The Law’s Lumber Room
The rusty curb of old father antic--the law
FALSTAFF
The Law’s
Lumber
Room
By
Francis
Watt
Second Series
John Lane, The Bodley Head
London and New York
mdcccxcviii
Printed by BALLANTYNE, HANSON & CO.
At the Ballantyne Press
Prefatory
_This is an entirely distinct book from the first series of the Law’s
Lumber Room. The subjects are of more general interest, they are
treated with greater fulness of detail, most are as much literary as
legal; but I have thought it best to retain the old name. No other
seemed so briefly and so truly descriptive of papers which tell what
the law and its ways once were, and what they have ceased, one may
reasonably suppose, for ever to be._
_I make two remarks. There is a great deal of hanging in this book;
that is only because those were hanging times. The law had no thought
of mending the criminal; it ended him in the most summary fashion. The
death of the chief actors was as inevitably the finish of the story as
it is in a modern French novel._
_Again, in pondering those memories of the past, one realises how much,
in other things than mechanical invention, our time is unlike all that
went before. This is not the commonplace it seems, for not easily do we
realise how far the change has gone._
_Under the sway
Of Death, the past’s enormous disarray
Lies hushed and dark._
_Details such as make up this volume have this merit: they bring the
antique world before us, and the net result seems to be this: we lead
better lives, we are more just and charitable, perhaps less selfish
than our forefathers, but how to deny that something is lost? for life
is not so exciting, and our annals are anything but picturesque._
_These papers were originally published in_ The New Review, The Yellow
Book, _and_ The Ludgate. _I have made very considerable additions to
most of them, and all have been carefully revised._
Contents
PAGE
TYBURN TREE 1
PILLORY AND CART’S TAIL 45
STATE TRIALS FOR WITCHCRAFT 68
A PAIR OF PARRICIDES 88
SOME DISUSED ROADS TO MATRIMONY 116
THE BORDER LAW 152
THE SERJEANT-AT-LAW 185
Tyburn Tree
Its Exact Position not known--Near the Marble Arch--Fanciful
Etymologies--The Last Days of the Old-Time Criminal--Robert Dowe’s
Bequest--Execution Eve--St. Sepulchre’s Bell--The Procession--St.
Giles’s Bowl--At Tyburn--Ketch’s Perquisites--The Newgate
Ordinary--The Executioner--Tyburn’s Roll of Fame--Catholic
Martyrs--Cromwell’s Head--The Highwaymen--Lord Ferrers--Dr.
Dodd--James Hackman--Tyburn in English Letters.
To-day you cannot fix the exact spot where Tyburn Tree raised its
uncanny form. To the many it was the most noteworthy thing about Old
London, yet while thousands who had gazed thereon in fascinated horror
were still in life, a certain vagueness was evident in men’s thoughts,
and, albeit antiquaries have keenly debated the _locus_, all the mind
is clouded with a doubt, and your carefully worked out conclusion is
but guesswork. There is reason manifold for this. Of old time the
populous district known as Tyburnia was wild heath intersected by
the Tyburn Brook, which, rising near Hampstead, crossed what is now
Oxford Street, hard by the Marble Arch, and so on to Chelsea and the
Thames. Somewhere on its banks was the Middlesex gallows. It may be
that as the tide set westward the site was changed. Again, the wild
heath is now thick with houses; new streets and squares have confused
the ancient landmarks; those who dwelt therein preferred that there
should not be a too nice identification of localities. How startling
the reflection that in the very place of your dining-room, thousands
of fellow-creatures had dangled in their last agonies! How rest at
ease in such a chamber of horrors? The weight of evidence favours (or
disfavours) No. 49 Connaught Square. The Bishop of London is ground
landlord here; and it is said that in the lease of that house granted
by him the fact is recorded that there stood the “Deadly Never-Green.”
Such a record were purely gratuitous, but the draftsman may have
made it to fix the identity of the dwelling. But to-day the Square
runs but to No. 47. Some shuffling of numerals has, you fancy, taken
place to baffle indiscreet research. However, you may be informed (in
confidence) that you have but to stand at the south-east corner of the
Square to be “warm,” as children say in their games.
Let these minutiæ go. Tyburn Tree stood within a gunshot to the
north-west of the Marble Arch. Its pictured shape is known from
contemporary prints. There were three tall uprights, joined at the
top by three cross-beams, the whole forming a triangle. It could
accommodate many patients at once, and there is some authority for
supposing that the beam towards Paddington was specially used for Roman
Catholics. In the last century the nicer age objected to it as an
eyesore; and it was replaced by a movable structure, fashioned of two
uprights and a cross-beam, which was set up in the Edgware Road at the
corner of Bryanston Street, and which, the grim work done, was stored
in the corner house, from whose windows the sheriffs superintended
executions. To accommodate genteel spectators there were just such
stands as you find on a racecourse, the seats whereof were let at
divers prices, according to the interest excited. In 1758, for Dr.
Henesey’s execution as arch-traitor, the rate rose to two shillings and
two and sixpence a seat. The Doctor was “most provokingly reprieved,”
whereat the mob in righteous indignation arose and wrecked the stands.
Mammy Douglas, a woman who kept the key of one of these stands, was
popularly known as “the Tyburn pew-opener.”
