Now, two things made the Reverend Paul exceeding wroth. One was the issue of pirated confessions, which were “a great Cheat and Imposture upon the World,” and they would not merely forge his name but mis-spell it to boot! His is “the only true Account of the Dying Criminals,” he urgently, and no doubt truly, asserts. All this touched his pocket, hence his ire, which blazed no less against the unrepentant malefactor, who—a scarce less grievous offence—touched his professional pride. He did not mince words:—“he was a Notorious and Hard-hearted Criminal,” or afflicted with brutish ignorance or of an obstinate and hardened disposition. “There is,” he would pointedly remark, “a Lake of Brimstone, a Worm that dies not, and a Fire which shall never be quenched. And this I must plainly tell you, that will be your dismal portion there for ever, unless you truly Repent here in time.” And after “Behaviour” in the title of his broadsheets, he would insert, in parentheses, “or rather Misbehaviour.” Most of his flock, stupid with terror, passively acquiesced in everything he said. These “Lorrain saints,” as Steele called them, received ready absolution at his hands and their reported end was most edifying. But in James Sheppard (the Jacobite), who suffered March 17, 1718, for treason, Lorrain had a most vexatious subject. A non-juring divine, “that Priest or Jesuit, or Wolf in Sheep’s clothing,” as the Rev. Paul describes him, attended the convict, and the Ordinary’s services were quite despised. The intruder, “e’en at the Gallows, had the Presumption to give him Publick Absolution, tho’ he visibly dy’d without Repentance.” Dr. Doran assures us that, on the way to Tyburn, Paul and his supplanter came to fisticuffs, and our Ordinary was unceremoniously kicked from the cart. One would like to believe this entertaining legend, for “the great historiographer,” as Pope and Bolingbroke sarcastically dub him, grows less in your favour the more you scan his sheets. His account of Sheppard concludes with the most fulsome professions of loyalty to the King and the Protestant Succession, for which he is ready to sacrifice his life. You note that he was charged with administering the sacrament for temporal ends, some scandal apparently of shamful traffic in the elements. There is no proof—indeed, we have nothing to go on but his own denial; but it shows the gossip whereof he was the centre. He had ingenious methods of spreading his sale. Thus he tells his readers that a fuller account of a special case will be published along with that of prisoners that go for execution to-morrow. In the case of Nathaniel Parkhurst, hanged May 20, 1715, for the murder of Count Lewis Pleuro, he actually reports the convict on the eve of his execution cracking up in advance the report which his ghostly comforter will presently publish! Strange advertisements fill up the odd corners of his broadsheets. Here he puffs a manual of devotion by himself; there the virtue of a quack medicine, some sovran remedy for colic, gout, toothache, “The Itch or any Itching Humour.” Again, you have “The works of Petronius Arbiter, with Cuts and a Key,” or “Apuleius’s Golden Ass,” or some lewd publication of the day. Even if the advertisements were Paul’s publishers’, how strange the man and the time that suffered so incongruous a mixture! Our Ordinary petitioned parliament that his precious broadsheets might go free of the paper tax, by reason of their edifying nature!
Turn we now to the Hangman. No rare figure his in Old England! Only in later years was he individualised. In James I.’s time a certain Derrick filled the office. The playwrights keep his memory green, and the crane so called is said to take its name from him. Then there came Gregory Brandon, who had “a fair coat of arms,” and the title of esquire in virtue of his office. This was through a mad practical joke of York Herald, who, perceiving a solemn ass in Garter King-at-Arms, sent him in the papers somewhat ambiguously worded, and got the grant in due form. York and Garter were presently laid by the heels in the Marshalsea, “one for foolery, the other for knavery.”
Gregory was succeeded by his son, also called Gregory, though his real name was Richard. His infantile amusement was the heading of cats and dogs, his baby fingers seemed ever adjusting imaginary halters on invisible necks; he was “the destined heir, From his soft cradle, to his father’s chair”—or rather cart and ladder. The younger Brandon was, it seems quite certain, the executioner of Charles I. Then followed Edward, commonly known as Esquire Dun, and then the renowned Jack Ketch, who went to his ghastly work with so callous a disregard for human suffering, or, as some fancied, with such monstrous glee, that his name, becoming the very synonym for hangman, clave to all his successors. He “flourished” 1663-1686. Dryden calls him an “excellent physician,” and commemorates him more than once in his full-resounding line. Some held Catch his true patronymic and Ketch a corruption of Jacquet, the family name of those who held the Manor of Tyburn during a great part of the seventeenth century, but this, however ingenious, seems too far-fetched. The original Jack was ungracious and surly even beyond the manner of his kind. In January 1686, for insolence to the sheriffs, “he was deposed and committed to Bridewell.” Pascha Rose, a butcher, succeeded but getting himself hanged in May Ketch was reinstated. It is recorded that he struck for higher pay—and got it too. You might fancy that any one could adjust the “Tyburn Tippet,” or “the riding knot an inch below the ear.” But the business called for its own special knack. In the History of the Press-yard the Hangman is represented, after the suppression of the 1715 Rising, as cheerfully expectant, “provided the king does not unseasonably spoil my market by reprieves and pardons.” He will receive ample douceurs “for civility-money in placing their halters’ knot right under their left ear, and separating their quarters with all imaginable decency.” Ketch’s fancy hovered between a noble and a highwayman. My Lord was never stingy with tips; ’twere unseasonable and quite against the traditions of his order. And the foppery of the other made him a bird worth plucking. I do not pretend to give a complete catalogue of these rascals, yet two others I must mention: John Price (1718) was arrested for murder as he was escorting, it is said, a felon to Tyburn. It was a brutal business, and he richly deserved the halter. He got it too! John Dennis led the attack on Newgate in the Lord George Gordon No-Popery Riots (temp. 1780, but of course you remember your Barnaby Rudge). He was like to have swung himself, but was continued in his old occupation on condition of stringing up his fellow-rioters. Of old time the Hangman was (we are assured) sworn on the Book to dispatch every criminal without favour to father or relative or friend; and he was then dismissed with this formula:—“Get thee hence, wretch.” I have noted the unwillingness to admit him into Newgate—his wages were paid over the gate—and the sorry condition of his equipage. This last gave a grotesque touch to his progress, readily seized on by the jeering mob, which had ever a curse or a missile for the scowling wretch.
