THREE
The Bloody Code was monstrous and ineffectual. Its vice lay in the enormous disproportion it maintained between offences and penalties. It gave the impression of a world in which ‘great thieves hang little ones’. It was not justice that was administered; it was a war that was waged between two classes of the community.
(The Times, editorial, 25 July 1872)
Instead of making the gallows an object of terror, our executions contribute to make it an object of contempt in the eye of the malefactor; and we sacrifice the lives of men, not for the reformation but the diversion of the populace.
(Henry Fielding, magistrate at Bow Street)
THE PENAL CODE
In 1582 William Lambard of Lincoln’s Inn applauded the fact that the English penal code no longer included ‘pulling out the tongue for false rumours, cutting off the nose for adultery, taking away the privy parts for counterfeiting of money’ or certain other punishments associated with the Medieval period. That is not to say that the remaining penalties were altogether humane. Lambard divided them into three categories – infamous, pecuniary and corporal.1 Infamous punishments were reserved for crimes such as treason and involved such hideous processes as hanging, drawing and quartering. Pecuniary penalties involved fines for such offences as swearing, playing a musical instrument on the Sabbath or failing to attend church. They were mostly imposed by Justices of the Peace and constituted an important source of revenue for the clerks who advised the Justices. The third category, corporal punishments, Lambard divided into ‘either Capital or not Capital. Capital (or deadly) punishment is done sundry ways, as by hanging, burning, boiling or pressing. Not Capital is of diverse forms as of cutting off the hand or ear, burning, whipping, imprisoning, stocking, setting in the pillory or ducking stool’.
From this description it is evident that imprisonment was only one of many punishments available and was, in fact, comparatively unusual, partly on account of the expense involved in constructing and maintaining prisons. Newgate itself, London’s largest prison, had a capacity of only 150 prisoners until the late eighteenth century, though this was often exceeded. Fines, on the other hand, were a useful source of revenue for the courts, while mutilations and public whippings were a popular if gruesome public spectacle. Thus, in 1572, an ‘Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds’ prescribed that such reprobates as ‘fortune tellers, pedlars, players and jugglers’ should be whipped and ‘burnt though the right ear’ as evidence to their fellow citizens of ‘his or her roguish kind of life’. Players of course, were actors, but fortunately for the cause of English literature this statute, passed when Shakespeare was 8 years old, did not apply to companies that enjoyed the patronage of prominent courtiers, as Shakespeare’s companies did. The act further prescribed that ears could be cut off for vagrancy while hands were removed from those who were responsible for publishing seditious books – a common punishment at a time when the publication of unorthodox religious opinions was regarded as little short of treason.
The financial motives for punishing vagrants with a public whipping were illustrated by an example cited by Lambard. Destitute beggars were liable to become a charge upon the parish, so Lombard proclaimed that ‘Any Justice of the Peace may appoint any person to be publicly whipped naked until his or her body be bloody that shall be taken begging or wandering’, this punishment being visited upon a ‘sturdy vagrant’ named John Stile, who was then returned to his place of birth to avoid further expense for the parish where he was apprehended.2 These attitudes prevailed well into the eighteenth century. An Act of 1744 divided such citizens into three categories. ‘Idle and disorderly persons’ and ‘rogues and vagabonds’ were to be publicly whipped; the third category, ‘incorrigible rogues’ (repeat offenders), were to be offered to the army or navy. Other criminals, rather than being imprisoned, were subject to transportation, which was first permitted by an Act of 1598, but did not become a regular feature of the penal system until 1719 when convicts were sent to North America. The American War of Independence ended this convenient outlet for Britain’s penal system, but criminals continued to be sent to Cape Town until 1849 and to Australia until 1864.
A further device for keeping the prisons empty was the enactment, from the late seventeenth century, of what became known as the Bloody Code, whereby those found guilty of an increasing number of offences, principally involving property, were made subject to the death penalty. In 1688 there were about fifty capital crimes, most of which had been added by Acts of Parliament to the Common Law offences of treason, murder, arson, robbery and grand larceny, but from that date there followed a series of statutes creating new capital offences. During the reigns of the first four Georges, 1714–1830, such statutes created a steady flow of such penalties, so by the latter date the number was approaching 300. Under this code an offender could be hanged for stealing goods worth 5s (25p), impersonating a Chelsea Pensioner, cutting down a tree or damaging Westminster Bridge. A statute of 1721 designed to discourage resentful weavers from damaging clothes made from imported cloth was to have strange consequences in the trial of the Newgate Monster later in the century.3 The most notorious of the statutes that created the Bloody Code was the Waltham Black Act of 1723, which was brought in to deal with roving bands who, with blackened faces, were stealing deer in royal forests. This act alone created fifty capital offences, including the poaching of deer. Some commentators have attributed this savage code to the fact that the interests of property were very well represented in both the Houses of Parliament which passed the statutes, an interest underpinned by the influential philosophy of John Locke (1632–1704) whose writings emphasised the role of just government in preserving property rights. In his Second Treatise of Government, published in 1690 as the Bloody Code began its monstrous progress, Locke defined political power as the right to make ‘Laws with Penalties of Death, and consequently all less Penalties, for the Regulating and Preserving of Property’. The 1830s were the high-water mark of the Bloody Code. In 1831 George Widgett was the last person to be hanged at Newgate for sheep stealing and the following year John Barrett was the last to be hanged for stealing from the Royal Mail.4 In 1842 the efforts of penal reformers saw the gradual removal of capital offences from the statute book until in 1861 there remained only the old Common Law offences of murder, treason, robbery and arson in the royal dockyards. After the demise of the Bloody Code, The Times, in an indignant leader, drew attention to the injustices that it had inflicted in defence of property:
The Bloody Code was monstrous and ineffectual. Its vice lay in the enormous disproportion it maintained between offences and penalties. It gave the impression of a world in which ‘great thieves hang little ones’. It was not justice that was administered; it was a war that was waged between two classes of the community.5
In practice many juries refused to convict defendants for petty offences which carried the death penalty, while in other cases the judges simply declared stolen items to be worth less than 5s and sentenced offenders to a flogging rather than the scaffold. This did not, however, eliminate appalling miscarriages of justice. William Cobbett left an account of a 19-year-old mother of two children whose husband had been pressed into the navy and who had stolen a small quantity of cloth in London. She was hanged, as was another young woman under a law which, in the words of the judge who sentenced her, was ‘aimed not at her death but at the death of her crime’ – in other words to set an example to others.6 This sentiment reflected the philosophy of the eminent Anglican divine William Paley, who held that a wide variety of crimes should carry the death penalty to act as a deterrent. He wrote that, ‘The proper end of human punishment is not the satisfaction of justice but the prevention of crimes’, and advocated the hanging of thieves because ‘property being more exposed requires the terror of capital punishment to protect it’. Paley, however, mitigated the severity of this judgment by the further argument that the death penalty should rarely be inflicted, believing that the resulting uncertainty would deter criminals: ‘The humanity of this design furnishes a just excuse for the multiplicity of capital offences which the laws of England are creating beyond those of other countries’.7 The weakness of his reasoning is illustrated by the fact that a large proportion of the crowds that attended public executions were habitual criminals. A nineteenth-century governor of Newgate reported that in his fifteen years as a governor he had never known a murderer who had not previously attended an execution.
