The rev. Paul Lorrain, Ordinary of Newgate, as has been said elsewhere, was in the habit of printing an account of the behaviour of criminals, after condemnation. He gives long accounts of his sermons. In the broadsheet relating to an execution at Tyburn on March 22, 1704, he describes the proceedings at Tyburn. The Ordinary exhorts the criminals to clear their consciences by making a free confession. The malefactors then address the people praying them to take warning from the example before them. Then the Ordinary proceeds to prayer: afterwards to the rehearsal of the Articles of the Christian faith: then comes the singing of penitential hymns[213]: then prayer again. “And so, taking my leave of them, I exhorted them to cry to God for Mercy to the last Moment of their Lives, which they did, and for which they had some time allow’d them. Then the Cart drew away, and they were turn’d off, as they were calling upon God.”
THE TRIPLE TREE IN 1747.
1743-1745. At the Old Bailey sessions, September 7-12, were indicted James Stansbury and Mary his wife, for the robbery of Mr. or Captain George Morgan. The case is very interesting, as having furnished to Hogarth the motive of one of his prints in the series of “The Effects of Industry and Idleness.” Captain Morgan, going home in the early hours of the morning of July 17, seeing a lady in the street, feared for her safety, and gallantly offered to escort her home. He was taken into a house where he was robbed and assaulted. The house, in Hanging-Sword Alley, Fleet Street, bore an execrable reputation, in virtue of which it was known as “Blood-Bowl House.” At the trial Mary Stansbury asked a witness, “Have I not let you go all over the house, to see if there were any trap-doors as it was represented?” The witness, Sharrock, replied that he had looked all over the house and saw no trap-door. It will be recollected that in Hogarth’s print the body of a murdered man is being thrust through a trap-door. The same witness spoke of the house as “Blood-Bowl House.” Stansbury asked him how he came to know of the Blood Bowl, to which Sharrock replied that he had seen it in the newspapers. (I have been less fortunate: I have not found accounts in contemporary newspapers referring to the name or to the trap-door). Stansbury was acquitted: his wife was sentenced to death, the sentence being afterwards commuted to one of transportation.
Stansbury was afterwards convicted of burglary. He described himself as a clockmaker, living in Whitechapel, from which we may infer that Hanging-Sword Alley had become too hot for him. It would seem too that he had not retired from Blood Bowl House with a fortune.
Mr. Nicholls in his notes on the print gives the name of Blood-Bowl to the Alley, but there is no evidence that it was ever officially known by this name. The alley is Hanging-Sword Alley in Rocque’s map of 1746; it bears the same name in Hatton’s “New View,” 1708, and in Stow’s “Survey of London” we read: “Then is Water Lane, running down by the west side of a house called the Hanging Sword, to the Thames.” The alley appears under this name in various books giving the names of streets: it was Hanging-Sword Alley when Dickens wrote “Bleak House,” and it is Hanging-Sword Alley to-day.
1749. February 20. Usher Gahagan was executed at Tyburn. Gahagan was a scholar. He edited Brindley’s edition of the classics, and translated into Latin verse Pope’s Essay on Criticism. He also, while in prison, translated into Latin verse Pope’s “Temple of Fame,” and “Messiah”—“with a Latin Dedication to his Grace the Duke of Newcastle.” His offence was filing gold money. These verses were addressed to him:—
Who without rapture can thy verses read,
Who hear thy fate, and sorrow not succeed,
Who not condole thee betwixt fear and hope,