EXECUTIONS.
Reasons for legal punishments--Early forms: branding, mutilation,
whipping, the pillory, and stocks--Penalties for females: the
ducking-stool, branks, and scourge--Capital punishment
universal--Methods of inflicting death--Awful cruelties--The
English custom--Pressing to death--Major Strangways--Spiggot and
Burnworth--Abolition of this punishment--Decapitation and
strangulation--The guillotine and gallows--Places of execution in
London: Smithfield, St. Giles, Tower Hill, Tyburn--Derivation of
Tyburn--Site of Tyburn gallows--Tyburn a generic title--An
execution in 1662: that of Colonel Turner--Crowds at
executions--Fashionable folk attend--George Selwyn--Breakfast party
at Newgate--Ribald conduct of the mob at executions--That of Earl
Ferrers and of Sheppard--Demeanour of condemned: effrontery, or
abject terror--Improper customs long retained--St. Giles’
Bowl--Saddler of Bawtry--Smoking at Tyburn--Spiritual attentions of
Ordinary not always devoted--Amateur preachers and others
assist--Richard Dove’s bequest--The hangman and his
office--Resuscitation--Early cases--Sir William Petty’s
operation--Tyburn procession continues--Supported by Dr.
Johnson--Sheriffs suggest discontinuance--Their reasons--The front
of Newgate substituted as the scene of execution.
The universal instinct of self-preservation underlies the whole theory
of legal punishments. Society, since men congregated together, 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 the
Mosaic law, were retaliatory, or aimed at restitution. All, more or
less, were intended also 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, upon which I propose now more particularly
to treat, and the present chapter will deal only with penalties
corporeal.
Taking first the punishments which fell short of death, those most
common in this country 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 woodyard, 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.”[104]
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,[105] “being then present,
[Illustration]
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. Dr. Bastwick and
others were similarly treated.[106] 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 “they burnt
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 this country 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. With us 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 so 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, who 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. Dr. 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 state-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’ ‘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,[107] 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 Dr. 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.[108] 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’s 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 when a young barrister having a desire to try the stocks,
and his being left in them by an absent-minded friend for the part of
the day, is probably well known. The stocks were not wholly abolished
till a few years ago.[109] The Stokesley stocks were used within thirty
years of the present time, and 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.[110] Stocks are still 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 horseplay 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 chapbook, 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 on the populace, principally those of the female sex,
that they pelted her till they put out both her eyes.[111]
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 Tumbrell, 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 see-saw. That at Wooton Basset was of the tumbrell 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, tumbrell, 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 chapbook,
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 tumbril 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 women was ducked under Kingston Bridge for scolding in 1745. 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.”[112] 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 this country 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[113] that little more than
a hundred years ago women were publicly whipped at the whipping-post by
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 small pox, and all
who walked about the country and begged.[114] 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
[Illustration: IN THE TORTURE CHAMBER.]
says,[115] “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 baulks 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;[116] 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
mattrass 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, or 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 firms 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.[117] 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 to 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 1657-8 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
[Illustration: W^m. Spiggot _under pressure in_ NEWGATE _for not
pleading to his Indictment_]
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 call
now-a-days 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 lbs. 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. Hawes declared
to the last that he was one of Jonathan Wild’s victims.
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 to 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 lbs. on his
body; “but, on addition of the 50 lbs. more, he likewise begged to
plead.” Both were then convicted and hanged in the ordinary course of
law. 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 1741 a new press was made and fixed in the press-yard, for the
punishment of a highwayman named Cook, but it was not used. The 12th
Geo. III. (1772) at length altered the law on this head, 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 by the
7 and 8 Geo. IV., cap. 28, that the Court should enter a plea of “Not
Guilty” when the prisoner will not 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 Dr. Guillotin, the rude germ of which existed
long previously in the Scotch “maiden.” The regent Morton, who
introduced this instrument into Scotland, and who himself suffered by
it, is said to have taken it from the Halifax Gibbet.[118] 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 would 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 south-west 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’ 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 to prisoners who
were taken bound. Pennant gives the derivation “Tye,” the name of a
brook or “bourne” which flowed through it. In Mr. Loftie’s ‘History of
London’[119] 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[120] gives the same derivation, and in one of
the earliest mention 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 further and further 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. Here certain zealous Protestant gentlemen from the Temple in
1585 hung in chains an image, a Popish image, although styled Robin
Hood. When Colonel Blood seized the Duke of Ormond in St. James’ 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[121] 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 south-west 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, however, but a place in Leadenhall Street
at Lime Street end, a spot near 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--“up,” 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, “got,” somewhere about St. Mary
Axe, “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, bad as it might be.