William Paley (1743–1805): born in Peterborough, William Paley trained as an Anglican priest at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Paley’s book, Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, Collected from the Appearances of Nature, presented God as a watchmaker and the creation as a carefully designed organism, each part, down to the wings of an insect, having its part in the order of things. Paley’s Evidences, as the volume was known, was required reading at Cambridge into the twentieth century, and it made a favourable impression on the young Charles Darwin when he was himself studying at Christ’s College in the nineteenth century. Darwin’s own work on evolution later overturned that of Paley. Paley became Archdeacon of Carlisle, a prebendary of St Paul’s Cathedral and Subdean of Lincoln where he was living when he died in 1805. He was an early campaigner against the slave trade.
THE PROCESS
The process by which defendants from Newgate were tried, sentenced and conveyed to their execution, originally at Tyburn, was a macabre ritual, though the trial that preceded it was often marked by unseemly haste. In the 1780s only one defendant in eight tried for a property offence at the Old Bailey was represented by a lawyer8 while an account of proceedings there, which was published in 1833, estimated that trials took, on average, less than nine minutes.9 The proceedings were no doubt on occasion expedited by the use of ‘men of straw’ who stood outside the courts with pieces of straw protruding from their footwear to indicate that they were prepared to give evidence for whichever side was willing to pay them. After sentence of death was pronounced by the judge wearing, of course, the black cap, the convict was taken to Newgate’s condemned cell to await his transfer to Tyburn and execution.
Under an Act of 1752 those found guilty of murder were taken to execution within forty-eight hours of the sentence (there being no Appeal Court at that time) while those convicted of lesser crimes were give about a week to await their execution. During this time the occupants of the condemned cell were objects of interest to well-meaning clergymen who wanted to prepare them for death. In the words of a contemporary, ‘The prison is beset with applications for admittance by persons who wish to be allowed to administer consolation to the unhappy malefactors.’ These were often Wesleyan clergymen whose attentions were resented by the Newgate chaplains, known as ‘Ordinaries’ who had their own reasons for ministering to the condemned. Curious visitors were also admitted to the condemned cell upon payment to the keepers so that ‘the parties may go home and say they have seen the prisoners under sentence of death in the condemned cell at Newgate’.10 Some of the more recalcitrant prisoners welcomed the celebrity conferred upon them by their condition, but were less impressed by the ministrations of the clergy. Jack Sheppard, Newgate’s most notorious escaper, told one clergyman that ‘one file’s worth all the Bibles in the world’.11
Some of those condemned to death escaped the sentence through the intervention of the Privy Council, which could give reprieves in the name of the king. Many of these were sentenced instead to transportation which, in Batty Langley’s time, took them to work on the American plantations in Maryland and elsewhere.12 A typical sentence of seven years would involve their being sold to a plantation owner by the captain of their ship. They would then work, virtually as slaves, for four years after which they could settle in America with a grant of land. If they returned to Britain before their sentence had expired they would, if caught, be sentenced to death.13
THE ORDINARIES AND THE CONDEMNED SERMON
In 1544, at the request of the Aldermen of the City of London, a chaplain from nearby St Bartholomew’s Hospital was appointed to minister to the needs of the Newgate prisoners. From 1694 these Ordinaries, as they became known, of Newgate were appointed by the Bishop of London. In the eighteenth century ten people alto The gether filled the post, each receiving a salary of £35 a year together with a house on Newgate Street, near the gaol. The Ordinary’s task was to minister to the needs of the prisoners, take the regular chapel services, preach the condemned sermon and attempt to bring to repentance those who faced execution. The last of these tasks enabled many of the Ordinaries to earn four or five times their salary by publishing ‘Accounts’ of the confessions of the prisoners. These were often published in the form of chapbooks, cheap and often poorly printed publications that were frequently rushed into print at short notice. The robber John Hall remarked upon the Ordinary’s persistence, on the morning of execution, when he ‘is as diligent in inquiring out the Particulars of their Lives, as though he were to send a Catalogue of their sins along with them’, thereby furnishing material for the Accounts.14
Over 200 such Accounts survive from the eighteenth century.15 They were long considered to be little more than fiction of the most sensational kind whose purpose was to make money for the publishers, but Peter Linebaugh, an authoritative source, has observed that many of the facts they contain can be verified from other accounts such as parish records.16 The Accounts normally included a report of the trial, a description of the crimes attributed to the condemned, an account of his or her confessions and, finally, a description, often lurid, of the hanging at Tyburn. Individual Accounts, as pamphlets, sold for between 2d and 6d, depending upon the notoriety of the prisoner, and bore such revelatory titles as The Ordinary of Newgate, His Account of the Behaviour,Confession and Dying Words of the Malefactors who were Executed at Tyburn. They were advertised in the Old Bailey Proceedings, which were published during the time that the court was sitting. It was in the interests of the more predatory Ordinaries to extract sensational confessions from the condemned in order to raise the price of the Accounts and some of them went to great lengths to achieve this. In the following century, the reformer Francis Place protested that ‘the Ordinary used to torture the person under sentence of death for confessions’. John Allen, who served as Ordinary in the early eighteenth century, offered to recommend reprieves for prisoners who were prepared to give especially colourful accounts of their crimes. Allen also ran a funeral business, which provided an additional source of revenue from the families of his unfortunate clientele.
