The Finger Pillory deserves a word. It was fixed up inside churches (that of Ashby-de-la-Zouch, for instance) and halls. Boys who misbehaved during service, and offenders at festive times against the mock reign of the lord of misrule, alike expiated their offences therein.
I note some remarkable cases. First, and most important, is the group of literary martyrs. The Stuart Government could not crush the press; but author, printer, and publisher all worked in peril of the Pillory. The author of Robinson Crusoe was, perhaps, its most famous inmate.
Earless on high stood unabash’d De Foe,
And Tutchin flagrant from the scourge below,
sings Pope in the Dunciad with reckless inaccuracy. In 1703, De Foe, for his Shortest Way with the Dissenters, was condemned to stand thrice in the Pillory before the Royal Exchange, near the Conduit in Cheapside, and at Temple Bar. The mob, he tells us, treated him very well, and cheered long and loud when he was taken out of what he calls a “Hieraglyphick state machine; Contrived to punish fancy in” (Hymn to the Pillory). He comforts himself by reflecting that the learned Selden narrowly escaped it, and turns the whole thing to ridicule; but then mutilation was no port of the sentence. Pope’s reference to John Tutchin is still wider of the mark. Tutchin, having narrowly escaped death for his share in Monmouth’s rebellion, was sentenced by Jeffreys, on his famous Western Circuit (1685), to seven years’ imprisonment, during which he must, once a year, be whipped through every market-town in Dorsetshire. The very clerk of the court was moved to protest that this meant a whipping once a fortnight; but the sentence remained. Out of bravado, or in desperation, the prisoner petitioned the King to be hanged instead of whipped; but, in the result, he was neither whipped nor hanged. He fell ill of the small-pox; passion cooled; and, intelligently bribing, he escaped, to visit Jeffreys in the Tower. Apparently he went to gloat, but remained to accept the ruined Chancellor’s explanation, that he had only obeyed instructions. “So after he had treated Mr. Tutchin with a glass of wine, Mr. Tutchin went away.”
Another of Pope’s examples is “old Prynne,” cropped (in 1632) in the Pillory for his Histriomastic, or Players’ Scourge, which was held to reflect on Charles I.’s Queen. Again he stood there in 1637, when the executioner cruelly mangled the ancient stumps. A quite incorrigible person was this same William Prynne, described by Marchmont Needham as “one of the greatest paper worms that ever crept about a library.” He wrote some forty works remarkable for virulence even in that age of bitter polemics. He strenuously supported the Restoration, and the new Government was at its wit’s end what to do with him till Charles himself solved the difficulty with happy humour. “Let him amuse himself with writing against the Catholics and poring over the records in the Tower,” said the king; and silenced him with the Keepership of the Records and £500 a year. Prynne’s second appearance was for a bitter attack on Laud; and he had as fellow-sufferers John Bastwick, who had written a sort of mock Litanie, and Henry Burton. Bastwick was “very merrie.” His wife “got on a stool and kissed him;” and, “his ears being cut off, she called for them, put them in a clean handkerchief, and carried them away with her.” There was a great crowd, which “cried and howled terribly, especially when Burton was cropped.” Being angered by the jeers and execrations of the mob, the executioner did his work very brutally. Pope’s Billingsgate is classic, but it remains Billingsgate. The Pillory shows often in his verse. Edmund Curl was a pet aversion of his, and for publishing the Memoirs of Ker of Kersland Curl suffered the punishment at Charing Cross on Feb. 23, 1728. Pope hints (Dunciad, II. 3 and 4) that he was badly handled by the mob. In truth he came off very well, owing, it seems, to an explanatory circular he got distributed among the spectators.
