Promotion lately was bestowedUpon a person mean and small:Then many persons to him flowed,Yet he returned no thanks at all.But yet their hands were ready stillTo help him with their kind good will.
Promotion lately was bestowedUpon a person mean and small:Then many persons to him flowed,Yet he returned no thanks at all.But yet their hands were ready stillTo help him with their kind good will.
Promotion lately was bestowedUpon a person mean and small:Then many persons to him flowed,Yet he returned no thanks at all.But yet their hands were ready stillTo 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,aliasTrevor, 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, andby 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 toooften 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. Othermeasures 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 andElizabeth’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
IN THE TORTURE CHAMBER.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 personwho 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 thechambre 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 wastorn 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 hiscoup de gracefrom 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 mostcommon 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 thepeine forte et dure, was a development of the ancient prisonforte et durethe 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 poolnearest 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 thepeine forte et dureHolinshed 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 thepeine forte et durein 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 wishedto 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 thepeine 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
W^m. Spiggot under pressure in Newgate for not pleading to his IndictmentWm.Spiggot under pressure in Newgatefor 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 toplead, 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 thisinstrument 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 asthe 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 belongingto 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 throughit. 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, buta 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.” κυφωνTurner 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 seventeenout 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. TheRoman 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 anauto 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 brutalsangfroid, 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. “Thedog 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 Newgatebecame 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 processiontook 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 nowexcited 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, andwhile 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’ssangfroiddid 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.” Otherconvicts 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 justthe 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,