Fanciful etymologists played mad pranks with the name. In Fuller’s
_Worthies, Tieburne_ is derived on vague authority from “Tie” and
“Burne,” because the “poor Lollards” there “had their necks _tied_ to
the beame and their lower parts _burnt_ in the fire. Others” (he goes
on more sensibly) “will have it called from _Twa_ and _Burne_, that
is two rivulets, which it seems meet near the place.” And then it was
plainly a _Bourn_ whence no traveller returned! Most probably it is a
shortened form of _The_, or _At the Aye Bourne_ (= _’t Aye-bourne_ =
_Tyburn_) or Brook already denoted. Tyburn was not always London’s
sole or even principal place of execution. In early times people were
hanged as well as burned at Smithfield. The elms at St. Giles’s were
far too handy a provision to stay idle. At Tower Green was the chosen
spot for beheading your high-class criminal, and it was common to put
off a malefactor on the very theatre of his malefaction. There are few
spots in Old London which have not carried a gallows at one or other
time. Some think that certain elm-trees suggested the choice of Tyburn.
In the end it proved the most convenient of all, being neither too near
nor too far; and in the end its name came to have (as is common with
such words) a general application, and was applied at York, Liverpool,
Dublin, and elsewhere, to the place of execution.
To-day the criminal’s progress from cell to gallows is an affair of a
few minutes. To an earlier time this had savoured of indecent haste.
Then, the way to Tyburn, long in itself, was lengthened out by the
observance of a complicated ritual, some of it of ancient origin. Let
us follow “the poor inhabitant below” from the dock to the rope. To
understand what follows one must remember that two distinct sets of
forces acted on his mind:--on the one hand, the gloom of the prison,
the priest’s advice, the memory of mis-spent days, the horror of
doom; on the other, the reaction of a lawless nature against a cruel
code, the resolve to die game, the flattering belief that he was the
observed of all observers, and perhaps a secret conviction that the
unknown could be no worse than the known. According as the one set or
other prevailed he was penitent or brazen, the Ordinary’s darling or
the people’s joy. Well, his Lordship having assumed the black cap and
pronounced sentence of death, the convict was forthwith removed to the
condemned hold in Newgate. There he was heavily fettered, and, if of
any renown as a prison-breaker, chained to a ring in the ground. Escape
was not hopeless. Friends were allowed to visit and supply him with
money, wherewith he might bribe his keepers; and the prison discipline,
though cruel, was incredibly lax (Jack Sheppard’s two escapes from the
condemned hold, carefully described by Ainsworth, are cases in point).
To resume, our felon was now frequently visited by the Ordinary, who
zealously inquired (from the most interested motives) into his past
life, and admonished him of his approaching doom. At chapel o’ Sundays
he sat with his fellows in the condemned pew, a large dock-like
erection painted black, which stood in the centre, right in front of
and close to the ordinary’s desk and pulpit. For his last church-going
the condemned sermon was preached, the burial service was read, and
prayers were put up “especially for those awaiting the awful execution
of the law.” The reprieved also were present, and the chapel was packed
with as many spectators as could squeeze their way in.
Now, our old law was not so bad as it seemed. True, the death-penalty
was affixed to small offences; but it was comparatively rarely exacted.
In looking over Old Bailey sessions-papers of from one to two centuries
ago, I am struck with the number of acquittals--brought about, I
fancy, by the triviality of the crime, not the innocence of the
prisoner--and jurors constantly appraised the articles at twelve pence
or under to reduce the offence to petty larceny, which was not capital,
and after sentence each case was carefully considered on its merits by
the King in Council (the extraordinary care which George III. gave to
this matter is well known: he was often found pondering sentences late
into the night). Only when the offender was inveterate or his crime
atrocious was the death-penalty exacted. In effect, cases now punished
by long terms of penal servitude were then ordered for execution.
I don’t pretend to say whether or no to-day’s plan may be the more
merciful. We have, on the authority of the Newgate Ordinary, a list
between 1700 and 1711. Of forty-nine condemned in one year, thirty-six
were reprieved and thirteen executed, in another year thirty-eight
were condemned, twenty were reprieved, and eighteen were executed; the
highest annual return of executions during that period was sixty-six,
the lowest five. An Act of 1753 (25 Geo. II., c. 37) provided for the
speedy exit and dissection of murderers; but the fate of other felons
might hang dubious, as weeks often elapsed without a Privy Council
meeting. The Recorder of London brought up the report from Windsor.
When it reached Newgate, usually late at night, the condemned prisoners
were assembled in one ward. The Ordinary entered in full canonicals
and spoke his fateful message to each kneeling wretch. “I am sorry to
tell you it is all against you,” would fall on one man’s trembling
ears; while “Your case has been taken into consideration by the King
and Council and His Majesty has been mercifully pleased to spare your
life,” was the comfortable word for another. The reprieved now returned
thanks to God and the King; the others, all hope gone, must return to
the condemned hold.
There broke in on them here, during the midnight hours on the eve of
their execution, the sound of twelve strokes of a hand-bell, the while
a doleful voice in doleful rhyme addressed them:
You prisoners that are within,
Who for wickedness and sin....
Here the rhyme failed; but in not less dismal prose the voice
admonished them that on the morrow “the greatest bell of St. Sepulchre
will toll for you in the form and manner of a passing bell”; wherefore
it behoved them to repent. In later years the songster procured himself
this rigmarole:--
Prepare you, for to-morrow you shall die.
Watch all and pray, the hour is drawing near
When you before th’ Almighty must appear.
Examine well yourselves; in time repent,
That you may not th’ eternal flames be sent.
And when St. ’Pulcre’s bell to-morrow tolls,
The Lord have mercy on your souls!
Past twelve o’clock.
Now this iron nightingale was the sexton or his deputy of St.
