention of Doctor Guillotin,
the prototype of which existed in the time of the Scotch "Maiden." The
regent Morton, who introduced this instrument into Scotland, and who
himself suffered by it, is said to have patterned it after the Halifax
Gibbet.[181:1] Guillotin's machine was not altogether original, but it
owed more to the Italian "Mannaïa" than to the "Maiden." Nor, according
to Sanson, the French headsman, was he the actual inventor of the
notorious instrument guillotine, which bears his name. The guillotine
was designed by one Schmidt, a German engineer and artificer of musical
instruments. Guillotin enthusiastically adopted Schmidt's design, which
he strongly recommended in the assembly, declaring that by it a culprit
could not suffer, but only feel a slight freshness on the neck. Louis
XVI was decapitated by the guillotine, as was the doctor, its sponsor
and introducer.
Strangulation, whether applied by the bowstring, cord, handkerchief,
or drop, is as old as the hills. It was inflicted by the Greeks as an
especially ignominious punishment. The "sus per coll." was not unknown
in the penal law of the Romans, who were in the habit also of exposing
the dead convict upon the gibbet, "as a comfortable sight to his
friends and relations."
In London various places have been used for the scene of execution.
The spot where a murder had been committed was often appropriately
selected as the place of retribution. Execution Dock was reserved
for pirates and sea-robbers, Tower Hill for persons of rank who were
beheaded. Gallows for meaner malefactors were sometimes erected on the
latter place, the right to do so being claimed by the city. In the
reign of Edward IV, however, there was a conflict of authority between
the king and the Corporation on this point. The king's officer set
up a scaffold and gallows on Tower Hill, whereupon the mayor and his
brethren complained to the king, who replied, that he had not acted in
derogation of the city liberties, and caused public proclamation to be
made that the city exercised certain rights on Tower Hill. Executions
also took place, according to Pennant, at the Standard in Chepe. Three
men were beheaded there for rescuing a prisoner, and in 1351 two
fishmongers for some unknown crime. Smithfield had long the dismal
honour of witnessing the death-throes of offenders. Between Hozier and
Cow Lanes was anciently a large pool called Smithfield Pond or Horse
Pool, "from the watering of horses there;" to the southwest lay St.
John's Court, and close to it the public gallows on the town green.
There was a clump of trees in the centre of the green, elms, from which
the place of execution was long euphemistically called "The Elms." It
was used as such early in the thirteenth century, and distinguished
persons, William Fitzosbert, Mortimer, and Sir William Wallace
suffered here.
About 1413 the gibbet was removed from Smithfield and put up at the
north end of a garden wall belonging to St. Giles's Leper Hospital,
"opposite the Pound where the Crown Tavern is at present situate,
between the end of St. Giles High Street and Hog Lane." But Smithfield
must have been still used after the transfer of the gallows to St.
Giles. In 1580 another conflict of jurisdiction, this time between the
city and the Lieutenant of the Tower. A gibbet was erected in that year
in East Smithfield, at Hog Lane, for the execution of one R. Dod, who
had murdered a woman in those parts. "But when the sheriff brought the
malefactor there to be hanged Sir Owen Hopton, the Lieutenant of the
Tower, commanded the sheriff's officers back again to the west side
of a cross that stood there," and which probably marked the extent of
the liberties of the Tower. Discussion followed. The sheriffs with
their prisoner accompanied the lieutenant into a house to talk it over,
"whence after a good stay they all departed." The city gave way—the
gibbet was taken down, and the malefactor carried to Tyburn in the same
afternoon, where he was executed.
The gallows were no doubt all ready for the business, for Tyburn had
been used for executions as long as Smithfield. There were elms also
at Tyburn, hence a not uncommon confusion between the two places of
execution. Tyebourne has been ingeniously derived from the two words
"Tye" and "bourne," the last a bourne or resting-place for prisoners
who were taken bound. Pennant gives the derivation "Tye," the name of a
brook or "bourne" which flowed through it.
In Loftie's "History of London" he points out that the Tyburn of
earliest times was a bleak heath situated at the end of the Marylebone
Lane as we know it, and which, as it approached the town, had two
branches. He suggests that the brook or "bourne" also divided into
two, hence the name "Teo Burne," or two streams. Mr. Waller gives the
same derivation, and in one of the earliest mentions of the Tyburn, an
ancient chapter at Westminster, dated 951, it is called Teoburne.