Samuel Pepys’s former secretary, Paul Lorraine,17 served as Ordinary at the execution of the notorious pirate Captain Kidd. Kidd was hanged at Execution Dock, Wapping, the traditional site for those convicted of piracy. Kidd was drunk by the time he reached Wapping and rejected Lorraine’s ministrations. The rope that was used to hang him broke, at which point Kidd’s nerve also broke and he repented before being successfully hanged at the second attempt. Following these executions the pirate’s body would be left for three tides to wash over it, during which time it was guarded by a Sheriff’s officer who prevented souvenir hunters from removing pieces of body or clothing as souvenirs or lucky charms. Lorraine was less successful with a young pickpocket who steadfastly refused to confess, prompting the frustrated Ordinary to exclaim, ‘Such case hardened rogues as you would ruin the sale of my paper.’ Another prisoner declined to confess on the grounds that he did not want the Ordinary to profit.18
The Ordinaries were not without competitors in compiling and marketing Accounts, which were openly sold at the execution scene. Tobias Smollett’s (1721–51) novel Roderick Random, includes an account of a penniless poet, imprisoned in the Marshalsea, describing his own attempts to earn a living from such literary productions. He explained, ‘I have made many a good meal on a monster; a rape has often afforded me great satisfaction; but a murder, well-timed, was my never failing resource.’ Such hack writers were bitterly resented by the Ordinaries as intruders upon their livelihoods and were themselves the objects of satire by authors like Defoe, Pope, Swift, Gay and Goldsmith. This did not prevent these writers from themselves penning highly colourful accounts of these events. Daniel Defoe, whose frequent state of financial embarrassment has already been noted,19 was the author of a colourful account of the career of the serial escaper Jack Sheppard, though it was presented as an account written by Sheppard himself. Written in the first person and illustrated with a sketch of one of Sheppard’s escapes, it is a skilful blend of lurid accounts of daring exploits and pious homilies on the consequences of crime. Thus Elizabeth Lyon, one of Sheppard’s accomplices who had escaped with him from Newgate and later denounced him, is described as a ‘wicked, deceitful and lascivious wretch’ followed by the request that ‘God forgive her’.20 Later accounts of Sheppard’s exploits are based largely on this account which spares no details of his daring and ingenuity.
Some Ordinaries exhibited impatience with anything that threatened to compromise the profitability of their publications. John Villette was the Newgate Ordinary in the 1770s and was required to accompany a young boy to Tyburn. Before the execution was carried out another person confessed to the crime, but when Villette learned that this had prompted a request for a reprieve for the unfortunate young man he told the executioner to proceed, exclaiming that it was no time to worry about ‘details of this kind’.21Despite Villette’s haste, the boy was spared. A reprieve was not invariably fatal to the success of a publication, however. One minister, not an Ordinary, sent an account of the crimes, confession and death of a prisoner to a newspaper which duly published it. In the meantime, the man had been reprieved and was thus able to read an account of his own death.22
The chapel services could be noisy affairs. In 1716 one Ordinary complained that prisoners were ‘eating and drinking on the Communion table that is now broken’ and urinating in the corner of the building.23 On other occasions prisoners would shout or spit at the Ordinary or even threaten to shoot him.24 In 1719 the service was disrupted when a prisoner circulated a bawdy pamphlet that he smuggled into the service by concealing it in his hat. An attempt by the City authorities to raise the tone of the prison by providing two Bibles was frustrated when they were stolen and had to be replaced by new ones which were chained in accordance with Medieval usage.
On the Sunday before the execution those to be executed the following day were obliged to attend chapel, where the Newgate Ordinary preached the condemned sermon, calling the guilty to repentance. To emphasise the solemnity of the occasion a coffin, to be called into use very soon, was laid out in the chapel in full view as those due to die the following day sat in the condemned pew. In the nineteenth century a humane Ordinary, Horace Cotton, tried to dispense with the coffin, but the City Aldermen sternly insisted on its reinstatement. The condemned services were very popular with local residents, so the keepers were able to charge handsomely for admission to these grim occasions. The proceedings were likely to be interrupted by insistent whispering among the onlookers and noisier quibbling with the turnkeys about the entrance fee for admission to the spectacle. In 1729 it was estimated that the turnkeys could make over £20 on a good day.25 The congregation included a number of what Punch called ‘Old Bailey Ladies’ who attended these macabre events in order to have ‘their Christianity and their morals mightily refreshed by the discipline’ on what the magazine termed an Old Bailey Holiday:26
Who would seek the vulgar playhouse when, with Newgate interest, ladies may be on the free list for all condemned sermons, when they may witness real agony, may behold a real murderer writhing in all the hell of horror and despair.
The condemned themselves were not always in repentant mood and it was not unusual for the Ordinary to have to shout his sermon in the small chapel in order to be heard above the hubbub of chattering spectators and loud threats from prisoners. In May 1762 the chronicler James Boswell, better known for his Life of Dr Samuel Johnson, visited Newgate and was moved by the plight of a former seaman, Paul Lewis, who had been condemned to hang at Tyburn. Boswell described him as a ‘genteel, spirited young fellow. He was dressed in a white coat and blue silk vest with his hair neatly queued and a silver-laced hat … Poor fellow! I really took a great concern for him and wished to relieve him. He walked firmly and with a good air, with his chains rattling upon him to the chapel.’27
The ritual did not end with the chapel service. In 1605 a wealthy citizen had bequeathed to the City a legacy which would pay for a bell to be rung outside the cell of the condemned at midnight, thus waking them from any slumber they had managed to achieve.28 The bell was rung by the sexton of St Sepulchre’s Church, which lay opposite the gaol, and it was accompanied by a recital of a verse that was calculated to instil repentance rather than cheerfulness:
All you that in the condemned hold do lie,
Prepare you, for tomorrow you shall die;
Watch all and pray: the hour is drawing near
That you before the Almighty must appear;
Examine well yourselves; in time repent,
That you may not to eternal flames be sent.
And when St Sepulchre’s bell in the morning tolls,
The Lord above have mercy on your souls.
