When you before th’ Almighty must appear.
Examine well yourselves; in time repent,
That you may not th’ eternal flames be sent.
And when St. ’Pulcre’s bell to-morrow tolls,
The Lord have mercy on your souls!
Past twelve o’clock.
Now this iron nightingale was the sexton or his deputy of St. Sepulchre’s, hard by Newgate; and his chant originated thus. In the early seventeenth century there flourished a certain Robert Dowe, “citizen and merchant taylor of London”; he disbursed much of his estate to various charities, and in especial gave one pound six shillings and eight pence yearly to the sexton of St. Sepulchre’s to approach as near as might be to the condemned hold on execution eve, and admonish malefactors of their approaching end, as if they were likely to forget it, or as if “Men in their Condition cou’d have any stomach to Unseasonable Poetry,” so pertinently observes John Hall (executed about 1708), “the late famous and notorious robber,” or rather the Grub Street hack who compiled his Memoirs. The rhymes were, so the same veracious authority assures us, “set to the Tune of the Bar-Bell at the Black Dog,” and their reception varied. Hall and his companions (but again you suspect Grub Street) paid in kind with verse equally edifying, and, if possible, still more atrocious. Most, you fancy, turned again to their uneasy slumbers with muttered curses. Not so Sarah Malcolm, condemned in 1733 for the cruel murder of old Mrs. Duncombe, her mistress. An unseasonable pity for the sexton croaking his platitudes in the raw midnight possessed her mad soul. “D’ye hear, Mr. Bellman?” she bawled, “call for a Pint of Wine, and I’ll throw you a Shilling to pay for it.” How instant his changed note as the coin clinked on the pavement! Alas! no record reports him thus again refreshed.
But Venit summa dies et ineluctabile fatum (a tag you may be sure the Ordinary rolled off to any broken-down scholar he had in hand); and our felon’s last day dawns. He is taken to the Stone Hall, where his irons are struck off; then he is pinioned by the yeoman of the halter, who performs that service for the moderate fee of five shillings (rope thrown in). At the gate he is delivered over to the Hangman (who is not free of the prison), and by him he is set in the cart (a sorry vehicle drawn by a sorry nag in sorry harness), his coffin oft at his feet, and the Ordinary at his side, and so, amidst the yells of a huge mob and to the sad accompaniment of St. Sepulchre’s bell, the cart moves westward. Almost immediately a halt is called. The road is bounded by the wall of St. Sepulchre’s Churchyard, over the which there peers our vocalist of yester-eve, who takes up his lugubrious whine anew:—“All good people pray heartily with God for the poor sinners who are now going to their death,” with more to the same effect, for all which the poor passenger must once more bless or curse the name of the inconsiderately considerate Dowe. He gave his endowment in 1605, seven years before his death: had some mad turn of fate made him an object of his own charity you had scarce grieved. But now the sexton has done his office to the satisfaction of the beadle of Merchant Tailors’ Hall, who “hath an honest stipend allowed him to see that this is duly done,” and the cart is again under weigh, when, if the principal subject be popular, a lady (you assume her beauty, and you need not rake the rubbish of two centuries for witness against her character) trips down the steps of St. Sepulchre’s Church and presents him with a huge nosegay. If nosegays be not in season, “why, then,” as the conjuror assured Timothy Crabshaw, squire to Sir Launcelot Greaves, “an orange will do as well.” And now the cart rumbles down steep and strait Snow Hill, crosses the Fleet Ditch by narrow Holborn Bridge, creaks up Holborn Hill (the “Heavy Hill,” men named it with sinister twin-meaning), and so through Holborn Bars, whilst the bells, first of St. Andrew’s, Holborn, and then of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, knell sadly as it passes. In the High Street of the ancient village of that name, Halt! is again the word. Of old time a famous Lazar-House stood here, and hard by those elms of St. Giles, already noted as a place of execution. The simple piety of mediæval times would dispatch no wretch on so long a journey without sustenance. Hence at the Lazar-House gate he was given a huge bowl of ale, his “last refreshing in this life,” whereof he might drink at will. The most gallant of the Elizabethans has phrased for us the felon’s thoughts as he quaffed the strange draught. On that chill October morning when Raleigh went to his doom at Westminster, some one handed him “a cup of excellent sack,” courteously inquiring how he liked it? “As the fellow,” he answered with a last touch of Elizabethan wit, “that drinking of St. Giles’s bowl as he went to Tyburn, said:—‘That were good drink if a man might tarry by it.’” The Lazar went, but the St. Giles’s bowl lingered, only no longer a shaven monk, but the landlord of the Bowl or the Crown, or what not, handed up the liquor.
Bowl Yard, which vanished into Endell Street, long preserved the memory of this “last refreshing.” At York a like custom prevailed, whereof local tradition recorded a quaint apologue. The saddler of Bawtry needs must hang—why and wherefore no man knoweth. To the amazement and horror of all he most churlishly refused the proffered bowl. Pity was but wasted (so our forefathers thought) on such a fellow. Before a dry-eyed crowd he was strung up with the utmost dispatch, but a reprieve arriving, was cut down just as quickly. All too late, however! He was done with this world. Had he but reasonably tarried, as others did, for his draught, he had died in his bed like many a better man. Hence the rustic moralist taught how the saddler of Bawtry was hanged for leaving of his ale. The compilers of the Sunday school treatises have scandalously neglected this leading case of lost opportunities. Nay, though a pearl “richer than all his tribe,” you shall search the works of Dr. Smiles for it in vain.
But the day wears on, and our procession must farther westward along Tyburn Road (now Oxford Street). It is soon quit of houses; yet the crowd grows ever denser, and, though Tyburn Tree stands out grim and gaunt in our view, it is some time ere the cart pulls up under the beam. Soon the halter is fixed, and the parson says his last words to the trembling wretch. And now it is proper for him to address the crowd, confessing his crimes, and warning others to amend their ways. If a broken-down cleric or the like, his last devotions and dying speech are apt to be prosy and inordinate; so that the mob jeers or even pelts him and his trusty Ketch himself. Or “some of the Sheriff’s officers discovering impatience to have the execution dispatched” (thus Samuel Smith, the Ordinary of a case in 1684), Jack cuts things short by whipping up his horses and leaves his victim dangling and agape. More decorously the cap is drawn over his face, and he himself gives the signal to turn off. The Hangman, if in genial mood, now stretches the felon’s legs for him, or thumps his breast with the benevolent design of expelling the last breath; but the brute is usually too lazy or too careless, and these pious offices are performed by friends.