There were many Tyburns, however, and as in London the gallows were
moved farther and farther westward of the building of houses, so the
name of Tyburn travelled from Marylebone Lane to Edgeware Road. As time
passed on it came to be the generic name for all places of execution,
and was used at York, Liverpool, Dublin, and elsewhere. Tyburn was a
kind of Golgotha, a place of infamy and disgrace. When Colonel Blood
seized the Duke of Ormond in St. James's Street it was with the avowed
intention of carrying him to Tyburn, there to be hanged like a common
criminal.
The exact position of the Tyburn gallows has been a matter of some
controversy. Mr. Robins places the Elms Lane as the first turning
to the right in the Uxbridge Road after getting into it from the
Grand Junction Road opposite the Serpentine. In Smith's "History of
Marylebone," he states that the gallows stood on a small eminence at
the corner of the Edgeware Road near the turnpike. Other authorities
fix the place in Connaught Square; because in a lease of one of the
houses, No. 49, granted by the Bishop of London, the fact that the
gallows once stood on the site is expressly mentioned in the parchment.
It was commonly reported that many human bones were exhumed between
Nos. 6 and 12, Connaught Place, as well as in the garden of Arklow
House, which stands at the southwest angle of the Edgeware Road. But
Mr. Loftie states as a matter of fact that no such discovery was ever
made. A careful but fruitless search at the time Connaught Place was
built produced a single bone, probably part of a human jaw-bone, but
nothing more. As to Arklow House, the report is distinctly denied by
the owner himself. It is, however, pretty certain that at a later date
the gallows were kept at a house at the corner of Upper Bryanston
Street and the Edgeware Road, in front of which they were erected when
required.
A detailed account has been preserved of the execution of Colonel John
Turner in 1662, which presents a strange picture of the way in which
the extreme penalty of the law was carried out in those days. The scene
of the execution was not Tyburn but a place in Leadenhall Street at
Lime Street end, a spot near the place where the deed for which Turner
suffered was perpetrated. An immense crowd had gathered, as usual, to
witness the convict's death. Pepys was there of course, as he tells
us; "and after sending my wife to my Aunt Wright's, to get a place to
see Turner hanged, I to Change." On his way he met people flocking to
the place of execution, and mingling with the crowd, somewhere about
St. Mary Axe, "got to stand upon the wheel of a cart for a shilling in
great pain above an hour before the execution was done: he delaying the
time by long discourses and prayers one after another in hopes of a
reprieve, but none came."
Turner was drawn in a cart from Newgate at eleven in the morning,
accompanied by the ordinary and another minister with the sheriffs,
keeper of the gaol, and other officials in attendance. On coming to
the gibbet he called the executioner to him, and presented him with
money in lieu of his clothes, which his friends desired to keep. Then
standing in the cart, he addressed the crowd with great prolixity.
He dwelt on the cardinal sins; he gave a circumstantial account of
his birth, parentage, family history; he detailed his war services as
a loyal cavalier, with his promotions and various military rewards.
With much proper feeling he sought to lessen the blame attached to his
accomplices in the murder, and to exonerate the innocent accused. At
intervals in this long discourse he was interrupted now by the sheriffs
with broad hints to despatch, now by the ordinary as to the irrelevance
and impropriety of such remarks from a man about to die. Again the
keeper of Newgate taxed him with other crimes, saying, for example,
"Pray, Colonel Turner, do you know nothing of a glass jewel delivered
to the Countess of Devonshire in room of another?" or "How about the
fire in Lothbury, or the mysterious death of your namesake Turner, who
died in your house?"
The condemned man discoursed at great length upon these various points,
and was again and again reminded that it would be better for him to
prepare for his approaching end. Still he continued his harangue and
took a new departure when he remembered the condition of the condemned
hold of Newgate, into which he had been cast after coming from the
sessions. This hole, as it was called, he characterizes as "a most
fearful, sad, deplorable place. Hell itself in comparison cannot be
such a place. There is neither bench, stool nor stick for any person
there; they lie like swine upon the ground, one upon another, howling
and roaring—it was more terrible to me than this death. I would humbly
beg that hole may be provided with some kind of boards, like a court of
guard, that a man may lie down upon them in ease; for when they should
be best prepared for their ends they are most tormented; they had
better take them and hang them as soon as they have their sentence."
This aspersion, however, on this part of his gaol the keeper tried to
refute by stating that seventeen out of the nineteen poor wretches
confined in the hole managed to escape from it.