THE PROCESSION TO TYBURN
The following morning, as the bells of St Sepulchre’s tolled twelve times, the condemned would be led into the prison Press Yard where their chains would be struck off. In Batty Langley’s words, ‘then they are bound with the same fatal Hempen String [hemp rope] which shortly after finally determinated their wicked days’.29 By this time the prisoners were often drunk, having been plied with fortifying liquors the previous night by sympathetic inmates. Occasionally, the hangman was also in this condition. These proceedings could be viewed by those who had been guests of the governor at the earlier ‘Governor’s Execution Breakfast’ where devilled kidneys were the customary fare. The prisoners were handed over to the under-sheriff who, with a troop of soldiers, was responsible for escorting them to the scaffold, a necessary precaution since it was not unknown for rescue attempts to be made. The procession to Tyburn consisted of a line of carts containing the prisoners, their coffins, the hangman and the Ordinary, a strict order of precedence being observed. Carts containing highwaymen who had robbed the Royal Mail went first, followed by lesser criminals. Traitors brought up the rear. They were denied the dignity of a cart, being dragged instead on hurdles. By the time the procession left Newgate a huge crowd would have gathered, since execution days were often regarded as public holidays. They lined the route from the prison along Holborn, Oxford Street (then called Tyburn Road) to the scaffold itself in the south-east corner of Connaught Square, close to the present site of Marble Arch, the site now being marked by a brass triangle set into the highway.30 The reconstruction of the site in the 1820s revealed a number of bodies, which suggests that some victims were buried at their place of execution.
Immediately after leaving the prison the convoy would stop at St Sepulchre’s where, to the accompaniment of the tolling bell, the sexton would make a further plea for those about to die:
All good people, pray heartily under God for these poor sinners who are now going to their death, for whom this great bell tolls … You that are condemned to die repent with lamentable tears … Lord have mercy upon you … Christ have mercy upon you.31
Fortified by these wishes, and by the nosegay and cup of wine each prisoner was handed at this point, the carts continued on their journey, cheered and occasionally booed by the excited crowds, among the more drunken of whom there developed a tradition of throwing dead cats and dogs into the air. Unpopular prisoners would be pelted with missiles. The procession would pass through a notorious slum district, The Holy Land, which was demolished when New Oxford Street was created in 1847. It would stop at Resurrection Gate, in the grounds of the church of St Giles in the Fields, a former place of execution close to the present site of Centrepoint. Further stops were made at inns on the route for more strong liquor, gin being particularly favoured for the Dutch courage that it conferred. The last such stop was at the Masons Arms in Seymour Place. More affluent prisoners dressed for the occasion, usually in wedding or funeral attire. John Hall wrote that, ‘One would take them for Bridegrooms going to espouse their old Mrs Tyburn’.32 Some wore white cockades in their hats to signify defiance or, occasionally, innocence. A foreign observer commented on the festive air that marked these occasions both for the condemned and for the spectators, writing that:
The English are a people that laugh at the delicacy of other nations who make it such a mighty matter to be hanged. He that is to be [hanged] takes great care to get himself shaved and handsomely dressed either in mourning or in the dress of a bridegroom. Sometimes the girls dress in white with great silk scarves and carry baskets full of flowers and oranges, scattering these favours all the way they go.33
Every opportunity was offered, and many taken, for the prisoners to make speeches and exchange witticisms with the crowd, some prisoners offering to pay for their drinks on their return journey. Highwaymen were the aristocrats of the criminal class and some onlookers would beg for a lock of their hair or a fragment of clothing in a manner reminiscent of the later treatment of popular musicians or sportsmen. Not everyone was so jovial. At a time when 14-year-olds could be executed one young boy was to be seen weeping into the lap of the father who accompanied him on his sad journey. In the vicinity of Tyburn itself the press of the excited crowd was such that fatalities occasionally occurred among the onlookers. On one occasion the scaffold collapsed and killed a spectator, and the throng was often so dense that the condemned prisoners had to descend from their carts and finish their journeys on foot. Lord Ferrers, a man with a history of violence to family and servants, took three hours to go from Newgate to Tyburn in 1760. He had murdered his steward and been convicted of the crime following a trial before his peers in the House of Lords. He had been condemned to hang at Tyburn and to have his body given up for dissection. His reputation, rank and behaviour had attracted an unusually large crowd. Such events also attracted tradesmen and pickpockets. As many as fifty could be arrested in the course of an execution morning, thus adding to the supply of criminals for trial and execution in a self-sustaining flow. Hogarth’s engraving, The Idle ’Prentice executed at Tyburn, shows the gingerbread salesman, Tiddy Doll, plying his trade while having his pocket picked by a street urchin.
As their end approached the condemned were allowed to address the crowd, which could number more than 10,000, some of whom had paid as much as £10 for a seat in one of the wooden stands close to the scaffold itself: Mother Proctor’s Pews, or those of Mammy Douglas the Tyburn Pew-opener. The anonymous author of an eighteenth-century pamphlet, which could charitably be described as a rant against the evils of modern society, was particularly censorious about a certain category of victim on these occasions. After a typically xenophobic complaint about people who employ French cooks to apply sauces to good, plain English food he decries the ‘Sodomites who go to public Executions unpitied and unlamented that can neither hope or expect any Mercy in this and may justly dread the Punishments in the World to come’.34 Some onlookers became connoisseurs of these grim spectacles. George Selwyn (1719–91) a wit, raconteur and somewhat inattentive Member of Parliament, was one such. Described as ‘not merely silent but nearly always asleep’ during Parliamentary sittings, he was nevertheless appreciative of a good execution and reputedly corresponded with judges about the best vantage points from which to watch them.35
Since they were about to die anyway the prisoners were free to make speeches in the knowledge that no further harm could come to them and a good, defiant speech was looked upon with favour by the crowd as part of the entertainment. By a strange coincidence these early examples of free speech took place close to the present site of Speaker’s Corner. As previously observed, some of the supporters of the Old Pretender in the 1715 rising took advantage of the opportunity to declare their allegiance to the exiled Stuarts.36 Some speeches were inordinately long in the hope that a reprieve would arrive in the nick of time. One such was given by a robber, Colonel James Turner, who was taken for execution on 21 January 1663, an event recorded by Samuel Pepys in his diary for that day, among a crowd of over 12,000 people. Pepys’s words help to convey the extent to which these events were public entertainment. After a morning’s work at the Navy Office:
I enquired and found that Turner was not yet hanged. And so I went among them to Leadenhall Street and to St Mary Axe, where he lived, and there I got for a shilling to stand upon the wheel of a cart, 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 and at last was flung off the ladder in his cloak.