In the centuries of its horrible virility, the Tree at Tyburn slew its tens of thousands. A record of famous cases would fill volumes. I can but note a very few. The earliest recorded, though they cannot have been the first, were those of Judge Tressilian and Nicholas Brembre, in February 1388. Their offence was high treason, which meant in that primitive time little more than a political difference with the authorities. This Brembre had been four times Mayor of London. He proposed some startling innovations in the city, one being to change its name to New Troy (Geoffrey of Monmouth perchance had turned his head). Here ended Perkin Warbeck, that “little cockatrice of a king” on whom Bacon lavishes such wealth of vituperative rhetoric, after abusing Henry VII.’s generosity more than once. The savagery of Henry VIII. kept the executioner busy, and he of Tyburn had his full share. On May 4, 1535, in open defiance to every past tradition, the King caused hang and quarter Haughton, the last prior of the Charterhouse, in his sacerdotal robes, without any previous ceremony of degradation, after which “his arm was hung as a bloody sign over the archway of the Charterhouse.” In 1581, under Elizabeth, Campion and Harte continued the long line of catholic martyrs. Campion had been so cruelly racked that he could not hold up his hand to plead without assistance, yet he maintained his courage through the raw December morning whereon he suffered. At Tyburn they vexed him with long discussions; but at last, while he was yet praying for Elizabeth, the cart drove away. Many of his disciples stood round. They fought for relics which the authorities were determined they should not have, so that a young man having dipped his handkerchief in the blood was forthwith arrested. In the confusion some one cut off a finger and conveyed it away. Some one else offered twenty pounds for a finger-joint, but the hangman dared not let it go. The fevered imagination of Campion’s adorers saw wondrous signs. Some pause in the flow of the Thames was noted on that day, and was ascribed thereto. The river
Awhile astonished stood
To count the drops of Campion’s sacred blood.
Campion himself had long a presentiment of his fate, which, considering the desperate nature of his mission, was not wonderful; and when occasion took him past the Triple Tree he was moved to uncover his head. Southwell, the “sweet singer” of the Catholic reaction, told the end of his friend in a little work printed at Douay, but in English, and of course for English circulation; and in 1595 Southwell followed his brother priest. His followers noted that, when his heart was torn out, “it leaped from the dissector’s hand and, by its thrilling, seemed to repel the flames.” A strange legend—not quite baseless, Mr. Gardner thinks—shows the effect of such scenes on the Catholic mind. Henrietta Maria, Charles I.’s queen, walked barefoot to Tyburn, as to a shrine, at dead of night, and did penance under the gallows for the sins of her adopted country. A felon of a very different order was Mrs. Turner, who suffered (November 14, 1615) for complicity in Sir Thomas Overbury’s murder. She had invented yellow starch, and my Lord Coke with a fine sense of the picturesque ordained her to hang “in her yellow Tinny Ruff and Cuff.” She dressed the part gallantly; “her face was highly rouged, and she wore a cobweb lawn ruff, yellow starched.” The Hangman had also yellow bands and cuffs, he tied her hands with a black silk ribbon herself had provided, as well as a black veil for her face. Being turned off, she seemed to die quietly. But yellow starch went hopelessly out of fashion!
After the Restoration, the bodies of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw were dug up at Westminster, removed at night to the Red Lion Inn, Holborn, drawn next morning (January 30, 1661), the anniversary of Charles’s death, to Tyburn, and there hanged in their shrouds on the three wooden posts of the gallows. At nightfall they were taken down and beheaded; the bodies being there buried, whilst the heads adorned Westminster Hall. Noll had his picturesque historians before Carlyle. A wild tale arose that his original funeral at the Abbey had been but a mock ceremonial; for his body, according to his own instructions, had been secretly removed to Naseby, and buried at nightfall on the scene of that victory. Even if we disregard this legend, the subsequent adventures of Cromwell’s head have been a matter of as much concern to antiquaries as ever the Royal Martyr’s was to Mr. Dick.
Time would fail to narrate the picturesque and even jovial exits of those “curled darlings” of the Tyburn Calendar or Malefactors’ Bloody Register (or any other form of the Newgate Chronicle), those idols of the popular imagination, the Caroline and Georgian highwaymen. Swift pictures the very ideal in Clever Tom Clinch, who—
... while the rabble was bawling,