Sepulchre’s, hard by Newgate; and his chant originated thus. In the
early seventeenth century there flourished a certain Robert Dowe,
“citizen and merchant taylor of London”; he disbursed much of his
estate to various charities, and in especial gave one pound six
shillings and eight pence yearly to the sexton of St. Sepulchre’s to
approach as near as might be to the condemned hold on execution eve,
and admonish malefactors of their approaching end, as if they were
likely to forget it, or as if “Men in their Condition cou’d have any
stomach to Unseasonable Poetry,” so pertinently observes John Hall
(executed about 1708), “the late famous and notorious robber,” or
rather the Grub Street hack who compiled his _Memoirs_. The rhymes
were, so the same veracious authority assures us, “set to the Tune
of the Bar-Bell at the Black Dog,” and their reception varied. Hall
and his companions (but again you suspect Grub Street) paid in kind
with verse equally edifying, and, if possible, still more atrocious.
Most, you fancy, turned again to their uneasy slumbers with muttered
curses. Not so Sarah Malcolm, condemned in 1733 for the cruel murder of
old Mrs. Duncombe, her mistress. An unseasonable pity for the sexton
croaking his platitudes in the raw midnight possessed her mad soul.
“D’ye hear, Mr. Bellman?” she bawled, “call for a Pint of Wine, and
I’ll throw you a Shilling to pay for it.” How instant his changed note
as the coin clinked on the pavement! Alas! no record reports him thus
again refreshed.
But _Venit summa dies et ineluctabile fatum_ (a tag you may be sure the
Ordinary rolled off to any broken-down scholar he had in hand); and
our felon’s last day dawns. He is taken to the Stone Hall, where his
irons are struck off; then he is pinioned by the yeoman of the halter,
who performs that service for the moderate fee of five shillings (rope
thrown in). At the gate he is delivered over to the Hangman (who is not
free of the prison), and by him he is set in the cart (a sorry vehicle
drawn by a sorry nag in sorry harness), his coffin oft at his feet, and
the Ordinary at his side, and so, amidst the yells of a huge mob and to
the sad accompaniment of St. Sepulchre’s bell, the cart moves westward.
Almost immediately a halt is called. The road is bounded by the wall
of St. Sepulchre’s Churchyard, over the which there peers our vocalist
of yester-eve, who takes up his lugubrious whine anew:--“All good
people pray heartily with God for the poor sinners who are now going
to their death,” with more to the same effect, for all which the poor
passenger must once more bless or curse the name of the inconsiderately
considerate Dowe. He gave his endowment in 1605, seven years before
his death: had some mad turn of fate made him an object of his own
charity you had scarce grieved. But now the sexton has done his office
to the satisfaction of the beadle of Merchant Tailors’ Hall, who “hath
an honest stipend allowed him to see that this is duly done,” and the
cart is again under weigh, when, if the principal subject be popular,
a lady (you assume her beauty, and you need not rake the rubbish of
two centuries for witness against her character) trips down the steps
of St. Sepulchre’s Church and presents him with a huge nosegay. If
nosegays be not in season, “why, then,” as the conjuror assured Timothy
Crabshaw, squire to Sir Launcelot Greaves, “an orange will do as well.”
And now the cart rumbles down steep and strait Snow Hill, crosses
the Fleet Ditch by narrow Holborn Bridge, creaks up Holborn Hill (the
“Heavy Hill,” men named it with sinister twin-meaning), and so through
Holborn Bars, whilst the bells, first of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, and
then of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, knell sadly as it passes. In the
High Street of the ancient village of that name, Halt! is again the
word. Of old time a famous Lazar-House stood here, and hard by those
elms of St. Giles, already noted as a place of execution. The simple
piety of mediæval times would dispatch no wretch on so long a journey
without sustenance. Hence at the Lazar-House gate he was given a huge
bowl of ale, his “last refreshing in this life,” whereof he might
drink at will. The most gallant of the Elizabethans has phrased for
us the felon’s thoughts as he quaffed the strange draught. On that
chill October morning when Raleigh went to his doom at Westminster,
some one handed him “a cup of excellent sack,” courteously inquiring
how he liked it? “As the fellow,” he answered with a last touch of
Elizabethan wit, “that drinking of St. Giles’s bowl as he went to
Tyburn, said:--‘That were good drink if a man might tarry by it.’” The
Lazar went, but the St. Giles’s bowl lingered, only no longer a shaven
monk, but the landlord of the Bowl or the Crown, or what not, handed up
the liquor.
Bowl Yard, which vanished into Endell Street, long preserved the memory
of this “last refreshing.” At York a like custom prevailed, whereof
local tradition recorded a quaint apologue. The saddler of Bawtry
needs must hang--why and wherefore no man knoweth. To the amazement
and horror of all he most churlishly refused the proffered bowl. Pity
was but wasted (so our forefathers thought) on such a fellow. Before
a dry-eyed crowd he was strung up with the utmost dispatch, but a
reprieve arriving, was cut down just as quickly. All too late, however!
He was done with this world. Had he but reasonably tarried, as others
did, for his draught, he had died in his bed like many a better man.
Hence the rustic moralist taught how the saddler of Bawtry was hanged
for leaving of his ale. The compilers of the Sunday school treatises
have scandalously neglected this leading case of lost opportunities.
Nay, though a pearl “richer than all his tribe,” you shall search the
works of Dr. Smiles for it in vain.