So long was his address and the prayers that followed that the Sheriffs became visibly impatient, but Turner’s behaviour was understandable since it was not unknown for a reprieve to arrive after the execution had been carried out, too late for the victim to benefit from it. A more typical final speech, as recorded in the Account by the Ordinary of Newgate, was that of 18-year-old William Dabell, hanged at Tyburn in December 1706 for a burglary. Dabell, according to the Ordinary’s pious version, ‘was very devout and showed great Sorrow for his Offences against God and his Neighbour. He begged pardon of both’. A less repentant culprit, according to a contemporary, was the notorious escaper Jack Sheppard who, when finally brought to his execution, ‘declared (it seems) at the Gallows, that he had laid a Foundation for raising the Reputation of the British Thievery to a greater Height’.37 Mercy was not a feature of the behaviour of the crowd during these final moments. One female victim, Barbara Spencer, was felled by a stone while kneeling on the scaffold to offer up her final prayers.38
Tyburn executions took place on the ‘Triple Tree’. This was constructed of three uprights which, when joined by beams, formed a triangular structure when viewed from above. Each beam could accommodate eight nooses so that twenty-four people could be hanged at once. In 1759 this gruesome memento of the penal code was demolished and replaced by a movable gallows which was taken away after each execution. Friends and relatives were allowed to mount the carts to bid a last farewell and it was at this stage that the guards would have to show special vigilance against rescue attempts made with the support of the crowd.
As the moment of execution approached the prisoners would be blindfolded or hooded and their arms would be tied. In an atmosphere akin to that of a carnival the crowd would cheer prisoners who fought the executioner unless they were unpopular, in which case they would boo. A large and fierce Irish woman, Hannah Dagoe, put up such a fight at her execution in May 1763, that she almost felled the executioner. She then ripped off much of her clothing and threw it into the crowd so that the hangman should not profit from its sale. The nooses would be placed round their necks by the hangman as the Ordinary continued to pray for their souls and then the carts would be drawn away, leaving the condemned swinging from the scaffold. Some attempts were made by more humane influences to ensure that death followed swiftly. The placing of the knot behind the right ear was believed by some to bring a quicker death from apoplexy or unconsciousness from pressure on the main blood vessels. The sudden ‘drop’ which broke the neck and which enabled later hangmen such as Albert Pierrepont to bring death within a fraction of a second, was not a feature of executions at Tyburn until 1760, Lord Ferrers possibly being one of the first to be executed in this way. Most prisoners died slowly from strangulation, their cries and contortions being applauded by the crowd: ‘Every contortion of the limbs was hailed with a cheer or a groan according to whether the sufferer was popular or not.’39 Some had their sufferings ended by relatives or other sympathisers who, by pulling on their legs, broke their necks. Occasionally, a merciful hangman would jump on to the shoulders of the victim to bring a swifter end. Others could swing gasping for air for over half an hour, the latter stages of their sufferings being marked by emissions of urine, a phenomenon referred to by connoisseurs of these events as ‘pissing when you can’t whistle’.
Some of the more sensitive spectators were deeply affected by the executions. James Boswell, having witnessed the execution of Paul Lewis, whom he had visited in Newgate,40 wrote that he was ‘most terribly shocked and thrown into a very deep melancholy’. When he went to bed two nights later he was ‘still so haunted with frightful imaginations that I durst not lie by myself’, but climbed into bed with a sympathetic male friend – an uncharacteristic act by the heterosexual Boswell. Some of the more celebrated prisoners were allowed to signify when they were ready for the ‘drop’. One of these was James Hackman, a young soldier who had been ordained a clergyman and who in 1779 shot the mistress of the Earl of Sandwich and then failed to shoot himself. His execution at Tyburn was a matter of such public interest that James Boswell tried to persuade the Daily Advertiser to commission him to write an account of it, but another writer had already gained the job. When Hackman dropped his handkerchief to signify that he was ready to die the hangman immediately picked it up, recognising that it was a saleable relic. The following day a huge crowd gathered at Surgeons’ Hall to view the body.
A few survived the attempts to hang them, the most celebrated being John ‘Half-hanged’ Smith. A former sailor, he was convicted of burglary in 1705 and sentenced to death. On Christmas Eve he was hanged at Tyburn, but took so long to die that the crowd demanded he be cut down. According to an account he gave to a witness:41
After he was cut down and began to come to himself, the blood and spirits forcing themselves into his former channels put him, by a sort of pricking or shooting, to such intolerable pain that he could have wished those hanged who had cut him down.
Smith received a pardon and had a further escape when the prosecutor died as a trial for later offences was due to start. Others who suffered similar experiences were not so fortunate. Patrick O’Bryan survived a hanging at Gloucester and proceeded to murder his victim and accuser. For this offence he was hanged at Tyburn in April 1689 and then gibbeted, ensuring that he would not survive his second execution.42
Gruesome though it was, hanging was not the worst way of inflicting death at this time. Women who were convicted of murdering their husbands could be sentenced to burn until well into the eighteenth century, since this was regarded as petty treason – disloyalty to her lawful master. This was the fate of Catherine Hayes in 1726. It was customary in such cases for the hangman to strangle the victim beforehand to ensure that the flames consumed the corpse rather than the living body, but on this occasion the fire, already kindled, reached the hangman before his work was done. He leapt from the blaze and the wretched Catherine fought in vain to protect herself from its advance: ‘The spectators beheld her pushing away the faggots while she rent the air with her cries and lamentations.’43 In 1753 Anne Williams was the last woman to be burned for this crime. Coining (debasing the currency) was classed as high treason and for this offence Christian Murphy was condemned to be burned in March 1789, but he was spared the worst suffering by being hanged first and then committed to the fire.
