Chapter VIII.
In 1752 Captain Lowry suffered at Execution Dock, and was hung in chains by the side of the Thames, doubtless for piracy; and in the same year John Swan was executed at Chelmsford and hung in chains in Epping Forest.
In 1764 William Corbett was executed on Kennington Common. His body was “fixed in irons”—a new expression—and hung upon Gallery Wall, between Rotherhithe and Deptford. Eighteen years earlier the gallant young rebel, Jemmy Dawson, had been hung, drawn, and quartered on the same common for “the —45.” A young lady—“dear Kitty, peerless maid!”—died of a broken heart on the day of his execution.
“She followed him, prepared to view
The terrible behests of law;
And the last scene of Jemmy’s woes
With calm and stedfast eye she saw.”[66]
On November 16, 1766, Thomas Parker called on his way from Penrith Market at a small inn at Carlton. Being somewhat the worse for drink,[67] the landlord urged him to remain, but the shaggy sot pressed on his way, and was murdered the same night. The affair caused an extraordinary local interest among a population who had not forgotten the shocking incidents of the punishments for the Rebellion of twenty years before. The poor muddled man had been beaten to death by one Thomas Nicholson, after a violent struggle with the assassin. The murderer, upon strong circumstantial evidence, was sentenced to be executed, and his body to be hung in chains near where the crime was committed. It so hung for many years, slowly dropping to pieces, until on one stormy night the gibbet was blown down. Shortly after some humane persons from Edenhall came and gathered the desolate bones together, wrapped them in a winnowing-sheet—it sounds like an episode from the Apocrypha, like a good deed of Tobit—and laid them in a grave. The spot was long after distinguished by the letters, large and legible, deeply cut in the turf, “T. P. M.,” signifying “here Thomas Parker was murdered.”[68]
The hanging in chains of a man named Corbet, of Tring, who murdered Richard Holt in 1773, is noteworthy, as the last instance of gibbeting in the county of Buckingham.[69]