The horrors of executions were but little diminished by the substitution of the Old Bailey as the scene. Seventy-four years were to elapse before the wisdom of legislators and the good sense of the public insisted that the extreme penalty of the law should be carried out in strictest privacy within the walls of the gaol.
FOOTNOTES:
[162:1] No. 45 of the North Briton charged the king with falsehood, and was the basis of the prosecutions; forty-five became in consequence a popular number with the patriots. Tradesmen called their goods "forty-five;" and snuff so styled was sold in Fleet Street for many years. Horne Tooke declares that the Prince of Wales aggravated his august father, when the latter was flogging him, by shouting "Wilkes and forty-five for ever!"
[164:1] Lords of Leet were obliged to keep up a pillory or tumbrel, on pain of forfeiture of the leet; and villages might also be compelled to provide them.
[165:1] "Punishments in the Olden Time," by William Andrews, F. R. H. S., to which I am indebted for many of my facts.
[167:1] This was not an uncommon offence. One Mary Hamilton was married fourteen times to members of her own sex. A more inveterate, but a more natural, bigamist was a man named Miller, who was pilloried, in 1790, for having married thirty different women on purpose to plunder them.
[172:1] Bernardo Visconti, Duke of Milan, in the 14th century, made a capital punishment, or more exactly the act of killing, last for forty days.
[181:1] By "Halifax law" any thief who within the precincts of the liberty stole thirteen pence could on conviction before four burghers be sentenced to death. The same law obtained at Hull, hence the particular prayer in the thieves' Litany, which ran as follows: "From Hull, Hell, and Halifax, good Lord, deliver us."
[200:1] The negligence and perfunctory performance of duty of the ordinary, Mr. Forde, is strongly animadverted upon in the "Report of Commons' Committee in 1814."