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 _sangfroid_, of
notorious murderers on trial.[122] 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
at the hanging of Vratz, Borosky, and Stern, convicted of that same
murder of Mr. Thynne of which Count Konigsmark was acquitted,[123] an
execution which took place in 1682, all London turned out to stare. The
gallows 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” (Boswell). 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 Harrington’s butler, for burglary,
which he had 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,[124] “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, ‘Êtes 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 sheriffs 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, when 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 _sangfroid_ 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.[125] Still more awful was the conduct of
Hannah Dagoe, a herculanean 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 neckerchief 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’
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’ 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 was 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. Several of these
accounts have been preserved, and I have referred to them in my chapter,
“The gaol calendar.” But 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.[126] Hence the
intrusion, which must have seemed to them unwarrantable, of dissenting
and other amateur preachers, of 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.
Dr. 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[127] (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, with 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, 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 addition to the foregoing there was an admonition pronounced to
the condemned criminals as they passed St. Sepulchre’s church wall on
their way to execution, which was to the following effect:--
“All good people pray heartily unto God for those poor sinners who are
now going to their death, for whom this great bell doth toll.
“You that are condemned to die, repent with lamentable tears; ask mercy
of the Lord for the salvation of your own souls, through the merits,
death, and passion of Jesus Christ, who now sits at the right hand of
God, to make intercession for as many of you as penitently return unto
Him.
“Lord have mercy upon you,
Christ have mercy upon you.
Lord have mercy upon you,
Christ have mercy upon you.”
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:[128] 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.[129] Jack Ketch did not give entire
satisfaction. It is recorded in Luttrell that Ketch was dispossessed in
favour of Pascha 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. Dr.
Plot[130] 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 28 minutes was operated on by a surgeon, who made an incision
into the wind-pipe. 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 Dr. 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 handed 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, Dr. 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 for the year 1784, and 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
[Illustration: _The New Gallows in the Old Bailey._]
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.
“We hope this alteration will produce many good effects to the public,
to the criminal, and to the prisoners in the gaol. The crowd of
spectators will probably be more orderly, because less numerous, and
more subject to control by being more confined; and also it will be free
from the accession of stragglers, whom a Tyburn procession usually
gathers on its passage, and who make the most wanton part of it. Add to
this the sentiments which the sight must naturally raise in the breast
of every man when exhibited with due solemnity; when the mind is allowed
to fix its whole attention upon this scene of awful ceremony, it will
feel with becoming dread the pain of disobedience and the terror of
example. Nor will the effect of this change be lost upon the criminal:
his spirits will be composed by the decorum of the place, and he may
prepare his soul for its dissolution by calm meditation, which he could
not have exercised under the former noise and disorder; the fearful may
gather strength and the hardened yield to remorse from the awe and
reverence with which they view their fate. To those in confinement, who
feel the heavy hand of justice so near the walls, it must necessarily
become a useful lesson of duty and obedience, and a strong admonition to
repentance. Example ought from its very nature to be directed
principally to the wicked, that they who have most offended may feel
most sensibly the certain consequence of offending; in the present
instance the application of it is conformable to its original design and
to the first principles of justice. It will be administered so as to
amend the lives of those prisoners who may escape the fate of their lost
companion, and to make those fitter for it who are doomed to suffer.”
I shall return to the subject of executions in the second volume, and
shall have to show that 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.