But the day wears on, and our procession must farther westward along
Tyburn Road (now Oxford Street). It is soon quit of houses; yet the
crowd grows ever denser, and, though Tyburn Tree stands out grim and
gaunt in our view, it is some time ere the cart pulls up under the
beam. Soon the halter is fixed, and the parson says his last words
to the trembling wretch. And now it is proper for him to address the
crowd, confessing his crimes, and warning others to amend their ways.
If a broken-down cleric or the like, his last devotions and dying
speech are apt to be prosy and inordinate; so that the mob jeers or
even pelts him and his trusty Ketch himself. Or “some of the Sheriff’s
officers discovering impatience to have the execution dispatched” (thus
Samuel Smith, the Ordinary of a case in 1684), Jack cuts things short
by whipping up his horses and leaves his victim dangling and agape.
More decorously the cap is drawn over his face, and he himself gives
the signal to turn off. The Hangman, if in genial mood, now stretches
the felon’s legs for him, or thumps his breast with the benevolent
design of expelling the last breath; but the brute is usually too lazy
or too careless, and these pious offices are performed by friends.
The accessories of such a last scene are preserved in Hogarth’s
_Apprentice_ Series. One of the crowd is picking a pocket, and you
foresee him ending here some day soon. (Is it not told of one rascal,
that he urged on the attendants his right to a near view, since, sure
of hanging some day, he naturally wished to see how it was done?)
Another in the crowd is bawling, a trifle prematurely, the last
speech and dying confession of Thomas Idle. Verses commemorative of
the occasion were sold broadcast. “Tyburn’s elegiac lines,” as you
may suppose, were sad doggerel. Here is the concluding portion of a
specimen (_temp. circa_ 1720):
Fifteen of us you soon will see
Ending our days with misery
At the Tree, at the Tree.
Even at Tyburn, how hard to renounce all hope! There was ever the
chance of a reprieve. There is at least one well-authenticated case of
a man making a sudden bolt from the cart, and almost escaping; and,
as the _modus_ was simple strangulation, and the Hangman careless or
corrupt, it was just possible that heroic remedies might restore to
animation. On December 12, 1705, John Smith was turned off, and hung
for a quarter of an hour. A reprieve arriving, he was cut down, and
coaxed back to life. More remarkable was the case of William Duell, in
1740. To all appearance thoroughly well hanged, he was carried off for
dissection to Surgeons’ Hall, where he presently recovered himself.
He was, somewhat cruelly, restored to Newgate, but was let off with
transportation. The law was not always so merciful. In another case,
the sheriff’s officers, having heard that their prey was again alive
and kicking, hunted the wretch out, haled him back to Tyburn, and
hanged him beyond the possibility of doubt. The rumour of such marvels
inspired many attempts at resuscitation. I fancy about one per cent.
were successful, but how to tell, since the instance just quoted shows
that such triumphs were better concealed?
Now, the _corpus_ is essential to the _experimentum_, so half an hour
after the turning off, the friends bring up a deal coffin, borne
across an unhinged coach door or any such make-shift bier. But Ketch
is still in possession: the clothes are Hangman’s perquisites, and
must be purchased. How the greedy rascal appreciates the value of each
button, dwells on the splendour of each sorry ornament, watching the
while and gauging the impatience of the buyers! Never went second-hand
duds at such a figure! Sometimes he overreaches himself, or no one
comes forward to bid. Then the corpse is rudely stripped, “and the
Miscellany of Rags are all crushed into a sack which the Valet de
Chambre carries on purpose, and being digested into Monmouth Street,
Chick Lane, &c., are comfortably worn by many an industrious fellow.”
And sometimes the law claims the body to be removed and hung in chains.
In cases of treason, the felon was drawn to Tyburn in a sledge tied
to a horse’s tail; he was hanged from the cart; but was cut down and
dismembered alive. His head went to the adornment of Temple Bar or
London Bridge; while his quarters, having been boiled in oil and tar
in a cauldron in Jack Ketch’s Kitchen, as the room above the central
gateway at Newgate was called, were scattered here and there as the
authorities fancied. The complete ritual of disgrace was reserved for
political offenders. After rebellions Ketch had his hands full. He
would tumble out of his sack good store of heads wherewith he and the
Newgate felons made hideous sport, preliminary to parboiling them with
bay salt and cummin seed: the one for preservation, the other sovereign
against the fowls of the air. If the traitor were a woman, she was
burned (till 1790); but usually strangled first. Cases are on record
where, with a fire too quick or a Hangman too clumsy, the choking
proved abortive and----! The sledge so often supplanted the less
ignominious cart, that I ought to explain that a traitor need not be a
political offender. Certain coining offences, the murder of a husband
by his wife, and of a master by his servant, were all ranked a form of
treason, and the criminal was drawn and quartered or burnt accordingly.
Two of Tyburn’s officials, the Ordinary and the Hangman, to wit, now
claim our attention. The Ordinary, or prison chaplain of Newgate, said
“Amen” to the death sentence, and ministered to the convict thence to
the end. A terrible duty, to usher your fellow-man from this world
into the next! I have heard that one such task near proved fatal to
an honest divine; but the hand of little employment hath the daintier
sense, and too often the Newgate Ordinary was a callous wretch, with a
keen zeal for the profits of his post, and for the rest a mere praying
machine. He needs must be good trencherman. It was one of his strange
duties to say grace at City banquets. Major Griffiths, who collects
so many curious facts in his _Chronicles of Newgate_, alleges him not
seldom required to eat three consecutive dinners without quitting the
table. In post-Tyburn days, when they hanged in front of the prison,
the governor’s daughter used to prepare breakfast for those attending
each execution (the _deid clack_, so they called such festivity in
Old Scotland). Broiled kidneys were her masterpiece, and she noted
that, whilst most of her pale-faced guests could stomach nought save
brandy and water, his reverence attacked the dish as one appetised by a
prosperous morning’s work. Most Ordinaries are clean gone from memory,
unrecorded even by _The Dictionary of National Biography_. One (as fly
in amber!) the chance reference of a classic now and again preserves.