THE EXECUTIONERS
It is not clear how hangmen came to their grim trade, though in a few cases the choice of men who traded as butchers suggests that some value was placed on their knowledge of how cadavers were put together and, therefore, might be taken apart. In the sixteenth century executioners were referred to as ‘William Boilman’ because of the hideous practice of boiling poisoners in the later years of the reign of Henry VIII. A tradition arose of victims offering payment to the executioner in the hope of a swift end. The executioners were not themselves men of irreproachable character. A butcher named Pascha Rose, and a successor named Price, were themselves executed for housebreaking, and attempted rape and murder, respectively. Another successor, William Marvell, was arrested for debt on his way to Tyburn, earning a reprieve for three condemned men. One executioner has bequeathed his name to the language. Goodman Derrick devised a structure by which several men could be hoisted aloft simultaneously, thereby executing several at once. It was later adapted for loading and unloading ships and is still used as a Derrick crane long after its original grim purpose was abandoned.
The most notorious of the Tyburn executioners was variously known as Richard Jacquet, John Catch or Jack Ketch, the last of these names being later used as a generic one for the practitioners of his craft.44 He was the executioner from about 1663 until his death in 1686 with a brief interval during 1686 when he was in prison for insulting a Sheriff. He is remembered for his incompetence as an axeman. In 1683 he took four blows of the axe to despatch William Russell for his involvement in the Rye House Plot. He excused his clumsiness with the claim that Russell ‘did not dispose himself for receiving the fatal stroke in such a position as was most suitable’ and that he ‘received some interruption just as he was taking aim’. When the Duke of Monmouth came to the scaffold for his rebellion two years later he paid Ketch the handsome sum of six guineas to despatch him quickly, no doubt mindful of Russell’s earlier ordeal. Ketch failed to slay the Duke with the first three blows and exclaimed, ‘I can’t do it.’ He had to be prevailed upon by the Sheriffs to administer two further blows from the axe before finally severing the head with a knife. His conduct so angered the crowd that he had to be protected from them by an armed escort. In the same year he was involved in the public chastisement of Titus Oates, whose Popish Plot had finally been unmasked as a fraud and some of whose innocent victims Ketch had helped to hang, draw and quarter six years earlier.
Titus Oates (1649–1705): one of the greatest rogues in English history, Titus Oates was the son of a dissenting preacher who had ministered to Cromwell’s New Model Army during the Civil War. He became an Anglican minister, but was suspended from his livings after accusations of blasphemy and buggery. He briefly joined the Jesuits in St Omer, an action he later claimed to have taken in order to gain insights into Catholic plotting. In 1678, during the reign of Charles II, who lacked a legitimate heir, he took advantage of anxieties about the possible succession of the King’s Catholic brother (later James II) to accuse a number of public figures of plotting to assassinate Charles and replace him with James. They included the Queen’s physician and the secretary to James’s wife, Sir Edward Coleman, who was hung, drawn and quartered at Tyburn upon Oates’s evidence while Oates watched. Charles II had never believed Oates’s accusations and, by interrogating him, revealed a number of falsehoods in his accusations. This simply encouraged Oates to level ever more extravagant charges, which led to scores of arrests and a search of the Houses of Parliament for another gunpowder plot. Such was the anti-Catholic hysteria of the time that Oates was awarded an annual pension of £1,200 and an apartment in Whitehall. Oates overreached himself when he accused the Queen of plotting to poison the King and in 1681 he was imprisoned. In 1685, following the accession of James II, he was convicted of perjury, which had led to the deaths of many innocent men, imprisoned and sentenced to be whipped from Newgate to Tyburn and pilloried, the punishment to be repeated every year. According to a contemporary, Oates ‘made hideous bellowings and swooned several times with the greatness of the anguish’. He was released upon the accession of the Protestant monarchs William and Mary in 1688 and died in 1705, still admired by some staunch Protestants.
THE EXECUTED: JACK SHEPPARD AND JACK RANN
On 16 November 1724, the public hangman finally managed to execute Jack Sheppard at Tyburn. It had not been easy. Sheppard (also spelled Shepherd) was born in Spitalfields in 1702, the son of a carpenter who earned an honest living but died when Jack and his brother Thomas were very young. Jack was himself apprenticed to a carpenter, a trade that he followed for about four years before becoming involved in thieving, sometimes from houses where he was working. He became involved with a number of underworld characters, including one Elizabeth Lyon, known as Edgeworth Bess, a distributor of stolen property, and the notorious gang-leader and informant Jonathan Wild. In August 1723, Jack’s brother Thomas was indicted at the Old Bailey and sentenced to be branded on the hand after which the two brothers became partners in crime and carried out a series of housebreakings and thefts of goods from retailers.
Following his arrest on a tip-off from a fellow criminal, Sheppard and Edgworth Bess, passing themselves off as man and wife, were committed by a magistrate to Newgate from which he organised the first of his remarkable escapes. He acquired a file from a visitor and used it to remove his and Bess’s fetters before removing an iron bar from their cell window. They descended to the yard below using a rope made of knotted sheets, scaled the external wall by using the locks and bolts of the great gate as footholds and disappeared into the underworld of St Giles, the most notorious part of London’s criminal community south of the present site of Tottenham Court Road Underground station. As a result of this exploit Sheppard was now something of a celebrity and was invited to join other more experienced criminals in the execution of their illicit enterprises. These soon bore such fruit that Sheppard and a particularly active associate known as Blueskin rented a stable near the present site of Horseferry Road to use as a warehouse for the proceeds of their crimes until such time as they were able to dispose of them safely. Eventually detected, Sheppard was again sent to Newgate in August 1724 and this time he was sentenced to death. On this occasion he removed a spike from a hatch in the prison, squeezed through the gap and fled to a public house in Spitalfields where he proceeded to dispense advice to admiring fellow criminals on means of escaping from the rather ineffectual custody to which he had recently been consigned. One can only marvel both at the insouciance of Jack Sheppard and the laxity of the authorities, who not only allowed him to escape from Newgate, but also enabled him to remain in its vicinity with little fear of detection or arrest, though his spell of freedom was aided by the fact that it coincided with Bartholomew Fair, a time of more than usual mayhem in the vicinity of Newgate.
Jack Sheppard was not one to learn from his mistakes. His enterprise was not matched by his intelligence, because a few days later he stole three watches from a watchmaker in Fleet Street. Sheppard took the uncharacteristic precaution of retreating the short distance to Finchley to avoid detection, but this was not enough to fool the authorities to whom he was now something of a challenge. He was arrested and taken to Newgate where he was confined in a cell on his own, handcuffed and chained via leg irons to a staple in the cell floor. The spectacle of the infamous Jack Sheppard thus confined offered unrivalled opportunities for profit to his gaolers, who were able to charge handsomely for the privilege of viewing him.