But the reprieve for which Turner looked in vain still tarried. He was
obliged now to fall to his prayers. These, by the Christian charity of
the officials, he was permitted to spin out as long as he pleased. Then
he went through the ceremony of distributing alms-money for the poor,
money for his wife, to be passed on to his young son's schoolmaster. At
last he directed the executioner to take the halter off his shoulders,
and afterwards, "taking it in his hands, he kissed it, and put it on
his neck himself; then after he had fitted the cap and put it on, he
went out of the cart up the ladder." The executioner fastened the
noose, and "pulling the rope a little, says Turner, 'What, dost thou
mean to choke me? Pray, fellow, give me more rope—what a simple fellow
is this! How long have you been executioner, that you know not how to
put the knot?'" At the very last moment, in the midst of some private
ejaculations, espying a gentlewoman at a window nigh, he kissed his
hand, saying, "Your servant, mistress," and so he was "turned off,"
as Pepys says of him, "a comely-looking man he was, and kept his
countenance to the last. I was sorry to see him. It was believed there
were at least twelve or fourteen thousand people in the street."
There was nothing new in this desire to gloat over the dying agonies
of one's fellow creatures. The Roman matron cried "habet," and turned
down her thumb when the gladiator despatched his prostrate foe. Great
dignitaries and high-born dames have witnessed without a shudder
the tortures of an _auto da fé_; to this day it is the fashion for
delicately nurtured ladies to flock to the Law Courts, and note the
varying emotions, from keenest anguish to most brutal _sang-froid_,
of notorious murderers on trial. It is not strange, then, that in
uncultivated and comparatively demoralized ages the concourse about
the gallows should be great, or the conduct of the spectators riotous,
brutal, often heartless in the extreme. There was always a rush to
see an execution. The crowd was extraordinary when the sufferers were
persons of note or had been concerned in any much-talked-of case. Thus
all London turned out to stare at the hanging of Vratz, Boroski, and
Stern, convicted of the murder of Mr. Thynne, of which Count Konigsmark
had been acquitted. The execution took place in 1682 on the gallows
which had been set up in Pall Mall, the scene of the crime. "Many
hundreds of standings were taken up by persons of quality and others."
The Duke of Monmouth, one of the most intimate friends of the murdered
man, was among the spectators in a balcony close by the gallows, and
was the cynosure of every eye, fixing the glance of even one of the
convicts, Captain Vratz, who stared at him fixedly till the drop fell.
The fashion of gazing at these painful exhibitions grew more and more
popular. Horace Walpole satirizes the vile practice of thus glorifying
criminals. "You cannot conceive," he says to Sir Horace Mann, "the
ridiculous rage there is of going to Newgate, the prints that are
published of the malefactors, and the memoirs of their lives set forth
with as much parade as Marshal Turrenne's." George Selwyn, chief among
the wits and beaux of his time, was also conspicuous for his craving
for such horrid sights. He was characterized by Walpole as a friend
whose passion it was to see coffins, corpses, and executions. Judges
going on assize wrote to Selwyn, promising him a good place at all the
executions which might take place on their circuits. Other friends
kept him informed of approaching events, and bespoke a seat for him,
or gave full details of the demeanour of those whose sufferings he had
not been privileged to see. Thus Henry St. John writes to tell him of
the execution of Waistcott, Lord Huntington's butler, for burglary:
which he attended, with his brother, at the risk of breaking their
necks, "by climbing up an old rotten scaffolding, which I feared would
tumble before the cart drove off with the six malefactors." St. John
goes on to say that he had a full view of Waistcott, "who went to the
gallows with a white cockade in his hat as an emblem of his innocence,
and died with some hardness, as appeared through his trial." Another
correspondent, Gilly Williams, gives additional particulars. "The dog
died game: went in the cart in a blue and white frock . . . and the
white cockade. He ate several oranges on his passage, inquired if his
hearse was ready, and then, as old Rowe would say, was launched into
eternity." Again George Townshend, writing to Selwyn from Scotland of
the Jacobites, promises him plenty more entertainment on Tower Hill.
The joke went round that Selwyn at the dentist's gave the signal for
drawing a tooth by dropping his handkerchief, just as people did to the
executioner on the scaffold. He would go anywhere to see men turned
off. He was present when Lord Lovat was decapitated, and justified
himself by saying that he had made amends in going to the undertaker's
to see the head sewn on again. So eager was he to miss no sight worth
seeing, that he went purposely to Paris to witness the torture of the
unhappy Damiens. "On the day of the execution," Jesse tells us, "he
mingled with the crowd in a plain undress suit and bob wig; when a
French nobleman, observing the deep interest he took in the scene, and
imagining from the plainness of his attire that he must be a person
in the humbler ranks of life, resolved that he must infallibly be a
hangman. 'Eh bien, monsieur,' he said, 'Etes vous arrivé pour voir ce
spectacle?' 'Oui, monsieur.' 'Vous êtes bourreau?' 'Non, monsieur,'
replied Selwyn, 'je n'ai pas l'honneur; je ne suis qu'un amateur.'"
