After the inquest the lid was adjusted to the coffin, and without mourners, without others than officials to bear the burden, the body was taken into the burial-yard of the prison, and lowered into the grave reserved for murderers.
Others are in company in the dust adjacent, who have suffered the same dread penalty and been borne to the same ignominious repose. Like others also, he had a stone erected, with his initials and date of the execution.
In his “Last hours of the Condemned,” a great Frenchman shows us, after his fashion of mingled power and fantasy, the sentenced wretch more appalled by the retrospect of an evil life than by the doom fast darkening upon him.
The interest a master of sensational phrases contrived to enlist for his subject is paralleled in actual fact by the curiosity with which the last hours of the criminal Peace were regarded.
This curiosity was not unnatural. It had been stimulated by the startling rumours which had been in circulation respecting certain confessions it was said the prisoner intended to make before he suffered.
In the old Tyburn days the great attraction of the gallows was, for many, not so much the sight of a fellow-creature dangling from a rope, as his dying speech and confession.
The British public supped full with the mere horror of executions in times when stealing from the person any trifle value for twelve pence was grand larceny, punishable by death, and offenders were turned off every day.
But there was always the prospect that the criminal would “die game”—that is, meet his end with bravado and blasphemy.
If he died penitent, he denied himself his right to address the multitude from the drop; and, whether he spoke or perished in silence, the inventive writers who purveyed the literature of the gallows made his biography their care, and hawked his miserable chronicle among the eager crowd for whom his hanging made a holiday.
The brutal longing to hear the worst and last that could be learnt of an assassin or a highwayman can no more be gratified in the old ways.