Bartholomew Fair: a fair held in West Smithfield in the last week of August each year from 1133 until 1855 when, after many failed attempts, the City authorities finally succeeded in ending this source of disorder in the life of the capital. The nearby St Bartholomew’s Hospital, London’s oldest, also dates from the twelfth century. In the Middle Ages, Bartholomew Fair became the principal cloth fair in the kingdom, the name being preserved in a road nearby, but by the eighteenth century it had became characterised by entertainments, including tightrope walkers, prizefighters, musicians and freak shows. By this time it had acquired a reputation for petty crime and disorder and for the rich pickings it offered for pickpockets, in which last respect it invites comparison with the Notting Hill Carnival, its nearest equivalent in the twenty-first century. In the middle of the nineteenth century the Smithfield live cattle market was relocated to an area north of Kings Cross. Once this had been done, the City authorities seized the opportunity to suppress the troublesome Bartholomew Fair and use the site for the construction of the famous Smithfield Wholesale Meat Market, designed by Sir Horace Jones and opened in 1868. The disorder associated with the event in the eighteenth century would have assisted Jack Sheppard’s rudimentary attempts to hide from his pursuers.
Sheppard had managed to equip himself with a nail, either found in the cell itself or possibly smuggled to him by a visitor. With this he unfastened the handcuffs and the padlock that attached his leg irons to the staple. Still in irons, he began to climb the chimney in his cell when he found his progress halted by an iron bar fixed across the cavity. He picked out the mortar which held the chain in place and proceeded to use the chimney to gain access to another room above his original cell. This was itself equipped with a locked door but, using the iron bar from the chimney, he wrenched off the lock and entered a passage leading to the chapel. Four further doors, all locked, along a corridor were passed with a mixture of force and enterprise, the last being opened by removing its hinges and opening it in the opposite direction to that intended by those who installed it.
Sheppard now found himself on top of a high wall from which he could descend to a neighbouring roof and thence to freedom. However, the drop would have been fatal, so Sheppard returned to his cell via doors, corridor and chimney to retrieve his blankets which, as a rope, enabled him to make the descent, enter the house via a window and fall asleep in the garret. When darkness came he left the house and made his way to a cowshed near Tottenham Court Road. Two days later he emerged from his hiding place and, with the help of a cobbler, removed his fetters and made his way to Charing Cross where he ate a supper of roast lamb while listening to his fellow citizens discussing his by now famous exploits. The next few days were spent wandering around Soho, drinking in a Rupert Street tavern, listening to ballads about his escape in the Haymarket and parading in Drury Lane, resplendent in stolen clothes and stolen jewellery, while displaying a decorated (and of course stolen) sword. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that his desire to be caught was matched only by the incompetence of the authorities who were looking for him. However, after a drinking spree in Newgate Street he was finally betrayed by a barman and conveyed, drunk, back to Newgate prison. There he boosted the earnings of his gaolers who are estimated to have taken £200 from visitors wishing to see the celebrated escapologist.45 While in the condemned call he was visited and painted by Sir James Thornhill, sergeant painter to the Crown.
Attempts by the Ordinary to persuade Sheppard to repent met with little success. He attended the prison chapel, but gave no impression of taking the services seriously and, as noted earlier, informed the Ordinary that ‘one file’s worth all the Bibles in the world’. When the day of his execution arrived, 16 November 1724, the prison authorities took the unusual precaution of searching him before he left the Press Yard. A zealous officer named Watson found a sharp knife in Sheppard’s pocket with which he was evidently planning to cut the rope that bound his arms, jump from the cart and flee from his pursuers with the assistance of the crowd, who were known to be more than usually well disposed to this, by now, heroic criminal. When he arrived at Tyburn he confessed to two robberies of which he had previously been acquitted. His death by strangulation in the hangman’s noose was prolonged, and excited the sympathy of a crowd of unprecedented size. His body was removed by his friends, who were initially suspected by the onlookers of being emissaries of the Company of Surgeons. The crowd was determined that Sheppard’s body would not be removed for dissection, so a prolonged scuffle ensued between those who wanted to remove the body for burial and onlookers anxious to frustrate the designs of the Surgeons. Reassured, the mob allowed the body to be taken to a tavern in Long Acre whence, after Sheppard’s friends had refreshed themselves with suitable libations, it was removed for burial in the churchyard of St Martin-in-the-Fields. He had died at the age of 23.
After his death Jack Sheppard’s reputation acquired fresh lustre. In 1725, shortly after his hanging, the British Journal published an account of an imaginary conversation between Jack Sheppard and Julius Caesar in which the thief’s exploits bore favourable comparison with those of the general and in the following century Karl Marx’s collaborator Friedrich Engels, in his Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), wrote that ‘some children have never heard the name of Her Majesty, nor such names as Wellington, Nelson … there was a general knowledge of the character and course of life of Jack Sheppard, the robber and prison-breaker’. In the 1870s the exploits of the outlaw Ned Kelly were compared with those of Sheppard in the Australian press and at the same time Jesse James, in the intervals between bank robberies in the Midwest of the United States, mocked his pursuers by writing letters to the Kansas City Star using the pseudonym Jack Sheppard. Such is fame.
SIXTEEN STRING JACK
In the second half of the century Jack Rann, who was executed aged 24, achieved an equal degree of notoriety, though for different reasons. He was born near Bath in 1750 and acquired a taste for luxurious living while working as a servant in a wealthy household. It was at this time also that he took to lacing his knee-breeches with sixteen silk laces, thus gaining his nickname ‘Sixteen String Jack’, which lives on in the name of a pub in Theydon Bois, Essex, close to the scene of some of his crimes. He began his criminal career as a pickpocket, for which he escaped conviction, but then took to more profitable work as a highwayman around London, using his mistress Ellen Roche to fence the goods that he stole. He was charged with highway robbery on many occasions and scarcely attempted to conceal from his contemporaries the means by which he earned his living. In 1774 he robbed a doctor of a small sum of money and a watch. Careful investigation by a Bow Street Runner, John Clarke, under the direction of John Fielding46 identified Rann as the thief. Ellen Roche was sentenced to transportation as an accomplice, but Rann, upon conviction, was confined in Newgate under sentence of death. On 27 November 1774, Rann threw a dinner party in Newgate at which he entertained seven prostitutes to a fine meal in the highest of spirits. On 30 November he was hanged at Tyburn, wearing a new green suit that he had ordered for the event.