E’en Guthrie spares half Newgate by a dash,
sneers Pope, referring to an alleged habit of merely giving initials.
I have turned over a fair number of the Reverend James Guthrie’s
accounts of criminals. In those he always writes the name in full. The
witty though himself forgotten Tom Brown scribbles the epitaph of the
Reverend Samuel Smith, another Ordinary:--
Whither he’s gone
Is not certainly known,
But a man may conclude,
Without being rude,
That orthodox Sam
His flock would not shame.
And to show himself to ’em a pastor most civil,
As he led, so he followed ’em on to the d----l.
And there were the Reverend Thomas Purney, and the Reverend John
Villette, but these be well-nigh empty names. We know most about the
Reverend Paul Lorrain, who was appointed in 1698, and died in 1719,
leaving the respectable fortune of £5000. A typical Ordinary of the
baser sort this; a greedy, gross, sensual wretch, who thrived and grew
fat on the perquisites of his office. Among these was a broadsheet,
published at eight o’clock the morning after a hanging. It was headed,
“The Ordinary of Newgate, his Account of the Behaviour, Confessions,
and Last Speeches of the Malefactors who were executed at Tyburn,
the--.” It gave the names and sentences of the convicts, copious
notes of the sermons (of the most wooden type) he preached at them,
biographies, and confessions, and finally the scenes at the gallows.
Let the up-to-date journalist cherish Lorrain’s name. He was an early
specimen of the personal interviewer: he had the same keen scent for
unsavoury detail, the same total disregard for the feelings or wishes
of his victim, the same readiness to betray confidence; and he had
his subject at such an advantage! You imagine the sanctimonious air
wherewith he produced his notebook and invited the wretch’s statement.
With the scene at Tyburn variety in detail was impossible. “Afterwards
the Cart drew away, and they were turn’d off,” is his formula. You had
a good twopenn’orth, such was his usual modest charge! The first page
top was embellished with two cuts: on the left Old Newgate Archway, on
the right Tyburn Tree. (Gurney affected a quainter design, wherein he
stood, in full canonicals in the centre pointing the way to Heaven,
whilst on his left the Fiend, furnished with a trident, squirmed in a
bed of flames.) The broadsheet was authenticated by his signature.
Now, two things made the Reverend Paul exceeding wroth. One was the
issue of pirated confessions, which were “a great Cheat and Imposture
upon the World,” and they would not merely forge his name but mis-spell
it to boot! His is “the only true _Account_ of the Dying Criminals,”
he urgently, and no doubt truly, asserts. All this touched his pocket,
hence his ire, which blazed no less against the unrepentant malefactor,
who--a scarce less grievous offence--touched his professional pride. He
did not mince words:--“he was a Notorious and Hard-hearted Criminal,”
or afflicted with brutish ignorance or of an obstinate and hardened
disposition. “There is,” he would pointedly remark, “_a Lake of
Brimstone, a Worm that dies not, and a Fire which shall never be
quenched_. And this I must plainly tell you, that will be your dismal
portion there for ever, unless you truly Repent here in time.” And
after “Behaviour” in the title of his broadsheets, he would insert, in
parentheses, “or rather Misbehaviour.” Most of his flock, stupid with
terror, passively acquiesced in everything he said. These “Lorrain
saints,” as Steele called them, received ready absolution at his hands
and their reported end was most edifying. But in James Sheppard (the
Jacobite), who suffered March 17, 1718, for treason, Lorrain had a
most vexatious subject. A non-juring divine, “that Priest or Jesuit,
or Wolf in Sheep’s clothing,” as the Rev. Paul describes him, attended
the convict, and the Ordinary’s services were quite despised. The
intruder, “e’en at the _Gallows_, had the Presumption to give him
Publick Absolution, tho’ he visibly dy’d without Repentance.” Dr.
Doran assures us that, on the way to Tyburn, Paul and his supplanter
came to fisticuffs, and our Ordinary was unceremoniously kicked from
the cart. One would like to believe this entertaining legend, for “the
great historiographer,” as Pope and Bolingbroke sarcastically dub him,
grows less in your favour the more you scan his sheets. His account
of Sheppard concludes with the most fulsome professions of loyalty
to the King and the Protestant Succession, for which he is ready to
sacrifice his life. You note that he was charged with administering
the sacrament for temporal ends, some scandal apparently of shamful
traffic in the elements. There is no proof--indeed, we have nothing to
go on but his own denial; but it shows the gossip whereof he was the
centre. He had ingenious methods of spreading his sale. Thus he tells
his readers that a fuller account of a special case will be published
along with that of prisoners that go for execution to-morrow. In the
case of Nathaniel Parkhurst, hanged May 20, 1715, for the murder of
Count Lewis Pleuro, he actually reports the convict on the eve of his
execution cracking up in advance the report which his ghostly comforter
will presently publish! Strange advertisements fill up the odd corners
of his broadsheets. Here he puffs a manual of devotion by himself;
there the virtue of a quack medicine, some sovran remedy for colic,
gout, toothache, “The Itch or any Itching Humour.” Again, you have “The
works of Petronius Arbiter, with Cuts and a Key,” or “Apuleius’s Golden
Ass,” or some lewd publication of the day. Even if the advertisements
were Paul’s publishers’, how strange the man and the time that suffered
so incongruous a mixture! Our Ordinary petitioned parliament that his
precious broadsheets might go free of the paper tax, by reason of their
edifying nature!