It was in these days, or a little later, when Newgate became the scene
of action, that an execution was made the occasion of a small festivity
at the prison. The governor gave a breakfast after the ceremony to some
thirteen or fourteen people of distinction, and his daughter, a very
pretty girl, did the honours of the table. According to her account,
few did much justice to the viands: the first call of the inexperienced
was for brandy, and the only person with a good appetite for her
broiled kidneys, a celebrated dish of hers, was the ordinary. After
breakfast was over the whole party adjourned to see the cutting down.
That which was a morbid curiosity among a certain section of the upper
classes became a fierce hungry passion with the lower. The scenes
upon execution days almost baffle description. Dense crowds thronged
the approaches to Newgate and the streets leading to Tyburn or other
places of execution. It was a ribald, reckless, brutal mob, violently
combative, fighting and struggling for foremost places, fiercely
aggressive, distinctly abusive. Spectators often had their limbs
broken, their teeth knocked out, sometimes they were crushed to death.
Barriers could not always restrain the crowd, and were often borne down
and trampled underfoot. All along the route taken by the procession
people vented their feelings upon the doomed convicts: cheering a
popular criminal to the echo, offering him nosegays or unlimited drink;
railing and storming, on the other hand, at those they hated or, worse
still, despised. When Earl Ferrers was hanged in 1760 the concourse was
so great that the procession took three hours to travel from Newgate
to Tyburn. Lord Ferrers told the sheriff that passing through such a
multitude was ten times worse than death itself. The same brutality
was carried to the foot of the gallows. The mob surged around the cart
conversing with the condemned: now encouraging, now upbraiding, anon
making him a target for all manner of missiles, and this even at the
last awful moment, when the convict was on his knees wrapped in prayer.
A woman named Barbara Spencer was beaten down by a stone when actually
in supplication upon her knees. When Jack Sheppard, that most popular
but most depraved young criminal, was executed, an incredible number of
persons was present. The crowd was unruly enough even before execution,
but afterwards it grew perfectly frantic. When the body had hung the
appointed time, an undertaker ventured to appear with a hearse to
carry it off, but being taken for a surgeon's man about to remove Jack
Sheppard to the dissecting-room, he incurred the fierce displeasure of
the mob. They demolished the hearse, then fell upon the undertaker,
who with difficulty escaped with life. After that they seized the
body and carried it off, throwing it from hand to hand, until it was
covered with bruises and dirt. It was taken as far as the Barley Mow in
Long Acre, where it lay some hours, and until it was discovered that
the whole thing was a trick devised by a bailiff in the pay of the
surgeons, and that the body had been forcibly taken from a person who
really intended to bury it. The mob was now excited to frenzy, and a
serious riot followed. The police being quite inadequate to quell it,
the military were called in, and with the aid of several detachments
of Guards the ringleaders were secured. The body was given over to a
friend of Sheppard's to bury, the mob dispersed to attend it to St.
Martin's Fields, where it was deposited under a guard of soldiers and
eventually buried.
While these wild revels were kept up both before and after the
execution the demeanour of the doomed partook too often of the
general recklessness. The calendars are full of particulars of the
manner in which condemned convicts met their fate. Many awaited the
extreme penalty and endured it with callous indifference or flippant
effrontery. Only now and again did their courage break down at the
eleventh hour, and so prove that it was assumed. A few notable examples
may be cited as exhibiting their various moods. Paul Lewis, once a
lieutenant in the royal navy, but an irreclaimable scoundrel, who
took eventually to the road, and was sentenced to death for highway
robbery, was boldly unconcerned after sentence. In Newgate he was
the leader of the revels: they dubbed him captain, like Macheath; he
sat at the head of the table, swore at the parson, and sang obscene
songs. It was not until the warrant of execution arrived at the prison,
that all bravado evaporated, and he became as abject as he had before
appeared hardened. John Rann the highwayman, better known as Sixteen
String Jack, had a farewell dinner-party after he was convicted, and
while awaiting execution: the company included seven girls; "all were
remarkable cheerful, nor was Rann less joyous than his companions."
Dick Turpin made elaborate preparations for his execution; purchased
a new suit of fustian and a pair of pumps to wear at the gallows,
and hired five poor men at ten shillings per head, to follow his
cart as mourners, providing them with hat-bands and mourning-bands.
Nathaniel Parkhurst, who, when in the Fleet for debtors, murdered a
fellow prisoner, demolished a roast fowl at breakfast on the morning
of his execution, and drank a pint of liquor with it. Jerry Abershaw
was persistently callous from first to last. Returning from court
across Kennington Common, he asked his conductors whether that was the
spot on which he was to be twisted? His last days in the condemned
cell he spent in drawing upon the walls with the juice of black
cherries designs of the various robberies he had committed on the
road. Abershaw's _sang-froid_ did not desert him on the last day.
