The original of this savage satire was, no doubt, Tom Cox, the younger son of a gentleman of Blandford, who, resenting his meagre fortune under that old fetish of the English landowner, the law of primogeniture, came to London for the purpose of adding to it in what was then the conventional manner. His career was ended, too, by the authorities with an equally slavish regard to precedent, for when convicted at the Old Bailey of highway robbery, he was sentenced to be hanged; and if, as a matter of fact, his actual ending at Tyburn on June 3rd, 1691, was marked by an incident of striking originality, it was his own pluck and resource that provided the piquant sensation created, and nothing officially contributed.
CLEVER TOM CLINCH GOING TO EXECUTION.
He had been heedless in the extreme while in prison of the ministrations of the Ordinary, and, being well provided with money, lived his last days riotously. Even when beneath the gallows at Tyburn he remained unmoved, and when the Ordinary asked if he would not join with his fellow-sufferers in prayer, he swore and kicked both him and the hangman out of the cart. He was but twenty-six years of age when he died.
But good humour generally prevailed on the way: "The heroes of the day were often on excellent terms with the mob, and jokes were exchanged between the men who were going to be hanged, and the men who deserved to be."
Not only the "mob" enjoyed these occasions: people who, by position and education ought to have known better, made a point of either witnessing the start, or, better still, of being present at the actual execution. Those were not constituent items of the "mob" who, for example, paid their half-crowns for seats in the grand stand that was a permanent structure at Tyburn, to witness the final scene; but they had all the ferocity of mobs, and showed it one day in 1758, when, having paid their money to see Dr. Henesey hanged, he was not hanged, but reprieved instead. Enraged at this shameful breach of faith—and not at all glad that one fellow-mortal had at the eleventh hour escaped a shameful end—they wrecked the seats and departed in a by no means appeased ill-humour.
Some enthusiastic sightseers walked all the way: they could not have too much of a good thing. Happy were those who could not only do that, but could by favour secure a place next the criminal himself! T. J. Smith, who wrote the well-known volume called A Book for a Rainy Day, tells how, as a little boy, he was nearly given such a treat. He did, at any rate, witness the start, under the care of Nollekens, and saw the clergyman give the condemned malefactor the nosegay: but the greater treat was, by a mere accident, not to be his.
"Tom, my little man," whispered Nollekens, "if my father-in-law, Mr. Justice Welch, had been high constable, we could have walked beside the cart all the way to Tyburn."
Where Holborn Viaduct ends westward in the Circus, graced in these latter days of ours with that polite equestrian statue of the Prince Consort, lifting his cocked hat so high to omnibus passengers, the Tyburn procession arrived at the summit of Holborn Hill; passing to it beneath the tall tower of St. Andrew's church. The respectable inhabitants of Thavies' Inn—that demure row of red-brick houses on the left hand, built late in the seventeenth century, or early in the eighteenth—were, we may be sure, as eager to view the passing show as were the "lower orders." The windows of the "Old Bell" inn, last but one of the ancient galleried inns of London, demolished so recently as 1897, were, no doubt, in great demand; and indeed, at all the many hostelries on the line of march the sightseers gathered, and at one and the same time satisfied their curiosity and quenched the thirst it provoked. But gone are all the relics of the coaching days, and most others. Holborn is not what it was. Nothing is.