Turn we now to the Hangman. No rare figure _his_ in Old England! Only
in later years was he individualised. In James I.’s time a certain
Derrick filled the office. The playwrights keep his memory green, and
the crane so called is said to take its name from him. Then there
came Gregory Brandon, who had “a fair coat of arms,” and the title of
esquire in virtue of his office. This was through a mad practical joke
of York Herald, who, perceiving a solemn ass in Garter King-at-Arms,
sent him in the papers somewhat ambiguously worded, and got the grant
in due form. York and Garter were presently laid by the heels in the
Marshalsea, “one for foolery, the other for knavery.”
Gregory was succeeded by his son, also called Gregory, though his real
name was Richard. His infantile amusement was the heading of cats and
dogs, his baby fingers seemed ever adjusting imaginary halters on
invisible necks; he was “the destined heir, From his soft cradle, to
his father’s chair”--or rather cart and ladder. The younger Brandon
was, it seems quite certain, the executioner of Charles I. Then
followed Edward, commonly known as Esquire Dun, and then the renowned
Jack Ketch, who went to his ghastly work with so callous a disregard
for human suffering, or, as some fancied, with such monstrous glee,
that his name, becoming the very synonym for hangman, clave to all his
successors. He “flourished” 1663-1686. Dryden calls him an “excellent
physician,” and commemorates him more than once in his full-resounding
line. Some held Catch his true patronymic and Ketch a corruption of
Jacquet, the family name of those who held the Manor of Tyburn during
a great part of the seventeenth century, but this, however ingenious,
seems too far-fetched. The original Jack was ungracious and surly
even beyond the manner of his kind. In January 1686, for insolence
to the sheriffs, “he was deposed and committed to Bridewell.” Pascha
Rose, a butcher, succeeded but getting himself hanged in May Ketch was
reinstated. It is recorded that he struck for higher pay--and got it
too. You might fancy that any one could adjust the “Tyburn Tippet,”
or “the riding knot an inch below the ear.” But the business called
for its own special knack. In the _History of the Press-yard_ the
Hangman is represented, after the suppression of the 1715 Rising, as
cheerfully expectant, “provided the king does not unseasonably spoil
my market by reprieves and pardons.” He will receive ample douceurs
“for civility-money in placing their halters’ knot right under their
left ear, and separating their quarters with all imaginable decency.”
Ketch’s fancy hovered between a noble and a highwayman. My Lord was
never stingy with tips; ’twere unseasonable and quite against the
traditions of his order. And the foppery of the other made him a bird
worth plucking. I do not pretend to give a complete catalogue of these
rascals, yet two others I must mention: John Price (1718) was arrested
for murder as he was escorting, it is said, a felon to Tyburn. It
was a brutal business, and he richly deserved the halter. He got it
too! John Dennis led the attack on Newgate in the Lord George Gordon
No-Popery Riots (_temp._ 1780, but of course you remember your _Barnaby
Rudge_). He was like to have swung himself, but was continued in his
old occupation on condition of stringing up his fellow-rioters. Of old
time the Hangman was (we are assured) sworn on the Book to dispatch
every criminal without favour to father or relative or friend; and he
was then dismissed with this formula:--“Get thee hence, wretch.” I have
noted the unwillingness to admit him into Newgate--his wages were paid
over the gate--and the sorry condition of his equipage. This last gave
a grotesque touch to his progress, readily seized on by the jeering
mob, which had ever a curse or a missile for the scowling wretch.
In the centuries of its horrible virility, the Tree at Tyburn slew
its tens of thousands. A record of famous cases would fill volumes.
I can but note a very few. The earliest recorded, though they cannot
have been the first, were those of Judge Tressilian and Nicholas
Brembre, in February 1388. Their offence was high treason, which meant
in that primitive time little more than a political difference with
the authorities. This Brembre had been four times Mayor of London. He
proposed some startling innovations in the city, one being to change
its name to New Troy (Geoffrey of Monmouth perchance had turned his
head). Here ended Perkin Warbeck, that “little cockatrice of a king”
on whom Bacon lavishes such wealth of vituperative rhetoric, after
abusing Henry VII.’s generosity more than once. The savagery of Henry
VIII. kept the executioner busy, and he of Tyburn had his full share.
On May 4, 1535, in open defiance to every past tradition, the King
caused hang and quarter Haughton, the last prior of the Charterhouse,
in his sacerdotal robes, without any previous ceremony of degradation,
after which “his arm was hung as a bloody sign over the archway of the
Charterhouse.” In 1581, under Elizabeth, Campion and Harte continued
the long line of catholic martyrs. Campion had been so cruelly racked
that he could not hold up his hand to plead without assistance, yet
he maintained his courage through the raw December morning whereon he
suffered. At Tyburn they vexed him with long discussions; but at last,
while he was yet praying for Elizabeth, the cart drove away. Many of
his disciples stood round. They fought for relics which the authorities
were determined they should not have, so that a young man having dipped
his handkerchief in the blood was forthwith arrested. In the confusion
some one cut off a finger and conveyed it away. Some one else offered
twenty pounds for a finger-joint, but the hangman dared not let it go.