He appeared with his shirt thrown open, a flower in his mouth, and
all the way to the gallows carried on an incessant conversation with
friends who rode by his side, nodding to others he recognized in the
crowd, which was immense. The season was the summer, and on the Sunday
following the execution, London was like a deserted city; hundreds of
thousands went out to see him hanging in chains.
Still more awful was the conduct of Hannah Dagoe, a herculean Irish
woman, who plied the trade of porter at Covent Garden. In Newgate
while under sentence she was most defiant. She was the terror of her
fellow prisoners, and actually stabbed a man who had given evidence
against her. When the cart was drawn in under the gallows she got
her arms loose, seized the executioner, struggled with him, and gave
him so violent a blow on the chest that she nearly knocked him down.
She dared him to hang her, and tearing off her hat, cloak, and other
garments, the hangman's perquisites, distributed them among the crowd
in spite of him. After a long struggle he got the rope around her
neck. This accomplished, she drew her handkerchief from round her head
over her face, and threw herself out of the cart before the signal was
given with such violence that she broke her neck and died instantly.
Many ancient customs long retained tended to make them more hardened.
Chief among these was the offer of strong drink by the way. When the
gallows stood at St. Giles it was the rule to offer malefactors about
to be hanged a great bowl of ale, "as the last refreshment they were to
receive in this life." This drink was long known as the "St. Giles's
Bowl." The practice of giving drink was pretty general for years later
and in many parts of the country. In Yorkshire at Bawtry, so the story
runs, a saddler was on his way to be hanged. The bowl was brought out,
but he refused it and went on to his death. Meanwhile his reprieve was
actually on the road, and had he lingered to drink time sufficient
would have been gained to save him. Hence came the saying that "the
saddler of Bawtry was hanged for leaving his ale." Other convicts are
mentioned in an uncomplimentary manner because they dared to smoke on
their road to the gallows. "Some mad knaves took tobacco all the way
as they went to be hanged at Tyburn." This was in 1598, when the use
of the weed introduced by Sir Walter Raleigh was still somewhat rare.
A hundred years later the misbehaviour was in "impudently calling
for sack" and drinking King James's health; after which the convicts
affronted the ordinary at the gallows, and refused his assistance.
There were few who behaved with the decency and self-possession of
Lord Ferrers, who went to his shameful death in a suit of white and
silver, that, it is said, in which he had been married. He himself
provided the white cap to be pulled over his face, and the black silk
handkerchief with which his arms were to be bound. His last words were,
"Am I right?" and immediately the drop fell. In his case there had been
an unseemly wrangle upon the gallows between the executioner and his
assistant. Lord Ferrers had given the latter, in mistake for his chief,
a fee of five guineas, which the head executioner claimed, and the
assistant would not readily surrender. Some were in abject terror till
the last act commenced. Thus John Ayliffe, a forger, was in the utmost
agonies the night preceding his execution; his agitation producing an
intolerable thirst, which he vainly sought to allay by copious draughts
of water. Yet his composure quite returned on his road to Tyburn, and
he "behaved with decency at the fatal tree." It was just the reverse
with Mrs. Meteyard, who with her daughter murdered a parish apprentice.
She was in a fit when put into the cart, and she continued insensible
all the way to Tyburn. Great efforts were made to restore her, but
without avail, and she was in an unconscious state when hanged.
It may be questioned whether that close attention was paid to the
spiritual needs of the condemned which is considered indispensable
in these more humane days. No doubt many rejected the offers of
the ordinary, refusing to attend chapel, pretending to belong to
out-of-the-way persuasions, and still declining the ministrations
of clergymen of any creed; others pretended, like Dean Swift's Tom
Clinch, that they went off with a clear conscience and a calm spirit,
without prayer-book or psalm. But very probably this indifference to
the ordinary and his ghostly counsels arose from a suspicion that he
was not very earnest in what he said. The Newgate ordinary, although
a sound Protestant, was a father confessor to all criminals. Not the
least profitable part of his emoluments came from the sale of his
account of the execution of convicts, a species of gaol calendar which
he compiled from information the condemned men themselves supplied.
