QUEEN HENRIETTA MARIA PRAYING AT TYBURN.
So changed are the modern circumstances of the spot where Tyburn Gate in later times, and Tyburn gallows in earlier years, stood, that vexed controversies are continually arising as to the exact spot on which the gallows was erected. It is not, really, a difficult point to settle. The structure shown in Hogarth's engraving, and displayed in a still earlier German print, in which Queen Henrietta Maria, the consort of Charles the First, is seen to be making pilgrimage and praying for the souls of her Roman Catholic servants hanged here, was erected exactly in the middle of the road, where, as you go westward, the straight line of Oxford Street and the Bayswater Road is met by the Edgware Road. Old maps indisputably prove it, and the point is more particularly settled by a large and very detailed plan of the parish of St. George, Hanover Square, made in 1725, and until recently in the vestry. It is now in the Buckingham Palace Road branch of the Westminster Public Libraries, where an old engraving of it also hangs on the staircase. This plan shows the parish boundary running up Park Lane to Oxford Street, and there meeting the boundaries of Marylebone and Paddington, at the junction of Oxford Street, the Bayswater Road, and the Edgware Road. The three boundaries all meet in the middle of this confluence of thoroughfares, and there the gallows is shown, one of its three legs in each parish.
In its later years, Tyburn as a hanging place became more varied, and the permanent gallows gave way to a temporary one, erected at different points somewhat further west. Two circumstances suggested this: firstly, the building of houses overlooking the scene, and the natural wish of the tenants that such dreadful exhibitions should not be displayed absolutely beneath their windows; and secondly, the even more practical necessity of ridding the public highway of the obstruction caused by the permanent scaffold. The key to this question of removal is found in the Gazetteer, May 4th, 1771, which remarked that the Dowager Lady Waldegrave was having a "grand house built near Tyburn," and added that, "Through the particular interest of her ladyship, the place of execution will be removed to another spot."
The highwaymen who suffered so largely here had in their lives, been a danger and a hindrance upon the highway, and they were now found, oddly enough, in the circumstances of their taking off, to be an equal nuisance. The road at this point had begun to be enclosed on all sides, and traffic, no longer able to avoid that ominous timber framework, would have actually been blocked by it. So, as with the passing of the years it had been found that executions tended somewhat to decrease, the permanent gallows was at last disestablished, and a new and movable one was constructed. This was used practically all over the area bounded by Tyburn Gate, at the junction of roads already described; by Bryanston Street, Seymour Street, Connaught Square, Stanhope Place, and so round by the Bayswater Road to Tyburn Gate again. The site of No. 6, Connaught Place, has been particularly mentioned, and, more particularly still, that of No. 49, Connaught Square, which the original lease from the freeholder, the Bishop of London, declares to have been the place where the gallows stood.
It was in 1783 that Dr. Johnson, that revered philosopher, declaimed against the changes then being witnessed. Perhaps the novelty that most angered him was the proposed abolition of the degrading processions of condemned malefactors from Newgate to Tyburn. "The age is running mad after innovation," he exclaimed to Sir William Scott, "and all the business of the world is to be done in a new way; men are to be hanged in a new way; Tyburn itself is not safe from the fury of innovation."
It was timorously remarked that this change would, at any rate, be an improvement upon the old order of things; but Johnson, like most elderly men, thoroughly believed in what has been styled, "the gospel of things as they are," and he vehemently retorted, "No, sir, it is not an improvement; they object that the old method drew together a number of spectators. Sir, executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators, they don't answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties: the public was gratified by a procession; the criminal was supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?"
But the age was more progressive than Dr. Johnson, and 1783 did actually witness the last execution at Tyburn. Unhappily, public executions did not come to an end at the same time; such dismal exhibitions continuing in London to draw huge and riotous crowds at the Old Bailey until they were finally abolished in 1868. The old excuse for public executions—that they were valuable as deterrents from crime—had long been proved singularly ill-founded; and it was notorious that these gruesome occasions, in some morbid fashion, attracted not only a ruffianly and callous assemblage, but brought all the graduates in crime to the spot to witness a scene in which themselves would, in all probability, some day figure as chief actors. The last dying speeches of the criminals were heard by few in the crowd, and were aptly described as "exhortations to shun a vicious life, addressed to thieves actually engaged in picking pockets." The hardened wretches who looked on at these last scenes, and who had, many of them, already qualified for a place in the cart, had a kind of perverted professional pride. They applauded when a malefactor, with a curse and a jest, "died game," and they howled disapproval when some poor nervous creature broke down pitifully on the verge of eternity.
We observe in the rough but effective old woodcut which graces, or at any rate, occupies, if it does not grace, the end of this chapter, a criminal, not only dying game (in spite of the curious black-faced, cheerful, parrot-like hangman above, who seems to be thoroughly enjoying himself), but apparently distributing handbills; very much to the astonishment of the sheriff's bodyguard, whose faces exhibit a singular variety of emotions. Perhaps the criminal is so unconcerned because he knows it impossible to hang him on so short a gallows as that shown here. The illustration is one of the curious seventeenth-century representations of current events that formed the pictorial news of the age.