The fevered imagination of Campion’s adorers saw wondrous signs. Some
pause in the flow of the Thames was noted on that day, and was ascribed
thereto. The river
Awhile astonished stood
To count the drops of Campion’s sacred blood.
Campion himself had long a presentiment of his fate, which, considering
the desperate nature of his mission, was not wonderful; and when
occasion took him past the Triple Tree he was moved to uncover his
head. Southwell, the “sweet singer” of the Catholic reaction, told the
end of his friend in a little work printed at Douay, but in English,
and of course for English circulation; and in 1595 Southwell followed
his brother priest. His followers noted that, when his heart was torn
out, “it leaped from the dissector’s hand and, by its thrilling, seemed
to repel the flames.” A strange legend--not quite baseless, Mr. Gardner
thinks--shows the effect of such scenes on the Catholic mind. Henrietta
Maria, Charles I.’s queen, walked barefoot to Tyburn, as to a shrine,
at dead of night, and did penance under the gallows for the sins of her
adopted country. A felon of a very different order was Mrs. Turner, who
suffered (November 14, 1615) for complicity in Sir Thomas Overbury’s
murder. She had invented yellow starch, and my Lord Coke with a fine
sense of the picturesque ordained her to hang “in her yellow Tinny
Ruff and Cuff.” She dressed the part gallantly; “her face was highly
rouged, and she wore a cobweb lawn ruff, yellow starched.” The Hangman
had also yellow bands and cuffs, he tied her hands with a black silk
ribbon herself had provided, as well as a black veil for her face.
Being turned off, she seemed to die quietly. But yellow starch went
hopelessly out of fashion!
After the Restoration, the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw
were dug up at Westminster, removed at night to the Red Lion Inn,
Holborn, drawn next morning (January 30, 1661), the anniversary of
Charles’s death, to Tyburn, and there hanged in their shrouds on the
three wooden posts of the gallows. At nightfall they were taken down
and beheaded; the bodies being there buried, whilst the heads adorned
Westminster Hall. Noll had his picturesque historians before Carlyle.
A wild tale arose that his original funeral at the Abbey had been but
a mock ceremonial; for his body, according to his own instructions,
had been secretly removed to Naseby, and buried at nightfall on the
scene of that victory. Even if we disregard this legend, the subsequent
adventures of Cromwell’s head have been a matter of as much concern to
antiquaries as ever the Royal Martyr’s was to Mr. Dick.
Time would fail to narrate the picturesque and even jovial exits of
those “curled darlings” of the _Tyburn Calendar or Malefactors’ Bloody
Register_ (or any other form of the _Newgate Chronicle_), those idols
of the popular imagination, the Caroline and Georgian highwaymen. Swift
pictures the very ideal in _Clever Tom Clinch_, who--
... while the rabble was bawling,
Rode stately through Holborn to die in his calling;
He stopped at the George for a bottle of sack,
And promised to pay for it--when he came back.
His waistcoat and stockings and breeches were white.
His cap had a new cherry-ribbon to tie’t;
And the maids to the doors and the balconies ran,
And cried “Lack-a-day! he’s a proper young man!”
But how to summarise the infinite variety of detail? To tell how, when
Claude Duval swung (January 21, 1670) Ladies of Quality looked on in
tears and masks; how he lay in more than royal state in Tangier Tavern,
St. Giles’s; and how they carved on his stone “in the centre aisle of
Covent Garden Church,” the pattern of a highwayman’s epitaph:
Here lies Du Vall: reader, if male thou art,
Look to thy purse; if female, to thy heart.
How the mob bolted with Jack Sheppard’s body (November 16, 1724) to
save the “bonny corp” from the surgeon’s knife! How Jonathan Wild,
“the Great” (May 24, 1725), during the finishing touches picked the
Ordinary’s pocket of his corkscrew, and was turned off with it still
in his hand (thus Fielding: Purney was the ordinary. _His_ account
is quite different), to the unspeakable delight of that enormous body
of spectators, to which Sheppard’s two hundred thousand onlookers
were (Defoe assures us) no more to be compared than is a regiment to
an army. How Sixteen-string Jack (November 30, 1774), his “bright
pea-green coat” and “immense nosegay” were almost _too_ magnificent
even for so noble an occasion. Alas! not ours to dwell on such details;
let the brave rogues go!
I cull one instance from the peerage. Earl Ferrers suffered at Tyburn
(May 5, 1760) for the death of Johnson, his land steward. He dressed
in his wedding clothes, “a suit of white and silver”: “as good an
occasion,” he observed, “for putting them on, as that for which they
were first made” (his treatment of his wife had indirectly brought
about the murder). Every consideration was paid to my Lord’s feelings:
“A landau with six horses” was _his_ Tyburn cart, and a silk rope _his_
“anodyne necklace”; and yet things did not go smoothly. The mob was
so enormous that the journey took three hours. It was far worse than
hanging, he protested to the sheriffs. His very handsome tip of five
guineas was handed by mistake to the Hangman’s man, and an unseemly
altercation ensued. My Lord toed the line with anxious care. “Am I
right?” were his last words. The accurate fall of the drop must have
satisfied him that he was.