That the ordinary attached great value to this production is clear
from the petition made by one of them, the Reverend Paul Lorraine, to
the House of Commons, that his pamphlet might be exempted from the
tax levied upon paper. It is easy to understand that the ordinary
might have been better employed than in compiling these accounts,
however interesting they may be, as illustrating the crime of the
last century. It is also pretty certain that, although, doubtless,
blameless and exemplary men, Newgate chaplains were not always
over-zealous in the discharge of their sacred office in regard to the
condemned. There were many grim jokes among the prisoners themselves
as to the value of the parson's preaching. Thus in the Reverend Mr.
Cotton's time as ordinary, convicts were said to go out of the world
with their ears stuffed full of cotton; and his interpretation of any
particular passage in Scripture was said to go in at one ear and
out at the other.[200:1] Hence the intrusion, which must have seemed
to them unwarrantable, of dissenting and other amateur preachers, or
well-meaning enthusiasts, who devoted themselves with unremitting
vigour to the spiritual consolation of all prisoners who would listen
to them. It is impossible to speak otherwise than most approvingly of
the single-minded, self-sacrificing devotion of such men as Silas Told,
the forerunner of Howard, Mrs. Fry, the Gurneys, and other estimable
philanthropists. Nevertheless unseemly polemical wrangles appeared to
have been the result of this interference, which was better meant than
appreciated by the authorized clerical officer. Doctor Doran, referring
to the execution of James Sheppard (Jacobite Sheppard, not Jack),
gives an account of a conflict of this kind. "Sheppard's dignity," he
says, "was not even ruffled by the renewed combat in the cart of the
Newgate chaplain and the nonjuror. Each sought to comfort and confound
the culprit according to his way of thinking. Once more the messengers
of peace got to fisticuffs, but as they neared Tyburn the nonjuror
kicked Paul (the ordinary) out of the cart, and kept by the side of
Sheppard till the rope was adjusted. There he boldly, as those Jacobite
nonjurors were wont, gave the passive lad absolution for the crime for
which he was about to pay the penalty; after which he jumped down to
have a better view of the sorry spectacle from the foremost ranks of
spectators."
It was no doubt on account of the insufficiency of the spiritual
consolations offered to the condemned that led old Richard Dove,
or Dow, to make his endowment for tolling the prisoner's bell. He
bequeathed fifty pounds a year for ever, so Stowe tells us, for this
philanthropic purpose.
When condemned prisoners were being "drawn to their executions at
Tyburn," a man with a bell stood in the churchyard by St. Sepulchre's,
by the wall next the street, and so to put them in mind of their death
approaching. Later on these verses took the form of exhortation, of
which the following is the substance:
"You prisoners that are within, who for wickedness and sin, after many
mercies shown you, are now appointed to die to-morrow in the forenoon:
give ear and understand that to-morrow morning the greatest bell of
St. Sepulchre's shall toll for you, in form and manner of a passing
bell, as used to be tolled for those who are at the point of death,
to the end that all godly people hearing that bell, and knowing it is
for you going to your death, may be stirred up heartily to pray to
God to bestow His grace and mercy upon you whilst you live. I beseech
you, for Jesus Christ His sake, to keep this night in watching and
prayer for the salvation of your own souls, whilst there is yet time
and place for mercy; as knowing to-morrow you must appear before the
judgment-seat of your Creator, there to give an account of all things
done in this life, and to suffer eternal torments for your sins,
committed against Him, unless upon your hearty and unfeigned repentance
you find mercy, through the merits, death, and passion of your only
Mediator and Advocate, Jesus Christ, who now sits at the right hand of
God, to make intercession for as many of you as penitently return to
Him."
In times when scaffold and gallows were perpetually crowded, the
executioner was a prominent if not exactly a distinguished personage.
The office might not be honourable, but it was not without its uses,
and the man who filled it was an object of both interest and dread. In
some countries the dismal paraphernalia—axe, gibbet, or rack—have
been carried by aristocratic families on their arms. The Scotch
Dalziels bear sable, a hanged man with his arms extended; a Spanish
hidalgo has in his coat armour a ladder with gibbet; and various
implements of torture have been borne by German families of distinction.
In France the post of executioner was long hereditary, regularly
transmitted from father to son, for many generations, and enjoyed
eventually something of the credit vouchsafed to all hereditary
offices. With us the law's finisher has never been held in great
esteem. He was on a par rather with the Roman _carnifex_, an odious
official, who was not suffered to live within the precincts of the
city. The only man who would condescend to the work was usually a
condemned criminal, pardoned for the very purpose. Derrick, one of the
first names mentioned, was sentenced to death, but pardoned by Lord
Essex, whom he afterwards executed. Next to him I find that one Bull
acted as executioner about 1593. Then came Gregory Brandon, the man
who is generally supposed to have decapitated Charles I, and who was
commonly addressed by his Christian name only. Through an error Brandon
was advanced to the dignity of a squire by Garter, king at arms, and
succeeding executioners were generally honoured with the same title.
