The accessories of such a last scene are preserved in Hogarth’s Apprentice Series. One of the crowd is picking a pocket, and you foresee him ending here some day soon. (Is it not told of one rascal, that he urged on the attendants his right to a near view, since, sure of hanging some day, he naturally wished to see how it was done?) Another in the crowd is bawling, a trifle prematurely, the last speech and dying confession of Thomas Idle. Verses commemorative of the occasion were sold broadcast. “Tyburn’s elegiac lines,” as you may suppose, were sad doggerel. Here is the concluding portion of a specimen (temp. circa 1720):
Fifteen of us you soon will see
Ending our days with misery
At the Tree, at the Tree.
Even at Tyburn, how hard to renounce all hope! There was ever the chance of a reprieve. There is at least one well-authenticated case of a man making a sudden bolt from the cart, and almost escaping; and, as the modus was simple strangulation, and the Hangman careless or corrupt, it was just possible that heroic remedies might restore to animation. On December 12, 1705, John Smith was turned off, and hung for a quarter of an hour. A reprieve arriving, he was cut down, and coaxed back to life. More remarkable was the case of William Duell, in 1740. To all appearance thoroughly well hanged, he was carried off for dissection to Surgeons’ Hall, where he presently recovered himself. He was, somewhat cruelly, restored to Newgate, but was let off with transportation. The law was not always so merciful. In another case, the sheriff’s officers, having heard that their prey was again alive and kicking, hunted the wretch out, haled him back to Tyburn, and hanged him beyond the possibility of doubt. The rumour of such marvels inspired many attempts at resuscitation. I fancy about one per cent. were successful, but how to tell, since the instance just quoted shows that such triumphs were better concealed?
Now, the corpus is essential to the experimentum, so half an hour after the turning off, the friends bring up a deal coffin, borne across an unhinged coach door or any such make-shift bier. But Ketch is still in possession: the clothes are Hangman’s perquisites, and must be purchased. How the greedy rascal appreciates the value of each button, dwells on the splendour of each sorry ornament, watching the while and gauging the impatience of the buyers! Never went second-hand duds at such a figure! Sometimes he overreaches himself, or no one comes forward to bid. Then the corpse is rudely stripped, “and the Miscellany of Rags are all crushed into a sack which the Valet de Chambre carries on purpose, and being digested into Monmouth Street, Chick Lane, &c., are comfortably worn by many an industrious fellow.” And sometimes the law claims the body to be removed and hung in chains.
In cases of treason, the felon was drawn to Tyburn in a sledge tied to a horse’s tail; he was hanged from the cart; but was cut down and dismembered alive. His head went to the adornment of Temple Bar or London Bridge; while his quarters, having been boiled in oil and tar in a cauldron in Jack Ketch’s Kitchen, as the room above the central gateway at Newgate was called, were scattered here and there as the authorities fancied. The complete ritual of disgrace was reserved for political offenders. After rebellions Ketch had his hands full. He would tumble out of his sack good store of heads wherewith he and the Newgate felons made hideous sport, preliminary to parboiling them with bay salt and cummin seed: the one for preservation, the other sovereign against the fowls of the air. If the traitor were a woman, she was burned (till 1790); but usually strangled first. Cases are on record where, with a fire too quick or a Hangman too clumsy, the choking proved abortive and——! The sledge so often supplanted the less ignominious cart, that I ought to explain that a traitor need not be a political offender. Certain coining offences, the murder of a husband by his wife, and of a master by his servant, were all ranked a form of treason, and the criminal was drawn and quartered or burnt accordingly.
Two of Tyburn’s officials, the Ordinary and the Hangman, to wit, now claim our attention. The Ordinary, or prison chaplain of Newgate, said “Amen” to the death sentence, and ministered to the convict thence to the end. A terrible duty, to usher your fellow-man from this world into the next! I have heard that one such task near proved fatal to an honest divine; but the hand of little employment hath the daintier sense, and too often the Newgate Ordinary was a callous wretch, with a keen zeal for the profits of his post, and for the rest a mere praying machine. He needs must be good trencherman. It was one of his strange duties to say grace at City banquets. Major Griffiths, who collects so many curious facts in his Chronicles of Newgate, alleges him not seldom required to eat three consecutive dinners without quitting the table. In post-Tyburn days, when they hanged in front of the prison, the governor’s daughter used to prepare breakfast for those attending each execution (the deid clack, so they called such festivity in Old Scotland). Broiled kidneys were her masterpiece, and she noted that, whilst most of her pale-faced guests could stomach nought save brandy and water, his reverence attacked the dish as one appetised by a prosperous morning’s work. Most Ordinaries are clean gone from memory, unrecorded even by The Dictionary of National Biography. One (as fly in amber!) the chance reference of a classic now and again preserves.
E’en Guthrie spares half Newgate by a dash,