I must not neglect the clergy. Here the leading case is obviously
that of Dr. Dodd, hanged for forgery (June 27, 1777). The strange ups
and down of his life (“he descended so low as to become the editor
of a newspaper”) are not for this page. The maudlin piety of his
last days is no pleasant spectacle. Dr. Newton, Bishop of Bristol,
thought him deserving of pity “because hanged for the least crime
he had committed.” Dr. Samuel Johnson did all he could to save him;
also wrote his address to the judge (sentence had been respited) in
reply to the usual question, as well as the sermon he delivered in
Newgate Chapel three weeks before the end. The King sternly refused a
reprieve. No doubt he was right. The very manner of the deed seems
to argue not a first, only a first discovered, offence. His doggerel
_Thoughts in Prison_ is his chief literary crime. He went in a coach.
His “considerable time in praying,” and “several showers of rain,”
rendered the mob somewhat impatient. He was assisted by two clergymen.
One was very much affected; “the other, I suppose, was the Ordinary, as
he was perfectly indifferent and unfeeling in everything he said and
did.” Villette was then Ordinary. He wrote an account (after the most
approved pattern) of Dodd’s unhappy end. The pair had spent much time
together in Newgate, and one hopes the report of Villette’s behaviour
is mistaken or inaccurate, though it is that of an eye-witness, a
correspondent of George Selwyn himself an enthusiastic amateur of
executions, who, when he had a tooth drawn, let fall his handkerchief
_à la Tyburn_, as a signal for the operation. James Boswell had a like
craze. He went in a mourning coach with the Rev. James Hackman when
that divine was hanged (April 19, 1779) for the murder of Miss Reay.
When Hackman let fall the handkerchief for signal it fell _outside_
the cart, and Ketch with an eye to small perquisites jumped down to
secure it _before_ he whipped up the horse. These are all names more
or less known. There are hundreds of curious incidents connected with
obscure deaths. Here are a few samples:--In 1598 “some mad knaves took
tobacco all the way as they went to be hanged at Tyburn.” In 1677, a
woman and “a little dog ten inches high” were hanged side by side as
accomplices--“a hideous prospect,” comments our chronicler. In 1684
Francis Kirk, having murdered his wife, must end at Tyburn. Shortly
before he had seen a fellow hanged there for making away with _his_
spouse; and this, he confessed, had inspired him!
One John Austin had the distinction of being the last person executed
at Tyburn (November 7, 1783). Reformers had long denounced the
procession as a public scandal. The sheriffs had some doubts as to
their powers; but the judges, being consulted, assured them they could
end it an they would. A month after (December 9, 1783) the gallows was
at work in front of Newgate, and Old London lost its most exciting
spectacle. Dr. Johnson frankly regretted the change:--“Executions are
intended to draw spectators, if they do not draw spectators they lose
their reason. The old method was more satisfactory to all parties. The
public was gratified by a procession, the criminal was supported by
it. Why is all this to be swept away?” In truth, the change of scene
was an illogical compromise: the picturesque effect was gone--save
for an occasional touch, as after Holling’s execution, when the dead
hand was thrust into a woman’s bosom, to remove a mark or wen--the
disorderly mob remained, nay, was a greater scandal at the centre than
in the suburbs. Dickens is but one of many writers who knowing their
London well described the unedifying walk and talk of the crowd before
Newgate; and in 1868 private was substituted for public execution
throughout the land. I do not criticise any system: I do but point
out that of the two sets of opposing forces noted as working on the
criminal’s mind, the latter, in a private execution, is entirely
suppressed.
Tyburn and its memories, its criminals, its Hangmen, its Ordinaries,
filled a great space in popular imagination, and have frequent mention
in our great writers. Shakespeare himself has “The shape of Love’s
Tyburn”; and Dryden’s “Like thief and parson in a Tyburn cart” is a
stock quotation. But I cannot string a chaplet of these pearls. Yet two
phrases I must explain. A felon who “prayed his clergy” was during some
centuries branded on the crown of his thumb with the letter T, ere he
was released, to prevent a second use of the plea. This was called, in
popular slang, the Tyburn T. Ben Jonson was so branded (October, 1598)
for killing Gabriel Spencer, the actor, in a duel. Again a statute
of 1698 (10 Will. III. c. 12), provided for those who prosecuted a
felon to conviction a certificate freeing them from certain parochial
duties. This was known as a “Tyburn ticket.” It had a certain money
value, because if unused it could be assigned once. The privilege was
abolished in 1827 (7 and 8 Geo. IV. c. 27), but it was allowed as late
as 1856 to a certain Mr. Pratt, of Bond Street, who by showing his
ticket (which must have been thirty years old) escaped service on an
Old Bailey jury.
Pillory and Cart’s-Tail
Hood and Lamb on the Pillory--Its Various Shapes--Butcher and
Baker--Brawler and Scold--Fraudulent Attorneys--End of the Pillory
and of Public Whipping--Literary Martyrs--De Foe--Prynne, Bastwick,
and Burton--Case of Titus Oates--The Tale of a Cart--Some Lesser
Sufferers.
Hood has comically told of his pretended experiences in the
Pillory:--“It is a sort of Egg-Premiership: a place above your
fellows, but a place which you have on trial. You are not without the
established political vice, for you are not exempt from turning,”--with
more punning cogitations of a like nature. Of rarer humour is Charles
Lamb’s _Reflections in the Pillory_, with its invocation to them that
once stood therein:--“Shades of Bastwick and of Prynne hover over
thee--Defoe is there, and more greatly daring Shebbeare--from their
(little more elevated) stations they look down with recognitions.
Ketch, turn me!” A century or so earlier these ingenious wits had
possibly stood therein--in fact and not in fancy. It was a way our
old-time rulers had of rewarding ingenious wits. And not wits alone:
since for many centuries it was in daily use throughout the length and
breadth of Merrie England.