THE AFTERMATH
Further indignities could be inflicted on the corpse after death, some of them encouraged by the law itself. It had long been the practice to impale the heads of traitors on prominent sites such as London Bridge and Temple Bar, as a warning to others. A German visitor counted twenty on London Bridge in 1661, presumably a result of the vengeance wrought on the regicides following the restoration of Charles II the previous year. The visitor may have taken advantage of one of the telescopes set up by enterprising Londoners through which passers-by were invited to inspect these gruesome relics for a payment of a halfpenny. An Act of 1752, known as the Murder Act ‘for the better prevention of the crime of murder’ formally sanctioned the Medieval practice of gibbeting which had long been in unoffical use. To this end, the corpses were returned to Newgate where, in Jack Ketch’s Kitchen47 they were dipped in boiling pitch as a means of preserving them for the gibbet. This device was a metal cage, sometimes in the shape of a body, in which the blackened body was placed, the gibbet then being suspended from a pole. This was usually situated near the scene of the crime or close to the culprit’s home and left to rot as a warning to others. To prevent relatives or other sympathisers from rescuing the cadaver from these indignities the post was often cased in lead, to prevent its being burned down, and studded with nails to deter people from climbing it to remove the gibbet.
Some cadavers were claimed for purposes of dissection, also permitted by the 1752 Murder Act. The Company of Surgeons were entitled to ten each year and the hospitals of St Bartholomew’s and St Thomas’s made similar claims. Further specimens could be provided by arrangement with the hangman, upon payment. The Surgeons’ accounts for the period include records of payments made, including 2s 6d as a Christmas present to the Newgate hangman and payments to the Company’s beadles for injuries sustained in collecting the cadavers from Tyburn. These payments reflect the fisticuffs that could be involved in claiming the corpses. Dissection was regarded as a great indignity, so friends or relatives of the deceased would sometimes put up a stout fight to prevent its infliction, as happened in the case of Jack Sheppard. Onlookers would also struggle to touch the dead body since many believed that this would cure, or guard against, certain diseases such as scrofula.48 Sometimes relatives would cut down the ‘deceased’ before death had actually occurred and smuggle the body away to be revived. William Duell, a robber, was delivered to the Surgeons in November 1740 and ‘came round’ on the dissecting table to the great alarm of the Surgeons. He was subsequently sentenced to transportation.
The tactic was not always successful even with the most ingenious methods of respiration. On 27 June 1777 the execution occurred at Tyburn of Dr William Dodd, known as The Macaroni Parson on account of his dandified dress habits and unconventional way of life. Dodd had been born in 1729, educated at Cambridge, ordained in 1751 and enjoyed some early success as a playwright, a profession that was still barely respectable and certainly not recommended for a clergyman. Nevertheless, his lifestyle and flamboyant personality brought him the friendship of Dr Samuel Johnson, Thomas Gainsborough and Lord Chesterfield, and helped to secure him the prestigious post of Chaplain to George III. He was instrumental in founding the Society for the Relief and Discharge of Small Debtors – a much-needed service when such debtors were frequently incarcerated in prisons like Newgate, thus denying them any chance of discharging their debts. He also founded the Humane Society for the Resuscitation of the Apparently Drowned, using an early form of artificial respiration recommended by the celebrated surgeon John Hunter.
In 1777, confronted by pressing debts, Dodd forged a bond in the name of Lord Chesterfield for the enormous sum of £4,200. He was quickly found out and prosecuted despite the fact that Chesterfield himself wanted to settle the matter without involving the criminal law. His case aroused great public interest and his conviction and the death sentence that followed provoked numerous petitions from citizens, from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge and even from the jurors who had convicted him. Samuel Johnson himself petitioned for his reprieve, but the King felt that it would be wrong to reprieve someone simply because he was a popular and prominent clergyman. Dodd was visited in Newgate by John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, a sect of people who were often more conscientious in ministering to the condemned than were the Ordinaries themselves. Dodd preached the condemned sermon himself in Newgate Chapel, the text being written by Johnson. Dodd’s notoriety ensured that his execution attracted even larger crowds than normal and guaranteed a big sale for the Account prepared by the Ordinary of Newgate. On this occasion the Ordinary was the avaricious John Villette whose Genuine Account of the Behaviour and Dying Words of William Dodd, LL.D. included the pious final declaration, ‘I was led astray from religious strictness by the delusion of show and the delights of voluptuousness. I never knew or attended to the calls of frugality.49
Distinctions of class were observed even on this final fatal journey. Dodd travelled to Tyburn in a carriage while Joseph Harris, a teenage highwayman who had previously attempted suicide, travelled in a cart along with his grieving father, ‘a circumstance which excited the pity of the spectators, according to an eyewitness. 50 Dodd was not entirely resigned to his fate. After his execution he was cut down by sympathisers who attempted to revive him using the Hunter method that Dodd had himself advocated. This involved immersing his corpse in a warm bath at an undertaker’s premises in Tottenham Court Road. On this occasion it failed. After Dodd’s death the Westminster Magazine said of him that ‘his parts were rather shining than solid’.51 His life was celebrated in the following century in a play, Law of the Land or London in the Last Century, whose final scene was entitled ‘The Condemned Cell in Newgate featuring Dodd’s prison thoughts’.
By the late eighteenth century some of the more enlightened commentators were beginning to entertain doubts about the Tyburn rituals and their effect upon public attitudes towards crime, civil order and hangings. The novelist Henry Fielding, whose work at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court is described in Chapter Four, was sufficiently repelled by the Tyburn spectacle to comment that, ‘Instead of making the gallows an object of terror, our executions contribute to make it an object of contempt in the eye of the malefactor; and we sacrifice the lives of men, not for the reformation but the diversion of the populace.’ The way was opening up for a more sensitive approach to capital punishment and imprisonment, though it was another half-century before the Bloody Code itself began to moderate.