The Act directs that persons condemned for murder shall be executed on the next day but one after sentence, unless Sunday intervenes, when the execution shall take place on Monday.
Bodies to be given to the Surgeons’ Company at their Hall or where else the Company may appoint, with a view to dissection; or the judge may appoint that the body be hanged in chains (not alive as proposed by J. R. and Ollyffe). In no case whatsoever is the body of a murderer to be buried except after dissection. Incidentally, the Act mentions that hanging in chains was already practised in case of “the most atrocious Offences.”
In one point only did the State go beyond its two advisers. The words of the Act show clearly that the interval between the passing of the sentence and its execution was purposely abridged. The interval had been allowed so that, with the aid of the ordinary, or other minister of religion, the condemned man might have time to repent, and to make his peace with Heaven. The abridgment of the interval must therefore be regarded as intended to lessen the chances of repentance, and to send the criminal to judgment still unrepentant. Thus regarded, the action of the State denoted a daring attempt to prejudice the final award of the Day of Doom; it was a distinct invasion of the jura regalia of the Most High.
The first to suffer under this Act was Thomas Wilford, a one-armed lad of seventeen, who married on a Wednesday, and murdered his wife through jealousy on the following Sunday. If we may trust the Gentleman’s Magazine, Wilford, sentenced on June 30, was hanged, not on the next day but one after sentence, but on the very next day, July 1: “Wilford to be executed the next morning, and then his body to be dissected and anatomised, according to the late Act.”
The fourth plate of Hogarth’s “Stages of Cruelty” shows the dissection of a criminal at Surgeons’ Hall, but as the print was published in 1751, Hogarth did not take the idea from the Act. Of course, the bodies of criminals frequently found their way to Surgeons’ Hall before the passing of this Act, but was the enactment suggested by Hogarth’s plate?
DRAWING TO TYBURN ON A SLEDGE, 1753.
In 1725 Mandeville proposed that the bodies of the hanged should be given to the surgeons for dissection, not as an aggravation of capital punishment, but in order to supply a want felt by anatomists; Mandeville was a doctor. He says: “Where then shall we find a readier Supply; and what Degree of People are fitter for it than those I have named? When Persons of no Possessions of their own, that have slipp’d no Opportunity of wronging whomever they could, die without Restitution, indebted to the Publick, ought not the injur’d Publick to have a Title to, and the Disposal of what the others have left?” (“An Enquiry into the Causes of the Frequent Executions at Tyburn,” 1725, p. 27.)
1752. July 13. Eleven executed at Tyburn.