whether from real emotion or the desire to make a sensation was never exactly known. On the fatal morning he came gaily out of his cell, nodded pleasantly to the governor, who stood just opposite, and then walked briskly towards the execution shed, smiling as he went along. There was a smile on his face when it was last seen, and just as the terrible white cap was drawn over it. Wainwright’s execution was within the gaol, but only nominally private. No less than sixty-seven persons were present, admitted by special permission of the sheriff. Rumour even went so far as to assert that among the spectators were several women, disguised in male habiliments; but the story was never substantiated, and we may hope that it rested only on the idle gossip of the day.
Many, like Wainwright, were calm and imperturbable throughout their trying ordeal. Catherine Wilson, the poisoner,[122] was reserved and reticent to the last, expressing no contrition, but also no fear—a tall, gaunt, repulsive-looking woman, who no more shrank from cowardly, secret crimes than from the penalty they entailed. Kate Webster, who was tried at the Central Criminal Court, and passed through Newgate, although she suffered at Wandsworth, is remembered at the former prison as a defiant, brutal creature who showed no remorse, but was subject to fits of ungovernable passion, when she broke out into language the most appalling. The man Marley[123] displayed fortitude of a less repulsive kind. He acknowledged his guilt from the first. When the sheriff offered him counsel for his defence, he declined, saying he wished to make none—“the witnesses for the prosecution spoke the truth.” During the trial and after sentence he remained perfectly cool and collected. When visited one day in the condemned cell, just as St. Sepulchre’s clock was striking, he looked up and said laughingly, “Go along, clock; come along, gallows.” He tripped up the chapel-stairs to hear the condemned sermon, and came out with cheerful alacrity on the morning he was to die.
Some condemned convicts converse but little with the warders who have them unceasingly in charge. Others talk freely enough on various topics, but principally upon their own cases. When vanity is strongly developed there is the keen anxiety to hear what is being said about them outside. One was vexed to think that his victims had a finer funeral than he would have. The only subject another showed any interest in was the theatres and the new pieces that were being produced. A third, Christian Sattler, laughed and jested with the officers about “Jack Ketch,” who, through the postponement of the execution, would lose his Christmas dinner. When they brought in the two watchers to relieve guard one night, Sattler said, “Two fresh men! May I speak to them? Yes! I must caution you,” he went on to the warders, “not to go to sleep, or I shall be off through that little hole,” pointing to an aperture for ventilating the cell. On the morning of execution he asked how far it was to the gallows, and was told it was quite close. “Then I shall not wear my coat,” he cried; “Jack Ketch shall not have it,” being under the erroneous impression that the convict’s clothes were still the executioner’s perquisite.
Often the convicts give way to despair. They are too closely watched to be allowed to do themselves much mischief, or suicides would probably be more frequent. But it is neither easy to obtain the instruments of self-destruction nor to elude the vigilance of their guard. The man, Bousfield, however, whose execution was so sadly bungled,[124] made a determined effort to burn himself to death by throwing himself bodily on to the fire in the condemned ward. He was promptly rescued from his perilous condition, but not before his face and hands were badly scorched. They were still much swollen when he was led out to execution. Miller, the Chelsea murderer, who packed his victim’s body in a box, and tried to send it by parcels delivery, tried to kill himself, but ineffectively, by running his head against his cell wall. A few other cases of the kind have occurred, but they have been rare of late years, whether in Newgate or elsewhere.
CHAPTER X.
NEWGATE NOTORIETIES.
Latest records of crimes—Poisoning, revived and more terrible—Palmer’s case—His trial at the Central Criminal Court, and demeanour in Newgate—His imitators—Dove—Dr. Smethurst—Catherine Wilson—Dr. Taylor’s opinion that poisoning very prevalent—Piracy and murder—The ‘Flowery Land’—Arrest of the mutineers—Their trial and sentence—Details of their behaviour while in Newgate—Murder of Mr. Briggs in a railway carriage—How brought home to Müller—Pursuit of murderer and his arrest in New York—Müller’s conviction—His protest against justice of sentence—Confesses guilt when rope is actually round his neck—Christian Sattler murders a police Inspector—Latest frauds and robberies—The forgeries of Wagner, Bateman, and others—Principal forger, an aged man, Kerp, escapes arrest—Robbery of Bank of England bank-note paper at Tavistock—Reward offered—Arrests made, followed by expressions which lead to capture of whole gang—Buncher and Griffiths sentenced—Cummings acquitted: his delight—Cummings an adroit and inveterate coiner.
AS these records draw to a close, the crimes I chronicle become so much more recent in date that they will be fresh in the memory of most of my readers. Nevertheless, in order to give completeness to the picture I have attempted to draw of crime in connection with Newgate, from first to last, I must make some mention, in this my penultimate chapter, of some of the most heinous offences of modern times.
The crime of poisoning has always been viewed with peculiar loathing and terror in this country. It will be remembered that as far back as the reign of Henry VIII. a new and most cruel penalty was devised for the punishment of the Bishop of Rochester’s cook, who had poisoned his master and many of his dependents. Sir Thomas Overbury was undoubtedly poisoned by Lord Rochester in the reign of James I., and it is hinted that James himself nearly fell a victim to a nefarious attempt of the Duke of Buckingham. But secret poisoning on a wholesale scale such as was practised in Italy and France was happily never popularized in England. The well-known and lethal aqua Toffania, so called after its inventress, a Roman woman named Toffana, and which was so widely adopted by ladies anxious to get rid of their husbands, was never introduced into this country. Its admission was probably checked by the increased vigilance at the custom houses, the necessity for which was urged by Mr. Addison, when Secretary of State, in 1717. The cases of poisoning in the British calendars are rare, nor indeed was the guilt of the accused always clearly established. It is quite possible that Catherine Blandy, who poisoned her father at the instigation of her lover, was ignorant of the destructive character of the powders, probably arsenic, which she administered. Captain Donellan, who was convicted of poisoning his brother-in-law, Sir Theodosius Broughton, and executed for it, would probably have had the benefit in these days of the doubts raised at his trial. A third case, more especially interesting to us as having passed through Newgate, was that of Eliza Fenning, who was convicted of an attempt to poison a whole family by putting arsenic in the dumplings she had prepared for them. The charge rested entirely on circumstantial evidence, and as Fenning, although convicted and executed, protested her innocence in the most solemn manner to the last, the justice of the sentence was doubted at the time. Yet it was clearly proved that the dumplings contained arsenic, that she, and she alone, had made the dough, that arsenic was within her reach in the house, that she had had a quarrel with her mistress, and that the latter with all others who tasted the dumplings were similarly attacked, although no one died.