The gentlemen were ready at the call. Their irons were knocked off before they entered the sledges, and each was slightly pinioned—so slightly that Syddal took advantage of it to take snuff, whereby to cover a little natural nervousness. Behind the sledges followed a coach, in which, under the guard of a warder, the younger Deacon lay rather than sat. His youth had saved his life. The parting of the two brothers was most touching, and the younger one implored that he might suffer too. He suffered more, for he was condemned to witness the sufferings of his brother. The mob between the prison and Kennington Common was enormous, in spite of the pitiless rain. At the period of the trials, when the Jacobite prisoners passed to and fro, the mob treated them in the most ruffianly manner; but now, on their way to death, not even a word of offence was flung at them. The crowd gazed at the doomed men and the heavy escort of horse and foot in sympathising silence.
AT KENNINGTON COMMON.
At the gallows tree there was neither priest, nor minister, nor prison ordinary, to give spiritual aid. Singular incidents ensued. The captives could scarcely have been pinioned at all. Morgan took out a book of devotion, and read it full half an hour to his fellows in misery, who stood around him, gravely listening. Syddal and Deacon read speeches, which were word for word identical. They were, in fact, addresses said to be written by a nonjuring minister, one Creake, and printed for circulation in the crowd. The purport was, that the two culprits professed to belong to neither the Church of England nor of Rome, but to a poor episcopal church that had cured the errors of all other modern churches. They were further made to say that one universal church was the only perfect principle; and they recommended a perusal of a work called ‘A Complete Collection of Devotion, A.D. 1734,’ which was believed to be by Dr. Deacon, the father of one of the condemned. Morgan appears to have really spoken. He abused the Church of Rome, which was rather ungracious at such a moment, in Towneley’s presence, who, however, never uttered a word in reply. Morgan declared he was a Church of England man (the anti-Jacobite journals denounced him as an unmitigated miscreant), and that his faith was set forth in two works: ‘The Christian Test,’ and, he added, ‘in a work to be hereafter published by my most dutiful daughter, Miss Mary Morgan.’ The other sufferers observed silence, but all, before they died, manfully declared that they died willingly in a just cause, and that their deaths would be avenged. One or two threw papers into the crowd; one or two their gold-laced hats—which must have disgusted the hangmen, who were thus deprived of part of their perquisites. Others, it is said, flung to the mob their prayer-books, which were found to be turned down at the 89th Psalm, from the 21st verse to the end, which passages will be found, not, indeed, altogether inapplicable, but needing some little violence to make the application suit the circumstances.
EXECUTION.
Next followed the unutterable barbarity of the execution; where, however, the strangling rendered the sufferers above all consciousness of the butcher’s knife, and the flames. The mob had time to notice that the twist of the halters were alternately white and red. The rope-maker, much urged to explain, gave no other answer than that it was his fancy. The crowd, at the close, had to make way for a coach which had been drawn up by the side of the scaffold. It contained the poor lad, Deacon, condemned to see his elder brother die. Thence, probably, has arisen the romance, which tells us that the coach contained a lady who had died of her love, and of her horror at the sufferings of her sweetheart, Dawson, and which afforded an opportunity to Shenstone to write his well-known ballad,—‘Jemmy Dawson.’
The Whig Press observed a certain decency in its comments on the sufferers. Exception, however, was made in the case of Morgan. ‘What his virtues and better qualities were,’ said the loyal ‘Penny Post,’—‘if he had any, have not yet come to our knowledge; if they had, we should gladly have mentioned them, that the world might not run away with the opinion that Mr. Morgan was the only man who ever lived half a century without doing one good action, and that he died unlamented by friend, neighbour, or domestic.’ There is a charming affectation of delicacy in another paragraph, which runs thus: ‘What his treatment of his wife has been, we have no business with. He parted from her with a good deal of seeming affection.’ One of the journals paid the sufferers as much compliment as the writer could afford to give under the circumstances: ‘They all behaved,’ he says, ‘with a kind of fixt resolution of putting the best face they could upon a Bad Cause, and therefore behaved with Decency and seeming Resolution.’
At the ‘clearing up,’ it was discovered that the papers the poor fellows had flung among the crowd, before they were hanged, were of a highly treasonable nature. There was eager snatching of them from one another, and a still hotter eagerness on the part of the Government to discover the ‘rascal printer.’ He had audaciously set in type the last expression of the sufferers,—that they died willingly for their king and the cause; regretted the brave attempt had failed;—and, had they the opportunity, they would make the same attempt, for their king, again. A mob rather than a group had collected about Temple Bar to see their heads spiked. Deacon’s and Syddal’s had been sent to Manchester. When the hangman and his assistant tripped up the ladder at the bar, each with a head under his arm, the sympathising spectators were in doubt as to whose shoulders they had originally come from. Bets were laid on one, as being certainly Colonel Towneley’s. There were counter-bets that Towneley’s had gone to Carlisle. Assertions were made upon oath—very strong oaths, too,—that Towneley’s head was then lying with his body at an undertaker’s up at Pancras, and was to be buried with it. The hangman was a reserved man, and his comrade was taciturn. They left the gaping crowd uncertain. One of the heads was truly Fletcher’s. Was the other Morgan’s? Information was not supplied by the officials; but, after consideration, the spectators decided that the colonel’s head was set up with the captain’s; and this judgment was never shaken from the popular mind. A correspondent of ‘Notes and Queries’ (Dec. 7, 1872, p. 456), says of the Jacobite colonel: ‘His head is now in a box, in the library at 12, Charles Street, Berkeley Square, the residence of the present Colonel Charles Towneley.’
HEADS AND BODIES.
The bodies of the Jacobites executed on Kennington Common were buried in the parish of St. Pancras. The headless trunk of Towneley was deposited in a grave in the old churchyard. Those of Fletcher, Deacon, Chadwick, Berwick, Syddal, Dawson, Blood, and Morgan, lie in the burial-ground of the parish, near the Foundling Hospital. The heads of the last three were given up to their friends. Syddal’s and Deacon’s were exposed on the market-cross at Manchester. Chadwick’s and Berwick’s were sent to Carlisle.
Towneley’s ghost was appeased by a ballad-writer who brought the spirit to the Duke of Cumberland’s bed, where the ghost scared him from sleep, charged him with crimes which he could hardly have committed in a life time, and so horrified him with a recital of the retributive pains the victor at Culloden would suffer in hell, that William rushed, for safety, to his usurping father, who bade him be of good cheer,—adding:—