As time wore on the punishment reverted to its earlier and milder form. Thus, in 1630, Dr. Leighton, for his Zion’s Plea against Prelacy, was pilloried, branded, cropped, and whipped; but the authors of the eighteenth century were punished by exposure alone, and were often solaced by popular sympathy. In 1765 Williams, the bookseller, stood in the Pillory for re-publishing The North Briton: he held a sprig of laurel in his hand, and a large collection was made for him then and there. In derision of authority the mob displayed (inter alia) the famous Bootjack—the popular reference to Lord Bute, the late Prime Minister. Still more farcical was the exposure (1759) of Dr. Shebbeare for publishing political libels. He was attended on the platform by a servant in livery holding an umbrella over his head, and his neck and arms were not confined. The court thought the under-sheriff of Middlesex something more than remiss: wherefore he was fined and imprisoned, it being judicially decided that the culprit must stand not merely on but in the Pillory. In this connexion I will only further mention the case of Eton the publisher, “a very old man,” who in 1812 was pilloried for printing Paine’s Age of Reason. Here, again, the crowd, by the respect it heaped upon the prisoner, altogether eliminated the sting from the punishment. The minor scribe of to-day is supposed to court an action, nay, a criminal prosecution, as a stimulus to circulation; a former age saw in the Pillory the best possible advertisement for the Grub Street hack. In Foote’s Patron, Puff, the publisher, urges Dactyl to produce a satire; and, when the proposed risk is hinted at, retorts: “Why, I would not give twopence for an author who was afraid of his ears.... Why, zooks, sir! I never got salt for my porridge till I mounted at the Royal Exchange, that was the making of me.... The true Castalian stream is a shower of eggs and a Pillory the poet’s Parnassus.”
Among cases other than literary, a notable one is that of Titus Oates (1685), who, being convicted of perjury, was sentenced to stand in the Pillory and be whipped at the Cart’s-tail. The lashing was so cruelly done that you feel some pity even for that arch rascal. The curious computed that he received 2256 strokes with a whip of six thongs—13,536 strokes in all. Yet the wretch lived to enjoy a pension after the Revolution! There was another remarkable instance that same year. Thomas Dangerfield, convicted of libelling the King when Duke of York, was sentenced to a fine, to the Pillory, and to be whipped from Aldgate to Newgate, and from Newgate to Tyburn. The dreadful work was over, and he was returning prisonwards in a coach, when there steps forward Robert Francis, a barrister of Gray’s Inn, with the cruel jibe, “How now, friend? Have you had your heat this morning?” Dangerfield turned on him with bitter curses (“Son of a wh——” is the elegant sample preserved by the records). Francis, much enraged, thrust at the aching, smarting, bleeding wretch with a small cane, and by mischance put out an eye, so that in two hours Dangerfield was dead; and no great while thereafter he himself was tried, condemned, and hanged. According to the testimony of the Rev. Mr. Samuel Smith, Ordinary at Newgate, he made a very edifying end.
Quite interesting is the case of Japhet Crook, alias Sir Peter Stringer, whose unhappy memory is preserved in some of Pope’s most biting lines. In 1731, poor Japhet stood in the Pillory at Charing Cross for forging a deed; when the hangman, dressed like a butcher, “with a knife like a gardener’s pruning knife cut off his ears, and with a pair of scissors slit both his nostrils.” The wretch endured all this with great patience; but at the searing “the pain was so great that he got up from his chair.” No wonder! Two years after Eleanor Beare, keeper of “The White Horse,” Nuns Green, Derby, was pilloried (August 1732) after just escaping the gallows for murder. She mounted the platform “with an easy air”; thus exasperating a mob already ill-disposed, which bombarded her with apples, eggs, turnips, and so forth; so that “the stagnate kennels were robbed of their contents, and became the cleanest part of the street.” Managing to escape, she dashed off, “a moving heap of filth,” but was presently seized and lugged back; and at the end of the hour she was carried to prison, “an object which none cared to touch.” A week after she was again forced to take her stand. The officer noted that her head was wondrous swelled, and he presently stripped it of “ten or twelve coverings,” whereof one was a pewter plate. Her aspect was most forlorn, but the crowd, no whit moved, pelted its hardest, and she was borne away more dead than alive. Yet she too not only lived, but “recovered her health, her spirits, and her beauty.” Two lighter instances, and I have done. In the early stages of Monmouth’s rebellion, an astrologer, consulting the stars, saw that the duke would be presently King of England. After Sedgemoor he was cast into Dorchester Gaol for this unlucky prediction. Again falling to his observations, he clearly read “that he would be whipped at the Cart’s ——”; and this time the planets spoke true. In 1783, the poet Cowper reports one humorous case from his own experience. At Olney a man was publicly whipped for theft; he whealed with every stroke; but that was only because the beadle drew the scourge against a piece of red ochre hidden in his hand. Noting the fraud, the parish constable laid his cane smartly about the shoulders of the all too-lenient official, whereat a country wench, in high dudgeon, set to pomelling the constable. And of the three the thief alone escaped punishment.