How the mob bolted with Jack Sheppard’s body (November 16, 1724) to save the “bonny corp” from the surgeon’s knife! How Jonathan Wild, “the Great” (May 24, 1725), during the finishing touches picked the Ordinary’s pocket of his corkscrew, and was turned off with it still in his hand (thus Fielding: Purney was the ordinary. His account is quite different), to the unspeakable delight of that enormous body of spectators, to which Sheppard’s two hundred thousand onlookers were (Defoe assures us) no more to be compared than is a regiment to an army. How Sixteen-string Jack (November 30, 1774), his “bright pea-green coat” and “immense nosegay” were almost too magnificent even for so noble an occasion. Alas! not ours to dwell on such details; let the brave rogues go!

I cull one instance from the peerage. Earl Ferrers suffered at Tyburn (May 5, 1760) for the death of Johnson, his land steward. He dressed in his wedding clothes, “a suit of white and silver”: “as good an occasion,” he observed, “for putting them on, as that for which they were first made” (his treatment of his wife had indirectly brought about the murder). Every consideration was paid to my Lord’s feelings: “A landau with six horses” was his Tyburn cart, and a silk rope his “anodyne necklace”; and yet things did not go smoothly. The mob was so enormous that the journey took three hours. It was far worse than hanging, he protested to the sheriffs. His very handsome tip of five guineas was handed by mistake to the Hangman’s man, and an unseemly altercation ensued. My Lord toed the line with anxious care. “Am I right?” were his last words. The accurate fall of the drop must have satisfied him that he was.

I must not neglect the clergy. Here the leading case is obviously that of Dr. Dodd, hanged for forgery (June 27, 1777). The strange ups and down of his life (“he descended so low as to become the editor of a newspaper”) are not for this page. The maudlin piety of his last days is no pleasant spectacle. Dr. Newton, Bishop of Bristol, thought him deserving of pity “because hanged for the least crime he had committed.” Dr. Samuel Johnson did all he could to save him; also wrote his address to the judge (sentence had been respited) in reply to the usual question, as well as the sermon he delivered in Newgate Chapel three weeks before the end. The King sternly refused a reprieve. No doubt he was right. The very manner of the deed seems to argue not a first, only a first discovered, offence. His doggerel Thoughts in Prison is his chief literary crime. He went in a coach. His “considerable time in praying,” and “several showers of rain,” rendered the mob somewhat impatient. He was assisted by two clergymen. One was very much affected; “the other, I suppose, was the Ordinary, as he was perfectly indifferent and unfeeling in everything he said and did.” Villette was then Ordinary. He wrote an account (after the most approved pattern) of Dodd’s unhappy end. The pair had spent much time together in Newgate, and one hopes the report of Villette’s behaviour is mistaken or inaccurate, though it is that of an eye-witness, a correspondent of George Selwyn himself an enthusiastic amateur of executions, who, when he had a tooth drawn, let fall his handkerchief à la Tyburn, as a signal for the operation. James Boswell had a like craze. He went in a mourning coach with the Rev. James Hackman when that divine was hanged (April 19, 1779) for the murder of Miss Reay. When Hackman let fall the handkerchief for signal it fell outside the cart, and Ketch with an eye to small perquisites jumped down to secure it before he whipped up the horse. These are all names more or less known. There are hundreds of curious incidents connected with obscure deaths. Here are a few samples:—In 1598 “some mad knaves took tobacco all the way as they went to be hanged at Tyburn.” In 1677, a woman and “a little dog ten inches high” were hanged side by side as accomplices—“a hideous prospect,” comments our chronicler. In 1684 Francis Kirk, having murdered his wife, must end at Tyburn. Shortly before he had seen a fellow hanged there for making away with his spouse; and this, he confessed, had inspired him!

One John Austin had the distinction of being the last person executed at Tyburn (November 7, 1783). Reformers had long denounced the procession as a public scandal. The sheriffs had some doubts as to their powers; but the judges, being consulted, assured them they could end it an they would. A month after (December 9, 1783) the gallows was at work in front of Newgate, and Old London lost its most exciting spectacle. Dr. Johnson frankly regretted the change:—“Executions are intended to draw spectators, if they do not draw spectators they lose their reason. The old method was more 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?” In truth, the change of scene was an illogical compromise: the picturesque effect was gone—save for an occasional touch, as after Holling’s execution, when the dead hand was thrust into a woman’s bosom, to remove a mark or wen—the disorderly mob remained, nay, was a greater scandal at the centre than in the suburbs. Dickens is but one of many writers who knowing their London well described the unedifying walk and talk of the crowd before Newgate; and in 1868 private was substituted for public execution throughout the land. I do not criticise any system: I do but point out that of the two sets of opposing forces noted as working on the criminal’s mind, the latter, in a private execution, is entirely suppressed.

Tyburn and its memories, its criminals, its Hangmen, its Ordinaries, filled a great space in popular imagination, and have frequent mention in our great writers. Shakespeare himself has “The shape of Love’s Tyburn”; and Dryden’s “Like thief and parson in a Tyburn cart” is a stock quotation. But I cannot string a chaplet of these pearls. Yet two phrases I must explain. A felon who “prayed his clergy” was during some centuries branded on the crown of his thumb with the letter T, ere he was released, to prevent a second use of the plea. This was called, in popular slang, the Tyburn T. Ben Jonson was so branded (October, 1598) for killing Gabriel Spencer, the actor, in a duel. Again a statute of 1698 (10 Will. III. c. 12), provided for those who prosecuted a felon to conviction a certificate freeing them from certain parochial duties. This was known as a “Tyburn ticket.” It had a certain money value, because if unused it could be assigned once. The privilege was abolished in 1827 (7 and 8 Geo. IV. c. 27), but it was allowed as late as 1856 to a certain Mr. Pratt, of Bond Street, who by showing his ticket (which must have been thirty years old) escaped service on an Old Bailey jury.

Pillory and Cart’s-Tail

Hood and Lamb on the Pillory—Its Various Shapes—Butcher and Baker—Brawler and Scold—Fraudulent Attorneys—End of the Pillory and of Public Whipping—Literary Martyrs—De Foe—Prynne, Bastwick, and Burton—Case of Titus Oates—The Tale of a Cart—Some Lesser Sufferers.

Hood has comically told of his pretended experiences in the Pillory:—“It is a sort of Egg-Premiership: a place above your fellows, but a place which you have on trial. You are not without the established political vice, for you are not exempt from turning,”—with more punning cogitations of a like nature. Of rarer humour is Charles Lamb’s Reflections in the Pillory, with its invocation to them that once stood therein:—“Shades of Bastwick and of Prynne hover over thee—Defoe is there, and more greatly daring Shebbeare—from their (little more elevated) stations they look down with recognitions. Ketch, turn me!” A century or so earlier these ingenious wits had possibly stood therein—in fact and not in fancy. It was a way our old-time rulers had of rewarding ingenious wits. And not wits alone: since for many centuries it was in daily use throughout the length and breadth of Merrie England.