Brandon was followed by his son; young Brandon by Squire Dun, who gave
place in his turn to John Ketch, the godfather of all modern hangmen.
Many of the immediate successors of Brandon above-mentioned were called
Gregory. Jack Ketch did not give entire satisfaction. It is recorded
in Luttrell that Ketch was dispossessed in favour of Pascal Roose, a
butcher, who served only a few months, when Ketch was restored. After
Ketch, John Price was the man, a pardoned malefactor, who could not
resist temptation, and was himself executed for murder by some one
else. Dennis, the hangman at the Lord George Gordon riots, had also
been sentenced to death for complicity, but obtained forgiveness on
condition that he should string up his former associates.
They did their work roughly, these early practitioners. Sometimes the
rope slipped or the drop was insufficient, and the hangman had to add
his weight, assisted by that of zealous spectators, to the sufferer's
legs to effect strangulation. Now and again the rope broke, and the
convict had to be tied up a second time. This happened with Captain
Kidd, the notorious pirate, who was perfectly conscious during the
time which elapsed before he was again tied up. The friends of another
pirate, John Gow, were anxious to put him out of his pain, and pulled
his legs so hard, that the rope broke before he was dead, necessitating
the repetition of the whole ceremony. Even when the operation had been
successfully performed, the hanged man sometimes cheated the gallows.
There are several well-authenticated cases of resuscitation after
hanging, due doubtless to the rude and clumsy plan of killing. To
slide off a ladder or drop from a cart might and generally did produce
asphyxia, but there was no instantaneous fracture of the vertebral
column as in most executions of modern times. The earliest case on
record is that of Tiretta de Balsham, whom Henry III pardoned in 1264
because she had survived hanging. As she is said to have been suspended
from one morning till sunrise the following day, it is difficult to
believe the story, which was probably one of many mediæval impostures.
Females, however, appear to have had more such escapes than males.
Doctor Ploto gives several instances; one, that of Anne Green, who
in 1650 came to when in the hands of the doctors for dissection;
another of Mrs. Cope, hanged at Oxford in 1658, who was suspended
for an unusually long period, and afterwards let fall violently, yet
she recovered, only to be more effectually hanged next day. A third
substantiated case was that of half-hanged Maggie Dickson, who was
hanged at Edinburgh in 1728, and whom the jolting of the cart in
which her body was removed from the gallows recovered. The jolting
was considered so infallible a recipe for bringing to, that it was
generally practised by an executed man's friends in Ireland, where
also the friends were in the habit of holding up the convict by his
waistband after he had dropped, "so that the rope should not press upon
his throat," the sheriff philanthropically pretending not to see.
Sir William Petty, the eminent surgeon in Queen Anne's time, owed
his scientific fame to his having resuscitated a woman who had been
hanged. The body had been begged, as was the custom, for the anatomical
lecture; Petty finding symptoms of life, bled her, put her to bed
with another woman, and gave her spirits and other restoratives. She
recovered, whereupon the students subscribed to endow her with a small
portion, and she soon after married and lived for fifteen years. The
case of half-hanged Smith was about the date 1705. He was reprieved,
but the reprieve arrived after he had been strung up; he was taken
down, bled, and brought to. Smith afterwards described his sensations
minutely. The weight of his body when he first dropped caused him
great pain; his "spirits" forced their way up to his head and seemed
to go out at his eyes with a great blaze of light, and then all pain
left him. But on his resuscitation the blood and "spirits" forcing
themselves into their proper channels gave him such intolerable
suffering "that he could have wished those hanged who cut him down."
William Duell, hanged in 1740, was carried to Surgeon's Hall, to be
anatomized; but as his body was being laid out, one of the servants
who was washing him perceived that he was still alive. A surgeon bled
him, and in two hours he was able to sit up in his chair. Later in
the evening he was sent back to Newgate, and his sentence changed to
transportation. In 1767, a man who had hanged for twenty-eight minutes
was operated on by a surgeon, who made an incision into the windpipe.
In less than six hours the hanged man revived. It became a constant
practice for a condemned man's friends to carry off the body directly
it was cut down to the nearest surgeon's, who at once operated on it
by bleeding, and so forth. The plan was occasionally, but rarely,
successful. It was tried with Doctor Dodd, who was promptly carried to
an undertaker's in Tottenham Court Road and placed in a hot bath; but
he had been too well hanged for recovery. A report was long current
that Fauntleroy the banker, who was executed for forgery, had been
resuscitated, but it was quite without foundation.
The Tyburn procession survived till towards the end of the eighteenth
century. It had many supporters, Doctor Johnson among the number.
"Sir," he told Boswell, when Tyburn had been discontinued, "executions
are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators they
do not answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to
all parties: the public was gratified by a procession, the criminal
is supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?" The reason is
given by the sheriffs in the year 1784, and it is convincing. In a
pamphlet published that year it is set forth that the procession to
Tyburn was a hideous mockery on the law; the final scene had lost its
terrors; it taught no lesson of morality to the beholders, but tended
to the encouragement of vice. The day of execution was deemed a public
holiday to which thousands thronged, many to gratify an unaccountable
curiosity, more to seize an opportunity for committing fresh crimes.
"If we take a view of the supposed solemnity from the time at which
the criminal leaves the prison to the last moment of his existence, it
will be found to be a period full of the most shocking and disgraceful
circumstances. If the only defect were the want of ceremony, the
minds of the spectators might be supposed to be left in a state of
indifference; but when they view the meanness of the apparatus, the
dirty cart and ragged harness, surrounded by a sordid assemblage of the
lowest among the vulgar, their sentiments are inclined more to ridicule
than pity. The whole progress is attended with the same effect. Numbers
soon thicken into a crowd of followers, and then an indecent levity is
heard." The crowd gathered as it went, the levity increased, "till on
reaching the fatal tree it became a riotous mob, and their wantonness
of speech broke forth in profane jokes, swearing, and blasphemy." The
officers of the law were powerless to check the tumult; no attention
was paid to the convict's dying speech—"an exhortation to shun
a vicious life, addressed to thieves actually engaged in picking
pockets." The culprit's prayers were interrupted, his demeanour if
resigned was sneered at, and only applauded when he went with brazen
effrontery to his death. "Thus," says the pamphlet, "are all the ends
of public justice defeated; all the effects of example, the terrors of
death, the shame of punishment, are all lost."
The evils it was hoped might be obviated "were public executions
conducted with becoming form and solemnity, if order were preserved
and every tendency to disturb it suppressed." Hence the place of
execution was changed in 1784 from "Tyburn to the great area that has
lately been opened before Newgate." The sheriffs were doubtful of their
power to make alterations, and consulted the judges, who gave it as
their opinion that it was within the sheriffs' competence. "With this
sanction, therefore," the sheriffs go on to say, "we have proceeded,
and instead of carting the criminals through the streets to Tyburn, the
sentence of death is executed in the front of Newgate, where upwards of
five thousand persons may easily assemble; here a temporary scaffold
hung with black is erected, and no other persons are permitted to
ascend it than the necessary officers of justice, the clergyman, and
the criminal, and the crowd is kept at a proper distance. During the
whole time of the execution a funeral bell is tolled in Newgate, and
the prisoners are kept in the strictest order."
The horrors of executions were but little diminished by the
substitution of the Old Bailey as the scene. Seventy-four years were
to elapse before the wisdom of legislators and the good sense of the
public insisted that the extreme penalty of the law should be carried
out in strictest privacy within the walls of the gaol.
FOOTNOTES:
[162:1] No. 45 of the _North Briton_ charged the king with falsehood,
and was the basis of the prosecutions; forty-five became in consequence
a popular number with the patriots. Tradesmen called their goods
"forty-five;" and snuff so styled was sold in Fleet Street for many
years. Horne Tooke declares that the Prince of Wales aggravated his
august father, when the latter was flogging him, by shouting "Wilkes
and forty-five for ever!"
[164:1] Lords of Leet were obliged to keep up a pillory or tumbrel, on
pain of forfeiture of the leet; and villages might also be compelled to
provide them.
[165:1] "Punishments in the Olden Time," by William Andrews, F. R. H.
S., to which I am indebted for many of my facts.
[167:1] This was not an uncommon offence. One Mary Hamilton was married
fourteen times to members of her own sex. A more inveterate, but a more
natural, bigamist was a man named Miller, who was pilloried, in 1790,
for having married thirty different women on purpose to plunder them.
[172:1] Bernardo Visconti, Duke of Milan, in the 14th century, made a
capital punishment, or more exactly the act of killing, last for forty
days.
[181:1] By "Halifax law" any thief who within the precincts of the
liberty stole thirteen pence could on conviction before four burghers
be sentenced to death. The same law obtained at Hull, hence the
particular prayer in the thieves' Litany, which ran as follows: "From
Hull, Hell, and Halifax, good Lord, deliver us."
[200:1] The negligence and perfunctory performance of duty of the
ordinary, Mr. Forde, is strongly animadverted upon in the "Report of
Commons' Committee in 1814."